Recycling and Rain Forests: Trojan Horses

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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

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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

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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 →

The Fog of (the New Cold) War

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When we find ourselves surrounded by thick fog that obscures familiar landmarks and directional signs, we need help to get home, or to the pub, whichever comes first. It happened to me in the mountains once, and I was glad for the company of my faithful dog, who promptly abandoned me. I found him home by the fire when I eventually made it there.

Natural fog is one thing, it comes and goes, but the industrial smokescreens being laid down these days by our politicians and disinformation sources have become chronic. We need either a very good dog, or some other tool, in order to navigate them. In these cases, logic, as applied by an experienced critical mind, is often the equivalent of a functioning GPS unit in the wilderness. It might not get you home, but it can show you where you are.

A recent case in point was the alleged attack on a retired spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England, two months ago. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a park bench in the center of Salisbury. The smoke generated around the incident was the equivalent of a continental forest fire, it could be seen from space, yet much of it can be dispersed by elementary logic. Continue reading →

Artificial Intelligence: Yet Another Oxymoron

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Flippy, the burger-flipping artificially intelligent robot, was the future of the fast food industry. For about four hours.

“The future is here,” proclaimed the Pasadena Star-News and about a hundred other MSM news sources — “Flippy” the burger-flipping robot was about to go into service at a fast-food restaurant in Pasadena, and in 50 more locations soon afterward. It was morning in America’s fast food joints: no more demands for a living wage, no more employee no-shows, no more first or last jobs for desperate Americans. It was, all the news accounts agreed, going to be glorious.

(Just as an aside here, may I say that there is no class of person for whom I feel more empathy than managers of fast food restaurants. Trying to keep a 24/7 restaurant open and functioning with a crew of kids has got to be qualification for admission to heaven based on having done your time in hell. I would rather work as a wrangler for a precision  drill team of cats.) Continue reading →

Dear Reader

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I’ve been away for (another) two months, but I know there is still a reader here. I heard from him yesterday.

Tom, it’s been a long while since we have heard from you. With so much to write about I can’t help but wonder if you are well. I’m so very fond of your work. Hope you are doing okay. Don’t think for a second that what you do isn’t important. Reading you keeps many of us sustained in this time of madness. please come back to us.

Talk about mixed feelings. I am immensely grateful for the concern, and for the compliments. At the same time I feel shame for having abandoned you.

Which is odd, because nobody signed up for this. We don’t have an explicit contract, you and I, and yet when people have been hanging out together for years, and one of them suddenly leaves, does he not owe an explanation? Of course he does. We don’t sign contracts to become friends, either, but we know when the terms of friendship have been violated.

So I want you to know, dear reader, that my absence from you has not been casual, or uncaring. There has been a distracting illness — not mine, but in my family — and I am tempted to blame everything on that. But that would be incorrect. Continue reading →

The Empire Strikes Fat

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Seems we are going to have to think outside the box to keep our fighting forces up to strength.

It does not take a particularly jaundiced eye to see that the American Empire is foundering. And now, to the long and growing list of wheels coming off the juggernaut, comes a new and startling piece of evidence of the decline and fall, one that is a profound shock to those swaddled most deeply in the myths of American exceptionalism.

Let’s first review, briefly, the last few years  in the life of the Empire That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, setting aside the fact that it has started an endless progression of wars that it has been unable to win or, in many cases, end. This has in no way hampered the Empire’s (illogically named) defense budget — it spends twice as much on war, each year, as its two principal adversaries, Russia and China, combined. With the result that: Continue reading →

The Russians Are Not Coming

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Although Hillary and Putin both like the idea conveyed by this illustration, it is not the way it happened. By a long shot.

Turns out it is possible to overstate the impact the Russians had on our last presidential election. According to the latest Mueller indictments, the Russian government spent as much as $1.25 million dollars a month to influence the 2016 elections. Imagine! If they had kept that up for only 12 and a half years, they would have almost matched what Jeb Bush spent before dropping out of the primary races in February. After spending $150 million, Jeb had managed to win the support of most, but not all, of his extended family. His mother remained on the fence. Continue reading →

The Freedom Train is Leaving

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Refugees from Syria on a freedom train to somewhere. Migrants like this all over the world are leaving countries where there is no hope of living a decent life, and they’ve added a new country to the list of those to be shunned. (Photo by electronicintifada.net)

They come all day, starting before full daylight. They come to the end of the road in taxis, or in beat up old cars driven by friends. They come alone sometimes, but usually in pairs or in families, often families with small children. When their transport has left, they gather their suitcases and cardboard boxes and struggle into the woods. Their goal is a shallow gully not far down the well-trodden path. With many a fearful glance behind them, looking for those who are out to intercept them, they reach the gully.

On the other side stands a uniformed police officer. He greets them politely. He tells them that they are about to cross an international border, and by so doing will have broken the law, and will be taken into custody. That is their plan. Being arrested on the other side is far preferable to the increasing levels of harassment, discrimination, forced deportation and overt bigotry they are experiencing on this side. And so they cross, relieved to be in a kinder country, and willingly submit themselves to its bureaucracy.

Here’s the kicker: these refugees are running away from the United States of America, seeking safety and a better future in Canada. Continue reading →

Advice to a Young Friend Running for Congress

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As long as you’re running for Congress you will be spending six hours a day on your smartphone, dialing for dollars. Did they tell you that in the recruiting brochure?

First of all, I’m glad you’re doing it. You’re young, energetic and smart, and seem to have a moral compass that can still find true north, so you probably won’t do very much harm to anybody. At first. I’m glad you’re running as a Democrat, because the wind is at your back this year. But I have to tell you — you, and your party, are blowing it. Hugely.

You’re doing all the right things that all the right people tell you to do. You’re spending six hours a day and more on the phone, begging strangers for money, answering their inevitable question: “Where do you stand on (fill in the special-interest blank)?” Then with the little time you have left, you’re spending the money on consultants: fundraising consultants, social-media consultants, data-analysis consultants, communication consultants,  campaign-management consultants, consultant consultants. And after all the meetings you need to have with them, you rarely get a chance to go to a public event. Continue reading →