Thursday, December 29, 2005

Why GNP growth doesn't make you happy

On the way home today I heard the follow - "for the fourth year running the median incomine in the USA has declined" and "over 50 percent of all Americans now earn less that they did in 2001". Why goes to show that GNP (Gross National Product) growth means zip to the average person in the street if income inequitity just keeps on getting, well, more unequal.

Which is why Bush can brag all he wants about how tax cuts have been good for the economy, but the truth is that the average person and the majority of all Americans are still worse off than they were four years ago. Unfortunately the average person still aspires to the unlikely event of making it big and joining that top 20% of all income earners who have managed to do better since 2001, or the top 1% who have been partying like its 1999 since 2001... The richer the rich get the more inspired the poor get to become like them. Yeah baby, strike me with lightening once, twice, three times.... I'm so lucky... hurt me more...

I know, I'm one supremely bitter and twisted mofo, but you did read the title of this blog right?

Monday, December 26, 2005

Why shopping doesn't make you happy

Here's a nice article on how buying stuff doesn't make you happy, but playing with it does. Unfortunately these days in the USA the more we spend the harder we work to keep spending which leaves less time for actually playing. In Europe and other countries they have it a better - although their workers have lower productivity and less disposable income than American workers, they also have more leisure time and hence play time leading to higher quality of life. Just ask any German how they would feel about cutting down from six weeks of vacation a year to just two.

Libertarianism comes to the United Kingdom

Libertarianism comes to the United Kingdom - via the car and the road. Welcome to our world Britain!

Monday, December 19, 2005

Shrubgate

A long time ago before digital cameras (okay, they did have them back then, they were just expensive and not very good) I went around work with my trusty Olympus Compact and took photos of my co-workers saying "F**k you". People seemed to like the result, it caught them in an off-guard moment they hadn't seen before, channeling their inner New Yorker perhaps. Several of those photos ended up posted on office doors.

Anyway I love this post about Bush's "F**k you" moment. Myself I'm just amazed about how much shit can pile up in the White House front yard and still not stick with the resident in chief. I mean really, if any of this had happened to Bill Clinton do you think he would have lasted more than five minutes in the White House, let alone five years? Yet Bush has run through trillions in deficit spending, hundreds of billions in occupation of Iraq for reasons that were completely bogus, totally made up and a complete waste of time, and killed almost as many troops as those pesky, but mostly Saudi Arabian terrorists killed bankers. And yet he's still there, old teflon shoulders, trying to blame unbelievers everywhere for not swallowing his Bushshit (ewwwwww!)

Come on people. We're not riding on a fake USA simulator here. This is the real deal - trillions are being blown away, thousands of people have died for no apparent reason, and worst of all IQs are dropping sharply. Wake up and smell the roses, Shrubgate is here and its time to impeach and get another terminally dull and ultimately unsatisfying Presidential witch hunt underway. Lets not forget Bush is so dumb and cock sure of invincibility he probably authorized tapping of his own phone with all the evidence needed to impeech him recorded for prosperity - if we last that long that is.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Park(ing)

Someone paid for a parking space and created a park in it. I love the idea. Why shouldn't you do anything you want with a parking space? Put a bed in it and sleep there? Put a cubicle in it and work there? Of course I'm sure someone will quickly find, or create a law that means parking spaces are exclusively for parking a car in. Don't forget, our society is designed around cars, car companies and oil companies that fuel them - humans are merely subserviant and dependent parasites in a car culture.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Big Brother - 1984 syndrome is complete

I've been going on about the Bush Regime and its similarity to Orwell's 1984 pretty much since this blog began. Not that it was a unique or original line of thinking, however it appears to be official now, Bush is Big Brother and he is watching YOU.


Gullible Brits blast off as IQs plummet

Sometimes I get homesick for the goof old British sense of humour - there's really nothing to compare to it. However this one really takes the biscuit - Space Cadets.

Space Cadets is what you get if you take a bunch-o-Brits who respond to a thrill seekers newspaper ad, hand pick nine for gullibility and throw in three actors for good measure. Then tell them they have been selected to be the first British space tourists. Pop them on a plane for an overnight flight to "Russia", take their watches away, fly them around the North Sea for four hours and then land them in the dead of night in Kent (no American kids, Kent is not in Russia). Stick them on a genuine Russian helicopter and fly them to an old military base in Ipswich done up to look like a Russian military base. Bingo... you have a recipe for laughter, disbelief and a tribute to lack of scientific knowledge in "kids these days" that's almost too painful to watch at times.

I'm only two episodes in, and I have to say I would probably have fallen for the transportation to Russia part. It was well done, with meticulous attention to convincing props - tired, disorientated and devoid of other information its easy to see how someone could fall for it. But, when instructor turned out be a real RAF type with handlebar moustache (what there aren't any English speaking Russians?) and he then tells them they would be flying at 200km for 5 days but wouldn't be experiencing zero-G..... Doh, that's where I walk out of the class and ask for my train ticket to London. Or maybe I just go along with it for fun. Strangely all nine candidates swallowed that one hook, line and sinker. After all, as the instructor explained to them - zero-g training takes 12 months and they just don't have time for it. Yeah, who needs that pesky zero-g, turn it off and just get me to space man!

I'm looking forward to seeing how they fake the launch and the view out of the window. Unlike the plane and helicopter ride to Russia this is probably one part where they wont be able to insist the window shades remain down!

Of course Space Cadets wont be showing in the USA any time soon - not until they have done their own clone of it, which could be better or worse. They could probably drag Richard Branson into the hoax and fake a flight on his Virgin Galactic plane. The question is, will too many Americans find out about the great Space Cadets hoax before they can pull off a US clone? My guess is with the rise of faith based rocket science there will be plenty of Americans gullible enough to fall for it for years to come.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Everything you wanted to know about supermarket food but were too afraid to ask

At my last job I worked with a guy who was previously a health inspector and had the dubious pleasure of inspecting a lot of restaurants. Needless to say he had a lot of interesting stories to tell that you probably didn't want to hear while you were eating your lunch. The most memorable one involved a dog stored in the restaurant freezer because the owner was waiting for spring to bury Fido when the ground thawed.

So, having wet your appetite for the gross and shocking you'll surely want to dive into Supermarket Secrets: Be Careful Where you Shop. When you've read it remember, that's Canada - do you think its going to be any better in the USA? Based on how many of my friends seem to have succumb to food-poisoning this year I somehow think we get just as much free salmonella as we do free-dumb. Thanks to Treehugger for the link.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Intelligent design is not economically viable

With stories like today's about Christians suing the University of California I have to say I was somewhat pleased to hear a story on the BBC World programme that effectively said "Intelligent design is not economically viable. Furthermore it wasn't just the "liberal media" or BBC making it up, it actually came from a Republican business man from Kansas.

You see the BBC was covering the great moral debate that is in the forefront of American minds - intelligent design vs. evolution. Yes my home country just loves to lampoon those whacky Americans with their tongues firmly in cheek - except this time I just don't think they realize how serious it is. However in focusing on Kansas, in particular the latest shenanigans of the Kansas School Board, they were able to unearth a strange new development - Republicans who are starting to realize all this intelligent design mallarchy is ultimately going to hurt their pocket book.

You see Kansas has quite a lively biotech industry and is trying to nurture its development, but unfortunately investors are starting to raise more than an eyebrow or two over Kansas' anti-science jihad. Republican business boosters are noticing this and beginning to see red flags over continued vilification of science in Kansas. Apparently last time this flame war got out of control neighboring states even started considering extra testing for Kansas science students wishing to transfer into their area.

I have to say, if people from Kansas are hell-bent (pun intended) in polluting, diluting and basically denying scientific principles that have defined pretty much every facet of human development in the last two hundred years, well then they should probably head over to Amish country and adopt a lifestyle without science, modern medicine and you bettcha, the Internet. That's a valid lifestyle to choose and you're welcome to it, I won't even both trying to convince you otherwise. But don't come running to us belivers in science (not to be confused with scientologists) asking for a vaccination, antibiotics, car, computer, fertilizer, or even a gun of the hand to go hunting with. No, its just rice and beans for you - that's the way it was designed to be right?

Still, with people starting to realize that supporting Intelligent Design might actually hurt their pocket books, maybe none of this will be a problem for much longer. Since the human spieces evolved to a point where it could defy mother nature to a great extect effects of natural selection pretty much came to a standstill. However in its place the effects of economic selection have replaced it. The upshot is that those countries and governments that are found to be economically inferior will wither and die.

Just ask yourselves what happened to the Roman Empire, French Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire or the British Empire... all pretty much dead as doornails because they were not economically sustainable. This is the fate that awaits a nation that decides that science has nothing to offer it while all of the rest of the world gets on an innovates it into extinction economically. Of course if we all want to run back to an agrarian culture with about 1/10th the population we have now that's fair enough - it sort of worked for Cuba right? But some how I don't think your average Monday night football and pizza loving American wants - do you?

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Fahrenheit 451 meets the constitution

I couldn't resist blogging about Just a Goddamned Piece of Paper which proves Bush's public and private attitudes to the Constitution and Democracy reek with irony and contradiction. We've been told he prefers his Supreme Court Judges to support a literal interpretation of the constitution, none of that interpretive nonsense liberals are fond of. Well I suppose you can't get more literal about interpreting the constitution than "It's just a goddamned piece of paper" can you?

So if Bush is adamant the constitution is just a piece of paper than its clear Bush has just reached fahrenheit 451 and something's about to go up in flames. Question is, will American soon be facing a burning Bush or a flaming constitution?

Your intellectual property rights or your life

In these Times has an interesting post about how the only know defense against Asian Bird Flu is Tamiflu that is patentend by Swiss manufacturer Roche. This apparently is preventing the US from embarking on a massive stockpiling exericse - they simply couldn't afford to - much like many African nations simply couldn't afford American patented antiviral drugs to protect against AIDS. How about that for getting some of your own back?

As the article points out, some nations are deciding to just do it (ignore patents) - especially those outside of the WTO like Taiwan. When Americans are drowning in their own blood because they chose to defend intellectual property rights over life they'll be the ones laughing all the way to the bank.

On this matter I have to say that significant investment to develop new drugs is one of those things I believe should be adequately rewarded - in the absence of government funded research to the same effect. But also defence of IPR for corporations is a privilege granted by the governments and society as a whole, therefore no IPR holder should expect to profiteer excessively from a monopoly, especially if they prove unable to produce sufficient quantities of the good they developed, or at fair market prices. In such cases they should forfeit their rights or be forced to license production to others. After all, lets face it, in the case of protecting against a global pandemic its in a company's best interests to keep as many consumers alive. Product demand for Roche's Tamiful will drop off rapidly if 50% of the planet is dead within a few months...

Friday, December 09, 2005

Bushism is the new McCarthyism?

Good night and good luck is a good post from the Angry Bear that relates the 50's communist witch hunt era of American politics to modern day vilification of those who oppose the war, US foreign policy (or lack thereof), fight to defend for civil liberties, defend the environment, oppose big corporations, or oppose pretty anything the Republicans do.

Many of us are aware how the Republican spin machine that labels everything bad it does with name that seems to indicate its good. So legislation that will permit an increase in air pollution is called "The Clear Skies Act" and those that permit massive increases in logging of wilderness forest are dubbed "Healthy Forests Initiative". Similarly they have taken to branding everything they do as patriotic, American or in the name of "Freedom" and "Democracy" implying that if we do anything to oppose them it means we are unpatriotic, un-American, un-democratic and against freedom. As the article points out this vilification of dissent is in an of itself as un-American and vile as the country's brief experiment with McCarthyism was.

But hey, you'll have to admit, defocusing the entire nation on a witch hunt is a wonderful and huge distraction, furthermore it gives us some great movies opportunities later on. I wonder will they label this current witch hunting era Bushism, Dubyaism, Republicanism, or NeoConism?

Babies not on board

Babies Not on Board is an Alternet article for all the child free readers. It a lament by a man who desperately wants children but leaves his wife because she wont have them and then starts another relationship with a woman who doesn't want them either. Doh!

The comments on the article are pretty entertaining, especially the woman who writes "Come on out to San Francisco and have babies with me!", or another who writes "I have pretty much had to cut off one friend who used to be a vivacious, interesting woman with a worldview. Now all she talks about is her baby, baby, baby..."

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Borrowed itself to death

Roger Waters (he of Pink Floyd fame) release a solo album called "Amused to death", it happens to be one of my favourites. I don't play it very often because it is a monumental downer but once in a while I'll find a spare hour, crank it up and tune out. The recurring theme is "This species has amused itself to death" and you really can't get more direct, and I believe, accurate than that. As living standards have increased the focus of humanity, at least in this country, has increasingly been on amusing ourselves and everything connected with that goal. Now I don't really have a problem with being amused - but as the be all and end all of existence? No way. It sounds far too much like plug in, tune out, f**k reality. In fact one of the definitions of amused is "diverted" which matches perfectly my perception of America's with obsession with amusement over actual living.

Anyway, that's all a long digression to eplain the title of this blog entry "Borrowed itself to death" which came to me after reading The Straight Truth about the Bush Economy". As I read it I started hearing the words "This country has borrowed itself to death". Actually the article starts off sounding like its supportive of Bush, but quickly segways to explaining pretty much all the economic good stuff is as a result of bad stuff. That is declining real wages, increasing poverty, a shrinking pool of people in the workforce, and massive increases in government borrowing and massive and historic decrease in personal saving (now at -2%).

The bottom line is the US is borrowing $3 billion dollars a day to sustain its current "recovery" and one can only wonder how long it will be before we are back on the nose dive trajectory again. If we are lucky it will be before the end of the reign of Emporer Bush II - if its after he's out of office we risk the shit hitting the fan during a democratic presidential term and then having to endure endless finger pointing from Republicans claiming it was the Democrats who screwed things up.

Separation of church and consumerism

There has been a lot of publicity about churches getting upset first with the White House keeping "Christmas" off its holiday greetings cards, but now it seems they area also upset about stores keeping Christmas out of the holiday shopping experience. Well it was news to me. Coming from the United Kingdom it took me a while not to talk about Christmas all the time and get used to receiving "Happy Holidays" cards, that simply doesn't happen in the UK and you know, no one gets upset about it. Or at least they didn't when I was last living there which admitedly was a while ago now.

But I have to say I always thought the reason America did the "Happy Holidays" thing was out of deference to the large number of non-Christians in the country. As recent surveys show more than half of the adults in the country consider themselves only somewhat religious, or less than somewhat religious, and a full third consider themselves not religious at all. If you're looking not to ram some message from a specific religious order down the throats of people not fully or not at all interested in it, let alone actually offended by it - well "Happy Holidays" seems like a reasonable compromise. However America seems to be full of people celebrating minority holidays who have no inherent interest in them (say St. Patrick's Day), and full of people celebrating holidays that could be construed as being downright offensive (I'm thinking of turkey day).

So I suppose I can see why Christmas gets a few people really upset, I mean why target that particular holiday for secularization?

But really when you look at it, Christmas is really an annomally, its a last remaining vestige of a long history of not celebrating religious holidays. Americans don't really celebrate Easter and as best I can tell never have done - that's pretty much relegated to a Hallmark holiday. There's no fasting for lent, nothing special for Whit Sunday, mother's day doesn't have any religious significance, heck you guys don't even do pancake day (Shrove Tuesday)! All these holidays are celebrated widely to varying extents in my home country with the result that I, a non-Christian can roll them off my tongue a full decade after living there.

So my point is, if you don't widely celebrate all the other ceremonies in this country, then why make a big deal over Christmas? And if you're going to celebrate Christmas then why not all the other religious holidays - from all the religions? That's exactly the point of those aiming to secularize this holiday - either celebrate them all (but even imagine we'll take a public holiday for them all) or not at all. The later is far more consistent with the constitution and, if you're not going to get a public holidy for it, then you are free, completely free, to celebrate these holidays in your homes and your churches as you feel fit.

I personally think the de-secularization of Christmas is a battle that will not be one that will not be won. The mega-corporations that are the mainstays of US consumerism serve the community as a whole and stand a lot to lose by taking the "side" of one religion or the other when marketing their seasonal sales campaigns (which lets face it, is all Christmas is to them - a sales opportunity). For them its far easier to just put "Happy Holidays" than Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanza and Happy everything else than risk some equality class action suit from one religious (or non-religious) group or another.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Tabloid truth exposes Shots of Mass Destruction

Thanks to The Binary Circumstance for revealing how tabloids may have uncovered the truth of Bush's return to the bottle. Noting how tabloids recently got it right about Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, Binary Circumstanc postulates they may also be bang on with the rumours of Bush being caught knocking back "Texas sized" shots after Katrina flattened and flooded New Orleans.

I don't think this is anything that would shock most people - but if it did come out it would be the kind of salacious revelation that would sink Bush for good. Fortunately for him he's only got three more years to keep it under wraps (or two if you discount the final year of electioneering for his successor). I like to think of the existance of those "Texas sized shots" reported in the Enquirer to be like the existance of those weapons of mass distruction that supposedly existed in Iraq. They are something a good number of people would like to believe exist - something some preemptive strikes could be done based on because if they did exist the consequences could be really bad (or good depending on your point of view). But they may or may not exist and in this case we don't have any inspectors probing the White House or the Shrub-in-Chief's bloodstream to look for them.

Personally I don't give a hoot whether the President consumes a healthy amount of alcohol, just like the rest of us, so long as he's not incapacitated when it comes to making major decisions. I'm sure those Presidents that have openly consumed alcohol (which is most of them) have, at one time or the other, been in a situation where they are incapacitated and not able to make a Presidential decision. So I would hope there is a protocol to keep at least one of the President or Vice President stone cold sober.

But... if the President goes on record as saying he never drinks, and uses that has a campaigning tool, and then it turns out he was lying all along. Well, in that case I'd say it was a pretty darned serious problem. Indeed we should probably have random spot checks of the Presidents blood stream because if he was lying about booze who knows what else he's lying about.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Torture the President unless its well, you know - bad

No, I didn't say "kill the President", just torture him, just a little bit, see how he likes it. Maybe some waterboarding, maybe standing up naked for a few days, throw in some retro Japanese water torture, a fake execution or two. Afterwards maybe he'll have a bit more clarity over whether its good to torture prisioners, and who knows, he might confess a thing or two. But of course afterwards he'd probably tell us he didn't do anything he confessed to - that he would have confessed to anything under torture.

Precisely. Under torture people confess to anything. Its a well know fact, even the CIA knows it. And that's quite apart from torture being morally bankrupt and a license for all your enemies to torture your citizens. Plus you'll probably have quite a few more enemies after you're done detaining and torturing citizens from across the world. I mean America loves to pick on countries that pick on its citizens, so why shouldn't everyone else act the same way as Team USA? Just who is this country that wants to unilaterally give itself favoured nation status to do whatever the f**k it wants.

Yes I'm pissed about this. Torturing people is not ethical, not decent, not productive, not a good example, completely non-Christian, and definitely not something I want happening in any country I live in. Yes, its one of those things that makes me think, maybe I don't belong in the United States? Maybe I should take my stuff and run for the border? When I find myself thinking like that I also start thinking why should I run from the country, can't the country change? It's changed so many times before so it can do it again. Maybe this Iraq War is to America as the Civil War was to slavery (if you ignore the protestations that the Civil War wasn't about slavery at all, but corporate power).

Maybe when the US troops are out of Iraq, the various factions there are back to fighting each other in the usual fashion, various commissions are done counting the hundreds of billions wasted, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the historians are totalling the damage to America's credibility, safety and integrity caused by the war. Maybe then, and only then will we all be able to look back and say, South Park style - you know, we learned something in Iraq: preemptive war is bad, unilateral "peace actions" are bad, falsifying evidence is bad and yes, finally, torture is bad.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Sex-Ed

This is so dumb, the federal government is offering money for sex-ed teaching only if it teaches abstinance as the only means for birth control. To be honest I must be behind because I wasn't aware it had gotten that bad - I thought they were only doing this for funding of overseas aid. But now their policies have come home to roost its good to see at least some states have their heads screwed on. Basically if the people in this country can't agree on what to teach kids then the federal government should just teach nothing about sex-ed as opposed to teaching stuff that's clearly of no practical use.

The name "sex-ed" tells all, sex-ed is about sex stupid and regardless of what you want to believe - sex happens. Every study of countries that try to teach abstinance only show its ineffective and leads to more pregnancies. If some religious schools want to teach no-sex-ed and some religious people want to send their kids there that's fine and dandy. Its a free country. But no, the government wants to bury its head up its collective ass and deny the truth along with all the other things they now seem to want to deny and saddle the rest of us with the burden of teen pregnancies and more unwanted and unplanned children.

Not to mention the fact that we can't even seem to teach all our people how to raise the children they wanted to have, let alone the ones they didn't want in the first place. Hello, aren't there enough people on the planet as it is? Why make Americans even more a part of the problem, and no, invading countries and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis doesn't give us free reign to go hog wild with producing unwanted babies either.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Airline Security

Bruce Schneier has written a nice article for Wired on why Airline Security [is] a Waste of Cash. In his Op Ed piece IDs and the Illusion of Security Schneier goes further, he points out that ID checks and profiling are basically un-American.

Frankly I buy his arguments hook-line and sinker. I don't fly much - I probably average a half dozen flights a year. But that's enough to witness a number of glaring security SNAFUs since 9/11. That's quite apart from all the exploitable flaws in the system I've thought about but of course did nothing about. If it helps think of each plane as a home computer, and all the airline companies as computer network companies. Like any non-trivial system, no matter how hard you try there will be security flaws, and no matter how many patches and anti-this and anti-that add ons you layer over them there will still be flaws not covered, and new flaws in the cover-ups.

Mostly I think all the security checks have probably served to do one thing - reduce the likelyhood of some idiot having a weapon on board and killing someone in a fit of air-rage due to the lack of chicken or beef. Shudder the thought they might actually get pissed off about something real - like non-functioning headphones, snoring or yacking neighbors, elbow wars, reclining seat invasions, poison gas attacks from the restrooms, and insurgent babies running amuck in the aisles.

A Schneier points out, the single most important thing they've done (they being the government) for airline security since 9/11 was reinforcing and locking the cockpit door. Arguably you could say the single dumbest thing they did was allow a gun inside the cockpit. That provides an excuse for hijackers to take hostages and kill passengers by non-firearm, pocket knife and nail-clipper based means (everyone knows special forces around the world are trained to kill with a rolled up newpaper or slight of hand), and then wait for a gung-ho Captain to charge out thinking he can save the day Rambo style (which is unfair to Rambo because he actually seemed to know what he was doing). After that its all over.

Finally Schneir points out the thing most likely to improve security was caused by the 9/11 hijackers themselves - alerting passengers to the fact that being on a hijacked plane may well turn into something more than an inconvenient detour to an different airport from where you wanted to go. But this fact seems to be the one that the government seems least interested in exploiting (for obvious financial reasons). They'll warn you about the hazards of alcohol contained within the plane as you board you US carrier's aircraft, but might fail to mention the hazards of in-flight hijacking by your flying companions. Why don't the pre-flight safety briefings include safe and effective ways to incapacitate a hijacker, where to find a blunt instrument under you seat, how to remove and use the seat tray as shield against knife attacks, and what to do with the tazer gun that will drop from the ceiling in case of hijacking?