A Real Life Episode of "Fargo"

Fargo is a 1996 movie by the Coen brothers about a series of senseless murders in northern Minnesota. Fargo also a series running on the FX cable channel about a different series of senseless murders in northern Minnesota.

A real life episode of Fargo just played out in Little Falls, 30 miles south of Brainerd, where the events of both Fargos took place.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2012, Byron Smith, a former State department security specialist, shot and killed two teenagers who had broken into his home (from the Star Tribune):

After repeated break-ins to his home in the months leading up to that day, Smith had prepared his home with recording devices and himself with guns, he later told authorities. He was in his favorite basement reading chair with a paperback that day, he said, when he heard someone rattle the door handles to his house and saw a shadow through a picture window.

The Morrison County jury heard glass break, movement, then two shots as Brady groaned “Oh.” Smith responded with another gunshot, saying, “you’re dead.”

Almost immediately after Brady was shot, rustling of the tarp was heard, then a dragging sound, then heavy breathing. Smith had moved Brady’s body to a workshop in his basement to keep blood from staining the basement carpet, he later told authorities.

The audio continued with the sound of a gun reloading, then more deep breaths and the sound of footsteps — first getting fainter and then becoming louder again. A few minutes later, in a quiet, low voice, a female mumbled “Nick.”

Soon, there was another booming gunshot and the sound of Kifer falling down the stairs. Smith quickly said, “Oh, sorry about that.”

“Oh, my god!,” Kifer said, and screamed.

“You’re dying,” Smith responded amid more gunshots. “Bitch.”

After more heavy breathing and a dragging sound, Smith said “bitch” once more. Jurors heard more movement, and the crack of a gun.

Yesterday the 65-year-old Smith was found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison. It took the jury only three hours to find him guilty.

How is this case different from the Trayvon Martin murder? Well, it was tried in Minnesota, so the murderer didn't have NRA-authored laws to hide behind. The victims were popular white kids. And Smith had carefully recorded the murders, apparently thinking it would exonerate him.

In his defense, Smith said he was deathly afraid of another break-in, because burglars had previously stolen his shotgun (and why wasn't it locked in a gun safe to prevent that?). Byron Smith was a trained security expert. Guarding facilities had been his job. It's just not credible that this kind of man was shaking in his boots, a-feared for his life. He thought these kids were vermin and he wanted their blood.

The victims were tweaked-out idiots who were so stupid they didn't even think to run away when they heard gunshots in house they're breaking into. They were addicted to prescription meds and committed several burglaries to get them (nice job, big pharma!).

But the penalty for B&E isn't death. There are hundred ways Smith could have dealt with the break-in that didn't involve killing these two nitwits. His murder plot was extremely risky. He exposed himself to a great deal of danger. Why didn't he lock the basement door and call the police when he heard the breaking glass? What if his pistol had jammed and the kids actually did have the stolen shotgun? Smith either knew they were no threat or was so bent on retribution that he didn't care.

But after shooting two teenagers with disabling wounds, Smith administered kill shots to both of them. He had planned to do this the entire time, even putting out a tarp on his basement floor to collect the blood.

Just as creepy and cold-blooded as Billy Bob Thornton's character on Fargo.

What's incredible is how many people think these murders were justified. The last time I looked, a non-scientific poll on the Star Tribune website had 41% of respondents disagreeing with the jury's verdict. Are they not familiar with exactly how blood-thirsty and deranged Smith's actions were, or do they really think you can kill people like that?

Just the other day, a Montana man set a trap with a purse as "bait" in a garage, and killed a 17-year-old exchange student from Germany, being careful to aim high with his shotgun to avoid hitting his car. Creepy...

You don't automatically lose all your rights just because you're on someone else's property, invited or not. If Smith had instead raped Haile after wounding her instead of capping her in her head, how many people would think it was justified? Exactly nobody. Why do so many people blithely accept killing her, people who almost certainly classify themselves as "pro-life?"

This is the dark place that the gun-mad NRA mindset leads to. Their constant state of paranoia turns every shadow on the street and every thump in the night into a threat that must be met with deadly force, not just to stop them, but to hunt them down and kill them like vermin.

Bill Maher on Racism

Hey, Look! Sarah Palin Needs Some Attention

At the recent NRA gathering, Sarah Palin said "Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists." So all conservatives need to thump their chests and holler, "Hoo-Ra!" and all liberals need to get super outraged and pay a lot of attention to her.

Ready?

Go!

Oh, and freedom died too...

So Much For The Free Market

I thought conservatives were all about the free market. I guess they aren't. 

Armatix said it had an agreement with the Oak Tree Gun Club, a large gun range and retailer about 20 minutes north of Los Angeles, to sell its iP1 pistol, which can be fired only after the owner enters a five-digit PIN into a watch that transmits a signal to the gun. The gun, which retails for about $1,800, disables itself if it is more than 10 inches from the watch. But once Oak Tree’s owner, James Mitchell, went public in The Washington Post saying the iP1 “could revolutionize the gun industry,” Second Amendment activists went into overdrive, flooding social media with threats to boycott the club. They took to Calguns.net, a forum for gun owners, and called for vigilante-style investigations of Ms. Padilla and Armatix.

Ms. Padilla is also receiving threats of violence as well. They simply can't allow technology like this to be available for sale to the general public. Imagine what would happen...gun SAFETY and RESPONSIBILITY. Gadzooks!

So much for allowing the free market to work itself out...

So Much For Government Force

It really sucks that the Cliven Bundy kerfuffle has now all become about race. What it should be about is a deadbeat receiving a government handout who thinks, as a communist would ironically, that land belongs to everyone. I thought conservatives were all about property rights...

But what really perplexes me about all of this is how the government, which I have been told many, many times will come with guns and force citizens to pay taxes if they haven not, has given up for the time being. Obviously, they don't want another Waco and with all the attention on Bundy, as well as the militia guys frothing at the mouth to fire their guns, any sort of forceful action would still look bad even given how much of an asshole Bundy has shown himself to be.

I guess the government really isn't in the "force" business after all and apparently is a lot weaker than we think.

A Real Johnnycab?

Remember the movie Total Recall, when Arnold Schwarzenegger takes a ride in a Johnnycab?

That ride didn't turn out so well, but Eric Jaffe's ride in one of Google self-driving cars was a lot better.

Google has been testing its self-driving cars on California freeways for years. Now they're moving to city streets, which are orders of magnitude more complicated. That's because so many things share regular streets: bicycles, pedestrians, jaywalkers, delivery trucks backing up, garbage trucks stopping suddenly, buses constantly weaving in and out of traffic, right-turn-on-red, cats, dogs, walk signals, crossing guards, potholes, patches of ice, red-light runners and left-turn-lane jumpers -- it's crazy out there.

Jaffe's story is highly complimentary to Google's system, even though the first rule of self-driving cars is to not compliment the self-driving car. However, the test driver had to intervene twice during the ride: once when some traffic cones appeared on the road and the computer stupidly couldn't figure out what to do, and again when a truck appeared out of nowhere and the computer didn't appear to respond to the impending collision fast enough (though the Google team said later that the machine would have stopped in plenty of time). Jaffe was favorably impressed. It is an impressive system.

But I'm much more skeptical about the practicality. One of the most difficult problems in artificial intelligence has been computer vision. Though the software is getting better at recognizing its surroundings, Google's system is completely dependent on extremely intricate maps and GPS. (Though, truth be told, a lot of people are now equally helpless without their GPSs.)

But what happens when conditions on the road don't match the map (say, because of road construction or an accident), or when the computer can't get a GPS signal? The machine is highly dependent on a laser array on the car's roof to make a 3D map of its surroundings. Does that laser system work in rain, in fog, or snow? Can the machine see brake lights through the windows of the car ahead and know that means traffic is stopping?

The article mentions that they're working on getting the software to recognize people standing behind poles. Working with incomplete data is something that humans are good at; if I see the bottom of the rim of a bicycle tire under a truck I know there's a biker up ahead. Can Google's hardware recognize those kinds of details, and can their programmers code that kind of knowledge into the software? On the other hand, if the car perceives everything as a potentially deadly situation, it will never go anywhere.

One of the arguments for self-driving cars is that they should be better at obeying traffic laws: they should obey the speed limit and yield the right of way (as long as they can reliably detect other cars). The software shouldn't get impatient and pull into a lane of fast-moving traffic from a parking spot.

But the technical aspects are probably the least of Google's problems in making self-driving cars a reality. I predict that legal and liability issues will be the biggest stumbling block. If a self-driving car runs down a child chasing a ball into the street, whose fault is it?

One could argue that a cautious driver, seeing children playing next to a street, would slow down  to 5 mph and shift out of the right-most lane, and on a narrow street perhaps even move into the oncoming traffic lane to ensure that there would be enough time to avoid any darting children.

What if Google's algorithm doesn't include that specific scenario? Were the programmers negligent? Could the car company and Google be sued for the child's death, and could the programmers be held criminally and financially liable for this oversight? And if the self-driving car was programmed perfectly to follow all the laws and take all the precautions, would there be any humans who would want to be chauffeurred by such a slow and timid vehicle?

Jaffe says that 90% of car accidents are due to human error. Self-driving cars, the argument goes, will eliminate human error and make the roads much safer. Except that's completely false. Humans will write the software and build the hardware that control the car. Yes, those humans will take a lot of time and do a lot of testing to make that software and hardware as reliable as possible. But, as we know from all the bugs we find in the software in our computers and mobile phones and cars and microwave ovens, that human-designed software and hardware is far from perfect. Will that software be open-source, available for everyone to examine?

To make it worse, these cars will almost certainly have black boxes that will record every piece of data recording during the trip, allowing the entire country to second-guess every traffic accident these cars are involved with. Let's say a baseball rolled out from between two parked cars. Any decent driver would immediately slam on the breaks, assuming a child would be chasing it. Will Google's software do the same? If it doesn't, and a child is run down by a car that doesn't know what a baseball is, what kind of liability will Google and the car company have?

Of course, people make these kinds of driving errors and kill themselves and others all the time (at a rate of 33,000 each year). At this point the car companies (and Google) can just shrug and say, "human error."

In fact, the biggest legal protection that car manufacturers have is that 90% human error rate: they can almost always blame accidents on the driver. But when we have self-driving cars, these companies will be legally exposed to everything that happens on the road.

Airplanes have autopilot systems, but they're typically used in very controlled circumstances, in clear skies when the aircraft is at cruising altitude. Autopilots can land and take off, but typically human pilots are in control at critical junctures. But even in those cases, airports are tightly run by air traffic controllers. Planes have several pairs of eyes watching them at all times. Google is proposing that no one will be watching any of the cars on the road, except some hardware and software.

Admittedly, driving on a freeway is a lot like flying an aircraft on autopilot in open skies. I can see how Google's system could be made to work on a sunny freeway with light traffic. City streets, however, are completely different. At any point something totally random can happen. Such streets are far more unpredictable than an airport runway, and there's no air traffic controller monitoring all the comings and goings.

I can see technically how Google's system could be made to work. I would even grant that it could be made to work if only cars were on the street, because most car-on-car collisions at city-street speeds are very survivable with the seat belts and air bags found in today's cars. It would be even safer if the vehicles were operated in their own zones, say on monorail tracks suspended above the streets.

But when you have a mix of cars, pedestrians, children, bicycles, buses, and massive trucks on surface streets, I find it hard to believe that any company's lawyers would allow them to relinquish the "human error" they can now blame for almost all car accidents. Everything will be the company's fault, even accidents caused by weather, because the car should have "known" it was going too fast for the conditions.

I'm not sure if Google's programmers realize it, but people are going to want the software to incorporate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. They're going to expect these robot cars to make moral and ethical judgments about what to do in an emergency. Suppose your car is tooling down the road, and an old man steps right in front of your car. There's barely enough time to swerve, but on the right is a sidewalk restaurant packed with bearded hipsters drinking lattes, and on the left is a school bus filled with adorable children into which you would run into head-on.

How will the car decide who will live and who will die? Run down the geezer because he has the fewest years left (and based on his ratty clothing is least likely to have a good lawyer)? Front-end the bus, assuming that its greater mass will protect the children and the car's airbag will miraculously save you? Or plow through the restaurant, because, well, bearded hipsters drinking lattes.

I'm afraid Google's vision of Johnnycabs ferrying us around the city is going to be crushed by those meanies in Legal.

Photo #1=Bad, Photo #2=Good

Remember this photo?

This was the "evidence" the Right trotted out in 2008 that the New Black Panthers were bad guys engaged in voter intimidation. So, BAD, right?

Yet the photo below, taken at Cliven Bundy's ranch, which shows one of the militia guys ready to shoot someone is GOOD.

So, just to recap...Photo #1=BAD....Photo #2=GOOD. Got it.

Oh, and no racism. That's over in 'merica.

Who Is Ben Carson?

Politico has a piece up about Dr. Ben Carson, the latest conservative darling who is fast becoming as revered as Thomas Sowell inside the bubble. I'm always amused when the Right flocks to people like this.

In October, Carson made headlines again when he said that the Affordable Care Act’s framework of mandates, insurance exchanges and federal subsidies amounted to “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.” He meant the comparison literally. “It is slavery in a way,” Carson, who is African American, went on, “because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.” 

First of all, who gives a shit if he is black? He's still a moron. Buying regulated private insurance is the same thing as human bondage? Really?

I don't see the GOP learning anything from 2012 which means the Democrats are going to keep winning elections.

He Brought A Black Guy To The Game

Here We Go Again...

First Nevada rancher and federal government denier Cliven Bundy declaims what he "knows" about "the Negro." Now Donald Sterling, a rich guy who owns a basketball team, tells his girlfriend not to show up with black guys at his games, or post photos of her with Magic Johnson (Magic Johnson!) on the Internet.

How can anyone possibly claim that we are "over" racism in this country?

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News Clippers center Jermaine O'Neal said:

"It's just strange that he would say those things and feel that way when you have a team that is predominantly African-American, a coach who's African-American, a staff that's African-American, basically."

No, it's not strange at all if this Sterling guy thinks he owns the black guys on his team. Like the slave owners of old, he doesn't appear to have problems with blacks working for him, picking his cotton, and toting his bales. He says he doesn't even mind if they service his girlfriend:

"It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people," he is heard saying. "Do you have to?"

Stiviano says that all she did was take a picture with someone she admires. "I think the fact that you admire [Magic] -- I've known him well, and he should be admired," Sterling replies. "And I'm just saying that it's too bad you can't admire him privately. And during your ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE, your whole life, admire him -- bring him here, feed him, fuck him, I don't care. You can do anything. But don't put him on an Instagram for the world to see so they have to call me. And don't bring him to my games. OK?" 

To be fair, I suppose any man would hate getting phone calls when his girlfriend posts pictures of her with a guy people assume she's cheating with. But Sterling goes out of his way to mention that it bothers him she's associating with black people. Would he care if she posted pictures of herself with Larry Bird?

The thing is, I am perfectly willing to believe that Sterling has tried his entire life to get over this kind of racism. I'm sure he says (and believes) he's not a racist, citing as proof the fact that he works closely with blacks, hires blacks, gives blacks positions of responsibility in his organization, has a girlfriend who's part African American, and so on.

But this episode shows again what I've long maintained: most of us are just recovering racists. Saying "I'm not a racist" is, for way too many people, simply not true. It's more accurate to say, "I don't want to be racist, but my dad was and some of it rubbed off on me," or "I have racist impulses but do everything in my power to ignore them. I'm only human."

Many whites believe that racism is what Hitler and his followers preached against the Jews, or what the Ku Klux Klan was doing when they lynched blacks. That's not racism, that's genocide and murder motivated by racism. Real racism is much more subtle.

Racism, and sexism, and homophobia, creep into decisions about who your friends are, who executives promote, who store owners watch on surveillance cameras, who cops frisk on the street.

Racism is a normal human impulse: we tend to distrust the unfamiliar. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, and we immediately form opinions about groups based on what our parents and friends (members of our "tribe") say about those groups, or on observations of one or two individuals from another "tribe." This stood us in good stead when we were cavemen fighting with other tribes over basic resources needed to survive.

But that time is long gone. We will not starve or even be inconvenienced in the slightest if we give a few paltry foodstamps to underprivileged black and Latino families.

But why do so many Americans begrudge a few hundred bucks a month for the poor, and just shrug when multimillionaires like Donald Sterling get billions in tax breaks?

Jesus Appears To Mary

A Curious Find

I had this link in my religion "to post" file and have no idea why. Perhaps it had something to do with people thinking that Paul is near to the same level as Jesus. A curious read nonetheless, especially the last line...

Considering how the quote in all its variants has been used primarily to ridicule the backwardness of unnamed Christians (a farmer, a pious deacon, and so forth) wary of new approaches to the Bible, I highly doubt Ma Ferguson ever said it — or if she did, she probably would have said it in self-effacing jest. My guess is that this was a free-floating bit of preacher humor that unfairly got attached to Ma Ferguson, much as Winston Churchill attracts various apocryphal witticisms.

I'm On Quora

Thanks to Kevin Baker, I have discovered the wonder and greatness that is Quora. Here is my page if any readers are interested. Thus far, I have enjoyed all the comments and discussions my questions have generated. They are a great mix of a variety of points of view. My only gripe is that you really have to spend time to drill down and see all the comments that each comment and/or question generates. There is a lot of threading that goes off on multiple tangents and it can be hard to keep track.

Of course, it's also nice to see the right wing blog mentality challenged so regularly and effectively. Not surprisingly, facts, logic, evidence and reason just bounce off the bubble. I encourage my five regular conservative commenters to join in and see how they fare against a much a larger group of people than is found here:)

Gun Making Up For Small Penis In Georgia

Looks like the new Georgia gun law is working out about like I expected...

Parents at a Forysth County park abruptly stopped a children's baseball game after growing suspicions of the behavior of a man carrying a gun in a waist holster Tuesday night. "He's just walking around [saying] 'See my gun? Look, I got a gun and there's nothing you can do about it.' He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing," said parent Karen Rabb.

Park users flooded 911 with 22 calls about the man. Forysth County deputies questioned the man, and found that he had a permit for the handgun. Authorities said since the man made no verbal threats or gestures, they could neither arrest him nor ask him to leave the park. Another parent questioned what point the man was trying to prove. 

"Why would anyone be walking around a public park, with a lot of children and parents and people here playing baseball, and he's walking around with a gun?"

Uh, because they are fucking insecure assholes who have control issues? Just a wild guess:)

"I'm Not a Racist"

After getting caught saying racist things, Cliven Bundy had to go and say it in an interview on CNN:

Chris Cuomo: Are you a racist?

Cliven Bundy: No, I'm not a racist. But I did wonder that. Let me tell you something. I thought about this this morning quite a bit.

It's like Richard Nixon proclaiming, "I am not a crook. I thought about this morning quite a bit, and even asked my attorney general and co-conspirator about it, and we decided that I'm not a crook."

It's amazing how frequently racists say, "I'm not a racist." Of course, they don't think they're racist because they don't understand what racism is. They make judgments about an individual based on the color of the person's skin or ethnicity or sexual orientation, or other factors that are completely out of the individual's control. They can't understand why everyone doesn't see the world exactly the same way they because it's so obvious to them, especially when they see black folks sitting on the porch. White people never sit on the porch. I mean, what are are porches made for, after all?

As with alcoholism, the first step in dealing with your racism problem is to admit that you have it. Of course Cliven Bundy is a racist. Most people are, to some degree. Racists are the first to see racism in other people. They're constantly complaining that it's blacks who are the real racists. But somehow they are completely blind to their own racism, because they don't perceive it as racism: they think their prejudices are how the world really is. They just know that all blacks are lazy, all Jews are money grubbers, all Arabs are violent terrorists, and on and on.

I'll be the first to admit to having my own prejudices, racial and otherwise, but I recognize them and try not to let them influence my judgment. I try to see every person as an individual and not an "other" indistinguishable from every "other" who has the same skin color or accent. If you don't realize that you have these prejudices, you'll never know when you're succumbing to them.

Racists and bigots frequently complain that liberals or blacks or gays are themselves bigoted and intolerant when they denounce homophobic and racist speech, or conservative attempts to enforce religious dictates on everyone, or political activities that undermine the rights of others (like when the CEO of Mozilla was ousted when it was revealed he donated to Prop 8 in California). Yes, you are free to speak your mind in this country; the rest of us are equally free to tell you to shut your racist homophobic yap. There are social consequences for being a jerk; dressing it up as your religion or god-given right of free speech doesn't make it any less offensive.

But there's a major difference here: reacting to the speech and behavior of specific individuals is not the same as choosing to offend others with racism and bigotry aimed at entire groups of people who have no choice about being a member of that group. Racists and bigots are offended by the very existence of minority groups and are often not shy about saying it because they just know they're right.

Being a member of a wacko church or the Tea Party or a communist is a choice. Being black is not. Though it's still slightly controversial, it's now completely obvious that being gay is also not a choice.

So, railing against neolithic conservatives or idiot liberals or stupid Catholic cardinals or shrill NAACP members or Wahabi Muslims is fine, because those people choose to be those things, though lumping all people who voluntarily belong to the same group is still a little short-sighted.

But pontificating about what you know about "the Negro" is racist, plain and simple. Just take your lumps, Cliven, and shut your yap.

Oh. And don't forget to pay your grazing fees, like all the other ranchers.

How Much Should We Spend on the Illusion of Safety?

Since 9/11 we've spent a trillion dollars on homeland security. We make everyone take off their shoes and buy special three ounce bottles of shampoo to get through airport security, where people wait hours at the checkpoints. Yet a Somali teenager can just hop a fence, hide in the wheel well of a jet plane and fly to Hawaii.

Apparently, it is trivial to walk on to the tarmac and plant a bomb on a plane's landing gear. Apparently, anyone can walk up to a chemical tank, punch a whole in it and poison a river (check it out on Google Earth). Apparently, anyone can put an obstacle on a train track, cause a derailment and a major fire. Apparently, anyone can walk into a fertilizer plant, start a fire and destroy several city blocks. Apparently, anyone can buy a gun, go to a school and shoot dozens of kids. Apparently, anyone can intentionally wipe out on a freeway during a snowstorm and hurt dozens of people.

These incidents weren't acts of terrorism, per se. But all of them could be. There's an infinite number of ways to cause deadly mayhem. We spend billions trying to prevent terrorists from repeating the same old tricks on airplanes, while totally ignoring equally deadly threats that we know exist but have completely ignored because terrorists haven't tried them yet.

Is all this homeland security stuff just a CYA exercise for government officials and a trillion dollar payout to the security industrial complex for a false sense of safety? Are we just pasting a happy face over an insoluble, intractable problem and pretending we're actually able to do something about it?

Or is the threat of terrorism really that much less than the security industrial complex wants us to think?

Clive Bundy A Go Go

The Piketty Plan

With his book, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty has engendered a series of dueling op-eds in The New York Times (The Piketty Panic and The Piketty Phenomenon), the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The National Review, and so on.

The basic thrust of the book is that capital grows faster than the economy: examining historical data, Piketty found that return on capital is historically about 5%, while economies grow at less than half that rate. That means that the rich will get richer much faster than people who actually have to work for a living, because salaries are limited to the growth of the economy. It also means that, in today's global economy, middle-class and poor Americans will get poorer.

I haven't read the book, but I understood its core message back in the 1980s with two simple calculations: 50,000 x 20 = 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 x 0.05 = 50,000.

That is, if you saved $50,000 a year you could have a million bucks in 20 years -- not even counting compounded returns. If you get a modest return on a million bucks -- I picked 5% back then, which happens to be Piketty's historical average -- you could make enough to live on through investment returns alone: you can retire in 20 years. In reality you wind up with $2 or $3 million because you're earning returns on your investments the whole time, even considering the ups and downs in the markets.

Let's call this "The Piketty Plan."

I made this calculation during the Reagan administration when IRA accounts were being debated. Later, laws were passed to allow companies to set up 401Ks. I was wondering whether these accounts were a good deal, because they had three serious limitations: you weren't taxed when you put the money in, but when you took it out; you were limited to contributing a few thousand a year; and you couldn't get at that money until you were old (unless you paid the taxes, plus a stiff penalty).

Since I planned on being rich when I took the money out, the tax rate "feature" was just a dumb gimmick -- returns on some investments are taxed at a lower rate (zero for tax-free bonds). Also, during the Bush II administration taxes on capital gains were drastically lowered, but money withdrawn from IRAs is still taxed as regular income, at the much higher rate. Which means that since we avoided IRAs and 401Ks, investing like rich people, we pay much lower taxes on our investment income than if we had socked all our cash in those programs, which we still wouldn't be able to get at yet. Thank you, George Bush!

All these "investment" vehicles for the common man were pushed by the finance industry, who wanted to get their hands on more of our money. Company pensions disappeared almost overnight. Instead of investing in their employees' retirements, companies outsourced the management of retirement funds to Wall Street, which took hefty fees for "managing" everyone's retirement accounts.

Companies like Enron put their employees' 401Ks into their own company stock, with disastrous results.  Other companies raided employee 401K funds, or played tricks with employee contributions, hanging on to the money for months before transferring it, "legally" stealing millions of dollars of interest from their employees. Over time, companies have cut back or stopped contributing to employee 401Ks, leaving most Americans up to their own devices -- and Social Security -- for retirement.

IRAs and 401Ks were sucker bets. Rich people would almost never use them: they diversified, put their money in T bills, stock, tax-free bonds, real estate, and so on. And it only got better for rich people during the Bush years, when taxes on capital gains were reduced to less than half the tax rate of people who do real work.

Because my wife and I both worked and had no kids, we were able to follow the Piketty Plan. We invested the way rich people do. We eschewed debt and all the trappings of wealth -- no boat, no vacation home, no ostentatious jewelry or fancy clothes. After the house we didn't buy anything we couldn't pay for outright. Then we paid off our mortgage years early. We never paid a nickel of interest on our credit cards. Still, we regularly bought new (never used) cars, took regular vacations, bought TVs and VCRs and computers and horses, and other Stuff. But we always saved one of our salaries (the "two can live as cheaply as one" trope). We were therefore able to retire in our forties, after putting up with corporate BS for 20 years.

The vast majority of middle-class Americans simply cannot do this, mostly because they have kids. They have to house and feed and clothe them, and pay for their daycare. They have to pay back student loans. They have to save for their kids' college. They bow to  nattering children, social pressures and advertising, buying houses that are too big for them and too far from their jobs, and expensive cars that waste gas, and cell phones and cars for all the kids. They waste hours a day idling their cars in long lines waiting to drop off and pick up their kids from school and shuttling them to soccer practice and music lessons and the mall. They eat fattening fast-food and pizza instead of cooking their own food, because they have no time.

I mean no insult to these people: that's just the way life is here. Most people cannot do what my wife and I did, because the country needs people to have kids. And the fact is, our economy depends on that mass consumption. If everyone followed the Piketty Plan, the American economy would collapse. The problem is, that lifestyle never leaves any money for the future: it's all going into the pockets of the rich heirs who are selling us Stuff at Walmart, or the rich heirs who drill the oil that fills our gas tanks, or the rich Wall Street bankers who mortgage our houses and fondle the money in 401Ks and IRAs.

Six of the ten richest Americans got their wealth from daddy (the Waltons and Kochs). Most of the richest Americans are elderly and will be leaving their money to their heirs any day now. A lot of them are in the oil and pipeline business (I can't imagine why they're denying climate change...). 

I don't have it in for rich people in general, because I'm one of them. But the kids of today deserve the same shot that I had. Fighting against them are the Kochs and Waltons and Adelsons, who are using their vast fortunes to buy laws and regulations that entrench inherited wealth, enhance capital formation and denigrate labor.

Everyone should have a shot at the Piketty Plan. Every kid in America should be able to start at the same point: a good education, college if they can hack it, and clear of debt, regardless of how rich their parents are. We should be working to secure the economic futures of all American kids, not just the heirs of the wealthy few.

Getting Behind the ACA

It looks like Democrats are taking my advice and getting behind the ACA. Check out this ad from "imperiled" Democratic Senator Mark Begich of Alaska.



The Times has a piece on how more Democrats are jumping on board with the ACA.

Real Men!

I look at the photo below and have to wonder...just how much of an inferiority complex to conservatives have?