A Rant From williamyard

Some old friends are having an email exchange. As usual, williamyard makes his presence known:

I have two reasons for optimism: SCOTUS' Citizens United ruling coupled with the release of "Avatar."

I believe that SCOTUS will use Citizens United to give "personhood" to artificial constructs--i.e., avatars. This way, flaws can be intentionally Photoshopped from (or, in a populist nod, added to), holograms of future candidates. Clones are another way to go; why limit ourselves to only one Scott Brown when you can spin off a dozen or more to ensure that like-minded "individuals" control not just a Senate seat but a Governor's mansion, a mayor's office--even a school board presidency? If Scalia survives long enough, look for "Brown vs. Board of Education--the Sequel" to be a big decision in Palin's second term.

Yesterday while shaving I listened to a Vegas bookie being interviewed about the Super Bowl. He did okay, although his traffic was a little lighter than expected, considering two high-powered offenses had at it. I wondered if he's making bookon dystopia and its discontents--who's the favorite to send us sliding back to the Dark Ages? I'm reading the planet's Racing Form: you got your nukes, your biologics (man-made and free-range), you got your expanding class division, your obesity, your infototalitarians (Google, China, et al.), your fundies of various persuasions, your grid collapse, your rising sea levels etc. etc. Each has its assorted twists and turns; as a guy from UCSF noted recently, the U.S. basically exports four things: weapons, entertainment, blue jeans, and food. In the food category, we use fructose to keep the consumers addicted. Downside: we're becoming a planet of fat pigs. Cut the fructose and you've just butt-fucked the U.S. economy. Good luck with that: the Farm Bill enjoys rare bi-partisan support. We are
killing more people with corn than the Taliban are with opium.

Speaking of which I just carbed up the bird feeder and a riot of chicadees, wrens, rock doves, and assorted other human-supplied-seed-addicted hangers-on are swarming all over the deck, jostling for one of the four feeding perches like basketball forwards elbowing for turf under the hoop. The red-winged blackbirds are back--a large cloud of them just rose from the grasses in my neighbor's cattle ranch and banked overhead. Ken, I hear it's foggy in your 'hood but here in Contra Costa it's clear as a moonrise in Democracy's cemetery.

The Beltway punditry and the government it feeds is so obviously out of touch with and purely reactive to the greater society that criticizing it is like shooting fibs in a barrister. Scott Brown was such a delicious Black Swan I wish someone would remake "Groundhog Day" with Bill Murray as a liberal blogger so we could see him squirm again and again and again as the results came in. If anyone deserves anything, the voters of the Great Uncommon Wealth of Massachusetts deserve a vacuous Playgirl model carpetbagging on hip nihilism after they took Teddy Kennedy for granted forever. John Murtha's district, as Zengerle recently noted, is in the toaster as we speak. Evan Bayh: turn off the lights when you leave, and don't try pocketing any pens or Post-it notes. The critical difference is that the punditry is watching but the rest of us are seeing.

Oops: I said "Palin's second term." There will be no second term for whoever ousts Obama after his first term. We are in for a succession of one-termers, because the spoiled, entitled, fat, stupid, lazy, and increasingly broke American people think the President, not them, is responsible for the mess we're in, and they'll keep shitting their diapers, waiting for someone to wipe their asses, rather than touch the fucking Monolith and learn to squat over the damn potty.

Palin's Jewish Problem Answered

A Jewish commentator for Commentary Magazine, Jennifer Rubin, wrote that Jews don't like Sarah Palin because we're snobs. Jennifer, a Jew, wrote this in Commentary, a Jewish magazine.

Jonathan Chait, a Jew at TNR, wrote a response at his new blog there taking Jennifer to task, and rightly so IMHO.

I have published comments left at TNR in the past, most notably from williamyard because he cracks me up and is so smart.  He's not the only one.  jhildner1 seems to have his writing chops too:

I think that I speak for most Jews when I say that one of the things that really caused us to hate Palin as a candidate, and as a person, and not merely view her as utterly lacking any of the substantive qualities one typically seeks in candidates for high office, is that she is what backward Americans refer to as a "straight-shooter." She is without affect or complicated agenda. She is "honest," like a slow Jewish child born prior to the days of genetics counseling. We Jews instinctively react negatively to this quality, as we are inclined toward deceit, unprincipled intellectual argument, and insidiously pragmatic and "values"-free pursuits geared toward enriching our people in the form of cash money and, if possible, destroying the traditional moral fabric of Christian societies such as the United States. Hence our firm grip upon the legal profession and entertainment industry.

Another thing about Palin worried us greatly. That is, the possibility and probability that, with the people's interest at heart, she would recommend taking unfavorable actions in relation to the financial sector of the economy, which we control, and through which we control most of what occurs in the world. Such action might have included refraining from giving us a lot of money -- an unacceptable setback. Although Barack Obama is a Negro Muslim, we knew, based upon secret communications held at our headquarters in the subterranean Gold Vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that he would continue to offer a level of support to the financial industry not justified by what backward Americans refer to as "common sense." (Yes, "common," indeed! Ha ha.) Anyway, Obama wants Malia to go to Juilliard, which we agreed to facilitate. We also taught him how to be a lousy and annoying golfer.

williamyard On Randi Weingarten, Or More Specifically, On American Parents

Randi Weingarten has apparently decided to give in to union busting by acquiescing to the nonsense that is teacher evaluation.  She is now for tying test scores to employment, a supremely stupid idea.  Here is her nonsense, and here are some reactions, as well as here and here.

I think williamyard responds well in this comment to the TNR post linked above:

As I've noted before, discussions about education-system fixes ignore the primary cause for student failure: their parents. One rarely even reads the words "parent" or "parents" in any such discussion. Student achievement is hugely determined before a kid ever walks into an elementary school classroom. Yet for a variety of reasons, parent accountability is rarely discussed.

Education reform needs to start before conception, when a future mother's intake of nutrients and poisons begins to enhance or limit the future brain of a human being who does not yet exist. The reform needs to continue by providing either aggressive preschool availability and standards, successful involvement of parents in early childhood intellectual development, or, ideally, both.

We've come to the place in this country where we think the primary responsibility to educate a child is the society's. It's not. It's the parents', which is one big reason why 30% of our students aren't finishing high school. Unfortunately, reinstating parents' responsibility and authority requires cultural shifts that at this point we seem unwilling to make.

Righting every wrong accrued by bigotry and poverty will do little unless Mom and/or Dad ensures that Junior walks into first grade with a basic respect for his peers, with an understanding of the alphabet, with many evenings of being read to sleep under his belt, with exposure to counting, with exposure to three-dimensional object relationships, with some practice in the hand/eye coordination needed to successfully manipulate a pencil, with exposure to artistic expression (e.g., finger painting, play-doh, beating drums), with the ability to share with peers, with nonviolent behavior, with the ability to practice basic hygiene and personal safety, with regular rest and adequate nutrition, with current vaccinations, with the ability to maintain attention and focus in an environment devoid of electronic stimulation, with hearing and vision tested as adequate and corrected as needed. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Every parent should be held accountable for every single item on the above list, and more. We do not allow a parent to beat a kid with a baseball bat--that's child abuse. Failing to prepare a child for society is a softer form of abuse, but it is still abuse. Why is this tolerated?

We lack the courage to attack this problem at its core, so instead we play these little games of throwing good money after bad.

Of course williamyard is correct when he says parents need to do their job. I have said this many times, and any sane person realizes that parents have responsibilities and one of those responsibilities is to raise their children to be good, productive citizens. If they can't do it, it's not that someone else can or will--it's that we're fucked if parents don't start parenting.

In Defense Of The (Nearly) Worthless Penny, By williamyard

williamyard is back, this time with a defense of the worthless penny at TNR:

And once again, the bleatings of the utilitarians must be heard!

Well, my friends, allow me to defend the humble $0.01. It occupies a far more important niche than its prosaic brethren the dime, the dollar, the mighty Jackson. It is, in fact, an artful artifact of philosophy, right there on the sidewalk next to the blackened gum and the pigeon poop where no one in their right mind will stoop to pick it up.

In our frenzied search for efficiency we kill serendipity in the public square: we leave no (wrong) turn unstoned. Forget meandering, traipsing, or taking the long way home: either lead, follow, or get out of the way. All hail GPS!

Nowhere does our fetish for boiling life down to every possible digital datum hold more sway than in finance. We must run those numbers, again and again. Why, I bet some math Ph.D. will figure out how to bundle debt obligations and make a market out of them. Won't that be a great idea? Forget the penny: derivatives are where it's at!

Standing against history's tawdry tsunami is our little copper friend. He is more trouble than he is worth--like an elderly relative in a nursing home, or a homeless vet living under a bridge. He can't survive without society's help, like a single mom raising her kids alone. He's worth more dead than alive--like millions of Americans with a life insurance policy and an underwater mortgage.

You want to see what a penny looks like? Look in the mirror.

No, my friends. The penny should not be eliminated because it is worthless; the penny should be RETAINED because it is worthless.

Somethings Happening Here, And We Don't Know What It Is

My favorite philosopher, williamyard:

williamyard said:

And to follow on what butchie wrote ("And if you're in the market, low prices are a good thing."), allow me to paraphrase Shawshank: "Either get in the market, or get busy dying."

We're always in the market, every market, for everything and anything. Everyone has his or her price--see Terry Southern's "The Magic Christian." Holy Goddess, if I had a few bucks I'd be scooping up foreclosed homes by the bushel. My own home is underwater, but I'm only 57 and plan to keep working for another 15 years if I possibly can, so I don't give a hoot (I love work; if you don't, all the money in the world won't make you happy at your job.) Same goes for my 401K--does everybody realize how cheap stocks are?? I'm buying--every paycheck. Who cares if they'll go down more? They'll be even cheaper, which means I can afford more of them. I mean, this downturn is less than a couple years old and likely to last less than a couple more years. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things. A pittance. It's a shakeout. Momma's putting the leftovers in the fridge, and the cheapskates who only came for the free meal are hitting the road.

Of course publically traded corporations are moaning and groaning: they live by the quarter and die by the quarter. When their numbers suck they get beat up by shareholders in would/coulda/shoulda mode. Nobody likes to get beat up. Tough titty; it comes with the territory.

Mom and pops that have been around forever are going belly-up. To which I say, you had a great run; be grateful, 90% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

Businesses pimping consumer goods paid for by irrational home equity are dying; automakers who've been building dinosaurs for decades are on the edge. You're telling me this is a bad thing? And Wall Street? Throw the moneychangers out of the temple and fumigate the damn place, sez I, or learn to live with cockroaches, like most of the planet.

Yeah, we're in a downward spiral/doldrums at the moment. Some people are hurting; we can easily muster what's needed to help them out ("OMG! That means we'll run deficits for several more years!" Put a cork in it.). Then await the economy's return, which should be interesting given the opportunities that are popping up like the spring weeds that decorate the hills around my home. Speaking of which, the aquifer that feeds my well is plumb tuckered out. I don't want sunshine. I want rain.

And recall that the sum of the squares of the two sides adjacent to the right angle still equals the square of the hypotenuse. Which will be true long after the Sun has turned into a red giant and charbroiled the Earth, i.e., truth has little to do with current events. (That's what's REALLY bugging a lot of people: something is happening here, but they don't know what it is, do they? We're all Mr. Jones.) Stick to what we might discern as universal truths--e.g., compassion, honesty, patience, industry, thrift, generosity, humility, integrity, courtesy, courage, the Pythagorean theorum--and everything else will take care of itself.

And get a couple chickens. They basically eat bugs and a little grain, so their eggs are nearly free, then they die and you eat them, too. Put the savings in a fund indexed on the S&P 500--or Treasuries, if you're really paranoid. You'll thank me.

And use condoms.

And COPE, goddamn it.

And be of goddamn good cheer. A close family friend recently blew out his bowel, came down with a nasty infection, lost most of his marbles in the process and now doesn't recognize his wife. His prognosis is bad and getting worse. That's a crisis.

This financial downturn--a "crisis"? Please.

Williamyard On The Economy's Near Certain Death

From williamyard at TNR:

What happens if the economy deteriorates even more? I know that not all of what happens will be bad, even remotely so.

Christmas last my girlfriend knitted her father a sweater. Do you think he would have preferred receiving one costing ten times as much that she bought at Macys? Of course not.

Will conservative-minded folks grit their teeth when, after months on the unemployment line, they take a government job? Yeah, they'll hate it until they get the first paycheck.

Will students promised a comfy private universtiy education collapse and die when finances force them to attend state colleges or--gasp!--community colleges? Not likely, especially when they discover the high motivation levels, racial and class diversity, and real-world practicality among the "inferior" school's teachers, fellow students, and curricula, a refreshing (and valuable) change from their Olde Prep School.

Will the idea of cutting driving costs in half by carpooling finally strike millions of commuters like a bolt out of the blue? (Tell it to the planet's ecosystem. Preach it, brother!)

Will two or even three generations of adults from the same family chafe at having to live under the same roof because they can no longer afford separate homes? Sure, at least at first. Here's hoping they'll relearn the art of telling stories, of sharing meals, of helping with homework and chores, of learning and sharing home repair tasks, of holding the hands of the sick. Of dying at home, among loved ones, instead of in a hospice or nursing home or ICU.

Will the thousands of urban residents now raising chickens in their back yards realize how much better truly fresh eggs taste than the ones carted in to the local Safeway? You betcha.

Will people become more self-reliant, more stoic, more frugal, more clear-eyed, more sober (literally and figuratively), less consuming, less avaricious, less silly? Will they discover that they don't need an iPhone (or any cell phone, actually) to be happy, that the nearest branch library contains more wonderful books than they could possibly read in the rest of their days, that walking down a country road is free, that singing in a choir is free, that an inner tube on almost any summer river in America beats most overseas vacations, that potlucks at the community center cost no more than feeding oneself?

Yeah, plenty of people will suffer, are suffering. Go help them. Meanwhile, can we all pledge to, um, STFU?

Good points! Think of it as a necessary adjustment. If you don't starve first!

Williamyard On The Terrorist Midget

What's the big deal? The Terrorist fist-bumping yet another albino Negro midget? Tell me something I don't already know.

Let me guess: the albino Negro midget's father came from "Kenya"--as in the People's Republic of Kenya.

How many times has the albino Negro midget registered to vote? Four? Six? It's anybody's guess.

Ten-to-one he's connected with all that offshore money pouring into the Obama campaign.

Methinks the midget won't be so keen on fist-bumping the Terrorist once he finds out his taxes are doubling so William Ayers can have convicted Negro felons teach highschoolers how to perform forced abortions on their Christian mothers under portraits of Malcolm X and Timothy Leary.

I've tried to point all this out, time and time again, but the MSM has ignored me. Meanwhile, CBS infiltrates Sarah Palin's campaign staff and her favorability ratings start tanking. And you won't hear CBS reporting on Obama's plans to pardon Charles Manson, now, will you? Coincidence?

I read this morning that Ahmadenijad has taken ill...just a little over a week before the U.S. election. How conveeeenient.

Tampa Bay hides the "Devil" in its name, Nate Silver predicts they'll win 200 games, meanwhile every Beltway "expert" is now quoting Fivethirtyeight, and the "Rays" are in the World Series.

Connect the fucking dots, people.

--Williamyard

williamyard On The Debate

From TNR:

I tend to be easily pleased, perhaps more so than Ms. Fairbanks. Then again, I prefer low-scoring pitchers' duels to ERA-busting slugfests. A universe is born, expands, and burns itself out in the time between the second and third pitch to the clean-up hitter with two outs and a guy on third in the bottom of the eighth of a scoreless game. It's easier to notice as we age and everything slows down.

I enjoyed the debate. I watched the first half-hour on CNN's website and listened to the rest on XM's POTUS channel as I drove home.

It was a "proud to be an American" moment. Both those guys could have been better, I suppose, but each of them individually--their contrasting stories and styles--and the two of them clinching and sparring as one unit reminded me how fortunate we are to have our system of governance.

I'm happy for Ole Miss. The debate for them must have been a cathartic act of public grace, like during Mass on Holy Thursday when we line up to wash each others' feet, kneeling then seated, giving then receiving.

Both men wore neckties. I hate neckties, and will wear one only under duress. But in this case it's a job interview, so they had to dress up. Have you ever interviewed someone for a job? What an honor it is to do so, to be asked to pass judgment on someone who wants to work for you. An unusual, almost archaic ritual of dominance and submission. In this case job applicants who will go so far as to debase themselves by wearing a necktie. Politicians are whores, and as y'all who know me a bit will confirm, I mean that in a good way. In this regard I wanted to reach out to McCain, the more flustered of the two, with his constant nervous chuckle, and say, there there, John, it's okay, we may not all agree with you but you can relax, we don't bite.

I particularly liked the fact that they both stayed true to themselves, to the classes to which they both appear iconic. Lehrer (amused, unflappable, terrific) kept trying to bait them into directly confronting each other. I think they are far less comfortable doing so than allowing their surrogates to do the dirty work. They are both friends of democracy; Obama at one point stopped himself from responding to one of McCain's criticisms by siding with Lehrer who had been trying to start a new line of questioning. In other words, Obama caught a couple jabs after the bell but played by the rules. I was reminded that patriots can be found in the cockpit of a fighter jet as well as behind the bar in a court of law.

That whole spat about talking to Iran without "preconditions" struck me as ironic, because I'd bet my next paycheck that the impetuous McCain would be much more likely to order Air Force One to be fired up in the middle of the night to fly off to secretly meet with somebody or other than would the circumspect, process-obsessed Obama. Then again, so much of this election has been about Bachelor Number One accusing Bachelor Number Two of being Bachelor Number One.

by williamyard

Williamyard Makes Sense!

Here is an important post from my friend williamyard:

williamyard said:

Ever notice that the ones doing the revolting are always unwashed, uncouth, uncool, unprepared, and/or unexpected? The Czar looks out his window and remarks, "What a peasant surprise!" Only in America do the peasants wear lipstick.

Michael Corleone, telling Hyman Roth about the martyred rebel, says "Now, soldiers are paid to fight. The rebels aren't," and Roth asks "What does that tell you?" and Michael replies, "It means they could win."

You hear that, Barack Obama? They could win.

Running an empire demands its own insularity. It rewards those who follow the SOPs. You cannot think outside a box that is hermetically sealed. Barack Obama is inside that box. The change he advocates is strictly by the book. He has the record to prove it.

Sarah Palin is also inside the box. But she doesn't have the record to prove it. She has the outsider's record, just like those who support her. They are outside the box, they have not been allowed in, and so they seize upon this fantasy--that she is "like them"--and that somehow she will go to sleep next to one of the space invaders' big green pods and not wake up with her soul replaced.

Everyone who works at that level of government is a soulless pod person. But we need them, these Presidents and Vice Presidents and Congressmen and Senators. Elected officials are a subspecies, a lower caste, eunuchs--democracy's niggers. Our first task is to admit that they have no souls, that their souls have been stolen by the intractable, inevitable, inexorable giant pod of political power, and therefore we must keep our eyes on them 24/7, never trust them, never believe a word they say, Republican or Democrat, frisk them, open their bags, strip-search them if necessary because they will rip us off and violate our trust and leave us worse off for the experience every single chance they get. And then they will be gone and another crew will have moved in, like a new generation of cockroaches.

This is OUR job, as responsible citizens and custodians of our country and our planet. Our job is NOT to project our lazy fantasies upon someone who panders to us, who pretends to be different, who is packaged and sold to us as "one of us."

Only a fool hires someone who is just like her. You hire someone you will whip until they bleed if necessary...or kiss their ass if necessary--same difference. Whatever works is the point. You ride them until they do the job, and when they balk or slow down you shit-can them and hire somebody else. And watch them like a hawk when they're on the register.

This is not a fucking game.

A Post Of A Comment From TNR By WilliamYard

The New Republic has 2 worthy posters (well, one is a commenter):

Why Palin Scares Me

Before I get to that, let me explain what I'm not scared of, which is that Palin has somehow altered the demographics of the race. I have a hard time believing that female Hillary supporters, or Rust Belt men, are suddenly racing to support McCain because of Palin. For one thing, vice presidential nominees almost never attract demographic groups that the nominee can't attract on his own. People vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. More importantly, if that historical pattern somehow broke down this year, it would probably hurt the GOP ticket more than it would help. People may love Sarah Palin, but they don't think she's ready to be president.

The reason Palin scares me has more to do with mechanics than demographics: Palin is such a sensation, and draws such large crowds, that anything she says--particularly attacks on Obama--immediately become part of the campaign conversation. On the other hand, both because she has a knack for delivering barbs with a smile, and because voters don't quite see her as presidential material, McCain suffers less blowback than he would if a more traditional running mate were saying the same things. Simply put, Palin has a much bigger megaphone than traditional running mates, but gets held to a lower standard.

That's a huge problem for the Obama campaign. Among other things, it really complicates the question of how to respond. You'd normally want to ignore your opponent's running mate in these situations, but it's hard to because of her reach. And when you do respond--say, when Obama points out that she's been making stuff up--there's very little impact, because no one's conditioning their support for McCain on Palin. Call her the phantom menace.

Obama's best hope is that Palin's novelty wears off soon, at which point we can go back to ignoring running mates the way we've been ignoring Joe Biden the last week or so. I'm honestly not sure what he does in the meantime.

--Noam Scheiber

In response to this post above,

williamyard said:

Palin doesn't scare me; rather, she confirms what I believe about democracies.

Democracies are doomed to self-destruct because the people who run them (the electorate) eventually find themselves, collectively, on the defensive. When that happens, they'll hire (i.e. vote for) the person who best ignore the rising waters while promising to order the Titanic's band to keep playing. Voters do not want to know what is really going on. That's the scary part. Otherwise the messenger gets killed.

Thus we have a nation (the United States of America) that is shipping over $1.5 billion a day in oil money alone overseas, mostly to people who loathe us and our way of life. To give one example: we enrich Venezuela, which now gives five times what the United States does in foreign aid to Latin America, with plenty of anti-American propaganda to go along with the aid. In other words, we are paying people to tell other people we're assholes. Just like we fund the madrassas in Pakistan and elsewhere, like we recently paid for the Cossacks to plunder Georgia.

We will not stop doing this, no matter what any candidate says. We can't, because we lack the will.

We live on a planet whose biosphere we are seriously fucking with. We will not stop doing this, either. We don't want to. It's not in our character to do so. Any candidate who will tell us, straight up, what we have to do to fix things (i.e. sacrifice) will get slaughtered at the polls.

Health care? Entitlements? Balanced budget? Hahahahaha, oh, y'all crack me up!

Nice piece in Bloomberg the other day about the fact that our taxes will be going up, big time, over the next decade or so, regardless of who's elected. And yet both Obama and McCain are promising tax cuts. Give me a fucking break.

Like any great nation in steep decline, we seek those who will sing us their lullabies--hush little babies don't you cry, Sarah's gonna sing you a lullabye. Why the hell should Palin tell us the truth about anything? We can't handle the truth, like the man said.

Barack Obama has got to realize he won't win the Lying Game or the Blaming Game. He has to go on the offensive by attacking the one group he's been afraid to attack before: the people whose votes he wants. He needs to say, straight up, "Get what, folks? We're fucked. It's either gonna be bad or it's gonna be worse. With me it's gonna be bad, and here's how: I'm gonna raise your taxes and you'll get little in return. You're gonna continue to shoot up millions of barrels of oil before I can get you into detox. Iran, Russia, Venezuela et al. are gonna yank your chains and there's not a God damned thing you or me or anybody else can do about it. In fact, the only thing I'll promise you under an Obama Administration is that a hell of a lot of America's families will get sober, truly sober, for the first time since the late 1800s when we started getting high on cheap energy."

"Any questions? Okay, line up in alpha order, drop your pants, bend over and wait for the body cavity search. And shut the fuck up."