in other news....

[Kurdish-inhabited areas include large sections of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia]

Headlines in today's Wall Street Journal -


Sanctions for Iran as Talks Fail
     The good news:  Western governments are finally showing some backbone in resisting Iranian nuclear program.
     The bad news:  The sanctions will screw the Iranian poor far more than the rich.


India in Race to Contain Untreatable Tuberculosis
     The bad news:  TB concentrated among the poorest of the poor, usually the Untouchables.
     The good news:  We're not in India


Home Prices Rise, But Not for Everyone
    The good news:  Home prices rose for some.
    The bad news:  Economic stratification in the US continues to worsen.


Charter Schools Fall Short on Disabled
     The good news:  We can afford oil and ethanol subsidies to big corporations..
     The bad news:   We don't have the money to care for disabled children.


Southern Baptists Pick Black Leader
     The bad news:  The Southern Baptist church was founded in 1845 as a secession from the abolitionist tendencies of northern Baptists.
      The good news:  The mo' fo's are so desperate for membership and relevance that they have been forced to stoop to engaging in the justice they have been preaching for over a century and a half.


Sandusky's Wife Contradicts Accusers
     The bad news:  Mrs. Sandusky is going to stand by her man, no matter what.
     The good news:  She is going to divorce him and take him to the cleaners as soon as he is convicted and the appeal fails.


Band-Aids for the Health Law
     The good news:  The US finally has a limited form of national medical insurance.
     The bad news:  What little we have of national medical insurance stands to be scuttled by the Supreme Court, the Guardians of Our Liberties.


Farm Bill Holds Windfall for Insurers
      The good news:  "Farmers" are usually large corporations who don't really need the money.
     The bad news:   Insurers don't exactly need any more of the public's money either.


Clues Emerge on Romney's VP Pick
     The good news:  He won't pick Palin.
     The bad news:  He will pick someone just as right-wing as Palin but not as laughably stupid.


Sides Dig In Over Gun Documents
    The good news:  Government program which resulted in the US arming Mexican mafiosi being unmasked by House Republicans.
     The bad news:  The House Republicans didn't care about the program when the Bush administration began it.


Europe, Weak Economy Add to Pressure on Fed
     The good news:  The Federal Reserve Board has several options to prevent the US economy from falling further into recession.
     The bad news:  In the past none of those options has worked.


Criminal Inquiry Focuses on EPA Email
     The good news:  A lead smelter company which polluted a park in Omaha and caused elevated lead levels in children playing there was fined $187 million by the EPA.
     The bad news:  The lead smelter company is trying to criminalize the EPA actions and get the $187M back.


Egyptian Opposition Finds Unity
     The good news:  The Egyptian opposition is finally united in opposition to what is effectively a military coup..
     The bad news:  The main result of the Arab Spring has come down to a showdown between rule by the military and rule by the Muslim Brotherhood,


Conservatism Propelled Islamist to Presidency's Doorstep
     The good news: The West can now drop the pretense that the Muslim Brotherhood is, or was ever going to be, "moderate".
     The bad news:  I am not going to even try not to say, "I told you so."  Repeatedly.


Mubarak In Hospital Following Stroke
     The bad news:  He was a son of a bitch,.

     The good news:  but he was our son of a bitch.  (Harry Truman describing Chiang-kai-shek)


Pakistan Court Orders Dismissal of Premier, Escalating Power Struggle
      The bad news:  The military regime are sons of bitches.
      The good news:  They're our sons of bitches .  Wait, they aren't even that.  There is no good news from Pakistan.


Associate of Bo Xilai's Wife Arrested
      The good news:  Evil local dictator has been undone.
      The bad news:  Corruption and power struggles are apparently endemic in China.


Activists Issue Plea to Evacuate Civilians in Syria
      The good news:  Syrian rebels are said in the West to be "moderate".
      The bad news:  Is there an echo in here?


Kurds Attack Turkish Post in Escalation
     The good news:  There are 32 million Kurds in the Middle East, 8 times as many as Palestinians..
     The bad news:    More than half of their country is occupied by our allies, Turkey and Iraq.  The rest is occupied by our enemies, Iran and Syria.


Europe Rethinks Approach to Madrid Aid
Cyprus Warns Deadline is Near for Bank Rescue
Confidence Declines in Germany and France
G-20 Leaders Divide Over Euro-Zone Crisis
     The good news:  The European Union and Euro-Zone are a brave and mature attempt to end a thousand years of endless, progressively more destructive, intra-European wars.
     The bad news:  The whole thing may unravel over quarrels about money.


WikiLeaks Founder Tries to Get Asylum
       The good news:  Julian Assange looks and sounds like the kind of privileged sleazeball who would do what he is accused of doing.
       The bad news:  Rape charges immediately after he embarrassed the US and NATO and arguably damaged our security, seems like way too much of a coincidence to be believed.  It reminds me of the trumped-up murder charges frequently brought against labor organizers in the early 20th Century US.



Of these stories, the one that matters is the untreatable TB in India story.  There are 200 million Untouchables in India, most of them close to penniless and living in intensely crowded slums.  The potential catastrophe is so immense as to make even people who don't give a damn lie awake at night.




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Hidden in Plain Sight

[Romney waves the flag.  The M and O have been reversed in Photoshop but the satire is truer than the original]

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that, according to his FEC filings, Mitt Romney's net worth is between $190 and $250 millions and that his income in 2011 was $21 million.  These numbers show why even most capitalists should vote against Romney.

Romney "earned" between 8.4% and 11% return on his money last year.   Federal and corporate bonds pay between 1 and 2%.  The S&P500 is an index which represents the bulk of the corporate wealth in the US.  It began 2011 at 1,257 and ended 2011 at --- at --- at --- 1,257.  The net capital appreciation for the stock market in general was zero, nothing, nada, zippity-doo-dah, rien, zilch, bubkes.   No capital gain at all.

Yet Mitt came up with between 8 and 11% return.  Actually more, since he presumably started the year with between $170 million and $230 million.  But why quibble about a few dozen million here and there?

Most of the debate, OK all of the debate, has been that as between rich people and working people, between the 1% and the 99%, that the game is rigged in favor of the 1%.  The most public and remediable abuse being that the 1% pay a lower percentage in taxes than the 99%.

But there in Romney's numbers is a demonstration that the game is rigged even between the 0.9% who are rich and the 0.1% who are far richer.  While the capitalists who own the corporations were earning nothing on their investments or 1% on their bond portfolios, far richer capitalists like Romney were getting handsome returns.  And at whose expense?

Romney and his supporters would have us believe that Romney did so well because he is a some kind of genius.  I have heard him speak and you have heard him speak.  I think that lays to rest the idea that he is a genius.   I see no way not to conclude that either Romney and other particularly rich people have been amazingly lucky years after year, or that they have been competing against other capitalists on something other than a level playing field 

One indication of what the problem might be is the missing three letters - SEC.  When is the last time one has so much as heard of the Securities and Exchange Commission?  Not even heard of it doing anything, but heard of it at all?   The SEC has vanished even from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  

The task Congress set the SEC was to regulate the investment markets to prevent the most egregious abuses against investors.  The purpose of the SEC was to protect capitalists both from small-time frauds, and from big-time corporate looters.  But the Republicans in Congress, with tacit Democratic assent, have cut SEC's budget year after year.   SEC is all but gone now.   Small capitalists, 0.9% of the 1%, have no protection from the endless chicaneries of the securities markets and of chicaners like Romney.  

Here we see why those who are more than merely rich are said to be filthy rich.  Romney demonstrate what the filth is.  Filth is when those who have doubly rigged the game in their favor, first in favor of the 1% and then in favor of the 0.1%, not only get away with it, but even have the gall to piously preach about how they deserve the money they did not work to get.  Schemed to get, yes.  Worked to produce, no.

Even the capitalist 0.9% of the 1% should reject Romney as their candidate.  Romney is the enemy of all working people and also of most capitalists, and still stands a good chance of being elected President of our country.  What does that tell you about the condition of our democracy?

A Modest Proposal

Eclipses, Tech, Shopping, and Surprises

[Sky Walk screen shot]

My nephew Steve Wilhelm and I drove to Lassen Volcanic National Park last weekend for the annular eclipse. Aside from all the other reportage about the drive (pleasant), the park (beautiful), the snow (lots of it), the people (fun and friendly), and the annular eclipse (delightful), there was a moment when Steve wowed me with an application on his iPad. It is called 'Star Walk'. 

Steve held his iPad up to the sky and Star Walk showed what stars were in the sky behind and around the iPad. It uses a combination of GPS and motion sensors to detect where it is and what position it is being held in. It uses those to show where on the celestial sphere it is pointed. It doesn't care about the earth being in the way and will show the stars in the sky on the other side of the planet just as easily if one holds it facing down. If you want to know what stars are in the sky over Australia and you have some sense of what direction Australia is, you can do that. In addition to the stars, it also shows the planets, the moon, comets, the constellations, and artificial satellites. It stores the data in its memory between updates, so it doesn't need access to broadband or wi-fi to work. Which is good because while it works fine in a city, it would be outstanding out of town where vastly more stars and constellations are visible for it to identify. 

My Tech-Toy Lust Meter instantly shot over to BUY NOW. Upon returning to the city I soon started shopping for iPads - models, memory, phone connectivity, prices, and so on. I had already figured that since Star Walk relies on motion and position sensors that it would not work on a laptop since it doesn't have those. But I saw a little ad about 'Alternatives to' and clicked on it. An iPhone is sort of a little iPad, maybe it would work on that, I wondered but started to wonder whether an iPhone would be any cheaper than an iPad. Probably not. 

Before I finished wondering these wonderings, the link took me to Android alternatives. Hey, I started to wonder, my Verizon phone runs Android right? Maybe I could get a cool new phone from Verizon and not have to change carriers and not have to (get to?) buy an iPad? The Android version of 'Star Walk' is called 'Sky Map'. I hunted it down online and found that it was compatible with the several-years-old cellphone I already have.  Great! I said.  

I just had to download it.  I spent a while locating and figuring out how to use the Android Store.  And then some time pawing through the ill-organized mass of app's available.  But I found it.  It was free, a good price.  I immediately attempted to download it.  But I couldn't.  Because it was already on my phone.  

The morals to be drawn here are three.  One is to check your smartphone or iPhone or iPad to see if you already have Star Walk or Sky Map.  If you don't, consider getting it.  Two is that this narishkeit foolish spinning one's wheels may well be how you too will someday spend your retirement.  I forget what the third was but it seemed clear when I started this paragraph.

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Hamas is so much fun....

[click on video for fullscreen]

Oops, got the video and the commentary switched.  This one is just as much fun as the previous one.  I am starting to really like this guy....

Here he explains what we have tried to explain for years, that the Palestinians are children and grandchildren of Egyptians, Syrians, and Saudis who came to Palestine for jobs created by the nascent Zionist settlements in the 1920's, 30's and 40's.

So far from having been in Palestine from time immemorial and having been "invaded" by the Zionist settlers, they came after the Jews did, drawn by the economic opportunities created by the new Jewish settlements.  And here is their foreign minister admitting it on television.


After a lifetime of demanding that Israel give them land that is not theirs, here he is demanding that Egypt, a poor country, give them oil without the inconvenience of paying for it.

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The Dictator

[Charlie Chaplin as 'The Great Dictator']

[Sasha Baron Cohen great as 'The Dictator']

The Dictator is tasteless, crass, politically incorrect up the wazoo, and funny.  I feared that, as with so many movies, the trailers would be the best scenes and the rest of the movie would be a let down.  

In this movie, none of the trailers are even in the movie.  Which makes the trailers not excerpts but their own genre.  As so often with new genres, the foundation document is a masterpiece.  

Homer invents the epic with 'Iliad' which has never been surpassed among epics.  Chaucer invents English rhyming poetry with 'Canterbury Tales', which are still worth reading today.  The best bible, as something to read and enjoy, is still the Hebrew bible. 

Anyway, Cohen is clever in placing his fictional Wadiya on the map of north Africa, not in a made-up location but where Somalia is.  Which is itself witty.  The Somali government cannot complain of being made fun of because Somalia is the most failed of all failed states and has no government.  Indeed he is clever in a dozen ways and makes fun of lots of stuff, including the United States of course.

I recommend.  Which raises an interesting question.  There is the royal 'we' and the editorial 'we'.  Is a blog writer entitled to the latter?  Do I recommend or do we recommend?  Either way, it is an enjoyable hour and a half or whatever.

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Hewlett-Packard Laptop Disaster Unwound

[Einstein and Fermi figuring out how to delete HPtonecontrol from Windows - actually it's Leo Szilard]

I have been tearing my hair out over a persistent problem with the big Hewlett-Packard Pavilion DV8t Entertainment PC laptop I got for doing Photoshop and watching Netflix, and all the usual email, Facebook, word processing, spreadsheets, and so on that one does.  I paid what seemed to me a lot at Costco for H-P's biggest and best screen - 18 inches, high resolution, good color, good sound.

What I got was a chronic pain in the butt that evolved into complete unusability.  The tone adjustment bars would not stay off the screen no matter what I did.  Since they immediately became the current program and pushed the others into the background nothing else could be run.  Since they could not be gotten rid of for more than a second, the pc was effectively unusable.  


Even before that became intolerable, the wi-fi antenna became equivalently unstable.  It constantly went from blue (on) to red (off) and knocked me off the router connection.  By the time the router connection was restored, the antenna went off again and blew off the connection yet again.

H-P Help wanted substantial money for services that every user forum universally described as "useless", "incompetent", "worthless", "didn't help", or worse.  With a machine that didn't work and that I couldn't fix nor have fixed, I had an expensive piece of junk on my hands.  I had a machine that sometimes almost worked and was too expensive to replace out of hand.  So it constantly made my life miserable and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it, except bite the bullet and buy another machine or suffer along with the ever-worsening piece of crap I already had.

BUT several entries down on a secondary user forum, a user suggested a fix.  Start --> Control Panel --> Uninstall a Program --> HPtonecontrol.     DELETE that evil piece of squat.  And it worked.

Now the wi-fi antenna stays on.  Now there are no tone control bars constantly popping up.

I can no longer adjust bass/treble balance. As they say in New Jersey, "Ask me if I care.  Go ahead, ask me."  And just in case you did ask me, the answer is, "No, I don't care."

It is yet another example of how some tiny thing can stop everything and wreck everything.  Once it is removed, the sun comes out.  

If anyone reading this has, or knows anyone who has, one of these H-P dogs, send them a link to this.  Or just copy the instructions.  Or just the words, 'delete HPtonecontrol'.

I call such things 'boron'.  There was a time when the Manhattan Project, which would dramatically shorten World War II, was stymied by few milligrams of boron impurities.  The trace amount of boron in the tons of graphite bricks Fermi was using to build a primitive nuclear reactor absorbed the neutrons and ruined the reaction.  The vast endeavor of mankind was held up for months while graphite purification processes were improved to get rid of it.  

If you look around you, you will find examples of boron in your own life and in the world generally.  Another phrase for it would be 'active entropy'.

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Marriage Rights for All!

[Brigham Young and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife and....]

Doesn't the legalization of same-sex marriage mean that bisexuals will continue to be discriminated against so long as a marriage is only between two people?  Shouldn't a man be able to marry the  man and woman whom he loves?  The woman he loves should have the same right, which would require a second woman, making a minimum of four spouses.


Would President Romney be more sensitive to this issue than President Obama?




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Blurting Out the Truth - Oops!

Palestinians Don't Come From Palestine: Quote from Hamas Minister of Interior and National Security, Fathi Muhammad

by Aryeh Savir 

Tazpit News Agency, May 7th, 2012

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/eye-on-palestine/hamas-senior-official-palestinians-dont-come-from-palestine/2012/05/07/

Hamas Minister of Interior and National Security Fathi Hammad recently said that the Palestinians actually came from Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. In an interview he gave to Al-Hekma TV, an Egyptian network, he discussed the necessity of Arab-Muslim solidarity and the support the Gazans need from the Egyptians to continue with their Jihad efforts. 

Hamas Minister of Interior and National Security Fathi Hammad recently said that the Palestinians actually came from Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. In an interview he gave to Al-Hekma TV, an Egyptian network, he discussed the necessity of Arab-Muslim solidarity and the support the Gazans need from the Egyptians to continue with their Jihad efforts. He declared that: “Al-Aqsa and the land of Palestine represent the spearhead for Islam and for the Muslims. Therefore, when we seek the help of our Arab brothers, we are not seeking their help in order to eat, to live, to drink, to dress, or to live a life of luxury. No. When we seek their help, it is in order to continue to wage Jihad”.

In an attempt to gain Egyptian sympathy, he said that all Palestinians have Arab roots, blood ties in various countries on the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. Hammad said that half of his family was Egyptian and over thirty large families are named Al-Matzri, from Egypt. Half of all Gazans came from Egypt; the other half came from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. He repeated and clarified: “Who are the Palestinians? We have many families named Al-Matzri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptians! They came from Alexandria, Cairo, Dumietta, the North, from Aswan and Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are a part of you”.

These statements stand in stark contrast to the common conception that the Palestinian Arabs have lived within the borders of the State of Israel from “time immemorial”.

Click on the link below to view Hammad’s comments on MEMRI TV:

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3389.htm



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Ten Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm

http://download.ted.com/talks/MaryRoach_2009.mp4



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Kiss a Methodist Today

[sailor kissing Methodist]

Methodist Church Rejects BDS Resolution - Anti-Defamation League 

<headlines@adl.org>

ADL Welcomes Methodist Church's Rejection Of Anti-Israel Divestment Resolution, But Calls Boycott Resolution 'Disturbing' 

May 3, 2012

http://www.adl.org/PresRele/IslME_62/6304_62.htm

New York, NY, May 3, 2012 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today welcomed the United Methodist Church (UMC) rejection of an unfair anti-Israel resolution that called for divestment from three companies doing business with the Jewish State.  At the same time the League expressed concern over the adoption of a measure recommending the boycott of products manufactured in Israeli settlements.

           

The vote took place on May 2 during the UMC's quadrennial general conference, which is being held this year in Tampa, Florida.  In 2008, the UMC also rejected an Israel divestment resolution.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement: 

Despite an intense campaign by a small group of anti-Israel activists, the United Methodist Church acted responsibly by once again rejecting a resolution to divest Church holdings in companies doing business in Israel.  We trust this second failure by divestment activists makes clear that the UMC rejects the divisive anti-Israel approach of divestment, while seeking constructive ways to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace and to promote Palestinian quality of life.

It is sad that some in the Methodist Church are preoccupied with demonizing Israel at a time when we need real religious and moral leadership to deal with pressing issues around the globe.  In an imperfect world surely there are many, many other humanitarian concerns and crises that demand more immediate attention.

It is disturbing that the Church approved a measure to boycott products from settlements, an essentially anti-Israel approach which promotes the punishment of only one side in this complicated conflict.  Positive economic investment in peace is the fruitful way toward reconciliation and to bolster the confidence of both parties in the conflict.

A United Methodist Church committee had originally considered a proposal calling for all United Methodist general boards and agencies to divest promptly from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett Packard until they end their involvement in the Israeli occupation.  However, by a committee vote of 50-24, with three abstentions, that motion was amended to exclude divestment, and replace it with positive economic investment before being presented to the conference delegation.    The amended version read:  "The 2012 General Conference calls on the General Board of Pensions and Health Benefits to explore serious peacemaking strategies in Israel and Palestine including positive economic and financial investment in Palestine."






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Actually Doing Something About It

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Why the Election(s) Don't Matter

[Hollande on the left, Sarkozy on the right]

Last night the candidates for the presidency of the French Republic debated the issues.  I was impressed by how they exemplified the choices facing all the Western countries.   For all the noise and chatter in the press about how to deal with government deficits and government debt, there are really only two ways to do it.  One is to spend less.  The other is to tax more.

A reasonable person would say there is a third way - to spend somewhat less and also to tax somewhat more. The problem with that approach is that it has no constituency.  The other two have.

According to M. Hollande, the candidate of the Socialist Party, solving the debt problem by cutting government  services and expenditures won't work because cutting government spending will cut consumer spending even more.  Reduced consumer spending will not only lower everybody's standard of living, it will also shrink the economy.  A shrinking economy will generate less tax revenue for the government.  Reduced government revenues will diminish the amount of the deficit reduction, or even exceed it.  Cutting expenditures results in impoverishing those who benefit from government expenditure but does not accomplish the desired goal of reducing deficits and debt.  M. Sarkozy, a conservative, claims that reduced taxing and spending will support investment and market confidence and lead ultimately to a growing prosperous economy.

M. Hollande's policy is the opposite.  He claims that increased government expenditures will lead to a growing economy.  It will  increase everyone's standard of living, and generate growing government tax revenue, thus reducing the deficit.  To which M. Sarkozy replies, that solving a debt problem by spending more and borrowing more doesn't solve the problem, it makes it worse.

One can summarize the two positions as spend less and spend more.  Neither will work.  

As  Nobel Prize winner in economics Paul Krugman recently pointed out in a stinging column in the NY Times, spending less has been proven repeatedly not to lead to economic growth.  Ronald Reagan claimed it would.  It didn't.  Margaret Thatcher claimed it would.  It didn't. There are dozens of similar examples. The fallback argument, when the first is exposed as a lie, is  that cutting taxes and expenditure will give investors and markets "confidence" and that "confidence" to invest will lead to growth and prosperity. Krugman explains clearly that investor "confidence" is a tooth fairy that only Republicans believe in.  In each case when austerity budgets have been introduced, the crucial bond market responded with a studied and quantifiable indifference.  In short the Sarkozy-and-conservatives-generally argument is garbage and that the people pressing it are either ignorant or dishonest.

Spending more won't work either.  For almost 15 years now, Japan, until recently the second largest economy in the world, has been moiled in a deflationary spiral.  The government and the Bank of Japan have both run enormous deficits in an attempt to reflate the moribund economy.  On the one hand it hasn't worked.  On the other, the Japanese government is now saddled with a huge debt burden and the interest on it.  Think too of the Labour governments of the 1970's, with their free-spending budgets which produced not growth but only inflation - the so-called stagflation.  Something similar happened in the United States in the 1970's under Jimmy Carter. Again, many more examples can be added.   According to Keynesian economics, stagflation, inflation without growth, is impossible..  Yet it was quite real.

My guess is that we are seeing a demonstration that governments, even with all the economic levers at their disposal, really haven't all that much control over national economies.  If they did, we would already long since have achieved permanently stable, prosperous economies with equitable income distributions.  

My Sw- example from the last century illustrates what really makes economies work.  Consider the three Sw- countries, Sweden, Switzerland, and Swaziland.  Sweden (at the time I constructed the image) was the richest country in Europe.  It had a socialist economy which controlled more than half of the gross domestic product.  There was full employment and no poverty.  Switzerland was right behind, the second richest country in Europe.  Compared to Sweden it had almost no government at all.  The Swiss Federal Government is a wisp.  Its seven-member rotating presidency is generally understood to be a joke.  What little government there is is largely conducted by the cantons, not the federal government.  But even the cantons do very little.  Like Sweden, Switzerland had full employment and no poverty.  Swaziland then (before the discovery of diamonds) was one of the poorest countries in the world.  The titular president of the country was merely the king of one of the tribes.  Swaziland had basically no government, neither  employment nor unemployment, and only poverty.

If the issues are what the politicians keep saying it is, picking the best ideology and implementing it, then either socialist Sweden or laissez-faire capitalist Switzerland should have been screwed up and miserable.  But neither were.  Both were terrific places to live and to raise kids.  

Swaziland had neither socialism nor laissez-faire capitalism.  It had a subsistence economy.  It was a terrible place to live and an even worse one to raise kids, not least because life expectancy was low and infant mortality was high.


Both Sweden and Switzerland had accumulated lots of infrastructure - good roads, good medical care systems, safe water supplies, good schools, colleges teaching technical skills, and lots of accumulated capital in factories, businesses, banks, and so on.  Most of all, both countries had lots of highly qualified, highly skilled, well-educated workers capable of adapting to and adopting new technologies as they were being introduced.  Both were able to compete successfully in world markets and to export enough to pay for the imports implicit in a small country with a high standard of living.  

Swaziland had little infrastructure - no roads, no schools, no hospitals, no safe water system, no colleges, no factories, no businesses.  Absent schools, workers had few technical or commercial skills, and little ability to adopt new technologies.  They had nothing to sell on the world market (this was before the diamonds) and therefore could buy little.  Swaziland remained grindingly poor.

Which suggests that the path to prosperity is in spending money on schools and on infrastructure.  Whether this is done by the government or by private enterprise doesn't matter in the least.  What matters is that it be done.  Spending on schools and infrastructure, no matter whether the money is raised by confiscatory taxes on the rich or by grinding the faces of the poor, also doesn't matter.  The fairness of the system doesn't matter either.   Income distribution was more egalitarian in Sweden than in Switzerland, but neither was as egalitarian as Swaziland where poverty was almost universal.  So even social justice doesn't matter.  

Life expectancies in poor countries are low in large part because of high infant mortality.  Imagine arguing to a Swazi mother with a dying child in her arms about the virtues of socialism or capitalism or even social justice - imagine the stare she would give you.  What the woman wants, in economic terms, is infrastructure - a clinic, a doctor, medicine, a road to the clinic - and access to them - national health insurance, no-fee socialized medicine, or a fee she can actually pay.

The Sw- comparisons suggest to me that the endless bickering over socialism versus capitalism, soak the rich versus fostering investment climate, and all the rest of it, are just pointless noise and distraction.  The basis of prosperity is educated productive workers and adequate-unto-excellent infrastructure.

BUT (there is always a 'but') several things are wrong with a program of spending on schools at all levels.  One is that the return on investment is years away, while the election is months away.  The other is that schools are a miserably difficult political subject.  There is no credible way to increase spending on schools without addressing the issue of education reform.  There are intractable racial issues, local control issues, class issues, immigration issues, and on and on.  It is a tar-baby that once engaged with, cannot be withdrawn from and which sullies everyone caught up in it.  Education reform is unavoidably divisive and of no use whatever to any ambitious politician.   

Infrastructure is easier to spend money on.  Everyone likes highways, hospitals, bridges, mass transit, water projects, and so on.  The problem is deciding who will pay for it.

Schools and infrastructure are not sexy subjects, but they are the real issues on which the economic and even cultural future of our country depend.  And, depend on it, neither will get any more than pro forma reference during the coming struggle for power between two factions of the ruling class both here and in France.  

In both countries the candidates will debate the issues that don't matter and ignore the ones that do.  That will be because the national interest has no lobby and it doesn't make huge cash contributions to campaigns.

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The Elephant in the Room

[Elephant?  What elephant?  I don't see any elephant.]

In the first round of voting for President of France, the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande got 27.1% and the center-right candidate President Nicholas Sarkozy got 25.6%.  The press is trumpeting this as a victory for Hollande even though 72.9% voted for somebody else.

More important is the fact that Marine LePen, the candidate of the rightist National Front, got 18.9%, the most ever for a National Front candidate.   Imagine an American election in which almost one American in five voted for Ron Paul.  Not one Republican in five, one American in five.  That is roughly what has just happened here.

The anti-capitalist candidate of the Left Front party, Jean-Luc Melenchon got 11.1% of the vote.  Melenchon describes himself as "a red".  6.1% of the vote went to candidates of parties to the left of Melenchon, including Marie-George Buffet of the Parti Communiste.  Between Melenchon and those further left, more than one French voter in six voted for the hard left.

One would think that whether center-left Obama beat center-right Romney by 1.5% or not, was not the most important thing to report about the election.  One would wonder what was going on and why no one was talking about it.

The two establishment parties between them got less than 53% of the vote to more than 47% for anti-establishment parties.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the established order of society.  Yet the establishment press - the New York Times, the BBC, CNN and even the press here, Le Monde and Le Figaro - continue to natter away about Hollande and Sarkozy and the 1.5% more votes that Hollande got than Sarkozy, as though that mattered more than the 47% who voted against both the Democrats and the Republicans.

If the economic crisis (It isn't a crisis - a crisis is short-lived and acute.  This has been going on since 2008.  But I don't know what to call it.  Maybe it is a depression?) is not resolved by the next election in 2017, one can imagine the centrist democratic parties further withering away as they did in the 1930's.

A 47% anti-establishment vote means that France is not stable, and if France is not stable, neither is the European Union.  That is the elephant in the room which no one is talking about.

The Triumph of Western Civilization

I

Last night we heard the Vivaldi 'Four Seasons' performed in the Sainte-Chapelle.  As so often in life, the first step to a joyous transcendant experience was overcoming my preconceptions against it.  Even though we already had tickets to the concert, I was tempted not to go.  My back was giving me a hard time and I had heard the Four Season so often it was sure to be a tired chestnut.  But I went anyway so as not to disappoint Rita.

It proved an outstanding experience.  The Sainte-Chapelle was the private family chapel of the French kings.  While not exactly small, it is intimate compared to Notre Dame.  It was built for Louis IX, who became Saint Louis, and was completed in 1248, a brief but memorable 764 years ago.  It is arguably the loveliest space in Christendom.

Not quite 500 years after the Sainte-Chapelle was built, Antonio Vivaldi composed 'Le Quattro Stagione' - 'The Four Seasons'.  It is a charming piece of music when played on an excellent stereo.  But when played live on violins, cello, and harpsichord, it is a masterpiece of both composition and performance.  The first violin, David Braccini, was masterful and brilliant.  Remember his name.  I predict you will hear it again.

The Sainte-Chapelle is a triumph of 13th Century Western Civilization.  'The Four Seasons' is a triumph of 18th Century Western Civilization.  The fact that 600 closely-packed common people attended the concert, not just the king and his family, is a democratic triumph of 21st Century Western Civilization.

Some Surprising Differences between France and the US

[It's good to be president]

The first round of the French elections are tomorrow.  There are ten candidates - one the rightist Marine LePen, one the center-right incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy, one the Socialist Francois Hollande, and seven others of various leftist persuasions.  The two candidates getting the largest numbers of votes advance to a run-off election in two weeks.

Superficially the system resembles our own system of primary elections followed by national elections.  But the differences are important.   In the US, from the Iowa caucuses to the November election is eleven months of continuous campaigning and is staggeringly expensive.  The campaigns are at least as much about campaign-fund raising as they are about vote-getting.  Among candidates with similar political postures, they are only about campaign fund-raising.  The campaigns are so expensive that the periods between elections are themselves dominated by the prospect of the fund-raising to come.   The urgency of the competitive fund-raising is so great that the interests and desires of prospective and actual political donors come to outweigh the interests and desires of the voters, some would say entirely outweigh them.

Arguably the primacy of donors over voters is the lever with which the power of the ownership classes and special interests is applied.  The French campaign season is only a few weeks.  Its cost is minimal compared to American campaigns.  The explicit domination of money over the French political system is correspondingly less than it is in America.  Because of the smaller cost of campaigns it is harder to translate money directly into political power than it is in the United States.  France has no equivalents to George Soros or the Koch brothers.

I would love to tell you that the result is the reign of reason and the public interest, but alas it is not so.  My impressions, as a tyro and a tourist, are that the two main parties, the Gaullists and the Socialists, appeal to the self-interest of different blocs of voters.  The parties of left and right appeal to the ideology and prejudices of smaller blocs of voters.

The logic of the runoff system is that if one wants to be effective, one must join together with other groups to present a common candidate to try to make it into the top two, one of whom will be president.  Et voila, instead of a unified bloc, the Left fields no fewer than seven competing candidates, eight, if one counts Hollande.  They paraphrase Henry Clay in saying they would rather be Left than be president.

This mindless self-destructive devotion to ideology and political correctness, in the US seen mainly on college campuses, here makes an entire section of French society politically powerless and its leaders politically irrelevant.

It is a close question whether it is better to be ruled by plutocrats or by windbags, and I leave it to the reader to decide.

What's Out There?

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George Zimmerman is 2012's Willie Horton

[Willie Horton, less-than-model citizen]

I observed in a blog a few days ago that the coming election would hinge on whether the Republicans would be able to get evangelicals to turn out to vote for an unwelcome Mitt Romney in larger numbers than the Democrats will be able to get blacks to turn out to vote for a President who hasn't done much for them.  

I observed that I did not expect that the Republicans would play the race card.  My theory was that the GOP would not play the race card out of fear that, if they did, it would lead to massive voter turnout of black and liberal voters who would vote for Barack Obama.

But try as I might, I was not cynical enough.  I did not recognize that it would be the Democrats who would play the race card.  They realized the same thing I did, that if race could be made an issue in the election, that it would benefit Barack Obama, perhaps decisively.  

It had not occurred to me that the Democrats would not wait for the Republicans to play the race card, but would play it themselves.  

I had not heard of the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman controversy when I wrote that blog.  When I did learn of it, I was confused about how a garden-variety altercation-homicide could morph into a national cause celebre.  

According to the US Census there are around 13,000 murders in the United States every year.  What makes this one so special?  Nothing about the Martin-Zimmerman case suggests that it was anything but two thugs getting into a fight in the course of which one of them was killed.  Nothing could be more ordinary.  The common-ness and ordinariness of such events are precisely why people work so hard to accumulate enough money to move out of the neighborhoods where such things regularly happen.  What makes this particular homicide more newsworthy than the other 12,999 that will happen this year?

Earlier this week there was a multiple homicide in San Francisco in which 5 people were brutally murdered.  That case has already faded to a conventional crime blotter story.  Why has the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman case not similarly faded into the same obscurity as the San Francisco murders?  That there is a layer of crime and sordid nastiness in our society is scarcely news.  Why are the networks all over this story as though it were the outbreak of war?   What accounts for the difference?  Why is this homicide different than all the other homicides?

There is no end to the blather and the pointless trial in the press, the endless testifying by people with no first hand knowledge, the heated discussion by partisans of one side or the other, none of it mediated by the rules of evidence, none of it leading to a charge or conviction.  I have seen journalists openly insult one another on the air (Piers Morgan of CNN and Toure Something of MSNBC) because of it.  It is all just pointless chatter since none of it can lead to a conviction nor a sentence.  Or is it?

One of those quoted on the subject was a political official who observed that, if he had had a son, that that son would look a lot like Trayvon Martin.  That political official was the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Could the playing of the race card have been any more explicit?  "I am black like you." is the import of the President's remark to black voters.   "And those damned crackers are still shooting blacks - and (sotto voce) you ought to turn out to vote for me because otherwise the George Zimmermans of the world will continue to shoot people like you and Trayvon Martin - and me."

The appeal to racial grievances and animosity implicit in the magnification of a dime-a-dozen homicide into a national debate could not be more explicit.  Who is responsible for this pretense that something has happened, when in fact nothing has happened? 

The question that appears is, "Why have the networks decided that the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman case is a huge news  story when everything about it suggests that it is in no way distinguishable from the other 12,999 homicides that will happen this year?"  

It would be an insult to everyone's intelligence to suggest that the government called up the CEO's of the various networks and ordered them to devote endless hours of air time to the case. That did not happen.   The network chiefs, partisan to the bone, jumped on it on their own. 

Whoever discovered the case realized early on that a case of someone shooting a black under murky circumstances is perfect for inflaming black racial feelings.  The only thing that could make it more perfect would be to find a way to avoid alienating whites while stirring up blacks.  What would make it perfect would be for the shooter to be neither black nor white.  Enter George Zimmerman, a Spanish-speaking half Peruvian Hispanic.

What we are seeing is the Democrats making a national issue of a trashy homicide between two specimens of trailer trash, two petty criminals.   By inflaming blacks about racism, they are mobilizing their base.

If I may speak personally here, and why shouldn't I, it is my blog after all?  I make a point of being cynical to  protect myself from the pain and depression in how cynical and corrupt the system and everyone in power in it are.  I am cynical also because it is the most consistent theory of explanation of how and why people and things work the way they do.  

But try as I might, I was not cynical enough to foresee that it would be the Democrats rather than the Republicans who would play the race card.  It is to their advantage to mobilize the black vote and increase black voter turnout.  They have not been slow to seek what is to their advantage.  It apparently does not matter a whit to them that they will damage the fabric of the nation, that it will  increase racial polarization after two generations of people of good will trying to reduce it.  It had not occurred to me that the Democrats, the party of FDR and John Kennedy, would be the sleazier and more anti-national of our two crappy parties.

My only excuse for being naive even into old age is that I was raised in the country.  In spite of fifty years in the city, I am still a bumpkin at heart.  But I don't need to apologize to you for my naivete.  It takes professional political cynics to come up with something as sleazy as publicizing the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman case.  It takes full-time professional political strategists. 

In 1988 Republican sleazeballs gave whites Willie Horton to play on their fear of blacks to elect George Herbert Walker Bush.  In 2012 Democrats have given blacks George Zimmerman to play on their fear of whites to re-elect Barack Obama.  No matter how cynical one tries to be, one can never be cynical enough.

My rule about American politics is confirmed yet again.  My rule is that the Republicans are cynical selfish despicable bastards, and the Democrats are cynical selfish despicable bastards.

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