The Bullshit Observer

How's That Recession Treatin' Ya?

I went to a gathering the other night at the Prague Cafe in San Francisco and hung out with a few people that I didn't actually know. Seems that half the people I met were unemployed. Some of them with MBA's. One of them had been out of work for 2.5 years. Not a great time to be a worker bee in America. Just look at this fucking debacle of a chart from NYT.

Note: Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession.

Like the B52's Rock Lobster song, "Down...down....down."

Now, as we head into the holiday season, let's look at the retail numbers from The Rockefeller Institute.

Whether we've bottomed out there is hard to say. But if unemployment hasn't bottomed out, then it's doubtful that retail spending is going to rebound anytime soon. Which means we're still stuck in the great recession (or coping with a contraction is perhaps a better way to put it) until further notice.

Why Republicans Win

I've been trying to sort this out in my mind for eight years, and now I think I've finally got it.
Why do Republicans win elections?

Republicans are more clearly focused on the attack and Democrats are more focused on their reaction to it. Democrats haven't built up their own identity independent of the Republican attack machine. They've allowed the Republicans to run the table and set the agenda.

Republicans are more clear about who their audience is and what those people think and care about. Democrats are trying to appeal to the humanity of all people, but people aren't listening with their humanity in mind. At least most are not. They're listening with their little mind.

On a related note, Americans have gotten more intellectually lazy and incurious in the past decade. Republicans have found it "a natural" to take advantage of that. Liberals...Democrats want people to be their best...to be like them...to think about things and consider the big picture. Republicans say, "I am like you and here's what that means." 

Just some late night thoughts on a Friday night.

Jon Stewart Glenn-Becks Glenn Beck

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

More than just a joke on Glenn Beck, it's a spot-on commentary about what is wrong with the right's on-air presence and how they're skewering public debate and pandering to the intellectually incurious nitwits. 

Birds + Bees = Blow Jobs

The level of discomfort in my 4th grade sex ed class was palpable. The room was closing in. But at some point during the fifteen minute course that supposedly would be the only formal education on sexuality that we would ever get, I remember cute little Christie Carstens asking the instructor, a class mom who volunteered, what a blow job was. Ahh, the 70's.

It was something that, I too, wanted to know. However, I couldn't imagine how Christie had the guts to ask the question. I couldn't even get my mouth to say the words for fear they'd come out in an embarrassing way. Blgo Jub or something. Or maybe I'd have some saliva drip out of my mouth as I asked the question in an ironic, though completely un-live-downable, way. I would half slurp at the end of the question and kids would seal the life-scarring memory with a loud snicker that would echo until the day of my death. My face would turn the color of blood since my skin was so white it was translucent. 

My grandmother, who worked in a medical lab of some kind, took care of my sisters and I that weekend. She'd been briefed on the sex ed thing, so she offered to help fill in any holes in my understanding. If any existed. Should I, you know, need that. Or anything. So, as she started cooking my breakfast that fine Saturday morning, I asked her about one of the major gaps in my understanding of intercourse, "So what happens to the 999,999 sperm guys that don't fertilize the egg?"

Her reply: "Do you like milk on your cream of wheat?"

And that, as they say, was the end of that. Much later, of course, I learned the truth. They swim up to the woman's brain and stimulate her hippocampus - the engine of long term memory development - and that's why women can list off the last seven things their man did wrong without pausing for a breath.

Thanks Nana.

Anyways, this being the era of hip parenting, the options for educating our kids about sex are too numerous to count. In fact, here's a woman totally dedicated to helping parents start, continue and even deepen (how does that work?) the conversations about sex with their kids. Birds + Bees + Kids offers workshops, public talks, and one-on-one consults.

Knowing how far to go with the education for your child's, er, level I would think would be somewhat of a blind spot for parents of kids under 12. At what point do you abandon just talking about the man and the woman getting naked together and talk about what happens next?  Then again, you don't want your precious daughter giving birth on her wedding day... at the age of 11

Because, apparently, that shit can happen. Some people learn better through trial and error. Poor bastards.

The holidays are coming! The holidays are coming!

As October exits stage left and November peaks from around the curtain, retailers are buzzing behind the set preparing their attack. If they play their cards right, all they really have to do is hit you with a barrage of reminders that what the holidays are all about is... giving!

And eating, drinking, and celebrating. But mostly it's about "giving" - a word that translates to the English word "buying" which is synonymous with "profits".

If you're an adult American, you don't need much reminding as you've already had it drilled into you a thousand times before. There are snowman-shaped butter cookies to bake, worthless trinkets to buy, baby trees to chop down, and weight to gain.

Pull your checkbook out and stick it in its holster so the depletion of your savings account can go that much more smoothly. Safety off! Pen cocked! All hail the red, white and green. Getcher wrapping paper, tape, ribbon, gift bags, and brightly colored tissue paper here. Getcher Lamborghini branded Christmas tree baubles, glass blown angels, and New York Jets Christmas Tree Skirts here.

There are toys made in China to be assembled according to impossible instructions cheerfully written in a cockeyed language I call "Vague Diagram." There are work functions to suffer, glad handing to be done, backs to scratch, and awkward and utterly forgettable memories to be created.

There are pictures to be taken, shared, ordered, posted, printed, and put away in a box forever. There are iTunes gift cards to buy, or Barnes & Noble gift cards, and/or Ross Dress For Less gift cards. Nothing says, "I don't know you anymore," like a gift card. Except maybe one of those small blue blankets swiped from an airplane - which sort of subtly adds, "...and I probably never did."

There are rooftops to be climbed, colored lights to be hung, and big plastic reindeer displays to be placed by the chimney with care. And let's not forget the actual event. The four hour family inadequacy session masquerading as a Christian and/or Jewish holiday that this is all about.

There are expectations to not live up to. Harmless compliments to misinterpret as vicious criticism. Prayers to mouth, grace to mumble, and hymns to hum. And don't forget to thank Jesus for this wonderful bounty of Q4 earnings. Praise the lord. Take a moment to absorb it all because it goes so darn fast.

There are hangovers to endure...for the love of Christ. There is wrapping paper to burn, boxes to recycle, and returns to make for something a little less, er, tight around the buttocks. Amen to that. There are resolutions to make, gym memberships to buy, and resolutions to break.

Can I get a hallelujah?

Come on, get in the spirit, people!

Let's get to it!

Caligula for President: Better Living Through Tyranny

I am reading a post-Bush era tome called "Caligula for President" by Salon.com contributor Cindra Wilson. Some very sharp-witted political writing masquerading as a modern day speech (of sorts) by Caligula, an entirely amoral figure from Rome's imperial Julio-Claudian dynasty. If you're looking for a little catharsis, a little free flowing rant, I highly recommend it. Here's a little tasty nugget from the book:

As former Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight once said, " If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."

Let the corporations have their way with you and your country for a while and, in the end, everything will normalize to how it was before they got there! Eventually, everything will be so trashed and pillaged, it will need to be regulated by the government again!

Regulations eventually seep back in as governors on the unchecked corruption and unaccountable greed that flourishes when the free market is left to nakedly pursue its own appetites with no grown-ups or babysitters in the house. It's sort of like letting go of the steering wheel and flooring it at the same time. It's really fun for a minute. 

OK. Back to the rape at hand, everyone. We're still in Capitalism's long minute of fun. Sorta. 

Bush Regrets. Does Not Apologize.

Bush recently gave a speech at the Regal Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, after which he was asked whether he would reconsider any of his decisions. That's pronounced "Dishesions" in Bush's language, by the way.

George piped up that he regretted his failure to complete immigration (not sure what that means), social security reform, and his handling of the Hurricane Katrina crisis.

Bush said he also regretted appearing in front of a “Mission Impossible” sign during a televised address in 2003. The controversial banner referring to the U.S. mission in Iraq, actually said “Mission Accomplished.” 

He did not bring up llegal wiretaps of American citizens, torture, renditions (kidnapping people and disappearing them), denial of habeas corpus, firing attorneys general for not persecuting and prosecuting Democrats, invading Iraq without cause, killing a hundred-thousand people in Iraq, killing thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, lying to the American people about most things (most notably intelligence about iraq), and cutting taxes while waging war to create the largest deficit in American history.

Various pieces of footwear were hurled high in the direction of the hotel and the line of riot police, who did not seek to arrest the throwers. Gotta love Canadians.

Why Capitalism Doesn't Work

 

You could write a book about this topic. You could write 100 books on it. In fact, if you Google this term, you get 5,780,000 results for why capitalism doesn't work.

One of the problems is that companies in any given industry are more likely to copy each other than they are to differentiate - particularly when copying ways to screw regular people out of their money. Now, I don't know about you, but for me something is lost from the concept of "competition" when everyone is doing the same thing.

At that point, it's just about who has a better brand campaign or customer-facing gimmick. If there is any competition, it's centered around doing a better job screwing the common man without losing him as a customer. Even then, as I said, whatever works gets copied by all.

Just take Banks for example. The Banks were ALL writing shitty loans and pooling them into big funds, decoupling them from the loan originator, and selling them on the open market over and over again. They ALL did it and now we own them and their ill-considered debt.

Then there's credit card companies who ALL charge fees willynilly, all raise rates quietly and whenever they feel like it, all hide their right to do all of this in the legal mousetype that nobody understands. The late-fee is its own industry worth $9 billion. If there's money to be made, they will find a way to suck it out of you. All of them. You don't hear about the HONEST BROKER credit card company.

The oil industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the food industry...I mean pick one and there's probably an obvious symptom showing that it's hostile to the common man. But if said common man wants or needs that kind of thing, they really have no choice but to submit to some form of micro-torture. You get the phone tree and hold musak, you get the made-up surcharges, you get lies about the safety of their products, you get denied coverage that you paid for, and you get misled EVERY time. Yet here's capitalism dancing off the tongues of our leaders with it's promise of choice, of competition, of market forces making everything better and better. It's bullshit. We're going backwards.

With the erosion of common decency, honor, and humanity out there in corporate-land, life for us "consumers" is getting more and more diabolically inconvenient, inexplicably expensive, and systematically confusing. It's a bit like being mugged, actually. Every single day.

Now, some might say that capitalism is the best thing out there...and I wouldn't disagree. But it also doesn't really work. So as Americans, I would think that it's in our nature to want to tweak it or re-invent it. Make it work better. Or at least develop some controls around it that compensate for the excesses. Something to protect us from the parasitic minority of aristocratic families marginalizing all of us to sharecropper status and sticking us in beige cubicles for the rest of our lives.

Or we can wait for things to get so bad that pretty much anything would be better than capitalism. Also an option. Thoughts?

Let's ask the robot.

Fox Vs. Obama: Please don't feed the animals

 

The White House has made a public request that other news organizations isolate and alienate Fox News. Further, it has sent out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece. Moveon dot org is in full swing against Fox as well.

Like any feud, if you feed it, it will grow - just like Fox's ratings, which are now up 20% since this ballyhoo got started. 

While I stand behind Obama on this, I don't hold out much hope for anything other than the fake outrage that Fox will inevitably dish out like watermelon balls at a country picnic. I just wonder what the administration is thinking bringing a knife to a gunfight that it doesn't even need to be in.

1) How valuable, exactly, are these ties that other media outlets have to Fox? How exactly does one media outlet shun another? Do they stop saying, "Hi" in the halls of the White House?

2) Don't you think that branding Fox as "opinion journalism masquerading as news" sounds an awful lot like the Republican refrain about Mainstream Media ("MSM") for the past eon and a half?

3) Don't you think it's insulting to the other news outlets that you would imply that Fox has any impact whatsoever on what they're reporting?

4) Can you really blame Fox for merely trying to monetize the vast segment of the US population that doesn't really read or think for themselves? Isn't that capitalism (or capitalism's unfortunate side-effect)? I mean, journalism is a tool that some news outlets just choose not to use.

5) Wouldn't eliminating Fox from the White House pool be very similar to the deplorable tact taken by the Bush administration whereby they essentially barred certain journalists from asking questions and made them sit in the back? At least I remember being outraged by that.

6) Does focusing on Fox open you up to the criticism that you're getting distracted from the important work at hand. Namely saving the economy, fighting two wars, and fixing health care?

7) Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that rallies the tin-foil hat wearing Republican base?

Fox News contributor Karl Rove said: "This is an administration that's getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people. And if you dare to oppose them, they're going to come hard at you and they're going to cut your legs off."

Karl likes to over-dramatize. But this is the kind of thing that gets into the discussion and then suddenly the administration is distracted by some stupid war of words about legs getting separated from their torsos that, frankly, they probably can't win, and not arguing over the things that actually matter - like whether the legs could have been re-attached by in-network surgeons recommended by the primary care physician under Obama's plan.

"The history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence," David Carr, NYT editor, wrote over the weekend. "So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year." 

As the saying goes, never get into a war of words with an organization that buys ink by the barrel. Or as the other saying goes, "Don't fuck with Bruce Lee. Even if you're Iron Man." (OK, I might've just made that one up.)

See video:

Louisiana Judge Refuses To Marry Interracial Couple

File this under "further proof America is slipping back into the dark ages."

Louisiana judge Keith Bardwell refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple because it's his experience that when you mix the races, the marriages tend to end quickly in divorce. Plus, the kids get teased and feel unwelcome in both cultures. He did it, or rather didn't do it, out of concern for any children the couple might have.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

As if allowing an African American newlywed to use your bathroom can safely put to rest any suspicions that you might have a racist streak. "No, the groom said he had to urinate and I pointed the way. Clearly I wouldn't burn a cross on the guy's lawn next Sunday at noon," Bardwell didn't say.

Incidentally, marriage between the races used to be illegal in the Thirteen Colonies from the late seventeenth century onwards, and subsequently in several US states and US territories until 1967. Similar laws were also enforced in Nazi Germany, from 1935 until 1945.  the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. Of the 16 states who still had laws on the books banning interracial marriage in 1967 when they were finally ruled unconstitutional, 15 of them were in the bumfuck, backward-ass South.

No offense to any southerners.

UPDATE 10/17/09: 4:31P

Heat Builds in Interracial Marriage Denial Calls Intensify for Firing or Resignation of La. Justice of the Peace Who Wouldn't Marry Black Man, White Woman.

Sell The Vatican, Feed The World

Side Note: "Global hunger is a “world emergency” now, if it wasn’t before, with the number of hungry people rising to a record 1 billion, according to the United Nations. Given this scary statistic, it’s not looking good for a goal, set in 2000, to reduce the number of people going hungry worldwide by half by 2015." Truthdig.

America: I think we're drifting apart

I don't know when it started, but I suspect it was towards the end of Nixon. We started moving apart as a country.

It started with simple disagreements. Then yelling matches. It eventually deteriorated into a mass migration away from each other. We sorted ourselves based on political affiliation.

According to the official data*, between 4 and 5% of us move each year from one county to another. There are plenty of reasons for this. But one of the reasons that's grown in prominence since Carter and his peanut gallery was political affiliation and the associated belief system. Conservatives, when they chose where to live, chose more conservative leaning areas. Liberals did the same with liberal neighborhoods. And the net result is that, over the years, we haven't really spoken to each other much. The number of "landslide counties" skyrocketed, and the number of voter-mixed counties plummeted.*

In 1976, only about a quarter of America's voters lived in a county a presidential candidate won by a landslide margin. By 2004, it was nearly half.*

The hill I live on in San Francisco, for example, is very blue. You'd be hard pressed to find a single person who voted McCain in 2008. In fact, my whole city is very blue. During Bush, there was nary a functioning car or truck bumper with a sticker expressing support for, or agreement with, the man or his policies. You could feel free to bash Bushy in public and know that anyone within earshot would agree with you. I even heard some people casually talking about the desire for an assassination.

Now, I won't lie. There's some comfort in that for us here. But what was missing was the kind of healthy debate that allowed us to see the other point of view. Clearly somebody support Bush for awhile and for a reason. A good half of us voted for him. Twice. So where are those other half? Not here, I'll tell you that much. And we are the poorer for it, I think.

Cuz, we really need to talk.

Alas, I think we've been stewing in our own juices a bit - all of us. Now we just don't get each other AT ALL. We've drifted apart to such a degree that it could easily devolve into a violent confrontation - as it has over the past year with the health care debates. You see campaigns now and they're not about persuading people that may not agree with you. No, they're about rallying people. Politics is no longer about policy, it's about numbers.

Now I sort of hear you saying, "Well, we have the Internet and the news media if we want to listen to each other."

Yeah, I supposed I can listen to Fox "News" and get your point of view and you can listen to NPR to get mine. Or can we? Does either of those places really represent our point of view? Or is it a gross exaggeration of our point of view designed to get us nodding and agreeing and watching/listening more? Truth is, we really only watch or listen to the things that we are going to agree with. The rest of it, we're inclined to dismiss out of hand. 

So how or when are we going to ever see eye to eye? Are you even as interested in that as I am? Are you out there, reading? Hello? Hello?

Damn.

* Data based on demographic data cited in the book, "The Big Sort," by journalist Bill Bishop.

Side note: look up the cultural make-up of your neighborhood here from the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.

Contemplating A Vasectomy?

From Wikipedia: "Some men experience depression or anger and go through a period of mourning over the loss of their reproductive ability. This emotion is similar to what some women experience after menopause. Approximately half of all vasectomized (notice how close that word is to "victimized") men prefer to keep their sterilization secret. Depending upon the study, between five and eleven percent of men regret the decision to have a vasectomy.

Of course these Wikipedia descriptions are often open to debate.

Glenn Beck: "McCain Would Have Been Worse"

In an interview today with Katie Couric of CBS News, Glenn Beck, clearly talking before thinking, spoke the words, "I actually...how bout this? I actually think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barak Obama." 

Watch CBS Videos Online

Because it's only a preview snipped of the Interview, I think we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how he justifies that. If he justifies that...I mean, he doesn't justify much. Ever. Most of his viewers and listeners get excited for the assertions that he makes because they generally reinforce their previously held positions. Positions like taxes are bad, fixing health care is wrong, democrats are the same thing as commies plus fascists divided by Kenyan Presidents who look like Alfred E. Newman with a Hitler mustache.

They don't need, or want, the justifications for these beliefs because justifications can be disputed. And we don't want our belief system to be disputed or undermined in any way. Oh no. We just want to yell shit and stamp our feet and say, "Hell Yeah Glenn! You go dog. Woof Woof."

I wonder, if Mr. Beck doesn't like McCain, Obama, or Hilary Clinton all that much, what kind of President would he like to see sitting there in the Oval Office. Someone like Bush? Nobody asks him and he's better off not saying. Again, that would be a position that could come under attack and he would lose credibility by asserting a solution.

Glenn Beck is as cowardly as they come - all about tearing down but not courageous enough to put anything forth. Or as this one commenter on the CBS News site says, "What happens when a gifted entertainer that likes conspiratorial interpretations is given a big platform? You get a kind of modern day typhoid-Mary of political worldview."

TV Everwhere. Oh Joy.

Once they started putting TV shows online, that meant we could get it on our phones and on our computers at work.  Combined with the set boxes we have in our homes and the ability to time-shift our watching, that means we can get our TV entertainment programming basically anywhere we are at any time. In a country where the average person spent 4 hours staring at television entertainment per day BEFORE this invention, I'm not sure the added availability of television is such a good thing. Clearly, we have a problem already.

And this is another flaw of capitalism. The system nurtures our vices. It promotes our counter-productive habits. Mobile entertainment has sucked all the idle "just sitting and thinking" time right out of people's lives. They no longer spend the time to process the events of their day. They stay in "consume" or "activity" mode literally all day until they go to bed.

As they go on, this will make them less and less aware of what is going on around them. More importantly, it will make them less aware of what is really going on between them. 

Not to mention what consuming stereotypes and exaggerated personalities and situations all day does to people's perceptions of what is really real.

“Television is a machine to manufacture reassurance for troubled North Americans. Reassurance is part of the entertainment, the objective is to disconnect the audience from uncomfortable realities of life and to lull them on a sea of gentle inconsequence – and then to sell them deodorant” - Robert MacNeil

Perhaps being more wired actually makes us more out of touch.