brainiac conspiracy

New Year's Eve Music Blogging

Because 2013 was no great shakes. Maybe next year will be better . . . yeah, right.

---Baron V

Today in Freedom

We honor the passing of another year. The decades come and go, but freedom endures:

Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Grand Prairie, Texas was awarded a $263,410,000 firm-fixed-price contract for fourteen four pack Patriot missiles and seven launcher modifications kits for the Emirate of Kuwait.

It's a symptom of a decaying social order that our governing elites won't even consider discussing the possibility of enacting a guaranteed annual income, except for banks and defense contractors.

---Baron V

The Most Underreported

It's no secret that our big corporate media outlets are generally terrible at reporting news that could get them in hot water with either the government or major advertisers. But even taking that into account, it's amazing just how incurious they can be when nature is already in the process of gradually reclaiming one of America's largest cities. I mean, this isn't some forecaster's model for 2050, it's happening now, and outside the liberal/hippie blogosphere, you'd hardly know it was happening at all. Maybe they'll take notice when the city's under 30 feet of salt water?

---Baron V

In Other News, Camels Fly Effortlessly Through Eyes of Needles

Submitted without comment.

---Baron V

It's Always Good News

Have blogged about this before, but it bears mentioning that scientists, as a rule, approach their work cautiously and conservatively. They tend not to draw conclusions until they have subjected their hypotheses to years of rigorous research---sometimes a decade or more---and even then, they hesitate to make many definitive claims about their findings without subjecting their work for further (i.e., peer) review, which can often take many years more to complete. So it shouldn't be surprising if we find out eventually---or even find out now!---that their forecasts about climate change were not, in fact, shrill exaggerations but best-case scenarios. Glad we've cleared that up!

---Baron V

Nothing a Guaranteed Annual Income Wouldn't Solve

This:

By almost two to one---64 percent to 33 percent---Americans say the U.S. no longer offers everyone an equal chance to get ahead, according to the latest Bloomberg National Poll. The lack of faith is especially pronounced among those making less than $50,000 a year, with close to three-quarters in the Dec. 6-9 survey saying the economy is unfair.

Now, a guaranteed income of, say, $25,000 to $40,000 a year---depending on your ZIP code---wouldn't necessarily make our economy fairer, but it would relieve a lot of stress and anxiety that financially-strapped Americans are feeling, and it would create jobs. Because if you give more money to lower-income Americans, they'll have more money to spend, and when they spend more, that increases aggregate demand, which spurs our job creators to, like, create more jobs. Sure, they may mostly be poor-paying service jobs, but even a job that pays poorly is better than no job at all. Because that's the crux of our unemployment problem---there simply aren't enough jobs for people who want them, and throwing $80 billion a month at some banks is, obviously, an inadequate policy fix.

---Baron V

Monday Night Music Blogging

Because fake recoveries are fake recoveries, but their consequences are not!

---Baron V

No, Not Everything is a Partisan War of Ideas

But in the Village, opinions forever differ:

When it comes to increasing partisanship in the United States, it seems no issue is immune. And that includes evolution.

A new Pew Research Center poll shows a widening political gap over theories about how humans came to be, with Republicans growing increasingly skeptical about the idea that humans evolved over time.

It's an insult to our intelligence to frame the question about evolution---more accurately, Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection---in terms of what we "believe" about it. Darwin's theory doesn't rely on faith, or "belief", to be confirmed. It relies on scientific evidence, or "facts" that can be observed. So in other words, we either know Darwin is correct, or we don't. What we believe is irrelevant. As it turns out, science has confirmed the general outline of Darwin's theory many times over, and if we practiced honest journalism in this country, the headline of this article would read: "Republicans' Grip on Reality Grows More Tenuous." But we don't value honest journalism in this country because if we did, we wouldn't be entertaining the notion that willful ignorance is just another type of informed opinion:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"---out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.

---Baron V

More Fake Freedom

Sure, it's great that everyone now has access to health care---or at least, cannot be denied health care. But what happens when you live in an area where there are few if any health-care providers? That's yet another dilemma that the Goldberg Act doesn't solve, and people who live in the poorest parts of rural America---where a sizable majority of the population is poor and elderly, and where access to public transit is minimal or nonexistent---are going to find that the promise of universal health care rings rather hollow when you can't get to a real-life doctor. There were policy fixes for this that could have been incorporated into the law---allowing nurse-practicioners to perform more doctoral functions, or loosening visa requirements for foreign-born doctors, or increasing federal aid to medical schools to admit more students---but one or more of the "stakeholders" objected, so the problem wasn't solved. Then again, that was to be expected when the task of fixing America's health-care mess was outsourced to the same people who created the mess in the first place.

---Baron V

Moderator in Chief

One thing that we've learned about the President over the last five years is that he's not confrontational by nature: he doesn't have an "in your face" personality, except perhaps to his friends on the basketball court. He much prefers to prepare a place at the policy table for all of the "stakeholders," and let the competing factions iron out their differences to everyone's satisfaction. That's an admirable quality for a community organizer, but not so much when the "stakeholders" at the table are the same people who are stealing our homes, robbing our pensions, gouging us for health care, poisoning the nation's food supply, and triggering mass extinction events.

Sometimes, a President has to put comity aside, and make difficult decisions that are going to alienate some powerful and entrenched interests because the call of history demands it. Lyndon Johnson understood this when he pushed for a civil rights bill; he knew full well that his support would lose the South for Team Democrat for many years to come, and that many officeholders in his party would pay a price for it. But he also understood how Southern apartheid was tearing the nation asunder, with frightful human and economic costs, and that history would judge him harshly if he failed to act when he had the power to do so. Otherwise, as he said at the time, "What the hell's the Presidency for?"

---Baron V

Probably Restating the Obvious

But we are governed by abject morons:

Chief Beck said the crackdown was a matter of public safety and traffic flow, noting the frustration of drivers trying to make turns and faced with crosswalks filled with people.

Because a 5,500-pound SUV is no match for a bunch of elderly pedestrians and people in wheelchairs. And because crosswalks are for cars, not humans. Which begs the question: Is there any way we can hire Bill Bratton back? I swear, he's the only halfway decent police chief we've ever had in this burg. The rest have been either sadists like Darryl Gates or fools like Beck. Regardless, incentivizing drivers to plow through crosswalks is utterly bassackwards public policy.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Obviously:

In early 2012, as JPMorgan was building up an unmanageable position in illiquid, toxic derivatives in a dark corner of its trading empire in London using the insured deposits of its banking customers, its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, was sitting on the Board of Directors of the New York Fed. As it was being investigated by the New York Fed, Jamie Dimon continued to sit on its Board, serving out his two terms which ended at the end of 2012. This debacle became infamously known as the London Whale trades. JPMorgan has owned up to $6.2 billion in losses from those derivatives.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other instance where bookies and loan sharks are allowed to serve on the state gaming commission. I mean, you'd think this would be against the law or something! But I guess they play by a different set of rules on The Street than the rest of us do, and this is likely why the looting will continue until either they crash the global economy again, or the lower orders start throwing up bonfires and barricades. Whichever happens, I am guessing it won't be a pleasant outcome.

---Baron V

Nothing Happens by Accident

Well, okay, some things do happen that way, but our chronically high unemployment rate is no accident. It's happening because it is in the economic best interest of America's job creators. When millions of people are desperate for work---any kind of work!---and there's only one job opening for every three job applicants, people will work for any wage they can get, which drives down labor costs and increases profitability. There are, and have always been, policy options available to level the playing field, but the people who govern us have concluded in their wisdom that they have done all that they can and that the invisible hand will take care of the rest. Yeah, I know that some members of Team Democrat make noises about raising the minimum wage, but they had ample opportunity to do it four years ago, and they didn't even discuss it. So, collective failure.

---Baron V

You Wonder Why We Even Have a United Nations

I always thought that a core component of its overall mission was to marshall the resources of the international community to resolve crises that were beyond the ability of individual member states to handle. Well, such a crisis is happening right now. So what the hell are they waiting for?

Responsibility for monitoring the hiring, safety records and suitability of hundreds of small firms involved in Fukushima's decontamination rests with the top contractors, including Kajima Corp, Taisei Corp and Shimizu Corp, officials said.

"In reality, major contractors manage each work site," said Hide Motonaga, deputy director of the radiation clean-up division of the environment ministry.

But, as a practical matter, many of the construction companies involved in the clean-up say it is impossible to monitor what is happening on the ground because of the multiple layers of contracts for each job that keep the top contractors removed from those doing the work [...]

Below the official subcontractors, a shadowy network of gangsters and illegal brokers who hire homeless men has also become active in Fukushima. Ministry of Environment contracts in the most radioactive areas of Fukushima prefecture are particularly lucrative because the government pays an additional $100 in hazard allowance per day for each worker.

---Baron V

Unemployment Insurance Costs Too Much

If only there was a way we could find the money.

Now I'm not saying that this particular policy approach is some panacea that would cure what ails us, or that it wouldn't produce some unpleasant side-effects, e.g., decreased demand, capital flight, etc. But the point is, we used to have a similar tax code in this country and it worked just fine, so there's no reason, given certain economic conditions and capital controls, that it couldn't work again. More to the point, there are policy options available to the people who govern us that could ameliorate the suffering of the poor and unemployed, and they are not even being discussed, let alone debated. Blaming one party or the other for this sad state of affairs may gird the loins of the faithful, but it's not an honest assessment.

---Baron V

Sunday Night Movie Blogging

Because I enrolled in health insurance at Covered California on the 7th, but didn't hear anything from my insurance company until the 27th, when I received a form letter explaining that my application was still "under review". That's a long time to wait, and for some reason, I suspect something's fishy:

In California, the last day to pay your first month's premium is Jan. 6, with coverage retroactive to Wednesday.

"If you miss the deadline to pay, some carriers are making you reapply," McLean said.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Matt Yglesias.

Because, you know, it's not dignified to allow the unwashed rabble to share the same dining room with people like me. They should be content with the Happy Meals they more richly deserve.

---Baron V

Unemployment Insurance: Unaffordable

Securing the blessings of liberty: Affordable!

Sometimes it appears that the world's most modern spies are just as reliant on conventional methods of reconnaissance as their predecessors.

Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries. If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.

These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the "most productive operations" conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms. This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks "around the world."

Okay, if this old-school intelligence-gathering method is so productive, why are we spending billions of dollars for servers and software to trawl the InterTubes for trillions of terabytes of gibberish that will never be analyzed because no one will ever read them? Okay, I know, grifters gotta grift and all that, but you would think that policymakers in Washington would start to worry by now that, whatever their original intentions, by their inaction they are allowing our out-of-control security-surveillance regime to lay the infrastructure of a future totalitarian state. Put another way: Even if they're comfortable entrusting this program to President Obama---and many members of Team Democrat regrettably are---would they be equally comfortable giving someone like, oh, President Christie such unlimited power, given what we know about his governing style? We're not talking hypotheticals here, folks.

---Baron V

Death, Taxes, Etc.

In contemporary Beltway journalism, one thing that's inevitable is the "Red-State/Blue-State Divide" essay where experts continually disagree over the respective states' approaches to public policy, and we can never conclude definitively what works. This is dishonest jounalism of the most clueless nature because, in fact, we can conclude definitively what works---and what doesn't---if we move beyond theoretical policy debates and look at actual policy outcomes. And since one state in this debate is running our of water, and the other state, like, is not, it isn't difficult to determine which state has the more viable model of governance going forward. I realize that's not fair and balanced reporting, but it would at least be accurate and, most importantly, it would be honest.

---Baron V

Too Bad About Those Unemployment Benefits

If only there was a way to find some money in the budget:

J. Walter Thompson, Atlanta, Ga., is being awarded an undefinitized contract action in an amount not-to-exceed $170,000,000 for an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity bridge contract under a previously awarded cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (M00264-08-D-001). Task order 0001 in the amount of $77,433,499 will be awarded concurrently. The bridge contract is for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command's (MCRC) Advertising and Recruitment Services Program's requirement. This contract provides for services to furnish the supplies and services customarily provided by a full-service advertising agency in order to support recruiting programs for MCRC at Quantico, Va., and other locations throughout the United States.

---Baron V