Migration is the Unstoppable Force: No Country is Immovable

Tell you what — let’s convene a Blue Ribbon commission to make recommendations about what to plan on doing when the tsunami gets here. All in favor say aye.

Pity for a nanosecond the unfortunate Donald Trump, who has just been run over by migration, something that is spreading across the world like a vast tsunami, threatening to overwash entire countries. It doesn’t really matter that, because he neither reads nor thinks, he has no clue what it was that just flattened him like a possum on an Alabama Interstate (“Why a Rogue President Was Forced to Back Down on Family Separation,” — The New Yorker); because few people in the world, including some very smart people, seem to know what to do about it.

Spoiler alert: It’s too late to do anything about it. Children are going to be crying at the borders for a very long time. Continue reading

Promises, Promises (You Knew You’d Never Keep)*

A perfect illustration of the fallacy underlying the false promises of gene therapy: that you can work on an organism as if it were a machine.

(*From the Burt Bacharach musical “Promises, Promises.)

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times: the best because of what we are being promised, by the loudest and most persistent voices of our culture, blaring from every screen; the worst because what we are actually getting as fulfilment of those promises is crapified beyond belief.

The promises come thick and fast. We are soon to be whisked around our town houses and country estates, totally safe and completely at ease, by driverless cars and pilotless planes. We won’t have to work because robots with artificial intelligence — which is so much better than the real thing — will do our menial jobs for us and cater to our every whim, whether it be dinners of hummingbird tongues or machine sex. (What’s that? You think I’m exaggerating the sex part? You don’t know about the sexbot Samantha, who among other things is being taught how to say, “No, stop!” to amorous approaches that are too rough or too boring? Google it.)

These promises are being made by people who are being paid lavishly to keep the promises coming. They are executing a kind of bank shot — they don’t really care if we believe their promises, they just want to get us talking about them, to create that essential “buzz” of interest that attracts grant money to the universities, investor money to the initial public offerings, bank money to the underleveraged, crypto money to the bare-faced maniacs. The process was illustrated recently by a near-perfect example. Continue reading

It Makes No Difference to the Indifferents

And these days, every vote not counted, counts.

Ask any candidate for public office to explain a poll that finds 98 percent of the electorate despises him, and this will be his answer: “The only poll that matters is taken on election day.” Self-serving? Yes. Dodging the question? Sure. Putting lipstick on a pig? Uh-huh. The thing is, though, it is absolutely true.

Polls don’t tell us much of anything. Many of them have small samples, or self-selected samples (as in Internet polls), or loaded questions, and actually subtract from the sum total of human knowledge. The ones that are well done offer us a snapshot of opinions held when the poll was taken, and that almost certainly have changed by the time we hear about the poll.

But polls are the junk food of journalists — no nutrition, but tasty, with no work required. Thus every day we are told what polls have to say about the economy, international diplomacy, and whether brain surgery should be conducted with stainless steel, or ceramic, scalpels. In that last category, we have recently been informed that Robert Mueller’s approval rating among the American populace has dropped. The assumption apparently is that only popular prosecutors get convictions. Continue reading

Costa Rica: A Love Song

Its scenery, and the profusion of its natural wonders, are not the only reasons to think of Costa Rica as “almost heaven.”

I happened to be in Costa Rica when Jose Figueres Ferrer died, or I may never have heard his remarkable story, or ever have grasped the dimensions of the near-miracle he wrought in his country. Spoiler alert: if you are among the vast majority of sophisticates who today find cynicism an appealing substitute for thought and effort, don’t read any further. This story could be dangerous to your sneer.

In 1948, Costa Rica was just another one of your garden-variety Central American banana republics. Its army spent most of its time beating up on its citizens, its government was incompetent, the people miserable. Rebellion ensued. Ho hum. But it soon became apparent that this was not your grandfather’s rebellion. It was Jose Figueres Ferrer’s rebellion.  Its first shots were fired on March 11, 1948. On April 11, the government gave up and on April 24 Ferrer’s forces entered the capital of San Jose.

Most accounts I have read of the conflict refer to it as the bloodiest chapter in Costa Rica’s history.  About 2,000 people were killed, a thousand fewer than died on the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Apparently Costa Rica’s history wasn’t very bloody. And in the spring of 1948 it took a sharp turn away from the normal course of its own history, and that of every other Central American country, indeed just about every country in the world. Continue reading

Pirates of the Industrial Age

This is what it looks like when investment companies take over your ship. Except that in reality, it’s often more brutal.

They do not wear eye patches, or wooden legs, or carry parrots on their shoulders. Their uniforms are suits of a dark color, they travel in private jets, and rather than bury their plunder in oaken chests they wire it to an offshore account. But they are pirates, make no mistake, who attack the vessels of commerce built by other people, take them over, plunder them, and leave them ghost ships drifting aimlessly, the crew gone and the lives of many thousands in ruins.

Consider just two examples of their work. Continue reading

Run From the Bank

The good news is that with modern technology there’s no such thing as a run on the bank, because the bank doesn’t spend your money, it vaporizes it.

We were proud to be early adopters, back in the day. For example, I was the first editor at the enormous publishing company where I worked to own a personal computer — an Osborne with a four-inch screen and a storage capacity of a massive 64k worth of text, as I recall. I was among the first in my family to own a smartphone, and delighted in its capabilities. When it came to online banking, depositing checks with my phone, paying bills automatically and electronically, I was way out in the vanguard, and happily so.

I have always been a terrible typist, who with my manual typewriter often ruined an excruciatingly picked-out page with a misplaced digit on the last line, one who used gallons of whiteout. A day. Not only did the computer eliminate the agony of the misdirected fingertip, it invited me to play with alternate words and phrases, to see without penalty how different constructions would look on the page, and these were gifts beyond price for a struggling wordsmith. The phone, too, delivered value way beyond its price, acting as my navigator, internet browser, e mailer, entertainer and oh, yeah, it could make phone calls.

I have written elsewhere about how updates have nearly ruined my computer and smartphone. But more than that, the spread of technology oncology (more aptly christened by the folks over at Naked Capitalism “the crapification of everything”) is strongly suggesting to me that, as habitual early adopters, it is time for us to do a 180, as the pilots say.   Continue reading

Don’t Update Me, Bro!

He made “Don’t Tase me, Bro!” a national meme. But computer updates are way more terrifying.

The other morning when I turned on my computer it was not my computer, it was a complete stranger. It demanded a password, which I had never used. My desktop icons were gone, my preferences obliterated, many of my links disabled. My lock screen no longer displayed my favorite family picture. My default browser was now Microsoft’s Edge instead of Google’s Chrome, my default email was now Outlook instead of Gmail, on and on. More importantly all my file folders, including one containing a fairly complex tax return in progress, were gone. When I clicked on the shortcut to the tax return it locked up the computer. Continue reading

Recycling and Rain Forests: Trojan Horses

Here, Trojans, have a horse. It’s free, a gift, and you’re gonna love it.

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, a passionate young environmentalist with my name undertook a kamikaze campaign for the state senate, running as an independent. I had previously labored in Republican vineyards, and had got to know a prominent campaign consultant of that persuasion, who called me one day, having heard of my Quixotic quest.

“Tom,” he said in an avuncular tone (although we were not related), “you could do okay with this, but not by talking about pollution and sewage and agricultural chemicals, like you’re doing. Dealing with that stuff kills jobs, and people know it. You could get a lot farther talking about things that people like and that don’t hurt them, like recycling, and saving the rainforest.”

When an enemy of your cause offers free advice on how to win an election, especially in an avuncular tone, think Trojan Horse, and remember the Trojan skeptic who warned against Greeks bearing gifts. Continue reading

You Can’t Drink (Money) From a Firehose

Using a fire hose to give water to thirsty people doesn’t work. Hosing down a few people with abundant cash doesn’t do the society any good, either.

The Bible needs an update: love of money has been far surpassed as the root of evil in our world by the simple possession of unearned money. Unearned wealth is that which has been inherited, conned, won at gambling in the great casino otherwise known as the stock market, conveyed by a grateful company for hanging out in the executive suite, or otherwise assembled by the manipulation of paper tokens and computer cursors. Great tsunamis of this bogus lucre are sloshing around the world in search of more lucre, devastating not only companies but whole economies, crushing the lives and hopes of ordinary people.

The damage is not just financial, it is psychological and social. People who come into great wealth without earning it, often rot out at the core. One reason is that they are perpetually surrounded by sycophants telling them how smart they are while promoting yet another scheme for ever more enrichment. The self-esteem of the super-rich becomes bloated even as their intellects and their ethics atrophy, and that’s just in the first generation. The sons and daughters of these inheritors tend to be several steps back down the evolutionary scale toward pond scum. Continue reading

Investors Do It With Protection

There are times in your life when you just want to believe there’s a safety net under you. This is one of them.

When I first saw a reference to the Plunge Protection Team, I of course assumed it was a suicide-prevention program for bankers who work in skyscrapers. As our president often says, who knew that it would be so complicated? Or, as he also often says, who cares?

Here’s why it’s interesting. There is no apparent, rational explanation for why the stock market continues to fly so high. No standard valuation of shares — not growth, not profitability, not return on investment, not the price/earnings ratio, not anything — can remotely justify the prices being paid for paper in this crazed casino, populated by riverboat gamblers playing fast and loose with OPM (other peoples’ money), chasing the chimera of 20 per cent returns. Continue reading