Credit Card Theft Not Worth Prosecuting?

So says Massachuset's Attorney General Martha Coakley.

"An open secret?" asks The Register

Monty Python does Baghdad Reality Show

HT Andrew Sullivan

Iraqi: "We've just received a death threat. I'm Sunni, my wife, Shia. This letter stuck to our gate says, 'We will cut your tongues out, behead you and exterminate your entire family... in the name of Allah the merciful.'"

American "peacekeeper": "Um, ok. Here, take my card. In case you have any trouble, call this number."

This all sounds too like a Monty Python skit.

American soldier: "Um, sir... won't he have a hard time calling for help if they've cut his tongue out?"

American officer: "You're right Johnson. Let's make sure to pray for them when we get back to camp."

Good thing we have religion to teach people morals and to show the way to peace. And since that isn't working, let's send a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth Christians to show them how to do the peace thing.

Sherman Yellen: George W. Bush - The Salesman of Death

Sherman Yellen at Huffington Post

When I was young, my first major theatre experience was watching Lee J. Cobb in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" on Broadway. It was a powerful melodrama about a man whose worship of success and whose false values lead to his ruin; a man who believed that all he needed was a ready smile, a dirty joke, and another chance to make that big sale that would keep him from failure. The chances ran out for Willy Lohman as his dreams of glory proved to be dead-end fantasies, he ultimately lost his insecure hold on reality which lead to his suicide. "Attention must be paid," his wife Linda cries out, lamenting the ruin of her foolish, faithless, dreamer of a husband, when the world turns against him, but we all know that Willy has brought on his own ruin, step by step descending into failure and death. Willy had nothing to sell except a belief in the power of his own personality, a selfish egotism, and that was hardly enough to hold off his personal tragedy, the loss of his job and the loss of his son's respect, leading to the loss of his sanity. Personality - the great overrated American virtue - divorced from substance equals tragedy. We should keep this in mind as we examine our candidates for '08. Willy was not merely the spoiler of his own life, but that of his sons' lives, sons whom he had infected with his worship of success at any price. If I recall that play properly, Willy never has a moment when he comes to an understanding of where he has gone wrong. I thought of Willy Loman as I watched
George Bush deliver his State of the Union address. Here was a man like Willy who was absolutely confident of his own charm, a personality man who had nothing of substance to sell; a man who brings ruin to all around him as he clings to his fantasies of success. Only unlike Willy, George Bush is our Salesman of Death. He stood there delivering his tired spiel, unpacking his tawdry goods; the misbegotten war, while peddling terror and no taxes as if they were shiny new stock. He dragged out all the initiatives that he should have considered six years ago, which now seemed shopworn, threadbare, and counterfeit in his hands, new sources of energy, health care, and his disastrous No Child Left Behind and its destruction of our educational system. Never has America had a leader who is so incorruptible, because there is nothing in George Bush that could be corrupted. To corrupt someone implies that they begin with some virtue, and it was difficult to think of any virtue known to man possessed by this President. George W. Bush had death to sell to the Congress and the American people, the death of our young soldiers to be sacrificed to his desperate need for another chance, another big score, all part of his fantasy of success, and his dread of failure. As even the Democrats in Congress bobbed up and down in response to his lies and banalities, I was a bit confused, and annoyed; then I realized that nobody was paying close attention to his words, this sign of deference may have been an effort to stay awake, like the snoozing John McCain (news, bio, voting record), or the jumping up and down of Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) to keep her foot from falling asleep. I expected Laura, like the loyal Linda Loman, to shout out from the balcony, "Attention must be paid," but instead she was playing a game of three card Monte, undoubtedly taught to her by Rove himself, exploiting the heroism of an African American working man, one who never enjoyed any of the benefits of Bush's America, to distract from her husband's failures and lend George some of this hero's aura. Perhaps the real Linda Loman was Condi Rice whose face was a mask of tragedy. Medea or Medusa, take your pick, it was awful to behold in its desperation for Condi like Laura and the Cheneys the tragedy wasn't what they had done to America, but what they had lost for themselves, power, respect, and honor. Perhaps the material profits of war are not enough for some people. Sadly, one knows that George W. will never have a moment when he understands how he went wrong, and what a disaster he has brought down on the American family. The big difference between that great play and this President is that you could weep for Willy Loman but never for this salesman of death.

W: Terrorists Fear our Freedom

In the first days after the 9/11 attacks I promised to use every element of national power to fight the terrorists, wherever we find them. One of the strongest weapons in our arsenal is the power of freedom. The terrorists fear freedom as much as they do our firepower.

W 11 Sept 2006

If terrorists fear our freedom as much as our firepower, why aren't we putting them in voting booths rather than beating the hell out of them and waterboarding?

Guard: "Run! Be free!"
"Detainee": "Arrghhhh! Nooooo! I'll tell you were bin Ladin is. Please! Not freedom!
Guard: I wasn't talking to you. I was giving this American guy freedom.
Detainee: Oh, sorry. May I have another beating, please?

Why Do I Fail to be Religious?

I've got the condenscention and intolerance... I just can't conjure the sanctimoniousness.

Prohibited by Constitution; Ok by George

W has made this presidency nothing but but a string of corruption of laws and power. To wit:


(H/T Andrew Sullivan)


Miami Herald

As required by law, the manual prohibits statements obtained by torture and ''cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment'' as prohibited by the Constitution.

However, the law does allow statements obtained through coercive interrogation techniques if obtained before Dec. 30, 2005, and deemed reliable by a judge.

An Impartial Interrogation of George W. Bush by George McGovern

Via The Nation

I'm glad to be back at the National Press Club. Indeed, at the age of eighty-four, I'm glad to be anywhere. In my younger years when the subject of aging came up, trying to sound worldly wise, I would say, "It doesn't matter so much the number of years you have, but what you do with those years." I don't say that anymore. I now want to reach a hundred. Why? Because I thoroughly enjoy life and there are so many things I must still do before entering the mystery beyond. The most urgent of these is to get American soldiers out of the Iraqi hellhole Bush-Cheney and their neoconservative theorists have created in what was once called the cradle of civilization. It is believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden. I mention the neoconservative theorists to recall Walter Lippman's observance, "There is nothing so dangerous as a belligerent professor."

One of the things I miss about my eighteen years in the US Senate are the stories of the old Southern Democrats. I didn't always vote with them, but I loved their technique of responding to an opponent's questions with a humorous story. Once when Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina had to handle a tough question from Mike Mansfield, he said, "You know, Mr. Leader, that question reminds me of the old Baptist preacher who was telling a class of Sunday school boys the creation story. 'God created Adam and Eve and from this union came two sons, Cain and Abel and thus the human race developed.' A boy in the class then asked, 'Reverend, where did Cain and Abel get their wives?' After frowning for a moment, the preacher replied, 'Young man--it's impertinent questions like that that's hurtin' religion.'"

Well, Mr. Bush, Jr. I have some impertinent questions for you.

Mr. President, Sir, when reporter Bob Woodward asked you if you had consulted with your father before ordering our army into Iraq you said, "No, he's not the father you call on a decision like this. I talked to my heavenly Father above." My question, Mr. President: If God asked you to bombard, invade and occupy Iraq for four years, why did he send an opposite message to the Pope? Did you not know that your father, George Bush, Sr., his Secretary of State James Baker and his National Security Advisor General Scowcroft were all opposed to your invasion? Wouldn't you, our troops, the American people and the Iraqis all be much better off if you had listened to your more experienced elders including your earthly father? Instead of blaming God for the awful catastrophe you have unleashed in Iraq, wouldn't it have been less self-righteous if you had fallen back on the oft-quoted explanation of wrongdoing, "The devil made me do it?"

And Mr. President, after the 9/11 hit against the Twin Towers in New York, which gained us the sympathy and support of the entire world, why did you then order the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11? Are you aware that your actions destroyed the international reservoir of good will towards the United States? What is the cost to America of shattering the standing and influence of our country in the eyes of the world?

Why, Mr. President did you pressure the CIA to report falsely that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons? And when you ordered your Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to go to New York and present to the UN the Administration's "evidence" that Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, were you aware that after reading this deceitful statement to the UN, Mr. Powell told an aid that the so-called evidence was "bullshit"?

Is it reasonable to you, President Bush, that Colin Powell told you near the end of your first term that he would not be in your Administration if you were to receive a second term? What decent person could survive two full terms of forced lying and deceit?

And Mr. President, how do you enjoy your leisure time, and how can you sleep at night knowing that 3,014 young Americans have died in a war you mistakenly ordered? What do you say to the 48,000 young Americans who have been crippled for life in mind or body? What is your reaction to the conclusion of the leading British medical journal (Lancet) that since you ordered the bombardment and occupation of Iraq four years ago, 600,000 Iraqi men, women and children have been killed? What do you think of the destruction of the Iraqi's homes, their electrical and water systems, their public buildings?

And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while neither of you has ever been in combat (Mr. Cheney asking and receiving five deferments from the Vietnam War), have you not at least read or been briefed on the terrible costs of that ill-advised and seemingly endless American war in tiny Vietnam? Do you realize that another Texas President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, declined to seek a second term in part because he had lost his credibility over the disastrous war in Vietnam? Are you aware that one of the chief architects of that war, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, resigned his office and years later published a book declaring that the war was all a tragic mistake? Do you know this recent history in which 58,000 young Americans died in the process of killing 2 million Vietnamese men, women and children? If you do not know about this terrible blunder in Vietnam, are you not ignoring the conclusion of one of our great philosophers: "Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it." And, Mr. President, in your ignorance of the lessons of Vietnam, are you not condemning our troops and our people to repeat the same tragedy in Iraq?

During the long years between 1963 and 1975 when I fought to end the American war in Vietnam, first as a US Senator from South Dakota and then as my party's nominee for President, my four daughters ganged up on my one night. "Dad, why don't you give up this battle? You've been speaking out against this crazy war since we were little kids. When you won the Democratic presidential nomination, you got snowed under by President Nixon." In reply I said, "Just remember that sometimes in history even a tragic mistake produces something good. The good about Vietnam is that it is such a terrible blunder, we'll never go down that road again." Mr. President, we're going down that road again. So, what do I tell my daughters? And what do you tell your daughters?

Mr. President, I do not speak either as a pacifist or a draft dodger. I speak as one who after the attack on Pearl Harbor, volunteered at the age of nineteen for the Army Air Corps and flew thirty-five missions as a B-24 bomber. I believed in that war then and I still do sixty-five years later. And so did the rest of America. Mr. President, are you missing the intellectual and moral capacity to know the difference between a justified war and a war of folly in Vietnam or Iraq?

Public opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of the American people think that the war in Iraq has been a mistake on your part. It is widely believed that this war was the central reason Democrats captured control of both houses of Congress. Polls among the people of Iraq indicate that nearly all Iraqis want our military presence in their country for the last four years to end now. Why do you persist in defying public opinion in both the United States and Iraq and throughout the other countries around the globe? Do you see yourself as omniscient? What is your view of the doctrine of self-determination, which we Americans hold dear?

And wonder of wonders, Mr. President, after such needless death and destruction, first in the Vietnamese jungle and now in the Arabian desert, how can you order 21,500 more American troops to Iraq? Are you aware that as the war in Vietnam went from bad to worse, our leaders sent in more troops and wasted more billions of dollars until we had 550,000 US troops in that little country? It makes me shudder as an aging bomber pilot to remember that we dropped more bombs on the Vietnamese and their country than the total of all the bombs dropped by all the air forces around the world in World War II. Do you, Mr. President, honestly believe that we need tens of thousands of additional troops plus a supplemental military appropriation of $200 billion before we can bring our troops home from this nightmare in ancient Baghdad?

In your initial campaign for the Presidency, Mr. Bush, you described yourself as a "compassionate conservative". What is compassionate about consigning America's youth to a needless and seemingly endless war that has now lasted longer than World War II? And what is conservative about reducing the taxes needed to finance this war and instead running our national debt to nine trillion dollars with money borrowed from China, Japan, Germany and Britain? Is this wild deficit financing your idea of conservatism? Mr. President, how can a true conservative be indifferent to the steadily rising cost of a war that claims over $7 billion a month, $237 million every day? Are you troubled to know as a conservative that just the interest on our skyrocketing national debt is $760,000 every day. Mr. President, our Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, estimates that if the war were to continue until 2010 as you have indicated it might, the cost would be over a trillion dollars.

Perhaps, Mr. President, you should ponder the words of a genuine conservative - England's nineteenth-century member of Parliament, Edmund Burke: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood".

And, Mr. President at a time when your most respected generals have concluded that the chaos and conflict in Iraq cannot be resolved by more American dollars and more American young bodies, do you ever consider the needs here at home of our own anxious and troubled society? What about the words of another true conservative, General and President Dwight Eisenhower who said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."

And, Mr. President, would not you and all the rest of us do well to ponder the farewell words of President Eisenhower: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Finally, Mr. President, I ask have you kept your oath of office to uphold the Constitution when you use what you call the war on terrorism to undermine the Bill of Rights? On what constitutional theory do you seize and imprison suspects without charge, sometimes torturing them in foreign jails? On what constitutional or legal basis have you tapped the phones of Americans without approval of the courts as required by law? Are you above the Constitution, above the law, and above the Geneva accords? If we are fighting for freedom in Iraq as you say, why are you so indifferent to protecting liberty here in America?

more at The Nation

Iraqi Prime Minister: Agree to Arm Us and You Can Leave

Just give us armor, guns and ammunition and we'll kill all the Sunnis for you, er.... terrorists, er.... insurgents. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket!


The Times Online

Oscar Wilde on Marriage

While a first marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence, second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience.

How Many Wars to Sustain a Presidency?

How many licks to the Tootsie-Roll(tm) center?

Talk has been rampant for some time hypothesizing that Bush's next goal is to excalate the Iraq quagmire by attacking Iran.

The recent attack of an Iranian embassy in Iraq certainly does nothing to qualm such rumors.

Until now, I saw the Iraq rumors as just that: wanton rumor-mongoring.

But with Bush's US approval numbers sagging faster than those in Iraq and the rest of the world, Bush is beginning to look desperate.

How hard would it be to incite Iran to make an attack? Say, launch a missile at one of our ships in the Gulf? Probably very little.

What would it take to turn such an incident -- Iran's launching a counter-punch -- into a Bay of Tonkin-esque call to war on Iran?

You have to admit, Bush's administration handles and profits from wartime hysteria better than any other administration in recent memory. Re-stirring the nationalistic rhetoric than has only recently begun to die down after Katrina would be easy to do for the Bush team.
Bloodlust would quickly overcome most resistance to Bush and his presidency and neocon thugs would quickly finish off the rest.

What would become of an anti-draft movement if the neocons portrayed Iran as striking first?

Daniel Gross: What Jobs do Americans Not Want to Do?

Inline with quoting whatever patriotic slogan seems applicable at the time (with the intention only of personal gain) corporations love to say, "Let the (Capitalist) market decide."

But whenever an opportunity to bypass that market for profit is found, it is heartily lept upon.

Such is the current labor market. It's not that Americans don't want to do jobs, it's that they don't want to do them for the lousy wages being offered.

As Daniel Gross points out below, Americans apparently no longer want to do manual labor, but apparently they don't want to be doctors, nurses, engineers or accountants either:


Dirty Work: What are the jobs Americans won't do?
By Daniel Gross at Slate
Posted Friday, Jan. 12, 2007, at 6:36 AM ET
Illustration by Jason Raish.

The United States is a nation of hard workers. Compared with many other developed countries, the U.S. boasts high rates of labor-force participation and productivity and has a very low unemployment rate. Americans work longer hours than Europeans—1,804 hours per worker for the United States in 2005, compared to 1,434 in Germany and 1,535 in France, according to the OECD.

Yet it's increasingly common to hear politicians, CEOs, and immigration activists impugn American workers as a bunch of shiftless layabouts who regard many good jobs as beneath their dignity. That, they say, is why employers have to turn to immigrants—some of them legal, many of them illegal. To hear CEOs tell it, they'd much rather hire English-speaking, tax-paying U.S. citizens, people who won't disrupt operations by getting rounded up in Homeland Security sweeps. But they just can't find any Americans willing to do their jobs. As President Bush himself said last March, the United States needs a temporary guest-worker program that would "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do."

What are these jobs that Americans will not do? Do they exist? Or are they a figment of the business community's imagination? It turns out that their claims are largely true—there are plenty of jobs Americans avoid. Let's take a tour of them. Americans shun pretty much any unskilled labor that requires them to get their hands dirty: landscaping, entry-level construction, picking fruits and vegetables (Reuters reports that "up to 70 percent of U.S. farm workers are estimated to be undocumented, totaling about 500,000 people"), cleaning hotel rooms, busing tables, and prep cooking in urban restaurants.

But the refusal to do jobs is moving up the value chain. American workers appear to be less interested in some kinds of factory jobs. The Washington Post, for example, recently reported that Georgia's carpet factories are increasingly dominated by Mexican immigrant workers.

Americans, it seems, are also less willing to take stressful jobs that require lots of training and long hours, and that require them to work in unpleasant environments. For example, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing is warning of a nursing shortage. This survey from the American Hospital Association says there are 118,000 nursing vacancies in the United States. Meanwhile, a 2003 report by the Council on Graduate Medical Education suggested there could be a shortage of anywhere from 65,000 to 150,000 doctors in 2020. (Given the time it takes to educate and train a physician, it's not too soon to worry.)

Spending your days tethered to a computer is also work that many Americans avoid. The Information Technology Association of America notes that 77 percent of companies it polled said there was a shortage of qualified IT talent in the United States. The solution: Import more geeks. The ITAA (and pretty much every technology company) supports boosting the number of H-1B visas above the current limit of 65,000 per fiscal year.

The more one looks, the more shortages of willing workers appear. Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe last month reported that the Pentagon is "considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks—including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to U.S. citizenship if they volunteer." Today, about 2 percent of the soldiers protecting America—about 30,000—aren't technically Americans. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on a dire shortage of professors of accounting, finance, and management that may cause some schools to curtail course offerings. "AACSB International, the accrediting organization for business schools, estimates a shortage of 1,000 Ph.D.s in the U.S. this year that will grow to 2,400 by 2012." (Apparently, American citizens with Ph.D.s in accounting, finance, and management can get high-paying, satisfying jobs in the private sector. Who knew?)

For the industries involved, and for their customers—everyone from meat-eaters to hospital patients—these shortages are a real challenge. But when employers have difficulty filling jobs at the wages they wish to pay, and as a result seek foreign-born workers, they shouldn't blame it on a fundamental unwillingness of Americans to work in those industries or professions. After all, in many of these fields—construction, nursing, the military, teaching, accounting—Americans still fill most positions. Immigrants tend to predominate only in the least attractive work imaginable—manual, back-breaking, seasonal, benefitless, farm labor.

Americans haven't grown too wealthy and snooty for the kind of work that gets your hands dirty, or for nursing, or for computer programming. Rather, the people who have the skills to enter those fields also have opportunities and skills to enter other fields. And so they have to decide whether the rewards—monetary and psychological—of the opportunity before them are worth it. It's not so much that Americans aren't willing to pick fruit and become computer programmers. Rather, they aren't willing to do those jobs for the prevailing wages and benefits. The Army may need foreign nationals to help fill its ranks, but the private security firms that pay six-figure salaries to ex-military types for security work don't. People without much in the way of skills or education probably prefer to take entry-level jobs at Wal-Mart rather than work at a meat-packing plant, even though it might pay a little less—it's less dangerous and disgusting.

The failure here isn't in the work ethic of Americans. Rather, it lies with the CEOs, business owners, university and hospital administrators, and government officials—and ultimately, with all of us who benefit from cheap labor—to offer the wages and benefits necessary to attract sufficient numbers of legal workers. There's a reason they call the labor market a market.

Olbermann On Bush's Credibility

Can't win for losing?

Olbermann:

President Bush makes no secret of his distaste for looking backward, for assessing past results.

But in our third story on the Countdown tonight… too bad.

Any meaningful assessment of the president's next step in Iraq must consider his steps and missteps so far.

So, let's look at the record:

Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said he was no nation-builder; nation-building was wrong for America.

Now, he says it is vital for America.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Today, U.S. troops observe Iraqi restrictions.

He told us about WMDs. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubing. Yellow-cake.

He has told us the war is necessary…Because Saddam was a threat; Because of 9/11; Osama bin Laden; al Qaeda; Because of terrorism in general; To liberate Iraq; To spread freedom; To spread democracy; To keep the oil out of the hands of terrorist-controlled states; Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.

In pushing for and prosecuting this war, he passed on chances to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden.

He sent in fewer troops than recommended. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, and "de-Baathified" the government. He short-changed Iraqi training.

He did not plan for widespread looting, nor the explosion of sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment.

Gave jobs to foreign contractors, not the Iraqis.

Staffed U-S positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.

We learned that "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".

He has said more troops were not necessary, and more troops are necessary, and that it's up to the generals, and removed some of the generals who said more troops would be necessary.

He told us of turning points: The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, a provisional government,the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, ¤elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam.

We would be greeted as liberators, with flowers.

As they stood up–we would stand down, we would stay the course, we were never 'stay the course',

The enemy was al Qaeda, was foreigners, terrorists, Baathists.

The war would pay for itself, it would cost 1-point-7 billion dollars, 100 billion, 400 billion, half a trillion dollars.

And after all of that, today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.

One More Chance for Maliki

John Marshall at TPM

But the logic of the 'surge' is that we're also cracking down on Maliki. We're giving him one more chance to get it right. And if they won't do their part, we're outta there. Or in other words, we pull up stakes without acheiving victory.

Just *who* are we giving the second chance to, after all the failures? Maliki? Please. This has been a constant rhetorical technique with the administration. Describe yourself, but replace your enemy's name with yours. This is Bush's last chance to punt his catastrophe into the next presidency.

Of course, we might also mention the point that the incomparable John Burns made on Anderson Cooper's show last night: that it's silly to really believe that Maliki is going to try to crush the Mahdi Army when they a) give him the votes to remain Prime Minister and b), more importantly, those are the fighters Maliki is planning on using the Civil War really gets cracking. As Burns put it, they're Maliki's Plan B.

Maliki is not failing. He knows who's gonna be left after the US eventually pulls out: the militias. The militias don't have the option to pull out any more than he does. They're in this for the long term, unlike some meddling, ineffectual superpower. Maliki's gonna placate Bush, who's only a bloviator at best and pay attention to the guys who've got the gun to his head: the militias.

Would anyone do any different in his (impossible) position?

Jesus Mending the Flag

Gotta love how we're blending Christianism with militarism. (Who would Jesus shoot?)

"If My People" by Jack E. Dawson

The guy pulls out all the stops. In a show of utmost professionalism, he even manages to include references to abortion.

Did he just forget to mention tax cuts, eliminating Social Security and abolishing gay marriage.

There's always next time.

Social Security and Ejection Seats

Many conservatives are highly in favor of eliminating (privitizing, same thing) Social Security.

I wonder if they also advocate the elimination of ejection seats in fighter jets?

The two share many characteristics, among them:

• Both Social Security (SS) and Ejection Seats (ES) are very expensive to build, install and maintain.
• In both cases, neither may actually be helpful in every emergency. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

So if both are big, bulky and difficult to maintain, why have them?

I think that they share one more thing in common: they provide a psychological safety net that encourages people/pilots to take on more risks that they might otherwise.

Sure, ok, SS may encourage some non-so-bright individuals to gamble all their money in keno and rely on SS to provide for their retirement. Likewise, we have many documented cases of not-so-bright military pilots relying on their safety equipment as a way out while showing off hazardous stunts to their buddies. In both cases we have many examples of the hazards of relying on safety equipment to overpower stupidity.

For the vast majority, however, SS provides a psychological safety net that encourages people to invest and spent money now instead of socking it away in a mattress. Our banking system serves a similar purpose. Money stuffed in a mattress is money "lost" from a macro-economic view. Money stored in a bank account can be "borrowed" by the bank and lent to others to put the money "to work" instead.

In both cases, time and energy that people would otherwise be put to trying to store their hard-earned money in the safest manner possible ( or stitching together home-made parachutes in the fighter pilot case) can instead be put to spending, investing and starting new businesses.

Social Security and the banking system both rely on a precept of trust. People's trust that our stable government will ward over their banking accounts and retirement funds allows people to relax money that would otherwise be buried in pickle jars in their back yards. (The fanatical savings rate of Japan is a prime example of an economy stalled by excess personal stashing for retirement.)

Likewise, the fighter pilot knows that he is being sent on dangerous, even deadly assignments, but his government shows good faith in protecting his well-being by providing a means of escape as well as a promise to make every effort to retrieve him.

It might be cheaper in the short run to leave pilots to die. After all, a pilot may be expensive, but wouldn't a lack of promised rescue make him more likely to better shepherd an even more expensive fighter jet?

Yes it would. But he would also not exhibit the aggresiveness that might lose a battle. Battles are almost always more costly to lose than are airplanes.

How to Lie with Numbers: The Housing Rebound

From The Sunday Times via The Big Picture

If a contract to buy a home, signed in November, is canceled in December, the Census Bureau does not subtract the failed transaction from the number of sales, or add the house back to its inventory total.

Even God Uses Sub-Machine Guns

God may be omnipotent, but he still likes to arm his homies.
Courtesy NeatORama

The Vatican City is guarded by the smallest and oldest regular army in the world, the Swiss Guard [wiki]. It was originally made up of Swiss mercenaries in 1506, now the army (also personal bodyguards of the Pope) number 100, all of which are Catholic unmarried male Swiss citizens. The Swiss Guard’s Renaissance-style uniform was commonly attributed as to have been designed by Michelangelo - this was actually incorrect: the large "skirt" pants were a common style during the Renaissance. Only their uniforms seem antiquated: most of the Swiss Guards carry pistols and submachine-guns.

$40 per day orgasms

Any time we turn on the TV, there are two programs that are always available: Law & Odor (or any of its hundreds of variants, CSI, etc.) and Rachel Ray.

Neither of us can quite figure out how Ray is able to generate more than 24 hours of footage per day (perhaps she's computer generated?) but somehow she manages to always get one eye-roll/MMMmmmmm out of her piehole before either of us can dive onto the remote control to change to another channel... any channel. Home Shopping network at least changes hosts every 16 hours or so.

So I guess it shouldn't be suprising that we're not the only ones to notice Ray's perpetual eye-rolls. They just did it better than I thought to.

$40 per day orgasms

Faith vs Hope

Faith is Hope in a nicer outfit.
-- me

The Right-Wing Ethic of Personal Responsibility

Everyone on the political pundit circuit is ringing their hands on the "best way" to "solve" the Iraq quagmire.


"Send more troops", "surge", "don't send more troops", "make the Iraqui's take responsibility for their country... they're too dependent and it's their fault anyway."


The question that few people seem to be asking (at this point, anyway) is who exactly is responsible for this mess? What happened to the trumpeted Neocon ethic of Personal Resonsibility? You know, the Personal Responsiblity that was to wrest control of American's retirement funds from the Social Security Administration and allow American's to invest their savings in the stock market in the name of increased gains, bigger wealth, etc.

Curiously, Personal Responsibility doesn't get much air time these days. Mainly because responsibility for this mess can be quickly (and accurately, I might add) be resolved down to a small group of people, with one guy notably "in charge", i.e. Responsible: George W. Bush.

Why is no one asking Mr. Bush why the Iraq excusion has failed so miserably? Why is no one asking him to close down this epic adventure? Oh, wait. Guess the 2006 mid-term "thumping" did exactly that.

But before we get too excited about bringing justice to those responsible, perhaps we should investigate just who put this yo-yo in power to begin with... twice. You know who you are.

Maybe *that's* why no one likes to ask who is responsible.