Brainiac Conspiracy

Blogging Moratorium Today

Not going out, no parties or anything else this year, etc. Just tired of venting, basically. So while you're all out reveling tonight, try not to drink too much. If you can't help yourself, at least refrain from acting like an asshole in public.

---Vitelius

But Does He Kneel After Tossing a Pick?

Dear God, save us from your most fervent believers, and from Post religion writers:

So why does Tebow’s expression of faith make people so silly-crazy? Why do they care what he does?

Because he emphasizes the aspect of his talent that is given, not earned.

Ignoring the questionable assertion that talent is "given", what annoys some of us about public expressions of piety is that they're, well, as a rule, phony:

When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

---Vitelius

Lesser Blogging Today

Off to see the circus this afternoon. Perhaps I should run away and join them.

---Vitelius

Idiocies of Rural Life

Why do so many conservatives seem to feel that a "sense of community" is something that can only be cultivated in small-town America? Here in my urban hellhole, my neighbors and I have formed a very nice little community of our own, thank you. We keep an eye on each other's apartments, pick up our mail and feed our pets when we're our of town, exchange gifts during the holidays, and spend lots of spare time chatting on the stoop or in the street and getting to know about each other's family lives and livelihoods. This probably happens because, in our high-density neighborhoods, we live in such close proximity to each other that it's really not practical, or even desirable, to wall off the neighbors and live in isolation. Of course, we come from all sorts of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, with diverse opinions and viewpoints, and cultivating relationships with such people requires an open mind, a willingness to see the world through the eyes of others, and the desire to learn from the experiences of people with whom we'd otherwise seem to have little in common. So I am guessing that the real reason why rural settings are so amenable to the conservative concept of "community" is threefold: (1) such places are usually more ethnically, culturally and politically homogenous than cities; (2) such places tend to be more hierarchically rigid than cities, i.e., people "know their place" in the social order, and stay there for generations; and (3) because conservatives would prefer to live in places where everyone else looks and talks and thinks just like them, where people don't make waves by grumbling about "income inequality" and other urban-elitist conceits, and where the TV is always switched on to Fox News in every diner, grocery and feed store. Bake sales and barn-raising are simply mass rituals to be employed in the pursuit of a cloistered life; "communities," where they exist at all, only serve to confirm one's prejudices.

Put another way: If this is such a desirable way to live, why does America continue to become more urban, and less rural, with each passing decade?

---Vitelius

No Money Down

We've all seen and heard the hustle on late-night TV, usually delivered by some oily pitchman who's looking for thousands of desperate suckers to reel in on some phony pyramid scheme involving gold or foreclosed real estate. Generally, these sales pitches run afoul of the law, and most people with a lick of sense avoid them since, well, if they sound too good to be true, that's probably because they aren't.

That same line of logic does not apply, however, to America's job creators:

Under standard accounting rules, companies calculate the fair market value of the options on the date they are granted and report that value as an expense, disclosed in regulatory filings. But the Internal Revenue Service allows companies to claim a tax deduction for any increase in value when those options are exercised, usually years later at a much higher price. The tax savings are listed in regulatory filings as “excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation."

For most companies, the primary advantage of using options is that options allow them to award large bonuses without actually depleting their cash, said Alan J. Straus, a New York tax lawyer and accountant. “But the tax treatment is a nice bonus,” he said. “It’s the only form of compensation where a company can get a deduction without having to come up with cash” [...]

“The reason the C.E.O.’s and corporate boards gave all those options during the crisis is because they expected the market to recover---and because the economy is cyclical, everyone knew it would recover,” said Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “And the whole game is played with other people’s money---the market’s money and the taxpayers’ money.”

---Vitelius

New Year's Resolution

To be once again employed in 2012. How to accomplish?

1. Stay vigilant for job openings daily.
2. Send out plenty of resumès.
3. ????
4. Return to prosperity!

---Vitelius

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Three years and trillions in free-money loans and toxic-asset purchases later, we have have only managed to postpone the inevitable:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC) is on track to be this year’s worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as concern about mounting mortgage losses and a global economic slowdown weighed on the second-biggest U.S. lender.

The 59 percent decline through yesterday erased almost $80 billion of shareholder value at Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America. It’s the firm’s largest drop since a 66 percent plunge in 2008, when a U.S. bailout staved off a collapse. The bank probably will also end 2011 last in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index and the KBW Bank Index [...]

Some of Bank of America’s biggest peers also made the list of laggards, with Citigroup Inc. (C), the third-biggest U.S. bank by assets, dropping 43 percent. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the largest lender, slid 21 percent. American International Group Inc. (AIG), the insurer owned mostly by the U.S. after its near-collapse in 2008, fell 52 percent for the second-worst showing in the S&P Financials, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) lost 46 percent.

It would certainly appears as though the greater investment community has pretty much given up on them as a source of future growth. Heaven forbid that our leaders should take the hint, and call out the FDIC.

And yes, I know, "market confidence" and all that. But even if breaking up an institution like BofA triggered a Lehman-style run on the banks, all that investment/deposit capital has got to go somewhere eventually. Even 10-year Treasuries selling at rock-bottom interest are more attractive than simply stashing the money under the mattress. I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure, breaking up BofA would be potentially wrenching in the short term, but it would likely create growth opportunities in other sectors of the economy. I think that's what America's job creators refer to as "creative destruction," no? Or does that term only apply when some other kind of business is being run into the ground?

---Vitelius

Might be a Rounding Error

Or perhaps a growing number of our fellow citizens are slowly figuring out that the casino is rigged against them.

Of course, the comments are a treasure trove of enlightened thought:

It was government (the Community Redevelopment Act), Frank, Dodd, @ Fannie and Freddie that collapsed capitalism in the last decade. Now the press runs to Frank and the Democrats to spin the anti-capitalist mantra. So..., you're surprised that the public believed you?

• • •

Do these "educated" voters know what socialism will do to a country? Maybe we can be like Spain and it's 22% unemployment rate, because if you dopes' re-elect the coward Marxist in the White House again, he will continue to fundamentally change this country. But then again, these are probably the same class of voters that don't pay any income taxes.

• • •

Congratulations to the communists and socialist progressives. Their strategy to infiltrate our schools and get children at an impressionable age has worked. It took destroying the education system and dumbing down America and weakening our society with drugs, but it was a valiant struggle under the covers and they succeeded. I'm too old to care, but I feel sorry for the children being born into bondage of money spent today by idiots (a product of the progressive movement) but borrowed from children of tomorrow.

• • •

The Democrats are the party of Communism. That is plainly evident. They are doing everything they can to destroy America. This has been a goal of the global Left for many decades.

This 99-Percent campaign is going to be one hell of a long-term reclamation project.

---Vitelius

Transit Economics

I can only speak from my own experience here, but judging from the timeline of the graph in this story, I think there's an obvious reason why bus ridership is up in recent years, and while improved access to Wifi-on-the-fly certainly makes bus travel more attractive, I suspect it's ancillary to the core motivator: Namely, bus travel has historically been a preferred mode of transport for poor people. It's not hard to understand why when you consider the cost of annual ridership---here in Los Angeles, to give an example, it's about $800 a year---versus the cost of owning a car, which is around 10 times as much. Also, while many cities don't yet have fully integrated light-rail/subway systems to compliment intracity bus travel, you can find buses---both publicly financed systems, and Greyhound-type private operators for longer trips---just about everywhere. Now combine the awesome ubiquity and low cost of buses with an exponentially increasing number of poor and jobless people in this country, and it's really no surprise that bus travel is up sharply. It's a good thing obviously, as buses are much more energy- and dollar-efficient in terms of passenger-miles than either trains or automobiles, but we should remind ourselves that this development is likely not symptomatic of an increased public awareness of the benefits of public transit as much as it is of a shitty socioeconomic dynamic where greater numbers of poor people are relying on bus-heavy transit systems that best suit their budgets.

Naturally, this is why our government should defund them.

---Vitelius

It's a Wash

Yes, we know that self-serving asshole Ben Nelson's departure is Horrible News for Democrats® since they're going to lose a Senate seat to the Republicans. On the other hand, Democrats can actually pick up a Senate seat they don't have control of now with the resignation of another self-serving asshole---who frankly can't get out of Washington too quickly.

---Vitelius

Light Blogging Today

No particular reason. Just can't think of anything new to gripe about. Try not to distribute any anti-semitic newsletters while I'm away.

---Vitelius

The Pauline Epistles

I meant to post something about them, but it looks like I've been beaten to the punch here. Basically, like Mike Konczal, I've had a hard time trying to understand what all the media folderol over Paul's newsletters has been about since (a) they're not anything that people haven't known about for years, and (b) if you strip out the overt anti-semitism and some of the more inflammatory language, they're nothing much more than a shorthand manifesto of modern-day Teabilly aspirations: Goldbug monetarism, repealing the 16th Amendment, dismantling the social welfare function of government, demonization of freeloaders (i.e., brownskins), criminalizing teh gay, etc. In other words, what's the big deal here? You hear these kinds of ideas expressed on Fox News every day.

I think this is why Paul doesn't appear to have lost any measurable support among the party base---if anything, he may have actually gained support over this flap. That's because the Paulite worldview---as with a substantial chunk of the GOP base---is so heavily informed by theories of massive Bilderberg/Rothschild/CFR/Trilateral Commisssion conspiracies of one-world government and light-bulb dictatorships that whenever some bit of unflattering news about their favorite son leaks, it's easier for them to draw the wagons around him since they already exist in a kind of perpetual survivalist Siege Mode: Someone's always about to confiscate their guns and lock them up in FEMA forced-labor camps, and negative coverage in the Times only confirms their suspicions. They're paranoids, for sure, but on the other hand, there's nothing about their paranoia that runs terribly far afield of the intellectual boundaries set by the last two decades of conservative political thought, so if the newsletters' content strikes some of our Serious Persons as extremist now, well gee, ya think it might be a reflection of a political party that has run off the rails since 1994?

I realize this is a case of "choosing sides," betraying liberal bias, etc., but it would be nice if the folks who run our major media outlets would wake up and face the facts about the current ideological state of today's GOP before we all wake up one morning to discover we're being governed by some authoritarian claque of Podunk Peronistas instead of the kind of pluralistic government we've come to know and love.

---Vitelius

Market-Based Solutions

Nothing could go wrong with this:

In the Federal Register, the FDA says that it plans instead to “focus its efforts for now on the potential for voluntary reform and the promotion of the judicious use of antimicrobials in the interest of public health.” That’s a reference to a draft guidance that the FDA put forward in the summer of 2010, which proposes that large-scale agriculture voluntarily stop using those “subtherapeutic” small doses, and also stop giving any antibiotic doses to animals unless veterinarians prescribe them.

You gotta admit, since voluntary solutions to private-sector crises have worked like a charm in the past, I guess there's no reason why we shouldn't try it again. In the meantime, you'd all better do some reading on something called Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. If you haven't heard about it by now, eventually you will.

---Vitelius

Still a Ways to Go

Nothing is preordained to follow this trajectory, but since our current government's preferred solution to the housing/foreclosure crisis is essentially doing nothing and waiting for lenders and borrowers to repair their respective balance sheets, it looks like we can forget about any significant recovery until around the time of President Bloomberg's first inaugural address, in the second half of this decade:

Again, it doesn't have to be this way. Years of stagflation won't be the result of some act of God that we have no control over; they'll be the result of deliberate and conscious decisions made by a leadership class that's been overrun by cynics, dupes and knaves.

---Vitelius

Voter Disenfranchisement

It's only a problem when Democrats are the ones accused of doing it.

For the enlightenment of the otherwise reliable staff at ProPublica, the whole idea behind a "nonpartisan" reapportionment commission in Calfornia came from . . . yes, that's right, Republicans. Who promoted the idea for decades:

Governor Deukmejian kept his [1984] campaign promise to get a fair reapportionment. Over 800,000 signatures were gathered to put his initiative on the ballot to establish a non-partisan commission of former judges to draw the reapportionment lines to prevent the blatant gerrymandering by the Democrats [...]

Governor Deukmejian’s initiative for fair reapportionment was defeated by voters fearful of “involving judges in politics,” it was said.

Meanwhile, Red State America.

---Vitelius

Really Rather Simple

Americans Elect is not a political party in anything other than name. It's a storefront operation that's been set up by a few dozen rich people who want to ensure that Washington is made perpetually safe for people like themselves in the name of Sensible Centrism. That way, the only legislators who would advocate raising taxes on rich people can be branded as far-left extremists, and Serious Persons everywhere agree that those hyper-partisans on the left are just as responsible for our dysfunctional government as those hyper-partisans on the right who want to abolish Social Security, Medicare, the EPA, etc. Truth to tell, most of the Americans Elect brain trust probably wants to achieve most of the same political objectives as the Republican right---they'd simply prefer to do it on the installment plan, minus embarrassing zanies in their midst screeching about light bulbs and FEMA camps and one-world government.

---Vitelius

Perpetual-Motion Warfare

Glad to see our leaders have reached bipartisan consensus on the necessity of gunning down American citizens without charge or jury trial or any due process whatsoever in the name of Keeping Us Safe®. For all I know, this may be effective counterterror policy, but constitutional questions aside, it's hard to see how the eventual outcome of the policy varies much from what we've experienced using this approach up to now, i.e., more collateral damage that generates a steady stream of new Qaeda recruits ready to take up arms against the Great Satan. Which then dictates the need for more drones, more secret bases overseas, more airstrikes, rinse, repeat, spend billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. Then again, maybe that's the point.

Meanwhile, po' folks at home.

---Vitelius

The Future's So Bright

I gotta wear blinders. Not that anyone would consider doing things any differently.

Those of us caught in the riptide, at least, are doing the best we can to cope.

---Vitelius

Maybe The Money Was Raptured up to Heaven

Betting dollars to donuts that someone here invested their pension money in shares of Banco Corzine, or some other institution with the same unimpeachable standards. At least we're punishing foreigners now, as well as our homegrown downtrodden.

---Vitelius

And There Was Feasting Throughout the Land

But it's still bad news for Democrats because it always is.

---Vitelius