I'd Rather Not Write About the Federal Reserve (three more vids - two [?] from Occupy - early October, 2011)

I have my reasons. One reason: I went through a period of reading about the Fed's history, the conspiracy theories about it, what some ballsy economists have said about it, etc. I find very many educated people I talk to know little or nothing about it. (Part of our paideuma?)

I'd say Google "Federal Reserve history" and "Federal Reserve conspiracy theories" and just read and read and watch vids. Then Wiki it and note the books on it, maybe read one or three over the next few months...if that's your thing. The best book I've read on the subject, so far, is William Greider's Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. HERE's an article by Greider from 2009 on the topic.

I have other reasons for not writing about the Fed, and they're related to writing about Ezra Pound on banking: it's an oddly dicey thing, requiring too many caveats; there's too much baggage, and you're climbing onto a vehicle with a ton of unsavory characters, most of them who still seem to have a point, but...Oh anyway. If you want to weigh in on the Fed, go ahead. In the comments section. Set me straight!
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Speaking of the Fed, the closest thing to a Mario Savio for the Occupy Wall Street movement - that I've seen - is this young guy (first video, below), a Ron Paul supporter. I think Ron Paul's particular ideas of laissez faire are probably wrong, or I simply find too many faults with them, given my non-privileged vantage point and current understanding about how people "really" act. I do think Ron Paul has the sanest foreign policy ideas of any of the candidates running, including Obama.

This fiery young guy I find gripping, and you're not going to see this on corporate TV. (The person who titled it chose to put Beck and Rush in the title, but they are not mentioned by the young firebrand):

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Compare this to the tenor or Mario Savio's now 47 year-old "machine speech," from the Berkeley FSM:

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This third video I found fittingly October-Halloweenish creeeeepy. The production values seem oddly high. It's Free Speech in my book, and enthralling. It's purportedly from "Anonymous," and the text fascinates me. I'm captivated by the history of extreme speech, and avidly collect books filled with what almost all citizens would find "outrageous" speech/texts/ideas. Those who've studied the antisemitic and notorious hoax  The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion will recognize some tropes here. I see up-to-date left-wing anarchist tropes here, too. I see some riffs that remind me of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.  I'd guess the writer(s) of this text were influenced by Georges Sorel, although that's a preliminary guess. According to the Wiki link I gave for Mario Savio, above, Anonymous has sampled from Savio, too. (It all comes full circle!)

I daresay I agree with the general thrust of the message; there are many who will want to shy away from some of the more inflammatory rhetoric, delivered in a diabolically "cool" style, almost cartoonishly suave, with hip middle-eastern quasi-qawwali music swirling around in the background. Rather than an impassioned speech like the one from the young New Yorker above, who is thoroughly steeped in 20th century populist rhetoric about monetary reform and the 2008 bank bailouts, this one seems more aptly placed as conspiracy rhetoric. One group alone is the problem...They cause Everything Bad...

I confess a marked squeamishness about the violent undertones, which at times percolate to the surface of the text. Especially "frontier justice." That's what interests me most about this video, uploaded to YT the first week of October, 2011: the sorts of rhetorical flourishes used. This one has some doozies. And I don't understand it: did they get a trained actor to deliver the text? It's a marvelously well-chosen speaking voice for this sort of rhetoric, and there's the now-familiar Anonymous V For Vendetta mask...

Which brings up another point: Anonymous seems to me to leave themselves open to a particular sort of Agent Provocateur: what's to stop the Far Right from adopting the same masks and calling themselves Anonymous? How would the original "Anonymous" group defend themselves?

Another thing we will not see on TV, to say the least!:

Does anyone think I've been irresponsible for including this on my blog? Speak now, free-speechers!

A Few Occupy Wall Street-Related Vids

Keith Olbermann reads what seems to be the first official statement from Occupy Wall Street, HERE.


Not exactly a bunch of hippies, or doctrinaire SDS types (although I bet there's a handful there). Here's a fairly "lamestream media" insider - who's on Fox sometimes! - who talks about her personal revelations about Occupy Wall Street. Not even a Weather Underground person in sight. (Yet? I hope not. I hope it doesn't get to that point, but who among us thinks it almost inevitable? Aye...That's a Q that deserves some pondering.) This viddy is just over 6 minutes:

This one's 1:28secs. Make sure you wait till around 1:00, for what I will caption, "If they have no bread, let them eat cake!"

Actor Mark Ruffalo, from Olbermann's show on Oct 5th. He's not the most articulate actor-activist, but he's emotionally engage here. 7 mins:

Finally, what would the OG be without Noam weighing in? From two days ago, 5 mins:

Occupy Wall Street/the 99%ers/ Missing Public Discussions/A Broad 10-Point Plan!

Buncha hippies? NOT! Check out this.

So far, the mainstream corporate media doesn't seem to know how to spin this story. They tried the They're a Bunch of Hippies thing. They tried Some of Them Have Legit Gripes, But Others Seem to Have Been Misinformed Radiohead Was Going to Appear. Oh, there have been a few other spins. If you're a talking head at CNN or ABC News, someone who flunked out of acting school and are reading what's on the teleprompter, what would you say?

You wouldn't be reading this blog, that's for sure.

The "gotcha" criticism seems to be that there's no coherent reason behind the massively growing protest. Which is bullshit. There are more and more coherent manifestoes flowing out of the movement. The two major themes are: hopelessness and rampant corporate unaccountability. And a third: everyone wants hopelessness to stop and they want banks and corporations to answer for what they've done.

True, many of the protesters have specific issues and grievances for which they seek redress. The truth is: things are so fucked up in the world's richest country that a lot of us have wondered most about not why the massive protests, but why did it take so long to get going?

And I'm with them. The 99ers, that is.

Here are a few items which I consider No-Brainers which should be done Yesterday, or Decades Ago, if not Tomorrow or Next Tuesday After Lunch or ASAP:

1.) Get rid of the Bush Tax Cuts. Are you fucking KIDDING ME? The economy is getting worse and worse, every REAL economic look shows that if you get rid of the Bush cuts and make the rich pay what they did under neo-liberal Bill Clinton - about a 4-6% "raise" in rate - then you start to heal, albeit slowly. But the Republicans, who never met a billionaire they didn't love and want to go to the barricades for (figuratively speaking) can't even do that. No: they think the Poor should pay more! And Obama has been relatively invertebrate on this, considering the stakes, the justice in the situation...And it's NOT a "raise" of taxes on the rich, either! The NeoCons said cutting taxes on the wealthy would create jobs. It didn't. It never has. It never will. It's exactly what Dumya's  daddy (AKA Bush 41) called Reagan's idea for cutting taxes on the rich: "voodoo economics." That's the only thing a guy named Bush ever said that made sense to me. When you hear a talking head say that making the rich pay more taxes will "hurt the economy," it has about the same philosophical status now as the question from the medieval period: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? In other words: it's like Church dogma. To put it plainly, it's unadulterated bullshit.

On second thought, the Angel question seems far more interesting. The tax cuts for the rich is just stale, dead, moronic. It's for morons. The only rich people who create jobs are that tiny minority who gamble and fund start-ups. Read more HERE.

Letting corporations pay next to nothing (after taking advantage of loopholes) was a very popular idea in Europe between 1922 and 1945, which is a polite way of saying it's a fascist idea.

2.) Cut war spending in half. At least! Unistat has let the "Military Industrial Complex" that Eisenhower warned us about get completely out of control. We spend as much if not more on war than all other countries of the world COMBINED. And there is a company in almost every single congressional district, and many have guaranteed cost-overrun contracts, and political sway in their district. No politician, Democrat or Republican, wants to be on the local branch of the Pentagon-tentacle's bad side. We must let these technicians keep their jobs, but there must be far less spending on junk and weaponry and killingry and illth, and more on wealth: better materials, more efficient energy systems, better mass transit systems, smarter ways to ephemeralize (i.e, doing more with less) the use of natural resources, especially in our cities. Use the massive cuts to fund rebuilding of the infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals).

The Pentagon system and its massive waste was mostly a way to subsidize high-tech industry; this was always very inefficient. (How did Japan recover after 1945, and by 1965 become a serious competitor? They gave massive amounts to the corporations/zaibatsu to make things humans actually wanted to buy. They didn't first scare their citizenry that a Russian bear was gonna get 'em and stare at them long enough until they turned into horrendous zombie commies, and then went on to build weapons for megadeath/trash in an effort to keep the economy afloat!) And we're seeing the results of that, now. No intercontinental ballistic missile is going to save us from some dedicated nutjobs with a dirty bomb that works in downtown NYC, Chicago, LA. We need to be smarter.

This one's going to be difficult, because it's an elephant in the room problem.

3.) This goes along with number two above: government, in conjunction with universities, our allies in other countries, private industry, and those former defense contractors need to wage a Manhattan Project for renewable energy. I have too much to say on this, so will save it for a future post, but let this suffice.

4.) Publicly financed elections. If you get enough signatures to qualify, you're on the ballot and will receive equal time on TV and radio as all the other candidates. Also: every candidate gets to appear in the debates. We want to hear as many ideas as possible, even if they're "crazy" ideas. The airwaves are owned by We, the People. Not corporations. Basically, we must get money out of politics as much as possible. The rich will always be there, trying for special favors, buying their way in. We can lessen this greatly.

4a.) It may need a Constitutional amendment, but we must get rid of corporate personhood.

5.) Fer crissakes and in the name of anything and everything that one would consider "holy": End the War on Certain People Who Use Certain Drugs. It's a waste in every sense.

6.) Medicare For All. I've read many studies that indicate we will pay less per person and have healthcare at least as good as those who are insured now have it. But it will be for everyone, and it's in line with what we say we hold as a value.

7.) Big bankers go to jail. You want me to name names, and why they should be behind bars? There are a few guys who really ought not be too big to fail.

8.) The NeoCons who lied their way into a $3 trillion war in Iraq, and tortured, etc: need to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity. None of these people are too big to jail. Or let's see them have their day in court.

9.) Expose the Bush-Cheney Halliburton/Blackwater/gargantuanly bloated Dept.of Homeland Security and their privateering offshoots. Those should be government jobs, held by Americans, beholden to the American people. "Of" and "by" the people, remember? You don't take my taxes, give it to private corporations, and have them spy on me in the name of "national security." And there are so many of these little spy agencies now that none of them know what the others are doing. That's fucking sick and wrong in so many ways...Read William Arkin and  Dana Priest on this.

10.) We need to start a long, serious discussion about the future and jobs. Collectively, we have developed a world in which drudgery in work has increasingly been eliminated by cybernetic automation. There will be no jobs, even for healthy, young, very-well-educated people. Are jobs a way of life? Or is "life" about something other than working a job, any job? We need to talk about Negative Income Taxes, Guaranteed Annual Wages, Government-Subsidized Low-Wage Jobs, Universal Basic Incomes, etc.

Okay, there's a Magical, Mythical Ten. One for each finger. If you don't like me for bringing up one of these ideas - or all of them - I have a special finger, just for you.

And oh yea: I've been a low or no-paid intellectual drone for a long time, but I do read in an exceedingly high number of corners of social "reality." With the 99%ers on the streets and growing, I think I know enough of that part of the corporate American Mind that is fascist to predict that we will in time find out there are/were at least one group who sought to round up every one of the Bad People who protest, because they are "leeches" or "un-American," this last epithet being one of the most ironic terms I see widely used. In fact, I'm not waiting so much to see who it was that wanted these people/me and my wider circle of friends eliminated; I want to see how much money and traction they had. And who was bankrolling 'em...Let us now reflect on Joe Hill, not mourning, but organizing.

Who knows? Maybe the fascists will succeed. If so, I hope you've enjoyed the OG, and I'll see you in the camps!

Have a pleasant day.

Embracing My Inner Neanderthal

In the apparently atavistic need to have a bad time when there's a bad time to be had, I read Craig's List "Rants and Raves," San Francisco edition, every now and again. This seems to me one of the more vile corners of the "Intrawebs," as Stephen Colbert calls it. (Aside from dedicated hate group sites, flunky neo-Nazis, various terrorist groups, child porn, Fox News, and a few other putridicities [I may have just minted a word and if so call "trademark!"] we needn't get into here.) Anyway...

...I was reading Rants and Raves last July or so (did I mention these are some of the dumbest, most racist and most mean-spirited people you're ever going to find on a well-known worldwide website?), and a person that I assumed was African-American (I used inductive logic) wrote a post citing recent DNA findings (probably heard about on teevee?) that any non-African people alive have up to 4% of their DNA from Neanderthal Man...or Neanderthal People...because apparently some homo sapiens fucked Neanderthals. Or vice-versa. (To paraphrase the rock group Queen, they "Got down/made love.") I tend to think the Cro-Magnons (the monicker we went by Back Then) were the initiators, the Neanderthal the sweet, shy, sensitive creatures. But then I have an inordinately overactive imagino in certain spells. Anyhoo, the thrust of the person's argument was these new facts somehow proved non-Africans were inferior. We are tainted by Neanderthal blood. And that's a bad thing?

Oh sure, the olde lines like "My boss is a total Neanderthal: he watches the NASCAR," or "What kind of Neanderthal leaves the toilet seat up when women are in the house?"- we've all heard variations of that. We may have uttered versions ourselves. The assumption being, I take it: they're dead and we're alive, so they were stupid. It's at this point that I picture Robert DeNiro, in his best mafia-gansta-punk (or just check out Mean Streets), saying, "Hey! Don't bust my balls over here! The bitch had it comin' to her." (I strongly dislike the idea that the not-yet-extinct are essentially winners. Got hubris? Do you know how much longer the dinosaurs' run on this spinning mudball was compared to ours? But that's for some other blogspew.)

But are they - those, dear, sweet Neanderthal - really extinct? I'll get to that later.

And not so fast on the inferior Neanderthals. I've been looking into them. And I find them quite lovely people. And if you do art (they did) and have a balanced diet you're good people, in my book at least, unless proven otherwise. They made some fairly advanced tools for that age, so that right there gets us homo faber to sit up and take notice. We've recently sequenced the hell out of some Neanderthal bones and in their DNA it looks like they had the FOXP2 gene, which is required for language! They took care of their sick, buried their dead...they feel like family to me. I like the Neanderthals! I find the more I learn about them, the more kinship I feel. They're the kind of people you'd want as neighbors. And anyone who tries to "neener! neener! you're part Neanderthal haha!" and think they're hurting my feelings? Lame! Next! Try again, sonny-boy. I have fully, proudly embraced my Neanderthalishness. Go Bing yourself.

And you probably ought to, too. (Embrace your Neanderthal, not the part about Binging yourself. Or is it "Go Bang yourself"?) Here's one reason why, and just stick with me; this is brilliant:

Okay, our very close cousins the Neanderthals probably walked out of Africa somewhere between 800,000 to 550,000 years ago. They found the climate of present-day Spain, France, Germany, and Russia quite lovely, the real estate was suitable enough, and they adapted to the cooler environment. They were shorter than us, and barrel-chested. Sorta like Hall of Fame baseball player Yogi Berra. (One anthropologist said that, were we to get one to time-travel to us, all he'd need is a trip to the barber and Wal-Mart and he'd be able to walk down the street inconspicuously. The anthropologist didn't mention he'd probably be more attractive than 80% of the people at Wal-Mart, but I'll say it for him.)

                 Artists and scientists reconstructed this image of Neanderthal woman, from DNA from 43,000
                      year-old bones. Her name: Wilma, after another artistic creation of alleged prehistory, who also 
                      had red hair. IF this particular blogpost goes viral, you will find groups of young men in their
                      twenties in pubs worldwide, asking each other, "Would you do Wilma?"

Under environmental pressures and other evolutionary factors, by 80,000 years ago or so they looked like they did, a lot of them with red hair and freckles. And they had larger brains than we do, by the way. But here's the interesting part: in some recent studies of comparative genomes between our pals the Neanderthals and people living in Unistat, Europe, Melanesia, and the Far East, we've found that interbreeding with the Neanderthals quite probably gave us a gene that codes for certain of the human leucocyte antigens. In other words, we got a huge boost in our immune system that enabled us to keep up with viruses, which mutate very quickly.

Man oh man: I wish there was some way to thank them!

But the story gets kinda dicey from here. The humans probably co-existed in the geographical areas with the Neanderthals (who had about 99.7% the same DNA as us) for about 50,000 years.

And then the Neanderthals disappeared.

Now, it could've been wildly fluctuating climactic change in Europe and the near-Middle East. And the terrain changed too much and they couldn't adapt. There are some highly qualified anthropologists who have offered this lugubrious theory. I'm not sure if I buy it, but I'll keep studying.

Another idea: volcanic eruptions did them in. See HERE for this idea.

Another idea I first happened upon when I read Jared Diamond's staggeringly erudite and engagingly-written multi-interdisciplinary book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies:

"Some 40,000 years ago, into Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their modern skeletons, superior weapons, and other advanced cultural traits. Within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. That sequence strongly suggests that the modern Cro-Magnons somehow used their far superior technology, and their language skills or brains, to infect, kill, or displace the Neanderthals, leaving behind little or no evidence of hybridization between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons." - pp.40-41

Diamond's book arrived in 1997. Even up to 2007 DNA sequencing had most scientists doubting we interbred with the Neanderthals. (Now it looks like at least 90% for sure some of our ancestors hooked up with Neanderthals. And we should be glad they did.) Another eminent anthropologist and public intellectual, Ian Tattersal, has also suggested the "we" wiped them out violently. Other eloquent PhDs disagree. See this video, for example.

So, yea. Sobering stuff. And not without all-too-numerous examples subsequent in the short time period of writing. Think of Cortez and Montezuma. The First Nations on North America. Jeez, you don't even have to seem like another species: just the wrong idea about some seemingly minor detail about some religious idea. Or you were too swarthy and you dressed weird. The Reader can furnish far, far too many examples of her own...

But I like the theory that I call the We Fucked And Merged. The Neanderthal didn't go extinct in the way we usually think about the idea. They were subsumed by the modern Cro-Magnons.

Through love, baby! Oh yea. And it was good.

I said I liked that theory - which is supported fairly well by some - I didn't say I "believed" it. I'm not sure. My intuition tells me, as of the date above, that some Cro-Magnons outperformed Neanderthals in competition for precious resources, driving them out, marginalizing them, killing them. I also think some of the more open-minded and liberal Cro-Magnons sought detente with those Odd Ones Over There. And they had sex, and it was not only good, but recent studies of immune system genes say: good for us.
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Getting back to the Craig's List idiot and my reaction and subsequent looking into the Neanderthals and liking what I saw in them, which is in me: how about we're all in this together, man? And how about celebrating the common ancestor to ALL of us: a black mother called Mitochondrial Eve? Our black father - all of ours, the latest science says - is named Y Chromosomal Adam.

Hell, why not go back to one of the first, if not THE first "true" mammal, Hadrocodium? Or do we have trouble summoning affection for some reason? Anyhow: Neanderthal we hardly knew ye. Hat's off to you!

Here's viddy as icing:

Wall St. Occupation: A Video Meditation

To steal from Jon Stewart, here it is, your moment of zen. (Well, 4 minutes of zen.)

From the good folks at Disinformation, probably via Luke Rudkowski/We Are Change?: a clip of the zeitgeist.

Make sure you stay long enough for the cops.

Here's the viddy:

Missing Public Discussions: Higher Education Seems Near-Broken in Unistat

Let me start with a story you guys and gals (and the always-welcome "Other,""Decline to State," and those transitioning between gender poles) may have heard about, the Berkeley Republican Diversity Bake Sale. Here's a story on it. From The Daily Mail here. And here...in case you missed it while you were out at the opera, or engaged in a marathon reading of Finnegans Wake, or bowling for dollars.

Okay, my politics are pretty far from these young College Republicans, but it's a perennial debate, always heated, I see merits for both sides of the argument, and these were some Republicans who were at least trying to use satire to get their point across. And most of the backlash seemed to me to feed into every negative stereotype about liberal PC histrionic humorlessness.

I noted one commenter on some blog saying what I had thought: I live in Berkeley. The Asian baked goods should've been the most expensive. The closer you get to the campus, the more you see beautiful bright young Asians walking around. Because their cultural inheritance is about kicking ass in homework, studying hard. Especially the Hard Stuff, like math. I know it's a classic stereotype: Asians are good at math. (Yea, but ask the working poor Laotians, Thai, Vietnamese. We're really talking Chinese here, folks. And some Japanese and Indian.)

I look at some kid walking down Durant towards Telegraph and think, "Whoa...I bet she aced Advanced Fluid Dynamics With Topological Applications when she was only 15, just for fun, and I don't even know what that means!" 

I know I'm generalizing wildly, but those kids got into UC Berkeley because their grades were over 4.0. A perfect score on the SATs is 1600, and that kid over there somehow managed to score a 1670; I don't know how, but let it rest with this: these kids are not only freaky good at math, they study - very many subjects other than math, too - like there's no tomorrow. (Or more accurately: like there IS a tomorrow.) I wonder what his Tiger Mom looks like, but I digress...

And I say: good luck to any kid who gets in, whether under some version of Affirmative Action or not. Study your ass off and try and enjoy it. And try and go the extra mile, do the really smart thing and be born into a well-off family. Which is where my point(s) come in...

Widely ranked as the best (or near it) public university in Unistat, in the 1960s you got into Berkeley if you were in the very top of your high school class in California. And believe it or not, tuition was free. Kids under that system started the Free Speech Movement. O! Our fallen world!

Skipping ahead...

By the late 1970s/early 1980s, universities started to run along something like the health care system in the US. You know, "managed care." And look where that's gotten Unistatians: depending on which data sets you look at but I'll even it out, Unistat is around 30th in the world in overall health care, factoring in quality, cost, life expectancy, and other items. It seems Costa Rica is always a country or three ahead of us. We pay more per capita than any other country in the world and we're around numero 30. (I could go on, but that's for some other rant.)

In November, 2010, there were protests at Berkeley because the Board of Regents approved an 8% fee hike to raise the annual tuition from $10,302 to $11,214. And earlier this month, the Regents pretty much said this hike would go on, year after year, until the fees are $22,068 by the school year 2015/16.

This doesn't cover all the other costs, like housing, books, beer, marijuana, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, and Opeth on iTunes, food, ecstasy, transportation, cell phone bills, etc.

(According to one source the average cost of a four year private school is nearly $37,000.)

I don't even want to know how much it costs to go to hoity and private Bennington for a year. It seems like only ten years ago I read that it was the most expensive in Unistat, at a then-stratospheric $23 grand a year...which is what public Berkeley will cost in a mere five years. Insanity! I tells ya!

Studying what you love is great. But unless you're in a totally killer computer science or biotech major, watch out when you graduate. Here's where it gets truly ugly and dire.

Student loan debt is approaching $1,000,000,000,000. Sorta feels Housing-Bubble-ish, doesn't it? And I don't know about you, fellow Unistatian, but lately, every time I'm forced to say the word "trillion" it's surrounded on all sides by Really Bad News. The student loan debt is more than national credit card debt. This has never happened. Better pay that down, twentysomethings!

But they can't. There aren't any jobs. (Wait a minute: did we all wake up one day in a Samuel Beckett play? Because that would explain a lot...)

"Only 56% of 2010 college graduates said they were able to find employment by spring. Even more disheartening, only half of these positions required a college degree." (Full article here.)

(Just try to not think of the other 44%. But I have tangentially discussed a possible some of them previously on the OG. See here. )

I'd say they might get a job driving a cab, but Google - of all people! - seems intent on phasing that delightful and time-honored job out. What? You haven't heard? Check this out.

Just one of very, very, very many jobs that are going away. For good. (I mentioned your computer science degree. You'd better be really good, because India, China, and South Korea have kids that score higher in math than Unistatians, and they'll innovate and program for cheaper. You've been warned.)

A recent study by the worldwide Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development says the US is losing ground in higher education. Most kids enter unprepared, they drop out ("attrition"), and besides, it's a rip-off:

The OECD factors this way: Unistat has the highest (by far) tuition rates in the world. They figure $70K for four years. But then they estimate the young person loses $39K while studying and not working, for a total of over $100K. The OECD average for other industrial countries: $50K. That's not good.

There's a welter of maddening books that show how "administrative bloat," university presidents who make $2 million a year - this is why I compared it to managed care - and moronic things like brand new football stadiums are splurged upon by the upper echelon, while you and your kid (who just moved back in with mum and dad a month after graduating) are saddled with a huge loan (a chance to lessen that burden was squashed by the Republicans in late 2010, while they fought to keep oil subsidies for an industry that saw record profits) and no jobs in sight.

Oh yes: it's become, since 1980 or so, ever-increasingly difficult to get tenure. The tenured professors? I suggest we lump them in with the administrative bloat. Because they - supposedly liberal and for equality and fraternity (in the French sense) - fight mercilessly for their privileges, which are extensive. (I think they are ones most happy this is one Public Discussion that stays Missing...I am being unfair: some tenured professors have spoken out against The System, but they are the brave few.)

The OECD report showed Unistat, among 34 countries studied:
-14th in reading
-17th in science
-25th in math

WOOHOO USA! USA! USA! WE KICK ASS! WE'RE NUMBER ONE! (in military expenditures)

Ahem...

Here's a final little tidbit before I shuffle off for beer:

"According to economist Andrew Sum, the number of college graduates under 25 who are 'underutilized' (e.g, working part-time, working at a job that requires no college degree, like bartending or waiting tables, or just plain unemployed), is over 3 million." (Get a load of the whole article here.)

The rot I barely touched on here is the iceberg-tip.  (Yes, it's a rotting iceberg. You too can mix metaphors grandly. Ask me how!) And I think it qualifies as a Missing Public Discussion. Don't you?

In closing, all my best to the Berkeley Young Republicans Club (or whatever they call themselves), and every kid that gets in to that Hallowed Institution, no matter what factored in. You're gonna need it. Hell, around 75% of the entire population is gonna need it. When a bright kid makes it into the best public school in the country, studies her ass off, gets good grades and graduates magna something or other...and then waits tables while living with mom? That's a telling symptom, folks. And I don't think we can just "walk it off."

Google Gives To Right Wing Groups Now Too

I just saw THIS at HuffPo, and while dismayed (what? I still had some idealism left?), it does figure. To non-Unistatians, check out one of the "think" (and I use that word VERY loosely) tanks, the Heritage Foundation and what they stand for. You'll be informed that Google now is playing all sides (like oil companies and other multinationals), that the Heritage Foundation stands for just about everything I think is wrong with Murrrkin politics, and...probably something else.

But this all points to something I've harped on ever since I moved to Berkeley six years ago, from Los Angeles: it's damned near impossible to steer clear of contributing to the politically odious.

I'm on Blogger. That's Google. Oh, well...If you drive a car that uses gas: oil companies. If you use the financial system in any way...jeez I could go on and on; this is too easy and most of you are probably way ahead of me.

A classic Berkeley story from a dinner party the other night:

Oh, but let me back up a little. First, a bit of background about Berkeley for any friends/readers in other parts of the world: Berkeley considers itself VERY progressive and leftish, a rare thing in Unistat. (And in very many admirable ways, it is. But that's not my point here, now.)

We were all sitting around talking about mutual friends and how some of them seem to reflexively want to tell you about their new diet. Not that they're trying to lose weight, no. In Berkeley, ideological/political "purity" seems to exist as a very difficult yet obtainable goal. I've looked into that; it's a chimera.

Nope: Some friends want to tell you they're a vegan now when they used to be a mere vegetarian. Or vice-versa. Some will suddenly change the subject from something interesting to the personal information that, as of last Tuesday night when they saw a documentary on Third World living conditions, now they only eat certified free-range poultry, blessed by a left-wing rabbi. Or a Tibetan monk. Oh, so-and-so is now a flexitarian, a real backslider. Gee, thanks for that. To me, there are few things more boring than talking about your new diet and what you refuse to eat, and why.

So here's the anecdote: a friend recalls a recent potluck in which quite a lot of food was brought and there were many leftovers, and after the party, the hostess was trying to package plates of food so people could take some home. My friend asked if the hostess wanted to just keep the vegetables my friend had brought.

Hostess: Are they certified organic?

My friend: Uhhh...no. I got 'em from Safeway.

Hostess: Forget it. Take it away.

                                        This dude seems to sum up most of what I'm groping for here.

The thing is, just as in the Bad Book, "There were giants in those days,"* today giants control almost everything - or far too much from my political stance - : the airways (have you seen how your cell phone provider has given to right wing/fascist politicians?), and just about anything you'd consume. And I personally see no reversal of this in sight. Au contraire: the right-wing move to "privatize" everything is going full guns. They call it privatization, because "government is evil, can't do anything right and private enterprise is much better; the American way." I call this bullshit on so many levels it will take a number of blog posts to enumerate how flawed this idea has already proven in practice. Also, instead of "privatization," I call it "privateering." Anyway...

What's so interesting to me is not that we vote with our pocketbook and we very often can't help but vote for people whose values we find putrid; it's the perennial quest for purity that so fascinates me. I find this admirable in some ways, and embarrassingly naive in others. It's a mixed bag. Choice - that aspect in the big bag of liberty and freedom - is quite often illusory. And, to me, this goes for the "choice" between Democrats and Republicans.

And purity? It would almost seem cruel to drop jokes on that, so I'll let it be. (Besides, Terry Southern did it far better than I ever could. Recall the "purity of essence"? The denial of "my precious bodily fluids"? See a 3 min clip at the end of this post from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove if you don't know what I mean. Suffice and albeit: as much given an omnipresence of pollution and other corrupting elements, many of us seem to have a misplaced hierarchy of health concerns? Aye? Wot? Our big brains. Our big, hyperactive neocortices, abstracting about abstracting about abstracting. In a word: paranoia.)

Regarding this ideological purity, the Quest for a Chimera, I'm moved by the intent. I am not impressed by the hardcore ideological standards. It's naive and snooty, and epidemic in towns in which you find outstanding universities. Why?

Because educated young people sometimes "know" too much. (And I blame their professors for only 37.23% of that, btw. Ask me about math later.) That is, they "know" that which is dubious at best. Or they're partly or even mostly "right" but have lost too much perspective. (On some issues I think the kids in their twenties are in the vanguard, but that's for another blogpost.) And I think that's because it's the educated who feel very strongly about ideas that can become strong ideologies. Save the Whales didn't start with a bunch of 9-5 blue collar factory workers in the Rust Belt. These things start on campuses. Because that's where people are privileged enough to care about such things, and they will often give you staggering amounts of information and very persuasive rhetoric about why you ought to care, too.

Another way to put it: you can become well-off enough to worry yourself to death about things that most people in the world can't afford to even think about worrying about.

I've seen people camping out on Wall Street, and I'm with them in spirit; I admire the protesting gesture, and for their underlying ideas I have almost total sympathy. But I also saw THIS little item, and wondered which gesture was more powerful. I think the latter. But bravo to all. We need to pick our fights, enact our values with integrity...but fer crissakes! Let us keep our senses of humor! Without that, we have much, much, much less. Without our sense of humor, what do we have left?

Some of us can also afford to take ourselves a lot less seriously. Less seriousness is valuable and costs much less than a choi-soy free-range free-trade latte with mare's milk from the locavore down the street.
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That which is not forbidden is compulsory. The forbidden comes to you via hardcore Moralists, who care about what you do with your body and mind, even in the "privacy" of your own home. The compulsory comes to you via those Delightful Persons called corporations. Try not to feel asphyxiation pending. Try.
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* Genesis 6:1-4. Some translations use "Nephilim." I prefer "giants" because a football team called the New York Nephilim somehow just sounds wrong.