Archive Listing
February 28, 2010 - February 21, 2010

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

I TOLD YOU SO. It's easy to minimize the bumps in the road that have gotten the biggest play in the press, but Obama's problems may already go beyond a few lame cabinet choices and a rocky introduction to the process of working with the congress. Victor Davis Hanson has a brief but excellent analysis of the president's missteps thus far, and his conclusions are sobering.


Hanson proceeds to offer up an itemized list of major blunders at home and abroad. The former are serious, but the latter are rapidly mounting up to potential disaster.


It's all well and good to end a dismal reckoning with upbeat bullet points about how to clean up the mess, but Hanson's finale is the only disingenuous part of his essay. In some sense, all this was -- and is -- inevitable. The frightening core of the situation is that Obama really is more messiah than politician. Yes, he showed considerable talent and flair at getting elected, as well as a ruthlessness about tactics which must have convinced his inside-the-beltway followers that he was, something like Reagan and JFK before him, a Natural. But the attainment of high office is only half the skill set of a gifted politician. The other half is the tempering of ideological conviction with the grubby pragmatism of problem solving: being a shrewd and skeptical judge of character, knowing the difference between delegating and losing control, and understanding when pure idealism must bow to the realities of the people, places, and timeframes involved.

But messiahs don't sell, bargain, close deals, and hammer out tough compromises. They simply speak and expect everyone to accept their wisdom. That's why Obama still hasn't figured out that all his gloom and doom characterizations of the economy are the antithesis of effective presidential politics. He is a true contemporary liberal, which means that he is a deep down opponent of America's traditional rugged individualism and can-do spirit.

Back in October 2005 I took the liberty of describing the real core beliefs of liberals. Does any of this ring a bell in terms of the rhetoric you've heard from Obama and the Democrat congress since the election? (Coincidentally(?), this was another time when Limbaugh was under assault for his claim to speak on behalf of conservative principles.)


All that's changed since then is that Obama won the election and somehow believes this fact means the nation as a whole subscribes to exactly the beliefs enumerated above. He thinks we're all, or mostly, converts to this dark view of the American opportunity. Everything about us is wrong and he's been Chosen to fix us and the country. He believes our belief in him is so strong that it will survive even a prolonged period of chaos while he remakes the social contract and the international scene in the image of his utopian vision.

Any real politician would know just how thoroughly wrong that particular belief of his is. No heterogeneous population will long accept a vision that is fundamentally bleak and insulting to the people it's supposed to inspire.

Obama has begun as he had to. He will proceed as he must. I don't doubt that he still has some smoke and mirrors in his arsenal, but eventually smoke blows away in the wind, and the empty image inside the mirror may very well shatter it beyond repair.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Have a nice day.

Monday, February 02, 2009

A Possible Bright Spot?

THE NEWS MISSES THE NEWS . I'm not predicting, mind you. I'm speculating. But there is some evidence on my side for such speculation. All I'm doing here is putting together some facts of the current situation in a way nobody else has thought to do.

Yes, it looks as if the Obama administration and the Democrat congress are actively seeking to destroy the American economy and the capitalist system. All the bailout requests from various big companies and industries have given them a long-awaited excuse for nationalizing many of the country's largest corporate entities. Their labor policies also look as if they're designed to paralyze the ability of individual entrepreneurs to respond to market conditions and weather the storms that will be created by capital scarcities caused by too many government borrowings that compete for funds which should be invested in profit-making schemes. All of this looks bad. In fact, very very bad.

But. Let me note that the doomsayers are making an argument that is at least redundant if not deliberately dim-witted. The companies and industries that are begging for government help are, by definition, already moribund. So why all the dark mutterings about what their prospects are as nationalized pawns of a government that will kill them through interference and ignorance? When your last resort is to a government that will unquestionably make your competitive situation even more untenable than it is now, you're already dead. You're in intensive care and all your negotiations aren't about being cured; they're about not having the plug pulled today.

Permit me to suggest three points. One, the giants of Wall Street, Detroit, and the mass media are appropriately at the end of their natural life cycles. Two, the government cannot nationalize the entire economy; their budget for financial misadventures of this sort has been or will be entirely consumed by the cost of the corpses they've already acquired. And, three, the underlying infrastructure of the American economy has been so much changed by technology that it is simultaneously responsible for the collapse of the elderly titans and beautifully conducive to a new phase of economic growth that can make up for all the insanity of the Democrats.

Insanity is, after all, the exact right word. Let's say you wanted to take over the NFL and remake the game so that every team finished every season 8-8, and the person in charge got to pick the playoff teams based on personnel diversity, environmental factors, and all-around niceness. Which four teams would you seize? I'm thinking you'd "nationalize" the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Arizona Cardinals, the New York Giants, and the New England Patriots. If your goal is mediocrity, cripple the best first. But in this analogy, who would the Democrats be nationalizing? The Detroit Lions, the Kansas City Chiefs, the St. Louis Rams, and the Cincinnati Bengals. They'd run them by committee, lose every game, and be out of business in two seasons. And guess what? The NFL would be better off. The worst teams would be off the field, new franchise opportunities would open up for cities and owners who are committed to winning, and the fans would be a lot more interested because of the new unfolding drama. The government would be out of money and their only remaining power would be to change the rules in eccentric ways. But if the rules got too absurd, the fans would rise up and demand a change.

That's where we are today in economic terms. Why is everyone so alarmed that the federal government is in the process of nationalizing the Detroit Lions? So what. So fucking what. America won't become Europe because Americans are not Europeans. TA DA. Who else has pointed out this particular obvious fact? We're not going to become Britain or France because we're not Brits or Frogs. We don't settle for dismal, unacceptable crap because we're not prisoners of centuries of class warfare propaganda that persuade us to put up with numbskull oppression because the weight of all our dead ancestors on our shoulders has drained away the energy to resist. We don't have ancestors. 99 percent of us don't even know the names of our grandparents' moms and dads. What we do know is that we still want cool stuff. Right now. And we'll move heaven and earth to get it. And most importantly, we also know how to move heaven and earth to get we want. It's called work. As a people, we know what that is because it's bred into us at a deeper level than all the media propaganda and government schools and political lies can overcome. Do you hate Y-Gen slackers because they think the world owes them a living? That they're the proof America's day in the sun has ended? You do? Then why are the slacker founders of Google and YouTube billionaires? You think they didn't do any work to make their billions come true? Ha.

Two key conceptual points of relevance. The average lifespan of a corporate entity is about half that of a human being. Ford, GM, Chrysler, Merrill Lynch, CitiBank, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine are extreme exceptions to this rule. As corporate organizations, they are all in late senility. IT'S OKAY IF THEY DIE. If they vanished from the scene entirely today, it would not eliminate the demand for cars, stock transactions, or news reporting. That demand would continue and new organizational entities would arise to meet that need. Government can seek to control or suppress capitalism, but capitalism is not an ideology; it is merely a description of what happens when government isn't big enough to sit on absolutely everybody. And as big as our government is, it's not big enough to sit on all of us, because we have too much stuff, too many ideas of our own, and we're Americans. Which is the perfect intro to the second point.

The government of any nation is determined by the personality and expectations of its people, not by the political framework in which that government operates. Citizens of the U.K. remain subjects of the Crown, regardless of the long steady ascendancy of democratic ideas over the perquisites of aristorcracy. That's why they stand still for the fact that they're the most camera-surveilled society in the western so-called free world. Russians remain hostages of an arbitrary, authoritarian, and bloodily ruthless czarist regime that has changed vocabulary in its transition from monarchy to communism to democracy but never the naked brutality, paranoia, and inferiority complex that drives its leaders to mindless aggression on the world stage. China remains a dynastic culture whose leaders always command absolute power over the tiniest details of individual lives, whether the government calls itself an empire, a dictatorship of the proletariat, or an oxymoronic communist-capitalist directorate. Japan remains Samurai... France remains Napoleonic... Spain remains a matador... Nigeria remains tribal... India remains a schizophrenic blend of the Raj and deep-down Hindu voodoo.. Australia remains a resentful, racist prison colony with something to prove... Canada remains a dutiful, mild-mannered colonial cipher in which freedom is merely a word... South Africa remains a volatile outpost of imperialist go-to-hell hubris... the Israeli Knesset has more in common with a board meeting of the average synagogue than it does with the U.K. House of Commons.

And America -- the United States -- remains a bubbling, irascible stew of mixed peoples, cultures, and beliefs united by an incredibly long tradition of only putting up with the shit for this long. A nakedly totalitarian regime in this country would give rise to the most indefatigable resistance movement in human history, something that would make the Civil War look like a riot at the mall. You see, our tradition is that the government cannot contain us or command us. We tolerate its impositions, and they are always impositions, up to a point.. Most of us pay the government so little mind that we notice its impositions late, reluctantly, at first with amusement and then, suddenly, with savagely creative defiance. Cowards become heroes, meek mice become attack dogs, and mere pawns become a boardful of queens moving whither they will to checkmate a king whom tradition has never allowed to move more than space at a time. Even if we had a king or emperor, he'd still be sucking up to this week's polls.

I remember when the first bailout was in place and the MSM was telling us every day that credit in the United States was "frozen." Am I the only one who noticed the flurry of new ads for immediate credit to buy a car, a house, an insurance policy against every medical and life emergency? Yes, the giants of olden times were frozen, but every entrepreneur in the country was flowing like mercury into the cracks in the ice.

That's where we are now. If the car companies fail, foreign manufacturers will build new manufacturing plants in the U.S. If the banks fail, every dreamer and weasel who owns a blue suit will open new banks. If the big newspapers cease operation, entrepreneurs will hire reporters to produce the grist for the endless Internet mill of commentary and satire. That's who we are. As a people. As Americans. If they kill the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Houston Texans will romp. We have clout because we have stuff and we are Americans. Our expectations are permanent.

And. Most critically. The technology is on our side. Never before in history has it been so comparatively easy to start a national or international business with no investment greater than a website. The reinvention of manufacturing a generation ago via "Just in Time" principles has now catapulted into the phenomenon of Just-in-Time businesses. A publication can be launched in an instant without an expensive printing press. An insurance company can be vaulted to billions in revenue by a CG lizard. New software can build an empire from a basement. And even the most onerous labor laws can be circumvented by virtual organizations that redefine what an organization is and who works for it or doesn't.

So Circuit City died. Aw. Chances are, they were obsolete, not price-competitive, Not sustainable. Maybe there will be no more strip malls in twenty years. Who knows? Maybe by then all goods will be flashed through an electronic network that makes UPS and Federal Express richer than Croesus until they expire of size, age, and senility....

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is still micro-managing the expensive hulks of CitiBank and The New York Times.

Who cares? It's entirely possible that the speed of entrepreneurially created markets will fatally outstrip the incomprehensibly slow attempts of 19th century socialists to "manage" them. Look at China.

Look at China. Then tell me we Americans can't outlast Obama's retro agenda and still come out smelling like a rose, with yet another recordbreaking run as the world's highest standard of living and freedom.

UPDATE. I shouldn't. But I will. Because I'm InstaPunk. Bruce Springsteen at the Super Bowl? He SUCKED. He can't sing any more, he was wearing a corset and a hairpiece, and I consequently broke my vow not to watch Scorsese's "Shiine a Light" because I didn't want  to see the Rolling Stones fall below the standard of the five concerts I attended over twenty years. A friend of mine who saw "Shine a Light" and the Springsteen performance put it to me starkly. "The Stones can still play. Springsteen is a joke." I can't believe Bruce began with his first and biggest hit and couldn't sing it. I've seen Mick perform "Sympathy for the Devil" (not his first hit) five times live, and every time he makes it a new dramatic event. I disapproved of the Stones as a Super Bowl Act a year ago. But it can't compare to my contempt for the decision to schedule this hyper-politicized mega-millionaire from New Jersey to play out his threadbare common-man act in Tampa yesterday.

A Step Aside:

LOVE. I love her anyway. She's my wife. And there won't be any Valentine's Day guff, either. No need. Love is year round.



I'm just sorry for all of you who don't have one of these.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

HERE WE GO AGAIN. This really isn't hard to do. We have it from the MSM that there's a lot of hoopla but little mystery.


So if you'd rather get it all out of the way ahead of time and use your Sunday for something other than an exhausting TV marathon, here's our little cheat-sheet of a post.

PREGAME

This part of the day will last, well, all day. Every single segment of it will begin with the same quasi-Ben Hur chariot race music accompanied by stupid graphics, so you may as well get it out of the way now with our small-scale version:


Then comes all the pre-game crap presided over by Bob Costas and his crew of exceptionally self-satisfied jocks and NBC know-it-alls and technicians. Here's pretty much all you have to know about them. (You can make up tomorrow's Steelers-Cardinals banter for yourself: Pittsburgh tough, Arizona lucky.)


And since halftime will be its own mega-extravaganza, NBC will probably have to give Keith Olbermann his airtime in the pregame hours as well. Here's a sample.
 

Eventually every single person shown on camera will have said everything everybody else has said enough times that they start to collapse from boredom and vocal strain. Then it's time for...
 
THE GAME

This is easily the least important part of the proceedings. Think of it as filler for the real purpose of the broadcast: commercials and NBC programming promos (commercials). We can easily simulate this experience for you right now. Here's the whole damn game of football that will be played.


Of course it's tempting, but you're not allowed to watch it all the way through. After every kickoff, punt, touchdown, timeout,  and any other excuse you can think of, you must pause the game and go to this site, where they have the most ballyhooed Super Bowl commercials available for your viewing pleasure, and watch at least one of them. After that, you have to go here and see at least one of the NBC promos. Only then can you return to the game, and on no account can you let more than a few minutes of playing time elapse before you pause for the next commercial. Got it?

You also have to pause the game at halftime, of course, so that Bob Costas can narrate the incredible pyrotechnics that will be taking place on the field:


Oops. Wrong tediously overblown stadium event. Our mistake. Actually, there will be a slight delay as they construct a second stadium inside the first one for the super-spectacular Bruce Springsteen concert. Here's Bruce telling us how long that delay will be:


Everyone will be glad to wait, though, for the always unforgettable poet-idiot of New Jersey, secure in the confidence that we can't be offended by loopy political non-sequiturs we couldn't possibly decipher through his increasingly Dylanesque slur. It's bound to be as great as all his other legendary four-hour concerts.


Don't make the mistake of rushing right back to the game after Bruce is done. They still have to demolish the temporary stadium on the field, which means you need to go back here and here for more commercials. And keep going back, again and again till all it's all mercifully over.

Got it? Enjoy the game.

POST-GAME.

Yes, if you're still not in a coma after the final gun, there will be highlight shows. Here's what we expect you'll be seeing a lot of.


We know we're really looking forward to it.

Friday, January 30, 2009

MORE DISAPPOINTING NEWS. Here's the straight skinny from NASA:


Or maybe it just, you know, met somebody more fun to talk to than NASA engineers.


Don't mind us. We're just having fun. Somebody has to.

OLD FRIENDS. As  matter of record, I've never used viral emails from the Internet as the whole substance of a post. But I'm starting to get the hang of the new political culture. Actually working is a waste of time if you can find some kind of bailout somewhere. So here's what I found in my inbox this afternoon.


Gosh. That was easy. It's politically pungent and contains virtually none of the strange unerhanded humor I normally inflict on readers of this blog. I like it. Hell. Why should I work? If you stop coming around to read posts, I'll just demand federal compensation under the terms of the AWNAA.

Feedback is acceptable but not exactly desired. If you know what I mean.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

CHILLING. Doesn't everybody seem a little overwrought these days? I think so. Regardless of what Al Gore thinks, whatever happens in the next few months or years isn't the end of the world*. Times may get tough, but the human species is pretty hardy and resilient. And that goes double for Americans. So I'm thinking it's time to dial everything back a notch or two, emotionally speaking. That's why I'm offering up three movies for your delectation -- no, not IP's grandiose list of national treasures, but something much more modest. In fact, modesty is the whole point. These are movies in which the normal range of human emotional expression appears to be lopped off somewhere above faint pleasure and somewhere below mild anxiety. It's not that the characters in these dramas don't have good reason for more fulsome reactions; it's just that they don't seem to be afflicted with our increasingly promiscuous urge to assault everyone else with our limbic seizures. Do you understand what I mean when I say "everyone"?


Sorry. I'm just pretty maxed out with all the passionate rhetoric about "the first," "the best," "the greatest," "the smartest," "the dumbest," "the worst," "the awfullest," etc. Maybe it's a WASP thing. It really is possible to have powerful feelings without forcing them on all and sundry just because they happen to be within earshot or striking distance. Really.

As proof, I offer up these three obsessively understated little films. I don't ordinarily use the word 'film,' but when a director goes miles (leagues?) out of his way to stomp on any attempt by his hired actors to act, we're no longer in Hollywoodland. We're in that peculiar but very occasionally rewarding hell called, well, you know.

The first one is actually the best. I know you're supposed to work your way up to the best, step by step, but to hell with that. Today, I'm all about anti-drama, anti-suspense. This is a movie that has absolutely nothing going for it. It's part of an artsy trilogy. It's Finnish. Finnish. Did you get that? Finnish. So it has subtitles. And I can't verify my sources on this, but I've been informed by the usual reliable sources that the production budget was sixteen dollars. It's called "Laitakaupungin Valot" or, in humanspeak, "Lights in the Dusk."

Are you snoring yet? Don't. It may be the most screamingly funny movie I've seen in a dog year, and I'm pretty sure the director wasn't trying to make an Ingemar Bergman film except for the no content; I think he knew exactly how funny it would be to make a movie about the world's most laconically miserable people failing to react visibly to anything that happens, no matter how dire. It's impossible to describe. Can you even imagine a first date on which neither partner makes any eye-to-eye contact ever and one of them still falls fatally in love with the other? With absolutely NO change in facial expression? And [SPOILER ALERT] did you know that when you buy a hot dog at a hot dog stand in Finland, what you get is a hot dog -- no mustard, no relish, no sauerkraut, and no bun? That's pretty much the movie in a nutshell. All right. Enough with the mesmerizing promo talk. Here's the trailer:


Go ahead. Find it. Watch it. I dare you. Laugh yourself sick. Just don't let on to anyone in the room that you deem any of it amusing.

The next one isn't as good. It's American. Unless it's Canadian. But you know. No subtitles. No bleak Helsinki nightscapes. What it does have is mallscapes. And John Turturro as a man who adamantly refuses to betray the slightest flicker of emotion about the personal annihilation he experienced when his wife was murdered in a mall parking garage. Actually, it's not funny. At all. It's eerie, creepy, brooding, and bulging with nameless dread. Somehow, no emotion becomes all the emotion in the world. It's called "Fear X." Here's the trailer.


After you see it, you won't know what happened exactly. Yup. It's a film, not a movie. But for some really weird inexplicable reason, you'll be glad you watched John Turturro hammer you without moving any of his facial muscles. The challenge is to get through it without moving any of your own. It's excellent practice for the Obama administration.

The third movie is the worst of the three unless it's the best. It's hard to know because it's one of those ones where you get to the end and realize you'd have to watch it two or maybe six more times, carefully, to figure out what the hell is going on. But you still think it's possible to figure out what's going on. If you pay close enough attention. Which makes it kind of an anti-Bergman film if you think about it. You see, it's not about Death or Despair or Growing Up Swedish. It's about time travel. Only not in the H.G. Wells science fiction sort of way, but in the Silicon Valley yuppie startup in the garage sort of way. In fact, it takes about a half hour to realize that this isn't a yuppie startup documentary kind of movie, but an incredibly complicated ''film' in which drastic things are happening without any emotional cues to help you decide who to root for and against. It's called "Primer." Here's the trailer.



There you have it. Three films. Don't get excited. Please. Keep it down. Don't thank me. Well, a politely worded note would be okay as long as you don't get all sentimental and like that.

Clear? Have an uneventful day, everyone.

*Unless there's any truth in this fairly alarming story.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

CAPITALISM SUCKS. RIGHT?. I'm not saying nobody's using the word 'inflation.' Various people are. But they tend to be the ones who are old enough to remember what it actually means, what it feels like, how it touches individual lives. And because I'm still capable of basic arithmetic, I know that people under the age of, say, 48 are highly unlikely to have the slightest idea what a significant resurgence of inflation would do to them. That's what this post is for. To bring all the neophytes up to speed so that they'll start paying attention when this mild-sounding term is tossed around by economists and politicians.

I'll start with a chart. (The only one in the post, I promise.)


So what's the "Inflation Rate"? It's the average percentage increase in the price of goods and services in any given unit of time. Mostly, it's calculated on a yearly basis. Sound technical? Well, it is and it isn't. Yes, in that it involves millions of computations by nerds in gray cubicles. No, in that it is absolutely real and when it attacks it will devour you, you, and you. And, yes, YOU too. It's a beast.



Batten down the hatches, kiddies. The storm clouds are gathering.

UPDATE. Commenter John Thompson writes:


To which I respond, he may be right, but that doesn't make the politicians who are frightened of deflation right. The truth is that over the long term, depressions are more closely correlated with inflation than deflation. Moreover, deflation is closely correlated with a contraction in the money supply, which is certainly not happening in the present economic situation. For three interesting articles on the subject which examine empirical data rather than the various conflicting theories, go here.

I'll also add one more chart:


Does anybody remember the Great Depression of 1920? Yes, there was a depression but it lasted only a year, and a deliberate contraction of the money supply is implicated as a prime cause. The recovery was quite rapid, perhaps because the government did not attempt to remake the economy with massive deficit spending. Note that even in the Great Depression, deflation was retreating from 1932 on, though real recovery did not occur until 1942. Observe, too, that the biggest inflationary spikes of all are associated with the two world wars, whose costs represented huge unproductive government expenditures. Tanks and guns do not generate new wealth the way a factory can; they cannot be sold to consumers or investors at all, much less sold again and again and again. The inflationary run-up to the Carter years can be seen to have begun during the Vietnam War, which also coincided with the giveaway programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Finally, note that there has been no significant deflation since the Great Depression (or since the retirement of the gold standard), but the American postwar economy has endured multiple recessions since then, a couple of them fairly severe. If the past half century is any measure, it would seem that inflation is a far more persistent danger than deflation.

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