brainiac conspiracy

Friday Night Music Blogging

Because we're all Ukranians now. Or something.

---Baron V

The Next Three Years Are Going to be a Laff Riot

Why is this considered at all newsworthy?

A newly-disclosed batch of previously-secret documents from President Bill Clinton’s White House offer new details on that administration’s early failures that could serve as a reminder that any future presidential bid by former first lady Hillary Clinton will inevitably involve revisiting and perhaps even re-litigating a series of fights from the 1990s.

Inevitable? Says fucking who?!?!? Christ, where to begin.

I really have never understood this attitude that's so prevalent on the part of the Washington news media that nothing the Clintons ever say or do can ever be taken at face value, that there must be ulterior motives to their every official deed, and that the baseless claims of psychotics and grifters must be re-exhumed because, well, because. I think what's annoying here is that Politico wants to have it both ways. They want to be free to traffic in all the sensationalistic bullshit because Clinton scandal-mongering is a profitable business, but they don't want to take responsibility for channeling proven lies. And we only have to put up with this nonsense for another three years, yippee!

Update (3:45 pm): Even. Fox News. Gets it.

---Baron V

Not Sure How We Handle The Russians

But I am guessing that threatening war isn't the smartest approach.

Sure, there's a certain amount of feint-and-dodge in these foreign-policy statements---a studied display of indignation is how you play the game, sometimes---but honestly, what the hell can we really do if Putin decides he wants to quash the unruly miscreants in his backyard? We've got as much power over him as the Russians would have over us if we decided to, say, invade the state of Sinaloa to stomp out a drug cartel. Okay, I suppose we could vote some trade sanctions on them, but even then our options are extremely limited because if we overplay our hand, Putin can always retaliate by shutting off the natural-gas spigot, and half of Europe will freeze to death. Maybe some backchannel discussions would be wiser than threats of confrontation.

---Baron V

All About The Blahs

Just about finished reading this biography of Strom Thurmond, who in many ways was the progenitor of modern American "movement" conservatism---it's highly recommended, by the way---and one thing was really leapt out from the pages was the inescapable fact that virtually every agenda item in the right-wing culture war that's been waged against liberals since the end of World War II---well, just about every single one of them is grounded in the politics of race: Specifically, in white privilege and the subjugation of the darker races. This is just as true now as it was in Strom's time---the only thing that's really changed between then and now is how they market the brand.

---Baron V

The Not-So-Greatest Generation

Being an older white guy who holds leftist political views can be lonely sometimes. Sure, I know there are plenty of others out there---most of my friends, in fact---but there have been more times than I can remember over the past ten years (especially in a professional/career setting) where I looked around a roomful of people who were talking politics and wondered in silence if I was the only white man over the age of 40 in America who hadn't been driven utterly berserk by crackpot media. The same thing happened to my own father (to a less malign extent), and it has always baffled me how seemingly well educated and sensible people like my dad can be suckered into buying the snake oil from obvious grifters like Beck and Hannity and Palin. Is it based in white people's Fear of a Black Gay Muslim Wetback Transgender Planet, or is it grounded in something else? I really don't know the answer, though I don't suppose it much matters. We've always had our share of reactionaries---they've just got their own media-industrial complex now, so their braying is louder than ever.

---Baron V

Invisible Hands in The Till

Their ebullient praise of free markets to the contrary, most of our most esteemed job creators actually hate the idea of market competition, and will go to great lengths to avoid it:

The London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say [...]

The paper is the first to raise the possibility that the five banks overseeing the century-old rate---Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG, Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc and Societe Generale SA---may have been actively working together to manipulate the benchmark.

I am guessing that there really is no such thing as a "safe" investment for little people like us anymore, except perhaps for an FDIC-insured savings account or a hole in the mattress. They might as well start writing the checks and paying some fines since no one ever goes to prison for this sort of thing, do they.

---Baron V

Don't Know Why They Bother

Sure, it would be great to have world-class infrastructure again, just like it would be nice to have single-payer health care and full employment. World-class infrastructure costs a lot of money, though, and the time to have gone to the mat for the money was five years ago, not now. Of course, it's a lot easier to propose Big Things when you know there's no chance of them ever materializing because it costs you zero political capital and there's no downside risk. Such is the state of modern American liberalism.

---Baron V

Midday Music Blogging

Because the rain. We need it!

---Baron V

Everything That is Wrong With Our Financial System

In one easy headline:

Ex-Goldman Sachs Fraudster Fabrice Tourre
to Teach Economics at University of Chicago

We certainly live in interesting times, now, don't we.

---Baron V

Everything That is Wrong With Our Health-Care System

In one easy paragraph:

"The Affordable Care Act is great," said Dr. Patience White, a rheumatologist and vice president for public health policy and advocacy at the Arthritis Foundation. "Insurance companies now have to take people with chronic illness. But they have investors and can't lose money. That's the way American healthcare is."

Boom.

As opposed to, like, a health-care system that doesn't view sick people as profit centers to be mined but as patients to be treated. Maybe we should consider trying it sometime.

---Baron V

Friends of The Working Man

Sure glad to see the administration siding with labor over management:

“My hands really began to hurt was when I switched to deboning,” 59-year-old Salvadora Roman said through an interpreter at a Capitol Hill news conference. “We have to pull the bone up and take the meat off---really rip it from the bone ... The real problem here is the lines go really fast.”

Currently, plants run processing lines at a maximum rate of 140 birds an hour. Under the USDA’s proposed plan, line speeds can rise to 175 birds an hour.

This might---repeat, might---have been acceptable if we had enacted an increase in the minimum wage for these workers when we had the votes to do it. But no, it wasn't even discussed because we needed to reduce the deficit and embrace austerity, and spend all our remaining political capital on health-care legislation that transfers billions of dollars from taxpayers to insurance companies. Why are these people even considering regulatory changes that endanger both workers and consumers? Beats me, but they must either be (a) very stupid, or (b) truly evil.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Peter Orszag.

It was grifters like him on the White House economic policy team---though he wasn't the only one---who swore up and down that while they were saving the banks, the rest of us would need to embrace deficit reduction and budget cuts ere the bond trolls took their pound of flesh from us. Of course, they were utterly wrong, and many people were greatly harmed by all the cuts---but that doesn't prevent anyone from getting a promotion and a big raise in D.C. these days. Hope his ex-wife manages to impose some austerity measures of her own.

---Baron V

Nothing Has Changed

And all this talk about economic recovery is utter bullshit:

"What we're seeing in these middle-aged people is very disheartening, because they are in what should be their peak earning years, when they should be accumulating assets before retirement," he said.

"We might be seeing people who have lost their jobs and are forced to spend their assets because they can't find work. Some of them may have given up looking."

You don't say. All I know is, I've made less money every year for the last five years running, and I'm not the only person I know who has experienced this same downward mobility. I guess people who own a lot of stocks have recovered their wealth, but otherwise, those of us who don't have seven-figure investment portfolios have been sacrificed for the benefit of those who do. A monumental policy failing that won't be quickly forgiven or forgotten.

---Baron V

Thursday Night Music Blogging

Because you can't get ahead if you got no money, no job, no prospects, and no hope. Perhaps someone in Washington would consider doing something about this? Or at least make a speech about it?

---Baron V

Money for The Jobless, Leisure for the Jobbed

Due to advances in automation, computerization, robotics, etc., it's becoming obvious by now that our postmillennial Information Age will likely be characterized by chronic high unemployment coupled with an ever-shrinking labor force that's working too hard. This is a recipe for a very unhealthy and stressed-out nation, and it's another reason for a guaranteed income---er, income support---for people who who need it, and for paid time off for vacations, maternity leave, etc. Personally, if I ran the show, everyone would get five weeks' paid vacation a year, just like the Euros get. I know we can never even think about this because Marxism, but I imagine we'd have a much more humane and happy society than what we have in America right now.

---Baron V

Baby Steps

They're the only kinds of steps our current regime seems capable of taking anymore. Not counting those times when they're spying on people or bombing their hamlets.

Sure, it's better than nothing, but it dodges the concerns many of us have about pesticides, herbicides, high-fructose corn syrup, genetic modification, country of origin, etc. We deserve to have all that information, too, not just fat, salt and calories. But that's just how this gang operates---promoting "progressive" reforms in the most business-fiendly manner---and that's why I joined the Greens.

---Baron V

Friends in Freedom

We really know how to pick 'em.

This list, while appalling, could be a bit more accurate in terms of how our relationships with each of these nations affects our relations with others. I mean, our relationship with the government of Djibouti only alienates us from the Djiboutian people who suffer under it, but our relationship with the government of Israel alienates us from tens of millions of people across a huge swath of the globe. But either way, whenever we sidle up to these awful people in exchange for oil or a drone base or a fueling station, it kinda undercuts what we used to call our "moral authority". I know you sometimes have to make devil's deals in foreign policy to achieve a greater good, but it has always seemed to me that our government has nearly always been too eager to make them without taking the time to contemplate what future impact they might exert on the commonweal. That's kinda how 9/11 happened, now, isn't it?

---Baron V

How Will The Kids Ever Get Ahead

If they start out their working lives with tens of thousands of dollars in debt?

There are ways to solve this problem. First, declare higher education as a right, not a privilege, and make it tuition-free. It actually won't cost us that much. Second, abolish for-profit colleges. Third, forgive all outstanding student-loan debt. Call it "quantitative easing" for people instead of banks. But whatever we choose, we need to do something because a generation in debt is a generation that's going to put off buying cars and houses, and getting married and starting families. That is, if we don't do something now, recession will become a chronic, not a cyclical, condition of our economy. Not good!

---Baron V

Wonder What it Is Going to Take

Before people take to the streets with fire bombs and brickbats:

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery---including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications---from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

I think we can put to rest the notion that Ed Snowden had some hidden ulterior motive when he leaked these documents to the press. The only thing that's really surprising about it is that nobody else was sufficiently alarmed to leak this stuff earlier. But we should be alarmed---both by the reach of our global surveillance state, and of the fecklessness of our leaders who cannot, or will not, bring it to heel. They are creating the infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism, whether they want to admit it or not.

---Baron V

Food For Thought

In a perfect world, we humans would have all made a successful transition from a meat-based diet to a plant-based one. It's more sustainable for the planet, for healthier for us! But we don't live in a perfect world, and some people will always want to eat animals---heck, eating animals played a big part in how we evolved! So the least we can do, if we're going to eat animals, is to ensure that the animals are safe for us to eat. In the past, government undertook this task, but this was before the neoliberals and the privatizers and the deregulators took over, so now eating animals is like playing Russian roulette.

If you'd asked me five years if there was any chance that Barack Obama would finish the work that Ronald Reagan started, I'd have said you were nuts. Silly me.

---Baron V