1/20/12 Nothing Like a Good Blab Posting
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
"Don't do that."
An old one-liner from Henny Youngman. But true all the same. I mean, would you stick your hand in the fire if it didn't hurt? Maybe some would, but their hand would still get burnt to a crisp and then where are you? The problem of sticking your hand in the fire is not the pain, but losing your hand. Pain is the warning signal that maybe you shouldn't be doing that.
It's like another old gag line, "Pain hurts." Good thing it does. Better some pain to make you stop than painless self-destruction. Pain is your body's way of saying, "Hey, cut it out!" It's mother nature's corporal punishment for doing stupid things.
Now this may seem like belaboring the obvious, but the same sort-of idea applies to all sorts of things. Better to have a warning signal that something is wrong than letting things fail catastrophically. That's what the idiot lights on the dashboard are for. Though they might be more effective if they sent an electric shock through the seat.
People tend to think things work a certain way and will keep on working that way. "Ignore it. It'll go away." And so people often tend to ignore warning signs. Or cover them up. Like a bit of black tape over the check engine light. That's like painkillers for cars.
I thought there was going to some kind of lesson in all this, but it eludes me. Like looking for a hidden meaning that just isn't there. Which leads to my segue, as contrived as it might be, to a quote from Sigmund Freud about dream symbolism.
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Though that reminds me of another line about cigars from the final episode of Cheers, "There's nothing like a good cigar. And this is nothing like a good cigar." So everywhere it says 'cigar' you can put in 'Blab posting'.
9/21/11 If I Were Delusional, How Would I Know?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
—Philip K. Dick
"If a thousand men believe a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
—Voltaire
"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe them."
—George Orwell
"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
—H.L. Mencken
"Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day."
—Sam Goldwyn
8/30/11 I Think Therefore I am, Though Thinking Doesn't Make it so
The picture above is my own version of something I saw recently on Zero Hedge. I thought it was pretty funny and so reprised it. Whether this is a quote or a saying or just plain plagierism I leave for the reader to decide. But since I didn't originate the basic idea I'm filing it under Quotes and Sayings.
Whatever the case, there's no denying it is what it is. Why? Because it is. Is that it? It is.
7/15/11 You Can Quote Me Quoting Them
And now, a few quotes without any commentary. Just a little food for thought, as they say.
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
—C.S. Lewis
"The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."
—H.L. Mencken
"The sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle."
—Alexis de Tocqueville
"I was born in a free country, but now it is a democracy."
—Walter Williams
4/26/11 More Ugly Truth
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
—Benjamin Franklin
And how much money have we been voting ourselves? Quite a lot actually. A lot more than we have, or are willing to come up with. That shortfall is the deficit you've no doubt heard people talking of. In 2010 the deficit was $1,400,000,000,000.
But that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The United States government (USG) has been running deficits for a while now. In other words, add up all the deficits USG has never repaid and you get the debt, which is a good deal more than the deficit. How much more? Here's a chart. Scroll down to see how much debt USG owes.
Quite a scroll, eh? This is only what USG has borrowed, not what it has promised people it will provide via Social Security, Medicare, and so on. These promises are expected to grow faster than the amount of money people make and pay taxes on. Which already doesn't cover spending.
One way or another something's got to give. And someday it will. What and when is anyone's guess. It's as much politics as economics and folks have a hard time predicting one let alone both. Which leads us to our parting, bonus quote:
"The mystery of government is not how Washington works, but how to make it stop."
—P.J. O'Rourke
4/2/11 Government Kool-Aid
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
—Yogi Berra
Official government figures are a funny thing. For instance, if the price of food, gas and housing go up, it doesn't count as inflation. At least not in the official statistics, despite your having to pay more in the real world where it does count. Yeah, there's theory and there's practice.
Not only do they cherry pick the data for inflation, they do it for unemployment, too. If you've been out of work, can't find a job and just give up looking, you're no longer unemployed. According to the government anyway. Statistically you don't exist. So take heart, while you may be jobless at least you're not unemployed.
You gotta love the way government figures things. They're so... optimistic. But no matter how optimistic you are a glass that's half full is still half empty, too. Though if you're the government you could claim the empty half has quit trying and so doesn't count.
But where it gets real fun is when the government economists take all these questionable figures and insert them into their formulas to determine what their policies should be. From this they expect to get the correct answer. Oh well, it works in theory anyway. Is it any wonder economics is called the dismal science?
3/16/11 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Truth
"The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
—Miss Prism from 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde
To own up, that's one of the things I like about reading detective stories and murder mysteries. The good guys win and the bad guys get caught. Well, usually. Anyway, I like it when wrongdoing is punished. And with fiction the author is in control of the outcome so that's usually the case.
That's not true with history where the author has no control of the outcome. What happened happened. Sometimes the good guys win and sometimes they lose. Except there is one thing about that — who decided who were the good guys and who were bad guys? That's something historians can, if not control, at least influence the reader about.
Ask yourself, was Alexander the Great a brave, conquering hero or a reckless, subjugating villain. How about Napoleon, or Ghengis Khan? Didn't all try to conquer the world by force of arms? Is your feeling about each different? I imagine Mongolians view Ghengis Khan a lot differently than Russians do. I guess it all depends on which side you were on.
They say history is written by the winners. Face it, winners don't like to admit they might be history's bad guys. Which raises the question, how much of history is just the facts and how much is partisan spin.
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
—Winston Churchill
2/17/11 Rob the Community Chest and go Directly to Jail? Not a Chance
The headline of a current Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi asks the question, "Why isn't Wall Street in Jail?" Here are a couple of snippets:
Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars....
...the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on.
Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year.
Which brings to mind something Joseph Stalin is purported to have said about the state's mass executions,
"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
To paraphrase Uncle Joe Steel as it applies to the treatment of Wall Street crimes versus the treatment of everyone else,
"Stealing $100 is a crime. Stealing a billion dollars is a statistic."
Normally I don't get into current affairs and steer clear of controversies. This is supposed to be a fun site highlighting my illustrations. But Matt Taibbi's article is too good to ignore. The only caveat is it does contain some raw language.
1/24/11 Backfire
"When the facts change I change my mind."
—John Maynard Keynes
If you believe in rationality you might subscribe to that idea. But do folks really act that way? Do people change their opinions when new information comes to light disproving or contradicting what they previously believed? Not as much as you might think. To go along with the confirmation bias there's a little thing called backfire. Which is explained in this snippet from a Boston Globe article by Joe Keohane:
...Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs...
...[People] already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
"The general idea is that it's absolutely threatening to admit you're wrong", says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon – known as "backfire" – is "a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance."
I guess another saying, or joke, is more likely to be true and why there's just no point in arguing with some people...
"Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up."
1/1/11 Happy New Year!
2010 is now a thing of the past. Gone but not forgotten, unlike many a child actor from long gone sit-coms who are forgotten but not gone. I could go for a year in review, but I won't. Mainly because I wasn't paying attention.
What does 2011 have in store? Well, it starts on 1/1/11 which is pretty meaningless, really. As for the rest, stay tuned. It could get interesting. Though as goes the old Chinese curse...
"May you live in interesting times."