Can Romney Lie His Way to the Presidency?

Version 0.3

Can Romney Lie His Way to the Presidency?

It seems to be time to make my prediction for this coming election. Pretty simple, actually. I think Romney will buy the GOP nomination and the neo-GOP will ride his coattails only because they sincerely hate President Obama, not because they think Romney is sincere about anything. It seems most likely that Romney will pivot SHARPLY to the left the day after he secures the nomination, possibly moving even to the left of Obama on many issues. Perhaps his final campaign slogan should be selected from this list:

1. This time I'm telling you the truth! Really!
2. Don't you just HATE President Obama!
3. Vulture Capitalism Works!
4. So that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of Americans, shall rule the earth.

You can certainly argue that Romney is a terrible businessman, at least when it comes to politics. While we know nothing about his real beliefs, we do know that Romney is spending a LOT of money to buy the nomination and will presumably spend much more to buy the presidency if he secures the nomination. Actually, if you're a sincere neo-GOP supporter, then you even regard Romney's only prior electoral success as a political liability, since he was a 'liberal' governor of a liberal state, so it certainly appears that he wasted ALL of the money he has spent on his numerous previous campaigns. All of that dough invested and NOTHING to show for it? So much for Romney's reputation as a so-called great businessman, eh?

Unfortunately, I feel that an election between Obama and Romney would be quite meaningless--which turns out to be an anti-freedom thing in my worldview. While I continue to feel that President Obama does stand for some good principles, his stands are mostly pretty weak, so it's hard to care much there.

In contrast, Romney stands for nothing that can be detected with any of my sensors. It seems that almost everything he has said at one time is contradicted by its opposite at another time for another audience. Perhaps it's a secret Mormon conspiracy to take over the afterworld with mass proxy baptisms?

Seriously, I feel there's no real choice there (because Romney is a meaningless choice), and meaningful (and unconstrained) choice is the essence of the important sense of freedom. For that reason, I conclude it would be quite good if Romney lost the nomination and the neo-GOP candidate (presumably the extremist Santorum) offered a REAL choice to the American voters. At least if Santorum or a neo-GOP politician won, then everyone would know for certain that America is finished. (I still love my country, but it's increasingly like the love for a close relative with a terminal disease. While I think Reagan and Dubya were rather minor symptoms, I definitely think Nixon and Cheney were quite serious indicators of malaise...)

Amusingly enough, I even think I know how to destroy Romney, but I don't know the person who could make it happen. What I 'think I know' is the central theme of a series of anti-Romney commercials. I think they will probably appear later on, but after Romney has the nomination it won't really matter even if they prevent him from winning, since the essential problem in America is now the lack of real choice (and thus the loss of freedom)--the so-called deficit of democracy in America. Maybe you know someone who can create some viral YouTube videos to get rid of Romney now? Before he wins the nomination and renders the election meaningless except as a contest in fund raising...

I can see these ads as running at various lengths, basically divided in two parts. The first part is essentially posing the question: Are you confused about what Mitt Romney believes? During this part of the video, the top should show the question, perhaps in the simplified form of "What does Romney believe?" while it shows paired clips of Romney contradicting himself on various issues. I think it might be best to do this part with a vertical split, freezing the first statement on one side as a visual reminder of each contradiction while it is showing Romney's second statement on the other side. Punch it up at the end with a big keyword diagonally displayed on top of each side? There are so many of these self-contradictions by Romney that they could run as long as desired, though of course the best pairs should be as diametrically opposed and as close together in time as possible.

Then it switches to a new theme: What I (the creator of the video) think Romney REALLY believes. In that part, it plays a pastiche video of Romney saying one sentence. I think it should be the Lincoln misquote mentioned in the facetious list above: "So that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of Americans, shall rule the earth." The punchline sentence is the only difficult part. You want it to show the cuts so that it is obvious it is not a claim of his actual in-context words, but you also want it to be smooth enough to be clearly audible and to get the message across... Perhaps display the words in a smooth scroll across the bottom as he 'says' them in the video snippets at the top?

Death of a Douche

Mostly I just wanted to react to a controversial public comment about the recent death of a prominent conservative agitator.

Reactions to "Death of a Douche" in the Rolling Stone

On one hand, I think it is not good to speak ill of the dead. On the other hand, I strongly believe in the Golden Rule. Not the neo-GOP version about people with gold making whatever rules they like by bribing the cheapest politicians. The old Golden Rule about doing unto others--and AB (Andrew Breitbart) certainly did a lot of things to other people.

Whenever I saw AB, my overwhelming impression was that he felt hate and anger towards his opponents. I can't even say they were political opponents, because he made it much more personal than that. In retrospect, I now wonder if he was just faking it. Knowing how often his statements were lies of various kinds, self-contradictions, counterfactual statements, partial truths, or even manufactured fake evidence, you have to conclude that he was either stupid or deluded. Some people claim he wasn't stupid, and I acknowledge that he showed plenty of cunning cleverness of the lowest sort. Does that mean he was deluded? Or maybe he was just faking the entire thing? Why would he fake it? Short, plausible answer: For the money. It certainly seemed he was doing okay financially, at least on the short term. That's the problem with so much of today's political fraud--the long term doesn't matter as long as you can get past the next election.

Does it matter? I guess that depends if you think there should be some lesson to be learned from his life and death. Oddly enough, the cause of death part is still pending. What's the complication there? Maybe the anger and hatred ate him up from the inside, and it's hard to figure that out from the autopsy results? I'm more inclined to the theory that he knew he was on the edge of death or at least likely to die young, and that motivated his anger and hatred. Perhaps there is evidence of foul play that they don't want to disclose for some reason? If AB was sincere about his public statements, I can actually imagine him trying to stage his own suicide to make it look like a murder committed by his adversaries.

Anyway, AB was just a symptom of the political dysfunction in America. He certainly wasn't the cause, and he certainly wasn't any part of a solution to any problem. I don't want to rejoice in his death, but I'm certainly not going to miss him and I'm glad that he will no longer part of making America's problems worse. Was he significant enough to matter one way or another? Obviously too soon to say, but I rather doubt it.


That was my comment about the article as added in the public comments of the linked article, but I don't know if I should add some additional context here...

I feel like it's just repeating myself to note that the American political system has become dysfunctional, and much of the problem is due to professional fakers like AB. It certainly seems he personally made a lot of money by destroying rationale political discourse, but of course the main financial beneficiaries are the corrupt businessmen who bribe the cheap politicians (referenced in my first paragraph about golden rules). The results are bad laws that remake the rules of the game, not just the game of politics, but even every game of doing business in America. Becoming more evil over time is no longer an option in America, it's the only way for a politician or business to survive beyond the short term.

Perhaps President Obama's greatest strength is that he hasn't been a professional politician on the long term? His entire political career has been relatively brief, and he didn't spend a long tine at any of the levels of politics.

Young Aristotelian Libertarians

Version 0.3

Young Aristotelian Libertarians

Another lightbulb went on today as regards the crazed Libertarians in relation to the Aristotelian Principle from Rawls' book on justice. As a brief review, Rawls argued that people were naturally motivated to excel, to seek to be the best people they could be. At the time it struck me as a ridiculous notion because most Americans (and lots of people elsewhere) have pretty clearly become couch potatoes. But ridiculous? Now I'd say "Not so much." It's a matter of age. Children really are driven by a kind of Aristotelian Principle because they eagerly want to grow up and become adults with full control over their own lives.

The concrete and probably genetically predisposed manifestation is that children love to play games. They just naturally want to spend lots of time playing, and they really do want to win and hone their skills. Without any incentives, they also want to learn or even create new games. Children really do have the kind of boundless enthusiasm that Rawls was claiming for humanity in general--but most of them grow out of it. I think that's mostly because as they grow they learn about the larger world and realize that there are always other more skilled and more creative players, so they realize they can't win. Or maybe the main influence is the need to go to work every day? Anyway, for whatever reason, most adults don't play as much as children or with the same boundless enthusiasm.

How does that relate to the Libertarians? They are quite like children in that they think they are going to win the game of life and they therefore deserve ALL the spoils of victory--just like children. The main thrust of Rand's writings was that the superlatively creative people are the only ones who should decide what they do, and the rest of the human scum are basically just parasites benefiting from their generosity in sharing their 'divine' creativity.

One of the pundits was describing Ron Paul's Libertarian supports as mostly being young, enthusiastic males. I'd like to see the demographics. but it certainly seems highly plausible. Libertarianism as a immature phase that they mostly grow out of? How many old Libertarians have you seen?

Boycott Bloomberg of New York City

Version 0.4

Boycott Bloomberg of New York City!

Sort of a joke because I have no plans to visit the Big Apple or do any business there, even via the Web. My detachment and disassociation is not a boycott per se, but just a natural extension of my increasing incredulity at the fantasy-based state of America. However there is a special and higher disdain, disgust, and even a sort of threat (of incarceration) that makes me want to stay far, FAR away from Bloomberg. It's not just that he's a dishonorable and hypocritical bastard. That's just the norm for American politicians these days, even for the amateurs like Bloomberg. (He's too rich from his Wall Street games to pretend he's any sort of professional politician.)

It's the lying that makes him a major threat to my personal liberty. I have a special dislike of flagrant liars, and if I were to meet him on the street, then I'd be likely to get so angry that I'd punch him in the nose. Boink! In the heat of the moment, I'd be quite likely to think (without real thought) that the jail time was worth it. If I was younger and as well armed as I was when I was in the service, then it might be much worse--and I'm pretty sure there are many such people among the large population of the once great city he rules with his little iron fist. I actually heard that he used to walk around on the public streets, but I don't think that's likely to be true these days. Never again, little Bloomy!

Why the special anger at Bloomberg? Because he is a BIG part of the problem, maybe even the leading part of most of the problems, and his pious mouthing about the First Amendment is hypocrisy above and beyond ANY legitimate call of his loyal duty to his own upper-upper class. His wealth came from his work in destroying the legitimacy of capitalism. I'm still convinced (but with less and less evidence over time) that democracy is the best political system, but I'm no longer convinced capitalism exists or can survive in any meaningful way, and Bloomberg is a leading part of some of the largest problems. His networked terminals have made him wealthy by encouraging technical analysis of share prices and thus discouraging fundamental analysis of the real values of the underlying companies. What does it matter if a company is making a good product or serving society when you can use a Bloomberg terminal to make money with a much more trivial question: "Can I sell this stock at a higher price in 10 minutes?" The more quickly it is sold, the better, and long-term thinking about the fundamentals lost out years ago. Not a coincidence that Bloomberg became rich at the same time. The entire notion of corporate shares as representing any real value in anything has been utterly destroyed. Congrats, little Bloomy!

Bloomberg made some noises about the First Amendment as he sent in the police to crush the protests against his OWN abuses of capitalism. However, my current feeling is that the "99%" protests are doomed. You might argue that the First Amendment protects the rights of the people to peaceably assemble, but that is for the purpose of presenting their grievances to the government. That has essentially nothing to do with the current situation, since the government has been captured by and become a facade for corporations. Corporations are people? No, the corporations are now running the show far above and beyond the pitiful people.

As a metaphor, for the 99% it has now become like individual cells complaining about what the corporate bodies are doing. (Actual, even the so-called 1% are quite self-deluded about their real and personal significance to the increasingly monstrous corporations. Does it matter whether the cell that used to be a CEO gets a golden parachute or a chartreuse chute?) Do you worry about doing something that might kill off a few of your cells? Well, that's just how the corporations feel about the people within them--or rather less so, since corporations don't even have the pretense of emotions to worry about anything. In the mindless corporations that conform to America's current legal system, it's more like asking a mindless cancer to worry about the death of the host.

Perhaps a Constitutional Amendment against corporate personhood would help. However, the bottom line is that there are things the government needs to do that are NOT business functions. For example, someone needs to be the referee and focus on keeping the game fair. If government doesn't do it, who will? The biggest cancer?

That part was mostly written before I learned about the pepper spraying of student protestors in California, but that topic is tightly linked and so I'm adding a comment here. There are various confusing aspects of free speech, but one aspect that is absolutely clear is that you can't speak freely in fear. It isn't just the fear of arrest now, but the fear of a face full of pepper spray no matter how quietly you're sitting there. That is the new atmosphere of America, and it has to be with the approval of the kleptocrats in charge.

Bloomberg? Where's my garlic?

Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

Version 0.2

Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

This is actually based on a comment I added to an article about replacing Joe Biden as VP on Huffington Post. My own answer is yes, he should step aside, mainly for the reasons below, most of which were not addressed in the article.

This article raised the political considerat­ions and then ignored the most important factor--th­e neo-GOP nominee. The best V-P pick to balance the Democratic ticket will crucially depend on who President Obama is running against. I actually like Joe Biden and don't think he's done a bad job, but he is fundamenta­lly too old to represent the future of the Democratic Party. Actually, I'm sure it was another metric of Dubya's fundamenta­l incompeten­ce that he didn't dump the big dick Cheney in 2004.

I actually think the most powerful V-P pick would be a progressive or even liberal candidate--from the OLD Republican Party. Someone who switched to the Democratic Party precisely because the GOP is no more. The dominant rightwing clique of the neo-GOP is actually strongly controlled by the Reagan Republican­s who used to be Southern Democrats. Unfortunately, I can't think of any examples of a prominent Republican who has switched to the Democratic Party. The neo-GOP party discipline puts Lenin's Bolsheviks to shame.

By the way, I don't think Reagan deserves much of the credit (or blame) for remaking the GOP into the far rightwing neo-GOP. That was mostly a negative reaction to LBJ's civil rights legislation, and Reagan was just an excuse that the Southern Democrats were waiting for. Almost any excuse would have done, and it was more like a supersaturated gas that suddenly condensed from gaseous Southern Democrats into Reagan Republicans. When I arrived in Texas in the mid-70s, there hadn't been a Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, but since the cloudburst of Reagan Republicans, there are no prominent Democrats in any statewide office in Texas.

Unfortunat­ely, as much as I respect President Obama, I think he lacks Reagan's skills as a propagandist and figurehead, and that is apparently what it takes to motivate Americans these days. Or maybe it's just the superior power of negative motivations? The Southern Democrats REALLY hated LBJ's civil rights laws... Maybe Obama could motivate a large migration of old progressive GOP voters into the Democratic Party, but I haven't seen any hint of such a trend.

In conclusion, I repeat that I think it's time for Joe Biden to step down as V-P. Though the original article dismissed him as regards State, I think he could and probably would do a good job there. However, I think that Clinton has done quite well there and he would probably be overshadowed for just that reason, barring some massive success such as peace in Israel.

Metrics of Democracy's Sickness

Version 0.6

Metrics of Democracy's Sickness

This is in response to John Dean's second installment on the destructive gaming of American democracy at http://verdict.justia.com/2011/10/07/gaming-american-democracy-2.

This is an important topic, but I really feel like you [John Dean] are focusing too much on some of the relatively minor fronts in the larger war. There are at least two other fronts where I think much larger battles are being fought--and lost--by the proponents of democracy. The first front involves gerrymandering, and the second front involves biasing the judicial system.

(1) Why do 40% of the voters ignore elections? That's far more than the roughly 30% that vote for the winning presidential candidates. Mostly because they believe their votes don't count and can't affect the results--and they are right. Their districts have been gerrymandered and their votes have been effectively precounted and negated before they are ever cast.

A metric for the degree of gerrymandering should be easy to calculate, and yet I've never seen a good one published anywhere. The effectiveness of partisan gerrymandering is in the degree to which you can waste or squander your opponents' votes. Equivalently, that means you want to distribute your own votes to maximize their impact. These effects must ultimately be measured by considering the anti-democratic results of the elections. The degree to which the electoral and policy outcomes differ from the preferences of the actual voters should be something that can be mathematically assessed and compared.

I can easily cite two examples of abusive gerrymandering, and both of them involve the neo-GOP politicans gaming the system. The earlier example is in Texas, where the Republicans forced early redistricting in 2003. My very own district was held by Lloyd Doggett at that time, but that district was stretched to Houston to include enough Republican voters to tilt it safely to the GOP, and Doggett was basically obliged to move to a different district with a much higher and newly concentrated percentage of Democratic voters--where more of those votes were now a meaningless excess. There was no massive shift in the voting demographics of Texas or in my original district, but in one fell swoop the Republicans were able to capture a large number of House seats from the Democratic Party.

The second example is in Pennsylvania. On a statewide basis the state voted for Obama in 2008, but the Democratic voters are highly concentrated in certain districts while many other districts have narrow (but safe) Republican majorities. I'm not certain how much of this situation was the result of deliberate gerrymandering, but the current situation is highly imbalanced. Therefore the Republican legislature is trying to change the rules regarding their electors. The math shows how Obama could win most of the votes in Pennsylvania while the gerrymandering would allow his opponent to capture most of the electoral votes.


I spent a while trying to define a good metric for the harm of gerrymandering. The best reference I was able to find was this paper on the geometric assessment of gerrymandering, but it doesn't consider the voters at all. It barely mentions them, so you wind up feeling like 'No harm, no foul.' It barely acknowledges the negation of voters. Based on that paper and my own struggles, I believe a good metric will consider the geometry, but not just the districts' shapes. The geometry of the voters must also be considered. In addition, to assess the harm, the electoral outcomes and even the legislative outcomes should be assessed. Finally a useful purpose for polling? Well, that would be nice, but...

Just to clarify the harms of extreme gerrymandering, I'm going to construct a little example here. We have two imaginary states, A and B, each of which has 10 equal districts of 100 voters. So as to include the most extreme case of the harm, we'll assume that each state's 1,000 voters are divided into 694 consistently blue voters and 306 consistently red voters. You can easily imagine the associated political parties, eh?

State A uses nonpartisan redistricting with the intention of producing the fairest and most representative possible outcome. The voters are somewhat unevenly distributed, with concentrations of blue and red voters. In this situation, it is not difficult to draw the lines to that 7 districts will be blue and 3 will be red. There is some threat of 'dictatorship of the majority', especially if party discipline is strong, but that is a known danger and we even have some established responses, such as some parts of the Bill of Rights and the judicial system.

The situation in State B is similar, but the red party is in charge of the redistricting and they are allowed to use perfect gerrymandering. They draw the districts so that their 306 voters are perfectly placed in 6 districts with 51 red voters each. The result of that election is that less than 31% of the voters would then control 60% of the legislature. If the red party has good party discipline, we can wind up with a fake democracy that is actually a strong dictatorship by a small minority.

I was going to say that the real situation in America is not that extreme, but now I find myself wondering. The actual percentage of Republican voters is only around 25%, and yet their party discipline is so strong that they were able to cripple the Senate with even fewer than 40 Republican Senators. The Democratic Party is fundamentally weak on party discipline, and the Republicans could pretty much always count on getting one or two Democrats to join them. Since gaining that 40th Senator, I feel the Republicans have gone way beyond crippling the Senate and right to the edge of destroying it as any sort of democratic institution. Then you have to consider that the Senate is not even apportioned fairly in relation to the population... Throw in the gerrymandering and various forms of disenfranchisement, and maybe the amazing thing is that the federal legislators EVER pay attention to the actual voters in this reputed democracy?

(2) The second front involves biasing the judiciary by appointing judges based on age and political opinions rather than based upon their judicial qualifications. I actually think this one would be easier to measure. There are only a few categories of data that have to be assessed. The easiest one is the age of judges who are nominated to the federal judiciary. If you think the neo-GOP is biasing things on a political basis, then the obvious prediction is that their judicial appointees will be significantly younger, the longer and better to thwart the voters' will when they pick the 'wrong' president. The other metric would be ideological consistency of the judges in their decisions. The prediction here would be that the judges appointed by Democratic presidents would be less ideologically consistent in their rulings.


If these are two of the main fronts in the war against democracy, then I think America is in a whole lot of trouble...

Can We Agree Even on the Main Problem?

Can We Even Agree on the Main Problem?

This is in response to a column in Justia written by John Dean on the gaming of democracy in America. It appears at http://verdict.justia.com/2011/09/23/gaming-american-democracy.


He closed with a request for reactions and feedback, but suggested Twitter as a channel for such replies. There is a non-Twitter reply mechanism there, but I don't know if it goes anywhere, so I've decided to compose my response here and send the URL as the so-called Tweet. To whit:

Few significant ideas fit within a tweet, but who knows if you will see this? Notwithstanding, I will attempt to be brief on these topics of shared interest.

First, I laud your treatment of the Tea Party as a facade, but two points to note. One, their cost is nominal to the players who are financing them. Two, I believe their primary use is to help tip the scales so that what used to be the far right is now perceived as the middle of the political spectrum in America.

Second, I've concluded that one of the most significant things is that though there is widespread agreement on various major problems, there is apparently almost no agreement on THE major problem. In other words, we evidently can’t reach any consensus on the priorities of our difficulties. Now I think that perhaps the major problem is the bigness itself. What can be bigger than big? Not so much big government but big business that both requires and depends upon big government. We have seemingly reached a consensus that it is natural for one company or organization to dominate in almost every sphere. (Now I wonder if this could be a projection of our monotheism?)

Third, as a result of this analysis, I’ve concluded we need to reach a deeper understanding of the economic history of America. Though I haven’t seen it described in this form, I think that America’s economic situation can be described in three phases. (1) Wealth through cheap land. (2) Wealth through REAL competition when anti-trust laws were powerful and effective. (3) Our imminent bankruptcy or eclipse after competition disappears in America. From that perspective, what is happening to the American political system is only one aspect of a more general malaise.

Is there a solution? I think it would only be possible if American laws were rewritten NOT to favor cancerous growth as the norm of business. We need something like a requirement for successful businesses to reproduce by division, thus creating MORE choice and MORE freedom and MORE competition in the economy. Not a penalty for success in gaining market share, but a reward of fairly creating new opportunities for greatness.

Libertarians are confused about freedom

Version 0.1

Interesting that this entry wound up suspended for a long time.

First is a meta-comment about the version numbers. I've decided to write more skeletal pieces without waiting for my muse. If there is some indication of interest, most obviously via comments with questions or reactions, then I will be motivated to flesh things out, but there isn't much evidence of interest. Or perhaps it should count as more evidence of the negative effects of the Internet on such intellectual activities?

Now to the topic at hand, freedom. Let me start by noting that "free" is an extremely confused concept, at least as the word is used in English. Just taking the online American Heritage Dictionary as a random source of authority, we find 17 senses for the adjective. Amazingly enough, or perhaps it's additional evidence of American confusion, but NONE of those 17 senses is the one that is probably the most common usage in the so-called real world. That sense appears near the bottom as a kind of footnote for an informal idiom defined as "without charge". In other words, the common monetary sense of "free beer" is barely noticed, but if you do a search for the word "free", most of the hits are related to that usage. Comparing three of the leading search engines for "free", Google, Bing, and Yahoo all list 5 of the top 8 for some sense of "free beer" (but the FSF is evidently gaming both Google and Bing for 2 of those hits in each list).

Since I want to focus more narrowly on "freedom", the situation isn't quite as bad. We don't have to worry about "freedom beer" and there are only 9 senses of the noun. Unfortunately, none of them is really relevant to my focus here, which is freedom for the individual. Sense 5 comes closest, and there are relevant aspects in some of the other senses, but none of them consider the context. Therefore I must begin with a short definition:

"Freedom" is about informed, meaningful, and unconstrained choice.

The "informed" part means that you need to know what the choices are, and your knowledge of the differences between the choices must be factual, sufficiently complete, and relevant to your own goals. The "meaningful" is both about the relevance and the number of choices. Having 1 or 0 choices is not meaningful, but having too many can also become meaningless, as in the famous example of trying to find the best pair of jeans among a hundred different styles. The "unconstrained" is mostly a tip to advertising, which is almost entirely about you to value mediocre merchandise more highly (and thus pay a higher price) or convincing you to want something without regard to your actual needs (and therefore buy unneeded stuff), but it can include any sort of interference or intrusive manipulation.

In contrast, Libertarians think "freedom" is about selfishness and the ability to do whatever they want. They usually say that's without hurting anyone else, but in the end that just means that whatever they want is still okay as long as the other people who were hurt were 'free' to get out of the way, and it's really the victim's own fault if the victim is too slow or too lazy or too stupid. The libertarian might agree that there is a moral obligation to consider the ramifications and side effects of the libertarian's selfish actions, but you would be infringing on the libertarian's freedom to try to specify how much consideration is appropriate.

They key thing about libertarians is actually evolutionary. It's just that they think they are the ones who deserve to win in the struggle for survival. You show me a strict Libertarian who has become physically crippled and who still clings to his Libertarian principles, and I'll show you a dead Libertarian. Maybe not right away, but soon enough.

The power of super-ignorance to destroy the economy

Version 0.3

The Power of Super-Ignorance to Destroy the Economy

Super-ignorance is one of several categories of information dysfunction that are helping to destroy America. This is a new condition that is greatly facilitated by the morally neutral tools of the Internet.

The basic idea is that people tend to believe what they want to believe, but the Internet makes it MUCH easier to do so. Everyone has a limited amount of time, but with the Internet search engines it is easy to saturate that time with so-called evidence of any crazy thing and thus completely avoid the much larger rational parts of the universe. Some years ago I anticipated this problem as 'pandering by the search engines', though now it is actively marketed as 'personalization and customization of the search results'. Basically the same thing, but I regard pandering as the dark side of the coin.

As it's working in America, this has become a key part of the political dysfunction that led to the recent manufactured crisis over the federal debt limit. It doesn't matter whether you favor democratic or republican forms of government, one essential for all such non-dictatorial forms of government is rational discussion of the problems of the real world before considering rational solutions. That is obviously NOT what happened over the last few months. It isn't a house divided against itself, but more like a house where certain rooms are in alternative universes, and never the twain shall meet.

At least two other information dysfunctions are of concern, both augmented by the Internet. One is just awareness by the impoverished of the way rich Americans live, causing them to see us as living high on the hog as a result of grinding their faces in the mud. The other is the malicious identification of borderline crazies to be pushed over the edge. Maybe the recent Norwegian madman or some of the American shooters were pushed?

Anti-neighborly Americans

Version 0.2

This is actually a combined reaction to some news and reading. The news was the recent spate of shootings in America. All of them involved the police at some point, but I was most impressed by the ones that started out with shooting at police. In particular, I was struck by the case of the armed lunatic who apparently walked into police station and managed to shoot four policemen (actually starting with a policewoman) before going out in a blaze of non-glory.

The reading was another passage from Little House on the Prairie. Though I've read a lot of related books, I've never actually read this one (at least since I started keeping records in 1971). It actually comes up in my Japanese study, so I'm only getting it second hand through the translation. However, the thing that struck me about it was not so much the independent streak as the dislike of neighbors and the selfishness. Probably some contribution from The Selfish Gene, too, but I plan to write more about that in my book review blog...

What it made me realize is that many people came to America for bad reasons. Yes, many of them had positive reasons like ambitions and dreams and a love of freedom as they imagined it existed in America, but many of them had bad reasons like disliking their neighbors and relatives or selfishness and greed. As it applied during the period of rapid growth in America, it meant that there were many small and rapidly growing families spreading across the country--families of people who basically didn't like the neighbors wherever they came from.

It drove a lot of expansion across America, killed a lot of Native Americans, and produced a lot of new Americans, but now there's no place for them to go. Too bad they still hate their neighbors, eh?

So they go nuts and shoot people or various other craziness. Now I'm reminded of the guy who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin about a year ago...

Money is infrastructure

Version 0.2

Money is infrastructure. Early forms of money were basically accidental, in the same way early roads were basically accidental. The first roads were just the worn paths where many people had gone before. The original forms of money were just things that seemed valuable to people for various reasons. Later the standard units of money were defined by governments as coins. Greater convenience, but they already had to introduce laws against shaving coins, debasing them, or counterfeiting them.

Modern money is advanced infrastructure, basically made up out of whole cloth. The value of a pretty little scrap of paper is essentially zero, but our governments legally define a much higher value and actively work to protect it. Just one of many infrastructure-related services the government provides as part of our advanced civilization.

Wanting to have lots of money without paying taxes is like wanting to have all the benefits of civilization without paying for them. The proximate cause for noticing this is actually WikiLeaks, which apparently just received a list of prominent tax evaders who are hiding their money in Swiss banks.

The reality is that we need infrastructure. Try to imagine the situation if every road was a privately owned toll road that forced you to pay your share every time you used it. Each time you entered the stretch controlled by someone else, you'd have to stop and pay the toll. Without government to organize freeways, every trip would be incredibly inefficient and troublesome. Actually, that's kind of what they have now in Afghanistan, but that proves my point about civilization.

Another example is that everyone benefits from education--but it's quite difficult to see the direct linkages. Lots of selfish and short-sighted really people hate the idea of helping to pay for other people's education. It's not just that the benefits are years down the road. In many cases they are ignorant fools who don't even appreciate what little education they received.

This is under the America's fall because the anti-government anti-paper-money rants seem to be pretty clearly concentrated in America. They are part of the problem, NOT part of the solution.

These days America seems to be an almost boiling pot just under the insanity point. Last week in Arizona, the pot boiled over again, and we had yet another mass shooting.

Advanced forms of slavery

Version 0.4

The key here was actually combines the WikiLeaks release of the 250,000 US government documents with the results of last month's election. The insight took the form of:

"The truth shall make you free? But what if the truth is that you are a stupid slave?"

In theory, the main value of the so-called Fourth Estate is the exposure of government corruption so that democracy can function.

What has actually happened is that news has devolved to the best propaganda that money can buy. Since the rich people have more money, they can afford to hire the best propagandists, and the result is that they can distort the reality to the point where their mindless greed is probably going to to lead not only to the destruction of the economic system that made them rich, but quite possibly to the destruction of the human race.

For most of history, most of the people have been slaves, though most of the written history has focused on the adventures and exploits of the few non-slaves. I'm not just talking about the officially recognized slaves who had the title. Almost all people lived their lives with little or no freedom. The largest obvious category is women, who were basically treated as property, and though many women have more freedom now, there are still large numbers for whom nothing has really changed. However, there are so many other categories of quasi-slaves and semi-slaves that I argue that most people have lived most of their lives as slaves. Another large categories is the serfs and peasants and various other impoverished farmers who were more or less firmly bound to the land of their peasant ancestors. In spite of the free exploits of the generals and admirals, most of the actual soldiers and sailors lived in disciplined conditions of de facto slavery. Even most of the hunter gatherers lived effectively without any choices but to repeat the lives of their parents. that's already covered most of the people who've ever lived.

Nowadays we've largely moved to economic forms of slavery. We even recognize them as wage slaves. The new chains are not made of steel, but of legal barriers to bankruptcy for the average people and improved law enforcement systems, even to the international scale. I'm not sure the slaves of old lived in greater fear of their masters than the indebted middle class now lives in fear of losing their jobs... In relative terms, being sold to a different master probably feels like the same thing as before. In contrast, if you start by living in a good house, and then you are forced to start living under a bridge, or are driven to criminal acts while trying to feed your children and winding up in prison... Well, those are big steps down, and plenty to be afraid of.

There's yet another form of modern slavery that may be the key to the destruction of humanity. That's in the form of national restrictions against migration combined with increased knowledge of the national differences. In brief, nowadays almost everyone in the world knows about advanced and wealthy life styles, with America having the wealthiest and at least one of the more advanced forms. However, for essentially all of the people living in poor countries, they are as unfree as the slaves of old when it comes to changing their lots in life. Most of the adults probably accept that they could never become wealthy doctors or lawyers--but they still believe their children would have much better chances at such lives if only they could live in rich countries. They also know that the lives of relative poverty in those rich countries would be no worse than their current lives, but with that enormous difference for their children...

Why the key to our destruction? Because the existing rich people and the increasing numbers of newly rich people can only sustain their wealthy status by squeezing more blood from the poor turnips. In other words, the rich don't only get rich and the poor poorer, but the rich people must translate more and more of their wealth into the wasteful military tools of oppression to keep the increasingly desperate poor people in their places. The asymmetric so-called war on terror is NOT going to go away, but only become more and more vicious and desperate. The natural and probably inevitable outcome will be a true doomsday weapon (probably a super bioweapon) in the hands of people who are willing to use it...

The punchline? It's that "Live free or die" is an American slogan. The Americans are both leading the modern forms of slavery and proud of claiming that they would rather be dead than enslaved.

WikiLeaks Realities?

Version 0.3

Though I have been following the general topic for a while now, I haven't seen anything like the following obvious analysis.

First, the minor conclusion is that the terrorist win again. Okay, so this line of analysis probably isn't "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer", but follow along. What we know suggests that most or perhaps all of this large document dump originated with a single private in the American military. How is that possible? How could one amateur spy acting alone possibly gather so much sensitive material?

It actually goes back to 9/11. Though the so-called investigations were highly fractured and mostly focused on protecting the incompetent, one of the main conclusions was that our intelligence services failed to connect the dots. In response, we created a system that enabled a lowly private to harvest 250,000 jumbo dots. We already know that a partial response has been to isolate some of the major databases--but that is flopping back towards the situation that allowed the 9/11 attack to succeed. America's so-called homeland security apparatus continues to respond with wild spasms targeted against the LAST perceived threat--and the terrorists win. (At least the last counter-terror spasm required them to buy a couple of cheap printers, but we are handling this one all by ourselves.)

Second is actually more serious. Remember that this rather massive information leak was the action of one low-ranked minor clerk. It's hard to even regard him as a spy. Now if this amateur could harvest so much information working on his own, imagine what must have been going on with the professional spies with the backing of their respective national governments. The two differences are that they probably harvested much more information and that they didn't send any copies to WikiLeaks. I have no evidence--but I bet the damage is vastly more serious, and it would certainly explain a lot of what has been going on recently, including some of the Chinese government maneuvers that had seemed somewhat mysterious.

Third, we get to the minor topic, but the main aspect if you look at the actual mainstream news. That's the aggressive, vindictive, and personal attacks on WikiLeaks, especially on the person of Julian Assange, who I predict is about to become a non-person. Actually, there is a significant aspect here, though you wouldn't notice it from the mainstream media news coverage. That's the determination to attack journalism and freedom of speech. Little late there, since they're both already essentially dead spirits, especially in America.

One more compound prediction. When they finally get around to analyzing it, almost all of the information that WikiLeaks has exposed will be judged harmless and mindlessly overclassified, with a small fraction that had legitimate grounds for secrecy and a much tinier fraction that was legitimately dangerous if revealed. My guess would be something like 99% to 1% to 0.1% based on the discussions so far. They've been desperately fishing for that tiny fraction of really dangerous stuff. I would be utterly astounded if the first category was less than 90%.

Maybe there's a solution down the road. Maybe the entire notion of secrecy is collapsing. There is some technical evidence that it's becoming more and more difficult to control information. However, an alternative outcome will be privacy as the ultimate privilege of the rich and powerful. The rest of us peasants may spend our entire lives under the microscope...

Campaign Finance Reform in the Lame Duck Session

Version 0.3

The minor lesson of the recent election was that visible money gets discounted, and heavily. Even with $140 million of her own money, the voters knew exactly why Meg Whitman was saying all those bad things about her various opponents, and she got discounted down to zero and lost badly.

However the main lesson of the election of 2010 was that invisible and anonymous money works rather well, as clearly shown by the large bulk of the election results. Not all of the voters select political leaders the same way they select laundry soap, based on the last ads they were exposed to on TV, but enough of them do that democracy is pretty much nonfunctional in America. (Remember that the largest voting bloc is the non-voters, who quite rationally understand that their votes have been gerrymandered away in advance.)

In the big picture, it's worth thinking about why McDonald's doesn't run attack ads against the other fast food restaurants such as Burger King and Wendy's, and vice versa. Obviously because they would be hurting their own business, shrinking the pie, so to speak, which is exactly what has happened to the value of the professional politicians as perceived by the citizens. About the only thing that all Americans agree on at this point is that we need far more high-quality political leaders to replace the current crop (but who quite often cling to power right up to their dying days).

The most obvious solution is campaign finance reform, and it's even conceivable. All it would take is for a few of the outgoing Republican senators to decide that they wanted to go out as statesmen who tried to save democracy in America. It's clearly in the interests of the less wealthy Democratic politicians to go along with the idea, and it's clearly what most of the people want. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no public discussion of the topic or any evidence that Congress is considering it. In the month since the election, I've only seen two public mentions of the topic. One was a letter to the editor from a defeated Democratic candidate suggesting he had been defeated because he had almost no money, which was probably true, and the other was a report that the supporters of the so-called Tea Party were determined to block any consideration of campaign finance reform, though they haven't had to lift a finger or spend a nickel on it.

Anyway, the hope would be pretty slim. The Supreme Court created new law to undo the McCain-Feingold law, and the same five so-called justices are still there and just as eager as ever to destroy democracy in America. The flood of secret money will eventually be exposed, but it's already too late to worry about it, though the full force of the damage won't be in place until next month... (I'm reminded of a law student with whom I corresponded at the time of Bush v. Gore. He said America was becoming a judicial dictatorship--and that was exactly why he was in law school.)

As it stands, the last chance for campaign finance reform is rapidly slipping away, though I wasted the last month doing what little I could to try to stimulate a public discussion of the topic. I'm convinced that if they don't pass it NOW, in this lame duck session, it will never happen. America has already suffered from one experiment with a so-called permanent Republican majority, but I don't think the country can hope to be lucky enough to get another Teddy Roosevelt.

Perhaps some of the problem is the demeaning label of "lame duck session" for the last session of the outgoing Congress? Maybe it would help if we called it the "retiring statesmen session"? Ha ha.

For my next joke, did you hear the one about the gerrymandered term limits?

(The effective discounting of votes by such practices as gerrymandering and the general abuses of professional lifetime politicians are also very important, but those problems are much more difficult and even I am unable to imagine them being tackled in a lame duck session. Congress has NEVER had that many statesmen at one time, even without regard to the consideration of extra ethical freedom for imminent retirees.)

P.S. This is really just a kind of outline post, but my new blogging policy is not to spend much time on a theme unless there are some comments suggesting someone is at least slightly interested in the topic. I will probably limit my responses to comments in responses, but if there is enough interest, I may do a full-scale consolidate rewrite, presumably as a new post.

Terraforming Venus?

One of the most prominent symptoms of America's malaise is the paucity of the nation's dreams and ambitions these years, at least as regards realistic or constructive ideas. There are plenty of highly vocal and even violent extremists arguing for such goals as destroying the intrusive federal government or selling the whole thing to the highest bidder.

Much earlier in my own lifetime America as a national government still had some quite noble dreams, including some that seemed wildly impractical. For a sad example, we had the War on Poverty that ultimately fell before the Biblical perspective of John 12:8: "You will always have the poor among you..." As a happy and successful example, we had the Apollo Program to reach the moon.

Along the lines of that success, I started thinking about a very large project near the limits of our capabilities--and arrived at terraforming Venus as something we could be be seriously thinking about, whether or not America is capable of taking the lead. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an article about terraforming Venus, but I guess that just shows that some people do agree with me about the essential feasibility of the idea. Not sure what will be in that article if you follow the link now versus when I read it, but I can offer a few obvious critiques and minor extensions:

1. We'd need to start with a very intense robotic exploration of the current state of the planet to make sure there is no life there now, or even an imminent (as in the next billion years or so) potential for life. Obviously, that could not be life as we know it, but we obviously don't know much about the limits of the universe, so a proper study would itself be a major and long-term investment.
2. I'd favor relatively small controllable mirrors in orbit around the planet. This would require a whole lot of computing power (mostly for the weather modeling), but relatively little physical power. Each mirror would essentially be a wire loop with a thin reflective film stretched across it, and a remotely controlled gyroscope at the center to reorient the mirror continuously as needed. In the case of Venus, most of the mirrors would be used to shade the planet most of the time, since there's a large surplus of solar energy at that distance from the Sun, but that energy could be directed to local power generating stations on the planet.
   
3. The design goal of the power stations would be to minimize the heat and maximize the conveniently usable electricity.
   
4. The power stations would then be used to power robotic factories. Their three most important tasks would be to produce more robotic factories, to generate hydrogen to boost more mirrors into orbit, and to produce really large chemical plants to change the atmosphere. Of course the real key is the self-replicating factory, since that geometric progression would be able to grow extremely rapidly once we get past the bootstrap phase.
5. The idea of changing the Venusian day (in the Wikipedia article) seems to me to be a total boondoggle. If we have sufficiently sophisticated control over the orbital mirrors, we can simply use them to make day and night whenever we want them at any location on the planet. This would depend on very advanced weather modeling--but that's a technology we also need to develop for use right here on Earth.

Anyway, the main point of this little commentary is that I've seen no evidence that America as a national entity is still capable of dreaming so big. Even the external websites referenced in the Wikipedia article are mostly outside the States (again, as of the date of this writing).

Democracy was a nice idea

It seems I need to preface these comments by saying something about why I think democracy has mostly worked pretty well. It keeps coming back to my basic projection of my love of freedom. I like to make my own choices and control my own destiny, and democracy is the system that makes that possible for more people. Amusingly enough, I don't think it's the highest percentage of people, but the largest absolute numbers of people. As you go backwards in time, when you arrive at a primitive hunter-gatherer society, then you can argue that everyone has absolute freedom--but none of the other comforts of civilization. However in terms of the old utilitarian approach, civilization creates a lot of happiness for a lot of people. I think the costs (such as governments and taxes) are worth the benefits (such as larger populations with more interesting and longer lives), but you can argue that is just my personal bias. As it applies to democracy, if it's actually working, then everyone should feel like they have a stake in the pie, even if their own preferred leaders didn't win the latest election.

However, that isn't how it's working out in America these days. I would say that democracy is being destroyed from two directions, and we had sterling examples of both attacks in this last week, one in the special senatorial election in Massachusetts and one at the SCOTUS in Washington, D.C.

The first attack is the transient rise of populist stupidity. You don't have to fool all of the people all of the time to persuade them to vote against their own best interests and against the best interests of their nation. That's the bow to Lincoln's 'all of the people' (though there's some doubt he actually said it). You don't even need to fool 51% just on Election Day, per 'most of the people'. It's even worse than that. There are large blocs of voters who are known to vote in certain ways, so all you need is to fool enough people to reach 50% + 1 voter on Election Day, which is a rather small chunk of 'some of the people'. Maybe the real cause of the stunning neo-GOP victory wasn't stupidity and very short memories. In that case it would appear to be pure vicious selfishness. Take your pick, but it's pretty hard to see as a victory for the wisdom of crowds. What this election apparently proves is that the voters have already forgotten how the neo-GOP ran the country into ditch, and now the neo-GOP can prevent anyone from fixing the mess they created. (As a political party, the existing neo-GOP is most like Lenin's Bolshevik's and nothing like the GOP of Teddy Roosevelt or the progressive Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln--but now the neo-GOP party is joining the Teabaggers, who most closely resemble the Russian anarchists who gave the czars so much trouble. Pretty hard to find anyone who would claim that either of those groups made any constructive contributions to Russian history...)

The other prong of the attack is the amazing SCOTUS ruling that allows corporations to donate as much as they want to any political campaign. Perhaps it's kind of inconsistent, since I actually regard money as a pretty pure motivation--but that's only true when all the parties to the transactions know everything that's going on. Absolutely safe to say that this is not the situation as regards politics, even in the relatively open American system. Of course Exxon is going to say they donated $50 million out of love, and it was purely coincidental that 6 months later the politician in question decided to kneecap and eliminate all of those pesky alternative energy projects. If hypocrisy was a fatal condition, Obama would get to nominate five new Justices, because those five would have exploded their own heads. Or maybe they don't know that the strong from of the claim of corporate personhood was actually a mistake, basically an opinion inserted into the official record as the SCOTUS deliberately evaded the issue.

Anyway, I did feel that democracy contributed a lot to the success of the United States over the years, though I don't feel it was the only factor. I'm actually inclined to think the main factor was the infusion of pure wealth from the real estate that was simply taken without any value-related payment as the native Americans were exterminated. Probably be a few centuries before historians and economists reach any kind of consensus on these topics, and as of this writing, I'm absolutely convinced that the United States won't last that long. I feel like the country has been racing towards a cliff, and the leading fools are squabbling over who's holding the steering wheel without even thinking about the lead foot on the gas pedal.

President Obama is about to make his state of the union speech. Every president says the state of the union is "strong". That's become pretty meaningless, because the strengths that exist are being overwhelmed by weaknesses that no one wants to face honestly. If he wants to be honest, I think he has to say that the state of the union is "insane, and quite possibly incurably insane."

The traditional Chinese system is an authoritarian kleptocracy with a merit-based bureacracy, and they just change the name of the ruling dynasty from time to time. Right now its the so-called communists, but things in China haven't really changed that much if you look at the big sweep of history. The Chinese view has always been that China is the center of civilization. It's just that they have a few bad centuries from time to time--and think they are just getting back to normal after one of those 'little' slumps. It troubles me to think that I may well live to see the contest decided, and the overwhelming evidence seems to be that China is smarter and tougher at playing these big games.

Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman: Part the Tiger Woods

Soccer Zen and Nice Guy Dennis Rodman:
Part the Tiger Woods

'Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman' is actually something of an ancient meme relative to my 20 years in Japan. It was surely something I thought of before Rodman retired in 2000 (courtesy of Wikipedia in my Internet lobe). Therefore I conceived it at least 10 years ago, and probably during my first 10 years in Japan. Though Rodman had joined the NFL even before I came to Japan, it took him some years to establish his reputation as a 'bad boy'.

The soccer zen part is related to my own very limited athletic experiences with soccer. Though I played for many years, I was never much good. However, there were a few flashes of zen moments when I was able to put all the pieces together, transcendent moments when I was really into the game. In my case, those moments were mostly when I was tackling the top striker of the enemy team, one Steve Martella. (I met Steve again at our 25th high school reunion in 1999, after he'd already retired from delivering mail.) Our confrontations were mostly back in the fifth grade, when I was in Mrs Clarke's class, and we basically played class on class against Stevie's class. I was too slow and too poor a ball handler to do much, so I was usually hanging around the goal waiting for Stevie to break out and came a rushing. I'm sure that he beat me most of the time, but I also and more vividly remember those times when I had the dream state and was able to strip the ball off him. It wasn't a matter of thinking or planning or trying, it was just a matter of doing. On those occasions, it was like my feet knew what was up and where to go, and I was just along for the ride. He was fast enough to go around me and skilled enough to take the ball through my legs, but there were those times when he couldn't do either. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, and my limited soccer skills actually got relatively worse over the years as the other players improved much faster than I did, but upon reflection, those were my moments of highest athletic involvement, what I would now call moments of soccer zen.

My belief is that a good athlete must feel like that for much of a game. A professional athlete probably has to be in that state for entire games at a time, competing against other professionals who are functioning in very much the same zen state. Then you have to think about the very top athletes, people such as Dennis Rodman in his prime, who are able to go even farther. Upon my poor foundation, I can only imagine levels upon levels until you reach those skills.

Of course there is a physical aspect to sports, but in the end, all of the top professional players are pretty much similar in their bodies. There are lots and lots big, strong people who can't become professional athletes at all, and there is always fierce competition from many healthy youngsters trying to become professionals and star athletes. If the body was all that mattered, you'd expect professional players to be lucky to last a season or two before they got beaten out by a youngster. It wouldn't matter what the peak age was, there would always be a large number of potential professionals reaching their physical peaks every year, whereas the reality is that the best players tend to last many years.

The important differences are clearly mental. There has to be something special about the mental condition of someone who can excel over and over again while playing against the best opponents, and for years at a time. In the case of Dennis Rodman, my fuzzy recollection is that he was especially strong on the boards. That means that he possessed outstanding abilities to figure out where the ball was likely to go in the future, to get there first, and then to fight off other athletes who were also experts with very similar skills and very similar bodies. My recollection is that he also got a lot of fouls, including some technical fouls, but he was obviously able to keep the fouls controlled to the degree that he was able to stay in the games and make important contributions. Lots more details in that Wikipedia article.

Dennis Rodman worked hard to earn a reputation for non-nice behavior, but my contention is that the wrong scale is being applied. It is completely unrealistic to expect above-average performance from average personalities. I'm being a bit hyperbolic to call him a "nice guy", and I still wouldn't want anyone like that as a neighbor, but if I was a basketball fan (which I'm not) and if I was buying a ticket to see the best possible game of basketball played by the best professional basketball players, then a great competitor is a "nice guy" of sorts, regardless of the peripheral considerations, and especially regardless of that player's antics away from the court.

Of course you should be able to see where I'm going with this as regards Tiger Woods. However, over the years I've noticed many professional athletes who have been criticized for mental aberrations of more or less sincerity. If I had a separate "Part the " for each of those stories, I'm sure I'd have more sequels than the worst of those recidivist movie franchises.

Still, we have to admit that the Tiger Woods episode is especially interesting in several ways. His game, golf, is especially mental compared to most sports, but most of his income was actually peripheral to the game, in the form of product endorsements. In addition, much of the value of his endorsements was based on a carefully cultivated reputation for really being a "nice guy", an image of Tiger Woods as a polite gentleman of the nicest sort. The reality turned out to be very different, that he was a rather wild philanderer, dallying with many women at the same time as he was pretending to be a faithful husband and a good family man and role model.

I actually don't feel like he should be criticized so much on moral grounds. I suppose a lot of it would depend on how much he lied to his wife BEFORE they got married. In retrospect, it now seems very likely that he was playing the field--the non-golf field--for some years, and probably going back before they got married. If he fooled her, too, and pretended that he was not seeing many women, then that's quite a different thing than if he told her that he was already playing around quite a bit. My own feeling is that she doesn't seem dull-witted, so she probably knew about his past before they got married, and in that case the big question is whether or not he promised to reform and be faithful. It sounds pretty sordid if you put it that way, but I have to regard her as pretty foolish if she actually expected a leopard to change its spots.

On the other hand, there's certainly plenty of foolishness to go around here, and I think the lion's share is clearly the Tiger's. Apparently there were at least a dozen other women involved here. How long did he imagine this could remain a secret? It's hard enough to trust one mistress, but a dozen? Even if all of them were sincerely discrete, he was just scattering too much evidence around too widely. Someone was going to figure it out sooner or later. It also appears that he had developed an adversarial relationship with his wife, which kind of boggles my mind. Before he got married was the time to check for jealous tendencies, and he certainly had a buyer's market to shop for a reliably tolerant spouse.

Maybe it just comes back to the mental aspect again? Maybe he needed the extra tension of the illicit sex to give him the extra tension on the golf course?

Where we are now, Tiger Woods is apparently regarded as financially the most successful professional athlete in history, the first athlete to gross over $1 billion, of which about $600 million has been converted into his personal worth. Not being a golf fan, I have to recycle the old joke about 'Not bad for chasing a little ball around with a stick.' Tiger has announced that he is taking a break from the game, but that was predicated upon becoming a better husband and father and rebuilding or somehow saving his marriage, and that seems to be a rather forlorn hope at this point. So far he hasn't missed any major tournaments, and if his marriage is really toast, it might be best for him to agree to a quickie divorce, and get back to his games of quickie lovers and golf.

The frequently repeated theme has been that his continued success on the golf course would salvage as much of the situation as can be salvaged. After all, the primary basis of his reputation is that he has the potential to be the greatest golfer in history, and the nice guy stuff was just frosting on the endorsement contracts...

Now it's time to elevate the analysis to a higher level, to the relationship of these professional athletes to the main theme of this blog, the "Distant View of America's Fall". My focus here is on the breakdown between the hard reality of these imperfect humans and the faith-based desire for perfect role models. This has actually become part of the national delusion that is destroying America. There is no Superman coming to the rescue, not on the athletic field and not in politics. This is actually a theme that I've addressed from a number of perspectives, but right now President Obama is becoming increasingly handicapped by the widening realization that he, too, isn't Superman flying to our rescue.

The dynamics of contemporary American politics are such that many of the supporters of any candidate regard their candidate as some sort of divine savior. In Obama's case, the themes of hope and change are now coming to haunt him. I want to believe that they are only bluffing and that they will think carefully in future elections, but disillusionment is a powerful negative emotion, just as many people feel disillusioned when professional athletes turn out not to be the role models they were marketed as. From that perspective, at least Dennis Rodman didn't market himself as a nice guy in the way that Tiger Woods did--and I think the result of that disillusionment may well manifest itself in the future in disruptive shouts on the golf course when Woods is competing, unwelcome distractions which may well prevent him from focusing in the way he needs to win.

It's very different when much of your base is completely faith-based on every issue. I'm talking about the hard core of religiously-motivated Busheviks that continued to support Dubya to the bitter end, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of Dubya Bush's miserable failures. Now that constituency has evidently transferred itself to Sarah Palin, while many of Obama's more rational supporters have simply become quite disaffected by his stubborn wrestling with harsh realities and neo-GOP obstructionism. My own feeling is that Obama is well qualified, intelligent, and skilled and is probably doing as good a job as is possible under the circumstances he inherited--but we seem to be in a situation where the best hope for the nation is for the GOP to be imploded by its dominant neo-GOP far-right wing, thus giving the Democratic Party the overwhelming leverage needed to fix the divisive problems that threaten to consume the nation.

I can actually imagine the situation getting worse--but not that much worse before it collapses completely. I think we dodged a major bullet in 2008 when the financial markets, again last year when Dubai was bailed out, and the Chinese might be about to throw another spanner into the works...

Can the CIA even protect itself?

Long time, no post, eh? Well, the obvious thing to note is that the apparent lack of readers of this blog is certainly not motivating me to do more work here--and writing well is pretty hard work. If I make you think, then a tip of the hat via a comment would be appreciated. If you have contradicting evidence to cite, I'm especially interested in learning about it. If you agree, that's nice, but I confess I don't really care that much. Basically I'm confident that my views are well considered and well supported by lots of evidence. I'm actually more interested in reasoned disagreement supported by solid evidence--but there seems to be very little of that in American politics these days.

Having said that, the topic of today's scribbling is actually in the category of a thought experiment based on the recent bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least 8 Americans (with a couple more still at risk of dying from their injuries). The solid fact is that the victims were not military personnel, and the reports and some evidence supports their having been CIA employees. This thought experiment is based on the belief that they were CIA people, and that the Taliban bomber went after them for precisely that reason.

The conclusion of my little thought experiment is that the CIA is clearly functioning extremely poorly. It should be obvious that there is no good reason so many potential human targets should be allowed to gather in such a place, and if the CIA didn't understand that, then they are really foolish or incompetent or both. It does not matter at all when the bomber started working for the Taliban. Maybe he was an old member and the background screening failed, but that's extremely likely in the turmoil of Afghanistan. However, I think it probably more likely that his background was completely clean and checked--at the time he started working with the Americans. What happened later to flip him doesn't matter at all. Maybe he regarded himself as a true patriot and started working for the Americans precisely because he knew his background was clean--and then he contacted the Taliban to join up. Maybe the Taliban contacted him, telling him that his entire family was being held hostage and would be killed if he failed to kill the Americans. Those are just the three most obvious intermediate stages of this thought experiment, but the obvious conclusion is that NO Afghan can really be trusted in this context, and the Americans ALWAYS have to operate on that assumption.

If the bombed facility was for exercise, as widely reported, then it should have been divided up by walls of sandbags so that any bomb detonation could never kill more than two or three people at a time. I'd also put big mirrors in a lot of the corners to expose potential hiding places for shooters. Lots of other precautions leap to mind, but the obvious point is that a CIA base in that place HAD to use such precautions, and some more besides, as the old joke goes.

So why did I include a Dubya label for this post? Because I think a lot of the REAL problem is that Obama still hasn't cleaned up ANY of the major messes he inherited. To a degree, that's a natural state of affairs insofar as some parts of some government systems were working pretty well, and even where they weren't, most of the people in those systems were sincerely trying to do their best. Also, it's obviously dangerous to rock the boat when you're in the middle of a river--but the mess left behind by Dubya is more like being adrift in the middle of the Atlantic. I'll explain more when I get around to writing "Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman, Part the Tiger Woods", which also belongs to this particular blog as another aspect of the malaise of America...

Fitting end of the Dubya era?

Feels like a rather awkward one to write, even painful. Kind of an obituary of a relationship? Not really close enough to call a friendship, though maybe I just don't know what friendship is supposed to mean. Most clearly a former employer, but we also had more than a few drinks in the local bar over the years, and I recall being invited to his palatial house one time. Even one of the few people I saw on both of my trips back to the States...

However, I'm deliberately attempting to protect the identity of the person I'm writing about here. Just a privacy thing for me, but I'd be uncomfortable if someone wrote this sort of post about me by name, so it's intended as a philosophic courtesy... For convenient reference, I'll call him Mr X.

The unique aspect of Mr X that motivates my writing is that he was the only Dubya supporter who I both personally knew and personally had high regard for. Actually, I was quite surprised, almost shocked, to find out that he was supporting Dubya Bush. There aren't many Dubya supporters around here, and the few I knew mostly seemed obviously flawed in ways that made me regard their political leanings as part of a flawed package. (For example, a Dubya-supporting moralist who admitted that his morality justified cheating on his wife, apparently because he felt everyone did. He was on his second or third wife by that time...) I've kept in touch with a number of old friends and acquaintances, and none of them were supporters of Dubya--but this one fellow stood out.

My recollection is already rather fuzzy, but I think I asked him a few years ago about what was going on in the States these years. It was a kind of open-ended query, but I was quite surprised to find that he regarded support of Dubya as a normal thing. At first, I figured it was just a Texas-local business thing, since most of his customers are in the rich or super-rich classes that Dubya describes as his base. I thought he was just playing along to make money. Such a well-educated and intelligent fellow couldn't really be drinking the koolaid, could he? However, he eventually managed to convince me that he meant it.

There was a lapse, and then we started discussing it again. I don't remember all the details of the discussion, but I never felt like he offered a rational defense of his position, and I suppose he felt the same way about my side of it. I remember that he wanted to make some kind of a wager about a prediction on the anti-Saddam war--so I referred him to my long list of predictions, written around 2001, but he evidently wasn't interested. Sadly, those were predictions of harms and damages that Dubya might do or at least be responsible for, and it turns out that all of my worst fears were realized--with compound interest. Worse than that, I missed plenty of other areas of harms I couldn't even imagine--and even though I was painting with a very broad brush there.

A couple of his later email messages finally convinced me there was no point to the discussion. At one point he tried the extremely weak argument of Dubya as the fellow you'd like to have a drink with. Fundamentally a flawed argument if you believe that Dubya is a teetotaller and if your idea of "with" means you aren't drinking alone. He actually approached it sideways, however, citing as his evidence a video of Dubya's self-deprecating humor at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few years ago. That was the same year that Stephen Colbert did the extremely funny and rather devastating closing presentation that showed the actual limitations of Dubya's sense of humor--when Dubya stalked off in a huff afterwards.

At that point I felt that there wasn't much sense in continuing the discussion, so I blew it off. It's one thing to disagree about what is funny, but I really felt like asking how Mr X felt about Dubya's earlier attempt at humor at the same dinner a few years earlier. I was thinking about the extremely tasteless video about searching for Saddam's missing WMDs. Thousands of Americans and far larger numbers of Iraqis have died for that sick joke--with a running tab of something like $600 billion to date (for the direct and acknowledged costs). Or should I have commented about all the unintended humor of Dubya? Not much basis for discussion there, since I think the options are incompetence, stupidity, or a simple lack of respect for his audiences. Having nothing good to say, I said nothing.

Later he followed it up with some pretty crazy stuff about a gun-related lawsuit resulting from Katrina. My fuzzy recollection is that he was happy some policeman had been successfully sued for trying to disarm potential rioters in the aftermath of the disaster. Church of the Second Amendment, eh? Sorry, but I just don't see the relationship to the well regulated militia" there. Actually, I see the Second Amendment as having a very clear intention--that was completely overturned by the American Civil War. It was written in the context of a recent and successful insurrection, and it was their intention to make sure the federal leadership wouldn't do exactly what President Lincoln did do. The real question of the Second Amendment should be whether or not the Civil War was worth the cost--which we're still paying. At least that's how I interpret the former Southern Democrats who are now the Reagan Republicans with the decisive voting bloc in Texas and several other states of the Confederacy...

He sent a couple more pieces after those, but there didn't seem to be much reason to respond to them, either. Having nothing to say, I said nothing--but I kept thinking about it, and it continued to bother me. Hence this venting.

Conclusion? I guess it's that Dubya was lying (again) when he claimed to be a uniter rather than a divider. Good riddance to bad rubbish, but we'll all be paying for Dubya's miserable failures for a long, long time to come, no matter who takes over to clean up the mess.

Comments on the Election of 2008

Secondary Subject: I hope you have hope

That's the great thing about voting. It gives me a hope I can make the world a bit better. It isn't like owning the government, but it's better than nothing, and even if my guy didn't win last time, maybe I can pick a winner this time.

Short version of my story: The neo-GOP of Texas tried to prevent me from voting this year, but Senator Obama's supporters saved my vote. I am grateful and want to share my gratitude.

Introduction to the long version: All things are linked, and pulling out a key thread is hard. What do you already know? Where are the gaps I must bridge? Why are you interested? What bores you? There is no Zen, but this is a Zen tale...

So does voting matter? Perhaps it's a kind of religious thing for me, but I've always regarded voting as a sacred right and a civic duty. I'm big on doing my duty. Often it seems that my vote will have no effect, but I do my duty and I rarely skip an election. I always hope to vote.

The hope of Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn was to prevent me from voting this year. She works in the office of the Secretary of State of Texas and sent me a long and complicated email message that was intended to convince me I could not vote. It fooled me, and it was even good enough to fool a retired lawyer friend, too. Maybe it was just the legal code hidden between the lines? Seemed really complicated to me, but probably it's easy stuff for lawyers. Focus on legality and lawyers agree on the law. From her legalese, I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a lawyer, too. McCain says he hopes to make budgetary evildoers famous--though he means infamous, but I think Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn deserves to be infamous, too. Have you have been disenfranchised by her? If so, please tell your story, too. But why did Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn try so hard to prevent me from voting? That thread leads to general political motivations, and the specific situation in Texas.

Remember that *ALL* of the politicians say they approve of voting, but I think most of them are lying. Yes, a few of them really love voting and are sincere about democracy, but most politicians see votes as bus tokens that they need to collect, and collecting tokens is just a tactical game. Stealing a bus token is even better--it's like getting two tokens at once. But if you can't collect the token and you can't steal it from your opponent, then the next best thing is to make sure it gets thrown away before your opponent collects it.

So how do most politicians play the game? Mostly by claiming to agree with the voters, even when they don't. But the voters often disagree with each other, so it's logically impossible to agree with all of them. Is it hopeless? Any disagreement with the politician could lose that token. One tactic of some politicians is to agree with both sides of every issue--which is why most politicians are known liars. It's just getting too hard to avoid getting caught, and it's much better to say meaningless gibberish while attacking anything the other guy said. Ergo, Karl Rove tried to perfect the art of politics as lying about your political opponents. (But maybe that mudslinging machine has finally run out of steam?)

That's actually a relatively 'good' side of the political game. An ugly side is the selective disenfranchisement. For example, gerrymandering during redistricting can concentrate the other side's votes so many of those votes are effectively wasted. Details would be too far afield here, but it's worth noting that many Americans don't vote simply because they know that their so-called secret ballots have already been precounted and gerrymandered, and thus rendered meaningless. Another vicious variation is when the neo-GOP targets 'hostile' voter registrations.

Perhaps my case isn't so bad, though I'm sure I was targeted because I was a likely Democratic voter when I mentioned wanting to vote in the Democratic primary. I don't know for certain if Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a Republican, but Texas politics is now dominated by the Republicans, so either she's a Republican appointed to her position for that reason or she's working for a Republican. In any case I'm firmly convinced the real motivation of her persuasive but misleading email was to block a probable Democratic voter. Voting while Democratic is almost a crime in Texas now.

These years the Republicans run Texas and control all of the top statewide offices--just as Texas used to be dominated by the Democrats for many decades. It's worth noting that the switch was due to a shift of old Southern Democrats who became new Reagan Republicans. That's a long history going back to the "War between the States" (AKA the American Civil War), but the best short summary was LBJ's statement that the Civil Rights Act was ceding the South to the Republicans for a generation--but I also hope that generation is over... Actually. when the Democrats ran Texas, the real state election was the Democratic primary, and now the real election in Texas is the Republican primary--and therefore, by blocking me from voting in the primary Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn had already succeeded in taking away my vote in Texas (but mostly if I switched to the primary that counts).

However, buried in the fine print in a lower paragraph of her email she actually admitted that I still had a residual right to vote--and that's what the Obama people told me about after the primary was past. They told me what steps to follow, and eventually I was rewarded with a ballot. Now I can hope it will be counted--unless Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn has some new tactic to kill it. Maybe I used the wrong kind of ink?

That's pretty much my story, but I want to close by trying to persuade you that you should vote, too, because there are real differences between the candidates in this race. If you don't choose, someone else will--and I confess I was *VERY* mistaken in 2000 to think it didn't matter much. I'm going to focus on one positive and one negative reason why I think this election matters.

What do you think about the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I think the life thing has to come first, or you aren't going to care about anything else. But do you think your right to life should depend on whether or not some insurance company thinks it's profitable to insure you? If you haven't needed medical treatment to save your life, just wait a bit. I think Obama understands this much better than McCain. I think Obama hopes to provide more medical care to help us live, while McCain just hopes to help some insurance companies. America pays more and gets less--because the insurance companies are too greedy in the middle. I think better medical care is a positive hope.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin hopes to meet Jesus, and soon. She's said she expects to meet Him within her lifetime. According to her church, that means she is hoping for and dreaming of Armageddon--and I *REALLY* don't want her in the White House working to make her dream come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies can be dangerous--hoping for the end of the world is a negative hope.

A summary? Politicians have various motivations. I think most politicians are in it for money, some for the power, and only a small number are really into the idea of public service for its own sake--even though all of them claim to put public service first. These differences cross party lines, but there is a bias. The Republicans have always been the party of business, and proportionately more of them are motivated by the money. That's why they normally treat elections the same way, working out the most cost-effective ways to get the required 51% of the votes. The power-crazed politicians seem roughly evenly split--but it's very clear that McCain has become one of them. However, the true public servants now seem to be disproportionately in the Democratic Party. Of course it's hard to be certain in advance, since they all say the same things... So far Obama has been walking the walk.

I started by hoping to pick a winner this time around. I'm picking Obama. This time is *NOW*. We need some hope for a better future.