America: You Fogged the Mirror. Carry On.

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Trust us, America, you’re going to feel a lot better soon. We’re going to elect better doctors. (Wikimedia Commons image)

Many years ago, as a young soldier (in civvies, but somehow they always knew) quaffing a few beers in a Georgia bar as far from the post as I could afford to get, I saw a young black soldier (in civvies, but I could tell) come through the door with a lovely date on his arm. She was white. Actually, blonde. I was sore afraid, and looked for a table to get under, envisioning the bar existing only as a pile of kindling when the riot was over.

As far as I could tell, not one person in the bar — remember I said it was far from the post, so it was not an all-Army crowd, but mostly locals — no one gave the couple a second glance or seemed to comment on their presence. That was in 1968, and it was then I began to rethink my easily-acquired caricature of Southerners as racist hicks. Having rethought it, and having similar Southern epiphanies many times over the years, I retained some faith in the decency of Alabamans, and became convinced they would not elevate the odious Roy Moore to the Senate of the United States. Continue reading →

America, Please, Fog This Mirror

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“Sir, I know you’re not feeling all that well, but we need you to get up and go back to work.” (US Defense Department photo)

Please, America, I know you are not well, but open your eyes just a little and listen to me. I know you were too weak to fend off Trumpicitis a year ago, and that it left you too weak in the aftermath to do much except marvel at your own ensuing insanity. I know your doctors have been trying some untested experimental treatments on you — the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, probiotics, that sort of thing — without any success. But dammit, sit up and listen to me, and stop mumbling “Do not resuscitate.”

You used to be “the last, best hope of earth,” for a lot of good reasons. I can remember when you still were, although you started to lose it in the 1960s. It was understandable; you lost three of history’s finest public figures to assassination in just a few years, and you became ensnared in Vietnam. But it was in the 1980s that you became really sick. That’s when the awful, metastasizing cancer of greed overwhelmed your defenses and began turning you into a pathetic shadow of your former self. Continue reading →

Robert Mueller: The Last Man Standing

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Don Blankenship was once the most baronial of the West Virginia coal barons. His greed and contempt for the law were legendary — John Grisham used him as the template for his villain in the 2008 best-selling novel The Appeal. Annoyed by lawsuits that were costing him money, Blankenship spent $3 million to elect a judge to the state supreme court, after which he stopped losing lawsuits. Even after 29 miners died in an explosion in one of his mines — an explosion that miners and regulators claimed was the result of Blankenship’s penny pinching and disdain for miner safety — he remained untouchable.

Except by Booth Goodwin. While state authorities stood by, U.S. Attorney Goodwin spent years meticulously putting together and trying cases against Blankenship’s underlings and ultimately Blankenship himself. Goodwin was the reason Blankenship spent last Christmas in a jail cell instead of cavorting on the French Riviera with his favorite State Supreme Court judge (named Spike — I am not making this stuff up, there are pictures). Continue reading →

The Song of Polly Anna

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This is the Song of Polly Anna, as sung by the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” Chorus, or whistled while passing graveyards:

When the fat lady finishes singing the Song of Polly Anna, it’s over.

Verse #1: “Unemployment is down to 4.1 percent, lowest in 17 years. 1.5 million new jobs created since I took office.” (Contributed by the Tweeter in Chief.)

“Don’t be fooled by low unemployment numbers,” says The Hill, not exactly a fringe publication, of the latest report. Candidate Trump actually had it right when he ridiculed the government reports as lipstick on a pig, or, perhaps more to the point, cosmetics on a corpse. The numbers are curried and combed, annualized, seasonally adjusted, revised and updated not to reflect reality, but to replace reality with a shimmering vision of 1950.

Case in point: the latest report estimates that just last month, 968,000 American workers left the workforce. While some of these people are elderly, students or disabled, their numbers have been swelled by people who could be working, who want to work, but have given up looking for work. Thus it is true that the number crunchers somehow massaged the unemployment rate to a 17-year low, primarily by counting as unemployed only those people actively looking for work. Meanwhile the number of people not in the work force, and thus not counted in the calculation, has reached 95 million, its highest level in 40 years.   Continue reading →

Driverless in Manhattan: A Comedy

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Drat. It seemed I had been proven wrong yet again. Just two months after having written that “The Self-Driving Car is Only an Oxymoron” and would never be a reality, I was confronted last week by headlines screaming a variant of : “Self-Driving Cars Will Roam New York City Streets Next Year.” The headlines were everywhere, from the New York Times to NPR, and the import was clear — driverless (or autonomous, or self-driving) cars are here, and ready to go on the streets of New York. (And if they can make it there….)

So I was on my way back to my hut in the Slough of Despond, there to lick my wounds a while, when I said to myself, “Wait a minute, perhaps we should read a bit beyond the headline and the first paragraph.” And what I found there made me smile again, briefly. Continue reading →

Stock Market Achieves Escape Velocity, Leaves Earth

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[Irony Alert: The following news is not fake. It is true, just not factual.]

The New York Stock Exchange announced today that according to its key indicator, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock market has attained escape velocity, has left Earth’s atmosphere and is, as a spokesman said, “on its way to the stars.” Having set a new record high of over 23,000 on October 17, a spokesman said the Dow is expected to broach 1,000,000 by the end of the year. “We’re in warp drive now,” the spokesman said.

Asked how stock prices could be so high when corporations are struggling with enormous debt, anemic profits, poor sales and sagging prospects, the spokesman laughed heartily. “See, that right there is thinking that is so 1929. The era of stock prices being tied down to the actual value of anything, or to business performance, is long over. Now it’s all about expectations and psychology. Facebook isn’t valued at half a trillion dollars because of what it owns or because it’s advertising works. [See: “Digital Advertising: The Rise and Fall of Crappy Crap”] It has that valuation because it is blindingly popular.” Continue reading →

Dopamine Dreams

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Madness manifests in people and countries in some ways that are obvious to other people and countries, even while the crazy ones remain oblivious to their own affliction. People with dementia, for example, often don’t see anything out of the ordinary in having to be reintroduced to people they have known for years, who just left the room a few minutes ago, but friends and family understand instantly what has been lost. Countries that repeatedly invade patches of jungle or sand in Asia or the Middle East, expecting each time they do the same thing to win hearts and minds, accept their state of constant war and failure as normal, but the countries around them do not.

The crazier you are, it seems, and the more completely unhinged your behavior, the less aware you are that anything is amiss. It’s one of those situations where, if you think you have a problem, you don’t; it’s when you cannot conceive of anything being wrong with you that you are screwed. Continue reading →

Hyping Data Analytics: What Color is Your Button?

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I am an oracle, and will tell you your future. I’ll use a crystal ball, or some goat entrails, or data analytics. Same difference.

Last Sunday, 60 Minutes plucked from his richly deserved obscurity a former website designer with no prior political campaign experience, and celebrated him as the self-identified architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. He did it, he said, with Facebook. He cited no evidence whatsoever for for this claim of omnipotence for a social medium that Betty White once described as “a very great waste of time.” But a fawning Lesley Stahl bestowed the CBS seal of legitimacy when she murmured, early on in the interview,  “And Facebook IS how he [Trump] won.”

Really? CBS used to call itself “The Tiffany Network,” but it’s more like Wal Mart than Tiffany’s now. And its crown jewel, 60 Minutes, seems more like a child’s charm bracelet, green with corrosion. The entire segment on Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s  digital director, was as uncritical of its subject and his grandiose claims as a Fox News segment on the compassion of Donald Trump. Continue reading →

The Unbearable Lightness of Billions

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Of course we’ll rebuild it, bigger and stronger than ever, but with what? (U.S. Navy photo of Hurricane Sandy aftermath by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Ryan J. Courtade/Released)

I have been trying to apply arithmetic to the problem of hurricane relief. I know, this is like translating computer code to cuneiform tablets, but bear with me — ancient learning was, after all, learning. The costs of recovering from Hurricanes Harvey (Texas), Irma (Florida) and Maria (Puerto Rico) are now estimated at about $220 billion. Congress has thus far appropriated $15 billion for the purpose, acting on September 9, the very day FEMA was expected to run out of money.

By its timely action, Congress solved seven per cent of the problem. With a burn rate of two million dollars a day, FEMA will be broke again in 75 days (from September 9). Nobody’s talking about this. At least, not in any way that makes sense. In a cheery piece claiming that FEMA can never run out of money, the explainer website HowStuffWorks says it can’t happen in the future because in the past, Congress has always bailed it out in time, just like it did with its seven-per-cent solution of September 9. Continue reading →

Resilience is Illegal in Florida

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Let’s say you live in Florida. Yes, I know, that requires us to assume you are pretty oblivious to the rising seas and corrosive stupidity assailing the state from every direction, but let’s just say you live in Florida. No offense.

You’re smart enough to know that life in Hurricane Alley could get difficult, and you live after all in the Sunshine State, so you installed solar panels on your roof, enough to run your house, just in case. Now, we just assumed you were dense enough to choose to live in Florida, so let’s assume, on the other side of the ledger, that you are smart enough to have avoided some of the major pitfalls of the rooftop solar business.     Continue reading →