The mantle of Abraham Lincoln

Someone sent me the link to a USA Today story from May 28 about how every household in America now "owes" somewhere in the neighborhood of $660,000+ for the national debt and ongoing cost of governmment. Of course, that's just federal.

In Illinois, the state assembly is voting as we speak to raise the income tax from 3% to 5% because of the traditional, historic incompetence of legislators to live within their means. Our illustrious US Senator Dick(head) Durbin visited the state house to encourage stage legislators to stick the residents of Illinois with the greatest tax burden possible.

"We can make Illinois howl!" Durbin said, paraphrasing Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman and enthusastically punching the air with his fists. (No, really, I just made that part up.)

Meanwhile, a gang of apparently able-bodied self-proclaimed Victims huddled in small pathetic groups around the state house, wearing t-shirts announcing their intention to cry and go homeless unless they can continue to suck the public teat. They're all suffering from that epidemic illness called I-can't-get-up-off-my-lazy-ass-except-to-beg-for-more-freebies.

Gee, I feel for them.

It doesn't occur to state legislators that businesses that are now in Chicago can very easily move to places more business-friendly, like Indiana, and carry on with nary a hitch in their operations. Do they really believe that Illinois residents and businesses are just going to sigh to themselves and say, "Yeah, well, I guess we do owe the government more than we're paying. After all, they do so much for us...."

Remember that micro-economic, supply-side graph, the "L" with the diagonal line connecting the long and short ends -- what costs more you will get less of. Raise taxes once again on citizens, you will have fewer citizens.

I kinda feel sorry for Illinois farmers, who are pretty much stuck here with their acreage. Too bad they can't just move their whole kit-and-kaboodle to Iowa or someplace that's more human-friendly. Pretty soon, they'll be the only people left to tax.

On a more positive note, yet another show -- this one on MSNBC, no less -- told the story of a group of homeless teens in California who were venturing to Arcata, California, to carry out some kind of plan to make a big killing selling dope. So I guess the entrepreneurial, innovative American spirit still resides within them, even if it's left the vast middle class of qualified voters.

Where does this end?

I may start practicing injured expressions and a limp to get myself on the gravy train. I just don't see much point in working anymore. Being an independent contractor, my taxes aren't automatically withheld... I see every goddamn penny that goes to government, and have to go out and drum up business for payments that go strictly to one level of government or another. It's getting to be that I spend more than half my time just to fund socialism -- something I object to on moral and other grounds. In the truest sense, this is slave labor.

So this is how Barack Obama and his cohorts have donned the infamous "mantle of Abraham Lincoln": Where Lincoln ended slavery, they have resurrected it. They believe they've made it "fair" though -- we are all slaves, regardless of race, religion, gender, age, or national origin.

I feel like I'm being invited to watch Marie Antoinette eat breakfast. (see the blog for 5/12, An instructive historical anecdote.)

And it occurred to me, watching the local ABC-TV affiliate report on our incompetent State Assembly, that raising taxes is simply the line of least resistance for these assholes in government. They don't want to go line-by-line through the state budget and figure out what doesn't work. They have no idea what works or doesn't. They have no idea which state-funded projects to cut. They don't want to take the time or invest the effort in finding out. They don't want some fat-cat contractor parking his limo in front of their sorry local office and reminding them that that $5,000 they contributed to the election campaign didn't come without strings. Raising taxes to pay for all this bullshit is just the easiest thing for legislators to do. It protects them from thinking.

Watched part of George Stephanopoulos' Sunday show -- maybe last week? (All this political crap is becoming just a blur....) E.J. Dionne suggested that California's problem is that the citizens passed a referendum that made it very difficult to increases taxes in California. To his credit, George Will kinda looked surprised and bemused at this, almost like he was ready to burst out laughing.

Yeah, what a hoot! And Dionne's is a typically liberal perspective. Let's never consider spending cuts. Let's just make it easier to raise taxes.

But you know what? I'm tapped out. I've been cashing in my IRAs over recent months partly to preserve their value in anticipation of the massive inflation coming our way, mostly because it's the only way I've been able to pay my mortgage. Once again, thanks to incompetent government mismanagement of the economy, work is getting harder to find. And the policies they're putting into place now will only make it harder.

What really ticks me off, though, is that my fellow citizens actually voted for the bozos who've been actively working to 1.) annihiliate our liberty, and 2.) wipe out any hope of material prosperity in the US.

They got exactly what they voted for. Obama is working very hard to deliver on all of his promises, even if he kills us. So who are the biggest morons in this scenario?

Race to the bottom

Given all the hoopla over Sotomayor's nomination for the Supreme Court, it occurs to me that I haven't talked about racism on this blog.

Well, despite my sympathy with the Tea Party crowd and Janine Garafalo's irrational delusions, I'm not a racist. I have been accused of it fairly recently, though, mainly because I've always opposed Barack Obama as president. However, to my way of thinking, the fact that he's a socialist is such a huge turn-off I never got beyond it. After looking at his policies, his color comes in a sorry last as something to think about.

I didn't vote for McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, or Clinton, either. They were white.

I don't really believe, deep in my heart, that there are any significant differences between blacks, whites, asians, Hispanics (are they a different race or only a different language group?) or southsea islanders -- or whatever the politically correct subscriber groups are, per the federal government. When asked for my race, I usually write down "human race." That's all anyone needs to know. Anything else isn't anyone's business.

Cultural differences do exist, but this is learned behavior, not based on physiology. Like Germans raised in the US have different attitudes from Germans raised in Germany, or in Brazil or anyplace else. Skin color doesn't really matter.

I knew a couple of Africans in college and they had different approaches and perspectives than most American blacks I know. One Nigerian woman kept telling the Americans that once we graduated, we should go to Nigeria because everyone has a college degree in America, but in Nigeria, we'd really stand out and could get all the good jobs.

I don't believe social divisions are based on race so much as they are based on whether or not a person actively works to adopt a certain set of characteristics, attitudes, etc., that he or she assigns to a particular group. Like if you believe Group X are over-achievers, and you class yourself in that group, you will probably be an over-achiever. If you sincerely believe you haven't got a chance for a job because you're black, Hispanic, or for any other reason, you probably won't get that job.

I was discriminated against once because I'm caucasian. I applied for a job at a Chicago publishing company, went for the interview, and was told frankly that the company really would prefer a black employee. OK. Funny, it never even occurred to me to file a complaint with the OEO. No hard feelings, either. It's their company, they can hire whomever they want for whatever reason they want. In fact, I half-suspected the inteviewer only told me that to be nice to me, and that I really just wasn't qualified for the job.

In contrast to real race issues, I tend to lump the perennially self-pitying along with the merely lazy and/or criminal into a distinct cultural group called "Victims," regardless of their age, race, religion, or nation of origin. These are people who always have good reasons for failing or for not even trying. They are often also alcoholics or have strange and debilitating addictions or one kind or another, and tend to develop the symptoms of whatever ambiguous mental or physical illness was recently discussed on some TV show. They volunteer for this role, the same way people volunteer to be fire fighters or mothers. At some point, personal choice is involved.

It's even hard to argue a case for ignorance anymore, as in: "He was raised like that. He just doesn't know any better."

Here we all are, sociologists and psychologists actively trying to measure the impact of being relentlessly bombarded by information in American society, and some people just don't know any better. Oh well, maybe their parents locked them in the basement until they were 35. I suppose that could happen.

Eddie Murphy did this bit on "Saturday Night Live" one time where he dressed up very Brooks Brothers and went out in "white face" makeup. He stopped at a news stand and picked up a newspaper, left money on the counter. The news seller looked at him with surprise and pushed the coins back, saying, "We don't charge white people for that." He stopped to get a shoe shine, same thing. It was a lot funnier than I'm presenting it... One reason Eddie Murphy makes a whole lot more money than I do.

Anyway, I think what Murphy was getting at in this sketch is that the supposed privileges of being white in America are very often wildly exaggerated, or are almost entirely non-existent, except in the oratory of people like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson and others who exploit this kind of thing for political and other kinds of gain. Playing the race card, you know. Or the Democrats' class warfare.

And it's easy for a bunch of snot-nosed punks to behave in a totally obnoxious way and when people object, to claim everyone hates them because of their color, their accent, or whatever. No.... really.... it's your rude and insulting behavior.

Which brings us to Sotomayor. In regard to the New Haven, CT, fire fighters.... Apparently New Haven had hired some professional organization to develop a race-neutral civil service exam to determine who would get promoted to lieutenant. The high scorers were all white except for one Hispanic. No blacks -- or anyone of any other color, I guess -- had test scores that would warrant their promotion. So rather than promoting only whites and one Hispanic, New Haven threw the whole thing out. No one got a promotion.

One of the white fire fighters, Ricci, filed a civil rights suit. (Actually, his name sounds Italian. Shouldn't he be considered Mediterranean or something? Or should we assume he's mafioso?) The case wound its way to the Court of Appeals, where Sotomayor reviewed it and threw it out. That is, she determined that it wasn't worthy of review and the Court of Appeals wouldn't hear arguments about it. The decision of the preceding court stood, and that court had backed the City of New Haven.

Other Appeals judges, including another Hispanic, took a second look at the case and disagreed. The case is now in front of the US Supreme Court. Sotomayor won't hear it even if she joins the Supremes. The case will be disposed of before she's sworn in.

Anyway, hearing about this struck me that that's exactly what happened in Dred Scott in the 1850s. Scott was a slave who'd lived most of his life in free states because that's where his owner had a business and lived. Scott petitioned for emancipation because he'd spent so many years in free states where slavery was illegal. (An owner from a slave state could bring slave into a free state temporarily, and the slave remained a slave. Scott's case was based on his having spent much more time in free states than in slave states.)

Scott actually won his case in the lower courts, but the decision was reversed on appeal. Scott petitioned for a hearing in the Supreme Court. Justice Taney reviewed the case and threw it out -- that is, refused to let it be tried in the Supreme Court. Taney's reason (and other judges dissented) was that Scott was a slave, slaves had no constitutional rights, so Scott had no right to sue anyone. So the decision of the last court held -- Scott could not be emancipated. The Dred Scott case set the precedent that in the US, if you were born in slavery, you could never be a citizen, not even if you were free.

Sotomayor did the same thing -- just refused to hear the case. It's really sort of a cowardly act, a way for a judge to sweep a matter under the carpet and refuse to think about it. It's a way to avoid controversy and/or attaching something to your reputation that you don't want attached.

Apart from cowardice, the effect of Sotomayor's actions in this particular case seem to indicate her belief that white people can't be discriminated against.

How could whites suffer discrimination? According to the Victim myth, white people own everything. White people get everything free. White people are invincible and, apparently because they're superhuman, they don't need the protection of the law -- not the same way Victims do. And apparently Sotomayor's background as a Victim, or overcoming her Victimhood, has made her actually more superhuman than even white people. In a separate statement, she talks about "the wisdom and richness of the experiences" of Hispanic women giving them the ability to make better judgments than white men.

So maybe we should just do away with the expense of paying legislators and just let Sotomayor make up the law as she goes along, based on the wisdom and richness of her experiences.

OMG, another omnipotent Messiah in this administration? We seem to be collecting a regular pantheon in Washington.

Macro-fiction

Think I mentioned before that I question the value of making decisions for the whole nation based on the "macro" perspective. Macro means looking at the nation as a whole, the economy as a whole, health care spending as a whole, etc. It's an extremely useful aggregate for scholars or historians (sometimes) but I'm not so sure it's useful for developing policy.

For example, wasn't it 2005 that Katrina hit? So looking at data from that year and ignoring everything else, you'd have to conclude that Americans spend one hell of a lot of money on repairing water damage. Should we mount a socialist program for that?

The same principle applies to health care and insurance. Of course, insurance adjusters and statisticians have finely-sliced demographics on which groups get the most money and benefits, at what age, and why -- apparently more money is spent on people in the last years of their lives than at any other time.

Surprise, surprise. People get sick, they may recover in part and stagger along for a time, and then they die. I don't think we even need insurance adjusters to figure that out.

The funny thing is, Obama seems to be looking at these high-cost groups in order to find some way to reduce what's spent on them.... apparently so he can offer this money to another group that has less use for it. This way, the Macro statistics on socialized medicine will look better.

Yeah. Kill all the sick people. That's a sure way of reducing health care costs. And that is fundamentally what Obama has planned.

Anyway, the macro view is, as I said, very useful for scholars as a means of number-crunching or something. But it isn't a useful or practical way of developing a general policy. You just can't lump people all together. You end up eliminating the cost of cancer treatments for a 70-year-old woman in order to guarantee insurance to a 24-year-old gymnast who probably has very little use for it. It looks good on the books, but it isn't a practical or reasonable way to provide health care. You're only taking it away from the people who need it.

And I guarantee, if health care becomes "free," suddenly many more people will believe they need it. Rather than sitting in the bathroom with the shower going hot, making steam, to break up chest congestion from a cold, people will be lining up at the doctor's office, demanding their fair share of attention and antibiotics. That part is entirely predictable.

And this applies to not only health care, but to everything else as well.

Anyone remember a while back when the federal government for some reason had a huge inventory of cheese? Apparently they'd bought tons of excess cheese from US dairies to support the price of cheese in the supermarket. The government floated the idea of redistributing this cheese to people who were getting welfare and food stamps in place of some of their cash benefits.

I don't know, although the scheme does seem convenient, is this a plan that works? People are hungry, so let them eat cheese? What if, instead of cheese, the government had purchased an excess of pine tar to support that industry? Would the feds be passing out barrels of pine tar and a booklet of recipes for making it palatable?

That's the trouble with the macro view.

And wouldn't it be better to let the dairies suffer a bad year and learn how much cheese to make instead of supporting their dreams of huge cheese demand? After all, the time and money they invested in making cheese might have been better spent making sour cream or yogurt. They should know that and make the adjustment.

The only way you can even try to get macro economic management to work is to take complete control of everything. And heaven knows, that doesn't work. Like, would there be some kind of Standing Fashion Committee in congress, determining what kind of shoes should be made in the US? The way congress operates, by the time they reached a decision, they'd have shoe factories making sandals in December and boots in April. That's pretty much the way it worked out in the USSR. But maybe the Commissars did manage to balance their books.

I doubt it, though. I knew some Russian Jews who were allowed to leave the USSR way back in the 1970s -- before the USSR collapsed -- and what I heard from them was that the black market was pretty much a way of life. No one even believed there was anything wrong with it. You had to cheat the system just to survive.

One of these Russians, actually he was Ukrainian, told me that somehow about three-quarters of all the produce raised in the Ukraine managed to fall off the truck before it reached Moscow. No one could figure it out.

And just to add... I had both macro and micro economics in college. In the micro class, one of the first things we learned was this graph of an apparently cast-in-stone principle. Picture a graph, more or less an "L" shape. Now draw a diagonal line from the top of the tall stem to the end of the short base. This illustrates what happens to nearly any kind of enterprise when you raise prices. That is, you'll make more money on fewer goods. Net gain -- zippo. Except you do stand to lose customers long term.

That's a given. Cast in stone.

Think about that in terms of tax increases.... on anything. The only way you can get around that kind of result is if you put a gun to the buyer's head and force him to pay the higher price. Or put a gun to the producer's head and force him to continue to produce. Etc.

This is another way of explaining why socialism doesn't work.

Awestruck

Well, it's Memorial Day tomorrow -- or today, depending on when I finish writing this.

To be honest, I'm not convinced there's anything I can say about it that could convey my personal appreciation for all those people who've laid down their lives to preserve the US. Can't beat Lincoln on this:

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.... (Gettysburg Address)

Almost anything you can say about Memorial Day comes off totally self-serving; "thanks" just doesn't cover what they did for me.

About 10 years ago I followed the path of Sherman's March through Georgia doing research for my Civil War novel. In most cases, you almost have to see the ground of a battlefield to write about it well, even if you're just writing fiction. Standing where those men stood, seeing what they could see can give you an entirely different perspective on things. Same is true of Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Manassas, Fredericksburg....

Anyway, leaving Atlanta (which is completely rebuilt and doing fine now) I veered off Sherman's course and headed down toward Americus, Ga., to Andersonville. That was one of the worst prisoner-of-war camps in the US during the Civil War. Yeah-yeah, Elmira.... OK, that was no picnic, either. Don't want to get into a yours-was-worse contest here. Andersonville is a national park now and a memorial to all POWs from all wars in which the US participated.

The old camp itself, the area that had been enclosed by the stockade walls, is a pretty good size and parts of it are dotted with capped wells. These are just metal caps embedded in the ground, maybe the size of the top of a mayonnaise jar. There wasn't a lot of good water at Andersonville, so the prisoners dug those wells, except Providence Well, which is kind of in the middle of the camp. A bolt of lightning struck the earth there and a well sprang up all by itself. Still and all, it's surrounded by signs warning against drinking that water.

Otherwise, a Y-shaped stream runs through the stockade, the branches on the hillsides feeding what's now a creek no more than two feet wide, if that. This ends in an area that's deliberately kept marshy. This served as a latrine mainly, but sometimes the water was used for drinking or washing, too. Sometimes a weakened prisoner just couldn't get to fresher parts of the creek. It was marshy because the fence impeded its flow beyond the wall of the stockade.

I visited Andersonville in late October, and it was 90 degrees that day. According to some reports from POWs at Andersonville, the death rate was highest in August, due to the heat. The day before I'd been to Pickett's Mill northwest of Atlanta, and the ranger there warned me that Andersonville was below the "gnat line," so to expect plenty of bugs, and he was right.

The prisoners at Andersonville had no shelter, no shade. Only the water described. The place was only open for about 10 months, and in that time, I believe something like 30,000 POWS moved through -- and quite a few of them are buried there. Something like 20% of them died of scurvy, typhoid, typhus, starvation, untended wounds, in some cases the violence they perpetrated on each other, and heaven only knows what else. It's one of the saddest places I've ever seen.

The museum is small but offers a tour of a wide variety of horrors soldiers have suffered throughout the centuries when they fell into the hands of their enemies. They had a life-size bamboo cage modeled after those that the North Vietnamese used to parade US POW's through the public streets with citizens throwing garbage and other stuff at them.

They also have a display of things the POWs made while they were in captivity. Little metal boxes of woven metal, these made from food cans cut into strips. One item that caught my eye was a handmade US flag about the size of a man's handkerchief. There's a story behind it.

This was at a Japanese POW camp during WWII. One of the Americans incarcerated there made the flag out of some kind of sacking, using an ink pen for the blue field of stars. I'm not sure where he got the red dye for the stripes, but the flag is a pretty good replica of the "real thing." During one inspection, a Japanese guard found the flag and confiscated it from the prisoner.

At this camp, the POWs were tasked with cleaning out the offices of the Japanese commanders. A prisoner who was assigned to this duty found this handmade flag in the trash in one of the offices. He retrieved it and returned it to the man who'd made it, probably at some deadly risk to his own well-being. Now it's just a relic from the past. And maybe a very painful memory for someone, at that.

Part of the Andersonville complex includes the graveyard for those who died there. When the Civil War ended, Clara Barton went down to Georgia to assist in collecting the names of those who'd died at Andersonville in order to erect tombstones for them. Actually, at the time they died, their bodies were just dumped into a common grave behind the tents that served as the prison hospital. So the tombstones now stand there side-by-side with only inches separating them and only minimal length between the rows. The tombstones don't represent individual graves; they only acknowledge those who are buried there... somewhere.

Then there's Arlington National Cemetary across the Potomac from Washington. That was a Custis family plantation -- as in Martha Custis Washington -- and ended up belonging to the wife and family of Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War, the land was "appropriated" shall we say, by a Union quartermaster named Meigs, who turned the land into a cemetary for the Union dead.

Meigs' son had been killed in battle, and Meigs wanted to bury him in the kitchen garden at Arlington, so that his grave would be visible from the windows of the plantation house. Sure enough, the oldest graves at Arlington are in the kitchen garden right outside the house.

And Audie Murphy is buried under a big tree directly across the road from the amphitheater behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You can stand facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the view encompasses the Potomac River, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Capitol Building, all in one line.

The last time I was at Arlington there was a sad little funeral in progress: a horse-drawn caisson with a single coffin on it under a flag, followed by a couple mourners. They were moving down a hillside on a side lane. I didn't know anyone still observed those traditions.

Anyway, everytime I see the flag, it conjures up all of this stuff. What does it say about the US now that we're so willing to give up our freedom for specious promises of subsistance from Barack Obama and Tim Geithner? Is that why all of those soldiers suffered and died? So I can stand in line at a filthy public clinic and beg for free aspirin or one more week on the dole? Or pedal to work in a piece of junk fueled by rotten cabbage so Waxman and Pelosi can keep their seats in the House?

Just can't find the honor in that.

It never rains in California

Haven't read any detailed accounts of this event yet, but have heard reports that Californians have stated a resounding "NO!" to a whole spate of new taxes designed to pull the state's fat out of the fire. Including one proposal that would withhold future lottery winnings. (Like, how many people would buy lottery tickets just as a donation to the state?) So apparently now the Governator is compelled to resort to Plan B: cutting government spending.

What a novel idea. Damn, Sam, cut spending? Eureka! Who the heck thought that one up? Put him on the payroll!

The trouble with California is that ever since residents of the state discovered the referendum process, they used it to vote themselves any number of "free" goods and services. I remember when California truly was the Golden State, but that goes back to the days when Reagan was governor.

Now it's bankrupt. And the climate has made it attractive to all kinds of loonies who want a handout, including illegal aliens. I mean, it's a lot more comfortable to live in an old Maytag box in L.A. than it is in Chicago or Boston.

I mentioned before that I have relatives who live in California. I've been there a few times and am not too crazy about it. Too hot and dry for me. Even the flowers out there have all the color scorched out of them (compared to what you see elsewhere), and the "grass" is all yellow and dried up. Kinda like what we'd call "hay" in the Midwest. I do really like the freeways, though, if you drive them in non-rush hours. I could just coast around from Long Beach to Pasadena and be perfectly happy... in non-rush hours.

Anyway, I'd be shocked to learn that Californians voted any other way than the way they did. Nobody wants a tax increase. Now let's see if they'll be happy to see all the government-sponsored goodies disappear. If they do. I suspect that California is like any other government enterprise and usually finds a way to spend four times as much as necessary for any product or service, so maybe the government largesse will be missed by only a very few people, and they might not even be US citizens.

Fox and Republicans have been cautiously optimistic about the vote in California all day. But, as I said, I would have been very surprised if anyone would answer "Yes" to the question: "Would you like to pay more taxes?"

Rather, I suspect that many of the citizens believe that everything that comes from government is free of charge, so why on earth should they be asked to pay more taxes? Duh?

And damn, all those manic-liberal movie stars out there... didn't they vote? Or have they moved to Nevada and Texas where the taxes aren't quite so bad?

I find it very bizarre to hear movie stars -- who won't do six weeks work for less $1 million+ -- whining about the poor. What the hell do they know about it? Or why don't they fund poverty programs themselves? They can afford it easier than most other people.

Same with many members of congress. If they're really committed to helping the poor and disenfranchised, all those millions of people they con into voting for them, why don't they pool their extra cash and open a trade school or co-op pantry for the poor, or a clinic for the homeless? Why do they insist that everyone else pay for these kinds of programs while they horde their bucks in tax shelters?

Hypocrisy. And in Hollywood, hypocrisy writ large. Those in "The Industry" are even worse than congress. At least the people in congress actually suffered through the whole election process and have to live in DC in summer, doing all the incredibly tedious work of government. Movie stars just flap their jaws on TV, or make a big show of support for poverty-stricken third-world nations -- flying in and out in First Class seats on airliners.

And, actually, if you've tried to listen to liberal movie stars "discuss" their political principles, most of them have almost no idea what a political principle is. Like Cher. Someone asked her why she was a Democrat. Her profound and insightful answer: "Who would want to be a Republican?"

I saw about 10 minutes of Sean Penn on "The Larry King Show" a while ago. I'd heard that Sean Penn was a really serious liberal. So Larry King asked him why he was against the War in Iraq, or something like that, and Sean Penn's response was something like.... "Uh.... hmmm... well...." and then it was time for a commercial break. But Sean Penn didn't seem able to get out a complete sentence when he won the Oscar, either.

Makes me wonder what he gets paid for. Well... reciting words that other people write. Yeah. So it does make sense that he's a liberal.

So anyway, let's hope a good many of these blockheads have surrendered California to the "real" people who live and work there 9-to-5, and who've been required to pay for all the stupid policies the elite rich support.

By the way, for those who don't know anything about 60's & 70's rock'n'roll, the whole line goes: "It never rains in California. It pours."

An ill wind

Did some research on wind power. Before you install it in your backyard, please check out this website:

http://www.betterplan.squarespace.com/

It's about the experiences of citizens in Mars Hill, Aroostook County, Maine, and in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who live in the shadow of wind farms -- literally in their shadows.

I never knew those wind mills made noise. At least one manufacturer claims that they make maybe 50 db noise on a windy day. He says that's about the same level of sound you hear coming from your refrigerator when you're in the other room. Well, go to that web site and see if that's true.

One woman in Maine says the windmills sound like "gym shoes in a clothes dryer," and this is documented on several tapes at that web site and in other videos on YouTube. The noise has been best recorded by the people in Fond du Lac. In one taped interview, you can definitely hear the "gym shoes in the dryer" effect -- from a wind turbine 1,100 feet away. It's louder than a car passing by on the highway 800 feet away. You can't even hear the car.

The same man, Larry Wunsch, who taped the Wisconsin noise, adds that when the wind is blowing really hard, the mill sounds "like a jet on the runway." While listening for noise on one tape (that I think is also from Mr. Wunsch) on YouTube, I found myself waiting for the jet to fly over so I could hear the windmill... But that was the windmill.

Then there's Shadow Flicker. Sounds almost pretty, doesn't it? This occurs when the sun is directly behind the windmill so that it casts a shadow -- a really big shadow that flickers over many acres. If I recall correctly, both the people from Maine and Wisconsin likened this to someone switching the lights on and off in your house... continuously, steadily, and for several hours at a time. That could get a little annoying.

In all cases, the people living under the shadow of the wind farms still like the idea of wind power. However, they believe that either the manufacturer of the mills or the seller-installers didn't reveal the whole truth about their downside. In Maine, the town council (or local authority, anyway) saw wind farm installation as a revenue source for the town, which is in a relatively poor area of Maine. The officials accepted the deal with no real discussion with the citizens. And here I thought New England was just over-brimming with town hall meetings.

In Wisconsin, it seems that a couple people did some research and tried to raise their concerns before they signed onto the project, but the seller-installer and/or local officials either explained away their worries or didn't let the naysayers speak.

Don't know if Mr. Wunsch was one of those blown off for doubting the magnificence of the wind farm project, but in one tape, he does reveal that he's done some research. He said that one wind turbine generates 1.2 kw of electricity when the wind is blowing 30 mph. I live not too far from Fond du Lac, and I can testify, 30 mph is a good stiff wind, usually heralding a pretty hefty storm. A bed sheet hanging on a clothesline would be pretty much horizontal. Anyway, Mr. Wunsch has this nice way of putting this in context -- stating that one of the largest businesses in Fond du Lac would need at least 20 kw to operate. So that one single business would require something like 15 windmills churning out peak kw's to get up and running. Mr. Wunsch concludes that wind power is pretty much a scam.

Can't say I blame him.

I looked all this up because of a news report I heard on the radio in the middle of the night last week. In California, one wind turbine had "run away", so the cops stopped all the traffic on the highway -- one of the major highways running between L.A. and Las Vegas. They were afraid the blades would fly off the mill and maybe kill somebody. I was looking to find out what happened. It was in a Bakersfield newspaper.

The "brakes" on the turbine had burned out, so the blades were spinning uncontrolled and couldn't be stopped until the wind stopped. I guess no one was killed; they didn't say.

Then I came across a brief video taken by someone driving past that same wind farm at a different time. She pulled over and videoed one of the turbines that seemed to be on fire, smoke coming out the tail end of it. Don't know what happened with that, but that sounds like a kind of dodgy situation in California, doesn't it? I mean, doesn't California burn down periodically? Didn't think anyone would want to encourage that.

And remember, these things are huge. They're 400-foot towers. The blades are probably at least 100 feet long. Having one of those flying through your windshield might leave a mark.

How I hate this b.s. I don't believe in so-called "Anthropological Global Warming" or, I guess they've changed it now to fit reality more appropriately: "Climate Change." I tend to go with Mr. Wunsch and his scam theory.

You know, Abe Lincoln once said that government should do the projects that are too big for individual citizens to do by themselves. He was talking about building railroads and bridges over the Mississippi, things like that.

Well, there's not much that citizens can't do on their own, amassing capital through corporations and so forth. The USA has proven that. Prior to the Great Depression, not much was built in America unless it was built privately -- including cars, electrical power plants, steel mills, air transportation, etc. Often the government was only a purchaser of these products, and its purchasing power might have boosted private investment, but never entirely replaced it. In fact, if you want to wreck an organization and/or guarantee fraud and inefficiency, invite the government to participate. That's been the true story throughout history, in the US and elsewhere.

So the government had to invent, or least embrace, Anthropological Global Warming (where it's manmade) to justify seizing privately-owned corporations and imposing their will arbitrarily on the entire population. The rationale behind that is that one individual can't change the planet, but the government can.

Not sure how that works, though. Do granite and palm trees recognize the majesty of government and kneel to obey it? Does wind?

But hell, ol' Barry knows so much better than any other person who's ever walked on the face of the earth, doesn't he? He believes his press; he seriously suspects he just might be the new Messiah.

I'm just hoping that in 2012 there will be something left of the USA to salvage, though I doubt it.

Also on YouTube, looking up wind farms, came across a video of a couple teenage girls driving around in Wisconsin near the wind farms. One of them said the very sight of the mills brought tears to her eyes and she started humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" or some rot. So the future isn't looking too bright.

Roller skates are next

I'm just shocked -- and I thought I was beyond it. I promise, I will try to watch my language.

The Chief Butthead in the White House issued a entirely totalitarian edict today:

We are all to drive around in oversized plastic roller skates. Just because he says so.

Let's hope he's the first to have an accident in one.

What positively blows my mind is the way he dumps all this crap on us with absolutely no debate and consideration in congress.

He's a goddamned totalitarian dictator. There is no longer any question about it.

How is it that the nation is sitting still for this?

That's all I can say right now without getting really profane.

Life without people

Maybe it's all the real-life disasters lately, but TV programming currently includes several shows that give us all a look at what Earth would be like if the human race suddenly and completely vanished. I saw an episode of History Channel's "Life After People," or something like that, which is a series, and found it pretty fascinating. The producers of that show go to the actual ruins and remains of abandoned cities and other manufactured structures, and use those findings to project what would happen on a massive scale.

Watched most of National Geographic Channel's "Aftermath: Population Zero," and was quite impressed with a few things. Number One, whoever wrote that show seems to believe that human beings don't belong on Earth. One phrase the narrator repeated a few times -- apparently so we wouldn't forget it -- is "It took 10,000 years for man to impose his will on the planet...."

In your dreams.

I think about Hurricane Katrina and Mt. St. Helens, the last "big one" in L.A. about 10 years ago (I have relatives who lived near the epicenter in Northridge), the tsunami that wiped out whole islands and reshaped coastline in Southeast Asia a couple years ago, and my personal experience of being buried for upwards of three months under the blizzards that blanketed Chicago in both 1969 and 1979. Where I live, the old air raid sirens, designed to warn of the "man-made disaster" of a nuclear attack, now usually indicate that a tornado is likely to touch down dangeroulsy nearby. Tornados last an average of something like three minutes, yet, remarkably, they manage to return us all to a state of nature in that brief span.

In all these cases, it proves difficult-to-impossible to impose the will of mankind upon nature. And note -- many of these events occur in areas that have been highly tinkered with: some of the largest cities on the planet. Despite supposed Global Warming and all the artificial technology, I didn't see any hint of the car in front of my house from early January to mid-March and just got used to struggling through the canyons created by six to eight-foot high walls of snow in temperatures that didn't rise above zero for weeks at a stretch. Twice so far in my lifetime.

My relative in L.A. went outside his home after that impressive shaker a decade ago and said the landscape suddenly included fountains of water spouting from fire hydrants, broken gas mains shooting fire from cracks in the streets, and the cross atop a nearby church was bent and twisted upside down, though it remained on the steeple. His neighborhood, he said, "Looked like something out of 'The Exorcist.'"

But the main thing is, the authors of the NatGeo program work from the assumption that human beings just don't belong here. I suppose they are also proponents of the theory that we are all descended from the Annunaki, extraterrestrial beings who seeded earth primates with their intelligent genes. Else according to them, where did we come from?

Is it that the viewpoint of sociology and anthropology has saturated ecological studies? In sociology, as Margaret Meade and others pointed out, the very presence of the scientific observer tends to modify what they observe. I mean, if you stroll into a thatched-hut village of a pre-agricultural tribe, they're bound to be curious about your cell phone, gym shoes, and video camera, let alone the plastic bottles of Evian water and hermetically sealed packs of trail mix. The very sight of these objects is bound to change their lives forever.

Is this how ecologists study the biological systems on the planet? Sort of a "pretend I'm not here" kind of viewpoint? Just take the human race out of the equation?

That's absurd. Human beings are creatures of nature whether we like it or not. The planet has shaped us vastly more than we've been able to shape it. And I don't think that all of the artificial aerosol sprays mankind has ever injected into the atmosphere have had quite the impact of mankind's "accidental" introduction of a certain kind of flea into Europe in the 1500s, or of bringing African bees into South America, or fire ants into Georgia. And we can't even control these man-made events once they get started.

Have to laugh. When ecologists think of themselves, do they conjure up images of Masters of the Universe who can strike a deathblow to Earth by stabbing an "ozone hole" in the atmosphere with their pinky fingers? Do they believe that they -- or the government, really -- can wave the magic wand of cap-and-trade and return the earth to "a state of nature"? Is the environmentalist's view of a "state of nature" at all desirable? Do you really want to live in a sod hut and hunt buffalo every summer? Or dig a big hole a yard or so from the Mississippi and wait for it to fill up with water, then wait for the mud in it to settle, then use it to make catmint tea over a campfire? Sound like paradise?

You know, a city is one of the most natural things on earth. It reflects and was caused by the biological requirements of a major and pretty successful species. So, we kill mosquitoes. They also kill us. Is the latter more acceptable?

And what, exactly, is the ultimate goal of the environmentalists?

There's a scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" that comes to mind as an answer to this question. It's rather early in the film, when all these ape-like creatures are huddled together in a cave, terror in their eyes.

I, for one, am very happy that the human race has been able to use its innate survival skills to overcome a small -- very small -- part of that terror.

Wag the dog

I find it interesting that Barack Obama -- or whoever's running things -- is so biased in favor of unions and unionization. For example, the "Card Check" thing, which makes it very easy for anyone to sign up to join a union -- whether they want to or not -- and makes it very very difficult for them to opt-out. The Obama administration has been really promoting this legislation. Why? In a recent poll, 82% of Americans who are not in a union said they don't want to join a union. Why force them to?

And remember the AIG bonus protests? Mostly SEIU and Acorn members. The SEIU people were the ones in the yellow and purple clothes, carrying yellow and purple signs. They were the people on the news videos in front of AIG headquarters. Did Obama or Geithner or Rahm Emanual hire the SEIU for that or what? And did those union members get a day off of work to go protest? Or is the SEIU simply sucking up to ensure a place at the head of the line for government handouts? Acorn I'll discuss separately somewhere else. Acorn is just scum, corrupt and exploitive.

Then there's the shafting of Chrysler. Bond-holders traditionally have priority for getting their debts paid back when any corporation is on the skids, involved in a merger or acquisition, etc. But not in this deal. The bond-holders were offered $0.33 on the dollar for the debt they held in Chrysler. They held out for more -- and apparently should have gotten more, given their priority status and Chrysler's assets. But the last I heard, the feds have ordered the bond-holders to take $0.29 on the dollar. The UAW gets the rest.

(As far as this deal goes, the UAW may be getting the short end of the stick here. The union was a large factor in the auto-makers insolvency. Let's see if the union as shareholders can figure out a way to fund their promises to retirees and remain afloat. It should be interesting. 'Course, when this proves to be impossible, they'll just saunter back to Obama, hat in hand, and Obama, who apparently loves the unions, will once again screw the rest of the nation in order to fund the UAW's plushy retirement packages. Union members whine, "I worked all my life for those benefits..." Hey, pal -- so did all the rest of us work all our lives. You did not earn my money, OK?)

Anyway, so I looked up unions, just general information. Here are some key points from a news release issued by the US Dept. of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2008, union members accounted for 12.4% of employed wage and salary workers, up from 12.1% a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of workers belonging to a union rose by 428,000 to 16.1 million. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1%, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

• Government workers were nearly five times more likely to belong to a union than were private sector employees.
  

  Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate at 38.7%.
  

  Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.
  

  Among states, New York had the highest union membership rate (24.9%) and North Carolina had the lowest rate (3.5%).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics continues:

The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.8%) was substantially higher than the rate for private industry workers (7.6%). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.2%. This group includes many workers in several heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Private sector industries with high unionization rates include transportation and utilities (22.2%), telecommunications (19.3%), and construction (15.6%). In 2008, unionization rates were relatively low in financial activities (1.8%) and professional and business services (2.1%).

I found out from the individual unions' web sites some more specific numbers. Like, the APWU and NALC -- both of which represent postal workers -- have pretty close to 700,000 members combined. AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has 1.6 million members. These are "public sector," that is, government jobs. They also have that squawking goose or whatever it is in their TV commercials. They've been working hard the last couple years to organize, organize, organize!!

So, Obama's bias in favor of unions translates into a bias in favor of government workers primarily, blacks perhaps coincidentally, and the more urbanized areas of the US.

Is that fair? That is, 12.4% of salaried and/or wage workers in the US are calling all the shots for the nation's economic policies?

You might want to consider, too, who pays these people. To paraphrase Pogo: "I have seen the payors, and they are us." We, citizens and taxpayers, fund all the various levels of government in the US.

Also, as far as Obama loving government workers and putting them before anyone else in the entire universe, the government is one of few large organizations in the country that's actually growing and hiring. Every item in the so-called "Stimulus Package" was funding for one or another government project. The states that accept those funds can't even use the money to pay down their debt -- which would certainly be helpful in California and also in Illinois. But no-o-o-o, they've got to spend more money and hire more people.As Obama himself has recently noted, this is unsustainable.

Actually, I think paying down their debt would be more productive in the long run and solve more economic problems than this manic spending spree. But then I'm not a Democrat. I don't quite "get" Obamanomics: Borrow $2.00, spend $4.00, and somehow you end up saving $1.00. Can someone explain this to me, please? Sounds like some kind of screwy hedge fund deal. Perhaps Obama has put too much weight on George Soros' opinions.

And just about everything else this administration has done -- like nationalizing the banks and bullying executives into towing the line on pie-in-the-sky credit lending policies, elbowing private borrowers out of the credit market, and the forthcoming-but-inevitable humongous tax increase and double-digit inflation, do nothing but discourage private enterprise. Kill it, actually. These policies will prolong any economic downturn and prevent recovery.

I think Obama wants to see us all on a government payroll. But he hasn't quite figured out yet who will fund this if there is no one producing anything that the government can tax. Good luck with that.

See, I'm beginning to believe that Obama is a really pure marxist. I really think so. The collapse of capitalism isn't working quite on Marx's schedule (note in the above, union membership has declined significantly over the last 25 years), so Obama's giving it a few healthy nudges and no doubt he and others of his stripe will call that "historical inevitability."

I call it bullshit, but that's just me. The net result of all this will be an even worse economic catastrophe. However, I'm also counting on the fact that most Americans are not going to just lie down and suck their thumbs and hope for some kind of government check. I think most Americans have brains enough to launch their own black market, cash-only businesses or something like that. (Anything below the IRS's radar is "black market." I'm not talking about selling dope.) We aren't going to curl up and die because our president knows nothing and refuses to learn anything about economics in the real world.

My own take on this: I prefer personal freedom to government dependency, and you can't separate personal freedom from capitalism, no matter how hard you try. And God knows, people like Obama have been trying and trying and trying.... Eventually, they come back to capitalism as a last resort, to fend off revolution if for no other reason.

The plot thickens

Can't believe I'm wasting time writing about this... but... Nancy Pelosi stuck her foot in her mouth again.

Leon Panetta, head of the CIA and appointed by the prez, issued a fairly simple statement today saying that it's not the policy of the CIA to lie to congress.

In response, Pelosi stated that she didn't mean to cast aspersions upon the CIA as it is now; rather, she's going after George W. Bush.

So the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, third in line for the presidency, is pleased to tell the American public that she's wasting the time and resources of the federal government trying to create a scandal.

Is this her idea of an acceptable explanation for her actions and accusations?

I wrote in a blog a little ways back how the Democrats ran on a deliberately incited hatred for George W., and that now they're running out of steam because they have nothing more positive to offer.

Pelosi proves my point: "Excuse me, I didn't mean to step on any toes, I'm just whipping a dead horse....."

This idiot really should resign, but I doubt she has the grace to do so. She's one of those people who believes with her whole heart that "right" consists of getting people to agree with you and support you. If she can get a "yes" from some pathetic creature who's afraid to hurt her feelings, she'll persist in her lies and reckless harangues and accusations. I mean, doesn't she have enough to do, she's got to fill her days trying to destroy an administration that has left office?

Hey, Nancy -- there's a Democrat in the White House now. Or did you miss that briefing? Or did your staffer only inform you that there had been an election, but didn't tell you who had been elected?

In another news video, we see the now-familiar scenario of Barack Obama wandering around some kind of auditorium-style venue, adoring fans in bleacher-style seating hanging on every word. So what's he saying?

He's telling his audience that the US economy is burdened with an unsustainable debt.... This is news only to him. Maybe he should have thought of that before jamming all this so-called "Stimulus" B.S. through congress.

And can someone please explain to me why shutting down car dealerships will help Chrysler and GM? The dealerships pay their own way, they aren't on the manufacturers' payrolls. Seems to me, all the closings accomplish is to make the cars less easily available, as well as throwing thousands more people out of work.

Meanwhile, back in congress, Obama's Democrat minions are laboring over adding an ever-increasing load to our unsustainable debt by trying to saddle the nation with socialized medicine... and prodding the EPA to take autocratic and totalitarian action to penalize anyone who breathes. We all exhale carbons, so it's only fair that we should all be taxed for it to save the planet.

And Barney Fudd has introduced a bill for a federal bail-out of California. This man is just totally insane. He really is. And that's being kind to him.

Why do I feel like I woke up in the middle ring of a Barnum & Bailey production? This would be funny, except that these idiots are really in charge.

If any one thing is certain, we will all be taxed to death -- quite literally, as health care will not be readily available. Remember the French Revolution.

Oh, and the prez also has re-thought the matter of military tribunals for the terrorists at Guantanamo. Seems that during the campaign, he had assumed with most other liberals that the Bush administration was only wholly satanic in devising the procedures they did to handle the terrorists. However, now that Obama has "seen the elephant," he's finding out that there was some reasoning behind all that. In other words, the Bush administration wasn't acting out of blind hatred. Gee, fancy that.

So maybe Obama's finally stopped campaigning and decided to try to govern.

Heaven help us all.

Trouble in Nancy-land

Something to watch:

Nancy Pelosi came out swinging this morning, claiming that the CIA is "misleading" congress and the public. That's her prissy way of calling the CIA a liar.

The CIA says that in Sept., 2002, a month after a couple terrorists had been waterboarded, Nancy Pelosi, who was then minority leader in the House, was told that the prisoners had been waterboarded and even explained the process.

Nancy Pelosi says the CIA told her and others that it was considering waterboarding, but hadn't actually done it yet. She said, "They didn't tell us anything they were doing. And the fact is, it didn't matter." This last refers to her sense that congress had nothing to say about what the CIA was doing. Her protest wouldn't have made any difference, she claims.

Porter Goss, former head of CIA under George W. Bush (appointed after this incident, however) and serving as a congressman from Florida, says that he attended the CIA briefing with Pelosi. He says Pelosi's main concern at the time was whether or not the CIA "was doing enough" to get information from the terrorists. Seems it was perfectly clear to him at the time that the CIA was informing the group that they were waterboarding some terrorists. Goss had no confusion about this message.

Interesting that another congressional rep -- can't think of her name off the top of my head -- actually did write a letter to George W., protesting the waterboarding, and Pelosi refused to sign onto it.

I guess whether or not waterboarding is a useful and practical thing depends upon how close you are to 9/11, for Pelosi, anyway. One pundit remarked that if Pelosi admitted to anything that suggests she was less than red-faced outraged over waterboarding, that would send all of her San Francisco Kool-Aid liberals into conniption fits, and they might not want to vote for her again.

Gee, what a shame. Though I can't in my wildest dreams imagine who they'd send in her place. The prospect is even a little frightening.

And CIA quickly struck back at Pelosi. Not sure what-all they did beyond making a statement, but apparently they are trying to substantiate their own claims. But they also have refused Dick Cheney's request to release the memos that noted what the waterboarding had accomplished. Supposedly the memos contain information that is either still classified or at least extremely sensitive. Of course, that's an easy claim for the CIA to make. Heaven only knows what they have in their files.

My money's on the CIA in this one. That is, I've been convinced for some time that Pelosi's a liar about a wide range of things. She's power-mad and will stop at nothing, including selling the USA into slavery, if it means she can hold weekly press conferences and fly around in an Air Force jet. Some people are so easy to please. They don't have any principles; they're just greedy for attention and don't care how many bodies they have to step over to get it.

And it's quite evident that Pelosi's a super-hypocrite, too. Actually, looking at photos of her with her half-shut eyes, and considering her labored way of speaking and usual klutziness, I always kinda suspected she was a drug addict. At least on Xanax or something. She can lie all she likes so long as it doesn't cost me any time or money, but what really rubs me the wrong way -- in Pelosi and quite a few others in Washington -- is the hypocrisy.

I hope the Democrats start getting antsy and send some low-level gopher to suggest to Pelosi over a nice glass of Mendocino and maybe some cheese and water crackers, that she resign -- at least as Speaker. She doesn't deserve the job. She's a rabid partisan and blind to anything like the Public Good. Her way or the highway, the republic be damned.

Funny how Pelosi was one of the people who initiated this whole flap, muckraking, hoping to dig up dirt on the Bush administration and tie up congress for the next few years slinging mud.

How does it feel to be on the receiving end, butthead? Get used to it. The honeymoon is over.

An instructive historical anecdote

Just briefly, because I'm busy with something else.

At the end of the 18th century, France was getting very weird. They had been pretty glorious under the Louis kings, I - XIV, but the whole house of cards was beginning to collapse. Monumental corruption for one thing. They were already going broke when Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson talked them into funding the American Revolution.

And what was really going on was the growth of the bourgeois -- the middle class. Previously, there had been the monarchy and nobility and the rest of the population were peasants or maybe soliders. At any rate, they had all been largely dependent upon the monarchy and the nobility and lived to serve them.

The middle class were merchants and skilled tradesmen; in every case, they were people who were managing to get a living and even get wealthy in other ways than simply bowing and scraping to the nobility. This period saw the beginning of real science and its natural child, technology.

These upstarts -- these bourgeois -- began to complain about the king's policies if and when they interfered with the interests of the independent bourgeois. Like, France was almost continuously at war with England and Spain. This really slowed down trade between the nations. Most European nations, and especially the "empire builders," who were going around the world setting up colonies, had adopted a mercantilist economic system. This system often messed up trade and commerce. It certainly made it more expensive.

For example, Boston (Massachusetts) was a British colony at the time. And most sugar was grown on plantations in the Caribbean -- both British and French colonial plantations. (By this time, Spain had taken itself out of the running and was pretty much sitting and staring its own navel and burning people at the stake in the Inquisition.)

Now in Boston, distilling sugar into rum was a pretty big business. But the distillers couldn't just buy sugar directly from the planters in the Caribbean. Under the mercantilist system, the sugar had to be shipped to England first (or to France, from a French plantation) in order to be weighed and taxed.

Only then would the sugar go to Boston for distilling. And it would cost more, carrying the extra burden of taxation, and probably also the cost of shipping it halfway around the world and back. The Boston rum smugglers were people who bought sugar off-the-books in the Caribbean and carried it directly to the distilleries in Boston, untaxed. I do believe they could have been hanged for that.

The same process applied to all the mining done in South America, silk from Asia, mahogany from Africa, etc etc . Mercantilism was extremely inefficient as an economic system, but it did make the kings and the nobility rich.

So, anyway, there's the background. The bourgeois would be the distillers, even the ship-owners, shop owners and merchants, and the dock workers.

And in France, the bourgeois started taking note of the excesses of the court of Louis XV and his son, Louis XVI. The younger Louis was supposed to be kind of an idiot, or at least very weak and kept under the thumbs of the nobility and court advisors. I'm quite sure he'd only ever had limited exposure to the real world. I mean, "the court," any royal court in any country, was a pretty exclusive club that rigidly enforced their own interests, as a class.

At any rate, things started slipping in France. The nobility didn't believe they were rich enough, and began taxing all kinds of things. Like, they would tax your doors and windows (I've heard that this is still done in Europe), tax your harvest, tax your cattle, tax your shoes, make you pay for toll roads, etc. They probably had a VAT even then. You got taxed for everything. This made it more and more impossible to make a living -- for peasants and for the growing bourgeois.

Unrest was growing. For one thing, the public media, known as "the Fourth Estate," was growing up alongside the bourgeois. The press had the nerve to insult Queen Marie Antoinette once for wearing an 8-foot wig adorned with pearls and little replicas of sailing ships. They didn't think it was fair that they worked so hard and had so little, while all Queen Marie did was sit on her butt and eat bonbons. Or maybe cake.

To appease the masses, the French monarchy would invite people into the palace at Versailles to watch the Queen eat breakfast. She constructed Le Petit Trianon on the grounds at Versailles. It's a little idyllic farm, so she could look out the window of the palace and see a pastoral panorama. A real-live family of peasants lived there and worked the place. She so loved the common people. It's rumored she used to meet lovers there, too.

For some reason, all of these kinds of public relations moves only pissed people off even more. The nobility couldn't figure it out. Here they were setting themselves up as models of perfection night and day, and the common herd just didn't appreciate it.

So Louis XVI, in perhaps the only useful thing he ever did, called upon a Swiss economist named Colbert to try to figure out exactly what he was doing wrong. He asked Colbert, "What can we do to help the bourgeois and ensure their happiness and prosperity? And keep them from murdering us in our beds?"

Colbert told him: "Laissez faire." That is, "Leave them alone."

Well, Louis didn't listen and I guess Colbert just went back to Switzerland. At least I hope so. And the rest is history. Louis and Marie couldn't leave the bourgeois alone. Louis and Marie needed more and more taxes to support the lifestyle at their court.

So the bourgeois locked them up and eventually beheaded them -- and their little dogs, too. The French Revolution was one of the bloodiest on record. It went on for years. The revolutionary government was, by all accounts, a little nuts. They didn't really have much of plan beyond murdering the nobility. Eventually, they began murdering each other. One leader, Marat, was assassinated in his bath tub.

And some of the nobility actually weren't too bad. They did fund the American Revolution. Among them were some of the leading voices of The Enlightenment, and among these were some of the loudest critics of the monarchy.

And then, or course, as the French Revolution wound down -- no one left to kill -- Napolean Bonaparte took over. By all accounts he wasn't such a terrible emperor. He didn't really care about micro-managing the country so much as expanding its borders. He left people largely alone, as long as they funded his wars and in other ways paid the consequences for them. However, due to his appetite for conquest, he didn't end happily, either.

Interesting note: I've heard that when Napolean died, a doctor took a lock of his hair. This was analyzed some time later and found to be saturated with enough arsenic to kill an elephant. Apparently Napolean had developed some kind immunity to poisoning.

I was stuck on a bus once at Place de la Concorde in Paris, where La Guillotine once ruled. It's a large plaza now with a big obelisk, kinda like the Washington Monument, where La Guillotine once stood. It was rush hour, the dog-poo covered pavingstone streets were jammed with gridlocked traffic, the air blue with auto exhaust fumes. And all the lights came on all at once. Paris is called "The City of Lights." It was very pretty, but not really my taste. Being a Lit major, I kept thinking about Madame LaFarge hunched in some dark corner knitting.

The French Revolution did clear away a lot of the Old World deadwood and paved the road for a better -- though not necessarily more peaceful -- world. Quite a price to pay, though.

People like Franklin and Jefferson looked at places like France and they invented the USA instead.

Has the human race learned nothing?

Better than secession

Being a Civil War buff, I've been in endless arguments about whether or not it's legal for a state to secede. I don't think it is. The US Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and no laws or actions of the states can contradict it. Possibly a state could petition congress for separation from the union, but that's about it, as far as the legalities go.

Some people claim that the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights ensures state sovereignty -- that is, that the states are fundamentally independent little countries that have voluntarily opted to join the US for the sake of convenience, and that they can opt out at any time.

Nullification is a similar issue. That means the states simply refuse to enforce a federal law or policy. The states often do this, simply by ignoring a federal mandate or not actively implementing it, but they are liable to be sued in the Supreme Court for it, and they may be fined or otherwise "punished." Or the feds might simply storm into a state and take over enforcement of a particular law -- like Civil Rights laws in some states in the 1960s.

So here's the 10th Amendment in its entirety:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.

Please note how even in this statement, which supposedly guarantees states' rights, the states are held to be distinctly subordinate to the federal government and the Constitution. And also -- very important -- the amendment says the "powers" delegated to the states, not the "rights." No government has rights under the US Constitution; only citizens have rights. Rights come from God or nature; powers are allocated to a government by its citizens.

On top of that, the US did suffer through a civil war, and the results of that, as well as judicial decisions and legislation since then, make arbitrary, self-proclaimed state secession less and less possible.

That's not to say that no other -- and perhaps better -- means exist for the states to exert authority against the federal government. This is an article in the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044199838345461.html

The article details how, according to the US Constitution, the states can meet in convention on their own and propose constitutional amendments. The author offers as an example a repeal of the 16th Amendment, which enabled the federal income tax. The states could propose and pass amongst themselves an amendment repealing the 16th Amendment, and this would invalidate the federal income tax.

To pass an amendment, they'd need a 3/4 majority of all the states, determined by the state legislatures or conventional caucuses, and the federal government would have to comply.

As an example of this type of action, the article notes that the US Constitution itself was created by a convention of state representatives who met to propose improvements of the Articles of Confederation, which were then in effect. At the time, the states decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation and wrote the Constitution to replace it.

So it works. And it's legal -- no cause for civil war. In addition, in at least one case where the states undertook this kind of action, the federal government and congress acted to legislate the desired policies before the states could act. Very interesting..... Apparently under this Constitutional authority, the states can do anything to the federal government they want, can make any changes they want. But all of this does have to be approved by a majority of the states, and that's no easy process. It usually takes years.

So, something to think about. This is a way for the states to limit intrusive federal policy and spending mandates. And it is these mandates that caused a few states recently to refuse to accept at least portions of the largesse the feds were trying to pass out via the Stimulus package. By taking the money, the states agree to spend it as the feds want them to. And when the federal money runs out, the states are stuck maintaining the programs on their own.

Amending the US Constitution at the state level sounds like a good idea, but it requires a lot of organization and effective leadership. And probably much funding to keep it going.

Any volunteers?

Stress testing federal agencies

The prez recently announced something like $18 billion in cuts from the federal budget. Turns out this is an amount similar to what John McCain had suggested during the campaign. Apparently the irony was lost on the White House or.... maybe not. The cuts seem to be mostly in national defense and security areas, though I'm not sure of this. (So stay away from high-rise buildings.)

I have a better idea, borrowed from the free market.

When a big business is ailing, one of the first things the managers do is apply their own kind of "stress test." They review all their operations to see which are the weakest performers and/or those that have nothing to do with the "core" business. For example, a company started out producing potato chips, then expanded into offering ceramic dishes for chips and dips. If the potato chips are still selling and the ceramic dishes are not, they'll probably dump the ceramic dish operation.

Anyway, they measure which are the most costly and/or least profitable divisions, which may have the most and/or least potential for future growth, etc. Some of these may produce a marketable product or provide a useful service, and then they're sold to other corporations or investors, spun off as independent companies, or they may sometimes be purchased by the division's own executives as a stand-alone company, etc. The divisions that can't be sold off or operated independently are usually just shut down. Nobody wants or needs them.

Why can't the federal government apply a similar stress test to its own operations? A few blogs ago, I talked about how difficult it is to get rid of a federal agency once it's been established. (see blog for 3/3/09 Just give it a try.) It's nearly impossible.

So why not do what commercial, profit-making organizations do? Take the Bureau for Studying the Early Demise of Pantyhose, for example. First you look at the costs, then you look at the benefits.... that is, the sales and/or profits it brings in.

Government organizations, of course, are non-profit. Well, they are now. But both the US Post Office and the Government Printing Office have "been encouraged," shall we say, to try to operate on a commercial basis to try to streamline operations and costs so that they can be at least partly self-sustaining -- or pay their own way to some extent.

The federal government generates a lot of data and statistics. These are mostly free to anyone who wants them. Sometimes you have to pay for a printed and bound copy, but the feds don't charge for the data itself. Like data collected and analyzed by the national census, for example. This is valuable information for marketing companies, who might want to know where young families live or senior citizens in order to open a store in those locations. Or, how much tin do US manufacturers import in a year? Very valuable to foreign tin miners who want to sell to the US.

The Census Bureau and other agencies in the Commerce Dept. could probably be self-sustaining if they were operated as independent businesses. And to tell the truth, I'd feel much more comfortable giving my personal information to a private business than to the government. But that's just me.

I don't think the Bureau for Studying the Early Demise of Pantyhose would pass any kind of viability stress test. And, unfortunately, probably about 80% of government agencies fall into this second "useless" category. Many have simply outlived their relevance and/or their work is duplicated by another agency in another cabinet department. They could and should be dumped. They're just boondoggles to keep prospective poliltical donors and voters on some payroll somewhere, or to demonstrate the "Your Tax Dollars at Work" concept.

Anyway, just a thought. But this whole idea would probably fall under the heading of "privatization," so I seriously doubt that this particular administration, which is making a beeline in just the opposite direction (toward socialism) would be interested in undertaking something like this.

But, you know, the feds are now stress testing banks. Maybe they should stress test their own operations before they set themselves up as abiters and referees of what's efficient and productive. I mean, do they really know?

Just a thought.

Alter egos

I haven't wanted to use my real name as the author of this blog because I do a lot of work in public relations and marketing as a freelance writer, and I'm rather apprehensive about being shut out of the market due to my political beliefs. I'm still not going to give you my real name, though it's not all that hard to figure out for anyone who's interested.

The thing is, apart from my "paying work" and this blog, I also write fiction. Thus far, it's been generally historic novels and one really offbeat mystery, but nothing really political. Of course, one of my novels was about the US Civil War, and even 150 years after surrender, the US Civil War remains a political issue.

I would have been on the Union side, probably. But I probably would have voted for Douglas rather than Lincoln. (And the slave states might have seceded eventually had Douglas won rather than Lincoln.) I think I would have been quite concerned about preserving the Union -- and that's what the North was fighting for initially. Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves until 1863, halfway through the war. Everyone understood that it was all about slavery, though.

But I digress....

I love the mystery novel I wrote, and I'm apparently almost alone in that. Most mysteries follow a kind of formula, but this one doesn't. Unfortunately, most mystery readers like some degree of predictability; that's why they read genre fiction. My mystery is kind of surprising, and it's not clear at the outset exactly what the mystery is. (Don't worry, plenty of other things to keep the reader occupied.)

In one way, the mystery was inspired by Doctor Zhivago, although it's not at all political and no one but myself would ever see the links between the two books. My novel is actually absurdly funny in a lot of places and is meant to be.

I also published it myself, since after years of studying the fiction market and contacting agents and all that, I scientifically calculated that I will probably be dead for 31 years before I get anything read and considered by a bona fide trade book publisher. I don't think I want them tampering with my work, anyway. They want things that are either 1.) mindless and continuous action, with some silly supernatural element; or 2.) heartfelt and touching and identifying a whole new, heretofore overlooked set of social victims.

The key to writing this second type of novel -- the more serious kind -- is to stick in some random word in the very first sentence so it doesn't make any sense. Or it sort of does, but... What exactly does the author mean by that? No one will have the faintest notion, but they'll all pretend they do to avoid looking like ignorant clods. And they'll probably publish it. It may even be nominated for the Pulitzer or National Book Award or Critics Award or whatever it is. But not my taste. I can't read that kind of stuff, let alone try to write it. I find it depressing to read some really nice work, only to find out the theme was borrowed from a "Brady Bunch" rerun.

So, anyway, I publish myself. That means you can't get the book into book stores -- another long story, but the existing publishing and distribution system just isn't set up for book stores to sell books from independent authors. Also, I don't do much marketing. A.) I have very little money. B.) For some reason, I can't get it out of my head that once the damn thing is written and edited, I'm done with it. Continuing to market it for months and months is kinda like having your grown children yo-yo back home to live in your basement, pilfer all the ice cream from the refrigerator, and keep borrowing your car.

At any rate, I'm writing a sequel to the mystery now that is very political. So that might explain why I'm not blogging as often as before. It's a whole lot more fun to write fiction. In fiction, I can make a happy ending.

So, who is "Gigi"? That's a name my sister gave me. She was 14 months older than me and just learning to talk when I was born. I still remember her poking her fingers through the slats in my crib, probably hoping I'd suffocate or something so she could continue to be Dad's exclusive "Princess." Eventually I became his "Pigeon." I'd rather be called Gigi than Pigeon.

Anyway, if you want to get in on the ground floor, my published mystery is called Life Without Music and it's available at Amazon. The sequel, so far, is called The General Welfare, but that might change. I'm sure I can come up with something better than that. It's a thriller-conspiracy thing, of course. But if my past work is any indication, it sure won't be what anyone expects -- nothing predictable, including the characters.

But I also will keep on blogging, probably just not as often. Try to stop me...

Cannibals

I'm never happier than when I see liberals deteriorate into factions fighting each other like dogs over a bone.

In one case, I would guess the bone of contention is power. Obama already signed the order to close the terrorist incarceration facility at Guantanamo Bay. He wants about $85 million to make this happen. The Democrat majority in congress isn't giving it to him.

Oh, Happy Day....

I suspect this is because the Dems in congress have heard about the Tea Parties and they want to prove -- somehow -- that they aren't entirely under Obama's thumb, no matter how personally charming and popular he is.

The Dems themselves say they won't fund the shutdown until the administration has a viable plan about where to send these guys -- many of whom are really uncivilized and desperate criminals who plotted and schemed to blow up the USA in one way or another.

Other prisoners are merely wannabe terrorists, apparently from China, who also wanted to blow up the USA but never found a really good opportunity to do so. These guys are characterized as "innocent" for some reason. And despite their "innocence," if they're returned to China, China will probably execute them for not following the Party Line closely enough or something and, God forbid, their deaths will be all our fault. The alternative is to set them free in the US.

Gee, what's the better option? Maybe it depends upon how much you love the USA and your own skin.

The really nasty guys at Guantanomo, including the guy who claims to have planned the 9/11 attacks, are supposed to go into US prisons, apparently for trial. Yeah, right. The only thing is, nobody wants them, except for one minimum security facility in Montana somewhere. (The place was built at considerable expense, but Montana doesn't have enough criminals to go around.)

Why not give the prisoners jobs in the White House? Or as Capitol pages? If the Dems are so concerned about the "rights" of demonstrably vicious and pathological criminals, they can take care of them. Maybe Nancy Pelosi can put up a couple of them at her place. Whaddaya think? Maybe farm out a couple to ACLU headquarters, answering phones and such. I bet they'd raise a lot of money: "Pay up or your family are hostages." It might get them a whole bunch of new recruits and donors.

Anyway, the Dems themselves are sobering up from their election campaign hysteria and are beginning to figure it out. They don't want these prisoners living next door and marrying their daughters anymore than anyone else does. Except Montana.

Something else on TV today -- don't know what; I was half asleep, waiting for the coffee to brew -- reminded me of something related.

You know during the Cold War, much internal criticism claimed that US foreign policy was propping up totalitarian states and petty dictators just because they weren't communists. It's true. We supported some really evil psychopaths in South America, Africa, and elsewhere because they promised to join the "Free World" rather than beg for rubles from the USSR. Castro was one who went with the Soviets. Bet he's sorry now.

Anyway, the argument against this policy stated that the US shouldn't be friends with any nation that didn't agree to support at least minimal "civil rights" for its own citizens. This concept has been more or less in place since the USSR went under. Hence, a generation or two of boycotts and refusals to grant diplomatic recognition and things like that. Our relationship with China seems to have slipped through the cracks, though, somehow.

OK. According to the new regime, that doesn't work anymore. The idea now is that we all have to try to just get along. So Hugo Chavez terrorizes the mayor of one his nation's major cities, spits on the US flag, and actively tries to publicly humiliate our president. And this guy is a "keeper" to the Obama crew and the people who voted for him.

Same for Grand Sultan Abracadabrajab in Iran. Let's see if we can talk him out of developing an atom bomb. I'm sure he'll listen to reason.

Always nice to start the day with a good laugh.

Anyway, so now we're back to supporting totalitarians and petty dictators, only this time there's no Cold War, no USSR for them to play with. So what's the reasoning behind this?

True, the USA almost always undermines other countries' cultures with things like blue jeans, rock-n-roll, and cowboy movies. This is one reason France usually hates us. So anyway, the idea is, establish friendly trade relations with a hostile nation, overwhelm them with automatic can openers, Tom Petty CDs, and Clint Eastwood movies, and they'll see the light of western (and American) culture. And they'll love us.

On the other hand, this cultural thing is one reason the Saudis and the muslim world, like France, usually hate us.

And this is also where I disagree with Libertarians about foreign policy. They say free trade and no political proselytzing will aid the US in winning friends and influencing people. But it was trading freely with these butthead nations that turned them against us.

Like, no westerner (US, European, etc.) can gain entry to Saudi Arabia.... They have like buffer zones or DMZs where western tourists are allowed, but only there. Like a cultural quarantine. They want the trade, yeah, but they don't want the culture. Western culture would mean infecting their populations with democratic ideas, decentralized politics, secularization. They don't want that at all. Osama bn Ladn made that absolutely clear.

No amount of butt-kissing on the part of our president or secretary of state is going to change that.

So, it's a lose-lose situation. Guess we don't have any really viable alternative to guide US foreign policy except self-preservation -- trying to protect our own rights and values. And that's tough enough with Democrats in the White House as well as the majority in congress.

Anyway, integrity always seems to work best in human relations at any level. Personally, I don't hang out with people I can't respect. I don't want to. I'm always afraid I'll say something rational without prefacing it with "in my humble opinion" and offend them. I would guess Hillary Clinton has had a similar problem in many of her recent travels.

So, let's just be the USA -- recklessly free, ruthlessly capitalist, noisy, vulgar, jeans-wearing, cowboy-movie-watching, a tad xenophobic, and jealous of our independence. What's to lose?