Generation Wars

These days people of every generation are vilifying other generations. Generation X is a bunch of ne'er-do-wells who were still living with mom at age 35, Millenials are coddled brats with helicoptering mothers, and Baby Boomers are self-involved ex-hippies who are going to destroy the entire economy by sucking Social Security dry.

Atlantic's The Wire has the definitive guide to the generations. Well, as definitive as you can get.

Because, honestly, all this stuff about generations is nonsense. Take, for example, the Greatest Generation. Ostensibly these are the people who suffered through the Depression, fought WWII and saved the world for democracy. But that generation is defined as ending in 1946. 1946! How could someone born after WWII ended have done spit to save to the world for democracy?

For that matter, how could anyone born after 1928 contributed in any material way to our victory over the Axis? My dad, born in 1933, was 12 when the war ended. He joined the army in the early 1950s but spent the Korean War in Germany. This Washington Post story does a better job of splitting up the generations, calling my father's cohort the Silent Generation.

It's the same with the Baby Boom: it's really at least two different cultural cohorts. Supposedly, it's characterized by the anti-war, free-love, acid-dropping turn-on-tune-in-drop-out, women's lib and civil rights movements of the 1960s. I was born in 1957, smack in the middle of the demographic bubble. But I was 12 when the 1960s ended. All that counter-culture stuff was completely alien to me.

The idea that the tens of millions of people born during the same 20-year period all have some kind of personality traits in common is even sillier than the idea that everyone born in the same month shares the same horoscope. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were both born in 1946, but that's about all they have in common.

What's salient about generations is not what year you're born, but what cultural events affected you when you were impressionable. But it's more complicated than that, because kids of different ages are impressed by different things.

Kids 5-12 will be influenced by things such as video games, the space program, cuddly animals, dinosaurs, fire trucks, and so on. Wars in far-off lands, sex, booze and drugs will never enter their minds -- if their parents are doing their jobs right. Kids 13-17 will be affected by the opposite sex, booze and drugs because those things concern them directly. Eighteen- to 25-year-olds are leaving home and entering the wider world, but are still quite impressionable, and are now being influenced by greater concerns like fighting in wars, earning a living, taxes, raising children of their own, politics and so on.

Your parents also affect your development: two children born in 1957, one to a 45-year-old WWII vet and the other to a 17-year-old single mother, are going to have completely different influences.

Even where you live can make a big difference: social trends starting in California or New York may take 10 or 15 years to reach Memphis or Topeka.

In my case the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s completely passed me by, but the space program and moon landing on the 1960s captured the interest of a 5- to 12-year-old. My politically formative years were the 1970s and early 80s, the tail end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, the Iranian hostage crisis, and Iran-Contra. According to this website, that puts me squarely in Generation X. I was born at the height of the Baby Boom, but culturally I'm a Gen-Xer.

The problem is is trying to define generations as lasting 20 years, apparently conforming to the active reproductive years of the human female. But people don't fall into neat little 20-year boxes. They're being born constantly.

If we're going to talk meaningfully about generations, we have to give up the idea of all parents belonging to one generation and the kids belonging to the next. Instead we have to talk about smaller cultural cohorts that may not be the same length. Thus, the turmoil of the 60s lasted about 10 or 12 years, but the relative stasis of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s endured for almost 30 years.

I would divvy up the cultural cohorts this way:

The Greatest Generation was between 1910 and 1928. They came of age during the Depression and fought in WWII. These folks are mostly gone now.

My father's generation lived through the Depression as children; they knew deprivation, but not the desperation that comes with being unable to provide for your children. They came of age during the post-War years, the Korean War, and the height of the Cold War, when in the 40's and 1950s Russia and the United States tested nuclear weapons every other week and people were building bomb shelters in their back yards.

The cultural cohort that corresponds to what we call the Baby Boom were children in the 1950s and teenagers in the 1960s, born from, say, 1942 to 1955. They were affected by the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution and all the other perils of that turbulent time.

My cultural cohort was born between 1952 and 1970, people who came of age in the relatively calm times of 70s and 80s. I'd call it the Computer Cohort. This includes Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the people who created the personal computer and made computers an integral part of everyday life during the 1980s. This generation were the shock troops in the fiscalization of our economy, where making money became more important than making things.

The next cohort came of age in the boom years of the late 80's and 1990s, when communism fell, America was unquestionably the king of the world, we could snap our fingers and the world would help us take down a dictator like Saddam Hussein and the Internet became widely accessible.

The next cohort comes of age in the 2000s and 2010s, their nights haunted by dreams of 9/11 and their days dogged by endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Internet becomes omnipresent and almost omniscient; this generation is the first to be electronically tethered to their peers all their lives.

We blame the children of each generation for their peculiar characteristics, but their parents and grandparents created the world that shaped them.

Baby Boomers are criticized for all getting old at the same time, putting a drain on the Social Security system and forcing their children and grandchildren to pay for their retirements. But they didn't ask to be born, and they had nothing to do with increases in Social Security payments, which are tied to inflation through automatic cost of living adjustments put in place by legislation Congress passed in the 1970s, when most Baby Boomers weren't old enough to be elected to Congress and many weren't even old enough to vote.

Generation X is criticized for living with their parents, but their elders tanked the economy, forcing them into that ignominy. And their parents let them stay in their basements. Millennials are castigated for constantly texting and playing video games, or their parents coming to to job interviews with them. But it's their parents and grandparents who built the Internet, created microelectronics, cellphones and wi-fi, and go to the job interviews with their kids.

In so many ways, it's the parents who are responsible for the way their kids turn out. Yet we always blame the kids for our mistakes.

If you look closely at the criticisms leveled at every generation, they're always the same: those people are selfish, self-involved jerks who don't give a rip about my problems. All of this boils down to the same old-man rant: kids these days just ain't got no respect.

And get off my lawn!

Find The Gun Cult A Fainting Couch!

Springfield, Illinois is now GROUND ZERO for the battle over gun rights after this absolute abomination was used in a classroom setting.

Oh no!! Someone fetch the smelling salts!!

GOP 2016 Presidential Nominee: Vladimir Putin

A colleague of mine in the social studies department finally decided he had had enough. He had to let loose his opinion on the situation in the Ukraine at a recent staff meeting. He's also the chairman of the department so we all sort of had to listen. He spoke of Obama's weakness and how since there was a Democrat in the White House, Putin was emboldened to do whatever he wanted. He posited that we should move NATO troops into Ukraine and send part of our navy to the Black Sea. It was a classic neocon screed that in many ways made me wax nostalgic for those good ol' days of Cheney and Rumsfeld.

More importantly, it made me realize that the perfect candidate for the GOP in 2016 is none other than Vladimir Putin himself. Think about it for a minute. He's strong, doesn't take any shit from anyone, and thinks with his guts! He has all the aristocratic airs that conservatives pretend they don't really like. He doesn't do all the pussy talking and diplomacy crap or rely on mealymouthed sanctions. He ACTS! Add in what President George W. Bush said about him...

He's not well informed. It's like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong.

and he is so unbelievably perfect as the GOP presidential nom that I can already feel that tingle up my leg!

Do Young Conservatives See Themselves Like This?

World Meteorological Organization: Extreme Weather Due To Climate Change

A recent search for the annual report from the World Meteorological Organization brought me to Fox News of all places.

A rise in sea levels is leading to increasing damage from storm surges and coastal flooding, as demonstrated by Typhoon Haiyan, the agency's Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said. The typhoon in November killed at least 6,100 people and caused $13 billion in damage to the Philippines and Vietnam. Australia, meanwhile, had its hottest year on record. 

"Many of the extreme events of 2013 were consistent with what we would expect as a result of human-induced climate change," Jarraud said. He also cited other costly weather disasters such as $22 billion damage from central European flooding in June, $10 billion in damage from Typhoon Fitow in China and Japan, and a $10 billion drought in much of China.

Perhaps the fact that Fox allowed this on their site is a sign of a shift in ideology. It actually makes sense when you think about it given that Fox is a huge supporter of the corporate world and firms are starting to lose money as a result of climate change.

How Free Markets And Government Spending Can Stabilize A Country

When someone mentions Rwanda, the first words that come to mind are violence and instability, not free markets and prosperity. This recent article in the Times shows just how far Rwanda has come and you can thank the power of capitalism for their recent success. One of my add-ons to the "teach a man to fish" saying is "teach a village to fish and they create a free market economy" and that is clearly what has happened in Rwanda.

Rwanda offers an alternative model, analysts say, a country where the economy has grown an average of nearly 8 percent over the last four years because of increased agricultural productivity, tourism and government spending on infrastructure and housing. Despite having a population of just around 12 million, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney last week named Rwanda the most attractive African market for retailers in its first ever African Retail Development Index. 

As the article notes, there are still challenges ahead for Rwanda but the simple fact that it has made it to this point illustrates that with the right balance of free market principles and government involvement stability can be achieved anywhere.

What is "McConnelling?"

Good grief is this funny....

Are The Republicans Celebrating Too Soon?

If you pay attention to politics, the 2014 elections (over seven months away and without nominees in many contests) has already been won by the Republicans. They've gained more seats in the House and taken back the Senate. Even statistical guru Nate Silver is on their side this time (his new site is pretty boss, btw).

But Tim Alberta says, "Whoa, there, son" and posits that the GOP is celebrating too soon. In looking at his main points, I don't see much progress. In short, he's right. And so is Doug Sosnik. The Republicans are channeling Groucho Marx.

At the national level, Republicans continue to be viewed as the congressional opposition party whose intransigence led to the government shutdown last October. These same interests actively worked to scuttle immigration reform this year. In this environment, it’s the likes of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and California Rep. Darrell Issa who define the Republican brand. The struggle for the party’s future is playing out in real time as we approach the crucial period leading up to the 2016 elections. Ironically, Republicans’ short-term tactics to pick up additional seats in the 2014 midterms—as well as the rightward pressures of the presidential primary process—will only reinforce the public’s perception of the Republican Party as unwelcoming and out of step with the majority of Americans.

Right. They only think in terms of short term gains and never long term victories. 2016 could be an absolute disaster for Republicans if they don't moderate now. They'll have 24 seats up in the Senate and it's a presidential year which means higher voter turnout on the Democratic side. If Hillary runs, she will likely win and possibly have both Houses back.

It will be interesting to see who they put up for candidates against the vulnerable Democrats. If they go moderate, it's a sign that they are thinking ahead to 2016. If not, they won't take back the Senate and will totally fuck themselves in two years.

Great Bumper Sticker

The Syrian Nightmare

A recent article in the Times shows just how bad the situation is in Syria.

The government bombards neighborhoods with explosive barrels, missiles, heavy artillery and, the United States says, chemical weapons, then it sends in its allies in Hezbollah and other militias to wage street warfare. It jails and tortures peaceful activists, and uses starvation as a weapon, blockading opposition areas where trapped children shrivel and die. 

The opposition is now functionally dominated by foreign-led jihadists who commit their own abuses in the name of their extremist ideology, just last week shooting a 7-year-old boy for what they claimed was apostasy. And some of those fighters, too, have targeted civilians and used siege tactics.

I can barely imagine how awful the situation is there for any average citizen that stayed behind. We were very smart not to get involved and I suppose it's just going to continue until so many people are dead that there isn't any country left.

This terrible thought led me to wonder what kind of a country will be left for Assad or someone else to govern. Who would want to rule such a place?

Heaven For The Gun Cult

I believe I have found the perfect place for the Gun Cult: Libya.

Libya, where hundreds of militias hold sway and the central government is virtually powerless, is awash in millions of weapons with no control over their trafficking. 

A central government that is powerless? Holy shit! Someone find me some Kleenex in which I can shoot my load!!! I'm sure now that the country is not a gun free zone violence will drop to nearly zero. Hey, maybe we can finally find out what happened at Benghazi!!

Are You Smarter Than An Atheist?

Take the quiz and find out!

Ukraine Inks Deal With EU

The EU and the Ukraine signed an association agreement yesterday but it got little notice in the press. Odd, considering that this was the spark that lit the flame which started all the instability in the region. Perhaps the "liberal" media has become too obsessed with either the "Obama is weak" meme or wringing their hands over the "fact" that "Obama is weak"

Regardless, the focus should be on this agreement because it's exactly why Vladimir Putin has already lost. It is the first step of trade and economic integration with Europe that won't stop with Ukraine.

The EU also announced it will speed up similar association deals with Georgia and Moldova, it said in its statement: The European Union reconfirms its objective to further strengthen the political association and economic integration with Georgia and the Republic of Moldova. We confirm our aim to sign the Association Agreements, including the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas, which we initiated in Vilnius last November, no later than June 2014.

As I have said many times in the past, the West's soft, economic power always wins in the long run. Sooner or later, Putin will have no choice but to fall in line like everyone else.

Food Stamps and Moral Hazards

Last week John Stewart tore into Fox News over their persecution of food stamp recipients. His basic point was that the $3 billion worth of food stamp fraud that Fox News was up in arms about is less than the $4 billion dollars in special gifts that oil companies receive from the federal government and Fox News called "peanuts."

Still, welfare fraud and foodstamp fraud are real. So let's look at some examples of this abuse.

The original welfare queen that Ronald Reagan made famous actually existed. Her name (at least one of her names) was Linda Taylor. She was not the typical black woman that everyone pictured when Reagan blew the racist dogwhistle. She was listed officially as white, though she could pass for pretty much any race with all the wigs and makeup she used. She also committed a huge number of other crimes including various frauds, kidnapings and possibly murder.

Welfare fraud was basically the only crime they could pin on her, in much the same way that Al Capone was finally jailed for tax evasion. So Taylor is not representative of welfare or food stamp recipients.

But she is typical of welfare and food stamp cheats. We have a few recent examples here in Minnesota.

Run-of-the-mill food stamp fraud consists of store owners letting recipients use food stamps to buy non-food items, or "entrepreneurs" buying food stamp cards for 50% of face value. Three people were arrested earlier this month in St. Paul for buying food with such cards and exporting it to Liberia.  Who would do such a weird thing?

Noni Snider, Walter Cooper, and Nyla Newbergh: they ran an export business. They were caught because their purchases of mass quantities of soda and noodles at Walmart and Sam's Club raised suspicions. Yes, these small businessmen -- otherwise referred to as job creators and makers by Republican -- are committing food stamp fraud. And based on their names and the suburbs where they live, my guess is that they are white and middle class (my search fu has sadly failed to uncover any perp photos).

In fact, most food stamp fraud is committed or enabled by small business owners, typically store owners: see here in Washington, here in Baltimore,  here in Buffalo, here is Texas (and that's just the last couple of weeks -- it seems like store owners commit food stamp fraud more frequently than gun owners shoot themselves).

The real problem here isn't the poor people committing the fraud, it's richer people ripping off poorer people by giving them only 50 cents on the dollar for their food stamp cards and tempting them with things food stamps aren't supposed to buy.

Now my dad would chime in here and say, "See, food stamps are bad because they encourage waste and fraud. We shouldn't have these programs." Yes, it appears that since small businessmen are so easily tempted into committing fraud we should stop helping poor people.

Food stamps and welfare, the right would say, create a moral hazard by encouraging fraud. But the exact same thing can be said about any number of Defense Department programs, which have cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions -- if not trillions -- of dollars in waste and fraud, especially during times of war. Remember the planeloads of cash flown into Iraq that just disappeared? That alone was $6.6 billion -- more than twice the food stamp fraud that Fox News abhors, most of it going to corrupt American contractors rather than buying off Iraqi terrorists.  Or the infamous Joint Strike Fighter program, seven years late and $163 billion over budget. Or the $2.7 billion dollars wasted on an Army intelligence program that just doesn't work. Or Reagan's Star Wars program. Or any of hundreds of other weapons and software programs that cost billions but never saw the light of day, all billed to the Defense Department not by lazy welfare recipients, but by highly paid CEOs working for Fortune 500 defense contractors.

In this way the Defense Department creates a moral hazard, by tempting wealthy industrialists into conning the government into weapons programs that will never work. Avoiding war profiteers was one of the main reasons the founding fathers opposed a standing army. The Iraq War was fought in large part because the defense industry -- represented by Don Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle on the Defense Policy Board -- wanted the war. The DoD moral hazard is far worse than the food stamp moral hazard, because American troops are inevitably killed and maimed when we start foolhardy wars. And because there is so much more money at stake.

The Chisholms: Typical Welfare Fraudsters

But back to welfare and food stamp fraud. Just the other day Colin and Andrea Chisholm, a Minnesota couple living in Deephaven (a high-priced suburb), were charged. They have an oceanside home and an 83-foot yacht in Florida, $3 million in banks there, an expensive house in Deephaven, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in banks in Minnesota. Because they're rich, they're not in custody: they probably winter in Florida, and by now have taken up residence in the Caymans to avoid prosecution. Their fraud was discovered by Medica when they claimed public assistance for massages at The Marsh, one the most expensive health clubs in the Twin Cities.

This time, however, I have a photo of these welfare cheats. They're upstanding white folks who dress in suits and drive expensive cars. The right's narrative about all welfare fraud being committed by despicable, lazy, poor black people just isn't adding up.

The fact is, rich people like the Chisholms are in a far better position to commit fraud of any sort. They own property and claim residency in multiple states, making it easy to commit all kinds of frauds, including voter fraud by using absentee ballots (that's how real voter fraud occurs -- no one in their right mind would try impersonating someone else; too easy to get caught). They have the money and the wherewithal to get the necessary documents to commit the fraud. And they can skip the country when the law catches on.

The worst poor people can do is sell their food stamp cards at half face value to some rich white woman at the homeless shelter or an exploitative store owner to buy a bottle of Ripple

And most importantly, the wealthy have the motivation: the envy and the greed that seems to drive so many of them to squeeze every penny out of the system by any means possible. According to the right, poor people just don't have the intelligence, gumption, energy or drive to commit real fraud. You need to think like an entrepreneurial small businessman to rip off the government.

Could it be that conservatives always think everyone else is gaming the system and committing fraud because they are?

The Smoking Gun From The Big Bang

I'm feeling extra science-y today so I simply must point out the recent news about the Big Bang Theory. 

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Congratulations to Dr. Guth for achieving his life's work!

Time for Israel to Put Up or Shut Up

Re: One State Solution.

I cannot imagine a one-state solution ever happening in Israel. It would mean doom for the Jewish state.

Think about it. All their laws would have to be changed to give all Jews, Muslims and Christians (6-10% of Palestinian Arabs are Christians) equal rights. No more special treatment for Orthodox rabbis and haredim (who seem to already be losing their special status).

Politically it would be suicide. Even with the current boundaries with a two-state solution demographics indicate that Arab Israelis will outnumber non-Arab Israelis in a few decades. With a single state that happens the day the two countries are unified. Bibi Netanyahu would be bounced out of office within two weeks when all the Arab members of the Knesset call for a non-confidence vote.

But Israel has to do one or the other. The status quo of oppressing all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories because some small number of them are terrorists is indefensible. Israelis will counter with arguments that there is a great animosity against them by all Palestinians, but they cannot use that as an excuse because they cause that animosity by denying Palestinians basic human and economic rights, by sealing up the Palestinians in economically isolated ghettos. This invites comparisons to certain mid-20th century dictators, but it's considered bad form to name names.

The situation in Israel and Palestine is now analogous to South Africa and its homelands during apartheid. Like apartheid, this occupation cannot stand forever.

There is a third option, and that's the one I fear Israel will exercise: ethnic cleansing. They did it in 1940s, killing or driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile in a Palestinian diaspora. They have been slowly swallowing chunks of Palestine since 1967, building giant walls splitting up villages and stealing land from farmers, many of whom now live on the opposite side of an impenetrable barrier from their olive groves.

So the Palestinians should call Israel's bluff: either finalize a two-state solution, or absorb Palestine into a greater Israel and give all Muslims and Christians in Israel and the occupied territories the same rights that Israelis enjoy. That's the kind of religious pluralism that Americans have, despite Republicans blather.

Israel has to put up or shut up. Are they a real democracy, or a religious dictatorship who destroys anyone who won't bend a knee to their god?

The situation is that much more ironic because the Palestinians' plight so closely mirrors that of the Jews, both in the Biblical past and the 20th century.

What We Know About Climate Change

A recent report from American Association for the Advancement of Science, spearheaded by Nobel Prize Winner Mario J Molina, clearly illustrates the threat posed by climate change. It targets a more general audience of Americans who need to understand that the danger posed is very real and could affect their children and grandchildren unless action is taken now.

This is a good report to share with people who don't want to be drowned in the science of climate change. For that, you can always visit this site. This new report is more of a summation of where we are at and what can be done.  I'm hoping this can be the beginning of a greater awareness about climate change and a move away from the caveman-ish "let's wait until we are on fire before we do something" mentality.

We Have Your Dog!

 This is from a few weeks ago but I had to put it up. Apparently, the Taliban are holding hostage....one of our dogs. Egads!!

Are we sure it's one of ours?:)

Eat As Many Cheeseburgers As You Want?

The good thing about science is that it's true whether you believe it or not and now that this study is out, I'm waiting for the health nuts of the world to blow a massive bowel.

The new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil. “My take on this would be that it’s not saturated fat that we should worry about” in our diets, said Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, the lead author of the new study and a cardiovascular epidemiologist in the department of public health and primary care at Cambridge University.

It's never been one particular ingredient but several of them combined with each person's unique genetic code. Honestly, it's this code that really dictates what sort of illnesses and longevity we will have.