As fat people go, I'm a pretty fortunate one. I've been married to the same guy for almost thirty years, I have a good job where I'm respected, and I'm blessed with good genes. I've never been one of those people who can't eat in a restaurant without someone coming up to them and saying, "You know, you really shouldn't eat that, dear."

That said, I don't think I've eaten a single morsel in the last forty-five years that I haven't obsessed about or put a value judgment on myself for eating. It isn't that I haven't tried to get over this dysfunctional relationship with my own body and learn to live in it, because I have. Goddess knows, I have. And now that I can be called legitimately fat, I look at photographs of myself as what I remember as a fat teenager, and think, "Girl, are you out of your fucking mind?" I look at that girl in a miniskirt and cute legs and I just want to shake her until I knock some sense into her.

What most of the weight scolds don't seem to realize is that fat people come in many different types. Sure, there are those who think nothing of eating an entire box of doughnuts, or have three McDonald's sausage, egg and cheese biscuits and four hash browns for breakfast. But there are also those of us who have oatmeal with dried cranberries, almonds and cinnamon, sweetened with stevia. There are fat people who LOVE brussels sprouts. I happen to be one of them. There are fat people who when faced with a menu at an outdoor cafe on a nice summer day will eat the Greek salad with the grilled chicken instead of the cheeseburger BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT TO EAT.

It's no mystery that Caucasian women in our society loathe their own bodies in a way we don't see in other cultures. No matter how thin a woman is, no matter how pretty, no matter what her body shape, you can rest assured that every year after Christmas, she'll be heating up some vile frozen 8-ounce food-emulating substance from a diet company for lunch and then trolling the office for chocolate by two-thirty. Sometimes I wonder what these women think about me -- someone who stubbornly refuses to go on another diet; someone still, after twenty-some-odd years of value judgments about food, learning how to know what it is I really want when I want to eat something.

It doesn't hurt that I'm blessed with good genes. My mother would still be alive today if she hadn't taken up smoking again after having lung cancer surgery TWENTY YEARS AGO (average five-year survival for lung cancer is only 15%). My father is eighty-seven and still kicking, having endured eight months of chemotherapy for lymphoma without breaking a sweat (though his knees are giving him trouble these days). Neither one of these people was a skinny Minnie.

We hear a lot about obesity these days, and no one seems to know what to do about it. New York City Mayor Bloomberg thinks curbing sales of soda will do it, except that I don't drink soda, other than a very occasional diet soda after largely kicking that habit a year ago. "Medical ethicist" Daniel Callahan now has an idea that gee whiz, no one has EVER tried before. [/snark] Callahan's idea is that if we just make fat people ashamed enough, they'll lose weight:

Daniel Callahan, a senior research scholar and president emeritus of The Hastings Center, put out a new paper this week calling for a renewed emphasis on social pressure against heavy people -- what some may call fat-shaming -- including public posters that would pose questions like this:

“If you are overweight or obese, are you pleased with the way that you look?”

Callahan outlined a strategy that applauds efforts to boost education, promote public health awareness of obesity and curb marketing of unhealthy foods to children. But, he added, those plans could do with a dose of shame if there’s any hope of repairing a nation where more than a third of adults and 17 percent of kids are obese.

“Safe and slow incrementalism that strives never to stigmatize obesity has not and cannot do the necessary work,” wrote Callahan in a Hastings Center Report from the nonprofit bioethics think tank.

Fat-shaming. Yeah, that's the ticket. Because fat kids who are teased by other kids aren't ashamed enough. Because fat adults who endure discrimination in the workplace, who have to ask for seat belt extenders on airplanes because they have hips wider than fourteen inches, who can't find well-made clothes that fit properly, who don't dare set foot in a gym because they don't want to be confronted by people who never had to worry about what they eat looking at them as if they were decomposing right in front of them need just a little more SHAME. Because if we can just make them hate themselves a little bit more, fat people will wake up and realize that they are fat.

Let me tell you something, Mr. Callahan: We know we're fat. Believe me, we know. This country is full of people who won't go to a gym, won't go to a movie, won't go out for a walk, order their groceries online -- because they don't want to deal with how people in this country treat fat people. Fat people have plenty of shame already, not because they want to, but because we live in a country in which every other form of bigotry is being conquered except this one.

I'll tell you something else, Mr. Callahan: We don't need "education" about obesity and about food. We know about food. We know all about food. We know about food because we can't just eat something, we have to think about it every single time we eat anything, every single fucking day: What can I eat for breakfast? What can I have when I start to fade out around 2:00 PM that will be satisfying and still tasty? Is it OK to put a little bit of wheat berry salad in with my greens or is that too much carbs. Do I dare go out to dinner with friends tonight after I had a sandwich for lunch instead of a salad? Let me see if there's a menu online so I can decide in advance what I can eat. I ate a cookie today. What a fat, terrible person I am. What about vacation? Can I go on vacation? What will I do about food? If I have a big breakfast can I still eat something if I'm hungry in the middle of the day or do I have to wait until dinner? Will they have grilled fish? I had bacon this morning AND butter on my toast so I can't have anything but fish and vegetables for dinner. Ooh, they have that cake I like. Can I have this? I'll hate myself if I have it. Oh my God, I had three pina coladas at the pool bar today. Nothing but dry toast for me tomorrow. Oh, this place is supposed to have really good onion rings. Can I get onion rings? No, they'll make me fat. Can we share an order? No, then we'll all get fat. But I ate the salad and I still want onion rings. Let me get a bag of chips instead. Shit. I ate the chips and I still want onion rings. Look, a frozen yogurt stand. Frozen yogurt is healthy, right? Am I allowed to have that? Shit. I shouldn't have had that yogurt. Now all I can have for dinner is a sliced tomato and a piece of cheese.

This is how we think, Dr. Callahan. What is in the previous paragraph is what goes through EVERY AMERICAN WOMAN'S HEAD EVERY SINGLE DAY. Not just the fat women, but all of us. Because in America, you're either fat, you used to be fat, or you are terrified of becoming fat.

So let's foster and nurture this climate, shall we? Let's not even LOOK at anything else that might be causing obesity...like endocrine disruptor chemicals in our foods and food packaging. Let's not talk about the stress of living in a country where if you don't work 80 hours a week you have to fear for your job -- and the effect that constant stress has on weight. Let's not talk about people like me who leave the house at 7 AM and get home at 7 PM, end up working at least part of the weekend and DON'T want to spend what little time they have after working, grocery shopping (oh, right -- we shouldn't buy food because we're fat), housework, paying the bills, doing the taxes, and taking the car into the shop, running on a treadmill or lifting heavy things in a room full of size zeroes.

In not even considering these other factors, and how they act in concert with other lifestyle factors, Callahan loses all credibility. What's pathetic is that there are people who will listen to him.

Labels: quackery, rant, weight

So here we are, in the aftermath of an election which saw the candidate backed by racists and closeted homophobes and slut-shamers defeated by the dark-skinned incumbent who backs gay marriage and immigration reform, with the Republicans wondering what they have to do in order to reclaim the Immunity Idol.

NYT:

¶ Now the Republicans find their divisions newly revealed in the raw. By exposing the party’s vulnerability to potent demographic shifts, the 2012 results have set the stage for a struggle between those determined to rebrand the Republicans in a softer light and those yearning instead for ideological purity.

But before acceptance comes denial. And the party’s first challenge, it seems in the immediate aftermath, is to find common ground simply in diagnosing the problem. Though some leaders argued that basic mathematics dictates that the party must find new ways to talk about issues like immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage, others attributed Republican losses to poor candidate choice, messaging missteps and President Obama’s superior political operation.

“We continually crank out moderate loser after moderate loser,” said Joshua S. Treviño, a speechwriter in George W. Bush’s administration who now works for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group. He said Mitt Romney was part of a “pattern” of Republican nominees, preceded by John McCain, Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush, who were rejected by voters because of “perceived inauthenticity.”

By contrast, Ralph Reed, the longtime Republican strategist and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said he would redouble efforts over the next four years to recruit women, Latinos and young people as grass-roots organizers.

“I certainly get the fact that your daddy’s Republican Party cannot win relying singularly on white voters and evangelicals alone — as critical as I believe those voters are to a majority coalition,” Mr. Reed said. “The good news for conservatives is there are many of those who have not always felt welcome in our ranks who share our values.”

Oh, really? And who, pray tell, are they? Those Latinos whom you continue to paint with a broad brush while insisting that you can trot out the Cuban-descended Marco Rubio and the Mexicans you've been demonizing for eight years will vote for them because they're Catholic? Young women who are just clamoring for mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds when the contraception to which you do not want them to have access fails? People who attend African-American churches who have heard you and your media flacks talk for the last four years about "food stamp president" and call this president "lazy" and wish he would "learn to be an American"? Which of these groups do you think is going to want to hear you couch your racism and your misogyny and your dream of returning to the world of Season 1 of Mad Men?

You want to know how to become a viable party again? Kick out the Galtians and the Krazy Kristians trying to work out their own childhood issues on the backs of sane Americans. You know who I'm talking about -- the billionaire CEOs in their 40,000 square foot houses who will cut jobs rather than absorb or pass on the fourteen cents on a pizza it would cost to provide health insurance. The radio "personalities" with the $400 million contracts who insist that wanting access to contraception as part of an overall health care plan makes you a slut and insist that the only thing black people want is food stamps. Fetophile congressmen who want abortion to be a crime for others but who press their own extramarital paramours to get abortions. Divorced legislators who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that marriage is sacred. Presidential nominees whose wives insist that shoving their religion in the face of people in other countries is exactly the same as putting your ass on the line in a minefield in Afthanistan.

Oh, wait. If you do that you won't have anyone left to buy your "I Got Mine And Fuck You" doctrine.

One thing that you develop when you have been the target of the white Christian male patriarchy's attempts to sustain power at all costs, is a pretty good horseshit detector. And you, Republican Party, are delusional if you think there's any way to put lipstick and a party dress on your hate-filled, social Darwinian ideology and make it palatable to the people you've been demonizing for two generations. It it looks like horseshit and it smells like horseshit, then it damn well IS horseshit. And we will call you on it with every attempt you make to call it otherwise. Because here in the reality-based community, you DON'T get to create your own reality.

Karl Rove discovered this on election night. The rest of you had better learn to deal with it. Because yeah, THAT's reality.

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, hypocrisy, It's a big club and you ain't in it, rant, Republican Confederate Party

Despite spending much of the last month looking at a glowing screen into the wee hours, I have been able to keep up with the Todd Akin fracas. Coming this late to the game, there's not a whole lot more I can add to what's already been said, except for one thing: Where is the woman in the equation of parsing the definition of rape? Where is the woman in the sanctity of human life definition?

When Akin made his now-infamous statement about "legitimate rape" over the weekend, he said "I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."

This was perhaps the most important part of Akin's words; far more important than the talk of "legitimate rape." We already know how right-wing men love to spend hours thinking about rape in an attempt to determine which rapes make it OK to have an abortion. My own personal favorite is this one from 2006, forever known as the "Sodomized Virgin Exception":

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

This is how the middle-aged white men (and it's disproportionately middle-aged white men) who hold the well-being of women in their hands via the state houses across the country and in Washington DC, think. This is how they spend their time, coming up with some perfect specimen of Virtuous Virginal Womanhood that whose life would be previous enough to make ending that of a blastocyst acceptable. This is how they spend their time, discussing with bogus doctors ways that the female body somehow magically shuts down when sperm from a rape is deposited in her. The most important thing to these men is to come up with a way to stigmatize and demonize not just the sluts and whores who dare to have sex and defy the rules these men have set down, but also women who become pregnant through no will of their own. It's so important to these men that women who would seek an abortion be branded as whores that they have invented the Magical Shut-Down Valve, just to assuage any pangs they might feel about forcing a woman to carry for nine months the product of the most traumatic experience of her life. Because for them, the woman is just an incubator and completely unworthy of their consideration, especially if they can invent some biological way that they can use to reassure themselves that "she really wanted it or her body wouldn't have let it happen."

Roe v. Wade was decided the year I graduated high school. Even when I was in college, the clinics that would later help to make women full-fledged recognized human beings in this country by giving them full control over their bodies had not yet fully materialized. Girls were still making bargains with God to please, please, please not let them be pregnant. Back in high school, girls who had gotten a little thick through the waist were still sent off to "stay with their sick grandma" for a while (sick grandmas being the All-Purpose Pretext of Choice in those days, including the one John List used to throw everyone off his trail after murdering his family in 1971), returning with their waistlines restored in just shy of a year. But even in those early post-Roe days, yes, there were always people standing outside of clinics, but you didn't hear men who held national political offices parsing out the intricacies of sexual assault. Perhaps they did in the porn houses of 42nd Street, but not in the halls of government.

And yet, here we are in 2012. We live in a country increasingly dominated by religious fanatics who are attempting to work out their own sick, twisted sexual issues and fantasies in the legal space of America. These man can't afford to give the woman in question any humanity; that is reserved for the rapist (who in their fantasies is probably themselves) and the "child" (which is what they no doubt believe vindicates their sick proclivities). To them, the woman is not at all human, but simply a vessel -- a vessel for something that they can regard as the only kind of life that's "pure" and a symbolic vessel into which they can pour their own hideous minds and self-loathing.

Labels: abortion, misogyny, rant, Republican id-driven two-year-olds, sick motherfuckers, womens rights

Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, has told his bosses to take this job and shove it -- on the op-ed page of the New York Times:

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

[snip]

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Now, I don't know how much Greg Smith has earned from the toxic environment at Goldman, but as an executive director, you have to believe it was a pretty penny -- probably enough to support himself and his family in comfort, if not quite the style to which they are acccustomed, for a good, long time; perhaps forever.

Lloyd Blankfein has been CEO at Goldman since May 31, 2006. Greg Smith was at Goldman through the financial collapse of 2008 -- and he stayed another three years. Even the most charitable view implies that he socked away enough money long after he had decided to do this that if he is blacklisted from Wall Street forever, he won't need the money.

So cry me a river, Mr. Smith. You had a chance to make a statement in 2008 when it became clear to everyone OUTSIDE of Wall Street what Blankfein was. And you stayed. I don't fault you for wanting to assure your family's future before throwing in the towel. But don't sit there now and tell me how moral you are for exposing Goldman when it's the very money and influence you gleaned from that system that gives you the clout to try to cleanse your soul in the Times. You may never work on Wall Street again, but you and your family will be living on the money made from that system. And no amount of op-eds will hide that fact.

UPDATE: Yeah. What Dan Gross said:

Labels: corporate assholes, rant, Wall Street

These days those oh-so-fragile Republican winkies are feeling a little flaccid in the wake of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Rush Limbaugh debacle and the awakening of American women to the Republican vision for them. So how better to get the blood pumping again to the Republican Terrible Swift Sword than a nice, bloody war?

I know that Americans have short memories. It's something in the national psyche on which Republicans rely. But it's difficult to believe that even the level of idiocy of the American populace being what it is, we've all forgotten what a rush (heh) to war does and how badly it can turn out. But are Americans really going to listen to the same old voices spouting the same old crap again?

I wonder especially about my own peeps. The name "Israel" is to American Jews what a rubber hammer to the top of the knee is. It evokes a knee-jerk reaction. Even Jews who are non-Zionists like me have a kind of visceral reaction when someone who isn't Jewish talks about letting Israel fight its own battles and not having our entire policy in the Middle East revolve around what makes the most paranoid among the Israeli leadership happy. It's faint, but it's there. But you don't have to be a card-carrying A.N.S.W.E.R. member to be horrified at how cavalierly the Republicans are calling for war against Iran, especially when you know perfectly well that it's not at all about helping "our friend Israel" but ALL about tapping into the still-powerful fears of Republican voters and Orly Taitz that the current President is really an Arab Muslim terrorist.

Mitt Romney is out there pretending that war is like those good old-fashioned board games that he no doubt loves to play with his lookalike Rom-bot sons over milk and cookies in the evening. He's out there scaring the children, hearkening a return to the Good Old Days of Duck and Cover in a way that should appall all decent people. Liz Cheney is out there putting her toes in the water for 2016 by showing that she can be just as hotheaded, wrongheaded, and bloodthirsty as her dad. Never mind that even the military cautions against the kind of full-speed-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes" approach that Republicans are using as red meat on the campaign trail.

And here they are, the strapping captains of the football team and their head cheerleader, taunting the only adult in the room. Romney, one of the two eunuchs currently leading the Republican field, is especially scathing, using words like "fretting" and "feckless" to describe the notion that one might consider the consequences before igniting the entire Middle East.

The national security and economic agendas we've seen from Republicans during this election season are nothing new. But it does clarify just why the low-information voter -- you know, the kind who would applaud a candidate who thinks that a President who wants everyone to have access to education and job training is a "snob" -- responds to Republicans. Because there's something reassuring about seeing, year after year, election after election, a bunch of white guys out there talking about the same things over and over again: The answer to all our economic problems is to give more money to the rich, and the answer to our fading American empire is to find someone to bomb. Republicans may have felt emasculated when a black man defeated Sen. Bomb-Bomb-Iran in 2008. They may be feeling emasculated when the economy starts to show signs of life for someone other than those in Mitt Romney's income level. I KNOW they're feeling emasculated when women rise up in the face of blatant misogyny and say "Enough!" But creating a nice big conflagration in the Middle East? THAT gets the blood flowing to the Republican member again.

Labels: Iran attack, rant, warmongering

Call me mean-spirited, but watching the devastation in Indiana and Kentucky from last week's tornadoes, I found myself wondering, "How many of these people think climate change doesn't exist and voted for Tea Party candidates?" After all, these areas are the heart of the "cut spending" crowd; the crowd that thinks people should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not expect government help. Of course I think the government should step in and help the rebuilding, but then, I'm a bleeding heart liberal who thinks that when disaster strikes, government is part of that "community" that SHOULD pitch in.

I suppose the attitude is one of "MY government assistance is OK, YOUR government assistance is undeserved", sort of the way conservative abortions are OK, it's those liberal abortions that aren't. I would just like to know what the political leanings are of those who will be getting checks from FEMA -- and whether they will put two-and-two together and realize that they are getting assistance not from Bain Capital, but from the government -- approved by the President they regard as a Kenyan Muslim Terrorist Communist Socialist Foreigner Usurper. An even more interesting question is whether it will change how they think of government.

But you don't have to have lost everything in a tornado to get a taste of one of Oscar Wilde's twin tragedies -- getting what you want. In Uniopolis, Ohio, they're getting a taste of what Tea Party governance looks like:

Residents here were all for balancing Ohio's budget. They didn't expect that to mean their town would cease to exist.

This small village of low-slung houses and squeaky swing sets in western Ohio's farm country has already laid off its part-time police officer and decided not to replace its maintenance worker, who recently retired. To save cash, Mayor William Rolston will propose Monday that the town turn off the street lights, and that Uniopolis disincorporate after more than a century in existence.

"We've decided that with the budget cuts, we just can't do it anymore," said Rolston, the mayor of 19 years, speaking from the town's one-room municipal building, its wallpaper covered with heart-shaped American flags. "About the only thing that can save it now is an act of God."

[snip]

In the western part of the state, a Republican stronghold where forgotten barns with peeling paint sit atop flat fields, many who supported Kasich say they didn't expect the cuts would reach their small hamlets. Uniopolis voted for Kasich by a margin of more than 2 to 1.

"I did vote for Kasich. He said he was going to balance the budget and he did," said Bob Wenning, whose wife, Elaine, has sat on the Uniopolis Village Council for 19 years. "But there's a lot of towns that are hurting because of those state budget cuts."

"He could have cut less than what he did," added Elaine Wenning, standing outside the couple's small house as big rigs rumbled by on a two-lane highway.

It's not surprising that voters supported the idea of balancing the budget in concept, but don't like the reality, said Bob Ward, director of fiscal studies at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y.

"People like the idea of cutting government, but not cutting services," he said.

Uniopolis may ask residents to pay higher taxes to keep the town afloat, but Mayor Rolston says there's little appetite for more spending in a town made up of little more than a part-time hair salon and a post office.

There's little appetite for higher taxes anywhere in Ohio, where voters in many towns have rejected requests for tax hikes. The Lakota school district near Cincinnati has asked taxpayers to put out extra money for the schools three times — and three times, voters said no. So high school athletes now pay $550 for each sport they play, and middle school athletes pay $350.

"We have a growing sentiment of 'live within your means,'" said Joan Powell, a member of the Lakota Board of Education. "I just hope that people will see what they've lost."

There are, of course, many who say that the budget cuts were necessary. Ohio's credit rating has been upgraded to stable since Kasich became governor.

"Some of it needed to be done," said Jim Thorpe, a retiree in Wapakoneta, a town near Uniopolis.

But it's possible that the drastic results of the cuts will motivate some voters to think twice about supporting candidates who pledge to make more trims.

"These communities have existed for generations. To try to devastate them with funding that has been taken away is un-American and un-Ohioan," said J.K. Byar, the Republican mayor of Amberley Village, a town outside Cincinnati.

In the Uniopolis post office, run by Link Noykos, a good-natured postmaster with sharp blue eyes and an easy laugh, townspeople shuffle in to buy stamps, pick up mail, and just to chat. Many blame the federal government for the budget problems, accusing it of spending money on bureaucracy and fancy dinners. Others say they want the budget balanced — as long as certain bits of spending remain.

And there you have it. These people are STILL blaming the Federal government for their plight, and that all you have to do is take away what they see is Michelle Obama's undeserved state dinner gowns and trips and Uniopolis will be one big happy town again. This is where the Democrats have completely fallen down on the job. A Federal government is NOT like a family that "has to live within its means." An economy as large and as complex as ours is difficult to understand. Republicans have framed this as cutting up the credit cards, and Democrats have refused to point out that austerity is more like deciding the SUV is big enough for a family home and refusing to pay the mortgage.

We're living in a country where a sizable audience cheers Rick Santorum for calling this president a snob because he thinks people should be educated. It's a country where ignorance is celebrated as virtue and independent thought derided as unnecessary -- and dangerous. And still people refuse to put two thoughts together and come up with consensus reality. The people of Uniopolis may just have to see their town disappear to drive home just what it is they voted for when they elected John Kasich. And it's tempting to think that the tornado-stricken people of Indiana and Kentucky should have driven home what THEIR "small government" voting means.

Except that we liberals don't think that way. Because we still have souls.

UPDATE: Also, this.

Labels: austerity, low-information voters, rant

Like many people who write, I have an unfinished novel that I may never finish. I don't pretend it's great literature. Its protagonist is a woman I put through quite a rough time until she comes out at peace with herself by the end -- pretty standard "woman triumphant" stuff. I have to admit that the plot is somewhat secondary to the placement in American culture. Its sweep is from around 1915 to the mid-1930's, so there are some significant things that happen during that period of time which form a backdrop. For me, the cultural research was the fun part back when I still had time to actually write, because in my meticulous effort to avoid historical anachronisms, I spent more time researching than writing. Right now in my spare bedroom, I have a stack of vintage magazines from the time which I pored over so as to try and get everything write. No detail is too small to confirm: When did commercially-packaged mayonnaise become available? Would a midwestern farmhouse have indoor plumbing by 1920? What about electricity? What did women cook in those days? On a farm, the big meal was in the middle of the day. Of what did it usually consist? What did people do in the evening? I even researched the town in which the middle of the novel is set.

When you look at how people actually lived during that time, not just what you see on shows like Downton Abbey, it really hits home just what kind of technological advances we've seen over the last century. Some of them have come back to bite us, but there was a spirit of "can-do" that characterized much of the twentieth century that seems to have disappeared, replaced by superstition and fear. It's one thing to recognize that we have exploited finite resources as much as we can and to try to leave a smaller footprint on the planet by returning to a simplier, more agrarian lifestyle (albeit one that has smartphones). It's quite another to want a complete return to the 14th century.




Think about the refrigerator. We don't think about it much except when the power goes out and we have to throw everything away. The refrigerator was around as early as 1905, as shown in the advertisement above), but wasn't until many, many years later that it became common. We can't imagine life without it.

The automobile was arguably the biggest game-changer of the 20th century. They'd been around for years, but the Model T made automobiles affordable to the masses. The ability to travel long distances begat the family vacation and expanded the horizons of many people. Think about how radio changed us. Radio technology too had been around in the nineteenth century, but radio stations as we know them today showed up around 1921. Suddenly mass communication became possible for both information and entertainment. Television. The VCR, the DVD player, and the DVR. Commercial air travel.

In the early 1960's, anything seemed possible. The Jetsons cartoons envisioned a world in which a very conventional 1950's family had a robot maid and an airborne car and other electronic gadgets:



The Futurama ride at the 1964-65 World's Fair envisioned a future of man conquering space, the sea, and other hostile environments:



In the 1970's, NASA, flush with the success of the Apollo mission and flush with cash to begin the space shuttle program, envisioned space colonization just as the middle east oil embargoes were reminding us of the cost of some of that technology:



Then in the 1980's, the advent of the personal computer revived the notion of what technology developed by smart, visionary people can do.

So it's all the more appalling that we find ourselves here today, with a man who rants about Satan "attacking America" being taken seriously as a presidential candidate (and a population 70% of which believes that Satan is real). This is a man who regards public schools as an "anachronism" no longer needed because of the death of the industrial revolution and who advocates home schooling for everyone, who thinks contraception is evil, and who is the Second Coming of Billy Sunday:



When we look now at the challenges we face in the future, yes, some of them brought on by the technological changes we saw over the last century, it doesn't exactly give me a lot of confidence that we are likely to have our educational system dismantled by people like Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney or John Boehner and the kind of willfully ignorant people who equate education with some kind of negative elitism and celebrate stupidity and religion for rational thought. To the extent that there is talk of science, it's coming from Newt Gingrich, who then turns around and spouts the Santorum line about infanticide and morality. There was a time not so long ago when we had confidence in the human mind's ability to come up with ideas to make life better. We financed public schools and colleges and we held science fairs and we lived in a world based on reality. Pipe dreams about undersea hotels and shoes that let us walk on the ceiling and beds that popped us up in the morning like toast may have been silly, and may have been in the service of corporations, but at least they demonstrated a sense of he possible. In the America of the religious right, nothing is possible. Everything is about doom and death. It's a world devoid of joy and pleasure, one in which they're just waiting to die so they can live in some ill-defined state with a guy they worship as a deity who died a long time ago and who just wanted people to be nicer to each other. They never stop to think that he might not want them.

Labels: dangerous religious freaks, personal musings, rant, willful ignorance

While enduring a TV commercial for Swiffer this morning that featured a bad cover of "Good Vibrations", coming on the heels of that obviously early boomer asshole on the motorcycle shilling for United Healthcare, I thought that sometimes even I can't wait until my own generation dies off so people don't have to endure 1960's music in TV commercials anymore.

Bonus points: Not having to listen to 80's hits like "Take On Me" used to sell Swiffers....

Labels: rant

When I was a kid, we always lived in what I remember my mother calling "the $25,000 house." The $25,000 house had three bedrooms and a bath and a half. Her dream was to be able to live in "the $30,000 house" that was the next level up. That house would have two full baths and a family room with sliding glass doors to a patio. The $35,000 house would maybe have a pool. That was about as far as I remember the aspirations going. It wasn't that my parents didn't work hard and didn't want more for their children. My mother worked part-time as a legal secretary at a time when it was scandalous for women to work outside the home. My father's ambition was to find the cure for cancer -- that's hardly thinking small.

While in college, I dated a guy whose father was a doctor. Their house wasn't all that much bigger than ours was. Yes, the furnishings were more expensive, and his father drove a Cadillac (which was the prestige vehicle nameplate for the nouveau-riche at that time). But they didn't live in a mansion with a bridal staircase and palladian windows and tray ceilings in the bedroom and a home theatre. The guy I was dating may have had top-of-the-line audio equipment in his room, but it was still a 10 x 10 bedroom in a suburban house. And he didn't have his own bathroom.

I don't know when this business about being rich started. Perhaps it was when cash-strapped states in the 1970's started legalizing lotteries, where all you needed was "a dollar and a dream." Or perhaps it was 1984, when a shaggy-haired guy named Steve Jobs emerged out of a middle-class neighborhood in California to unveil the Macintosh; and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous began to air, bringing "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" into living rooms of the middle class seemingly every single night. It was important that the middle class start seeing these lifestyles every night, and regarding them as something to which they should aspire, despite the fact that most of the people profiled on the show made their money in the ferociously competitive maw of the entertainment industry, where luck plays as much of a role, if not more, than talent:





What's interesting about these two clips from the show is how ordinary these "lifestyles" look today. Micky Dolenz' English mansion resembles from the front about half the McMansions built in Bergen County during the last decade. A kitchen like that shown in the 1980s as being part and parcel of the life of the toffs was regarded on real estate programs on HGTV during the last decade as mandatory in even the most modest POS cape cod if you wanted to be able to sell your house. Places like Bobbie Brown's "luxury vacation spot in Arizona" are now all-inclusive resorts like the Sandals/Beaches chain, visited by the kind of people you surely know who take their kids out of school for a family vacation at a posh resort.

It isn't that there wasn't interest in celebrities before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Photoplay and Motion Picture Story were founded in 1911, and People had been around since 1974. But the effect of Lifestyles was to start people thinking "I could live like that," especially with the kind of money Wall Streeters were making at the time.

Somewhere along the line, just living "a good life" wasn't enough anymore, and it seems to have coincided with the ramping up of income inequality right around the heyday of Lifestyles, when Ronald Reagan first cut taxes on investment income -- a practice continued with enthusiasm under Presidents George H.W. Bush and, yes, even Bill Clinton. A great deal of money was made by a few during the Reagan era, and even more made by a few during the dot-com bubble. But for average workers -- people like my parents for whom sliding doors to a patio was a big deal -- the pie was growing ever-smaller. So if the entertainment industry that had spawned Ronald Reagan could dangle enough shiny in front of ordinary Americans and get them longing for stone mansions with French country kitchens, they might not notice how the lifestyle they were actually living was in danger.

And so we came to the 1990's, when guys in blue jeans and T-shirts became multimillionaires and even those who weren't wanted to live like them. So the POS capes and ranches started coming down, and huge ersatz country houses with bridal staircases and designer French country kitchens and crown molding in every room and teensy-tiny windows on three vinyl-sided sides of the house allowed people who were not celebrities to "live the good life", even if only on a 75 x 100 lot instead of seven rolling acres in the English countryside. Car leases allowed entry-level programmers to drive BMWs. A middle-class family could go to a "posh" resort like Beaches ("Luxury included® Resorts for Everyone").

And then it all came crashing down in 2008.

It gets harder to dangle the shiny of fancy cars and luxury homes to a guy whose job ws sent overseas and now finds that his entire industry has. It's hard to sell "If You Just Work Hard Enough" to a guy who hasn't worked in two years and can't even get a job at Wendys because as a skilled machinist, or PC tech, he's "overqualified." It's hard to sell champagne wishes and caviar dreams to a couple who really did try to look at the numbers the mortgage broker was showing them to "prove" they could afford their house with the French Country kitchen and tray ceilings , but now they find the house is worth half of what they owe on it and they're both out of work and scrambling to find a rental that will take two unemployed people, their kids, and their dog.

Mitt Romney is out there talking about his father's humble beginnings, moving ever-closer to declaring himself as having been born a poor black child. When confronted about his net worth, he tosses off comments that he wants EVERONE to be rich. This is red meat to guys like Gene Marks, who thinks every small business owner wakes up every day dreaming of the day he too can be like Mitt Romney. I used to work for one of those small business owners. He's about as Republican as they come. His wife and co-owner had an autographed photo of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the wall in her office the way tween girls have Justin Bieber posters. He's an unrepentant supply-sider. But I know that most days, he's not dreaming of being able to expand a fancy house in La Jolla. He'd be just as happy to be able to keep his business going. I think he works pretty hard, trying to drum up business, but he's not Mitt Romney. And I have to wonder just how hard Romney had to work. I mean, how difficult is it, really, to buy up companies and wreck them?

The bottom line is that not everyone is going to be rich. If a company employs 100,000 people, only one is going to be be the CEO. Most people are going to make less, and that's OK, as long as they can actually find work and earn a living. I think people are starting to realize that not everyone needs a 6000 square foot house with a French country kitchen, tray ceilings, and a bridal staircase. They're scaling back their aspiration, not because they want to be lazy (though I do think people are getting sick of working 80-hour weeks and foregoing vacations to "prove their dedication to the company", then finding themselves shitcanned anyway in favor of someone overseas who'll work for a dollar a day), but because the cost of pretending to be one of the toffs is just too high.

For Mitt Romney to get up there and say that further tax cuts for the already rich are a step towards everyone being rich is ridiculous on its face. Not everyone is going to be rich, and I think most people know this. All most people want is just a fighting chance.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, rant, social Darwinism, supply-side economics

It's only January 3, and already I feel that if I see one more paid celebrity shilling for diets I'm going to throw something at the TV. Every year, Americans make the same two resolutions: 1) I'm going to lose weight; and 2) I'm going to really hit the gym this year.

I've even succumbed to it this year, now that I've realized that even cookies don't appeal to me the way they used to, and that when they do, it's about one or two, not a dozen...and commercial cookies not at all. I don't expect to ever be the size six that I was for about five minutes in 1983, but a twelve would be nice.

See? There I go again.

It isn't the celebrity spokesmodels that make me think somehow this year will be different, not even Jennifer Hudson, who went on Weight Watchers can't seem to stop; rapidly turning into Thin-Era Oprah, with a tiny body and a huge head. Of course what no one admits is that Jennifer Hudson had a great voice and an Academy Award under her belt before she lost a pound, so it isn't as if doors were closed to her just because she was overweight. Not even Carrie Fisher, who is at least close to my age and has every bit as much emotional baggage. In fact, when I see a celebrity spokesperson for a diet, all I can think of is the personal chef that these people have, whipping up delicious meals with the appropriate number of points, or luscious salads and vegetable dishes to supplement all that inedible Nutra-System food. All I can think of is the personal trainers that these people can hire, and the workout time they can spend while not on a movie set (and sometimes, when they are) -- and the seven-figure fees that these people get to shill for programs that may work for those who have to live up to these fees and can afford the personal chef and trainer.

It's all part of the culture that gives us In Style magazine and other supermarket eye-catchers that show air-brushed photos of celebrities and tell us that yes, we too can look like them if we just follow their secret formulas. Of course those celebrities whose bodies (and minds) are like those of real people, and who end up failing again and again to keep the weight off, are treated brutally by the press -- see also Kirstie Alley, who has to dance two hours a day to keep her extra weight off and no doubt has a personal chef creating her "portion-controlled, organic diet".

And yet every year, women in particular make the resolution to lose weight and hit the gym. And every year, they fail, to the tune of the ka-CHING of cash registers at the companies that profit off of futility (NYT link):

Like many Americans who’ve made resolutions for 2012, I made these very same New Year’s promises about this time last year.

Which, it turns out, is great for business. Our collective failure to keep our resolutions represents an annuity of sorts for health clubs, weight-loss centers and other enterprises that make up what you might call the self-improvement industry. It’s an industry that thrives on our failure to change: recidivism is good for the bottom line

Americans spend many tens of billions every year in the hope of keeping resolutions to lose weight, get fit, quit smoking, fix their finances, organize their closets — on and on. Last year, we spent $62 billion on health club memberships, weight-loss programs, exercise tapes, diet soda and the like, according to projections from Marketdata Enterprises, a market research firm.

We start with good intentions. Memberships for health clubs and weight-loss programs spike each January, says John LaRosa, the president of Marketdata. But by March, the lines thin at the treadmills and many dieters relapse. So the next year, we try — and pay up — again.

“If I try one quick fix and it doesn’t work, I may be more likely to try the next quick fix,” says Lisa Lahey, the co-founder of Minds at Work, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., which coaches executives and educators in sustained behavior change.

Supposed easy remedies like celebrity diets hold a powerful allure, but they rarely work in the long term, she says. After all, it’s hard for people to shake the underlying conditions — like stress or anxiety — that cause unwanted habits. If exercise tapes, dietetic meals, nicotine lozenges and personal finance apps worked by themselves, we’d all be fit, thin, smoke-free and rich.

The hard work of changing a lifestyle isn’t as alluring as dropping 30 pounds in 30 days. But some stop-smoking and weight-loss programs, as well as gyms, are trying to help for the long haul, a strategy that can improve customers’ chances of success and, for companies like Weight Watchers International, build brand loyalty and revenue.

JANUARY is the most important month of the year in the health club industry. At many gyms, new memberships double. Given that about a third of all members tend to turn over every year, the resolution crowd is crucial.

“The resolutioners always pop up,” says Scott Hamann, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets covering the fitness industry.

But you probably know what happens next. Only a fraction of members work out twice a week or more, despite all those monthly dues. Health clubs in the United States had more than 50 million members and revenue of $20.3 billion in 2010, according to the latest data from the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, an industry trade group. But clubs reported that members typically visit only 54 times, or slightly more than once a week.

Here's the reality for those of us lucky enough to still have a job: We're simply too stressed out and too damn tired to hit the gym. And when we get home at 7 PM, we're too damn tired to start cooking delicious healthy meals. And there's no personal chef waiting there with a lovely plate of field greens and organic vegetables topped with a perfectly-sized portion of honey-lacquered salmon and a one-once wedge of artisanal cheese in a light citrus vinaigrette made with $25/bottle extra virgin olive oil from a perfect mountaintop in Italy. If you're lucky, there's a spouse who gets home before you who can throw some chicken burgers in a pan, and heat up some Trader Joe's side dishes.

As for the gym? Yes, there's a gym right on site where I work. But what's it to be, then, eh? I have to leave the house by 7:15 AM most mornings; 6:15 on mornings when I have a 7 AM teleconference. On a GOOD night I'm home at 6:15 PM, but usually it's closer to 7 PM. So when should I use this gym? Should I skip lunch, which is not good for you either? Should I leave the house an hour earlier so I can do a half-hour on the treadmill? Should I stay after work and get home at 8 PM, then have dinner and take all the calories to bed an hour and a half later? Those options don't seem particularly healthy either.

OR, I can give up this blog and other writing, which is the only thing I still have in my life that I enjoy doing? Perhaps I should just become this machine that does nothing but work, eat quick, frozen, unsatisfying "diet" meals, exercise, and try to get some sleep amidst the chaos. Because after all, what is personal satisfaction and getting some pleasure out of life when compared to the pressure to lose weight and be as fit as a 25-year-old, no matter what your age or the reality of your life?

There's a reason Weight Watchers is a billion dollar business. There's a reason they recommend that you continue to attend meetings for the rest of your life. Every day I see women at work heating up their 8-ounce frozen meals from Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers or Lean Cuisine. I see them digging the last morsel out of the two-ounce can of Jenny's chicken salad. And when the leftover sandwiches and cookies come out of a meeting at around 3 PM, they're the first ones hitting the stuff -- because they're hungry. And yet, they keep going back to the meetings and ordering the food.

Take a look at the comments section of any article that is even remotely related to food or diets or exercise, and you'll see at least five bozos telling people who are overweight to lay off the fast food and doughnuts and get off the sofa. You know what I have to say to them? Fuck you. I don't eat fast food and doughnuts, and if I want to hit the sofa at 8 PM so I can wind down enough to be able to fall asleep by 9:30, who are these people to demand that I jump around the basement for an hour and then try to fall asleep? Especially when unless you make weight maintenance the entire focus of your life, your efforts are pretty much doomed anyway?

Last Sunday, the Times' Magazine section had an article about how those of us who have fought this battle our whole lives continue to fight with our own bodies even when we lose weight:

For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.

[snip]

Janice Bridge, a registry member who has successfully maintained a 135-pound weight loss for about five years, is a perfect example. “It’s one of the hardest things there is,” she says. “It’s something that has to be focused on every minute. I’m not always thinking about food, but I am always aware of food.”

Bridge, who is 66 and lives in Davis, Calif., was overweight as a child and remembers going on her first diet of 1,400 calories a day at 14. At the time, her slow pace of weight loss prompted her doctor to accuse her of cheating. Friends told her she must not be paying attention to what she was eating. “No one would believe me that I was doing everything I was told,” she says. “You can imagine how tremendously depressing it was and what a feeling of rebellion and anger was building up.”

After peaking at 330 pounds in 2004, she tried again to lose weight. She managed to drop 30 pounds, but then her weight loss stalled. In 2006, at age 60, she joined a medically supervised weight-loss program with her husband, Adam, who weighed 310 pounds. After nine months on an 800-calorie diet, she slimmed down to 165 pounds. Adam lost about 110 pounds and now weighs about 200.

During the first years after her weight loss, Bridge tried to test the limits of how much she could eat. She used exercise to justify eating more. The death of her mother in 2009 consumed her attention; she lost focus and slowly regained 30 pounds. She has decided to try to maintain this higher weight of 195, which is still 135 pounds fewer than her heaviest weight.

“It doesn’t take a lot of variance from my current maintenance for me to pop on another two or three pounds,” she says. “It’s been a real struggle to stay at this weight, but it’s worth it, it’s good for me, it makes me feel better. But my body would put on weight almost instantaneously if I ever let up.”

So she never lets up. Since October 2006 she has weighed herself every morning and recorded the result in a weight diary. She even carries a scale with her when she travels. In the past six years, she made only one exception to this routine: a two-week, no-weigh vacation in Hawaii.

She also weighs everything in the kitchen. She knows that lettuce is about 5 calories a cup, while flour is about 400. If she goes out to dinner, she conducts a Web search first to look at the menu and calculate calories to help her decide what to order. She avoids anything with sugar or white flour, which she calls her “gateway drugs” for cravings and overeating. She has also found that drinking copious amounts of water seems to help; she carries a 20-ounce water bottle and fills it five times a day. She writes down everything she eats. At night, she transfers all the information to an electronic record. Adam also keeps track but prefers to keep his record with pencil and paper.

“That transfer process is really important; it’s my accountability,” she says. “It comes up with the total number of calories I’ve eaten today and the amount of protein. I do a little bit of self-analysis every night.”

Click over and read the entire article, if you haven't already done so. Note especially the "Before" and "After" photos of Adam and Janice Bridge. In the "Before" photo, they're happy and smiling and enjoying themselves despite being overweight. In the "After" photo, they're grim and unsmiling. Perhaps they are just hungry.

They are also retired, which gives them hours a day to exercise. And still, they burn less while exercising then people who have never been overweight:

Scientists are still learning why a weight-reduced body behaves so differently from a similar-size body that has not dieted. Muscle biopsies taken before, during and after weight loss show that once a person drops weight, their muscle fibers undergo a transformation, making them more like highly efficient “slow twitch” muscle fibers. A result is that after losing weight, your muscles burn 20 to 25 percent fewer calories during everyday activity and moderate aerobic exercise than those of a person who is naturally at the same weight. That means a dieter who thinks she is burning 200 calories during a brisk half-hour walk is probably using closer to 150 to 160 calories.

Last year I resolved to dramatically reduce consumption of "white foods" -- white pasta, white potatoes and the like. I was pretty successful with that one. During the year I gave up diet soda and substituted water with meals, and it still took me a month to get used to not having that sweet taste with dinner. This year I think it's going to be sugar -- fewer desserts, protein snacks like nuts nstead of cookies or granola bars to address the 2:30 PM crash. These are things that are do-able.

But live like Janice and Adam Bridge? Yes, it might help me live longer...or maybe it'll just SEEM longer. Besides, who's going to have enough money to live that long anyway?

Labels: personal musings, rant, weight

And no, it's not about the endiing of George W. Bush's My Dick Is Bigger Than Daddy's war in Iraq.

It's about the deliberate and systematic demolition of the American middle class.

They aren't quite there yet, but there is definitely significant progress:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

But don't worry. I'm sure a Kardashian is up to something, and there's a woman in a hijab at the Publix to worry about, and gee that Newt Gingrich sounds like a smart fella and he's from the south so I know we can trust him. And after all, the Rapture is coming and we good God-fearin' folk won't have to worry about poverty anyway, so let's just keep on keepin' on. And oh yeah, those dirty hippies protesting should just STFU.

Because poverty can't happen to those who love Jesus, right?

Labels: despair, rant, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

Every year, the usual suspects come out and claim that the Godless heathen homosexual jewish Muslim Kenyan socialist fascist great unwashed have declared war on Christmas, what with their "Happy Holidays" and their menorahs on the town hall lawn right there alongside of the Baby Jesus.

Well, you know what? Maybe there SHOULD be a War on Christmas.

Yesterday I received my copy of the local newspaper. It was the size of the Sunday New York Times, and almost all of it was ads for "doorbuster specials." It was one thing when the doorbuster specials started at 8 AM, or even at 7 AM. But when people are camped out at Best Buy for days on end, something has gone very, very awry with this holiday. It seems that Black Friday has become National I Got Mine And Fuck You Day for that portion of the 99% which doesn't realize it's camping out at Target to get $200 off a flat screen TV BECAUSE the oligarchs have taken away all but the last few bucks in their pockets.

Nothing exemplifies this horrific trend more than this confluence of the thuggish tactics employed by the University of California at Davis police and Christmas greed:

A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.

The incident occurred shortly after 10:20 p.m. Thursday in a crowded Los Angeles-area Walmart as shoppers hungry for deals were let inside the store.

Police said the suspect shot the pepper spray when the coverings over the items she wanted were removed.

“Somehow she was trying to use it to gain an upper hand,” police Lt. Abel Parga told The Associated Press early Friday.

He said she was apparently after some electronics and used the pepper spray to keep other shoppers at bay.

You can almost write the post-apocalyptic Philip K. Dick story for yourself; about a consumer-driven society driven mad by having everything it believed to be true proven wrong, scrambling for the marked-down accoutrements of their former life while those who run the companies that provide these opportunities watch on TV screens and laugh.

Oh. Right. That's already happened:



If this is Christmas, then I want no part of it. So I am hereby declaring a War on Christmas. Oh, I'll still make chili for the company potluck, because it's what you have to do. But other than that, I want no part of it. And if everyone just simply stayed away from the stores, or shopped exclusively locally (not just on Small Business Saturday), we just might get the message across that WE are the "job creators".

Update: Also, this. And this. And this.

Labels: rant, War on Christmas

This is what companies do when they have large cash reserves (NYT link):

at a time when the nation is looking for ways to battle unemployment, big companies are creating fewer jobs, and critics say they are neglecting to lay the foundation for future growth by expanding into new businesses or building new plants.

What is more, share buybacks have not fulfilled their stated purpose of rewarding investors over the last decade, experts say. “It’s a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a lack of investment in the long term,” said William W. George, a Harvard Business School professor and former chief executive of Medtronic, a medical technology company. “If we’re not investing in research, innovation and entrepreneurship, we’re going to be a slow-growth country for a decade.”

Liberal critics insist the trend is another example of top corporate executives raking in an inordinate share of the nation’s wealth, even as their employees suffer.

“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor under President Clinton who now teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. After diving in the wake of the financial crisis, buybacks have made a remarkable comeback in recent years, with $445 billion authorized this year, the most since 2007, when repurchases peaked at $914 billion.

But spending on capital investments like new plants and infrastructure has stagnated more broadly in corporate America, confounding efforts by the Obama administration to spur economic growth. Capital expenditures by companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are expected to total $546 billion in 2011, down from $560 billion in 2008, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters Eikon.

The principle behind buybacks is simple. With fewer shares in circulation, earnings per share can rise smartly even if the company’s underlying growth is lackluster. In many cases, like that of the medical device maker Zimmer Holdings, executives are able to meet goals for profit growth and earn bigger bonuses despite poor stock performance.

“It’s clear there’s a conflict of interest,” said Charles M. Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “Unless earnings per share are adjusted to reflect the buyback, then to base a bonus on raw earnings per share is problematic. It doesn’t purely reflect performance.”

In addition, executives, who are often large shareholders, stand to benefit from even a small, short-term jump in stock prices.

When everything is about the stock price, and keeping the insatiable maw of Wall Street analysts happy, there's zero incentive to create actual growth by investing in products and services and plant, let alone investing in people.

The whole "public" ownership model has become a sham. The concept is that issuing stock allows companies access to more capital than they might be able to tap otherwise. But "public" (and I use the quotation marks deliberately) ownership isn't about returning actual value to shareholders, it's about keeping Wall Street happy.

Case in point: Apple.

On a recent flight back form Florida, I counted no fewer than ten iPads befre I had to get on the plane and stop counting. At least three others of them besides me were reading Steve Jobs on it. I would say that at least twenty percent of the people on that flight were listening to iPods. Another sizable number had iPhones. There are other tablets and music players and smartphones, but these names are becoming almost generic terms for all brands of their concepts, much the way "Kleenex" now means facial tissue, no matter who makes it.

On October 18, Apple announced its third-quarter results, which included sales of 17.07 million iPhones. Got that? OVER SEVENTEEN MILLION iPhones sold in three months. That's over five million a month or over a million a week. But the stock immediately lost five percent of its value, because the "Wall Street analysts" predicted sales of 20 million -- and it's been swooning ever since, closing yesterday at $369.01.

Has anything really fundamentally changed at Apple since the stock surged to over $400/share in early November -- almost a month after Steve Jobs' death? The day after he died, 96% of Wall Street analysts gave the stock a "Buy" rating with a MEDIAN target price of $500/share. And now the price is $369, because some idiot in a suit pulled a number -- twenty million -- out of his ass, and because only a million and a half iPhones sold per week, the stock has been slammed.

And this is the system we're protecting? No wonder executives are buying back stock to artificially prop up the price rather than actually invest in something that might help their companies actually grow. Taking chances is punished by Wall Street.

We keep hearing about how we have to lower corporate taxes to eliminate "uncertainty". Is this what business has come to? Guaranteed results, every time? Business is all about uncertainty. Innovation is what generates growth in a business, and innovation THRIVES on uncertainty. A new car model may not go over well with buyers. A new drug compound may turn out to be ineffective and have to be scrapped. Buyers may be wary of a hi-def webcam because they don't want to have to dress up and put on makeup to talk to relatives. 3-D television may prove not to be perceived as having sufficient additional value to warrant the cost. The very nature of business is a crapshoot. It's full of uncertainty, and it always has been. But today business is governed by Wall Street, and Wall Street goes into a panic at the slightest bit of bad news. Today we hear news that Greece may default? The Dow will drop by almost 400 points. Tomorrow there are signs that an agreement may be reached? A 300-point surge. Day after tomorrow we'll hear bad news about Italy and it'll be another swoon.

Is this any way to run an economy? What happened to rewarding the risk-takers; those who take a chance that they may lose, but that they also may win? In an environment in which a risk that doesn't reward is punished out of all proportion to the supposed "offense", why take the chance?

There's a nice little company called Angie's List. The concept is simple: People who have used contractors and other professoinals rate them, so that if you need someone to, say, install insulation in your attic, you can read other people's unsolicited experiences with insulation contractors, rather on just relying on the references the contractor provides. It started with construction-related services, but has branched out into medical, veterinary, and other services. No anonymous reviews are allowed, only members are allowed to review companies, and while your name and contact information isn't published, Angie's List knows who you are. This also keeps contractors themselves from spamming their pages with bogus reviews. I'm a member, and I don't hire anyone without checking their reviews on Angie's List. The membership is about fifty bucks a year.

Angie's List is about to be ruined, because it's going public, with an initial IPO price of $13/share. Three venture capital companies are going to own 43% of he company. and as you can see, the analysts are already freaking out. My guess is that within three years, Angie's List will cease to exist and you'll be back to waiting until one of your neighbors has work done on his house to find a good contractor. All because Wall Street hates "uncertainty."

It's all part of today's "up is down" world, in which the biracial son of a single mother is said to have "grown up in a privileged way"; Republicans use veterans as political props to shore up their so-called defense cred and then vote against veterans' benefits; and yacht owners are the real victims of the recession.

It's no wonder our economy is in the crapper. It's run by a bunch of people who, like five-year-olds, want iron-clad guarantees of success before they'll take any chances at all -- like on hiring people, one of whom could very well have the Next Great Idea.

Labels: Chicken Littles, economic death watch, rant, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class, WATBs

I've been watching some pro football the last couple of years. I don't know if I'd be watching if both New York teams were terrible, but the Giants are having a pretty good season, the Jets are kind of like the Mets as the area's Goofy Team and might also sneak in. But football for football's sake? Naah. And I have zero interest in college football.

I watch my friends struggle to get scholarship money for their college-bound children, and the only money available is for sports stars. I see the obsession in my town with youth sports and I know that at least some of this is due to parents knowing that while the National Honor Society might throw a few bucks at your kid, a sports scholarship is where the significant money is. Of course they dream of their kid being the next B.J. Raji, a local kid whose parents are soon to move into a ridiculously bigass house with corinthian columns on a through street in my area, but the more realistic parents will take what they can get if it offsets some of the mid-five-figures that college costs every year, even if it's only a couple thousand dollars for excellence in fencing.

Football gives money to a very few kids, but it brings in BIG money to colleges. And for Big Ten schools that have "legendary" coaches like Joe Paterno, the money is huge, which probably explains the cone of silence that was the result of assistant coach Mike McQueary informing Joe Paterno that he had seen Paterno's heir apparent, Jerry Sandusky, raping a boy in the shower.

But while we correctly have universal revulsion in our society for those who molest children, our revulsion seems to be selective. We confuse pedophila with homosexuality. Gay men can't be Boy Scout troop leaders, but no one hesitates to leave their son with a priest, a pastor, or a youth coach.

When a guy rapes and murders his 7-year-old neighbor, we get "Megan's Law", and there is, as there should be, universal condemnation and revulsion. Even if a child is not murdered, but "only" raped, there's universal condemnation and revulsion. It's accepted wisdom that even in prison, child molesters are regarded as the lowest of the low.

But let the abuser come from a religious framework, or from a highly-touted sport (and I'm not sure that there's a difference in some people's heads between actual religion and football, which seems to be a quasi-religion to many), and all of a sudden there's "nuance" and "extenuating circumstance."

If the guy down the street flashes a group of schoolchildren, pandemonium ensues. But if a priest sexually abuses a child, it's covered up by the Church. If a pastor sexually abuses a child, no one dares say anything. It's as if these people think that the abuse of a child is somehow sanctioned by God, or that there MUST be some kind of "explanation" that exonerates the suspect if he is a "man of the cloth". And when part of the mythos around a star sports coach is that he was "a god" at Penn State, it's not difficult to make the leap from being a figure of speech to an actual reality.

It's been interesting to listen to local progressive talk radio AND to sports talk radio the last few days. I've especially been gratified to see that the sports talk guys AREN'T falling into the "He's The Legendary Joe Paterno So I Know He Meant Well" trap. Even the biggest asshole on the New York airwaves, Craig Carton, minced no words when a Penn State journalism student tried to defend Joe Paterno yesterday by blaming the media:



Carton is a guy who was fired from his last gig for making fun the postpartum depression of the wife of then-Governor Richard Codey, and I have no great love for this guy, for all that he's weirdly entertaining and yes, Boomer and Carton is sometimes my morning drive-time guilty pleasure. But on this one he's 100% spot on.

Carton is the father of young children and as a result is correctly responding from that visceral place of "What if that had been my kid?" But even among people I know, there is clearly a struggle going on between trying to justify Paterno's actions by saying "Well, he thought he was doing the right thing by reporting the incident to the college authorities" and "What if that had been my kid?"

Most of the callers into Boomer and Carton and to Mark Riley yesterday were clearly struggling with what this incident means to Paterno's legacy and what should be done. A caller to Steve Summers last night on WFAN concocted a fairy tale in which Jerry Sandusky went to Joe Paterno and said "I have this problem, I need help", to which Summers responded "Then why didn't he get him help?" A caller less in thrall to the Church of College Football because he himself had been a player told Mark Riley yesterday morning that the entire football program at the school needs to be shut down for two years and rebuilt from the ground up, with NONE of the current staff, including Mike McQueary, allowed to stay on.

But here's what I find disturbing: Why is there even any dispute that Penn State did the right thing by firing Paterno? Aside from the fact that the entire structure deemed it appropriate to protect a pedophile rather than "damage the Penn State brand", why is there any ambiguity? Does fielding a winning football team year after year justify EVERYTHING, let alone anything? When the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman hit the news in 1994, it was the talk of the lunch table at the company at which I was working at the time. One of my colleagues refused to believe that O.J. Simpson could have possibly killed his wife, because "He's O.J., man!"

He's Joe Paterno, man!

No, what he is, or was, is a guy who helped bring in over $50 million to Penn State every year, that's what he is. And the bottom line here is that until the last few days when the story could be contained no longer, Penn State and everyone who still defends Joe Paterno, obviously believe that the rape of a ten-year-old, or multiple ten-year-olds, as appears now to be the case, is necessary and a small price to pay if it protects the cash cow that is Penn State football. It's the "Never Disrespect the Bing" school of moral relativism.

And that anyone -- ANYONE -- feels this is justified is a sad commentary on our culture.

Labels: college sports, Joe Paterno, rant, sex crimes, sports

These Republicans (and the Democrats who similarly do the bidding of banks and corporate CEOs) are a funny lot. There are still the Bush dead-enders who still think that if they Just Work Hard Enough™, they'll be in the Rich Guys Club too someday, but an increasing number of us -- you know, those who watch that George Carlin video over and over again, know that the game was rigged thirty years ago when Ronald Reagan said that if you just give the rich enough money, the stuff that overflows from their stuffed pockets will "trickle down" to us. The saddest cases aren't the long-term unemployed who know they'll never work again and after Working Hard Enough their whole lives, now find themselves going to the church food pantry for some boxed macaroni and cheese. The saddest cases are people like the Peter Griffin soundalike who recently called Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren a "socialist whore":



This is someone who's a victim of The Big Club, but he's so invested in the Just Work Hard Enough meme that to realize that everything he believed in is a lie would probably destroy him. It's easy to forget that when these people send around e-mails of Obama with a bone in his nose, or take guns to Democratic candidate appearances, and vote again and again against their own self interest, choosing candidates who point their attention elsewhere so that the latter's corporate masters can steal the last few bucks out of the former's back pockets, they're operating out of fear -- a fear that the Big Club has spent thirty years tapping, and will continue to tap until we're all scrambling for scraps.

The politicians who do the bidding of the Big Club think they're part of it. They get invited to conclaves given by the Koch brothers and they receive the largesse that the Big Club gives them and they think that when the middle class has been successfully destroyed, they'll be on that Big Boat with the Big Club, swilling Dom Perignon from the cleavage of hookers. They don't realize that they'll be left behind too. And it doesn't matter that

And that explains why, now that they seem to have successfully stymied any attempt to rebuild the job base in this country, they're going after the unemployed (NYT editorial):

Tragically, the more entrenched the jobs shortage becomes, the more paralyzed Congress becomes, with Republicans committed to doing nothing in the hopes that the faltering economy will cost President Obama his job in 2012. Last week, for instance, Senate Republicans filibustered a $60 billion proposal by Mr. Obama to create jobs by repairing and upgrading the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. They were outraged that the bill would have been paid for by a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million.

Things may be about to get worse.

Federal unemployment benefits, which generally kick in after 26 weeks of state-provided benefits, are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. That would be a disaster for many of the estimated 3.5 million Americans who get by on extended benefits — an average of $295 a week. It would also be a blow to the economy, because it would reduce consumer spending by about $50 billion in 2012 — which would mean slower economic growth and 275,000 lost jobs. Unfortunately, given Republicans’ demonstrated willingness to ignore human needs and economic logic, it is more likely than not that jobless benefits will be a major battle in the months ahead.

There are no plausible arguments against an extension — in fact, Congress has never let federal benefits expire when the unemployment rate was higher than 7.2 percent. But there are many specious arguments, chief among them that providing benefits reduces the incentive to get a new job. The evidence says otherwise.

A recent paper by Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that benefit extensions in early 2011 raised the jobless rate by about 0.1 to 0.5 percentage points, but most of that was due to benefit recipients staying in the labor force and actively looking for work during the time they are collecting benefits, rather than, say, dropping out in despair.

Unemployment benefits are the first line of defense against ruin from job loss that is beyond an individual’s control. In a time of historically elevated long-term unemployment, they are an important way to keep workers connected to the job-search market. They are also crucial to ensuring that the weak economy doesn’t weaken further.

The Republicans blocking an extension of unemployment benefits seem to WANT there to be mass despair and a complete elimination of the middle class. They seem to think that when everyone is poor except the Big Club and themselves, that somehow they'll benefit. But there's no way the Big Club can buy enough STUFF to keep an economy this size healthy, and that's really the point. The Big Club already has its sights set elsewhere. It could be China, it could be India, it could be the Philippines, it could be Indonesia. It could be the entire Middle East, for all we know. But if you finish a Big Bulp from 7-Eleven and you're still thirsty, you buy another Big Gulp. And as long as there's another Big Gulp to be had for the Big Club, they don't care about the giant, non-bio-degradable plastic cup they leave behind.

These politicians will find this out after it's too late.

Labels: economic death watch, Greedy Republican Bastards, rant, unemployment

I will post this as many times as it takes:



Yesterday Rick Perry unveiled his so-called "flat tax plan", offering up the twin pillars of temptation for the uneducated: simplicity and the false promise of "job creation" -- as if those who head up corporations are going to magically, out of the goodness of their hearts, "create jobs" if we just give them enough money; if we just make them RICH ENOUGH. How rich that is remains to be seen, but we've been shoveling money into CEO pockets for thirty years now and they don't yet seem to be rich enough -- if in fact the trickle-down doctrine worked, which of course we know it doesn't.

Rick Perry is at six percent in the polls right now, so perhaps even discussing his tax plan is a moot point. But Republican voters have already shown themselves to be a fickle lot, easily tempted by Teh Shiny at any given moment. And Perry is a huckster, a snake-oil salesmen dangling promises of jobs and income tax filing that a ten-year-old can do and a cushy retirement brought to you by the same people who almost brought us to global economic collapse three years ago. His "plan" is the bastard child of Ronald Reagan and Steve Forbes, and it's designed to do one thing: tempt the stupid with the promise of easier April 15ths and the false promise of a better lot through the further enrichment of the already-wealthy. It's snake oil, and we will see in the next few weeks if Republican voters -- and the pundits who have shown themselves to be equally fickle -- buy it.

The ugly underbelly of Perry's speech (which you can read here) is the demonization of what he calls "The Federal nanny state", with its misogynistic undertones. In Rick Perry's world, those in need of help -- the elderly, the sick, those affected by natural disasters who DON'T live in Texas, the poor, the unemployed -- deserve our contempt, not our help. Because in Rick Perry's world, reaching for a brass ring that is systematically out of reach because there are no public schools, no nutrition programs, no Head Start, nothing to help move the children of tomorrow out of poverty or keep the middle class kids of today from sliding into it, is what has to be done in order to keep the rabble from realizing what the 1% has done, is doing, and will continue to do to them.

Rick Perry's plan, as does Herman Cain's plan, is designed to give that top 1% MORE. It reminds me of that ad a couple of years ago, I think it was for big-screen TVs, and the guy is standing there in the electronics store as the voice of Freddy Mercury shouts:

I want it all
I want it all
I want it all.....and I want it now!

Here's what the 1% has gained since Americans started believing Ronald Reagan that if you Just Give The Rich ENOUGH, they will piss silver dollars and gold coins upon you (NYT link):

The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, in a new report likely to figure prominently in the escalating political fight over how to revive the economy, create jobs and lower the federal debt.

In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income.

“The equalizing effect of federal taxes was smaller” in 2007 than in 1979, as “the composition of federal revenues shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes,” the budget office said.


[snip]

The report found that higher-income households got a larger share of the pie, while other households got smaller shares.

Specifically the report made these points:

¶ The share of after-tax household income for the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled, climbing to 17 percent in 2007 from nearly 8 percent in 1979.

¶ The most affluent fifth of the population received 53 percent of after-tax household income in 2007, up from 43 percent in 1979. In other words, the after-tax income of the most affluent fifth exceeded the income of the other four-fifths of the population.

¶ People in the lowest fifth of the population received about 5 percent of after-tax household income in 2007, down from 7 percent in 1979.

¶ People in the middle three-fifths of the population saw their shares of after-tax income decline by 2 to 3 percentage points from 1979 to 2007.

George Carlin was right in 2005. They want it all. They want it all and they want it now...and what little you have, they're going to take it. Your pension? Gone. Now you have a 401(k) that pays fees to Wall Street banks out of your money, and you sit there while a man lies dying of pancreatic cancer in California at the age of 56 and all you can think of is how his death is going to affect your retirement. That statement you get every year that tells you how much you're likely to get from Social Security in retirement? Just shred it. Because you're going to get bupkis. You'll get bupkis because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. Whether you're a baby boomer, Gen-Xer, Gen-Yer, millennial or Brownie scout -- forget it. Because you're getting bupkis. You'll get bupkis because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. A permanent job with benefits? Forget it, you're getting (if you're lucky) a contract job that pays half of what you used to make. Because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. Good public schools for your kids? Forget it. In the very near future you'll have to pay to send your kids to school. There's no money for schools because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. Clean air to breathe instead of vaporized mercury? Forget it. We have to dismantle the EPA becase THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW.

They'll promise you that this anal rape with a red-hot poker they're delivering to you will give you a shot at their club...that you too can someday join them in that top 1%. But there's a reason it's the top 1%. It's a big club....and you ain't in it.

And you will never, ever, ever be.

Rick Perry will, though. Because he's aiming for a position where he can give them what they want.

All of it.

Labels: And people want this lunatic to be president?, Greedy Republican Bastards, income inequality, rant, Rick Perry, right-wing economic terrorism