Taxpayer now paying to sell mortages

Another of those difficult-to-believe-we-are-that-collectively-stupid things…

Another Hidden Bailout: Helping Wall Street Collect Your Rent
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/another-hidden-bailout-helping-wall-street-collect-your-rent-20120319

This sums it up:

As one hedge fund analyst put it to me this morning: “Help inflate the bubble, create a foreclosure crisis, buy homes in bulk, and rent them out to the same average homeowner.”

Is this what we had in mind when we created the “ownership society” – helping billionaires collect your rent?

Instead of your brain on drugs…

Your Brain on Fiction
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html

Really interesting to me that the act of reading actually triggers the very neurons that would be engaged if you were experiencing the same thing in real life. Perhaps this will serve as motivation to read to and watch movies with my boy.

While real life is never like the books, real life is never like any other substitute medium either. If reading story books helps young people develop social skills (though clearly they need to practice those stills in the real world), all the better reason to encourage them to dive in.

Follow the Sacredness

Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/

An interesting bit of a theme working out here, purely by accident…

OK, read the following and pick if you are Type A or Type 1…

Type A:

“Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle… “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

Type 1:

“Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

Not an accident that I chose to label them type ‘A’ and type ‘1’, I was trying not to show any preference for one or another. According to the article, if you picked A then you are a liberal democrat. Picking 1 means you are a conservative republican. Notice, though, that both are justifying actions that are tantamount to war, demonize their ‘opponents’ and thus make it easy to accept that the ends justify the means.

The whole article is very interesting, I hope that the tidbits I have here will encourage you to read the rest…

A different view of GOP history

Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/why-conservatives-are-still-crazy-after-all-these-years-20120316

Here’s the problem: To this way of thinking, the triumph of enlightenment liberalism is always inevitable. Now it’s demographics that’s the inexorable force (I debunk that argument here); in the 1960s, it was the certainty that Americans would never consent to give up their big-government perks. And yet, somehow, alongside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That’s because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it’s because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they’ve been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).

Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it’s not going away, either. It’s just getting more powerful. That’s a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.

I don’t recall Reagan’s campaigns. Certainly nothing regarding his first run and little to nothing on his second run (I really didn’t start to become politically aware at all until Ford (I only know Nixon from historical reading), but really didn’t follow until the middle of the Reagan years). Reagan, for all I know, was the vitriolic anti-everything during the primary that the GOP is turning out now. The author of the article makes much of what he terms as Reagan’s reluctant agreement on increasing taxes, but based on my reading taxes at the beginning of Reagan’s terms they were much higher than I have ever considered fair. Still, it seems to me that the final comment is the most telling. The Tea Party wackos have got more power now and have ‘learned’ the ‘liberal strategy’ (all these in quotes because they all seem to be part of some delirium) of packing the courts with _conservative_ activist judges (though in the GOP’s eyes, they aren’t ‘activists’ since they are just ‘setting things to right’ when they overturn / create law).

I should emphasize this more

Mockery: Women’s new weapon
From a sex strike to satirical anti-Viagra bills, the war on reproductive rights has some responding with laughs
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/mockery_womens_new_weapon/singleton/

I feel strongly about this whole GOP assault on women, but haven’t really articulated my thoughts here. I have read several articles that had me on the point of posting, but didn’t have any thoughts organized enough to put down. I think this article was the activation energy I needed, hopefully I can articulate something meaningful…

I think that the general reason why historically women allow men to be in charge is two fold. One is men tend to greet resistance with violence and women (in general, there are plenty of exceptions on both sides) tend to resist meeting the men in kind. Second, I think that women (again, in general) have evolved methods of getting most of what they wanted anyway, so were (more or less) content with standing behind the throne and directing events from there. Based on my reading of history, the societies where women have substantial control of events (btw, here in the US at this point we are NOT at one of those states!) tended to be few and far between and were often overthrown by male invaders intent on destroying the female society (meaning not on wars of conquest (where they could be bought off), but wars of destruction and domination). I have read about more instances where women were factors at the very top of society (empress, queen, prime minister, Pharaoh, etc.) and while women, in general, might have experienced a more positive environment (perhaps better described as less negative), the trend was generally quickly reversed when a man took over. I suppose that women have evolved to be less adversarial with men largely because of their dependence on men during the child bearing and rearing process. Just imagine how much more difficult it would be for a stone-age single woman to bear and rear children! (I could envision, though, a society (much like elephants) where it is female dominated and men really are just sperm donors; it just seems like humans took a different path.)

Interestingly (to me, anyway), recent thoughts on human evolution suggest that one of the things that sets us apart is that early men used to hunt and bring their kills back to the womenfolk. It seems that there is a very critical period during pregnancy and shortly after birth where the _failure_ to get certain lipids and fatty acids in the mother/child diet leads to a lifetime’s worth of smaller cognitive capacity. Calculations have shown that even with the man producing only a few percentages worth of calories for the family, if those calories are supplied during the critical periods of child bearing and rearing the children will be much more likely to realize their cognitive potential (i.e., get bigger brains). Since gathering is a rather intensive process (though one that can be done during most of pregnancy and nearly all of rearing) it makes sense (at least until the invention of herding so as to always have a ready supply of the necessary nutrients) that women who did NOT put up with men and their irrational and often violent outbursts fared less well than those women who put up with our idiosyncratic behavior. Over long periods of time that would put a lot of pressure on what evolved into humans to have very different behaviors between sexes.

I think that when we (as a species) are in eras where appropriate food is fairly plentiful and women can get what they need for bearing and rearing there is much less pressure for them (women) to put up with our (men) crap. Today is is rather trivial for a single woman to bear and raise a (or several) child so there is less pressure from society against women who get ‘uppity’ to be ostracized or in any other way punished. Conversely (and this where the GOP seems to be), this means that men have to give up some of their cherished notions, such as the ‘ownership’ of women (and their wombs!). Men, being the irrational and violent beasts that they are (consider that the men who were poor hunters during our evolutionary history were underrepresented in the population, via good old Darwinian survival of the fittest) don’t cotton to giving up any power (even though, as I mentioned in the beginning, much of that power was illusory as I expect women have been in control for most of our history), hence this push back among people who call themselves ‘conservatives’. “If we could only return to the days of yore when women had to engage in back breaking work all day just to raise children we wouldn’t have to put up with all this damn talk about women all the damn time!”

I hope that with this latest folderol regarding the GOP’s efforts to restrict women’s ownership of their reproductive rights will be enough to reverse this trend we have been seeing for the last couple of decades. At least this election cycle has shown the GOP’s ‘anti-abortion’ efforts for what they really are (shoving women back into the kitchen) so those who truly object to abortion (but are otherwise happy with reproductive rights) can focus on that (I have read some very persuasive epidemiological studies that show that with greater access to lower cost contraception there are vastly fewer abortions, so the true anti-abortion activist should be working toward the goal of universal availability of contraception) instead of supporting these assholes that just want to return to the ‘good old days of yore when women were too damn busy to have a voice’.

As for how to help champion women’s rights? That I am not sure. At the federal level supporting the democrats basically means supporting a guy who (despite being a ‘Constitutional scholar’) shreds the Constitution, assassinates US citizens and works steadily to erode the bits of privacy we have left. Certainly at local contests not all GOP-backed candidates are so focused on ending women’s rights and there are plenty of so-called ‘blue dog’ democrats whose voting record makes it clear they are quite happy pushing women back into the kitchen. It is easy to say, for instance, that electing Santorum would be a massive step backwards for women, not as easy for Romney (though the Mormon church is certainly not friendly to women (that is, when they are anything but barefoot and pregnant)) and downright impossible to figure for Gingrich (Paul, it seems to me, is mostly in line with Santorum, not that there is any chance Paul will be the GOP candidate). Since it still seems quite apparent that Romney will be the GOP candidate it seems clear to focus on him. It is clear that you can’t trust him, he has a history of being anti-women’s rights (in his church, anyway) and has been forced into that direction because of the asinine hold that the conservative whack jobs in the Tea Party (which, to me, seem clearly intent on getting those damn women back into the kitchen and locking the door). Of course, that inability to trust him works both ways; if he happened to build his government with pro-women’s rights people he could easily ‘turn’ on the Tea Partiers.

You know that sexism, like racism, is still prevalent in our society when someone feels obliged to make sexist statements like this to try to make a point:

My best friend is a woman and several of my closest friends are women!

Some quick thoughts

These articles have a common tie (at least to me) so rather than post on each one I thought I would post them together. The first shows that our government culture has the potential to yank its head out of its ass long enough to realize that it really isn’t so bad standing up straight and not sniffing shit all day:

FAA says new ‘safety culture’ will stress solutions, not blame
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/14/travel/faa-nonpunitive-reporting/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

Imagine, a safety group actually focused on safety rather than blame?! Shockingly, they are finding that if reporting errors (now called the less threatening ‘incident’) is not associated with punishment, people are more likely to own up to their mistakes. Indeed, by including the mistake-ee in the evaluation, they can often get a really good insight into why the event happened in the first place. Of course, it is subject to abuse (like anything in the human sphere), but there are plenty of laws that address people who deliberately put lives or assets in danger so I am confident that these changes will result in even greater safety in our airlines. This reminds me of some research on quality control in manufacturing I read years ago. It seems that the general way of managing manufacturing defects is to have a dedicated group of people fix any defective products. Amazingly, the identical defects kept coming up day after day. Finally someone came along and said, howzabout we ask the people responsible for the defects to fix them, then ask them for suggestions on how to keep the defects from happening in the first place. I always recall this particular instance used as an example: this company that made wiring harnesses kept having defective wires where the insulation had been nicked and in some cases stripped leading to all sorts of problems. This had been going on for years and years but once the people responsible for the defects started to fix them, one of the workers realized that what was happening was as they built the wiring harness the long wires were draped over their chairs, which happened to have very sharp metal edges. The simple fix? Put some tape along the edges of all the metal chairs and bingo! the problem went away. Stop making the (non criminal) source of defects adversarial and all the sudden you have the potential for a vastly superior product.

Speaking of the potential for superior product, given our current government is pretty close to being so defective it is impossible to imagine it getting worse, here are some recommendations to make our government less dysfunctional:

Three simple ways to make Congress work
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/15/opinion/avlon-fix-congress/index.html?hpt=hp_bn3

I try to be an optimist (despite my constant drone about apocalypse, yes I know it is hard to reconcile those two issues) and like to think that it is possible for our society to avoid catastrophic collapse. Were Congress able to pass such laws as mentioned in the above article I might finally be able to develop some faith that things can get better in the future. Until then, I think I am better served by being a pessimist, at least that way I can spend some time evaluating alternatives when/if our economy collapses.

Similarly to how the FAA got a brain and proposals are being put forward to inject intelligence into Congress (boy, those will have to be some huge needles!), this article discusses what is plausibly behind the defective culture that has grown up in our banking industry:

What’s really wrong with Goldman Sachs
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/15/opinion/lessig-goldman-sachs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

It is plausible to me that the ‘simple’ change of making a partnership organization into a publicly traded company can lead to dramatic cultural changes. Professional organizations are not supposed to be able to duck personal liability (why they created partnerships in the first place) and based on my study of business it resonates with me that such a simple (on the surface) change can lead to dramatic differences. When partners equally share liability two very substantial behaviors are highly prevalent: first, the individuals are less likely to take huge risks as they stand to personally lose and second, their peers are likely to very closely watch their behavior since their peers are also personally responsible (they all share equally in liability, meaning when one fucks up they all pay the price just the same). However, once you incorporate then all the sudden the personal liability issue goes right out the window and risk taking becomes consequence free. I am not sure it is possible in our current oligarchical climate to change any of this, but it is an interesting idea.

Statins, not for everyone!

Do Statins Make It Tough to Exercise?
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/do-statins-make-it-tough-to-exercise/

A number of years ago after a Doctor’s visit my doctor prescribed statins for me (I think the actual prescription was for Lipotor, not that it matters). While I am not a health care professional, not only am I married to one but I have a degree in biochemistry, so I have the background and exposure to understand what is going on. I did a lot of reading on statins and was very upset to realize that they were _only_ to be prescribed once diet and exercise had failed to address the higher cholesterol concerns. That doctor was close to retirement (I don’t recall ever seeing him after that, he sold his practice to a pair of much younger doctors) and probably was used to old fat white men ignoring advice on diet and exercise so decided to save some time. In any case, I developed a pretty detailed understanding of the biochemistry of statins and how they presume to work (in case you can’t guess based on my attitude, I never took any of the statins, never even filled the prescription).

Most people who have moderately high levels of cholesterol (I was a member of that group at that time) can be easily treated by eating a diet higher in vegetables (hence fiber) and getting off their fat lazy asses and moving around. Almost immediately after such a ‘prescription’ the patient’s cholesterol levels return to optimal and as long as they continue with that program (which has been well documented to lead to a vastly longer and healthier life for many many reasons) they never return to the higher levels. Note, btw, that the higher levels of cholesterol (and LDL and HDL, etc.) are _correlated_ with heart disease and there is (to my knowledge, that, while not encyclopedic, is quite extensive) _causative_ evidence. What this means is that it is quite possible that the higher cholesterol, etc. levels are a _byproduct_ of some other underlying condition, behavior, etc. that leads to heart disease, not the cause. I was quite surprised when I read this; based on the endless blather by the pharmaceutical companies you would have to believe that such conclusions were well accepted science with massive amounts of incontrovertible evidence instead of what amounts to opinions of medical professionals absent of any reliable clinical trial. Then again, when I had heard all the brouhaha regarding cholesterol and eggs after having recently learned in my biochemistry classes that virtually no dietary cholesterol made it into the blood stream, I should have been suspicious.

Cholesterol, btw, is an _absolute_ requirement for living. If you were somehow able to eliminate cholesterol from your blood stream you would likely die within days, and probably very unhappily. Cholesterol is require to build hormones, it is often part of structural membrane proteins and acts as a base molecule for dozens, if not hundreds, of critically important molecules in your cell’s biochemistry. It is no wonder that the reported article shows detrimental effects in athletic people on statins, cholesterol is necessary for rebuilding cell membranes and mitochondria (the bits of the cell that actually provide most of the cell’s (hence organism’s) energy) are mostly made of membrane. The bit about memory loss? Guess what: nerve cells have a thick lipid membrane surrounding them that is full of cholesterol.

Based on my research, unless you have a family history of serious heart disease AND have elevated cholesterol levels that _fail to respond_ to diet and exercise changes, THEN and ONLY then would you have a likelihood of a better health outcome by taking statins. Not exactly the impression you get when all those glowing commercials are on TV, eh? I listen closely to those commercials and they are meeting their fiduciary duty by (very quietly) mentioning all the relevant elements, but for people not as attentive and further with their doctor pushing the meds, they would hop right on the bandwagon without a second thought.

I consider it practically criminal that the pharmaceutical companies are now trying to push this crap on children. In addition to the side effects mentioned in the article that would reinforce the lack of activity in the target demographic (fat kids), these children’s brains are still growing and more than likely heavy statin use would lead to lifetime negative impacts. Of course, since the FDA is owned outright by the pharmaceutical companies nothing much is likely to change in a good way. However, my dear reader(s) have at least been exposed to some science and have the opportunity to avoid being sheeple in this regard.

A MASSIVE understatement

“Of course, our current technology takes massive amounts of high-tech equipment to communicate a message using neutrinos, so this isn’t practical now,” says University of Rochester physics professor Kevin McFarland.

Neutrinos used for communication
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/62099-neutrinos-used-for-communication

Now, if you could highly directionally transmit neutrinos AND reliably receive neutrinos, then this might be something interesting. However, unless there happened to be some pressing need to communicate with a vastly lower lag than bouncing off of satellites, transmitting through the core of the earth is just not going to be a driving force to make a useful technology out of something like this.

More boiling bloodpressure, this time BofA

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314

It is a long article, so for some of you that automatically means it won’t get read. However, the first few paragraphs do a pretty good summary of the article, so you can get the gist without the details if you want. These sorts of things are so common now that it is hard to get excited, but I like Matt’s writing style and I do think it is important to try to elevate these sorts of things, so here you go…

Political destruction of the US Post Office

Congress’s war on the post office
The Postal Service faces a threat greater than email or economics: Politics
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/congresss_war_on_the_post_office/singleton/

Just like the whole war on contraception is really a war on women, this war on the Post Office is really a war on unions. It is crystal clear to me that this idiotic mandate (exclusively applied to the Post Office!) to fully fund their pension and health care is entirely motivated to destroy the post office and as a consequence destroy one of the largest remaining unions in the US. I am not a general fan of unions and have seen plenty of examples of grievous mismanagement and outright crookery (compared to Wall Street, though, they are babes in the wood), but when a union has worked so closely with management, as the Post Office union clearly has, any objection has to be due to clear and unyielding ideological bias, nothing more. Much like the blather about the public service sector unions being a ‘drain’ on state and local budgets (a blatant lie since the state and local governments failed to properly fund the benefits to begin with (much like the whole social security funding scare is a blatant smoke screen because our ‘great’ government has bled the fund dry)) and therefore should be stripped of their collective bargaining powers, it is purely and simply an ideological war. There are plenty of things wrong in the US today, but based on my analysis unions and contraception are so far from the top of the list that this attention would be amusing if there wasn’t such an organized and well funded effort to push the agenda.

Now, if it is true that this is really what Americans want, then I clearly am in the wrong damn country!