News today that Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, resigned at the behest of Obama and/or his henchmen, and that GM also will get a few billion more in corporate welfare.
I find it rather interesting that Wagoner recently was quoted as stating that he was re-thinking the bankruptcy option. Good for him! But maybe that's why he was fired.
Don't know why, but seems Obama and the feds are just all hot and bothered over the idea of owning their own little car manufacturer. Or else why not bankruptcy? Seems a better course than bleeding the Treasury dry. Seems even the feds would recognize that, dumb as they are.
In the case of a corporation with publicly traded stock (stock selling on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ) bankruptcy can be a legitimate public concern. Large corporations often have millions of shareholders and are regulated because of that. Publicly-traded corporations operate within a given set of laws and regulations that are supposed to provide a certain amount of transparency regarding what the corporation is doing with shareholder money. (And other types of corporations exist, too -- closely held, family held, "S" corporations. These are NOT publicly traded.)
Individuals and businesses of all kinds have several options under bankruptcy laws. Chapter 7 bankruptcy is simply liquidation. This type of bankruptcy often is driven by a company's creditors, who may end up getting only a few cents on every dollar owed them by the failing organization. And the company just goes out of business. This is a last-resort kind of action for business owners, when a failing business is so bad off there's no hope of saving it. This is when the company's debt exceeds any assets or strategies it can muster to pay it off.
Another option is Chapter 11. Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company continues to operate while it restructures, and its creditors are held at bay. Company executives have to develop a reorganization plan and present their plan to a Bankruptcy Court judge, who approves it or not. Worst-case scenario, the company goes into receivership and it's reorganized by an independent third party appointed by the Bankruptcy Court.
United Airlines operated under Chapter 11 bankruptcy from 2004 to 2008. Did anyone notice any serious disruption in service? Anyone afraid to buy a ticket in January for their July vacation, when buying months ahead of time meant big discounts? Anyone really have a problem with Chapter 11?
So why doesn't GM go into Chapter 11? Under Chapter 11 protection, corporate executives could renegotiate all their contracts and continue to do business. They could have as much time as they wanted for this -- until they came up with a reorganization plan agreed upon by everyone and approved by the Bankruptcy Court.
Is it better to nationalize GM and have the federal government completely take over all its operations forever? This is unfathomable to me. Do Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi just want an auto manufacturer to play with? Arm-twist them into mass producing an electronic car that they can force upon the American public? I understand these cars now cost over $30,000. Not exactly practical, unless you're a California millionnaire obsessed with the idea of Global Warming. Or a community organizer who's never had to meet a payroll, never operated a business for profit, and always looked to government to fund his pet projects.
Obama doesn't seem to understand that there are ways of getting funding other than lining up for public aid.
Since the US public are now all shareholders in GM, do we all get free cars? Or is Obama so impressed by Adolf Hitler that he just likes the idea of commanding an auto manufacturer? (Hitler ordered development of the Volkswagen, literal translation: "Peoples' Car".)
Anyone remember the Yugo? That car was designed and produced by the communist government in Yugoslavia. It was notoriously shoddy, unsafe, dysfunctional, and impossible to repair because the government couldn't organize a replacement parts operation. I suppose this is what we can look forward to from GM.
Oh well. I never had a Chevy and never really wanted one. I've never had a Japanese car, either, but they will surely be preferable.
Why can't GM go into bankruptcy? The bankruptcy laws were written and have been employed for decades to handle just exactly this situation.
Why can't GM go into bankruptcy?
Is it because Obama loves the labor unions? Obama's also very fond of "card-check," the mafia-style of union organization. Maybe if we were all divided up into little piles of union workers, Obama believes he could simply push and pull us around anyway he wants like so many chess pieces. Or maybe it's the whole idea of having someone else shove federal policies down the throats of the public. Is that it? Make the union bosses the fall guys for Obama's socialism?
Or is it because the labor unions have Obama and the Democrat party as a whole by the short hairs? The unions are among the largest Democrat contributors in the country -- though the numbers of union members have been diminishing. Most Americans do not want to join a union. That's just a fact.
I suspect it's the unions' campaign contributions. Obama's just trying to build up the Democrat base. He'll throw us on the curb and stand on our necks until we promise to join the Democrat party. Apparently that's becoming evermore necessary for those jerks to attract and keep voters.
So... just more politics as usual. Obama's "change" is not an improvement on the existing corruption and abuse in Washington. Just a change in who believes they hold the reins of the republic.
Keep pushing, buttheads. You'll find out who really holds the reins.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Ye that love mankind!
Haven't wanted to write very much because of the sorrow. Watching America die causes me genuine grief.
What the hell is with Tim Geithner? He doesn't have enough power. Aw-w-w-w. Think I mentioned yesterday, he doesn't have enough power because much wiser heads than his decided more than 200 years ago that no one should never, ever, ever, never in a trillion years have that much power over another person.
I don't know where this fool Geithner grew up (or Obama or Pelosi or Reid, or Barney Fudd, or Thomas Dodd, for that matter), but I was always taught that you don't steal from others or push them around. Not even if you truly believe in your darkest, deepest, most sociopathic fantasies that it's all for their own good. You're bound to respect their freedom and their rights and must let them rise or fall on their own merits.
So regulate this, Tim. And burn in hell while you're at it.
I can't think about it anymore. I've got no place else to go. Macedonia has been advertising on TV. They have low taxes and stuff, trying to attract the business that America despises. Maybe I'll go there.
Reverse immigration. Leave the land of the vicious and envious for the land of the near-destitute but genuinely hopeful -- not this hype-hope that appears on Democrat banners. Hope for some Big Daddy to come along and take pity on your sorry ass....
Anyway, I got to thinking about this term paper I wrote about propaganda in the American Revolution when I was in college. We had to develop at least an eight-page paper. I got all kinds of carried away and turned in 39 pages. With footnotes. Ask me anything about Sam Adams, one of my great heroes. Publican Sam, the rum-runner....
The term paper quoted numerous sources. I loved writing it. I loved researching it even better. Those were the glory days, when people had guts and believed in things and actually got off their butts and did something about it instead of waiting for the government to take care of it.
Anyway, to be positive. Here are a few thoughts from Thomas Paine. When North America was still all shiny and new, without the burden of millions of useless buttheads looking for a handout. It was enough in those days to be free in order to think for yourself, live by your own lights, and get what you wanted for yourself. Americans seem to have lost the knack for that.
From The Rights of Man, 1792:
America did provide "an asylum for mankind." That is, true hope for the world, that you didn't have to live under oppressive and power-hunger idiots, wouldn't be taxed into poverty, or spied upon and/or arrested without cause. And it changed everything. It became so darn attractive, autocracies and monarchies and oligarchies all around the world began collapsing. It was amazing.
But, as Ben Franklin said, "A republic, if you can keep it."
Guess we now have the answer to that.
Wish I'd been around for the beginning, rather than having to witness the end of the Enlightenment and of America.
What the hell is with Tim Geithner? He doesn't have enough power. Aw-w-w-w. Think I mentioned yesterday, he doesn't have enough power because much wiser heads than his decided more than 200 years ago that no one should never, ever, ever, never in a trillion years have that much power over another person.
I don't know where this fool Geithner grew up (or Obama or Pelosi or Reid, or Barney Fudd, or Thomas Dodd, for that matter), but I was always taught that you don't steal from others or push them around. Not even if you truly believe in your darkest, deepest, most sociopathic fantasies that it's all for their own good. You're bound to respect their freedom and their rights and must let them rise or fall on their own merits.
So regulate this, Tim. And burn in hell while you're at it.
I can't think about it anymore. I've got no place else to go. Macedonia has been advertising on TV. They have low taxes and stuff, trying to attract the business that America despises. Maybe I'll go there.
Reverse immigration. Leave the land of the vicious and envious for the land of the near-destitute but genuinely hopeful -- not this hype-hope that appears on Democrat banners. Hope for some Big Daddy to come along and take pity on your sorry ass....
Anyway, I got to thinking about this term paper I wrote about propaganda in the American Revolution when I was in college. We had to develop at least an eight-page paper. I got all kinds of carried away and turned in 39 pages. With footnotes. Ask me anything about Sam Adams, one of my great heroes. Publican Sam, the rum-runner....
The term paper quoted numerous sources. I loved writing it. I loved researching it even better. Those were the glory days, when people had guts and believed in things and actually got off their butts and did something about it instead of waiting for the government to take care of it.
Anyway, to be positive. Here are a few thoughts from Thomas Paine. When North America was still all shiny and new, without the burden of millions of useless buttheads looking for a handout. It was enough in those days to be free in order to think for yourself, live by your own lights, and get what you wanted for yourself. Americans seem to have lost the knack for that.
From The Rights of Man, 1792:
It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from the government.From Common Sense, 1776
If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute.
The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her -- Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
But, as Ben Franklin said, "A republic, if you can keep it."
Guess we now have the answer to that.
Wish I'd been around for the beginning, rather than having to witness the end of the Enlightenment and of America.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
More propaganda from the White House
Just visited http://www.whitehouse.gov/, where people are invited to ask questions that the president plans to answer today in an online chat. The way it's set up, there are already 75,000+ questions, and you're supposed to scroll through them and vote on the ones you want the prez to answer.
Looked at the first couple pages. They're all about education, and all ask things like, "I just graduated from college. What can you do to help me pay back my student loans," or "What are you doing to ensure quality education?"
Yep... Spam-in-a-can stuff, designed for Obama to propagandize about the educational programs in his socialist agenda. I don't think it's even going to be worth looking at. You can get the same information and the same honesty and spontaneity from a White House press release.
I did leave the president a comment via the regular White House email thing (try it, you'll like it). I told him that the White House is not the only organization that hires public relations professionals, and those of us non-White House communications pros do recognize spin and propaganda when we see it.
I also asked him why he wants to take away my freedom with his socialist agenda. Everyone should. That should be the Number One question on the list. Not all this crap about education.
Meanwhile, Tim Geithner was whining about not having enough power to do whatever he damn pleases with the banking and maybe other industries.
Hey... those restraints? Those restraints are called THE CONSTITUTION. It's supposed to limit what the government can do. That's what it's all about, in fact. The idea is, the less government, the more personal freedom.
America originally was all about freedom. Now apparently it's all about getting someone else to pay your bills.
I'm sorry, I'm just too fed up to write any more this morning.
Is anyone really buying all this crap coming out of Washington? If they are, we're all doomed. This is making me hate the human race.
Looked at the first couple pages. They're all about education, and all ask things like, "I just graduated from college. What can you do to help me pay back my student loans," or "What are you doing to ensure quality education?"
Yep... Spam-in-a-can stuff, designed for Obama to propagandize about the educational programs in his socialist agenda. I don't think it's even going to be worth looking at. You can get the same information and the same honesty and spontaneity from a White House press release.
I did leave the president a comment via the regular White House email thing (try it, you'll like it). I told him that the White House is not the only organization that hires public relations professionals, and those of us non-White House communications pros do recognize spin and propaganda when we see it.
I also asked him why he wants to take away my freedom with his socialist agenda. Everyone should. That should be the Number One question on the list. Not all this crap about education.
Meanwhile, Tim Geithner was whining about not having enough power to do whatever he damn pleases with the banking and maybe other industries.
Hey... those restraints? Those restraints are called THE CONSTITUTION. It's supposed to limit what the government can do. That's what it's all about, in fact. The idea is, the less government, the more personal freedom.
America originally was all about freedom. Now apparently it's all about getting someone else to pay your bills.
I'm sorry, I'm just too fed up to write any more this morning.
Is anyone really buying all this crap coming out of Washington? If they are, we're all doomed. This is making me hate the human race.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The stuff that dreams are made on
While commenting on congressional partisanship, one pundit or another noted that the Dems and Reps don't seem to speak the same language anymore. After listening to all the relentless debate about the AIG bonuses, I understand what he means. It's a kind of "doublespeak," a term coined by George Orwell in the novel 1984.
For example, "socialism" has different interpretations for conservatives and liberals. Conservatives view socialism as government interfence and "coerced guidance" you might say, of business, commerce, and the economy.
On the other hand, liberals view socialism, often slavering uncontrollably, as a kind of "single ownership" structure -- totally nationalized -- where the government clearly owns everything, with all policies set and controlled by the government.
This second definition is really probably just far too totalitarian even for most US liberals to stomach. England tried it and it was a catastrophe. It also lacks the hypocritical sheen of the particular spin liberals put on the term "individual rights." That is, anything the government is compelled to spend money on, i.e. the "right" to health care, never-mind that it involves the virtual enslavement of health care providers, since doctors and hospitals don't fall from heaven.
So, no, most liberals don't want "socialism," they just want to control privately-owned assets. And this is the real issue.
In most Euro socialist countries, the assets are owned privately but are heavily controlled by government regulation. For instance, in some countries, the unions get a say on whether or not a company can close a plant. Managing a business is no longer viewed as a black-and-white economic decision based on inescapable realities, but a political decision based upon the same stuff that dreams are made on.
So what is "ownership" anymore? Used to mean that you were the decision-maker about what to do with specific assets. Now apparently it means you do what the government says and take the blame for the outcomes. Or you invest your private dollars in "Public-Private Partnerships" and take the blame for the outcomes. Semantic sleight-of-hand or load of crap? (And some might say these two terms mean exactly the same thing....)
Some US industries already are heavily government-regulated. The financial industry is one and always has been, starting with Alexander Hamilton, who was Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington. Currently, apart from the guidance set by the Federal Reserve and government control of the money supply, the financial industry functions under scrutiny of one major federal agency -- the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) -- as well as heaven only knows how many other subcommittees and busybodies devoted to oversight on specialized industry segments.
Energy is already highly regulated federally and locally, and environmentalism is likely to only increase the regulation. Environmentalism also is the driving force behind much of the regulation in all types of manufacturing with haz-mat (hazardous material) dicta, zoning laws, emissions regulations, waste and dumping regulations, etc. The National Labor Board and other workforce-related agencies dictate in many cases who can/should be hired, why, why/why not employees can be fired. We have a minimum wage, and on and on.
Anyone remember George McGovern? He was a Democrat US senator from North Dakota and ran for president against Nixon in 1972. One plank in the Democrat platform that year was "guaranteed income," which meant that every US citizen would qualify somehow for a certain income, whether they worked productively for pay or just sat around writing blogs, for instance.
After McGovern retired from politics, he tried to open a restaurant. He stated he had no idea until then how many hoops an entrepreneur has to jump through to start a business. He finally understood the conservative argument that regulation defeats free enterprise.
Many regulations are designed to protect the public. And maybe some of them do. However, if a chemical company poisons the water supply, that should be a criminal offense, shouldn't it, like "reckless homicide" or "conspiracy to defraud"? I mean, do we need another layer of regulation to cover that?
I don't understand stalker laws, either. These laws define a certain crime for when someone you don't know or don't like follows you around. However, long before the stalker laws, people could get restraining and protective orders against potentially threatening people. I don't know how the stalker laws vary from this. You still have to wait until a stalker actually makes a definite threat, breaks into your house, assaults you, etc., before you can prove the stalker's intent. So how useful is this? We already had laws against extortion, assault, breaking-and-entering and all that.
Once again, it's all about power. Every law gives the government at some level -- local, state, federal -- another reason and another way to control citizens. They take over the duty and responsibility for making your decisions. You can't disagree with them anymore; you'd be breaking the law or violating the regulations.
So I'm not so sure anymore that the difference between free enterprise and socialism is just a matter of degree. Where, precisely, do you draw the line between freedom and government interference? Thomas Jefferson once said that if an individual's behavior "neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg" he should be able to practice that behavior. Otherwise, for violating the rights of another, he might face prosecution.
Judging by the current mess that Washington has made of the financial industry, I think we'd all be better off without them. Like, if you or me or the guy next door makes a bad investment, he loses -- but his loss neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg. However, if the government makes a bad investment, all citizens have to pay for it for maybe the next three or four generations, definitely robbing and crippling the population.
For example, "socialism" has different interpretations for conservatives and liberals. Conservatives view socialism as government interfence and "coerced guidance" you might say, of business, commerce, and the economy.
On the other hand, liberals view socialism, often slavering uncontrollably, as a kind of "single ownership" structure -- totally nationalized -- where the government clearly owns everything, with all policies set and controlled by the government.
This second definition is really probably just far too totalitarian even for most US liberals to stomach. England tried it and it was a catastrophe. It also lacks the hypocritical sheen of the particular spin liberals put on the term "individual rights." That is, anything the government is compelled to spend money on, i.e. the "right" to health care, never-mind that it involves the virtual enslavement of health care providers, since doctors and hospitals don't fall from heaven.
So, no, most liberals don't want "socialism," they just want to control privately-owned assets. And this is the real issue.
In most Euro socialist countries, the assets are owned privately but are heavily controlled by government regulation. For instance, in some countries, the unions get a say on whether or not a company can close a plant. Managing a business is no longer viewed as a black-and-white economic decision based on inescapable realities, but a political decision based upon the same stuff that dreams are made on.
So what is "ownership" anymore? Used to mean that you were the decision-maker about what to do with specific assets. Now apparently it means you do what the government says and take the blame for the outcomes. Or you invest your private dollars in "Public-Private Partnerships" and take the blame for the outcomes. Semantic sleight-of-hand or load of crap? (And some might say these two terms mean exactly the same thing....)
Some US industries already are heavily government-regulated. The financial industry is one and always has been, starting with Alexander Hamilton, who was Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington. Currently, apart from the guidance set by the Federal Reserve and government control of the money supply, the financial industry functions under scrutiny of one major federal agency -- the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) -- as well as heaven only knows how many other subcommittees and busybodies devoted to oversight on specialized industry segments.
Energy is already highly regulated federally and locally, and environmentalism is likely to only increase the regulation. Environmentalism also is the driving force behind much of the regulation in all types of manufacturing with haz-mat (hazardous material) dicta, zoning laws, emissions regulations, waste and dumping regulations, etc. The National Labor Board and other workforce-related agencies dictate in many cases who can/should be hired, why, why/why not employees can be fired. We have a minimum wage, and on and on.
Anyone remember George McGovern? He was a Democrat US senator from North Dakota and ran for president against Nixon in 1972. One plank in the Democrat platform that year was "guaranteed income," which meant that every US citizen would qualify somehow for a certain income, whether they worked productively for pay or just sat around writing blogs, for instance.
After McGovern retired from politics, he tried to open a restaurant. He stated he had no idea until then how many hoops an entrepreneur has to jump through to start a business. He finally understood the conservative argument that regulation defeats free enterprise.
Many regulations are designed to protect the public. And maybe some of them do. However, if a chemical company poisons the water supply, that should be a criminal offense, shouldn't it, like "reckless homicide" or "conspiracy to defraud"? I mean, do we need another layer of regulation to cover that?
I don't understand stalker laws, either. These laws define a certain crime for when someone you don't know or don't like follows you around. However, long before the stalker laws, people could get restraining and protective orders against potentially threatening people. I don't know how the stalker laws vary from this. You still have to wait until a stalker actually makes a definite threat, breaks into your house, assaults you, etc., before you can prove the stalker's intent. So how useful is this? We already had laws against extortion, assault, breaking-and-entering and all that.
Once again, it's all about power. Every law gives the government at some level -- local, state, federal -- another reason and another way to control citizens. They take over the duty and responsibility for making your decisions. You can't disagree with them anymore; you'd be breaking the law or violating the regulations.
So I'm not so sure anymore that the difference between free enterprise and socialism is just a matter of degree. Where, precisely, do you draw the line between freedom and government interference? Thomas Jefferson once said that if an individual's behavior "neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg" he should be able to practice that behavior. Otherwise, for violating the rights of another, he might face prosecution.
Judging by the current mess that Washington has made of the financial industry, I think we'd all be better off without them. Like, if you or me or the guy next door makes a bad investment, he loses -- but his loss neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg. However, if the government makes a bad investment, all citizens have to pay for it for maybe the next three or four generations, definitely robbing and crippling the population.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Hey! It's all a scam!
Was watching the news and the "spontaneous" protests in New York and Boston in response to AIG executives getting $165 million in bonuses. You know, the "spontaneous" eruptions of public ire, where everyone is wearing purple and yellow, carrying professionally-printed placards, and so forth. These are not indications of spontaneity. Neither is the fact that so many union members showed up to march.
At any rate, also saw Obama agreeing with the public wrath about AIG... and Congress passing some unconstitutional laws to try to reclaim that AIG bonus money. In a flash, it came very clear to me.
I DON'T believe in conspiracies, but this is just all too pat.
If you listened to what Obama said on Jay Leno, he's talking about how, yeah, he understands why people are so ticked off about the fat cats on Wall Street getting all this tax money, yadayadayada....
This whole thing is a White House communications strategy.
Get people all wound up about this stupid issue, then rush in and.... agree with them, promising "Yeah, we'll fix that" with this monster socialist Obama budget -- which claims to give all citizens their "fair share" of the federal largesse.
This is all political manipulation. It's all hype and b.s. to get that actually frightening socialist legislation through to supposedly even things out.
I was having a hard time putting the pieces together. Now it all makes sense. Just another variation of the Reichstag Fire.
At any rate, also saw Obama agreeing with the public wrath about AIG... and Congress passing some unconstitutional laws to try to reclaim that AIG bonus money. In a flash, it came very clear to me.
I DON'T believe in conspiracies, but this is just all too pat.
If you listened to what Obama said on Jay Leno, he's talking about how, yeah, he understands why people are so ticked off about the fat cats on Wall Street getting all this tax money, yadayadayada....
This whole thing is a White House communications strategy.
Get people all wound up about this stupid issue, then rush in and.... agree with them, promising "Yeah, we'll fix that" with this monster socialist Obama budget -- which claims to give all citizens their "fair share" of the federal largesse.
This is all political manipulation. It's all hype and b.s. to get that actually frightening socialist legislation through to supposedly even things out.
I was having a hard time putting the pieces together. Now it all makes sense. Just another variation of the Reichstag Fire.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Who's "we," Kimo Sabe?
Seems most citizens right now are all upset over AIG giving out $165 million or so in bonuses to some employees. I say, big deal. That's only a small part of the larger citizen rip-off. And it's only money. As Senator Dirksen once said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money." The latest AIG fiasco pales in comparison to the Stimulus Package and the Pork Bill and just may be a diversion from all the other crap that's still on hold in congress or slowly and tediously making its way through committee.
What concerns me more is Mr. Obama apparently throwing down the gauntlet about his proposed "reforms." I saw only a brief news clip about this on TV. He saying something like, "If you have a better solution, let me hear about it." Not sure what kind of solution he was talking about, but it got me thinking about the Macro view in general.
Some talking head on TV a while back said something like, "We've spent $600 billion on health care over the last five years."
Who's "we," Kimo Sabe?
I've spent a total of $60.00 on health care over the last 10 years. I had the flu about 1999 or so, and it turned into a worse lung infection. I went to a clinic run by a local, very large hospital, saw a doctor after about a 20-minute wait, and she checked me out and gave me a couple sample blister-packs of a penicillin antibiotic, which was a really nice thing to do and sincerely appreciated (the pills would have cost $100+ at a drug store.) The visit cost $60.00 because I don't have health insurance -- costs too much. Told ya, I'm self-employed.
At any rate, it occurs to me, what kind of a "solution" is the president looking for? I mean, solution to anything?
He seems to want to find some single method of dealing with health care. One way to do education. Some single type of energy or energy grid and a single method of using it.
One size fits all? What's wrong with this picture?
Take health care (pleeeze....) Right now there are a number of options for getting health care. I described one above. A lot of people get health insurance from their employers. Some people have HMOs or buy individual packages from insurance carriers. But do we really even need health insurance?
I think this only muddies the issue. People need health care, not necessarily health insurance. Read something from a doctor complaining about how the insurance industry regulates what he can or can't do for his patients. Now the government wants a crack at regulating it. Will that help?
Why can't you just go to a doctor and pay him for the visit? Does that need to be regulated or controlled by anyone?
Same with education. What's wrong with a couple teachers getting together and starting their own academy? Doesn't have to be expensive, though right now there surely is a status thing attached to private schools. Maybe because students' parents pay twice for it -- once in taxes for the public school, a second time in tuition to the private school.
This is where vouchers enter into it. You pay your taxes and you qualify for a voucher for education. You can take the voucher to any school -- not necessarily the public school. What's wrong with that? Yet a successful voucher system in Washington, DC, was recently terminated, by the US congress, which is responsible for DC.
The teachers' unions don't like it because they say vouchers take money out of the public school system. Well, someone ought to. It doesn't seem to be working very well. I suspect the union teachers really just don't want to have to work as hard as they might have to in order to compete with private institutions. First rule of unions: don't work too hard, we're all getting paid the same, and if you do something extra, we'll all have to do it. (See my blogs on Socialism, Feb. 2009)
How about home-schooling? If kids learn at home, the worst they may experience is that they don't learn how to hate school and learning in general. They might not learn that it's much more important to be popular and wear the most expensive shoes than it is to do the homework. Home-schooled kids might just learn to love learning. Something wrong with that?
Chicago for a long time had some of the lowest-rated public schools in the US. The Democrat Machine that runs things there has gone to some lengths and spent a lot of money trying to fix the system. Not sure how that's going. But at the time the public schools were notoriously bad, some friends of mine put their kids in Catholic school, even though they weren't Catholic. Or they home-schooled. And in Chicago, one private school run by an enterprising teacher took in the "problem kids" who'd been kicked out of the public schools and somehow she managed to teach them successfully.
The thing is, in a free country, there should be an endless number of ways to take care of all of these things. The solutions are limited only by peoples' imaginations.
You only run out of options when you're more worried about controlling a system -- any system -- than you are about creating a solution.
There are no end of solutions for anything. In a free country, people sit up all night thinking up ways to use their skills and talents to make money -- like what have they got that other people would be willing to pay for? Teaching their skills and talents are one way they can always make money -- or one way they should be able to, but teacher certifications and other regulations generally protect the teachers' market from anyone non-unionized.
The same applies to health care. There's no end of ways for doctors and other health care professionals to deliver their services. What about midwives? LPNs? Paramedics? I'm guessing most of the people who take up doctors' time could be wholly cured with bandaids and aspirin. Do you need a full-fledged physician to take care of this?
However, from the view of macro-economics -- Washington's perspective -- no one person can control all these solutions. They're likely to spring up overnight like mushrooms. Good things could be happening for people all over the place, and all driven by lone individuals and small businesses. Washington might not even know anything about it. That would get Obama's and Pelosi's panties all in a twist, no doubt; no reason to dump monumental debt on the citizenry, herd us into some nightmarish conformity, nothing to run on in their next election campaigns. Whatever would the bureaucrats do to fill their empty days?
The best thing these idiots can do to provide viable and affordable solutions to the problems that beset the nation is to get the hell out of the way and let private citizens get to work on them.
What concerns me more is Mr. Obama apparently throwing down the gauntlet about his proposed "reforms." I saw only a brief news clip about this on TV. He saying something like, "If you have a better solution, let me hear about it." Not sure what kind of solution he was talking about, but it got me thinking about the Macro view in general.
Some talking head on TV a while back said something like, "We've spent $600 billion on health care over the last five years."
Who's "we," Kimo Sabe?
I've spent a total of $60.00 on health care over the last 10 years. I had the flu about 1999 or so, and it turned into a worse lung infection. I went to a clinic run by a local, very large hospital, saw a doctor after about a 20-minute wait, and she checked me out and gave me a couple sample blister-packs of a penicillin antibiotic, which was a really nice thing to do and sincerely appreciated (the pills would have cost $100+ at a drug store.) The visit cost $60.00 because I don't have health insurance -- costs too much. Told ya, I'm self-employed.
At any rate, it occurs to me, what kind of a "solution" is the president looking for? I mean, solution to anything?
He seems to want to find some single method of dealing with health care. One way to do education. Some single type of energy or energy grid and a single method of using it.
One size fits all? What's wrong with this picture?
Take health care (pleeeze....) Right now there are a number of options for getting health care. I described one above. A lot of people get health insurance from their employers. Some people have HMOs or buy individual packages from insurance carriers. But do we really even need health insurance?
I think this only muddies the issue. People need health care, not necessarily health insurance. Read something from a doctor complaining about how the insurance industry regulates what he can or can't do for his patients. Now the government wants a crack at regulating it. Will that help?
Why can't you just go to a doctor and pay him for the visit? Does that need to be regulated or controlled by anyone?
Same with education. What's wrong with a couple teachers getting together and starting their own academy? Doesn't have to be expensive, though right now there surely is a status thing attached to private schools. Maybe because students' parents pay twice for it -- once in taxes for the public school, a second time in tuition to the private school.
This is where vouchers enter into it. You pay your taxes and you qualify for a voucher for education. You can take the voucher to any school -- not necessarily the public school. What's wrong with that? Yet a successful voucher system in Washington, DC, was recently terminated, by the US congress, which is responsible for DC.
The teachers' unions don't like it because they say vouchers take money out of the public school system. Well, someone ought to. It doesn't seem to be working very well. I suspect the union teachers really just don't want to have to work as hard as they might have to in order to compete with private institutions. First rule of unions: don't work too hard, we're all getting paid the same, and if you do something extra, we'll all have to do it. (See my blogs on Socialism, Feb. 2009)
How about home-schooling? If kids learn at home, the worst they may experience is that they don't learn how to hate school and learning in general. They might not learn that it's much more important to be popular and wear the most expensive shoes than it is to do the homework. Home-schooled kids might just learn to love learning. Something wrong with that?
Chicago for a long time had some of the lowest-rated public schools in the US. The Democrat Machine that runs things there has gone to some lengths and spent a lot of money trying to fix the system. Not sure how that's going. But at the time the public schools were notoriously bad, some friends of mine put their kids in Catholic school, even though they weren't Catholic. Or they home-schooled. And in Chicago, one private school run by an enterprising teacher took in the "problem kids" who'd been kicked out of the public schools and somehow she managed to teach them successfully.
The thing is, in a free country, there should be an endless number of ways to take care of all of these things. The solutions are limited only by peoples' imaginations.
You only run out of options when you're more worried about controlling a system -- any system -- than you are about creating a solution.
There are no end of solutions for anything. In a free country, people sit up all night thinking up ways to use their skills and talents to make money -- like what have they got that other people would be willing to pay for? Teaching their skills and talents are one way they can always make money -- or one way they should be able to, but teacher certifications and other regulations generally protect the teachers' market from anyone non-unionized.
The same applies to health care. There's no end of ways for doctors and other health care professionals to deliver their services. What about midwives? LPNs? Paramedics? I'm guessing most of the people who take up doctors' time could be wholly cured with bandaids and aspirin. Do you need a full-fledged physician to take care of this?
However, from the view of macro-economics -- Washington's perspective -- no one person can control all these solutions. They're likely to spring up overnight like mushrooms. Good things could be happening for people all over the place, and all driven by lone individuals and small businesses. Washington might not even know anything about it. That would get Obama's and Pelosi's panties all in a twist, no doubt; no reason to dump monumental debt on the citizenry, herd us into some nightmarish conformity, nothing to run on in their next election campaigns. Whatever would the bureaucrats do to fill their empty days?
The best thing these idiots can do to provide viable and affordable solutions to the problems that beset the nation is to get the hell out of the way and let private citizens get to work on them.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Involuntary servitude
About 10 years ago I wrote an historical novel about the US Civil War. (All Out of Heart, by a fictional Civil War journalist named Nicholas Canfield. It's at Amazon.com). I spent about a year writing it, but more than five years researching it and found out a few interesting things along the way.
Some people, even today, are fond of asking, "If slavery was so bad, why didn't the slaves revolt?" I suppose this feeds their position that: 1) slavery really wasn't all that bad; 2) the slaves somehow deserved to be slaves.
Well, let's look at this.
The antebellum south witnessed a couple really horrifying revolts, such as the Stono Rebellion, which occurred while the colonies were still colonies, and Nat Turner's rebellion. Turner was a self-made preacher who apparently believed he was acting on the will of God to go out and kill as many white people as he could, including women and children. Then there was Denmark Vesey, a freeman in Charleston, S.C., who organized a slave rebellion involving an "army" of slaves from several different plantations. One of his soldiers, a slave, actually ratted out the whole operation before it had a chance to get underway.
Slaves often simply ran off for a while and hid in the woods -- or even somewhere on the master's property. The slaves often conducted casual work slow-downs, and in a history class one professor told of statistics taken from a large plantation that showed a really absurd number of broken tools. This seems to have been a kind of deliberate sabotage, at the personal level at least, to secure some freedom from labor.
Frederick Olmstead, who was an agriculturist, and who, by the way, designed New York's Central Park, made several trips across the slave south in the 1840s and 1850s to study southern agriculture. He reports in the book King Cotton a lot of inefficiency in the slave system, to the point where meals were rarely on time, slaves treated stock carelessly or even cruelly, and that though slave owners seemed to unilaterally condemn this type of thing, they also tolerated it. They blamed it on the slaves, claiming that it was evidence of the slaves' inferiority, laziness, stupidity, and their general incapacity to take care of themselves. All of this became part of the rationale for slavery. Many slave owners genuinely believed they were benefactors for their human chattel, and that the slaves couldn't survive without them.
Many slaves believed this, too. That's what they'd been taught all their lives. They'd been treated -- at best -- like hapless children in need of direction, and at worst, like dangerous criminals, also in need of direction, often in the form of vigilant and brutal supervision.
And slavery was quite brutal. Whippings were pretty commonplace; less common was the practice of publicly burning alive rebellious slaves. One account from the WPA Project (I think) tells of a slave whose wife was raped by a white overseer. The slave went to the overseer to try to secure some justice for it. He was whipped, and his ear was nailed to a board and lopped off. He wasn't supposed to complain and served as an example to other slaves who might also take offense to rape.
But these are extreme cases. Consider that in parts of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, the black slave population outnumbered the whites -- and not all of the whites in the area were slave owners. So why didn't the slaves rebel?
The slaves weren't armed; they weren't organized. By and large, they didn't know they held an advantage in the population. They weren't familiar with military tactics. They didn't have leaders. They'd very literally been beaten into submission. Many of them internalized and believed that they were inferior, incompetent, stupid, lazy, and on their own would surely be seduced by gambling, drunkenness, profligacy, crime and violence.
Most slave states had laws against teaching slaves to read. In addition, postmasters in the slave states were charged with the task of censoring incoming mail, including books, magazines, and newspapers that even considered emancipation. This was regarded as "outside agitators" hoping to "incite servile rebellion." And it's my personal opinion that the censorship was directed toward the white population rather than slaves. After all, could slaves receive mail without their masters knowing about it? And most slaves couldn't read, anyway.
So the slaves -- along with many poor whites -- remained in a kind of subhuman condition, and were deliberately kept clueless about how to free themselves from it.
Some ran away. Most were captured. Because of the Fugitive Slave Law, which compelled even free states to hunt down and return runaways, any slave in search of freedom had to get to Canada. That's a long, long way from Georgia or Louisiana.
The slaves developed all kinds of cultural mechanisms to survive in this situation. Most simply accepted the hopelessness and desperation of their condition and tried to make the best of it somehow. They played by the rules -- at least so far as ol' massa' knew about it -- and many found comfort in religion. If you listen to the slave songs, the most hopeful are those that portray death as a joyful release from the burden of life.
This is not to say that slaves didn't embrace the concept of freedom. During the Civil War, anywhere the Union lines moved into slave territory, the army was inundated with runaway slaves. One southern lady, Kate Stone, who lived on a plantation in Mississippi, reported in her diary, Brokenburn, how as the Union army moved south down the Mississippi River, she and her neighbors every day "lost" a couple slaves. And not only that, but the slaves who remained often became very difficult to control. Stone talks about her trusted cook chasing her mistress around the kitchen with a butcher knife in response to some criticism. The next day, the cook was gone; she liberated herself and took off for the Union lines.
Where there was hope of successful escape from bondage, there's considerable evidence that the slaves took advantage of it.
The main thing, and the most horrifying thing, that I learned about slavery was that slave owners made a deliberate and calculated effort to cripple the spirits of their slaves, beginning at a very young age. The more gentrified white owners despised the brutality this required, so they hired others to do it for them. Often these "others" were slave drivers, who were slaves themselves. Given this privilege and social status a cut above other field hands, they were even more cruel and brutal than most white overseers would dare to be.
And slavery worked.... for some. The slaves remained slaves from one generation to the next. The white antebellum south included some of the wealthiest people in the world, and very often these people and their counterparts held all the key political positions in their counties, states, and in the US Congress. Some of them were presidents and Supreme Court Justices.
I don't want to get into all the issues and arguments surrounding slavery and the Civil War. Plenty of other blogs, mailing lists, and web sites provide more in-depth discussion on all of this.
The point I'm trying to make is about slavery -- involuntary servitude -- and why people are willing to put up with it.
It starts with regarding yourself as a victim in need of help, or deliberately placing yourself in this kind of situation. Like teenagers having kids, and even regarding this as some kind of virtue or significant indication of adulthood and responsibility. Or maybe just the hope that your dolt boyfriend will marry you and you'll live happily ever after. Stupid and wrong -- and just about impossible.
Or failing to find yourself ignorant, impoverished, and a victim of one thing or another, you go out and adopt unproven and alarmist perils -- like the myth of Global Warming. Right now, the US lives by some potent cultural myths that are not only pure fantasy, but absolutely destructive to human life. If you're more concerned about the fate of owls or fish than about the human race, you definitely fall into this category.
Some things may well be done best by the government (depending upon the government) or by some kind of collective effort -- including corporations -- like building roads and bridges, or providing local police and fire departments. But health insurance? Child care? Deciding where your kids go to school and what kind of education they get? The food you eat? The work you do? Where you live? Your income? The charities you support?
Personal freedom means making these decisions for yourself and paying for them by yourself, then enjoying and/or suffering the consequences of them by yourself.
For US citizens, the scope and range of what we're "allowed" to do for ourselves is getting narrower and narrower.
Oh, but then health care will be FREE!! Yeah... but what kind of health care? If you're over 70 -- or maybe even 50 -- you probably won't get a heart valve replacement because the government will decide that this type of "investment" should go to someone with more productive years left. You won't have anything to say about what books your kids are reading or what kind of information they're being fed every day in school. You're going to pay astronomical rates for electricity because of a misguided and factually WRONG assessment that human beings are causing the earth to self-combust.
And you'll work and work and work and see half or more of your income go to other people for one reason or another. A good many of these others won't be "needy" at all; they'll simply be legislators and bureaucrats and their pals -- the very source of your oppression.
Is this the world the you want to live in? Is this what you want to leave your kids?
I have a hard time with the idea that so many people -- driven by what? greed? delusions? guilt? -- could wish this on anyone. I have a hard time believing that they don't see that there's no advantage for them in any of this, only pain and yes.... involuntary servitude. And if they understand the truth about it, why on earth would they promote it? It's the worst of all possible options for the human race.
If you look at history, usually it's the intellectuals and the artists who are the first to go. They are the ones who threaten the authority of totalitarian government. The general population just might listen to them instead of the local ward boss. And it's the intellectuals and artists right now who are the staunchest supporters of all of this. No doubt, they think they'll be part of the new ruling class. Well, look at history....
My God, even the European semi-socialists are shocked and appalled at what the current president and congress are doing to the "Free World." I'm curious to see the outcomes -- if any -- from the upcoming world economic conference. Right now, the USA has considerable clout because of its wealth and productivity (the results of our freedom). With that being systematically diminished by mountains of public debt, increasing taxes on productivity and infrastructure, and the constipation of more and more governmental regulation, how long will that wealth and political clout last?
Do you really want to live in a Third World country? There are plenty of places you can go right now for that -- some people in Hollywood actively seek out the Third World adventure vacation to broaden their horizons and to provide themselves with flawless "liberal" credentials. But why destroy the USA when you can go almost anywhere else to wallow in poverty and despair?
I'm perfectly happy with allowing anyone to make him or herself a slave. But please leave the rest of us out of it.
Some people, even today, are fond of asking, "If slavery was so bad, why didn't the slaves revolt?" I suppose this feeds their position that: 1) slavery really wasn't all that bad; 2) the slaves somehow deserved to be slaves.
Well, let's look at this.
The antebellum south witnessed a couple really horrifying revolts, such as the Stono Rebellion, which occurred while the colonies were still colonies, and Nat Turner's rebellion. Turner was a self-made preacher who apparently believed he was acting on the will of God to go out and kill as many white people as he could, including women and children. Then there was Denmark Vesey, a freeman in Charleston, S.C., who organized a slave rebellion involving an "army" of slaves from several different plantations. One of his soldiers, a slave, actually ratted out the whole operation before it had a chance to get underway.
Slaves often simply ran off for a while and hid in the woods -- or even somewhere on the master's property. The slaves often conducted casual work slow-downs, and in a history class one professor told of statistics taken from a large plantation that showed a really absurd number of broken tools. This seems to have been a kind of deliberate sabotage, at the personal level at least, to secure some freedom from labor.
Frederick Olmstead, who was an agriculturist, and who, by the way, designed New York's Central Park, made several trips across the slave south in the 1840s and 1850s to study southern agriculture. He reports in the book King Cotton a lot of inefficiency in the slave system, to the point where meals were rarely on time, slaves treated stock carelessly or even cruelly, and that though slave owners seemed to unilaterally condemn this type of thing, they also tolerated it. They blamed it on the slaves, claiming that it was evidence of the slaves' inferiority, laziness, stupidity, and their general incapacity to take care of themselves. All of this became part of the rationale for slavery. Many slave owners genuinely believed they were benefactors for their human chattel, and that the slaves couldn't survive without them.
Many slaves believed this, too. That's what they'd been taught all their lives. They'd been treated -- at best -- like hapless children in need of direction, and at worst, like dangerous criminals, also in need of direction, often in the form of vigilant and brutal supervision.
And slavery was quite brutal. Whippings were pretty commonplace; less common was the practice of publicly burning alive rebellious slaves. One account from the WPA Project (I think) tells of a slave whose wife was raped by a white overseer. The slave went to the overseer to try to secure some justice for it. He was whipped, and his ear was nailed to a board and lopped off. He wasn't supposed to complain and served as an example to other slaves who might also take offense to rape.
But these are extreme cases. Consider that in parts of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, the black slave population outnumbered the whites -- and not all of the whites in the area were slave owners. So why didn't the slaves rebel?
The slaves weren't armed; they weren't organized. By and large, they didn't know they held an advantage in the population. They weren't familiar with military tactics. They didn't have leaders. They'd very literally been beaten into submission. Many of them internalized and believed that they were inferior, incompetent, stupid, lazy, and on their own would surely be seduced by gambling, drunkenness, profligacy, crime and violence.
Most slave states had laws against teaching slaves to read. In addition, postmasters in the slave states were charged with the task of censoring incoming mail, including books, magazines, and newspapers that even considered emancipation. This was regarded as "outside agitators" hoping to "incite servile rebellion." And it's my personal opinion that the censorship was directed toward the white population rather than slaves. After all, could slaves receive mail without their masters knowing about it? And most slaves couldn't read, anyway.
So the slaves -- along with many poor whites -- remained in a kind of subhuman condition, and were deliberately kept clueless about how to free themselves from it.
Some ran away. Most were captured. Because of the Fugitive Slave Law, which compelled even free states to hunt down and return runaways, any slave in search of freedom had to get to Canada. That's a long, long way from Georgia or Louisiana.
The slaves developed all kinds of cultural mechanisms to survive in this situation. Most simply accepted the hopelessness and desperation of their condition and tried to make the best of it somehow. They played by the rules -- at least so far as ol' massa' knew about it -- and many found comfort in religion. If you listen to the slave songs, the most hopeful are those that portray death as a joyful release from the burden of life.
This is not to say that slaves didn't embrace the concept of freedom. During the Civil War, anywhere the Union lines moved into slave territory, the army was inundated with runaway slaves. One southern lady, Kate Stone, who lived on a plantation in Mississippi, reported in her diary, Brokenburn, how as the Union army moved south down the Mississippi River, she and her neighbors every day "lost" a couple slaves. And not only that, but the slaves who remained often became very difficult to control. Stone talks about her trusted cook chasing her mistress around the kitchen with a butcher knife in response to some criticism. The next day, the cook was gone; she liberated herself and took off for the Union lines.
Where there was hope of successful escape from bondage, there's considerable evidence that the slaves took advantage of it.
The main thing, and the most horrifying thing, that I learned about slavery was that slave owners made a deliberate and calculated effort to cripple the spirits of their slaves, beginning at a very young age. The more gentrified white owners despised the brutality this required, so they hired others to do it for them. Often these "others" were slave drivers, who were slaves themselves. Given this privilege and social status a cut above other field hands, they were even more cruel and brutal than most white overseers would dare to be.
And slavery worked.... for some. The slaves remained slaves from one generation to the next. The white antebellum south included some of the wealthiest people in the world, and very often these people and their counterparts held all the key political positions in their counties, states, and in the US Congress. Some of them were presidents and Supreme Court Justices.
I don't want to get into all the issues and arguments surrounding slavery and the Civil War. Plenty of other blogs, mailing lists, and web sites provide more in-depth discussion on all of this.
The point I'm trying to make is about slavery -- involuntary servitude -- and why people are willing to put up with it.
It starts with regarding yourself as a victim in need of help, or deliberately placing yourself in this kind of situation. Like teenagers having kids, and even regarding this as some kind of virtue or significant indication of adulthood and responsibility. Or maybe just the hope that your dolt boyfriend will marry you and you'll live happily ever after. Stupid and wrong -- and just about impossible.
Or failing to find yourself ignorant, impoverished, and a victim of one thing or another, you go out and adopt unproven and alarmist perils -- like the myth of Global Warming. Right now, the US lives by some potent cultural myths that are not only pure fantasy, but absolutely destructive to human life. If you're more concerned about the fate of owls or fish than about the human race, you definitely fall into this category.
Some things may well be done best by the government (depending upon the government) or by some kind of collective effort -- including corporations -- like building roads and bridges, or providing local police and fire departments. But health insurance? Child care? Deciding where your kids go to school and what kind of education they get? The food you eat? The work you do? Where you live? Your income? The charities you support?
Personal freedom means making these decisions for yourself and paying for them by yourself, then enjoying and/or suffering the consequences of them by yourself.
For US citizens, the scope and range of what we're "allowed" to do for ourselves is getting narrower and narrower.
Oh, but then health care will be FREE!! Yeah... but what kind of health care? If you're over 70 -- or maybe even 50 -- you probably won't get a heart valve replacement because the government will decide that this type of "investment" should go to someone with more productive years left. You won't have anything to say about what books your kids are reading or what kind of information they're being fed every day in school. You're going to pay astronomical rates for electricity because of a misguided and factually WRONG assessment that human beings are causing the earth to self-combust.
And you'll work and work and work and see half or more of your income go to other people for one reason or another. A good many of these others won't be "needy" at all; they'll simply be legislators and bureaucrats and their pals -- the very source of your oppression.
Is this the world the you want to live in? Is this what you want to leave your kids?
I have a hard time with the idea that so many people -- driven by what? greed? delusions? guilt? -- could wish this on anyone. I have a hard time believing that they don't see that there's no advantage for them in any of this, only pain and yes.... involuntary servitude. And if they understand the truth about it, why on earth would they promote it? It's the worst of all possible options for the human race.
If you look at history, usually it's the intellectuals and the artists who are the first to go. They are the ones who threaten the authority of totalitarian government. The general population just might listen to them instead of the local ward boss. And it's the intellectuals and artists right now who are the staunchest supporters of all of this. No doubt, they think they'll be part of the new ruling class. Well, look at history....
My God, even the European semi-socialists are shocked and appalled at what the current president and congress are doing to the "Free World." I'm curious to see the outcomes -- if any -- from the upcoming world economic conference. Right now, the USA has considerable clout because of its wealth and productivity (the results of our freedom). With that being systematically diminished by mountains of public debt, increasing taxes on productivity and infrastructure, and the constipation of more and more governmental regulation, how long will that wealth and political clout last?
Do you really want to live in a Third World country? There are plenty of places you can go right now for that -- some people in Hollywood actively seek out the Third World adventure vacation to broaden their horizons and to provide themselves with flawless "liberal" credentials. But why destroy the USA when you can go almost anywhere else to wallow in poverty and despair?
I'm perfectly happy with allowing anyone to make him or herself a slave. But please leave the rest of us out of it.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac a "cash cow" for directors
Anyone who's interested in the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac debacle, here's a video of congressional hearings -- from 2004 -- on proposed regulations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
So the next time you hear our dauntless prez and his cohorts whining over having to fix the mess they "inherited," please remember -- they're still dealing with the blockheads in congress who created it.
And remember, too, we get to re-elect members of the House of Reps every two years.
Now might be a good time to start campaigning against the most arrogant and least competent clods who sponge off taxpayer dollars and do nothing but cause us grief.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
So the next time you hear our dauntless prez and his cohorts whining over having to fix the mess they "inherited," please remember -- they're still dealing with the blockheads in congress who created it.
And remember, too, we get to re-elect members of the House of Reps every two years.
Now might be a good time to start campaigning against the most arrogant and least competent clods who sponge off taxpayer dollars and do nothing but cause us grief.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Paved with good intentions
Back in the 1990s, Illinois' Dept. of Children & Family Services (DCFS) came out with a private memo or report or paper of some kind that raised an interesting issue. It noted how some social workers were managing to establish an apparently perpetual following among the families they helped.
Social workers are trained in how to relate to people, to recognize and deal with social and psychological problems AND they also have to know what public services are available to people and help them navigate the tangle of government bureaucracies. I would guess most of them are sincerely committed to helping people, and most of them also have more cases than they can handle well.
This study or report -- whatever it was -- noted that some social workers had an impact upon the families they served that acted almost like a narcotic. The social workers "hooked" these families on welfare, state-sponsored educational programs, "FREE" this, "FREE" that -- all the stuff that's available to the poor and needy. Often this aid never resulted in the family freeing itself from public welfare; it only taught them how to use the system more effectively to get what they need from the state. It was creating a "perennial underclass."
This report was a private document. It was supposed to be kept under wraps and circulated only to certain people. I managed to verify the fact that it did exist, however. And in one rather embarrassing incident, I asked a lady who held a managerial position at DCFS if she'd ever read this report. Her eyes shot flames as she demanded, "How did you find out about that?"
Well, both Patrick Moynihan, once a US senator from New York, and Charles Murray, a social researcher and author, have written about exactly the same thing: the negative impacts of welfare and other public aid programs. Moynihan had been a staunch supporter for federal programs like ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) and similar, until the statistics began to come in after a decade or so of destruction. He remained a liberal, but was honest about admitting the errors in these programs and their terrible social consequences: the creation of a perennial underclass.
At about this same time, a documentary -- probably on PBS, though I really don't remember -- featured a young woman who had a couple kids, no husband, living on welfare and with her mother. Interesting. This woman seemed to be a vocational program junkie. She'd take one course after another at state expense, pass the course, but she never seemed to be able to get a job. She might work for a week or two, then would turn up on welfare again, volunteering for another vocational program. She also managed to get carfare out of the state so she could get to her classes, childcare, healthcare for herself and her children, paid rent, etc etc etc. She just never seemed to be able to keep job.
The documentarians were illustrating the point that what this woman had learned was how to milk the system. How to stay on welfare. What kind of excuses for her failures were acceptable. How much she could get for which services the state was willing to render. What classes she could take, etc. etc. She learned all that, but virtually nothing about how to live as an independent person in a free society. She never even learned why that might be a "good" idea.
I worked with a woman with a couple young kids in a similar situation. She was divorced and her husband wasn't around and/or willing to keep up with anything like child support. She couldn't have lived off of that, anyway. So she was on welfare for a few years. When both of her kids were old enough to be in school all day, she started looking around for a job.
OK, now here's the problem. She too was getting a "full range" of benefits from the state. This included food stamps, paid rent, vocational training, healthcare for herself and her kids. When she started looking for a job, she had a hard time finding a position at her skill level and with her limited work experience, and which offered enough income and benefits to sustain her lifestyle. No, she wasn't living particularly large on welfare, but few private companies will provide the same social services as the government does.
She opted to take a job, with lower income for herself at first, but she worked her way up, too. But for her, the transition was like jumping off a cliff -- and she had to ensure that her kids would be taken care of.
A lot of people never make the transition. From their social workers, they learn how to work the system, and apparently they believe that's all they need to know. Ever.
And what do their kids learn? The same thing. Or at least the girls do. They often end up with their own kids before they finish high school, and deadbeat dads who never signed up for quite this kind of self-responsibility at the age of 15 or 16. And, with government serving as daddy and bread-winner, the boys are free to go out and terrorize each other as well as unsuspecting citizens. They learn that crime pays better than legitimate effort, at least until they get caught and go to jail. So the beat goes on....
To his credit, President Clinton helped to put an end to this never-ending cycle of generational dependency and victimization, but it seems that the current government is trying to undo all of that now. It seems that the current government is trying to put the middle class on welfare for one reason or another with socialized medicine, "FREE" housing, and so on. Huh... wonder why.
Let me assure you, too, that this isn't a racial assault. Most of the people I've ever known who were ever on welfare were white. That woman with the two kids who chose to jump off the cliff and take a job in the private sector was a co-worker, and she was black.
What amazes me about this whole thing is how quickly the public forgets the bitter lessons the nation has suffered -- and continues to suffer -- from the "good" intentions of misguided busybodies.
Let's look globally for a moment. In college, I had a political science professor who was genuinely brilliant. He was born and raised outside the US and only came here to attend the University of Chicago.
We had a course on terrorism, where every student had to pick a trouble spot somewhere in the world and research it, try to understand the forces at work, and suggest some kind of solution. We students were a little short on solutions..... hard enough to just find out who stole who's pig first to start the conflict. Most times, it didn't really matter. All sides involved in the conflict just grew up hating the other guys. That was all the "reason" they needed to sustain their wars.
Anyway, Palestine was one trouble spot. At the time, there was no nation of Palestine. Palestine was a geographic region that had been a British protectorate. A remnant of imperialism. Palestinians were primarily islamics who fled Israel when it was made an independent nation in 1947, after World War II. They didn't have to leave, they just decided to. While Israel is officially a Jewish state, it tolerates other religions and religious practices.
I was in school roughly 35 years after Israel had been created. And our professor pointed out that these Palestinian refugees were still huddling around the borders of Israel, complaining about A) being disenfranchised; B) being ragged and poor; C) having no homeland of their own.
And at this time, they were finding a voice: Yassir Arafat. He seemed concerned about the misery of his constituents. He didn't seem concerned enough to help them do anything about it, though, except slaughter Jews. Like that would be a positive step toward the Palestinians' economic and political progress.
Meanwhile, the Jews were turning Israel into a productive and free democratic nation.
Thirty-five years sitting on the border and whining? That in itself would seem to take considerable effort -- thwarting the perfectly acceptable and altogether natural impulse to produce something to better yourself and improve your situation. But Arafat and apparently other Palestinian leaders had a vested interest in keeping those people ragged and poor and raging at their fates. They provided Arafat with a political base, a constituency. Arafat turned them into terrorists.
If you don't have a reasonable argument, kill the opposition. That works. It really does. Wouldn't be my first choice, but violence and terror are, after all, sure-fire ways to get other people to do what you want them to do. History is littered with examples.
But God, this is disgusting. It goes back to power and victims. Some butthead effectively enslaving people, cheering them along to maintain their own oppression and helplessness so that he can boss them around and become their Leader. I always thought this was some kind of sociopathy, where you don't care about what you do to other people, as long as you get yours. I'm beginning to think it's what makes politics an attractive career for many people.
Liberals are fond of claiming that liberal thought is much more subtle and complex than conservative ideas. Actually, I think liberal thought is just jam-packed with convoluted fallacious rationalizations to help liberals keep on believing that what they're doing is good for anyone. At best, they're trying to salve their own bizarre sense of guilt that they may be better off than some other people. At worst, they're ruthlessly power-hungry and hoping to establish a constituency they can manipulate. Like Ol' Massa' on the antebellum plantation.
Either way, guess who pays for it -- and in much more than dollars and cents.
A couple quotes from Karl Marx:
I always kinda liked Reverend Ike a whole lot better. He used to say, "Give a man a fish, he'll be back next week looking for another handout. But to teach a man to fish, and you set him free."
Social workers are trained in how to relate to people, to recognize and deal with social and psychological problems AND they also have to know what public services are available to people and help them navigate the tangle of government bureaucracies. I would guess most of them are sincerely committed to helping people, and most of them also have more cases than they can handle well.
This study or report -- whatever it was -- noted that some social workers had an impact upon the families they served that acted almost like a narcotic. The social workers "hooked" these families on welfare, state-sponsored educational programs, "FREE" this, "FREE" that -- all the stuff that's available to the poor and needy. Often this aid never resulted in the family freeing itself from public welfare; it only taught them how to use the system more effectively to get what they need from the state. It was creating a "perennial underclass."
This report was a private document. It was supposed to be kept under wraps and circulated only to certain people. I managed to verify the fact that it did exist, however. And in one rather embarrassing incident, I asked a lady who held a managerial position at DCFS if she'd ever read this report. Her eyes shot flames as she demanded, "How did you find out about that?"
Well, both Patrick Moynihan, once a US senator from New York, and Charles Murray, a social researcher and author, have written about exactly the same thing: the negative impacts of welfare and other public aid programs. Moynihan had been a staunch supporter for federal programs like ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) and similar, until the statistics began to come in after a decade or so of destruction. He remained a liberal, but was honest about admitting the errors in these programs and their terrible social consequences: the creation of a perennial underclass.
At about this same time, a documentary -- probably on PBS, though I really don't remember -- featured a young woman who had a couple kids, no husband, living on welfare and with her mother. Interesting. This woman seemed to be a vocational program junkie. She'd take one course after another at state expense, pass the course, but she never seemed to be able to get a job. She might work for a week or two, then would turn up on welfare again, volunteering for another vocational program. She also managed to get carfare out of the state so she could get to her classes, childcare, healthcare for herself and her children, paid rent, etc etc etc. She just never seemed to be able to keep job.
The documentarians were illustrating the point that what this woman had learned was how to milk the system. How to stay on welfare. What kind of excuses for her failures were acceptable. How much she could get for which services the state was willing to render. What classes she could take, etc. etc. She learned all that, but virtually nothing about how to live as an independent person in a free society. She never even learned why that might be a "good" idea.
I worked with a woman with a couple young kids in a similar situation. She was divorced and her husband wasn't around and/or willing to keep up with anything like child support. She couldn't have lived off of that, anyway. So she was on welfare for a few years. When both of her kids were old enough to be in school all day, she started looking around for a job.
OK, now here's the problem. She too was getting a "full range" of benefits from the state. This included food stamps, paid rent, vocational training, healthcare for herself and her kids. When she started looking for a job, she had a hard time finding a position at her skill level and with her limited work experience, and which offered enough income and benefits to sustain her lifestyle. No, she wasn't living particularly large on welfare, but few private companies will provide the same social services as the government does.
She opted to take a job, with lower income for herself at first, but she worked her way up, too. But for her, the transition was like jumping off a cliff -- and she had to ensure that her kids would be taken care of.
A lot of people never make the transition. From their social workers, they learn how to work the system, and apparently they believe that's all they need to know. Ever.
And what do their kids learn? The same thing. Or at least the girls do. They often end up with their own kids before they finish high school, and deadbeat dads who never signed up for quite this kind of self-responsibility at the age of 15 or 16. And, with government serving as daddy and bread-winner, the boys are free to go out and terrorize each other as well as unsuspecting citizens. They learn that crime pays better than legitimate effort, at least until they get caught and go to jail. So the beat goes on....
To his credit, President Clinton helped to put an end to this never-ending cycle of generational dependency and victimization, but it seems that the current government is trying to undo all of that now. It seems that the current government is trying to put the middle class on welfare for one reason or another with socialized medicine, "FREE" housing, and so on. Huh... wonder why.
Let me assure you, too, that this isn't a racial assault. Most of the people I've ever known who were ever on welfare were white. That woman with the two kids who chose to jump off the cliff and take a job in the private sector was a co-worker, and she was black.
What amazes me about this whole thing is how quickly the public forgets the bitter lessons the nation has suffered -- and continues to suffer -- from the "good" intentions of misguided busybodies.
Let's look globally for a moment. In college, I had a political science professor who was genuinely brilliant. He was born and raised outside the US and only came here to attend the University of Chicago.
We had a course on terrorism, where every student had to pick a trouble spot somewhere in the world and research it, try to understand the forces at work, and suggest some kind of solution. We students were a little short on solutions..... hard enough to just find out who stole who's pig first to start the conflict. Most times, it didn't really matter. All sides involved in the conflict just grew up hating the other guys. That was all the "reason" they needed to sustain their wars.
Anyway, Palestine was one trouble spot. At the time, there was no nation of Palestine. Palestine was a geographic region that had been a British protectorate. A remnant of imperialism. Palestinians were primarily islamics who fled Israel when it was made an independent nation in 1947, after World War II. They didn't have to leave, they just decided to. While Israel is officially a Jewish state, it tolerates other religions and religious practices.
I was in school roughly 35 years after Israel had been created. And our professor pointed out that these Palestinian refugees were still huddling around the borders of Israel, complaining about A) being disenfranchised; B) being ragged and poor; C) having no homeland of their own.
And at this time, they were finding a voice: Yassir Arafat. He seemed concerned about the misery of his constituents. He didn't seem concerned enough to help them do anything about it, though, except slaughter Jews. Like that would be a positive step toward the Palestinians' economic and political progress.
Meanwhile, the Jews were turning Israel into a productive and free democratic nation.
Thirty-five years sitting on the border and whining? That in itself would seem to take considerable effort -- thwarting the perfectly acceptable and altogether natural impulse to produce something to better yourself and improve your situation. But Arafat and apparently other Palestinian leaders had a vested interest in keeping those people ragged and poor and raging at their fates. They provided Arafat with a political base, a constituency. Arafat turned them into terrorists.
If you don't have a reasonable argument, kill the opposition. That works. It really does. Wouldn't be my first choice, but violence and terror are, after all, sure-fire ways to get other people to do what you want them to do. History is littered with examples.
But God, this is disgusting. It goes back to power and victims. Some butthead effectively enslaving people, cheering them along to maintain their own oppression and helplessness so that he can boss them around and become their Leader. I always thought this was some kind of sociopathy, where you don't care about what you do to other people, as long as you get yours. I'm beginning to think it's what makes politics an attractive career for many people.
Liberals are fond of claiming that liberal thought is much more subtle and complex than conservative ideas. Actually, I think liberal thought is just jam-packed with convoluted fallacious rationalizations to help liberals keep on believing that what they're doing is good for anyone. At best, they're trying to salve their own bizarre sense of guilt that they may be better off than some other people. At worst, they're ruthlessly power-hungry and hoping to establish a constituency they can manipulate. Like Ol' Massa' on the antebellum plantation.
Either way, guess who pays for it -- and in much more than dollars and cents.
A couple quotes from Karl Marx:
1) The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
2) The quickest way to a man's head is through his stomach.
I always kinda liked Reverend Ike a whole lot better. He used to say, "Give a man a fish, he'll be back next week looking for another handout. But to teach a man to fish, and you set him free."
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The blame game
A long time ago when I was doing office work for a living, I had a terrific boss named Jean. The company had just digitized all of its files and as anyone who's gone through such a conversion knows, this involves a rethinking and reorganization of the whole company. (And though I've done office work in union shops, this place wasn't unionized.)
Jean was very laid-back, unflappable, and knew her stuff. She trained us, handed out assignments, and then pretty much let us take care of getting the job done. Everyone worked hard and steadily in that office, but everyone was also friendly and respectful of each other. We used to have informal talks on break and in lulls in the work day.
Don't recall how we got on the subject, but Jean told us about her first position as a manager -- some years before and at another company. She said some project was royally screwed up somehow. There was a bad storm, people didn't show up for work, they had some kind of a mechanical breakdown. And over the next couple days, they didn't quite get caught up.
Jean's boss called her into his office and she began to explain effusively about the problems she'd had in her department. Truly, most of the failings had been beyond her control.
Her boss looked at her blankly and said, "I didn't ask you why things were messed up. I asked you: What are you going to do about it?"
Jean said she felt like crying as she confronted the reality that it was her job and responsibility to get the work done -- no excuses, no whining, no blame. Just get the work done. But Jean had one of the most positive attitudes of anyone I've ever worked for. She was open to suggestions, gave credit where credit was due, and honestly tried to be fair with all of her employees. She looked for solutions instead of whining that things weren't going the way she wanted them to go. And we got the work done.
So the prez signs an executive order to lift the ban on stem cell research. But not without making a truly nasty and small-minded statement suggesting that President Bush had trompled all over the concept of scientific integrity.
FYI, Mr. Obama, the scientific community itself has ruled certain types of research off-limits for various reasons.... Like, in doing recombinant DNA studies, you don't inject certain types of virus into bacteria cells, even though bacteria cells are easier to work with. The reason for this is that a careless or thoughtless or simply absentminded researcher could inadvertently create something like an airborne cancer bacteria that could be transmitted through sneezing or something like that. So contrary to White House belief, ethical considerations are very much a part of scientific research.
Then there's the whole matter of the $410 billion Pork Bill. I think it might have passed the senate today, but I'm not sure.
While running for office, Obama promised to veto pork, but he's agreed to sign this bill. Why?
Well, as he sees it, it's not "his" bill. It's a carry-over from the Bush Administration. It's old business that should have been done last year, but apparently congress was so busy fawning over and trying to curry favor with the president-elect that they didn't get any real work done. However, the more than 9,000 pork items in the bill are for spending this year.
So, Mr. Obama, if you don't think this is "your" bill and you have nothing to do with, why not send it down to Crawford, Texas, and let George Bush decide whether or not to sign it?
That's just one thing. Have you tried criticizing any Democrats lately? The knee-jerk response is, "Well, the Republicans were even worse...." Or, "It was the Republicans who left this mess...." etc etc.
First, this ain't 'xackly true. The Democrats were a majority in the House even while Bush was in the White House, so all the crap and mess in Congress right now truly does belong to them. They didn't inherit it from anyone. They brought it with them. Nancy Pelosi may even be proud of it. After all, she thinks her position gives her the privilege to boss around the Air Force.
(Having access to an airplane make you feel important, Nancy? Another way to consume the public treasure. I'd suggest she try commercial flights or, being a millionnaire, pay for her own GulfStream, but then Pelosi's philosophy doesn't embrace the concept of anyone having to pay for anything. The whole idea seems to completely elude her. Wouldn't you hate to see her credit card statements? Maybe she's the reason Citibank has crashed....)
Second, what the hell difference does it make whose fault it is? It is what is. If your house is on fire do you spend a few hours trying to blame someone for it, or do you try to put the fire out? The buttheads in Washington wanted the job, so deal with it. Or not. And if not, get the hell out of the way of people who do have some solutions.
I wrote my Senator Dick Durbin a little email today that I'm quite sure will go right over his head. I said something like, "Ever read the Constitution? Congress is supposed to do a few more things than just spend money."
I'm certain he'll be totally clueless about that one. A) I'm not entirely convinced he's fully literate; B) "What Consti-- Wha? How do you spell that?"
The country's in a mess. Go ahead, point fingers if that makes you feel more comfortable. I was going to say, "but how about coming up with a solution?
The thing is -- If Mr. Obama's $3.6 TRILLION budget proposal is supposed to be a solution....
Nah, hey, keep on pointing them fingers. It'll keep you all fired up and busy until we can vote you out.
Jean was very laid-back, unflappable, and knew her stuff. She trained us, handed out assignments, and then pretty much let us take care of getting the job done. Everyone worked hard and steadily in that office, but everyone was also friendly and respectful of each other. We used to have informal talks on break and in lulls in the work day.
Don't recall how we got on the subject, but Jean told us about her first position as a manager -- some years before and at another company. She said some project was royally screwed up somehow. There was a bad storm, people didn't show up for work, they had some kind of a mechanical breakdown. And over the next couple days, they didn't quite get caught up.
Jean's boss called her into his office and she began to explain effusively about the problems she'd had in her department. Truly, most of the failings had been beyond her control.
Her boss looked at her blankly and said, "I didn't ask you why things were messed up. I asked you: What are you going to do about it?"
Jean said she felt like crying as she confronted the reality that it was her job and responsibility to get the work done -- no excuses, no whining, no blame. Just get the work done. But Jean had one of the most positive attitudes of anyone I've ever worked for. She was open to suggestions, gave credit where credit was due, and honestly tried to be fair with all of her employees. She looked for solutions instead of whining that things weren't going the way she wanted them to go. And we got the work done.
So the prez signs an executive order to lift the ban on stem cell research. But not without making a truly nasty and small-minded statement suggesting that President Bush had trompled all over the concept of scientific integrity.
FYI, Mr. Obama, the scientific community itself has ruled certain types of research off-limits for various reasons.... Like, in doing recombinant DNA studies, you don't inject certain types of virus into bacteria cells, even though bacteria cells are easier to work with. The reason for this is that a careless or thoughtless or simply absentminded researcher could inadvertently create something like an airborne cancer bacteria that could be transmitted through sneezing or something like that. So contrary to White House belief, ethical considerations are very much a part of scientific research.
Then there's the whole matter of the $410 billion Pork Bill. I think it might have passed the senate today, but I'm not sure.
While running for office, Obama promised to veto pork, but he's agreed to sign this bill. Why?
Well, as he sees it, it's not "his" bill. It's a carry-over from the Bush Administration. It's old business that should have been done last year, but apparently congress was so busy fawning over and trying to curry favor with the president-elect that they didn't get any real work done. However, the more than 9,000 pork items in the bill are for spending this year.
So, Mr. Obama, if you don't think this is "your" bill and you have nothing to do with, why not send it down to Crawford, Texas, and let George Bush decide whether or not to sign it?
That's just one thing. Have you tried criticizing any Democrats lately? The knee-jerk response is, "Well, the Republicans were even worse...." Or, "It was the Republicans who left this mess...." etc etc.
First, this ain't 'xackly true. The Democrats were a majority in the House even while Bush was in the White House, so all the crap and mess in Congress right now truly does belong to them. They didn't inherit it from anyone. They brought it with them. Nancy Pelosi may even be proud of it. After all, she thinks her position gives her the privilege to boss around the Air Force.
(Having access to an airplane make you feel important, Nancy? Another way to consume the public treasure. I'd suggest she try commercial flights or, being a millionnaire, pay for her own GulfStream, but then Pelosi's philosophy doesn't embrace the concept of anyone having to pay for anything. The whole idea seems to completely elude her. Wouldn't you hate to see her credit card statements? Maybe she's the reason Citibank has crashed....)
Second, what the hell difference does it make whose fault it is? It is what is. If your house is on fire do you spend a few hours trying to blame someone for it, or do you try to put the fire out? The buttheads in Washington wanted the job, so deal with it. Or not. And if not, get the hell out of the way of people who do have some solutions.
I wrote my Senator Dick Durbin a little email today that I'm quite sure will go right over his head. I said something like, "Ever read the Constitution? Congress is supposed to do a few more things than just spend money."
I'm certain he'll be totally clueless about that one. A) I'm not entirely convinced he's fully literate; B) "What Consti-- Wha? How do you spell that?"
The country's in a mess. Go ahead, point fingers if that makes you feel more comfortable. I was going to say, "but how about coming up with a solution?
The thing is -- If Mr. Obama's $3.6 TRILLION budget proposal is supposed to be a solution....
Nah, hey, keep on pointing them fingers. It'll keep you all fired up and busy until we can vote you out.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
The "Mediocrity of Evil"
Had the TV on last night while I was in the other room doing dishes, so I don't know what the context was, but there on the screen was a guy holding up a copy of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged.
Given our current sociopolitical milieu, it reminded me of what Ayn Rand labeled "The Mediocrity of Evil." That is, true evil isn't necessarily a supernatural demon from hell or a 14-year-old nut-job with an AK-47 who was educated in a terrorist grammar school. Rather, evil is the guy who says, "If you've got more than I do, you're going down."
To expand on this a bit, History Channel ran a series of shows about a month ago on the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, and Envy.
Why envy? If you look at a lot of TV commercials -- honestly, a useful gauge for what America believes is attractive and desirable -- envy is something to envy.
A while back there was that shampoo commercial, or was it for hair dye?, that had a model pleading rather smugly, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." She does kinda make you want to smack her one. Her conceit knows no bounds. She just assumes your whole life revolves around having beautiful hair.
More recently, we see a soccer mom driving her kids around in an SUV. Her daughter in the back seat remarks that one of the neighbor moms said they were "spoiled." The soccer mom asks, "You're spoiled?" The little girl says, "No." Implying that it's the soccer mom who's spoiled because she gets to drive around in the big SUV. The soccer mom sort of grins enigmatically -- Gee, she scored a big one there.
The Seven Deadly Sins TV series emphasized that envy doesn't consist only of wanting what someone else has, but wanting to take it away from them, or wishing some sort of horror upon them because they have something more than you do.
So many examples of this in literature. I was a lit major and had to do a paper on what the heck were Iago's motives in Shakespeare's "Othello." Othello was happily married to a beautiful woman named Desdemona. Iago was supposedly a friend of Othello, but engineered a plot to convince Othello that Desdemona was cheating on him. In the end, Othello strangled her.
Iago is one of the better known villains in literature. But the play nowhere states forthrightly what Iago's motives are for devising Othello's misery and downfall. I saw a production of this play with James Earl Jones as Othello and Christopher Plummer as Iago. Plummer played Iago as though Iago were gay and in love with Othello, and therefore jealous of Desdemona. It worked OK as drama, but jealousy and envy are two different things.
I used to live in the city of Chicago. Walking to the strip mall a few blocks away, I passed an apartment building that had a parking lot in the back. The public sidewalk went right along this parking lot. Going to the mall one day, I noticed that someone in that building had just acquired a really beautiful Cadillac. It was midnight blue with gold-colored fittings -- like the door handles were gold, the grill gold, etc. Probably not real gold, just golden, but it was a beautiful car.
Unfortunately, this car occupied a parking space right next to the sidewalk. I wondered how long before it was keyed up.
Within a week, sure enough, someone just couldn't resist destroying that beautiful car. They'd scratched a rough sketch of certain parts of the male anatomy and a couple nasty words in the Cadillac's satiny dark blue surface.
Why? Though it's totally predictable, it isn't funny or endearing in any way. I still can't imagine being inside the head of the person who did the damage. That would be the real nightmare -- having to live with such seething anguish day in and day out because someone else has something that you don't have, blind to everything else and devoting time and energy to wrecking everything that's truly beautiful.
Like the head-case who threw red paint on Michelangelo's "Pieta." Why?
Heard a story about a family in Jamaica. The father had landed a job at the local bauxite plant -- bauxite is used in making aluminum. Anyway, the plant paid really good wages and everyone in the neighborhood wanted to work there. And one day the mom in this family did her laundry and hung it outside on a clothesline to dry. And one of her neighbors came along and cut out all the pockets in the clothes. Why?
Wreaking vengence upon the successful because they're successful? Does that make life better for anyone?
In another case, I knew someone whose daughter was accepted at a magnet school for gifted children. The family went out of town for Christmas that year and when they returned, they found that their home had been vandalized -- and by neighborhood kids who despised the daughter for her gifted status. They emptied the refrigerator all over the furniture, spray-painted obscenities on the walls, peed (and worse) in the carpets, etc etc.
Why?
This is surely one of the uglier sides of human nature. Can someone please explain it?
Anyway, I think this is a large part of what Ayn Rand referred to as the Mediocrity of Evil. Do you hate someone because they're better than you, or is it really that you hate yourself because you judge yourself as being somehow not-so-good?
In either case, it seems to be related to the whole "victim" attitude: "I'm useless and hopeless and someone else owes me for it."
It's difficult to imagine devoting your life to destroying other people whom you perceive as being better off. So very negative, consuming yourself in destruction, and ultimately so self-destructive. Isn't making use of what you do have and what you can do a more positive and beneficial approach to life -- for yourself and everyone else?
The thing to keep in mind is that people do this to themselves. They're the ones who place more value on others and upon the things that belong to others, than they do upon themselves and what they have. Who cares what anyone else has? All that matters, really, is what you can do for yourself and your own. (see my blog from Feb. 2009, By your own lights.)
You do need a degree of personal freedom in order to do this. You have to determine your own values, assess your own capabilities, and then be in a social and political environment that lets you go for it and maybe even cheers you on.
I suspect that envy is what's behind socialism. Some people are rich, so they become targets for those who aren't. Never mind that the rich spend all their time thinking up ways to make money and probably ignore or never appreciate very much else in their lives. They have money. They own things. You don't. So let's go after them? Why?
Or else the rich are people with really unique and creative ideas who managed to put those ideas into practice by inventing useful products or by providing services everyone wants. Really, for self-made millionaires, their wealth is a gauge of how much they've contributed to everyone else's well-being. How can anyone hate them for that?
Socialism doesn't raise people up; rather, it only lowers the status of the relatively few who are wealthy. No matter how rich Bill Gates is or the Kennedys, if you divide their wealth amongst 300 million people, there's just not enough to elevate the general standard of living. But you have managed to bring down the wealthy. You've managed to take away any incentive they might have to create new and better tools other people can use to better themselves, or for the rich to invest in those who do have the ideas for these innovative products. For what? Exactly what purpose is served?
You've demolished success, wrecked personal achievement. Now you can bask in the glory of.... what? I suppose the destruction of the world as we know it does provide an excellent excuse for whining about your own miserable situation.
I don't get it. It's like watching the World Trade Center going down, and then the videos of that weird-looking hag in Syria or someplace with the dirty, crooked teeth, dancing in joy. Why? She's ecstatic at the deaths of almost 3,000 people who were strangers to her. That is evil, that really is.
Misery loves company. Is that it? How very mediocre.
Given our current sociopolitical milieu, it reminded me of what Ayn Rand labeled "The Mediocrity of Evil." That is, true evil isn't necessarily a supernatural demon from hell or a 14-year-old nut-job with an AK-47 who was educated in a terrorist grammar school. Rather, evil is the guy who says, "If you've got more than I do, you're going down."
To expand on this a bit, History Channel ran a series of shows about a month ago on the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, and Envy.
Why envy? If you look at a lot of TV commercials -- honestly, a useful gauge for what America believes is attractive and desirable -- envy is something to envy.
A while back there was that shampoo commercial, or was it for hair dye?, that had a model pleading rather smugly, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." She does kinda make you want to smack her one. Her conceit knows no bounds. She just assumes your whole life revolves around having beautiful hair.
More recently, we see a soccer mom driving her kids around in an SUV. Her daughter in the back seat remarks that one of the neighbor moms said they were "spoiled." The soccer mom asks, "You're spoiled?" The little girl says, "No." Implying that it's the soccer mom who's spoiled because she gets to drive around in the big SUV. The soccer mom sort of grins enigmatically -- Gee, she scored a big one there.
The Seven Deadly Sins TV series emphasized that envy doesn't consist only of wanting what someone else has, but wanting to take it away from them, or wishing some sort of horror upon them because they have something more than you do.
So many examples of this in literature. I was a lit major and had to do a paper on what the heck were Iago's motives in Shakespeare's "Othello." Othello was happily married to a beautiful woman named Desdemona. Iago was supposedly a friend of Othello, but engineered a plot to convince Othello that Desdemona was cheating on him. In the end, Othello strangled her.
Iago is one of the better known villains in literature. But the play nowhere states forthrightly what Iago's motives are for devising Othello's misery and downfall. I saw a production of this play with James Earl Jones as Othello and Christopher Plummer as Iago. Plummer played Iago as though Iago were gay and in love with Othello, and therefore jealous of Desdemona. It worked OK as drama, but jealousy and envy are two different things.
I used to live in the city of Chicago. Walking to the strip mall a few blocks away, I passed an apartment building that had a parking lot in the back. The public sidewalk went right along this parking lot. Going to the mall one day, I noticed that someone in that building had just acquired a really beautiful Cadillac. It was midnight blue with gold-colored fittings -- like the door handles were gold, the grill gold, etc. Probably not real gold, just golden, but it was a beautiful car.
Unfortunately, this car occupied a parking space right next to the sidewalk. I wondered how long before it was keyed up.
Within a week, sure enough, someone just couldn't resist destroying that beautiful car. They'd scratched a rough sketch of certain parts of the male anatomy and a couple nasty words in the Cadillac's satiny dark blue surface.
Why? Though it's totally predictable, it isn't funny or endearing in any way. I still can't imagine being inside the head of the person who did the damage. That would be the real nightmare -- having to live with such seething anguish day in and day out because someone else has something that you don't have, blind to everything else and devoting time and energy to wrecking everything that's truly beautiful.
Like the head-case who threw red paint on Michelangelo's "Pieta." Why?
Heard a story about a family in Jamaica. The father had landed a job at the local bauxite plant -- bauxite is used in making aluminum. Anyway, the plant paid really good wages and everyone in the neighborhood wanted to work there. And one day the mom in this family did her laundry and hung it outside on a clothesline to dry. And one of her neighbors came along and cut out all the pockets in the clothes. Why?
Wreaking vengence upon the successful because they're successful? Does that make life better for anyone?
In another case, I knew someone whose daughter was accepted at a magnet school for gifted children. The family went out of town for Christmas that year and when they returned, they found that their home had been vandalized -- and by neighborhood kids who despised the daughter for her gifted status. They emptied the refrigerator all over the furniture, spray-painted obscenities on the walls, peed (and worse) in the carpets, etc etc.
Why?
This is surely one of the uglier sides of human nature. Can someone please explain it?
Anyway, I think this is a large part of what Ayn Rand referred to as the Mediocrity of Evil. Do you hate someone because they're better than you, or is it really that you hate yourself because you judge yourself as being somehow not-so-good?
In either case, it seems to be related to the whole "victim" attitude: "I'm useless and hopeless and someone else owes me for it."
It's difficult to imagine devoting your life to destroying other people whom you perceive as being better off. So very negative, consuming yourself in destruction, and ultimately so self-destructive. Isn't making use of what you do have and what you can do a more positive and beneficial approach to life -- for yourself and everyone else?
The thing to keep in mind is that people do this to themselves. They're the ones who place more value on others and upon the things that belong to others, than they do upon themselves and what they have. Who cares what anyone else has? All that matters, really, is what you can do for yourself and your own. (see my blog from Feb. 2009, By your own lights.)
You do need a degree of personal freedom in order to do this. You have to determine your own values, assess your own capabilities, and then be in a social and political environment that lets you go for it and maybe even cheers you on.
I suspect that envy is what's behind socialism. Some people are rich, so they become targets for those who aren't. Never mind that the rich spend all their time thinking up ways to make money and probably ignore or never appreciate very much else in their lives. They have money. They own things. You don't. So let's go after them? Why?
Or else the rich are people with really unique and creative ideas who managed to put those ideas into practice by inventing useful products or by providing services everyone wants. Really, for self-made millionaires, their wealth is a gauge of how much they've contributed to everyone else's well-being. How can anyone hate them for that?
Socialism doesn't raise people up; rather, it only lowers the status of the relatively few who are wealthy. No matter how rich Bill Gates is or the Kennedys, if you divide their wealth amongst 300 million people, there's just not enough to elevate the general standard of living. But you have managed to bring down the wealthy. You've managed to take away any incentive they might have to create new and better tools other people can use to better themselves, or for the rich to invest in those who do have the ideas for these innovative products. For what? Exactly what purpose is served?
You've demolished success, wrecked personal achievement. Now you can bask in the glory of.... what? I suppose the destruction of the world as we know it does provide an excellent excuse for whining about your own miserable situation.
I don't get it. It's like watching the World Trade Center going down, and then the videos of that weird-looking hag in Syria or someplace with the dirty, crooked teeth, dancing in joy. Why? She's ecstatic at the deaths of almost 3,000 people who were strangers to her. That is evil, that really is.
Misery loves company. Is that it? How very mediocre.
Save the planet
Was looking up information on energy policy and came across an op-ed article called "Destroying Both Jobs and Energy Security" at http://www.newt.org/, Newt Gingrich's website. Here's a quote:
You must understand, I'm a "flatlander." Spent an afternoon once driving through desolate canyons around Los Angeles along fire roads. We seemed to be surrounded by "mountains," really just pretty high hills, I guess, and almost desert-like. At any rate, driving through there was very claustrophobic for me. I'm used to the Big Sky of the Midwest. Surrounded by mountains, I feel crowded and, in a way, burdened by the landscape.
Anyway, in South Dakota, I drove from Rapid City to Deadwood, before Deadwood became a casino town. In this area, there are no real mountains. They do have the Black Hills (miles south of where I was), and if you go a little farther west, you begin to see the Rockies. But right between Rapid City and Deadwood there were mainly only the buttes. These are steep hills, windswept at the top, so they're shaped like mounds of ice cream or mashed potatoes with their peaks bent and tipped toward the east by the westerly winds constantly leaning against them.
So I'm halfway down one butte and could see across a very broad and shallow valley to the next rise. You can see the highway, I-90, wending along. And it looks really insignificant, like a pen-scratch on a pile of clay. Also in this valley, actually cradled up to the next butte, was something that looked like it might be a lumber yard or a quarry, a square of industrial activity hemmed on one side by a cluster of buildings. I could see big 18-wheel trucks moving around that place, like "Hot Wheels" models, the entire industrial site itself no more than a small scuff on the land.
What struck me was something like, "Jeez. If the human race disappeared tomorrow, we would have left hardly any tracks."
Another trip along I-80 was interesting, too. Again, I'm a flatlander and pretty much used to the height of the sky at whatever sea-level is in Illinois. As you drive along I-80 west across Iowa and more notably moving across Nebraska, you feel yourself getting closer to the sky although the land is relatively flat. It's bizarre. The clouds seem to be getting lower.
Then these strange long bursts of rock begin bolting up, ripping through the layer of soil. Like the bedrock suddenly decided to stand up and look around. This effect gets to be a kind of norm the farther west you go. But these things are enormous. Some, like around Chimney Rock, are ledges miles long. They look like cracks in the earth, almost, one side higher than the other, the underlayer of solid rock rising up.
There are a few other bizarre formations around Chimney Rock, too. I paid special attention to this because I was writing a book about the Oregon Trail, and Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluff, the Courthouse -- all rocky formations -- for the 1840 wagon trains these geological features served as "the elephant" in the phrase, "I've seen the elephant." All very strange and exotic, and most became landmarks for these travelers.
And then there are the Rocky Mountains. When I finally saw them from the ground (as opposed to flying over), I was less impressed by their beauty than I imagined I would be. After all, we've all seen so many Westerns and postcards and coffeetable books, etc etc. But the Rockies are huge and spread out enough so I didn't get quite the same sort of claustrophobia as in the hills around Los Angeles. The Rockies were more like.... Really Dangerous. Even though the land for hundreds of miles around them has been rising steadily and you're nowhere near sea-level anymore, you've already seen the smaller eruptions of rock pushing up, the Rockies are still, well, monumentally towering, bare, uninviting, scarred, insensate rock.
And I thought: What on earth happened here? Where's all the nice, soft, sweet-smelling grassy soil? The Rockies seem to belong to another planet.
And what did happen there? People used too much aerosol hairspray and deodorent?
Actually, apparently parts of the Midwest, especially around Rapid City, were once the bottom of an ocean. If you're familiar with the Plate Theory -- that the earth's crust consists of a number of plates that move around very slowly over the more liquid core of the earth -- then you understand that at some time the plates collided and the Rocky Mountains are the result. The mountains are actually the edge of one plate crushing through and riding up on another.
Only when you haven't grown up around this and see the mountains for the first time, you can't even imagine the force that could create these formations. It's like $3.6 TRILLION, it just goes beyond any capacity to comprehend.
That's when I lost any real interest in environmentalism, or rather, grew orders of magnitude more skeptical of the argument that claims human beings are destroying the earth. Sure, we can dump a lot of garbage into lakes and rivers, kill all the fish, and make the water non-potable for us and for everyone downstream. But I'm not convinced we're capable of doing significantly more damage. It seems incredibly arrogant to me to believe we could.
Went to Italy once and to Pompei. That town was a resort area for rich Romans and has always been "under the shadow" of Mt. Vesuvius. Actually, Vesuvius is a good 10 miles away or so. As you walk into the ruins of Pompei, there's a big glass window framing Mt. Vesuvius in the distance. And on the window, they've painted a line that shows how high Vesuvius used to be. It blew like Mt. St. Helens did -- the whole top exploded -- and projectile-vomited tons of ash and all kinds of earth junk, burying Pompei and the surrounding area. It's a great place to visit. If you ever get to Italy, go there, definitely.
At any rate, just to add to the pile of things to consider: Mt. St. Helens. Or the mountain in Southeast Asia somewhere that blew up about 1819 or so, and spewed so much ash and gas into the atmosphere that residents of North America eventually experienced the "Year with No Summer." It snowed in July here.
So, in the face of what the earth is capable of, the forces and energies it can whip up all by its non-intelligent and entirely material self, I don't see how human beings can seriously challenge it or win too many battles against it. We can grub around with our little tools and plant things. We can lay down long strips of asphalt to ease our passage across it. We can puncture it and bleed out little pools of oil. I suppose we might set off some chains of events that might not have a happy ending (for us) in our interaction with the planet.
But even if, in fact, something strange is happening to the ozone layer, or the polar ice caps are melting, I doubt that it's entirely the fault of our puny selves, and I also doubt there's much we can do about it. I'd look somewhere else for a more plausible explanation.
But it might be warmer and fuzzier to think it's all our fault. That would mean it's under our control.
Environmentalists say that mankind must learn how to live with the earth. Yeah, I think that's what we've been doing since we emerged as a distinct species. We have to know how to live with the earth, extract from it what we need, because our ability to manipulate the environment is really our only effective and successful method of survival. We have to operate more or less pro-actively with the earth, take the initiative, rather than just waiting for, say, a passive bovine or a bunch of asparagus to deliver itself to our doorsteps. Otherwise, we won't survive.
And given all this, I suppose it was inevitable that eventually human beings would turn on each other. Sometimes it's a lot easier to steal food and shelter from others than to get it for ourselves through our own efforts. Of course, that means turning the "others" out, watching them wander away and die of exposure and starvation.
Human beings can be soft-hearted. Usually we have to demonize our enemies before we destroy them in order to justify our own cruelty, label them "monsters", "ogres", "corporates CEOs", or "rich people." Then they're fair game. They aren't people like us anymore.
But ya know, it takes a lot of thought and energy to steal from someone else. You have to either hit them over the head with a hammer, shoot them, outlaw them, or devise convoluted and complicated government mechanisms, get the legislation through congress, set up bureaus and agencies... All that energy could be used to make something for youself by yourself. And unless you plan on building an atom bomb, don't worry too much about irretrievably screwing up the planet. That's not all that easy to do.
President Obama just signed a controversial, pork-laden, trillion-dollar "stimulus" package. We'll spend another $350 billion this year on imported oil.Many moons ago I took a trip to Mount Rushmore for the simple reason that I hadn't ever been there before. I flew to Rapid City, South Dakota, and spent a week driving around.
And with the stroke of a pen, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar canceled 77 Utah oil and gas leases that had gone through seven years of studies, negotiations and land-use planning. In an instant, he eliminated hundreds of jobs, terminated access to vital oil and gas deposits, and deprived taxpayers of millions in lease bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues.
The canceled leases represent one-third of acreage estimated to
contain enough oil to fuel 3 million cars and enough natural gas to heat 14 million homes for 15 years. They were rejected because temporary drilling operations might be "visible" from several national parks more than a mile away.
You must understand, I'm a "flatlander." Spent an afternoon once driving through desolate canyons around Los Angeles along fire roads. We seemed to be surrounded by "mountains," really just pretty high hills, I guess, and almost desert-like. At any rate, driving through there was very claustrophobic for me. I'm used to the Big Sky of the Midwest. Surrounded by mountains, I feel crowded and, in a way, burdened by the landscape.
Anyway, in South Dakota, I drove from Rapid City to Deadwood, before Deadwood became a casino town. In this area, there are no real mountains. They do have the Black Hills (miles south of where I was), and if you go a little farther west, you begin to see the Rockies. But right between Rapid City and Deadwood there were mainly only the buttes. These are steep hills, windswept at the top, so they're shaped like mounds of ice cream or mashed potatoes with their peaks bent and tipped toward the east by the westerly winds constantly leaning against them.
So I'm halfway down one butte and could see across a very broad and shallow valley to the next rise. You can see the highway, I-90, wending along. And it looks really insignificant, like a pen-scratch on a pile of clay. Also in this valley, actually cradled up to the next butte, was something that looked like it might be a lumber yard or a quarry, a square of industrial activity hemmed on one side by a cluster of buildings. I could see big 18-wheel trucks moving around that place, like "Hot Wheels" models, the entire industrial site itself no more than a small scuff on the land.
What struck me was something like, "Jeez. If the human race disappeared tomorrow, we would have left hardly any tracks."
Another trip along I-80 was interesting, too. Again, I'm a flatlander and pretty much used to the height of the sky at whatever sea-level is in Illinois. As you drive along I-80 west across Iowa and more notably moving across Nebraska, you feel yourself getting closer to the sky although the land is relatively flat. It's bizarre. The clouds seem to be getting lower.
Then these strange long bursts of rock begin bolting up, ripping through the layer of soil. Like the bedrock suddenly decided to stand up and look around. This effect gets to be a kind of norm the farther west you go. But these things are enormous. Some, like around Chimney Rock, are ledges miles long. They look like cracks in the earth, almost, one side higher than the other, the underlayer of solid rock rising up.
There are a few other bizarre formations around Chimney Rock, too. I paid special attention to this because I was writing a book about the Oregon Trail, and Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluff, the Courthouse -- all rocky formations -- for the 1840 wagon trains these geological features served as "the elephant" in the phrase, "I've seen the elephant." All very strange and exotic, and most became landmarks for these travelers.
And then there are the Rocky Mountains. When I finally saw them from the ground (as opposed to flying over), I was less impressed by their beauty than I imagined I would be. After all, we've all seen so many Westerns and postcards and coffeetable books, etc etc. But the Rockies are huge and spread out enough so I didn't get quite the same sort of claustrophobia as in the hills around Los Angeles. The Rockies were more like.... Really Dangerous. Even though the land for hundreds of miles around them has been rising steadily and you're nowhere near sea-level anymore, you've already seen the smaller eruptions of rock pushing up, the Rockies are still, well, monumentally towering, bare, uninviting, scarred, insensate rock.
And I thought: What on earth happened here? Where's all the nice, soft, sweet-smelling grassy soil? The Rockies seem to belong to another planet.
And what did happen there? People used too much aerosol hairspray and deodorent?
Actually, apparently parts of the Midwest, especially around Rapid City, were once the bottom of an ocean. If you're familiar with the Plate Theory -- that the earth's crust consists of a number of plates that move around very slowly over the more liquid core of the earth -- then you understand that at some time the plates collided and the Rocky Mountains are the result. The mountains are actually the edge of one plate crushing through and riding up on another.
Only when you haven't grown up around this and see the mountains for the first time, you can't even imagine the force that could create these formations. It's like $3.6 TRILLION, it just goes beyond any capacity to comprehend.
That's when I lost any real interest in environmentalism, or rather, grew orders of magnitude more skeptical of the argument that claims human beings are destroying the earth. Sure, we can dump a lot of garbage into lakes and rivers, kill all the fish, and make the water non-potable for us and for everyone downstream. But I'm not convinced we're capable of doing significantly more damage. It seems incredibly arrogant to me to believe we could.
Went to Italy once and to Pompei. That town was a resort area for rich Romans and has always been "under the shadow" of Mt. Vesuvius. Actually, Vesuvius is a good 10 miles away or so. As you walk into the ruins of Pompei, there's a big glass window framing Mt. Vesuvius in the distance. And on the window, they've painted a line that shows how high Vesuvius used to be. It blew like Mt. St. Helens did -- the whole top exploded -- and projectile-vomited tons of ash and all kinds of earth junk, burying Pompei and the surrounding area. It's a great place to visit. If you ever get to Italy, go there, definitely.
At any rate, just to add to the pile of things to consider: Mt. St. Helens. Or the mountain in Southeast Asia somewhere that blew up about 1819 or so, and spewed so much ash and gas into the atmosphere that residents of North America eventually experienced the "Year with No Summer." It snowed in July here.
So, in the face of what the earth is capable of, the forces and energies it can whip up all by its non-intelligent and entirely material self, I don't see how human beings can seriously challenge it or win too many battles against it. We can grub around with our little tools and plant things. We can lay down long strips of asphalt to ease our passage across it. We can puncture it and bleed out little pools of oil. I suppose we might set off some chains of events that might not have a happy ending (for us) in our interaction with the planet.
But even if, in fact, something strange is happening to the ozone layer, or the polar ice caps are melting, I doubt that it's entirely the fault of our puny selves, and I also doubt there's much we can do about it. I'd look somewhere else for a more plausible explanation.
But it might be warmer and fuzzier to think it's all our fault. That would mean it's under our control.
Environmentalists say that mankind must learn how to live with the earth. Yeah, I think that's what we've been doing since we emerged as a distinct species. We have to know how to live with the earth, extract from it what we need, because our ability to manipulate the environment is really our only effective and successful method of survival. We have to operate more or less pro-actively with the earth, take the initiative, rather than just waiting for, say, a passive bovine or a bunch of asparagus to deliver itself to our doorsteps. Otherwise, we won't survive.
And given all this, I suppose it was inevitable that eventually human beings would turn on each other. Sometimes it's a lot easier to steal food and shelter from others than to get it for ourselves through our own efforts. Of course, that means turning the "others" out, watching them wander away and die of exposure and starvation.
Human beings can be soft-hearted. Usually we have to demonize our enemies before we destroy them in order to justify our own cruelty, label them "monsters", "ogres", "corporates CEOs", or "rich people." Then they're fair game. They aren't people like us anymore.
But ya know, it takes a lot of thought and energy to steal from someone else. You have to either hit them over the head with a hammer, shoot them, outlaw them, or devise convoluted and complicated government mechanisms, get the legislation through congress, set up bureaus and agencies... All that energy could be used to make something for youself by yourself. And unless you plan on building an atom bomb, don't worry too much about irretrievably screwing up the planet. That's not all that easy to do.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The Democrat process at work in health care
This is going back about 10 or 15 years to the time of Hilary Clinton's failed attempts at nationalizing the US health care system.
At the time, a friend of mine and I decided to attend a Town Meeting on socialized health care scheduled by a US Representative from a district in the city of Chicago. Can't remember the rep's name (she was that memorable), and she's not in office anymore. I think she was gerrymandered out.
Anyway, it was an open meeting. The public was invited to give their views on socializing the health care industry. So my friend and I decided to go and maybe hear some interesting proposals and/or ask some thoughtful questions.
Maybe about 100 people showed up. They were mostly ordinary citizens, maybe a couple local ward bosses, who knows? We all sat down in a kind of stadium-type setting in a school auditorium.
So the US Rep got up to introduce herself and to begin the discussion. She said quite plainly, "We aren't here to discuss IF we're going to have universal health care. We're here to discuss HOW to make it happen."
My friend and I left. What's the point? The Rep didn't want to hear any point of view but her own. She wanted applause, not a discussion; a fan club, not free citizens with minds of their own.
Had a major flashback on this whole event today, listening to Barack Obama addressing his Health Care Summit or Preaching to the Choir event in Washington DC.
He said basically that all voices will be heard, all suggestions considered... except the status quo.
OK. So then I started wondering, Well who the heck is at this meeting? I called the Cato Institute, which is a highly-respected free market think tank. They weren't even invited.
I was going to call the American Enterprise Institute -- also leaning toward free markets and capitalism -- and The Heritage Foundation, which is conservative. Before I did, though, I found a list of the people who are attending the conference. It was on the CBS News web site today, but they've since taken it down. Don't know why. (I cut and pasted the list, though. It's too long to post here, but anyone who wants a copy, I'll happily email it to them if they make a request through the "Comments.")
Anyway, they're all 1.) Politicians, mostly Democrats; 2.) Union people; 3.) Community organizers; 4.) Some people from insurance companies; 5.) Even fewer people from business and commercial organizations. They were also assigned to attend various break-out sessions, which means they're divided up and segregated, each to focus on their own topic. Gee, that sounds so free and easy, doesn't it? So open to all sides.
The Voice of the People at this conference is apparently represented by the community organizers, largely the "We Demand Our Fair Share" crowd, groups who regard themselves as victims of one kind or another. Probably Obama's most loyal constituency, since this is his own professional background.
Hmmmm.... Wonder what kind of solutions they'll come up with. Maybe... Socializing the health care industry? Do ya think?
But who's going to pay for it? Surely not the small minority of business people who were attending or the three or four Republicans. They can't afford it all by themselves.
But here's a better question: Why do people think socialized health care is a good idea?
Obama himself says that people can still keep their private policies and that businesses and labor unions can still provide group policies.
Think they will? When health care is "FREE"? Medicare was only supposed to cover the elderly who didn't have health care coverage in their pension plans, or who couldn't afford private policies. That was in 1964. Do you know any person over 65 years of age nowadays who isn't registered for Medicare? Know of any insurance companies that will insure anyone 65+, except at truly exhorbitant rates, which means private insurance for seniors is available only to the very, very rich.
How stupid does Obama et. al. think we are? (Well, I think that's pretty obvious. He assumes our IQs are roughly equal to those of cinder blocks.)
And why would anyone want socialized medicine?
In Chicago, there's Cook County Hospital, which is "FREE" for the indigent, etc. When I was in college, a fellow student who had no insurance went down to County for one thing or another. She reported what she learned from the experience: "You really have to get to the Emergency Room by about 3:30 in the morning if you want to see a doctor that day."
That's in the Emergency Room. We can only wonder how long the wait is for non-emergency care. Bring a sandwich, and a pillow and blanket.
And Cook County as a whole is nearly bankrupt... hangin' on by a slim financial thread and, I'm sure, right now drooling with anticipation of getting its Fair Share from the Stimulus Package.
I'm told of a friend of a friend in Canada who needs surgery. Canada has socialized health care. His operation has been scheduled for nine months hence, the earliest slot available. And he tells me that in Canada, most of the hospitals aren't even open year-round, rather only a few months out of the year. And that Windsor, Ontario, has an arrangement with Detroit, Michigan, whereby Windsor sends it pregnant mums to the USA for routine prenatal care. Detroit health care providers are re-imbursed, but this is all because Ontario can't handle the patient load and, unfortunately, babies won't wait any longer than nine months to be born.
Anyone remember the Brain Drain? This was during the 1960s and 1970s when European nations were getting their nationalized health care programs going. A good many of their doctors -- and many of their best -- came to the USA. Europe resented the hell out of the USA for that. I've been told that many of those doctors who didn't want to abandon their homelands for freedom to practice medicine, opted instead to take teaching positions, or they left the medical profession all together.
If the USA socializes its health care industry, where will the doctors go? Or maybe they won't be so willing to spend 12 or 16 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education. Maybe they'll just all become cab drivers or something. Or join the UAW or SEIU.
Yeah. Socialized health care is so inspiring, isn't it?
As far as controlling health care costs.... Well, look at the charts and graphs on nationwide health care costs from the 1960s. They were kind of level and flat, maybe a slow upward creep, until 1965 -- when Medicare went into operation. Then the costs shoot straight up like a rocket.
Did the over-65 crowd, suddenly fall ill all together? No. But now health care was "FREE" for them. And the government has had to back down on that significantly. Now seniors have to pay some of the costs for the services they receive, and they're strongly advised to buy "supplemental" insurance to plug in the holes that Medicare can no longer accommodate.
And while you're at those government web sites checking out Medicare costs, you might also want to take a look at GDP and the federal budget. "FREE" government-supported health care consumes about 70% of the federal budget... Even though it only covers certain segments of the population, and only partially covers their expenses.
In addition, in the days when Medicare was chugging along at full tilt, many states, including Illinois, established Medicaid programs for welfare families and indigents, etc. The costs became so outa-control the federal government just had to step in to "cap" the costs. For example, suppose you need an X-ray. The hospital's actual cost for doing the X-ray might be $100, which includes the cost for running the machine, the cost of a technician's labor, the use of the room and lead vests, etc.
OK. So the feds decided to pay $80 for an X-ray. After all, those greedy money-grubbing hospitals were probably exaggerating everything just to make money, right?
No. Not really. The hospitals really do have to pay for their machines and equipment, and they really do have to pay technicians. So, if they were forced to take $80 for doing an X-ray for a Medicare/Medicaid patient, they were losing $20 on every procedure.
Where do they get the money to make up for that? Ask the technicians to take a cut in pay? Pencil-sketch "guesstimates" of the patient's insides instead of using machines?
They do cost-shifting. That is, they charge patients with private insurance $120 for an X-ray to compensate for their losses and cover their costs. And the ultimate consequence of the federal caps was that about a dozen inner-city hospitals in Chicago completely shut down. They served largely a Medicare/Medicaid clientele and didn't have enough patients with private insurance to gouge in order to make ends meet. Those hospitals are just gone.
Another sorry consequence: The costs for private insurance carriers ballooned up, but who cares? Corporations pay for that, right? Or rich people. Who gives a damn what happens to them? They don't count. They aren't victims.
So, think about this: Socializing the entire health care industry -- making health care "FREE" for a large segment of the US population -- will tend to put private insurance pretty much out of business. Who's going to pay for Medicare/Medicaid then?
Do you feel a MAJOR, MAJOR, MAJOR tax increase coming on? Or, what the heck, maybe Communist China will kick in another few billion to keep the USA viable. Whaddaya think?
However, we aren't entirely without alternatives. Yet another friend of mine needed surgery. She asked her doctor about costs. He said the procedure usually ran about $8,000 to $10,000. Being a savvy free-market person, she asked the doctor, "What if I pay you cash instead going through the insurance company?"
She got the surgery for $4,000, and the doctor threw in a few little freebies, too. He said it was worth it, to save him the paper work and the wait for payment from an insurance company.
But Obama's health care conference doesn't really include many voices from the free market. Apparently he doesn't want the free market to handle it. By definition, the free market can't be bullied and controlled, sliced, diced, or "capped", and it can't compel highly-qualified professionals to work for minimum wage. We certainly can't allow that sort of thing in a free country, can we? I mean, where would it end? Efficiency? Low-costs? Universal accessibility? Quality care for the truly indigent through private charity? What a freakin' nightmare!
No, Obama's right... The shut-up-and-pay-only-I-know-what's-good-for-you Democrat Process works much better for everyone. Right? (Say "yes" right now to avoid a confrontation with Nancy Pelosi.)
At the time, a friend of mine and I decided to attend a Town Meeting on socialized health care scheduled by a US Representative from a district in the city of Chicago. Can't remember the rep's name (she was that memorable), and she's not in office anymore. I think she was gerrymandered out.
Anyway, it was an open meeting. The public was invited to give their views on socializing the health care industry. So my friend and I decided to go and maybe hear some interesting proposals and/or ask some thoughtful questions.
Maybe about 100 people showed up. They were mostly ordinary citizens, maybe a couple local ward bosses, who knows? We all sat down in a kind of stadium-type setting in a school auditorium.
So the US Rep got up to introduce herself and to begin the discussion. She said quite plainly, "We aren't here to discuss IF we're going to have universal health care. We're here to discuss HOW to make it happen."
My friend and I left. What's the point? The Rep didn't want to hear any point of view but her own. She wanted applause, not a discussion; a fan club, not free citizens with minds of their own.
Had a major flashback on this whole event today, listening to Barack Obama addressing his Health Care Summit or Preaching to the Choir event in Washington DC.
He said basically that all voices will be heard, all suggestions considered... except the status quo.
OK. So then I started wondering, Well who the heck is at this meeting? I called the Cato Institute, which is a highly-respected free market think tank. They weren't even invited.
I was going to call the American Enterprise Institute -- also leaning toward free markets and capitalism -- and The Heritage Foundation, which is conservative. Before I did, though, I found a list of the people who are attending the conference. It was on the CBS News web site today, but they've since taken it down. Don't know why. (I cut and pasted the list, though. It's too long to post here, but anyone who wants a copy, I'll happily email it to them if they make a request through the "Comments.")
Anyway, they're all 1.) Politicians, mostly Democrats; 2.) Union people; 3.) Community organizers; 4.) Some people from insurance companies; 5.) Even fewer people from business and commercial organizations. They were also assigned to attend various break-out sessions, which means they're divided up and segregated, each to focus on their own topic. Gee, that sounds so free and easy, doesn't it? So open to all sides.
The Voice of the People at this conference is apparently represented by the community organizers, largely the "We Demand Our Fair Share" crowd, groups who regard themselves as victims of one kind or another. Probably Obama's most loyal constituency, since this is his own professional background.
Hmmmm.... Wonder what kind of solutions they'll come up with. Maybe... Socializing the health care industry? Do ya think?
But who's going to pay for it? Surely not the small minority of business people who were attending or the three or four Republicans. They can't afford it all by themselves.
But here's a better question: Why do people think socialized health care is a good idea?
Obama himself says that people can still keep their private policies and that businesses and labor unions can still provide group policies.
Think they will? When health care is "FREE"? Medicare was only supposed to cover the elderly who didn't have health care coverage in their pension plans, or who couldn't afford private policies. That was in 1964. Do you know any person over 65 years of age nowadays who isn't registered for Medicare? Know of any insurance companies that will insure anyone 65+, except at truly exhorbitant rates, which means private insurance for seniors is available only to the very, very rich.
How stupid does Obama et. al. think we are? (Well, I think that's pretty obvious. He assumes our IQs are roughly equal to those of cinder blocks.)
And why would anyone want socialized medicine?
In Chicago, there's Cook County Hospital, which is "FREE" for the indigent, etc. When I was in college, a fellow student who had no insurance went down to County for one thing or another. She reported what she learned from the experience: "You really have to get to the Emergency Room by about 3:30 in the morning if you want to see a doctor that day."
That's in the Emergency Room. We can only wonder how long the wait is for non-emergency care. Bring a sandwich, and a pillow and blanket.
And Cook County as a whole is nearly bankrupt... hangin' on by a slim financial thread and, I'm sure, right now drooling with anticipation of getting its Fair Share from the Stimulus Package.
I'm told of a friend of a friend in Canada who needs surgery. Canada has socialized health care. His operation has been scheduled for nine months hence, the earliest slot available. And he tells me that in Canada, most of the hospitals aren't even open year-round, rather only a few months out of the year. And that Windsor, Ontario, has an arrangement with Detroit, Michigan, whereby Windsor sends it pregnant mums to the USA for routine prenatal care. Detroit health care providers are re-imbursed, but this is all because Ontario can't handle the patient load and, unfortunately, babies won't wait any longer than nine months to be born.
Anyone remember the Brain Drain? This was during the 1960s and 1970s when European nations were getting their nationalized health care programs going. A good many of their doctors -- and many of their best -- came to the USA. Europe resented the hell out of the USA for that. I've been told that many of those doctors who didn't want to abandon their homelands for freedom to practice medicine, opted instead to take teaching positions, or they left the medical profession all together.
If the USA socializes its health care industry, where will the doctors go? Or maybe they won't be so willing to spend 12 or 16 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education. Maybe they'll just all become cab drivers or something. Or join the UAW or SEIU.
Yeah. Socialized health care is so inspiring, isn't it?
As far as controlling health care costs.... Well, look at the charts and graphs on nationwide health care costs from the 1960s. They were kind of level and flat, maybe a slow upward creep, until 1965 -- when Medicare went into operation. Then the costs shoot straight up like a rocket.
Did the over-65 crowd, suddenly fall ill all together? No. But now health care was "FREE" for them. And the government has had to back down on that significantly. Now seniors have to pay some of the costs for the services they receive, and they're strongly advised to buy "supplemental" insurance to plug in the holes that Medicare can no longer accommodate.
And while you're at those government web sites checking out Medicare costs, you might also want to take a look at GDP and the federal budget. "FREE" government-supported health care consumes about 70% of the federal budget... Even though it only covers certain segments of the population, and only partially covers their expenses.
In addition, in the days when Medicare was chugging along at full tilt, many states, including Illinois, established Medicaid programs for welfare families and indigents, etc. The costs became so outa-control the federal government just had to step in to "cap" the costs. For example, suppose you need an X-ray. The hospital's actual cost for doing the X-ray might be $100, which includes the cost for running the machine, the cost of a technician's labor, the use of the room and lead vests, etc.
OK. So the feds decided to pay $80 for an X-ray. After all, those greedy money-grubbing hospitals were probably exaggerating everything just to make money, right?
No. Not really. The hospitals really do have to pay for their machines and equipment, and they really do have to pay technicians. So, if they were forced to take $80 for doing an X-ray for a Medicare/Medicaid patient, they were losing $20 on every procedure.
Where do they get the money to make up for that? Ask the technicians to take a cut in pay? Pencil-sketch "guesstimates" of the patient's insides instead of using machines?
They do cost-shifting. That is, they charge patients with private insurance $120 for an X-ray to compensate for their losses and cover their costs. And the ultimate consequence of the federal caps was that about a dozen inner-city hospitals in Chicago completely shut down. They served largely a Medicare/Medicaid clientele and didn't have enough patients with private insurance to gouge in order to make ends meet. Those hospitals are just gone.
Another sorry consequence: The costs for private insurance carriers ballooned up, but who cares? Corporations pay for that, right? Or rich people. Who gives a damn what happens to them? They don't count. They aren't victims.
So, think about this: Socializing the entire health care industry -- making health care "FREE" for a large segment of the US population -- will tend to put private insurance pretty much out of business. Who's going to pay for Medicare/Medicaid then?
Do you feel a MAJOR, MAJOR, MAJOR tax increase coming on? Or, what the heck, maybe Communist China will kick in another few billion to keep the USA viable. Whaddaya think?
However, we aren't entirely without alternatives. Yet another friend of mine needed surgery. She asked her doctor about costs. He said the procedure usually ran about $8,000 to $10,000. Being a savvy free-market person, she asked the doctor, "What if I pay you cash instead going through the insurance company?"
She got the surgery for $4,000, and the doctor threw in a few little freebies, too. He said it was worth it, to save him the paper work and the wait for payment from an insurance company.
But Obama's health care conference doesn't really include many voices from the free market. Apparently he doesn't want the free market to handle it. By definition, the free market can't be bullied and controlled, sliced, diced, or "capped", and it can't compel highly-qualified professionals to work for minimum wage. We certainly can't allow that sort of thing in a free country, can we? I mean, where would it end? Efficiency? Low-costs? Universal accessibility? Quality care for the truly indigent through private charity? What a freakin' nightmare!
No, Obama's right... The shut-up-and-pay-only-I-know-what's-good-for-you Democrat Process works much better for everyone. Right? (Say "yes" right now to avoid a confrontation with Nancy Pelosi.)
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Mountains out of molehills
Seems to be a big deal in the media over Rush Limbaugh saying in his speech to CPAC last week that he would like to see Obama fail. I understand him perfectly. He said he hopes the president's socialist policies fail. So calm down all you liberals, it wasn't a personal attack.
And it seems that Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, didn't really understand the question he was asked about this. First of all, everyone has been taking Rush's comments out of context, and second, Rush Limbaugh doesn't really make Republican policy. He may be a powerful influence over it, but he doesn't write the platform.
Nice diversion, though, when the only other thing to think about is the USA collapsing.
Really strange.... I watched Rush's speech. And only hours before, I'd been on the internet and came across a little political poll. One of the questions on the poll was: Do you want to see the President fail? You had to answer yes or no.
I thought about this for a long time. I don't want to see the president fail, not on a personal level. In an odd way, I feel sorry for him. I think he got pushed into office -- who else did the Democrats have? -- before he was ready to take on the job. And he's not going to get another chance after this one. Too bad.
Think I mentioned before, being a resident of Illinois, I may have become aware of Barack Obama a little ahead of non-Illinoisans. He's very charismatic, extremely likable. I've been a political activist -- but not anymore -- and recognized within him immediately a really viable political candidate. And he's always been a Democrat, and I am not (not a Republican, either), so I've never agreed with his views. He's just extremely personable. You want to like him.
However, I think the Democrats have wasted Obama. He's too inexperienced. He should have spent a little more time in the Senate. That might have helped. But from the moment he was elected to the Senate, he was out on the campaign trail. And he's young. I believe he was just testing the waters in 2008, with a plan to really go after the presidential nomination in 2012. But who else did the Democrats have? And Obama is so very affable.
The very fact that he believes he can simply carry on with his own agenda in the face of a national disaster is evidence of his inexperience and even naivete. He's not black so much as he's green.
George W. Bush didn't go to the White House hoping to get into a nightmarish tangle with a bunch of crazy islamic terrorists -- no matter what the loonies on the left say. I think "W" was hoping to contribute something more positive to the nation.
But then catastrophe intervened. I had been at an international trade show at McCormick Place, Chicago, for four days prior to 9/11. That Tuesday morning, I didn't have to go down there again, so I slept in a bit. When I got up, I put on a pot of coffee, sat down in the living room, and switched on the TV.
What flickered across the screen was a pair of talking heads with this screen behind them. I thought they were reviewing an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. A building on fire.
I changed the channel. Hmmmm... same damn thing. The networks are such a bunch of buttheads. They run news at the same time, sports at the same time, ads at the same time....
I put on Court TV (now RealTV or something like that), and here's two more talking heads with the screen behind them with a building on fire.
What the hell?
So I turned up the sound and listened. They were speculating that a private plane had veered w-a-a-a-y off course somehow... And then:
"Oh my God, a second plane has just flown into the other tower...." And people looking like they wanted to cry.
I cried. I cried for days. All I could think about was being on that plane, going to California for a wedding or something, vacation, maybe Disneyland. Then here you are, way too low, following the course of the river, like being in a canyon, Jersey on the right, Manhattan on the left. Then this huge glass and steel structure looming up....
Well, contrary to some crackpots, I doubt "W" was behind that. I don't think he could foresee it. I think it drew him up short. He was talking to a grammar school class when he was notified, and if you look at his face, you see something like disbelief, then real pain that hardens into resolve. Yet he didn't skip a beat with the kids.
And on that morning, after it sunk in that, yeah, this was really happening, I called a friend of mine, and the first thing we both said to each other was, "I'm so damn glad Bush is president instead of Al Gore." It was just instinctive, but I'm still so damn glad Bush was president instead of Al Gore.
Bush loved America for whatever it is. Perhaps he lacked Gore's imagination, but Bush wasn't trying to turn the USA into his personal vision of Utopia. He valued the nation's strengths, accepted its failings, and wouldn't let anyone hurt us if he could help it. I got a very different vibe from Al Gore, like maybe he'd sell us out and sign the Kyoto Treaty so he'd be regarded as a mover-and-shaker on the relatively clueless and predatory international scene.
Anyway, Bush applied himself to the problem, gave it his full attention, and even if you don't agree with his response to it, at least he confronted it as an inescapable reality and tried to work through it.
Obama couldn't have foreseen the crash of the US economy. A few people did see it coming, but who believed them?
And Obama apparently still doesn't believe the crash is real, doesn't understand that the fate of the stock market has quite a bit to do with the fate of the nation, seems to think he can go on his merry way, spending non-existent money willy-nilly for heaven only knows what purpose.
He's not looking at reality.
I talked about the economy as a pie a few blogs ago. About how socialists try to divide the pie, etc etc.
Hey, you know what? There's only about half as much pie now as there was six months ago. We've lost 25% of the pie since the end of January.
No productivity + no trade + no credit + no jobs = no pie.
So Obama apparently is going to try to borrow a pie from someone else so that he has something to divide up.
Somehow, dividing the pie is not a really relevant concern when there's no damn pie.
So... Do you want the president to fail?
Not particularly. I just don't want his policies, which guarantee that I'll probably lose through "redistribution" whatever I've managed to save for myself -- from a lifetime of work. And he doesn't seem to care. He doesn't seem to regard me or my concerns as worth his consideration. I'm just a number in a ledger that owes the government taxes. He seems to be preoccupied with some fantasyland vision of free-flowing milk and honey and thousands of happy people on a hillside, holding hands and singing in unison.
So, yeah, I hope the president fails -- if what he wants to do is nudge the nation (my country) into a ditch. Of course, I don't have a lot more confidence in Joe Biden, and God forbid, Nancy Pelosi is lost in space... I'd say with this bunch, from the president on down, the nation hasn't got a prayer.
Or maybe a prayer is all we've got.
Jeez, I forgot. I promised to write something positive. Here it is: My cat really loves me. He may regard me as a "sofa with thumbs," according to one veterinarian, but that's OK. At least he's honest about it.
And it seems that Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, didn't really understand the question he was asked about this. First of all, everyone has been taking Rush's comments out of context, and second, Rush Limbaugh doesn't really make Republican policy. He may be a powerful influence over it, but he doesn't write the platform.
Nice diversion, though, when the only other thing to think about is the USA collapsing.
Really strange.... I watched Rush's speech. And only hours before, I'd been on the internet and came across a little political poll. One of the questions on the poll was: Do you want to see the President fail? You had to answer yes or no.
I thought about this for a long time. I don't want to see the president fail, not on a personal level. In an odd way, I feel sorry for him. I think he got pushed into office -- who else did the Democrats have? -- before he was ready to take on the job. And he's not going to get another chance after this one. Too bad.
Think I mentioned before, being a resident of Illinois, I may have become aware of Barack Obama a little ahead of non-Illinoisans. He's very charismatic, extremely likable. I've been a political activist -- but not anymore -- and recognized within him immediately a really viable political candidate. And he's always been a Democrat, and I am not (not a Republican, either), so I've never agreed with his views. He's just extremely personable. You want to like him.
However, I think the Democrats have wasted Obama. He's too inexperienced. He should have spent a little more time in the Senate. That might have helped. But from the moment he was elected to the Senate, he was out on the campaign trail. And he's young. I believe he was just testing the waters in 2008, with a plan to really go after the presidential nomination in 2012. But who else did the Democrats have? And Obama is so very affable.
The very fact that he believes he can simply carry on with his own agenda in the face of a national disaster is evidence of his inexperience and even naivete. He's not black so much as he's green.
George W. Bush didn't go to the White House hoping to get into a nightmarish tangle with a bunch of crazy islamic terrorists -- no matter what the loonies on the left say. I think "W" was hoping to contribute something more positive to the nation.
But then catastrophe intervened. I had been at an international trade show at McCormick Place, Chicago, for four days prior to 9/11. That Tuesday morning, I didn't have to go down there again, so I slept in a bit. When I got up, I put on a pot of coffee, sat down in the living room, and switched on the TV.
What flickered across the screen was a pair of talking heads with this screen behind them. I thought they were reviewing an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. A building on fire.
I changed the channel. Hmmmm... same damn thing. The networks are such a bunch of buttheads. They run news at the same time, sports at the same time, ads at the same time....
I put on Court TV (now RealTV or something like that), and here's two more talking heads with the screen behind them with a building on fire.
What the hell?
So I turned up the sound and listened. They were speculating that a private plane had veered w-a-a-a-y off course somehow... And then:
"Oh my God, a second plane has just flown into the other tower...." And people looking like they wanted to cry.
I cried. I cried for days. All I could think about was being on that plane, going to California for a wedding or something, vacation, maybe Disneyland. Then here you are, way too low, following the course of the river, like being in a canyon, Jersey on the right, Manhattan on the left. Then this huge glass and steel structure looming up....
Well, contrary to some crackpots, I doubt "W" was behind that. I don't think he could foresee it. I think it drew him up short. He was talking to a grammar school class when he was notified, and if you look at his face, you see something like disbelief, then real pain that hardens into resolve. Yet he didn't skip a beat with the kids.
And on that morning, after it sunk in that, yeah, this was really happening, I called a friend of mine, and the first thing we both said to each other was, "I'm so damn glad Bush is president instead of Al Gore." It was just instinctive, but I'm still so damn glad Bush was president instead of Al Gore.
Bush loved America for whatever it is. Perhaps he lacked Gore's imagination, but Bush wasn't trying to turn the USA into his personal vision of Utopia. He valued the nation's strengths, accepted its failings, and wouldn't let anyone hurt us if he could help it. I got a very different vibe from Al Gore, like maybe he'd sell us out and sign the Kyoto Treaty so he'd be regarded as a mover-and-shaker on the relatively clueless and predatory international scene.
Anyway, Bush applied himself to the problem, gave it his full attention, and even if you don't agree with his response to it, at least he confronted it as an inescapable reality and tried to work through it.
Obama couldn't have foreseen the crash of the US economy. A few people did see it coming, but who believed them?
And Obama apparently still doesn't believe the crash is real, doesn't understand that the fate of the stock market has quite a bit to do with the fate of the nation, seems to think he can go on his merry way, spending non-existent money willy-nilly for heaven only knows what purpose.
He's not looking at reality.
I talked about the economy as a pie a few blogs ago. About how socialists try to divide the pie, etc etc.
Hey, you know what? There's only about half as much pie now as there was six months ago. We've lost 25% of the pie since the end of January.
No productivity + no trade + no credit + no jobs = no pie.
So Obama apparently is going to try to borrow a pie from someone else so that he has something to divide up.
Somehow, dividing the pie is not a really relevant concern when there's no damn pie.
So... Do you want the president to fail?
Not particularly. I just don't want his policies, which guarantee that I'll probably lose through "redistribution" whatever I've managed to save for myself -- from a lifetime of work. And he doesn't seem to care. He doesn't seem to regard me or my concerns as worth his consideration. I'm just a number in a ledger that owes the government taxes. He seems to be preoccupied with some fantasyland vision of free-flowing milk and honey and thousands of happy people on a hillside, holding hands and singing in unison.
So, yeah, I hope the president fails -- if what he wants to do is nudge the nation (my country) into a ditch. Of course, I don't have a lot more confidence in Joe Biden, and God forbid, Nancy Pelosi is lost in space... I'd say with this bunch, from the president on down, the nation hasn't got a prayer.
Or maybe a prayer is all we've got.
Jeez, I forgot. I promised to write something positive. Here it is: My cat really loves me. He may regard me as a "sofa with thumbs," according to one veterinarian, but that's OK. At least he's honest about it.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Just give it a try
What kills me is the people who say that the USA ought to just give Obama's budget and social programs a try.
"How do you know what's going to happen? We haven't tried it yet," they say.
So someone hands you a can of a brand new synthetic gasoline and suggests you try it out by pouring it all over your house and lighting a match. Hey, it might not work.
What if it does?
I'm not afraid of socialism failing; I'm afraid of it succeeding.
Here are two things:
1.) You know how ticked you are -- and me, too -- about giving Citibank 18 thousand-kazillion dollars, and then they use it for a party in Vegas? OK, suppose your neighbor pays your mortgage or takes care of your health care expenses. And then you don't mow your lawn often enough or you smoke cigarettes or pig out on fudge brownies. Isn't that a slap in their faces? After all, they've given you all that money, at a huge sacrifice to themselves, and you just don't seem to appreciate it, and even do things to make a mockery of it.
That's one chief way you lose your freedom via socialism. You give your neighbors control over your life. After all, they're paying for it.
We see that in health care already. First, there's the one-size-fits-all mind-set that says doctors can do only treatments A, B, and C for certain ailments, and the government is only going to pay $.45 for each procedure. That tends to seriously limit your and your doctor's options, as well as driving you both into bankruptcy. But the government has a duty and obligation to control it, right? Because after all, the taxpayers are paying for it.
Of course, then the government has to launch the Bureau of Spying on Every Citizen All the Time, and that, too, costs money. But, on the plus side, they'll be hiring!
2.) If the USA as a nation decides to saddle the next three or four generations with an apparently unlimited amount of debt, and with tools to rack up more and more debt every second.... There's no looking back. The house has burned down. Too late to do much about it now. When was the last time you ever heard about the government actually shutting down a government agency?
Trouble is, the prez or congress or someone says, Yeah, let's create a bureau to analyze the causes for why panty hose only seem to last six hours. Well, whoever's running that agency (no doubt a heavy donor to the party in power) has to hire a staff, and they have to set up satellite offices all over the country and hire more staff. Pretty soon, they've got 3,000 people on the payroll.
Has to do with the budget process. Suppose you run The Panty Hose Unexplained Early Death Syndrome Agency. You go before congress every year to ask for your budget. Are you going to say, "Well, we pretty much sat on our butts all last year and played computer games." No, you'll write an exhaustive and unintelligible report about all the hard work you're doing, and end by asking for a bigger budget and more staff. Maybe even a lab. After all, your own job is at stake here.
So the next president or congress comes in and says, "What the hell is this? An agency to study the causes of rapid death among panty hose? I think we could eliminate this."
But, my God, you'll be putting 3,000 people out of work -- and by this time, they may be unionized, so just try to fire them, just try.... So, bury this agency and all of its expenses in the budget for the National Park Service or maybe FEMA.
Maybe the only thing the feds can do at this point is to force the states to fund this agency and all its satellite offices. And very often the states will happily take it on, because the agency is a place where the states can find jobs for their useless brother- and sisters-in-laws and all the halfwit kids of their wealthy campaign contributors. They can all drive around in government cars and act important. The thrill of it all. Maybe they'll even get badges or some kind of complicated ID they can hang around their necks on lanyards.
You never get rid of the deadwood. You never do. Every president promises he's going to do something about it, but they can't do it.
Every stupid, useless government agency has a constituency. They flourish like crab grass. You can't get rid of them, or their stupid and useless and actually detrimental regulations. It's impossible.
So, why not give all this garbage a try?
The easy answer: Why should we? If it works, we're all screwed. If it fails, we're stuck with it forever anyway.
Enough for now. And next time I'm really going to try to write something positive and hopeful. I'll make something up if I have to.
"How do you know what's going to happen? We haven't tried it yet," they say.
So someone hands you a can of a brand new synthetic gasoline and suggests you try it out by pouring it all over your house and lighting a match. Hey, it might not work.
What if it does?
I'm not afraid of socialism failing; I'm afraid of it succeeding.
Here are two things:
1.) You know how ticked you are -- and me, too -- about giving Citibank 18 thousand-kazillion dollars, and then they use it for a party in Vegas? OK, suppose your neighbor pays your mortgage or takes care of your health care expenses. And then you don't mow your lawn often enough or you smoke cigarettes or pig out on fudge brownies. Isn't that a slap in their faces? After all, they've given you all that money, at a huge sacrifice to themselves, and you just don't seem to appreciate it, and even do things to make a mockery of it.
That's one chief way you lose your freedom via socialism. You give your neighbors control over your life. After all, they're paying for it.
We see that in health care already. First, there's the one-size-fits-all mind-set that says doctors can do only treatments A, B, and C for certain ailments, and the government is only going to pay $.45 for each procedure. That tends to seriously limit your and your doctor's options, as well as driving you both into bankruptcy. But the government has a duty and obligation to control it, right? Because after all, the taxpayers are paying for it.
Of course, then the government has to launch the Bureau of Spying on Every Citizen All the Time, and that, too, costs money. But, on the plus side, they'll be hiring!
2.) If the USA as a nation decides to saddle the next three or four generations with an apparently unlimited amount of debt, and with tools to rack up more and more debt every second.... There's no looking back. The house has burned down. Too late to do much about it now. When was the last time you ever heard about the government actually shutting down a government agency?
Trouble is, the prez or congress or someone says, Yeah, let's create a bureau to analyze the causes for why panty hose only seem to last six hours. Well, whoever's running that agency (no doubt a heavy donor to the party in power) has to hire a staff, and they have to set up satellite offices all over the country and hire more staff. Pretty soon, they've got 3,000 people on the payroll.
Has to do with the budget process. Suppose you run The Panty Hose Unexplained Early Death Syndrome Agency. You go before congress every year to ask for your budget. Are you going to say, "Well, we pretty much sat on our butts all last year and played computer games." No, you'll write an exhaustive and unintelligible report about all the hard work you're doing, and end by asking for a bigger budget and more staff. Maybe even a lab. After all, your own job is at stake here.
So the next president or congress comes in and says, "What the hell is this? An agency to study the causes of rapid death among panty hose? I think we could eliminate this."
But, my God, you'll be putting 3,000 people out of work -- and by this time, they may be unionized, so just try to fire them, just try.... So, bury this agency and all of its expenses in the budget for the National Park Service or maybe FEMA.
Maybe the only thing the feds can do at this point is to force the states to fund this agency and all its satellite offices. And very often the states will happily take it on, because the agency is a place where the states can find jobs for their useless brother- and sisters-in-laws and all the halfwit kids of their wealthy campaign contributors. They can all drive around in government cars and act important. The thrill of it all. Maybe they'll even get badges or some kind of complicated ID they can hang around their necks on lanyards.
You never get rid of the deadwood. You never do. Every president promises he's going to do something about it, but they can't do it.
Every stupid, useless government agency has a constituency. They flourish like crab grass. You can't get rid of them, or their stupid and useless and actually detrimental regulations. It's impossible.
So, why not give all this garbage a try?
The easy answer: Why should we? If it works, we're all screwed. If it fails, we're stuck with it forever anyway.
Enough for now. And next time I'm really going to try to write something positive and hopeful. I'll make something up if I have to.
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