Today, I had the rather surreal experience of voting in a New Jersey voting booth. It was surreal because I felt like I was at John King’s touchscreen on CNN, pressing things on an oversized board to make them light up. It was fun.

It sure beats the heck out of Alameda County’s old fill-in-the-blank-with-a-pen-till-you-run-out-of-ink system. The green lights were very clear and made it obvious where and how to vote. Em said she worried that her big board display may have been misaligned or just gone off into the ether, but I think it’s just as easy to burn or discard paper as it is to fail to count something.

My vote really counted, today, though, because I was more than 0.05% of a movement! At current tallies, with 99% reporting, only 1,987 others joined me in voting for Gregory Pason for Governor of the great state of New Jersey. It looks like he’ll finish 9th (of 12 candidates).

I considered voting for Chris Daggett, the independent candidate you’ve heard of in the race. Despite poll numbers topping out at around 18-20%, being widely regarded as the aggregate winner of the debates, and the endorsement of the largest NJ-based paper, Daggett’s running a disappointing 5%+. He still beat Pason by a margin of about 66:1.

I liked Daggett as an independent vote, as a third party (rather than, say, a ninth party), as the man who won the endorsement of the Sierra Club and supports a lot of reasonably progressive things. But ultimately his focus on tax reduction and reshifting burdens to regressive methods was just too onerous for me to sign on to. While I liked his impact on the campaign, I wasn’t really convinced that I’d like him as Governor, and thus voting for him would just be piling on to someone who people had heard of the same way most voters pile on to someone they think has a chance of winning. Not the way I prefer to vote.

So I supported Pason, a man whose portion of the overall vote count was almost as small as my vote was a portion of his total support. There are about two-thousand people who would prefer socialism at this time in New Jersey, at least of those voting and bothering to show up for something like this, and those not choosing to compromise their vote or voice in some way or another.

It seems to bear recognizing at this juncture in history. I’m not saying Jersey will change or anything will, but it’s worth at least recording how things stand tonight. But the next time you hear anyone accused of socialism, it might bear noting how many people are actually supporting socialism, real socialism, these days.

And then you can tell them that you know a real socialist. If you don’t mind not speaking to them again.

Russ and I worked all night to bring you this stunning awards show:

Enjoy. Tell your friends. Book your tickets on a dirigible!

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride” (movie)

At this rate, Inigo Montoya is the leading candidate to win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Sure, he’s fictional and is known primarily for making death threats. But the way things are going, that looks like an improvement.

As a nearly lifelong pacifist, I know a thing or two about peace. I know how rare my set of beliefs about the world and human interaction are. I know the joys of explaining to people why one wouldn’t kill the person whose finger was on the button to destroy the world or why killing in self-defense is still just murder you thought of after the guy who you’re killing. I know what an uphill battle the very concept of peace has in this world and how counter-intuitive it is to most people.

This is why it has always been great comfort and solace to me that a world so beleaguered and prone to violence has created (and recently) an award designed to honor my belief structure and those espousing it. Has recognized, with the prestige of the world stage, that peace is and should be a universal human goal and that making strides in achieving it is no more a pipe dream than progressing in medicine or scientific pursuits.

The history of the Nobel Peace Prize is certainly not perfect. They failed to recognize the world’s greatest pacifist of all time, only posthumously offering him acknowledgment once he’d been killed. They have a long history of giving pretty notorious killers the prize for either reforming (see most of the Israelis and Palestinians who have won it) or doing one thing out of the ordinary that’s peaceful (see Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger). While this isn’t my favorite practice in the world, there has always been a concrete step in the direction of peace, actual peace, that has justified the awarding of the prize.

Then in 2006, a funny thing happened. The Nobel Peace Prize committee completely abdicated their mandate and decided that the spread of capitalism was somehow a peaceful aim, justifying the awarding of the Prize to someone whose only life achievement was setting up a microfinance bank. The link between this and peace is sort of like a bad loose-link resolution extrapolation in a parliamentary debate round: “Well, when I think of peace, I think of pieces of things, like pieces of eight, which is money, which leads me to microfinance.” Okay, that’s a bit of a straw-man, admittedly – the real link is that if we all are democratic capitalists, then some people believe in democratic peace theory and then, someday in the vast unforeseeable future and ignoring the wealth disparity and rampant inequalities of capitalist systems, we might have peace.

It’s pretty weak and it doesn’t make sense. The Peace Prize is supposed to be about direct peace work, work that ends a conflict or prevents a war or replaces a violent movement with a nonviolent one. Muhammad Yunus may, arguably, be a good guy, but he has nothing to do with these goals. Even if you believe in microfinance, believe that it really builds up the poor in a way that doesn’t ultimately destroy their rights, it has nothing to do with questions of violence and non-, unless you believe that everyone receiving a loan would have committed armed robbery and assault instead of running their business. Given the gender statistics on the loan recipients, if nothing else, this is just facially inaccurate.

But 2006’s gaffe was nothing compared to the subsequent year, where the Peace Prize decided to sub in “Environmentalism” for “Peace”. While the co-opting of the peace movement by environmentalists is nothing new, to have it recognized and codified on an institutional level was profoundly disheartening. The fact is that while environmentalism is a good cause (although I have long-stated qualms with the whole global warming obsession, but that’s for another time), it is completely tangential to issues of war and peace. Human violence and natural disasters are on opposite ends of the spectrum – one can argue that humans have the will and capacity to prevent the latter in this age, but the former is clearly preventable and always has been. The sheer preventability and self-inflicted nature of the harm is one of the factors that has made pacifism and the peace movement so powerful. All we are trying to do is prevent man’s inhumanity to man.

But Al Gore’s selection was also appalling because he hasn’t accomplished anything. It’s not like his power-point and movie crusade has led to the adoption of new strict standards on greenhouse gas emissions and power plant methodology shifts. And his personal hypocrisy in having an enormous carbon footprint is a little akin to a pacifist slaughtering people who shout him down while he gives speeches because they are impeding his message. Pacifism is means-based, so the method matters as much as the message. Al Gore may get a prize for effort in a compromising role, but certainly not for achievement in a consistent way.

But all that gets away from the larger point: none of his work is about peace. It’s just not. Even if you believe global warming is the greatest threat to humanity that exists, it’s not a violent threat. It may, very slowly, change the way that some people live their lives by forcing them to move from the coasts or changing what they farm or what animals they surround themselves with. It may even increased the number of natural calamities, though predictions of doom after 2005 have been met with a series of record-settingly light hurricane seasons. But it doesn’t matter: peace is about the violence that people do to each other, not that acts of God inflict on people.

It’s like giving a firefighter an award for being a good police officer. You can say their interests are sort of vaguely aligned, you can say that there’s a common interest in some ways, you can draw tangential links between the two offices. But in the end, it’s a total flub. Firefighting is not police work. It’s just a tautologically false move.

Last year was fine, a refocusing of the prize on the actual work Alfred Nobel charged his committee with enacting. But this year, oh this year. Disaster has struck again, possibly even worse than in ‘06 and ‘07.

Barack Obama has talked an interesting game about peace. On the one hand, he has created a compelling smokescreen of arguments about hope and change and a new day and we being the people we have been waiting for, one that has swept most of my generation away with starry-eyed idealism and the promise of tomorrow. At the same time, his presidential rhetoric has actually closely mirrored George W. Bush on practical matters of the prosecution of wars. This might be a good time to remind everyone that Barack Obama is currently prosecuting two full-scale wars (three if you count the amorphous drone-bombing “War on Terror”) and, despite vague promises, has done nothing to limit the scope or scale of any of them.

I’m going to repeat that. Barack Obama is currently prosecuting more wars than any other standing government official in any nation and has done nothing tangible to bring any of them to a close.

The idea that he was even nominated is insulting to the very concept of peace. It’s like giving it to Kissinger or Peres or Arafat before they turned their policies from killing to conflict resolution. But, you may say, his rhetoric has changed the tone of discourse about peace.

Really? The problem is that, in running against John McCain and then running the country, his rhetoric has actually been remarkably hawkish. He’s made it clear that one of the main goals of the government is to hunt down and kill people who disagree with us in other countries. He’s advocated crossing any border and violating any agreement to do so. He’s said that while the Iraq War may eventually end, the War in Afghanistan is just getting started, taking concrete steps to expand that conflict and widen the violence. He’s continued to advocate a policy of war without end, war without limit, war without definition in the most powerful country on the planet.

Yes, he’s not George W. Bush. He probably wouldn’t have started the Iraq War, even though he’s not in any hurry to end it. Yes, he’s a symbol of greater cooperation and openness. I understand that much of the world just feels better about the planet and this country because the US was capable of electing an African American. But one does not give awards to symbols, especially when what they symbolize is belied by their actual record of action. Not only is it ill fitting of the mandate of the Peace Prize, but it sets a terrible precedent. The message is that warlike leaders can win awards if only they talk a good game, go make a couple speeches that seem to extend an olive branch while directing bombings and troop movements in the back room. This is precisely the kind of message the Peace Prize was created to counteract, to thwart, to pre-empt.

What’s so personally disheartening about watching the crumbling integrity of this award is that I have to question whether I even want to win it anymore. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been the highest aspiration of my last two decades and now the company I would be keeping is questionable to the point of absurdity. This is not Time Man of the Year or some similarly meaningless appellation that’s a popularity contest intended to sell magazines or stir controversy. This is a (perhaps until recently) respected, dignified award with lasting consequences. And now it seems to have abdicated its purpose, content to honor people for not being other people or for accomplishments in economics or the environment.

I know there aren’t a lot of true peace advocates in today’s world, that most people are content to urge the killing of all sorts of people. But they are out there. And if you can’t find them, heck, not awarding the prize sends a stronger message than just picking some approximation out of a hat. The Peace Prize has the power to call great attention to a particular injustice, conflict, or method.

Instead, this Prize only calls attention to how far the committee has strayed while endorsing policies belligerent enough to make most world leaders blush. My only hope is that in his press conference in seven minutes, Obama recognizes all these facts and declines the award.

Yesterday’s jobs report for the last week in September was really bad. But you’d be hard pressed to find it on the major financial websites, since it was getting buried under more neutral news about mergers and GM becoming more efficient (by ditching Saturn) and such. And while today’s news of unexpected (!) rises in unemployment and job losses did top a lot of headlines, it didn’t stay there all day. In fact, as of this writing, CNBC’s homepage isn’t even carrying an article directly about the jobs numbers!

So what’s the deal? Certainly every glimmer of green shoot, however fabled or trumped-up (like the clunkers numbers that are unsurprisingly now crashing, just as predicted) gets top billing in the hopes it will send the market surging. So why is there no equal play for the downside of reality when it comes in?

The answer is simple and probably obvious. The people doing the reporting are biased. They are rooting for an economic recovery just as hard as the embedded reporters in the early days of the Iraq War were rooting for American victory. This bias, the real bias innate to our modern system of journalism, is far more insidious than alleged left-right political spectrum claims or even less visible Democratic-Republican differences. For this bias actually manages to separate us from the reality of what’s happening and is all the more costly for it.

While I have posted before about the ills of exaggeration in partisan bickering and its proclivity to make people think larger-than-life differences exist, I find this type of bias to be far worse. For one thing, there’s no presentation of an alternate viewpoint. Because everyone in the mainstream media is personally invested in a 401k and/or personally says the pledge of allegiance, there’s no one to present the other side of the debate, to take a contrarian viewpoint. This is exceedingly dangerous, because it allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that everything is fine because all our “objective” arbiters are actually propagandists in fedoras.

This is precisely how messes like the Iraq War were crammed down the throats of what would have otherwise been a questioning populous. The role of the New York Times and other trusted media outlets in making bogus claims of the Bush administration seem credible is well documented. Their role in failing to follow-up on the dangers of the initial subprime housing bubble is also at issue. But their current role in making things seem way better than they are on the economic front is clear yet undocumented. For who would document it? Who reports on the reporters? Only similarly invested other reporters.

This is not a call to arms for bloggers against the mainstream media per se, even though I’m clearly writing this on a blog and railing against the “MSM”. For I doubt there are a lot of mainstream bloggers out there (yes, this heralded “independent” media of personal internet reporting has now developed a mainstream of its own) calling for a deeper examination of the current economic numbers and asking why no one is reporting them accurately. After all, most of these bloggers also have 401k’s and such. Which begs an important question: who got us all invested in these 401k’s in the first place?

This ends up relating back to my most recent Mep Report post as well, indicating that everyone’s investment in the money system and its entailing rat race ends up blinding us to the real ills of the world and how we could spend time solving them. And while I doubt money was invented by the Mesopotamians specifically as part of a vast distraction conspiracy, the modern impact of money has mostly been to get us to obsess about our own personal financial standing at the expense of worrying about larger communal goals.

Of course, since every major country in the world, encompassing every developed press, is on the same page about the direction they’d like to see the economy go, there’s no one minding the store anywhere. Sure, the BBC is better at reporting generally than CNBC, but the BBC’s reporters are surely pro-economy as well, damn the reality. (Though I guess it’s worth nothing that the BBC’s economic headline right now is the stark “More US jobs lost than expected”, in high contrast to American news outlets’ relative denial.)

Everyone’s mostly convinced that the economy is largely psychological, that if we can just say and think enough good things, then everything will turn out okay. But as my Dad would say, the problem is that there’s a real reality out there somewhere. And in that reality, the numbers don’t add up. A few people getting tired of selling stocks does not a recovery make. A 70% consumer-based economy with no jobs and no consumer spending does not function. A society obsessed with buying houses and having mobility does not work when home values continue to plummet and everyone feels stuck. And throwing fiat currency at the problem in big heaps is not going to instill any lasting value in anything.

The problem is that the only difference between right now and the nadir of the market in March is that people irrationally think something is better now. We employ journalists to wake us up from perceptual snafus like this. But they are just as deluded as the rest of us.

If you’re wondering how whole societies in history could have seemed to go crazy, could have put their faith in insanity, could have made self-defeating decisions, this is how it starts. It starts when no one in the society has an incentive to point out the Emperor’s nudity. And right here in River City, it’s long underway.

Part 5 in an 8-part series regressing through the Stanford 2002 APDA tournament.

Last week: Round 5 (re: Native American Reparations)

Today’s round features one of the best cases I ever hit in my tenure on APDA, run by a future National Champion and his wacky then-partner.

The case was one of the few “infinite opp-choice” style cases that were generally reserved for final rounds. While not technically infinite, the round involves picking something out of a list so long that it might as well be infinite, then having Gov pick another side. Or, as in the 42-way opp-choice on the seven deadly sins that Jeff “Crack” Nelson and I ran in Fairfield finals, having Opp pick both sides.

These cases can be deceptive, however, because they don’t necessarily require a Gov team to prep an infinite number of possibilities, just two (a first choice and a backup). And in this particular round, we didn’t grab their first choice (Lenin), but came close by picking Stalin. The question was who the Man of the Century should be in terms of influence, leaving out moral or perceptual considerations.

So heat up some canned borscht and potatoes and enjoy the round:

Stanford 2002 APDA Round 4 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

I should know better than to listen to political speeches hoping to hear anything inspiring, exciting, or new. What I get out of political speeches tends to be exemplified by my experience last night: I listened to Barack Obama outline his healthcare “reform” plan and realized that I am against it. In fact, I am convinced that it is a step in a worse direction from the status quo. Yes, that’s right, it would be better to do nothing to the current system than to enact this policy. I realize many of you will find this statement to be outlandish, so allow me to elaborate:

0. Demise of the Public Option
I’m going to make a slight assumption here that Barack Obama’s speech technically left vague, but I believe made very clear between the lines. I’m going to assume that the public option is dead. Obama spent more time in his speech telling progressives why they should support a bill without a public option than he did defending the potential merits of said option to anyone else. From the beginning, Obama has vested zero commitment to the concept of a public option. Given the penchant of Democrats to compromise pretty much everything when “negotiating”, I think the writing is on the wall. Many of my arguments hereon will assume that the final version of the plan will be devoid of a public option. The presence of a robust public option, pending a miracle, would mitigate some (but by no means all) of my objections.

1. Public Goods for Profit by Private Industry
A recurring theme of what I find most objectionable about the plan proposed is the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Any plan with an individual mandate, regardless of other provisions, is going to draw scorn from me.

What’s so problematic about the individual mandate is that it’s a recognition that health insurance (or healthcare coverage of some kind, at least) is a public good. Anything so fundamental to citizenship that we would make failing to do it illegal is sort of the ultimate public good. Passing this bill would state that we have determined access to health insurance to be of maximal public value to society as a whole.

Now this is all well and good, right up till the point where only private insurers are enabled to offer this public good. Let’s consider other things we think of as public goods: fire protection, police protection, the military, highways, primary and secondary education, etc. In all but the last example, private groups are disallowed from offering services. The goods are considered simply too important to even let the private sector in the door. In the last example, education, the public option is considered the most vital aspect of the system, though competition is begrudgingly allowed from the private sector. Nevertheless, almost none of the private sector groups involved run on a principle of profit. They are non-profit organizations run as charities, often losing money on the fees they charge directly for student admission.

There is only one instance of anything remotely like a public good only being offered by private groups: car insurance. Indeed, car insurance seems to be the “inspiration” for much of this plan as it is manifesting, despite its obvious flaws. The function of the car insurance system in modern America is to serve as a regressive tax on car owners to funnel money into the hands of private for-profit insurance companies. Rather than institute a progressive tax throughout society to pay for financial liability coverage in case of a car accident, the government mandates the added expense of profit margins and the added inequality of variable coverage that requires people to bet against themselves. If you’re wondering how much profit (i.e. inefficiency) there is in the system, just look to what proportion of current advertising comes from auto insurance companies. You can think briefly about how many of these commercials you can recall from memory – Geico, Progressive, State Farm, All State, and realize how much margin there is in this industry.

The tax is regressive because people pay on a per-car basis and, often, because of the way insurance “risks” are calculated, those on the margins of society are forced to pay the most. Using this system as a model for any kind of coverage is devastatingly unfair.

But with health insurance, it’s even worse than car insurance, because at least someone can choose not to have a car. It’s very difficult in some circumstances, but it is an option. Choosing to not have a body is not an option, and thus everyone in society is swept up in the dragnet of the insurance-industry bailout known as “healthcare reform”. This is literally unprecedented in our society – never in our history has something been enacted that requires 100% participation. Not taxes (only those who are employed or make purchases in certain states), not ID cards, not voting (certainly not voting!), not conscription (only males), not education (only children), absolutely nothing has ever been mandated for everyone. And we are planning on breaking this precedent with… paying private insurers to offer you healthcare coverage?

What would be next? Saying everyone has to buy oranges because they’re healthy? Everyone has an individual mandate to buy ten oranges a day. How about mortgage-backed securities? Everyone must help the economy by buying one toxic asset from a bank per month. This is an insane way of achieving what is clearly observed to be a public good.

2. Lack of Cost Controls
You’ll note that, aside from a token mention of tort reform, Obama said nothing about keeping costs in check. Apparently, competition is supposed to be the magic force that keeps escalating healthcare costs in line, even though we’ve ostensibly had a system of competition for the last century, which has brought us onto this runaway train in the first place.

Now, there is some confusion about how the “marketplace of insurers” exchange system would work. Obama said both that the entire block of people in the exchange would act as one big group to negotiate and gain leverage AND that individuals and businesses could “shop” among options. These can’t both be true. Either the whole group negotiates as one, which would drive down price but also mean that everyone in the negotiating pool can only go with the insurer with the best bid OR the group is every person for themselves, navigating bids offered them as individuals, like a lendingtree.com for health insurance. I’ll take these issues one at a time.

If it’s Option A, where people have one choice of insurer only that’s the result of pooled negotiation, this insurer immediately becomes extremely powerful. They can raise their rates later, especially once they’ve driven many competitors out of business. They functionally become a stand-in for the public option, only motivated by private profit-driven aims.

But if it’s Option B, where people are all on their own, then there is no collective bargaining advantage to be gained, and one will have exactly the price conditions present in the status quo. The only difference is that the companies will have the leverage that buyers HAVE to buy one of the options offered, so if they all raise rates they know the customers can’t rebel and go elsewhere.

Either of these scenarios ends up actually escalating healthcare costs, because there’s no incentive to keep prices down. Right now, the only market force keeping prices down at all (and it’s not doing much) is the idea that someone can choose not to buy coverage. Once everyone has to buy, the market is a captive audience.

3. People Out in the Cold
Obviously the mandate is most troubling for the people at the very bottom levels of society – the homeless, the very poor, the Wal-Mart employees. Obama tries to allay fears about the impact of a mandate on these individuals, but my concerns are not even slightly allayed.

The first line of defense is “tax credits”, which is laughable on face. A great deal of the people who can’t afford insurance aren’t employed in the first place, either because they’re one of the one in five Americans who want a job and can’t get one, or because they’re homeless, or because they’re facing a personal health barrier to getting a job in the first place. Tax credits do absolutely zip for people not earning income. They only help people making a good income but still managing to squander money, perhaps on the clunker trade-in and the new house they were also conned into buying based on tax credits. In any event, it is extremely unlikely that a tax credit of any size will be large enough to flip the switch from insurance being unaffordable to affordable for any sizable number of Americans. This only seems to really move the needle for profitable small businesses who can then get their accountants working on exploiting this new tax loophole. Again, this plan manifests as a business bailout.

For all those not earning income, the second line of defense is a “hardship waiver”. But what does this mean? Does it mean a waiver from the mandate? Because in that case, these people are guaranteed to not have coverage, to be alone in this fact, and this plan then amounts to some sort of economic eugenics program. The only alternative is that this means people will be given health insurance coverage for free. But who’s going to pay for that without a public option? What sucker insurance company is going to be told to hold the bag on all the truly uninsured, especially given that their lack of income makes them proportionally worse bets in our society-wide game of Sickness Roulette.

There seems to be no evidence or implementation behind the idea that a waiver would enable free coverage – indeed the word “waiver” seems to imply avoiding debtor’s prison from failing the mandate far more than getting a handout. So these people are doomed… not only do they continue to not receive healthcare, but they are in an even smaller and less powerful minority of same than they were before.

CONCLUSION: Advancement of Corporate Kleptocracy
Ultimately, the end result of this plan would be to make more money for private for-profit insurance companies who are in the business of selling fear to an already terrified American public. It would further acclimate people to the idea that their public goods are only available from profit-hungry sources and that government is primarily in the business of propping up private industry.

Yes, the plan would eliminate some of the most despicable practices of the insurance industry right now in its use of pre-existing conditions and coverage cancellation. But the insurance companies would then have to recoup the profits lost from such practices by raising premiums on everyone, just in case. This would further fuel runaway costs, with the only check on this being some sort of theoretical competition that doesn’t work and has been further hamstrung by this plan. Or people would make cuts the other way (see also car insurance), by offering cut-rate plans that are the functional equivalent of not having insurance at all, but still have a daily cost. Then the medical bankruptcies and inability to pay for treatment can continue, but under the guide of a system that falsely touts its universality.

Needless to say, with Obama’s declaration that he intends to be the last President to work on healthcare reform, this plan would also be the permanent deathknell of the public option, let alone single payer. The hope of real change would be buried forever by a man who ran on exactly that platform. Even if this plan were roughly equivalent to the status quo (it’s worse), it would be worth it to have it fail to maintain the possibility of a real improvement in the future.

Consider this a brief follow-up to last week’s examination of existing home sales figures…

Good news! (Again.) New home sales are soaring, exceeding expectations, and signaling that despite people not having jobs, money, or much credit, everyone’s buying a home. Yes, that may have had something to do with the problem in the first place, but let’s not worry about this. New home sales were up almost 10% in July!!

But I’m not going to need to run a statistical analysis of whether this rate really indicates growth or not. Because not only are the year-over-year sales prices down 11.5%, negating the month-over-month 9.6% rise in total sales, but the year-over-year total sales figures are down 13.4%.

Surely I don’t need to draw a graph showing why a 13.4% reduction in sales combines poorly with an 11.5% reduction in price. This is a sign that the housing market is recovering!

Of course, it’s actually just another sign of the bubble being created by the temporary tax break for new homes. One anomalous month that is only good in comparison to surrounding months and still represents total regression on an annual basis does not a recovery make. In fact, it should make you dread the fall numbers that will drop so sharply that it will likely crush this inflated optimism harder than it would had the numbers never started to look artificially good.

The only actual positive indicator in this whole report is that the supply of new homes is starting to dry up, to its lowest level in a decade and a half. I’m no fan of American capitalism, but I’ve been saying for months that if your really wanted to save it, you’d put in a five-year home-building moratorium nationwide. If you combined this with a bunch of WPA-type programs, then the construction industry wouldn’t fold completely and it would keep the supply of houses in check long enough for the existing homes to start to recover some of their value. But as long as people are building new homes, an already over-glutted market will continue to deteriorate further and this will never lead to the recovery of the market.

Unless, I guess, you just open the borders completely, which I’d also support. Then there might be enough demand for American houses to counteract the extreme bubbilicious glut we’re facing now.

I can’t wait to see what good news comes out next!

Today’s headlines have been overwhelmed with dancing in the streets. No, not the dancing in Libya, though that’s there too, but the dancing over the incredible housing recovery that now has cold, hard data to back it up.

Now, I like data as much as the next person – probably much more, in fact – and I miss aspects of my old job at Glide where I got to play with numbers and charts and such. So let’s look at this alleged data and see what kind of exciting housing recovery is already underway!

First, go here and read the brief article about the July home sales data. Please note the screaming headline about the 7% jump in existing home sales. Also, note that it’s an AP story, so it’s not Boston-centric despite being on boston.com… it was just the first place the story with raw numbers popped up on Google News.

If you’re scoring at home, the key stats therein are that sales totals were up 7.2% and sale prices were down (yes, down) 15.1%. Is this the economic model of recovery? Let’s run some numbers and find out.

But wait! Hold the phone! These numbers are apples and oranges. 7.2% is a month-over-month rate, from June 2009 to July 2009, while -15.1% is a year-over-year rate, from July 2008 to July 2009. So to do a real comparison, we have to find the year-over-year rate (much more stable, accurate, and revealing than monthly fluctuations) for home sales.

Ah, here we go. Hm. Only 5.0% year-over-year. That’s not 7.2%, but it’s still pretty good.

So, back to our experiment. We can run the actual house-price numbers in a minute, but I’m curious to see how it plays out in a simple economic model with nice round numbers:

Lets say you sell widgets. Rather expensive widgets, with a target price of $100. And since they’re expensive, you’re only looking to sell 100 of these a month. Keep in mind that in actual America, instead of our model, you’re actually looking to sell many more widgets and for a much higher price, since 2008 numbers are really depressed in both metrics from where you want to be. But we’re running a simple model to see if the current pace is growth/recovery or not, so let’s leave that on the side for a moment.

2008 – 100 widgets for $100 each

Great. Now, let’s run the sales growth rate of 5.0% units sold and the sales price declination of 15.1% and see what happens over time.

2009 – 105 widgets for $84.90 each
2010 – 110.3 widgets for $72.08 each
2011 – 115.8 widgets for $61.20 each
2012 – 121.6 widgets for $51.96 each
2013 – 127.6 widgets for $44.11 each
2014 – 134 widgets for $37.45 each
2015 – 140.7 widgets for $31.80 each
2016 – 147.7 widgets for $27.00 each
2017 – 155.1 widgets for $22.92 each

Great news! You increased sales by 55% in 10 years. The only trouble is that, over the same time period, your sales price declined by, uh, 77%. So unless you were making an 80%+ margin to begin with (who does this?), this is very bad, because you are now losing money on each widget and thus selling more widgets is actually a bad thing. And even if your margin was 80%, your margin has now shrunk to just under 3%, which means the odds are you aren’t really supporting your business anymore.

But this probably doesn’t make it clear enough. Let’s look at your gross revenue over time:

2008 – $10,000.00
2009 – $8,914.50
2010 – $7,950.42
2011 – $7,086.96
2012 – $6,318.34
2013 – $5,628.44
2014 – $5,018.30
2015 – $4,474.26
2016 – $3,987.90
2017 – $3,554.89

Yeah. That should put it as starkly as it needs to be seen. Gross revenue is down more than 64% in a decade with steady declines throughout. Certainly looks like a winning business model to me. Try walking into a venture capitalist’s office with this ten-year revenue trajectory (even in this economy) and see how quickly you get kicked out the door.

If you’re wondering what this looks like against the actual housing numbers, it’s going into July 2017 with an annual pace of 8.15 million existing home sales at a median price of $40,889 each.

Think about that for a second. That’s not a recovery, that’s a fire sale. A full-fledged housing panic.

How many of you paying $178,000 for houses right now would be heartened to hear that you can flip it in ten years for $41,000 in a market glutted with 55% more homes?

But the numbers are actually even worse than this. Because the July 2009 numbers, by their own admission, have been massively propped up by the $8,000 tax credit that’s set to expire in the fall. Left to their own devices, market forces would have led to far fewer sales and probably at an even lower price, since people don’t negotiate as hard for a deal when they know they’re getting a fat rebate (see also: Cash for Clunkers).

The indicator that this new report isn’t really good news is also buried in the story, that despite the increase in the number of sales, the stockpile of existing homes sitting on the market actually increased 7.9% (more than the 7.2% sales jump!) from 3.8 million to 4.1 million. They cover this by saying it’s a 9.4 month supply at the current sales rates, which is unchanged, but that fact alone should show you that the increase in sales isn’t outpacing the increase in market glut. Which may be part of why prices are down 15%.

But the largest problem of all these is not that the numbers are inflated by the incentive deals like tax rebates or Cash for Clunkers, it’s that such incentive programs actually create unsustainable bubbles which will crash even harder than the market would have by itself. This summer, everyone who was even thinking about buying a house or a new car is doing so, because of all the super-bonus incentives. Once those incentives expire, absolutely no one will buy a house or a car for some time, because it looks like an even worse deal than it would have otherwise, because people have come to expect a super incentive to buy. So the rebound effect of these programs is to create a quick brief spike that falls even further on the back-end.

I know the principle is to fool people into thinking that everything’s better with the spike so that stocks go up and people just start believin’ again and somehow we’re on an upward spiral. But when the super spiked data still has you on a pace to get to a median existing home sale price of $41,000 in ten years, somehow I don’t think the goal has been fulfilled. So go get your party hats and streamers if you want to, but I’m going to pass on this parade just yet.

Americans love hard-nosed binary conflict. Football has wholly eclipsed baseball as the nation’s pastime, replacing one contentious battle of grit and will with another more grueling, violent one. We were all raised on Disney movies that pit vile, monstrous, heartless villains against flawless, kindly, generous heroes (with two can’t-miss codes to determine the difference: dark and ugly is evil; light and pretty is good). Find me an American who doesn’t love either sports or Disney movies (or both) and I bet you most anything they love something else: politics.

We can play chicken-and-egg games all day about whether American predilections created the manifestations of binary conflict or whether we were fed binary conflicts to the point where we embraced them. The point is that nowhere can hard-nosed binary conflict be found more strenuously contended than in the arena of American politics. Two parties. Two allegedly diametric viewpoints. Everyone must choose a side and stay unflinchingly, unwaveringly, blindingly loyal to one or the other while spouting that everyone in the other camp is some insane species of self-destructive insect.

Despite dire warnings from the founding fathers about the dangers of factionalism, most Americans believe that the great Democratic-Republican binary choice is a fundamental and immovable part of our democracy. Despite periodic efforts to bridge the divide or do an end-run around it – ranging from the Unity08 movement to H. Ross Perot to Ralph Nader to countless third party candidates who slog through pyrhhic campaigns for a few thousand votes – everyone believes that the two parties are inevitable and impenetrable. After all, a majority of American voters exit polled in 1992 would have voted for Perot “if he’d had a chance of winning”. No greater proof is needed of how innately intractable the two-party system is in the American republic.

The problem (well, the main problem) is, of course, that the parties really aren’t all that different. Both parties have had whatever principles they may claim to espouse hopelessly co-opted by special interests, and almost always the same special interests who savvily play both sides of the coin to assure the steady influx of coin. Both parties are essentially centrist, diving toward the middle of the road on most every issue to ensure the appearance of reasonability and thus electability. (Interesting Firefox spellcheck aside: “reasonability” is not listed as a word, but “electability” is. What a perfect illustration of our society.) And the design of our republic is such as to almost guarantee the necessity of compromise on every issue, allowing the parties to present extremist rhetoric against a backdrop of very mild actual disagreement.

It’s this extremist rhetoric I want to focus on, though, because it’s getting so much attention lately. Obviously the poster-child here is Sarah Palin, who has been able to follow up her “palling around with terrorists” line about Obama with an even more quizzical warning against his impending “death panels” allegedly incumbent in his healthcare proposals. Though by no means is she alone (or is her side alone) in shoveling ridiculousness – countless numbers of my Democratic friends announced unequivocally that they would move to Canada if Bush defeated Kerry in 2004. Not one of them made good on this outlandish promise.

The aim of this rhetoric is to vilify the opposition, yes, but its far more insidious impact is to create the illusion of a wide gulf between parties and leaders who espouse and enact roughly the same policies. To hear the pundits, pollsters, and punters talk about it, one could not imagine two more different political viewpoints than those of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Indeed, most everyone accused the United States of complete schizophrenia for being able to elect the two back-to-back. But an examination of their actual policies reveals something different: both have supported nearly identical economic approaches to dealing with the recession (throw as much money at everything as possible, print more, repeat), both have taken identical actions regarding foreign policy (wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and “on-terror” all full speed ahead) with admittedly slightly different rhetorical tones in certain contexts (e.g. when in Egypt), both have continually labeled terrorism (the phantom menace) as the biggest threat to society and acted accordingly (when’s Gitmo closing, exactly?), and both want nothing more than the promotion of free-market corporation-based American capitalism and its propagation across the globe. Yes, there seem to be some tangible differences on the environment, although Democrats and Obama talk a much better game about environmental protection than they enact. There are also some allegedly significant differences on abortion (the issue that itself sort of best illustrates these phantom divisions between D and R) that manifest in state-based policies so marginal they almost defy understanding. Bush put in place the Court that was allegedly going to overturn Roe v. Wade. And as was imminently clear to anyone paying attention, such an overturn would never happen, even with nine die-hard Evangelicals on the Court. But that’s elaboration for another post.

And then there’s healthcare. Since stocks are up and everyone’s thus convinced that a lack of jobs, production, demand, or valuation means the economy is fine, healthcare has taken center-stage on the American political scene. And despite Democrats having a super-duper-crazy majority in the Senate and alleged carte blanche to enact whatever policies they see fit, suddenly the public option has disappeared from the radar of “healthcare reform”. Which means that any bill enacted would only serve to bolster and bailout the existing system of private insurance that enables our broken plutocracy to keep on equating money with rights. Not only is the final bill likely to not be a step toward single-payer healthcare (despite repeated polls showing that a majority of Americans are most interested in single-payer), but it’s probably going to be a very Republican-looking sideways step into mediocrity.

But that’s not how they’ll talk about it. No, one side will claim crushing victory while the other warns against impending Apocalypse. Because we rearranged some line-items in a code that ensures that people’s lives and well-being are a for-profit business in a country that claims life is an inalienable right. Sarah Palin will wag her finger and warn about death panels while Joe Biden talks about how he and his friends single-handedly saved the lives of millions of Americans. And nothing will actually change. Except, maybe, some corporations will get richer while those on the margins get further marginalized and wonder why the media is telling them all of their peers’ lives are improving so much.

Now I’m not saying, necessarily, that the Democrats and Republicans are in league together planning the same coordinated policy and then drawing up outlandish ways of making each other look silly while pocketing corporate money and whoring themselves out. However, I can’t imagine what would be different if they were in league. Surely having every President come out of the same two families was starting to look a bit suspect, but the Daily Show was doing a great job (for a while at least, haven’t seen them in a long time) of running Bush speeches about war and terror back-to-back with Obama speeches about same to illustrate that even the rhetoric on that front is virtually indistinguishable. If you poll most Americans, even most citizens of the world, they would have diametric understandings of Bush’s and Obama’s broad foreign policies. And yet when it comes to actually enumerating those differences, to actually making distinctions in actions, I think people would be heavily challenged to name one.

This is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics, but I do think it’s getting worse. September 11th (or, more accurately, American reaction thereto) certainly served to squash together the walls of what acceptable policy decisions could be, convincing both parties overnight that war-without-end was the only way forward for their nation. John Kerry’s inability to distinguish himself from Bush in any meaningful way was probably his second-biggest reason for losing in 2004 (first, of course, being his cardboard charisma), and Hillary certainly seemed Hawkish and Bushish on most every issue. People opted for Obama because they hungered for change, but what change have we truly seen?

The truth is that Obama doesn’t want change. Not real change. He wants to seem visionary, uniting, to claim credit for making changes. But he declines to take policy stands, instead asking Congress to craft change in its own measly watered-down way. He publicly states that the public option is non-essential to reform. Because all he really wants is to win. Like the football team or the Disney hero, what’s really essential in the end is victory at all costs. Being able to claim that your side crushed the other side, even if you’re really the same lousy side.

Because, as Americans, we know the good guys are the good guys because they win. And because we’re Americans and think of ourselves as eternal winners, we don’t move to Canada, we don’t change our policies, and we certainly don’t admit defeat. So as long as the winners and losers take turns enough, they can both be winners. And thus good guys. And thus hide the fact that they are both, all of them, really the bad guys.

Bonus points for those of you who read today’s title and said to themselves, quietly, “What? About five feet in front of our face?”

Emily and I spent the day at the newly rebuilt Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It purports to be the “greenest museum on Earth”. When we first walked in, we were propped in front of a green screen, the backdrop for a photo of our choice upon exit. This has become relatively standard procedure at museums and especially aquariums of late, so we thought little of it. Though I wondered why there was no image of a happy whale shark or cartoon character behind me – just all-green. Maybe this is the new “green” message – just an all-green background is all that counts anymore. No wonder we get along with Libya these days.

So, in we went. Predictably, I was immediately captivated by the fish and pretty much anything that swam, taking my time to marvel at the rays and small sharks and something that we thought was a skate but turned out to be a guitarfish of all things – they’re really cool if you want to check them out.

The penguin show was aimed at especially young ones, with an invitation to same to come up and read short passages about my favorite (sorry emus) flightless birds. There was no shortage of reference to March of the Penguins and Happy Feet and it occurred to me how steeped in the lore of global warming these films are; that penguins themselves have become sort of posterbirds for the growing apocalyptic fever gripping those not concerned with a religious apocalypse. It’s hard to keep up with your apocalypses these days. I might consider the fourth book I write, after the three upcoming in the next 12 months, to be “An Illustrated Guide to Recognizing Your Apocalypses”. And people think I’m depressed.

Next up was an apocalyptic line for the rain forest exhibit, clearly the feature entertainment of the day’s program. Housed in a clear sphere, the forest promised to simulate conditions of actual rain forests, minus the need to wade through piranhas. After a half hour of snaking around the dome in anticipation – wherein Emily and I were confronted by people in line whose motivation for being at a museum of any kind we could not, for the life of us, figure out – we were brought into the closed space between the outside world and the rain forest. Having been to butterfly gardens before, I was prepared for the brief pause between doorways. I was not wholly prepared for what followed.

A man, just barely of age and bearing a strong resemblance to Russell of the recent hit film Up, intoned to us: “Welcome, folks, to the rain forest. Now I’m sure you’ve heard all the rules out there before you can enter the forest, but we have just one more thing to go over. Since we have live butterflies flying around inside, you will be sprayed just a couple seconds with a protective spray. It’s not FDA approved just yet, but it will be and it’s to protect the butterflies and it’ll just take a couple seconds.”

The air died in the room.

He was joking, of course, and cracked a quick smile and let us in directly as most of us were scanning the ceiling for shower jets. Even the lugnuts of flesh who we’d trailed in line – beefy, disinterested couples dredged in from suburbia – seemed disconcerted and one of them muttered “I was gonna say – wait a minute” as we were ushered by Russell’s older brother, probably wondering why his joke wasn’t funny. What we were all wondering, even the suburban chaff, was what we would have done had he not been joking. What could we have done?

Homeland Security has made co-conspirators of us all.

Anyway, the rain forest was gorgeous and just starting to grow – an ominous foretelling of a time when exhibits like these might be the only living examples of their ilk. At each level, from ground floor to understory to canopy on up, we were introduced to the diverse rain forest species of a different world region, brought to an understanding that the Amazon and Madagascar and Borneo might as well be three entirely different ecosystems, though they are all varieties of rain forest. While looking past the fallen butterflies and wondering what their expected lifespan was (it always seems a pressing question in butterfly gardens – how does parading hundreds of humans with attention spans shorter than insects’ through their habitat impact their lifespan?), the exhibit was most impressive. I kept looking down to the fish while most looked up to the birds and I even managed to peel some layers, promising Emily that I would wear shorts all the time if we lived in that dome. That’s some climate change I could go for.

But as we headed for the fish – riding an elevator that can only be taken down – I was still thinking about one of my favorite evolutionary theories. There’s a huge blue whale skeleton hanging outside the dome, perhaps only slightly less daunting than the full blue whale replica that so daunted my entrance to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium 23 years ago. And it reveals my favorite fact about marine mammals – that they have fingers. Now why would an animal that lives only underwater and only has flippers develop fingers? Penguins certainly don’t have fingers hiding within their flippers. Nor do sharks within their fins. So what gives?

And then there are these tiny underdeveloped two little bones hanging toward the back of the enormous spine, dangling just below. What are those about, evolutioneers?

Well I’ll tell you – they’re feet. Because marine mammals – or at least cetaceans (lest you think I’m including otters and seals) – came from the land. They used to walk around up here. And dollars to donuts, anything that figured out how to enter the sea and use sonar to communicate was sentient a long time before that. And I don’t mean Ben Brandzel’s weird use of the word that anything seeking to survive is sentient – I mean Sentient. Like we think of ourselves.

Last time they faced an apocalypse, they figured out the only place to go was going to be underwater. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from those guys. I mean, I’m not going to say they built the Pyramids, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out either. It makes a lot more sense than aliens.

And you thought all those beachings were confusion. Not some sort of protest or suicide because conditions in the ocean had gotten so unlivable. Wait till the blues start beaching.

Anyway, these thoughts were rattling the back of my mind, somehow throwing humanity’s own position into some kind of stark relief. The fascinating fish, the familiar collection, the reef – almost identical to Georgia’s – and the frequently proffered seafood guides, advising which kinds of fish the flesh-hungry audience were permitted to eat and still get to count themselves as “green”.

Which just got me going all over again. I mean, when is a global warming advocate or an animal curator just going to come out and say that the visitors have a moral obligation to become vegetarian or they might as well not show up? I know, I know – it’s offputting, it’s bad press, it’s not what the visitors want with their bread and circus. Any five-year-old sitting in the audience can make the connection between the fluffy penguins in the exhibit and the chicken fingers in the cafeteria; between the beautiful fish in front of them and the dead fish on the plate. So why can’t the twenty-five-year-olds, much less the fifty-five-year-olds? At what point does habit transcend thought? Ten? Eighteen? Twenty-one?

The literature is all about what incredibly damaging effects fishing has on the oceans, how catastrophic it has been. And unlike global warming, the apocalyptic predictions about this one have already come to pass. We’ll all be joint owners of the world’s largest swimming pool pretty soon – no need for chlorine and just dodge the trash and the occasional corpse. I wonder how the marine mammals are going to sort this one out, especially with sonar that the submarines destroyed.

But the aquarium was filled with signs about “if you love seafood…”, making the pitch that you can only continue to love seafood if the oceans survive. Nonsense. You can only have the oceans survive if everyone sacrifices their love of seafood. You’ll never catch anyone saying it, but I would bet a vast portion of the aquarium’s staff don’t eat fish. And probably not much other flesh either.

I wonder how many kids leave places like the Academy of Sciences pledging to become vegetarians. And how many of their families wear them down before the month is out.

But the show was cool, with the live diver taking questions from inside the coral reef tank that had a strange flavor of CNN interviews to them – I think it was more about how contrived CNN has gotten than any particular insincerity in the tank. After all, the Q&A was pretty clearly scripted right up till kids got to ask questions, and that’s probably about the speed CNN’s running on, minus the kids.

By the time we’d waded through all the fish, and up to spy on the albino alligator (crocodile?) resting on the rocks before an enthralled audience, we realized it was time to book it to the planetarium show, “Fragile Planet”. Having already gotten my blood up about the global warming stuff and the contradictions (Why isn’t vegetarianism the very first “action step” you can take to fend off global warming, anyway? Because that would make too much of a difference?), I was certainly leery of the show’s title. But I’m a sucker for a planetarium show, and this one was housed in the ominously opaque dome that served as counterpoint to the rain forest exhibit. Once again, we joined a circumnavigatory line, but this one was really moving. No need to joke about sprays, I guess.

We took our seats, noticed the pleasantly eerie ambiance of the blank dome-screen and the echoey music as everyone leaned back and Emily almost immediately started drifting off. (She didn’t fall asleep till the show actually began.) As we all were seated and the doors closed, one of the ushers began to explain what we were witnessing – the largest digital planetarium screen on the planet, with no giant star projecting unit in the center to obstruct views. Only the invisible digital display units on the rim of the dome, creating a wholly immersive experience. As my mind often wonders at such types of things (or maybe it was the spray joke again), I started to contemplate how much power one could wield with such a realistic and overwhelming display. By the time they were warning about motion sickness, I realized just how much one could terrify or thrill someone with something so captivating as a dome larger than the extent of one’s peripheral vision.

The show’s visual power lived up to my fantasizing – it was wholly overwhelming. Nothing scary about it (though for some reason I kept thinking they were going to plunge us from the Earth’s surface into the depths of an ocean, which would certainly have given me a start) as they whisked us from the interior of the very museum we were in, zooming out to the planetary level, observing the planet, and then out to the stars.

The film’s content was intriguing – it was a basic study of the components for life and what makes Earth so special. The discovery of water(-like-stuff) on Mars has done wonders for the scientific community having to backtrack from Earth being unique in the universe. Already this show was ready to say that not only could there be remnants of life under Mars’ surface, but also on a moon of Jupiter and another moon of Saturn. This despite Earth seeming to be at the ideal epicenter of the so-called “habitable zone”, neatly illustrated in green. Leaving this paradox unresolved is a big step forward from the days of science books declaring that Earth held the only life in the universe and that we were so desperately alone. I was truly heartened.

The problem was that the movie had a larger paradox to wrestle with – it wanted to both deeply explore the real possibilities (I’d call them realities) of life on other planets and simultaneously tow the party line about Earth being the only known locale of life and thus being so desperately important to preserve. I understand the need to beat the drum of global warming and desperation (though not actual desperation that would compel someone to stop eating meat or anything drastic to stave off apocalypse), but I still think you have a compelling message to Earthbound humans that their planet is important without making it the last hope of life in the universe. Is microbial life on Mars really solace to this species if it gets wiped out? I mean, it is to me, but I was never all that big on my species. I think the suburban lugnuts disagree.

Regardless of which, we started zooming beyond Saturn’s moons and into nearby solar systems, exploring a case study of another planet the size of Jupiter that seems to ellipse through an equally magical “habitable zone” around its sun. Exciting stuff, truly. The number of qualifiers and equivocation used seemed wholly unnecessary, but the message was still clear, if filtered: we ain’t alone, kids. Not that anyone brought up the sentience question, but … baby steps.

And then, as though there were any question about the odds, we zoomed out of the Milky Way and started counting galaxies and the numbers started to swim and dance like Ben Bernanke conducting an auction. As though to leave behind any doubt whatsoever that the universe is positively teeming with life, life to fill a billion science fiction novels of all shapes and sizes.

Though there was the cautionary note about light-years and distance and how even the idea of traveling at lightspeed (fully accepted in the Ender’s books I’m reading right now, by the way) is still mega-theoretical and would still take pretty much forever. And then it was back to Earth and how we might (really?) be alone and so we’d best not destroy ourselves, The End.

As we rubbed our eyes and I woke Emily up and we stumbled out into the gallery filled with beautiful posters of these infinitely distant galaxies, it occurred to me (again again again) to wonder why no one stops to think whether light-year distances were put there as deliberate boundaries on travel. And then of course the recollection that the idea of purpose (beyond the evolutionary deity of SURVIVAL AT ALL COSTS) is forbidden from scientific study. That presuming things are the way they are for a reason that isn’t chaotic, while implicitly assumed every day, can never go to a place where it is spoken or understood. Because that would bring God into science and then 1 would equal 2 and all hell would break loose. Or something.

Also, why can no one reconcile that evolution’s progeny worshipping only survival seems somehow at odds with an intelligent species hellbent on self-destruction? Doesn’t something have to give there?

But seriously, kids… there’s a reason everything is so flipping far away and it seems totally incomprehensible to travel there, no matter how cool science someday gets. Because we’re not supposed to go there! BUT (and this is big) we are supposed to know that it’s there. And be amazed by just how much life is out there.

And then (THEN!) we can think about what all that life would be doing, what it would mean, and why it would be very important that we don’t interact with it. And then we might be getting somewhere.

Out onto the roof, to contemplate the “living roof” – a rooftop garden concept run totally amok and made wild instead of edible. Emily informs me about all these sustainable things they’re doing with the roof and it hits me how quickly and overwhelmingly an idea can catch on if enough people think it’s important. This is somehow very reassuring, though I can’t help but be nagged by how few seem to be asking the right questions. But it’ll pass, it’ll pass.

Then down to the final unseen exhibit, the one I’ve been putting off, the Global Warming Propaganda Special. To my pleasant surprise, they do have an exhibit about food and your diet’s large impact on your carbon footprint, though the meat doesn’t seem to carry as high a penalty as it should and this seems like another tool of watering everyone down into thinking it’s all about trade-offs and as long as you recycle two out of three times, you’ll probably stave off TOTAL APOCALYPSE.

This is funny (to me, at least) because it’s totally how these things are marketed. I mean, I don’t believe in global warming (clearly), but if I did, I’d have enough sense to realize that me doing the green things or not (most of which, by the way, consist of buying some new consumer item to replace an old consumer item, which seems remarkably unsustainable in practice) would not make the difference on the unimaginable upward spike that the graph of carbon has allegedly taken. I mean, really. Do you know what’s really creating that, kids? It’s called Capitalism. You can chart the spread of the concept against the carbon graph and find a perfect fit. With the consumer reality and disposable culture have come an unending rise in demand. We demand stuff. We demand the ability to create trash. We demand an unending stream of stuff that we can have only to trash it.

And now, hurrah! Capitalism is available in almost every country in the world! No wonder all those countries are ripping down their rainforests to build stripmalls or materials for someone else’s stripmall. They have to be just like us (US!).

But does the Global Warming Propaganda Machine tell me that we need immediate eco-socialist revolution? Or just to do everything possible to make sure this recession becomes the depression that permanently defeats capitalism and everything that even rhymes with a “consumer”? No. It says to buy a tote bag.

Do you know how many tote bags we have? It’s getting to the point where there are almost as many tote bags as paper bags. Because we have a new marketable brand – green. And we just need to produce the everliving stuffing out of this new brand. When is someone going to realize that if you produce as many reusable items as one-use items, there’s no point? When is someone going to understand that being truly green means not buying anything ever again, especially anything new?

But our exit brought the piece de la resistance, a moment so colossally insane as to undo much of the joy (yes, I had thoroughly enjoyed the experience despite some misgivings) of the visit to the Academy in the first place. Remember that photo taken so many hours before, upon our heady entrance to the greenest museum in the world? Well it was ready for us! I supplied my little card to the guy standing under three big digital screens advertising the photos and waited for our image to pop up on one of them. I could even see that there were different backgrounds being advertised and this was the clear reason for the green screen – choice! We could pick whatever our favorite part of the visit was and this would increase our likelihood of plunking down an insane amount of money for a picture we could have gotten a nice family to take of us on our own digital camera for free.

But the screen didn’t change. Where was the guy with our ticket? Oh, it couldn’t be! But it was… he was bringing us set of fully developed photos – glossy printing, glossy paper, all irreparably used – that had been waiting for us since we entered.

My mind boggled.

Every entrant, every ticket – thousands of people crossing through the doors every day, and every single one of them was having full-color digital glossy printouts of their photos being prepared for them in the hopes that they would buy it at the end.

It was more than I could bear. The guilt tugged on the heartstrings, my mind full of all the wasteful propaganda of my carbon footprint. And then a second welling of rage came up – this was deliberate. Insidious. They didn’t create the waste out of thoughtless irony, but out of a planned assault on the wallet. They were hitting people below the belt with a newly informed important decision – do you want to force us to create waste? As though the decision were somehow yours instead of the people who had already destroyed the paper and ink, below three perfectly good digital screens.

The $20 was laughable, but I think I would have refused to take the picture off their hands had it been flawless and available for 50 cents. I was so incensed. I burn thinking about it. Thinking about how many people they’ve coerced into buying an exorbitant picture they don’t want and can’t afford out of a new leaden guilt they carry about every scrap of paper they waste. And what blatant waste the Academy creates in a Machiavellian sacrifice for their bottom line.

Just thinking about it, hours later, makes me seethe. I can’t stand it. And I know, as I just articulated a few paragraphs ago, that each individual piece of paper is nothing in the scheme of it. But the whole philosophy of the propaganda is that every bit counts. And the reason it’s hard for me to get into it (even if I believed) is that I know how much institutional waste and greed and power dwarfs that of the individual. And here’s the institution, the very institution trying to make me a believer, demonstrating the very scale of waste that I couldn’t hope to compete with if I wanted to. In the name of green.

It’s green, all right. But not the green you may be thinking. There’s a war on, kids, and it’s not the one you think or the sides you believe you’re choosing. It’s between the greenback dollar and the real green left on the earth, that grows from the ground. When they say green, they mean the former, no matter what it sounds like. When there’s none of the former left, none of it at all, that’s the only true hope for the latter.

There is a quiet communion about the world as it is meant to be. I write this while sitting in a pasture, llamas in the distance, gentle winds overwhelming the wheaty grasses of the Central Valley of California. Not connected to anything, even the Internet (I will upload this later), my back against a metal fence that is just the right balance of sturdy and sufficiently comfortable. There are bird sounds and trees reacting to winds, the sun bearing down under mixed clouds that threaten an eventual sullying of this dried landscape. Bugs hover and dive amongst the grasses, perhaps subtly aware that they have just a few hours until rains will temper fulfillment of their tasks.

Today, they tell us that the oceans are so full of garbage that there are spare airplane seats in the flight-paths of missing jets that are not from those jets. That it’s perfectly reasonable to expect all kinds of discarded material to show up in the sea, since we’ve been leaving it there as long as we can remember. Our species has so blatantly disregarded the gifts we have been given that we don’t consider them gifts anymore – the only gifts we can accept are those we give ourselves. We have lost a sense of perspective, of balance, of harmony. We don’t sit in pastures anymore, trying to describe what we’re missing. We think everything we’re missing is on the Internet.

And yes, I’m aware of how both (1) unoriginal my comments are and (2) how ironic it is that they are appearing on the Internet. The Internet offers us wonderful things as well, like the ability to connect with others from a field with just the minimum of time-delay.

Nonetheless, I have to think that we lost our way, collectively, when science split from religion. Or vice versa. Surely there were crimes committed on both sides, as there always are in human disputes. Conflict is nothing if not mutually assured on my home planet. But when the scientists stopped being interested in God and the religious stopped being interested in solving mysteries, then surely something was irrevocably torn asunder. How anyone can accept the answers offered by one group in total ignorance of the other eludes me daily.

(As though to taunt me, a wireless network has just been found by this laptop. Or maybe a metaphor about ability to make connections from remoteness or the seeming lack of connection? You decide.)

In any event, we can all look to extreme examples and see the absurdity. Science reducing all human existence to a collapse of uncontrolled synapses, eliminating free will and indicating that all human existence and creation is a lie, while pleading endless randomness in the face of the most wondrously perfect system ever built or discovered. Religion claiming that God will decide all and answer all, that those who die are meant to, while those who are afflicted should not fight but simply resign themselves to a fate larger than themself. A similar abdication of free will, a similar destruction of meaning, a similar breakdown in the purpose that ought drive human existence, both on a macro scale and the individual level. How are these examples not sufficient to get everyone to attempt to strike a middle-ground? Even atheist scientist friends are uncomfortable with the elimination of free will altogether, and certainly don’t live their lives like they believe it’s true. Even religious zealots seem to assert themselves as though they have the ability to change something around them. So why all the trouble seeing across the divide?

Surely the closest society to holding these interests in balance was the first society to settle on my home continent. Or series of societies. There was wide-scale recognition of higher powers behind every aspect of the universe they saw, as well as interest in developing and advancing to higher levels of understanding of that universe. The respect that was afforded each of these concepts led to the development of a minimally invasive culture, with much time for contemplation and communion.

But it was not a culture designed to particularly assert control or dominion, and it is a telling lesson about my species that this is one of the few cultures upon which an all-but-complete genocide has been visited in recorded history. The very idea of trying to learn more from the land than one was taught was so reprehensible that its adherants were forced to either change or die.

My wife, Emily, is not particularly spiritual, not much of a believer. About half of our conflicts for the more recent half of our marriage so far have evolved from some sort of discussion about this topic. I struggle with reconciling my love of Emily and my respect for her intellect with the fact that she not only doesn’t overtly believe in God, but finds the question to not be fundamental to existence on the planet. It should be noted that most of my friends feel this way as well, and while this also concerns me, one’s identity is far more wrapped up in a spouse than a friend. It feels like more of a reflection of oneself when one’s own life partner rejects something so fundamental to one’s own perspective.

And yet, Emily says that she feels something whenever she is isolated out in nature. That connecting with animals, with the basic forces of the natural world (wind, water, flora), simply being “out there” is enough to get her thinking about the bigger picture and often feeling some conviction that there is something greater afoot. She often remarks, either in nature or when confronted by amazing constructions of human hand that she finds less impressive, that she has never seen something made by humanity that can measure up to the lowliest product of nature. While this sometimes surprises me, grandson of an engineer who learned about bridge-building and to differentiate styles of columns before most anything, I think she has a telling route map to those who are otherwise disinclined to believe. What makes us (collectively, as a species) think we’re so great? Why do we even bother scarring the Earth’s surface with our contributions when nearly everything impressive is already there?

It’s a competition, in part, or even an offering as an aprentice. That we have something to contribute which can hope to allude to the grandeur and beauty of what we already found when we first opened our eyes. Look ma, no nature. I did it all by myself. Like a crude reflection of the world around us for taping on the refrigerator with a quietly pitying love. And just as high-quality, just as worthwhile in the face of the real thing, as a four-year-old’s lazy finger-painting.

Which is not to say that there’s nothing worthwhile in the Pyramids, the Internet, language, or art. But compared to the systems and understanding implicit in your average field, your average patch of non-garbage-infested ocean, your average rainforest? I think the metaphor flies.

Part of what I’ve never understood about the pitched battle between science and religion is the respect that each have for order. Science even calls the discoveries it makes about the universe’s order of operations “laws”, the same word religion uses to indicate its principles and guidelines for living. Science interprets the world around it with a presumption towards order, towards compacting what it finds into a series of laws that are never abridged, or at least never contravened except where another identifiable law overrides. And indeed this bears out – we hardly see gravity working some of the time in Iowa and then failing to at random times. But somehow, science is disinterested in a source of all this order and law and perfectly behaved matter, insisting that all order came from one moment of complete chaos. This theory itself fails to stand up to science’s own presumptions and policies of rigorous study – were it about anything other than something in impenetrable pre-history, it would be rejected on face. But because there’s no other explanation available without resorting to the three-letter no-no, it is offered as fact. How can science not feel that every additional law that holds up, every extra consistency and element of order that is found, how are these not evidence for God?

The only explanation is that religion has mangled God into seeming arbitrary, somehow the opposite of order. Because in its rejection of scientific practice, many religions have tried to ascribe unending magic and mystery to the figure of God. Mysterious ways, inexplicable methods, something that cannot and should not be known. This idea is just as dangerous and worthless as atheism. Perhaps moreso, for it rends people’s conception of the most important aspect of the universe from the reality of that aspect, thus nullifying it for the interpreter far more thoroughly than mere denial would. This resorting to inexplicability is just as senseless as resorting to the Big Bang – for wont of explanations, those who expect themselves to seamlessly explain everything appeal to something wholly inconsistent with the rest of their theory. And then wave the crutch of paradox or the rest of their intellect about to try to fend off naysayers.

The truth, of course, is that science can prove God with all of its order, and thus God is knowable. God is not mysterious and inaccessible and hopelessly oblique – God is in the systems that work every day to maintain life in its countless manifestations. God is the laws and rules and policies and structures that keep it all just so in ways that humanity fails laughably to imitate. How is it that humans have never made a computer that can’t break down, and yet life on the planet persists from well before humanity to (likely) long after it?

But perhaps this would rend the people who pursue science and religion from what they’re really after – power. If they were not maintaining some sort of supremacy in their ability to properly interpret God or the laws of the universe (truly the same thing), what use would there be in the respect they are accorded in our hierarchies? And if they did not do battle, how could they build their power by tearing each other’s down, by fighting for followers, by bringing the urgency of a following and extreme loyalty out because of the urgency of a false conflict? You think nation-states are the only ones that can raise a false-flag to ask unthinkable sacrifices of their minions? No, only by mystifying and cloaking the fundamental and simple realities of their alleged domains can scienctists and religious leaders exert their authority over those they attempt to mislead.

Perhaps not always with such a nefarious intent, I’ll grant. But certainly with that level of nefarious effect.

So what is to be done? How do we get to a place where people recognize the order in the universe as the signifier of something greater than themselves rather than the converse? How do we make peace between scientist and religious leader before it is too late to fish the garbage from the ocean, or worse, before it is after anyone cares about such things? Like all of the important realizations, it cannot be forced or likely even persuaded. It must be found within each person, of their own volition.

In the meantime, I spend time in the pasture, contemplating a day I have long dubbed Mortality Day, a reflection of a larger scientific/religious order I find in the planet’s course of movement through the same space every 365 days. A day laden with symbols (6), the memory of an unbelievably significant mass-murder (D-Day), the steady approach of a day when the planet is held in balanced opposition to itself. It is vital to neither dwell in the anticipation of death nor to ignore its daily possibility, but for me, setting aside a holiday of sorts to recognize the mortality of myself and others, has worked well. Eighteen years to the day after the death of my mother’s father, I continue this personal tradition, sometimes to the fear of those around me. But fear not for me in the context of death, for I have conviction that it would be merely a step, and probably ultimately a relieving one. I have not felt less that way than now for some time (about the relief), and yet I still can recognize that no matter how much I personally desire to cling to this planet and help it out, there are wonders beyond my imagining ahead, other planets and other learning to be had.

And whenever this faith wavers in the slightest, as it sometimes trembles like the trees in the wind, bending with the difficulty of a given circumstance or a cold black fear, I come back out to nature. And the wind itself reassures me, reminds me of what I know even in the worst challenging moments. How can you look upon the world, upon an “ecosystem” or a “valley” (whichever you prefer to call the same thing) and not be awed by the presence of God? How can you understand the depths of human understanding and think this is all for the purpose of one isolated planet, 60 or 80 years only?

Go out into the fields. Walk. And then come tell me it’s all random, happened for no reason, that there’s no purpose to anything we do or try or contemplate. Tell me all these rules are either figments or coincidence. And tell me that, somehow, the pursuit of a means of exchange or sheer hubris is worth destroying it all.

A plane tears through the sky, close enough to hear but not to see. Through the clouds that are darkening the sky and escalating the threat of rain. Rain that will not be enough to wash it all away.

It’s been a crazy week on my home planet, one that presses the line of credibility to an extent. It seems all the books have major crises one after another, piling into one great crescendo that’s either cataclysm or triumph. But that’s not supposed to be real. That’s supposed to be Ender’s Game or its sequels (which I’m devouring at present), not 2009.

But every once in a while, there are years like this. 1968. 1987. Years that just sort of transcend everything and usher in a series of changes that seemed like it would take decades or even centuries, in a grand swoop.

It’s weird to be in a gentle transition and a soft landing against the backdrop of such a year. Although, I can anticipate the incredible bulwark of changes about to be breached. 1987 made so much sense, because my own life was in crazy upheaval and it reflected well. Indeed, maybe 1989 was really the year, far more than 1987, but things for me were calmer in 1989. Maybe it’s all just the personal filter one puts on things and maybe there’s nothing really going on at all.

Somehow, I doubt it.

But I’ve been in limbo nonetheless. A fantastic trip to Seattle, with lots of baseball and hanging out by the water and soaring to great heights (planes, Space Needle). A subsequent return to an apartment full of boxes that need weeding, resorting, unpacking toward repacking toward a ship date that looms ever closer, now looking like 7/7/9.

Yesterday, after chasing sold-out showings around the East Bay for much of the week prior, Emily and I went to see “Up”. My conclusion was that the only reason they give you 3-D glasses is that most people are self-conscious about crying around other people, even in a dark room. The substantial plastic glasses are a great cover for a movie where one spends most of the time weeping. To keep the kids happy, ever shorter of attention span (presumably, and if the youngin’s at the 10:25 PM showing were any indication), there’s a discordant chase-filled plot that even ends in a rare Pixar death (spoiler alert), but it’s bookended by tragedy worthy of Hans Christian Andersen. Seriously.

Today I went to lunch with a friend in the City (which means SF for only a few more weeks, and then I guess will mean… what, gulp, New York? Wow). She works at the San Francisco Food Bank, this huge airplane hangar of a building in the hills overlooking the freeway. As we approached the building, a pigeon flew into the glass side of the building, made a horrendous thudding sound, and fell to the sidewalk, dead.

At least it looked dead. It wasn’t even twitching – the wind gave its feathers a deceptively eerie sense of movement. But it was very much dead. Cue the Monty Python parrot sketch.

It was a horrific sight. I hadn’t seen the actual impact with the glass, but I’d heard it and seen the bird hit the ground. Its legs were curled up under itself as a last dying act, falling from the side of the building. Coming in as fast as it had, it was little wonder that it had killed itself with the impact.

The receptionist called Facilities to take the bird away, and just before I left, they informed us that the bird had been shot. It had a pellet in it and this had caused the death. Had we actually seen the bird hit the glass? Well no, I had to admit, but I had heard it. Maybe the bird was flying out of control because it already knew it was dying. Or it was hit where its ability to control its movement was, and had no choice but to fulfill a building-bound trajectory after being shot. Or it was shot just before hitting the building? But that would have to mean the shooter was far closer than we realized. And who shoots pigeons anyway? In the City of San Francisco?

If I hadn’t already been thinking about Air France flight 447, I sure was now. I couldn’t believe that something like this had happened right in front of me in the same week. Crossing one of the only radio deadzones on my home planet, the plane suddenly falls out of the sky. It was breaking up, but it was whole when hitting the water. It exploded in the sky, but didn’t break apart. We can rule out terrorism, but everyone saw a flash and fire. There was a massive lightning storm, but other planes made it through and every plane on Earth gets struck by lightning every few years. It left a debris trail, but the trail of debris was not from the plane.

It’s all about as crazy as an already shot bird hitting a window with enough force to die.

Suddenly limbo is seeming okay for now. Maybe the problem is just momentum.

Statistics, 2002-2008
Domestic US Deaths by Firearm Homicide: over 80,000
Domestic US Deaths by Terrorism: 0

While people enjoy citing the fact that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed under the US Constitution (conveniently dropping the reference to the purpose being a well-armed militia that could actually stand up to the US standing army), no one really likes to mention that there are other rights enumerated in this document. For example, rights against unwarranted search and seizure (even before boarding a plane!). Or, say, the right to not be deprived of life or liberty without due process.

A story recently ran on CNN that said people were actually turning against further restrictions on firearms rather than towards them in the wake of recent upticks in mass-homicides by firearm. I guess people think they can fight gun violence with their own guns and we can turn every subway and mall into the OK Corral. Those were the days.

And even the idiots answering these surveys and fomenting public perception in America know that you can’t fight terrorism with terrorism. Or can you? That certainly seems to be the consensus method picked – seizing and torturing individuals while bombing their society into submission. For the purpose of intimidating all those who might oppose. Hm.

It’s not news to observe that people have been willing to hand their rights over to the fist of fascism as soon as the specter of terrorism is raised once, despite no renewal of the allegedly infinite threat in the last 7.5 years. What is news is that people react utterly irrationally to legitimate threats of violence, such as ubiquitous and seemingly surging shootings.

A while back, I suggested that we start referring to all quantities of deaths in terms of the unit of measure “September 11ths”. Since September 11th, we’ve seen 26 September 11ths worth of shooting deaths. When are we going to wake up to just how profound the real threats are in our society while clearing the smoke and smashing the mirrors?

We have nothing to fear but all this idiocy and obliviousness.

We could live beside the ocean
leave them far behind
swim out past the breakers
watch the world die.
-Everclear, “Santa Monica”

Russ and I went down (up? over? out? – I have no sense of direction in LA) to Santa Monica yesterday and wandered around this open-air mall area near the ocean. We had a good time and caught some sun, but I was also sort of overwhelmed with the sense of impervious obliviousness of the people of Southern California. I had a hard time putting a precise finger on what was befuddling me, but I had a strong sense that a meteorite could have landed nearby and no one would particularly pay attention. A combination of intense absorption in one’s own world with general apathy to everything.

This then sparked a debate about LA apathy vs. NY apathy and Russ defending NY as an insider, which contrasts with my general perception of NY as an outsider. Place puts a real filter on the way one perceives what’s going on, though. This is not a new concept, but it can be startling to see (really feel) it in action. If nothing else, the Bay Area feels very raw and exposed. It’s as though there’s a bubble or force-field around LA that shields it from everything, while the Bay Area just feels completely open to whatever’s going on, if not actually having a magnifying glass bear down on it for extra fun.

But watching the stock market revel this morning, I get the sense that my bubbly feeling in Santa Monica was enhanced by a larger denial rippling all over the place. The ostensible reason being proffered for a return to 8,000 on the Dow is the impending demolition of mark-to-market accounting, which you can find under “accountability” in your financial dictionary. Without this rule, the same financial geniuses who created our current economy would be freed to attribute whatever value they wanted to whatever assets they have. Keep in mind that this entire mess is largely attributed to a massive bubble, followed by a period of uncertainty sparked by not knowing how much someone’s holdings are actually worth. Now you’re trying to cement a reality where we bubble up in positive reaction, followed by a world where everything is valued by unconfirmed self-perception? Really?

If you think people lack confidence now, wait till absolutely everything on the balance sheet is measured by optimistic, self-interested accountants! Sure, this house could go for a million if everything transforms tomorrow. I mean, there’s no evidence that this Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card will ever be worth six figures, but if I value it at that price, why not give me credit for same? Don’t you want to invest in my outfit that has access to millions, nay billions, because of a stockpile of baseball cards, used books, and cat litter?

It makes sense as a reaction to a world where currency governs most everyone’s life and currency is manufactured out of whole cloth (literally) by the government at their random and manipulative whim. It is the perfect answer to a country spinning out of control in its own realization that it has no idea what anything is worth, what anything even means anymore. It’s a little like the whole place just became LA. Put on your sunglasses, get gussied up, and let’s go pretend everything’s fine. Bring the credit card and the substances, for tomorrow we die.

This may be a weird time to mention that I won $781 in an online poker tournament the night before last, more than paying for the trip I’m on. Hooray gambling.

Tomorrow morning, unemployment figures will be announced for the US in March. They will be worse than anyone could imagine, probably fueling an even greater rally in the stock market (it’s how they roll). It’s a nice thought that we can value our household appliances and trinkets at millions of dollars to make up for the fact that no one will pay us for anything else anymore. But eventually, an economy based on tying people in the bondage of day jobs and profiting from their enslavement will fail when no one is employed anymore. I promise.

If you need me, I’ll be at the beach or in the casino. Seriously.

This is the old straight-up appeal to the masses – if you’re involved in the Digg thing (or can easily sign up), please help us get our new AIG March Madness commercial (Youtube, previously posted about):

Digg It!

Also, the final new (spoof) video we created finally uploaded properly:

Tell your friends!

Russ and I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours at it again. We unearthed secret archived videos from the good old days of AIG and are sharing them with the world. Better yet, we are spoofing some of our favorites directly. For example:

Before:

After:

Here’s another spoof we didn’t include the new one of:

And a whole bunch of old ones:

Enjoy.

It’s becoming a well-documented fact that the US stock market these days is rallying on bad news and crashing on good news. But nowhere is this more evident than on days when unemployment figures are announced.

Yesterday, the market rallied 217 points on the back of the worst employment report in a quarter-century. Though the more compelling fact is this: “The loss since November is the biggest 3-month drop since immediately after the end of World War II, when the defense industry was shutting down for conversion to civilian production.” (CNN)

We have never seen a faster unraveling of an employment market in United States history. And despite that everyone expects it to get worse in the months ahead, each month still manages to “beat expectations” in terms of how quickly jobs are disappearing. Not only that, but each past month’s figures are quietly getting revised upwards as well, meaning that things now are even worse than you’re being told – you’ll just find out later.

Combine this with the fact that unemployment is around 18% using the methodology used during the Great Depression, and that at this temporal stage in the Depression (if we equate the 2008 crash with the 1929 crash), unemployment was around 10%, and we have an existential crisis the likes of which no one can really comprehend.

But the market likes it. Big-time.

Part of this, no doubt, is because devastating employment figures increase the likelihood of further bailouts. And Wall Street likes bailouts because free money is fun. Arguments have been circulating on financial message boards and even some articles about bailouts being the next great American economic bubble. Just tank your performance, qualify for a bailout, then watch the free money flow in. Sometimes this backfires, as with AIG, Fannie/Freddie, and others whose stock value went to near-zero as the price of a bailout. Yet Wall Street continues to have faith that future bailouts will be the old no-strings no-national control style, with free cash and blind eyes for all.

The larger concern, of course, is that it’s not in business’ best interest to have jobs. Since the advent of Reaganomics, we’ve bought into this myth that somehow business is “on our side”, that they’re interested in creating jobs and putting America to work. It’s not true. Business is all about profit, and during the last 20 years, profit has been driven more than any other factor by cutting American payroll. The real, fundamental reason that Wall Street loves skyrocketing unemployment is that it means the businesses still left are becoming more profitable, at the direct expense of the American worker.

But the market has found an insidious way to prevent the obvious reversal of their disinterest in the fate of workers. One would expect that workers would just throw the middle-finger back to the market and there would be an all-out struggle. But with the infiltration of IRA’s, 401k’s, and the propaganda that the stock market is just like a savings account, only better, the market has embedded itself in the psychology of the American worker. American workers have to care about the market, because their future is tied up in it. Thirty years ago, this wouldn’t have been the case and we could jettison the market like so much chaff. But now, the first bailout passed the House almost entirely on the back of the argument that saving Wall Street would be the most efficient way to save American workers because their savings were tied up in Wall Street.

Eventually, of course, this vicious cycle of Wall Street reveling in the destruction of jobs will hit a wall. But almost certainly not before it’s too late to reverse the predominant trends and save what we currently think of as being this country.

This one is only the latest in what is becoming just about the fastest growing trend of the last 7 months. People lose their jobs, go home, and slaughter their family.

Sometimes they spend a couple frustrating weeks or even months looking for a job first.

In a couple conversations three months ago, I predicted that these would be the big news story of 2009 – self-defined (or society-mandated) “providers” feeling so overwhelmed at the burdens of being unable to provide that they decided to eliminate the need for provision altogether. All of them killing themselves directly afterwards.

It’s not that things like this haven’t happened in America since the dawn of the nation. But now we have a wider proliferation of firearms, more acceptance and awareness of these types of crimes (I would imagine they would’ve been considered hideously deviant and unspeakable in the 1930’s, whereas they seem sort of quietly understandable and unfortunate now), and of course the impending Depression II (aka the Greatest Depression). Thus the extensive spread of pater familias execution sprees.

I’m not here to tell you that the life of clients we serve at my work (or any similar location) is glamorous. I’m not going to say that living on the government dole or even the street is the best situation ever.

But compared to being shot by one’s father?

Have we really created a set of male adults so enamored with their standard of living and their self-image that any major break from that reality manifests in gunning down the 3-6 people they most love?

We need a public re-education program, and quick. Talking about the programs available, the way to subsist in a modest, humble, government-sponsored life when one no longer has viable employment as an option. We need the AdCouncil going on the airwaves talking about free after-school programs and free clothes and free everything for kids of the unemployed, overleveraged, and flat broke. We need people to understand that losing a job is not the end of the world, any world, certainly not the world of those who have not yet reached the age where they’re expected to take a job at all.

I’m not trying to minimize the pressures and weightiness that these individuals face – I am blessed to be in an entirely different financial category than the patriarchs I am addressing here. But right now, a notable portion of the population believes that losing their job without much hope of being rehired somewhere soon is literally the end of the world. Think about that for a second. They are so convinced it’s the end that they cannot imagine a future of anything but pain for any of their children or their spouse. To the point where they are willing to effectuate an end to pain, despite how blindingly painful the act of doing so must be.

Maybe if less energy were spent in this country defining “hope” as “everything will magically turn around tomorrow for no reason” and instead turning it toward “this country might be able to get accustomed to not being so unsustainably greedy and abundant” – maybe then we could reduce the number of job-loss-related filicides.

Until then, I have only this personal appeal. Stop. Think. Realize that most people in the world raise children on less money per lifetime than the government gives US citizens in your situation in a year. Even if you think it’s the end for you, let your children decide for themselves.

Groundbreaking research out of the University of Iowa today has confirmed what many have long suspected: most babies are clinically depressed.

A shocking 83% of babies have been found to have the hallmark symptoms of a newly identified strain of depression. The numbers may be even higher among infants.

“When you think about it, it makes sense,” noted Steven Bernard, MD, part of a team that led the study. “Most people are able to cope with the struggles of life without breaking down crying multiple times a day. Babies are notorious for being unable to demonstrate these coping skills.”

In the study, to be published in the February issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Bernard and his team explain that most parents miss the critical warnings that their baby is depressed. “Parents assume their baby is simply crying, when it may actually be a cry for help. Crying more than once a day is a sign of a serious inability to integrate with the expectations of normal, healthy life in society.”

While the causes of the disorder are unclear, the symptoms are not. Crying, incontinence, and low attention span are hallmarks of extreme and chronic depression. One theory about the causes of the disorder prompted researchers to tentatively dub this strain of depression Womb Exit Trauma Disorder, or WET-D.

The solution? Medication.

“Babies are notoriously undercommunicative about their feelings,” Bernard says. “They are unlikely to respond to talk therapy as they tend to have underdeveloped language skills.” Resistance to the development of language skills may, itself, be a further complication of depressive disorder. “When people don’t want to talk about their feelings, that’s a warning sign. Having to act out on emotions instead of using words is a red flag.”

Tragically, many parents may not get many warnings before it’s too late. New research is attempting to link this disorder to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). “Babies may actually be exhibiting a form of suicide,” Bernard warns. “Further study is needed to demonstrate a causal link between WET-D and SIDS, but it looks promising.”

In the meantime, parents can watch for the warning signs and request a battery of new drugs just approved by the FDA. Bernard and his team urge parents to be patient when trying medication. “Babies may not always react right away. That’s not a sign that medication doesn’t work, but that the dosage may have to be increased.

“The worst thing you can do for your baby is let the symptoms of WET-D go unchecked. If your baby continues to cry repeatedly, it’s a sign that more medication is required.”

Somewhere along the way, Time Magazine lost its way. Maybe it was the influence of AOL, long nicknamed “A-O-Hell” by my generation, which itself is somewhere between the nickname of “Generation Y” and “The Millennial Generation”. I’ll take either one, but I’ve always preferred “Generation Why” (this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve made this observation on this blog alone).

AOL killed my computer in the transition from high school to college. This was the computer that was a present from my parents to take to college, was exciting and new. It came with a trial AOL account that I used to connect with other fellow “pre-frosh” en route to Brandeis, few of whom were worth meeting in person. I got it in July and by the time it landed with me in Waltham, it was rapidly becoming cursed. Two weeks into school, it went off the deep end entirely, prompting Compaq to send a series of head-scratching techs to the remote ends of campus searching for Scheffres Hall. Their confusion only began in looking for a third-floor dorm room on a locked hall and ended with wondering why Compaq felt their time (probably $100-300/hour) was worth more than Compaq just replacing or refunding a computer that two of the three techs literally labeled as “possessed” on the work order form. Two people with hundreds of dollars an hour’s technical training using the word “possessed”. So much for technology, progress, experts, us being in a place beyond medieval witch doctors. The writing on the cinder-block wall, or at least on three sheets of carbon copied paper. Somewhere in a “box of doom”, I still have a yellow sheet, now even more yellowed, in papers I just refuse to throw away. Like the 16,000+ e-mails I’ve sent at work, they’re records and it all counts.

Or maybe none of it does. Just ask Time.

Time’s selection of Barack Obama as 2008 Person of the Year is hardly egregious, especially in comparison to some of their past picks. The original mandate from Henry Luce, who was at least a journalist despite myriad other problems (do we have anyone we can call a journalist anymore?) was to pick the person who had influenced things most, for good or for ill. Who was an emblem of the change that is innate to a year. Somewhere along the line, as with so much of America, an interest in true depiction got replaced by an interest in happy-talk. George (HW) Bush won in 1990 instead of Saddam Hussein. Rudy Giuliani won in 2001 instead of Osama bin Laden. You won in 2006, prompting the ire of nearly everyone and my supposition that everyone should start putting “2006 Person of the Year, Time Magazine” under their “Awards and Accomplishments” section of their resume, if only to ridicule the selection. End of history indeed.

So much for the legacy of a notoriety that had the guts to pick Gandhi 17 years before the Nobel Peace Prize had failed to do so (and it was too late as they tried to make up for it with their lame posthumous recognition). For a group that picked Hitler in ‘38 and Stalin in ‘39, demonstrating a foresight in recognizing the two most devastating and influential figures of the twentieth century before each had done much of their killing. And maybe 1941 is where it turned, picking FDR instead of Hideki Tojo.

Of course, there’s a part of me that says maybe Time knows too much. Maybe there’s a reason Tojo was passed over in 1941 and bin Laden in 2001. And it’s not just about wanting to be patriotic. But this is not the post for such conjecture, until maybe later.

Which brings us to Barack Obama. Clearly the second I clicked the revealing link into the Time Magazine article, I was expecting to see Obama’s tall grin looking back at me. Having been surprised and disappointed by so many picks in the past, I was almost surprised to find that my supposition had been correct. And yet, upon reflection, it became clear that this was not the right pick.

Think this is a special nod to the wave of change that seems to be coming with Obama-mania? Think again. This pick in an American election year has become a knee-jerk reaction for Time. W won in 2000, Clinton in 1992, Reagan in 1980, Carter in 1976. So really, this was the President-Elect’s award to lose all along. They probably had penciled it in for whoever won in Time board room meetings in January and moved on.

And seemingly more than any previous pick, Obama seems to have changed the landscape of how people think they’re looking at America. (After all, wasn’t Katherine Harris really the influential force in 2000, while W was just the beneficiary bystander?) Obama is an agent of action, a force for change, the first great rhetorical leader to hit the political scene since JFK. How could you pick anyone else?

And yet, my temptation is to say that 2009 is really the year for Obama. Not that people can’t win multiple times or, indeed, even back-to-back years (only previous back-to-back winner: Nixon in 1971-1972). Time even seems to acknowledge the fact that they’re jumping the gun, setting themselves behind the eight-ball with a title “Why History Can’t Wait”. And of course, a la my thoughts about 1941 and 2001 and even JFK, maybe they’re ensuring that they literally jump the gun. An assassination of Obama in the next year would be the most expected, telegraphed, universally anticipated assassination in world history. It seems painfully ironic that such cynical fear follows an individual known for inspiring hope and disparaging attitudes of terror. And yet I haven’t spoken to a single person about the historic Bryant Park rally on November 4th who wasn’t mentally scanning the crowd for firearms from the moment he and his family hit the platform.

So maybe Time’s hedging their bets, knowing that they can document the innocence and hope and anticipation that comes with Obama now, either on the precipice of its horrific fall or at the base camp of its tremendous climb to the future. Either way, it’s about the safest pick in history.

And yet, I doubt 2008 will be remembered for Obama. 2009, yes, whatever happens, but not 2008. 2008 will be about the melting of America’s economic standing. 2008 will be about the clash of hubris and reality, the tormented battle between those clinging to the Titanic’s decks and those packing up banquet food into lifeboats.

Time’s Person of the Year (then Man of the Year) was started in 1927, just in time to make an amazing pick in 1929. While they didn’t select anyone directly related to the collapse of the stock market and the American economy, they chose Owen D. Young for his “Young Plan”, a desperate effort to offset the German reparations payment schedule. What a prescient selection in determining how history would look back on the 1920’s! The Young Plan failed, of course, and the rest is profound history. But Time knew what it was doing back then.

So who really represents 2008’s influence on the coming years? The obvious road seems lined with some combination of Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson. The team that will be remembered for destroying the greenback dollar, plunging it into unprecedented worthlessness. With a mutual effort of eliminating interest rates and ratcheting up the printing of money, Bernanke & Paulson are the duo that are setting the dollar to its destiny as just another failed idol in the story of human belief.

So they’re the obvious pick, the real safe picks, the clear standouts. But for symbolic flair, neither of them, nor the pair, are my selection. My pick for 2008 Person of the Year is Bernard Madoff.

He’s a late entry to the contest and maybe disproportionately influential because the selection is made in December. He probably became important after the story on Obama had already gone to bed. But he is the single clearest embodiment of the attitude of 2008 and what this year means to history.

Can you imagine any other time in history, save maybe the late 1920’s, when the profit rates of a pyramid scheme would be able to pass themselves off as the realistic results of sound investing? When there would be so little oversight and investigation that a charlatan of this magnitude could be appointed to run the NASDAQ? Is there any more profound human embodiment of American greed, faith in money, reverence for capitalism, belief in the systems it invented, and total trust in the infinite upward spiral of wealth? Bernie, you really hit this one out of the park, and just in time. If only you could maintain the defiant refusal to face facts that we see in Rod Blagojevich, you’d be beyond perfect. Reading about the board room meeting you called where you admitted what happened, followed by turning yourself in, revealed that you have shreds of accountability that don’t really resonate with the America I know. Maybe you’ll have to share it with the still-clinging Illinois Governor.

But sure, Obama’s fine too. A hat-tip to the future, as even the great picks in ‘29, ‘30, ‘38, ‘39 were. Up near the top of the article, Obama admits his own fears, despite the image he’s projected to the nation. He outlines four scary priorities for the nation:
1. Economy
2. Afghanistan
3. Nuclear Proliferation
4. Climate Change

Oh boy. While I agree that no one could deny the precision of #1, it’s #2-4 that make me roll my eyes. Escalating a war may be his hidden solution to #1 (indeed, this picture hit me like a ton of bricks as the explanation of why government policy has so thoroughly greased the wheels of the economy’s slide, especially on the employment front… in an era where the all-volunteer military and lots of wars are big priorities, you have to de facto draft people by giving them no alternative jobs), but it offers nothing to a pacifist who has come to realize that we are in a post-conquest era in history. Nuclear proliferation? I posted over a year ago about how Iran will get toasters. It’s not that I don’t believe the world would be better off without nukes spreading further, but frankly, the worst nations in the world already have nukes and trying to maintain peace by keeping a stranglehold on science and technology is about as futile as shutting down the Internet by cutting physical cords, one at a time. And don’t even get me started on climate change. If you really think climate change is a third of the threat that most people seem to, then total, unrecoverable economic collapse is your only hope.

My hopes this season are pretty scant. I hope to get to New Mexico so I can bury myself in warmth, friends, family, green chile, and a part of the world that has managed to inspire me through some of the darkest times. I hope for a little snow, a bit of cheer, a lot of thought and reflection. I hope to find the energy to light at least one candle, to buy at least one gift, to make at least one wish for the year to come.

May God be with you.