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