Rocky III

We are all toddlers informed only by single syllable words and unable to do simple arithmetic.  That is the most important conclusion I drew from Monday night's debate.

Mitt Romney tells us that all nations exist only to serve American purpose.  We are not allowed to understand our enemies or imagine objectives that may not be Americentric.  Good guys and bad guys.  White hats and black.  Life is so simple.  Be tough, send messages, and continue to inflate a military that has, after 11 years in Afghanistan and 9 in Iraq, fought to poorly defined stalemates.  Do you remember those bumper stickers that said, "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam"?  Mitt doesn't.  I do.

The world's greatest businessman and financial wizard has a plan to simultaneously (1) balance the US budget, (2) cut taxes by 20%, and (3) increase military spending.  Half of America is believes him.  Then, again, half of all Americans are below average intelligence.  I don't know the size of the correlation, but I would be willing to bet -- $10,000 anyone? -- that it is large.

Liar's Logic

Romney has discovered a corollary to Goebbels' Law.  The Nazi propaganda minister said tell one big lie and then repeat it again and again and again. Mitt prefers breadth to depth.  Romney's tells a million lies.  Each Romney lie can be refuted, but there just isn't enough time to knock them down. One big lie can be answered.  A million lies are like a denial of service internet attack.  The system crashes from overload. 

There is an old joke about Lyndon Johnson that applies well to Mittens.  Johnson lied often, so people became adept at reading his body language.  If LBJ tugged at his ear, you knew he was telling the truth.  If he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up, he was telling the truth.  If he interlaced his fingers, he was telling the truth.  And, if he opened his mouth, he was lying. 
 

The Basics

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  So many words; so few ideas.  I wish that President Obama was tougher and sharper on Wednesday night.  Sure.  And I wish that Mitt Romney had been battered with sweet science precision; a bleeding cut above one eye, a good bruise on one cheek.  Enough damage to guarantee a unanimous decision, but not enough to draw pity.  Didn't happen.  Too bad.

But, the real disappointment was the distance both candidates stayed from the fundamental principles that should define these United States:

1. Health care is a right, not a privilege.  
2. No one in America should go hungry.  
3. Everyone in the country has the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat uncontaminated food.  
4. All children have the right to high quality education including university education.
5. The laws of this country including the tax code must guarantee items 1 through 4.  

 Keep your eyes on the prize.

How Obama Should Answer Romney's Secret Speech

Charlie Pierce, as always, got it right in creating the speech that Romney should give in response to the secret tape.

 There is a corresponding speech that Obama should make -- though he won't -- to the same audience:

Listen up and shut up.  I'm all you got.  You want to keep tying yourself to that dying elephant?  Go ahead.  That party is going down.  Nothing coming but years and years of failed national elections.  Sure, they'll still win big for school boards and dog catchers.  But, that's not what you care about.  Is it?  So, here's the deal: I'm all you got.  Capiche?  I mean, where else are you going to go?  Put your money in euros or sterling or yen or renminbi?  Swiss francs?  Don't make me laugh.  Yessirree.  Uncle Sam is the only game left and, right now, I'm the croupier.  Got it?

I'm going to let you keep most of your money.  From now on, though, you only get to haul it in with dumpsters instead of 18-wheelers.  Quelle fucking dommage.  Glass-Steagall is coming back.   Yeah.  There's gonna be boring, nine-to-five bankers and there's gonna be high flying investment aces; but you can't be both.  You guys get to figure out who is who.  Draw straws.  Russian roulette.  I don't give a fuck.  Just make it happen or you get cuffed and perp-walked from Wall Street down to Battery Park where I will personally toss you the fuck into the fucking river. 

And, the SEC?  It's coming back for real.  No more old-fashioned fat wheezing cop on the beat willing to look the other way for a few bucks.  Uh-uh.  Real.  I may even put Elliot Spitzer in charge.  Ha ha ha.  

I know what you're thinking.  I know you're wondering what you are going get from this deal.  The answer is a stable, predictable, reliable economy.  No more insane booms and busts.  No more masters of the universe bullshit.  You get to make money.  You get to keep a lot of it. What's not to like?

 In return, you have to grow the fuck up and pay taxes.  This country of ours -- emphasis ours -- needs good schools, firefighters, cops, roads, hospitals, and parks.  You are gonna help pay.  No different than what your parents and grandparents did.  And, you're gonna like it.  In fact, you're gonna love it.  Because, I'm all you got.  You didn't mind when the Republican party was overloaded with crackpot religious fanatics who cared only about abortion and evolution.  It didn't matter, did it?  You got your tax cuts; the loons got the shaft.  Your streets were paved with gold.  Now, though, the inmates are in charge of the GOP.  They are ready to screw you by losing big time.   Let me repeat, "I'm all you got."

The decision is all yours. And, I'm a generous guy.   No hard feelings.  You and the missus will still get invited to the White House next term.  You're still big cheeses.  Still on the A-list.  But, if you are not with me now, if you don't show your love for me with your wallets, then you will get the tables in the back next to the kitchen where you will sit with crazy Ron Paul and his Kim-Jong-Il-style Senator son, and they will tag-team lecture you on the benefits of the gold standard and their commitment to freezing the debt ceiling.  In other words, I'm all you got.

 

The CEO President

Romney is really in trouble. Congressman, Senate candidate, and religiomisogynist Todd Aiken is still in the Senate race despite Mitt's call for him to step aside. Mittens looks weak and foolish.  Talk about the emperor not having any clothes.  Romney has no goddamn clout within his own goddamn party. If this were 2000 or 2004, you could bet that a Karl-Rove-led death squad would have eradicated Aiken by now. No congressman can ever be allowed to defy the party's presidential nominee. No fucking way. The bastard's body would have been drawn and quartered and his head mounted on a pike set atop the St. Louis arch and left to rot until after election day.

Once again, Romney's supposed strength -- his CEO expertise -- has been undermined.  Back during the good old days at Bain, if the manager of a midwest satellite office embarrassed the hell out of the company, Romney would have issued a pink slip and some fixer from the home office would have flown out to take temporary control until the mess was cleaned up.  Two security guards, neither smaller than a beer truck, would make sure that Aiken cleaned out his desk and left quickly.  Aiken's photo and license plate numbers would be posted in the guard shack at the company entrance along with instruction to never ever let him back in.  More importantly, for Romney, it would have been 15 minutes and done.  A couple of phone calls.  If Aiken's transgressions went beyond embarrassing to criminal, then Mittens might have needed to issue a public statement and the 15 minutes could have stretched to half an hour.  But, that's all.  Romney's involvement, from start to finish, would have been finished and forgotten before lunch. 

The real Todd Aiken is not following the business model.  This is down and dirty politics, and Romney doesn't know what to do.  The upper class twit who expects to become the most powerful human being on the planet, can't even get rid of a dimwitted knuckle-dragging member of his own party. 

Chris Hedges is a Dolt

One week ago, Chris Hedges' Truthdig post began with,

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men, women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was strategically and militarily indefensible. The Japanese had been on the verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance. It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions, which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of death.

 As a scientist, I have gone through a range of emotions and responses to this condemnation. But, the most appropriate is Carol Kane's line from Annie Hall, “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”

Battling stereotypes often comes down to accountancy.  I could counter Hedges' block condemnation of scientists by enumerating science's triumphs starting with victories against communicable disease. Smallpox is estimated to have killed at least 300 million people in the 20^th century. Overall fatality rates were 1-in-3, and as high as 80% for children. Now the disease is gone. Polio, measles, and pertussis were also heading to near extinction, until anti-science, anti-vaxers kicked public health to the curb and watched children die. Who, in these examples, are the moral idiots?

Assaying science's benefits misses the point, though. Instead, Hedges' essay is really the mystery of the dog that barked in the night. He condemns scientists, technicians, communists, and fascists by name, and rapacious capitalists indirectly. Who else is left? World War I, he tells us, negated three hundred years of Enlightenment. He brings in Freud to describe the dark side of human nature and lists writers, artists, and musicians who explored that darkness. (Why did sourpuss include Henri Matisse? Where is the gloom in fauvism or his large canvases or the vast colored-paper collages that characterized Matisse's final work? And, how could anyone be gloomy who created a household that included both wife and mistress?) But, Hedges omits the guides who can bring us to the light. We get plenty of villains; where are the moral geniuses?

I infer from Chrs Hedges other writing that religion is the missing piece. Unfettered science dooms us all; only religion can save us. We must not drink freely from the fountain of knowledge because it is polluted with powerful poisons and tainted with hubris and deification delusions. Holy men must carefully separate and distill, then only they will fill our cups with the good and hide the bad. This approach may not eliminate “ancient lusts for war, violence and death,” but, thank god, those passions will remain unamplified. Eliminating atomic weapons and missiles and aircraft, transforms mass murder into hard slow work. Death tolls will be minimized by inefficiency.  We must look elsewhere for "the most potent agents of death."  Rwanda in 1994 is a key example. (Okay, so I'm heading back to using numbers.)  Limited to knives, machetes, and hand-held weapons, the killing rate averaged only 5000-to-10,000 people per day from early April through mid-July.

Just a small part of America's nuclear arsenal could kill two million people in a few seconds. In contrast, Pol Pot needed three long years to murder an equal number of Cambodians. His Khmer Rouge accomplices had to use starvation and executions with outdated guns. They sought an agrarian society free from intellectualism. Wearing eyeglasses was a sign of book learning, and grounds for execution. No totems to science there.

I lived in Los Alamos, NM, from 1980 to 1982. The town had 27 churches and 3 bars. Really.  At first, I just assumed that the scientists and engineers needed absolution from their weapons work.  There must have been, I thought, so much guilt and moral uncertainty that the town needed 27 churches to counsel all the worried souls.  Three bars also made sense.  Excessive drinking had to be done quietly in private because alcoholics or binge drinkers might lose their security clearances.  

After a few months, I realized my naivete and ignorance.  Piety and weapons work were comfortable partners in a long-term relationship.  God and country.  America's enemy was also, conveniently, religion's foe.  The message to Los Alamites from the pulpits was simple and clear:  you are doing righteous, good work.  Sure, a few outsiders showed up with protest placards every August 6th and 9th; but the local churches had no part in those barely noticed demonstrations. 

When I questioned one of the stalwarts about the need for a nuclear stockpile that could kill everyone on earth several times over, he pointed out that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked.  Thirty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no country had again used a nuclear weapon against another country.  He and his colleagues believed they were protecting their families and country.  They were not amoral cogs in the vast military machinery.  They really believed their work to be good.  And, their churches -- all twenty-seven -- concurred.

Yes, the Los Alamos scientists and engineers were irrational in their weighing of benefits and risks.  They ignored the environmental destruction that the nuclear arms industry created at home, and downplayed the financial waste.  Those are human traits that we all share.  And, so, back to Chris Hedges, I wonder if he can identify a golden age when rational thought dominated science and technology, and when art, music, and literature were always uplifting. The scenario actually sounds horrible to me. Something like a Twilight Zone re-creation of Lake Wobegon. Hedges' doesn't identify a refuge – either historic or hypothetical – from his stereotype-filled dystopia.

Society's best hope is more knowledge, not less. Some of it can even protect us from self-delusion.  

Drop Back Another Quarter Century

Similarities between the Great and Lesser Depressions are obvious: banking collapse, liquidity traps, and upper class twits moving confidently in the wrong direction.  But, the intransigence of the Very Serious People (as Paul Krugman calls the always wrong and never in doubt crowd) also echoes World War I.  Austerians have transformed economics into a trench warfare.  Middle-class and poor people are being ground to paste.  Their savings have been eradicated.  Their once most valuable assets are as worthless as Confederate bonds.  Higher education, long identified as the ticket for upward mobility, is a dead-end section of trench bottomed with quicksand.  

Comfortable generals in grand far away places exhort the hoi polloi to climb up and out of the trenches.  Stop being so damn lazy.  Be entrepreneurs.  Take risks.  Be like us!   You, too, can become self-made, rags-to-riches, Horatio Algers.  You only need the will and gumption to run successfully across mine fields, under concertina wire, and through machine gun fire.  Anyone can do it!  But, hush, the generals  keep secrets.  They know that only a few people will make it rich.  Most will end up exhausted and broken; either caught in the trenches or eviscerated in no mans' land.  The generals know because they planted the mines, unrolled the concertina wire, and hired the mercenaries manning the 100-shot-a-minute guns.