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As news has reared its ugly head recently, putinesque, one begins to realize we are living in interesting times. I’ve noticed that magazines and newspapers can’t keep up with the pace.  It’s one flaming brown sack of shit left on our stoop after another. Reading this week’s New Yorker is almost comical, insofar as they’re three sacks of shit behind in their reportage, and fading fast. The newspaper isn’t doing much better. Hell, the net can barely keep up; what chances do papers and magazines have?

And so, my friends, I’ve been searching desperately for calmer waters, where I can spend a little time in respite from the turmoil and strife of daily life; somewhere that I can recharge in order to face the next hour or half hour of gigantic, scary change. And I’ve found it. I’ve found it in Fred Thompson’s forehead.

Here is the picture that led me to peace:

Fred Thompson

Not very impressive, you say? Just some Republican/movie star hack who rose beyond his level of incompetence? Well, you’d be right, but you’re not looking at the big picture. Or rather, you’re not looking at a small part of the big picture that you should be looking at, viz:

Fred's head

The magnificence should be coming into view, but let me direct your attention closer:

Like ripples on a still, deep pond

And even closer:

Fred's rippling forehead

And now, a quick pull back, like that one tulip film that pulls back to show shocking thousands of tulips, to blow your mind and calm your fears:

Fredlines, peace be upon you and yours

When all seems hopeless, and misery and fear lurk in every shadow, Fredlines will be here for you. Good night.

Remember how a few years ago artists were employed to draw pastels of court scenes because cameras weren’t permitted in? I don’t know, I guess to protect the innocent, on the very off-chance that the accused were somehow found innocent? I think the same technique ought to be used in pictures inside the stock market exchanges. Because there’s bound to be one or two innocents among the perpetrators.

When the Thundering Herd Comes up Lame

–Keith Fitz-Gerald

I’m sick and tired of hearing how “we” caused this … how, according to the mainstream media, “we” somehow did this to our financial system.

Baloney.

For the most part, “we” didn’t do squat. The average American had nothing to do with this. For the most part, “we” pay our taxes, “we” pay our credit card debt and “we” pay our mortgages – on time, and in full.

…

While I truly feel sorry for the people who honestly didn’t know better, or for whom there was no other option, I cannot extend my sympathies to others like my neighbor who spent through his home equity to buy a Hummer, a new boat, two jet skis, and a lavish European vacation.

He’s now about to lose his toys – and his home – not to mention his marriage.

Nor can I extend my sympathies to the modern robber barons like the corporate chieftains of Fannie, Freddie and the other bailout candidates – who pocketed millions while shareholders lost billions.

I don’t see any of these guys offering to return their bonuses, or to forgo their “golden parachute” severance packages, to help their former employers pay off the debts they helped these companies accrue. And forget about them reimbursing the U.S. taxpayers, who are stuck with the bill for cleaning up this mess.

No, instead these ex-boardroom warriors are now lying low somewhere in Old Greenwich, out at The Hamptons, or out on their yachts somewhere – until the storm blows over.

The fact that the profits from this colossal fiasco will be privatized while the losses will be socialized fills me with hatred for these people. The fact that the public is maneuvered into a position that requires socializing loss in order to prevent system collapse creates in me the urge to crush skulls.

IF I COULD REACH OUT AND CRUSH SKULLS

Imagine if your job were set up in such a way that your value within the company rose over time, yet that value could not be extracted and put to work at any other company. For example, you’ve been working for IBM for 15 years, but now IBM does something that really pisses you off. Yet you can’t pack up and leave for Google, because they will not recognize your 15 years at IBM. They will only recognize your several minutes (and counting) of time at Google, and pay you accordingly. Imagine that.

You could respond by saying “I’d never go into a field that was set up in such a way; I’d do something different.” But say you really liked doing what only IBM does. Or say your natural progression through life led you down this path, almost unbeknownst to you, until you finally had a chance to look back to see where you came from. In other words, your tenure at IBM is a kind of fait accompli. And if for whatever idle reason you ended up at General Motors or Best Buy or Barney, Barney, and Tate instead, other people, people you know, just like you, ended up working at IBM through the magic of statistical probability. It’s like this: some people are blue-eyed, some people have a recessive gene for dwarfism, some people work for IBM. There is a certain amount of choice involved in working for IBM, but some bodies, many bodies, work for it, and that is ineluctable. Try to remember how you fell into the job you have now, and remember how serendipitous that was. Remember?

Imagine that IBM is old, its industry is hoary. Generations of workers have imagined it as their goal, and a great press of workers is ready to do IBM’s work for almost any amount of money, because they don’t know any better. But IBM cannot hire these workers for any amount of money; they can only hire them for a contractually certain amount of money. A union-bargained amount of money.

Imagine that Unionism caused the devaluation of your work at comparable companies at the same time it caused your value to increase at IBM, but that this is not ipso facto a consequence of unionism itself. One can point to other industries where this did not happen, because a union was nascently and presciently fashioned to include all companies in the industry, not each company individually. But for IBM the time of nascence is long passed; the union is what it is, and too many people would be economically hurt to change its charter now. So from a worker’s standpoint, there are better and worse ways for a union to have come about. An industry-wide union will exist and bargain and allow its workers to prosper for as long as the industry exists; a company-specific union will exist and bargain and allow its workers to prosper for only as long as the company exists and prospers. Imagine there were political reasons that the latter was the only initial path to Unionism for IBM’s workers.

Imagine all that; now tell me how distaste for unions and Unionism can arise in workers without a concerted political effort to undermine unions and Unionism by powers that would rather hire workers for any amount of money, and fire workers for any reason. “But my distaste for Unionism comes from my personal, considered distaste for unions’ excesses and corruption;” but what unregulated or poorly regulated social or political agency ever maintained its original aims? And now that unions are better regulated, and have been better regulated for decades now–much the same way that some industries (oil, mortgage, health insurance) and the management of those industries have not– now that this is true, from where does the distaste arise? From considered thought? Or from politically-managed perception?

“I’m a manager at IBM. I can tell you that the unionized workers here are lazy, that they hide their laziness behind their contract, and that they feel entitled to that laziness.” With all due respect, Mr Manager, there are inefficiencies on both sides of the managerial divide. Inefficiencies are what make a job bearable. Inefficiencies are what keep one from being forced to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The difference between managerial and worker inefficiencies is that the workers bargained for theirs, and you take yours when you think the Board isn’t looking or doesn’t care. That’s the difference. And if by some chance the Board does glance your way and sees you taking a little personal time in between moaning about the workers’ sense of entitlement, and fires your ass, you have the opportunity to pack up and start over at Google at a comparable salary, because that is the way your job was set up long before you took it.

I have no idea how I ended up working in a unionized industry. I look back, and all I can say is that it just sort of happened that way. But now that I’m here, now that my life is intertwined with the well-being of my union (and the well-being of my company, since that is how the Unionism ball bounced in my industry), now that all that is true, I find myself paying attention to how Unionism is portrayed in the media. It’s not a good portrayal; the public does not view Unionism in a good light. Perceptions have been managed.

Imagine that this kind of perception management happens all the time, in other ways, for other movements. Liberalism, for example. That’s not hard to imagine, is it? How else can we reconcile the way many citizens vote against the very people and things that would help them most? Or vote for the very people and things that help them the least; that, in fact, willfully cause great misery in their lives?

There is no way.

And how can we justify the actions of the worker who votes against fellow workers because raising their standards of living will be an inconvenience?

There is no way.

“First they came for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then they came for me;
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

Recently, my hosting service (Midphase) has started to come apart at the seams. It’s one thing to have no access to the database and get the consequent “Wordpress Database Error” message; it’s another thing entirely when whole posts get swallowed up into the ether, which is what happened today. Two whole posts….gone.

Midphase has been telling us to bear with them as they move their servers from one farm to another, but that’s been going on for (literally) months now, and what should have been an improvement has resulted in the kind of service I’d expect only from drunken marmots. I didn’t mind…too much…when all I was losing was a little up-time. Now that I’ve lost actual posts, though…probably time to look for someone else. Any suggestions?

I’m reading a top “worst tech products of all time” thing on pcworld.com…it’s not important why…and it reminds me, again, of how out-of-touch with peripheral crap I can get. Which is of course a good thing, I like to think, but disconcerting all the same. It’s mostly disconcerting because the article is obviously intended for a target audience that cares about such things, and I like to think that I *do* care about computer evolution. I like to think I *am* the target audience. I’ve owned several several computers in my life, have done the homework that’s necessary to acquire several several computers, and have learned the idiosyncracies of all those computers over months and years of happy interaction and berserk fury when bad things happen.

But I’m not really the target audience. Apparently I don’t have the necessary staying power. For instance, with this ‘top bad products’ article, I find myself agreeing with some of the entries, like pricelinegroceries and the PCjr. I remember those debacles. For other entries, though, I have not the slightest memory of debacle or fiasco. In fact, if it weren’t for this article, I would assume these companies from Yore are still doing business with someone, somewhere. The example is ‘dBASE.’ Yes, I’ve heard of it in the last few decades. It occupies an odd spot in my head devoted to business…devoted to business that I couldn’t care less about. My brain long ago decided there was a program called ‘dBASE’ that some businessmen used for obscure fiscal reasons; it decided that it would never be called upon to be an advisor to a person of that type, therefore it had no further use for that knowledge or that word, therefore it would be filed away permanently. Now I find that dBASE is synonymous with ‘fiasco.’ Not only that, I find out that that is common knowledge; common enough for the offending company’s name to place highly in a ‘worst of’ list.

So I’m not really the intended audience here. And you may or may not know of this fiasco, and know that dBASE’s place in this list is well-deserved. That’s not my point, really. My point is that no matter how clever you are, you can’t pay attention to everything. You can’t even pay attention to the things you pay attention to; something huge will always slip by.

Strooth!

“Ladies & Gentlemen, men of the press, your Royal Highness,

“We at Blithering Idiot Co are excited about the future. Confidently upbeat. Future-wise, we see ourselves moving forward. And not just moving forward in the sense that everything must move forward in space-time, but in a whole other, more exciting sense that you have to take my word on.

“My predecessor at Blithering idiot, a fine man, led this company on a new path. He dared to lead when others lay back and said ‘It will never work!’ They said ‘The change is too much!’ They said ‘The tank is about to blow!’ Well, I’d just like to say to those doubting Thomases that he was one hundred percent correct, in the sense that two out of three is one hundred percent. And I’d like to build on the successes of this man, this towering hero, by dismantling his initiatives and replacing them with entirely new ones. May he rest in peace going forward.

“Make no mistake, we also plan to learn from our mistakes, if we’ve made any, which we have not. We will learn from these non-mistakes in a looking backward, vibrant fashion. For we at Blithering Idiot regard every mistake that we’ve never made as really an opportunity, an opportunity to improve our synergies and initiatives seamlessly with regard to things.

“So as we stagger from opportunity to opportunity in our march into the future, let us always remember that, even though other companies may tie a bow on a sack of horseshit and call it pretty, we would never, ever do such a thing, unless it were both lucrative and unattributable.

“Thank you and God bless you all.”

This entry has been changed since I can’t depersonalize it enough to guarantee maintenance of total anonymity, which is vital since I don’t get paid. So screw it.

It’s the mark of a worker-controlled company if that company will give a worker a leave of absence for the purpose of making him less dependent on the company. An owner-controlled company would have no qualms with denying that leave. Give you more control of your destiny? Be less dependent on the company for a livelihood? That’s absurd.

I’ll find out, maybe, whether Brand X Airlines is a company of the first sort when I apply for a leave of absence four or five years from now to go to nurse anesthetist school. I’ll find out whether Brand X considers me a person or a serf. That’ll be interesting to know.

Here’s an excerpt from my Economics book:

“Supply-siders believe that how long and how hard people work depends on the amounts of additional after-tax earnings they derive from their efforts. They say that government should reduce marginal tax rates on earned incomes to induce more work, and therefore increase aggregate inputs of labor…. The higher opportunity cost of leisure would encourage people to substitute work for leisure. This increase in productive effort could be achieved in many ways: by increasing the number of hours worked per day or week, by encouraging workers to postpone retirement, by inducing more people to enter the labor force, by motivating people to work harder, and by avoiding long periods of unemployment.”

Isn’t that fine? In this excerpt, it’s the supply-siders talking about maximizing work and productivity, but it’s not limited to them; all economists see that as a good thing. In other words, the economic theorists are busy trying to minimize our pleasure. That’s their mission. They want us all to work longer and harder, so that more goods are created, so that more consumers can be born to work harder to create more goods to allow more consumers and more goods and more work. To an economist, there is no such thing as “enough.”

I’ve spent four months with this textbook. There are many passages similar to this one. I’ve learned what I was supposed to learn, at least to the point that I could perform adequately on tests, yet I feel, between the authors and myself, that someone’s missing a critical point, and that someone is not me.

This is the point: is it not evident that a person should maximize leisure? “Leisure” means time that is one’s own; doesn’t it make sense that we should try to have as much of that as we can?

Yes. Yes, it does.

I fail, on a basic level, to accept McConnell and Brue and their cohorts’ premise. I fundamentally disagree with them.

And that’s what I’ve learned from my Macroeconomics course.

I’ve got an idea: tax the shit out of the rich. You know Forbes’ annual list of the ultra-rich? Tax the living shit out of them.

I’m a practical guy. When I proposed to my wife, while it wasn’t exactly out of the blue, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I mean, I didn’t bide my time, calculate, buy an engagement ring, and all the stuff a man is “supposed” to do. So I didn’t have an engagement ring to give her. I didn’t have anything to give her to symbolize my love for her; I gave her my love, I didn’t need any symbols.

But my wife has let it be known once or twice over the years that she misses not having an engagement ring.

Like I said, I’m a practical guy. So, when I look at somebody’s big ring on her finger, I don’t think “Why, isn’t that lovely!” I think “My GOD! They could’ve put a downpayment on the Biltmore with the money that thing must’ve cost!”

The whole thing the DeBeers people spew about how a man should spend 2 months’ salary on a ring fills me with loathing. They are evil, calculating bastards. I remember, years ago, the DeBeers people used to say that a month and a half’s worth of salary was adequate to do the job. I remember vividly when they changed the commercials to reflect their escalating, filthy lust for my money: it was in the 80’s. Do you remember that? It really happened. The DeBeers people are filthy.

There are ways to show you love someone without lining the pockets of the already super-rich. And I don’t mind symbols of love, until someone starts making a business out of it.

I’ll probably buy my wife a ’substitute ring’ someday to make up for my crass refusal to make the diamond people richer. Who knows, maybe I’ll put a downpayment on the Biltmore for her.

ps: she does have a wedding ring. I’m not totally heartless.

Confessions

This should be required reading for anyone who gets within 200 yards of a car dealership.

“The other boxes on the 4-square are for the price of the trade-in, the amount of the customer’s down payment, and the amount of the customer’s monthly payment.

‘When you negotiate, this sheet should be covered with numbers,’ Michael said. ‘It should be like a battleground. And I don’t want to see the price dropping five hundred dollars at a pop. Come down slowly, slowly. Here I’ll show you how.’”

I despise companies that try to force me to learn new words for old things.

I walk into a hamburger joint, I’m ordering a hamburger. A big mac? No, get me a god damn hamburger. Would you like a grande frappucino? No. No, I would not. Gimme a medium coffee, you retarded, advertisement-spewing tool.

The best thing you can do is not watch television. The second best thing is, if there’s a show that you simply have to see, when the commercials come on, mute them.

It’s instructive to watch a commercial without sound; for instance, car commercials. Balloons rise, flags wave, mud splatters, and salesmen walk briskly from one side of the shot to the other, like they have some fucking purpose. They’re busy busy busy! Things is hapnin down at the dealership, so come on down! We have purpose; trust us! We’re smiling, for chrissake! Give us your money!

I was watching the Bill Maher show the other day. During the call-in segment; one caller asked Bill (and Arianna Huffington, apparently his usual guest) how they felt about the “new bailout” for the airlines. Arianna, who somehow became pro-worker between now and when she played would-be kingmaker to her conservative husband back in ‘94, was essentially for stabilizing the industry by reducing the new post 9/11 security taxes. Bill was adamantly opposed to a bailout of any kind, preferring instead that market forces work their unfettered magic on the industry by weeding out the sick and the injured, in order to leave the industry stronger in the long run.

My point is: what unmitigated bullshit. The reason we have a government at all is to prevent the rail barons of the world from squashing their workers underfoot, whether they be programmers, pilots, or garbagemen. Maher (whose opinion I normally respect, or at least pay attention to) prefers to play the dispassionate Darwinian, which seems to be all the rage the last few years, and plays nicely into the hands of the powerful few. The powerful cultivate that philosophy. It allows each industry to be looked at, not as a group of people with families and needs, but as some kind of dumb mechanized vector to be straightened regardless of the human toll.

Every consumer (so by extension, every person) is a member of some big dumb vector, whether he knows it or not. And Consumerism teaches each of us to pride himself on his ability to analyze other people’s industries, and to make personal, dispassionate judgments based on those analyses. Like Bill was doing. I’ve certainly done it, and do it every time I walk into Wal-Mart to buy something for a dime less than I could’ve gotten it elsewhere. I feel bad about it, when I think of it, and I try to spread my dollars around a little. But most people don’t feel that way; most people are smug about saving a few bucks like that, and even though they know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that the reason they’re saving that money is because someone who was paid 10 dollars an hour was replaced by someone making minimum wage, they don’t care.

Those smug consumers are oblivious to the certainty that the mean eye of consumerism will be trained on their own industries eventually. Totally oblivious.

That’s where we are today, where each industry can be scrutinized and straightened in turn, to the ruin of its workers, and everyone else sagely nods while the most vituperous Darwinisms fall out of their heads.

Well, I want Bill Maher’s big, dumb vector straightened next.