Notes from the front

It found that in 1979, households in the bottom quintilereceived more than 50 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007,similar households received about 35 percent of transfers. “Theshift reflects the growth in spending for programs focused on theelderly population (such as Social Security and Medicare), in whichbenefits are not limited to low-income households,” the studyexplains. “As a result, government transfers reduced the dispersionof household income by less in 2007 than in 1979.”

1) In case anyone is wondering why I'm not happy with social security and medicare and want to see them seriously reformed and curtailed to their stated purpose of social safety net, this is one reason. There is no reason a country, even a very wealthy country like the United States, should undertake to redistribute significant wealth to people who are already wealthy. Keep in mind also that this study was measuring household income quartiles, not net worth quartiles, where the retiree population would make it look even worse. Indeed, net worth gaps between the elderly and the younger working generation, which are always substantial, have grown even faster than income gaps.


2) After that debacle last night, I seriously hope Rick Perry goes away for good. Seriously "oops?". Also, I could name off at least 8 or 10 cabinet positions or significant federal agencies that I'd want to see rolled down to nothing or their actually useful programmes rolled into other budget posts.
a) the Vice Presidency and associated bureaucracy. Obsolete requirements that we select strange people to be on a Presidential ticket with very minimal vetting in the event they end up ascending to the post of President is not a good idea to begin with. That there's a huge infrastructure around it is even less so.
b) Homeland Security.
c) DEA. Enough said on these two.
d) Department of Energy (most of the funding and programmes in it are actually related to the DoD or to foreign treaty compliance with the IAEA, the rest is largely useless subsidies to oil, coal and ethanol. Also I'd prefer to see CAFE standards go away and be replaced by a significant gasoline and carbon tax).
e) I'd like to see the Department of Agriculture and FDA combined and most of the USDA's functions eliminated.
f) Department of Education can be seriously curtailed or devolved to the states. The one qualifier I have there is that the states (or the fed) should make a serious effort to provide for school choice of the sort where money follows students. Even those "socialist" Europeans have a more capitalistic venture than we do when it comes to education, hence we're doing something wrong in the parlance of conservatives. SWEDEN "for pete's sake" has school choice systems and a superior educational model for what amounts to K-12. To say nothing of places like Finland which totally kick our ass at it. No child left behind would end also.
g) Commerce can go, its survey functions can be rolled into Treasury since most of them are economic data anyway (the census also could go in there). Labor is in a similar boat.
h) FCC
i) Cut the number of distinct financial regulatory boards to two or three, for starters.
j) Significant reforms to Medicare/aid and Social Security would presumably have some impact on HHS's budget. Eliminating Medicare Part D would be among these.
k) After removing the mortgage deduction and possibly introducing a negative income tax we could do away with HUD.
l) Cuts to defence would be in the 40-50% range if it were up to me. When including the two to four active wars that we don't need to be in, more like 60%
m) NASA would be privatized

And so on. It would not be hard for me to stand up and announce which ones were going away. I'd also be able to explain why rather than just have applause lines.


3) I haven't written about Cain's heinous off the field exploits. There are two reasons. First, I think it's a waste of time. The guy doesn't take running for President seriously to begin with as evidenced by his idiotic political positions on just about everything. He ought to be buried already without some sort of salacious sex scandal and isn't yet mostly because total ignorance is celebrated in the politics of the right today. It's also celebrated in the politics of the left, but they don't have a primary to demonstrate it where there are other options who might look smarter or dumber by comparison to Obama the way there are with Cain. Everybody but Perry and Bachmann on the platform looks smarter than he does (even Gingrich, which is saying something)...and the fact that all three are/were at points popular in polls is telling. Second, the amount of information we have on what he is accused of doing, much less what he actually did, is too poor for me to make any assessments. But from his bungled reactions to all this media attention, I think I can create a strong assumption that he's at least a scumbag like DSK. Whether that makes him guilty of a crime or just yet another case of men in powerful and prominent positions making all other men look like assholes to women generally, I don't know. If the stories and accusations leveled at him are true however, at the very least this is not a man who should be running for President, or should become President in the 21st century. But we knew that already before this story broke because of his statements on.. well just about everything else. Since usually I find American style sex scandals to be enormously tedious (except when they are evidence of hypocrisy, then they are amusing for about 20 seconds), I'm going to mostly ignore it until he finally goes away from one source or another.

Deficit deals, or are they?

So after a couple months of handwringing, and intense debates over what qualifies as a "tax increase", and intimations that our most significant spending programmes (entitlements/defence) were on the slab for cutting and reform, we got (insert blank).

Right. That's it.

To resolve the American debt crisis, three things needed to happen.
1) Taxes needed to be reformed. This would include for some people, increases in taxes because of exclusions and subsidies that need to disappear. For all the railing the conservative apparatchik does about wasteful stimulus spending, it engages in the most detestable forms of hand waving when it occurs that a) their proposed reforms to entitlements are basically tax increases themselves or b) their protected tax exclusions and subsidies are forms of government expenditure to protect favoured constituencies. The essential nature of the Simpson-Bowles compromise on taxes would have worked for me. Get rid of the HMI deduction and some other tax expenditures (especially corporate welfare programmes), and generally lower rates correspondingly. I would also favour getting rid of the corporate income tax and replacing it by abolishing the distinction between capital gains and income (with perhaps a carve out for direct property sales by individuals and businesses). But since none of this happened even under the most severe circumstances, and indeed, most all of it wasn't even up for discussion at any time, I grow concerned.
2) Entitlement reforms. Particularly with medicaid (block grants), and the reform of medicare and social security into means tested programmes operating as actual social safety nets instead of as middle class entitlements. Progressives rightly fear what would happen if we took these programmes away from the middle class, particularly the upper-middle class (the near universal support they enjoy presently would disappear). Nevertheless in their current form they are unsustainable boondoggles. And depressingly, were never seriously debated. Conservatives had a few proposals floated to reform these (as did the moderate Democrat wing), but none were all that serious and none enjoyed even considerable Republican support. After all, all those old white people who lean right vote also.
3) Defence cuts. After the entitlements, this represents a massive proportion of the budget. Ending or curtailing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would certainly decrease this expenditure. But so would drawing back our deployed armies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Naval patrols to help deal with piracy in the Red Sea/Horn of Africa region make sense. That's an international concern that directly impacts American interests. And intelligence or even special operations missions dealing with terrorist groups around the globe make sense. Again, an international concern that directly impacts our interests. Neither of these interests require the American public to have a military budget that is roughly half of the global military expense, with our closest allies (NATO europeans, South Korea, Israel) accounting for another ~25%. Even if China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela/Cuba were all to band together somehow into a coherent and cooperative military alliance against us (something that their competing self-interest and global displacement as well as force composition make an exceedingly dubious proposition), and this alliance were to gang up somehow exclusively on America with no international aid to our defence, we would be more than capable of defending ourselves and would probably end up with a couple of new states/protectorates in Cuba for our trouble at our current levels (assuming that nuclear deterrence kept the war conventional, a strong likelihood). What concerns me most with this point is that INCREASES in spending are depicted in the media as DECREASES. While there are real spending dollars (inflation) to consider, even inflation does not increase at the rate our military budget has over the last decade even excluding our active military operations. I would slash this budget to the EU level of about 1.5% of GDP instead of 4%+ as it is currently. But even cuts to the 2.5-3% level would be a significant achievement and go a long way to cutting our deficit with a minimal impact on the real US economy. This too was never up for debate. (Note, there is a proposal to cut almost 350B over ten years from the defence budget if no future deal is arrived on for cuts. I consider this an unlikely prospect that no future deal will emerge with cuts to something else. But it is always possible that the GOP caucus will remain fixed on cutting planned parenthood, NPR, and ObamaCare, and not on things where actual deals are possible. If so, larger defence cuts will be mandated however, a deal which I imagine will motivate enough Republicans and Democrats alike to come up with something because such spending is taboo to cut for political reasons. Even with these relatively large dollar amounts in cuts, the amounts are still very small relative to what is available in the overall defence budget, perhaps 10% would go. Woo-hoo...)

Among other cuts, nothing was mentioned about Homeland Security funding or the War on Drugs. Little was mentioned about eliminating or even reducing agricultural or energy subsidies (some on oil or coal came up, but didn't go anywhere). Wasteful education spending? Nope. Rent controls? (admittedly a usually local concern but often supported directly through the HUD architecture of low income housing subsidies). Not really. And so on down the line.

Instead, a new law came up in the House which effectively requires ISPs to spy on their customers in order to protect against "child predators". All their customers. Not just the ones the police or FBI tell them to keep tabs on. Nor does the law limit authorities' inquiries to child pornography. Any request for information is sufficient and no justification is required. Anybody care to guess where and for what that will be used? In what ways has the PATRIOT act been used for aside from its more explicit supposed use of anti-terrorism? (the list is numerous). This is even less safeguarded than the FBI's use of NSLs under the FISA directives.

Pathetic.

Further note: I don't support a balanced budget amendment. Two reasons.
1) The government operates more like a corporation than individual household budget. Loans, often large loans, are par for the course. Reasonable constraints to real spending come in the form of the requirement of paying back such loans, and servicing the national debt can be an especially pricey prospect. The reason entitlements and tax reform must be on the table is to deal not with the immediate and admittedly pressing problem of the current national debt, but to keep the expense of future national debt (as well as swelling entitlement costs) from engulfing the entirety of the federal budget. This was a long-term economic disaster that bond markets and other players have every right be concerned about. The immediate prospect of a default is child's play next to a much more massive government in the US's future defaulting or being rendered unable to perform its basic duties.
2) One of those duties is on some level to operate a social safety net structure. In times of recessions, such safety nets require more funding than is usual and induce deficits. What should be required instead of permanent balancing is that governments should be prevented in "good" times from expending more than they take in. The impetus to spend the cash it is flush with when the economy (and therefore the tax base) grows is very strong. If it spends this money on basic infrastructure (or repairs to such) or on educational reforms, and not on providing money to favoured constituencies and the middle class, then there is at least some form of capital available afterward (physical or human) that can be drawn upon instead in recessionary periods. Spending on tax cuts likewise isn't all that useful. Money should be horded so that it is available when times are bad. For governments at least. Expansion of services when times are good merely means that there are, as now, much larger expectations of government provision when things are bad. That's a huge problem. Something like an unbalanced budget amendment instead makes more sense to deal with the very real problem of counter-cyclical budgeting. Countries like Norway or China or Germany who have budget surpluses, usually from exports and higher tax bases, are more than capable of stashing some of that cash and then expending it on the natural emergencies of any state. Why are we not doing the same? Why was it necessary to cut taxes in 2001 when we still had such a surplus for example?

Recent entertainments

Red Pretty standard action comedy. Stuff blows up. John Malkovich or Brian Cox say funny things afterward. "Wanna get some pancakes" is a pretty good line. I'd say this was slightly better than Iron Man 2, mostly because of Helen Mirren and Malkovich. Morgan Freeman seems to have been an afterthought in this movie (sort of like in Wanted). Also: I'm not entirely sure who the target audience was here. Old people looking for fountain of youth? Or younger people watching aging stars go explode things?

Hereafter
This was better. Not nearly as good as Inception. I think people wanted the movie to focus more on "Hereafter", a conception of the afterlife supposedly, and that the movie doesn't really answer that concept's inherent questions (why would it) is leaving people unsatisfied. I thought of it as a conception of connections. To people. Both living and dead. Really the movie's a love story, or a story about how people bond and what happens after they do, or what happens when those bonds are severed. You can see this with Damon's character as he tries to connect with someone, but it's a curse the way he does it and it smashes everything he tries to do, and especially you can see it with the French woman or the kid. The big key is watching what happens when your love for someone can't be returned any longer, Damon happens when he tries to meet a girl in a cooking class, French woman's boss has a new lover instead of her, and the kid's twin brother dies. Those are obviously very different problems, but to paraphrase Tolstoy, unhappy people are all unhappy in their own way.

Humor is pretty light, but it shows up every time there's a psychic. Watching people work through generalisation after generalisation and people who "believe" creating specificity (or not), just like astrologers do, was hilarious.

More generally, I guess I looked at the movie this way because it makes no sense to make a dramatic movie about "the afterlife" to me. That's a metaphysical construct, so a movie about such things is a comedy (like say, as Bruce Almighty was a movie "about" god), not a story. So it was easier to go in and throw back out the metaphysics that you would think the movie was about. Once you paid attention, it's about people. As Damon's character says, "A life that's all about death is no life at all". This to me is the biggest problem with having religious focuses, or even stories and promises about, toward an afterlife. It's a waste. You have a life right now. Do something with it. At best you have no idea if you have more or other life after it. At "worst", this is all you get (I personally think afterlife belief is a crutch absolving us of the responsibility to live).

So a movie about the "hereafter" would be a waste too. I took "Hereafter" to be a story about "here" and "after" something tragic or painful or significant happens to us in life and because there really wasn't a whole lot about any "hereafter" at all, this would seem to be the point.

One other amused point. Hereafter seems to take a great stock in the coincidental nature of life. That is, random things happen, sometimes very conveniently (for instance, all three characters being in the same place, or the London subway station bombing and "the hat" thread). This is really easy to do with a life when you have screenwriters for it of course. But in truth, a lot that seems to happen does seem to be coincidental or random. We meet people in "random" encounters, and we ascribe purpose and meaning to this randomness. I think most of the time we create these random encounters on purpose and assign the meaning to it later when we know the outcome, or at least we desire a particular outcome (a new love, a new job, etc). Most of life and its purpose or meaning seems to be about chasing these random moments and making something of them. When you stop chasing them, you'd better have a lot of good memories to live off of because you'll start eating yourself away.

the cause of liberties

I've been engaged in trying to explain how a competitive market for schools would work to the economically challenged. It has not been going well.

But I suspect that this is hardly the only situation where a supposed "conservative" who might be reliably framed as favoring markets would in fact support something totally ridiculous instead (that is, the present system that creates parental oversight over ALL schools rather than simply allowing parental oversight over the school of their choice).

For example, conservatives have cynically been defending medicare against cuts (after decades of railing against the program's very existence. Of course, their passing a massive expansion of the program has not helped). They often suggest methods of cutting social security. Both of these are programs that I'd suggest should not even exist at all. As with schools, it might be a public good or a significant externality to require people to save money for retirement as a hedge against mass irrationality, just as there is a case to fund education through public taxation. But that case does not mean that the government should administer the methods of funding, and hence act not as an honest broker transferring funding to needed and desired public goals. Instead it seizes funding and presumes the public's goals. Similarly, there may be a strong case that consumers should in fact have some method of saving or insuring against medical risks and perhaps that should be a mandated requirement, with public assistance for those who cannot afford to do so. But this again does not mean that the government should thus decide which manner of insuring risks shall be used, what risks should be insurable, what methods of treatment should be deployed, etc. It may well be that the government can act to preserve transparency, to conduct studies on the efficacy of treatments, on the desirability of curing various diseases and conditions relative to the costs and benefits of such things in a general way, and also act to demand transparency of information and costs from providers of health care. These methods could act to preserve and extend markets into health care. But it makes little sense to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the aged (and hence infirm) on the sole basis that they are aged. It should be the responsibility of the individual to assume control over their health care, its quality and provision as well as their own health maintenance over a period of a lifetime. A system which provides relatively free health care and medications to people on the basis that they "need" them, without a full regard for their private ability to provision themselves with such things is apt to be a program which transfers vast sums of money to people who do not need it and did not ask for it.

That is hardly "conservative" either, just as it is hardly conservative to demand all schools teach what a handful of active parents decide through local or state school boards.

I could of course go on at length on the subject of the flailing drug war and its costs to human life and liberties, and to the subject of condemning people to suffering and privation of abject poverty on the basis of their place of birth by excluding the possibility, indeed the hope, of improvement by relocation here. But after a while, it gets depressing to see such visions as those of drug warriors and xenophobes/nativists taken with any seriousness.

complexity of people

Two faces. Presented by the same person on the same person.

Face of counsel and caution Which, had we some sense of national conscience willing to look back upon our error, could have been attended to with greater wisdom at the time and saved us much blood, treasure, and toil in needless consequences.

But it had the misfortune to come from this face too. The former KKK member who opposed civil rights and the purchaser of many monuments to his own perceived grand influence through the largess of the taxpayer. Including, of all things, a coast guard station in the middle of a mountainous state with no significant waterways or beachfront to speak of.

I guess some mysteries are better left confusing.

the war on the elderly continues

It's a stealth war.

And we're losing. The only good news is that those old folks don't do a lot of driving. And start to become less numerous around the point where they start getting very dangerous. But we still don't do anything more than a bloody eye test in this state, despite statistical reasons to be looking for reasons to vacate old people's driving licenses.

I'm also a bit confused why Hyundai is running an ad campaign that presumably targets one of its demographics: younger people who will have cheaper cars. Those old people will be driving tanks and battleships. It's the whippersnappers who do all the driving who will buy up all the little economy cars that Hyundai sells.

why hospital visitation was meaningless

Contracts don't mean a thing

At least when the state can just decide to ignore them rather than respect and enforce them.

"wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other" - None of these are things that require you to name someone who you are legally married to or even related to. You can name whoever you want, with some limitations mostly relating to your own mental status. So instead of abiding by these contractual arrangements made in good faith, the state decides to ignore them, because...why? That isn't even necessarily a problem merely limited to homosexual couples at the point where governments decide to do as they please and bypass our private arrangements without due process.

Toyota didn't do it?

This is getting worse

As the story goes about. I guess I have two problems.

1) I can write this off as more and further proof that people are morons. Especially the homicidal elderly driving population.

2) I can assume there was some minute flaw with Toyotas they needed to address. That is that moronic people figured out ways to misuse their cars.

evidence that I am secretly an old man

Check out the 45 and up

Naturally this was something I predicted I would feel (rage and/or apprehension) at the notion of "updating" classic works of fiction and filling them with fistfights, explosions, and womanizing, with the implicit assumption being that there was somehow not enough real content in the original works to hold our attention.

I'm also slightly amused to watch the chipmunks flutter toward worst movie of the year status.

(Update: the 45+ crowd isn't as extreme as it was from the first blush. It was around 5.9 but has gone up somewhat to a now respectable score, though nowhere near as crazy as those teenagers are. I now get to look down my nose upon "fellow" old people as they allow their culture to be defamed in the name of a cheap movie thrill. If I wanted a movie with explosions and fighting that resembles a crime drama with a superhero involved, I will watch the two new Batman movies. Sherlock Holmes was a different species of superhero.)

this is not a race issue

uh, why is this a black thing?

Because last I checked, the demographics relating to civil rights for homosexuals had a generational gap for everybody. It pretty much is old people versus their grandchildren, or in some cases, children, regardless of racial or ethnic factors. There are religious factors which impact tolerance here, but since younger people are more apt to leave religious institutions they have strong disagreements with (most commonly over views on abortion and homosexuals; Catholics/fundamentalists with birth control) than people who've been in those institutions their entire lives, there again, these are generational gaps.

So to summarize: blacks are no more likely than any other ethnic group to oppose gay marriage rights. When controlled for factors like religious affiliations and attendance rates, socio-economic status, and so on, and what comes out at the end is a group of people who look just like everybody else on their stance toward gays: old people retain their bias and younger people don't share in it. This was studied to death in the wake of the California ballot last year with the supposed problem that all of Obama's minority voters had voted against gay marriage. It was in fact, older largely religious white people who had (goaded by well-funded scare tactics from the Mormon church and others). The "angle" being used here is pointless nonsense to justify a headline that doesn't alienate the core readers of newspapers: older white people. Who are in fact, on this issue among a few others of late importance to the nation, :cough, health care and social security reform :cough, the problem.

The "rift" story is one of grandfather and maybe father versus progeny. Please stop patronizing us with this illusion that it is somehow only black people who suffer from having older bigots in their voting ranks.

bullet points on the speech for later

Heading off the President's speech later, I'd like to call attention to some relevant issues on the health care "debate" as it stands

1)It is perfectly acceptable for mostly old white people to stand up and complain about changes to a system that is heavily advantageous to themselves. Money for government health care for senior citizens is little more than an unsustainable pyramid scheme in the long run. That is precisely why there must be a debate over cost. Much of that cost is wasteful or, more precisely, is not tied to any sense of value that it imparts to people receiving services. I don't think it is too much to ask that people should have to think about the procedures they get, perhaps ahead of time, for difficult and expensive treatments and how this cost is more often paid by others instead of themselves. Sure nobody wants to die, and I'm not recommending that old people should have to just lay down and die either. I am suggesting that we think harder about the costs of keeping people alive versus the cost of making them healthier, or, heavens no, happier. It does not seem unreasonable to assign these decisions to the people who have to make them (namely the elderly and their doctors and closest relatives). I'm sorry they're hard to make, but we (the working generation) are tired of paying for people who don't want to make them at all.

2) Some of the points raised by "descenters" are perfectly legitmate questions. What will it cost? Who will pay? How will we pay? What does this do to what I have now? And so on. I think it is reasonable to ask these. What I have a problem with is that many of the people who commonly make them do not seem to have thought through that there are legitimate problems with the present system that REQUIRE action and thought to resolve. They have put forward an untenable position that suggests there is nothing wrong with the situation now. It is in fact, unsustainable, costly, wasteful, and often dangerous. When pressed, these questions should hint at follow up questions on what might be ways to better allay these concerns for example. Perhaps even put forward a coherent plan instead in opposition to the present vague one.

3) I don't expect this of normal everyday people who work and receive their benefits from work. In fact, I am finding unsurprising that nobody wants to challenge the status quo. Most people do not think that their health benefits cost them something, or if it does that it costs them very much. In addition they will then proceed to believe that it provides them with a higher standard of care. It does not. It provides them with access to a more expensive standard of care but it does not automatically provide people with access to better health care outcomes. This is a prime reason why the recent Atlantic article was so useful. It was a story, something most people will relate to, about the costs of the current system in terms of producing poor quality outcomes and high cost relative to its actual value. People may disagree freely with his prescriptions for resolving this, but I don't think you can argue that the present incentives for good quality outcomes for health care consumers are messed up and that a good reason for this is the third party payment system we use for most everything medical (employer provided or government benefits). There are additional costs in the way of receiving wages in the form of benefits that should be obvious, but apparently aren't.

4) We will probably continue to hear a lot about preventive care and costs. I have decided this is a useful thing to include, but not because it will reduce costs. What it appears to do is transfer the cost of high maintenance chronic care ailments and injuries with the possibility of more expensive problems that can be prevented thus adding to the overall expense, to people who have low health care consumption needs. Those people will, by some extension, be encouraged to go more often and consume more health care than at present to better insure themselves against catastrophic events, say cancer or heart disease. This it can be argued is a desirable outcome. Indeed it is very likely that a balanced preventive care methodology would produce much greater value from quality of care outcomes. But it is difficult to argue that it actually reduces cost in a substantial way. Particularly if there are not methods used that re-capture some preventive costs as disincentives upon the public to require them in the first place (like high excise taxes on tobacco or alcohol). These methods have come up for discussion, but they are not that commonly included in the legislation at present, meaning it's not clear if there would be a net benefit to a national emphasis on preventive care as far as reducing our costs.

5) Most of the public debate has centered around insurance reform. I do think it is a legitimate and vital discussion to have on how we pay for health care through the device of insurance. That's not really the discussion we've been having of course. And for the most part, medical care itself has not been up for debate. It is assumed that the right wing talking point "we have the best medical care in the world" is widely believed and hence accurate. It is not actually the best in terms of patient outcomes (though we have some good stories here to tell in particular ways, like extending the lives of old people by about a year over other societies and generally good, but expensive, cancer treatment). America has been second before in other things like for example the space race (we're still way behind the ball in education) and it survived this humbling experience. And more importantly it's certainly not worth the price we pay for what we get. Nor the price we will continue to pay in the future if we do not head off the causes of these rising costs.

6) I'm really confused as to how a party that was all over entitlement spending as a problem/ talking point first passed a massive increase in it (Medicare part D) and now seems content, rather than coming up with their own way to reduce entitlements, to demagogue the attempts to tackle this essential question. It's fine to want to stop bad legislation. It's not helpful however to push against resolving essential and pervasive problems. I think stalling the initial push to pass health care reforms immediately was a good thing. But then, that wasn't a stall coordinated by Republicans in the first place. Any reasonable observer should note that the only place there appears to be a debate over the important questions at all in this country is between moderate Democrats and less moderate Democrats. We effectively have no "two party system" because the other party has no ideas of its own. Whether you think Republicans are hell spawn of some sort or not, this is not a good thing for a democracy to have no major differences of ideology and opinion upon which to rely on giving it real choices on how to resolve its public issues.

so yes that sucks

George Carlin died over the weekend. The man was funny and irreverent. And 71. For almost fifty years he'd been poking fun at our strange culture.

We need more like him. Life is just not that complicated: "You get up, go to work, take one good shit, and go back to bed, what's the big mystery?"

a place for my stuff

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/business-of-future-home-inventory.html

This was a funny analysis of how inventory has been transferred as a business problem to a people problem. Carlin has the routine on how a home is just a pile of stuff with a lid on it. Well people are essentially over-stuffing their piles because of how products are sold and because they don't keep track of their stuff very well either. Try to imagine all the sunglasses and writing implements that have been lost. Or the amount of food that we consume in half-thought out meals, zoning out in front of the boob tube while some nonsensical show is on interspersed with advertising for products we don't need (I really have to wonder about all the ED commercials... seriously are that many old people unable to get it up or are we just worrying them to death? And how many of them are watching a basketball game anyway.) In a country without budgets and without some accounting for our own inventories, it's no wonder that businesses can 'take advantage' of us.

It would be ok if we all had more or less endless supplies of income to dispose of in this way.. but we don't.

happened to me

"What happened to me is both tragic for me and a lot of people," says Monus, who watched Rockies and Indians ballgames while in prison.

Now keeping in mind that being sent to prison isn't very pleasant.. I'd have to wonder how someone who was convicted on 109 counts of embezzlement and fraud could have the balls to say 'what happened to me'. It happened because of your activities dipshit; it wasn't an accident. A car wreck where one car's brakes fail or someone doesn't make a good, quick reaction is an accident. Something unpleasant happened to someone. A car wreck caused by a drunk driver or someone driving too slow (yes, too slow) or way too fast is caused by someone. This smells to me like the second case.. so I'd have to wonder why something 'happened to him', rather than the other way around.

ranting for dummies

I've decided now to turn to things of importance and create a listing of rantings.

House fires are terrible, now get them off breaking news. It can wait until later. I'm watching a game show. (well I'm not, but somewhere out there someone doesn't know the answer and never will)

Ditto car chases. I'm glad I'm not in LA.. Somehow I'm amazed they can have a car chase there. You'd think the traffic would prevent it.

Most everyone is a 'liberal' until they start paying taxes. Then everyone hates government. I don't think this means we should vote one way or the other. I just think it means there is something we can agree on: We hate taxes. While we're at it, enough with the name calling. Almost nobody is straight when it comes to politics.

Why is there so much coverage of disasters and bombings? You'd think the world was about to end every day by the news. I think every newscast should start with "and the sun will come up tomorrow", then it can proceed downhill. We'd feel a whole lot better knowing at least the sun will come up tomorrow.

Why do I care about two people I don't know getting married? Is this worthy of network news? Was it a slow day? I suspect in a world full of misery, carnage, and despair, they could have had a good story in there. No we have to see footage of tom-kat. I get enough of that waiting to check out when the self-checkout line is down for service thank you.

Why can't Ohio get with the program and realize that they are creating '007's in droves when they license old people to drive with little more than an eye test and a checkbox for the organ donor program. I've had to avoid 5 accidents in the past year and not one of them looked a day younger than King Tut (who's going on what, 4000?). The campaign against the elderly has officially been opened. I'm tired of this. Old people feel entitled and get to push us young rascals around because they actually vote. Well, your days are numbered old man.

In case you weren't paying attention, I tire of posting lengthy opininated essays that receive no attention. Apparently we are suffering from a dearth of intellectuals in this fading republic. So I will instead assemble a series of rambling insults in a deliberate attempt to incite rebellion in the minds of lesser mortals.