Griftopia

==>The picture to the left is a politcal commentary on how JP Morgan bailed out the United States of America during the Panic of 1907.

I would at some point like to get back to talking about America under the Articles of Confederation, and, for that matter, the fact that we lost most of what liberties we had gained from the Revolution during the tumultous period from say, 1787-1800, but I've no time. I would observe that the American revolution was completely unique in the history of the world because of geography. In no other country, in no other time, was it possible for things to turn out the way they did. And primarily because of the prospect of unlimited land. Property was rarely mentioned in revolutionary texts precisely because it was so taken for granted. Don't like where you are? Well, all the Injuns is pretty much killed off or helpless before us, move on! Grab some frontier property! It's free! Or might as well be.

That wide open petri dish of a continent for our particular colony of bacteria allowed Americans to spread and breed at the absolute biological maximum, and boy did we ever! And this has never happened in recorded history. I suspect something like this hsn't happened since upper Paleolithic times, when hunter gatherers followed the herds into the New World.

At any rate, I am reading excerpts of Matt Taibbi's upcoming book "Griftopia". (Some may know Taibbi as the man who branded Goldman Sachs the "vampire squid sucking on the face of humanity". With colored prose like that, how can it not be a good read?) It promises to be an interesting read, and there is an excerpt of the book at Rolling Stone magazine.

I would mention that Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is being groomed as the sane Republican candidate for 2012. His (my) home state has been fortunate the past few years for not running a budget deficit, and Daniels is strutting around that. Of course, fortune is the appropriate word. And we will see how it goes if all those dumb Hoosiers vote in the proposition to cap property taxes, like California did years ago. It's not so much skill as luck, and, of course, pawning off state property, like the Indiana Toll Road, to foreign investors, so that he could plug budget holes. The Indiana Toll Road, over the span of  the hundred year lease, is expected to pull in 80 billion in net revenue. Mitch got a whopping 2 billion. Way to go, Mitch! If President, how much could he get for our national parks, I wonder?

I think George Carlin once said "Ever since the invention of priests and bankers, humanity has just been circling the drain". Well, I think he is spot on about banks, I've always maintained that money, like air and water, is something we privatize and commodify at our own risk. I'm not quite a Marxist like the Founding Fathers were but I do think a very good case for nationalizing the creation of credit can be made.

As recounted by the experience of Ben Franklin:

"When he arrived, he was surprised to find rampant unemployment and poverty among the British working classes… Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied: “We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.”  In 1764, the Bank of England used its influence on Parliament to get a Currency Act passed that made it illegal for any of the colonies to print their own money. The colonists were forced to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold. Anyone lacking in those precious metals had to borrow them at interest from the banks. Only a year later, Franklin said, the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed beggars, just as they were in England. The money supply had suddenly been reduced by half, leaving insufficient funds to pay for the goods and services these workers could have provided. He maintained that it was "the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War." This, he said, was the real reason for the Revolution: "the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction."

Science Friday

The ISS, the International Space Station is in its second decade in orbit, and has travelled 1.5 billion miles, which, if it had been in a straight line, would put it nearly in reach of Uranus. Yes, I said Uranus. Fucking grow up.

The Tevatron, Fermilab's 2 trillion electron volt proton/anti-proton particle accelerator gets a three year program extension, until 2014. Fermilab will continue its work to look for the Higgs particle, the particle which physicists theorize gives matter its mass. It is not known what the elusive Higgs will look like, but some suggest a strong resemblance to Mr. Peanut – albeit, like, really, really small, dude.

A researcher at the California National Primate Research Center may have contracted a virus which jumped species just like in the Hollywood horror movie scenario. Not much else to say, except, if true, serves you right you monkeyfucker.

On the tech front, the Japanese have moved a step closer to their dream of not just fucking humanoid robots, but becoming humanoid robots. Further revisions to the Actroid-F model 7. Reports coming in vary but the consensus is it is getting to be less and less like fucking Yoko Ono.

And finally, giant dragonflies have been successfully raised in high oxygen chamber in a simulation of late Carboniferous conditions. Biologists report dragonflies with wingspans of 300 feet. Plans are to contract out giant Japanese humanoid battle bots should the dragonflies threaten the warehouse district.

That is All!

The Articles of Confederation

The lesson of history is... no learns it.

Here you've got tough times for the Baby Boomers. It was never supposed to be like this. The 21st century was supposed to be clear sailing right into the time of the Jetsons, living in sky apartments, and driving flying cars, and getting entitled government goodies that no one had to work for or be taxed upon.

Instead, we got a depression, with savings and pensions wiped out,  a less than rosy future. And so these pampered, privileged, worst-day-better-than-the-best-3rd-worlder's-best-day, fat, soft, pink, slow, giantly-huge-buttocked lardasses go and fall on the floor, stamp their feet, hold their breath, turn blue, scream, and have a proper Tea party tantrum. Because We Ain't There Yet!

And I'm picking on the Tea Party Republicans (yes, they are a Republican faction, make no mistake) again and again and again because, quite frankly, they are not helping the nation in any way whatsoever.

They are, in fact, with each dumb decision, with each selfish piggy little grab at power, with each pouty whiny little obstruction, sending the United States of America daily closer to a fascist dictatorship....

And...

and...

You know what? This isn't helping.

Granted, I do think that the current batch of so-called "libertarians" and "conservatives", having drunk the Neoliberal Koolaid for the past 30 years, are seriously fucking up this country. And in a perfect world, in which a just and wise deity rules and metes out eternal punishment to his beloved creations, the koolaid would have made them all just... DROP DEAD in their tracks at the first sip. But this ain't a perfect world.

The biggest problem is that we do have examples of what happens when government is indeed limited. And a real conservative, one who wishes to conserve the best traditions and institutions of this country, would choose to examine history warts and all. You know, examine our history rather than cherry-pick to justify his fucked up worldview. Honesty is the best policy, and all that.

Kind of reminds me of my own lesson in honesty. I had a job interview once upon a time, where one of the questions I was asked was about a rather large gap in time on my resume.

"I notice you have nothing listed for the period from 1982-1984" said the interviewer, "What were you doing then?"

I could have bullshitted my way through that question, blaming the Reagan recession for lack of employment, or saying I was on sabbatical, or hiatus, but I told him the truth.

"I was an unemployed alcoholic at that time, living in the basement, sponging off my parents, and smoking a lot of dope", I replied.

"Oh! Well, I can't fault you for your honesty!" Got the job, too.

Here's another. I had to attend a meeting with a boss who was just a complete sadistic asshole, if, and here's the qualifier, he found out you were bullshitting him or trying to foist off responsibility. I'd heard that regular attendees would often puke in the bathroom before the meeting. We had a problem closing out the business cycle due to a computer error. Once it was my turn on the griddle, and he asked me why we were not closing the books of the year.

"I fucked up".

"Oh," he was completely disarmed. "What are you doing to fix it?"

I told him what I was doing to fix it, and got out of the meeting unscathed.  So, honesty works more often than you would think.

Okay, so honest appraisal of all data. Ever wondered why, we've never had a Libertarian Utopia? You know, a paradise of privatized social services and limited government? Anyone?

Well, we did.

We tried it. It didn't work. It was the United States under the Articles of Confederation.

It was our missing piece of time that we are embarrassed to list on our resume. We ended up unemployed and  alcoholic, living in the basement.

Look it up.

Kurman's Maxim

In an essay entitled "Theory and Practice of Time Travel", the science fiction writer Larry Niven proposed a law which went:

Niven's Law: "If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel, then no time machine will ever be invented in that universe".

This basically solved the time travel problem for Niven, because, let's face it, you've got a problem with global causality violation the minute you start mucking with time. Solution? Don't allow it. Stephen Hawking, The Pope of Science himself, has made similar noises. It's just not allowed.

Hans Moravec suggested that, if time travel is possible, a way out of paradoxes would be the alteration of the act of travel itself. In other words, if a message is sent to the past, the very act of sending it causes the message to affect the sending of the message itself, in such a way that no paradox can occur. In different terms, let's say you have a pool table, and you hit a ball into a pocket that is a time machine which sends the ball back into the past, changing the shot you made and thus missing the ball. But according to Moravec, this will not happen. In a kind of Darwinian temporal dynamic, Reality will find the most fit solution to this causality violation to avoid a paradox. In the example, you would have actually missed the shot that sent the ball into the time travel pocket, but the ball appears from the future and knocks the ball into the time travel pocket. This is also known as the Novikov self-consistency principle.

In other words, you can't change the past.

In a previous essay on time travel, I came up with something similar. I knew I had called it "Kurman's Law", but I could not remember the exact wording.


Google to the rescue.

Kurman's Law: "Any contingent change of history to alter the outcome of a turning point causes the turning point to cease to exist".

In other words, you, the time traveller, fervently wish that the South had won the Civil War. You go back and modify the conditions then extant so that the Confederacy can win the Civil War. And the South wins the Civil War. Huzzah!

But, traveling back to your own time, you find out that the Civil War never happened in the first place. In order for them to win, you have changed conditions so much that the conflict never occurs in the first place.

Paradox avoided. But, you saw them win. Yeah, well, tough shit.

Well, actually, there's another, better, Kurman's Law, which I found while googling. And it goes like this.

Kurman's Law: "No man is completely worthless. He can always be used as a bad example".

Dude, whoever you are, Kudos and Godspeed. Wish I'd thought of it. (Actually it sounds like something my older brother would write, but... nah).

Therefore, my law will no longer be a law. It will henceforth be Kurman's Maxim.

Please make a note of it.

Monkeys on Treadmills - or - More Weird Japanese Shit

Okay, here we go! I'm going to try an embeddence. A few words first. I recently tried to find a video of a monkey riding a treadmill. To my thorough disgust, there are none to be found on the internet.

"Why?" you ask, "do you wish to find a video of a monkey riding a treadmill?"

Well, I read an article on neural rehabilitation, in which they severed the spinal cords of monkeys, wired up the nerve endings, and then set them to walking on treadmills, while the signals to the nerve endings were transmitted via the wires to robots. So, spinal-cord injury monkeys are radio controlling robots. And I wanted to see a video of it, if it existed.

No, I'm not shitting you. I wish I could find the article. In fact, it now makes me wonder about all those kids playing first person shooter and MMPORG video games. They could be the monkeys on treadmills, remotely operating robots, in, say, China, assembling cell phones or something...

Anyway, it really doesn't have to do with the Japanese robot video I am about to embed. Well, only partly.

We've all known for a long time now that the Japanese have rather strange sexual proclivities. They like bondage, and school girls. And pixellating private parts. And virtual girlfriends. And Real Dolls. And the end result of all this, their Final Solution so it would seem is that they want to fuck robots.

Actually, I think it's quite more than that. They not only want to fuck robots, they want to be robots. Look at their anime, their cartoons, their fascination with giant humanoid fighting robots. The fact that they've been in a national depression for nigh on twenty years. Of course they want to be robots. No more aging. No more sad emotions. Just pure utter power. And fucking. With metallic parts. Gotta be it.

Here we go:



Did that work?  It did! Yay!

So, the Japanese are just starting to emerge from the Uncanny Valley . This is only borderline creepy.

You're Stupid!

I've mentioned before the four levels of stupidity. Let's recap.

• Level 1 Stupid: Process stupid. The wiring ain't right. Something definitely wrong with the brain, can't process things right. Automatically absolved of behaviors. Remediation: Supervision. Restraints, if necessary.
• Level 2 Stupid: Ignorant stupid. Can process information, just doesn't have enough information. Has either been deprived of facts, or unaware of them. Remediation: Inform and educate.
• Level 3 Stupid: Unreasoning stupid. Can process information, has the facts available, can't analyze, associate, and synthesize to reach a conclusion. Usually under the age of 25. Remediation: Again, inform and educate.
• Level 4 Stupid: Dangerously stupid. Can process information, has the facts, can analyze, asociate, and synthesize, can reach conclusion. However, if conclusion violates chosen worldview, chooses not to. Remediation: Supervision. Restraints, if necessary. Repeat offenses endangering others: Banishment to the Island of Broken Toys.

Well, apparently there is now a fifth level of stupid: Kentucky Stupid. This involves a guy named Profitt ignoring a huge fucking suite of behaviors that can be used in a confrontational situation, and just going right for the violent reaction. And then providing weasel arguments about how (despite supposedly espousing a conservative policy of personal responsibility), "it warn't actually mah fawlt kausin' the po-lice shood stapped in and kep me frum doin thet".

Is it fair to call it Kentucky Stupid? Actually, I'm quite fond of Kentucky and its inhabitants. Some of the hottest babes I've ever seen were down there. And when I was in college at IU, I subscribed to the Louisville Courier-Journal , and found the paper to be consistently well-written, the articles cogent, the coverage dang near interstellar in its scope.

So, no, it's not fair to call this behavior Kentucky stupid.

However, I do recall a time when a woman from Kentucky confronting a particularly stupid individual, poking her finger into his chest and telling him, in that particular dialect that holds more dipthongs per syllable than most:

"You're stupid".

Beleive me, when you are called stupid by someone with that accent, you are really fucking stupid.

Don't Get All Papa Smurf On Me

I'm not really sure what that means. It's something I said in a dream. I have to assume it means someone was getting paternalistic and patronizing with me. And seeing as I am fundamentally recalcitrant, I didn't cotton well to this.

Speaking of which, I've noted a lot of election event editorials about how "The Left Doesn't 'Get' The Tea Party". About how the Left is alarmed and fearful of a party that, message parsed down, no honest, Means Well.

Hey, Don't Get All Papa Smurf On Me.

You lookin' out for yourself, teabaggers. Not me. Not the nation. Your own interests. How do I know? Because you say you are the inheritors of the mantle of the founding fathers. Because you call yourself patriots. Because you call yourself a party.

Oh, you who never learn history.

Let me tell you what the founding fathers they would think of the Tea Party Patriot movement. They would be gravely disappointed. The founding fathers would look at these soft, fat, pampered pink apes and shake their heads in disgust.

How do I know this? Because that's they thought about post-revolutionary America. They were gravely disappointed in it. How do I know this? They wrote about it. To one degree or another, they were ashamed and dismayed by what America had become. The revolutionaries, from James Warren and Samuel Adams to David Ramsay, Light-Horse Harry Lee, Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Jefferson had all lost faith in the revolution.

Benjamin Rush: "We are indeed a bebanked, bewhiskied, and bedollared nation". Democracy in America "will certainly fail".

John Adams, bewailing the results of the revolution, including the commodification of democracy, the religious revivals and Bible societies of "the bigoted and superstitious", wrote "Where is now, the progress of the human mind? When? Where ? and How? is the present Chaos to be arranged in Order?"

The founding fathers found it difficult to accept that their fate now rested in "the opinions and votes of a small-souled and largely unreflective ordinary people".

George Washington  himself, at the end of his life, had lost all hope for democracy in America. Party spirit, he said in 1799, had destroyed the influence of good character in politics. One could as well "set up a broomstick as candidate", "call it a true Son of Liberty", and it would "command their votes in toto".

Ouch! What would they think of us tiny-brained moderns? Especially those who, living in comparative paradise, complain so frequently and readily.

And who is to blame? Well, one significant part would  be the formation of political parties. The modern political party, a permanent institution to which loyalty to becomes the sole criterion of political worth, goes back to Martin van Buren - the first modern professional politician. Van Buren had no fame, no fortune, no military record, no reputation of achievement, no charisma. He was barely known throughout the United States. What he did do was build the best and most organized political party the nation had ever seen. van Buren's Democratic-Republican party, soon to be shortened to the Republican party*, won him the election.

I deem it no small coincidence that Martian van Buren is classified by historians as the worst president ever. No small accomplishment that. It seems the designation stems from the fact that, during the Panic of 1837, van Buren refused to regulate the banks that defrauded the American people. What else? How about the Trail of Tears?

Partisan politics. The flesh eating bacteria of the American dream.

*(Update 10/28/10) this should read the Democratic Party rather than Republican. I admit my error rather than engage in weasel revisionist editting.