Beware the Coming [insert non-threat] Pandemic!!!
As you know, we’re all preparing for the devastating Swine Flu epidemic, which has reached our shores and infected eighty-something people.
It is destined to be the latest pandemic, taking its place alongside the millions of deaths America suffered during the BIRD Flu epidemic, West Nile epidemic, SARS epidemic, Mad Cow Disease…the list goes on, all of them heirs to the mass death of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.
And they all have this subtle trait in common:
They turned out to be sheer nonsense.
Nobody in the US has been killed by Bird Flu. Only already-sickly people in third-world countries like China, where a common cold can kill you, too.
A few Americans have actually died from West Nile, but only 1/10th the number who died from swimming pools, far less than 1/100th of the number who died from the common hospital infection, staph, in the same period.
Even in third world countries, SARS has a mortality rate of less than 10%. In the US, its mortality rate is ZERO.
And the same is true of Swine Flu. At the time of this writing, 80+ Americans have gotten it, and NONE have died. The normal flu is more dangerous.
And, of course, they can’t prove anyone’s ever really even GOTTEN mad cow, much less died from it.
For decades, people have been claiming to recognize what the next big 1918 Flu Pandemic heir will be.
But they always have to refer back to 1918, because 91 years ago is the last time it happened.
Why?
Because medical technology is so advanced that it’s not likely to EVER happen again.
In 1918, most of the ideas and techniques now ingrained in medicine were in their infancy. It was, really, the last good opportunity for a big pandemic to happen. Now, it’s too late.
So why do we keep hearing that the Next Big Epidemic is coming?
The same reason we keep hearing that we’re in imminent danger from asteroids and global warming:
Fear Equals Funding.
Because of budget-padding witch doctors at places like the CDC and NIH.
See, those guys have EXACTLY the same motivations as a tobacco scientist; Money.
Except that they have an even worse dependency upon money than a tobacco scientist. They have a budget that depends almost purely on fear.
DC bureaucrats actually use the phrase Fear Equals Funding, when discussing why they make things they know to be unlikely or harmless sound like doomsday.
Do a quick search for “CDC budget request” or “NIH budget request” on Google. You get results like this fearmongering from the Director of NIH, asking for more money for the next budget:
New threats and diseases constantly emerge. For example, soldiers suffering from blast injury highlight the importance of additional knowledge on traumatic brain injuries. Infectious diseases remain among the leading causes of death worldwide. More than 30 newly recognized infectious diseases and syndromes emerged in the last three decades alone, including HIV/AIDS and SARS. Infectious diseases that once seemed to be fading, such as tuberculosis and malaria, have resurged. New drug-resistant forms of once-easily treated microbial infections are emerging at a rapid pace. New strains of influenza occur each year. There is concern that a new influenza virus may emerge with the capacity for sustained human-to-human transmission, possibly triggering a pandemic similar to what occurred in 1918, 1957, and 1968.
Doom and gloom fearmongering. He is STILL robbing the taxpayer with the SARS bogeyman, years after Southpark mocked its irrelevantly low mortality rate:
Stanley, listen to me. I have SARS. There’s only a ninety-eight percent chance that I will live.
Likewise, you can find the CDC terrorizing the public with threats of “avian flu”, even though it’s caused ZERO deaths:
“Concerns that avian influenza (H5N1) could become the next influenza pandemic”
They also emit girlish shrieks about SARS and West Nile, in the same budget request.
The Swine Flu panic is not about saving people from imminent death, but about greed.
NIH/CDC official = Tobacco Scientist
The “Global War On Terror” is a Lie
The neocon philosophy of cowardice demands that we surrender our essential freedoms, in return for the promise of temporary safety
The neocons are parroting Conservative words, loud and shrill, these days. Suddenly they’re against the very same socialism and police state that they defended when Bush was doing it.
But you can be reminded that they’re neocon frauds, when they start fearmongering “terrorism”, which they seem unable to stop doing.
Recently, it’s been this insane pretense that the Somali pirates are terrorists.
Of course, you and I and every other rational person know:
Terrorists commit random acts of destruction/killing, to create an environment of fear, in order to work toward some political goal.
Pirates attack vessels in order to obtain wealth, either by looting or ransom. In a way, they are the opposite of terrorists.
The Somali ship-stealing guys are doing nothing but attacking vessels for loot/ransom. They are pirates, not terrorists.
Really, given the two definitions above, it takes a fool incompetent in the subject to confuse them.
Great way to identify some of the neocon fakes in talk shows and punditry.
But it doesn’t stop with the pirates.
They still pretend the resistance fighters in Iraq are terrorists.
Resistance fighters attack a foreign occupation force, in order to drive it from their country.
That’s what is happening in Iraq.
But the charade isn’t just one of pretending anything they don’t like is terrorism. The neocons also have double standards about whether terrorism is bad.
They support, for example, the training and funding of terrorists, as long as their mass murder is useful to us.
- When we trained and supplied Al Qaeda in the 1980s in Afghanistan, it was at their behest.
- When we supported Saudi Arabia’s building of Wahabi hate schools all around Asia in the 80s and 90s, the neocons were the reason.
- When we backed, and funded, the Pakistani fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship’s overthrow of the Afghani government by the Taliban, it was to the joy of the neocons.
Of course this hypocrisy extends beyond terrorism…the neocons fought to keep us openly supplying Weapons of Mass Destruction technology to Saddam Hussein in the 80s. But we’re dealing with their fake Terror War here, not their general sociopathic nature.
So, getting back to the topic, the neocons have undermined democracy in the middle east, refusing to deal with the elected government of Palestine, claiming they won’t support former “terrorists” in government…and yet backing, no matter what war crimes they commit, the former terrorists who run the Israeli government.
Blowing up buildings full of innocents in a land where you were not even born, as the future rulers of Israel did in the 1940s, is OK, but blowing up soldiers occupying your homeland and keeping you in concentration-camp conditions today is “terrorism”
Actually, it’s not. They’re resistance fighters, of course. Whether the Jewish people who moved to Palestine in the 1940s and started killing people there count as resistance fighters (you’re supposed to be locals fighting foreigners) is debatable. But there’s no question the Palestinian fighters are resisting foreign occupation.
Side Note: Precedent
We were all disgusted when the mass-murdering Russian government started calling resistance fighters “terrorists”, to parrot Bush. The problem is that Bush set that precedent, by abusing the word just as laughably.
Precedent is one of the practical reasons to not blindly defend “your guy” when he’s doing something wrong. Bush built many of his abuses on Clinton’s precedents. Clinton coined the phrase “war on terror”, and attacked both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to distract from domestic problems, while claiming to fight terrorists…a perfect lead-in for Bush. Likewise, Obama’s current socialist agenda, nationalizing banks, spending trillions on fake “stimulus”, is identical to what Bush was doing before he left office.
But, getting back to terrorism, precedent is its most ugly with the case of Obama using the police state Bush created, for his own domestic agenda. Verbally supporting liberty is literally being described in official government documents as terrorist, by the new, unconstitutional, and definitively police state Department of Homeland Security.
On the other hand, he has stopped referring to our inconsistent, hypocritical foreign policy as a “war on terror”, to the horror of the neocons, who are essentially saying this amounts to treason.
There is no actual Global War on Terror. Just a bunch of dishonest men advocating evils that they appear to believe will benefit themselves, while using fear to get you to submit to it. THAT is preying upon terror, as much as anything.
Unemployment Benefits INCREASE Unemployment
The recent increases in unemployment benefits, rather than helping fight unemployment, have actually increased unemployment dramatically
Subsidies Cause Surplus
If you wanted to have too many apples, you could simply get the government to pay billions of dollars to apple growers. You can do this with almost anything; it’s called a subsidy.
Aside from the many problems intentional subsidies always cause, there are many “unintentional” subsidies. Perhaps the worst of these is the unemployment subsidy.
When you give people money for each apple you grow, more people choose to grow apples, and apple growers choose to make more. It creates an imbalance, producing more apples than the society really finds worthwhile.
When you give people money based on how unemployed they are, you likewise cause more people to be unemployed, and people to be unemployed longer. I don’t even need to go into how that creates an imbalance, as (unlike apples) more unemployment is obviously, universally, bad.
Some people, mostly those who have little real-life experience (like a Kennedy or Bush family member) might say “But nobody would CHOOSE to stay unemployed, just for benefits”.
Second, they’re wrong…but I’ll get back to that.
First
FIRST, it doesn’t matter if nobody does it on purpose. When the Fed raises interest rates just 0.25%, fewer people buy houses. Not one human being actually says “I am not buying this house, because the Fed raised rates by a fraction of one percent”. It isn’t even raising home loan rates (it has no control over those), just the rate at which it lends to banks. Yet the trickle-down effect is fewer homes bought, in part because home loan rates creep up a tiny bit.
The same is true of unemployment. There is a trickle-down impact, over the span of 300,000,000 people, where some stay unemployed longer, and more BECOME unemployed, because unemployment is subsidized. As even a tiny increase in home loan interest rates invisibly pushes a few people over to the side of not buying a house, an increase in unemployment subsidy pushes a few people over into being unemployed.
Over the span of hundreds of millions of people, that is dramatic, in both cases.
And now we can get back to “second”:
Second
The ivory tower “nobody would choose to stay unemployed” people are wrong.
People DO choose not to work because they know they have an unemployment buffer.
They choose not to work as hard or otherwise volunteer to be the one laid off, choose not search as hard, pass up jobs they would otherwise take, and even actively stay unemployed, because of the unemployment benefits.
We who have real-life experience probably ALL, right now, know people who are doing this. Many of you, in fact, probably have done it. I am a consultant, so I don’t get unemployment benefits, but I’m sure it would influence me if I did.
I certainly have friends who actively cite the unemployment benefits as allowing them to take their time working. I even know someone who says they are glad the benefits have been extended, as they will be able to go for a year without looking for a job, now.
Sure, most states have some sort of fake attempt to require people to look for and take jobs. But there’s no way to actually make this work. It would cost more than unemployment benefits provide, to actually verify all the claims people make on their “looked for a job” forms. And any cheaper means of proving it would be draconian against all the people who were honest.
The Unemployment Subsidy
So yes, that’s exactly what the Liberals’ unemployment extension has done:
Increase unemployment, by subsidizing it.
We will have higher unemployment rates, and suffer this depression longer, because of the benefit increases. Yet another example of government’s coercive “help” making the problems they attack worse, instead of better.
Going Green is Bad for the Environment
Many of the wild claims made by Green lifestyle advocates are actually worse than doing nothing at all. They increase your carbon footprint, increase trash, and are generally bad for the planet, as well as harmful to people.
You may think you’re helping save the planet, or at least being a responsible member of society, if you recycle, avoid styrofoam, drive a hybrid, use electricity instead of fossil fuel, et cetera…
But, unfortunately, taking the advice of the “green living” trendies may actually do more harm than good.
“Green” environmentalism is chock-full of urban legends, inductive reasoning, and pseudoscience that end up harming the environment, as well as being directly bad for the people pushed to conform.
Here are some facts on the subject, gleaned from the Facebook group of the same name. JOIN Going Green is Bad for the Environment, if you want more info on the topic.
_______________________________
Government-mandated Recycling Pollutes
… (not the for-profit kind) is usually so inefficient that it produces more pollution than making new paper, glass, and plastic! 13 of the top Superfund hazardous waste sites were once recycling centers!
[1] New York Times: Recycling is Garbage
[2] http://Pen & Teller on Recycling
Biofuels Have Huge Carbon Footprint
…actually have a bigger carbon footprint than simply using fossil fuel, because they require the clearing of land for agriculture, AND the farmers use fossil fuels to run their farm equipment.
[5] New Scientist Magazone: Forget Biofuels, Burn Fossil Fuels and Plant Forests
[6] How Big is the Biofuel Carbon Footprint
[7] Carbon Footprint of Biofuels: Can We Shrink it Down to Size in Time?
[8] London Times: Biofuels Produce More Greenhouse Gas than Fossil Fuels
Hybrid Cars are Worse than Normal Cars
…have batteries are so bad for the environment that you probably can’t drive one long enough to make up for the damage, before the battery goes bad and you need a new one, causing the problem all over again
[9] Prius Outdoes Humvee in Environmental Damage
Environmentalism Causes Forest Fires
Laws preventing the clearing of wood from “wild” areas, combined with efforts to prevent small forest fires, set up “tinderbox” situations, and are the reason the gigantic wildfires end up engulfing large areas
Continue reading
Monkeys Don’t Kill People; Xanax Does
Which is more responsible for the isolated incident of a lady being mauled by a chimp...this pigmy marmoset, or the drug the 200 lb ape was taking, that is known to cause violent aggression?
You’ve probably heard, in tedious detail, about the chimp, Travis, who ripped the face off some old lady.
What’s creepy about this story, more than it sounding like people are keeping pets that can kill them (as can horses and dogs), is the way power-hungry politicians are exploiting it, contextually lying, in order to pass unconstitutional laws we’d otherwise never tolerate.
The facts of the story are that a 200 lb chimp, who’d been raised as if a child by some woman who strikes me as emotionally akin to a “cat lady“, was secretly given the drug Xanax in his tea. Yes, she fed him tea. A few minutes later, he freaked out and bolted outside. When the lady’s friend, who apparently had a new hairstyle rendering her a “stranger”, showed up to help, Travis attacked her.
You may have noticed a detail that’s not normally mentioned, above. Travis was given a mood-altering drug, of which he was unaware. Xanax is a drug that is used to control people’s minds, but it has a well-documented “paradoxical” side effect of sometimes causing people to fly into insane rages, becoming violent and aggressive.
In fact, experts say that Xanax may very well have been the cause of the rampage. Why did journalists mostly ignore this detail? Who knows…perhaps it’s because they’re so likely to be under mood control drugs, themselves. /shrug
Now even people who know they’re taking that drug, and that it may cause them to become criminally aggressive, can be driven to act nuts by it…imagine some animal that doesn’t even know there’s a drug involved (probably doesn’t even understand the concept), who is being drugged.
I wouldn’t want to be around a collie or retriever who’d been driven mad by drugs, nor riding a horse in such a state.
So what’s the response of Big Brotherment to this incident?
Why, to ban the sale of ALL PRIMATES, of course.
Yes, that’s right; they are passing a ban on the sale of 1 inch long mouse lemurs, and all other primates, because some idiot prescribed a drug drug that can cause violent rages, to a 200 lb chimp.
If we were actually going to try to pass some over-reaching law to retroactively prevent this laughably rare, even isolated incident, surely it’d be something like “you can’t give huge apes drugs that might make them insane”, or even a ban on mood-control drugs entirely, which would be a loss ONLY insofar as prohibition is bad.
The truth is, of course, that one of the most vile things politicians do is try to pass laws based on single incidents. The already-suicidal chick who killed herself after someone else’s mom mocked her online has spawned a host of vile laws that are already being extended to speech outside their original intent, for example. Or the crazy Brady Law, that effectively banned only weapons that were not using in the shooting of its namesake. Or the ridiculous “security” measures set up after 9-11, that do zero to actually prevent future terror attacks. How, precisely, will you hijack a jumbo jet with nail clippers and a four ounce sippy cup?
Of course such laws are almost never passed by people who care about the incident at hand. They’re dishonest people who are actually attempting to forward some agenda of their own. In the case of Representative Blumenauer, author of the primate ban, he’s apparently one of those “pets are slaves” PETA nut-jobs, who has openly said that reptiles are next on his list of ban victims.
What we need, really, is fewer laws, not more of them. Banning the sale of lemurs so small that they’re are in danger of being eaten by mice, in response to the drugging of a man-sized ape, seems like one of those “Romans got brain damage from lead-lined aquaducts, and then things all went to hell” moments.
Representative Blumenauer appears to think these baby monkeys should be banned as a choking hazard.
Attacking AIG-style Bonuses Will Cause MORE Companies to Fail
Recently, I wrote an article about how Golden Parachutes are important for our economy, instead of bad.
And yet now we have people objecting to AIG fulfilling its contractual obligations to people who might otherwise have abandoned the company to collapse years ago.
This needs to be re-explained, in simpler, clearer terms:
- If a company is struggling, it needs the best people it can get, in order to TRY to save itself.
- If you are the best man for the job, then you don’t need to work for a struggling company. You are almost certainly going to choose a healthy, growing company where your job is secure.
- In order to obtain your services, a struggling company must either:
- Offer you far more money up front, which it probably can’t afford to do, or
- Offer you protection against the company failing, like a bonus that you will get even if, or only if, something goes wrong despite your best efforts
- In order for struggling companies to have a chance to survive, benefiting the entire economy and all of we who are in it, you must therefore have:
- The power to offer bonuses in case the company fails despite a manager’s best efforts
- enforcement of that bonus contract, so the potential managers trust it’ll get paid, and
- freedom from punishment for receiving such a bonus
The problem, here, is not AIG honoring a style of contract that is absolutely necessary for the health of our economy.
The real problem here is the same that we face whenever there is government intervention with our taxpayer money:
This form of socialism will always cause conflicts of interest, that will harm the recipient, the taxpayer, and the economy ever more, in a snowball effect.
Think of how people were trapped on welfare, from the 1970s through 1990s.
The government bailed out people in need, but then had to punish them if they ever made any progress in getting out of poverty, because it would be irresponsible to keep paying them the same amount of welfare, when they got even a little of their own income.
Likewise, many state governments violate your freedom of choice on health-related issues, on the premise that those states are paying for some people’s health care. They impose gigantic taxes on tobacco, alcohol, even convenient food, claiming that people who use them are raising government health care costs.
In all three cases, the freedom of private people is violated as a natural domino cascade starting with government taking your taxpayer money, and bailing people out with it.
Our response to this obvious conflict of interest, between bailouts and people’s free choices, should be to legislate against bailouts, not liberty.
Tired Today? Thank Government Arrogance.
What could be more megalomaniacal than declaring time, itself, wrong by an hour?
If our arrogant Congress announced that it was going to pass a law forcing you to get up an hour earlier, go to work an hour earlier, eat supper an hour earlier, et cetera, because this is somehow “in your own best interest”, it would not be tolerated.
It would be pointed out that the Federal government, as we all know, has no legitimate power to do this. Not only is no such power listed in the Constitution (its only source of authority, outside of threat of violence), but the very principles of liberty upon which our country is founded say that NO government could ever rightfully have such authority.
And yet here we are, getting up an hour earlier, dragging to work an hour earlier, eating supper an hour earlier, trying to make ourselves sleep an hour earlier, even though studies say this is harmful for us, can even shorten our lifespans and doing so for two extra months, this year.
Why?
Because that power-mad government, a while back, found a way to game the system. It can’t get away with telling you when to go to work, but it can simply declare TIME ITSELF to be wrong.
Is there a stronger word than simply “arrogant”?
The sun, the Creator, the cosmos…all of it is off by one hour, because some megalomaniacs in DC think that it’s better if we are forced to get up earlier.
If you wish to get up earlier, to save electricity or match your schedule to banks or farmers, that is your right, and should be your choice. If anyone were to pass a law forcing you to get up later, it would be a crime against you.
But the same is true in reverse. People should not be forced to get up earlier, jeopardizing their health, increasing their stress, or even simply inconveniencing themselves. It is their natural right to choose, just as it is yours.
So aside from increasing the sleep deprivation that shortens lifespans, risk of heart attack, traffic accidents, childhood behavior problems, business costs, and so on, it also puts the US behind Kazakhstan (who ended forced daylight savings time) on the protection of your natural rights.
We can choose to save electricity by getting up earlier, or our lives by sleeping in...we don't need Big Brotherment to violate our choices "for your own good"
So You Thought Oil Prices Were NOT Driven Up by War?
Resistance fighters in Gaza, struggling against the internationally condemned occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government, have been shooting shoulder-fired missiles at Israel for years, now. They have even killed a handful of people, in their largely-fruitless effort.
Faced with an election, and the need for an October Surprise, the Israeli government decided to “retaliate” against this long-standing effort, by slaughtering a few thousand semi-random Palestinians, by attacking ANYONE who lived in the areas from whence the missiles supposedly were being fired.
The effect on the US, other than dirtying its hands by unconditionally defending the Israeli government’s war crimes?
Oil prices, that were steadily declining for months, as I noted and explained here, suddenly reversed themselves, and have climbed since the butchery started.
The only glimmer of hope for the US economy, keeping hope of not being entirely trapped in another economic depression, was the dramatic drop in the oil prices that helped create the depression in the first place.
Anyone who thinks the previous, 700% inflation of oil prices were from a weak dollar, or oil shortages, or growth in demand, et cetera, take note. As illustrated in this chart, the actual cause of high oil prices was, and is today, foreign policy strife.
We’re backing “retaliation” against the Palestinian neighborhoods that is killing tens, or hundreds, of times more innocents than the Palestinian resistance fighter attacks do, and the sole “benefit” we get is newly crippling oil prices.
Super-Sizing Sour Grapes
What Americans have, even in the midst of an economic depression, is an embarrassment of riches.
When the citizens of other countries complain that Americas eat too much, what they are really saying is “We are jealous of America’s plentiful food”; Despite (or because of) all their redistributive, anti-choice socialist programs, the typical European has less access to food, in diversity or amount, than even the poorest fifth of Americans. Maybe nobody in Europe goes hungry, but they don’t really prosper, either. (facebook readers beware; the rest of the article is after the picture, don’t ask me why that happens)
A Fox found a bunch of grapes, on a vine over a lofty branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no success. At last he had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour, anyway." MORAL: It is easy to despise what you cannot get.
And when they say “Americans are too fat”, what they mean is “Americans are more affluent”. Americans don’t need to walk as much, or otherwise engage in as much involuntary physical labor. Even poor Americans have more comfortable homes, more access to cars, more video games and computers, infinitely better television, more leisure, even without the Europeans’ governments forcing them to suffer the pay cut imposed by a mandatory six week vacation every year.
Of course their response to this being pointed out is “more leisure? More entertainment? More living space? Bah! What kind of horrible way of measuring quality of life! People must be equal, not happy, you dirty materialist!” And yet, of course, everything about socialism is materialistic, an endless class war of envy and hate, worrying about who has more than whom, redistributing wealth, controlling our choices. That is the reason Marxists called it the Materialist Dialectic.
But it turns out that socialism traps people in stagnancy and perpetual shortages, while freedom allows people to have many more things. So, naturally, the actual materialists had to turn around and claim that prosperity is “decadent”, and “greedy”. How it can be more greedy than wanting to redistribute other people’s money for oneself, I don’t know.
Americans have a tendency to be hard workers. They are, statistically, the most productive society on the planet…but people, in general, who have access to more food and more leisure have to learn how to balance that with the need to choose to maintain physical fitness. Even if Americans, as a society, do learn that, the percentage of individuals who do not will still drag down the “average”.
An embarrassment of riches is a wonderful problem to have. “Oh no, too many people want to date me!” “Oh woe, I’ve grown so many tomatoes, I must give them away!” “Pitty me: now that I’ve won the lottery, people keep asking me for money!”
Who would seriously choose a life of more hunger, less choice, and more involuntary struggle over one where they need to choose to struggle a bit to stay in good physical condition?
In tests, lab animals that go somewhat hungry live longer. This probably is true of people as well…but what benefit is the added life, if it’s a result of being forced to do with less?
We’re better off being faced with the need to control how much to work out, to watch our diet, et cetera, than being lean because we haven’t the chance to be flappy even if we were irresponsible. To be free to choose whether to life short, fat, comfortable lives, or strive for longer, healthier lives.
Some of us will chose wrong…but that isn’t necessarily limited to the ones who choose leisure.
For some people, the effort may make life less worthwhile. For others, the working to “stay fit” might actually be more fun, as well as healthier.
Americans are free to choose, whereas the victims of socialism in the rest of the world have what is supposedly best forced upon them “for your own good”, in a one-size-fits-all solution. People are better off being free to determine their own size.
That’s why even the most enlightened, economically and socially homogeneous European country still has more citizens wishing to become Americans, than Americans (despite our larger population) wishing to move to that country.
The price of choice, is the risk of mistakes. Even life-altering ones. But, overall, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
Americans can be proud to have the freedom that allows us the prosperity to choose whether to supersize their meals. The reason the rest of the world complains, ultimately, is that they are deprived of even the option. They have super-sized Sour Grapes.
Golden Parachutes, Explained
It sounds outrageous, that some companies end up filing for bankruptcy restructuring, or even vanishing entirely, while their presidents and CEOs leave the companies with bonus severance packages of millions of dollars, a “golden parachute“.
It seems unfair to the workers, who are out of jobs, the investors and stock holders, and everyone else who gets nothing.
Why should an executive, who obviously failed everyone, whose very competence as a manager is in question, get enough money to retire on, while everyone else has to struggle a disastrous end to the venture?
It sounds terrible, that executives get huge bonuses when a company goes under, but this clause actually saves many companies in the first place.
Why on earth do companies offer them, in the first place? Especially the ones that are already struggling…shouldn’t they refuse to offer a big severance package when they’re likely to go under, anyway?
Well, in fact, the struggling companies don’t want to offer those packages.
What happens is that the company does know it’s struggling, and so it is looking for the best CEO it can find, someone who can save it when its last managers obviously were just making things worse. But when they call the best guy available, they run into two problems:
- First, they can’t afford him, because they’re struggling. The money for his high salary could bankrupt them.
- Second, he doesn’t want to risk his reputation. If the company turns out to be too far gone, he will definitely get blamed, even if he did all that was possible.
Fortunately, they can solve both of these in one :
They can offer a lower salary now…what they and the executive agree they can afford, plus a huge severance package.
If the company is saved, then he’s earned it.
If the company goes under despite his great skill, then he gets compensated for his damaged reputation, and the pay cut he took during the time he worked there.
This means that a struggling company can hire a better executive, therefore increasing the company’s chances of surviving, if it offers a golden parachute.
So it’s actually better for the workers, shareholders, investors, and customers if a company does offer a golden parachute. Not just struggling companies, either…because it can always improve the executive a company can hire, therefore improving the company’s future.
Now there are other, obvious benefits to having golden parachutes.
Golden parachutes also help protect companies from hostile takeovers, because the executives of the taken-over company, inevitably all fired, will cost millions to the devouring company.
Really, any way you look at it, companies being able to offer golden parachutes is good for all involved. Including the regular employees.
Not a Recession: A Depression
Why does this economic downturn seem different than previous ones in our lifetime? Why does it seem familiar to anyone who is familiar with the economic history of 19th and early 20th centuries?
Because, up to the mid 1940s, the US tended to face economic depressions. Since then, we had not had one…until now.
What we are suffering, today, is an economic depression.
Sure, it had been trendy, in the last decade or more, to say “we just stopped using the D word after the Great Depression”. But, once again, anyone who knows economic history realizes there’s more to it than that.
There is no official definition of an economic depression, other than the idea that they’re worse than recessions.
There isn’t really an official definition of an economic recession, either, although the pat answer is “two quarters of GPD shrinkage”. Real economists hate that definition, because it ignores more factors than it considers, to the point of being almost useless.
But we can simply examine what were called “depressions”, from 1800 through 1938, and compare them to the recessions between 1947 and 2007, and the differences are obvious.
Depressions, Described
Each depression / panic from 1819 through 1938 shared certain traits:
A shortage of money itself, leading to
- Usually at least 2 years, as many as 23 years
- Sudden runs on banks, causing bank failures
- Commodity price collapse, where something generic like cotton, steel, oil, or real estate plunged in value, causing a domino effect that devastated the economy
- A more general decline in prices across the economy
- A collapse in capital, for example stock market collapse, once that became an important factor
- A credit freeze, making loans and other forms of obtaining temporary money more difficult
- Massive business closings
- Astonishing amounts of job loss and unemployment
Now what about the subsequent “recessions”, from 1948 through 2003?
Recessions, Rescribed
Every one of them happened like this:
A dramatic raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve, followed by
- Usually only a few months, rarely more than a year
- An increase in private interest rates
- An increase in unemployment
- Moderate to extreme price increases
- A plunge in the stock market and moderate tightening of capital
- Some amount of business failure
You can see examples of both recessions and depressions at the History of Economic Downturns.
What’s the Difference?
We face, as was normal during the days of the gold standard, massive bank runs, a credit freeze, price failures
Now the most obvious difference is timespan.
During the days of economic depressions, the downturns lasted much longer. Always years, sometimes decades. Economic recessions generally only last months, rarely more than a year…the longest recession has not lasted as long as the shortest depression.
The second is that the trigger is slightly different.
Depressions were caused by a direct shortage of currency (money) in the economy. This, in fact, led to the other obvious differences, like runs on banks, mostly caused by a shortage of money making people worry about bank stability.
Recessions, on the other hand, have been preceded, in every single case, by the Federal Reserve raising rates, trying to make it harder to get new money. That’s very similar, but it leaves the financial sector able to compensate, however painfully, so that bank runs and commodity price failures never become “necessary”.
And that’s probably the next most important difference:
During the depressions, bank runs were almost universal, commodity price collapse was normal, the loss of huge numbers of jobs and businesses was a constant.
In the era of recessions, none of those things occurred at all. Unemployment, though miserable, was generally only a few percentage points higher, and while some businesses failed, nothing like the tens of thousands of the depression days, even though the economy was smaller back then.
Now, which are we seeing today?
Are We Depressed?
- Runs on banks, and bank failures
- Real estate price collapse, along with some other commodities, including many metals like gold, copper, and nickel
- The massive price inflation expected to result from high energy prices failed to materialize, representing an inability of people to pay more, even though production cost had to rise
- A collapse in capital, for example stock market free-fall
- A failure in credit, making loans and other forms of obtaining temporary money more difficult
- Massive business closings
- A rising snowball of job loss and unemployment
Well, this does indeed sound almost exactly like a depression, not a recession.
And, in fact, it was preceded by a money shortage, just like other depressions. In our case, the shortage was caused by high oil prices, two wars, and hundreds of billions in new foreign “aid” shipping trillions of dollars overseas, much faster than the Federal Reserve was creating new money. This meant that, while the surplus of foreign-based dollars caused its value to plunge compared to foreign money, here in the US there was less money available than usual.
Without as much money, we could not maintain the prices of some commodities, we became distrusting of banks, credit became scarce…ultimately, a new economic depression was natural.
Why didn’t we have depressions from 1948 through 2007?
Up to the 1940s, the US had usually depended upon gold, and sometimes silver, to back its money. It claimed you could cash in a paper dollar, any time you wanted, for gold. This meant that money was, in a sense, just a glorified form of barter for a commodity.
In those days of a gold standard, if the economy grew faster than the supply of gold, this created a shortage of money, which could only grow as fast as people could dig up gold. When the economy grew faster, the relative shortage of money would eventually force banks to close, commodity prices to plunge, prices to decline, credit to freeze, and generally the economy to grind to a halt, to wait for gold to catch up.
That ended in 1946, when the US entered into the Breton Woods agreement. This was a sort of price fixing scheme, where instead of making a dollar equal to a certain amount of gold for exchange, each government just attempted to force the price of gold to remain a certain amount, compared to its money.
This happened to coincide, exactly, to the end of economic depressions. Without money being linked to the barter of a commodity that had its own separate value and supply, it did not end up in such short demand that the whole economy would fail. The recessions that did occur were from money shortages caused by the Federal Reserve, but these could be overcome, so banks never had runs, commodity prices never collapsed, et cetera.
This became even more true in the 1970s, when even the Breton Woods agreement was ended, and the price of gold became a legitimate free market price, not a fixed one.
Why are we having a depression, today?
As I noted earlier, this is the first time since the 1930s when there was a shortage of money so grave that we stopped trusting banks, could not pay for important commodities, and so on.
This is because we sent so much money overseas, out of our own reach.
The normal money we have sent abroad for decades, because we buy goods, was actually barely enough to keep up with foreign demand for dollars…but in 2001, that began to change:
The price of oil went through the roof. At its peak, we were paying 700% of oil’s natural price. This amounted to as much as one trillion dollars leaving the US to import oil, without getting anything in return (beyond what we normally got for 1/7th the amount).
Meanwhile, we engaged in two wars, that cost hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which went to foreign countries.
And, in order to support those wars, paid hundreds of billions in new “foreign aid”, money shipped abroad with no imported wealth to offset it, at all.
This left us without enough money to simply run our own economy.
The result? Bank closings, real estate and other price failures, massive unemployment, bankrupcies, business failures…
Another economic depression.
Stopping Piracy on the High Seas
Now that a ship of the evil, but highly influential, Saudi tyranny has been hijacked by pirates, suddenly the long-standing problem of piracy in the Indian ocean is headline news.
Crackpot neocons like Michael Savage, and his imitator Mark Levin, are calling for the US Navy to run around destroying boats and slaughtering people suspected of piracy.
Socialists/Liberals are proposing the normal, faux-pacifist solutions of more international committees and taxpayer funding to bureaucratically consider the problem, and more handouts, and of course trying to force an authoritarian central government on Somalia, sort of a reverse-Iraq, nation-destroying project.
But the real solution is, as usual, not one of more governmental intrusion, but one of more individual liberty and responsibility:
Allow private craft to be armed.
Now, most people probably don’t realize this, but there are complete bans on boats or ships carrying defenses in most nations where you might come to port. These leave craft largely helpless against piracy, even though the ban on defense has no practical benefit.
Imagine how easy it would actually have been for a ship the size of an oil tanker to defend itself, against pirates in a speedboat, armed with rifles and grenades. Especially considering the expenditure that would be justified by the value of its cargo. How good a defense could YOU afford, if you were shipping $100,000,000 worth of oil?
The pirates reportedly captured the supertanker with rifles and grenades, in a speedboat. Imagine if the tanker were legally allowed to defend itself...
Allowing/encouraging craft to defend themselves would have the added benefit of making it safer for any craft to NOT defend itself. Even pacifists, who did not arm their boats, would be protected, because any potential pirates could not know whether the boat is armed, or not. So ALL people would be safer, if only SOME would arm themselves well enough to make piracy too dangerous.
This is, of course, the story of Big Brotherment mentality, where the governments constantly arm themselves better, but tell the individuals that arming yourself is bad…and yet fail to protect the disarmed people WITH the government’s massive weaponry.
Meanwhile, of course, criminals arm themselves BETTER, because of the disarmed masses. What is easy to buy on the black market is whatever desirable thing is most wrongfully banned by a government.
Even a small boat could take out an attacker with a single shot…and yet, of course, pirates would not profit if THEY took out victims with a single shot. You don’t make any money from ransom, nor gain any loot, if you sink your target.
Therefore, if ships were allowed to defend themselves, there would BE no pirates, because it would be far more risky, with modern weaponry, than profitable.
Problem actually solved.
If, instead, we have government deal with the problem of piracy…well, when’s the last time government actually solved a problem? Actually fixed the thing they claimed to be fighting, so that the problem was simply gone, and the powers usurped to deal with it were returned to the people?
Has that ever happened?
Let’s go with liberty, letting ships defend themselves, instead of bureaucracy, spending billions to probably make the problem worse.
Pacifism Breeds Violence
There two obvious extremes of self-defense:
- Sociopaths like neocons, who want to kill other people “just in case”
- Pacifists, who will not even defend their own lives
Of the two, it’s more widely understood that the sociopaths are wrong, and cause violence where none may otherwise have occurred.
But what’s often overlooked is that the pacifists, too, actually cause violence and death.
I know, it’s counter-intuitive…the truth often is, because the world’s more complicated than slogans like “non-violence equals peace”.
In real life, people who refuse to defend human life accomplish two things:
- They cheapen life. Their actions state that life is not worth defending. They would rather they, or others around them, die, than sully themselves with taking action to protect the innocent.
- They make violence safe and easy. There are no consequences in assaulting a pacifist. No risk of getting hurt, no cost in harming others.
Now anyone who wants to be a pacifist should be allowed to do so, even though it actually brings more risk to those around them, as any known pacifist is not a factor in whether to attack someone near them…
When you do not defend your life, or others around you, unjust violence becomes cheaper and safer to commit, and you are saying that life does not have as much value as your selfish belief
It’s unfortunate that pacifists are often hypocrites, though, who wish those around them to be forced to be pacifistic, themselves. They advocate bans on self defense, whether weapons or defensive violence, and want those bans backed by a government that enforces its bans with, of all things, threat of violence.
If you insist on owning a gun, or fighting someone who is robbing an innocent person nearby, even though some pacifist-advocated law bans you doing so, how will the government enforce that ban? Fines and imprisonment. If you refuse to comply with those penalties, what will it threaten in order to get you to submit? Violence.
So let’s count that as THREE ways pacifists often violence: They cheap life, they make violence safe and easy, and they often recruit governments to use the threat of violence to force pacifism upon others.
Trickle-Down Taxation
Item #2 of the Communist Manifesto: "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax". What isn't mentioned is that this was a way Marx could make the poor even poorer and weaker, not the rich. Marx gained power from the strife caused by poverty.
One of the best-sounding of the freebies that Obama is offering to hand out (if it’s not just another politician’s empty campaign promise) is exempting everyone who makes under $200K from the income tax. This one even tempts me. Lower taxes are good for the economy, for economic freedom, and of course for everyone who earns less than that amount of money.
But there’s a serious down-side to this. How do we fund all of the other freebies he is giving out, if we are going to cut government tax revenue with this one?
Of course the answer is simple: We are going to tax the people who make OVER $200K so much more that it makes up for the loss. Obama says it’s only fair, to “spread the wealth around”.
Now this may not be quite as bad as it sounds:
- First, people who make over $100K or so pay most of the taxes, already. Unfortunately, Bush’s tax cuts were not really all that “for the rich”, and “wealthy” people already pay almost all of the taxes. It was pointed out today that there are some companies, in fact, that are forced to pay more taxes per year, individually, than 66% of all families. It’s famous that the top two percent of earners pay something like 60% of the taxes.
- Second, tax cuts boost the economy, which increases tax revenue. Both Reagan and Kennedy both demonstrated this, cutting and simplifying taxes, and having tax revenue increase.
Unfortunately, those two things aren’t enough. The billions paid by people who earn less than $200K still adds up…and tax cuts don’t all work equally well.
For example, tax cuts that favor one group over another help the economy less, while ones that spread the burden evenly help everyone more. In fact, simply spreading the burden evenly, with NO tax cut, would boost the economy more than cutting taxes for some people, while raising it for others.
Especially when the taxes (as they already, are, and will now be more) are designed to punish hard work, success, and contribution to society.
Just as a slight increase in interest rates, so small it certainly doesn’t change any one person’s mind, has a large nation-wide impact on how much people borrow, so a tax that increases as you earn more money has a nation-wide impact on how much people earn, depressing income growth.
But there’s something involved, that’s more important than ALL of that:
WHEN Barak Obama raises taxes on people who earn more money, the wealthy will not pay a penny of it.
You will.
The counterpart to trickle-down economics (which points out that wealthy people who earn more money spend and invest more, allowing all of society to become more wealthy) is…
Trickle Down Taxes
When you raise taxes on the rich, they ALWAYS respond to defend their wealth. The more money and power they have, the better they can do this. They can give themselves raises, pay accountants to shelter their income, or otherwise make up for the new tax.
But where do they get the new money, to pay themselves enough to make up for the taxes?
From you.
Wealthy people and companies can, for example, raise prices to pay themselves enough extra to make up for the taxes. Guess who pays the higher prices.
They can also cut jobs or pay among their employees, in order to make enough to pay themselves more. Guess who the employees are.
Along with those two tools of passing along higher taxes, the rich and powerful can cut quality of products, again to save for themselves. Ice cream that was once two quarts is now 1.5 quarts, and the same price. Check Edy’s and Breyer’s, next time you’re shopping. Guess who ends up paying for all the reduced-quality/quantity food. Not the rich guys…the can afford to pay a premium for consistent quality.
Ultimately, ALL costs the government imposes on the wealthy, they pass down to you.
Oh, but the tax trickling isn’t done, yet.
If They Lose, You Lose More
Let’s say you, somehow, manage to force the wealthy and powerful to pay for their own taxes.
You are now shutting thousands of people out of jobs, and, causing more hunger and poverty.
Why?
Because the wealthy don’t put their money in giant Scrooge McDuck vaults, to play in while they cackle wickedly. Instead, they either spend or invest it. Spending it creates jobs directly. If they buy a car, someone built it, someone shipped it, someone sold it, people repair it, people clean it…maybe someone even drives it as their job. The less money ANYONE spends, the less work there is. But, let’s face is, the wealthy have more money, per person, than other people, and therefore supply more jobs with money.
Poor people have to mow their own lawns (if they have them). Middle class people may be able to pay someone to mow their lawn for them. A few dozen families might, between them, manage to keep one lawncare guy employed. But one wealthy dude may employ a half dozen lawn guys, all by himself.
Take away his money, and the rich guy may have to lay off his lawn people…perhaps one hundred times the job impact of a middle class person having to stop hiring a lawn guy.
But most of a wealthy guy’s money is not spent, so it doesn’t make jobs.
Well, not directly.
Investment Creates Jobs
The “capital” in capitalism is investment.
Rich people and companies are the reason most new jobs ever get created at all, because it requires investment to build the factory, or store, or restaurant, whatever it is. Even when poorer people start their own successful business out of pocket (something pretty rare, because of government regulation and taxes), they only create large numbers of jobs as they become successful and rich.
One of the many reasons the economy is so weak, now, is because investment is so rare, thanks to punishment of investment through taxes, regulation, deflation, and the preference for stagnating money shelters like bonds and treasury notes, over the stocks to which government has proven to be so hostile.
If we are to get back on the road to economic growth, we must first get on the road to economic freedom for all, including the wealthy, who just happen to pass on ALL effects we try to have on them, good or bad.
Thanksgiving: Happy Conservatism Day!
Thanksgiving, as it exists in America, is very special, right up there with Independence Day, as a celebration of true Conservative principles, and a repudiation of what we now know as Liberalism.
Against Collectivism
For example, what the Pilgrims were celebrating was an abandonment of the collectivist/socialist ideals they’d adopted when they first tried to form their colony.
The first colonists had starved, suffering the inefficiency and laziness bred by a “share the wealth” philosophy, where everything went into a common pool, and everyone got an equal share, much like Europe and the Clintons of the world embrace today.
When they finally started requiring people to take responsibility for themselves, adopting what amounted to a precursor of Reagan/Paul Conservatism, with community property being replaced by private property, and central planning by liberty, they found prosperity, and stopped dying out.
We’ll be in pretty much the same situation, a few years from now, after yet more years of the “share the wealth” philosophy of big government, ultimately not much of a departure from Bush’s stealth Liberalism of the past eight.
Pro-Christian
Not only were the Pilgrims celebrating the abandonment of socialism, and resulting prosperity, but the tradition of having a feast to give thanks was theirs because it was a Christian tradition to do so. Thanksgiving was not a “harvest festival”, as the politically correct in the Establishment media and government schools would have you believe.
It was, in this case, celebrating a bountiful harvest, but the “thanks giving” part was a standard Christian tradition in England, who would do this at any time of year, to celebrate whatever blessing they felt God had given them, or even to remind themselves of what they still had, when things were bad.
Puritans and other devout Christians in England, any time in the previous century or more, might have a thanksgiving feast any time a baby was born, or loved one died, for example.
And, as we all know, Liberalism is very anti-Christian, however loudly they object to that being pointed out, in between rounds of banning voluntary religious expression in public places, unless it’s Jewish, Islamic, or something else not-Christian. In fact, even the Christian nature of Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas, has been stripped by Liberal media, schools, and government, or else I wouldn’t need to be writing this in clarification. 
Republican Leadership, Chosen via Affirmative Action?
I’ve been puzzled by the sudden, ridiculous, forced fascination the Liberal Republican/neocon leadership suddenly developed for Bobby Jindal. 
It reminds me of the invention of prefab heir apparent Barak Obama in 2004.
And, in that sense, it’s obvious that this is what they were trying to do, “create” a winner the way the Democrats did with Barak.
But why pick this guy? He’s really something of the worst of both worlds…from the most corrupt state government in the country, “moderate” in more or less the opposite way of actual Conservatism, for example a gross mismatch vs a Reagan or Paul. At the same time, definitely not neocon enough to be their dream guy to pimp. So why him?
Then it occurred to me…it has NOTHING to do with his politics, his (scant) supposed leadership in Louisiana, or any of that irrelevant stuff that only people who actually care would be concerned (approving or disapproving) with.
No, it’s when I was thinking about his real name, Piyush Jindal, and his status as the first “person of color” elected governor in Louisiana’s history, that it suddenly hit me:
He is Barak Obama Junior, just executed Hollywood-style.
The Liberal Republican leadership are attempting to learn a lesson from this past election…but they’re far too foolish and petty to learn any lesson that was actually present.
So they learned faux-lessons, focusing on trivial, collectivist things.
It reminds me of:
Hollywood’s Response to a Blockbuster Movie
In reality, the lesson of the blockbuster is usually something like “This movie came up with an idea that hadn’t been beaten to death, and/or presented it in an original way” or “it actually stuck to the book, didn’t talk down to the audience, nor follow the normal Hollywood formula”.
But Hollywood doesn’t EVER learn those particular lessons. Instead, they pick some obvious cosmetic detail, like “this movie had two cops in it, who are buddies”, and for the next few years every second movie out of Hollywood is a Cop Buddy Movie.
Likewise, there were two sets of lessons to learn from Obama’s win…the substantial, and the superficial:
SUBSTANCE
- He appeared honest (compared to McCain and Bush)
- As an extension of that, he appeared open, not secretive. The biggest impact on his lead, outside of Palin, came from the neocon pretense that they knew of dangerous Obama secrets
- He opposed our self-destructive, hypocritical foreign policies
- He appears to oppose the neocon police state
- He ran a Reaganesque campaign (not platform) of communicating clearly to people, not talking down to them or playing stupid
- Related to that, he has charisma/personality and communication skills that allowed him to be fast-tracked, a-la Kennedy or (against the Liberal Republicans’ own efforts) Reagan
- He appeared, if only because he is new and therefore lacked opportunity to mess up or get caught, to lack the baggage and corruption of 99% of the leadership of either party
- As an extension of that, he lacked “political experience”, which rational Americans recognize to be a bonus. Political experience plus success equals corruption
- As an extension of THAT, he is not a 500 year old, corrupt bureaucrat with no understanding of real human beings
- He really did appear to represent change, insofar as (on the two-dimensional Establishment spectrum) he was the antithesis of the neocons
- The Republican challenger was Liberal, unable to attack Obama on his real weakness; the issues, without it simply being turned back around on him as “but you used to say the same thing”, so he was limited to negative, personal attacks against Obama, discrediting himself.
PETTY
- He was a Person of Color
- He had a bizarre foreign-sounding name
- He is young(er)
- He was politically inexperienced, presumably easy to handle by the people behind the scenes and in the smoke-filled rooms
- He was fast-tracked to the forefront by people who “created” his success, a One-man Political Boy Band[TM]
- He appealed to his base
So, what is Jindal?
- He is a person of color
- He has a (half-concealed) bizarre foreign-sounding name
- He is young(er)
- He is politically backwoods, presumably easy to handle by the people behind the scenes and in the smoke-filled rooms
- He is being fast-tracked to the forefront, by people who are trying to force his success.
- He is adamantly pro-life, which supposedly is all that’s required to appeal to the Republican base
Jindal, in fact, has NONE of Barak’s winning traits, but all of his superficial ones.
They took away the Hollywood lessons, not the real ones.
Not a surprise, considering that Hollywood, too, is superficial and Liberal.
In fact, really, this could be anticipated by their choice of VP.
Palin was:
- A woman
- She was from somewhere exotic
- She was young(ish)
- She was VERY politically backward and inexperienced, almost as much as Barak himself, presumably easy to handle
- She was teleported to the forefront by people who anointed her with instant success
- She was quite folksy, and unlike McCain, was clearly pro-life
Ultimately, this seems to be the new trend among the Nixonian leadership of the Republican party:
Ignore all of the things they’ve done wrong so far, but try to imitate even more of the Liberal Democrats’ formula, without even understanding that.
Their failure to “get it”, even after McCain lost because he and Bush were too Liberal, is hardly surprising. I mean, McCain said he wanted “more affirmative action”.
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
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Words of the Sentient- Tolkien, on Government
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