Self-made People

We, here where I live, seem to be surrounded by people who think they got where they were with sheer hard work, and without any help from anybody.

This is a frustrating attitude to be confronted with regularly.  I am known as a liberal, and my friends keep very quiet about political philosophies (when I'm around) because they take the attitude that Arch is an idiot, and he thinks, just because his family got a lot of assistance from ... various sources, that everybody needs a leg up.

People like Arch, they figure, must need a lot of help, because they are so helpless, and are so misguided, and ... yackety yak, blah, blah.  Well, back when I was in grad school, and making just about $360 before taxes, we were put on the WIC program, because my wife seemed a little anemic.  That's it.  I'm eternally grateful for the food assistance, and I'm sure our daughter benefited from the improved nutrition.  And, obviously, we would be less likely to have to get into medical trouble because of the improved nutrition.  Oh, and I mustn't forget: we attended the Well-Baby Clinic in Allegheny County, which gave free inoculations to newborns and infants up to three years old.  That was good.  Now some would take the view that everyone should be responsible for their own damn kids and their inoculations.  But listen.  If a kid gets sick with some preventable disease and spreads it around the school, it becomes everybody's problem.  Ah, but these people will reply, that is what we have lawsuits for.  So there you have the genius of American Society.  An answer to every question, which involves a delicate balance of personal financial resources, and legal recourse.  People who have never been in a lawsuit have a rosy idea of how effective the courts are at addressing problems that have not been taken care of by some sort of social safety-net.  Unfortunately, the American litigation process only works for the most wealthy.  It does not work for the average citizen, unless a lawyer can be persuaded to take the case on pro bono, with an interest in any resulting financial award.

Oddly enough, I was so successful in the areas in which I was successful, because (A) I was naturally musical, and I discovered that mathematics came easily to me, (B) my family encouraged me to be engaged in lots of extra-curricular activities, because they were both that way: music, theater, history, politics, psychology, education, social services, all these things were interesting to me, and I got to know a lot of people of different sorts, rather than being surrounded by people who thought exactly like I did.  I was also (C) encouraged to read widely, and in rational thinking, which is to say that philosophical positions based purely on prejudice were ridiculed.  Finally, (D) though my parents were deeply religious and in fact pillars of the church, they did not consider religion as having first position over science.

They are both dead, and so I am not in a position to query their take on Marriage Equality and things like that, and there is an even likelihood that they might object to it in principle, but then, they don't have to live in a world where that level of diversity has to be confronted daily, and so they would have had the liberty of disapproving of it.  We should support it, because such an enormous fraction of the population now has the opportunity to live happily with spouses of their choice, and so many among our friends would probably let us know that they have an alternate sexual preference if they were sure that we would support that.

This is the problem.  Insularity breeds insularity.  I live in Central Pennsylvania, and a few decades ago, few of my neighbors had ventured further than Altoona.  The few that have escaped the gravitational well of this area hate to come back, probably because they find the people back home impossibly insular.  In contrast, they love getting together with other Pennsylvanians-in-exile, because they do love the region.  They love the people, too, but in small doses.

But back to the main topic, namely that everyone should look after themselves, everyone should be given the liberty to keep the money they earn, and not have to pay taxes.  Some would prefer that all schools be private, so that those who can afford it can send their kids to better schools, which are not cluttered up with the children of poor people.

Some would prefer to live in exclusive neighborhoods in which they would build their own superior roads, have them plowed privately, after a snow fall, have their produce brought to their doorsteps by refrigerated private truck, have their own private militia to protect their homes and neighborhoods (so that they need not pay taxes for policemen), and have their own helicopter pads in their backyards, so that they don't have to take the public highways, rubbing shoulders with the masses, and using smelly public rest areas.

And the wildlife, of course, has to look after itself.  Bald Eagles have to pull their own weight; if they're endangered, it's their own damn fault.  If a species can't survive in the 21st century, it jolly well deserves to die out.

What about those African killer bees?  If the customs and the coast guard had been doing their jobs, we would not have them here.  Well, we just have to manage with however we can pollinate our crops using special tractors, or whatever; maybe we can breed some sort of artificial bee that can do it for us, or can't we spray pollen on the crops?  If we don't have to pay taxes, we could afford all this stuff.

What about gasoline for helicopters?  Well, see, the economy would take care of itself.  The company that can sell the most fuel for the least money would survive, and we would buy cheap gas from them.  The government is encouraging oil companies that should not exist, because they charge just too damn much.  (Swearing is something conservatives do only in private, so consider this rant a private one!)  Prices would go up if gasoline becomes a monopoly?  That's nonsense.  If prices get too high, someone is sure to start up a new gasoline company that sells it cheap, and the monopoly will crumble.

That's the problem with amateur conservatives: they don't know the principles of anything, really, because they have limited success with the little that they have the imagination to try, and they extrapolate that they know all that needs to be known about everything.  We can all go it alone in every sense, if only we were allowed to keep all the money we make without having to pay taxes.

The ordinary citizen often has very little idea of the myriad ways in which government subsidies and government programs protect them and facilitate services that appear on the face of it to be delivered automatically.

Mapping.  Zoning.  Water purification.  Cell towers.  Airport.  Weather reporting.  Developing new drugs.  Training doctors.  Keeping air quality good enough.  (Hah.  I'd like to see private citizens keeping their air clean.)  Keeping streams stocked with fish.  Maintaining the Internet.  Making sure restaurant food is safe, by and large, except for instances where the inspectors were bribed by your rich neighbors.  Making sure that fires don't break out in highly populated areas.  Making sure that zoning laws are enforced, so that there is no recurrent flooding (especially in freshly developed areas).

Ignorance rules in conservative areas, because many conservatives hate to be bothered by bad news, and like to live in ignorance.  When Democrats bring up unpleasant facts, the GOP folk tend to identify those unpleasant scenarios with the Democrats, because they'd never even heard of these things before Democrats started stinking up the place.

I'm going to blog about why I hate business so much very soon.  It's not that business is bad for us.  It's because business are not good at running everything all the time.  It should not be a basic principle that what's good for business is good for everybody.  That's an axiom that we must abandon, no matter how easy adopting that fallacy makes things.

Arch

Tenure and Wisconsin

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A news report on the website of the (Minneapolis-based?) Star Tribune reveals that the Wisconsin state budget committee has recommended that the tenure system of Wisconsin colleges and universities be abandoned, and that the University of Wisconsin budget should be cut by $250 million.  (More details are on Huffpost here.)  I may have got the whole thing wrong, but it doesn't matter; in my opinion, this move is not unexpected.

That the sum is so enormous hints that the entire University of Wisconsin budget must be far more enormous.  The questions arise: why is tenure necessary?  Why must public colleges and universities have such enormous budgets?

I can imagine, perhaps several decades in the past, a world in which the ordinary expenses of a private citizen are lower than they are today, but where the government takes a proportionally greater responsibility for supplying the needs of the typical citizen than is common in the US today.  Public education is paid for by the government out of taxes, but in addition to their role of providing education for the citizens, (whatever that basic education may consist of,) it is understood that the public university professors also take on the right to disagree strongly with public policy.  This means that university administrators must not be given absolute carte blanche to hire and fire professors, because disagreement with official policy must be tolerated, and not be punishable by termination.  To put it in a cartoon-like way, the university is essentially a community of potential whistle-blowers, who are nurtured in the bosom of the government.  So tenure is a form of giving independence to faculty, once they have proven themselves as fit.

This only makes sense in that sort of world, where the expenses of the university are moderate, where salaries are small, and where the public does not feel the need to supervise the universities so closely because they are proportionately such a minor burden on the tax base.  In addition, the freedom of today's highly-paid university professors is much more odious psychologically, because the very nature of the political system is coming into question.  One sector of the population wants freedom from the shackles of a controlled economy, and views those academics --among others-- who disagree with them, as misleading their youth, and wants them silenced.  But they can't be silenced; tenure is all about resisting the forces of censorship.  The other sector of the population want a more controlled economy, where the level of government responsibility for the needs of the population (and the nature of those needs that are met by the state) is higher (and different), and this sector wants its ideas championed by those faculty who agree with them (and very likely wants the other faculty silenced!).

Why do Universities have such enormous budgets?  It is because in America today, only one thing is understood thoroughly: business.  Everything must be run as a business, from churches, to schools, to universities, to the postal service, and the Supreme Court, and the government itself.  Everything must pay its own way.  And everything must advertise, and the media has ensured that an enormous fraction of the budget of every business has to be devoted to: what?  Advertising.  So the razor edge on which the fate of universities and colleges are balanced is made even horribly sharper by the inflated budgets of these places, which must pay not only for the professors, but what are, from the point of view of academic curmudgeons such as myself, inessentials.

The discussion of tenure often takes the form as to what sort of disagreements should be tolerated; philosophical and academic disagreements are okay, but other disagreements must not be allowed, and so on.  Universities today are so large that faculty who want to bring their particular views to a wider public often need to indulge in a certain amount of theatre, which enrages a sector of the public, which precipitates more calls for the abolition of tenure.  In today's society, flag-burning and book-burning and occupying assemblies, and so on, are deemed necessary by some, while others take to public media, and highly orchestrated tissues of lies and misrepresentation and inflammatory remarks on television and the Internet (the entertainment of choice of the most feeble-minded among us) to persuade the most easily persuaded among us.

Our fellow citizens, unfortunately, have very little resistance to propaganda.  Resistance to propaganda comes from a certain sort of education.  But it is clear that our ability to spread this sort of education is weak; because the ability to benefit from education comes from, among other things, the environment of the home; and society, which is under the control of business, makes demands on its workers which preclude the sort of home environment that is conducive to growing engaged and thoughtful citizens, who are able to benefit from education.

So the questions of how education must be conducted, and whether and how academics should be given the freedom to disagree with government policy and social conditions, and even university structures, cannot be discussed comfortably, because they are so tightly entangled in the very ability of citizens to understand and to unravel the very questions themselves.

In addition, just as society is indignant at the abuse of social welfare by certain recipients of it, we are just as indignant about the abuse of tenure by certain faculty.  But in both cases, the abuse must be tolerated, and moderated by other means than withdrawing the service, or the right of tenure.  In the case of tenure, it is a much harder decision, as the Wisconsin legislature has learned.  In viewing university faculty as mere educational technicians, state employees as vulnerable as all other state employees, are they endangering the education of their future citizens?  Perhaps the mare has already escaped the barn; across the country it is becoming clear that, while a small minority of our youth are able to absorb a wonderful education from the schools they attend, the vast majority of high school students and college and university undergraduates merely acquire the tiniest fragment of knowledge from their experience.  Tragically, our future professors must be drawn from these pathetic academic remnants, so our future is truly dark.  Our kids will not be taught by the scumbags, if scumbags they are, who populate the halls of academia presently.  They will be taught by future scumbags, who are drinking and smoking their grey cells to death even as I write this.

I know that's dangerous rhetoric, but it certainly expresses my own dismay at the inexorable march of the entropy of education.  There is no doubt that some of the graduates who will burst upon the employment lines this summer can get their lives together, and will make admirable mentors for the kids currently in grade school.  But will they choose academia, which is so much the target of a hostile society, or will they choose instead to set themselves up as crooked Wall Street brokers, or used car salesmen, or lobbyists for Congress, or media spin doctors, where the money is better?

Arch

Is Cholesterol really bad for you? Is being overweight really bad?

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The available information about the interrelation between heart disease, cholesterol, Omega-3 fatty acids, saturated fats, and high blood sugar is confusing, to say the least.  It is at least as confusing to medical practitioners as it is to laymen, because of the onslaught of vast amounts of information (some of it not very good) that physicians are regularly bombarded with.  Every doctor is constantly being given information from pharmaceutical companies, their alma maters, and medical agencies, and a significant proportion of this information is contradictory.  In addition, doctors are constantly under the threat of malpractice lawsuits.  Some of these lawsuits are frivolous and vicious, some of them are simply patients desperate to find financial resources to correct their medical conditions, because medical expenses are so high that not infrequently a lawsuit is the only way to obtain the means for pursuing treatment.  Not all doctors are quacks, and not all doctors are brilliant, and obviously a large number of doctors are just tired and jaded, and not as altruistic as we would want them to be.  Let's face it: we all suck, and doctors are no exception.  We have to be grateful that the health services in this country are not in worse shape than they are, given the conditions under which they operate.

Just recently, one Dr. Dwight Lundell, a former surgeon, was quoted as saying essentially the following:
(1) It isn't cholesterol that causes heart failure.
(2) Heart failure is caused by inflammation in the blood vessels.
(3) Inflammation is caused (among other things) by excessive amounts of processed foods, e.g. refined sugars such as corn syrup, lots of sugar generally, and Omega-6 fatty acids, such as found in Soybean oil.  (Omega-3 fatty acids are the good ones.)

This information, we find, was announced by Dr. Lundell as far back as 2007, though the information has begun recirculating once again this year.

On further examination, a sort of medical quack-hunting vigilante called Dr. Stephen Barrett has looked into Dwight Lundell's story, and has turned up that he has been in financial trouble with the IRS and has been on the brink of bankruptcy, and has lost his license to practice medicine in 2008 (though he has been practicing since about 1970).  He was also sued by at least two patients for incompetent post operative care.

Despite the hostility of Stephen Barrett, I find Lundell's analysis of the situation persuasive.  People are always looking for a silver bullet to remove the threat of heart disease once and for all.  Constantly consuming large quantities of polyunsaturated oils (Canola oil, for instance) is not the answer.  Lundell might be bad at managing his finances, and careless in his management of surgical patients (after-operation care is important, and intelligence on the part of the caregivers, the patient, and the patient's family is all needed for a good outcome), but he seems to be on the mark as far as his advice is concerned.

It is unfortunate that everyone wants the cure-all to solve all their problems.  To be healthy, you need to do a number of things.  I know what is needed, even if I don't do it myself!  Here is some obvious advice.  Bear in mind that (paraphrasing the immortal words of Robert Young) I'm not a doctor, though I play one on the Internet!

A.  Don't use poly-unsaturated oils exclusively.  Small quantities of Olive oil is good for most purposes; if you're stir-frying, Coconut oil is good.  Do your own reading; if you learn that this advice is not the best for you, act accordingly

B.  Don't consume too much fat.  A couple of slices of bacon once a week is probably fine, even if you're a seven-foot lumberjack.  Look up the ideal body weight for your height, and stay within a dozen pounds of that.

C.  Don't eat too much sugar.  The more you eat, the more you should exercise.  Don't eat too much of anything.  Don't eat too much white bread.  Don't encourage kids to eat sugar and white bread, because they will crave it when they're older.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with wonder-bread might be a convenient soporific to administer to annoying kids, but in the long term they will pay the price.  Hopefully you won't be around to see when your kids become 300 pound couch potatoes.  All this propaganda that heavy is beautiful is a bunch of bull.  Nobody should weigh more than 5% beyond their ideal weight, even if they've been persuaded that they belong to a special "heavy" variant of the human species.  Especially kids should remain within their ideal weight, because heavy kids are at risk of turning into heavy adults.

There is general belief that a healthy self-image is more important than a healthy weight.  This is nonsense; both are important.  This trend of making the messenger feel guilty for delivering an unpleasant message is the creation of some idiot, and if I get my hands on him or her I will not be responsible for what I'll do.  Of course an overweight child is not entirely to blame for his or her condition: it is the family that must take the responsibility.  Occasionally it is some genetic or thyroid condition that is to blame.  But often thyroid conditions, I'm reading, are triggered by psychological factors.  I don't know how to deal with people who are eager to have their families classified as dysfunctional.

D.  Do eat unprocessed, or natural foods, which have a certain amount of fiber, such as oats, salads, green vegetables, whole wheat bread.

E.  Eat locally-grown produce.  I have started buying locally-grown lettuce, and it is awesome.  We also live in an area that has more than its fair share of Pennsylvania Dutch.  Now, PaDutch are not the healthiest people in the world; they do tend to eat a richer diet than will work for most of us.  But there's no faulting their produce.

F.  Choose your meat carefully, if possible.  Cold cuts in the summer months are difficult to avoid, but a healthy mix of meats is better than eating only chicken, or only turkey, or only beef.  Smoked meats should be eaten sparingly, i.e. once a week at most, and in small amounts, like a slice or two of bacon or ham.  It appears that eggs are not bad for us, if we stay under an egg a day.

G.  Do exercise in moderation.  Do not put too much stress on your feet and your knees.  If you're past the age of 50, consider wearing knee braces when you walk or row, or whatever.  This is to stave off problems later on.  Take your advice from your doctor; I don't want to contradict the doctor if he insists that knee braces are unnecessary.  (Check around, to see whether his other patients have bad knees.)  Avoid running, unless you run on padded surfaces, or run carefully on grass.  Do not run on asphalt or concrete.  Even if you don't exercise every day, try every other day.  Failing that, at least once a week.  Failing that, every other week.  Walk to church, if going to church is one of your vices.  Take a backpack, and put your jacket in it for the return walk, if you don't want to perspire in it.

H.  Prepare your own food.  Eating out should be an occasional thing.  Teach your kids to cook, starting early.  Kids of eleven and older can learn to fix simple food, and can certainly help with more complex food preparation.  Don't be intimidated by their reports of what their friends do or don't do.  Just because junior's buddies can't even slice bread for themselves doesn't mean junior should be just as inept.  Don't take klutziness as an excuse.  Klutzes are learned, not born.

Finally, be objective when judging how competent your family physician is.  Find a good one.  Keep an ear out for who your friends think is a good doctor, and switch when the opportunity arises.  Be a full participant in your health; learn the facts about any condition you have, and be a full partner when you or someone in your family falls ill.  This is good general advice, just as you must be a full participant in your child's education.  I'm not suggesting that you debate things with your child's teacher; I simply want to encourage you to take an interest in the material, help with preparation, give positive feedback, and be sensible about criticism.  Don't outsource important things like health and education, as if you're handing it over to H & R Block.  Even your taxes, for that matter, deserve your full participation.

I'm sorry to come across as being preachy.  It is important to be unambiguous about certain things which people like to misunderstand in the direction of taking it as an endorsement of bad habits.  "See, Barbara, it says here that it is okay to be overweight!"  No; I only said that 5% overweight is the most that you should allow yourself.  Don't misunderstand this sort of advice.

Arch

Op-Ed Deplores what Higher Education Has Become

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Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory, has written a --scathing, I believe-- op ed in the New York Times entitled: What's the Point of a Professor?

I did not read it.  I'm not the sort of professor who inhabits the concept-world of senior academicians of the 1950's.  A rebuttal appears in a blog here, which still responds to the original article on its own terms, by and large, and how the writer of this rebuttal describes what he does is a little closer to what I do: provide information to students who are looking for it, provide a basic experience for students who just want the accreditation, and occasionally be the role-model which Bauerlein wishes he would be allowed to be.  (I know, I didn't read it, but I read the cheat sheet.)

I've been writing about this for years, and there isn't any point to repeating what I keep saying.  Perhaps I never said it succinctly enough: private higher education does not sit comfortably in the business model we have in the USA.  I don't even think what should ideally take place in on a college campus comes exactly under the heading of mentoring.

One theme does stand out in all these writings about the undergraduate experience: nothing is going to work if an undergraduate is in the classroom unwillingly.  I suspect lots of undergraduates are on campus willingly: they get to stay away from home; they get to play sports; they get to meet members of the opposite sex unsupervised by their parents; they get to eat what they like in the cafeterias, and complain all they want.  They get to be slobs, and piss off their roommates.  But they're in the classrooms unwillingly.

This is quite unsurprising, because the society is becoming more and more exploitative.  Whereas a half-century ago, it may have been a pleasure to work somewhere, and you may have got some credit for whatever achievements you were able to make, today a worker has all his effort and energy sucked out of him at work, and is paid relatively less for equivalent work.  It follows that a youth prepares for employment grudgingly, and college is seen as preparation for employment, and the classroom is seen as a hurdle.

While there may be professors who are in the business for the prestige and the money, the vast majority of professors take up employment in academe because they love their subject, and they love teaching young students.  Teaching undergraduates is like a drug; it is surprisingly enjoyable, if you have halfway decent students.  (It does lose its shine over eight months, at which point you need some time off.)  But I honestly think that education should be absolutely free, and that you should qualify for it by competitive examination.

The open university is a whole different thing; a different sort of professor is needed to teach students who are not qualified, to engage them and seduce them into learning beyond their expectations.  Unfortunately, all of academe is heading in this direction, because often it is the unqualified who have the money.  So, to earn the right to teach bright, poor students, you have to put in some time teaching lazy wealthy kids, who just want to be accredited.  Sick Sad World, as Daria would say.

Arch

Writing in Word -- This time, for reals

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Microsoft Word is available everywhere, and there is hardly anyone who hasn't used it.  It's easy to get into it, and start writing; using it at this level is simply using it as it were an editor, just something into which you type basic text.  Notepad would do just as well.

Most writing programs now support the basic features of boldface, italics, underscore, and sometimes strikeout, including HTML-based editors, such as this one I'm using for the blog.  This is called character level formatting; you switch the boldface or italics on and off as needed.  In addition, it is usually possible to switch the font any any point.  All of this is possible, even in the middle of a word.

For those who write often, additional features are available, and you can get help anywhere.  But when you write large volumes, and read large volumes, you begin to appreciate consistency of style.  This is hard to explain, and I'm not going to try now; it is basically that similar things must look similar, e.g. an excerpt from a letter.  This is done usually by indenting on both sides (making the paragraph narrower, side-to-side, or equivalently, making the margins wider).  Similarly, you want to have the same spacing between paragraphs throughout.  (Or you could indent paragraphs; this is just indenting the first line, to set it off from the previous paragraph.)

The first huge step towards consistency is to use Styles.

In the Home tab of Word (Since 2007, Word has begun to use Tabs, which are an array of boxes at the top, just below the title.  This is so that Word can give you a different Toolbar for each task.  You spend most of the editing time in the Home tab, with the standard toolbar on top, just below the tabs) there is a section in the toolbar called Styles.  This section can be split off by clicking the little spot shown outlined in red, below.

This portion of the toolbar (it probably has a name, which I forget) will now be on the right side of the window, alongside your document.

Suppose you want to create a rather long document, and you want the main body of the document to be
(1) in Times New Roman font.
(2) line spacing 1.5.
(3) You want each paragraph spaced 6 points from the following paragraph.
(4) You do not want the first line indented at all.

What is most convenient is to modify the "Normal" style to be this way.  To do this, you move your mouse over the word Normal in the styles list.  Don't click!  Just move the mouse pointer to hover over the word.  This makes a little icon appear on the right--what is called a "Drop-down-list."  Click on that, and the choices appear; move down to Modify --and click on that.  You should see a grey window, what is called a "Pop-up box", appear.

This is where you tailor the Normal style to have all the properties you want in your normal text, just for this document.  (If you want all your documents to have this sort of Normal text, we have to do something a little more invasive, which I will try to remember to tell you afterwards.)

Here is an illustration of the Modify Style dialogue pop-up box:

You can clearly do (1) right here, by adjusting the font to Times New Roman.  (You can even set the text size at the drop-down box right next to the font box.)

To do (2), (3) and (4), you have to click on the button shown outlined in red above.  A list of choices appears; select Paragraph.  Yet another dialogue appears.  All three of (2), (3) and (4) are set inside this dialogue.

Click on the side of the box that shows "Multiple" in my illustration (yours may have something different), and select 1.5 lines.  That takes care of (2).
For (3), in the Spacing area, select 0 pt for Before, and 6 pt for After, or 3 pt for each.

For (4), you probably don't need to do anything; Word paragraphs are usually not indented.  If you would like to indent the first line of each paragraph, by say 1/2 an inch, you go up to the Indentation area, to the Special area, click on the drop-down list, select First Line, and then specify By 0.5 inch.

Click on the OK button, and the Paragraph box disappears.  Now if you click OK on the Modify Style box, your setup will be just for this document.  If you want all your future documents to have these settings, you have to select Future documents based on this template.  Click on the little white dot, and it should show a little black dot, to indicate that it has been selected.

There you have it.  This should take you a long way.

Arch

Writing in Word, and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and anyone else who chooses to run

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I just got started learning to use a program called Scrivener, which is a sort of add-on to --apparently-- a number of other word-processors, such as Word.  Most of the features of Scrivener echo what's available in Word, and it struck me that most people really don't know how to use Word with all its features, so I'm writing this little introduction.

Meanwhile, down at the farm, the Presidential "race" is gearing up.  First the Democrats have to have their own private bloodbath, with Republicans sniping from the sidelines, and then the Republicans get to have their bloodbath, while the Democrats laugh themselves silly, or get furious, depending on what goes down.  Fortunately we've already heard a lot of the nonsense spouted by the Republicans, and they will have to come up with a newer and more preposterous lie to get me really angry.  Unfortunately, the Dems have succumbed to pressure, and begun to use the same sort of clever tactics, such as telling the electorate any sort of lie it wants to hear, just until they get elected.

One of the truly original American inventions is, as a great man said several times: advertising.  The concept of advertising has now developed into a finely-tuned plan for propagating as many lies as possible without getting caught, and having a good story ready, just in case you do.  More money seems to pass through the hands of advertising companies and consultants than through any other industry.  For instance: you've heard about college fees skyrocketing.  You know why?  Because private colleges are in a race to make their campuses look as attractive as possible, which means: more buildings, more sports facilities, more athletic teams, more coaches, more team-mascots-related sportswear in the college bookstore.  Why?  Advertising.  Every student, therefore, has to pay more tuition just to attract more students, to pay more fees.

In Politics, the game has become advertising, all advertising, all the time, and nothing but advertising.  All these conservative antics, and the complete circus to which they have reduced the electoral process, are, broadly viewed, an advertising game aimed simply at the next election, to denigrate their opponents, and persuade the public to vote for their candidate.  So, okay, I'm lumping all sorts of propaganda under the general heading of Advertising, but the word advertising gets across how cheap the whole thing is, in a way that the sophisticated word propaganda fails to do.  Propaganda seems, in its tone, something subtle, subversive, intelligent, sophisticated, and worthy of indulging in, to defeat a clever enemy.  But what we have here is a cheap, expensive effort to confuse the fact, and put someone in place in the White House and in Congress so that Business can continue to run roughshod over the poorer members of Society.

There is an element of fear in politics, from the point of view of the most wealthy members of society, the so-called One Percent.  No one ever got into the One Percent by working.  The only way into that select few is to be born with money.  If you're born with money, or you can steal it, or talk a lot of people out of it, this society has ways to enable you to steal more of it from poor folks.  This is the so-called American Dream: to get on the thieving side of society, rather than to keep working so that you can be stolen from.  Remember that.  If you're already rich, you can stop reading now.  All you can possibly be interested in is to steal more money from the poor by overvaluing your services to mankind, and to prevent the government from returning it to the poor, via taxes.

If you're not rich, you have two choices.  Work hard, and subsidize Big Business: Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Media, Big Automobiles, and Big Military; or organize together to change the system to be more friendly towards workers.  Don't let the One Percent, and it's media slaves, and your idiot poverty-stricken friends who imagine themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" persuade you that being a worker is stupid.  Being a worker makes sense, provided the affluent end of the spectrum pulls its weight, and pays its fair share of keeping the country running.

The One Percent should pay at least 90% of the cost of rebuilding roads.  Why?  Because they own the trucks, which bring goodies to them in their enormous homes hidden away in Connecticut (or Texas, or wherever).  The same goes for practically everything.  If the One Percent gave 1% of their wealth to fix the roads, that would give the working poor a living wage for a year, which would boost the economy like you would not believe, and bring WalMart so much income they could probably start a shuttle service to the Moon.  Excuse me, while I go try to find out how much the One Percent owns ... roughly 2 million a year per person.  That's obviously an income, not wealth.

Let's suppose that the population of the US is 300 million.  That means there are 3 million members of the One Percent.  Suppose they donated 10% of their annual income.  That's 10% of $2 million per person, multiplied by 3 million people: $600 billion.  Divide that up among the 15% unemployed or underemployed people out of the 300 million population: that's

$600 billion / (15% of 300 million) = $600 billion / 45 million = about $13000.

$13 thousand a year would not get a large family very far, but the poorer, single members of my family could sure as heck use $250 a week, no kidding.  Right now, some of the younger members of my family have no income at all, and they would dearly like to contribute at least a little bit towards their room and board.

"Why I want to be President."
One of the harder things a presidential candidate --who is for real-- will have to do this year is to persuade the public that they have good reasons why they want to be President, because the more thoughtful among us knows that the job can bring nothing but misery to anyone whom we trust.

1.  I want to push legislation through that reduces business influence in politics.
This is going to be almost impossible to accomplish, because Congress, by and large, is in the pocket of Big Business.  I want to restrain and restrict lobbying practices in Congress.  Lobbying is a type of corruption.

2.  I want to get people employed repairing the US infrastructure: roads, bridges, schools, water systems, and parks and preserves that have been destroyed by energy companies, electric cables, airports, waterways, and the coastline.

3.  I want to force streamlining of the automobile industry energy standards.  At present, car companies can get away with not improving gas mileage for some of their vehicles by promoting the model line to a larger-sized one.  Larger cars are allowed lower economy, so car companies simply make the car larger, without making the engines more economical.

4.  I want to liberate schools from tying their financial support to student performance on tests, or at least make the rules a little more reasonable.  (Don't get me started.)

5.  I want to alleviate the tax burden on lower-income people.

6.  I want to continue to withdraw troops deployed abroad.

7.  I want to remove the tax subsidies to Big Energy.

8.  I want to regulate Banks and consumer credit.

Word

Man, I'm pooped.  This will have to wait.

Hilary Clinton Announces that she will Announce her Candidacy

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Hilary Clinton, former Secretary of State finally announces her candidacy, and indicates that she will make a formal announcement via a video around midday today, and already there are a half-dozen YouTube videos denigrating her character, and giving reasons why she should not be made President.

I was just complaining about this to my wife, when she coolly pointed out that we liberals do the same thing; as soon as someone throws their hat into the ring, there are ten liberal experts who point out why they would make a terrible president.  To our minds, they’re all jokers who’ve thoroughly discredited themselves, and we cannot even conceive of one of them occupying the White House, and we start going into deep depression over it.  Likewise, to us it seems that Hillary Clinton in the White House would be fabulous.  In the first place, she would not dismantle the machinery of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, The National Science Foundation, the Nation Foundation for the Arts, the National Foundation for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and numerous other institutions that have come under fire from both extremely wealthy conservatives, and dirt poor conservatives.

A decade or two ago, we were not reduced to horror when contemplating the installation of a Republican administration, though they were indeed pretty bad.  But now, with the strange denizens one finds among them, they cannot be trusted further than we can sling a piano.

Let’s be honest: as those on the far Left often observe, the political leadership of the USA has always rested in the hands of the educated elite, and to all intents and purposes, those who elected them were also members of the educated elite, albeit fringe members.  But today, the elite has resolved into two groups: the wealthy elite, who are educated in name only; they may have credentials from various Ivy League institutions, but these credentials are due to family influence and affluence, and not to mental acuity or academic excellence.  They have taken over the reins of enormously successful businesses, banks, investment companies and so on, and have put their friends and families and running dogs in Congress.

The other group is the truly educated elite, teachers, writers, members of academe, working mostly in second tier companies, occasionally in the government, and in social services.  It is this group that continues to hold onto the attitudes of social responsibility.  They believe that high taxes are the lesser of the two evils, the other of which is abandoning social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the remaining items on the blue list.  In the old days, the elites on both sides of the aisle would not dream of abandoning social services.  But now the uneducated elite has adopted the rhetoric that we’re forced to give up these services, because the pesky liberals, and Democrats, have spent more than they raised in tax revenues.  Never mind that it was the Conservatives who constantly oppose taxes.

There is very little to be gained in running for President; I have no idea why Hillary Clinton wants to do it, except, perhaps, the compassion liberals have for the poor and the indigent, and even for the undeserving penniless members of the Tea Party.  (I know a little of what drives them; we were just doing the taxes of our son, who has just entered the work force, and even his meager income is being whittled away by unforgiving local and state taxes.)  Perhaps it is for the fame of being the first woman President of the USA, and who better than she, who tried her level best, when she was only the First Lady, to bring true Health Reform to legislation?  Barack Obama succeeded to pass Health Reform legislation only by keeping it in the private sector.  (The country as a whole has only hearty contempt for both the health care, and the health insurance industry, from the way they have responded to the legislation.)

Mark my words.  If a conservative is elected, with this Republican Congress, they will raise taxes, and blame the Democrats.  And none of it will be used for social services.  It will all go to the military, for higher salaries for Congress, for huge tax incentives for the largest corporations, e.g. Exxon and BP, aid to Israel, and a tiny bit towards paying off the deficit.

[Added later:  I have just seen Hilary Clinton’s video.  It is at times like this that the teen texting abbreviation “OMG” is so useful.  “When families are strong, America is strong,” she says, stealing the utterly empty rhetoric of the Tea Party and other people who natter inanities at times, including, I’m sorry to say, Elizabeth Warren.  If she had said “When poor, hardworking families get the support they need,” that would make total sense.  But let’s face it: there is nothing that the Federal Government can do to make families strong, dammit.  Families are weakened by poverty, unemployment, drugs, lack of education, and general stupidity, encouraged by business and its marketing machine, in turn abetted by the Media, ever hungry for advertising revenue.  The government can’t do anything about that; that ship, as the saying goes, has sailed.  There are very few strings left that the government can pull, to make things better in a social sense.  In contrast, the Supreme Court has decreed that the government cannot interfere with “string pulling” by the Private Sector.

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