You can't make this stuff up

For your edification without further comment:

Can't stop tellin' them lies

The government today announced new unemployment statistics for September: U3, the usually reported number, is now 10.3%; U6, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment, is now at 17.5%. So by the government's own jiggered and finagled data, we're at 1931, which had an unemployment rate of about 16.3%. Over at ShadowStats, John Williams adds in the millions of unemployed/underemployed Americans the government pretends don't exist to arrive at a new rate of 22.1%. Just astounding! That's only 2-3 percentage points away from the Great Depression maximum of 24-25%.

So why does the government keep lying about the gravity of the situation in this country? How can people respond rationally to the situation when our government pretends that the unemployment crisis is only half as severe as it really is?

Notice in the graph above that the blue ShadowStats line is shooting upward with a very steep slope. The slope of government's U3 line (in red) is substantially less steep. Back in elementary calculus class, we'd say that the blue curve is concave upward, indicating an accelerating rate of change (in a bad way, since up means more unemployment). The red line is concave downward, indicating a decelerating rate of change (that is, unemployment may be reaching a peak or a plateau). See the difference that telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth makes? The blue line demonstrates the severity of the unemployment crisis and the utter failure of the government to cope with it. The red line lets government gasbags emit all sorts of happy talk about recovery.

What a remarkable fact that the largest information gathering enterprise in the history of the human race--the Federal government--gathers all this information and then lies about what it means!

Good news, bad news

Last night, there was good news and bad news on the gay marriage front. In Maine, a law including gay people in marriage was vetoed by 52-48. In Washington, a civil unions law granting gay people all the rights of marriage (it was touted "everything but marriage" by its supporters) was ratified 51-49.

The only difference between the laws in both states was the word "marriage." In both states, the civil law was extended to cover gay people; in Maine, gays were incorporated into existing marriage law; in Washington state, gays were given all the rights, protections, and privileges of marriage law in the form of an extension to existing civil union law. In both cases, there was no difference at all in the civil law under consideration because in both cases gay people were to enjoy all the legal standing of married people. The only difference was the word "marriage" in Maine as opposed to "civil union" in Washington. I conclude that we live in a country where about half the people don't care about the content of a law; they care only about the manner in which a law is described. I also conclude that about half the people of the country cannot distinguish between civil, secular law on the one hand and religious rites on the other. This fact also implies that about half the country does not understand or believe in or accept separation of church and state. Evidently they think either that the church is an extension of the state or that the state is an extension of the church. In either case, it's a profound failure to understand American constitutional law.

So election night was 50-50 for gay people. In Maine, gays will still enjoy civil unions. In Washington state, gays will enjoy marriage in every sense except the word "marriage." And we can be encouraged by the vote. I've written before and have believed for a very long time that on this issue, gay people must simply wait for an inevitable victory. Examine the votes of these and other similar contests and you'll discover that the winning margin for the anti-gay bigots is based on the vote of the elderly. People 60 and over are the base on which this anti-gay reaction is built; younger voters tend to support gays. As a voting block, these elderly people are simply impervious to reason and argument; until their dying day, they will never even consider equality for gay people. Happily, their ranks are diminishing daily. Nature and mortality will soon eliminate this political base. The vote tallies for the last 15 years on this issue track the mortality statistics: on average about 1% of Americans die each year (primarily the elderly) and on average gays have gained a percent of support each year. We are now within a few percentage points of prevailing. In about five years or so, the anti-gay reactionaries will have largely exhausted their supply of elderly bigots. Younger generations support gay people and their rights; people under 35 overwhelmingly support gays. Attrition and replacement will achieve for gay people what appeals to reason, facts, science, equality before the law, and simple human decency have not. The future does not belong to the bigots. They are taking their bigotry to the grave.

Life imitates art (or at least classic TV)

Britain has become one of the most surveilled societies in human history. Its network of spy cameras and snooping devices makes Orwell's Oceania look downright primitive. Now, snoopers are being recruited to spy in the comfort of their own homes. You can even win prizes spying on your neighbors, strangers, anybody. How long before we're hearing about the snooping addiction? And strangely enough, hardly anybody in Britain is alarmed about becoming a nation of snoops. Next step: a nation of snitches.

Fact: Read about it here

Fiction: Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 1
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 2
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 3
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 4
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 5
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 6

There is nothing wrong with your television set. It's just looking at you while you're looking at it!

Well, wouldn't you?

Let's be generous. We know that Andre Agassi did not write his own "autobiography;" he hired somebody to wrangle those pesky words for him. We know that Andre Agassi's biography isn't really important in any way, shape, or form. We know that Andre Agassi's life could be encapsulated in a moderately long Sports Illustrated article replete with lots of pictures. We know that celebrities and their "autobiographies" are exercises in vanity.

What we don't know is why, if you're going to all this trouble to draw attention to yourself, would you put a picture that for all the world looks like a police line-up photo on the cover? Did he just wake up from an all night bender? Couldn't he have shaved? Or used some eye drops to clear up that glazed vacuous stare? Or shaved? Or smiled?

If you were yelling to the world "Look at me!!!!", wouldn't you at least try to spruce up even an itsy bitsy bit?

A decade disappears

According to John Williams at ShadowStats, inflation-adjusted retail sales have receded to the level of 2000. The first decade of the 21st century has been repealed. This follows data I've previously posted that all American jobs created in this decade have been lost, and all income advances in the decade for 80% of Americans have been lost as well. As I've posted before, we're trapped in the Time Machine and it's stuck in reverse!

Also, this tidbit from a recent interview with Paul Craig Roberts: New York City's Fifth Avenue, the world's prime retail space, has a 15.3% vacancy rate! This in an economy that until recently was 70% devoted to consumption and retail sales.

Sparta, Prussia, America

First amendment watchdogs often complain about lowering the "wall of separation" between church and state as the government bribes and entices more and more "faith based" organizations to accept government money with the inevitable government control to follow. That's bad news, but defenders of the Constitution should be shouting from the rooftops about the rapidly dissolving barrier between the civilian and the military. It seems that the Army, blessed with countless billions of civilian tax dollars, wants to create a national junior ROTC (JROTC) program--for middle schoolers!

Seventh graders won't be students any longer; they'll be cadets. They'll march and wear snappy dress uniforms on special days and learn about weapons and adopt military values that will save them from being "at risk" (so says a JROTC booster in the article below). What would entice a school system to accept such a monstrosity? Money, lots and lots of military money. Everything's for sale nowadays in America, so shouldn't dead-broke school boards auction off their students for bucks?

The generation that fought the Revolutionary War despised standing armies so much that they refused to create one for the new republic and instead insisted that citizen militias defend the country. That's the historical meaning of the 2nd amendment. Until the eve of World War II, America had a minuscule military and an army of not much more than 100,000 men. There was no "military-industrial complex" to speak of. National life was entirely civilian with hardly any military presence in any way, shape, or form.

Now we'll have the military in the nation's public middle schools. They've been in the high schools and colleges for decades. They're funding and training police forces all across America; they're organizing joint law enforcement exercises with city police and country sheriffs. The posse comitatus act of 1878, which prohibited the military from taking part in any form of civilian law enforcement, has been nullified. At the instruction of the president or attorney general, the military can arrest and detain any American citizen and hold that person incommunicado for at least three full years and no civilian court can interfere. The military today is more widely deployed both in America and across the world than at any time in our history. The military has access to more than $1 trillion annually, and every year that sum increases. The division between civilian and military is essentially non-existent; our civilian authorities defer to the military, facilitate it, and support it without question.

How far away is the day when the military dispenses with the civilian nuisance altogether?

Read it here

Peace prize? What?

Did you react the way I did when I learned that Mr. Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize? "Say what??!!??" How can a man who is prosecuting a war and an occupation in Iraq, a war and occupation in Afghanistan, a covert war in Pakistan, covert military interventions in Sudan and Somalia win a "peace" prize? Hello? Who's running the Nobel prize committee these days? Characters out of George Orwell?

Paul Craig Roberts asked the same questions below and concludes that, yes indeed, George Orwell's 1984 is now the reality of the day. We Americans live in Oceania; Big Brother surveils us night and day; our news media are torrents of Newspeak; our minds are full of Doublethink. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The Nobel prize committee is full of you know what.

Not only have these Norwegian dimwits disgraced themselves and degraded both the prize they award and the principles its founder wanted to honor and encourage; these dimwits have totally undercut any opposition to these wars.

How can you oppose Mr. Obama, our officially recognized Prince of Peace, now? He's the champion of peace; the Nobel prize committee says so.

How can you oppose Mr. Obama's policies--which are indistinguishable from Mr. Bush's--now? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.

So what if Muslim men, women, and children are being slaughtered everyday by American forces? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.

So what if Mr. Obama is stirring up the world to wage war against Iran? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.

War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The year is 1984. Big Brother has won the Nobel peace prize.

Read Paul Craig Roberts here

Signs of the times

When a former assistant of the treasury in the Reagan administration who was one of the designers of supply-side economics approving quotes Marx and writes that Marx and Lenin knew what they were talking about when it comes to late stage finance capitalism, then you know we're in it up to our necks.

Paul Craig Roberts gives an astonishingly grim assessment of the present situation. To paraphrase Churchill: apropos the Great Depression of the 21st century, this is not the end of it nor even the beginning of the end of it; it's just the end of the beginning. There's much worse yet to come.

Read Paul Craig Roberts here

Conservative Bible?

Apparently a gang of zanies at Conservapedia (a toxic waste dump of right-wing, wing-nut, ultra-right, fringe-right, and to-the-right-of-fascism "conservatives") want to "translate" the Bible into conservative-friendly text because, they claim, too many translated Bible passages sound "liberal." Evidently not only "liberal" translations irk these nuts; they view askance passages like "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" in Luke (maybe it's not "authentic" but was inserted by some ancient liberal).

Conservative Bible? Liberal Bible? The Bible used to be God's word. Did he sell the copyright to somebody? Soon it will be the Republican Bible belonging to the Republican National Committee (RNC). Perhaps the "conservative Bible" will revise the opening of John's gospel to read "In the beginning was the RNC, and the RNC was with God, and what God was the RNC was..."

If you follow the link in the post below to the article on Conservapedia and read it, you quickly understand what these crack-pots are up to. They care not an atom about the actual text of the Bible or scholarship. They merely want to paraphrase (not "translate") the text and thus change it into a version replete with modern politically loaded terms wherever they want to insert them. The aim, in short, is to turn the Bible into a propaganda device for a particularly obnoxious American political faction. And given the present state of the know-nothing Christian right, they'll succeed. They have plenty of precedent. Millions have read at least part of the "Living Bible," another paraphrase from a generation ago, and thought that they were getting the real stuff when all they were getting was one man's distortion of the text mixed with a huge amount of unspoken theological biases and hidden agendas.

The alternative, of course, is to devote years to learning ancient Greek and Hebrew, studying ancient history, mastering the history of Bible textual criticism, and learning about the principles and practice of honest, scholarly translation. Who's gonna do that these days? So look for the "Conservative Bible" in a Christian bookstore near you soon.

Read about it here

21.4% and rising

John William at ShadowStats has examined and corrected the government's latest unemployment data. The result: the effective unemployment/underemployment rate in this country is now 21.4% (that's the blue line in the graph). The government's own U6 index (the gray line--which the government claims to be the broadest measure of unemployment/underemployment) has risen to 16.8%. This index omits millions of people who have given up searching for jobs that don't exist; the government claims that they are "out of the work force" and ignores them.

In the meantime, the commercial real estate crack-up proceeds without let up, a new round of mortgage resets will begin in the new year (this time it's Alt-A mortgages--millions of them), and credit card defaults continue to reach unprecedented heights (unprecedented since last month when they reached unprecedented heights, and the month before when they did, and the month before that, etc). And sometime in early 2010, half the homeowners carrying mortgages will find themselves underwater--i.e., the balance on their mortgages will exceed the value of their homes. Gerald Celente of Trends Research is predicting the worst commercial Christmas in history, the aftermath of which will wipe-out countless marginal businesses that are at present hanging on only by their fingernails.

So in the final quarter of 2009, we are trillions of dollars in debt because of "stimulus" programs and bail-outs (the Plan A of both the Bush and Obama administrations), yet have absolutely nothing to show for it. What's Plan B?

A world run by fools and tyrants

How do students often raise money for their school organizations? A bake sale. But not in New York City. The cabal of tyrants who rule the city have decided (a) too many fat kids is a problem and (b) banning bake sales in public schools is a solution. As if buying a brownie at a back sale explains why half of America is fat.

So now students who for some reason still care about their failing public schools and who want to do something positive to improve them will no longer have a useful and effective way to raise funds. So much for school spirit!

Similar regulations are enforced in various school systems across the country. "Schools around the United States, including throughout California, have banned bake sales or put a limit on the sugar and fat content of the goodies. But New York’s regulations are among the strictest in the country..." And exactly what do these regulation accomplish? Apparently nothing because "Roughly 40 percent of the city’s elementary and middle school students are overweight or obese, according to the [NYC] Education Department." In other words, these policies in NYC schools and else where have no positive effect; they are failures; they serve no demonstrable purpose. They are merely exercises in petty tyranny by useless busybodies who claim the right and duty to police what people eat for as long as those unfortunate people are within their jurisdiction.

Just another reason why abolishing public schools altogether is looking more and more attractive as time goes by.

Read it here

Germany-America 1933

Have you ever wondered what the National Socialist take-over of the Weimar Republic looked like? Take a peek: View here

Broke and getting broker

Economist Michel Chossudovsky explains why the "bailouts" were really shakedowns--vast, unprecedented transfers of wealth from you to the government and its favored banks.

Watch video here

Jury Duty

Today (9/14), I was on jury duty; for the first time, I was a member of a jury. Not a full twelve-person jury, but a six-person jury assigned to hear a DUI case. Not exactly cutting edge jurisprudence, but interesting nonetheless.

The facts: The defendant was stopped by a sheriff's deputy at 2:20 AM sometime last May because the sheriff had seen (he said "observed") that the defendant was driving with no lights. The sheriff noticed a smell of alcohol (he said "intoxicants") in the car, and he asked the defendant to stop out of the car. The defendant agreed to take some field sobriety tests--the eye test, the walk-the-line test, the standing on one foot test. The deputy claimed to have seen enough "cues" to indicate probable driving under the influence, so he arrested the defendant. Implied consent allows the state to take a blood sample for analysis; the deputy called another deputy to come and do the blood draw. Subsequent testing yielded a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .127%. The legal limit defining automatic DUI is .08%, so the defendant was half again over that limit.

The defendant was charged with two DUIs! How? In Arizona law the fundamental constitutional protection against double jeopardy apparently doesn't apply, so you can be charged with DUI with "the slightest impairment" at the same time as you are charged with DUI at or over the .08% limit. This double charging has significant legal consequences because for a single DUI, you get between 1 and 10 days of jail, lots of fines, suspension of driving, plus possible other restrictions while you are on probation. But for two DUIs, you get between 30 and 90 days of jail time and lots more of the fines and other penalties. Obviously, if you're in jail for at least 30 days, your job is gone and you may be reduced to penury. And of course you've got a criminal record that will pursue you for life. Perhaps that is an appropriate situation for a repeat offender, but how can that possibly be appropriate for a first time offense? Not only that, but the law allows a jury to presume impairment if the defendant's blood is drawn within two hours of arrest and subsequently tests at or over the .08% limit. Thus you can be presumed guilty of DUI with "the slightest impairment." I find this outrageous. The burden on the state is to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Arizona has evaded that requirement by allowing juries to presume guilt--even though juries are explicitly instructed to base their decision solely upon the evidence presented in court! Allowing juries to presume without evidence is an affront to constitutional protections against arbitrary government and an egregious example of the tyranny of prosecutors that Paul Craig Roberts and others have voluminously documented.

In addition to this affront to justice, the arresting deputy admitted under cross examination that at no time did the defendant exhibit any impairment--slurred speech, wobbly stance, inability to respond to questioning, etc. The defendant has just left a Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru in which he had turned off his lights as a courtesy to others in line ahead of him. He had pulled out into a well-lit street and had driven less than half a block before he was pulled over. This was the evidence of "impairment" that the prosecutor harped on almost to the point of absurdity.

During deliberations, two members of the jury were initially inclined to convict on both counts. I quickly spoke up and stated my position: the second charge--DUI over .08%--was incontestable and had not even been seriously challenged by the defense. The defendant claimed to have drunk only two beers, one at 8 PM and the other at 10 PM. Oh, please! It is physically impossible for the defendant (a 175 pound male) to have a .127% BAC with just two beers consumed at once much less over a period of hours. C'mon, we're not stupid. However, as to impairment, I insisted that no such evidence of impairment had been presented in court; indeed the evidence was the opposite. As to driving without headlights, the prosecutor had the unfortunate luck to have chosen a jury in which at least half of the members (me included) had driven without headlights in similar circumstances; nobody bought the prosecutor's argument.

In the end, we agreed to acquit on the impairment charge and convict on the legal limit charge. I felt sorry for the defendant. He's a 30-year-old bank manager who wants to become a professional soccer player. All that may be in jeopardy because of one mistake. However, I did my duty as a juror to apply the law impartially and to decide based solely on the evidence presented in court.

I wonder why this case ever came to trial in the first place. Surely, the prosecution and the defense could have negotiated an appropriate plea bargain. Nobody was hurt; there was no accident. Yes, .127% BAC is dangerously high. But in what world could justice be served by wrecking this man's life and career? Maybe the most important lesson I learned is that genuine, proportionate justice is not the goal of the state or its prosecutors. I've read a lot over the years about this perversion of justice in our law. It's quite sobering to see it in person.

Signs of the times

I'm having an amazing argument with somebody on YouTube. A few days ago I happened across a posting of the movie "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" (henceforth TCM2). Have you seen the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre?" I once saw it in a theater a long time ago; my retinas haven't been the same since. It is a disgusting piece of pseudo-sadism in which the audience is entertained by scene after scene of mutilation, torture, and murder. I posted a note on TCM2 complaining that despite all the really fine movies made, a piece of garbage like TCM2 gets posted for viewing.

Somebody really got angry with me, and has been posting increasingly angry notes. Basically, I should shut-up and let people enjoy whatever they want to enjoy. I pointed out that normal people do not enjoy watching other people getting disemboweled or having their limbs cutoff or being hoisted by a meat hook in the back--even if merely its movie fakery. Sadists like this sort of thing, I said. Do you really want to defend sadism as a form of entertainment, I asked.

My antagonist replied: Yes! I was floored. I think that this person is being truthfully. He or she really thinks that movies depicting the most brutal murders and mutilations--provided that these movies are called "horror"--are OK and an acceptable form of entertainment. Abnormal psychology now becomes normality as long as its on film.

Which of course misses the point! The point is not merely that the movies are sadistic; it is that the audience is assumed to be a pack of sadists who get their jollies watching other people--even if they're only actors--get ripped apart with saws, axes, drills, and sledge hammers. And judging from the continued market for these loathsome movies, that assumption seems to be true.

If that fact isn't more frightening than any "horror" movie, what is?

Time machine--in reverse

In July, I wrote a post quoting unemployment data to the effect that all the jobs created in the 21st century had been lost in the Great Depression of the 21st century. That's bad enough, but in the article below we learn that median family income--the point at which half of America's families earn less and half earns more--is now at its lowest value since 1997! An entire decade of income gains has been lost for most American families. Basically 80% of American families have had their inflation adjusted incomes fall; only the top 20% have had income increases (any surprise there?). We are trapped in H. G. Wells's time machine, and it's stuck in reverse. Of course the debt burden accumulated since 1997 has not lightened, so people are trying to cope with enormous debt while living on shrinking incomes--if they have any income at all!

And people in Washington are still talking up the "recovery?" What are they smoking? Here is something about which we all should be shouting "You lie!" from the rooftops. Congressman Wilson, where are you and your big mouth now?

Read it here

Vice will save Kansas

Have you ever been to the airport in Las Vegas? It is the weirdest place. It is a casino with airplanes. Everywhere throughout the airport are banks and banks of gambling machines beeping and flashing and twirling. Got an hour layover between flights? Gamble, gamble, gamble.

The prevalence of gambling in this country is just astounding. It's everywhere. Drop by the customer service desk at Safeway. It's a mini-casino. Get your lottery tickets. Get your latest scratch ticket games. Gamble, gamble, gamble.

Now out in the heartland, Kansas has gone the final mile. Not content to tolerate vice and skim the profits in the guise of tax collections, the state has decided to go the way of Bugsy Malone and get into the gambling business directly. What was once the the domain of organized crime and your local bookie is now the domain of the government of the sovereign state of Kansas. Incredible!

Even more incredible is that nobody in Kansas can make a persuasive argument that the vice business should not be the public's business. If that isn't decadence, what is?

Read it here

1932

According to John Williams at ShadowStats.com, the actual unemployment/underemployment rate in the US is now 21.1%, a number that puts us squarely in the year 1932, one of the bleakest, most desperate years of the Great Depression. And we're only three-quarters through the current year! The bad news has already invalidated all the happy-talk predictions the Obama administration made way back in January and February. Now that Plan A is defunct, do they have a Plan B?

Shrinking empires

Not all news about the current depression is bad. Focus on the Family, the personal empire of the loathsome James Dobson (the Martin Bormann of the religious right), is in big trouble. For the third time in a year, it's laying off employees. Apparently, the chumps who listen to Dobson's daily rants can't send in enough cash to keep Dobson's empire intact. From a peak of some 1400 employees, Focus is now down to 860. That's pretty serious shrinkage--almost 40%! Focus still rakes in plenty of loot: more than $130 million this fiscal year. But empires are expensive, and there's no reason to suppose that the belt tightening at Focus is stopping any time soon.

There is an interesting twist to this story. Apparently like every other kind of business operation, Focus spins off its subsidiaries to raise cash or cut costs. Focus has been running a giant scam for many years: a so-called ex-gay operation called "Love won out." Well, Focus has spun this scam off to ex-gay scammers at Exodus International, their former partners in crime--literal crime, consisting of swindling money out of pathetic, self-hating gay people trapped in anti-gay fundamentalist religious cults. So I guess that this closes a sordid chapter in Focus's sordid history; right-wingers just can't make the big bucks peddling anti-gay hate the way they used to.

Read the good news here

On missing the entire point of one's own post

Here is an interesting post from a person in private education about the costs of education rising faster than the overall rate of inflation:

Read the blog post here

It makes sense right up to the last paragraph. According to this person, folks who have predicted that the cost of education cannot rise indefinitely are out to lunch. For the last 30 years, this person reasons, this has been the case, so why can't it continue indefinitely into the future?

Good grief! Does this person not know how people have been financing the explosion in the cost of education? By going into debt and more debt! By taking on colossal amounts of debt in the now rapidly diminishing hope that future income will offset the enormous debt taken on early in life. If we can pile debt upon debt upon debt and never pay any of it back to our creditors, then the cost of education--private or public--can rise indefinitely. This was the thinking behind the dot.com bubble and the housing bubble and now the squander-ourselves-out-of-recession bubble of the Obama administration. Do we live in such a world?

We can match rising costs with debt only as long as our creditors never want to be paid back. But if they do and they send the bill collector after us, this kooky scheme--known in the underworld as a Ponzi scheme--falls apart.

This blogger understands nothing about the industry in which he works. As long as he charges more for his services (so he reasons), he will earn more. How could it be otherwise? Simple: people stop buying his services. They find cheaper alternatives, or they do without. And then our educator goes bust.

Debt cannot be the basis of a sustainable economy.

Back from Denver

I've been in Denver all August studying for my CELTA certification. It's been 4 straight weeks of teaching practice, teaching observation, reading, researching, writing papers, and general hard work. I'm worn out but happy. Things went well. I made it through the program--not without some cuts and bruises along the way, however!

Now I'm qualified to seek employment as a teacher of English to adults who want to learn English as a second language. I'll look around here in America for positions before I look around for position in foreign countries.

For various reasons, I am not especially keen on living abroad even though life in these United States is becoming more obnoxious and hassle ridden by the day. Today, for example, while on my way home from CELTA training, I was subjected to a full body X-ray at the security screening station in the Denver airport. If you haven't heard, the TSA has a new doodad to inflict on air travellers: an X-ray that examines your body and sees beneath your clothes. It isn't enough that we have to take off our shoes and belts, empty our pockets, and pass through a metal detector; it isn't enough that our carry-on baggage is X-rayed and even arbitrarily examined by TSA agents; it isn't enough that all these affronts to our person, property, and privacy defy the Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Now the TSA goons want to X-ray every inch of you on the pretext of keeping the skies safe from terrorists. This high-tech version of a strip search is just the living end of governmental arrogance and stupidity. But if you're in a distant city and want to get home, what can you do other than submit to this egregious tyranny?

And to top it off, when I pulled my bag off the baggage carousel I noticed that it had been opened. I always move the pouch zippers to the ends and never let them meet in the middle. But the zippers were in the middle. Somebody had moved my zippers! Sure enough, when I opened my bag there was a note from the TSA notifying me that they had opened my bag and had run their fingers over all my private things. This has happened to me five times in the last two years! I have really had my fill of the TSA. It makes you almost want to plant a bomb just to spite them.

Gore Vidal on the American police state

Here is a terrific essay by Gore Vidal on the present American police state. The last few paragraphs are very chilling.

Read about the American police state here

Why you should ignore the general news media

The other day it was reported in the general news media that recent new house sales had experienced the largest increase in eight years. That must be a really big number because the last eight years were the real estate bubble where everybody with a pulse was buying houses. Sounds good, huh? Happy days are here again...

The facts are otherwise. This graph tells a grim and completely different story:



(Source: ShadowStats)

Kooky thinking about the depression

Here is an astonishing statistic: U.S. manufacturing is currently operating at only 65.6% of capacity. That is, fully one-third of American manufacturing is idle. Not since the Great Depression (the other one in the 1930s) has such a huge chunk of American manufacturing--once the engine of wealth creation for the entire world--stood unused with no prospect of recovery. Considering that manufacturing was once fully 25% of this country's economy but now comprises not more than 9%, the sad tale of the decay of America's industrial base leaves a person almost breathless. This decline is unprecedented in human economic history.

Incredibly given these facts, people are still forecasting a "recovery" in the fall; indeed, Mr.Obama has staked his entire administration on this recovery. But how is recovery supposed to happen? With what will anybody recover? Exactly what will be recovered? How can an industrial economy "recover" despite one-third of it being idle? What could "recovery" mean under these circumstances? These preposterous forecasts are exactly like those absurd predictions of "top psychics" that get published in "The National Enquirer" and other such rags.

The truth is that America's industrial base is severely wounded. World markets are shrinking fast; the American domestic market continues to decline. The world is awash in idle industrial capacity. I'm willing to bet a dollar that the idle capacity of China alone exceeds total American industrial capacity. What sensible person thinks that high-cost America will recover sooner than low-cost China? If you were a capitalist investor, where would you be putting your money?

And if American industry remains hobbled, where's recovery going to come from? Want a peek at our real future? Just keep up with current events in California. California this year is America next year.


Read the article here

The limp noodle wants us all to just get along

In a previous post I wondered how long we would wait before Mr. Obama went soft, waffled on his previous "acted stupidly" statement about the Cambridge police, and basically leave his good friend Professor Henry Gates twisting in the wind. Answer: a matter of hours. Apparently Mr. Obama has determined that there's blame for everybody involved, but that everybody involved is good and well-intentioned, so nobody is to blame for anything, and nobody should be held accountable for anything. Now that we're all friends again, Mr. Obama has invited both the arresting officer and Professor Gates to the White House for a beer. How chummy!

Can't we all just get along?

What I want to know is what does Mr. Obama do for the back pain caused by his spinal chord being filled with marshmallow creme?

Stupid, arrogant, contemptuous, and abusive

Have you heard about Harvard Professor Henry Gates? Having returned from a trip, he found that the door to his home was jammed, so he and his taxi-cab driver tried to force it open. Eventually Professor Gates got into his house via the back door. Some sharp-eyed neighbor saw the professor trying to get into his house and called the police to report an attempted burglary. The police arrived, and Gates explained. Now the story diverges: Gates contends that the police demanded proof of residence because he is black and would never have made such a demand to a white man who obviously was the legal occupant of the house; the police claim Gates flew into an abusive, unreasonable rage, so they arrested him on a charge of "disorderly conduct." The charges were subsequently dropped, a fact which demonstrates that the charge of "disorderly conduct" was pure police intimidation of somebody who irked them because he wouldn't obsequiously put up with their crap. The story got extra legs when, at his recent press conference, President Obama stated that the police behaved "stupidly." Now the police are demanding an apology from Mr. Obama; Mr. Gates is demanding an apology from the police.

So who's telling the truth? My money is on Professor Gates. I don't believe a word by any of these cops, whose defensive is "we followed procedure". So what, if that "procedure" lets you target black men because of racial profiling? That's precisely what Professor Gates is claiming. How is following racial profiling procedure a defense against a charge of racial profiling? So I am on the side of one of Harvard University's most distinguished, celebrated, and honored scholars. The cops responded to a possible burglary 9-1-1 call, found a black man in the supposedly burgled house, and hassled this man because they could and because that is their standard operating procedure. Now the cops are lying about what they did and pretending that they're the real victims because the police always do the right thing and their actions should never be questioned.

Once upon a time, I might have given the cops the benefit of the doubt. But real life, personal experience forbids. I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the abuse, harassment, and belittlement of a black man, charged with no crime, by white cops in a public place in full view of a store full with customers. I was livid. No white citizen would have tolerated such behavior, and no cop would have dared treat a white citizen with such contempt. But they treat black men in this manner with impunity. So I'm standing with Professor Gates.

But the squishy Mr. Obama may not be standing with us, for he has already back-pedaled a bit by stating yesterday that "cooler heads should have prevailed," which means that maybe Mr. Gates did something wrong. How long before he melts like an ice cube in the hot summer sun and blames everything on his good friend Mr. Gates? A day? Two? Let's see. Today, Mr. Obama stated that he could have "calibrated" his comments differently. What does that mean, I wonder? Nothing good for Mr. Gates. What will this limp noodle say next?

Read about it here

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: The worst is yet to come!

A while ago, the Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky did some figuring and some ciphering and discovered that when the Bush-Obama borrow-and-spend splurge finally bankrupts the government and the fiscal you-know-what hits the fan, everything that the federal government pays for besides the military and the "stimulus" will have to go because there will be no money to pay for it. That's right: all the federal tax receipts pay for only two things: the military-industrial complex and the so-called stimulus spending. Welfare, education, science, health--currently all these things are paid for by borrowed money; when the borrowing stops because no rational person will lend the insolvent federal government another dime, all these things are unfunded and must be cut!

So you think that such a situation can never happen? Au contraire. It's happening right now--this very moment--in Ireland. It seems that the Irish, just like Americans, love to live it up on borrowed money. Now the Irish are broke and the bills have come due. The Irish government is taking a meat axe to its budget and cutting, cutting, and cutting some more. The Irish are up in arms (almost), but there's nothing they can do. They can't pay for their lifestyle and nobody's lending them any money to keep the good times in the Emerald Isle going. Every social program is getting whacked, and people are facing unemployment and destitution without the government's promised social welfare safety net. You can read about this mess in the article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard below.

If you haven't noticed, the same process is happening now in America. For the present, the state governments (most of which are broke) are doing the cutting and the raising of taxes. The federal government has kept the borrow-and-spend splurge going because after last summer's crash, many people panicked and put their money in US Treasury bonds. That allowed Bush and then Obama to impose their preposterous spending "stimulus" programs. As a consequence, this year's deficit will be about $2 trillion and so will next year's. Just a few years ago during Mr. Bush's first term, $2 trillion was the entire budget (deficit included) of the federal government; now that number is just the borrowing the government must do (billions and billions every week) merely to keep the doors open and the lights on. With the Europeans, the Americans, and the Japanese borrowing any penny they can lay their hands on, the bond markets will soon suffer an interest explosion. When that happens, the value of the dollar will evaporate, and we Americans will be paying $25 for a gallon of gas, $15 for a loaf of bread, $20 for a small bag of potatoes. But only for a while. Then hyper-inflation will kick in, and the sky's the limit on prices.

Whatever happens, you can't say that we haven't been warned.


Read Evans-Pritchard here

Paul Craig Roberts--The worst is yet to come!

Excerpt from Paul Craig Roberts' latest column:

The worst of the economic crisis has not yet hit. I don’t mean the rest of the real estate crisis that is waiting in the wings. Home prices will fall further when the foreclosed properties currently held off the market are dumped. Store and office closings are adversely impacting the ability of owners of shopping malls and office buildings to make their mortgage payments. Commercial real estate loans were also securitized and turned into derivatives.

The real crisis awaits us. It is the crisis of high unemployment, of stagnant and declining real wages confronted with rising prices from the printing of money to pay the government’s bills and from the dollar’s loss of exchange value. Suddenly, Wal-Mart prices will look like Nieman Marcus prices.

Retirees dependent on state pension systems, which cannot print money, might not be paid, or might be paid with IOUs. They will not even have depreciating money with which to try to pay their bills. Desperate tax authorities will squeeze the remaining life out of the middle class.



Read the complete column here

California Dreamin'

Want to know why California is going broke? Here's a small part of the problem: in San Jose, police and fire fighters are collecting $100,000+ pensions in their mid-50s! Yes, that's right. You can "retire" in the prime of life in San Jose and for the next 30-40 years receive $3,000,000-$4,000,000 from the taxpayers for your "service." And these are only the egregious examples; no doubt many more "retired" ex-police and ex-fire fighters are receiving just a bit less than $100,000 per year in "retirement" pay, which makes their total take a tad less than $3,000,000 for "retirement" years. And they get free medical, too!

How can San Jose afford to pay this army of parasites? The city can't anymore, so soon there's going to be an ugly showdown between the greedy retirees (and their unions) and everybody else in Silicon Valley. And how did this absurd situation happen in the first place? The citizens of San Jose let their city government do what it pleased, and it was pleased to rip the citizens off. Now the citizens are shocked, shocked to find out that they've been played for the fools that they in truth are.

Read about it here

All jobs created in 21st century are gone!

All the US jobs created since the turn of the 21st century are gone. Apropos employment, it's as if the last 8 1/2 years never happened and we are back in the summer of 2000. And the losses keep coming. So much for the dimwit bloggers who think that there's good news about the economy. Over at ShadowStats the news is even grimmer. The unemployment-underemployment figure now exceeds 20%! We're in Great Depression territory and a long way from the bottom. Even worse: when we finally hit bottom, who says that we won't stay there?

Trouble right here in River City and at Burger King

As related in the news report below, fast food peddlers are using sex to peddle fast food. Can you imagine? There's trouble right here in River City.

Elsewhere I posted a frivolous reply to an outraged comment on this subject; the post didn't survive long and was deleted--probably in a huff. For some reason unclear to me some people take this matter very seriously. Why?

All advertising is by definition vulgar. Its purpose is to excite appetites by any means necessary. Consider the issue using the medieval Seven Deadly Sins to give context. The complaint is that advertisers appeal to Lust and that this appeal is out of bounds. Why? What moralist complains when advertisers appeal to Pride by way of vanity? Or to Gluttony as they urge us to cram our gullets with sugary treats or 3000-calorie meals? Could advertising even exist without appeals to Envy and to Greed--to want more of what some else has? What would religious advertising be without appeals to Anger disguised as holy outrage against the outcast group of the moment? Where would the hospitality and entertainment industries be without appeals to Sloth?

Of course, my point is that advertising is inherently and incorrigibly detestable simply because the sole purpose of advertising is to get money from you by appealing to any and all of your base desires. Its purpose is vulgar, and it accomplishes that purpose by employing vulgar means. How could it do otherwise? What's the point of bellyaching about one facet of advertising vulgarity when the entire endeavor assumes vulgarity as a given, requires it, and couldn't exist without it?

View an ABC report on this non-issue here

Good riddance!

Robert S. McNamara, one of the evilest men ever to walk to the earth, died today. Mr. McNamara, a one-time executive at Ford, was selected by John F. Kennedy to be his Secretary of Defense. When Lyndon Johnson became president, McNamara retained his office and became a co-conspirator with Johnson in the deceiving America into the war in Vietnam. McNamara, despite knowing that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fake, happily implemented Johnson's genocide against the people of Vietnam--both North and South. Millions of men, women, and children died or were maimed by these madmen; hundreds of thousands of Americans were sent to Vietnam to kill the Vietnamese people; tens of thousands of American deaths and scores of thousands of American casualties were the consequence.

And for exactly what? Not a living American can give a coherent reason why America fought that war, what its aims were, and why those aims were to be furthered by the massacre of millions. Toward the end of Johnson's term, McNamara went nuts and resigned; the pressure of mass murder and running a failed war got to him. To help assuage his conscience, Johnson appointed him president of the World Bank.

McNamara spent a good part of his later life trying to absolve himself of his crimes with a lot of phony-baloney pseudo-mea culpas that always exonerated him and excused his participation in mass murder and Johnson's conspiracy against the Constitution. In a moral world, this man would have been tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged as a war criminal. Instead, he spent his declining years in comfort and security. Robert McNamara is a good reason why the universe needs Hell.

Read about this evil man here

The book of Leviticus takes another hit

The Delhi High Court has ruled that a 160-year-old law prohibiting something called sex "against the order of nature" (usually understood as gay sex) violates the principle of equality before the law and is thus unconstitutional. So where did this weird law come from? Answer: from India's colonial overload, Great Britain. And where did Britain get this law? Answer: from the book of Leviticus by way of Paul's letter to the Romans.

For some reason I cannot fathom, Paul, who is famous for dispensing with the Mosaic law in favor of what he called "freedom in Christ," is nonetheless construed by obtuse readers to be both advocating and applying the Mosaic law in Romans 1, especially in the passage in which he mentions males lusting after males and doing what is unseemly. People unacquainted with either dialectical reasoning or Paul's theology fail to realize that the long passage from 1:19 through 1:32 in which he reprises the standard Jewish accusations against non-Jews who knew nothing about the Mosaic law (see chapter 13 in the book "The Wisdom of Solomon" for a more detailed account of gentile depravity) is the anti-thesis against which he argues beginning in Romans 2 and against which he has stated his thesis--viz, the just shall live by faith--in 1:17. If being outside the Mosaic law makes a person by definition an outlaw, Paul must have been one of those outlaws disparaged in 1:19-32. Instead, Paul argues that the Mosaic law is literally a dead letter and has no meaning any longer because Christ's death and resurrection have ended its authority and purpose.

Dialectical reasoning is the standard way ancient people educated in the Greek manner argued. Today, we seem to understand only expository and analytical reasoning, so the contemporary naive reader thinks that Paul is explaining his position in 1:19-32 when he is really presenting an opposing position (i.e., outside the law are only outlaws) against which he will argue in the rest of his letter. People forget that Paul is defending his theology of faith and freedom before a group of Roman Christians, mostly Jewish, who did not know Paul and who were likely hostile to his abandonment of Mosaic law. If you want to understand the depth of the Jewish Christian reaction against Paul, all you need do is read the Gospel of Matthew in which the evangelist puts in the mouth of Jesus a no-holds barred condemnation of Paul (and of his followers) as being the least in the kingdom for teaching that the law is no more. Not so, the evangelist has Jesus say. The law is eternal. Not so much as even a jot of it will ever go away.

Paul's opponents outlived him and got the best revenge: they reinterpreted his theology and reinvented him as a proponent of the law. The great apostle of freedom became the great supporter of the law (or at least of the parts of the law that partisans found useful to impose on others). This is now the standard, official reading of Paul's once radical theology, a reading supported by churches, popes, bishops, reverends, theologians, assorted legalists, and other enemies of freedom. Imagine: the great apostle of freedom as a ventriloquist's dummy for tyrants. Paul must be rolling over in his grave in fury and frustration!

Loonies running the government

The state of Pennsylvania, like many other states, is in a fiscal mess. The solution? The governor wants to increase the state income tax by 16%! In the midst of a depression, this loon wants to jack up taxes. Have people in government just gone nuts or what? What does it take to get this fundamental truth into the lead-lined skulls of politicians: Lower taxes and cut spending in a depression? Instead, the governor plans to bleed his fellow Pennsylvanians to financial death.

It's time for freedom-loving Pennsylvanians to march on Harrisburg, surround the statehouse, and burn it to the ground with the governor and the legislature trapped inside.

Read about the lunacy here

Shut up, already!

Here's today's installment of the Mark Sanford saga:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said Tuesday that he "crossed lines" with a handful of women other than his mistress — but never had sex with them. The governor said he "never crossed the ultimate line" with anyone but Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine at the center of a scandal that has derailed his once-promising political career.

"This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."

This creep's wife and four sons are getting their hearts ripped up every time this fool opens his big, stupid mouth. This guy has not an atom of decency, good sense, circumspection, or dignity. He is an utter jerk, an exhibitionist, and a louse.

Sooner or later economists catch up to reality

We know that we're in a depression--the Great Depression of the 21st century--but until know conventional economists have doubted this; they're still calling this catastrophe a "recession."

But now, a pair of economists have studied the data and--surprise! surprise!--they've found that the dreadful economic performance of the last two years tracks the dreadful economic performance of the first years of the Great Depression that began in October, 1929. Yikes!

The conclusion of these guys: This is a Depression-sized event. The contemporary data are as bad or worse than comparable data from the 1930s. Shouldn't somebody in government be aware of this study and try to plan accordingly?

Read the Financial Times article here

A short shelf life

Carrie Prajean is back in the news again--briefly. A month ago she had a tussle with pageant officials who wanted to fire her for failure to live up to her contractual obligations as Miss California. Donald Trump, the owner of the pageant, decided to let retain her position. Now a month later, pageant officials say that Miss Prajean is still failing to fulfill her obligations, so they've fired her with The Donald's approval.

But Miss Prajean is blaming gays for her troubles, specifically the sour reaction to her now infamous "opposite marriage" statement. This is a novel approach to employment: don't show up for work and blame gay people if you're fired. Whatever happens, don't accept personal responsibility for your personal behavior; it's always somebody else's fault.

In truth Miss Prajean's fifteen minutes of fame expired a month ago; nobody's much interested in her now. She tried to maneuver a bit of celebrity into a career on the religious right; her irked employers got enough of her antics and told her to get lost. But the pleasures and rewards of victimhood beckon. Miss Prajean says that she's writing a book that will tell all--especially her sufferings and pain and tears. Do you suppose that she'll have a chapter about her silicon boobs?

Read it here

Who's smoking what?

If you read the generic press, you may be cheered by recent announcements from journalists (who could not possibly know) that the recession seems to be "bottoming out" and signs of "recovery" are sprouting all over the place and unfolding themselves to the warm rays of the summer sun.

Yet...the jobs data get worse by the day. According to new financial data, Americans lost 1.3 trillion dollars (that's $1,300,000,000,000) of their personal wealth in just the first quarter of this year. (Add that 1.3 trillion to the trillions lost in the two years of the current depression and then consider that people are yakking about a recovery in consumer spending! What are these people smoking?)

On the other hand, less credulous folks like journalist Dave Lindorff tell us from both personal experience and a sound understanding of the real data that we're anything but bottoming out, that things are falling apart at an accelerated rate, and that Mr. Obama's "recovery" is as fake as his rhetoric. Inflation, once thought impossible in a depression, is now rapidly rising. Oil prices are shooting up, so is gold, and have you been to a grocery store lately? The trillions of dollars in government bonds that Mr. Obama is trying to peddle to the world are not selling; investors (a.k.a. "chumps") want higher interest. Soon the Federal Reserve will have to comply to prevent a California-style governmental bankruptcy. When interest rates start taking off, there won't be any stopping them and that's the end of the American economy.

But fantasy/hope springs eternal. The generic press, still in love with Mr. Obama, still gets misty-eyed at his crooning. They're still describing him as "eloquent" even though they know for a fact that Mr. Obama does not write the speeches he delivers. And they're still describing the worsening depression as recovery. Ain't blind love grand?

Curmudgeons, on the other hand, will read Dave Lindorff's latest column below and profit from it.

The Wheels are Coming Off

Another powerful column from Chris Hedges

Here is another powerful article from one of the few morally serious journalists left in America, the indispensable Chris Hedges.

Read Chris Hedges here

More stupidity from the religious right

A cursory scan of various religious right web sites reveals an interesting rhetorical change among the wackos. The phrase "secular humanist" is out; the term "post-modernist" is in.

What on earth possesses these dimwits? Apparently "post-modernist" means to them something like "denies moral absolutes." However, since that's what they accused those naughty "secular humanists" of doing, why the vocabulary change? Post-modernism is really an academic fashion, now largely spent and falling on hard times, that is associated with French pseudo-philosopher Jacques Derrida. I'm pretty sure that your average right-wing pew potato has never read Derrida and wouldn't understand Derrida even if he did read him, so what could "post-modernist" possibly mean to such folk? It's just more incoherent babble from a decadent, dying political movement that itself is now largely spent and falling on hard times. Seen in that light, maybe the word change is appropriate after all!

Gay march of the penguins

Remember how the religious right tried to make the movie "March of the Penguins" into a celebration of heterosexual "family values" and thus by implication denigrate gays and their families?

It seems now that gay penguins in a German zoo are picking up the pieces of a failed heterosexual penguin pair and doing a much better job a making a family. That's the story of many gay families which adopt children abandoned by their heterosexual parents and rear them into happy, successful adults. But don't hold your breath waiting to hear a celebration of these penguins on the next "Focus on the Family" broadcast because Dr. Dobson and his zombies believe that if they keep pretending that happy gay families don't exist, then nobody will ever realize that they in fact do exist.

Read about the penguins here

Number 6!

Finally, New Hampshire has become the 6th state to legalize gay marriage. Both houses of the state legislature approved the religious protection language required by the governor, who promptly signed the marriage bill that had been approved almost two weeks ago.

Equality before the law takes another step forward. Which state will be number 7?

Read about the victory here

Hooray for Nevada

The Nevada state legislature, perhaps taking a cue from the Vermont state legislature, has overridden Governor Jim Gibbons' veto of the recently passed domestic partners bill. Gay couples will now have legal recognition and protection in Nevada.

A few posts back, I noted that Gov. Gibbons and his mistresses were avid defenders of traditional marriage. In fact, Mr. Gibbons likes traditional marriage so much that he's had two of them--divorcing his first traditionally married wife so that he could have a traditional marriage with his second wife, whom he is now divorcing as well. I suppose that Mr. Gibbons will have a traditional third marriage fairly soon after he dumps his traditionally married second wife. Will the governor select Mrs. Gibbons Number 3 from his large assortment of former and current mistresses and paramours, or will he go traditional wife hunting somewhere else? Mr. Gibbons finds himself in the company of other loud-mouthed Republican "defenders" of traditional marriage including Rush Limbaugh (with traditionally married wife number 4), Newt Gingrich (with traditionally married wife number 3), and Bob Barr (principal author of the federal "Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 and with traditionally married wife number 3).

Now in fairness, I must concede that Bob Barr has disavowed his Republican party membership and morphed into a kind of semi-Libertarian; he has also renounced his own DOMA legislation and called for its revocation (read it here). Nonetheless, in his previous political incarnation as a Republican Mr. Barr's mouth was loudly proclaiming his fidelity to traditional marriage while the rest of him was proving that he cared not a fig about it. I suspect he would still be loudly defending DOMA had he not been voted out of office as a Georgia congressman. The point, of course, is that Mr. Barr's devotion to traditional marriage was purely rhetorical and had nothing to do with his personal life.

In any event, the victory in Nevada is tremendous news and a great step forward toward genuine equality before the law. The victories just keep rolling in!

Read about the Nevada victory here

Sound thinking on gay marriage

A libertarian perspective

Back on track, maybe

After a week-and-a-half of anxiety, the New Hampshire legislature seems back on track to make gay marriage legal. You'll recall that the governor decided to back gay marriage provided that language "protecting" religious denominations was adopted. The Senate quickly voted in favor, but the House vote failed by 3 votes. The bill went to a joint committee; the committee has finally agreed to language that is basically the same as originally proposed; the governor has signed onto the compromise. A vote appears likely on Wednesday. Sometime next week gay marriage will be the law of the land in New Hampshire.

That will leave only one New England state, Rhode Island, without gay marriage. A new poll indicates that fully 60% of Rhode Island citizens approve of gay marriage. The present governor does not; the present Democratic leaders of the legislature do not; so one wonders how long the personal preferences of three elected officials will be allowed to trump the will of the vast majority of the citizens. The Catholic church is very influential in the state, so the fight for equality is likely to be an ugly one. One would think that the Catholic church had lost all moral credibility given a decade of exposure of its rotten, corrupt tolerance of child rape by its priests (the latest horrific chapter of this tale is now being played out in Ireland, and a more appalling tale of officially tolerated brutality against helpless children cannot be imagined by decent people). But the church and its boosters pretend to speak from a moral high ground as they shamelessly lie about gay people and their families, and enough dimwits believe this rot to keep gay marriage a contentious topic.

Read about New Hampshire here

Defenders of marriage

Jim Gibbons, governor of Nevada, has vetoed a bill providing gay people domestic partnerships citing his support for traditional marriage as justification. Mr. Gibbons is both Mormon and Republican, so you can easily see why he vetoed the bill passed by a Democratic state legislature. What you may not know (but everybody in Nevada knows) is that Mr. Gibbons is a serial adulterer and is accused of sexually assaulting a woman, among other things. Such a man is the defender of "traditional marriage" in Nevada. This lecherous creep enjoys all the rights, protections, rewards, and privileges of traditional marriage while mocking it by his behavior but simultaneously denies gay people any legal rights as domestic partners. Do you feel all warm inside knowing that Jim Gibbons and his mistresses are on the frontlines defending marriage from those nefarious gays who want to redefine it?

For further information about this champion of marriage, read an extended quotation from Wikipedia about Gibbons here:


Gibbons has been married twice and has three children. He married his current wife, Dawn Gibbons, in 1985; they have a son, born in 1987. Dawn Gibbons did not move to Washington to live with her husband during the 10 years he served in Congress, saying she preferred to raise their son in Nevada. She herself was elected to the Nevada State Assembly in 1998, two years after Jim Gibbons was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. On May 2, 2008, Gibbons filed for divorce, citing grounds of incompatibility stemming from an undisclosed event in Reno, and requesting the court to determine whether Gibbons or his wife would live at the governor's mansion.

In April 2009, Gibbons was living in Reno; his wife, Dawn, remained in the Governor's mansion in Carson City. An 1866 state law requires that governor must "keep his office and reside at the seat of government." A spokesman for Gibbons described the move by the governor back to the couple's Reno home, which they had owned since 1989, as a temporary situation and said there was no violation of the law. By April 2009, Dawn was living in an apartment near the Mansion rather than in it.

Divorce proceedings were stayed upon agreement of living separately pending the suit. Dawn accused Jim of "infatuation and involvement with the wife of a Reno doctor,” but he stated the woman is just a friend. On March-April 2007, he sent 860 text messages in one month to the woman. He later reimbursed the state $130 for the cost of the messages. In June 2008, he was seen with former Playboy model Leslie Durant at the Reno Rodeo. Durant is particularly prominent not solely because of her nude Playboy appearance, because she was once married to Pete Sferrazza, formerly mayor of Reno.

On April 6, 2009, a judge in Washoe County Family Court ordered the records of the divorce proceedings unsealed. Dawn's papers alleged that Jim was unfaithful with Durant, and with the woman who received the 860 messages, and "has had similar relationships with many other women during the marriage." She also referenced her humiliation at standing beside him when her husband attempted to defend himself from allegations of attempted sexual assault shortly before the 2006 election. See "sexual assault allegation" below.

Jim Gibbons' divorce filings stated that he wanted his wife out of the Governor's Mansion because she was aggressive: "It was once said in another context that being in close quarters with such a volatile person was like being locked in a phone booth with an enraged ferret."

I told you so

In a 6-1 decision, the California state supreme court sustained Proposition 8. The chief justice, previously one of the majority who ruled in favor of gay marriage, upheld the revocation of gay marriage. In other words, the chief justice decided not to defend his own decision, which speaks volumes about this guy's utter lack of integrity.

So much for seeking the rule of law in a court of law in California. The court did let stand the 18,000 gay marriages that had occurred prior to the November vote, thus leaving the state in the bizarre situation of simultaneously prohibiting gay marriages and upholding them. Not only is the California state supreme court bereft of moral or legal integrity; it is also bereft of logical integrity. It, like the rest of California's political institutions, is utterly corrupt. The rule-by-referendum madness and the fear of recall that have both paralyzed the state's government and driven it over the brink of bankruptcy now have handed human rights over to the whims of the mob. No wonder that Plato and other ancient philosophers declared democracy to be the worst sort of tyranny--the mob gets whatever it wants by force solely because it outnumbers its opponents. Nothing is safe from the action of the mob, said Plato. We see plain evidence of that today in California.

Of course, this ruling settles nothing. Gay marriage will be the law of the state very soon. Gays are organizing politically state-wide, and the trend is entirely on our side. This was the last, embittered hurrah of the anti-gay haters. Soon the ballot box that they have so effectively used as a weapon against gays will be turned on them. Then they will be the ones screaming about their rights being violated, specifically their religious rights. But now that they've cut down all the laws that protect human rights from cancellation by the mob, what will protect them? Answer: nothing. Sounds like karma to me.

Bet on abject deference to the mob

Tomorrow, the California state supreme court will issue its ruling on the constitutionality of Proposition 8. The argument in favor of Proposition 8 is simple: 52% of the voters wanted it, so they get what they want. The argument against is also simple: the Califonia constitution requires a more complex, extended, and prolonged procedure to make major revisions of the constitution. Taking away human rights by constitutional amendment is such a major revision. Therefore, the quickie referendum route was unconstitutional. This was the argument of the state's attorney general.

I'm not betting a dime on the integrity of the California state supreme court. The justices know that the rule-by-referendum loony-tunes way of government in California makes them vulnerable to retaliation by recall. A bare majority of justices went out on a limb once to rule that equality before the law actually means equality for gay people too. Rightwingers sawed that limb off, and the justices got the message loud and clear. So I fully expect that we'll hear a lot about the sacredness of the democratic procedure, the sanctity of the voting booth, the will of the people, blah blah blah, as ways by which the justices will acquiesce to mob rule and allow this affront to human rights and the rule of law to stand. The justices will get to keep their jobs; that's the most important thing for them; the human rights of gay people can go hang.

As evidenced by the state's budget catastrophe, demagoguery runs California and all elected officials know that they are on a short lease. Any disgruntled mob able to secure enough signatures on a petition can throw the state into electoral chaos. That's how Governor Arnold got his job; now an angry mob is collecting signatures against him. With talk about a constitutional convention running rife, mass layoffs, defunded schools, canceled healthcare and welfare for poor people, anti-tax fervor, and growing public anger at everybody in or near Sacramento, no elected official wants to run afoul of a mob of vigilantes who'd just as soon string him up from the nearest tree. That includes justices on the supreme court.

I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe that law still rules in California, and that the court will defend its own decision--which was absolutely correct. But I know better having lived there. The mob is out to punish, and California's elected officers--including judges--are gutless. Expect Proposition 8 to be sustained.

Now it's 6 states

The governor of New Hampshire will sign the new gay marriage bill as soon as the legislature amends the bill to include language protecting the rights of religious organizations from being forced into performing such marriages (as if that was ever going to happen here in the real world).

This language is perfectly acceptable to gay people in New Hampshire. This fact completely discredits any of the ridiculous, contrived objections that bigots have used to prevent this legislation from being enacted. Of course, the bigots are still opposed; they just don't have even the appearance of an argument to make now. All they can say is just "No, no, no, I don't want it." To bad.

Now all eyes are on New York, specifically the state senate. Will the state become the lucky seventh state? Do New Yorkers really want to be less enlightened than folks in New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine or Iowa or Massachusetts or Connecticut?

PS: What a pleasure to type that honor roll of states, and what a pleasure knowing that the list will soon include many more!

Read it here

The logic of thinking illogically

According to the "economics writer" of the article below, we're in lots of trouble because Medicare is already broke--paying out more money than it takes in--and Social Security will begin doing that in 2016, draining its "trust fund" in 2032 and going broke then.

Maybe the writer got his facts correct regarding Medicare, but he certainly doesn't understand Social Security. There is no such thing as the "trust fund." This "trust fund" is supposed to be the accumulated SS funds collected over the years but not yet disbursed to recipients. This big pile of cash is supposed to be in a vault somewhere. But there is no cash. Fact: every dime of SS funds ever collected has already been disbursed. The biggest recipient? The US federal government. It has "borrowed" these funds to spend year by year as part of its annual budget deficit financing. The SS "trust fund" is just a big pile of IOUs--government bonds, i.e., debt. Any excess SS funds accumulated during the year are always spent--just not on the old folks.

So in 2016 (or before), when SS begins paying out during the year more than it collects, then (and not later) SS will be insolvent, i.e., broke. Where will the missing money come from? Higher domestic taxes or more borrowing from abroad are the only possibilities. Maybe we can persuade the rest of the world to finance the retirements of millions of American elderly, but I doubt it. Maybe we can tax young American workers up to 100% to finance the retirements of millions of American elderly, but I doubt it too.

So what happens in 2016 (or before) when it all goes broke? Well, the logic of illogical thinking catches up with America and the crap hits the fan. My guess: if the government has not already done so financing Mr. Obama's colossal deficits, wars, and bailouts, it will then print money by the trillions to pay its debts. Hyperinflation will overwhelm the economy. Everybody will be impoverished. After that, who knows?

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"Fierce advocate" fakery

Mr. Obama has marketed himself as a "fierce advocate" of gay rights. What that phrase means is anybody's guess because Mr. Obama's gay rights record is a blank. Not a single piece of legislation advancing gay rights or eliminating arbitrary denial of rights to gay people bears Mr. Obama's name as author--not in the Illinois state legislature or in the US Senate. Mr. Obama is on record as opposing gay marriage, a position in which he finds himself shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Pat Robertson. Does he oppose "don't ask, don't tell?" At various points during his presidential campaign, he seemed to say so, but his first opportunity to prevent a discharge under this preposterous law came and went yesterday without Mr. Obama lifting a finger to do anything about it.

Lt. Dan Choi--Iraq veteran, platoon leader, West Point graduate, fluent Arabic speaker--was found unsuitable for service in the National Guard and discharged because he stated on a CNN talk show that he is gay. Mr. Obama--who has never worn his country's uniform nor has ever been to war nor has ever even broken a sweat in defense of his country--let Lt. Choi be dismissed despite the fact that his war record is impeccable, his leadership qualities unimpeachable, and his language skills absolutely essential. Lt. Choi wants to serve in Iraq, for gosh sake's. But Mr. Obama let him be fired instead. Some commander-in-chief.

So where's the "fierce advocacy" already? In the lunch meat section at your nearest supermarket along with the rest of the baloney, that's where!

Read it here

By the way up in Washington state...

All the action on the gay marriage/civil union front is not in New England. Recently the Washington state legislature expanded the state's modest domestic partnerships into everything marriage is except the name. That's just how this expansion was openly discussed in the legislature. The bill has been sent to the governor for her signature.

The wacko religious right is trying to organize a referendum against the soon-to-be new law. They argue that the everything-marriage-is-except-the-name law is effectively marriage and within a few years Washington state will have actual gay marriage once people get used to the idea. Well, duh! They've finally got something right. Now they need to convince citizens of Washington state that somehow this matters. Fat chance.

The real evidence that the tide on gay marriage has turned is that politicians are openly embracing it. You can count on one hand the number of years ago that supporting gay marriage was a career-ender, or at least so quivering officeholders thought. They wouldn't give gay marriage advocates the time of day much less support. Civil unions/domestic partnerships were radical ideas on their own and had little support. Then KA-BOOM! The zeitgeist changed. Gay marriage is now on a roll, and Democrats in liberal states (along with a small but growing number of Republicans pols who want a future) are now leading the charge (having sprinted from behind to catch up with the advancing army). Clearly soon we are going to be a nation in which some 10-12 states allow gay marriage. That's the critical mass necessary for advancing to the next phase: federal recognition and repeal of DOMA.

That's also a critical mass necessary for federal judicial action. The idea that a married gay couple with two adopted children enjoy full legal protections as a family in their home state but become four unrelated individuals when they cross the border into one of the anti-gay marriage states is simply repugnant to any conception of equal protection under the law. Someday soon the federal courts will rule that the 14th amendment includes married gays and will overturn all those preposterous anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendments with the stroke of a pen.

I can't wait!

You've got to be joking, Mr. Obama!

Mr. Obama and staff have been poring over the federal budget for fiscal year 2010--the first budget that he will present to Congress as president--looking for places to cut and programs to end. They've finished their work. The cuts total--hold on to your hat--$17 billion in a budget that will be well over $3 trillion and more likely approaching $4 trillion when you add in all the "off budget" expenditures people in Washington like to hide from public view.

These "cuts" amount to a little more than one-half of one percent of the $3 trillion budget. So much for Mr. Obama's campaign promises to cut and end old and wasteful programs. According to Mr. Obama, everything else the federal government spends money on is essential and efficient.

This guy is no more serious about fiscal responsibility than was his dimwitted predecessor. Both are empty-headed spendthrifts and squanderers. The federal government is bankrupting itself and us along with it.


Read the nonsense here

As Maine goes, so goes the nation

The phrase in the title used to be something of a political principle in American presidential politics. Maine was then the quintessential state, America in miniature.

Let's hope that regarding gay marriage this principle still holds because today the governor of Maine made gay marriage legal by signing a marriage bill passed by large majorities in both houses of the legislature. The governor, previously opposed to gay marriage because he thought civil unions were enough, decided that "separate but equal" was baloney. Equality before the law requires equality, which civil unions are deliberately intended to deny.

Congratulations to the citizens of Maine. The angry fundamentalists will now mount a referendum campaign to force a vote in November in an attempt to veto this new law. In previous years, they forced such votes on anti-discrimination laws that included protections for gay people, winning twice before finally being defeated and giving up. Let's hope that the citizens of Maine will vote resoundingly for equality in November and put the people's imprimatur on full citizenship for their gay fellow citizens.

Bad news for Carrie

Things are not going well for Carrie Prejean, Miss California. You'll recall that her largely incoherent answer about gay marriage irked Perez Hilton. Since then, Miss Prejean has become a mouth (but not a brain) for an organization working against gay marriage. And suddenly, little items have begun popping up. Item: it seems Carrie didn't like the pair of knockers God gave her, so she got herself a pair of silicon fakes she liked better. Item: it now turns out that she has posed nude and somebody's got the pictures to prove it.

This latter fact presents several problems:

(1) Why do conservative Christian organizations claiming to be dedicated to traditional family values want a nude model with fake boobs to be their spokesperson?

(2) Miss Prejean signed an agreement with the pageant in which she specifically affirms that she has never posed nude. Whoops, looks like she lied. Now her crown is in jeopardy not to mention her veracity.

(3) Miss Prejean admits that the person in the nude photographs is indeed her--at 17! What was an under-age Carrie doing posing for nude photographs? There may be some serious legal entanglements here, both for her and the photographer. There is certainly very bad publicity for her and her anti-gay pals. Giggle, giggle.

Looks to me like the anti-gay nitwits are up crap creek without a paddle. It serves them right. It serves Carrie Prejean right. Having an opinion is one thing; attacking the human rights of gay people is something else. More juicy details will surely become public. I can't wait!!!

Read it here

Read this! Forewarned is forearmed.

John Williams publishes the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter (www.shadowstats.com). He is an amazing professional economist with a great grasp of the real economy. He and I have arrived at the same conclusions about almost everything in the economy, despite the fact that we approach it from totally different directions: me from the fundamentals, and he from a real technical and numbers point of view.

I am now in John’s home in Oakland, California, looking past the government numbers to get his views on the world as it really is. Shadow Government Statistics reconstructs published government statistics the accurate way we used to do it that reflects reality, rather than the way these numbers are now manipulated, and comes up with different conclusions about the economy, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and other revealing areas published by government.

I trust John’s numbers because the government has been manipulating and restating these numbers for purely political purposes.

HJR: John is it necessary to recreate government statistics to show what you feel is reality, and how have you recreated them? I’d like some examples.

JW: Howard, I’ve been a consulting economist for about 27 years. I found early on that to make meaningful forecasts I had to have accurate information. It was evident early on that there were big inaccuracies in government reporting I surveyed at a convention of the National Association of Business Economists. Some economists have to make real-world forecasts, as opposed to economists who are employed by Wall Street to come to up with happy stories to encourage people to buy stocks and bonds.

I asked them what they considered the quality of government statistics to be. Most thought the numbers were very poor quality. Political manipulation tends to increase in election years.
I talked to the chief economist for a large retail chain, and he told me that the retail sales reports were absolutely no good, but he thought the money-supply numbers were pretty good.
Next was an economist for a major bank. He said the money-supply numbers were not very good, but he thought the retail-sales numbers are pretty good. The more someone knew about a given statistic, the greater the problems there were with the numbers.

Over time public perceptions increasingly varied from what the government was reporting because government kept changing methodologies, and usually tended to build an upside bias to the economic statistics of unemployment or the GDP – the broad measure of economies – and a downside bias in the Consumer Price Index, a popular measure of inflation.

When it became popularly used in auto-union contracts after WWII, the concept of the Consumer Price Index was fairly simple. But they wanted to measure changes in the cost of living, and they needed to maintain a constant standard of living. That was the traditional definition; the way the CPI had been designed.

That held pretty much in place until we got into the 1990s when Alan Greenspan and Michael Boskin, the head of The Council of Economic Advisors for the first Bush Administration, started talking about how the CPI really overstated inflation. The rationale was that when steak goes up in price, people buy more hamburger instead of steak; therefore you should reflect the substitution in the CPI.

That is not the concept of a constant standard of living; it is the concept of a declining standard of living that has no value to anyone other than politicians in Washington. They succeeded in reducing the reported level of inflation, which reduced cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security checks. Because of the changes in the 1990s, our Social Security checks are about half what they should be!

There have been different definitions over time. The government itself publishes six levels of unemployment from what they call “U-1” through “U-6.” The popularly followed measure is called “U-3.” Right now they say it is around 8.6 percent.

The broadest measure published by the government deletes “the discouraged workers” and people who are marginally attached to the economy. This is close to 16 percent. The key there is the “discouraged workers,” people who consider themselves to be unemployed. They know whether or not they have jobs. The Discouraged Worker hasn’t been out looking for work because there are no jobs to be had in his area.

Up until 1994, those discouraged workers wouldn’t have to specify how long they had been discouraged. After that, if they were discouraged, the government wouldn’t add them. I add them into my numbers, and it totals around 20 percent unemployment.

The popular number for the Great Depression is 25 percent unemployment rate and 34 percent among non-farm workers. We are mostly a non-farm economy.

HJR: During the Bush Administration, we heard all the happy talk about how well the economy was doing because of the cuts in tax rates. Is that really just happy talk or was the economy really doing well under Bush?

JW: We actually had a pretty bad recession in the early’90s, longer and deeper than popularly reported. Near the end of Bush’s first term at the time of the re-election race, a senior Commerce Department officer talked with a senior executive in the computer industry and asked him to boost the reporting of computer sales to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which prepares the GDP report. They did; it boosted the GDP, the broad measure of the economy, and George Bush touted the strong economy. But some felt he was out of touch with reality.
The average guy has a pretty good sense of reality and knows whether or not economic conditions are good, or if inflation is up or down, which is why people have a difficult time accepting the government’s numbers. They have gotten so far away from common experience that people just don’t find them credible.

In terms of the GDP, clearly retail sales and industrial production were showing us a deepening recession long before the government reported it with the GDP. In fact, you didn’t show a contraction in the GDP until the second quarter of 2008. Officially the recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, started back in December, 2007. If the GDP numbers accurately reflected what was happening, it would have at least shown the contraction two or three quarters before that. Other indications show that the recession really began in late 2006.

HJR: Let me get to a practical issue. What kind of economic activity should we support? For example, the conservatives will say we should cut tax rates to boost the economy. What does your research show?

JW: Cutting taxes is always a good idea. The private sector can do more with the money than the government can. Right now we are in a deep and deepening recession which will probably be called “a depression” before it ends. By depression, I mean a ten-percent contraction in overall economic activity.

When the government is reasonably solid, it can cut taxes. It can even increase spending without disrupting the system.

Right now we have a system where with the money poured into the banking system, and the “stimulus” by way of spending and tax cuts, is on top of record deficits.

If you look at the real numbers on the deficits, based on numbers published by the federal government, we really should look at it how it used to be. In the late ‘70s, the ten biggest accounting firms and congress said they could design an accounting system where the government will report its books the same way a company does. They finally got that into effect in 2000. Since then, instead of running deficits in the range of a couple of billion dollars, on a Generally Accepted Accounting Principal (GAAP) basis, the deficit has averaged $4 trillion a year. It was over $5 trillion in 2008 and will top $8 trillion this year.

This is unsustainable! You could not raise taxes enough to bring that into balance. If you wanted to bring it into balance, you’d have to eliminate Social Security and Medicare payments. It can’t be done.

HJR: Right now, Obama is spending money – I won’t say like a drunken sailor, because a drunken sailor spends his own money – but he is throwing trillions of dollars at the economic downturn, assuming it will stimulate us out. My personal opinion is that they are only stimulating government growth, and some day the average person may get a job, but his employer will be Uncle Sam.

What is the end result of creating all this money and throwing it at the problem?

JW: It will not stimulate the economy. The cost of all this is inflation. We will see inflation levels not seen in our lifetime by as early as the end of this year. Eventually we will see liabilities of $65 trillion – more than four times U.S. GDP, more than global GDP. There will be a hyper inflation where the dollar becomes worthless, where the paper is worth more as wall paper than as currency.

HJR: They couldn’t even use the money as toilet paper because it is a bad absorber of water. So we will have hyper-inflation. How can we protect the value of our assets, assuming that people have some discretionary money? Should they buy growth stocks because they are cheap, assuming “buy low, sell high?” Or are there better alternatives?

JW: We are headed into a hyper-inflationary depression that will become a Great Depression. When hyper inflation hits, it will disrupt the normal flow of commerce and turn it into a Great Depression.

What about paper assets based on the dollar? You want to get into something like gold or silver –physical gold or silver, not paper. Perhaps get some assets outside the dollar. It’s a time to preserve your wealth and assets, not to start speculating on the stock market. There is a lot of volatility ahead. Over the long term, gold and silver are your best hedges.

HJR: That sounds like the familiar tune I’ve been singing for several years. I’ve been publishing for 33 years. About 11 of those years I have been bullish on gold and silver as investments. When I abandoned gold in the early ‘80s, I was excommunicated from the gold-bug church because I was supposed to stay faithful to gold, but then the metals weren’t the right place to put your money. As a financial adviser, if I don’t have subscribers in the right investments, they will lose money and not renew their subscription to The Ruff Times. So I have a financial interest in being right. Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” the same thing is happening that I saw in the ‘70s that drove the prices of gold and silver to unprecedented highs – only more so now. They are creating more money than they ever thought of creating back then. We are using words like “trillions,” which we never used before. I’m not just looking at it as an investment and a place to make money. I am looking at it as a possible way to preserve the real value of your assets so you are not left destitute with a pile of worthless paper.

You showed me a display of Zimbabwe currency, where multi-billion dollar notes started out as $2-bill notes. We could face the same thing. The world is littered with worthless dead-paper currencies with an average life span of about 75 years. It’s always the same: we make too much of it ever since we created paper currency with the printing press, and creating too much of it to buy votes, diminishing its value.

A subscriber who wrote to me recently asking me that if the government and the bankers can manipulate the price of gold and silver, so couldn’t they do that for many years and gold and silver would go nowhere?

History doesn’t record a single example when a society inflated the dominant currency even near the quantities we are creating dollars now without destroying its value. Gold and silver, not being anyone’s debt or obligation, is where people ought to put their money.

I have been watching your work now for more than two years. I am amazed that you and I have arrived at the same conclusions from different sides of the street. I’ve learned a lot from your view of the numbers, and I’m a fundamentalist.

One reason I like you is because you agree with me. We like people who agree with us. Thanks so much for sharing your time and expertise with us.

JW: Thank you very much, Howard. I greatly appreciate the interview. I also appreciate your work. Indeed, we are in very broad and general agreement on where things are headed here. I have followed your work for many years; in fact, your writings back in the 1970s were part of my education as to the nature of the real world. Again, thank you, sir!