CBS News No Longer Even Pretends

"We cannot verify this film clip, but it appears to show victims of a Syrian gas attack." If you cannot verify the film clip why are you airing it? A legitimate news agency does not air anything which it cannot verify as accurate. A propaganda machine airs anything which purports to support the position it is promulgating.

"The United States hit this airfield with 59 missiles after the last time Assad used chemical weapons on his own people."  First, the United States fired 59 missiles, but only six missiles hit that airfield. Fifty-three missiles went awry, some shot down by Russian air defense, and some for unknown reasons. Second, the putative chemical weapons use which triggered this missile attack was debunked; it never happened.

CBS News no longer even pretends to tell the truth.

Stupidity Reigns

The stupidity of these claims regarding the use of chemical weapons becomes more and more bizarre. Having essentially won, overall, his civil war, Assad destroys 90% of an enemy position and then, ready to begin “mop up” operations, hits civilians near that position with chemical weapons. We do not even stop to ask why he would do that.

In view of an announcement that we are leaving, Assad makes a move which is certain not only the get us to stay, but to get us to renew our threats of attacking him directly, something we have done only in a token manner before this. We do not pause to ask why he would want to have us in active military engagement against him.

Don’t even get me started on the White Helmets, who have been making idiots of us for years.

Beware of First Impressions

As Loyola of Chicago was in the final minutes of what was obviously a losing effort on Saturday, television showed a shot of Sister Jean being wheeled out of the arena several minutes before the final buzzer. I thought that was a bit odd, and certainly not in character. Sure enough, she was merely making sure that she was in place to greet each player as they left the court, congratulating each one individually on a successful and wonderful season and acknowledging each for their accomplishment. Nice.

Burden of Proof

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics filed a lawsuit to force coffee sellers to advertise that its product poses a risk for cancer and won, based on the judge's conclusion that Starbucks had failed to prove that coffee does not pose a risk of causing cancer.

Interesting legal theory. If you are sued for causing the death of your neighbor's barking dog by witchcraft, for instance, are you guilty if you are unable to prove that the charge is untrue?

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

From the glorified blog posing as a newspaper, The Hill,

Hillary Clinton is striking back at critics telling her to “shut up” following her 2016 loss, saying, “They never said that to any man who was not elected.”

That's because nobody needed to. Yes, Al Gore went on to become an advocate for climate change concerns, John Kerry ran for the Senate and John McCain remained there, but no man went on a speaking circuit giving speeches about nothing other than why they lost the election to a brain dead carnival barker.

Of Course The Irony is Missed

Facebook was widely lauded as a wonderful and valuable instrument of social change when it was credited as a prime mover of "color revolutions" in the Middle East. It is, however, being demonized when it is claimed to have had an effect on a US presidential election.

One has to wonder to what degree the demonization is due to the influence having been utilized by the wrong party. Would the media have cried foul if Cambridge Analytica had been working in behalf of the party of the left?

The New Orleans Saints Again

Some years ago it was revealed that the New Orleans Saints football team management and coaches were offering bonus money, and paying it, to players who deliberately injured key players on opposing teams. Management and coaches were fined and in some cases suspended by the NFL as punishment, but when the NFL tried to pursue similar punishment with respect to the players who took payment for inflicting the injuries to players, the Saints chapter of the NFL Players Union sued claiming that the NFL did not have the authority to do that under the terms of the union contract (known as the “players’ agreement”).

Now we have another reason to despise the New Orleans Saints.

It turns out that they have a set of rules which, they claim, are designed to protect their cheerleaders from being hit on by the players. These rules require that the cheerleaders may not contact or talk to the players, but there is no corresponding rule forbidding the players to contact or talk to the cheerleaders. Further, “If a cheerleader enters a restaurant and a player is already there, she must leave. If a cheerleader is in a restaurant and a player enters afterward, she must leave.” There are no similar rules pertaining to conduct by players.

I will continue to encourage victory for any team playing against the New Orleans Saints, including (sigh) the New England Patriots, as difficult as that may be for me.

Always Stoke Fears

When more than one interpretation can me made, or more than one conclusion drawn, from a statement, the media and/or pundits will always chose the one that stokes fear.

Form a March 20th New York Times story about things that go bump in the night could derail the economic recovery, “In February, markets tumbled after a report showing unexpectedly strong wage growth revived long-dormant fears of inflation.”

Strong wage growth posed as a negative for business due to inflation. Given that consumer spending is 70% of our economy, and that consumers are wage earners, why was strong wage growth not seen as a fuel which would increase consumer spending?

Hurry Up

I cannot wait for that silly-ass Chinese space lab to come down so that we will no longer be bombarded with headlines about its impending fall and nobody knowing where it will burn up and how many pieces will hit the Earth and nobody knowing where they will hit.

Spousal Anxiety

Light switches rarely go bad, but in a forty-year-old house anything can happen, so when my wife left the house yesterday I was in the process of replacing a light switch and she was in a state of anxiety about it.

Electricity scares her to death, and it doesn't help for me to point out that electrical work is the one thing for which I have actual training, since I was an Electrician's Mate in the US Navy and the government trained me very thoroughly for that task. I then worked as an industrial maintenance electrician for some years after I got out of the Navy.

None of that helps, and she is convinced that when I am doing something electrical someday she is going to come home and find me dead. I have a suspicion that she leaves because she doesn't want to watch me die horribly, but she denies that.

When she got home she carefully did not express her relief that I was still alive, but did comment that the switch I replaced was whiter than the one next to it, and readily accepted my explanation that it was because it was forty years newer. She then noted that the new switch was upside down, and I don't think she was entirely convinced by my assertion that I had done that on purpose.

If that seems at odds with the "very thorough" training I received while I was in the Navy, I can only tell you that it was a domestic switch of a type that the Navy does not use.

On Anger

Anger has much in common with fire. Like fire, it can serve us well when stoked by proper fuel and kept within the confines of vessels which control it, or it can destroy us when overfed and/or allowed outside the places where it can be of use to us.

The anger that is bred of an unjust act against me or against someone who matters to me is like a cooking fire or a coal stove. Such anger moves me to right a wrong or to take action which betters my environment. It does me no harm, and indeed invigorates me. It moves me into actions which benefit others.

There is another anger that is like a forest fire; that harms and can destroy me. That anger is the one born from the cult of self; anger raised because someone does not agree with my opinion, anger raised because someone takes an action of which I disapprove and, worst of all, anger raised because it is a feeling that I prefer to that of experiencing fear.

That last surprises you? Many of us manifest depression, which is fear turned inward, as anger. We become angry if we fear that someone or something will deprive us of what we have or will deny us access to what we want.

The origin of the useful anger lies outside of myself, and since my anger resolution is aimed at the source the anger is resolved, the social or physical environment is bettered and I am left at peace.

Anger which has its roots inside me, in my unmet expectations or my unexpressed and often unrecognized fear, starts a vicious circle. Perceiving the source of the anger to be outside of myself, I aim my resolution efforts at that which is not the source, and allow that anger, like a forest fire, to grow larger and larger, to feed on itself, and ultimately to destroy all that it comes in contact with, mostly me.

When I abandon the cult of self, when I turn outward from self and expand my intellectual and emotional horizon to include others, then anger and fear lose their ability to control my life. It happens automatically. It is the inevitable result of the turn toward others and expansion of my horizons.

It Means What It Means

In political argument, the point being made means whatever you want it to mean, and proves whatever you want it to prove. The same citation, actually, can prove diametrically opposite positions depending on the point you are trying to make at the moment.

We know, for instance, that Vladimir Putin personally interfered in the 2016 presidential election because computer experts have traced his fingerprints through the internet and have tracked the computer hacking backward to a computer that sits right on his desk, in a room to which no one but him has a key.

Well, maybe not, but you get my point. Claims are made that the “interference in the election,” and the hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email servers have been traced to specific computers which prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Russia, under the direction of Putin himself, interfered in the election.

Now Putin announces that Russian nuclear weapons have been upgraded in response to a Trump policy in which nuclear weapons may be used in response to a cyber attack. MIT’s Theodore Postol tells us, an a Real News Network interview cited by Naked Capitalism, that Putin should have ignored that policy as an empty threat because it was unrealistic.

Postol says in the interview that as to, “the issue of using low yield nuclear warheads in conventional military situations or in response to a cyber attack, first of all, I don’t know how you would know where the cyber attack came from.” He goes on to say that, “anybody who’s even modestly competent, even some of these hackers who really are not very competent people, you can hide your address, your location from anybody you’re attacking.”

So when the Obama administration wants to blame Russia for interfering with our election, yes we can trace the cyber attack to its source, but when Russia defends itself against Trump administration threats against it, no we certainly cannot trace the cyber attack to its source. Isn’t that convenient?

Not a Manchurian Candidate

From the New Yorker magazine, written by Jane Mayer, comes a serious and scholarly resume of Christopher Steele, the guy who exposed President Trump as a guy whom, among other things, likes to be urinated on by Russian whores. Steele told us that Vladimir Putin watched this being done, in fact, and would therefor be able to use that information to blackmail Trump into turning this nation into a vassal state of Russia.

Well, okay, maybe a little bit hyperbolic, but every bit as serious as the subject matter warrants. New Yorker obviously thinks differently, however, as they pay this…, this…, this person big bucks to write an article telling us how the “Steele Dossier” came to be written.

“In January, after a long day at his London office, Christopher Steele, the former spy turned private investigator, was stepping off a commuter train in Farnham, where he lives, when one of his two phones rang,” the piece begins, so now we know that the guy is so important that he carries two phones. The pace is brisk right from the beginning.

Notwithstanding his importance, she goes on to tell us, still in the first paragraph, he, “looks much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept his phones in a Faraday bag—a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block signal detection.”

Which implies that you can tell by looking at him where he "keeps his phones," and, um, wait a minute. If he keeps his phones in a “Faraday bag” which blocks electronic signals, how did the phone ring? An average eighth grader knows that for a cell phone to ring, an electronic signal has to reach it.

I can’t tell you about the rest of the article because I stopped reading at that point. I don’t read dime novels written by idiots.

Stunning

MIT published a report saying that a study had revealed that the vast majority of Uber and Lyft drivers make net earnings of less than minimum wage, and that fully a third of them are actually losing money by driving in this "sharing economy" business. That's not the stunning part; hardly surprises me, in fact.

What's stunning is that it took an MIT study to bring it to public attention. If our schools were graduating people with real educations, this "sharing economy" nonsense would never have gotten off of the ground, because the basic economics of income and costs is dead simple and the drivers would have realized within a month of starting the work that driving your own car for someone else's profit is a losing proposition.

Also stunning is that Uber responded to the report by saying that MIT's study protocol was "deeply flawed." Of course it was.

Passing the Smell Test

This whole “Russia meddled in the election” thing just makes no sense to me. The test that it fails for me is a sensible answer to the question of, “What’s in it for them?” The indictment of 13 Russians by Mueller reduces that issue to absolute absurdity.

According to Mueller’s indictment the purpose of all of this was to “sow dissent” within the United States and to “cause Americans to lose faith in democracy.” And how does that benefit Russia or the Russian government? Even if they are doing what the indictment claims they are doing, what do they gain by it?

Actually, far from gain, it actually endangers Russia and the Russian government. In fact, it endangers the entire world, because the American government does what any government does when faced with unrest at home. It increases foreign adventurism in order to distract it’s citizenry from domestic issues. It threatens war with North Korea, for instance, and it wages war throughout the entire Middle East in the name of “fighting terrorism.”

Keeping this whole “Russia is our enemy” issue active, whether Russia meddled in our election or not, whether Russia is active in our social media or not, is a useful method of distracting the public from the failure of our government to do virtually anything that works to the real and lasting benefit of the American people.

It also serves to distract the public from the influence of American money, not only in our elections, but in every aspect of governance in this nation.

We are horrified that the Russians may have spent a few hundred thousand dollars on social media to influence votes, and allow that to distract us from the fact that for many decades corporations and the wealthy have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to influence not only our elections, but to directly affect the passage or failure of legislation on a routine basis.

It seems likely to me that these 13 Russians were doing what they were doing, not for the purposes assumed and stated by Mueller, but rather for the same reason that thousands of Americans do the same things – generating “click bait” in order to create a multitude of “followers” which they can use to sell themselves for the purpose of a form online marketing consisting of “reviews” of products and services.

“I have 50,000 followers,” they will tell a business, “pay me $15,000 and I will write a favorable review of your product which those 50,000 people will read online.” Not very savory certainly, and possibly illegal, but the use of an election to create the followers was entirely incidental to a money making scheme.

Oh Really?

From Time Magazine we get an article which tells us that,

A study published Monday in the journal Trauma Surgery & Acute Care says that medical dramas — Grey’s Anatomy, specifically — “may cultivate false expectations among patients and their families” when it comes to the realities of medical care, treatment and recovery.

Get out your coloring book, turn to page four and color me shocked.

I'm not sure which magazine is discredited more by that, Time Magazine for passing this nonsense on or Trauma Surgery & Acute Care for authorizing a "study" to determine something that a eighth grader would regard as obvious simply by watching a couple episodes of the show.

Wrong Conclusion Again

A bunch of "heads of intelligence agencies" were in front of Congress yesterday to warn of all the dangers facing the nation, chief among them being that Russia interfered with the 2016 election and is now actively meddling with the 2018 midterm election. "We do not want Russians to tell us who to vote for," one of these clowns intoned, warning us of Russia's activity on Facebook.

Think about that for a moment. If people are basing their vote on Russian Facebook posts, then the problem is not that Russia is posting on Facebook, the problem is that people are basing their votes on Facebook posts.

We are a nation governed by morons who are elected by idiots.

Hypocrisy Rules

Dean Baker is fond of castigating media persons for “mind reading” when they tell readers what various parties believe or think, even when the parties in question are on record as saying that they believe or think whatever belief it is that the writer ascribed to them.

“Republicans think that in a robust economy the social safety net could be dealt with by non-governmental charity organizations,” for instance, will instantly draw a charge of mind reading from Dean Baker, even though dozens of Republicans have stated that belief publicly over the last fifty years.

I would have no issue with Dean Baker for asserting that the belief is idiotic, but stating that Republicans believe it is certainly not mind reading.

Then on Monday he himself stated that, “Republicans in Congress are explicitly using the federal tax code to target states controlled by Democrats,” with the most recent income tax law. I wrote to him in the comments, noting his use of the word “explicitly,” and politely asked him to tell me the name of the Republican(s) who told him they were doing that or, I asked, “are you doing some mind reading here?” He deleted the comment.

Then yesterday he accuses the Washington Post of mind reading, saying,
“It's good we have the Post to tell us what the White House really believes.”

The entirety of his piece was not to challenge the theory advanced by the White House, but merely to castigate the Post for mind reading after he started the piece by saying that, "I thought it was just a way to give a middle finger to low-income people for getting government aid," which is, of course, clearly not mind reading.

What Passes For Logic

Dean Baker tells us today that in the late 1990’s, “many new startups actually were financing investment by issuing stock,” and that, “This is generally rare, since the vast majority of investment is financed by retained earnings and borrowing on credit markets or from banks.”

The stock market, according to Investopedia, “provides companies with access to capital in exchange for giving investors a slice of ownership.”

So startups in the 1990’s were doing precisely what the stock market exists to do; they were selling part ownership in their companies to investors in order to obtain capital to build their companies into major operations. And Dean Baker tells us this is rare.

In the same article he tells us that, “In principle the stock market is the value of future corporate profits,” which actually has become accepted thought generally and is factually nuts, being completely contrary to what the stock market actually is, in which a share of stock is a “slice of ownership.”

That “principle” assumes that purchasing stock entitles you to be paid a share of corporate profits, but it does nothing of the sort. Other than for “Subchapter S” corporations, which most large corporations are not, it entitles you to receive a dividend, which is declared by the board of directors and may be greater than or less than the profits achieved by the corporation.

Dividends are usually less than corporate profits, as the corporation maintains some cash in the form of “retained earnings” against future operations and investment. If dividends were larger than profits, which is sometimes the case in order to (falsely) maintain stock value, the corporation has to borrow the money to pay them.

So at best, this definition should read, “In principle the stock market is the value of future corporate declared dividends,” and would still be bogus, since it misdefines what the stock market is, in which (to repeat) a share of stock is “a slice of ownership.”

Investopedia goes on to describe the “primary market” in which initial offerings of stock are sold to investors to raise capital, and the “secondary market” in which stocks are bought and sold between traders. It is in the latter that the prices of stocks rise and fall based on their perceived value.

The real value of a stock is determined by the corporation’s net worth, reflected by the bottom line on its financial balance sheet, divided by the number of shares outstanding. The perceived value is, quite simply, whatever someone is willing to pay for it, and is often totally irrational. Witness tulips going for thousands of dollars per bulb in the 1800’s and Amazon at $1,458 today.

To claim that perceived value as being “the value of future corporate profits” is sort of putting invisible new clothes on the emperor and hoping that no little kid comes along. You buy a stock based on what you think you can sell it for in the future. It’s called gambling, and investors do it with the same logic that visitors to Las Vegas use at the craps table.

Play Of The Game

Many are talking about the fourth and goal play near the end of the first half, when the ball was snapped to the running back, who tossed it to a flanker, who threw a touchdown pass to the quarterback. It was certainly an exciting play.

But for me the play of the game was this tackle, with the Patriots third and two at the Eagles’ nine yard line. The New England runner went airborne, intending to leap over the Philadelphia tackler. The tackler foiled that plan by keeping his head up and his eyes open, a practice that defensive players are taught but which they all too seldom actually do, and met the runner in mid air. He not only made the tackle, he stopped the runner dead in his tracks, preventing the first down and leading to a missed field goal.

Hyperbole Extends Now to Golf

I was watching the Waste Management Open in Phoenix yesterday... Well, I was watching it in San Diego; the tournament is being held in Phoenix. Anyway, NBC was carrying on about the tournament drawing the biggest crowds of any golf tournament in the world, which it does, and then they got carried away and started putting up graphics to claim that the event draws by far the biggest crowds of any sporting event ever, of any kind, anywhere in the nation.

They put up a graphic showing attendance for this year's event at 689,000 and pointing out that the largest crowd ever to watch the Indianapolis 500 was a paltry 350,000, but they failed to mention that the golf event is four days while the auto race crowd is cited for a single day event.

Not everyone who attends a golf tournament goes all four days, so it would be incorrect to assume that the daily attendance in Phoenix is 172,250, but the highest single day crowd is not much bigger than that, being about 204,000.

It's certainly far smaller than the crowd of 350,000 which showed up in one day to watch the Indianapolis 500.

They also failed to point out that, since the event is always held on NFL Super Bowl weekend, their biggest daily crowd of 200,000+ is on Saturday. That crowd almost entirely evaporates on Sunday, dropping to 50,000 or so, when 75% of those who attended on Saturday stay home on Sunday to watch the Super Bowl.

They made quite a point of saying that their attendance of 689,000 is more than twice the population of Scottsdale, which hosts the tournament and is home to 246,000 people. That little bit of hyperbole suffers when one realizes that the tournament actually draws about 200,000 people, many of whom attend the tournament multiple times, and that means there are actually more than 40,000 fewer people coming to the tournament than the population of Scottsdale.

The narrative really bites the dust when it is pointed out that Scottsdale is a contiguous suburb of Phoenix, and that the Phoenix metropolitan area has a population of over 4 million.

Busy, busy, busy...

I watched CBS News do a piece on the Super Bowl venue last night, telling us that cold weather was not any kind of deterrent to having fun when there is a Super Bowl in town. Temps of nine degrees, they were telling us, do not prevent crowds of people from enjoying the zip line over the Mississippi River, and the ice sculptures, and sledding down...

They tried their best to show us those "crowds of people enjoying the run up to the Super Bowl," but somehow never managed to widen the field of view on their camera to take in more than about eight people at a time. The gender and age ranges of those people could not be determined due to parkas and snow pants, so they interviewed a few folks so that we could know that both men and women were attending the game in Minneapolis.

Failure of Rational Thought

This DACA thing is sort of amusing, really. Obama asked Congress to pass it as a law and Congress, at the time controlled by Democrats in both houses, refused to do so. They didn’t just reject the request, they introduced the bill in both housed and voted against it in both houses. Liberals yawned and went to the vineyards to sample wine. Outrage = zero.

Obama passed DACA as an executive order, not only usurping Congress’ role as lawmaker, but actually directly going against the will of Congress, and liberals cheered lustily, ignoring the cautions that what was done by the executive order of one president could be undone by the executive order of another president. They weren’t worried because Democrats would certainly never lose a presidential election.

Trump then says he is cancelling the executive order but will sign a DACA bill if Congress passes one. Congress does not pass one, but no anger is directed at Congress for not passing a DACA bill, in fact for twice not passing a DACA bill.

Instead, enormous anger and accusations of racism are directed at Trump for cancelling an executive order that, being executive overreach, should never have been issued in the first place.

All this despite the fact that 38% of voters approve of Trump while only 15% of voters approve of Congress.

No, I am by no means a Trump supporter, vote for Democrats more often than I do Republicans, and I am not expressing an opinion here for or against DACA. I am expressing that I continue to be astonished by the abysmal failure of political rationality in this country.

Dean Baker Goes Openly Anti-Worker

Dean Baker argues today that the recent “uptick” in the economy may not have much to do with Donald Trump, creating a rare moment in which I actually agree with him, and goes on to say that it may actually be due to “the continuation of the Obama-Yellen recovery,” which puts us in separate universes again. The rest of his piece today is a virulent rant against the interests of the working class.

He does agree with Summers that when another recession happens “the Fed will again have to rely on unorthodox monetary policy,” and goes on to say that, “This is why many of us have argued for an inflation target higher than 2.0 percent.” Of course, so that the working class can suffer as badly during economic boom times as they do during a recession. Brilliant.

He then claims it is “also worth bringing in the story of robots taking all our jobs,” saying that it is “a story of a massive uptick in productivity growth,” which is awesome because he loves productivity growth. It is, after all, another opportunity to worship an economic theory which in modern times punishes the working class.

Higher productivity means that more product is produced by less work, so higher productivity means fewer workers. Even if, as Dean Baker claims, higher productivity inevitably resulted in higher wages, which it does not, then higher wages for fewer workers is not really a good outcome for the working class.

But higher wages for fewer workers is not a good outcome for business, either, because it requires an investment which doesn’t cut labor costs much, if at all, so business sees to it that higher productivity means unchanged wages for fewer workers, which really sucks for workers.

Dean Baker even admits that his claim of higher productivity is not actually what causes higher wages when he says that, “It's possible that we won't see the same wage growth this time due to weaker unions, the decision to expose less-educated workers to competition with low paid workers in the developing world, and more protectionism in the form of longer and stronger patent and copyright protection.”

The patent and copyright thing is nonsense, of course. It’s a pet peeve of his which he injects into everything, and it’s not about the working class at all. The abuse of patents and copyrights is about inflating prices to increase corporate profits and has nothing whatever to do with working class wages.

The other two items, weaker unions and offshored jobs, have a lot to do with wage growth not occurring as a result of productivity growth, so of course Dean Baker would follow that statement by agitating for stronger unions and for restoring manufacturing jobs to this country, right?

He does nothing of the sort. His support for the working class evaporates in a puff of smoke when he argues that to make up for wages not rising the government should, “make up the lost demand with larger budget deficits.” You get that? He’s a member of the “as long as money is being spent, it doesn’t matter who’s spending it” school of economics. He only cares about cash flow and, like the rest of the Washington elite, is unconcerned about the spending power of the working class of this nation.

Since workers are not being paid well and have no money to spend, he claims, the government should spend money instead, using borrowed money, to keep the economy flowing. The working class won’t be okay, but the economy will be fine. The spending level will be high even though the working class is flat on its ass, because the government will be spending money that it borrowed from…?

Sort of what we have today, actually, because last fiscal year, during what he claims to be economic good times, our government spent $665.8 billion more than it took in. He does not say what number in the way of a “larger deficit” he would consider reasonable.

Okay, He's Finally Lost It

Dean Baker seems to have finally lost all contact with reality, as yesterday he went totally, completely and utterly batshit crazy over tax cuts and investment by Apple Inc.

My favorite was his statement that the columnist he is criticizing, “doesn't seem to have a clue why the government taxes in the first place,” and proceeds to tell us that, “The reason the government taxes is to reduce demand in the economy. The purpose is to prevent the economy from overheating and experiencing inflation.”

I mean, I knew that Baker was unconcerned by the amount of the federal debt, an attitude which has always struck me as a bit bizarre. I never in my wildest imagination, however, thought that he believed that all government operation, things like national parks, highways and the military, should be financed entirely and only by borrowed money and increases in the government debt.

He appears to be of the modern school of thought that citizens should reap the benefit of government services and benefits without having to pay anything for them. Citizens at least think that somebody else, “the rich,” should pay for those benefits, but Baker seems to think that they should be paid for by just borrowing more money.

He expands on his “taxation to reduce demand” theme by adding that, “When the economy is near full employment we face the standard story where we have to tax to finance spending. In other words, if we want additional spending we have to pull demand out of the economy to open the space. However, when we are below full employment, the government is not constrained by its tax revenue.” I have no idea what any of that means, don't think that he does either, and included it here merely for it’s entertainment value.

He goes on in the same column to say that the government will not benefit from Apple paying $38 billion in taxes on the repatriation of funds from overseas because the money is, “already being held in the U.S., its ownership is just attributed to a foreign subsidiary,” which ignores the fact that it was not being taxed and now is, and that having $38 billion is better than not having $38 billion.

He asks the question, “How would the world be different if Apple still held its money overseas and we had the Fed credit the government with another $38 billion to count against its debt?” Because, apparently, the money that the Federal Reserve Bank creates out of thin air for "Quantitative Easing" is the same thing, in Dean Baker’s feverish little mind, as real money which will be paid by Apple in the form of taxes.

He then repudiates one of his favorite rants about how the media is “mind reading” when they say that “Republicans think blah, blah, blah” merely because Republicans say “blah, blah, blah,” when he says that Apple’s claim to be spending $20 billion on capital expansion and pay raises is due to the tax cut is not true because they would be doing that anyway without the tax cut, because businesses “make investments and raise wages all the time,” but that, “They usually don't go to such great effort to put on a public display” about it.

Actually, they do, but let’s not split hairs with an economist who has totally lost his mind.

Why Newspapers Publish

From an article in The Washington Post regarding a Trump "scandalous" rumor, "That doesn't mean it's true or even that there has been any genuine wrongdoing — just that it's worth asking some very serious questions."

Yes, a real newspaper prints that statement and then goes on to say that because a porn star says something we should read it on the front page and have a long discussion about it, even though she presents no proof of her allegations and offers as evidence facts which have been printed in the media for many years and is knowledge which has been held by millions of people, such as that Trump had a bodyguard named Keith and a secretary named Rhona, and that he didn't like sharks.

And the media claims that Trump is making the nation ungovernable.

PS: Okay, that's assuming that the Post is "a real newspaper" which is, perhaps, arguable but...

Election Derangement

I am considered by those who know me to be liberal in my thinking. Those who know me best see some fiscal conservatism moderating my liberal social thinking, but none would hesitate to label me a Democrat. They would be mistaken, but only partly so. Although I tend most often to vote for Democrats, I am registered as a Republican and sometimes vote for them.

An objective examination of reaction by the losing party in the last three elections which resulted in the White House changing from one party to the other might shed some light as to why I will not register as a member of the Democratic Party.

2000, Bush v. Gore: Democrats promptly claimed that votes in Florida had not been properly counted. They further claimed that the Supreme Court improperly intervened to prevent those votes from being properly counted, and that if they had not done so a recount would have given the state’s electoral votes to the Democratic candidate and the White House would have remained in Democratic Party hands.

While the losing presidential candidate, Al Gore, never embraced this argument, the Democratic Party leadership did. The outgoing president embraced this argument. Senior Democratic members of Congress embraced this argument.

2008, Obama v McCain: Republicans reaction was to vow to “block the Obama agenda” and to resolve that they would defeat him in the following presidential election, (i.e. “make him a one-term president”). While their reaction was inartfully expressed, that is pretty much what opposition parties are supposed to do. At no time did they question the legitimacy of the electoral victory.

There was the nonsense about the place of Obama’s birth, but the Republican Party leadership never from the beginning embraced this ridiculous argument. The losing presidential candidate, John McCain, certainly never embraced this argument. The outgoing president never embraced this argument. Senior Republican membership in Congress never embraced this argument. There was never the slightest suggestion that any Congressional investigation should be made as to the place of Obama’s birth.

2016, Trump v. Clinton: Democrats claimed generally that “the Russians interfered with the election.” Clinton also claimed that the FBI interfered with the election and, although that gained no traction with the media, she adhered to that claim regardless.

The outgoing president embraced the Russian interference argument. The losing presidential candidate embraced this argument. Democratic Party leadership embraced this argument. Senior Democratic members of Congress embraced this argument. So enthusiastically do Democrats embrace the Russian interference argument that Congressional committees are established to investigate Russian interference and the degree to which the winning candidate participated in it.

Conclusion: I am not a Trump supporter and did not vote for him, but I do support this nation’s constitutional democratic process and certainly have no desire to become a member of a political party which routinely attempts to discredit that process simply because it did not work in their short term favor.

Waiting For Orders

In news coverage of the mudslides in Santa Barbara County the past few days, I noticed that one person after another said that the noise made by the mudslides had waked them up in the middle of the might. That raised a question in my mind to the effect of, “Why were you asleep?”

Certainly these people knew about the Thomas fire that had left those steep hills denuded of any trace of vegetation, and certainly they knew that heavy rain was forecast for that night. The media and public officials had been warning for several days of the danger of slides and urging people to leave. And yet here they were, at home and asleep when the event happened precisely as predicted.

One woman explained why they didn't leave, saying that, “We were never issued the mandatory evacuation order.” She went on to say that, “We’re good citizens, if we were ordered to leave we would have left. We would have done what we were told to do.”

It suggests to me that if left to think for themselves, the people of this state will not do so. They were warned for days of the danger. They were warned for days that leaving would be the wise thing to do. They were waiting for someone to order them to do it.

Sportsmanship Still Exists

A small point is being sort of overlooked in what was maybe the best football game I have ever watched; the SEC National College Championship game between Alabama and Georgia on Monday evening. The game had it all. It had dominance, comeback, highlights, lowlights, suspense and exhibitions of the obvious.

But the best thing I saw all night came from a player who, at the time, was not even on the field. It was the Alabama quarterback, Jason Hurts, who played in the first half with so little success that Nick Saban pulled him in the second half and replaced him with a freshman. This freshman was wildly successful and brought Alabama back from a thirteen point deficit to win the game.

The entire second half, Hurts was on the sideline and fully engaged in the action. He was not standing behind other players, he was on the sideline, cheering on his team and applauding their successes. When his replacement threw a touchdown pass and returned to the sideline, the first person to meet him was Jason Hurts, applauding and pounding him on the shoulder pads.

Less is being said about this young man than should be said. It was a demonstration of sportsmanship and personal character that was heartwarming and rewarding to watch.

Tarnished Gold

I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, hopefully my wife won’t read it, but I can’t hold it in; the Golden Globes is just too typical of where we've gone.

The women who sucked up the courage to initially accuse Harvey Weinstein were not there, and were given no recognition. Asia Argento, Rose McGowan, Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino, and Annabelle Sciorra.

Did you see them there or hear their names spoken? Of course not.

The women who enabled that piece of shit for decades, who fawned upon him to advance their own fame and glory were there, wearing their symbolic black dresses and pronouncing that the era of men was at an end; that women have all of the power now.

They can, after all, put a man’s career and personal life into the trash can with merely an unsupported accusation now, against which his denials are about as useful as a paper match in a hurricane.

These women's definition of leadership is to find a parade, already formed by people with real imagination and courage, and to jump in front of it.

I’m willing to bet there are plenty of men who think this. It is symptomatic of the problem that none have the courage to say it.

Aging Well

I have written three checks so far this year, and I wrote the year as 2018 on all three. Unfortunately, I also wrote the month as December on one.

Do not grow old unless you tolerate embarrassment well.

Missing The Point

The Dow Jones rose another thousand points, much to the delight of pundits who think that overpriced stocks are good for the economy. As usual, the media reported the increase in a manner which made the one thousand point increase seem more dramatic than it actually was, with Market Watch telling us that the rise occurred, “in a blistering 23 trading days, which would represent the fastest rally to such a mark, outpacing the 24 sessions it took to ascend to 21,000 last March and the move to 11,000 back in May of 1999.”

But what was the increase in the value of the stock index in terms that have actual impact on the value of the stock market? Well, this month’s increase was 4.2% in 23 days, amounting to 0.18% per day, which is a little less exciting than the “blistering pace” they described.

The increase last March was a 5.0% increase in 24 days, or 0.21% per day, which means that the current increase did not “outpace” that March increase. The current increase was actually smaller than the earlier one, and it gets worse for Market Watch.

The increase in May of 1999 was a whopping 10% increase in 24 days, or 0.42% per day, meaning that it had twice the impact on stock values as did the one in March of this year and more than twice the impact as did the current one.

The media gets all excited about each “one thousand point” marker in the index, but that is hardly very informative. As the market index becomes larger, each thousand points becomes a smaller and smaller indicator. Here they are citing three such indicators, and are presenting the least impactful one, at 4.2%, as being more dramatic than an earlier one that was just one day longer and, at 10%, had more than twice the impact.

Constitutional Duty

Today’s version of “democracy” is baffling to me, and I suspect would make the founders of this nation wish that they had taken up golf instead.

The founders saw fit to make it one of the duties of our president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The people of this nation used to applaud presidents for fulfilling that obligation, but today they seem more often to applaud his breach of it and excoriate the executive branch for any attempt to carry out the constitutional mandate.

For instance, lawmakers, Congress and state legislatures, passed an amendment back in 1919 to make the production, transportation or sale of alcohol illegal, and Congress passed a law in 1920 making the possession and consumption of alcohol illegal.

While both aspects of the legislation were violated in a pretty massive fashion, no one ever suggested that the executive should ignore the existence of the law, or that no attempt to enforce the law should be made. Certainly no one ever suggested that any state could pass a law making alcohol sale, possession and consumption legal and that the federal government should overlook and allow that. By 1933 voters had pressured lawmakers to repeal the almost universally unpopular federal law. All of that was consistent with what the founders, I think, had in mind as to what they had set up for governance in this nation.

Then in 1970 Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act which, among other things, classified marijuana as an addictive drug and made production, transportation, sale, possession or consumption of it illegal. More and more people, voters, are objecting to that law, but instead of agitating for the repeal of that federal law, they are insisting that they can pass state laws making it legal and that the president should simply not enforce the federal law.

I am actually sort of neutral on the legalization of marijuana. The evidence seems to be that it is actually somewhat less dangerous than alcohol. If nothing else, withdrawal from excessive use of marijuana is not medically dangerous, while alcohol withdrawal can cause death. Don’t know, and don’t really care. My point here is about governance.

President Obama announced that he considered marijuana to be a state issue and that he would direct the Justice Department not to interfere with states which had declared marijuana to be legal. In doing so he was actively renouncing his constitutional responsibility to enforce federal law, and he was widely applauded for doing so. If any voice was raised criticizing him for violating his oath of office, I never read it.

Then President Trump rescinds that directive and directs the Justice Department to enforce federal law. He is excoriated by the same media and the same people for following his constitutional mandate to enforce federal law as applauded President Obama for renouncing that mandate.

Nowhere is any call made upon Congress to change that part of the Controlled Substances Act which relates to marijuana. The media is, big time, all over whether or not the Executive Branch should enforce the federal law on marijuana use. The discussion, under the false umbrella of "states rights," is not about whether or not the federal law should exist, it is about whether or not it should be enforced, which is utterly nonsensical.

So what we had in the 1930’s was that a law which was unpopular resulted in the voters putting pressure on the legislature to change the law. Today we have an unpopular law resulting in voters putting pressure on the executive to violate his constitutional duty by failing to enforce the law. Voters, apparently, realize that they not only do not control Congress, they do not even have any influence with Congress.

Or perhaps the whole thing is just hollow drumbeat to popularize one president and, more to the point, to depopularize another one, and no one really cares whether federal laws are enforced or not. In either case, it’s pretty clear that what our founders created is no longer functional.

Tweeting For Change

John Dean tweeted today, “Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is more important in 2018 than taking the US House from the GOP, and beginning the end of Trump’s horrific presidency. The well being of the nation depends on it. Don’t let a day pass without doing some act to help Democrats win control.”

It is worth noting that if you change one name, this would fit well for Democrats in 2002 after Bush was elected, and for Republicans in 2010 after Obama was elected. (“Our duty is to make sure Obama is a one term president.”) In both cases the opposing party did gain majorities, in both houses, and in both cases it changed nothing.

It’s also worth noting that both presidents, in 2004 & 2012, were reelected.

The Democrats might gain control of one or both houses in this year’s midterm election. Any bets on what it will actually change?

"Tweeting," forsooth. I would be intellectually embarrassed to discuss that I relied upon a "twitter" account to communicate in any dimension, given that "twittering" is what we used to accuse brainless adolescent females of doing. Brainlessness is no longer limited to adolescent females.

Dean Baker Does It Again

Dean Baker’s Tuesday column proves once again my theory that studying economics in college causes brain damage, when he says that this nation’s cuts in economic support to the United Nations were a waste of time because doing so didn’t really save us any significant amount of money.

He’s obviously not a parent. When you dock a kid’s allowance, do you calculate how much money that is going to save you?

He references a New York Times article which informs that a cut of $1.2 billion amounted to 22% of the UN operating budget, and that another cut constituted 28.5% of the UN’s budget for peacekeeping operations, which calculates to a cut of $1.94 billion. From that, a reader whose brain was intact could derive the information that Trump’s punitive cuts to the United Nations for its votes on the Jerusalem issue, no matter how ill advised, was fairly effective punishment.

Dean Baker, whose brain is clearly not intact, was critical of the Times for not telling their readers that the cuts of “slightly less than $3.1 billion” amounted to a mere 0.08% of federal spending. I’m not sure I trust the percentage, since he clearly is not a mathematician: the total of the cuts he cites comes to $3.14 billion, which is slightly more than $3.1 billion.

I’m surprised he didn’t related it to GDP, and I suspect he tried to but came up with a few thousandths of one percent and didn’t know how to express that in print. 1.65e-4% would be even less understandable to readers than… Readers would simply think his calculator blew up, and he’s talking about “informing readers.”

Good Thinking

The NFL rearranged the schedule for the last week of the season, putting all games which involve teams "in the playoff hunt" in the 4:30pm EST time slot so that no team will know, as they begin their game, whether or not they are still alive in the playoffs.

Nice thought, but it screws the fans, because it means that any fan who wants to watch more than one of those meaningful games, or two by means of recording one of them, cannot do so because all seven of the games are at the same time and they are all carried between only two networks.

Good work. The NFL, as always, is putting the fans last.

Christmas Morning

This may not seem impressive, but in San Diego we usually either have a "marine layer," which is a solid cloud layer, or the wind is offshore, in which case there are no clouds at all. In either case sunrise is, to say the least, unimpressive. So Molly and I had a nice treat this morning while the wife slept in.

Stealing The Game

The Pittsburg Steelers lost the game today because of an utterly ridiculous call by the officials with 13 seconds remaining in the game. The Pittsburg receiver caught a pass on the one-yard line, went to his knees, rotated his body, reached the ball across the goal line, placed the ball on the ground and let go of it. The officials ruled it an incomplete pass because the reception "did not survive contact with the ground."

The rule that this idiot was referring to requires the receiver to "make a football move" before losing control of the ball, either by contact with the ground or from a defender, or to make contact with the ground with any part of his body other than a hand or foot while in control of the ball, for it to be ruled as a completed pass. Apparently this official did not consider rotating one's body and reaching the ball across the goal line to be "a football move," nor did he consider both knees to be a "part of the body other than a hand or foot."

Actually, by another rule, once the ball crosses the goal line in an offensive player's control, which it very clearly did in this case, it is a touchdown no matter what happens to it afterward. Apparently the official is unaware of that rule.

Off-Season Quickie

I'm not sure I want to mention "quickie" and Danica Patrick in the same article, but this piece doesn't have a whole lot to say. Danica announced that she would exit the stage by racing at the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500 next year, but named neither sponsor or car owner at the time. There now seems to be a problem. Only two owners have cars in both races. Penske immediately sent a message to Ganassi saying that he hoped Ganassi would enjoy the 2018 experience with Patrick, and now her negotiations with Ganassi seem to be on the rocks.

Quick Question

Do you think the tax bill would pass without all this sexual misconduct?

Two months ago, in an online discussion, I remarked that all of the hand wringing over the proposed tax bill was uncalled for because it could never pass in anything like its then-present form. I submit that the comment was entirely correct, given the circumstances at the time.

The great lie of Russian interference in the election had been repeated often enough that everyone believed it, but no one really cared any more because the "magic bullet" that proved that Trump had participated with the Russians in corrupting the elections, or that he was the Manchurian Candidate, had never materialized. The media had given it one last shot with a memo that he supposedly received about Wikileaks documents ten days before they were released, but after a couple days of hyperventilation it turned out he got the email, along with several million other people, four days after they were released.

So now we have this tidal wave of accusations of sexual misbehavior. They've been around for years, of course; Bill Cosby comes to mind. But now we have a tidal wave. Every day there are one or two new ones. Politicians, newsmen, football players, media stars, actors, journalists, chefs... And who is on the tail end of that parade? You got it, The ones who accused Trump early in the campaign and were ignored are back making the same accusations, but in this climate they are being taken very seriously indeed.

And because of this distraction, the tax bill, which I said two months ago could not pass, is going to pass into law before the end of the year.

The Eternal Question

Dean Baker is at it again, saying that the claims of employers that there is a shortage of skilled workers is nonsense because, “there are always workers with the necessary skills — they just might work for competitors or in another city,” and that all an employer needs to do is offer higher wages in order to lure those workers away from those competitors and other cities.

He offers no evidence for his statement, of course, let alone proof, but we'll let that go and proceed with our argument based on the accuracy of his unsupported allegation, unlikely as it may be.

So if you have an shortage of gas in the form of a 20-gallon tank with only 10 gallons in it and I have a full 20-gallon gas tank, all we have to do is siphon half of the gas from my tank to yours and the gasoline shortage is over, right? Because you now have 20 gallons of gas and I have…

Oh wait, something went wrong. There’s still the same shortage of gasoline, but it’s just in a different place. I now have it instead of you.

Only an economist would come up with the utterly stupid idea that you solve a shortage by moving that which is in short supply from one user to another. Which raises the eternal question. Do only idiots become economists, or does becoming an economist cause normal people to turn into idiots?

Hoist On Their Own Petard

The media is presenting the concept of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of our embassy to that city as being some radical idea conceived in the insane mind of Donald Trump and sprung as a major surprise into the politics of the nation, catching everyone on the wrong foot and at a loss for how to respond to such an insane idea coming from such a stupid and inexperienced idiot.

I have been waiting for one news pundit, just one, to mention the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, Bill S-1322 passed by votes of 93-5 in the Senate, and 374-37 in the House and not vetoed by William Jefferson Clinton, allowing it to become law on Nov. 8, 1995.

The law mandates that the US recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and requires that the State Department move our embassy to Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999. The bill provides that failure to move the embassy would be punished by a cut of 50% in State Department funding.

It is worth noting that among the people who voted for the bill and are now screaming about Trump’s insanity in this particular action are John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, so both sides are in on the hysterical hypocrisy.

Clinton, Bush and Obama all repeatedly took advantage of the bill’s provision for a six-month delay in implementation based upon national security concerns. Trump used one such delay, but is now carrying out the will of Congress.

Anyone with more than half a dozen functioning brain cells has to be wondering why the media is so intent on condemning Trump for carrying out the will of Congress and so unconcerned with addressing the insanity of people in Congress complaining about Trump acting to implement their own law.

Democratic Thinking

Spoiler alert: the title is irony, perhaps sarcasm.

Democrats are leaping to claim that Al Franken should not have resigned because he has twenty women who claim that he did not sexually harass them and was, in fact, a perfect gentleman to them at all times.

So when a man is accused of robbing a bank, his defense should be to present a list of banks that have never been robbed. The judge will promptly bang his hammer on the bench and proclaim him innocent.

This actually parallels NFL gambler thinking, which now places the Los Angeles Chargers, with their 13th-best 6-6 record, as the third most likely team to win the Super Bowl, albeit with 15-1 odds. This despite the fact that they have not yet this season defeated a team which currently has a winning record.

Jobs Data Nonsense

The jobs report from the Bureau of Lies and Scams tells us that the country added 228,000 new jobs in November, which has economists ecstatic about the “robust economy” and has them swooning about the economy being “on its firmist footing in at least a decade,” but is leaving them confused about why “salaries show meager growth,” given their theory that increasing employment should lead to increasing wages.

Maybe it’s because the jobs increase is not as “robust” as the “Employer Survey” would lead us to believe, since the “Household Survey” tells us that 43,000 fewer were employed in November than in the previous month.

The report does turn that 43,000 fewer people into 57,000 more people employed on a “seasonally adjusted” basis, but one has to wonder how those seasonal adjustments are helping some 100,000 people pay their bills. Do the mortgage and utility companies accept seasonal adjustments as payment?

The absurdity of the method used by the BLS to report on the jobs situation in the nation simply defies belief. They conduct telephone surveys which result in two conflicting reports which inform us that 43,000 fewer people are filling 228,000 additional jobs. They then attempt to reconcile that discrepancy with “seasonal adjustments” of 100,000 fictional workers that suggest that 57,000 new workers are filling those 228,000 new jobs.

Really? Neither the 100,000 seasonal adjustments, nor the 57,000 imaginary new workers that result from the 100,000 seasonal adjustments can fill 228,000 new jobs.

If you’re going to make up numbers, at least make up numbers that work.

What sense, regardless of the rationale for them, do seasonal adjustments make? We’re talking about living breathing people here, and about whether or not they are able to feed their families. If you are in the labor force, are you employed, unemployed, or are you a “seasonal adjustment” as reported by the Labor Department? Ridiculous.

There is a very easy, fast and highly accurate method of reporting on the jobs status. Employers file payroll tax reports within ten days of every pay period, and from that data we can gain the exact number of people employed and the exact amount they are paid. The BLS says they cannot use those records due to “privacy concerns” which is utter nonsense.

Those databases can provide information in any manner which is programmed into them, including summary numbers and totals, and the information needed to provide jobs data can be provided all but instantaneously with total respect to the privacy of all individuals. Ignoring them to obtain contradictory, tardy, costly and contradictory data in the current manner is utter stupidity.

Worldwide Garrison as Homeland Defense

In an article datelined AFP, which presumably stands for the world’s third largest news agency Agence France-Presse, we are informed that the United States has announced that it is prepared to maintain a permanent military presence in Syria.

My immediate reaction is, “Well that’s no surprise. We maintain one everywhere else, why not Syria?” Which should not be interpreted to imply approval by me of anything.

Anyway, Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told that news agency that, “We are going to maintain our commitment on the ground as long as we need to -- to support our partners and prevent the return of terrorist groups.”

Hard to imagine who Eric thinks “our partners” are, since the Syrian government has said repeatedly that our military is not welcome in their country and has told us in no uncertain term to get the hell out. That would seem to mean that “our partners” are forces fighting against the Syrian government, and against the Russians, and makes our presence there a very dicey proposition both on legal grounds and logistically.

Some people would, of course, describe the “partners” we are supporting as terror groups themselves, and do actually, but not all nations define terror groups in the same manner. That itself has actually been a point of contention in Syria for quite some years, but it’s a separate topic and would fill a book all by itself.

I’m beginning to see a trend here. We are maintaining a “multigenerational” presence in Afghanistan in order to “deny them space in which to plan their attacks” (which is very nice grammatically at least), and now are maintaining an apparently permanent presence in Syria in order to “support our partners and prevent the return of terrorist groups.”

Aren’t we just fucking awesome?

Maybe not so much. The Roman Legions occupied Britain, France and Germany in order to keep the Visigoths from attacking Rome, and we all know how that turned out.

Go Chargers?

Local sports writers are absolutely swooning over the fact that the Chargers (never mind that they are no longer a local team) are now tied for the division lead, having won five of their last seven games. Let’s see how close that brings them to the Super Bowl.

Other than the AFC West, the worst division is the AFC South, which is led by two teams tied with 8-4 records. The Chargers are in a three-way tie atop the AFC West with the Chiefs and the Raiders, all with 6-6 records.

The Chargers, in this seven game streak, have played two teams who currently have winning records. They lost both games. To underscore the point, of the five games they won, all of them have been against teams which currently have losing records.

They scored 19 points this past weekend against a team with a 0-12 record, winning by a whopping nine point margin. The Chargers are just majorly kicking ass, aren’t they?

Signs of The Times

Yesterday evening I went to Rubio’s to order a take-out meal for the Sunday Night Football game. Well, full disclosure, my wife doesn’t watch football so we watched a program on the DVR while we ate and then I watched the football game and wound up wishing I hadn’t. But this is not about the football game.

Two customers came in ahead of me with the same purpose, ordering take-out, one of them carrying a rather large dog. The dog was of a size such that the guy was barely able to carry it, and he had no small amount of difficulty keeping hold of it while waiting for his order. No employee informed the man that state law does not permit dogs to be in food service establishments, including the manager who spent her entire time delivering orders to tables and ignoring her employees, few of whom were actually working.

Three of the employees, in fact, were petting the dog and chatting with the owner, fellow dog owners apparently. None of them washed their hands before returning to their food handling duties. The manager saw that, but did not appear to notice it.

I saw my order placed on the kitchen’s serving shelf, two bowls of salad and two small containers of dressing. A worker, not one who had been petting the dog, put lids on the salads and put them in a bag, turned and called my name and handed me the bag, correctly describing my order. I looked in the bag, for effect because I already knew precisely what was in it, and told her that I didn’t see any dressing. Only then did she turn and notice the dressing containers sitting right there where she had taken the salads from.

And they want to be paid $15 per hour because…?

Certainly not because they are highly trained and know the rules under which they are working, like what is and is not permitted in their place of work and that they are required to have clean hands when handling food. Not because they are so attentive that when taking an order off of a shelf and putting it in a bag they are careful to get all of that order. Because, apparently, someone told them that they have rights and did not tell them that with rights come responsibilities.

We're real big on rights these days. Not so much on responsibilities.

Of Course She Did

A San Diego woman has filed a lawsuit for damages resulting from her participation in a protest that “spilled out onto I-5” from the USD campus last winter. Named as defendants in the suit are the university, the city, the police department and the driver of the car that hit her when she went onto the interstate highway.

She claims that the police, and apparently the city and somehow the university as well, should have prevented her and the crowd of protestors from leaving the campus and going onto the freeway. Not sure about her rationale regarding the driver of the car. Perhaps the driver should have levitated the car over the crowd.

The protestors were, of course, protesting the presidential inauguration, arguing that it should not have taken place because elections only matter when the right side wins.

Yes, The Name is Apt

Given fifteen years of military progress in Afghanistan and recent conduct of the US Navy's Seventh Fleet, yes, I believe the Dallas Cowboys can appropriately be called "America's Team."

Meanwhile, local sports writers are swooning over the Chargers having won "five of their last seven games" and now being in contention to reach the playoffs. Right; with a current record of five wins and six losses. It should be noted that all five wins have been against teams with losing records; such notables as the Giants, currently 2-9, and the Broncos, who are currently 3-7. They have played two teams with winning records in that seven-game stretch, and have lost to both of them.

Specious Argument

Dean Baker used yesterday the kind of specious argument that is beginning to make me think that economists should simply be shot dead immediately upon graduation from economist’s school, claiming that the proposed increase in the standard deduction would decrease the value of the mortgage interest deduction.

His headline is about the elimination of state and local taxes as deductions, but that only serves as a lead to the taxpayer’s use of the standard deduction, which the tax plan would double in size. He immediately points out that, “The piece notes that doubling the standard deduction will reduce the number of people who itemize and therefore benefit from the mortgage interest deduction,” and thus has changed the subject away from the headline in the first paragraph.

Note the disingenuous argument here, when he refers to people who, “itemize and therefore benefit from the mortgage interest deduction.” If using the standard deduction results in a lower tax burden, how does it cause one to “lose the benefit” from the mortgage interest deduction? They are paying a lower tax.

The sleazy and dishonest part of his argument is what he means when he says that the new tax plan will “decrease the value,” specifically when the standard deduction is not large enough to overcome the advantage of itemizing and using the mortgage interest deduction, in which case he points out that difference between itemized and standard deduction would be smaller, thus making the itemized deduction “of less value.”

So when one thing costs more than another, if you raise the price of the cheaper one you devalue the higher-priced one.

Only an economist could argue that doubling the standard deduction is a bad thing. Just shoot them all and put us out of our misery.

Mutual Poop Fling

Economists crack me up. They also annoy the shit out of me, sometimes doing both things at the same time. Dean Baker has yet another case in point where he makes a hilariously ridiculous statement in “correcting” an error that Robert Samuelson made in a print editorial.

He doesn’t link to Samuelson’s editorial, but from Dean’s rebuttals it seems that Samuelson claimed that our current trade deficit is being caused by the dollar’s status as “the global major currency,” inadequate government enforcement of patents and copyrights overseas, and the failure of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement to come to fruition.

I have no problem in agreeing with Dean Baker that Robert Samuelson is full of shit. My problem is that I don’t agree with his reason for thinking so, which is that “The reason the U.S. is running such large trade deficits was the decision by many developing countries to accumulate huge amounts of reserves…”

He does not make any mention whatever of consumers buying Korean televisions and Japanese automobiles, or the decision by American manufacturers to export the production of both industrial and consumer goods to foreign countries. No indeed, this nation had nothing whatever to do with creating the terrible trade deficit that is trashing our economy. It was entirely inflicted upon us by others, making us innocent victims of predatory foreign countries.

Economists should be sealed in a hogshead immediately upon graduation from college, stored in a deep isolated cavern and fed through the bunghole until they die of old age.

Security As Oxymoron

My wife and I switched health insurance this month, due to her phased retirement which will be finalized at the end of the year. United Health Care invited me to create a personal account at the website for the new plan, which I did Wednesday.

I had, of course, to create a username and password. The latter took me several tries due to a long list of rules for security reasons. It had to have a capital letter, a small letter, a number, and one of several special characters. It could not have any of several other special characters. No letter or number could be repeated more than once, and it could not contain any actual words.

All of this to protect entry into a site that does not allow any data entry, merely allows the viewing of data. They are seriously concerned with protecting my medical payments from being viewed by unauthorized eyes.

The next day I get an email from them thanking me for signing up at their website. It went on to say, “Please write down your username and password for future reference. You will need it to sign in the next time you visit our website.”

The emphasis is mine, because I am pointing out that they are asking me to render all of the complex security rules they have for creating the password entirely useless, since a password that is written down anywhere is completely insecure. (Not to mention the grammatical error of using “it” to refer to the two things they told me to write down.)

The point should be made that due to their security rules the password must be written down because no one could possibly remember it.

One website required me to remember the name of the street I lived on when I was in first grade. I am 74 years old and grew up in the military. I don’t remember the name of the street I lived on before we bought this house twenty years ago, let alone something from almost seven decades ago. I made something up to satisfy their webform, and then immediately forgot what it was that I invented.

When I needed to answer that “security question” I tried “First Street,” which seemed like a logical answer, but apparently I was not that logical the day I filled out the stupid form.

Fine Lines

Best quote about the Chargers game from a San Diego resident. “That was like watching your ex throw up on the dance floor at a party and knowing that’s no longer your problem.”

Um, You Already Said That

The Denver Broncos promise to "evaluate all areas" after being humiliated 41-16 by the New England Patriots and bringing their record to 3-6, tied with the Los Angeles Chargers for last in the division.

Um, they said that last week after losing to the Philadelphia Eagles 51-23.

Last night was special, in that they muffed a punt on their own 15, gave up a 103-yard kickoff return, and suffered a blocked punt, all in the first 18 minutes of the game. They also scored field goals to answer New England touchdowns, apparently not realizing that scoring three points every time your opponent scores seven is not a winning strategy.

Perhaps they should evaluate their mascot; trading a stallion for a jackass.

Even More Fubar

I read the published account (pdf) of the investigation into the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S McCain today, and it leads me to conclude that the US Navy is even more fubar than I revealed in my discussion of last Tuesday. There are at least two statements in that report which indicate that the investigating officers were no more qualified for naval service than were the officers and crew they were investigating.

The report states, for instance that the ship was running in “darkened condition,” part of which was that, “all interior lighting was switched to red instead of white to facilitate crew rest.”

If that was the reason for red interior lighting, why would the red lighting include operational areas of the ship, such as the bridge and Combat Information Center? In fact, that is not the reason to “rig for red.” The red lighting is to promote night vision so that if any of the crew is required to go topside their vision is optimized for being able to function at night.

The report describes the situation with three ships approaching Fitzgerald from starboard, and correctly says that Fitzgerald was required by the International Rules of the Nautical Road to take action to “remain clear of the other three and if possible to avoid crossing ahead.”

Well and good so far, but then the report says that, “In the event Fitzgerald did not exercise this obligation, the other vessels were obligated to take early and appropriate action through their own independent maneuvering action.”

“Early?” The privileged vessel is, in fact, required to maintain its course and speed until it is apparent that the burdened vessel is not maneuvering to avoid, at which point, and only at that point, the privileged vessel should take action to avoid. That is hardly “early and appropriate” action which, in fact, the rules of the road specifically prohibit.

These are fairly minor points, and the report reasonably attributes fault, and I suspect does so for the most part fairly accurately. But the lack of basic knowledge of shipboard routine, such as not knowing the reason for red lighting, casts a certain aura of doubt on the expertise of the investigating body.

Fubar

To this day, fifty years after I left the service, I continue to regard my time in the Navy as the best and most useful years of my life. I would not trade that experience for everything else that I have done before or since, and I have held the US Navy in the highest possible regard for all the years since I had the honor and privilege to serve.

What I have read the past few years of its ships and its men today almost brings me to tears. The ships of today’s Navy are barely seaworthy, are certainly not battle worthy, and social engineering has so degraded the manning of the Navy that high quality ships would be wasted in any case.

I read that the Captain of a ship is in a bar on shore during liberty drinking with the enlisted crew of his ship. How can good order and discipline be maintained under such circumstances, and how can a Captain’s subordinates possibly maintain a proper respect for a “drinking buddy?”

The crew of another ship forgets to replace the lubricating oil in the ship’s main propulsion reducing gear box, rendering the ship inoperative and requiring shipyard repair. In addition to the appalling carelessness of the crew, what kind of ship is rendered useless by the loss of one set of propulsion gears?

When the bridge crew of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer causes a collision with a civilian ship ten times its size and one engine room is flooded, the ship is disabled and has to be towed to port. What kind of warship becomes a stationary target due to the loss of a single engine room?

The initial cause of that collision turns out to be that a watchstander is seen to be “struggling to cope with handling both helm and engine orders.” I have stood that watch, and anyone incapable of dealing with helm and engine orders after a couple of days of training does not belong in the Navy in any capacity. He probably does not belong outside of his parents’ care.

The Arleigh Burke class did, at least, mark a return to all-steel construction. From Wikipedia, “An earlier generation had combined a steel hull with an innovative superstructure made of lighter aluminum to reduce top weight, but the lighter metal proved vulnerable to cracking. Aluminum is also less fire-resistant than steel; a 1975 fire aboard USS Belknap gutted her aluminum superstructure. Battle damage to Royal Navy ships exacerbated by their aluminum superstructures during the 1982 Falklands War supported the decision to use steel.”

That policy didn’t last. What does the Navy decide to do in building its new Littoral Combat Ships? Use all-aluminum construction, including the hull. How stupid can we be?

Facebook & Twitter?

Watching a bunch of Senators so serious in their grilling of a panel of "social media" executives leaves me in despair. If our voters are making their presidential election decisions based on Facebook and Twitter, then this nation has problems far, far bigger than anything that Russia can do to us.

And So It Begins

The timing and content of Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates are interesting.

Particularly interesting is the timing, in that the release comes on the heels of two weeks of media coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign being the instigator of the infamous “Trump dossier,” confirmation that the Trump Jr. meeting with the Russians was a sting perpetrated by Fusion GPS, the company hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign to produce the Trump dossier, and of discussion about Uranium One’s contributions to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was Secretary of State.

Even while still sealed, news of the indictments was released on Friday afternoon so that the media could bloviate all weekend and on the Sunday morning shows about who it might be and what the indictments might contain. It’s called “the politics of distraction.”

The content of the indictments are interesting only to the degree of how uninteresting they are. None of them have anything to do with Russia during the election or with the Trump presidential campaign. They have to do with Manafort’s and Gates’ work as lobbyists for the former government of Ukraine, the government which the US government helped to overthrow.

Democrats, and other anti-Trump forces, are rubbing their hands with glee, praising Mueller as if he is a combination of the Messiah and Steven Hawking, and forecasting the immediate downfall of Donald Trump. They are as giddy and as self assured as they were when projecting the electoral victory of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

National Cat Day

She is, of course, not actually a cat. She is a princess. And sometimes a little bit of a brat.

The Dike Is Broken

I am writing less often lately, mainly because national discourse has become so utterly divorced from reality that each time I start to write I get a sense of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. The trickle has become a flood and it is time to run for your life.

Harvey Weinstein’s devil is revealed, and now every public person of the male gender is being accused of sexual attack by every female person who has ever been within arm’s reach of him. Our elections are supposedly meaningless due to the ability of foreign powers to corrupt them, and yet we are supposed to believe that an election of Democrats next year would be entirely valid and would save the world. Articles purporting to be scientific discourse are filled with “might be” causes and “could happen” events.

When the news was first released that four of our soldiers had been killed by ISIS in the African nation of Niger, my first reaction after sympathy for the soldiers and their families was to assume that they were not killed by ISIS. My next thought was not to wonder why they were in Niger, we have military units everywhere, but to wonder why their deaths were being reported when similar deaths under similar conditions in the Philippines was not.

Last night Margaret Brennan reported on the battle in Niger on CBS News, saying that the unit was attacked by, “an ISIS offshoot operating in the area.” She described the group of “35 to 40 fighters” and its leader and, just twelve seconds after describing it as “an ISIS offshoot” said that the leader “is wanted by US and French authorities, but US intelligence has not established any direct link between him and the ISIS militants that the US is already fighting on the battlegrounds in Iraq and in Syria.”

We won't even go into the US "fighting on the battlegrounds in Iraq and in Syria," which we vehemently claim we are not doing, but how credible is a news organization which, within the span of just a few seconds, says that “an ISIS offshoot” has “no direct ties with ISIS militants?”

Feline Follies

So, I'm watching a football game and eating potato chips from the bag.

My calico cat, Molly, jumps up on my lap and immediately becomes hyperfocused on potato chips. Her eyes are the size of dinner plates and they follow each chip from the bag to my mouth. She periodically leans in and peers into the bag. Her breathing is rapid and her whiskers twitching. The anxiety steadily increases.

The left paw comes up and she tries to intercept a chip in transit, getting a sharp, "Ut, no" from me.

She tries the imploring look, and a little soft "meow," but I am heartlessly unmoved. Merely laugh.

She goes back to watching each chip in transit, like Pablo Casals watching a tennis match. Pablo Casals? Damifino. First name that came to mind.

Anyway. Anxiety is building and control is slipping. She kind of leans forward with each chip that makes the passage.

Finally she makes her move - darts forward and tries to bite a chip just as I am putting it into my mouth. She gave me too much warning, though, and I win. She settles back, giving me a look that reminds me that even house cats with three colors (well, technically two colors and white) are predators.

I break off a little piece of chip and lay it down for her to have, and she snarfs it down. She looks at me, licking her chops, clearly says, "We could have saved a lot of time and anxiety," and leaves.

Minds and Tracks

Notice that we are halfway through the month of October, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of pink accoutrements I have seen on the NFL football fields this month, because everyone is too busy screaming at each other about kneeling for the national anthem. Jesus. Can we walk and chew gum at the same time? Evidently not.

The light at the end of the tunnel is some idiot with a flashlight halfway down where the tunnel bends. When we turn that corner we will be disappointed to discover that it is night time.

Not Forward Thinking

Democrats were thrilled to have laws created by executive order when it was a Democrat doing it. They are less thrilled when a Republican does it.

It was suggested by a few, back then, that what was created by executive order could be reversed by executive order, but it never occurred to them that they might lose a presidential election, even after mocking and excoriating Republicans for proclaiming a “Republican century” two decades earlier.

And Democrats are, for the second time after a presidential election loss, casting doubt on the validity of the electoral process itself. Does it not occur to them that, if and when they win the White House back, Republicans might proclaim that, “Democrats were right, the electoral process is not valid, and this Democrat president is not a valid President.”

So far, Republicans have never cast doubt on the electoral process after a loss. Democrats have done it twice now, and if they do it often enough Republicans might decide to emulate them.

A Democratic discussion group was outraged that Harvey Weinstein was not prosecuted long ago, until it was pointed out to them that he was raising millions of dollars for the Democratic Party and that his position as a major part of their money machine protected him as long as the Democratic Party controlled the Washington power structure. Would he have been brought to justice if Hillary Clinton had won? The discussion stopped when that question was asked.

There may be a group that does less forward thinking than liberals, but I have not come across it.

Anaheim Fire This Morning

This weather satellite image was at 7:00am local time, and it means the wind is still offshore and still pretty strong. Not good news. No fires in San Diego; that is just remains of morning marine layer.

Update, 6:00pm: Good news; smoke from the Anaheim fire has completely disappeared from the satellite image.

Mind Boggling

Dianne Feinstein is running for reelection. Consensus is that it means there will no meaningful primary election for the US Senate in California, and Nancy Pelosi says that is good news for the Democratic Party and for America. If reelected, Feinstein will complete her next term at age 91.

I’m not sure which is more mind boggling; Feinstein running for reelection, or Pelosi claiming that her doing so is good for America.

Google said that putatively Russian-connected sources bought $53,000 worth of ads “in an effort to influence the 2016 election.” That amounts to 8 ten thousandths of one percent of the $6.8 billion that was spent on campaign advertising.

Something like putting one teaspoon of baking soda into Lake Michigan and claiming that doing so changed the chemistry of the lake.

It’s also pretty weird to think that anyone would believe that Russia is so stupid that they would think that $53,000 worth of Facebook ads would alter the results of the election.

Unintelligible Intelligence

The “Labor Report” is absolute gibberish this month. It is often misleading, although I don’t believe that is deliberate. I think it is just a high level of incompetence on the part of the Labor Department and the media. But this month it reached a nadir.

First it tells us that the economy lost 330,000 jobs in September, but falls all over itself assuring us that the figure reveals “strength in the economy” because it was due to hurricanes. I doubt that people who were in the areas hit by the hurricanes are buying that, but we aren't at the best part yet.

It goes on to say that the unemployment rate, “derived from a separate Labor Department survey of households,” declined to 4.2% in September.

How does the unemployment rate decrease when the number of employed showed a rather large decrease? Not a bad question. Why are media reports of the number of employed and the unemployment rate coming from two separate reports? That is a very good question.

The Household Survey, which includes the 4.2% unemployment rate, shows that the number of people employed increased by 906,000 in September. Why did the media choose not to report that? And why does one report show a decrease of 330,000 while the other shows an increase of 906,000 for the month? That's a difference of 1.26 million people.

This would normally be where I would provide the answers to these questions, but I don’t have any. I’m wondering why I seem to be the only one asking the questions.

I Don't Think So, But...

This morning Molly was walking down the hallway, licking her chops and minding her own business. She's gotten a little hard of hearing in her old age, so she didn't notice me coming out of the bedroom in front of her until, seeing her, I said aloud, "Hello, there's a cat."

I swear, she looked over her shoulder to see if there was a cat behind her.

Interesting Stat

The Denver Broncos, in their 34-year history, have had more trips to the Super Bowl than they have had losing seasons.

Heartbreaking

When I was growing up, guys wore blue jeans and cowboy boots every day. We wore cleaner and newer jeans with more fancy boots to dances on Saturday nights. Girls, on the other hand, only wore their skirts and boots on Saturday nights when it was time to go out and listen to country music, flirt with boys, do some dancing and drink Coca Cola. The skirts were longer then, of course, but… Those were good times.

These poor girls went out for a night of country music and fun and wound up running for their lives. It’s enough to break an old man’s heart.

It should never have happened. We must decide, as a people, that beyond the need to comfort and offer healing to those who were harmed, it means nothing. We must not allow fear to take control our lives. If we do that then evil, what ever its form or purpose, has won the day. If we must live in fear, then what’s the point?