Signs and Portents of Armageddon

American Idol

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:55:00 +0000

According to Neal Gabler, fundamentalists have adapted their religion to force their politics down our throats.

Perhaps the single most profound change in our political culture over the last 30 years has been the transformation of conservatism from a political movement, with all the limitations, hedges and forbearances of politics, into a kind of fundamentalist religious movement, with the absolute certainty of religious belief.

Gabler also notes that for political fundies "this isn't political jousting, this is Armageddon." And we know how much they love a good Armageddon!

Wendell Berry is a dangerous anti-Armageddon radical!

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:57:00 +0000

He actually wants to stop our slide toward Armageddon and return to Genesis! He must be crushed!!!!

A proper economy, moreover, would designate certain things as priceless. This would not be, as now, the “pricelessness” of things that are extremely rare or expensive, but would refer to things of absolute value, beyond and above any price that could be set upon them by any market. The things of absolute value would be fertile land, clean water and air, ecological health, and the capacity of nature to renew itself in the economic landscapes.

(Sure, he claims he's speaking from Psalms and Leviticus, but we know better!)

Are prisoners the canaries in the economic mines?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Seems that prisoners are the first to feel the effects of our recession:

We get broadcast television, so the state of the economy outside is no secret. Our families and friends tend to come from the segments of society that are the worst off in the best of times, and worse off still in times like these. Our mothers and fathers, wives and children, those to whom the ties that bind haven’t been unbound by the course of our lives, tell us how hard it is out there.

The first inkling of financial difficulties in here surfaced in the chow hall. All of a sudden prison officials became concerned about our overeating. In the last couple of years, our brown plastic trays have started to look and feel a lot emptier. Even the old staples, beans and rice, shrank into bite-sized portions. Luxury items like frosted cake and meat cut from the carcass of a once-living thing vanished. The new menus, chock full of potatoes and meat substitutes, seem right out of a Spartan's cookbook.

. . .

The talk in here contains an element of schadenfreude. When the TV shows legislators complaining about how deep in the hole the state budget is, laughter fills the day room. Our captor turns out to be simply inept.

Revenge of the hamburger

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:52:00 +0000

This summer has been a bad one for Brits.

Four people have been trampled to death by cows in just over eight weeks this summer, prompting British farmers and the Ramblers Association to warn yesterday of the potential dangers.

. . .

"Cows can get aggressive in the presence of dogs, especially if they have their calves with them," Robert Sheasby, the NFU's rural surveyor, said yesterday. "They see the dog as a threat, and take exception to it. Cows are generally placid and docile, but when a mother animal feels the protection of her offspring is at risk, temperaments can change."

The view from the bottom - of the cliff

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:43:00 +0000

Are dems really ready to lead? No.

They are, however, ready, eager, and willing to jump off the cliff when a Conservative bloviator screams at them to do so.

In an interview with The Hill, Reid said it is essential for Obama and congressional Democrats to work closely with Republicans in the new Congress. He added that 2009 is very different from 1993, the last time Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House.

Back then, Reid said, Democrats had controlled the House for decades and behaved as though the opposition did not exist. This time around, their recent stint in the minority would give them a commitment to bipartisanship.

Then the "sheepish" Dems look up and wonder why the crowd didn't follow them ... and why that Conservative is standing at the clifftop laughing at them.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are wondering exactly what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meant by her pledge to "govern from the middle."

Pelosi (D-Calif.) made that promise immediately after the election that expanded her Democratic majority.

To Republicans, it does not mean increased bipartisanship.

GOPers spent their first day as representatives of the 111th Congress vilifying the Speaker — who was reelected and unanimously supported by her caucus — for changing the rules regarding how much power the minority has to hinder the legislative process on the floor.

The seven deadly si(g)ns, revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Greed and gluttony are sooooo second millenium! Here are the seven new sins that will destroy our civilization.

1. Self-righteous indignation.

We all know self-righteous people. (And, if we are honest, many of us will admit having wallowed in this state ourselves, either occasionally or in frequent rhythm.) It is a familiar and rather normal human condition, supported -- even promulgated -- by messages in mass media.

While there are many drawbacks, self-righteousness can also be heady, seductive, and even... well... addictive. Any truly honest person will admit that the state feels good. The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.

Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again. Moreover, as Westin et.al. have found, this trait crosses all boundaries of ideology.

Indeed, one could look at our present-day political landscape and argue that a relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism and an inability to negotiate pragmatic solutions to a myriad modern problems. It may be the ultimate propellant behind the current "culture war."

2. Tribalistic self-absorption.

"I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly." This claim persists -- indeed, is often intensified -- even when Group X is clearly the strongest, most privileged and most favored group. So intense is their need for self-victimization -- so inebriating is their self-absorption and so lacking are they in any capacity for empathy -- that, for all the noise and rhetoric, the arguments they make virtually always have this tribalistic self-absorption at its core.

3. Clinging to outmoded and long-debunked worldviews.

These four combating worldviews have little to do with all those superficial slogans that people have let themselves get lathered about in this century. Things like communism, capitalism, Islam. We have seen wars and death aplenty, but they weren't fought over such simpleminded ideologies. Not really.

Rather, I am talking about deeper themes that pervaded human psychology since the dawn of time. All four of the antagonistic memes that I'm about to describe can be shown to have appeared in all historic cultures, sometimes coexisting under conditions of high tension. Or else they have taken turns, dominating or setting the tone for entire civilizations.

4. Obsessive reliance on following the herd.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even wildebeests do it.

One by one they gather in big groups - and think and act as one.

What is herd mentality?

"It's the idea that the individual members of a herd relate, behave in a similar fashion," said Pat Thomas, general curator at the Bronx Zoo. "And that's so that they don't stand out and appear different than their group mates."

"If they act too much out of the norm, more often than not they're singled out and identified by a predator - and don't survive very long."

Herds can be awesome, moving and flowing in masses, reminding us that in nature there's the quick - and the dead.

And those who stay scared are more likely to stay alive.

Fear: It makes animals run in herds. Could it also cause otherwise thoughtful people to stop thinking for themselves and follow the crowd?

5. Seeing yourself as a persecuted and oppressed minority when you are, in reality, part of the "persecutor and oppressor" group.

Indeed, sometimes it feels as if it is no longer defined by principles at all, nor by energy and ideas, but rather, by a limitless ability to feel put upon and slighted. To be a conservative these days is, or so they would have you believe, like being black in Birmingham in 1952. It is to be the victim of media, culture and law, which hate you just for being.

Your first thought is to reason them out of it, but it is notoriously hard to reason people out of victimology because it: a) feels good, b) demands deference, c) relieves them of any responsibility for their own fouled-up condition. Victimology is as addictive as crack – and as mentally damaging.

6. God is dead, so you get to be god, part 1: I'm infallible and you aren't.

It's known as the "M.D.eity syndrome" – that particular sense of invulnerability that a physician’s practice and training can aggravate. And it can make the denial that is part and parcel of addiction especially acute. Aldren exemplifies that arrogance – in the early stages of treatment he'll employ his considerable intelligence to sabotage the recovery process. He'll rationalize, evade, lash out at the colleagues who've confronted him about his addiction and the doctors who work to help him heal. In time, however, he'll turn that intelligence – and the sense of duty and care that marks all good doctors – inward, and from an epiphany of realization, will begin to heal himself.

7. God is dead, so you get to be god, part 2: If I believe it then it's true, because I'm omniscient.

What Greenspan missed repeatedly over the years -- and still misses today -- are the corrosive impacts this bubble had in fostering the imbalances and excesses of an asset-dependent U.S. economy. Unprecedented consumer leverage is only part of the problem. So, too, is the failure of an aging U.S. population to save precisely when it needs to prepare for retirement. Global imbalances are also an outgrowth of this era of excess -- underscored by America's massive external deficit and, by the way, the protectionist fires it stokes. Alas, these fault lines were made all the deeper by the Fed's regulatory laxity in an era of unprecedented financial innovation -- a laxity made all the more dangerous by the cheap borrowing costs of a Fed-induced credit bubble. This dangerous combination undoubtedly played a key role in fueling voracious investor demand for opaque and increasingly toxic financial products.

It didn't have to be this way. Just saying no to asset bubbles was always an option. A variety of anti-bubble tools -- the bully pulpit of jawboning, more disciplined regulatory oversight, and, ultimately, a tighter monetary policy -- could have prevented disaster. Yes, economic growth would probably have been slower, but that shortfall likely pales in comparison to the post-bubble carnage now before us. Too bad Greenspan couldn't bring himself to follow the sage advice of one of his predecessors at the Fed and "take away the punch bowl just when the party was getting good."

Warning: Belief in Darwinism can be harmful to your belief in religion

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:20:00 +0000

Here's a group that wants to warn you about the dangers of Darwinism:

Darwinism, communism, materialism, violence and terror are all inseparable parts of a single whole. Since Darwinism regards human beings as aimless animals, it leads people who adopt this perspective in the direction of rebellion, conflict, anarchy, lovelessness, selfishness and immorality.

People raised under Darwinist indoctrination, which turns them away from the values that make human beings human and suggests that life is a battleground, attach no importance to the family, religious moral values or honor and virtue and are quite capable of turning toward any heretical ideology or movement. Movements based on Darwinism were responsible for the worst destruction, wars, acts of terrorism, mass slaughter and genocide in the last century. Darwinism inflicted communism, fascism and war on the world as a whole and terrorism on Turkey. Darwinism is the key to all the problems of all kinds that have arisen over the last 150 years.

Sounds like our home-grown religious fanatics, right? But take a look at their main page. The authors have a Turkish Muslim take on their anti-Darwinian slant. Guess superstitious freaks inhabit all ideologies.

We don't need no steenkin' meeedle class!

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:17:00 +0000

After WW II, the United States engineered the largest expansion of the middle class in history. For 30 glorious years, they extended privileges formerly enjoyed only by the upper-middle and upper classes -- education for all, homeownership, one-worker households, even weekends, glorious weekends, with not one but two days off. Their achievement was copied across the globe - for better or worse.

All that began to change on the late 1970s. The normally prescient Jimmy Carter foresaw the impending contraction of the middle class -- and warned people -- but was unprepared for America's level of denial. "That's not what we want to hear!" screamed millions, and turned to Ronald "Morning in America" Reagan, who (along with his successors George and Bill and George and - maybe? - Barack) lulled the middle classes to sleep with pretty bedtime stories.

Stories like:

"Sure, it takes two full-time workers to sustain a household, but the house is full of pretty pretty toys!"

and

"Sure, I now need to work two jobs, but who needs weekends when my recreation is tv!"

and

"Sure, my boss is making me work longer and longer hours for less pay, but that's a lot better than joining a union! Those people are criminals!"

and

"Sure, I have to take out a ridiculous mortgage to buy a home and send my kids to college, but look how much money I got in that latest re-fi!"

and

"Sure, it's getting harder and harder to make it all work, but at least I've got these antidepressants to help me cope!"

And then, 30 years later, the middle classes woke up to discover that it was all over for them. The United States had just engineered the largest contraction of the middle class in history. Workers are just now discovering that their losses -- in education, in worker's rights, in homeownership -- weren't temporary after all. People who saw themselves as rising up the class ladder now find themselves in the middle of a steep fall, and wonder how it happened.

How the hell did the middle class not notice something that's been happening for 30 years?? Will they ever wake up!!

Catholic Fundies prepare for Obama's invasion

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:06:00 +0000

Catholic Fundies are mad as hell about the upcoming Barack Obama commencement speech, and they aren't going to let anybody forget what the speech really means: Because of the speech, millions of abortions are happening on Notre Dame campus - so many, in fact, the the sewers of Notre Dame are running red with the blood of aborted fetuses!

We want your family and the family of every graduating senior in Joyce Center to have these sickening pictures gaging [sic] them as they applaud the man who glorifies this carnage. Our avowed purpose is to respectfully, lawfully, ruin this ceremony; not to be vindictive but to force people to stop acting as though everything is normal at Notre Dame. It is not normal for a Catholic institution to honor a man who supports infanticide. The sewers of South Bend are literally running red with the blood of Notre Dame’s children. We are going to figuratively pry open the manhole covers and force the entire university community to smell the stench of death.

Gosh - if the sewers of Notre Dame were "literally" filled with dead fetuses, wouldn't it make more sense to literally (not figuratively) pry open the manhole covers and literally show the fetuses to the students? Or would that only confuse them, because an actual aborted fetus doesn't look anything like the photograph of a miscarried fetus on their banner, and fetuses still in the womb, while cute, haven't actually been aborted, and female/second baby) fetuses aborted overseas by anti-choice zealots can't be stopped by any Supreme Court ruling, and infanticide-instead-of-abortion babies are the result of anti-abortion zealotry?

Still, fundy fetus fetish fotos are fun to collect!

Forget global warming: Hell just froze over!

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:38:00 +0000

There have been plenty of similar posts on the left, but The American Conservative has a post which rips the curtain off Fox News' wizard's lair: The tea parties may have been counterproductive:

Having the right emotional response to war or taxes is not enough. You must also know how the world works and how you can change it — or prevent others from changing it around you. Broad emotional responses cannot make necessary critical distinctions between, say, opposing war and opposing Republicans, or supporting Ron Paul and supporting Rick Perry, both of whom may say things that hit the right emotional buttons, but who stand for very different philosophies and policies.

There is a reason why the scoundrels of Fox News and talk radio and the neocons in the press can get behind the tea parties. The reason is that these protests pose no threat to the Republican and neocon establishment — they are thoroughly tame and impotent diversions of populism. They reinforce the power of the establishment by redirecting popular discontent into mere sound and fury. If the Right had learned anything at all from the Bush years, it should have learned that neoconservative and Republican elites are adept at manipulating emotional populists — proud patriots, heart-on-the-sleeve social cons, enthusiastic Christians. And now people who are "mad as hell" about economics are falling for the same trick. Get mad about busing — and elect Richard Nixon. Get mad about abortion — and elect George W. Bush. Get mad about the bailouts — and fill in the blank. Any folksy-demeanored Republican hack who has mastered the Right's talking points will do.

I truly expect the author to be (a) ignored by the scared lefties, and (b) univited to rightie parties.

The Governator says "yer dead, California"

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:56:00 +0000

Ah-nold has maybe played the Terminator too many times:

In Terminator 1, Arnold was sent back in time to prevent the birth of the guy who was going lead a resistance against the machine-armageddonists.

In Terminator 2, Arnold was sent back in time to defeat the super-terminator who was sent back in time to kill the guy who was going to oppose the machine-armageddonists (machine-armageddonists having learned that killing the unborn is wrong!!!).

In Terminator 3, Arnold was sent back in time to defeat the super-duper terminator babe who was sent back in time to kill the guy who, we find out, actually caused the machine-armageddonist timeline by preventing those humans who wanted to stop the machine-armageddonists instead of fighting them in the future.

The machine-armageddonists won. Of course, we should have realized they won after observing that the machine-armageddonists were still cranking out (faster! better!)terminators and no human-resistors came back from the future ("One possible future. I don't know the tech stuff.") after Terminator 1.

Not counting on the teevee show, of course.

Now, in Terminator 4 ("he absolutely will not stop until the State of California is dead"), Arnold's job is to bring about the GOP's economic Armageddon for California. ("Yer terminated, Democrat fuckers!")

How's he doing?

Will a giant aluminum hat help?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:57:00 +0000

Is the earth's magnetic protection cracked? What does it mean? Who can repair it?

Recent satellite observations have revealed the largest breach yet seen in the magnetic field that protects Earth from most of the sun's violent blasts, researchers reported Tuesday. The discovery was made last summer by Themis, a fleet of five small NASA satellites.

Scientists have long known that the Earth's magnetic field, which guards against severe space weather, is similar to a drafty old house that sometimes lets in violent eruptions of charged particles from the sun. Such a breach can cause brilliant auroras or disrupt satellite and ground communications

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:59:00 +0000

How do you solve the problem of too many Boomers vs. not enough Social Security? Make sure they die early!

Fast food has been doing their part for decades, making their cheap food as unhealthy as possible. And now the health care industry wants to get involved in pushing burgers.

Now Burger King wants to export the U.S.A.'s health care/retirement plan to the world!

After the guinea pig villagers decided (of course!) that the Whopper tasted better than the Big Mac, Burger King sent a production crew out to the villages to cook burgers. Under the guise of "sharing things about both our cultures (Gee, where have we heard that before in sanitized colonial history?), shots of a burger broiler being airlifted and sledded in by dog are shown. The villagers, of course, like the burger, with the narrator saying, "They told us yesterday, 'No, we want to experience other things in this world, too. We want to taste other foods. We want to see other people. We want to see other things.'"

Right out of the most banal of Thanksgiving scripts, the narrator says, as one of the crew receives a coat, "And they've been extraordinarily gracious to us." Burger King defends the ads, saying it worked hard to respect cultural sensitivities.

All this, to spread disease to developing peoples. And Burger King knows it. The Westernization of the global diet, led by America's fast-food giants, is helping spread obesity and diabetes as it has never been seen before. It's not enough that those diseases are off the charts with Native Americans here at home. Now we want to seduce Inuits abroad. Even if levels of obesity stay what they are now, the number of people around the world with diabetes will explode from the 171 million people of 2000 to 366 million by 2030.

Maybe this suggestion that Obama select a "bold reformer" as Ag Secretary isn't such a good one. If the Ag Dept. is truly reformed, the companies that can push $1 burgers because of all the farm subsidies may not be able to kill enough Americans.

(You did watch Supersize Me, right?)

Nerdy theologians or ostriches?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:52:00 +0000

When self-described "nerdy theologians" laugh at the foibles of religous types, that's okay, but they don't laugh at the same "nerdy theologian antics" the rest of us laugh at. Are they using humor as a way to deflect self-examination?

A Global Recession? Who could have possibly foreseen?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:49:00 +0000

A pair of British experts have counted up the top 20 signs and portents for how recession happened. Would the world's top 20 list look the same? You betcha!

China. Did the post-Reaganomic scheme to bust American unions by letting the Chinese manufacture goods cheaper than the U.S. ever could (meanwhile ensuring that American minimum-wage workers could continue to buy their Walmart trinkets) implode?

The liquidity bubble. All that 401(k) money found a home on Wall Street. But where did it go?

Search for yield. The Reagan Revolution rewrote the book on what made a business profitable - high CEO salaries, lots of worker layoffs, and debt, debt, debt! Who are we to question the financial wisdom of Saint Ronald?

Sub-prime lending. Didn't poor people spend every evening of the last decade hounding bankers with phone calls begging for mortgages to houses they couldn't afford?

Leverage. And didn't those same poor people convince the banks the mortgages could pay for themselves when the house rose in value?

Originate and distribute. And didn't those same poor people force the mortgage houses to offload the mortgages onto overseas investors?

Alan Greenspan. His job was to instill public confidence in an economy based on lies. He did his job well.

The Democrats. Specifically, one Democrat: Bill Clinton, who thought "centrist" meant toady to the right so conservatives like him.

The Republicans. Specifically, all Republicans, who put the "con" in "conservative."

Regulators. People paid a lot of money to look the other way. 'Nuff said.

Credit rating agencies. People paid considerably less money to spread the "look the other way" message.

Financial Services Authority. Again -- people paid to look the other way. Why so many layers of pseudo-oversight?

Greedy bankers. They were the guys the regulators, credit rating agencies, and financial service authorities worked for.

Consumers/housebuyers. They are the ones who must be punished for believing what Alan Greenspan, the Democrats, the Republicans, the regulators, the credit rating agencies, the financial services authorities, and the greedy bankers told them.

Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan, in Brit-speak.

Moral hazard. Keep the system going until you retire to some nice, warm country with no extradition. Something Alan Greenspan achieved but Henry Paulson didn't.

Gordon Brown. Britain's Henry Paulson -- except he gets to run the U.K. now.

Mark-to-market accounting. Supposed to pass for transparency.

Basel 2. No American equivalent, because we don't even pretend to regulate like those socialist countries do.

Estate agents. We call them real estate agents. They've all gone back to the jobs they left when they were going to get rich selling houses.

An exit strategy for Guantanamo?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:45:00 +0000

How did British PM Gordon Brown use the capital he achieved by being an economic expert in charge when the global economy tanked? He went to Saudi Arabia and met with ex-Guantánamo prisoners:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown met former Saudi inmates of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay as he toured a deradicalisation facility on Sunday.

Brown spoke to six men at the facility near the capital Riyadh and shook hands with two inmates who had each spent six years at Guantanamo Bay as a result of their al-Qaeda links.

Saudi officials claim their efforts at rehabilitating extremists using months of reasoned argument against radical Islam have a success rate of 80 to 90 per cent; only 35 people out of 3200 in the program have been rearrested for security offences.

When the men are released, they are given jobs and other support.

An official at the centre, Dr Abdel Rahman Hadlaq, said it was a key step to break the inmates' links with radicals.

"If we don't support them, someone else will support them," he said.

Preventing young British Muslims, particularly those with family ties to Pakistan, from embracing violent extremism has become a key priority for Britain's security services since four British men killed 52 commuters in suicide bomb attacks on London's transport network in 2005.

Should the United States open a "deradicalization facility" as a prelude to closing both Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib -- or let one of our "allies" do it?

American Idol-atry

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:31:00 +0000

Did American Idol give our youth a taste for small-d democracy? If so, shame on them!

There are important differences between "American Idol" and our constitutional American system. "Idol" is a direct democracy, for one. (And, like in Chicago of yore, "Idol" watchers can vote as often as they desire.) But, at the end of the day, they are both about voting. And as much as some might scoff at the deleterious effects of "Idol" on our culture, it has created a culture of voting among our young people. Where past generations of youth might have felt cynically about their ability to affect change, the millions of "Idol" voters can see the palpable impact of their vote -- live in prime time and with Ryan Seacrest as their Walter Cronkite.

Found! A connection between Obama and the Devil!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:34:00 +0000

A Fox News blogger, James Pinkerton, has uncovered a startling connection between Satan and Barack.

No, we aren't joking. Neither is he.

OK, you might be asking, where is this Lucifer stuff coming from? It comes from a man named Saul Alinsky, who devoted his life to left-wing agitation in Chicago. He also wrote two seminal books, "Reveille for Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals," still regarded as key how-to manuals for left-wing activists.

But Alinsky was more than just a leftist; he was a genuine out-there crazy, someone who loved to shock and stun, just for the helluvit. And so in the first edition of "Rules for Radicals," published in 1971, he offered this astounding dedication: "Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement of the very first radical, from all our legends, mythology, and history … the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom--Lucifer."

And how are Satan and Alinsky and Obama related, you ask? Did they frequent the same bakery? No... they are connected because they are all libruls! Evil, evil, libruls.

There's a new Buffet!

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:14:00 +0000

Fiction from Chris Tannhauser, author of Sadhus in Trouble, See-Through and Zoroaster's Conundrum, comes "Prologue: God's Dogs," the first installment of his (serialized here!) novel of a conquered Earth: Tears of the Wounded Sky.

I will kill everything that eats children.
Animals, people, ideas.
Things from the stars.
I ask but one thing of you, cosmos: let me be their suffering.
The nocturnal hours passed, counted in breaths. He thought long, slow memories of Amy, her dark hair spread on a pillow. Amy in sunlight, her smile squeezing his heart. He thought of Amy: did she burn, or decompress? For the thousandth time he decided it didn't matter. It just didn't matter. He squeezed the grip of his baseball bat until his knuckles were bone white and his tendons creaked. The wood wouldn't give. Neither would he.

Also in Armageddon Buffet: Our editorial tracks John McCain's quest to become the next Cowboy in Chief in "The Right's Last Hurrah."

Viewed more broadly, this ploy of the McCain campaign seems yet another in a long line of Hail Mary passes that have characterized its post-primary run for the presidency. McCain has made much over the years of his maverick status, but his maneuvers in the past several weeks have made him seem erratic, even whimsical. Most prominent among these was his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. As a brazen attempt to snatch both the women's vote and the redneck vote in one swoop, the selection initially seemed incredibly clever, too clever, jumping-the-shark clever.

For a time during and after the GOP convention, the crowd that embraced Obama was dismayed, even depressed, to the sneers and jeers of the right. McCain alone had not been able to appeal to the really stupid voters who form the core of the Republican base. Sarah Palin would draw those voters out of their holes in the woodwork. The 29 percent who still believe W. has done a splendid job would swallow their doubts about McCain and come out for the gun-totin' pro-pregnancy cheerleader from Wasilla, and the U.S. would continue its smug decline.

Visit Armageddon Buffet, and Eat While You Can!

Was Gordon Gecko wrong??!?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:11:00 +0000

Could we have possibly misunderstood the point of Wall Street? Greed was good, right? Especially if it's greed in service of - greedy individuals!

And then the word "theoretically" becomes very important. I have attended many conferences on quantitative finance, at which professors and practitioners describe their latest models for derivative instruments and the like. All the time I'm sitting in the audience thinking that these models are far too simplistic and based on countless unrealistic assumptions. I tell people that these instruments are dangerous, that no one understands the risks. But no one cares.

As long as people are compensated hugely for taking risks with other people's money, and do not suffer equally on the downside, then those risks will inevitably become outrageous. Whether markets are efficient or not I don't know for sure, but I do know that if there's a way for someone to make money at another's expense, he will. In spades. I want out.

The Four Horsemen Have Arrived

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:50:00 +0000

#1: Global capitalism, which - as it's currently incarnated - is a series of Ponzi schemes (dot-com, subprime mortgages) not-so-cleverly disguised as "progress."

The relationship between the United States and Chinese economies is what I have characterized elsewhere as chain-gang economics. On the one hand, China's economic growth has increasingly depended on the ability of American consumers to continue their debt-financed spending spree to absorb much of the output of China's production. On the other hand, this relationship depends on a massive financial reality: the dependence of U.S. consumption on China's lending the U.S. Treasury and private sector dollars from the reserves it accumulated from its yawning trade surplus with the United States: one trillion dollars so far, according to some estimates. Indeed, a great deal of the tremendous sums China -- and other Asian countries -- lent to American institutions went to finance middle-class spending on housing and other goods and services, prolonging the fragile U.S. economic growth but only by raising consumer indebtedness to dangerous, record heights.

#2: American foreign policy, which favors war over diplomacy and thinks stopping a war is "quitting" and "cowardice."

The United States is funding and in many cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq -- the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs. These factions rule over partitioned patches of Iraqi territory and brutally purge rival ethnic groups from their midst. Iraq no longer exists as a unified state. It is a series of heavily armed fiefdoms run by thugs, gangs, militias, radical Islamists and warlords who are often paid wages of $300 a month by the U.S. military. Iraq is Yugoslavia before the storm. It is a caldron of weapons, lawlessness, hate and criminality that is destined to implode. And the current U.S. policy, born of desperation and defeat, means that when Iraq goes up, the U.S. military will have to scurry like rats for cover.

#3: The social sciences, which seem to be focusing their energy on helping the corporate overlords study human sheep.

But under the right circumstances, key investors and traders pick up on the same contrarian cues, and the herd can change course very quickly. In a paper due out later this year, the psychologists Jonah Berger of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and Chip Heath of the Stanford Graduate School of Business describe a series of experiments demonstrating precisely such collective swings.

In one experiment, the psychologists in effect created a fad at a university dormitory, selling residents the yellow LiveStrong wristbands popularized by the cyclist Lance Armstrong several years ago. A week later, they sold the same wristbands at a nearby dorm populated by students with a nerdier reputation.

The number of people wearing the wristbands in the first dorm quickly plummeted by a third; and in questionnaires students from that dorm acknowledged that they believed themselves to be 'dissimilar' to those in the academic dorm.

#4: Reaganomics, which every conservative Apocalypto has been riding since 1980 - and cannot, must not ever admit is a failure:

When Ronald Reagan was elected president, one of his top priorities was to fight the stagflation and economic lethargy that dominated the 1970s. Legislatively, this plan became the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, an across the board 25 percent tax cut, and the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Together, these bills lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent in 1980 down to 28 percent by 1988.

The long term effect of the tax cuts is clear, with a surge in activity and investment in the private sector that ended the lethargy of the 1970s and unleashed three decades of record growth.

Birdbrains of a feather kill together

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:36:00 +0000

Q: How are guillemots different from chickenhawks?

A: They're not. Both birds believe in killing their neighbors' chicks so their chicks thrive.

Do you have what it takes?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:13:00 +0000

Test your social justice knowledge, and see if you have what it takes to carry out a populist uprising.

What's the Word?

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:43:00 +0000

We have become a one-word-answer nation:

As the world has gotten increasingly complex over the last thirty years, America's public discussion about the world has gotten simpler. Issues like foreign policy, globalization, and immigration have added all sorts of gray shades to the political landscape. But with so much complexity and so many conduits of propaganda, the only messages that break through are the most crisp sound bites and the most simple explanations.

For someone like Rick, who spent 20 years developing a landscaping business in southern California, this has created a terrifying fog -- one that eliminates any sense of security or control.

. . .

But he, like all of us, has become addicted to simple answers -- so addicted, in fact, that he barely notices when those answers conflict with each other.

When we talk about the environment, he says, "This country is being destroyed from within by its own government." He says environmental regulations "are running business out of this country faster than you'll ever know." Yet he complains that smog is destroying Los Angeles.

When we talk about his time at Douglas, the California defense contractor now owned by Boeing, he says the company moved many of its operations from Long Beach to China.

"We're losing our jobs, and these are good-paying union jobs," laments the same guy who was just ripping on unions.

The "Ricks" of this world must have one-word-answers, but -- in the current election -- what are the one-word-answers he is given?

For America's international policy, the word is "kill."

Does McCain envision a military buildup? That conclusion hardly seems an exaggeration, at least to judge from his final invocation to glory. "Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight," he told the wildly applauding throng. "We're Americans, and we never give up. We never quit."

For its oil policy, the word is "drill."

The audience spilled into a stupid stupor — roaring "Drill, baby, drill!" — unaware that by the time they see a drop of oil from new off-shore drilling facilities, their money will be gone and their coach will be retired.

Should we give "Rick" the future his one-word-answers will provide?

Warning! A shocking revelation about American voters!

noreply@blogger.com (Runaway Serfer) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:12:00 +0000

Studies show people vote against their own best interests!

I probably disagreed with 99 percent of what Bush said, but I can at least remember some of his talking points. He said he worked hard and promised to work hard for American families. He said he understood American families. He said he would protect American families.

Was that a load of bull? Of course. But it sure was delivered in pretty packaging. And, most importantly, it made a large number of voters feel good.

. . .

Simply put, people don't always vote for the candidate or the policy that serves their own best interests. That concept should be no more surprising in politics than in other parts of people's lives. If individuals always did what was best for them, they would consistently choose broccoli over cake; they would enter into relationships with the good guy (or gal) instead of the charming jerk who never calls; they would stick to purchasing necessities and use credit cards as a last resort -- only when there's not enough money at the end of the month to pay for groceries or utility bills.

Who knew?