Kevin Baker Hits The Big Time

It's been a few weeks since I poked my head in at Kevin Baker's site. I think it's only fair that I check in once in awhile as I know for a fact that he reads my site every day. The first post I saw was this one. It seems that Kevin has finally arrived. Check out the video below.




You know you've hit the Big Time when Colbert makes you look like an absolute fool. I am curious as to what Kevin would have done differently in terms of the Ukraine issue. It sure is awfully easy to be a critic...

Of course, the insecurity is still at an all time high with this post. Kevin, dear, why are you so unsure of yourself? You do realize that I have teenagers in my life who do virtually the same thing when they show me long and antagonistic text conversations to feel better about themselves and their side of the argument. What are you afraid of?

So Much For Freedom of Speech

Louisiana, MoveOn group tangle over political billboard

Guns Don't Kill People...

...Goodwill does! 

What is James Madison's Worst Nightmare?

Rich Yeselson's piece on Republican obstructionism is a must read. The chief author of the Constitution would indeed be disgusted.

Gene Sperling A Go Go

Two noteworthy lines from former NEC director Gene Sperling at his recent Monitor breakfast.

On the ACA.

"I find it unusual that the president goes out of his way ... to have a smoother transition to new policies with less disruption for small businesses and Republicans are complaining."

Yeah, why are they complaining?

On the differences between serving in the Clinton administration and the Obama administration.

"In the Clinton administration, what was often most difficult was having [to deal with] a unified and strong opposition.... This time around, you learn the challenges of having a divided opposition…."

The latter might seem like it would be easier but if you think about it, it's really not.

The Long-Term Solution to the Russia Problem

There are all kinds of people critiquing the president's response to Russia's annexation of the Crimea. Republicans are blustering about it, but what do they expect Obama to do? Target Russians ships in the Black Sea port with cruise missiles? Send Americans troops into Simferopol and take the parliament building? Drop nuclear bombs on Moscow?

As I mentioned previously, in the short term economic sanctions are the only way to make Russia pay.  However, some people believe that Putin is actually losing: the situation in Ukraine is a sign of his weakness, not his strength. In Ukraine Putin is only succeeding in uniting ethnic Russian and Ukrainians against a dictator, and that may be inspiring Russians in Russia to defy Putin's tyranny.

But if they're wrong, and Russia keeps pulling this sort of crap, what about the long term? How do we prevent Russia — and countries like Iran — from throwing their weight around?

Russia is inherently unstable. Its people are unhappy. In the conversion to capitalism the vast majority of Russians have been left out in the cold. They don't live in a democracy. Their elections are rigged, even though Putin would probably still win if they were fair because Russians love strong men and long for stability, and they think he can provide that. Putin throws people in jail for criticizing his government. He lords over an oligarchy of corrupt officials who use their control over state assets to make themselves and their buddies wealthy.

But Russia has power today for one reason alone: oil and gas. It's like the Middle East. If the Middle East had no oil, they'd be an insignificant backwater that no one cares about, instead of the center of a never-ending conflict that keeps drawing us in.

The New York Times advocates using exports of American natural gas to undermine Russia's economic stranglehold over Europe. We need to go much further than that.

Since oil and gas are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold the world over, our dependence on fossil fuels enables the bad actors of the world. Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq have power over us because they have oil.

If we want to undercut their influence, we need to reduce the importance of fossil fuels. Not simply by producing more oil and gas ourselves — because no matter how much we produce, we'll never be able to fuel the entire world. The best we can do is knock the price down a bit. And those bad actors will simply crank up production to make up for the loss. The price of oil will go down more. China and India will buy up the cheaper oil, build more infrastructure, make their people a little richer, start buying a lot more oil, and then the price goes up again. Then Russia starts using fracking technology and suddenly they have a lot more oil and gas to sell.

No, we need to develop other sources of renewable energy. Not just electricity production from solar and wind, but other alternatives such as fuel production plants that produce methane from bacteria or liquid fuels from algae. Energy production systems that we can build and license to other countries that will free them from dependence on the Middle East and Russia. These efforts have long been undermined by energy companies in the United States; that should stop right now.

As long as we have a fossil-fuel based economy, the oil barons of the world will have outsized influence over the rest of is. Oil is currently the ultimate power, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately.

Good (?) Words

“We fear for the safety of our families. It’s why neighborhood streets that were once filled with bicycles and skateboards and laughter in the air, now sit empty and silent … [For] the things we care about most, we feel profound loss. We’re sad, not because we fear something is going wrong, but because we know something already has gone wrong. That’s why more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition.

The greatest freedom is to have the ability to have all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want.”

(Wayne LaPierre, at the CPAC Conference, March 6, 2014)

My oh my…Appeal to Fear much?

I don't get it. I thought violence was going down. So why is the Gun Cult still afraid? And why are they lying? Neighborhood streets are not empty and silent and are, in fact, filled with bicycles and skateboards and laughter in the air. What a bunch of hysterical old ladies!

Responsible Gun Owner

Man Shoots Himself In The Head While Demonstrating Gun Safety.

Hmph. I wonder if he was one of those responsible gun owners who want to patrol our nation's schools.

Not around my fucking kids. Ever.

Getting the Other Guys to Fight Each Other

The wealthy are in a high dudgeon today. They don't feel like they get enough respect. They claim their detractors are inciting envy, waging class warfare and hating people for their hard work and success.

But this is simply false. It's not envy. It's anger against injustice. Anger that the same guys who almost drove this country into a depression are making out like bandits. Anger that bonehead CEOs get paid millions of dollars each year, screw up, get fired, get a golden parachute, and then go work for some other company and repeat the process.

They're angry that every time companies have problems, the answer is always to lay off some employees, cut the salaries of the rest and make the survivors work harder, longer and for less money. Then they gloat to the board about how much they increased productivity! And then the board — composed of other CEOs just like them — gives them more stock incentives and pay raises for doing such a bang-up job.

People don't dislike the Koch brothers because they're rich, but because they spend billions of dollars pretending that climate change isn't real, buying off regulators so they can fill the air and water with pollution and toxic chemicals, trying to buy national elections and even trying to stage coups in little towns across America.

But when you listen to conservative commentators and news outlets, you hear a constant din of sneering hatred for the poor. Check out the selection of clips in this Daily Show segment to see what I mean. And that's just Fox News. Talk radio is far worse.

Then there are the usurious payday lenders that are waging all-out war on the poor, charging 200% interest. In some states (Missouri, Oklahoma) they use the court system to harass borrowers, and even get them arrested. And you thought the bad old days of indentured servitude were over.

An article in the New York Times by a former hedge fund manager paints a stark picture of the mindset of the 1%.

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

It is self-evident that wealthy are the ones possessed by envy and greed. Like that hedge fund manager, their obsession with class and status motivates them and drives their every decision: where they work, what they do, what clothes they wear, what cars they buy, what houses they own, who their friends are.

There are exceptions, of course. Bill Gates doesn't seem to be driven by those base drives. Nor does Warren Buffett. Not every rich person is an envious scumbag. The ones who started real businesses and actually built something themselves are frequently more humble and down-to-earth. It's the hedge fund managers, investment bankers, traders and hired-gun CEOs who never really accomplished anything real on their own who seem to be most driven by envy and greed.

But you couldn't tell that by listening to Fox News and talk radio.

Why the constant drumbeat against the poor in the conservative media, by people who claim to be Christian? Why do fictitious nickel-and-dime food stamp fraud stories get such prominent play, while stories about corporate malfeasance involving billions of dollars are only barely mentioned in the financial segments on TV?

The reason conservative media outlets are doing this is because they're afraid of a revolution in the ranks. The people they count on for votes are much more like the poor people that they sneer at than the millionaire Fox News hosts doing the sneering.

They paint the poor as living luxurious lives — recycling completely unsubstantiated rumors about people using food stamps to buy sea food and lottery tickets and going to casinos — to generate anger and envy in their viewers. And "the poor," by implication in the conservative media, are always black and Hispanic.

Because if the message that the 1% are undeserving, greedy, envious douche bags whose special treatment should end starts to gain traction with Southern white Americans — many of whom are themselves poor and on food stamps and various forms of public assistance — the Republican party is toast.

That's why the full-court press against the poor. The best way to to keep two guys from ganging up on you is to get them to fight each other.

Kneejeking Obama

Here are two great pieces which more than adequately address the knee jerk criticism of the president.

Who’s the Villain Here?

Blaming Obama First

I don't get it. Half of their base is libertarian now and doesn't give two shits about Ukraine. Ah well, any excuse to bring up Benghazi...

Is The Ukraine Situation A Fight We Can't Win and Russian Can't Lose?

John A. Mazis posits this question in a recent column in the Strib and while I don't agree with everything he writes, he does have a voice that needs to be heard.

While President Vladimir Putin is not a democratic leader, he is elected (voting irregularities notwithstanding) and is still popular in Russia. His reasons for intervening in Crimea, and maybe elsewhere in Ukraine, are grounded in concrete security concerns as well as in history. His intervention aims at securing the safety of Ukraine’s sizable Russian minority and safeguarding his country’s dominance by keeping the West from encroaching on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.

This is the heart of the matter, really. Ukraine wants to be part of Europe, not Russia. Pro-Russian forces within the country and in Russia. This is more of a European issue than a United States issue. Of course, President Obama is being measured for his manliness right now by some (not all, thankfully) in the Republican Party in how he responds to this crisis. I think that the barometer should be placed firmly on how the EU, particularly Germany, responds. They are the ones on the hot seat, not the president.

Wall Street Journal: Affordable Care Act Effects Account for Most of Income, Spending Increases

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Affordable Care Act is already boosting household income and spending.

The Commerce Department reported Monday that consumer spending rose a better-than-expected 0.4% and personal incomes climbed 0.3% in January. The new health-care law accounted for a big chunk of the increase on both fronts. On the incomes side, the law’s expanded coverage boosted Medicaid benefits by an estimated $19.2 billion, according to Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The ACA also offered several refundable tax credits, including health insurance premium subsidies, which added up to $14.7 billion. Taken together, the Obamacare provisions are responsible for about three-quarters of January’s overall rise in Americans’ incomes. 

Wow. 

Two Close Shaves in Two Days

951 Gaspra

Today an asteroid passed by the earth closer than the moon, at a distance of about 217,000 miles. You read about them every once in a while, but these things zipping by every day! Tomorrow a rock between 7 and 30 yards across will come within 50,000 miles.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tracks these Near Earth Objects (NEOs) on a web page anyone can access. Over the next two months more than 80 asteroids will pass by Earth with an average of 40 lunar diameters (9 million miles) at closest approach. That's two or three a day.

Most of them aren't that close -- 9 million miles is a tenth of the distance between the earth and the sun. But that's a lot of junk floating around in space near us.

All of these are too small and dim to be seen with the naked eye. But that doesn't mean they aren't potentially dangerous: five of these 81 asteroids may be as much as a mile across. A strike by an asteroid of that size on earth could kill a lot of people and drastically change the weather.

These asteroids are still being discovered by the hundreds each year. As of March 3rd, JPL was tracking 10,665 NEOs. Even though these asteroids aren't currently on a collision course with earth, we need to keep an eye on them because their orbits can be perturbed by interactions with other asteroids and big planets like Jupiter, which has a tendency to yank asteroids out of the asteroid belt and send them careening across the solar system.

So, no Armageddon this week. But keep your eyes on the skies.

The Minimum Wage, Corporate Welfare and Kids

The Minnesota legislature is currently debating a bill that would increase the minimum wage to $9.50. Recently the president increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10.

The problem is that the current minimum wage isn't a living wage — especially if you have a family to support. Many minimum wage earners have to turn to the government safety net — public housing assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, home heating assistance, earned income tax credit, etc. — to be able to survive.

By not paying their employees enough to live on, companies are getting subsidies from the government to keep their costs down, and therefore increase their profits. This is corporate welfare, at the taxpayers' expense.

The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation; in adjusted dollars it pays far less than when it was first introduced. If the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it would be $18. The United States has one of the lowest minimum wages among developed economies: $7.25, compared to $9.25 in Japan, $9.57 in the UK, $9.76 in Canada, etc., up to $15.75 in Australia (in 2011, some of these have increased since then).

Opponents of an increase to the minimum wage are slowly yielding to logic, but they still want an exception: a lower minimum wage for workers under 18.

Yes, they want child slaves.

They justify this in a number of ways. "Kids don't have any responsibilities, they don't have to pay any rent, buy food or support children." Or, "Kids don't really need money. They just need a little pocket change to pay their cellphone bills and buy a t-shirt every once in a while." Or, "Kids are so unreliable, I have to train them to get to work on time, they're not worth that much."

The reality is that there are plenty of kids who do have real responsibilities. They have to help their parents — often single moms — pay the rent, buy their own and their siblings' food. But those aren't rich suburban white kids, so they fall beyond the ken of the people who oppose the minimum wage increases.

When I was in school I "lent" my dad money — the real estate market was a bear in the seventies — so I can attest to the fact that kids really do give their parents money, even white kids.

I don't mean to denigrate suburban white kids — they need money too. Have you looked at the cost of college these days? College students are frequently saddled with onerous amounts of debt after four years of tuition — colleges are really expensive these days. The more money they can save before they go to college, the less they'll have to borrow.

The silliest canard is "I have to train them to get to work on time." The average 16-year-old has been going to school for a decade, and has been getting up at 6:00 AM, turned in hundreds of homework assignments on deadline. Many have participated in hundreds of team practices and critical matches, where the success of their team hinged on their actions. They have been dealing with the whims and demands of parents, teachers and coaches their whole lives. It's preposterous that employers think they are teaching these kids anything they haven't been exposed to a thousand times before.

It's a fact: a lot of kids are unreliable. Just like a hell of a lot of adults.  They know what they're supposed to, and when they're supposed to do it. If they can't do the job on time or to your satisfaction, just fire them. Why should the good workers get paid less just because you have problems with the bad workers? Firing them may be the best lesson you can give them.

But if you can pay workers peanuts and invest nothing in them, you don't really care how bad they are, just as long as you can get a minimum amount of effort out of them. Yes, raising the minimum wage will result in some job losses: bad employees who aren't worth what they're being paid will be fired. You will get more work out of your good employees because they'll be more motivated. These are good things: unemployment is still too high, and there are plenty of people who need jobs and are willing to work hard.

Businesses that have good employees making a higher minimum wage will either have to cut their own profits or executive compensation packages (I'm looking at you, Walmart), or raise prices. Companies will have to charge prices for products that reflect the cost of producing them in an economy where everyone can afford to live on what they get paid, instead of depending on the government to step in and prop them up.

Some small number of businesses will fail, because their owners aren't competent to compete without screwing over their employees, or because they're selling products that no one is willing to buy for what it costs to make them — that is, they have a failed business model.

In either case, what's the problem? Those companies are just the corporate version of bad employees.

Obama A Go Go

I've heard a lot of President Obama rage of late. Hatred of this president become a cottage industry. It ranges from the usual conservative rag about how he is commie bent on being an totalitarian dictator to somewhat bizarre liberal mouthfoam regarding how is a magic puppet who dances for an evil cabal of wealthy corporatists who seek to depopulate the earth. Honestly, I have trouble telling who is left and who is right. They all sound the same when their blood gets up.

Yet, if you look at this actual record, you see what you see with most presidents. A list of impressive accomplishments, mistakes, and projects in the works.

In looking at the first link from Washington Monthly, I simply don't understand how anyone on the left can accuse him of being a puppet. He's pissed off a lot of people with these policies so I can see why some on the establishment Right don't like him. But the left? One would think they would be happy. The second link shows his mistakes as well his achievements. Again, not perfect but part of some grand conspiracy? Where is the evidence?

Do Rapists Only Pretend to Be Drunk?

When there are accusations of rape, alcohol is frequently involved. Because of that, many rape cases are never reported, many never go to trial, and many prosecutions fail because the cases devolve into he-said she-said arguments. Defense attorneys claim that both perpetrator and victim were drunk, everything was consensual, no one's at fault and there was no crime.

Even if they believe the woman's accusation, judgmental jurors may decide to punish the woman for going into bars and getting drunk in the first place, or for being a "tease." Women jurors may be the least likely to believe the victim.

But a study conducted by the universities of Toronto and Washington seems to counter some of that narrative:

Young women are often the targets of aggression when they're out in bars, but the problem isn't that guys are too drunk to know better.

Instead, men are preying on women who have had too much to drink.

That is, the perpetrators of sexual assaults may be cynically pretending they were drunk as an excuse for crimes they commit while in full possession of their faculties.

Men may perceive intoxicated women either as more amenable to advances or as easier targets who are less able to rebuff them because they don't have their wits about them, the researchers say.

I believe the intent may be even more sinister: if their victims press charges, they know that intoxicated women are less likely to be believed, and that people will think they deserved whatever happened to them.

I admit I have no personal experience with this; my personal anecdotes about alcohol involve my paternal uncles dying of various diseases caused by alcoholism, the disintegration of my sister-in-law's marriage from alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and my wife's cousin who went to prison after shooting his brother in a drunken fight. I don't drink and I don't frequent bars. They're too loud, too dark, and for most of my life they were smokey. Drunk people get into nasty arguments and brawls. And they kill people by the thousands on the highway.

All I have are the statistics from the National Institute of Health, which indicate that a quarter of all American women have been sexually assaulted, half of all sexual assaults involve alcohol, and 80% occur in social situations.

I am in no way blaming the victims here, but if you're a woman who wants to reduce your chance of being raped, the single best precaution you can take is to not drink in public or on dates. Not only do you keep your wits about you, it deprives rapists of their best excuse, and warns them immediately that you're not easy: they will just seek easier prey. That may mean you won't get as many dates, but you don't want to go out with those guys anyway.

There's a theory that farming was developed not to grow grain for food, but to produce beer, which allowed the development of civilization. If so, it's about the only good thing that came from booze.

Calling Out The Inflation Obsessives

Paul Krugman's recent piece on the inflation obsessives is absolutely correct. Worth of highlighting...

What accounts for inflation obsession? One answer is that obsessives failed to distinguish between underlying inflation and short-term fluctuations in the headline number, which are mainly driven by volatile energy and food prices. Gasoline prices, in particular, strongly influence inflation in any given year, and dire warnings are heard whenever prices rise at the pump; yet such blips say nothing at all about future inflation. 

They should know this but they seemingly don't.

They also failed to understand that printing money in a depressed economy isn’t inflationary. I could have told them that, and in fact I did. But maybe there was some excuse for not grasping this point in 2008 or early 2009. 

It's nothing really but willful ignorance.  It's fundamental economic fact.

The point, however, is that inflation obsession has persisted, year after year, even as events have refuted its supposed justifications. And this tells us that something more than bad analysis is at work. At a fundamental level, it’s political. This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are. While a few conservatives believe that the Fed should be doing more, not less, they have little if any real influence. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative. 

It's also emotional and rooted in profound insecurity. Why are they like this?

In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best. Back in the 1930s, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter inveighed against any effort to fight the depression with easy money; to do so, warned Schumpeter, would be to leave “the work of depressions undone.” Modern conservatives are generally less open about the harshness of their view, but it’s pretty much the same. 

The flip side of this antigovernment attitude is the conviction that any attempt to boost the economy, whether fiscal or monetary, must produce disastrous results — Zimbabwe, here we come! And this conviction is so strong that it persists no matter how wrong it has been, year after year. 

It's truly bizarre. The continue to be wrong...clearly...and yet they continue to assert they are right. I suppose that's the bubble for you:)

Krugman doesn't paint a very rosy picture of the Fed either. At least it's rooted in fact and not moutfoaming moonbattery. 

Are GOP Governors In Trouble?

Unless they go full on moonbat, the GOP has a good chance of making considerable gains in the Senate. But what about the Governor races? Take a look at some of the polls.

It looks like most Democratic challengers beat Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania. Wendy Davis is going to make a serious run in Texas, especially with Abbott running around with Ted Nugent (someone please give him more chances to open his mouth!). Kasich is going to have a tough fight in Ohio. Rick Scott is going to lose. Period. And Snyder is going to struggle in Michigan.

2010 was the year when the states went red in terms of state government. It looks like that's going to change in 2014.

Fannie Mae Pays Back With Interest, US Makes Profit

Fannie Mae has paid back the United States government all of the $116.1 billion dollars it borrowed after posting an eighth straight quarterly profit. Earnings were at $84 billion dollars, the highest ever for the firm. The total amount paid ended up being $121.1 billion dollars.

“Obviously, it’s good news for taxpayers that Fannie Mae is profitable,” Chief Executive Officer Timothy J. Mayopoulos said on a call with reporters.

“For the last five years, the employees of Fannie Mae have come to work with the goal of reaching this accomplishment for the taxpayers,” said Mayopoulos, 54. “I’m very proud of what our employees have achieved and I’m very, very happy for the taxpayers.”

I seem to recall shrieks of doom and rolling in boiling pits of sewage over Fannie Mae. Hmm....

Ukraine and Private Sector Foreign Policy

There are a lot of histrionics over Ukraine now, as Russia's invasion is complete. A couple of points to put the situation into perspective.

The Crimea, which is the focal point of Russian action, has long been a flashpoint. The Crimean War was fought by Russia on the pretext of saving Orthodox Christians. Famous for Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Crimean War pitted Russia against an alliance composed of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and Sardinia. The war ran from 1853 to 1856.

After the Russian Revolution and the bloody Civil War that followed in which White Army fighters were massacred after they surrendered, the Crimea was made an autonomous republic and part of Russia. Stalin deported the indigenous Crimean Tatars in 1944 to central Asia for supposedly collaborating with the Nazis, along with Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks.

In 1954 the Supreme Soviet transferred the Crimean Oblast (area) from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian SSR. This was  a symbolic gesture on the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming part of Russia. Ukraine is viewed the birthplace of Russia, Rurik's Kievan Rus'.

Today Russia's Black Sea fleet is based in Sevastopol. This warm-water port has long been coveted by Russia, with Peter the Great (Putin's idol) failing twice to seize it. In 2010 Russia extended its lease on the port with Ukraine until 2042.  The population of Crimea is dominated by Russians, with many retired military officers living there, and many holding dual passports. It's warmer there, and a lot of regular Russians also retire there; if Sochi is the Russian Miami, the Crimea is the Russian version of the Florida panhandle.

With its own autonomous parliament, Crimea is for all intents and purposes a separate Russian enclave. Probably all the Russians in Crimea are in favor Russian troops coming in. They have swallowed Putin's line that western Ukraine is a puppet of Europe and America.

Putin's justification for acting in Crimea is the protection of Russian Christians. This plays into the historical context leading back for centuries. If he were to cite an American analog to justify his actions, he would point to Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983, when Reagan claimed that American students were in danger.

The recently deposed president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, is an authoritarian tyrant who was stealing the country blind. In addition to his gigantic mansion near Kiev, where reporters have found incredible opulence and many incriminating documents, he was building a huge palace on the Black Sea. Yanukovich has been "privatizing" state assets and selling them to himself, his family and his cronies.

Some of the people who tossed Yanukovich out are louts just like him, only they're Ukranian rather than Russian, and they're only slightly less corrupt. The people who were protesting in the streets aren't happy to see those clowns come into power, but then anyone is better than Putin.

Putin could well be biting off more than he can chew. He already has a problem with Muslim terrorists. Now he's antagonizing Ukranians, many of whom live in Russia. Russia's anti-gay laws are just one symptom of his increasing intolerance and arrogance. He seems to think he's the second coming of Peter the Great.

Given these facts, castigating President Obama for "doing nothing" is short-sighted. There's nothing to do, militarily. Crimea has been a Russian colony for a century, part of Ukraine in name only. There's absolutely no justification for us to take any kind of military action, if Crimea is the end.

However, if Russia moves on the rest of Ukraine, that's a different story. At that point it will become extremely serious. To prevent that, the international community needs to show the Russians that they aren't going to sit idly by. We have to hit the Russians where it hurts: the wallet.

Western governments should immediately put economic sanctions on Russian accounts, and not let up until Russia leaves Crimea. At the same time we should also act as guarantors for the safety of Russians in Crimea and affirm Russia's right to the Sevastopol lease.

Why are economic sanctions any kind of threat?

Since Putin's ascension, corrupt oligarchs who have profited by sweet-heart oil and gas contracts and  "privatization" of state assets have been sending billions of dollars into western banks and offshore tax havens. They've bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real estate and businesses in London, Paris and New York. American and British bankers have been kowtowing to Russian tycoons for years; many New Yorkers have come to hate the rich Russians who have bought up apartments and condos and driven real estate prices into the stratosphere.

As much as two-thirds of the money leaving Russia is derived from criminal enterprises, by the Kremlin's own analysis. American hawks complain that economic sanctions are toothless against Iran and North Korea, but those countries have relatively weak ties to western economies. The Russian oligarchs have sunk all their ill-gotten gains in the west because they don't trust that Putin will let them keep it: if they look at him sideways he'll throw them into jail and take all their money -- which has already happened to a couple of tycoons who crossed him.

Western countries thus have the capability to destroy the oligarchs who prop up Putin. Instead of carping about what the president should do, American and British business communities should start applying some moral judgments about who they do business with.

Since two out of every three dollars coming out of Russia is from a criminal enterprise, American bankers with Russian customers have to know they're dealing with crooks. Now is the time for them to practice a little private sector foreign policy and and let regulatory agencies know of any suspicious activities they might have noticed.

If Putin's pals start hemorrhaging cash they may not be so sanguine about military adventures in Ukraine.

Nominee For Best Picture: Gravity

Gravity is still the best film of the year. The images and story of one woman's struggle for survival still haunt me months after seeing it. Hands down, the performance of Sandra Bullock's career and that's saying a lot considering her tun in The Blind Side. And I am just a giant geek for space stuff!

I hope it wins tonight!!

Nominee For Best Picture: Nebraska

I found many familiar people and scenes in Alexander Payne's Nebraska. For those of us who live in the upper midwest, the sight of men staring blankly at a TV set and eventually falling asleep is commonplace. Bruce Dern is so fucking good as Woody, a man convinced he has won a publisher's sweepstakes prize of one million dollars.

Nominee For Best Picture: Philomena

Did the Catholic Church engage in slavery in Ireland in the 1950s? Yes they did and the results were devastating to single women who were simply exploring their sexuality. Phiolmena is both charming and sad as Judi Dench plays Phiolmena Lee (based on a real woman) searching for her son who was given up for adoption by evil nuns. It's worth it just to see Steve Coogan thunder away at a nun in wheelchair.

Nominee For Best Picture: Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyer's Club should be the Tea Party pick of this year's nominees as it is most decidedly anti-government. But with good reason as the federal government's response to the AIDS epidemic in the early years (in particular, the FDA) was abominable. Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are brilliant.

Nominee For Best Picture: Wolf of Wall Street

I am the most open person about sex that I know and have no filter whatsoever between my mouth and brain when it comes to carnal matters. But I blushed several times when I saw Wolf of Wall Street. Leo's performance is exhausting to watch and after 3 hours, I felt as though I'd ran a marathon. He's my fave for Best Actor.

Nominee For Best Picture: American Hustle

I think David O. Russell has followed in the footsteps of Martin Scorsese and decided to make a career of telling right to the very core American stories. While American Hustle touches on the Abscam operation in the late 70s and early 80s, it's really a story about how desperate and fucked up we are as a nation. All of the actors in this film are simply outstanding!

Nominee For Best Picture: Her

Can you be in love with someone who doesn't have a body? Can you have sex with them? If we create an artificial intelligence that evolves, have we become God? These are the questions I asked myself after I saw Her. 

I don't have any clear answers as of yet.

 

Nominee For Best Picture: 12 Years A Slave

I found people's reaction to 12 Years A Slave to be both sad and amusing. They were shocked (!) at how awful slavery really was and couldn't believe that plantation owners were that harsh. The film certainly doesn't pull any punches but it's pretty much what I expected. How quickly people forget their own history...

Nominee For Best Picture: Captain Phillips

I enjoyed Captain Phillips a great deal and thought that Tom Hanks was great as he always is. The last 45 minutes of the film did an excellent job of capturing the tedium of hostage situations. But what was very wonderful about this film was how they showed the life of an average Somali near the coast and the near constant pressure they are under in their daily lives from barbarians. It was a very balanced film and not so pro-American hoo rah.

Looney Liberal Night

I love my really liberal friends but last night drove me absolutely bonkers. Hanging out in downtown Minneapolis for a birthday party for one of them, I was regaled with mouthfoaming about how all corporations are evil puppet masters who have hijacked Barack Obama's mind and soul, manipulating him into doing their nefarious bidding. Apparently, the Federal Reserve is behind it all.

Great.

After I took far more than I should, I posited that they don't sound any different than those moonbats on the far right and their evil government conspiracy theories. That made them very upset, offering several "Wow. Just wows" at my "naivete" at "how the world really works." One woman kept asking me over and over again if I knew just what the Federal Reserve really was. I replied that I did. When she asked for an explanation and I gave her one, she rolled her eyes and accused me of being "blind." Her boyfriend then described to me his theory that Barack Obama was taken aside after about a month in office and given his orders.

"Just look at the difference in his face after a few weeks in office. He went from young looking to ashen. Yeah, they told how it was."

"Who is they?" I asked.

"Ah, c'mon Mark, you know!!"

I still don't.

I tried to explain to them that I had been through all this in the 1990s, listening regularly to Art Bell and Coast to Coast. I still listen to it today but realize with the wisdom of my years that most of this stuff is just fictional garbage. More frustrating is the sad fact that people on the Right view all liberals as being this way. We are most decidedly not.

The whole night really kinda sucked because I was, once again, given a shining example of how when the left goes too far, they end up sounding like right wingers. Chem trails, the Bilderbergers, Monsanto, and a whole host of other moustache twirlers are all comin' to gin us!

Conceal and Carry A Go Go

The Christian Science Monitor has a piece up about conceal and carry that is most excellent. It starts off with this story.

Charles Ingram and Robert Webster were neighbors in Florida, but friends said the two older men had little love for each other and often quarreled. On a spring day in 2010, the two men, both gun enthusiasts who had state permits to carry concealed weapons, got into another argument across their lawns.

This time, police later said, both men pulled out their weapons. When Mr. Webster began approaching, Mr. Ingram raised his gun, as did Webster. Two shots rang out simultaneously, and both men fell. Webster died almost instantly, Ingram less than a month later. That "Deadwood"-style neighborhood gunfight is one of 555 examples compiled by advocates of gun control detailing how the mere presence of legal guns can turn mundane moments into tragedies.

I think we are going to see a lot more of this as conceal carry numbers have risen dramatically in the last 20 years. Back then, there were less than a million. Now?

In a country that witnesses bloody gun violence of all kinds on a daily basis, Ingram and Webster were part of a growing cohort, a sort of standing militia of what concealed-carry advocates say are between 8 million and 11 million citizens carrying concealed guns in public in the name of protecting themselves and those around them.

Those around them...yeah, I don't need their fucking protection. They can take their fear, anger, hatred, and paranoia and shove it up their collective asses.

Complicating this rise of the concealed gun in America, new research on the psychology of what is called "embodied cognition" suggests that simply the act of holding a gun shades one's perceptions, sometimes at odds with reality. To opponents of concealed carry, such research suggests that a toxic mix of politics and paranoia, added to 30 ounces of chromed steel tucked legally under a belt at Wal-Mart, ultimately equals a scarier and more dangerous society.

Sounds pretty familiar to me. I wonder if this article will bounce off the gun blogger's bubble or if there will be some actual reflection. Thankfully, they aren't all like this.

"There is a certain psychology at work with some who carry openly or concealed," writes columnist Stephen Lemons, in the Phoenix New Times newspaper. "I have seen it in the nativist camp, where these grizzled old white extremists try to provoke their enemies with guns on their hips, itching to blast someone." 

While that may be harsh, even some concealed-carry proponents see a strain of disturbing behavior among some carriers. "Acting like a deadly threat is imminent, walking around stores jerking your head around ... 'on a swivel,' planning your tactical movement from the gas pump to the cash register IS paranoid behavior, unless you live in Fallujah," writes one permit holder on a concealed-carry Internet forum. "Acting like every situation involves a critical threat is goofy.... Don't confuse life with movies."

Indeed.  

America Is Not In Decline

Dovetailing quite nicely with Kurtzman's Second American Century is this piece from Politico magazine by Sean Starrs. Our continual and often hyperbolic obsession with "America's decline" really can be most hysterical and irrational.

It all started with a wave of declinism in the 1980s, set off by the rise of Japan. Then the doom and gloom suddenly vanished amid the triumphalism of the 1990s, which transformed the United States into the world’s only superpower. After the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, many thought “empire” was a better moniker, with the United States apparently able to reshape world order virtually at will. And then just a few years later — poof! — declinism returned with a vengeance, with American power supposedly crashing like the latest Hollywood reality queen. China supplanted Japan as a hegemon on the rise, and the biggest global financial crisis since 1929 — emanating from the United States itself — was allegedly the final nail in the coffin of the American century.

This really is an issue that both parties are guilty of having their heads up their asses. Recently and in the same day, Bubba T and my ultra libertarian/rabid Randian brother in law both foamed at the mouth about how America is doomed. I realized how similar the far left and the far right sound when they are shrill:) But this is exactly what Starrs is talking about in this piece. For example, the metric by which we measure Chinese power is flawed.

China, for example, has been the world’s largest electronics exporter since 2004, and yet this does not at all mean that Chinese firms are world leaders in electronics. Even though China has a virtual monopoly on the export of iPhones, for instance, it is Apple that reaps the majority of profits from iPhone sales. More broadly, more than three-quarters of the top 200 exporting firms from China are actually foreign, not Chinese. This is totally different from the prior rise of Japan, propelled by Japanese firms producing in Japan and exporting abroad.

In the age of globalization, we can't measure a country's economic power in the same way.

What Did The World's Fair of 2014 Look Like 50 Years Ago?

Issac Asimov was pretty accurate when he predicted what the world would look like in 50 years. Check out one of his prognostications.

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)

Exactly what they look like now. The whole piece is amazing. Read it!

A Generation Lost To Fox News

Edwin Lyngar discusses how he lost his father to conservative rage via Fox News. Thrashing hysteria indeed. Some of the highlights.

I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.

Incalculable levels of conservative rage...I wonder if he has ever checked out any right wing blogs:)

I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it. What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.

I was the same way when I watched Fox News after 9-11. They thrive on anger and fear but it's not just them. Conservative media as a whole is patterned after the Fox model.

Truly, this is a sad piece. As Lyngar notes, his father's generation are "a wounded and thrashing legacy of white hegemony." This is why they act the way they do. They are afraid.

Good Words

Many Americans warmly smiled when former first lady Barbara Bush said “I love Bill Clinton.” The respect and affection between former presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush is genuine and very American. It hearkens back to an Americanism dating back to the early republic of Jefferson and Adams, which voters would greatly value today, when political opponents collaborated with mutual respect to advance national interests. 

The mudslinging attack by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) against Clinton is a textbook case of why Kamikaze Republicans lost national elections in 2006, 2008 and 2012. Voters are disgusted by this lowball brand of GOP politics, practiced by politicians who look mean, shallow and small against a former president who is widely liked, admired and respected. Ditto for Republicans addicted to what I recently called their “Benghazi disease,” which has left former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton towering above potential Republican opponents in polling for the 2016 presidential race. 

--Brent Budowsky, The Hill

In addition to voters being disgusted by these sorts of attacks, they also don't take a shine to the far right. The Republicans have a chance to make some real gains this year. Will they be able to resist the catnip of going full on moonbat as they have done in the past four elections?

The Second American Century

Joel Kurtzman, former Editor in Chief of the Harvard Business Review, recently posted a great summation of his new book, Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance. Looks like I am going to need this book ASAP.

The core of his argument is optimism. Despite the continual drudge of negative views of the future of our country,  we are indeed poised to continue our hegemonic dominance of the world. Kurtzman posits that because of the following four reasons, the future is looking very, very bright for you country.

American Creativity

Manufacturing Renaissance

An Energy Bonanza

Abundant Capital

He offers brief summations of each of these reasons in the linked post above. I'll be taking about this book as I read it, thus the new tag called "Second American Cenutry."

If I were a political party in this country (hint hint), I would jump on the Kurtzman bandwagon right now. Optimism always wins the day over anger, hatred, and fear.

For Arizona Republicans

A Tool-Using Fun-Loving Crow

There's been a long debate over what differentiates us from animals. Some say it's self-awareness, some say it's language, some say it's tool use, and so on.

Here's a hilarious example of a crow that demonstrates two very human qualities: tool use and having fun.


Why did the crow decide to do this? It seems unlikely someone would have gone to the effort of training it. Did it see some kids sledding down a hill and copy them? Or did it slide down a roof one day and find that it was fun but kind of rough on the tootsies, so it looked for something to sit on to prevent chafing?

Crows have long been known to be quite intelligent, able to count up to at least five, use tools and recognize human faces. Squirrels and scrub jays have a "theory of mind:" they know that if other animals see them hide food that they'll have to come back and move it. There have been parrots with large vocabularies, the ability to count and the intellectual and emotional capacity of young human children. There's a border collie that knows the names of hundreds of objects and can perform fairly complex commands with them. Dolphins exhibit self awareness. Apes like Koko and Kanzi can communicate with humans using sign language or computer lexigrams, and Koko even wanted pet kittens.

Pet owners can describe any number of seemingly intelligent behaviors that their charges exhibit; most of these are likely due to repetition and anthropomorphization, but the undeniable conclusion is that animals can form a strong two-way emotional bond with humans that extends beyond a trained Pavlovian response.

From these examples it's clear that some animals have expressed each of the abilities that comprise human cognition. Humans are the only creatures that assemble the whole package into what we call intelligence.

Intelligence is not an either-or proposition: it's a continuum with a huge variation among individuals of the same species.

Death Knell for Bitcoin?

Mt. Gox, the main bitcoin exchange, will apparently declare bankruptcy.  The exchange was robbed of 740,000 bitcoins, "worth" $350-400 million. The exchange rate for bitcoin is now about $580, down from over $1,200 a few months ago.

How did this happen? The main problem with digital currency is that it's just a string of bits that can be copied any number of times. Since you can potentially use the same bitcoin to buy stuff from 10, 1,000 or a million different people, you need some mechanism to prevent that:

HENN: In the conventional banking system - trusted third parties, like banks and credit card companies - keep ledgers to make sure I can't do that. But bitcoin solved this problem by creating a public record of every transaction. So if I buy something from you with a bitcoin, a record of that transaction is shared and recorded across the entire bitcoin network - everyone knows.

The theory is that public ledger make it impossible for me to spend a bitcoin twice. Because after I spent it, everyone would know that coin was actually yours. You know, one of the appeals of this system is that it eliminates those trusted third parties, those banks and credit card companies, and at least in theory could make moving money around the world much, much cheaper.

BLOCK: OK. But wait, Steve. If you're telling me that every transaction is supposed to be recorded in a publicly-shared ledger, right, how does it happen that thieves could apparently manage to steal, what you say, could be $350 or $400 million from this exchange, Mt. Gox?

HENN: Well, that's a great question. So sharing and recording all these transactions on the bitcoin network it turns out takes some time. So for this and a couple other reasons, the community developed kind of a short-cut: A temporary ID number that would be attached to each transaction and making tracking transactions in the short-term easier. But these temporary ID numbers can be faked.

Apparently people were approaching Mt. Gox with fake ID numbers, telling the exchange they hadn't received the bitcoins they were owed. And then Mt. Gox was relying on these numbers and giving the thieves real bitcoins. This may well have drained Mt. Gox's resources to the point were it's now insolvent.

The main draw of bitcoin is that there's no governing central authority keeping track. This is also the main drawback of bitcoin: there's no governing central authority keeping track, or protecting or insuring you. The people whose bitcoins were stolen have no recourse. There's no FDIC insurance. Unlike the Target credit card number theft, there's no Visa or Mastercard to shield consumers from losses. There's utterly no way to track down who ripped off Mt. Gox and their customers: anonymity is the entire point of bitcoin.

The impetus for using bitcoin for legal transactions is a little hazy. When you buy something on the Internet you still need it sent to your house. That's hardly anonymous: the seller has to keep computerized records of your address, so your anonymity is only protected by how careful and competent your supplier is. Even if you're buying something digital, like porn, it still has to come to you over the Internet, which after the NSA spying scandal turns out to be not very anonymous.

If you're concerned about hiding transactions from your spouse (like a surprise birthday gift, or that porn bill), you can often pay through a PayPal or similar account, which is a lot easier to keep secret than a joint credit card.

Anything you buy in person can be bought with cash, which is even more anonymous than bitcoin because it doesn't require any computers or connection to the Internet. Using it won't leave any digital footprints that lead the NSA back to your door, and your spouse won't find it in the browser history that you forgot to clear.

At this point, bitcoin is the domain of drug dealers, gun runners, money launderers and crooks. But there's another den of thieves itching to get in on the action.

Barry Silbert, of SecondMarket, is in discussions with several banks to create an exchange to trade bitcoins. Only large institutions would be allowed to join. Some of these same institutions advised their clients to invest in bogus CDOs while betting against those same financial instruments; they gambled away trillions of dollars on bad real estate deals and trashed the world economy. What could possibly go wrong when they start advising their clients to invest in the totally unregulated market of bitcoin futures?

Maybe someday there will be a reliable digital currency that has the virtues of bitcoin but none of the problems. But today's digital currencies are little different from the gold players create in World of Warcraft -- which when I checked today had an exchange rate of $12.80 for 10,000 gold. Not quite bitcoin territory, but what can you expect for killing a bunch of orcs? And the crazy thing is that bitcoins are created in essentially the same way: just crunching numbers on a computer.

The bitcoin market is like the Wild West, only there are no Earp brothers or Texas Rangers. It's just a bunch of crooks and their libertarian tech geek enablers. Since a huge percentage of Mt. Gox's customers are criminals dealing in drugs and money laundering, it's no surprise they were robbed blind.

When you sleep with dogs you get fleas.

How To Check Out Chicks in Minnesota

Best Office Guy EVER!!

If only more guys were like David Thorne...

A Massive Eugenics Program?

I was reading this conversation on the New York Times about why theists believe in gods. The first order answer is simple: the vast majority of people believe in gods because they were brought up to do so.

But why, when there's utterly no physical evidence whatsoever that gods act in the real world, are we so easily convinced of the existence of a super Santa who keeps track of who's naughty and who's nice? The answer might be found in evolutionary biology.

For literally thousands of years of humanity has been conducting one pogrom after another against people who don't believe in god. The Egyptians deified pharaohs as living gods and forced their subjects to worship them. The Romans required citizens to pay obeisance to their deities. Christians hounded pagans across Europe to convert, and killed those would not. Muslims scoured Asia, Europe and North Africa and forced infidels to convert or die.

American settlers killed countless Indians through disease and war. The remaining few had their religion, culture, and their very names stripped away when the government sent their children away to Christian boarding schools.

Many conservative Christians deny the existence of evolution. But they know from personal experience that you can breed desirable traits into domesticated animals, and eliminate the undesirable traits.

For millennia most of the world has been conducting an intensive selective breeding program to cull non-believers from their ranks. How long would it take this kind of selection to result in physical changes in the brain that predispose people to believe in the existence of supernatural beings? Some researchers believe there is a "god spot" in the brain; has that structure in the brain been bred to be more prominent over thousands of years by believers?

When you factor in the commandments of so many religions, including Catholicism and Mormonism, to have large families, the admonitions of Catholicism to eschew birth control, and Islam encouraging men to have multiple wives, it's clear that they're trying to inflate their numbers on the supply side as well.

So you gotta wonder: is religion a massive eugenics experiment?

Your Own Spaceship

Have you ever wanted to cruise the solar system, see the rings of Saturn, ride the moons of Jupiter? There's a freeware application for Windows called Celestia that lets you do that, virtually. (It's available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/, and addons are available at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/).  

Saturn and Mimas

Celestia lets you position yourself almost anywhere in the universe and shows you what you would see. You can put yourself in orbit around Saturn, following its moon Mimas, or Mars, or Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri, or Cygnus X1, one of the first black holes astronomers discovered.

Celestia is basically a planetarium application that frees you from the constraints of the terracentric viewpoint most such programs impose. You can position yourself anywhere and easily change the angle you're looking from, zooming in and out. You can reverse time, speed it up, slow it down, watching the moon go through its phases as it orbits the earth, or the Galilean moons zip around Jupiter like moths around a flame. You can turn on your virtual spacecraft's thrusters and zoom around the solar system at the speed of light. Celestia also displays man-made objects, such as the International Space Station. It will also find the dates of solar and lunar eclipses and display the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface so that you can tell where the eclipse can be seen from.

Though Celestia feels like a game, it's rooted in science. It has been used by NASA and the European Space Agency, and several universities and schools to teach astronomy. Its graphics aren't on par with what professional artists can produce with their high-powered graphics workstations, but hey, it's free!

This photo album shows images of Earth, Mars, Jupiter, its moon IO, and the Discovery spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey (but no monolith, alas), the Atlantis space shuttle, the International Space Station, Saturn and its moon Mimas, and the galaxy M83.

But the coolest part about Celestia is that you can add your own images and objects, and a lot of people have done exactly that. Celestia Motherlode is a repository of addons that people around the world have created. Enthusiasts have created addons depicting stars, planets and spacecraft from real life and scientific conjecture, as well as numerous fictional sources such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, Niven's Known Space, Star Wars, etc.

The most detailed fictional creations are from the Orion's Arm Universe Project, a worldbuilding project where hundreds of people around the world have collaborated to create a future history in which mankind has spread out across the galaxy.

To test customization out myself, I made my own texture for the moon, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tick. A texture is just computerspeak for a flat JPEG image that is wrapped around 3D objects by graphics programs. Here's the resulting video:


If you want to create your own addons for Celestia there's quite a learning curve, but there are a lot of resources on the Internet that give all the details. You don't really have to know orbital mechanics to make your own creations; you just have to be able to cut and paste text files. To make your own alternate surface textures for planets and moons you'll need a graphics program (The Gimp is a good freeware one, despite the name). To make your own 3D objects, you'll need a 3D editing program (Blender is an amazingly sophisticated freeware application). Be warned: making 3D objects is big job if you don't already know how to do it.

For a long time it seemed that the dream of mankind going into space was dead. But the reach for space is finally getting rolling again: countries like China, India, Japan are joining the United States, Russia and Europe with serious space programs that are conducting real science. Companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are pioneering private launch services. Entertainment ventures like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and the Mars One project (the one-way trip to Mars planned for the 2020s) may never come to fruition, but the dream is alive and people are taking space very seriously.

And Celestia will give you a little preview of what we'll see out there.

Keynes and Hayek A Go Go

A recent discussion in comments reminded me of this piece from a while back that I never posted. There were a couple of good points in it.

The problem with the Hayekian position is that it’s relentlessly negative: spending doesn’t work, stimulus doesn’t work, all we can do is suffer a nasty bout of deflation and trust in the invisible hand to eventually get us back to work again. 

Right. Then, there was this highly familiar point...

For the Hayekians, the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth was particularly revealing: she would take a question about rescuing the financial system and duck it by talking about how rescuing the auto industry was a bad idea. Or she would ridicule high-speed rail by saying that no one wants to take the train from New York to L.A.—a route that precisely no one is proposing. In other words, the Hayekians were more comfortable with straw men than with messy reality. 

Pretty much sums up every discussion I've every had with these sorts of folks. 

But I remembered that the main reason why I didn't is that is seemed far too bipolar. The answer isn't always simply "Keynes" or "Hayek." In fact, in the current age of globalization, neither fully apply. I've always been one to take a more constructivist approach to any issue of the day. New ideas that are people driven, not "school of thought" driven. For example, both liberalism and realism completely failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. They didn't figure that Gorbachev would simply give up and call it a day. Is there an economist out there or world leader who will finally leave behind both Keynsian economics as well as the theories of Friedrich Hayek? In my view, it's long overdue. How does one stimulate aggregate demand when we have a world economy? This implies that all of the world's governments would have to act in concert to achieve this end and, given the reality of the international stage and conflicting interests, this hardly seems likely.

And there are far too many misconceptions about John Maynard Keynes that have sadly taken root. The thing that people forget about Keynes is that only called for increased government spending in times of contraction. When economies were doing well, he did call for austerity and reduced spending. The anti-spending anaphylactics tend to forget that. These same people also forget that Ronald Reagan was a Keynsian by both cutting taxes (which increases aggregate demand) and increasing spending. "I'm not worried about the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself," he once quipped. Richard Nixon famously said, "We are all Keynsians now" and, to a certain extent, he was right.

My biggest beef with Hayekians is that can't point to a real world example of how his theories work in practice. Like the libertarian fantasists, where was the utopia of which they dream? How would it work today, given globalization? Certainly, they can point to austerity measures taken during boom times but that's honestly Keynes, not Hayek. The reality is Hayekians just don't like the government. Their emotions about it have clouded their judgment and inhibited them from seeing that different circumstances dictate different paths of solutions.

Sometimes you can't plug a square peg into a round hole. Shocking, I know!

Snow Swimming

Yes, the snow is that deep in Duluth. It's about the same here in Minneapolis.

Spokesman For Science

Great piece in the Times about how Alan Alda is working to improve the way scientists communicate with us ordinary folk. Why?

That scientists often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity. They sometimes spray information at us without making that contact that I think is crucial. If a scientist doesn’t have someone next to them, drawing them out, they can easily go into lecture mode. There can be a lot of insider’s jargon. If they can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances. They won’t fund science. How are scientists going to get money from policy makers, if our leaders and legislators can’t understand what they do? I heard from one member of Congress that at a meeting with scientists, the members were passing notes to one another: “Do you know what this guy is saying?” “No, do you?” 

Agreed and exactly why we have the problem we do with climate change.

Of course, that's why I think more scientists should run for Congress! 

Subdividing the Denial Camp

The video Mark posted divides the American people into six camps on climate change. One of the camps, however, needs to be broken up into two distinct subgroups: those who deny climate change but know it is happening and want it to happen, and the suckers who believe them.

The first subgroup is lying about it because they stand to rake in trillions of dollars in oil and gas revenues. This group includes oil company executives like the Koch brothers, people like Sarah Palin and anyone in Congress who gets money from oil companies.

The Koch brothers aren't stupid. They understand and appreciate science (David Koch is a major funder of the PBS program Nova), including climate science. They know that the ice is retreating from the arctic more and more each year. They know because arctic warming is melting the permafrost under their roads, oil rigs and pipelines, raising havoc with the foundations of their drilling operations.

But in the long run, they see global warming as a good thing: the warmer Alaska and Canada get, the easier it will be to extract the oil from the Arctic. Right now extracting oil up there a real bitch: they only have a couple of months a year for exploration because the seas get so rough and the weather gets so bad. But they know that the deposits elsewhere in the world will quickly run dry, what with countries like China and India increasing demand, and they want to get in on the ground floor in the Arctic regions. Gotta beat the Russians!

And an ice-free Northwest Passage would be great for commerce: it'll be so much easier to send Canadian oil to China!

Sarah Palin lives in Alaska, so she should know as well as anyone that Alaska is getting a lot warmer fast. But living in such a cold place is not a lot of fun, despite what she says on her TV shows, so she'd really prefer it 20 degrees warmer.

Other mining concerns stand to benefit hugely if the ice sheet on Greenland melts: there are massive deposits of minerals, including aluminum and uranium, in Greenland, and potentially a great deal of oil. The people of Greenland, all 50,000 of them, would like to get money from that mining, be able to grow their own food, and be independent of Denmark.

How can these guys reconcile the fact that they know they're trashing the climate, hurting billions of people in the next several decades? First and foremost, they just don't care. This is the typical reaction you get from a lot of people — but especially conservatives — when you point out terrible injustice or serious consequences of what they're doing.

Tell them that voter ID will prevent minorities, the elderly and students from voting: they don't care. Tell them that polar bears will go extinct: they don't care. Tell them that Kiribati will be drowned: they don't care. Tell them that Florida will lose all those beaches: they don't care. Tell them that higher sea levels will cause storm surges on the Atlantic coast to drastically increase storm damage: they don't care. Tell them that Manhattan will be inundated: they don't care, and would love it if all of New York disappeared.

They may say they don't believe that the ill effects you speak of are happening, and they may rationalize it away by saying "we need to increase confidence in the integrity of the voting process," or "species of animals go extinct all the time: just look at the dinosaurs,"  but the reality is that they just don't care, or they want it to happen.

They should care in the case of global warming, because it will hurt this country in the pocketbook with increased insurance rates, decreased crop yields, higher food prices, more tropical diseases, more powerful storms, bigger defense budgets trying to deal with the warfare that droughts, floods and famines in other countries will produce.

But climate deniers are like smokers. "Yeah, I know smoking will kill me eventually. But since I like smoking and I don't want to make the effort to quit, I'll just take my chances. Maybe I'll get hit by a bus before lung cancer kills me. So why bother to quit smoking, or get daily exercise, or eat right?"

Replace "smoking " with "climate change," "lung cancer" with "drought, famine, floods, and war" and "quitting, exercise and eating right" with "developing renewable energy sources" and you have encapsulated the mindset of the climate change deniers.

Another coping mechanism is rationalizing that we'll just adapt. "People can just move. We'll find a way to stop if it does happen. Human ingenuity trumps all." They just don't seem to get that using ingenuity sooner rather than later would save a whole lot of trouble, money and lives.

Perhaps the most foolish rationalization possible is that "God won't let it happen. He promised." Yeah, and every football team that huddles in prayer before the big game wins, right?

Then there are the "we can't be the first" and "it's not all our fault" rationalizations. This argument goes: since China is emitting the most CO2 now, we don't have to do anything -- even though in 2009 we burned four times more fossil fuel per capita than China.

Then there's uncertainty: some climate change deniers like the Koch brothers are well-versed in science. They know that climate change predictions are difficult, and any number of things could cause the planet to cool if they happened. There is natural variation in climate, and maybe we'll luck out and it'll kick when we need it most. If a giant volcano blows up, the planet would be cooled down. If a sizable asteroid hit the planet, we'd have a nuclear winter. If solar output mysteriously drops, the temperature could plummet.

But doing nothing because such unpredictable -- and terribly destructive -- things might happen is the worst kind of wishful thinking. It's like speeding toward an intersection and closing your eyes when the light turns yellow.

The last refuge of these scoundrels is not patriotism, but money. "Even if everything you say is true, it'll cost too much to do anything about climate change." This is essentially what the few reputable climate scientists that the Koch brothers' claim as their own have said. They admit it's happening, but there's just too much political and economic inertia to do anything about it. "We'll just have to make the best of it."

The climate change deniers of today are like the smokers of the Sixties. They know what they're doing is bad, but can't kick the habit. But as the scientific evidence that smoking caused disease kept piling up, and more people got tired of breathing second-hand smoke, smoking started to be banned most everywhere: planes, restaurants, bars, even outside public buildings.

The problem is that climate change deniers can't smoke in the privacy of their own homes: their CO2 winds up in the same atmosphere that shapes the climate that we all live in.

The Battle of Wisconsin

Three years ago, Wisconsin become Ground Zero for the battle over public sector unions. There were two sides drawn with Scott Walker and austerity supporters on one and the unions on the other. The former prevailed and the public sector unions were not allowed, by law, to bargain collectively (except for the police and fire department).

The results from this change in policy are muddy at best. Scott Walker promised 250,000 jobs as a result. The state has only netted just over 50,000. Of course, that's a politician's promise so a boulder of salt should taken with it. Wisconsin's unemployment rate sits at 6.5 percent which is about the national average. The state government has a surplus (yippee!) but that's not really saying much. As I have mentioned previously, Wisconsin illustrates how austerity policies do not work.

That being said, this recent article in the Times shows how there are many sides to this story. For instance,

Ted Neitzke, school superintendent in West Bend, a city of 31,000 people north of Milwaukee, said that before Act 10 his budget-squeezed district had to cut course offerings and increase class sizes. Now, the district has raised the retirement age for teachers and revamped its health plan, saving $250,000 a year. “We couldn’t negotiate or maneuver around that when there was bargaining,” Mr. Neitzke said. “We’ve been able to shift money out of the health plan back into the classroom. We’ve increased programming.” 

A good thing for students but not so great for the teachers. Now, they have to contribute more out of pocket and, as a result, they don't have as much money to spend in the economy. The rest of the piece looks at examples of all the different angles and fallout from Act 10. It's very much worth a slow read because what is seen on Fox or MSNBC is very simplistic.

Here's something else from the article I found interesting.

James R. Scott, a Walker appointee who is chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, which administers the law regarding public-employee unions, said that “as a result of Act 10, the advantages that labor held have been diminished.” He added: “It’s fair to say that employers have the upper hand now.” 

But the employers are the government. Doesn't that add power to "Big" Government? What power does the individual now have if they are a public employee?

Global Warming's Six Americas

The President's Approval Ratings Rise

Rasmussen has the president at 50 or above for the last four days. Disapproval is dropping as well. I wonder why?

Pizza That Lasts Years

It's stories like this that give me hope.

MILITARY NEARS HOLY GRAIL: PIZZA THAT LASTS YEARS

Imagine it....a pizza that takes this long to go bad...so wonderful!

Another Reason To Hate MSNBC

 Really?

U.S. Economic Activity, Split in Half and Mapped

Check this out...

The orange represents 50 percent of the economic activity of the entire country whereas the blue represents the other half. Looks like my hometown is pulling its weight quite well. Of course, it's hard to go wrong with 3M, General Mills, Target, Best Buy, Cargill and UHC in one spot, just to name a few.

Hmm...I see a whole lot of blue in red state areas. What a bunch of freeloaders...must be the fault of Obama and the federal government!;)

Arizona Gaydar

Arizona passed legislation Thursday that would allow businesses the right to refuse service that violates their religious beliefs. The main intent of the law is to prevent the gays from gaying up "Christian" businesses with their fag germs. I'm wondering if these same businesses can refuse service to anyone now based on religious beliefs. In addition, how can they tell if someone is gay? Smell? Looks?

It will be interesting to see if Jan Brewer signs the bill. I get that Arizona has a lot of frightened old people that are becoming more irrational by the minute but this law seems preposterous. I think the most detrimental effect will be on the economy of Arizona. Why are gay people's money less green than straight people's money?