A Twitter twit that I follow posted this article earlier today on his feed:

• The Economy Will Be Fine. No, I’m Being Serious.

. . . Despite the doomsayers, America will shake this event off like a bad case of fleas. The people shouting “Doom!” the loudest are the very ones who stand to benefit the most.

Hank Paulson is trying to bail out his former firm and his friends. Congress sees a blank check it can amend to death once passed, and pile on more pork to their friends. The presidential candidates use it as a talking point. . . .

You know, there’s a very good chance the economy is going to be just fine–and it seems most Americans also think so or at least are willing to accept whatever fallout from letting some (insured) banks fail or get bought out. Despite the slim majority of the House that voted against the bill, estimates put the number of constituents who have written or called their legislator at 50 to 1 100 to 1 against the bail out.

We could be wrong; we could be headed to a disaster that leaves us all tanning hide for warmth on crumbling asphalt streets. But the funny thing is, an overwhelming number of economists, economics professors, thinktanks, agree that a bank bail out will be the worst thing to happen to the economy.

Here’s some interesting points to ponder:

We already know Hank Paulsen was the former CEO of one of the largest banks he wants to bail out. Old news.

But yesterday’s (Monday’s) market crash–did you know that was caused not by a sell out, but just the opposite: no one was selling on Wall Street. If the economy was about to tank, if people were legitimately afraid of an economic disaster, people would have been selling fast and cheap and cause a crash–but by no one selling what happened was basically Wall Street was holding the economy hostage while they demanded their bail out.

Interesting that this morning before the market opened the president addressed the nation with gloom and doom messages–some economists say in order to destabilize the inherent trust that runs a healthy stock market in hopes on a real crash which would justify the bail out that would help his friends….

Instead, the market rallied with its 3rd highest point gain, evah! Much to Bush’s, Paulsen’s, and Bernake’s chagrin, I’m sure.

The bail out plan this weekend, even the one with all the “protections” Obama wanted, would have succeeded in only one thing and have failed on the most important thing: It would have given Wall Street and speculation bank executives Christmas morning, but would have done not a single thing to help average citizens (in fact the $1T credit debt the nation would have incurred would have devastated the middle and lower classes and forced a gutting of social programs), while also have done nothing to fix the problem in the first place. It did nothing to address the epidemic of foreclosures and property value plummet which is the underlying cause of the crisis. Nothing.

“The people shouting ‘Doom!’ the loudest are the very ones who stand to benefit the most” That sure isn’t me, my family, my friends, my neighborhood, and probably not you or anyone you know.

“Devilstower” has a fantastically complete and detailed explanation of how three of the largest events/scandals to undermine the U.S. economy in the last 25 years have had the involvement of persons like, oh, John McCain, his financial adviser Phil Gramm, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan:

• Three Times is Enemy Action

Alan Greespan is often lauded, even by people skeptical of conservative administrations, as a champion who tried real hard, darn it. I’d known his policies helped accelerate the corporate owned government but I didn’t know to what extent–nor when it all began! I didn’t realize until I started to do some research that Greenspan was appointed by Reagan and was involved in the development of “trickle-down” Reaganomics which sought to tear down New Deal regulations and oversight and increase the flow of wealth toward the top of the social pyramid.

He was also the Fed Chairman under Clinton–but then, he had little to do with the Clinton admin’s balanced budgets and federal surplus. What he was involved with was the continued encouragement of government by the CEOs, (supported by Clinton as well, lest people forget that while he was a social progressive, Clinton was still a corporatist).

Here was the biggest kicker for me: Greenspan was a dyed-in-the-wool Objectivist and even a close friend of Objectivism’s matriarch, Ayn Rand, and a member of her “inner circle”. (Objectivists are anarcho-libertarians; I learned about them back when I was learning about libertarianism. They believe in no government (or at least no government involvement in economics) with a focus on selfishness and self-gratification (in an economic/business sense). They believe people are inherently self-serving and altruism is a “sin” which perverts the operations of a completely free market. This is in stark contrast to anarcho-socialists (like me) who believe in no government but with a focus on collectivism, altruism, trade and labor unions.)

To put someone like this in charge of the Fed is like putting a wolf in charge of the management of the hen house, or an atheist as a church’s preacher. Or a faith healer as Surgeon general.

Is it any wonder….

The first privately funded, non-governmental, liquid fuel rocket reached Earth’s orbit this last weekend!

Phil Plait comments on it in his Bad Astronomer blog:

• Space X makes it to space!

It’s kind of funny, when you go to the company’s Web site, the illustrations of the craft look so sci-fi, or like a page from a role-playing game book.

It took twelve years to get from Russia’s first satellite, Sputnik, to the first moon landing. We have the information, knowledge, and experience from the past to help as well as better technology–they better be able to put a person on the Moon in under ten years or something is seriously wrong. I think private enterprise will be able to get a Moon-walk before NASA’s projected return to Moon goal.

With developments like this, so long as the state of the middle class improves from this current slide toward disenfranchisement and being an even seriously more have-not class, I would like to be optimistic that my daughter will have the opportunity in her lifetime to be able to ride into space. It would be a dream of mine to be able to view our delicate, blue-green home from the inky black of space. *sigh*

Bottom line, we have to be able to get off this planet, and develop the ability soon if there’s going to be any hope for the human race (assuming one wants the human race to be able to survive. I suppose I can accept the academic argument that we should remain on Earth and thrive or perish as a species just like any animal on the planet. Personally, bollocks to that!) Whether it’s because we’ve frakked up our habitable biosphere, or a killer comet, or pandemic disease, whatever the reason–humans are ultimately doomed. It’s just a matter of when: tomorrow; 100,000 years from now. If we can start to colonize space (and arguably spread our locust-like expansion to as yet innocent and unsuspecting planets and moons) we can increase the chance that our species will be around long enough to evolve into more hardy, space-resilient creatures.

Speaking of hardy resilience, our own planet so wants to kill us! Check out this video, also supplied by Phil Plait, on some pesky weather found in Antarctica:

http://view.break.com/487339 - Watch more free videos

Too tired and sleepy to comment on…but it doesn’t need any additional commenting by me anyway:

Despicable arrogance of self-satisfied culture of police brutality on cs’s “Classically Liberal” blog:

• Gang brags about beating crowd.

First, we have McCain wanting to suspend his debate and take the V.P. debate off the schedule in order to “work on this economic crisis.”

Huh. This is from the guy who has said on more than one occasion that he doesn’t know anything about economics. Plus, he’s not on any of the Senate committees investigating the issue. So, what exactly will he be working on? Sitting at his desk, all alone, playing with a calculator? (For the 5th time that day he turns it up and down and gives his creepy chuckle and nudges his aid who rolls his eyes, “Heh heh, look, it spells ‘80081E5′!”)

On a more serious note, here’s some significant info no one is talking about:

First, banks have already failed, gone under, closed doors, got bought out–like Lehman Brothers and AIG. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson does nothing.

Then Goldman Sachs is about to go under, and suddenly Paulson wants nearly a trillion taxpayer dollars (which doesn’t exist, by the way–it would have to be created out of imaginary numbers on paper and eventually owed to probably China) to bail out the banks.

Here’s the interesting part: Henry Paulson worked for Goldman Sachs for decades, was even their CEO up until he became Treasury Secretary! In 2006 his stock ownership in Goldman Sachs was estimated at half a billion dollars. Convenient that when their debt gets wiped off their books and transferred to the tax payers, their stock will rise again. Hmmm.

Anyone see a problem with this? Or is it just me?

Alex Palazzo has a brief blog post with pretty charts letting us know how next to inconsequential opening up offshore drilling would be to U.S. gas prices and economy (although it would be a huge boon to the oil lobbyists working in the McCain campaign and the oil companies they lobby for)

• Let’s talk about the facts - Part 6 - Offshore Drilling

But here’s bit of info that gets almost completely lost in the debate but is as an exceedingly vital component in how strongly we want to make oil drilling a component in who to vote for–and especially where we shoud be butting our tax money:

When the offshore oil fields are opened up, who’s going to go drill it? Is it the U.S. Army? The National Guard? Citizen volunteers? Noooo…. it’s multi-national oil companies. And what will they do with that oil? Will they barrel it up and hand it over to the Governor of Texas with a red bow? Noooo…. They sell it on the international commodities market.

In short, “our oil just sitting off our shores” is not our oil. It’s Shell and Exxon-Mobil’s oil. And it’s a decent bet that very little (and possibly none of it) would go to U.S. refineries to make its way into U.S. gas pumps. Just keep that in mind, McCain voter, next time you want to shout “drill drill drill!” and scoff at U.S. based wind and solar farms.

Side but related note: I’m pleased to have recently learned that Obama is not entirely against increased nulcear energy production! Yea!

An amazing article by David Rushkoff that briefly explains exactly how the capitalist system we work under was a contrived system to serve the royals and proto-capitalists (and is not a “natural” development as the hegemony would have you, the proletariat and the petite bourgeois, believe), and how what we are witnessing may be the beginning of the end of it:

• Print Your Own Money

. . . Unlike local currencies, centralized currencies were biased towards retaining their value over time. Capitalism (in addition to being a lot of other things) is the way people get rich simply for being rich. Capital becomes the most important component in the capital/labor/resources equation. Since the purpose of the Renaissance innovations was to keep the currently wealthy wealthy, the currency was biased to favor those who had it - and could mete it out at high interest rates to those who needed it for their transactions.

What we witnessed over the past decades has been the necessary endgame of the scenario.

. . .

The collapse of centrally controlled commerce and currency simply creates an opportunity for local commerce and currency to revive. For people to learn to work and live together on a human, local scale - as the original free market advocate, Adam Smith, actually suggested. Admittedly, this would be a painful transition for many - but it’s better than maintaining dependence on a fiscal system designed from the start to turn people and communities into extractable corporate assets. (Think about that the next time you’re called up to “human resources.”) . . .

This reminds me of the post I wrote not too long ago in which I discuss, ad nauseum, the failures of conservativism and the corruption of capitalism, and the ideals of anarcho-socialism:

• The failure of conservatism.

And to a lesser although probably more readable degree:

• Viva la hypocrisy!

Warning: Extreme elitist misanthropic opinion follows.

I watched the latest “Real Time with Bill Maher” the other day, and he decried the intelligence of the American people as unable to do the right thing when voting, citing as one of his examples the fact that most people (according to USA Today) believe in angels, particularly interceding “guardian angels.” This news was immediately below the article on the economic collapse. He may also at one point mentioned the fact that Bush got 49 and 50% of the popular vote the last two elections as an example of the lack of intelligence in the U.S.

That stayed in the back of my mind for a while. Then the other day I had to sit in the emergency waiting room and had the privilege of sitting near an 18-year-old mother of what looked like a 1 year old, with her husband/boyfriend/whatever and his friend. She didn’t in general seem very bright, the boyfriend seemed a bit dim, and the friend was a dead ringer for “Larry the Cable Guy”. Including the god-awful voice. Next to them was another teen mom who was only slightly more with it. When we moved to the next waiting room, there was a, what I would peg as a 16-year-old, who wasn’t too shy about expressing her “embarrassment” (yeah) at being a “what’s it called, when someone has sex and, like, isn’t married or something? Oh, yeah, a for-ni-ca-tor. Now I bet they’re all thinking I’m a for-ni-ca-tor” she said as she patted her flat bare tummy. It was very surreal.

Now, let me stop for a second and correct what I’m sure is an understandable misreading of where I’m going with this. My story isn’t done, but it would look like I’m about to equate teen pregnancy with lack of intelligence. I’m not. Anyone old enough to be capable of sex with an IQ of 50 to 150 can get pregnant as a teen. Teens have sex, it’s what our bodies evolved to do regardless of intelligence. We may not like it (I’d prefer if my own daughter abstained until, say, 32…) but it’s a fact of life. Where intelligence would have any role in this is in how the adults in society approach the subject: Either pretend it won’t happen and teach abstinence only despite the facts, or accept it may happen and teach the realistic dangers of sex and appropriate birth control. But, this isn’t what this post is about, although it’s slightly related. I just wanted to clear up that my thoughts on American intelligence only coincidentally was sparked by being around pregnant or child-n-tow teens who happened to be dim bulbs irrespective of their state of parenthood.

So, this later girl and her mother are talking to another waiting room patient who I pegged as what this girl would likely be like in 40 years: not a very sharp tack but experienced, yet without having learned from it. And somehow they get to talking about the girl’s boyfriend sleeping in the same bed…but they don’t have sex. Of course the other woman commented, “Riiiight!” with the girl responding “It’s true! But, it wasn’t an “It’s true!” with the subtext of “You must believe my claim of chastity!” but rather “…and it sucks!” My read of her subtext was confirmed by the mom saying, “Oh, it’s true, they don’t…and she’s very frustrated about it.”

Buhwah?! Yep, you read right and I heard right. The mom was sympathetic to the 15, 16-year-old daughter’s pain at not having sex because of her boyfriend’s “respect issues.” This is obviously a woman who has no idea what a parent is supposed to do and evidently believes the best way to parent is to be your child’s “best friend.” Well, my droogs, I’m certainly not the first person to express “bullshit” at that idea and present as Exhibit A the f–ed up state of American culture as proof that we have way too many parents out there who are doing a piss-poor job of parenting. Why is it we’re one of the most modern, richest, advanced countries, and we have a higher drug addiction rate, higher crime, teen pregnancy, belief in Creationism and literal Biblical interpretation, lowest math and science scores than any other modern Western nation? We have a culture of intellectually retarded people raised by idiots who are now raising their own idiots in a tradition of pride in idiocy.

At risk of sounding like a curmudgeony stand-up comic, the “perfect America” never existed and “Leave it to Beaver” never existed, but there WAS a time when a kid got in trouble at school they got in equal or more trouble at home. A premium was placed on getting education. On learning. Today if a kid gets in trouble at school, the parent will be “all up in da principal’s face” defending their kid’s right to be a slacker delinquent.

We have a media culture that panders to mindless entertainment and shies away from anything challenging. “News” that believes all sides must get equal time, even if that means giving flat-earthers as much validity as legitimate scientists. “News” programs that encourage belief that a frakkin’ bug on a camera lens is a ghost or angel without a whisper of skepticism or encouraging people to actually think.

We have a society in which any sign of intelligence is derided as “elitism” and we make fun of it like the school bully who deals with his latent insecurity about being dumb by beating on the smart kids. We have a bully culture that thrives on war and violence, responds only to fear, and mistrusts intellectuals or education.

Well I for one am sick of it. I’m tired of “who would you rather have a beer with/watch football with?” as a poll question when discussing who to vote for. No one asks “Who would you rather have defining the scientific agenda for the country?” or “Who do you think has the ability to use statesmanship in the complex and delicate balances of world relations?” We seem to be a country of “American Idol” addicted weeble-wobbles with a media culture that has no interest in doing anything other than feed the demand for more idiots playing to the idiots and an education system that has no teeth or ability to make any significant difference. We live in a country in a world that demands intelligent, thoughtful, reasoned leadership and representation. Our very existence as a country depends on it.

I think it’s time we suspend the idea of “everyone has the right to vote” in favor of “you must be this intelligent to vote” criteria. It’s a somewhat fascist idea, but if we don’t stop voting on “values” and “beer buddy” benchmarks and start voting into offices people who are capable and bright, we’re doomed. The school bully tends to grow up and become an insurance or car salesman or real estate agent; the picked-on nerd runs the internet and controls the systems we all depend on. Well, it’s graduation time and America is becoming a car salesman and the smarter countries will before long own and control us. I don’t know, maybe we derve it. We get the President we deserve, they say. Maybe we’re getting the status in the world we deserve as well.

Hemant Mehta just posted a great little piece on his site about a “sermon” at a UU church by atheist Michael Aquino. The sermon can be found here, but I want to quote w/o permission the snippet Hemant used on his site because it’s so poignant!

For the past eight months we’ve put our health and happiness in the hands of one person. Our OB GYN. Dr. Lylah Reyes has the power of life and death over us. Our devotion to her is absolute, almost like a cult. Because Dr. Reyes is not an easy master to please.
Every week she demands to know what my wife is eating. How much weight she’s gained. How her blood pressure has been. How her blood sugar is doing. If we’ve been good, her smile makes us glow for the rest of the week. If we’ve been bad, we pay for it with a couple of expensive days at the hospital.
…
Our obedience to Dr. Reyes bends the odds in our favor just a tiny bit. Once upon a time we might have resorted to prayer, but studies have shown statistically that prayers make no difference at all. It takes people like Dr. Reyes to make all the difference in the world.
I believe we live in an indifferent, uncaring universe. I believe this life is all we have. Some religious people might say this view is nihilistic, that it demeans the significance of our lives. To me that means just the opposite.
It means that goodness, compassion, and mercy are all human attributes, not divine ones. So when I am grateful for my blessings, I am grateful to people like Dr. Reyes, and not to some being out there who takes all the credit for the good things ordinary people do.

A recent panel of skeptics spoke on a panel at DragonCon, recorded and presented on the Sketpic’s Guide to the Universe, features a couple of great stories about debunking. I urge you to listen to them in their own words.

• SGU episode #163

The first story is how the SGU group, early in its career, sought to investigate the Warrens (a famous couple, one a “psychic” and the other a “scientist” who made their claim to fame by creating the entire mythology around the “Amityville Horror” house). The Warrens were very charming and charismatic, and eager to participate. They gave the SGU crew a tape that was their one biggest most fantastic piece of evidence for the supernatural: a video tape of a person “dematerializing.”

So using a video editing deck which allows one to see a wider field of view and various data that you don’t see on the TV, including timecodes, on the tape you could see the person in question in the distance. Then a finger you can’t see on the television framed image approach the camera. Then when the “disappearance” happens, the timecode instantly jumps. The obvious verdict: someone paused the camera and restarted it once the person had moved away. Simple as that.

But once this was pointed out, the Warrens became upset and angry, quoted as saying, “I don’t care what you say, that kid disappeared!” Not even actual hard evidence to the contrary can dissuade some people from their embedded beliefs.

Then, James Randi told a story of how he was asked by a TV station to go out with a “medium” and investigate the Amityville house. The psychic told him once she steps foot on the property, she’ll sense “vibrations” from the spirits on the land. So, they get out of the car, she steps on the house’s lawn, and instantly goes into fits and rolls around from the power of the spirits.

Meanwhile a police car had been hanging back, watching the crew. Once the psychic started her gyrations, the police approached and asked what was going on. Once informed they were investigating the Amityville house, the police told them, “Oh, that’s two blocks down that way.”

I’m listening to an episode of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe where they podcasted from the recent DragonCon, and one of the early cool things discussed on the panel is how telescopes from around the Earth were “linked” together to form a giant virtual telescope the size of the planet, and examined the center of our galaxy. They saw the event horizon and tell-tale evidence of a 40 million solar mass giant black hole!

But what I most wanted to mention was the discussion on the brain and dreams. Prompted by a question from the audience to discuss lucid dreaming, Steven Novella (a neurologist as well as a podcast host) described how a dreamer is in a literally altered state of consciousness (sounds like a “no duh!” statement, but it’s deeper than just the obvious) which is in essence an entirely different you than when you’re awake.

Part of that fundamental difference is the turning “off” of the parts of the brain that compare experience and stimuli to what we understand as “reality”. Thus, when we dream, everything makes sense to our dreaming selves, nothing seems unusual or odd no matter how unusual or odd it is. Unless you can manage to switch that filter “on” while dreaming in which even you then are “lucid dreaming,” knowledgeable that you’re dreaming–although that state tends to last very briefly.

I remember an NPR news article a few years ago where researcher is schizophrenia developed a VR goggles and headphones that allowed people to experience a small taste of what it’s like to suffer from schizophrenia. They described the brain as always running in a sort of dream state at the base of consciousness. But that the “normal” person has these filters, like what Steve discusses in the podcast, which filters out the surreal and abnormal from our reality. But people with schizophrenia don’t have these filters. So any bizarre and unusual idea or image or sensory misfire or thought that their brain comes up with in this constant stream of dream-like processing, their conscious brain thinks is totally believable and acceptable.

On the panel was also a co-host of Skepticality, Derek, who suffered a stroke a few years ago. (Young guy, in his 30s, who one day after dinner just dropped and if not for the immediate reaction from present friends and family he’d likely be dead. As it was, he was in a coma for weeks and had to “climb” back into a recognizable form of conscious wakefulness. Then spend months in therapy and had to reconstruct his speech ability–and even now, a few years later, alive and well, he doesn’t quite sound like the person he was before the stroke.

They mention on this panel how his stroke affected his language center, which is intimately tied to our thought-process in that we think in words and language. When that ability of having language is stripped, reality and thinking becomes surreal and untethered and difficult to make sense of. Derek mentions how it took him a year to even make sense of the idea that he was in a coma at one time.

Something else interesting they discuss, is that the impressions he had while “in” the coma, the impressions of people and words and singing, similar experiences many people who had been in comas report as having, he actually did not experience while in the coma but rather as he was waking up–but he had at the time attibuted to from inside the coma.

Anyway, cool stuff.

With the spiraling nose-dive of the economy due to deregulation and risk-free corporate greed in the news, I thought I’d start this short post with a reminder that banking and securities and lending industries aren’t the only areas that suffer from deregulation: the herbal/dietary suppliments are also completely unregulated (well, except that suppliments can’t claim to cure cancer…that’s about it).

But what harm can herbal supplements cause? They’re “all natural”! Well, a recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has reported that more than 20% of herbal supplements medicine that comes out of India have dangerous levels of (all natural) heavy metals like lead, mercury, and arsenic. In some cases 100 to 10,000 times more than the acceptable level of “all natural” heavy metals.

Back to financial deregulation, I guess I just have this comment someone made to an article on Phil Gramm (the McCain financial advisor and probable Sec. of Treasury if McCain wins who said we’re a nation of whiners and it’s “mental recession” earlier this year) on the subject to add:

82boat69: “Government is the problem.”I keep hearing that mantra over and over from free-marketeers.Yet the 19th century was NOT some “golden age” of capitalism, as if the economy was stable and the stock market was earning a decent return, year after year. Financial panics and depressions happened roughly once every 10 or 15 years. There was outright fraud much of the time, even counterfeit stock certificates being sold as the real thing (read about the “Big Four” in the railroads), because the Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t exist yet.And in the 19th century, the stock market was a playground only for the very wealthy. Ordinary workers couldn’t count on investing in the stock market for their retirement, because they didn’t have the financial cushion to ride through those wild shocks.In the 19th century, old age was a one-way ticket to poverty for many, because Social Security didn’t exist yet. And poverty could mean starvation for your children, because there was no significant social safety net. Failure to pay your rent on time meant the landlord would show up in your apartment and literally toss your belongings out into the street–and call the cops to throw you out. The slum conditions and factory conditions back then were terrible, because there were no regulations governing humane treatment. In medicine, quack cures, such as dangerous radium and opium, were common, because the FDA didn’t exist yet. Many innocent people got hooked on opium or radiation poisoning from radium.That was the “free market” before the Government reforms of the 20th century.Is that the free market “ideal society” you would like to live in?
rinoma Sep-20