brainiac conspiracy

Tuesday Night Transit Blogging

Because posting was light today because real paying work, unlike this blog which is a labor of love. How I slave and sacrifice for you people! But I promise to be appropriately lazy and slothful tomorrow. Tonight's video is a bit grainy, but if the soundtrack doesn't make you wanna hop the train, nothing will.

---Baron V

Know Your Enemy

It's the oldest rule of war, because you'll never be able to defeat him otherwise:

Ultimately they themselves are going to have to say we'll do the right thing...There are members in the Senate right now and I suspect members in the House as well who understand that deep down, but they're worried about their politics. It's tough. Their base thinks that compromise would mean somehow a betrayal. They're worried about primaries and I understand all that. And we're going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure to do what's best for the country.

At this point I've disabused myself of the notion that this President is possessed of any genuine partisan beliefs he's willing to fight to the finish for---except, perhaps, during election season, when they make compelling talking points in campaign speeches---but you would think after all this time that he'd have finally realized what the rest of have known from the minute he took office: That the opposition wasn't, and isn't, some principled adversary that has the nation's best interests at heart. They weren't, and aren't, good-faith negotiators. They weren't, and aren't, people who could be reasoned with. That's because they're not reasonable people, because they aren't surrogates for the crazy people or conduits for the crazy people---they are the crazy people, and acting crazy is what got them a ticket to Washington in the first place.

Maybe the President sincerely believes that somehow, some way, that he'll be able to break their spell of craziness, that they'll all be able to break bread together and write sensible policy someday, and if that's the case, then history will decide whether the President was either a naif, a narcissist, or some combination thereof. But before he departs Washington, he really should spend a little more time, you know, listening to the radio or watching a little TV. It might provide him with a bit more insight into the psyches of the people he's trying to deal with. Just a suggestion!

---Baron V

Watch What We Say, Not What We Do

And just keep those checks rolling in:

"There is no doubt that Karl Rove and his allies will spend millions of dollars lying about what the President’s budget means in terms of the economic health of our country,” Burton, now a strategist for the Democratic public affairs firm Global Strategy Group, wrote in an email. “What we don’t know is just how much Democratic donors are going to stand up to those lies.”

Because mean ol' Karl Rove forced the President to offer up Social Security cuts in exchange for basically nothing. Yep, that's exactly how I remember it, too.

Why do the leaders of Team Democrat think its followers are stupid?

---Baron V

It Was 100% Predictable

That the people who were peddling 401(k) plans as a vehicle for average Americans to save for their retirement weren't the least bit interested in actually helping people save for their retirement. What they were interested in was getting their hands on your money, and it's the same reason why they want to turn Social Security into two hundred million private "investment accounts"---or, barring that, to defund the program in drips and drabs to force people to buy more 401(k)s. They should have been ignored then, and they should still be ignored now. So why aren't they being ignored?

---Baron V

Not Like Shopping For a Car

There's a reason why big corporations hire actuaries and administrators to help them choose which level of health care to offer to their employees: Because the relationship between private health insurance and health-care delivery is difficult and complex, and being able to properly calculate the costs/risks versus rewards of any plan is a full-time job requiring a level of education that most ordinary people lack. People can't make smart choices about health insurance unless they possess the knowledge to make smart decisions, and since most people don't, this is yet another reason why the Affordable Care Act is looking more and more like a looming disaster that isn't going to work to the benefit of anyone but the companies that wrote the legislation. Imagine that!

Of course, this could have been foreseen since the whole idea of an insurance mandate with health exchanges originated with a conservative think tank---which is to say, it was an inherently bad idea. Generally speaking, bad ideas, once enshrined into law, tend to yield bad outcomes, so perhaps in the future, our leaders would consider ignoring bad ideas and embracing better ones instead?

---Baron V

Still Not Getting It

Can't see at this point how central banks dropping interest rates is going to solve anything when nobody can afford to borrow the money. Well, it does make it cheaper for the banks to lend to each other, and of course the equities traders will love it so the shareholders will earn a few more pennies by the end of the day. So, rich people win! But dropping interest rates in itself is not going to create any more jobs for everyone else. If that were the case, we'd be at full employment by now, and the fact that this is their default response to rising unemployment numbers kinda confirms that our best and brightest economic policymakers really don't know what the hell they are doing.

---Baron V

Monday Night Transit Blogging

Because even the Africans have got HSR. With airport access! Why can't we have these nice things here?

---Baron V

Gay Stuff

I don't blog much about sports here---ironic, as one of my very first professional writing gigs was as a sportswriter, back in the days when it as Morning in America---but I guess the time was ripe for a male athlete in a major team sport to finally come out because it really does seem that there's been a huge shift in public opinion about homosexuality over the last decade or so, and obviously, one that's been for the good. I don't know much about this particular player, but apparently he's a pretty upstanding guy, and I would think that would certainly encourage greater acceptance of, and maybe greater public support for, marriage equality, among other things. Personally, I don't think he'll get much blowback from fans or athletes or anyone except for the usual dickwads who like to run off their mouths because it pisses off liberals. Maybe the fact that we've been through a calamitous financial crisis and two terrible wars have given people a more balanced outlook on this subject---namely, with so many people suffering from the hardships of austerity, there are plenty of other things to get excised about than the gender of the person whom some athlete or celebrity happens to be romancing. But whatever the reason, it's a positive development.

---Baron V

Two to Tango

It's fair enough to say that a President can't move mountains of legislation on his own by simply making an eloquent speech or issuing some unenforceable decree. But nobody has forced this President to shill for austerity, or to offer up unilateral cuts to Social Security, or to sign off on a health-care law that was formulated by a right-wing think tank, or to piss off his supporters with (literally) toxic public policy initiatives, so a lot of the "frustration" he claims to feel has been, to an extent, self-inflicted. And considering that he has already announced that he has no intention of deviating from the same Congressional negotiating strategies that have failed dismally every time they've been attempted, it's hard to work up a great deal of sympathy for him---especially when so many of the policy initiatives over which he does exert direct control have been legally and morally indefensible.

---Baron V

Protection Rackets We Can Believe In

This, in essence, is what our bank-and-regulator dog-and-pony revue has become. The banks shell out $300 for a stolen home, and they get liability protection from, well, the regulators:

Senator Warren: So I want to just make sure I get this straight. Families get pennies on the dollar in this settlement for having been the victims of illegal activities or mistakes in the banks' activities. You let the banks, and you now know individual cases where the banks violated the law and you are not going to tell the homeowners, or at least it is not clear yet whether or not you are going to do that?

Mr. Stipano: We have not made a decision on what we are going to tell the homeowners.

It is not easy to keep track of how many ways taxpayers get hosed on these deals: first, of course, untold thousands of homes were stolen; second, we saved their asses with the TARP, HAMP, and all the other acronymic recovery measures; third, we're keeping them awash in liquidity by swelling the balance sheet of our central bank by three trillion dollars; fourth, we take a hit in local government services---particularly public education---when property tax revenues in our neighborhoods decline (lots of foreclosed homes will do that to a neighborhood); and fifth, we take further hits in government services when our local law-enforcement and community-service agencies get overwhelmed with heavier caseloads and reduced budgets. I'm sure we get hammered a few other ways, too, but in the aggregate, it is surely enough to leave any future historian shaking his head and wondering what the hell our political leaders were thinking when they allowed this parasitic outlaw zombie cartel to go on extorting money from the public for apparently as long as they wanted.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

As currently constituted, I have no idea, either.

Yes, the Affordable Care Act should help the poorest Americans to purchase health insurance, and to a lesser extent, middle-class people as well---but it's also going to screw over the youngs, the self-employeds, and the hourly-waged, who by themselves make up 75 million workers. That's a big fuckin' deal, wouldn't you say?

The big problem with the PPACA, as your humble blogger sees it, is that while it shifts health-care costs around---a lot to the government and to individuals, not as much to businesses---it doesn't do much to drive down the costs of a health-care system that is obscenely overpriced. Yes, we've heard about how the cost curve will be bent downward as soon as we get all of those able-bodied and healthy people enrolled along with the chronically ill, but we heard the same exact argument here in the Marxist dystopia when our legislature, in its wisdom, passed a mandatory auto-insurance law back in the '80s. A few antisocial cranks like Ralph Nader mumbled something about collusion and blank checks, but they were ignored by the serious persons of the time who assured us that market forces would solve everything as soon as both good drivers and bad drivers had some skin in the game---and no sooner had the law passed when premiums went through the roof for everyone. The voters got so enraged that, a couple of years later, they voted to create a state Insurance Commission to regulate the the industry and to approve rate increases----and one suspects that for the ACA to be truly successful as a cost-saving regime, the federal government will need to create some sort of Interstate Insurance Commission to set some basic standards for premiums, fees, co-pays, etc.

The irony, of course, is that the federal government already has a mechanism to set premiums, fees and co-pays. It's called Medicare, and it's a fairly efficient program. Perhaps in the future, our leaders would consider expanding a program that's proven it actually works instead of trying to fine-tune a program that, for most people, abysmally doesn't.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Persons

These persons. Because they want to kill us:

In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the "Great Recession" and its accompanying austerity across Europe and North America.

In Greece, moves like cutting HIV prevention budgets have coincided with rates of the AIDS-causing virus rising by more than 200 percent since 2011---driven in part by increasing drug abuse in the context of a 50 percent youth unemployment rate.

Greece also experienced its first malaria outbreak in decades following budget cuts to mosquito-spraying programs.

And more than five million Americans have lost access to healthcare during the latest recession, they argue, while in Britain, some 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the government's austerity budget.

No, I'm not saying they consciously want us all to get sick and die prematurely--but it's just what their policies will do when put into practice, and we have sufficient data to make an ironclad case. Don't harbor any illusions that this will reframe the debate in Washington, but it would be nice if our political leadership class would acknowledge the fact that tens of millions of their constituents have been needlessly suffering through five years of dire economic times, and that cutting unemployment checks and cancer-center transfer payments is not---repeat, not---going to cause a thousand flowers to bloom. Because if you don't water the flowers, then the flowers, they die.

---Baron V

Policy Priorities

Our leaders have them, and they can broken down elegantly into four basic groupings:

Rich people: Essential.

People who blow shit up: Also essential.

Jobless people: Not essential.

Hungry old poor people: Also not essential.

Snark aside, I'll never understand what the 11-dimensional Parcheesi players at the White House were thinking when they cut this sequester deal with the crazy people. I know they assumed the crazy people would de-crazify themselves after the election was over, but as has happened every other time they tried to cut a deal with the crazy people, they were proved disastrously wrong because the crazy people, to no one else's surprise, are still crazy. Gambling wrong on the crazy people, in itself, isn't necessarily harmful, but when it results in needless hardship being inflicted upon millions of people, it's generally stupid politics, and even worse policy. So maybe, stop doing it?

---Baron V

Simple Fixes

Have blogged on this before, but League of Serious Persons reminds me this morning our chronic jobs crisis could be ameliorated, at least in part, by lowering, not raising, the Social Security retirement age---to create more job openings for younger workers. And the best way to induce older workers to take early retirement is to offer them a Social Security package that will sustain them comfortably in the event they haven't managed to save up enough on their own. (And most older workers haven't.) Now $15,000 a year might---repeat, might---be sufficient to scrape by if you live in a trailer park in the rural South, but it's completely inadequate almost everywhere else, and that's why Social Security disbursements need to be sharply increased, not cut. How to fund this? Well, there are many ways, but a good place to start would be to stop rewarding rich people for the simple fact of being rich, and transfer all of that money to the people who aren't. Two hundred billion a year would go a long way!

---Baron V

Your Tax Dollars at Work

This, I am guessing, is why we can never have nice things in this country:

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president---courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader [...]

[T]here is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

We still need that Truth & Reconciliation Commission, Mr. President. And we need to sequester permanently this stupid and pointless war. Now.

---Baron V

American Surveillance State

It appears to be a fait accompli as far as our political leaders are concerned, and while it poses obvious potential privacy problems, an expanded surveillance regime does not necessarily need to be particularly intrusive or violative of our individual liberties. In fact, such a state could even prove beneficial to the commonweal, but our leaders would need to reorder their policy priorities. i.e., to leverage the power of the state to monitor conversations in places like the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein instead of expending resources on keeping track of what some Saudi exchange students are Skyping each other. Just a thought!

---Baron V

Sunday Night Transit Blogging

Because sometimes, the coolest destination is actually the station.

---Baron V

Laff Riot II

Don't seem to recall hearing any good jokes about this last night:

The U.S. economy has recovered for households with net worth of $500,000 or more, a new study shows. The recession continues for almost everyone else.

Wealthy households boosted their net worth by 21.2 percent in the aftermath of the recession, according to the study released today by the Pew Research Center. The rest of America lost 4.9 percent of household wealth from 2009 to 2011.

No doubt the situation would be even worse were it not for the monthly money bombs our central bank has dropped to inject liquidity into the banking system, but four years on, all that cash isn't trickling its way down the foodchain, partly because too many people can't afford to borrow/spend the money and partly because many of our job creators are greedy rapacious bastards. Meanwhile, one political party wants to give the rich people even more money, and the other party wants to take it away from the poor, sick and elderly---and these are the only solutions we are being allowed to discuss, even though we know that as matters of policy, they are both terrible and cruel punch lines. So let's crank up the volume on the laugh track, and pretend that the worst of the recession is behind us---even though, actually, it isn't.

---Baron V

Nonstop Laff Riot

This just in: President roasts journalists, hilarity ensues:

Meanwhile, more hilarity:

An op-ed in the New York Times on Monday from prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel details the painful process of being force-fed by prison authorities.

The Yemeni-born inmate wrote: "I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can't describe how painful it is to be force-fed in this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn't.

"There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone."

His testimony comes after Shaker Aamer, the last British resident being held at Guantánamo, described the treatment of hunger strikers such as himself as "systematic torture".

Aamer---who has spent 11 years at Guantánamo despite never being charged---told his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith that the US base may soon be dealing with its first fatalities as a result of the current hunger strike.

"I might die this time," he said to Stafford Smith in a telephone call last week, adding: "I cannot give you numbers and names, but people are dying here."

---Baron V

Random Thought

One of these days we should ask ourselves what the Easter Islanders must have been thinking when they cut down the very last tree on the island and destroyed what was left of their ecosystem. No particular reason for asking, I suppose, but would really hate to see us repeat the same silly mistake!

---Baron V