America's Debt: If It is So Bad, Why Do They Do It to Themselves Again and Again

Here's a thought for the day...

If debt is so dangerous, as the Republicans claim, why do home owners typically go into debt at roughly 300% of the income level to buy a house? This makes the US federal debt at 100% of the GDP look like fiscal prudence.

If families followed the Republican mantra, nobody would buy a house without 100% cash down. In short, the already crippled housing market would completely stop functioning. Chalk up a "win" for Republican fiscal "prudence".

Take a look at this awning chasm of debt that has the Republicans convinced they must stage Armageddon to "save America from itself"...


That increase in debt was a one-time-event to save the US from going into a Great Depression, something which the Republican party knows all too well because their man, Herbert Hoover, led the nation into the Great Depression.

So why are the Republicans on a tear and ready to destroy the country by going into default on "America's credit card" over debt? Because they smell political blood and they are going after Obama to destroy him (and the country as the innocent victim in this political "game") in order to win elections in 2012.

Is Something Happening Now?

Here is Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 saying "something is happening now". It leaves me wondering... is there something happening now? With the Great Recession and the shaking of the foundations of the world economy, is there something happening now? (Listen at 6:30 in this first clip. MLK was widening his message from racial equality to economic equality and the need for global peace & security.)

Part 1:


Part 2:


In the second clip at time 2:35 there is something relevant to the Giffords assassination attempt. And 8:50 is when MLK is prophetic about the coming of the end of his life. He remained positive to the end. He held his vision of a better future to the very end.

The transcript of the speech is here.

For all the hatred of "socialist" Obama, I think back to the early 1960s when my church had a youth minster who had to flee Alabama with his wife and two young toddlers because fanatics from the KKK had burned a cross in his front yard to give him a warning. The descendants of those fanatics now run the Republican party. this is nearly 50 years later, and change has come but it has not yet come deep enough to root out the fanatics of hate. There is something that needs to be happening now. I hope it is. I hope that I don't see it because I'm too close to it. But change has been going on and continues to go on, and needs to be going on.

A good history of the American Civil Rights struggle can be found in Taylor Branch's three volume study:

• Volume 1: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63


• Volume 2: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65.


• Volume 3: At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68

The American Civil Rights struggle was a revolution, but like all revolutions it has left much still to be done. Each struggle is like a wave of the ocean lapping at the edge of the land. Each brings in new possibilities, but each ends by receding a bit, then a new wave arises and comes in to yet again offer hope.

I am left wondering... is something happening now?

Robert X. Cringely on Jared Loughner

Here is a bit from an interesting post by Robert X. Cringely about his experience with a mentally unstable student like Jared Loughner:

I worked late at night back then in creaky old Redwood Hall. Sitting there grading papers at midnight every sound seemed to be an unwanted footstep. The math professor didn’t get any hate mail, to my knowledge and here I was getting a letter nearly every week.

Then they stopped.

My former student had taken his life, parking his car in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and jumping to his death.

...

It’s hard to think more than a step or two beyond our experience. The fact that the teachers and administrators at Pima Community College didn’t see their guy being a mass murderer shouldn’t be surprising. On the other hand I suppose that they — and I — played the odds to some degree.

Much of this comes down to not really knowing people. The Education School accepted my student not knowing what he was like, nor did they seem to put much effort into knowing him once he was there. They were incredulous that I even cared. So too this guy in Arizona. Maybe he had long been on this path but nobody knew it because nobody cared.

The whole post is interesting. It is another perspective on dealing with crazy students.

What bothers me the most is how much the "problem" people (criminals, crazies, etc.) suck the life out of a society. They are parasites who demand so much effort from the rest of society. It is tragic that they can't be spotted early and helped. You know, the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure motto. But in reality, this is a problem that will always be with us. I think the only social control on these social parasites is via the ethic of the population at large. If society sets its expectations high and thereby pressures these people to conform then there is less parasitism. On the other hand, I don't want to live in a "barracks style" society where we are all regimented and forced to think in lock step.

This is a very tough problem. There is no solution. Like most problems society will swing around an optimal point sometimes been too indulgent (like the tolerance of Jared Loughner) and at other times the society will be too rigid and intolerant of non-conformism (and you end up burning innocent witches at the stake).

An Optimistic View of the Future

Here is a thought worth taking the time to ponder: the future will be better and we will have given place to a better version of ourselves...



This sounds right to me. We no longer are the hunter gathers with the high death rates from inter-tribe feuding. Hopefully we are beyond the 19th & 20th century nation state "global" wars. We are civilizing ourselves despite ourselves. Self selection in an urban environment is changing us.

The above is the narration of cosmologist Carl Sagan on us as an "adaptable species". An interesting thought...

Here is yet another version. Same narration, different visuals and music...

EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

If You Want to be Humbled...

The following video will not only introduce you to an interesting astronomical experiment, it will humble you in its implications...



Copernicus brought the rage of religion because he proposed a model of the universe that moved man from the center and replaced Earth is Sun. In the early 20th century, most astronomers thought that "all there is" was just the Milky Way galaxy, but then some fuzzy patches were discovered to be "near by" constellations. Whole other galaxies lurking in space. This video gives you a sense of how immense space is.

This video humbles those who want to put humans on a pedestal and say that we are the "meaning" of the universe, that it was created for our sake! What foolishness. We are smaller than small.

Intriguing Thoughts

I ran across this posting by Douglas Rushkoff on Boing Boing. I find it interesting. There are elements that sound true to me. As always I'm not willing to completely swallow this line of thought hook, line, and sinker but I'll let it rattle around my brain for a while. It is worth thinking about:

The current situation resembles the managed capitalism of Mussolini's Italy, in particular. It shares a common intellectual heritage (in disappointed progressives who wanted to order society on a scientific understanding of human nature), the same political alliance (the collaboration of the state and the corporate sector), and some of the same techniques for securing consent (through public relations and propaganda). Above all, it shares with fascism the same deep suspicion of free humans.

And, as with any absolutist narrative, calling attention to the inherent injustice and destructiveness of the system is understood as an attempt to undermine our collective welfare. The whistleblower is worse than just a spoilsport; he is an enemy of the people.

Unlike Europe's fascist dictatorships, this state of affairs came about rather bloodlessly--at least on the domestic front. Indeed, the real lesson of the twentieth century is that the battle for total social control would be waged and won not through war and overt repression, but through culture and commerce. Instead of depending on a paternal dictator or nationalist ideology, today's system of control depends on a society fastidiously cultivated to see the corporation and its logic as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.

That's why it's no longer Big Brother who should frighten us-- however much corporate lobbies still seek to vilify anything to do with government beyond their own bailouts. Sure, democracy may be the quaint artifact of an earlier era, but what has taken its place? Suspension of habeas corpus, surveillance of citizens, and the occasional repression of voting notwithstanding, this mess is not the fault of a particular administration or political party, but of a culture, economy, and belief system that places market priorities above life itself. It's not the fault of a government or a corporation, the news media or the entertainment industry, but the merging of all these entities into a single, highly centralized authority with the ability to write laws, issue money, and promote its expansion into our world.

Then, in a last cynical surrender to the logic of corporatism, we assume the posture and behaviors of corporations in the hope of restoring our lost agency and security. But the vehicles to which we gain access in this way are always just retail facsimiles of the real ones. Instead of becoming true landowners we become mortgage holders. Instead of guiding corporate activity we become shareholders. Instead of directing the shape of public discourse we pay to blog. We can't compete against corporations on a playing field that was created for their benefit alone.

This is the landscape of corporatism: a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of their de- pression.

We need to understand how this happened--how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what --if anything-- we are to do about it.

While we will find characters to blame for one thing or another, most of corporatism's architects have long since left the building-- and even they were usually acting with only their immediate, short-term profits in mind. Our object instead should be to understand the process by which we were disconnected from the real world and why we remain disconnected from it. This is our best hope of regaining some relationship with terra firma again. Like recovering cult victims, we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatist society. Only then can we begin dismantling and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.

More on Douglas Rushkoff here.

The Frog Prince Departs

Somehow I can't help thinking that this is what Bush has done to the American people...

Two minor girls married off to frogs
17 Jan 2009

PUDUCHERRY: In a bizarre ritual, two minor girls, both seven, from the remote Pallipudupet village in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district were married off to frogs on Friday night. The ceremony, an annual feature during the Pongal (harvest) festival, is conducted "to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village''.

The girls, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, dressed up in traditional bridal finery -- gilded sarees and gold jewellery -- married the frog 'princes' in separate, elaborate ceremonies at two different temples in the presence of hundreds of villagers.

The picture in my mind of Bush standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center on 9/11 with his arm around the fire chief has the same sense of irreality as the above picture of two little girls being dolled up and married off to frogs as an incantation to deal with "evil spirits".

In my mind, the following is comingled with pictures of Bush announcing the invasion of Iraq:

Amidst chanting of vedic hymns, the temple priests garlanded the brides and tied the magalsutras on behalf of the frogs pronouncing the two as wives of the amphibians before the sacred fire at the auspicious hour.

The villagers threw themselves into the ceremonies with gusto. While residents living in the western part of the village acted as relatives of the brides and those from the eastern part play-acted as relatives of the grooms. The ceremonies had all the usual elements of a traditional marriage including a sumptuous feast.

In two days the long national nightmare for the US will hopefully be over. The frogs will go back to being frogs. The little girls will be handed back their future. The people will stop their celebrations of Washington-concocted myths and illusions. ... well, at least let me dream!

Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"

Gladwell's books are always interesting, and a fast read. I picked this one up in the evening and finished it by the next morning. That's my best indicator of an entertaining book.

His theme is simple: success goes to hard work & luck. Nothing profound about that, but it is always useful to remind ourselves. I love the examples of NHL hockey players, Termin's termites, Southerners with a Scotch-Irish ancestry and a culture of honor, airliner crashes cross-linked to PDI (Power Distance Index), and educational results linked to the rice culture. Lots of fascinating examples to hammer home the point. He doesn't try to establish one or the other factors as "dominant". He presents his exemplary cases and lets you see that old cliches like "genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration" or "success favors to the prepared mind" have already nailed the point he wants to make. But his 300 page book is a lot more entertaining than a pithy adage.

I especially enjoyed his last chapter where he traces luck and effort in his family history.

Update 2008dec21: Here is a David Brooks review of the book Outliers in his New York Times op-ed piece. And here is Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts about the Brooks review.

Life Lessons

I stumbled on this blog entry by Robin Hansen an economics prof at George Mason University that poses some interesting thoughts:

Food isn't about Nutrition
Clothes aren't about Comfort
Bedrooms aren't about Sleep
Marriage isn't about Romance
Talk isn't about Info
Laughter isn't about Jokes
Charity isn't about Helping
Church isn't about God
Art isn't about Insight
Medicine isn't about Health
Consulting isn't about Advice
School isn't about Learning
Research isn't about Progress
Politics isn't about Policy

I first ran across Robin Hanson over half a decade ago as a leading figure in the transhumanist movement. So... Robin has been out there being spectacular or making a spectacle of himself for a good many years. His writings are always interesting.