Infinite Test

I read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest from March to June this year. I intentionally read it very slowly, trying to savor what is a very thick, and even more dense book. If you tried to read it too quickly, your head would likely start to wobble in a distinctly oval path.

So it is with a profound sense of now-you-tell-me that I discovered, through a post at Matt Yglesias's Blog that he and a group of friends are reading IJ this summer, and blogging about it at A Supposedly Fun Blog. It's a real joy to hear opinions from people as they plow their way through the best book I ever read.

Honestly. Set aside a few months. Read slowly, only a few hours a day, preferably morning so you can mull over what you just injested, and enjoy the high, so to speak. It's addictive, and if you take it in small doses over a long time, it won't kill you to finish it (Mithridates, he died old), and the withdrawals when you're done won't be quite as bad as if you'd filled up your day with it every day. But and so.

Oh, and you might want to brush up on your Hamlet first...

Gourmet Grass Fed Beef Jerky on Sale!

Well, we've finally managed to get our long-dreamed-of gourmet grass-fed beef jerky business off to a very small start... We're bartering with our friends at Nectar Hills Farm for the beef. We're cutting back on everything else in order to at least attempt to sell Robin's delicious jerky--especially the new jalapeño and Ommegang Hennepin Ale spicy beef jerky, which sold out at last week's Cooperstown Farmer's Market!

Civil Disobedience by the Manichaen Paranoiacs?

Ethical arguments are always moved along by action, often violent. In a comment to a Whiskey Fire post on the Tiller murder, I wondered about the one thing that's always bothered me about these terrorists... Why do the run? Why, if they believe the law is wrong, and that they are committing not just murder but an act of civil disobedience, do they run and try to hide?

If their cause is so righteous, why not just shoot, and then sit down and wait for the cops, while you explain to everyone around you, as your victim lies there bleeding to death, how righteous you are?

This is an extension of the Manichean Paranoia exhibited, nay apotheosized, by the Bushies, that says, essentially, I am good and therefore I can do bad without being bad. Seeing the world in black and white leads to some stark conclusions and, in some cases, extreme actions. But if you believe you are good, that you just have to do bad to protect that which is good, then why run?

A Backstage Story of Downstage Proportions

It's been a while since I told a backstage story, so how about the time, maybe 10 years ago, working a show at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles called Tongue of a Bird. With Cherry Jones, Sharon Lawrence, Diane Venora, and my friend Marian Seldes. Fun show with Sharon flying around all over the place, falling out of the grid, and a set with lots of sliding doors. Great fun back stage with a small rail to operate the doors, prop guys doubling on the rail, barely enough time to make your next cue...

One of my cues was going out on stage for a scene change in low light. Cherry Jones rolled a big heavy iron frame bed toward me, and I put it up stage through a door, which then closed, with me and the bed in there. One night, Cherry makes a bad roll with the bed, which heads off stage left, which, in the horseshoe-shaped house of the Taper, means it's heading right for an old ladie's lap in the front row. I jump down stage, stop the bed, spin it around, throw it in the upstage hole, the door closes, the lights come up, and I'm standing there on stage with Cherry Jones who looks at me like, "What are you doing here?"

So, I jump off stage, over a row of foot lights, and as I'm running up the aisle to the vom, I hear a round of applause! For me!

Well, the stage manager who shut that door and left me out there in the light (my Dad always said the only time anyone ever notices a stage hand is when you fuck up) became a good friend over the years. We did many shows together after that, and she never left me out in the light again. But we sure like to laugh about that story, still. Now she writes a blog, There I Am. Exactly how I felt that night, standing there in front of 750 people... There I was!

If you're interested in theater at all, you should follow her blog. It's a great insider's take on the theater world from an old hippie who has, quite literally, seen it all (I almost wrote scene it all)...

Busy Spring Gardening and Making Friends

Well, as you can tell I haven't been posting to this blog. That's because when I'm not working creating new web sites, or working on other people's sites getting them higher search engine ranks, I'm in the organic garden which I had to build, since this is our first year up here near Cooperstown NY.

I just finished making a site for our new friends who raise grass-fed beef and meats at Nectar Hills Farm. I've also been putting in a smaller garden for the Rose and Kettle Restaurant in Cherry Valley. Plus, Robin has been making grass-fed beef jerky from the Nectar Hills Farm highland cattle, both of which are delicious. We're selling the grass-fed beef jerky at the Nectar Hills Farm store in Cherry Valley, and at the Cooperstown Farmer's Market. We're hoping it will be available in a few other places soon!

Those of you subscribed to this blog's feed know that I often post things to that feed through delicious. I'm not sure how to make them appear here (which is odd, because I should be able to figure that out), but if you subscribe you'll be treated to all kinds of fun posts in your reader.

High-quality digital movies at affordable prices

This camera took this video. Seriously. Follow the links. The price of high-quality cameras is falling so fast... Low-budget movies don't have to look like crap anymore. And think of what this will do for nature photography.

Whiskey Fire In Binghamton

I've been reading the Whiskey Fire blog for quite a while now. Great snark. Plenty of insight. Always good wing-nut fun making. When a shooter killed 14 people in Binghamton last week, I was surprised to hear that this fun little blog I'd been reading is being written by folks just down the road from me. I felt a little tinge of memory from past tragedies that make us all feel closer together. In this case, we were pretty close already.

I was anxious this morning to see what they had to say about the tragedy, now that it's had some time to really sink in. The post is from Jake T. Snake: Why is the mine still open when the canaries keep expiring? It's a powerful post, and I recommend reading the whole thing, now, because I'm going to quote the end, which is where Robin and I wound up when we talked about this yesterday. Why, if this guy was pissed at people who fired him, or the rednecks (Binghamton is a city of 43,000, of which 80% are white) who made fun of his bad English, did he go shoot other immigrants like himself?

Finally, I think it is instructive that the shooter picked as his victims, not someone powerful like the people who had laid him off, but a group of the powerless like himself. This is the other dynamic that repeats itself over and over, don't attack those in power that are the root of the problem, but rather find someone weaker to victimize and perpetuate the cycle. This also explains the disdain people have for social workers. We help the weak and disenfranchised and in the united states that is a sign of weakness the unforgivable sin.

All the pitchforks and torches talk is a bunch of hot air fueled by psuedo-populists who will pat the back of the next CEO to donate to their election campaign. When the really angry people lash out with their firearms and satchels of ammo hanging around their necks, they don't go after the powerful. They go after the weak, the easy targets, those least able to protect themselves or fight back. Their self-loathing is exposed through their choice of targets.

Take the case of the Pittsburgh cop killer who was so certain that we were going to take his guns that he, whipped into a frenzy by the riot inciters in the GOP and Fox news, decided to take it out on some middle class, under paid cops who were just doing their job trying to keep their community safe from the likes of Wing Nuts like him. Maybe those cops were conservative 2nd amendment types too. He didn't know. He just started shooting at the first easy target to walk up to his house. He used an assault rifle. The cops were sitting ducks. Easy targets.

We're going to see a lot more of this. As Bushvilles sprout up all over the country, as the welfare roles and the unemployment lines get longer, as wages continue to fall, real income collapses, health care is lost, mental illness goes undiagnosed, we're going to see some very angry, heavily armed people lose it. And they won't lash out at Phil Gramm, George Bush, or Dick Cheney. In one of the final, ironic twists of the Bush era, they will take it out on the people who least deserve it.

UPDATED: Safe Havens in End-of-Your-Rope-istan

Expect to see a lot more of this (well armed people attacking and killing groups of people, like in Binghamton, NY yesterday). While we're trying to stop a safe haven for terrorists in AfPak, we're letting them re-develop in militia-stan, crazy-stan, and at-the-end-of-your-rope-istan (think Michigan).

We have increasing numbers of frustrated people. These are especially frustrating times. We have easy access to guns and ammo, rampant undiagnosed mental health problems, loss of access to health care and medication, rising unemployment, homelessness and Bushvilles, higher rates of poverty, violent gangs, mafias, narco-terrorists, layoffs of cops and public safety officials, rapidly declining tax revenues at the state and local level. Add desperation to the mix, and people will react in very angry and violent ways.

Odd that John Robb of Global Guerrillas gave testimony to the House Armed Services Committee (pdf) Thursday in which he said:

"With the failure or weakening of nation-states across the board and the lack of ideological alternatives, people will shift their primary loyalties to any group that can provide them security and the basics of survival. These groups will span the gamut of gangs, tribes, criminal syndicates, militias, religious sects, etc. Many, if not most of these groups, will maintain and expand the interests both vigorously and violently. The worst version of this trend line would be the expansion of the criminal insurgency in Mexico into the US (through expansion of the criminal ecosystem more than anything due to ethnic identity)."

While not exactly on point, the example in your backyard is more proof of societal collapse, and is to be expected in the pressure cooker of 21st century America: armed and more dangerous than ever.

UPDATE: Three police officers dead in Pittsburg, shooter feared Obama Gun ban.

Poetry After Years of None

Thousands of Tiny Taps Almost at Once

Almost frozen rain drops bounce
off slanted glass: molten BBs
the second impact of which
humans can barely detect.

The defroster-warmed windshield
lubricates the basal slide,
a glacial race across car parts
toward salted road like wrist blood

down fingers. Red and blue sirens
intermittently flash blinding,
weary authority from cops, ambulances,
and plow apparatus-strapped pickups.

The shorting-neon bar-sign effect prisms
through each half-flattened drop in the mire--
Tetris-piled-ice sky-scrapers, an opaque
cityscape on a bedrock of wiper blades.

Flip the switch! See a civilization
destroyed! The rubber barbarian
horde squeegees the watery wen
into compressed detritus, then resets.

Oil-fueled blades slice ice aside
into dross monoliths, offal sacrifices
destined to feed roadside sluices.
Obliviously eager new sleet

floods the excavated tabula rasa--
the abhorred-vacuum, now a province
filled by termites, protected witnesses,
contraceptive sponges, and colonists.

Gravity hauls the slush across
the transparent Diolkos, unaware
of its shivering nakedness, bare
liquid held together by sheer

temperature like exposed, decrepit
houses in leafless woods,
revealed only in winter,
about to be obliterated.

Scott Supak
February, 2009

Lauging off the Weed Questions

The following is a comment I left on John Cole's post today about weed:

First of all, there is no reliable evidence showing that marijuana is as bad as tobacco or alcohol in terms of health costs. In fact, it's way down on the list of drugs that do harm in those terms.

But there is one angle where legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, would make a big difference: the drug war now raging on our border with Mexico. As the administration has been saying for the last week, the US's appetite for these drugs (a large chunk of which is Mexican weed) is fueling the war (as are our guns).

Before Sarah Palin changed the Alaska law, a citizen there was allowed to grow as much weed as they wanted as long as it never left the property on which it was grown. This kind of decriminalization would increase domestic production of pot, and decrease the demand for the weed coming in from Mexican narco gangs.

So, the dismissive way which Obama laughed off the question was, indeed, a big missed chance for him to say something substantive about the good things that could happen if we would refocus our resources on things that actually cause more harm, like alcohol, tobacco, meth, and blow.

Plus, decriminalization would mean less people in prison for pot. The fact that we jail people for possessing even small amounts of weed is astounding to me. These are non-violent people enjoying a substance which has been proven to be less detrimental to the public health than tobacco or alcohol, and yet we put people in prison for it. I have severe arthritis and live in a state where I can't even legally use it for pain, even if my Doctor thinks it would be better than the pharmaceuticals that have severely screwed me up in the past.

This is a serious subject, and deserves to be treated that way. Laughing it off just shows me that our president is capable of ignoring important issues because he thinks the people who ask the questions are stoners.

Foul Weather Gear

I landed a new internet marketing client who sells sailing gear. Specifically, foul weather gear for sailors. He also sells some sailing accessories, like hats, sunglasses, and hand-held GPS units, that aren't specific to foul weather, per se. So, when I started researching keywords to use to drive more traffic to his site, I kept coming back to outdoor gear.

Today, I get word that they don't want to associate themselves with the term "outdoor gear" as it is so general that they're afraid the sailors who come to their site will think it's just regular old outdoor gear, and not the specifically for sailors kind. I can see where they're coming from. Makes my job much harder. But, hey, that's what I get paid for. I'll be talking more about this specificity problem at my internet marketing blog.

I just wanted to post a notice here for all those Wall Street types who are about to find themselves with a lot of extra time.

Go sailing. Please. Take that nice sailboat that you paid for out of your taxpayer funded bonuses, and sail away. Sail to the Bahamas. If there's a storm in your way, strap on some professional sailing foul weather gear, the kind used by actual competitive off-shore and ocean racing sailors, and sail right through it. If you're prepared, you can sail right through the worst weather. Salt water won't eat away at your shoes if you get the right sea boots. Your hands won't get cold if you use the right sailing gloves. You will be protected by the clothing made especially for sailors.

Some of you might want to sail to the Cayman Islands. Don't be afraid to take the Mrs., or maybe your mistress, as you can get women's foul weather gear too! Maybe get a little condo--something more than the little PO Box you had to get out of paying taxes in the US, taxes that pay for things like the Iraq war, Halliburton shock-showers, and your hero President GW Bush's pension. In fact, I hear the sailing is good year around down there, so buy a bunch of great sailing gear and sail away to your John Galt paradise where all you productive people can live happily away from all us socialist scum up here in the US, who will have to wade through the muck, without decent muck boots, that you have left us with.

Cheer up! Your warm salopettes and fleece lined hats will keep you cozy and warm no matter how much spray is hitting you, or how much guilt you feel. Feel a little cold around your neck? No, that's not the breath of federal regulators coming to put you in prison for fraud. It's just the cold sea air... put on a neck gaiter and you'll be all snug and warm as you tack off toward warmer waters in more deregulated lands.

Please understand that this is just snark. I understand that many people like to sail, and by no means are all of them fraudulent wall street crooks or Bush voting John Galt types. Plenty of Democrats (I'm looking at you Teddy) love to sail. In fact, a recent nominee for President was photographed in a wet suit while windsurfing. I'm just suggesting that you sailing people take a look at my new client's site and see if you need anything that's for sale there. My research suggests that they have some of the best prices on this gear, so consider it a money saving tip.

But for those of you who have been stealing billions of dollars from the treasure, our pensions and 401ks, in the form of Bush tax cuts, or Bush no-bid contracts, or deregulation of financial instruments you used to get rich while you looted the companies that were paying you so well... Well, for you jerks, I do hope you keep sailing into the sunset, toward a low-tax Randian paradise of deregulation and no minimum wage for your "help." I just want to make sure you're wearing the proper gear for your trek into your conservative utopia. Wouldn't want you to catch cold.

Scott Murphy for Congress from NY-20

Conservative Catharsis: Blame Deregulation and Privatization

[Cross posted everywhere it makes sense.]

George W Bush broke the world. It was pretty fucked up to begin with, after years of laissez-faire economics practiced by all American presidents since FDR, but much more so since Reagan. The conservative philosophy was corrupted by deregulators who's belief in the free market completely left out the fact that most people are greedy bastards who will steal everything that's not tied down.

Now this upper class of well-to-do Reaganites, many of them in the Democratic party, have drained the wealth of this country into their walled communities and private security forces, while they whine about their portfolios being worthless. What did they think when they were doing everything Phil Graham suggested? Did they think we could just trust the robber baron class not to be robber barons?

The profit motive works just fine in a regulated market, where everyone has their cards above the table, and we all play by the same rules, which we can all understand. Old timey conservatives were for stringent regulations, especially capital requirements on banks and the like. To be a fiscal conservative meant, literally, to not take crazy risks. A little risk for a decent return, but nothing crazy.

Well, you guys had your chance and you blew it. But what's funny about it is that Karl Marx basically predicted it. It's not hedge fund science, you know. If you have a bunch of money in one place, and you loosen the rules that protect it, someone will steal it. Human nature--GREED--is not good in a market because the greedy will take down the rest of us in that inter-dependent system.

So, now we're going to try something else. It's kind of like what FDR tried, at least in the sense of the largess, the investment in infrastructure and people, and the like. But it's also like FDR in the sense that he realized that everyone deserves some basic floor to stand on: a starting place so that we are all, indeed, created equal when we become a member of The Class of US Taxpayers. Now some of us might get more out of that system than we paid in, but the ones at the top will still get something out of it. They'll have clean dishes to eat cooked food on in restaurants. They'll have firemen and cops and teachers and those people will have the basic dignity of health coverage, affordable housing and utilities, and the like. If the private enterprise system refuses to charge enough for the products and services so that those people can be paid enough to buy their own coverage, then it is we the people, the government, who must force them to, through taxation.

And if you don't believe that, then your option is to have a whole class of people who are broke, unhealthy, and damn angry about it. In this country, those people vote for someone who will make the playing field fair again. In the current view of the dominant conservative voices, those people can just crawl off and die somewhere. Or wind up in prison where we subsidize their everything.

There will be people at the top who pay for it. That is populism. That is the price you pay for living in a country where we pay people who stock shelves at Wal Mart so little that they qualify for government subsidized health care. I'm sure most free market conservatives would prefer to have Wal Mart take care of their employees. But then how could they be the low price leader?

It's still a free country, and there's going to be a free market for practically anything (including things that are illegal). There will be a free market for health care and those of you who can afford it are more than welcome to sink your dollars into a system that profits from your sickness on one end (the HMOs) and profits from your minimal care on the other (the insurance companies who don't want to pay, they just want to collect). I ask you, which force will drive doctor salaries lower? A government that tries to enforce fairness, no matter how cumbersome a bureaucracy that develops in order to implement that fairness (and, again, medicare does it with amazingly low administrative costs compared to private companies), or a private insurance company that is trying desperately to keep outlays down because raising premiums is just making them lose customers?

I'm all for personal responsibility. I grow a lot of my own food. I own my own small business and work for a lot less than minimum wage. I would require more stringent food requirements on Food Stamp recipients, like me, to eat healthy foods and support local, small, and organic farmers. But when it comes to something as complex as health care, I just don't trust the greedy bastards to run it anywhere but into the ground.

I lived in LA for 20 years. I remember the Enron fiasco during the electricity crisis. We had been sold a bill of goods about privatizing and deregulating the electricity markets that turned out to be worse than a load of horse shit (which is at least good fertilizer). It is a perfect example of how unfettered markets only serve as suet to a bunch of hungry birds like Ken Lay who fly away with the whole chunk if they can.

At that point, I started looking into co-ops, public ownership of utilities, community supported agriculture, and credit unions. I like employee owned companies and try to support them when I can. Guess what all those examples are? Communist! They take the assets, the factories, the power lines, the loan portfolios, and they collectively own them among all the members. Where I live now, we have an electric co-op (a remnant of FDR's Rural Electrification Association). It's great. All the people who get the cheap power own the assets of the power company collectively. There is no profit, but the guys who cut the tree branches out of the way get paid well, get health insurance and other benefits. So does the nice lady who answers the phone. Because we, the owners, have decided that's a good thing to do. There's no profit for any corporation, but there is enough to make sure everyone gets paid what they're worth. If those employees had a government health plan they could choose, and pay for with a tax on their paychecks, then as a co-owner of the co-op, I would be more than happy to give them a raise with the money the co-op saved by not having to pay for their health care.

I'm pretty sure GM would like that too.

Why should health care be any different than the co-op itself? Why can we not use the medicare paycheck tax to pay into a fund that is then used to pay our dues for a medical co-op that fairly and equitably distributes care on a triage basis, and puts a premium on prevention, even to the point of rewarding people who do the right thing for their health (thereby being less of a burden to the rest of the co-op)?

Now a lot of people will say it's a red commie flag there, but if you really think about it, and look back over American history at the collective good that has developed as a ethic in this country, it's conservative. It says YOU have a stake, YOU have a responsibility, and if you do well, you will be rewarded. The fact that we are all owners makes it the ownership society for real. And the fact that it is controlled by a bureaucracy that is built to make it as fair as possible takes it out of the realm of Stalin or other totalitarian philosophies, and puts it squarely in the hands of voters who get tho choose the head of the federal government every four years.

I worked my ass off for big entertainment companies for 20 years. They made plenty of money off my labor: more than I did, in fact. And when that work caused the degenerative disease I have in my big load bearing joints, those company's insurance companies denied that they had caused it, and tossed me out like any old broken cog. In your world, it's toughsky shitsky for Scotty because they have to profit. In my world, the money I put into the co-op would come back to me from the co-op when I needed it. Some guy who profited more from my work might have to pay a little more tax now to fund it, but I'll never get back all the profit I helped him make. That's fine. But when he tries to say he has no responsibility for my care, now that I'm broken down and can't do the physical labor that I spent 20 years turning into a career, I say he's full of it.

But when he says, well, I don't really want to pay into a system where a bunch of jet-setting insurance company executives and HMO executives milk every last dime out of everything in order to feed their Myopic vision of next quarter's stock price, then he has a point. I don't want him to pay them either. I want him to pay my doctor, with as little administrative or other overhead as possible. In fact, less overhead means more for my doctor.

So that's my long and winding explanation of why I want medical care to be non-profit and universal. And I'd like to thank the Ron Paul Republican who's been rattling a few cages around here for setting me off on what was a comment, but turned into a diary. So much for banging out a quick answer and getting back to work!

And thanks to Hunter today for firing up my populist, anti-Randian roots. Sometimes I forget why I hang out here, and then Hunter posts something that makes me feel like writing again.

Health Care's the Cure that Ails Us

I'm a big fan of the Freakonomics blog. They recently announced the winner of their new 6 word slogan for the US contest. The winner was: Consumption's the Cure that Ails Us.

Today, I learned from two of my stagehand buddies that health care is the cure that's going to break the back of the unions. One of those buddies you probably heard of. He's the stagehand who "surfed" the collapsing scaffolding at the Academy Awards a few years ago, breaking his back in the process. He was a rigger, made good money, and is now disabled, but he stays in touch with old friends from backstage. Here's what he told me:

[...] health care has a annual low limit....weekly, a person has to make $830/week to qualify for health insurance....[a friend] worked for Port Charles props nighttime turnaround...averaged 40 hour weeks. in 2000, she made $600/week for a 40 hr week. with the raises per year to now.....nighttime turnaround at GH probably makes over $700/week...not enough to make health insurance.....there are many uninsured members in the 2 and 3 groups [this union has 5 senority "groups"].

Health care is killing unions. Every inch of negotiating room is eaten alive by the health insurance monster. My other friend from the IATSE sent me a story from today's LA Times, Conflict erupts inside theatrical stage employees union:

Leaders of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, whose members include 35,000 who work behind the scenes on film and television sets, are facing a high level of dissent from the rank and file over a contract that includes modest pay increases but also deep cuts in the union's coveted health and pension benefits.

There's more than one way to battle the health care monster. Cutting coverage for those covered is one way. Another is to put heafty qualifications on qualifying, like requiring substantial over time hours or even a second call (daily hire job) on your days off. Here we have yet another American Union, the battlers for the 40 hour week, and worker protection, essentially bowing to corporate demands that workers only deserve health care and pensions if they work more than 40 hours per week. From the LA Times again:

Under the proposed three-year contract, members would be required to work 400 hours every six months, up from the current 300 hours, to keep their benefits.

That's the movie locals requirement, and at least it's less than 40 hours per week average. My old local, 33, is in even worse shape, and has been forced to institute coverage that only covers those who make the most money. Younger members, who often work in lower paying television jobs, don't even make enough to qualify when they work full time.

Eugene Debs would be appalled.

Unions are going to be forced to cut back on pensions, 401ks, increased hourly wages, and better working conditions (meal penalties, continuous tour, golden time, etc) in order to feed the health care monster, and the Wall Street Monster that Ate the Pensions. These Unions (not all IATSE) already hamper themselves by sending stagehands in $200 suits in to negotiate with lawyers in $5000 suites. Now they have the other arm tied behind their back with capitalist, robber baron, Republican tactics to drain power away from what they see as communist union thugs robbing them of their next BMW.

As much as I hate to say it, I don't see any light on the cyc, so to speak. Things are going to get much worse, and who knows if we'll ever recover. And now our new progressive government is going to tinker around the edges while the solution, single payer universal non-profit health care, stands screaming from the sidelines, while we all talk about Rush Fucking Limbaugh.

The only slight glow coming from the dimmer racks on this one is that, in the kollapsnik world, guys with calluses and working knowledge of mechanical systems will be the new kings, wearing $200 overalls.

3/3

My Dad, Frank Supak, died nine years ago today. I'll be listening to Miles, Kinda Blue, here in a little while, while I drink a beer. I'm just sorry I can only afford the cheap regional lager, and not an Anchor Steam. And I prefer Bushmills to single malt Scotch. But I'll be listening to his Miles CD, on his speakers, at his volume (not too loud). Maybe I'll listen to Holtz, The Planets. Maybe some Brubeck, live at Oberlin (a CD the significance of which he couldn't stress enough). I know I'll listen to Art Pepper, because I listen to him a lot.

But I don't think of Dad that often anymore. He was the contradiction: a Republican union member (IATSE), so, by dying 9 years ago, he saved us both a lot of grief. He had a very good life, if too short (he was 62). He was the sound man at the Hollywood Bowl for 20 years, and he enjoyed every second of performance pay.

But any time I feel sad, I remember that he liked to say that things only seemed one in a million because we don't live a billion years.

And after we Mad Max the place...

I stumbled upon a speech, Social Collapse Best Practices, posted at the blog ClubOrlov, written by Dmitry Orlov, aka kollapsnik. He predicts what my wife and I call the Mad Maxing of America, or the collapse of the US government. Having seen the collapse of the Soviet Union first hand, Orlov is not some nut on speaker's corner. I'm sure most people will want to dismiss his reasoned thesis as survivalist rantings. I suggest you give this speech a read, keep an open mind, and think.

In a big way, what's been happening to me is a kind of microcosm of what's going to happen to us all, eventually. I was a cog in the entertainment industry, riding big ladders and scissor lifts, hoisting big lights and scenery to create a world of make-believe, calling it art, and selling it for big bucks. Well, the "owners" got big bucks. I got decent bucks, and even though I was never much more than a daily hire, I had a good career at free-lance stagehand work for 20 years.

Well, this cog wore its gears out, and has been tossed aside. My pension, if I ever see it at all, is shrinking. Social Security Disability will deny that you're disabled for years, while your doctor tells you not to dare lift anything over 20 lbs. The house I'd invested in turned out to be worthless when I couldn't afford to pay for it anymore. My skills as a hard laborer who understood stagecraft are now useless. My writing skills still scrape up some cash, in the internet marketing world, but that's internet dependent.

In the social collapse scenario, though, I do have one skill that will make me a valuable person. I'm a skilled organic gardener. And in the world of collapsing social order and government control, the farmer will be king.

Internet Marketing with Bald Mt. Press

Am I a blogging fool? Well, in the best sense of the word, yes. I started this blog back in 2001, before 9/11, in fact, so I've been blogging longer than most. In a kind of effort to learn as much about different blogging platforms as possible, I started little blogs here and there: testing the systems, seeing how much Google PageRank a new blog could get, and how much linking power those particular blogs would have in boosting the sites to which they linked.

In the process, I watered down a lot of good information that I had written. Little bits and pieces of important internet marketing information were scattered in the wind. More than once a blog would get wiped out by some administrative maneuver on the host's part, and I'd have to re-post everything from back up, when it wasn't lost completely.

So, I started looking for a basket to put all my internet marketing eggs in: a central blog for my company that would handle all aspects of my internet marketing business. Clients and potential clients would only need to go to one place to see a whole host of information about internet marketing and what I can do to help their businesses.

So, here it is: Internet Marketing with Bald Mt. Press. Good reading.

Look on the Bright Side

It's rare that I read something that drops my jaw, but check this out, from Dmitry Orlov's speech at the Long Now Foundation (h/t to John Robb of Global Guerillas):

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their [the government's] realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Baby pictures! My daughter is visiting from California, where she's a hairstylist (please note, all you theater hair people who might need some new blood in your union). She spent some serious "awwwww" time going through the big plastic bin o' pictures, and came up with a handful to scan. So now, from the could-you-be-any-cuter files, here's Jasmine's favorites:

When People Do Things: The Ethics of Actions

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.--Steven Weinberg

Interesting guy. Guess for his statement to be true, you have to go in for the Socratic thing, "To be is to do." So, in Weinberg's construct, if you do evil, you're evil, if you do good, you're good. That's a little harsh, I think. In fact, I could even argue that if you're starving, it's evil not to steal. If your child's life depends on some expensive medication you can't afford, is it "good" to let them die, or "evil" to steal what you need?

Of course, Sartre's point was, "To do is to be" -- or, and I'm taking some liberties here, existence is based on action. Each action, then, defines your existence to that extent. In that respect, a bad action is just a small component of your existence, not a defining one. So, a bad action doesn't make you all bad? OK, again, I could argue that George Bush was wrong to argue his Manichean Paranoia, that he could do evil means to reach good ends. Torturing people is evil, no matter why you do it.

Which leads me to one of my favorite quotes, by Kurt Vonnegut, who I miss deeply:

"To be is to do"--Socrates.
"To do is to be"--Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra.

Suffering, Police State, and the Ditching of Unhappiness

When I was a young, broke, but care-free philosopher in the University of Arkansas, hanging out with poets, working at a red-neck bar for beer money, and fancying myself a writer, I worried a lot. The bar had a big red button behind the counter, right above a double-barrel, twelve gage shot gun. I was told it was loaded with rock salt. Pressing the red button killed the juke box and called the cops. I only had to use those bar-back tools once, and I quit.

Even in those salad days of learning my place in the world, gaining valuable experience as the next John Prine, I worried a lot about ethics, fairness, and the pursuit of happiness. Through the heart of the dark, up-river jungle of the Reagan years, I suffered a kind of academic akathisia that only worsened as I learned more about the world. I studied the new world of Bio-ethics, ventured off into the history of War and Money, and tortured myself with Epistemology.

Nothing helped. The general malaise got worse. The Challenger exploded. Then Iran Contra exploded. That got my political attention. I started paying more attention in history classes. I drank more, but I took control of my education. I read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I read more Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter Thompson. I was enlightened and horrified. I wrote some bad poetry, and a few good things that won awards that made me feel cool for a while. But the more I learned, the less able I was to be happy, and I got happy less often. One of my best friends, Randy Vincent, wrote a line that always cheered me up, even in midst of a general early 20's unhappiness spiral. Something like:

Now I know
I could skip a quarter
across the pond
and down the juke box slot
just to hear
some tonk musician scream.

Or something like that. Still makes me happy. For a minute. Then it wears off and sends me back to that familiar humid, moldy, greasy, beer-smelling, neon-lit place where the tonk scream originates. It's not a nice, clean, first rate torture chamber like Guantanomo. There aren't any power subversion enablers (as George Washington might put it) kneeing me, or freezing me, or hanging me by my wrists, or insulting my religion. Hell, I don't have a religion. I'm certainly not gentle in Eric Hoffer's sense of the word, but I am a cynic who doesn't care if there's a god or not. I don't need a symbolic crown of thorns to know that human suffering stirs my tonk musician's cover of Munch's scream. The effect of that suffering penetrates deeper than any religion can, like water poured into the upside-down sinuses of all humanity.

Then the real trickle-down torture begins: Sneeze! Cough! Take two of these... Shake it off! Our bad... Off you go now... Good luck! Don't worry! Be happy! Be careful!

You're on your own.

The most salient thing I learned in honky tonks from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee, from Branson, Missouri, to Austin, Texas, was to be careful whose nose you pour water in; a lot of southerners never learned that the rednecks were the good guys at Blair Mountain. They'd hassle the college boys (with our Clinton for Governor bumper sticker) until they got sick of us, and then they'd kick our asses or run out of gas trying. Maybe we could have been nicer to them, maybe even lie to them (had we only known they like fake cowboys so much), but eventually, I managed to carve out a rule I could live with:

Be ethical. If that's not good enough, Fuck It!

Maybe because it caused me so much trouble, it took me a long time to be comfortable with that philosophy. “Fuck It” seemed so final, as if I had given up on the world if I wasn't out picking at it like a nostril scab. Eventually, I figured out that I shouldn't be too careful with my happiness. No matter how many civilians died in the formative years of the new disaster capitalism, I had to do a little living. I had to enjoy something. While I was still beating around the bush of my raison d'être, I found solace in music and poetry. Certain poems and songs brought the kamikaze moth of happiness, just after sunset on a moonless night, crashing into the next brightest source of light. The intensity of each fix of happiness seemed to steadily decrease, like the monarch population near a genetically engineered corn field. I measured my happiness level and frequency often, feeling guilty if either went up. Each action of observation seemed to move the next data point, randomly (ergo coincidentally), but consistently lower.

My philosophy evolved into defining and proscribing the ethical: environmentalism, stewardship, minimizing my impact, fairness, justice, liberty, and minimizing unhappiness (since actually maximizing happiness seems so much harder). It was time to rein in the effort to something more manageable. I became a professional in the entertainment industry, the next best thing to being the next John Prine. Oh, and there were all those student loans, so a union job looked great.

So did a beautiful, intelligent, Italian (tempered and debate-trained) wife, a beautiful daughter who makes a living making people beautiful, and a son who at fourteen can already play guitar more beautifully than I. We lived in Hawaii for a year (three jobs!). Bought two houses (one before and one after Hawaii). Even without a lot of money, there was enough to get by. I had leveled off into a steady and manageable happiness.

We all get a few of really great memories, and we get to keep them no matter what happens to us. It's a kind of defense we have evolved, the ability to cherish memories when times are hard. A kind of mental snorkeling dive, away from the surface blemishes, into another dimension, surround by beauty, floating in peace, not even breathing...

The rest of the time, as some graffiti on a bathroom wall in a Beale Street bar once said, "There is no gravity; the earth sucks." There was even a crude drawing of the earth (the Western Hemisphere, I believe), with a little stick man standing on it. Just a few blocks away, a bunch of ducks live in a "palace" on the roof of the Peabody Hotel.

Every day at 11 a.m., they are led by the Duckmaster down the elevator to the Italian travertine marble fountain in the Peabody Grand Lobby. A red carpet is unrolled and the ducks march through crowds of admiring spectators to the tune of John Philip Sousa's King Cotton March. The ceremony is reversed at 5 p.m., when the ducks retire for the evening to their palace on the roof of the hotel.

I think of those ducks often, even when I'm not drinking. They live better than most people I know, like Royalty in the birthplace of the blues. Not far from the Peabody, a little closer to the railroad tracks, there's a motel that reflects the flip side of Royalty, the very soul of suffering: the Lorraine, now known as the National Civil Rights Museum.

The heart of American Folk Music and Blues is struggle, and struggle we must if we want to sing about it. In the late 80's, after my Dad retired to Las Vegas, we would visit (not enough), and I would try to convince him, a double union pensioner, to stop voting Republican. He was a mathematician. He hated taxes and studied the odds. He had high blood pressure and cholesterol. He loved Jazz. He beat prostate cancer. He drank single malt scotch in the morning and ate cheap casino steaks at night. He would tell me to be happy I still had my health. When he drove his 1971 Porsche back to Vegas from LA, he would stay in 5^th gear all the way up the big hill out of Baker, which required speeds in excess of 100 mph. Our last conversation:

"You know, Dad, you can down shift on the way up the hill."

"I don't want to."

He died of an aortic aneurysm just weeks later. He liked to say that things only seemed like one in a million to us because we don't live a billion years.

Occasionally, over the eye-blink of time I've been thinking about such things, I found theories that might explain my progressive unhappiness, but they turned out to be mental Lego constructs. The edges were too jagged to make graceful ontologies; not enough points on the graph to smooth the curves.

Maybe happiness was something seductively plump that shrank, a decrease in the total available happiness. Perhaps Matt Taibbi was on to something when he dissected Thomas Freidman's graphing abilities with the theory that happiness correlates with the size of Valerie Bertinelli's ass. More seriously, and perhaps more likely, David Foster Wallace might have been onto a grand-unified happiness theory that turned out to be a Medusa.

All theories, once scrutinized, seem like Lego representations in an anti-aliased world.

Eight years of George Bush have taught me one thing: ethics are now rough, dry shit stuck in the throes of prescription-induced constipation that make Bill Clinton's lapses look like laxatives. Oh, sure, we talk high and mighty about justice, but there is no justice when the high and mighty are involved. We have plenty of punishment for drug addicts, shoplifters, and burglars. But the torturing, mass-murdering, robber barons took over the executive branch walked away very much alive and free, with pallets of I-just-paid-cash-for-this happiness. One of my complex ontologies theorizes that there's only so much happiness in the world, and the Cheney people have drained the water table (and sullied the rest). How to simplify that...?

Those people just screamed “Fuck You!” while they fucked you. Kinda screws your whole decade.

In the middle of those Fuckings, I lost my health (diagnosed with osteoarthritis), my career (due to that disability), my house (with its therapeutic pool and hot tub), my 401k (spent moving to cheaper digs), my year of state disability payments (that were less than half of what I was making), and most of my clients from my internet marketing business (which now costs more than it makes). Next, I'll be losing the health insurance. I'm 25% of the way into a two year wait for my first Social Security Disability appeal hearing. There are lawsuits in the works, but by the time I see any money from them, I'll owe it in past due bills and rent (if I can convince my landlords to let it slide for a while). I'll probably have to declare bankruptcy.

My doctors thought they were doing me a favor putting me on anti-depressants. I wound up on Prozac for a few months, which did help to keep the pain/depression spiral monsters from feeding each other. But the Prozac side effects were just too much. So, they took me off it. Now, I've discovered that Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Discontinuation Syndrome (the pharmaceutical companies object to calling it withdrawal) is the single most unhappy thing I ever experienced, save perhaps triple hernia surgery. It's been big fun for my family, too, but that's a whole other essay.

Now what's my sage advice on how to be less unhappy (aside from avoiding drugs that fuck with your brain chemistry)? Prepare for the inevitable fallout. I plead the Kris Kristofferson defense: I have nothing left to lose. I live the way disaster capitalists want me to: hand to mouth, on the brink of bankruptcy, and eager for less because it's better than none. What are they going to do, fire me?

I'm prepared! I get food stamps. Ha! Take that, Republicans! And, I have an organic victory garden (FDR would be proud). I've discovered that I can keep food alive (nothing is really growing now) even when it's negative 13 degrees outside, by building a cold frame around the garden. Engineering and biology made me happy for a while. Just wait until my Jeffersonian spring!

Guess I showed them.

I still play music, occasionally. Haven't had to hock the guitar, yet. I'll even attempt Little Rock Getaway from time to time. Hard to stop that from cheering me up¹, for as long as my thin calluses and arthritis can keep up. My son's much better than I. He can play for hours, which brings me great joy, until he goes back to his video games (and other not- his-homework) and listening to his parents fight about all the things we don't have. Or the things we have too much of. I haven't screamed this much since my honky tonk days. It exhausts the throat. Sorry, kids. As Phillip Larken wrote, in This Be the Verse:

They fuck you up, your mom and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Since college, I've been searching for that perfect Tonk Scream, a kind of cathartic nirvana, maybe as reconnaissance for a pre-emptive war to save my throat. I've been hoping for something akin to Steve Goodman's You Never Even Call Me By My Name (as performed by David Allen Coe), whereby the song becomes the perfect country and western song when endowed with that final verse featuring mama, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk. I thought John Prine himself got close with his song It Don't Make No Sense that Common Sense Don't Make No Sense No More or maybe Souvenirs (Goodman, again, that rascal). I've made a few solo stabs at it, but I tend to be get too philosophical. Maybe I don't drink enough Jack.

One of my favorite professors, James Whitehead (who died in 2003, also of an aortic aneurysm) told me the story about my psychology professor, Dr. John Marr, who used to party at Jim's house with Tom T. Hall. Dr. Marr liked to talk about state memory recall theory, in which

"..memory pathways forged under the influence of specific chemicals, drugs such as alcohol, can be more effectively accessed again when under the influence of that drug."

So Hall wrote a song called I Only Think About You When I'm Drunk. Honestly, I'd be afraid to drink enough to remember the blurry parts of my Tonk years. Whatever clear memories I access will more likely come from the last half of my life.

Of course now I'm too tired to keep looking. As Homer Simpson put it, “...the weight of the world crushed my spirit.” Sometimes I try to work my way out of that realistic funk. To paraphrase Marty Ward, who taught me how to play bluegrass guitar while he played a mean banjo, "You're never going to find anything good by looking for it."

I'll just keep my eyes and ears open while I keep trying to pick out the lead myself. Maybe once my calluses are thick enough, I'll be able to play long enough to find it. After all, thanks to my son and YouTube, I finally learned that lead to Wish You Were Here. And as soon as I quit thinking about it all, I remembered a line from my favorite Big Jim Whitehead poem (A LOCAL MAN ESTIMATES WHAT HE DID FOR HIS BROTHER WHO BECAME A POET AND WHAT HIS BROTHER DID FOR HIM):

On his deathbed he reached out for my hand
And he said we come from where we get the wound.

How could we stop looking back at the places where we got the wounds, when we had clues like that left in our path?

1 This jazz-come-bluegrass song, written by Joe Sullivan in 1938 and made popular by Bob Crosby (Bing's brother) and the Bobcats in 1939, supports my theory that the more chords in a progression, the happier the song.

My Favorite Moment: No More Bad

President Obama makes it clear, right from the start, that the Bush Bullshit is over.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

Just one last thing, though. People who break the law must be prosecuted, or what's the point.

Endorsements for Change

The voting at Change.org is over, and the top ten ideas were presented to the Obama transition team. I'm a half-glass empty kinda guy, so I'm not expecting much, especially on the more controversial items, especially from a guy who seems to want us all to get along even at the price of not prosecuting war criminals (cause, you know, that would be too divisive, as opposed to say, breaking the law and torturing and spying on people).

These are good causes, though, and could make a big difference in the world. No matter how much our new President wants to avoid the fighting, if enough of us support these causes, and fight (and vote) to make them reality, then even he can't stop us.

So, here are the ideas I've endorsed at Change.org, in no particular order:

• ReBuild and RePower America with a Green Stimulus Package
• Develop & Implement a National Strategy for Sustainability
• Pass Marriage Equality Rights for LGBT Couples Nationwide
• Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties
• Free Single Payer Health Care
• Make the grid green in 10 years
• Appoint a Special Prosecutor for the Crimes of the Bush Administration
• Solve The Credit Crisis From The Bottom Up Through Social Lending
• Legalize the Medicinal and Recreational Use of Marijuana
• Move the country toward transparent election systems

Here's my Change.org page. It's a great site, and I encourage everyone to join in.

Fair Fines and Flatulence Taxes for the Half-Glass Empty Class

"I guess it depends if you're a half-glass empty guy or a half-glass full guy."—George W. Bush

Ever get a parking ticket when you were a half-glass empty guy? Or maybe you were a full-glass full guy, in Bernie Madoff's old neighborhood, and you've had some million dollar months? A $100 equals a tenth of a grand a month, one ten-thousandth of a million. If you make $50,000 a year (a little above the median), that ticket is 0.024% of your monthly income. If you make $12 million per year, it's 0.0001%, approximately 240 times less than the median American's unhappiness over the same violation.

A flat tax would be more fair than a flat fine. At least with flat income taxes, we'd all be paying the same percentage of our income.

Dwindling tax revenues force governments to look for ways to balance their budgets. Draconian nose amputations are showing up in emergency rooms all over America. More are on their way. Regressive taxes are just worsening the pain on the lowest earners.

From parking tickets to OSHA fines, governments charge a flat price. If the idea of these fines is to discourage a certain behavior, why isn't the discouragement equal and just? We all know that many corporations find it easier, and cheaper, to simply pay the piddly, bothersome fine rather than correct the infraction. Why should Halliburton and Harry's Hardware pay exactly the same amount for the same safety infraction? To inflict the same pain, a fair pain, we should index the fine to the company's or individual's income.

In Finland, fines for motor vehicle violations were indexed to the state's latest income data, resulting in a record speeding ticket of $103,600 for Nokia director Anssi Vanjoki (who was doing 75 km/hr in a 50 zone on his Harley). I don't advocate making the rich pay more for everything (providing your tax return with every purchase would be a bit ridiculous). But I do think that every government official in America should think twice before increasing any regressive tax during a depression recession.

This goes for fines, fees, gas taxes, sin taxes, sales taxes, carbon taxes, and flatulence taxes (a proposed flat tax levied on each dairy cow). All of these taxes discourage some behavior: driving, smoking, drinking, speeding, parking wrong, providing an unsafe workplace, polluting, lying to the SEC, or greenhouse gases (like cow farts). One argument against these taxes is the rule of diminishing returns, that you are taxing away the bad behavior, leading to less and less revenue. I'm more concerned with making the unhappiness equal. While it's true that a rich person is paying more total alcohol tax than me (because he buys better booze), it is not the same pain to his income. The percentage tax on his bottle was exactly the same as mine. Same with sales tax. Sure, he buys a more expensive car, pays more total tax, but he pays a lower effective tax rate than me. Since most Americans agree with the progressive income tax, why are so many politicians raising the regressive taxes right now, taking an even larger percentage of income out of the hands of those who can least afford it?

Sales taxes are especially good at spreading unhappiness during a recession, as they increase the money paid by those who can least afford it, while also causing a decrease in spending, leading to further job losses, and even more pain for those below them. Meanwhile, those at the top keep trying to find new and better ways to squeeze more out of those at the bottom. The incentives to cheat, lie, and steal increase exponentially as profits dry up. Think the fight or flight reflex is strong when you're facing profound losses? Try having your electricity shut off, getting evicted, or watching a loved one die because you can't afford medical care.

When prosecutors tried to put Madoff in jail for sending packages of valuables to family members (a violation of his bail), his defense was that they weren't really that expensive, just some cuff links and $200 mittens. $200 mittens? The fact that $200 mittens even exist is proof to me that money can buy happiness.

While many of my friends, most of whom are decidedly middle class, argue with me on this point, it is obvious to astute philosophers and economists that money can indeed buy happiness. In this Justin Wolfers post at the Freakonomics blog, he talks about the assumption that money can't buy happiness.

Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox.

What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations:

1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
2) But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.

Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a “hedonic treadmill,” in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness.

This definition of the relation between money and happiness seemed to catch on, as it made the optimists (most of whom, as George Bush Freudianly noted, have a only a half-glass to begin with) happier.

The evidence points to the opposite. Not only do we need at least the bare necessities to keep us from despair, but the more money we have, the happier we are. Wolfers again:

There is no Easterlin Paradox.

The facts about income and happiness turn out to be much simpler than first realized:

1) Rich people are happier than poor people.
2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.

Moreover, each of these facts seems to suggest a roughly similar relationship between income and happiness.

Not only can money buy happiness, but more money can buy more happiness. Why? Because we are animals. We react to pain with unhappiness and the lack of pain with the lack of unhappiness. As we evolved into the kind of animals that can split atoms and create credit default swaps, we discovered that some of us could go beyond the lack of unhappiness, and actually get giddy when we had money pouring in.

We have even cut out the middle man. Now it seems, money doesn't even have to purchase anything. The money itself causes happiness, almost exactly like what cocaine does to our brains. In a guest post at the Freakonomics Blog, Andrew W. Lo, the Harris & Harris Group Professor at M.I.T. and director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering, writes in Fear, Greed, and Crisis Management: A Neuroscientific Perspective:

The alleged fraud perpetrated by Bernard Madoff is a timely and powerful microcosm of the current economic crisis, and it underscores the origin of all financial bubbles and busts: fear and greed.

Using techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, neuroscientists have documented the fact that monetary gain stimulates the same reward circuitry as cocaine — in both cases, dopamine is released into the nucleus accumbens. Similarly, the threat of financial loss activates the same fight-or-flight circuitry as physical attacks, releasing adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, which results in elevated heart rate, blood pressure, and alertness.

These reactions are hardwired into human physiology, and while some of us are able to overcome our biology through education, experience, or genetic good luck, the vast majority of the human population is driven by these “animal spirits” that John Maynard Keynes identified over 70 years ago.

Lo goes onto to suggest that Obama host a “crisis summit”:

...in which all the major stakeholders involved in this crisis, and their most knowledgeable subordinates, are invited to an undisclosed location for an intensive week-long conference.

During this meeting, detailed information about exposures to “toxic assets,” concentrations of risky counterparty relationships, and other systemic weaknesses will be provided on a confidential basis to regulators and policymakers, and various courses of action can be proposed and debated in real time.

At the end of this meeting, he suggests the government release the redacted minutes so we can all see just how much unhappiness these geniuses have wrought. While they're at it, perhaps they can discuss what kind of punishments could be doled out, who should be investigated for Ponzi schemes and other frauds, and how we should index their fines to their income from the last 5 years. It will be hard to get the worst offenders to fess up, of course, unless we offer them immunity. If we threatened to index the fines for such behavior to their income, they would lawyer up faster than they can offshore your job.

One thing we can certainly do for these happy people in the future is discourage them from creating unhappiness by choosing to pay a relatively cheap fine instead of following the law. While these higher fines will equalize pain as they move up the income brackets, the total amount of happiness in the world, to the delight of lower income utilitarians everywhere, would probably increase, as it almost always does when justice is served.

In a down-side up economic world where medical care, food, and energy costs are not counted in inflation calculations, where dental care is somehow separate from medical, and where work is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains, it would help to understand just how well the rich have been doing. The people at the top, or in George Bush's world, the full-glass full people (aka his "base”), have been doing quite well lately.

If you can stand window shopping, try gazing through the glass at the Cost of Living Extremely Well Index, or CLEWI, as measured by Forbes Magazine. In Peter Bernstein's book, All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make—and Spend—Their Fortunes, you can study this handy data visualization (PDF, without pictures of super cool expensive stuff), which shows that since 1982 the consumer price index (CPI) has doubled, while the CLEWI has nearly quadrupled. Before you decrease your happiness worrying about the ultra rich on the Forbes 400, keep in mind that their income has risen by a factor of 10 in the same time.

Back in the half-glass world, in 1982, the median household income was $36,811. In 2003, it was $43,318, for an increase of $6,507, or 17.6%. The full-glass people, defined in this particular case as the Forbes 400, saw their income rise by 1000%.

Income inequality has risen even more sharply during the Bush years, with the happiness getting spread all over the upper income brackets like Chinese lead from Dick Cheney's bird shot. As reported by David Cay Johnston in the New York times in March of 2007 (which also includes handy data visualizations):

Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928...

The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression. [...]

The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.

Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who analyzed the Internal Revenue Service data with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, said such growing disparities were significant in terms of social and political stability.

Le duh! Meanwhile, we half-glassers panic over the mere sight of flashing lights behind us, in dread of a ticket that would mean skipping that trip to the dentist, or not getting that prescription next month, while the guy in the Mercedes (who blew our doors off) might get a ticket for an amount he probably has laying around on his teak dresser.

Social and political stability depend on an innate sense of fairness which has evolved for millions of years. Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University have shown that "nonhuman primates respond negatively to unequal reward distribution." ScienceDaily (Sep. 19, 2003):

These new findings, coupled with previous scientific data that demonstrate a direct link between nonhuman primate behavior and that of humans, support a new school of thought that economic decision-making is based as much on an emotional sense of fairness as on rational considerations. [...]

In this study, researchers made food-related exchanges with brown capuchin monkeys. The subjects refused previously acceptable rewards (cucumbers) if they witnessed their partners receiving higher-value rewards (grapes) for equal or less work.

No primate wants to see another be rewarded grapes for the same work for which he got cucumbers. While the primate research didn't study regressive punishment per se, I would wager that no primate likes paying grapes for the same infraction for which another pays cucumbers. Some conservatives, though, including some who measure their happiness by the price of their mittens, will likely rail that I am preaching class warfare and socialism: a brainless, straw-stuffed distraction of an argument. To keep that argument from going up in flames, those conservatives would have to argue that there is no innate sense of fairness because we didn't evolve. In that case, we can end with a Lisa Simpson quote: “Mom. They are teaching us Creationism in school. We had a test today, and every answer was ‘God did it’.”

For the sake of arguing with even those conservatives a bit further, let's assume God gave us our sense of fairness. Jesus H. Christ himself had something to say about justice, and paying your fair share. Buddha was all over the subject. Does it matter where our sense of justice came from? We experience unhappiness when we discover unfairness. It is why we evolved from improved upon Hammurabi's code, the Magna Carta, and our constitution. Social and political stability are built on a cornerstone of fairness. Undermining this cornerstone has cracked the whole structure. We need to patch those cracks before they lead to collapse.

Patching those cracks will be similar to recovering from a crack addiction. We must undergo a financial abuse recovery program. We must make investments that will pay off later, like in green infrastructure, and education. We must correct imbalances that have led to capitalism driven by marketing to create needs, rather than ingenuity to fill needs. This transformation will be expensive, and someone will have to pay. Should we unfairly burden the least able of our children and grandchildren?

As we kick the financial equivalent of addiction, we'll have our group therapy. We'll attend conferences, hold summits, and sit in on seminars. For the sake of a more fair system on which to base our recovery, we should explore the idea of making taxes, fines, and fees more progressive, not more regressive. Indexing fines to income is an especially a good way to increase taxes on only the rich who most deserve it, something with which most primates would agree.

Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican who instigated progressive income taxation, wrote in his autobiography, almost 100 years ago:

Because of things I have done on behalf of justice to the workingman, I have often been called a Socialist. Usually I have not taken the trouble even to notice the epithet. Moreover, I know that many American Socialists are high-minded and honorable citizens, who in reality are merely radical social reformers. They are opposed to the brutalities and industrial injustices which we see everywhere about us.

...many of the men who call themselves Socialists to-day are in reality merely radical social reformers, with whom on many points good citizens can and ought to work in hearty general agreement, and whom in many practical matters of government good citizens well afford to follow.

Perhaps we should read more from the progressive Republicans of our history, of which there were many. Our future happiness, or at least our lack of deep despair, may depend on it.

Protect Precious Land, Keep Tim DeChristopher Out of Prison

On December 28th of last year, I posted a diary at the Daily Kos entitled Fake Bids as Protest: So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World in which I made a brief excursion into the history of fake auction bids as a form of protest.

Yesterday, in this recommended diary at the Kos, JohnnyRook reported that Tim DeChristopher, whose bids at a BLM auction in Utah monkeywrenched the Bush administration's last minute oil and gas lease giveaways, is trying to raise the money to pay for the leases he "won." In which case, the bids wouldn't be fake, and he wouldn't have to go to prison.

Now, as anyone who's been reading my recent posts knows, I'm dead broke. This economy has been very harsh on my clients, and that has trickled down to me (the only way trickle down economics really works). I wish I could lease an acre or two to help this brilliant young man out. If you can, please do so. You can donate at his cool web site.

Tim needs to raise $45,000 by Jan. 9. As of this morning, he's up to $37,101. Please do all you can to help.