A little game

Please match the following items (1 from column B and one from column A.)  The result will describe my day thus far.

ANSWER:  A-B; C-D.

Buh-bye Facebook

It's been six months since I parted with Facebook.  I still have a profile there, and I can still access messages through my Messenger app, but I don't read anything except messages, and I don't post anything.

  Except for when I'm thinking about the cute pictures of babies I'm missing and the invitation to someone's Turducken party I don't have yet, I don't miss it.

A forum poster from way back in the 80s, at graduate school (my school being on the Internet before most) , I still find it a little strange that I hate Facebook so much.  In graduate school, I met all my friends online through "forums", or what we called "conferences."  If you wanted to read what was new in the conference, you signed on and scrolled down a list of topics and there was some kind of symbol or alert that let you know which topics had been added to.  If you wanted to read that topic, you opened it and could read all the posts on that topic.  Then you had a choice with each post you read:  Answer (or something like that); Pass; and Forget.  I thought the Forget command was essential to the whole deal.  If you "Forgot" something you would never see it again unless you actively did something to "un" forget it.  (Kind of like the "hide" prompt oon Facebook).

Years later I began participating in the Amazon Reviewers forum and met some incredibly good friends there.

So why do I hate Facebook so much?  Let me count the ways.

Crazy Bernie!

Everytime I hear someone call Bernie Sanders "Crazy Bernie" I remember those '70s and '80s appliance commercials where the owner or local manager is admitting to being certifiable because of the sales he's offering.  "Everyone says to me 'That's CRAZY!'  But that's what I am, so that's what I'm doing!"

I guess it fits pretty well.  Picture a warehouse with boxes labelled, "Tuition", "Health Care", "Humongous unemployment benefits", "Vacations", "Big Paychecks for Inexperienced Workers", etc.  There's Bernie standing in front!  "They say I'm CRAZY to do this!  Well, I AM!  That's why I'm giving this all up for FREE!  Be sure to vote for Crazy Bernie to get free tuition!"

Of course, in the case of Crazy Joe's or Crazy George's appliances, the producers of the commercial (and most people who watched it) knew that nothing George or Joe was giving up was going to get into the hands of consumers free or even "at wholesale", or without someone either making a profit or eating the cost and passing on to consumers later.  Bernie's followers seem to really believe that their free stuff will really be free.  They won't see--at least until tax time; and maybe not even then if they're not paying attention, that somehow or another, they will pay.  If not with income taxes, with increased taxes elsewhere.  The idea that Bill Gates and Billary (who love to remind us that taxes should be for THEM, the ROYALTY, and not for the LITTLE PEOPLE) are going to pay for it all is nonsense.  (And why should they anyway?  And if they want to why don't they just send you a check for your tuition so they don't take my money?)

In Bernie's case the only promise he will be able to keep if he gets his way is illustrated in a popular twitter meme these days:  You'll get 52 weeks of free vacation, when your employer is bankrupted after paying for all your other "free stuff".

Capitalism

I'm not very good at explaining what capitalism is, much to my own chagrin.  I've learned about it by reading Bastiat and Smith and listening to podcasts by Tom Woods and the like, but I'm not a teacher by nature so aside from asking others to go to the same sources, all I can do is start a list of all the things that I thought were capitalism, that weren't.  So without further ado....

WHAT CAPITALISM IS NOT

Capitalism is not "Too big to fail."

Capitalism is NOT lobbyists, or politicians, for that matter.

Capitalism is not tarriffs (whether they're leveyed by Tokyo or Washington, Berlin or Beijing)

Capitalism does not take away from other people when a person benefits from it...

...in fact, if both traders do not believe they've benefited from a transaction, that transaction by definition is not a capitalist one.

Capitalism is not force.

Capitalism is not slavery.

Capitalism only works when each party participating is doing it of their own free will (which is why in most societies it's difficult to keep.  Human nature often leads us to forcing others to do what we want.  That's democracy, not capitalism.  You can have capitalism in a democracy; it's just hard.)  

The Story of a Campaign

Part 1:  The Debate

Mr. Jones:  I will give you more free stuff!  All free stuff for all!
President Miller:  But I will continue cutting your taxes so you won't have to pay for stuff!
Debate attendee:  Well, what do you think?
Another debate attendee:  Well I like President Miller--but we could sure use some free stuff!

Signs:  "Elect Jones!"  "More free stuff NOW!"  "I deserve FREE STUFF!"  "Re-elect Miller!"  "Balance the budget!  Re-elect Miller!"

Part Two:  The Pundits 

Jimmy Falon: So hey, what about this Jones guy?  He's got a lot of charisma but can he beat Miller?
Political Pundit looking suspiciously like Lea Michelle: Well, you know, he's got a powerful message, "Free stuff, free stuff, free stuff!"  It's gonna be hard for Miller to find something the voters really want.  And I think that they want free stuff most of all; don't you, Jimmy?

Part 3a:  January 21, if  one guy wins:

"I know I promised you free stuff, but when I came here and saw all the damage the Miller adminhistration had done, I realized that we just couldn't do it."
Part 3b:  If the other guy wins:

"Yes, I did promise to reduce the debt, but none of us anticipated the Ben and Jerry collapse...what a tragedy for our fellow citizens in Vermont.  And of course we never could have predicted the big snowstorm at Christmas.  I thik it's clear, we need to give away more FREE STUFF!!!!!!"

Who went and made Kelly an conservative-libertarian-anarchocurious goofball?

The list of people I have listened to, read, watched in action and spoken to, who I consider my "mentors" along my political (and apolitical) journey, includes but is not limited to the list you will find if you click "more" below.

 Since my way of thinking emphasizes liberty, personal responsibility, the lethal properties of welfare, problems of democracy, lies of Communism, dangers of the State, and the non-aggression principle, I've indicated which of these topics each "mentor" has led me in.  They are not necessarily in alphabetical or influential order.  I have not included any of the friends, writers, and professors who led me to the psychosis of Marxism earlier,  before I was freed from the chains of his philosophy;  but I might tackle that in a later post.

Slaughterhouse Not 135, 000

Since I've been obsessed about World War II, oh, since about 10th grade, one of the stories that fascinated me was Dresden.  Dresden, for the uninitiated, used to be thought of as the worst incident in terms of civilian fatalities  in the European theatre; possibly the war.  I've used Dresden as an example in discussions (and arguments) to suggest that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable to it, not highly exceeding it.

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Dresden in 1945 was an old city, a beautiful city with lovely architecture, home at the time to about 600,000 souls.  (350,000 was the official population at the time but there were many refugees fleeing the Red Armywhichwas coming towards them from the East).  There also were some Anglophone (US, British, Canadian) prisoners of war in the city where they'd been assigned work projects.  One of them was author Kurt Vonnegut Jr,, who later incorporated his experiences as a POW and of the firestorm in his novel, Slaughterhouse V.   Dresden had avoided bombardment, until  Allied planes approached on 2/13/1945.

The idea of "strategic bombing"---aiming for infrastructure, not just enemy targets, despite the inevitable increase in civilian casualties; and of tight formations to ensure heavy damage of specific targets, as well as better ability of all in formation to cover one another's back--played a large role in what happened in Dresden.  The goal of strategic bombing was manifold, and included demoralizing the population.  Killing loads of them, of course, is a good way to demoralize.  It's definitely a tragic story,  and whatever thenumber of  casualties, serves as a sickening reminder of who suffers the most during war.

The  figure has been rounded down to 22,000 to 25,000.  They believe the wrong number was promoted, and perhaps even created, by the Nazis and later the Communist Party of the Democratic German Republic (East Germany, where Dresden had the misfortune to land after the war), both of whom got considerable secondary gains from doing so....the Nazis in drumming up sympathy among citizens of Allied Countries; the Reds in pointing out, "The Russians never did anything like that.  The Americans and British did that.  So you never want to go back to their way of life...right?"After Mauerfall (literally, "wall fall", the name Germans give to the time the East Germans en masse began to destroiy the Berlin Wall), those hanging onto the inflated numbers for political gain lost their jobs and either melted in the background of the newly reunified Germany, or figured out the way the wind was blowing soon enough to develop an atrocious allergy to Communism.

The "new" figures (actually, the podcast indicates the lower ones have been accepted by most since the late 1990s) put Dresden more in league with London and Hamburg in numbers of fatalities and, if deaths due to radiation sickness in the weeks following August of 1945, quite a bit under those of Hiroshima (69,000) and about equal to Nagasaki (25,000).

Maybe that's a good thing.  Dresden suffered immensely, but many other cities suffered just as greatly during the war.  I believe the European war in WWII was a just war; quite unsure about the war between the US and Japan.  Going over the plight of these cities before they were rebuilt is sobering and helps me remember that we need to have a high threshold of what we call "evil" and a call-out for a war because the inevitable civilian suffering in every city affected will call out to us across the centuries for what we do.   .

What Free Trade Is, and Isn't. Why apples are sometimes better than tacos, why I miss Bad Quaker, and why software CEOs earn more than the average union member

Bad Quaker, who unfortunately has had, due to health reasons, to end his own informative libertarian podcast,  used to give the absolute best analogy of what Capitalism is.

The next time someone complains that we need more stuff written inSpanish around here....

I'm a social worker, not necessarily because I ever aspired to be one; that's just the way things worked out and the piece of paper the State makes me carry around in order to get paid for the work I do.  But it is the cause of much consternation on my part.  Lately, that consternation comes in two flavors:  my frustration with  social workers who understand economics and natural rights so poorly that they think spending other people's money on third parties solves the third parties' problems; and the stupidity inherent in certain politically correct myths propogated by social workers.

Such as the desire for people to have Michigan carpeted with copies of everything written in English, in Spanish, to help the invisible horde of Mexican and Guatemalen immigrants deplaning at Metro and coming over the Detroit-Windsor bridge and tunnel.

Why I'm Avoiding Writing About the Americans

I really did want to catch up with this season and review each episode of "The Americans."  I also would like to write that parallel show I would call "The Russians" and maybe a reunion show for 5 years from now called, "The Americans and Russians...in Hawaii!"

But there's a growing allergy I have to the show, which became evident last year when it became clear that Jared killed his family, and the Jennings' handlers wanted their daughter Paige to be the next Jared.

And as the time period in which the show takes place reflects more and more of my own Cold War memories, I'm disappointed by the moral relativism embodied by the show.

The Americans: At Last!

Sorry for my delay in reviewing the latest "The Americans" season


First, a review of the major premises of the series:

Former Mickey Mouse Club-ette and "Felicity" star Keri Russell, and Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, play 2 KGB agents from the Soviet Union pretending to be a plain ol' American mom and dad with nary a Russian (or Welsh) accent between them---named Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings.  They have 2 children who never have been outside the US, Paige and Henry.  Paige and Henry are clueless about their parents' origin, which Elizabeth and Phillips hide pretty well despite giving their children horrible names


Elizabeth and Phillip have a neighbor....depending on whether the neighbor got the house after his divorce; I haven't been able to determine that yet.  He is a (wait for it......) FBI agent.  Stan.  And no, neither Stan nor the Jennings' children have figured it out yet that Elizabeth and Phillip are from the Cheka.  On Stan's part that isn't too surprising.

  Phillip and Stan...

Fun with E-mail

Politician computer errors, masquerading as stupid politician tricks, are in the news again as Hillary Clinton tells the State Department, (to paraphrase) "Oh snap! I forgot to use an official government e-mail account and now, well, I'll just have to print 'em out for ya.  After my staff reviews them, of course."

Christopher, Cross

No one's going to get that pun unless they're around my age.

Sorry.

So Chris Cuomo was on TV the other night arguing with the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.  The conversation purportedly was about gay marriage, about which I'm against both of them (I don't care who gets married to whom, but I don't think making laws about marriage is a good idea, and would personally ignore all existing ones, were I to ever get married).

But the "honorable" justice, who doesn't get the "stay out of the bedroom thing" made a statement:  "Our rights come from God!"

Mr. Cuomo protested.  "That's not the constitution!  That's just your faith! It might be your faith AND my faith, but it still didn't give us our rights. Our rights come from MAN."

If Cuomo is using the word "man" as "humanity; the human family; mankind"....ehhhhh, I might continue to drink a beer with him in the bar where we started that conversation.  But I'd worry about his understanding of law, the history of law, and philosophy.

Now first, here are some caveats before we continue.

I've read the constitution, and I've never been a fan.  The US Declaration of Independence rocks, and reading the ideas of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and even those who influenced them (John Locke, Cato, etc) is interesting to say the least.  But the US constitution is imperfect.  It's an instrument that, under its designed judicial system, allowed the Fugitive Slave Act to continue;  it refers to African Americans as "3/5 of a white person" in terms of voting (some say to give them some access to the polls; others say that these people surely voted the same way their master's did, out of fear of repercussion; so any ability of this minority to adress grievances was cut off, at least as far as the writers knew); and the "checks and balances" it alludes to haven't work since George Washington gave his first executive order.  The amendments serve to correct some of these problems....sometimes.

And the Bill of Rights...well, I guess I have a love/hate relationship.

As a document that shows the founders ACKNOWLEDGED our natural rights, it's great. They were definitely talking about natural rights, using some natural-rights-ese, if you would.  The lingo of Locke, Rousseau (no not the part about letting kids live wild and free in the streets),  Paine, and others;  things like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", "natural rights (of course)",

But the Bill of Rights isn't there to GIVE us ANY rights.

Among philosophers, and politicians, you can argue the morality or even the existence of "natural rights."  But whatever your view of them, if you believe they are something that other human beings can "give" to us...or even "allow us to have"....you've missed the whole point.  

Moi, je suis Charlie

Watching clips from the news in Paris regarding the CharlieHebdo terrorist attack.  It's sad in a way how such heinous attacks bring out the best in people.  John Kerry, the tea drinker extraordinaire (and with his pinky out!) just said something on Fox (maybe all the channels) about how terrorism can never kill humour and free speech.

All the same, after years of defending France to people who thought they were all wimps, I love seeing Francois Hollande on TV calling terrorism terrorism (and a spade a spade)

I'd go into a diatribe about how retarded wahabists are pretty warped to believe that someone satirizing them or their religion belongs to them and that they have to control their thoughts. But I'm too nauseated right now.  Wonder what Davi Barker is thinking .

1914 & All That

Happy holidays, and let me apologize here for my absence (in case anyone is actually reading....is that crickets I hear?).  I've been spending 2014 learning a lot about 1914, military history buff that I am.  I've been watching things on the History Channel, listening to podcasts, looking at maps....sort of how I followed the 150th anniversary of the US Civil War for a minute, until it became exceedingly dull.  Now the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's death is approaching and I'm all, zzzzzzz...I'm sure it'll be interesting again in April.

But the centennial of the Great War is completely fresh, as of July anyway.

The most ridiculous sign within 5 miles of me

Join me on the other side of "more" for  the discussion.

The conversation I wish I could have with certain people I work with

In Michigan,  two pieces of paperwork have to be completed before involuntary psychiatric hospitalization can be considered:  one is a petition, which any concerned person can complete if they have reason to believe the future patient has a mental illness and/or is a danger to himself or others.  The second is called a "certification", which can be completed by any physician or PhD level psychologist.

Holy Show Trial, Batman!

OK, after a few weeks hiatus, your Cold War anti communist "McCarthy was right dammit!", Soviet-kitsch-o-phile blogger is back to "The Americans."

Actually, I've seen all the episodes, but episodes 11 and 12 were kinda boring.  Except for the fact that Nina (remember her?  She's the KGB agent the FBI guy who lives next door to the KGB spies masquerading as The Donna Reed Show,  fell in love with, and whose activities and pillow talk Nina is faithfully sharing with the Residentura at the Russian embassy) is in a bit of a pickle.

Implosion of the State Through Education Only?

One of the things that has been hard for me to grasp as a recovering statist is the notion that "you can't use the state's methods to topple the state."  I agree with it wholeheartedly, because I'm not into violence, and I don't think that libertarians getting into power, then enacting their own laws, would create anything better than what we have now.

But at the same time, as a behavioral scientist, I know that when most people come accross new information, particularly if it goes against what they believe, it's unlikely they'll absorb it in any helpful way.  That is my instinct anyway, and my observations in my own half-century one rat study.

Something clicked for me yesterday as I pondered my Christian beliefs, my (limited) knowledge of history, and the history in particular of liberty.  And now I'm thinking, maybe their have been times in the past when the State was toppled, or at least challenged, by those who wanted to educate their fellows that it was simply an imaginary construct that they could shrug off whenever they were ready.

"The Americans" Update: "Martial Eagle."

More about the show that makes you wonder, "So is there a TV show in Russia about CIA spies with perfect Russian accents living in Moscow called, 'The Russians'?"

WARNING:  Spoilers-a-plenty ahead.