Despite Rebublican's Best Efforts, the Economy Manages to Improve

The headline says it all.

The Apologists Creed

I believe in one God, but you don't have to
It makes sense to me that there is a God who created the whole universe

If we don't agree, we might have some great discussions
that are more interesting than if we agreed

I believe in Jesus Christ, the son of God, but you don't have to
This is how I can try to relate to God, through knowing his son
But I think God is always calling us and uses whatever ways we respond
so you might relate to God as a Muslim or a Jew or Hindu, or not

I believe in the Holy Spirit, but you don't have to
The Spirit is the life in the universe and I see it in lichens clinging to rocks
and tube worms living near volcanic vents in the ocean
you might think of it as mother earth or the spirit of the wind


I believe you are not going to hell if you don't believe what I do. Why does anyone think they get to decide that? I believe that kind of attitude is one of the main causes of pain and suffering in history (and even now). Maybe if we tried to find similarities among us rather than the differences we'd be a lot better off.

Yeah, we may have differing views of God and that's ok with me and I believe, with God too.

Comments welcome!

Who put your mortgage in the blender?

One of the culprits is MERS - here's Beau Biden, Delaware Attorney General, talking about problems with the mortgage market. You will have to endure an ad to get to the story, sorry.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#45081550

I think all 50 state AGs are involved in a lawsuit against large banks and financial institutions. Find out more and don't let them settle for a few billion dollars.

Isn't that an amazing thought? 'a few billion dollars'. This thing is so big that fining people something like one hundred billion dollars seems too small.

The Keystone Pipeline

Here is what I wrote to President Obama about the pipeline that would run from the oilsands in Alberta, Canada to the US midwest.

Keystone Pipeline.

Dear Mr. President,

The Keystone Pipeline has many good and bad points and I won't add to that.

What I do want to say is that if you decide to permit the pipeline, you have a great bargaining chip with Big Oil and big oily congress.

If you decide to build it, make Congress pass some compensating legislation. How about taking the $6 billion giveaway to oil companies and putting it to fund renewable energy?

How about forcing them to pass real job creation legislation such as you have been touring the country to promote?

Keep up the pressure. The Occupy Wall Street and all the other Occupy's are getting the message to people. Did you know there is an Occupy Fairbanks Alaska?

Political Cartoon

Spoiler alert, I can't draw. But I can write those thousand words. Picture Obama (editorial cartoon style Obama) leading a crowd of citizens toward the future but being pushed against by a big elephant (editorial cartoon style Republican elephant with those big pissed off eyes). Got that? Good. Now the caption reads. "It's hard to move forward when you're waist deep in elephant poop."

Dick Deadeye

Dick Deadeye is a sailor in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera HMS Pinafore. He has such a bad name and is so ugly that whatever he says, everyone takes the opposite view. He could say the sun is yellow and get an argument from the rest of the crew.

I bet President Obama feels like Dick Deadeye. Seems like any time he supports a Republican idea, the Republicans immediately hate that idea.

Wait, maybe this is more like Steve Martin in The Jerk when that crazy guy picks him randomly out of the phonebook and starts shooting at him at the gas station where he works. As the guy continues to shoot, Steve hides behind some oil cans but then figures out "he hates those cans!"

No, the Repubs don't disklike their own ideas, they don't want to see anything the President does succeed. Isn't that horrible? Putting politics over the good of the country, especially during this long long recession is unpatriotic. Whatever happened to 'Country First'?

If I did this, I'd be in prison

Here's a 60 Minutes documentary about banks FORGING mortgage documents.  In this video, people admit to signing or notarizing documents they knew were false.  The banks used these to back up their foreclosures on toxic loans when the house of cards fell and they didn't have the paperwork. 

If you or I did this, we'd be in prison so fast.  But is anyone being even investigated by someone other than CBS?  
(I apologige that there are probably ads before the clip)

60 Minutes Video

In this environment, rich people and powerful corporations ALWAYS do just fine, no matter what happens with taxes or governments.

Here's a little gallows humor from the Daily Show -

Daily Show Video

I call BS on 'job creators'

The phrase 'you can't increase taxes on job creators' annoys the heck out of me because it is a lie. .  We've been un-taxing the rich for thirty years and you see the results around you. Institutions have been hollowed out.  The idea of the commons is gone.  It is all me, me, mine.   

Remember the Clinton years?  The tax rates were still very low but we did take in enough to have an actual middle class..  We even had a budget surplus.  W took care of that surplus by un-taxing the wealthy.  You and I got $2500 while the upper 1%  got billions.  Where are the jobs those billions should have created?  Why does anyone think giving them more billions will create more jobs?

So here it is, the rich corporations do not create most of the jobs.  Most of the jobs they have created are overseas.  It is small business that creates local (real) jobs.

Don't be fooled when politicians talk about 'small business' either.  They mean Subchapter S (Sub S) corporations and in this case the small means 20 stockholders which can be 20 VERY RICH stockholders.

What is wrong with giving back a bit to the system that has enabled all this wealth?  You know, where  people who have a lot are expected to contribute to the good of the entire nation? 

Winged Radio

Right wing::

Guest: "Those liberals hate America."
Host:   "Yes they light the Consitution on fire with a  burning American flag."

Left wing:

Guest: "Those conservatives hate America"
Host:   "You can't say that in general.  even the wackiest Tea Party congressperson believes they are working for the good of the country."

Plan B for the economy

There are so many Plan B's floating around DC now that this is probably off the end of the alphabet  but here's my take:

As the artificial debt crisis fiasco hits the deadline, Congress can't figure it's way out of a paper bag, so -

The President uses the 14th Ammendment to the Constitution to keep the US out of default and avert global crisis

Congress starts impeachment hearings because a Democratic President has acted like a Republican President, and they completely ignore any deficit legislation.

- I pray that I am wrong.

Espe's Conjecture

This is an early attempt at writing down a half baked idea that needs work.  Stay tuned as I'll edit this as I get ideas.  Thoughts and comment are very welcome.
---  here is my conjecture:


A sufficiently complex system has at least one singularity

These terms need some definition and at present they are still not quantatative enough but here goes

A singularity is an inconsistency or paradox or something that cannot be proved or done in the system itself.

This might be restated along the lines of open versus closed systems, implying there are no closed systems, a closed system being defined as a system with no singularities.

Examples:

Logic - this sentence is false

Cryptography - an electronic system requires some pre-existing trust.  For example, Difffie-Hellman requries some pre-shared secret or it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack.

General Realitivity - has real singularities inside black holes! 

Math - singularities are called Axioms.

Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is another example - it might even be a more concise statement of this Conjecture but at this point I'd like to think the conjecture is more general.

You get the idea, if a system is complex enough, it has built in limits, it cannot explain or do things without something from another system or outside actor.

Innovation versus healthcare

One  ideal in business is the idea of an innovative company that takes risks and brings new products to the market. Some of these products would be so innovative that they'd create a new market  Those new products then improve our standard of living.  I think of game changing products like the PC, the iPhone, stuff like that.  The United States does a great job along these lines and we should keep doing that. 

What we can do to help foster new innovative companies is to provide  healthcare.  Critics call it socialized medicine - and it is.  This is a good place to apply socialism - really.  Health of the nation is a social thing, it should be shared.  When the whole national healthcare debate started, I thought businesses would be glad to give the healthcare burden to the government.  I believe it would be way more efficient to insure everyone than to hassle the insured and leave the uninsured to the dogs. 

But back to my poin: if you have a family and a kid with a chronic health issue and come up with a billion dollar idea, you might just forget the idea and stay at your job because it has the healthcare benefits your kid needs.  If your healthcare was not tied to your job, you'd go out and innovate.  We want business to take risk but we don't want to risk our families  to do it - do we?

Why does it make sense to link medical care with whether you have a job or not?  All the other grown up countries separate the two.  The United States is the most innovative place but we are hobbling ourselves with limits like this.  Think how much better we could be if business risk didn't involve family health risk.

It's your money

Yeah that was great, wasn't it?  Lowering taxes and getting to keep all that money is wonderful, huh?

No?  Where'd it all go?  Funny how all your money that you saved isn't there - OK it isn't funny.

The money that you didn't give to the government seems to have gone to really rich folks.  We didn't even notice we were giveint it to them.

But it cut down on waste and big government - except now we have to pay for visiting the parks and we have to pay for school things our kids used to get.  And pay little taxes here and there and there and there and there

By being fooled into reducing taxes so we could keep 'our money' we have cheaped our way into this mess while rich folks have actually gotten to keep their money (and apparently our money too).   

The way I see it, if we all worry about the other person, we will all be better off.  If we're all out for ourselves, some of us will do very very well but most of us won't.Thing is, the well to do would still be well to do, heck, if everyone was better off, they'd be even weller-to-do. 

Still think you're a person?

I don't know why you do.  Courts keep rubbing your nose in it and you should just get over it.
You seem to think your personal information is somehow yours - courts would differ since they have ruled data miners have rights to it - maybe more rights than you have to it. 

Think politicians care about your opinion?  Not unless you can put up those big corporate donations that corporations do(sorry, they're people too - better people than you).

Patience

Maybe its because I'm older now that I have more patience with almost everything.  I've seen enough to know that sometimes it just takes a bit of waiting on something.  Like letting bread rise.  You can't rush it.

It is also one of the best things about democracy and maybe the least understood.  I have thought for some time that one of the greatest things about democracy is succession.  All other forms of government have a problem with succession.  Sure kings and queens have succession but eventually that falls apart, strong men can't live forever and their heirs can't maintain the strong rule forever.

Once I realized this critical difference in the world's governments, it seemed to me that democracy was inevitable.  You just need patience.  Sure it isn't perfect and the road is long and painful but patience will pay off.  What is the alternative? 

Well we tried the alternative in Iraq.  Depose an evil strong man and democracy will flower.  Yeah right.

Imagine if we had patience.  Eight years after Iraq, something happened in Tunisia.  People just got sick of their leader and decided to try democracy.  Amazingly the process was reasonably peaceful, it might even work.  We won't know for quite a while.  Patience.

Then this idea spread to Egypt where, again, it was reasonably peaceful and, again, we will have to be patient.

Imagine if we had waited, had not invaded Iraq,  What do you suppose would have happened then? If this movement had arrived at an Iraq that was still dominated by a strongman,  I can't think it would have been peaceful.  There was too much tension I expect that Iraq would have been more like what is happening in Libya - ugly.

Speaking of Libya, where is the patience there?  There is pressure to establish a no-fly zone there but it turns out that Step One is an act of war - destroy Libya's air defenses.   Yet we do feel we must do something because Libyans are dying.

I did say being patient was not easy.