How are God and Newt different?

Answer: God doesn't think He's Newt Gingrich.

Newt Links:

Newt the transformational figure in cartoon form.

Newt takes a "no-adultery pledge". You cannot make this stuff up.

Where was war-hawk Newt stationed during the Vietnam War? Come on, you know the answer.

During a recent debate Newt realizes that he is saying he, himself, should go to jail. Video shows the moment at 1:40 mark.

And I quote: “See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”

Conservative radiotalker Michael Savage offers Newt $1 million to drop out of race. And another righty makes the case against "globalist Newt."

Own your very own pet Newt!

Gingrich spokesman outs Newt as "anonymous source." With loyalty like that, who needs Democrats?

Ron Paul's anti-Newt attack ad video.

Adopt a Catholic!

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League is asking his members to adopt an atheist in time for Christmas:

If we hurry, these [Atheists] can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”

Biologist Greg Laden, in excerpt:

Oh. Bill. It makes me feel bad when you say things like that about me.

I “believe in” quite a few things, at least by my use of the phrase. I believe in my Christian friends, and my Atheist friends, as people, in that I trust them and hold them as important in my life. I stand for many things. I stand for a progressive society, and I stand for making a difference in this world. So, I hope I’m good for something. I feel that my main role in life is to carry out acts that improve the lives of those I love, sometimes by making them laugh, sometimes by helping them stop hurting themselves, sometimes by standing up for them, sometimes by leaving them alone, sometimes by doing stuff for them, sometimes by doing stuff with them so they know they are not alone.

Damn. I suppose that makes me a lousy Atheist.

Pujols to Angels

 for 10 yrs/ $254m

He rejected the Cards' 10 yr/ $220m offer.  Mark my words, this is a mistake.  He will fail in the American League, certainly he will not be the mega-star he was in St Louis and at the end of the day his reputation and endorsements will suffer more than the nominal $34m he will make over 10 years. The one advantage is that he can evolve into a designated hitter in he AL, which I'm sure is part of the calculation, but by that time he'll be decrepit and fans will resent paying a DH $25m/yr.

The big winner is Prince Fielder who is next up in the free agent wars.  To offer the 32 yr-old Pujols a 10 year contract is generous to the point of silly and sure to mean that the 28 yr-old Fielder will get an even better offer.  If he's smart, he'll stay in the National League.

Book review: Catching Fire, by Richard Wrangham

Five Stars.


This book was recommended by an evolutionary biologist and is written by an evolutionary biologist and primatologist but the Dewey decimal system in the library categorizes it as a cooking book. Admittedly, I was a bit disconcerted to find it next to Anthony Bourdain's latest tome, but Catching Fire is a gem: easy to read and presents a simple hypothesis with exquisite supporting evidence regarding the social and physiological evolution of hominids.


The basic premise is that Australopithecines developed the ability to process food by mashing and pounding 2.5 million years ago which led to the transition to Homo habilis, the "handyman", who had a larger brain and shorter gut.  The evolution was effected by easier digestion of food which enabled habilines to extract more energy from food sources.  Homo habilus learned how to control fire about 1.9 million years ago which brought about relatively rapid evolution to Homo erectus, a robust species marked with even greater cranial size and short, efficient gut.  This efficiency of calorie extraction allowed greater cognitive ability but also the ability to travel long distances.  Fire affects food in ways that make it easier to digest and therefore more calories are available.


We are evolved to eat cooked food as evidenced by our short gut and the development of taste for cooked food.  Other primates such as chimpanzees also prefer cooked meat although they have not evolved specifically to eat cooked food.  Wrangham hypothesizes that this is due to the easier digestion and the higher caloric extraction from cooked and processed food versus raw food.  He gives a fairly detailed and worthwhile description of how various food sources are affected by mashing and cooking...take that Bourdain! 


Fire also allowed hominids to live on the ground since it afforded greater protection from predators and led to migration across savannahs, increasing the available habitat.  Homo erectus was a robust and long-lived species that survived over a million years in harsh, predator-filled environments.  They lost their hair/fur since they were able to sit and sleep by fire; this enabled them to dissipate heat when running and allowed long distance running.  Fire changed the social relationships between sexes and communities enabling beneficial division of labor and shaping the roles we still have to some degree today.  It all started with the control of fire. 


Darwin recognized the control of fire as "probably the greatest [discovery], excepting language, ever made by man," and Wrangham develops this thesis with strong supporting evidence from anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies as well as observations of lower primates.  


Wrangham discusses the biochemistry of food calorie availability and remarks that the current system of calorie determination is flawed since it does not take into account the processing of food.  Cooked meat contains denatured protein which is easier to digest than raw meat.  Likewise, cooked vegetables and seeds are easier to digest and therefore contain more available energy than raw food.  Wanna lose weight? It's simple, eat raw food which burns more calories in digestion for the fewer calories that are liberated.


Catching Fire is an intriguing, well-written book which answers a lot of questions about how and why we enjoy food and how fire affected nearly every aspect of our physical and social evolution.  It's a short readable book, and gets my highest recommendation. 

Packers selling more shares

The Green Bay Packers are offering new stock through February, which will dilute those shares owned by current shareholders.The new shares will mostly be sold to to the unwashed masses to fund new boxes that will allow millionaire season box-holders to have a more pleasant game experience.  


The reason stated in the article that Personal Seat Licenses (PSL), the usual way most franchises pay for stadium improvements,  won't be sold is that PSL's might lose money for the seat-owners.  Heaven forbid the titans of industry don't put their asses in soft cushy heated seats subsidized by working stiffs!  The cost of stadium upgrades instead is borne by poor folks who shell out $250 per share for... nothing-- no dividend, no tickets-- nothing.  The least they could do is rotate some seats in the end-zone for shareholders so that once in a lifetime the sawmill jockey from Fon-du-Lac can grope Kuhn's ass.  


If anyone chooses to waste money on Packers shares-- which by the way cannot be re-sold, thus making them worthless-- they should make damn sure that they've first 1) paid all their health care premiums for life, 2) funded their retirement with real investments and 3) covered their kids' education.  Only then is it allowable to throw your hard-earned money away so that CEO's can have a temperature controlled buffet and warm totties in front of the Jumbotron.  What is it that PT Barnum didn't say? 

Interestingly,  from the article:  "...only two franchises, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Chicago Bears, where PSLs were selling at a premium to their initial sale price."  That's called free-market capitalism, but why try it when you can get the hoi polloi to willingly give you money?

Prof Newt, educator-in-chief

Bonus! If elected president, Newt Gingrich will teach an on-line course from the White House!

"The idea would be, why wouldn't you want a president in the age of social media to methodically in an organized way share with you what they're going to accomplish so that those people who really won't understand it can understand it," Gingrich said.

Number 1: Who are you calling "those people"?


Number 2: Newt, how would you find the time to design a "social media" course when there would so many staffers to fornicate with in the White House?  


How much raging narcissism does Newt  have coursing through his veins to think that the American people would  benefit from , as Miranda Celeste says, the "Sleazy, ethically bankrupt, thuggish, pompous, painfully unlikable Newt Gingrich" as president?

Religion changes its “morality” based on secular considerations

From Jerry Coyne:

Religious morality appears to change under only two conditions: either secular morality moves ahead of religious morality, causing it to change... or scientific advances show that the scriptural basis of religious morality is simply wrong (e.g., there’s no Adam and Eve and hence no Original Sin).

If a religion’s moral dictates remain fixed in stone for centuries, even under the press of secular advances, then that religion loses adherents.  This, of course, is what is happening to Catholicism in so many places.

My comment: I agree.  Consider that the vast majority of nominal Catholics do not adhere to the fundamental behavioral teachings of the Church: 98% use artificial birth control and abortion rates among Catholics are the same as society in general. Church leaders seem to look the other way in order to keep the “faithful” in the flock, although this remains a sore point among conservative, ie, orthodox, Catholics whose numbers are dwindling.

Believers, of course, will maintain that any changes in morality are "inspired" by divinity while all the observable evidence is otherwise-- that moral behavior is determined by very human desires and secular considerations.

World's Largest Model Train Set

The World's Largest Model Train Set - Watch MoreFunny Videos

Fight The Power

Music by the Isley Brothers, used without permission.




 

A nation of victims

Susan Jacoby has an excellent piece in the WaPo about the Republican's recent Iowa Thanksgiving Family Forum in which she notes the tendency for politicians nowadays to call attention to their hardships as a simplistic means test for the office of president.  A family member's affliction or a personal trauma can be presented as a totem that qualifies one for president, and of course, there is a heavy dose of hardly believable religiosity.


Jacoby points out that both Democratic (John Edwards) and Republican candidates do this, in sharp contrast to, say, FDR, who went to great lengths to downplay his disability in public appearances, yet he championed the cause of the less fortunate in public policy.  Jacoby: 

The Iowa forum was a triumph of the union of psychobabble and public religiosity that has come to dominate American politics. President Obama’s refusal to engage in this kind of faith-infused psychological exhibitionism is one of the main reasons why the media (and not only conservative media) have tagged him as a cool professorial type who does not know how to make a connection with ordinary people. Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, who were not present at the faith-and-suffering group therapy session, are also bad at exploiting whatever sorrows lie in their past to advance their candidacies. That’s probably one of the reasons Republican voters aren’t enamored of Romney and barely register Huntsman in their polls.

To really get the full flavor of the Iowa Family Forum, you have to watch the video, complete with 36 minute introduction containing religious and patriotic claptrap.  Then the candidates-- Perry, Gingrich, Paul, Santorum and Bachmann-- amble onstage to bare their souls of their deepest, most meaningful personal traumas, failures and triumphs.  I cried...I almost cried...I DID cry!  Read Jerry Coyne's site (contains embedded video) for another excellent review.  I got through the video of the freak show but not without some personal trauma myself...I'll have to tell Frank Luntz about it the next time we're both in front of a camera.

Nothing new was learned.  These people are not like me; they are so unlike anything that would appeal to me that I don't know that I would hire them to change a furnace filter let alone run my country.  Such histrionic appeal to the lowest common denominator, simplifying complex coping skills, and belief in supernatural bogeymen and saviors, all seem counterproductive to tackling any remotely involved job, especially that of president of the United States, which is, as Rick Perry says, "the most difficult job in the whirl."

I don't have a problem with individuals trying to sort out their problems, but is it necessary to do it with Frank Luntz in front of millions of onlookers? 

UC Davis: Assault and battery?

I'm no lawyer, but this looks like a felony.



via KagroX:  "UC Berkeley's policy on tear gas & pepper spray says: Use of tear gas or a tear gas weapon, EXCEPT in self-defense, can be a felony."

Barry's righteous rant

From Barry Ritholtz' Big Picture, an excerpt

In America, we are too busy dropping the kids off at soccer, running around looking for sales and bargains, racing to keep our heads above water. We seem to forget to get outraged. Our control over our once Democracy — the one we had a revolution against a monarchy dictating decisions from afar — slips away from us. Not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a 1000s acts of gradual ceding of power to the new Monarch. We have given up hard won rights to a coordinated attack from all three branches of government; Our Congress has become the legislative branch of eBay — Congressmen are auctioned off to the highest bidder; they even have a Buy It Now button to get specific legislation passed. The executive branch has fallen under the sunk cost fallacy, afraid to prosecute banks because we spent so many billions bailing them out. It turns out that even our once venerable Supreme Court is just as corrupted, with lobbyists partying with Justices and backdooring ethics by hiring their wives.

In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient. This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends. We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.

The right question isn’t why am I angry, sad and outraged. The proper question is, why aren’t you?

Go read the whole thing, and the comments, too.  And for the full discussion, read his excellent book Bailout Nation.

QOTD

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." 

--- Mahatma Gandhi

Occupy Wall Street:

Evolutionary Tree of Life

For a larger gif, go here.

Newsflash: You are ALREADY mandated to buy health insurance

From the NYT:

But not only is there a precedent for this, there is also clear support for it in the Constitution. For decades, Americans have been subject to a mandate to buy a health insurance plan — Medicare. 

  
Except that this health insurance is for other people, and the 65 y/o version of yourself.  So it is the hallmark of insanity to buy this necessary product for other people but not for yourself.  Would you buy an iPad for every senior citizen but not for yourself?

Links to Drink By: Wednesday AM

I know this is the lazy man's way to blog, but this is what I'm reading:

Newt Gingrich took $1.6 million from Fannie and Freddie.  What, you mean it's not Barney Frank's fault!!?

Six reasons why young people leave Christianity, especially in Ireland...

God's power presented graphically.

Businessweek: Americans won't do dirty jobs.

"Fathoming Amazon"

Charles P. Pierce: 2012 election field is an embarrassment to democracy

Jimmy Fallon as Jim Morrison

Links to Drink By

Irish billionaire goes bust: the biggest individual loser of the current financial meltdown.  Why didn't he just buy bonds and retire 20 years ago?

John Corzine is another case for the rich just buying municipal bonds and retiring: now Corzine's fortune is up for grabs.

John Feinstein: Paterno is not the victim, and...

Jeffrey Pollard: What Paterno could do now to promote healing

Former Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder: The Folly of the Flat Tax

WE ARE: PENN STATE!

Um, no, we aren't.

I've read a lot of opinions on this scandal but none is more chilling than Christopher's at the conservative Catholic website Christopher's Apologies.  He made a video drawing the accurate analogy between this child abuse scandal and the Catholic Church's priest abuse scandal, and he makes a mild leap to the Gosnell case where a doctor was killing newborn infants and calling it abortion.  Okay, a gratuitous, albeit obtuse and inaccurate, jab at abortion, but I'd agree that Gosnell's office was also a similar hierarchy that eschewed outside oversight and covered up crimes.  Fine.

Christopher, for some unknown reason, goes on to draw a direct line from anal intercourse with a 10 year-old  to consensual sex between adults, as in the Tiger Woods and... wait for it... the Bill Clinton peccadilloes.  Bill Clinton analogies never get old for conservatives.  But Christopher gets whacky when he equates failing to report child sex abuse to keeping an extra hamburger that was mistakenly placed in your McDonalds bag.  Is this what goes for Catholic morality these days?

If Christopher is to be believed, we are all Penn State, we are all lax in our duties as citizens and human beings.  Not!!!  I was trying to imagine how graphic the image would be of witnessing an adult male raping a 10 yr-old in a shower, especially witnessed during an otherwise ordinary day at work.  The graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, had seen such a thing in 2002 when he was 28 years-old, certainly an age of knowing right from wrong.  Is it really within reason to merely report such an occurrence to Joe Paterno and then go about your career within the coaching hierarchy of a university for another nine years, never questioning why the cretin Sandusky is not just out of prison, but still working at the university!?

McQueary's grand jury testimony says that he told Joe Paterno the graphic details of the incident and then went about his career.  Paterno, for his part, told the athletic director but found nothing untoward about Sandusky, his long time former assistant, continuing to work at the university.

There are surely enough WTF moments in this saga to boggle the mind.  At no time did any member of the Penn State University athletic department or administration have empathy for the victims and future victims of this pedophile.  Does this sound familiar?  Is the Catholic Church's priest abuse scandal analogous?  You bet it is.

Nittany Lion

And the common denominator is that both institutions are examples of top-down hierarchies with little or no outside oversight.  One law enforcement officer in Pennsylvania remarked that nobody from the coaches to the athletic director to the university president himself-- nobody-- ever thought to notify the police of the crimes that were being witnessed and discussed.  Protection of the university and Coach Sandusky's reputation became paramount, with no apparent consideration for the victims.  Even JoePa's final statement "I wish I had done more" seemed more a plea for his own personal reputation than for any justice or empathy, echoing similar sentiments from various bishops.

Anyone who could for a minute analogize child abuse to keeping an extra nickel of change from a restaurant, as ersatz Catholic moralists seem to be doing, needs to do some re-evaluation.

QOTD

Ridicule is the only weapon that can be used against unintelligible propositions.
Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.
– Thomas Jefferson

Your health care dollars hard at work

I'm sure this guy is worth it.  Not.

Fortune magazine lists the highest paid executives under 40 years-old, and there are the expected wunderkinds of the tech world, or communications or entertainment, but then there are the guys (and almost all are guys) in the insurance business, and specifically the health insurance industry. What possibly can a 39 yr-old, or anyone really for that matter, do in health insurance to earn $6.5 million per year? Did he invent a magic weight loss pill or figure out how to cure cerebral palsy? No. More likely he came up with some novel foolproof approach for denying claims on necessary medical care.

I can truly understand paying individuals who add value to a product or create wealth within society or can play shortstop, but health insurance executives do none of this. They are useless middlemen who shuffle money around and take a huge cut. I know of no highly trained physician who comes close to making a tenth of this Howdy Doody look-a-like's salary.  Atrocious.

Catholic theologian relents and allows release of video [UPDATE]

[UPDATE]: The video is up at the Gaines Center site.  I guess I don't really see the point of Dr. Haught's drama.  Dr. Coyne was vociferous, but polite and on point.  He makes the case that Christianity and science are not compatible and having read one of Haught's book (The New Atheists), I can say that his talk was similar in style, obtuse and without any substantive claims.  His Christianity is emotional, ie, an emergent phenomenon of his material being. Coyne's site has some comments to read as well.

----------------------------------------------------------------


Under pressure from the blogoshpere, John Haught has agreed to the release of the video of his recent debate with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.  The kerfuffle ensued when the sponsor of the event, the University of Kentucky, announced that it would honor Haught's unilateral request to nix the release of the video.  Coyne's website has been abuzz with comments which have boiled over to reddit and other sites, and even an on-line petition. Haught himself has provided a comment as to why he initially vetoed the video's release.

My own personal experience is consistent with this high sensitivity of the faithful when their beliefs are challenged.  I agree with Coyne's approach that our society-wide deference given to religion should be challenged with facts and reason at every turn.  Now, we must wait and see if the video really is released.

We should vote on what's true, it's the American way

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Panel recommends HPV vaccine for boys

From the NYT:

Boys and young men should be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV, to protect against anal and throat cancers that can result from sexual activity, a federal advisory committee said Tuesday.
[snip]
Parents of boys face some uncomfortable realities when choosing whether to have their child vaccinated. The burden of disease in males results mostly from oral or anal sex, but vaccinating boys will also benefit female partners since cervical cancer in women results mostly from vaginal sex with infected males.

For the record, The Kalamazoo Post made a similar proposal in 2007:

My modest proposal is to make the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine mandatory for boys and optional for girls. Frankly, I'm hesitant to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for anyone, especially for the first five years of use until unforeseen problems can be studied. My bias is to keep such things optional for all, but if mandatory vaccination is to be instituted, I would argue that boys should be required before girls.

Newer data on the increase in males acquiring HPV related anal and head/neck cancers makes the recommendation more compelling.

Did WikiLeaks end the Iraq war?

From Glenn Greenwald:

From a CNN report on why the Iraqi Government rejected the Obama administration’s conditions for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline: 

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers.
But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment.
The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks’ release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported. 

That description from CNN of the cable’s contents is, unsurprisingly, diluted to the point of obfuscation. That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, “provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.” The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.

This is in contradistinction to the run up to the war in 2002-03 when the news establishment-- and especially the NYT's Judith MIller-- were abetting the Bush administration's case for war with obfuscations and outright lies.  

Greenwald continues:

History is filled with examples of those who most bravely challenged and subverted corrupted power and who sought reforms being rewarded with prison or worse, at the hands of those whose bad actions they exposed. If Bradley Manning did leak these cables, his imprisonment is a prime example of that inverted justice.

Links to drink by

David Foster Wallace was a dick...or had a very dry sense of humor.

112,000 owners make the Packers unique.

The illusion of skill, read Kahneman's entire piece.

Qadaffi, just another dead asshole who spent his nation's wealth.  Take my word for it, don't even bother with the link...it's too depressing.

No due process for American citizen Awlaki, or his 16-year-old son.

Spain's stolen babies.

Did alternative medicine kill Steve Jobs?

Short answer: we'll never know. Orac has the best discussion.

Dunkashein

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Why is this so damn hard to understand?

...and why is she the only one saying it?

The evolution of self-deception

British evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has a forthcoming book entitled The Folly of Fools (US) in which he calls for a "new science" dealing with the how and why of self-deception, mainly because it's so prevalent and psychology has not come up with a theory.  From an interview in the New Scientist: 

You argue that we deceive ourselves all the time, but why do we do it? 

One reason is to better deceive others. Deceiving consciously is cognitively demanding. I've got to invent a false story while being aware of the truth, it's got to be plausible, it cannot contradict anything you already know or are going to find out and I've got to be able to remember it so that I don't contradict myself.

This takes concentration and I may give off cues that I'm lying. If I try to slip something by you I may not be able to meet your gaze. For linguistic cues, there are more pauses and fillers while I try to come up with my story. I'll choose simple action words and avoid qualifiers. Another thing that gives us away us is the effort to control ourselves. Let's say I'm coming to a key word in a lie. I tense up, but tensing up automatically raises my voice. That's a very hard thing to fight.

So believing the lie yourself can help with this cognitive burden? 

Yes. If I can render all or part of the lie unconscious I can remove the cues that I'm deceiving you. So that's one kind of general reason to practice self-deception: to render the lie unconscious, the better to hide it.

Trivers says that such self-deception can lead to better social success and thus more offspring, the hallmark of any genetic benefit.  Of course there are costs as well, but the overall effect must be that self-deception has net benefit. 

In your new book you get into some quite serious stuff about how self-deception fuels warfare and other evils...

Regarding warfare, if you can get the group believing the same deception, you have a powerful force to impose group unity. And if you've sold the population a false historical narrative, say "the German people need room in which to live", then it's relatively easy to couple marching orders to the delusion.

Tell me about the relationship between self-deception and religion.

It's complex. At one extreme you could say religion is complete nonsense, so the whole thing is an exercise in self-deception. I was raised as a Presbyterian and I occasionally attend. I stand back and I read the creed that I was taught as a child and it's utter, utter nonsense. But could it have spread so far by self-deception alone? Religion has been selected for. It has given many benefits to people - health benefits, cooperative benefits. So I take an intermediate position.

Again, my bete noir... he does not define religion!  But I'll assume he means the organization of communities around sacred ideas.  Trivers is a quirky, eccentric scientist but this latest is sure to promote some thought.  My question is how we come up with more universal ideas of what is sacred that all human communities can agree upon and leave out the supernatural mumbo jumbo, ie, a secular religion.  I realize Trivers probably will not delve into this topic but the first step is certainly realizing that humans are masters of self-deception and religion-- the prototype of human self-deception-- is certainly part of our biology.

Should Romney embrace his Mormonism?

An interesting "Open Letter to Mitt" from the WaPo Faith section, an excerpt:

The Mormon story is a quintessentially American tale. Joseph Smith, the prophet of the Mormon Church, was a farmer’s son, persecuted for his interpretation of the Christian story and assassinated in 1844. After his death, 70,000 of his followers eventually took a grueling overland trek from the Midwest to Utah’s Salt Lake Valley. The faithful undertook this six-month journey, often in covered wagons, at great personal risk of injury, illness and death. Proud of their pioneering ancestors, Mormons tend to value self-reliance, grit, optimism, hard work. Your faith may be the source of your most defining personality traits.

Leave out the magic underwear and it's not much different than other faith communities.

Aaron Task defends Occupy Wall Street

Well done.

Bruce Bartlett: "CEO's are full of crap"

Former Reagan administration official on the demand destruction of a deflationary cycle:




Okay, it's a bit long but well worth it to hear someone who really understands the economic problems we are enduring, and how to fix them.  I'll make a few points:

1.  It's the demand, stupid.  D'uh.

2.  I love how Kernin carries the water for CEO's who are whining about regulation.  Newsflash: everyone complains about regulations in whatever field they are in, and the complaints ALWAYS become louder when demand falters and businesses suffer.  If demand is good, then regulations actually benefit the better-run entities.

3.  Bartlett calls out Paul Ryan and GWB for their promotion of Medicare part D-- always a favorite topic of mine because 1) Part D is emblematic of the hypocrisy of the GOP on their budget, 2) Part D has literally gutted Medicare and is the major, if not sole, cause that it's in ruinous financial shape.

4.  As an aside, Bartlett has said elsewhere that the annual doc-fix on Medicare should be eliminated, and as destructive as I think it would be to physician pay, I cannot disagree--- as long as it is accompanied with other reforms of Medicare.  Reducing health care costs cannot be accomplished solely by reducing physicians' reimbursement.  Eliminating the doc-fix would effectively throw a boulder in the pond and, yes, doctors en masse would immediately stop seeing Medicare patients... then the REAL conversation would start about where all this f**king Medicare money is going.  Trust me, Big Pharma and Big Insurance don't want that conversation.

Memo To The Media: It’s Not ‘Anti-Capitalist’ To Protest An Industry That Was Saved By Trillions Of Taxpayer Dollars

Offered without comment, because none is necessary.

Erin Burnett enters the media elite

I had high hopes for Erin Burnett, after all she was mentored by my favorite curmudgeon, the late Mark Haines at CNBC.  So when her new show on CNN debuted last night, I had my bowl of popcorn ready for some righteous indignation and some calling bullshit on the Masters of the Universe.  Result: disappointment.

 


Seriously?  No mention of AIG and the massive counter-party risk that was covered by taxpayers that 1) saved the biggest banks at the expense of the smaller ones, and 2) will never be paid back?  Erin knows this argument but chose instead to ignore it while bullying some 20-something with her supposed airtight argument about "who made money on the bailouts".  Burnett also failed to mention that more wealth is now concentrated in fewer banks than before the crash, leaving us more vulnerable than ever.  No mention of the lack of regulation to prevent another disaster.  Burnett gave no voice to the angst of people who lost their homes, their jobs, their pensions while the assholes running Wall Street firms-- the guys who caused the crisis-- are still there.  Only one bank CEO from the major institutions was fired, and he was replaced by his next-in-command.

Do the hipsters have reasons to brood?  Sure.  Does Burnett have a responsibility to understand those reasons?  I suppose not (and feel free, Erin, to giggle; it gives you that much more journalistic credibility.)  Are the hipsters required to have a developed agenda for fixing a completely fucked up system?  No.

I also like her quip at the end of the segment about the protesters wearing Lululemon clothing and using Apple products, implying some evidence of hypocrisy because these companies trade on the NASDAQ.  Since when does Wall Street claim credit for the creativity of Apple, based in Cupertino, CA?

Protesters don't have a valid reason to be angry?  Seriously?  Mark Haines would be ashamed.

Obama's lost opportunity

Printed in it's entirety, from Walker Todd:

Obama’s First 100 DaysWalker ToddOctober 3, 2011

The first 100 days of the Obama Administration were a golden opportunity wasted for ending the financial crisis and laying a base for sustainable growth with less governmental subsidy than we actually experienced. 

First should have been a thoroughgoing stress test of the banks on a mark-to-market basis, excluding derivatives (which should not have been spared a full test in the bankruptcy courts), followed by a recapitalization of banks (but not bank holding companies) proven solvent or nearly solvent on a basis analogous to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s. Deposit insurance should have been limited to protecting the payments system and depositors, not large creditors or bank holding companies. The limited recapitalization under TARP was a weak imitation of 1930s policies. 

Next should have been the stabilization of household finances, with across-the-board, fixed-rate refinancing of borrowers as much as 25 percent below zero equity as long as they could prove capacity to maintain debt service on the new basis. The analogy here is the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the 1930s. Elizabeth Warren's consumer protection agency should have been created on a stand-alone basis and given a two-year emergency powers warrant to restructure all credit terms, other than principal owed, for household and consumer credit. 

Finally, a public works program to create jobs after 13 weeks of unemployment would have been preferable to providing nearly two years of unemployment assistance. Between TARP and the first stimulus bill, nearly $1.5 trillion was appropriated. In addition, the Federal Reserve created nearly $1.2 trillion out of thin air to bail out the banking system, much of it for foreign banks, and about one-half of that assistance was issued after Election Day. 

The agenda described here could have been accomplished for probably not more than one-half of the $2.7 trillion marshaled for the policies actually followed. 
We’re not in the end of the world camp quite yet...

The Obama presidency has shown us more than anything the important leadership of FDR in the last century.  We lived under the protection of Depression-era regulations and programs that have been slowly whittled away over the last two decades.  


The other lesson is that we obviously need more pain.  

My White Sox fantasy: Pete Mackanin

This has been a brutal year as a White Sox for no other reason than the immense expectations that greeted the season a few months ago. NOw the team is in tatters with Ozzie Guillen gone and the payroll full of mediocre performers locked into top salaries. What the Sox need is a total management overhaul. Yes, Ozzie needed to go, but so does Kenny Williams and from interviews it seems apparent that Williams will not be GM next year and likely will get bumped up the role of President of the organization. Fine, he may be an excellent businessman but his hand a picking talent has gone cold-- if ever it was hot in the first place.

Ozzie roaming SS in the 80's

 The emotions of seeing Ozzie go are decidedly mixed. His history with the White Sox is full of positives: a long career, beginning with Rookie of the Year (at left) and peaking with the only World Series win in Chicago for a century. But his demeanor grew as tiresome as was his handling of pitching staff puzzling.  In Ozzie's defense, was he responsible for trading Daniel Hudson and JJ Putz away for Edwin Jackson? Did Ozzie sign huge contracts for struggling Jake Peavey and the incomparably bad Adam Dunn? No and no. And I'll just mention briefly the brainstorm of releasing Aaron Rowand in favor of Brian Anderson in centerfield, and then doubling down by taking on Alex Rios' heavy contract as yet another questionable centerfielder. Maybe none of these transactions could have been foreseen to be miserable, but certainly at some point a GM needs to be held accountable for lack of results. Williams needs to do something else in or out of baseball. Booking National Anthem singers might be more within his skill set.

Pete Mackanin, Brother Rice HS alumnus

Here's my fantasy: The White Sox hire Terry Francona, not as field boss, but as General Manager. Nobody knows the talent around the league better than Tito and he might benefit from one layer of management away from the day-to-day machinations. And the new manager would be current Phillies bench coach Pete Mackanin who has been tutored by greats such as Charlie Manuel and Joe Maddon. The former has been in baseball forever managing dozens of Hall of Famers and the latter has done nothing but bring some of the lowest payrolls of young players into the playoffs year and year. Mackanin is a Southside native who would be a solid addition and supplement Francona's stature. The White Sox ownership is dedicated to winning as evidenced by the consistently high payrolls, and Reinsdorf needs to put better management in place to make it all happen. Who knows, miracles could happen...maybe Dunn can hit .200 next year.