I don’t like the direction our country is taking. I see us heading down the path towards a type of soft socialism. It seems to me that society is ready to let the government take care of them; they seem to almost welcome it. I would be against it even if I thought it could work but to me that’s the great irony of it. I don’t think it will or can. It’s just going to lead to a lot of misery before the country comes to its senses and we try dig ourselves out of the hole we dug.
You know the old saying that you don’t have a heart if your not a liberal when your young and you don’t have a brain if you not a conservative when your old? Well actually it can’t be that old of a saying because it’s using the modern definition of liberal and conservative. I must have been a heartless youth because I’ve never been a liberal, in the modern sense at least. I have gotten more conservative over the years though, but always with a strain of libertarianism. At first I was drawn to libertarianism because of the ideology of it. I guess I was reading too much Heinlein, but over the years the conservatism reasserted itself and I came to see the value of tradition and certain institutions in our culture that deserved more protection from the government than strict libertarianism allowed. Over the last couple of years though I have begun to see that whatever values that those traditions and institutions may have the government can not protect them. That the cost involved in making government powerful enough to preserve them is a cost that is to high too bear.
Take drugs as an example. Drug abuse whether it is alcohol, methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, whatever places a huge burden on family. Family is one of those bedrock institutions in our civilization that I feel is worth protecting, there fore it is a fair trade to sacrifice some of my natural rights to ensure that protection for families. I’ll give up my right to smoke or inject anything I would like except for the traditionally approved drug, alcohol, so that the institution of family can be preserved from the detrimental affects of drug abuse. The problem is that that’s not the only right I am giving up anymore. I could read out a laundry list of rights that you and I’ve given up to the war on drugs, but for the sake of brevity I’ll bring up the one most sacred right we have, our right to life. I can’t look it up at the moment so I’ll have to water down this statement somewhat but I’m nearly as likely to be killed by police officers exercising a no-knock warrant on the wrong house than from a home invasion. I would say that that holds true in all but the most violent parts of the country. The irony is that the safer your community the more you have to fear that the gang shooting your dog and busting down your front door in the middle of the night with guns at the ready will be those that have sworn to serve and protect you. The tragedy is that we are losing war on drugs. No matter how many rights we surrender it’s a problem that government has proven it can’t fix. We have only to look into our own past to our experience with alcohol prohibition to see that it doesn’t work. Prohibition just compounds the problem funneling huge amounts of money to the most unsavory organizations imaginable, which just leads to ever escalating war that we continue to lose.
I watched Bill Maher’s Religulous tonight. Thanks Jay. I’m not sure why. I figured it would be a steaming pile of narcissistic slop and it was, but it wasn’t quite as odoriferous as I expected and despite the way it may seem after reading these words I did enjoy it. I actually found myself chuckling here or there, even laughing out loud on the bits about Scientology, Mormons, and Islam. It is a strange fact though there does seem to be a direct proportion between the time spent lampooning a particular religion and the tendency of that religion to strike back either legally or physically. Basically Maher travels around the world speaking with a few experts and religious scholars, but mostly everyday men and women and a handful of crackpots. He shows himself to be a master at putting people at ease as he manages to poke fun of their most closely held beliefs. A technique he is especially skillful of is coaxing a deer in the headlight look from his subjects. He is honest, at least in the conduct of the interviews. He is straight up with everyone he encounters with just what he believes and doesn’t try any kind of trickery to elicit certain responses. At least from what we see in the doc. To be cynical though, and I can’t help it when Bill Maher is the subject, that is the magic of editing. We only see what he wants us to see and in the order that he wants us to see it. A short little aside about the editing, there is no real structure I could discern to the doc. It just seems to jump around from topic to topic. There was no thread linking it all together, just a beginning, bunch of facts, more facts, and an ending. He should have let my buddy Stephen Lackey edit it. He can find some kind of narrative in anything. Still though he was more fair than I expected him to be and he was always polite and courteous so I give him credit for that.
The biggest curse of the thing is that it’s just the same old arguments; it doesn’t add anything new to the dialog. He basically just goes out and finds some people that he knows will do or say something silly if they have a camera on them long enough and a handful of people that agree with him. He’s preaching to the choir, and while I’m sure the choir will find it amusing he’s getting no closer to the goal he professes in the wind up, which is to get people to drop religion as an old outdated institution that mankind can’t afford to waste effort on any more.
Maher comes across as a straight out atheist, nothing wrong with that, I’m an atheist. But at the same time he is always referencing his doubt as well. He talks about his doubt, but at the same time he is certain that religion is at best a silly eccentricity and more likely a crutch that believers cling to keep from seeing the world as it really is. He brings up the old shibboleth that more blood has been shed in the name of religion than any other influence. After the twentieth century I’m not sure that really hold up any more or not, but granting that it’s true it still missing the point. Religions are institutions of man, kind of an obvious point for an atheist I would think. Mankind has a pretty good track record for finding reasons to kill, maim and enslave with or without religion. For every war fought in the name of God, for every instance of a Catholic priest buggering alter boys you have to weigh the good that religion has brought to the world. It’s an inescapable fact that Western Civilization has been the most liberating force in history and along with some ideas that the Greeks came up with a long time ago the pillars of that civilization are the Judeo-Christian creed. Not to mention the fact that most people find some kind of religion comforting, something I don’t understand but can’t deny.
Just as obvious as it is to me that there is no God it is obvious to many more that God exists. People I respect, love and I know are a lot smarter than me believe in God. I don’t understand it, but I’m not ready to call them all fools. Maher is though. Maher seems to believe that getting rid of religion would rid the world of all of the corruption and evil that can be laid at its feet, but the corruption and evil doesn’t come from religion it comes from man. As an atheist where else could I believe it comes from? Without it man would find some other avenue to express it. He claims that doubt is the only hope for the world, he prescribes doubt for everyone else but he expresses none himself. His closing argument is that mankind’s thirst for religion will lead to our destruction. I guess I’m just not as pessimistic as Maher. I admit I find myself extremely pessimistic about the coming years, but if you plot the welfare of man across our history the trend-line is unmistakably on an upward trend, there are bumps and dips but over the millennia it is up, up and up to such and extent that if the rest of our lives and our children’s lives were spent in pure misery they would still only represent a small dip in the total history of man.
On January 28, 2009 · Comments Off
New review of Breakfast at Tiffanys is up at Cinegeek.
On January 28, 2009 · Comments Off
 Woodrow Wilson - H.R. Brand As dire as things look now there was a time not a hundred years ago when they were worse. During the First World War this country was basically a fascist state. The government was indirectly controlling a huge portion of our economy and tens of thousands of people were imprisoned for speaking out against the government. For the last eight years I had to listen to people yelp about there speech being suppressed, but they never seemed to have a problem finding a soapbox to stand on. During Wilson’s presidency people were actually imprisoned for speaking there mind.
And what was Wilson? A Republican? A man of the right? Nope he was a Democrat, but more than that he was a progressive. Remember when Hillary complained about being called a liberal that she preferred the term progressive? Well it was a progressive presidency that ended up imprisoning tens of thousands of his critics. People who a few short years before were his supporters. In my mind there were many other reasons to despise Wilson but that one sticks in your mind.
I got the book for Christmas, it wasn’t a joke, I asked for it. Dad was a little indignant that I had asked for a biography of Democrat but there is a very good reason. The most curious thing about the Wilson presidency is that after such a swing to the dark side, the country swung back. I figured I need to study the dark before I could figure out how we came back to the light.
The book is part of a series The American Presidents they are all short volumes edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I absorbed it in one sitting and enjoyed it so much I’m thinking about trying to pick up the others in the series. It would be a nice way to fill in the many gaps in my knowledge of American history without that big an investment of time and money.
As you would expect in a series like this the book is not very critical, but it doesn’t paint Wilson as a saint either like some of the other material I’ve been reading about him. Reading of his stroke and death left me with mixed emotions about the man. In a way there was much to admire and his rhetoric could be stirring but the policies he enacted in office and what they inspired a decade later I find despicable.
Big R Republican or little L libertarian, I’m not sure what to call myself anymore. Maybe “dupe” is the best term. One thing I have no doubt about though is I’m a capitalist through and through. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system out there hands down. Sure it’s not perfect but it’s closer to perfection than any other method of arranging our affairs. That’s one thing that makes these times so frustrating for me. Everywhere I turn capitalism is being attacked and those that should be championing it are hanging their heads and acting like whipped dogs. The harsh truth is that those supposed champions never really believed it. They just used it as path to power so when they are challenged they just collapse and cringe in the corner and take whatever scraps they are offered.
Take the current economic situation we are in. What’s the root cause? Capitalism? Hell no! While there are of course a bunch of reasons we are in the situation that we are in but the root of it is that a bunch of goody to shoes in Washington thought it would be a good idea if more people owned their own homes. The primary goody too shoes, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Who can argue with that? Sounds like a laudable goal. Now all of what follows is a gross simplification but it’s what happened in a nutshell. A bill was passed that made banks along with the quasi governmental organizations Freddie Mac and Freddie Mae ease up on the mortgage requirements to allow more people to purchase their own home. Hell I’m even a recipient of part of that largess. The reduced down payment that I had to put down on my own mortgage was paid for by some grant from the state, all I had to do was take a class about budgeting, that I bet was funded by the Federal government. I’ve made all of my payments but a lot of people didn’t. When I bought my house, this was in the early ‘00s, the bank approved me for double of what I spent. I did the math. I knew there was no way in hell that I could afford the payments if I spent what they would have gladly given me. A lot of people didn’t. At the time my credit was pretty good, I just didn’t have enough cash to make a big down payment. So my mortgage got bundled with a bunch of other mortgages. Some better some not so good, with new home buyers with little equity it’s a crap shot. These bundles helped spread the risk or that was the idea. You didn’t even have to buy a whole bundle you could buy bits of one bundle and bits of another bundle, again it helped to spread the risk. This went on for years, with the banks getting more and more aggressive with the loans, meaning riskier and riskier, because they could bundle them up and somebody would buy them, not me or you but other banks and financial institutions. Now don’t forget where this all started. Congress pressured the banks into making these loans and changed the rules to make it possible and profitable for them to do it. Who were the two most responsible in Congress for pushing these changes? Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the chairs of the appropriate committees.
Fast forward to last year, people are defaulting on their mortgages, lots of people. Bundling, the mechanism meant to spread the risk has in fact spread the rot. Now all of those bundles are contaminated, remember the saying about apples in a barrel. Now this would not be the end of the world. Some mortgages would be foreclosed on, some people who were having problems would catch up. Those banks and financial institutions that owned the bundles would eventually take a hit, but the damage would be spread out and while it would be painful but like I said it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Except for something called Sarbanes-Oxley.
Let’s jump back several years, how far back I would have to look up and I don’t feel like it right now. There was a big accounting scandal, again I don’t remember the specifics. I assume it had something to do with companies fraudulently carrying worthless assets on the books, under the old rules the companies wouldn’t technically take a loss on those assets until they were sold. Some how this caused some type of kerfuffel which for this discussion is not pertinent. Anyway Sarbanes-Oxley was the solution. It required companies to mark assets to market, which meant that any assets that a company held had to periodically have their value adjusted to their market value. Now combine this with all of those banks and financial institutions that have invested in those bundles, which because they are contaminated by those bad mortgages, are now worthless. The bundling did such a good job of spreading the risk around that it’s impossible to untie the good mortgages from the bad. Now all of the banks and financial institutions have to mark down their assets, which means even if their cash flow is okay their books now look like hell. Our economy relies on money moving from institution to institution. Banks and other financial institutions loan money back and forth all the time, but now whose going to loan money to a organization that has a balance sheet that looks like shit?
Now given a little bit of time this might have all sorted itself out, banks would have failed, the ensuing credit crunch would have caused other business to go under, jobs would be lost, but that’s the nature of capitalism. Creative destruction is a important part of the capitalistic system. Out of the ashes of the fallen firms would have come newer stronger institutions, the unemployed would find new jobs often jobs that would take better advantage of their skills than the old jobs, some of the unemployed would start their own new businesses, most of those would fail but the surviving few would more than make up for those that didn’t. There would be individual tragedy and lives would be upturned but when everything sorted itself the economy would be stronger than it was before. That is if the market is left to itself. There is an institution though that can no longer leave anything to itself. Government.
The great meddler saw an opportunity to play the hero, it climbed it’s little step ladder and swung it’s swollen fat thigh over the back of it’s poor little white pony and waddled out to tilt windmills. Yes the government thought it could short circuit this process. There was no need for these troubled firms to have to go under and all those people lose their jobs. The government would pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the system to prop things up. There was considerable resistance to this but those two champions of the little guy , Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, added there voices to the fray and managed to arrange all of the chicken littles so that the bill passed. There is plenty of culpability to go around here and Bush deserves a large portion of it, but Frank and Dodd are particularly conspicuous due to their actions in precipitating the whole boondoggle. No one saw the irony that the fools responsible for causing the mess were the same that ended up being trusted in fixing it. No instead they blamed capitalism. Anyway the bill promised over seven hundred billion dollars in aid. Three hundred billion to be spent immediately, or very soon at least, and the rest to be spent at a later date.
Now several months have past the first three hundred billion is gone. No one really knows what it got spent on and there is really no way to tell if it made any difference or not. A day doesn’t go by with out hearing about a different company going under or about five or ten thousand or more people losing their jobs. Doom was averted certainly but according to the government it was only postponed. Now they are asking for even more. They chant stimulus, stimulus, stimulus, but most of the spending will not even kick in for eighteen months, probably just as the economy is coming around on its own. Looks like Generation X, Y, and Z will get a life lesson on run away inflation and of course by then Barney Frank and Chris Dodd will have figured out someway to blame that on capitalism as well.
As I’m wrapping this up I just heard that the Great Rip-Off just passed. At least the whipped dogs had enough backbone to unanimously vote against it.
On January 7, 2009 · Comments Off
The sweet natured creek bottom gorillas of Nova Scotia are easily winded because they have lungs the size of a grape.
On January 6, 2009 · Comments Off
In the autumn of 1974 Gerald Frupinstock of Upper Dignigham consecutively swallowed an estimated seventy seven chocolate covered peanuts whole over a period of seventy two hours. When asked why it took so long Gerald responded. ” I didn’t know you were timing me!”
I’m kind of sick of best of worst of lists, but we are getting one together for the podcast Thursday. The funny thing is I’m interested in what Brian, Alan and Stephen come up with. So maybe it’s not the lists it’s the people making the lists.
Anyway I’ve been going through all of the 2008 movies I’ve seen over the last year. I know I’m leaving stuff out but I came up with a list of thirty eight movies. Twenty nine of them actually in the theater. I don’t know if that’s a lot or not. I know I’ve probably watched at least that many non 2008 movies at home. Hell I watched all twenty of those stinkers on that Burnt Rubber compilation I picked up after Christmas. Now that I think of it I may have watched that many bad kung fu movies. Okay now I’m starting to get depressed.
The weird thing is that while five favorite movies of the year will be easy to come up with. Coming up with the five worst is giving me a little bit of trouble. The problem is I actually did a decent job of avoiding stinkers this year which under any other circumstances would be a good thing but right now it’s going to force me to put some movies I didn’t think were that bad into the “worst” category. Anywy I’ve got until Thursday to figure it out.
Have you ever had a good friend write a novel? It’s mostly cool but there are some tiny flecks of suck here and there. First fleck of suck is that green bitch envy, but I squished her between my toes pretty quickly. The only real bit of suck that scared me was the fear that it sucked. Is my buddy of over twenty years expecting praise or is he expecting the truth from me. Luckily for me I didn’t have to find out. My buddy put into my hands a mean little beast of a story. A tribute to all of those goretastic exploitation films from the seventies. Not really my thing. I love pulp but my tastes tend to run towards morally challenged private dicks not hillbillies with separation anxiety. Anyway I was worrying over nothing. Besides a few misspellings or grammatical suggestions, very few with my command of spelling and grammar, there was nothing in there that I found worth complaining about.
“Nothing worth complaining about” talking about damning with faint praise. Not only could I find nothing to complain about I loved the thing. If it wasn’t written by my best friend I never would have touched it but I loved every greasey little minute of it.
Now that was all a couple of years ago. Now Stephen’s going to be making a movie of the book. Here’s the website. So I thought I would go back and read it again. So I went and bought the pdf from Lulu for $2.50. Would I love it as much the second time around. Would I still get the chill down my spine like the first time I read it. Yes I would and I did.
On January 6, 2009 · Comments Off
Any body that has read more than two or three SciFi or Fantasy novels has picked up and started reading a book in the middle of a series or trilogy. After all there have only been fourteen standalone SciFi novels published since 1957 and Fantasy is even worse. So if your picking a book at random you’ve only got a one in four chance of picking up the first book in a series. Well the other day at the The Great Escape I picked up volumes #298, #299, #301, #302, #303 and #304 of Pendleton’s Executioner series. Obviously I knew I was picking up in the middle of the series, but wouldn’t you know it that #298 is the third book of a trilogy embedded in the series.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t like it to much. I barged through 75% of it in one night and it took another two weeks to finish it off. I was expecting some rough and ready pulp style action, what I got was a bunch of people talking on cell phones and downloading dossiers, punctuated by an explosion or two. I’ll give the other five a chance, they are quick reads if you can stay focused, because I so want to like this series.
Why you ask. Because there are over three hundred of them, that’s why. I’m still not over the heartbreak of discovering Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books after reading George Will’s obituary of O’Brian. Not the best way to find out about an author.
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