Happy New Year

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And happy old year, too!

Here is an awesome video.

Some violin jokes are to be found here.

The Politics of Being American

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What does it mean to be “American”?

To some it means to love liberty.  It means freedom.  It means never being told what to do.

It means having the opportunity to accumulate enormous wealth.

It means being able to afford an enormous car, even if from an environmental point of view, owning it puts a burden on air and water quality.

It means being able to buy cheap goods, even if it is produced by poorly-paid foreign workers.

It means being able to have a guaranteed white-collar job, even without knowing as much as, or having the skills of, your foreign counterpart in an equivalent job.

It means being able to afford expensive medical treatment, and being able to afford an expensive legal battle if your doctor makes a mistake.

It means being able to live like a king, far from the accusing eyes of the poor.

It means being able to use up all the wilderness in the USA, but being able to go look at interesting wildlife anytime you feel like it.

It means being able to have good, organic food wholesomely produced in small farms that do not exist anymore.

It means being able to fill up your enormous gas-guzzling SUV with oil that was stolen from poor people who live somewhere else.

It means having the right to have your children taught senseless fairy tales about nature, and yet have them be sufficiently well educated to be able to produce the drugs required to treat the diseases that your lavish lifestyle will surely cause in the poisoned environment you live in.

It means demanding a sophisticated world with expensive services which you do not want to pay for with taxes.

It means having an excellent education for your kids, taught by poorly-paid people whom you curse and vilify at every opportunity.

It means never going to the polls to vote, but being furious at the idiots who are elected to office.

Do we want to continue to be American?

Choosing a Major

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I hope my readers don't think I'm acting beyond my mandate if I offer a few suggestions about choosing a major.  This is for college students; others should leave this page at once.

It might be a bit too annoying if I were to give detailed reasons, but I'm going to give you a peep into my thinking anyway.  The world is too full of people giving instructions with very little supporting arguments.

1.  You must pick a major you're interested in.  Sure, you have to find a job, but if you can't stand a subject, you will be miserable for several decades.  Select one of your two most favorite subjects.  If you have to be practical, you can go with the one that promises more employment opportunities.

2.  Make sure you take your writing courses and your math courses seriously.  You could have a major in basket weaving, but your writing ability and your ability to do double-entry book-keeping might get you a job, especially if this employer can't afford a fully-qualified accountant.  Being able to use MS Word and MS Excel are also good for employment.  Your major is not the only thing that matters.

3.  In these times when everybody is going to grad school (this might be news to you, but college degrees are becoming commonplace), you must keep an eye on possible graduate school "majors".  In theory, you can go to grad school in (say) Economics, even if your undergrad degree is in History.  But in practice, Economics graduate schools tend to think that an undergraduate degree in Mathematics or Engineering is a better preparation for an Economics graduate degree.  On the other hand, your undergraduate major might not be a deterrent for a graduate degree in Music, for instance.  But you must have a solid background in music theory and performance.  I guess I'm saying: keep graduate school in the back of your mind.

4.  As I have often said, statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Government) show that people change occupations, and even career areas, on the average of three times in a lifetime.  You may start off in a job in Marketing (though your major was Art), and end up working for a non-profit.  My wife got an undergraduate degree in Archeology and History, but her first full-time job was as a writer for an Engineering journal, and now she is a grant writer for the county government.  If you're good, you could get hired to do a tricky job no matter what your undergraduate major was.

5.  You can declare and un-declare your major a couple of times; nobody is going to insist that you stay with your original choice.  Keep taking courses in all the areas you're interested in, so that you keep your options open.

6.  If you want to make money, don't go into teaching.  Well-meaning friends may urge you to go into teaching, because "You would make such an awesome teacher!"  But you would be a miserable awesome teacher who can't pay her bills.  Until the situation changes and our culture begins to take teachers more seriously, hassle them a lot less, and pays them a lot better, the nation is going to have to make do with teachers who go into the profession because they can't make more money elsewhere.  On the other hand, if you're a Mother Theresa in the making, by all means teach.  Or teach, and moonlight as a tax accountant.  And get a bullet-proof vest, because who knows?

To conclude, a major (in the theory of tertiary education that holds sway at the moment) is an area into which a college student goes in some depth.  Your general education courses provide breadth.  The idea of college is not to make you more employable in terms of your subject knowledge (though, inevitably, that does happen), but rather because your college experience should have given you a better perspective on life, culture, and the world, than most people without a college experience.  This is valuable to many employers.  (Unfortunately, many of your college-mates have been able to go through college without an iota's change in their perspective.  They have to somehow keep that fact hidden from more perceptive employers.)  The general education courses give you that perspective, and your major trains you into thinking deeply about at least one subject.  Some people find it difficult to think deeply about anything, and these people should not be in college.  So pick a major in a subject you like sufficiently well that you aren't afraid of going into it in depth.  Remember, if you're a sophomore now, you might be quite a different person by the time you need to go into your major in depth, and you might not be as scared of intellectual stuff at that point.

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Business—My Take

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‘Business’ has meant to me—and will continue to mean—simply the old idea of trade taken to a more sophisticated level.  A trader obtains goods that he or she thinks will sell well in some other locality, transports them there, and sells it at a profit.  The service is mostly that of transporting the goods to where they will be more useful.  (In some languages, ‘cooper’, ‘carter’ and ‘merchant’ all mean the same thing.)

In more recent times, when cities grew large enough so that everyone did not know everyone else, to buy what they needed directly from the supplier, the storekeeper would obtain goods that someone could supply—usually in bulk—and sell it to someone else, who knew to look for the good in the Store.  The service here was that of warehousing the goods, hence the word Store.

Today, a business is either a manufacturing business, or one that provides a service, or one that combines the services of transporting and warehousing, and possibly dressing the goods up (packaging), and profits today are, of course, an order of magnitude higher than they were in the good old days of the tradesman.

America was built on farming, to begin with.  But soon tradesmen began to acquire political power, and the myth was born that America was built by business.  Because the life of a storekeeper is a lot easier than that of a farmer, over the centuries businessmen have had the leisure to dream up many more shady schemes than those in other occupations, in order to acquire still more economic power, and America has certainly been the place where economic power buys a great deal of political power.  Americans love to despise the political power that Chinese businessmen have been able to acquire, but of course it was American Business that showed the world how economic power could be profitably abused.

Today, business is worshiped so much in the US (and to some extent, everywhere else) that when there is an economic slump here, people are called upon to go out and spend, to “help The Economy recover.”  Consumption, and consumer spending is considered a sort of economic panacea, because (encouraged by Business) US economic theory is based on consumption.

I, for one, do not believe in this myth.  Consumer spending helps business.  Business does not help anything except business itself.  Business has discovered the futility of helping the community, the arts, or education.  The only thing on which Business would consider spending any loose change that lies around, is marketing, which is simply a particularly evil brand of the old advertising.  So our towns and cities are simply covered with enormous, ugly billboards that advertise everything from cigarettes to alcohol to no-good crooked politicians.  Business is not a charity that needs our support.

Now that Business has learned the benefits of offshoring any sort of unpleasant material or activity, and now that banks in other countries have learned the benefits of providing a home to US funds, any money that Business has left over is shipped straight offshore to the welcoming arms of foreign banks, and do not help the so-called US economy at all.

Ironically, small businesses, which simply do not have the resources to rip-off the population as efficiently as Big Business, do identify with Big Business!  This is funny, and it is even funnier when small businesses wail and complain about the woes of Big Business, even if the complaints are completely inapplicable to them.  Small businesses are unlikely to offshore their needs, and certainly not their bank accounts, though they may aspire to do that someday.  Neither do they have to pay the sorts of taxes that Big Business should be paying.  And most laughable of all is how much individuals who are actually unemployed defend the rights of Big Business to pay very little tax.  “Some day,” an unemployed person can be heard to say, “I anticipate being extremely wealthy, and I do not want to have to pay taxes on that day.”  This can only be caused explained by their education having been distorted so as not to explain that people with higher incomes are required to pay taxes at a higher rate.  Some things in the USA simply defy reason.  Hello, y'all!  Raising the taxes of Exxon does not mean that small businesses have to pay higher taxes!  You got that?

We also used to have laws forbidding petroleum giants like Exxon from swallowing up other competing businesses.  But now, behold: Exxon has swallowed up Mobil.  So Exxon can spread fear that gas prices will rise if their taxes are raised.  If there was a suitable degree of competition among these oil companies, in theory, smaller companies would sell gasoline at lower prices, and Exxon would have to sell at the lower prices, just to stay in business.  But if Exxon is the only game in town (and I wonder which administration is to blame for having allowed Exxon to acquire Mobil, and do we honestly think that it was to the public benefit that the merger was to take place?) then certainly they can raise the price of gasoline, and certainly in towns where there are only Exxon gas stations.  How has the population been made to think that monopolies are good?  And Americans don’t like to be called stupid.

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Christians and their Gun Laws

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I guess we honestly need to find out, once and for all, whether, as the NRA and pro-gun folks (lumping them all together) claim, the existing gun laws are not vigorously enforced.  Is it true?  Is law enforcement turning a blind eye to illegal gun sales?  Or is the law pretty much impossible to enforce?  If the existing law is simply unenforceable, or inconvenient to enforce, or if enforcement is not appropriately funded, then something has to be done.  We must deploy the few miserable pennies that the wealthy allow us to levy in taxes to effective law enforcement.

Christianity, as I understood it in my youth, was a very demanding religion, and not for the faint-hearted or the feeble-minded.  But now it appears that most of those who adhere to it like glue are precisely those.  The large evangelical mega-churches coach the faithful more to protect the leaders, and then protect their own narrow interests, rather than to see to the welfare of mankind at large.  The attitude seems to be that the masses have their reward in heaven; the faithful must lead a cushy life now.  This is not the gospel I remember.

Well, it belongs to them, and I suppose it has evolved.  At least the Mormons and the Christian Scientists go about it honestly: they have modern prophets who have elucidated the message of the scriptures.  The rest of them are twisting the meaning of the gospel.

A recent poster making the rounds conflates the ridiculous storm in a teacup of the Starbucks' "Holiday" mug falling short of its Christmasyness, and the recent mass shooting(s).  It's naive to think that agnostics or atheists are less violent than Christians for philosophical reasons.  The sort of violent horror in the US that the meme refers to is hardly caused by reason of some ideology or philosophy.  On the other hand, maybe it is, but it appears to be the norm to always put it down to insanity.  We probably ought to create a splinter group of Christianity into which we can quickly assign the culprits of mass shootings, and blame that sect, rather than insanity.

So what's going on?  Are the majority of Christians innocent victims of a small, violent minority among them, who force the rest of them to refrain from the kind of charity that the horrible economic straits of our poor demands?  Is there a pernicious core in the Christian church that holds some mysterious power over the Chosen, that prevents them from encouraging their representatives to enact effective gun control laws?  Or is it that the system does not work, and the deceitful candidates for public office cannot be trusted to carry out the wishes of their constituents, and simply pander to the lobbyists of special interest groups?  We know that the gun lobby is among the most powerful in Washington.  Few electoral districts have candidates who have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby.  We are a nation of cowards.

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