Sub-prime vs. Consumer The Resurrection

And I thought the banks were supposed to be repentant, and had learned their sub-prime lesson. Cash handouts were made by the government to keep the ol' he-con-o-me [economy] going and they were going to be good.

So is it any surprise I find myself deluged with even more 0% interest teaser credit cards with super-prime rates of 15% or more after the sting is in. And unlike the "good times" every single one comes with a transfer fee so its really 3% interest. Nope, you can't fool me, but I'm sure there are many in-debt mortgage payers going for broke in these babies only to get sub-primed all over again.

I mean what gives? First its the energy crisis, then its the stock market collapse, then its housing market collapse (forgive me if I skipped a few there). Has the entire US economy finally simplified itself down to some perpetual tag-team pyramid scheme not unlike Orwell's perpetual war against Oceania, no scratch that East Asia, no scratch that. Anyway, you get the picture...

I would be a little less bitter but last night I watched, well listened to, Zeitgeist, that well known training flick for neo-conspiracists. It was nothing I hadn't seen already in separate pieces and from different sources but as a whole it certainly either beats you down or sends you away laughing at people's stupidity.

The one striking claim that I took from it was that the Federal Reserve bank at one time manufactured a collapse by pumping cash into the economy causing a spate of lending by small banks. Then a little while later they deliberately tightened the drawstrings causing thousands of small banks to fail and end up getting bought up at a bargain by the big guys - which was the intended purpose. I mean you really can't have just anybody loaning out money...

So as I hear about the billions being pumped into the economy by the central banks of the world, a rash of credit card offers to consumers, I keep wondering how long it will be before fiscal policy is tightened and the next boatload of banks will go tits up. Oh well, as the Captain of the Exxon Valdez said as he swigged on his tenth beer for the night and parked his vessel into the side of Alaska for the night - "It's all good for the economy!".

(Yeah, I know he didn't actualy say that, but it is - as government paid economists currently measure "good").

Another solution to the fuel/carbon/resource crisis

This is one solution to the fuel/carbon/resource crisis that few people are talking about - taxing production, human production. It's pretty clear a sure fire way to half consumption is to halve the number of consumers, it will just take 100 years to have full effect.

I guess China tried a variant on this a while back with their one child policy and it wasn't very popular or successful. The Australian proposal has the interesting twist that it makes procreation a luxury the rich can afford easily which surely has some unpleasant eugenic implications.

The next "big thing" and the next anti-"big thing"

So first it was the dot com crash - everyone saw that coming right? Well they should have done - people were predicting it for years. My friend the Tin Man started bugging me about it before most even realized the dot com era was here, let alone on its way out. There was never really any "if" about it, it was just a question of when the merry-go-round would stop sending everyone flying off into economic disarray.

Then there was 9/11. Of course most of us never saw the planes coming, either actually or metaphorically (apparently the CIA/FBI/NSA and Bush government did the latter), but some of us wondered just how long the government could keep the FUD masquerade up. They made it easier by pumping over a $1,000,000,000,000 of borrowed cash into the national economy while simultaneously pulling cash out of the local economies. It was kind of like sitting in foamy bath tub of bubbles with air coming in an bubbles getting bigger and fewer, rising over our head, popping here and there, their connections getting more and more strung out (like local economies and our bank balances) until we are all sitting under this single tenuous shiny impossibly thin veil of something not quite sure of what is holding the bubble up there. Then one day along comes a butterfly called "sub-prime" that flaps its wings and brings it all crashing down. Pooh - no more bubble and we're sitting cold, wet and alone in the tube crying for mother to bring us a warm blankey.

There, there, America, Mama will keep baby cosy and warm, Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe, Of course Mama's gonna help build the wall...

So I ask you - what will be the next big thing and what will be next anti-"big thing" to bring it all crashing down. I mean I'm only 40 and I've already experienced a whole bunch of these - oil crisis, 1987 stock market crash, dot com crash, and now the sub-prime implosion (it's an implosion because Uncle Sam doesn't like to talk about banks crashing any more).

Be my guest - post your best guesses as a comment and let's see who gets it right!

Torture

This article got me thinking - what is worse: a President who protest his innocence of lying by arguing about what the definition of "is" is, or one who wants to protest his innocence of torture by arguing about what the definition of "torture" is?

Read the second to last paragraph and you'll realize that times really have changed, and when brute force is substituted for intelligence it is definitely a change for the worse.

Dog mauling

Analogy - if cars randomly went crazy and killed people. Find dog mauling statistics.

How to arrest 2,000 people a day

I guess I'm going to have to read the book to get the real facts, but this Alternet article reveals more staggering figures on how the USA wastes staggering resources busting people for petty drug charges. Over 600,000 arrests a year for simple possession of pot - not dealing or trafficking, just possession. That's one an a half times the population of Oakland getting a criminal record every year. Okay, I'm ignoring the possibility of multiple arrests of the same person but even so. And the combined figure for all pot (not other drugs, just pot) arrests at over 800,000 per year exceeds all violent crime arrests.

Isn't that just mind numbingly crazy? Does anyone see the huge problem with this? Never mind the economic arguments - that legalizing pot could add $30-odd billion in tax revenue to the governments coffers, and remove a $100+ billion source of revenue from the criminal underworld.

This country has...

This country has jumped the shark.

Yes, that's right - I'm saying "The United States of America aka Team USA has JUMPED THE SHARK". I hear that phrase applied almost every day to some thing or other and a few weeks ago I started realizing it applied most appropriately to the USA. The signs are everywhere and if you don't see them you have jumped they shark with Team USA too.

Birthdays without pressure

Being child-free I get invited to precious few kids birthday parties but I know they can be veritable orgies of proto-consumer excess and sugar infused excitement - and I probably haven't experienced anything like the examples of birthday party hell out there. I like to think our friends with kids are better than those examples but I know how easy it can be to sucked into the madness. We've certainly seen some bad examples at "pre-birthday party" baby showers... kids not even born yet with enough clothes for the next three years, and three of everything a new parent could need.

I used to think that feelings about too many gifts at parties were because I'm an old fart, or I'm just jealous that when I was a kid I probably only had one or two parties where anyone other than my immediate family was present. Furthermore I don't recall ever getting more than one major present per birthday and that was always from my mum and dad. When I got older my big brothers managed a few cool gifts but other relatives usually gave money or clothes - my grandma was always good for a hand knitted sweater at Christmas, or a few 50p coins stuck in an envelope. Mind you 50p was serious dough back then - it could by a lot of crisps or bottles of soda!

But I do get this feeling that I'm perhaps not the only one to think there could be a problem, as the Birthdays Without Pressure web site puts it, "children's birthdays are out of control" and that out of control parties contribute to:

• A too much stuff culture
• A me first culture
• A trash and waste culture
• An entitlement culture
• A envy culture
• A more of everything culture

and that is precisely what we don't need when the next generation grows up because it is exactly those things that brought us the baby-boomers who got and kept us in this big global warming over consuming mess in the first place. The last thing we need just when conservation might actually be cool again would be a whole new generation who couldn't give a damn and wont do anything without a gift bag at the end of it (don't you get it? - the gift is life and you get it up front with a whole lifetime to enjoy or squander it as you wish).

Okay, end of rant, this grinch is going home...

Birthday reform

I'll be the first to admit I'm a bit of grinch when it comes to birthdays. A big party once in a while is fine, but every year is over the top. And even "big" birthdays don't warrant big parties in my humble opinion. My big 3-0 was quiet a do, but my big 4-0 had prisely two attendees (not counting three cats), perfect. These days I have so few friends that live anywhere near me I just couldn't bring myself to throw a huge party when so many of the people I'd want to drag out to celebrate wouldn't be around. Yeah I know real friends would travel around the world for a party, but really its just not right to expect people to drop everything, plus a bundle of cash to show up for a few hours of boozing and cake.

So I guess I'm a birthday luddite because if I had kids of my own it seems like I would have a whole different perspective on birthdays. I'd be expected to throw a huge party for every kids birthday, and drag my kids to everyone elses presents in hand. And now even kids attending other parties expect to get presents, WTF? Being child free agent J and I get invited to precious few kids parties but those we've been too (and even the "pre-birthday" baby showers) are usually non-stop consumer good orgies http://www.birthdayswithoutpressure.org/

Graffiti as art

My neighborhood gets graffiti everywhere, and it sucks. I mean not just that it sucks we have graffiti, but the graffiti itself sucks too. These guys are amature scribblers of the worst kind - I've seen three year olds who could paint a better picture and even sign their name more leggibly. Of course most of these people are not trying to be artists - they really only qualify for the label "tagger" and are just trying to claim territory like a dog marking its territory.

Like I said, it sucks... oh that their sidewalk pissant efforts were something more like we find at The Wooster Collective.

That's graffiti as its meant to be, well executed, interesting (often inciteful) and an improvement on what is there already. If I was sure it wouldn't attract wannabe scribblers too I really wouldn't mind seeing more of this around - it would brighten up a lot of our drab and ugly post-modern condo buildings. Compared to some of the official "art" that public art dollars pay for I know which I would choose!

Executor in Chief

It's nice to know that George Bush is working (working hard!) on establishing his legacy as Executor in Chief.

I think I have a solution to the death penalty problem - make wrongful execution a crime punishable by death. I doubt anyone who's convictions that execution is right will by ready to step up to the plate - after all as the article points out, 123 people sentenced to be executed have already been proved to be innocent while waiting to die, so goodness knows how many were actually executed before their innocence was proved, or took their knowledge of innocence to the grave.

I guess George finds plenty of validation for his plans in the bible, that is if God didn't talk directly too him with instructions...

Dick "El Predicto" Cheney

Many thanks to the Tin Man for sending me a link to this You Tube wonder:

Holey [sic] smokes batman, who would have thought old Dick Cheney could have been so insightful, so forthright and just so, so, so damned RIGHT back in 1994? Just goes to show, in Washington you're made to be dumb as the dumb-ass you work for. I suppose Bush would argue that's why he has to be so dumb - because he works for the United States people. You know how that saying goes: "Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice... I must be an American voter"

Two dollar bill R.I.P. (just my $2.00 worth)

No that wasn't a typo, I really did mean $2 worth and not $0.02 worth (or 2 cents worth). I just got a copy of Utne Reader and couldn't help noticing an article about the two dollar bill. You know that just kind of funny looking bill that might turn up in your change but once a year, if that.

Well according to Utne the $2 bill is getting a new lease of life thanks to its use in strip bars who are rapidly catching on to the idea of giving their customers change in two dollar bills. This meant customers no longer had any bills smaller than $2 to tip waitresses and performers. The idea of handing out $2 bills apparently started in Texas at a club called Baby Dolls, and this fact became so well known in the town that it was assumed any man spending a $2 bill had obtained it from Baby Dolls. The upshot was that actual patrons of the club would feel obliged to spend every one of the bills before leaving the club to avoid future embarassment next time they opened their wallet. So not only were patrons forced to tip at least double what they usually did, they also had to spend all the change before leaving thus further improving profits for the club and dancers.

According to Utne since 2001 the practice started in Texas has spread far and wide among strip bars such that the clubs use of them has increased the demand for the two dollar bill from the federal bank by tens of millions of dollars in bills per year. So big was the increase in demand that the Feds actually went off to investigate the source of increased demand. My prediction is we are now inevitably looking a the demise of the venerable $2 bill. Rumors of the bills frequent use in strip bars will spread far and wide, this will lead to a certain puritanical demographic into shunning the $2 bill, refusing to use it or take it as change. "My goodness, I'm not taking that bill, I don't know where its been!", will come the cries (as if we know where any of our currency has been!) Similarly anyone attempting to use the bills will become stigmatized such that they will just not want to spend them and hence accept them any more. Ultimately there will be calls to remove the "stripper bill" from circulation. There will also be spirited support for the bill by its fans - using it will be seen as a form of defiance. Support or lack of for the $2 bill will probably even feature in 2012 presidential debates (if not sooner) as some kind of moral litmus test for candidates. But the government, pandering to its base, will eventually be forced to oblige and remove the now tainted twofer.

If you want more evidence of the rarity of a $2 having interesting applications, just read about how certain Florida shoppers are using them.

Power to the people - but not in my backyard

It kills me that I live in Oakland which has a major Pacific rim port with a lot of wide open flat industrial land and no one is doing something like this wind generator project, in England of all places. Oakland isn't in the Dakotas but we still get plenty of a wind and as the Port of Oakland is a major polluter and had a profit of over $200 million last year I can think of no better way for them to make amends.

Oakland has a really bad rap, and doesn't have much to be proud of. I can think of nothing better to see when driving off the Bay Bridge as you enter the East Bay then some whopping great turbines twirling in the breeze generating power. Since the Port is already knee deep in towering cranes over 300 feet high I can't imagine that a few dozen turbines would hurt anyone and they integrate perfectly into the existing land use, and provide power exactly where its needed. A project like this would really put Oakland on the map - it might even make those crunchy granola types in Berkeley jealous.

Driving ourselves to extinction

I couldn't believe it when I came across the video below. If you watch carefully you'll see someone miss their freeway exit, make a U-turn on the freeway and drive back to the exit in the outside lane, and then make another U-turn to the exit.

I mean WTF? Miraculously no one is killed in the making of this video but really they should have been - the driver of that car should be dead because whether they realized it or not it was effectively attempted suicide and attempted manslaughter all thrown in. They might as well have sat on the freeway bridge and jumped into traffic... If we have become that dumb and that coddled that someone can get away with something so stupid and walk away scott free to drive another day there really is no hope for us.

Once in my youth I remember one of my brothers suggesting that all criminals should just be executed. I'm not sure where that line of thinking sprang from, perhaps he'd been studying the Old Testament too closely, but I seem to recall some debate about the wisdom executing everyone who commits a crime. If you can get past the dubious ethical basis of executing anyone at all (which America seems to have no problem with) then there are still insurmontable problems. Like determining which people broke a law which they had no idea existed (I did this once myself - so I should be dead), and proving they broke a law in the first place - of which America again provides dozens, if not hundreds of examples of failing to do so - sending innocent people to the gas chamber, electric chair and the like.

However, when I see a video like that I really feel that person should not be alive any more regardless of what they are thinking. Yeah, that's a pretty shocking conclusion, but go figure that the other 99 times out of 100 the person would probably have been broadsided by a truck and probably killed several other people. Even more shocking is that with all the technological advancement we have we still allow people to take personal command of several tons of steel and propel it at 60, 70, 80 or more mph down the freeway separated from other people doing the same thing surrounded by nothing more than a few feet of thin air and a strip of paint a few millimeters thick.

It really is time that cars ran on rails and people took the back seat to technology on this one. If necessary the backseat can have a driving simulator so they can pretend they are driving and yacking on the cellphone. Sure technology lets us down but at least that is something we can fix, unlike the 150 or more people killed by human error on US roads every single day. That's better than 1 in a million odds of not making it home each day - orders of magnitude better than winning the lottery. I think the next "fish" religion/darwinism bumper sticker should combine the two concepts - a fish with wheels on a crucifix tombstone.

Chicken or Beef? The Ultimate Answer

I have friends that used to keep a blog called "Chicken or Beef?" but they have moved on to new places now ("Mousebacon" and "This is My Dangerous Career").

It occurred to me today in an Adams inspired moment of silliness (Douglas Adams, not Samuel Adams) that "Chicken or beef?" could have been the ultimate answer. You know the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, the question of life, the universe and what's for dinner?

Fear of falling - up!

Apropos nothing, here is a flying interlude...

I was flying my paraglider at the coast this weekend and cloud base was low, around 700 feet and I was at about 650 feet, moving reasonably slowly into the wind at just a few mph. For once cloud base at the coast was fluffy white cloudlets drifting overhead, not just an opaque blanket of fog (stratus) that you slowly disappear into while the ground (or ocean) melts away into white below you.

So I'm flying around at that height and starting to feel like the cloud is "coming right for me" because its blowing onshore at a reasonable speed and I'm so close to it. Then I notice when I'm looking up at the cloud just over my head and I start to feel a vertigo like dizziness coming on, like I was looking over the side of a tall building at the pavement, even to the point that I actually sensed some fear that I might fall up and hit the cloud... Granted that fear was perhaps well founded - cloud base can be a turbulent place to be where thermals peter out, and air layers mix up often violently - but I have a feeling it's source in this case was less rational and more primal, just like vertigo.

The solution was simple, just look down which when flying holds no ill feeling for me at all. But it was a weird experience and I'm now wondering if there is a name for the phenomenon.

Hitchens on O-Town

The article "Brutality by the Bay" about Oakland hit my radar today and I started reading it without even noting who it was written by. Lets just say I was shocked that none other than Christopher Hitchens was weighing in on O-Town and the recent raid of the Your Black Muslim Bakery in connection with the murder of local journalist Chauncey Bailey.

Why GOP doesn't want to reform healthcare

This Alternet article gives the facts behind America's bloated, inefficient, and second rate (well actually seventeenth rate - or worse) healthcare system. And it makes the point that our system is focused on sickness not on health because a healthy population isn't profitable. Nothing new there - I knew most of it and I haven't even seen Sicko yet.

However its link to employment figures is interesting - it points out that the explosion in healthcare spending which is the reason for the explosion in healthcare costs to Joe Public, has been the driving force behind the explosion in healthcare employment. So guess what happens if you throw out the inefficient private healthcare system and put in one that is efficient and centrally managed by a single payer? Well you'll get massive unemployment in the healthcare sector because a business that spends six times what other countries spend on administration is clearly going to need far fewer employees - and that, as Bush would say, is "bad for the economy".

So America, you're going to have to continue to suffer because no government wants to sit by as hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers lose their jobs and ruin their unemployment statistics. Can you imagine the battles with unions that will happen if the squeeze on these bloated HMOs ever comes along? Never mind that it might be good for the health of the rest of us, never mind that it would save us hundreds of billions, and never mind that its what works for every other developed nation.

Rapture agenda

I have to say I was shocked by the high profile GOP people involved in this Rapture baloney thinly disguised as support for Israel... See the video. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

You can take your taxes and ...

Hot on the heels of my last post about "America: Freedom to Facism" as if by magic a court ruling shows up that lets a man off who has been refusing to file and tax return and pay his "taxes". Apparently they failed to show that his income was actually taxable, which was one of the main points of AF2F - that employment wages are basically straight barter - you give your time and the employer gives renumeration for what that time is worth.

Okay, so there could be some profit in the wages for time equation - maybe if you're a CEO making say $50M a year it could be argued you salary was inflated and your time wouldn't be worth $50M to you. But just how you'd ever show that I don't know. You could also argue that most people are drastically underpaid for their time, so what is that - a loss that you can write off against other taxable income (such as stock market profits).

So I'm actually guessing that an IRS argument would go like "your tax free allowance is basically what we think you're entitled for your time, everything else in excess is profit for your time and incentive for you to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for money". But that hardly seems right since everyone gets the same allowance so it is saying that an unskilled worker's time is the same value as a highly skilled one (say a doctor, teacher or rocket scientist). Economically that makes no sense to me... but then again I expect they just decided any other way of taxing wages as income is unworkable and more regressive so they just stuck with what they figured was easiest to enforce (or not as the case may be!).

America: Freedom to Fascism

I just got done with watching America: Freedom to Fascism using NetFlix on demand (you can also watch a low res version yourself for free on Google Video).

This documentary could have been made by Michael Moore - I rather wish it had for the reason it would gain wider audience and of course notoriety. But other than that I think it was spot on and concurs with many of my thoughts on "What's wrong with the country formerly known as America?". The truth is at all times there have been many things wrong and until the last twenty years or so it seemed like the general trend was to improvement. But as this documentary points out America that no longer appears to be the case.

The writer Douglas Adams mused on how humans had spent thousands of years coming up with ideas to make everyone happy (without nailing any one to a cross) but how each one seemed to revolve around the movement of small green pieces of paper "which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - I think this documentary essentially says they same.

It seems like there may have been a few liberties taken along the way - so far the best evidence I can find for the case that the 16th Amendment was never ratified indicates it is based on minor technicalities that probably apply to any amendment's ratification you care to examine. It seems pretty clear that the spirit, if not the exact letter of the amendment was ratified by the required 75% super majority of states. Other arguments made against the legality of taxes may stand except of course, apparently, in a court of law. However the larger point is really quite beyond the legality of collecting non-apportioned income tax - it is how that, and many other "anomalies" of this supposedly "free" country continue to be enforced basically by brute force of collusion between money, media and corporate collusion in the houses of power that run the show and hold all the big bang, bang you're dead weapons.

That said - don't forget you've never had it so good - and even if the answer to "You think that's freedom you're living" is a hearty "No!" it is, almost the closest you'll get in the world. At least that is until unverifiable electronic elections become ubiquitous, untraceable humans and money - illegal, and descent - treason. Chose your moment to act or act up wisely America, because your days of freedom may be numbered.

Shoppers fear Chinese goods - but keep shopping at Wal*Mart

Business Week's story Shoppers concerned about Chinese goods misses some obvious points when it quotes "Joyce Simple, a church secretary, interviewed on a recent shopping trip to a Wal-Mart". Joyce says "I'm scared to death. We are dependent on our government inspecting things, I would be careful of anything that came from China."

Gee didn't anyone tell Joyce who the #1 importer from China is and the huge percentage of WalMart inventory that comes from China - last I heard it was close to 80% inspite of their red-white and blue flag waving activities. Oh well, ignorance is bliss but if she really wants to avoid Chinese goods she should shop else where and put money where her mouth is.

Later on in the article it says "There's no question that too many Chinese manufacturers and food producers put the bottom line ahead of safety". Oh really, well I think there may be a certain carrot being dangled in front of them by major retailers like WalMart who put the bottom line above everything else as almost any article or interview with a former WalMart supplier would reveal. So if there was anyone who chose to turn a blind eye or pray to god (literally) that quality goods would be delivered at bargain basement prices, that would be WalMart.

After all for the corporation there is nothing to lose - most of the time they would be okay and if there was a problem then well, it is easy for them to point the finger at the government and say it was someone elses for not inspecting the goods. Thus they are simply leveraging the wonderful economic crutch of "externalities" whereby society gets to foot the bill for all of industries blunders - from pollution, global warming, industrial accidents, to poisoned consumers - while they reap all the profits from cutting corners at every opportunity.

You see when it is convenient big government is a big evil monster that must be destroyed because its always telling us what to do with pesky laws and regulations, and collecting those nasty taxes and driving prices up. At other times those same people will tell us it is of course the governments job to protect us from them. Naturally they wont say it literally, but when things like ground plastic in pet food show up because they went with the cheapest bid (hmmm, rather like NASA has always had to do) and they want the government to foot the bill for testing every load of food that arrives because they can't trust their corner cutting suppliers, well that's the implication.

So you see, shopping at Wal*Mart is just perpetuating corporate welfare - to those that need it least, and its perpetuating businesses that do what everyone does best - looking after #1 above all and screwing over their neighbors for nickels and dimes.

Notariety for O-Town

One of my biggest gripes about living in the USA (spare me the "so move somewhere else" quips - you're boring me!) is the f**ked up health care, or rather health insurance situation. I was really happy to see that Michael Moore had tackled this issue with his new movie "Sicko", even happier that unlike Fahrenheit 911 it is getting universal, bi-partisan acclaim, and ecstatic that my home town Oakand (aka "O-Town") is getting previews of the movie projected on the head quarters of Kaiser. Like all HMOs Kaiser gets some "special" attention in Sicko.

I'm event more pleased to point out that Moore makes a point of telling us that Kaiser, as a corporation is legally obliged to maximize profit for its shareholders, yes there is a supreme court ruling to that effect, Kaiser could get sued if they didn't put the dollar before your health. Not the kind of behavior you want from an company that is supposedly trying to give you health care. As Moore tells us frequently - profit is not something that has any business being considered in conjunction with health care.

George Hypocrite Bush

Said George Bush today "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical — and it is not the only option before us"

Well that's a very convenient attitude to take when you talking about embryos which at the time of harvesting are no more "alive" than a hunk of flesh from your nose that any plastic surgeon would willingly lop off - for the right fee.

So George, how come in Iraq you have no problems causing the death of hundreds of thousands in the hope of saving some human lives? Even at his worst Saddam didn't have that kind of effect on the people of Iraq. Could it be that Mr Bush you are a hypocrite pandering to a special interest in the hopes of keeping your friends in power?

Cliff Notes

A sweet story from the UK about someone who discovered the real power of music - using Cliff Richard tunes to disperse evil hoddies.

Tim Griffin resigns - the real story is missed by US "press"

US Attorney for Arkansas Tim Griffin has resigned but a search of Google news is showing that there has been little coverage of the story so far in the main stream. The longest story from CNN details his involvement in the ongoing Gonzales attorney firings scandal. However every seems to be missing the connection between Griffin and an ongoing investigation into voter caging that may eventually implicate none other than Bush's "Prince of Darkness" Karl Rove. To quote from Greg Palast's announcement of June 1st:

Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee investigating the firing of US Attorneys, met Thursday evening in New York with Palast. After reviewing key documents, Conyers stated that, despite Griffin's resignation, "We're not through with him by any means."

Conyers indicated to the BBC that he thought it unlikely that Griffin could carry out this massive 'caging' operation without the knowledge of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rove.

Griffin has not responded to requests by BBC to explain this 'caging' operation. However, in emails subpoenaed by Conyers' committee, Griffin complains to Monica Goodling, an assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, about the BBC reporter's reproduction of caging lists in Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse."

Last Wednesday, Goodling testified under a grant of immunity before the House Judiciary Committee that Gonzales' Deputy Paul McNulty, "failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote 'caging' during his work on the President's 2004 campaign."

Goodling's testimony prompted Conyers' request to the BBC for the Griffin emails.

Last night Palast showed Conyers a Griffin email from August 2004 indicating that Griffin not only knew of 'caging,' but directed the operation.

Hmmm, and the next day Griffin resigns, coincidence? Just how long before the real story breaks? You can help Palast's story get some coverage by digging it over at Digg.com

Bleeps from the past

I couldn't believe today when I pulled up my Napster start page - with is on the Electronica page - and saw the featured album was by Jean Michel Jarre. It's been a long time since I was into his work, at the time well ahead of the electronica curve. Maybe Napster somehow knew I was trolling the favourites of my youth today with a monster ELO-fest. Anyway I started listening to Teo and Tea and you know what, it's pretty darned good. If you're all into electronic or used to be a Jarre/Vangelis/KraftWerk/<insert 80s electro-pop band of your choice> you might want to give it a try.

Here's a link to listen to it for free on Napster - Téo & Téa

When the US leaves Iraq...

I'm not going to say 'if the US leaves Iraq' - it has to be inevitable right? I mean we know that the only reason we are still there is because

• George Bush doesn't to be on record as having "lost" a war
• The Republicans want to make sure that job of leaving and cleaning up will be done on the Democrats time - guaranteeing that Republicans can blame Democrats for screwing up Iraq. Within a decade you can rest assured most Americans will believe that it was the Democrats who invaded Iraq in the first place.

My biggest worry is that surely if the US pulls out then why on Earth wont the Iranian just roll in their tanks the next day? They have been busy keeping the diplomats busy rattling their nuclear option, but in the mean time all they have to do is invade Iraq and get all that oil and a strategic increase in land and Shiite followers for the cause. Even better because the Americans did the exact same thing they can do it themselves with impunity because

• The Americans already made a case for unilateral preemptive strikes
• They can simply cite "spreeding freedom" as the justification
• The Americans' already wiped out any ability for Iraq to defend itself
• There is no way the Americans will return once they pull out

Sicker too...

I forgot to mention that Gen A to E will be sicker too. Thanks to Michael Moore and his new movie Sicko for reminding us of the insanity and embarrassment of USA being the only major industrialized nation to not have free universal health care.

Generation A to E - Poorer, weaker, dumber...

Begin rant

If you read this blog you should already know that thanks to Bush Americans are on average poorer than ever before, not to mention enjoying relatively lower standards of living compared to Europe. Americans can mock Europe's socialized medicine all they want but ask them how they would feel about 5 to 6 weeks of vacation a year. I've yet to find a politician who could spin that as bad for you... of course could just tell you that you're busy working hard pursuing the American dream and you don't need all that vacation - working hard is patriotic, yada, yada, yada... Unforunately people are dumb enough to fall for that and not even think about why when standards are supposedly improving they need to work more and more and more...

And if you have half a brain you'd realize that pissing away over $1 trillion dollars (folks that's $3,333 per man, woman, child and illegal immigrant) on fighting Iraq has lead us to the point where we can only blow hot air at other nations who dare defy Uncle Sam. Team USA invade Iran? Not happening. Attack North Korea? No way. All of a sudden Bush thinks maybe he'll give diplomacy a chance. Scratch from the table that his own country would be rioting (not just protesting this time) in the streets if there was another war started in The (Old) White (boys) man (club) House. The US simply doesn't have the resources at hand to do engage any more enemy combatants, I mean it can't even protect its own borders, let alone remote ones.

But the latest revelation is that oh boy, this country has gone dumb and dumber. The simple fact that the above are true is a testament to that fact. A smart populace doesn't put up with declining living standards, a smart populace doesn't support policies that actually make the country more vulnerable. Now we find that America has become a bunch of telly addicts and the media refuses to cover anything but pulp fiction. Anything remotely like an "issue" is off limits so we can become comfortably numb while we become comfortably dumb.

This shouldn't be any surprise to anyone who has been near a school recently and knows how instead of education the prime occupation of kids these days is remembering their A to Es - that's endless streams of A to E answers to multi-choice questions. Whatever happened to essay questions, or completely open ended questions where you might have to express and think for yourself? If all you've ever experienced is A to E questions where the right answer is on the paper somewhere (just roll the dice...) what that heck are you supposed to do in real life where the real answer is something you have to provide? Instead we now have some kind of institutionalized knowledge welfare where everyone expects at every step of the way to be handed a guaranteed right answer to life, the universe and everything on a plate. All they have to do is roll the dice and pick that answer - and if they don't, well they just got unlucky. Whatever happened to just "using your loaf?" (brain).

Instead kids are busy learning to talk with text and email abbreviations (BRB, BF, ROTFL etc.) they are also busy assimilating their entire knowledge base as some bizarre DNA like encoding of DABCEABCDEBABCDCAABEEACEDADBE... etc. and that is supposed to be their and this country's key to prosperity. My only question is just how bad does it have to get before this country just starts falling apart, I'll give it a generation at most so it won't be the global warming that gets us, it'll be global (or in this case local) dumbing that does it...

Assisting that increasing dumbness (and numbness) is America's collective obsession with "faith in god" which statistics claim is something like 90%. But when you really look at it you find that these days more people either don't believe, or don't have any strong convictions than those who are regular church going theists who have any clue of what they really believe (and even if you go to church on a weekly basis it has no real bearing on whether you actually believe or know what you believe - I've heard at some churches there's free food and wine available followed by a good old sing song, doesn't sound so bad...). I guess it shouldn't really come as any surprise that if America was going to do religion it would do it at least as badly as it does everything else these days (diplomacy, economics, health care, welfare, education). And yet the media continues to pander to the deep pocketed god-corps as freely as it does other corporations, so there really is no breaking out of their stranglehold any more than we can escape from the tyranny of the A to E generation. Sigh. Try and get some real publicity for non religious "free thought" and you'll be ostracized and ridiculed just like homosexuals and racial minorities were just a few decades ago.

Oy.

End of rant

Zen and the Art of Hot Dogs

A nice little "joke" about Zen and hot dogs that was mentioned by Christopher Hitchens:

Did you hear the one about the Zen Master who said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything?"
The hot dog vendor hands him one with everything. The Zen master hands him a $20 bill and the vendor pockets it.
"What about my change?" asked the Zen master.
The hot dog vendor says, "Change comes only from within."

This morning I laughed out loud on the drive to work when I heard Bush say this:

I admire Paul Wolfowitz. I admire his heart and I particularly admired his focus on helping the poor."

My immediate thought was, yes he really did well for his poor girlfriend, gave her one big fat pay raise to get her out of poverty. Yeah, that Wolfie, one heck of a guy...

Of course by the end of the day he probably got his own big fat hand out from the World Bank in return from his resignation. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a nice tax free World Bank retirement policy included to boot.

Democracy - sold out!

Tonight I was lucky enough to attend a special preview performance of Josh Kornbluth's new monologue called "Citizen Josh". It was at once fun, entertaining and thought provoking with a distinctly more political bent than normal - that's great for me since Josh is "one of my guys" but it may make it harder to tour with the performance. Better hope he doesn't experience a Mike Daisey style audience coup!

Anyway,early in the show Josh postulated that perhaps America had done so much "exporting of Democracy" in the past few year that it had simple run out of it at home. Sold out, gone, dried up - no more democracy for you. I know what he means, it certainly feels like that at times. What's a country to do? Well the rest of the monologue is all about that and Citizen Josh got his groove back and rekindled his democratic flame. Nicely done Josh.

Books are good mmmkay

While browsing books in the book lined basement of City Lights bookstore (San Francisco) it occurred to me that they use up an awful lot of trees to make books. No great revelation there - there's a reason they (geeks) call printed media "thin tree format". However trees are made of carbon which means growing trees, turning them into paper and then storing them, often for hundreds of years must have taken an awful lot of carbon out of play. Yes, books are our very own knowledge based carbon sequestration technique. We should be burning or recylcing books but just filling our basements, garages, and homes with them. What a thought, buying books is patriotic!

But then again I have to wonder, does it take more carbon emissions to produce each book than that which is stored in the book on the shelf? If so maybe it is time for low carbon emissions eco-friendly books.

Peace in Iraq for a few billion more...

While Bush is asking for over $100 billion to further his war efforts (I'm waiting for them to rename the defence department "The Ministry of Peace") I have a suggestion that will only cost a few billion, probably less than their original $6 billion invasion plan.

I say they just go into each town of Iraq and seize, destroy, crush, shred and otherwise remove from the streets every single damned car in the country. The result will be no more freakin' car bombs and more people getting on the streets and getting to know each other. Anyone driving a car is either a terrorist or a soldier - that should make things a bit easier then.

I mean, just how many cars are there in Iraq and how much could they be worth after almost years of war? I'm sure there aren't too many shiny new SUVs except for the ones the occupying powers brought with them - everything else, even if its a few million cars could be taken off the road for a few thousand dollars each - more money than most of the owners will have seen in a long time. That would be a total of billions - even if its tens of billions its still far less than Bush is spending - remember the bare minimum the Iraq war has cost is $500 billion, more realistic estimates are closer to $1 trillion - over $3,000 each per man woman and child in the US (or more than ten times as much per Irai!). Just after the initial invasion I read that US forces were at one point going around with trucks of money at one point compensating families of civilian casualties with a few thousand each, maybe $10,000 if they were lucky, so by comparison buying cars is a good deal.

Okay I admit as Palestine has shown there's plenty of opportunity for suicide bombers to wreck havoc without a car - but you know there's no more chick'n shit leaving a car full of explosives at a market and walking away stuff. You've really got to believe that those 40 virgins are waiting for you in paradise to blow yourself up for it. Or you could just take Uncle Sam's money and buy yourself a nice triple venti latte and enjoy the rest of the day watching TV and drinking beer.

Of course the car companies would never allow systematic genocide of automobiles - even though it would basically be a big subsidy for them since eventually all those people, when peace had broken out, would want to by shiny new gas guzzlers. Hey for a few billion more you could get them all a nice new fuel efficient Prius or heck a bunch of solar panels and some electric cars. What kind of nice utopian paradise would that be - maybe they could send a few virgins over there for paradise on earth, actually if some theories are to be believed all they need are some white raisins. Who'd have thought you could get peace, love and paradise on earth for a few billion and a truck load of raisins...

Stumbled upon

It seems that someone at Stumble Upon has stumbled on this site. While the hundreds of hits it is causing are more than welcome (hey hope you enjoy the visit) I'm perplexed that the StumbleUpon website wont tell me where the link that refers to LDTT is. Maybe its a search feature you only get if you sign up, I can't tell. Even more frustrating my web stats software doesn't tell me the URL either.

Perhaps one of those visitors from StumbleUpon would be kind enough to post a comment with a link to the page where they came from - many thanks.

Update: thanks to those who commented on this post - I'm now less in the dark about StumbleUpon. It seems there must be a lot of people out there using it - now I'm feeling bad that I don't post to this blog more often - truth be told most of my posts go elsewhere these days since I have pretty much lightened up in the last year or so. But once in a while the dark side still gets to me!

PS: Something seems to have gone wrong with blogger - it was showing this post twice so I deleted the one with no comments but now it lists no comments when I publish even though it tells me there are still 4 comments attached to it. Strange - must be a Blogger bug... Sigh.

Common Errors in English Usage

While using the abbreviation "e.g." it occured to me I had no idea of the Latin it was an abbreviation for. Of course I know what the meaning is ("for example") but when Googled for the Latin I came across a definition from this website that is also a book "Common Errors in English Usage. I guess a lot of people confuse "e.g." with "i.e." - I don't, my mother set me straight on that a long time ago. But at least I now know that they stand for "exempli gratia" and "id est". Check out the reams of other common errors, e.g. Dangling and misplaced modifiers or By far and away.

Reinvading Iraq costs more than first time

This article from AlterNet states the budgeted price for the current "surge" in Iraq as $5.6 billion, and that another billion has already been added to the price. That's almost $7 billion right off the bat. Does anyone else find that price shocking? Didn't Bush promise that the original invasion would probably only cost about $6 billion... I mean it was pretty much going to be self financing he told us. Now they add a measly 20,000 troops to hold just Baghdad and it costs a whopping $6.6 billion (if you believe they could stick to budget just once!).

And finally...

As Mickey Rooney said this weekend on 60 minutes, the recruitment policies of the US Army are digging deeper and deeper into the barrel, finding more and more desperate souls to go fight their war. The average American has no interest in playing a part in this NeoCon mis-adventure. In future if America wants to go to war it should be paid for by average Americans and if they wont sign up voluntarily then it must be draft.

Personally I think that is a brilliant idea - there should be a constitutional amendment to require a draft before going into any war, even its a specious "on terrorism" war. I think that will give the US public laser focus on the issues next time a misleader is trying to drag us kicking and screaming into another Iraq.

VerizonMath - it's payback time!

VerizonMath is the story of one man's battle to resolve a Verizon screw up in quoting data usage fees as "point zero zero two cents per kilo byte" instead of "point zero zero two dollars per kilo byte". This caused him to run up a $71 data roaming charge instead of what he expected $0.71 or 71 cents.

George Vaccaro posts both emails and an audio recording of his dealings with Verizon and it is pretty stunning how much work (and patience) it took for him to eventually get this resolved. After initially being offered a 50% refund, he was finally given a full 100% refund but without any admission of error but he boldly went on to extract an admission of error and that they will revise customer service material. But wait there is more... days later they are still misquoting the rate in cents per kb instead of dollars per kb. Inspite of George's resolution and the publicity it gained, weeks later another person who had the identical problem has yet to get a refund.

I love the way this thread is going - I wish more people had the time and energy to follow through like George. It looks to me that well dugg stories and YouTube postings have true potential in getting exposure - and the irony of hearing the "this call may be recorded for training purposes" notification is so thick its probably lost on Verizon. Hearing two reps agree there is a difference between a dollar and a cent, and a half a dollar and half a cent but there is no difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents - well that's just priceless.

After reading and hearing all the recordings I start wondering "what if everyone starts doing the same thing as George?". How long will it be before it is just one deafening cacophony of complaints out there on the web with no specific action being taken? And how long before companies start trying to counter such trends with threats of legal action when customers post records of their reps and post emails from them? I know that ultimately that kind of thing will fail because it will backfire (blowback?) too badly - but it could get ugly for a while.

A few other comments on this:

1. I know being a CS rep must suck - I know someone who deals face to face with customers day in and day out and there are some real stinkers out there, over them phone it is even easier to get nasty. That is why I try really hard to be very courteous and patient with customer service people even when I'm near my wits end because they probably are as well. It usually pays off as my many (eventual) success stories with T-Mobile customer service have shown. It is frustrating that you sometimes do have to waste hours of your time and energy to get resolution. If we all calculated the value of our own "free time" on the phone in dollars per hour most people would give up long before resolution, it is simply not economic unless you're trying to get big bucks refunded.

2. I'm almost certain I got a similar misquote of data roaming rate from T-Mobile when I recently enquired about using it when traveling to the United Kingdom. When I went there two years ago it was completely free - part of my US unlimited plan, this time I think I got the point zero zero two cents per kb. I need to go back and check - if they haven't already wised up to Verizon's errors.

3. All this could be avoided if companies would only quote prices in dollars. But, as someone pointed out in one of the blog comments: many people just aren't comfortable with fractions of a dollar so that isn't going to happen.

4. But hello... being unable to distinguish a fraction of a dollar from a fraction of a cent - is it just too much to expect from people educated in "the worlds only superpower"? Vaccaro wasn't talking to uneducated or foreign nationals who might have a language problem, they could clearly hold and follow an English conversation, use a calculator, distinguish a dollar form a cent. So just what is going on with the education system and powers of reasoning in this country?

The inability of the two (and presumably several previous) people to make the cognitive leap and see and agree there was a problem is a striking demonstration of how ill equipped the average person now seems to be to make rational choices and process really, really simple mathematical concepts. Just how can we expect anyone to do anything as complicated as balance and weigh stuff like economic or scientific data when reasoning about which president to elect?

I start to wonder if it was an inability to doubt the corporate info or the computer that caused the reps inability recognize the error, or if it was a true failure of basic math because they don't understand how to use decimals and units in calculations? Obviously someone at Verizon eventually figured it out - was it because they were a) smarter or b) incentivised to (i.e. they realized it would cost too much not to figure it out).

5. Don't get me started on mass confusion that exists over if or when 1k is 1024 or 1000 and if a kb = kilo bit or kilo byte.

6. My inner conspiracy theorist would say that Verizon manufactured this whole thing and deliberately and rigorously trained their staff to confound and dumbfound people like George while secretly they busting a gut trying not to laugh at how hard the customer tries to explain the problem to them.

Hitchens vs. Ford

Sometimes you really need a contrary opinion which requires a contrarian which leads us straight to the door of Christopher Hitchens. So who better to dish the dirt on Gerald Ford in his Slate article The Ugly Truth about Gerald Ford". As he sums up:

To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

The Ford epoch did not banish a nightmare. It ended a dream - the ideal of equal justice under the law that would extend to a crooked and venal president. And in Iraq and Indonesia and Indochina, it either protracted existing nightmares or gave birth to new ones.