Fafblog Social Security crisis FAQ

Fafnir sums up the Social Security crisis excellently better than I could if I tried so go there and read his and laugh at the silly crisis.

Link http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_23_fafblog_archive.html#110687103723037689

Opera is not Blogger-editor friendly, so you'll have to cut and paste your links, and that will make the irony all the sweeter when you get to the fafblog and realize that you're redundant.

Those who weep for the future need more tissues

According to Mr. Toppo of the USA Today news company, many of our high school students think our press has too much freedom, and that the government (I can only assume they mean ours, W, Dick, et al--but hey, they're in high school, they may be thinking of King George, or maybe even the Lilliputians)--that the government, I was saying, should be allowed to read and approve of articles before publication.

Weep here.

On the other hand, high schoolers are forced into close proximity with hordes of witless, jabbering morons every day, and so perhaps a muzzle on freedom of chatter sounds like a reasonable option to them.

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms

Back to the issue of humanity: I've said before that those who believe that being human is a natural superiority over--or fundamental difference in kind from--animals are doomed to animal behavior, and only by recognizing that one is an animal first can one hope to rise to the level of humanity, as we typically understand it, with its higher level of understanding and far-sighted, socially-responsible ideals.

In this experiment we see that we can add vicarious, visually-based social hierarchy study (gossip magazines and personality-based TV) as well as pornography enjoyment to the already long list of attributes we share with other animals.

Being human not animal requires recognizing what one is and reordering one's values and actions in accordance with a philosophy that includes the data of our nature as well as the ideal of our goal. Simply desiring to be superior in some way and denying one's natural state is not enough to elevate an animal into a human.

That was harder to express than I had anticipated. I'll try again.

Hard to shake that feeling

In reading Mencken one discovers that the world was full of wicked morons riding a handbasket to hell 80 years ago, not at all unlike today. In fact, if one were to post a Mencken essay, many might not realize it is not written specifically for the current situation. This seems to give some comfort. Things may seem ugly, but they turned out at least as good as our own "good old days" of less than 50 years ago.

Then you read another warning about global warming over at BBC News and you start to go over that possibility again, like some poorly planned garden party, just wondering whether you've ordered enough chairs. That's if you're not a paranoid fringe person. That's just a normal responsible, aware response.

Then over at National Geographic they point out yet another medical experimentation twist (mice growing human neurons for brains; Chinese half-human half-rabbit embryos) that needs to be considered, not necessarily by those of us in the peanut gallery, but certainly by someone, and even if we don't bear any responsibility, it seems we'll be faced with some uglier, more challenging social changes than the cell phone pandemic, and sooner rather than later.

Take a look at the numbers, and follow the money

Mr. Krugman helps us unpack the language of the right wing steam roller yet again in his column in the New York Times, showing how the privatizers of Social Security are selling snake oil to the black community and tipping their hand to show their lack of hope of improving the inequalities in our society.

The evidence against the value of privatizing, or semi-privatizing, Social Security is overwhelmingly against, and as it seems therefore suicidal to pursue such a goal so patently, one can only conclude that this maneuver is a feint to keep the social watchdogs occupied whilst the right pursues its short-sighted destruction of our protections and their limitations, the limitations that were put in place to stop them from going too far, which is something that they are prone to do because they have no system of evaluation other than money and position in the societal hierarchy, based again on economic strength. All other evaluations are secondary or meaningless to them, making them excellent business machines, but not much use as fellow citizens.

Dream On America: World Rejects the US Model

Dream On America: World Rejects the US Model

Much has made, for instance, of the differences between the dynamic American model and the purportedly sluggish and overregulated "European model." Ongoing efforts at European labor-market reform and fiscal cuts are ridiculed. Why can't these countries be more like Britain, businessmen ask, without the high tax burden, state regulation and restrictions on management that plague Continental economies? Sooner or later, the CW goes, Europeans will adopt the American model—or perish.

Yet this is a myth. For much of the postwar period Europe and Japan enjoyed higher growth rates than America. Airbus recently overtook Boeing in sales of commercial aircraft, and the EU recently surpassed America as China's top trading partner. This year's ranking of the world's most competitive economies by the World Economic Forum awarded five of the top 10 slots—including No. 1 Finland—to northern European social democracies. "Nordic social democracy remains robust," writes Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School of Economics and a "New Labour" theorist, in a recent issue of the New Statesman, "not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it."

NYTimes.com Article: Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Use Social Security as

Re: NYTimes.com Article: Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Use Social Security as
Cudgel

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/politics/25marriage.html?ex=1107674790&ei=1&en=0e3f0dd95234eb3f

[Need to login? User= madatyou6  Pass=madatyou ---courtesy of BugNot]

Imagine the level of a mind that interprets Christianity as putting laws
against other people's freedoms as more important than laws supporting
social stability. Imagine the level of the mind that is shocked by George
Bush's lack of ability to push their issue after watching him in the media
for over four years. Imagine the level of a mind that will allow a
government that is barely even nominally in the same religious camp
overturning the laws that made the practice of their religion possible, and
how cloudy it must be to not see that after, or even before, that
administration is gone, they will then be open to oppression without
protection, having removed that protection to get the other guy.

Put "the Jews" in for every instance of the gays, and suffrage and property
rights in for marriage, and the letter could easily be written to the German
government 70 years ago.

Possible economic dreariness, a warning

Go here and read, but be cheerful when you start, it's heavy going:

http://www.thinkingpeace.com/pages/arts2/arts355.html

According to the economist Andre Gunder Frank, "All Uncle Sam's debt, including private household consumer credit-card, mortgage etc., debt of about $10 trillion, plus corporate and financial, with options, derivatives and the like, and state and local government debt comes to an unvisualizable, indeed unimaginable, $37 trillion, which is nearly four times Uncle Sam's GDP [gross domestic product]." This rising level of indebtedness will become a huge deflationary weight on economic activity if debt growth should seriously slow – which is the economic equivalent of a catch-22.

And so Safire bows out to pursue progress, oddly

Indeed, his exit from the political punditry scene is none too soon, mostly for him, I think, as he was not making converts from the left, and doing no good for the right. I sense that perhaps his otherworldliness may not stem from Alzheimer's so much as a need to believe in the positive, a drive to underscore the possible in even so skewed and damaged a system as ours. He has hopes for the future, and he is like a new father in his optimism about American politics. Well, let's hope for his sake that's what it is. For others, such as David Brooks, I would not spend the mental coin to break their fall, but at least for Safire, as a fellow lover of words, I'll look the other way for a moment.

Free lunches, line forms on the left, one cross each

Sometimes I do find myself puzzled: why don't privatizers understand that their schemes rest on the peculiar belief that there is a giant free lunch there for the taking? But then I remember what Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

--Paul Krugman


And I reiterate my snappy definition:

A socialist is a person who understands there's no such thing as a free lunch. A capitalist is a person who believes that a free lunch is the ultimate goal.

Safire had a different take on the speech

Interestingly, Safire found only 49 instances of freedom in the inaugural speech. Poor boy must be suffering terribly from something. He points out that tyrants "enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace." Isn't this the old "killing the village to save the village" line? Couldn't we simply say that Bush, having no mandate and dampening civil liberties, and starting wars, and provoking revolutions at home and abroad, is that tyrant, and that the line could just as easily read "it is tryants who free peoples, start wars, and provoke revolution?"

He also goes on to say that he's a Wilsonian idealist, and that he, like Bush, puts liberty before peace. It seems then that he's turned Wilson's hatred of war inside out. It also seems that war is no longer a last resort to free enslaved peoples, but rather the first option, and that the urge to preserve the peace and prevent war is in some sense evil. If we carried this thinking just a little further, we would say that violent overthrow of the government is to be preferred to a peaceful, diplomatic transition through education and democratic suffrage--this makes Safire tantamount to a national traitor, who is saved from this accusation only by the fact that his boyo is the tyrant de jour. If the opposition ever gains office, they'll know to where to send the jackbooted thugs first in their liberty-driven quashing of free speech.

Before Time Inc. was kind to the sand people

What Time Magazine had to say in '32:

Striking Contrasts between the realms of leaning King Feisal and fighting King Ibn Saud:

1) Bagdad, capital of the Kingdom of Irak, is a thriving beehive of 250.000 busy, haggling souls. Mecca, one of the two capitals of the Land of Saud, is a Moslem "show place" of only 60.000 which receives and scandalously mulcts each year some 70,000 pious pilgrims.

--from Time Magazine in the '30's.


And so the word of the day is

mulct

Pronunciation: (mulkt),
—v.t.
1. to deprive (someone) of something, as by fraud, extortion, etc.; swindle.
2. to obtain (money or the like) by fraud, extortion, etc.
3. to punish (a person) by fine, esp. for a misdemeanor.

—n.
a fine, esp. for a misdemeanor.
from http://opera.infoplease.com/ipd/A0546066.html

which word crops up often in Mencken. No surprise.

The inaugural

With a brief glance at the obvious fact that this is a canned, off-the-shelf, spam-quality speech, "freedom" seems to be the main topic and motivator here. I would guess that when Bush talked about the importance of helping your neighbor, caring for the weak and deprived, he was suggesting that the government has no place there, but when he talked about the society having standards, he's talking about who you have sex with, what you smoke and drink, and what you read and watch, and that's something that the government would like to get involved with. Freedom from government help for the poor, freedom from activities the government doesn't like. Freedom from free thinkers, and free prison cells for free livers.

And don't forget to point out to your Libertarian and Anarchist friends the stern pointer toward the importance of "the rule of law."

Numbers:

free 34 [6]
freedom 27
liberty 15
---------
76 [now I get 48. Still not in agreement with others, but I'm not doing a hand count.]

76/2086 [48/2086]

3.6% or 1 in 27 words. [2.3% or 1 in 43 words.]

reason 0
rationality 0
responsibility 0
accountability 0
community 0
history 7
faith 2
god 3
heaven 1
destiny 1
equal 1
equality 0
war 7
peace 2

[Update: I used the word "free" in my search with TextWiz instead of the word "free " and so resulted in a higher tally. The correct number of free/freedom/liberty references is less than fifty.]

In no particular order

I haven't read the context, but I find it outrageously humorous to see a picture of C. Rice with the phrase "The time for diplomacy is now" under her image--I'm reminded of the good talk that all prospective employees give, but the irony is that the whole world watched her and her boss toss away years of diplomacy to go about smacking down some weaklings only to discover that the diplomats were doing the right thing. Now that she's up for the diplomat's job, she opines that the time is right to do some talking. I say the time is right for smacking. Someone needs to spank her severely and send her back to college for some finish work, notably in ethics, but also in general philosophy. I've lost all respect for anyone left in this administration. They've all had plenty of time to do what O'Neill and others have done, to get out and come clean. No one respects the ex-Nazis just because they were loyal, so why should we respect these clowns? We all thought Powell had more in him, but then, what was he doing in the Republican party if that was the case?

frrrrrgggggggblllllllddddtttt!

I was knocked into a comatose state by the giant hammer of American Stupidity in November, but have roused now for a brief moment. Let me get a glass of water run through some rotten potatoes and sterilized by heat evaporation . . . .