Can't think of much too saay

Mostly, it is getting stale.  I am sick of the ongoing and hyperventilating crises and the end of the western world as diligently documented by the doomers and others.

I am not so intellectually puerile as to start listening to mainstream media.

I am completely aware of the government and differing political parties takes on the issue and feel that they are all fantastically full of shit.

I think that this weekend, I will do laundry, clean house, brew beer and play World of Warcraft and pay no attention to the nonsense surrounding me.

See Y'll Monday, nothing this weekend unless something tickles my funny bone.

Don't take it too seriously

The occupation movement is serving its purpose.  It is a starter, not a finisher.

OK, I'm fat, so what?

Again Kunstler pisses me off.

When I go out in America, I see fat people and skinny people both.  When I was in Germany during the last six months of my time in the Army, I got to meet a bunch of fat folks there too.  When I went up to Sweden, there were fat people there as well.

Kunstler is a prick sometimes.  He is a prophet of peak oil doom whose carbon footprint involves so much jet travel that he could personally power a small town for a year.  He decries the shallowness of American suburbia, then goes out and wades in the shallows of personal appearance.

But he is the same as everyone else in America.  Content in their own righteousness and ability to see the motes in other's eyes.  Like all of us, he is a hypocrite.

But I have a question to ask him.  Who maintains the greater sins against his fellow man.  A man who uses the equivalent of fifteen or twenty years of my children's inheritance jetting about the world preaching sustainable energy use, or a underemployed, poorly educated serf with a fondness for Whoppers.

Pumpkin Pie

The eldest has been press-ganged into providing the baking labor for Thanksgiving this year.  He is a dab hand with cooking and usually things turn out pretty well.  He does have a tendency of leaving a frightful mess in his wake, but that is a function of being a novice as well as a teenage boy.

He has been practicing on the willing subjects of the younger and myself.  Pumpkin pie was made on Saturday evening.  Most of the work was done with a happy heart, but he was a touch crestfallen when he was informed that the pie would be eaten on Sunday with dinner, not as a Saturday late night snack as was his intent.

        Pie Crust (Pâte Brisée)

• >2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling 
• 6 to 8 Tbsp ice water
• 1 cup (2 sticks or 8 ounces) unsalted butter, very-cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Cut the cold butter into the flour with a pastry with a fork or pastry blender if you have one available , pour the water into the flour a bit at a time, until it is just sticking together into a ball.

Wrap up the dough ball in plastic wrap and let it sit for at least an hour in the fridge.

Roll out the dough and plop into a pie pan.  Press down along the bottom and all sides. Fit a piece of aluminum foil to cover the inside of the shell completely. Fill the shell up to the edges with dried lentils (about 2 pounds) and place it in the oven. Bake for 10 minutes, remove the foil and lentils (save these for later use) and bake for another 10 minutes or until the crust is dried out and beginning to color.

       Gabe's Pie Filling

• 1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened 
• 2 cups canned pumpkin, mashed 
• 1 cup sugar 
• 1/4 teaspoon salt 
• 1 egg plus 2 egg yolks, slightly beaten 
• 1 cup half-and-half 
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) melted butter 
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract 
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 
• 1 teaspoon fresh ground ginger

For the filling, in a large mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese with a hand mixer. Add the pumpkin and beat until combined. Add the sugar and salt, and beat until combined. Add the eggs mixed with the yolks, half-and-half, and melted butter, and beat until combined. Finally, add the vanilla, cinnamon, and ginger, if using, and beat until incorporated.

Pour the filling into the warm prepared pie crust and bake for 65, or until the center is set. Place the pie on a wire rack and cool to room temperature. 

Flat Taxes

I am all for them, but not the way that you think.

First of all, I am for flat taxes in the following manner:

1. Stop thinking about income tax, it is a stupid way of thinking about it.
2. Everyone in the country is taxed, no exceptions.  A newborn with a trust fund is fair game.  Grandma's nest egg is fair game.
3. Corporations are taxed, no exceptions and at the same flat tax rate on their both their revenues and capital.  No deductions.  And this will include anything made by a foreign subsidiary of a corporation who offshored American jobs to save money on US taxes.
4. All individual wealth is taxed, no exceptions.  This includes savings, capital gains, real estate values, dividends, bond incomes, every nickel earned, retirement savings.  Everything of value is in play
5. No exceptions.  No oil depletion allowance, no home interest deduction, nothing.
6. A complete freeze of capital flight.  Fuck you and send you to prison if you try to run away to another with our country's wealth.  You are keeping it for now, it isn't yours to take and go elsewhere.  On the converse anyone who brings wealth in keeps it here.

I think that it wouldn't change a damn thing for the bulk of the folks.  Most people don't really own that much and live paycheck to paycheck so the flat tax of around 5 % won't effect them.  The middle class will pay about the same.  The rich will get royally screwed and will actually start paying the piper for their lawyer-infested underpayment for the past.

But you have to couple this with a balanced budget amendment.  The money that you take in is all you get.

I think that the real problem is that folks think of taxes as a moral issue.  They are not.  Government provides services at a cost.  Those services can be debated endlessly, but they still exist.  I don't think that a privatized army is a good thing, think here Wallenstein.  Government inspection of the food supply is essential, think here Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".  The FDA is corrupt on the pharmaceutical side, but it does a better job of policing than allowing the pharmaceuticals to police themselves.  And we have all had a great big dose of what happens when you deregulate banks.

All of these basic services cost money.  If you add what I feel are the worthy extras and you have a budget 2/3's of the current.

But this is a pipe dream.  The rich want their money and the poor want it as well.  The rest of us are just tools. It ain't gonna happen.  It is just what I want.

Or: Herman Cain is a Douchebag

9-9-9 or 9-0-9 or My left nut.

Click to get a better view

Thank you for the graph

Solo pago quando ricevo

Now, lets take a look at a quote from Federalist sixty-three (James Madison):

Thus far I have considered the circumstances which point out the necessity of a well-constructed Senate only as they relate to the representatives of the people. To a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next. 

It may be suggested, that a people spread over an extensive region cannot, like the crowded inhabitants of a small district, be subject to the infection of violent passions, or to the danger of combining in pursuit of unjust measures. I am far from denying that this is a distinction of peculiar importance. I have, on the contrary, endeavored in a former paper to show, that it is one of the principal recommendations of a confederated republic. At the same time, this advantage ought not to be considered as superseding the use of auxiliary precautions. It may even be remarked, that the same extended situation, which will exempt the people of America from some of the dangers incident to lesser republics, will expose them to the inconveniency of remaining for a longer time under the influence of those misrepresentations which the combined industry of interested men may succeed in distributing among them.

When I read this, I wonder what President Madison would have thought of the current Senate?

The dogmatic and partisan nature of the current political class is so wide of this founders mark that he could probably only hold his head in shame.  It is a political circus, with re-election money averages of 8.5 million for the incumbent.

I fail to see how the vision of Madison can be transposed onto this greedy monstrosity.  Elections in America no longer have any of the dignitas required of so important an event.

Senators were originally appointed by the state legislatures.  The system appeared to work just dandy for the first fifty or sixty years of the republic.  Then the civil war and our first major national conflict started having unfilled seats and folks started whining about how they couldn't directly elect the senate. Oregon (of course) started us down the path for direct elections.

As part of the process of making the "improvements" the folks trying to fix things noted that:

Intimidation and bribery marked some of the states' selection of senators. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906. In addition, forty-five deadlocks occurred in twenty states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating senators. In 1899, problems in electing a senator in Delaware were so acute that the state legislature did not send a senator to Washington for four years.

I wonder what the do-goodniks who "improved" the system would think of the current open whoredom of the election process.

Spend some time on this one

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/10/22/opinion/20111023_DATAPOINTS.html?ref=opinion

This is one of the most complicated graphics that I have ever seen, but I think that it gives me a better idea of what is going on over in Euroland than anything that I have read so far.

What shocks me is how many, big, and fat are the arrows going out of the USA.

I might even stir myself from my Sunday sloth and go buy a copy of the Times.

Local Affairs

A lot of you won't really care about this post.  It is concerns a local matter here in lowly Vancouver and the State of Washington and doesn't tend really address the big issues that are normally addressed in these pages.  But perhaps not, read on, gentle reader, and I think that you may find a story that you will be experiencing yourself soon enough.

Proposition 1183 is a move to sell off the state liquor stores and license the sales of alcohol to private businesses.  Pro's and Con's are out in force.  The person's opposing the move trot out the obligatory M.A.D.D. mother to explain what a bad thing drunks are.  The persons promoting the move are trotting out cops and firemen (In uniform of course, the firemen are exceptionally fetching) explaining how, with the new taxes and laws they will be able to do their job better.

From the best that I can see, all of these issues are just window dressing.  The primary funders and drivers of the bill appear to be Costco and the grocery store industry to sell the booze once the state is kicked out of the business. Costco alone has contributed a whopping 22.5 million dollars to fund the initiative They have been nothing but smart about it.  They hire big name marketing firms to do the con job. They have engineered the bill so that only stores bigger than 10,000 square feet get the nod, effectively making this a "corporate only" game.

You see, they are playing all the cards that big money has to play.  They define a market niche where there are profits to be made.  They advertise the hell out of it, with all of the false flags and disingenuousness  so prevalent in our society, and use their new found "rights of free speech for corporations" to tilt the playing field.  But in a sense, I find their very predictability soothing.  Nothing unexpected.  Repulsive perhaps, but nothing out of the norm.

The opposing side is playing its usual cards.  A bereaved mother believing that limiting the sale of booze will stop people from being killed in alcohol related accidents.  The liquor manufacturers fighting a rear guard action to allow them to keep selling overpriced booze to a pliable and compliant bureaucracy.  Again, repulsive perhaps, but nothing out of the norm.

I guess there are two arenas where I find the reactions to be much more unsavory.   The whores in the firefighting industry who are pissed that another public employees gets paid a wage when it should be going to him, and the morons who decry any government activity whatsoever.

First the cops and firemen.  These are the guys that are the most likely to be servicing the not -to-unlikely outcome of freeing up the sales of booze.   They say that cost saving from removing the state liquor stores would make sure they get paid.  I see nothing in the proposal that would ensure that would occur.  From what I can see, the money goes to state and local government with no ear marks.  It just goes into the hole.  Same as now.

What the bill does do is state that getting rid of the liquor stores will add 200 million to the states coffers.  and add 200 million to local governments over the next six years.  Gravy to the government is what we are talking about.  That tax money will come in from firing 1,400 employees.  That won't add up to 200 million a year.  It would also close 324 stores.  Hmm. Nothing close to 200 million there.

So the extra money coming in would primarily be from increased liquor sales primarily benefiting the folks who paid for it.  Fred Meyer and Costco.

So, when I hear the "all government is bad" morons, the clueless stooges, working cops and firemen wax poetic about this piece of corporate gravy, it really makes me sick.  It is a bribe to the state and local politicians to turn their heads while the corporations sell opium to the coolies.

To me, it is better the devil you know.

An afterthought
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/18/us-drinking-costs-idUSTRE79G6UX20111018

At the risk of

You know, there are times that I am certain I am not paranoid enough.

I get /. sent to me in my mail every day, and these two gems came up today.

http://www.newschannel5.com/story/15725035/officials-claim-tennessee-becomes-first-state-to-deploy-vipr-statewide

http://www.klfy.com/story/15717759/second-hand-dealer-law

The panjandrums are setting the stage for clamping down to keep their perqs.  Keep your eyes open and stay careful.

Gee, I Wonder?

If this graph has anything to do with our current economic problems.

Toms

I put the picture I am talking about down at the bottom, because it really is a footnote.

There have been a whole bunch of people out there who have been doing the little hand-printed "rebuttals" to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) or 99% movement.  I spent some time thinking about what they wrote, and the more I think about them, the more that I think that they are wrong.

Look, no one is looking down on you because you busted your ass to get through a system that is stacked against you.  Hell, most of us are amazed and proud.  What you went through is noteworthy and to be commended.  I can't praise you enough for your not having a iPhone and living within your means in cheap apartments is cherishing a time-honored trend, students have always lived in cheap apartments (mine was a basement with a pipe running through the living room that cost $135.00/month).

But my question is, why the hell did you have to do it?  What the folks in the movements are speaking of is a society where the maldistribution of wealth is rampant.   It is this maldistribution of wealth that needs to be addressed on a societal level.  The colleges have become profit centers with college cost vastly outrunning inflation.

The student loan game is nothing less than corporate loan sharking.  Not meaning to be overly effusive in my praise, but you are a level headed kid, a lot of your fellow students really are dumb-ass teenagers who think nothing of signing a non-dismissable note which cannot be gotten rid of for the rest of their lives.   I am a cynical old man, but this is nothing less that preying on the stupid. That should be banned.

What the occupy movement should be about is returning a balance to the conduct of our government.  We are over-rewarding the haves at the expenses of the have-nots.  We are allowing the field to be narrowed to those few who, like you are level headed and willing to kill themselves slowly, and the rich who can afford to buy the paper ticket of success for their spoiled children.

Seems Long Ago