God Is God, Law Is Law, and Stupid is Stupid.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The surprise is we haven't seen this "solution" proposed more often as overtly. Here is a lesson on how not to try to make intractable cultural traditions compatible with intractable reality under dubious moral imperatives. But what this really shows is the limit of patience. People hammer away at something that refuses to yield to the methods being employed and rather than change methods, eradicate the problem. This sort of things make it so easy to be a cynic.

Continue ReadingGod Is God, Law Is Law, and Stupid is Stupid.

But wait, there’s more!

It's black Friday today, and I was somehow reminded of Ron Popeil, of Chop-o-Matic fame, inventor of many well-known household products. He has sold more than a billion dollars worth of rotisseries. I noticed that many of Popeil's infomercials are available on YouTube, including this one featuring his food dehydrator: Popeil, who was quite successful as an inventor, was equally impressive as a marketer. He explains his approach to inventing and marketing here. Tonight it occurred to me that even though I saw Popeil's commercials decades ago, I remembered much of Popeil's shtick. I especially remember the audiences applauding on cue. It was somehow effective even though I knew that these people had been paid to applaud on cue. What I didn't know was how the audience members were paid, and it was not with money, as you'll read here. As you can read in the same article, Popeil is now getting ready to market what he characterizes as his final invention, a deep fryer.

Continue ReadingBut wait, there’s more!

Man in coma for 23 years now fully conscious?

You've heard stories of people waking up from comas, but how often is it claimed that a person in a vegetative state for 23 years wakes up and can suddenly communicate with his family in sophisticated ways? That is the claim in this story, but not so fast! If you read the entire story, you'll see that family members are taking the man's fingers and pointing at a special keyboard. He's not able to move his hand himself. He's not able to speak. Does this sound suspicious? Check out this quote:

The therapist, Linda Wouters, told APTN that she can feel Houben guiding her hand with gentle pressure from his fingers, and that she feels him objecting when she moves his hand toward an incorrect letter. Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said he is skeptical of Houben's ability to communicate after seeing video of his hand being moved along the keyboard. "That's called 'facilitated communication,'" Caplan said. "That is ouija board stuff. It's been discredited time and time again. When people look at it, it's usually the person doing the pointing who's doing the messages, not the person they claim they are helping."
So there it is: Yet another case of hope prevailing over the evidence. This same issue of "facilitated communication" once swept the United States among people with severely autistic children. Many parents who desperately wanted to believe that their severely autistic children were suddenly writing sophisticated phrases have been devastated to learn that it was actually a case of "automatic writing," displaying the thoughts and the attitudes of the facilitators rather than the patients.

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William K. Black: It’s time for real economic reform

We are a nation in severe crisis. According to William K. Black, a white-collar criminologist, President Obama doesn't deserve any more of our patience:

The Obama administration promoted Bush's architects of the financial disaster and demands that we hail them as heroes. President Bush was ridiculed for saying: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." FEMA administrator Michael Brown stood by while Hurricane Katrina reduced a single large city to ruin. Geithner and Bernanke stood by while scores of large cities were devastated.
Black offer much more than criticism. He offers ten opportunities for digging us out of this mess. It will be difficult to attain any of these while the banks own Congress, but we need to dig deeply an somehow find the political will. Here are two of Black's points that stand out to me:
Can the Wrecking Crew. Fire the senior leaders of Bush's and Clinton's financial Wrecking Crews and stopping treating them as financial experts. President Obama should not reappoint Bernanke as Fed Chairman. He should dismiss Geithner and Summers and cease to take any advise from Rubin. Replace them with the Reconstruction Crew -- people with a track record of getting things right and being effective economists, regulators, and prosecutors . . . End "too big to fail." These banks are "systemically dangerous institutions" (SDIs). They should not be allowed to grow. They should be shrunk to the point that they no longer pose systemic risk, and they should be subject to vigorous regulation while shrinking. They are too big to manage and too big to regulate. They are ticking time bombs that will cause recurrent global crises as long as they are SDIs.
Here are some of Black's other suggestions. I agree with all of them whole-heartedly: - We need to provide the FBI with 1,000 more specialized white-collar crime investigators. - No more executive compensation looting. - Kill TARP and PPIP. ("Use the funds to help honest homeowners that would otherwise lose their homes because of predatory loan terms.") - Make the Federal Reserve System public. - Defeat any proposal to make the Fed the "Uberregulator." - Create a robust "Consumer Financial Product Agency. - End the waste of long-term unemployment (Instead, of paying them to do nothing, pay them to do public works) Consider, also, Black's Five Fatal Flaws of Finance.

Continue ReadingWilliam K. Black: It’s time for real economic reform

When lyrics were not as self-absorbed

There are still many incredible lyricists who write about a wide variety of issues, but it seems to me that today's typical lyrics (at least those that on can hear broadcast on mainstream radio) tend to be self-absorbed: songs about a small social circle consisting mostly of me and what I want and what I'm feeling about me, and aboutyou and what you think of me. Maybe it's more difficult to write about political change these days because our problems today seem so much more intractable. Back in the 70's I was part of a eight-piece jazz-rock band we called "Ego." Yes, many of the tunes we played were about falling in love and breaking up, but we also played songs dealing with the need for social change. One of those tunes was called "Dialogue," by Chicago. It consisted of a dialogue between Peter Cetera (also the bass player) and Terry Kath (an extraordinary guitar player). As I listened to "Dialogue" this morning, I was transported back to an earlier day when more of the music that was played on the radio challenged us to think and to change. The consolidation of the mass media makes it much less likely that you'll hear these kinds of ideas when you listen to music on the radio, but you could hear such ostensibly political lyrics in the past, and they planted powerful seeds in some of us. Here is the two-part dialogue that so moved me: Part I Are you optimistic 'bout the way things are going? No, I never ever think of it at all Don't you ever worry When you see what's going down? No, I try to mind my business, that is, no business at all When it's time to function as a feeling human being Will your Bachelor of Arts help you get by? [more . . . ]

Continue ReadingWhen lyrics were not as self-absorbed