Put another way.....

"One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent. "

-Napoleon Bonaparte

.....or, never pass a law that cannot be enforced or for which the political will is lacking. We fall deeper and deeper into this chasm.

Well, that's reassuring

In his introductory remarks to his SCOTUS nomination today , the COOTWH stated that she represents what we need, less of the dry dead old law on paper, and more concern for people in their everyday lives. I thought I already had somebody like that......my Representative.

I cannot for a moment believe that a law professor / factotum, sans judicial experience, is even going to be able to be concerned about the everyday lives of people, let alone conceive that that is her job. The Constitution gives broad legislative powers to Congress, and the 435 districts into which the House of Representatives is divided is crafted and specifically intended to see to my "needs."

Yet another example of rhetoric that is either simply BAD, or which has intentions which are far more than questionable, given that we are presently visited with far, far too much legislation by judicial fiat.

Moynihan Lives

The fuss over the misbehavior of a variety of pro sports athletes is merely in microcosm of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about, writ large:

"There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos... And it is richly deserved."

-- Daniel P. Moynihan, Family and Nation [1965]

And, as he wrote before he died, what applied largely to the black community in 1965 has spread to include all sectors of society. The manifestation of this in irresponsible and brutal men has become an equal opportunity employer.....

An Honest Politician?

Setting aside my great reluctance to post the name of a politician, hats off to Senator Evan Bayh for jumping ship. I don't even know which party he's affiliated with, but he knows the system is broken.

Can politicians who just quit (Bayh had never been defeated in an election, and was considered the choice for re-election) force reform? In my opinion, no, because it's the career-obsessed that remain who will have to vote it in. Stalemate.

Eradicating Meaning

When a "player," someone who represents an interest (aka a nation) gets the Nobel Peace Prize, it damages the whole notion of "peace." Peace cannot be partisan....and when we dig into the elements of most situations where leaders or representatives of states were awarded the NPP, the partisan element isn't hard to find.

Woodrow Wilson fundamentally didn't deserve the Nobel Prize, because no matter how noble his Fourteen Points, without the U.S. taking the lead and forgiving all the war loans to the European countries (which was done after WWII, a lesson hard learned), it ultimately validated the crushing reparations exacted against Germany in the Versailles Treaty, which was a major factor in bringing Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP to power in Germany. The U.S. may or may not have deserved the pejorative "Uncle Shylock," but Calvin Coolidge was simply being Bismarckian in his realpolitik when he said "They hired the money, didn't they?" These things may be judged one way or another by history, but they don't fit into consideration for a peace prize. They just don't.

Henry Kissinger, in the context of the Vietnam War, may have been deserving of many things, but the Nobel Peace Prize was certainly not one of them.

One of the very few things James Earl Carter may deserve to be remembered for is the Camp David Peace Accords. But should anyone have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for this? Peace in that situation would have involved the Palestinians, whether the Egyptians were present or not- and the Palestinians were nowhere to be found. This may have been the first "joke" NPP.

What Barack Obama has done -in any substantive way- to merit a nomination for such a prize -let alone its being awarded- is hard to fathom. The Nobel committee's most trenchant statement on the topic seems to boil down to "He's made people feel good."

At the very least, it is questionable that the leader of a nation with tens of thousands of its forces currently in combat roles on foreign soil would be considered for such an award, regardless of the situation. It is therefore impossible to believe that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize (along with the prize for Literature...any that aren't awarded for measurable scientific achievement) hasn't devolved into the same level as the political vagaries of the International Olympic Committee or the United Nations. The Nobel Peace Prize should be ignored.

A valid comparison?

George Will comments on the Obama administration's politicizing the arts, and

This.

Of course, to some people there is no comparison. The ends, as always to some humans, justify the means. We will be told that the ends of the former are noble, humane, and socially true, therefore whatever exigencies, whatever horror must be perpetrated to carry them into effect are just. The ends of the second example were horrible and perverted, etc.

The thing is, if you dug up anyone in history who had ever attempted to direct an entire society and its culture to their own agenda.....they would tell you exactly the same thing.

Living in Hyper Reality

While the United States cannot be said to have a proper hereditary aristocracy (unless one count those crowned by money, such as Rockefellers, or by public mania, like the Kennedys), we have an upper class pursuing a variety of "lifestyles" who comprise our Dons, Boyars, Mandarins, or similar de facto in our society.
These people might be characterized by having lots of money, but since few go around wearing hats with their combined assets printed on them, they can be difficult to identify. And, these days, even to be a billionaire has gotten rather ho-hum, in a time when garbage collectors an assembly-line workers have become millionaires. Hence, a problem that the Lords Twit-Stickybottom or the Marquis de Fromage don't have to deal with.
What we do to fulfill Thorstein Veblen's dictum that wealth/power must be displayed is to parade these folk constantly in the media, the amount of attention and size of retinue or retainers, fawners, and general hangers-on determining public status, leaving us to simply assume the amount of decimal points in their net worth commanding such attention.
A century ago, this class was comprised largely of industrialists. There are some now, Trump, Gates, etc., but in general it's become in bad taste to generally proclaim one's status by mere empire-building. Hence, Trump secures his status by his alternate roles as sometime pundit and game show host on TV.
The main groups in the U.S. living in what one pundit has referred to as "hyper reality" are movie and other media personalities, sports figures, politicians...not by any means all of any of these categories. We have to have standards, after all. Added to this must be any member of the hoi polloi who happens to break through for their 15 minutes of fame on any given day....or who the media will grant an extended stay by by disappearing under particularly lurid circumstances, or be the victim of a particularly hideous or grotesque murder. We also must not omit the criminals perpetrating same, preferably in the categories of "mass murderer," "serial killer," "pedophile discovered to be living in neighborhood" or anyone providing adequate titillation on America's Most Wanted.
As the relentless egalitarianism of our age attempts to grind us all into the same mold, these people have been elevated by the only criterion that can possibly matter: popularity. It's all a big award show, and it should be named after only one of the dozens out there: The People's Choice Awards.
Unless you're caught up in popular culture, it's all so banal and tawdry as to defy description.....but that doesn't matter. Vox populi, vox dei, and the people have decreed -at least in the United States, that They Will Be Entertained. Do so, and you will be suitably rewarded, whether you are Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt, Donald & Ivana Trump, or Michelle & Barack Obama. The reward isn't just money, power, or status; it's the relentless attention that feeds back the simulacrum of of the reality of one's own importance. Thus, we have a class of people that anyone with a microphone and camera automatically assumes to be experts on anything whatever......and the person in question, due to the positive feedback they receive, largely believes this to be true.
This phenomenon can even be observed spreading throughout the media such that a person who might in past years be asked to pronounce on their own specialty or something they actually know about -motorcycle racing, for example- is now asked to forumulate Middle East policy.....and actually expected to advance an opinion, which will be presented as the absolute equal of anyone else's. To write such a thing is absolutely ludicrous, and would seem the subject of fiction; and yet it's our daily news. The show must go on.

Just Like Magic

We abruptly have commercials on national TV for "NORML," an organization seeking the instant high ground portraying marijuana use as "norml." It's really obvious we've entered a time when all sorts of people, having had all manner of extravagant promises made to them, are now in "collect mode." No questions about the ramifications of all this......it's going to save our economy, clear out the prisons, rectify yet another of the thousand thousand historical injustices that translate into "keeping us from doing whatever we bloody well want."

Bertolt Brecht wrote that the motto of The City of Mahagonny was "Do it."

Perspective as a Substitute for Hysteria

In recent posts, I have complained about the snowballing trend in the media to conflate fact with adjective, and that any sense of perspective prior to 4:30 last Wednesday afternoon is receding at light speed. I now advance several positive reforms in reporting to counteract these trends.

1. Indicate not only figures expressed in current dollars, but also in constant dollars. Current figures given, e.g. $(trillions and trillions) could be followed with a symbol, say, something hardly used like: "※," that would stand for constant 1932 dollars (or 1968, or whatever....thus "trillions and trillions" becomes "millions and millions" or just ※ 9.98.

2. Create a perspective index for all weather reporting. The symbol "§," (which kinda looks like a hurricane anyway) could stand for "We really don't have facts & figures to support theories such as 'super-hurricanes' that might occur, because actual weather data, including hurricanes, only goes back to 1895, which means that our projections are not only worse than conjecture, they're just fantasies."

3. The symbol "仝," when applied to reports on volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like, could stand for "We've said this horror will overtake you someday, but not only do we have no real idea when, we have nowhere else to suggest that you might go. And, no, you can't come and live with us here in the studio."

4. We might address the sporadic reports of some sort of Armageddon (whether by Biblical prophecy, Nostradamus, the Mayan Long Count calendar, nuclear war or the examination of entrails of the reporter's recently deceased guinea pig) by " 〆," signifying "Disclaimer: while we've done our best to scare the crap out of you, and want to take any credit for giving you sleepless nights, naturally we can take no responsibility for the actual occurrence of any such horror upon humankind. We will, however, fully warrant our prediction that in 12 billion years (±200 million) the sun will expand into its red giant phase and leave the Earth a burned-out cinder.....so worry about that."

A Crisis Based on Fantasy?

Heard this morning on NPR- an interview with a individual whose profession is analyzing the domestic and international financial markets, discussing the level of "bad mortgages," which we have had drilled into us Lo! these many months now.

I have organized his discussion into a sic et non set of "Myth vs. Fact."

Myth: "There are trillions in bad / unrecoverable mortgages."

Fact: There are only about eight (8) trillion in total mortgages in the entire U.S.

Myth: "The level of bad / unrecoverable mortgages is a large percentage of the total."

Fact: It's about two (2) percent. Ninety-eight percent (98%) of all mortgages are currently being paid on schedule (not in arrears).

Myth: (From question by NPR interlocutor) But aren't there trillions of these "new" and very risky financial instruments used to compile mortgages for sale in the market?

Fact: There are about two (2) trillion worth of these sorts of instruments total, worldwide.

I would like to advance the following in the form of a debate proposal:

Resolved: We have no basis for even knowing if we are becoming "the tribe that lost its head," if we cannot determine what is and is not factual in the media.

My only weapon against this is a distrust of all media -all- that grows deeper every day.....and that's not a good place to be, either.

Maybe This Time......

Not much of a joiner, never have been. But The Long Now Foundation may be an exception. I've been tired of the relentless presentism of modern culture for a long time and, at 65, I'm fed up. So, yes, I can see myself joining an organization the most tangible project of which has been the design and construction of a 10,000 year clock. Such things as always writing "0" in front of the year (so that we're now in 02009) seem more pretentious, but I'm sure they'd just say I'm not yet there in my ten thousand year thinking yet.......

You Can't Top This

Now we have another of those pieces of back-door legislation that sneak in and fulfill Harry Truman's dicum that one bad law breeds contempt for all law. There may be trace amounts of lead in printer's ink, so now we're going to test The Grinch for lead, or he goes in the fire. Ribbentrop and Goebbels approve, and I'll have a double helping of Cat in the Hat and some Little Red Hen on the side, please. With mustard.

.....which leads to the question of the day: What would be symptomatic of an entire nation suffering from mass psychosis? Ten minutes, no talking among yourselves.

Fashionable Catastrophe

I love reading this type of science article.....but then I have to stop and reflect that there's not all that much science in it. Right now, it's quite the fashion to blither on about catastrophe and Armageddons of all sorts and stripes, but this article -in a putatively respectable "journal of record," is typical of much of what one reads and/or views. A theory built upon linked hypotheses, all resting on very limited and even tenuous physical evidence. The problem is that once the "fashion effect" takes hold, and the theory begins to appear on multiple web sites, then The Hysteria Channel takes over, or The Discovery of a New Disaster Channel, The Learning about Lahars and Tsunamis Channel, or The All Weather is a Disaster Channel....and suddenly a fringe theory has become a sort of "fact" in the common wisdom, a mountain of speculation with only the most tenuous base of support in fact. But facts are such dreary things......

He lit a match*

I normally don't just link to a comic, even though I enjoy xkcd, but I'll make an exception. this one takes me back to covering the miles of two-lane highway (back when I was little, and most highways were), and finding the Burma-Shave signs a welcome blip in the miles of corn fields. On the other hand, when you're a kid, those miles of corn fields may be your first chance to experience introspection- a pastime of great difficulty in contemporary culture.

*Can you complete it? (Scroll down to the 1959 jingles....)