In his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon speaks of a “clinical version of the truth.”
What a concept!
I’m having a vision, here: I see a clinical version of the truth in which truth is not really true but only the appearance of truth that meets certain criteria to qualify itself as truthful even though it isn’t, strictly speaking, exactly true, but is close enough because it fits preconceived notion of truth as defined by a Blue Ribbon Panel of Experts whose brief is narrowly enough defined that it is possible to arrive at a truth that meets all the clinical criteria for truth when truth isn’t exactly true but is made so by being properly defined with quantifiable metrics to accurately measure the degree to which it deflects from what is and should be the Truth but can’t be because it is clinically defined.
Do you smell victory in Afghanistan?
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
A Happy Thought
Imagine every lunatic in the asylum had a staff made up of the best and the brightest that would take their mad ravings and rework them into policies and directives. Without this staff, the ravings would remain ravings; with the staff, the same ravings could well become legislation.
Gosh! Isn’t that what we have on the Beltway where legions of the over educated take the deliriums of the mad (We can win in Afghanistan! Iran is a threat! We must save our feral bankers!) and craft them into policies and laws that give these ravings a patina of sanity?
Without these drones, the bombing of wedding parties would never have achieved the respectability it has. In their hands, murder becomes tactical.
Gosh! Isn’t that what we have on the Beltway where legions of the over educated take the deliriums of the mad (We can win in Afghanistan! Iran is a threat! We must save our feral bankers!) and craft them into policies and laws that give these ravings a patina of sanity?
Without these drones, the bombing of wedding parties would never have achieved the respectability it has. In their hands, murder becomes tactical.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Casting Runes on the floor of the NYSE
Economic is not a science; it is augury; it is the casting of runes in a vain attempt to bring predictability to the nonlinear chaos that is our human lot. And, as John Michael Greer points out, economists have an abysmal track record.
One of the problems is that economists believe that the past never happened. The past is a dream lost in the mists of time and has no relevance to the present. Their vision is a pinprick of light that sees only the fleeting present they mistakenly believe can be captured and held in place by complex mathematical models.
Greer quotes John Kenneth Galbraith who said that, “[I]n the financial world, the term ‘innovation’ usually refers to the rediscovery of the same limited set of bad ideas that always, without exception, lead to economic disaster.”
This is especially true of bubbles, be they housing bubbles, dot.com bubbles, South Seas bubbles or tulip bubbles. Every time a new bubble surfaces, economists put on their priestly robes and mumble that four-word incantation that is the precursor to disaster, “It’s different this time,”
It never is.
However, as Greer points out, bubbles are golden eggs for economists. As asset prices soar towards the galaxy, economists are the seers assuring us that the current bubble is constructed of high-carbon steel and will never, ever burst. And the first thing a people with no sense of history do after the bubble has popped is to forget that it popped so they are primed and ready for the next one.
Economics is a branch of the social sciences, surely history’s greatest oxymoron. They filled the vacuum left by the collapse of religion and are just as invalid.
Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy is a product of quantum physics, but it certainly describes the fatal flaw in the social sciences. The principle states, “Absolutely precise measurements are impossible, due to interference to the measured quantity which is inevitably introduced by the measuring instrument.”
In other words, as soon as an economist opens his mouth, the phenomenon being described is changed by his statement. But that doesn’t stop economists from constructing their mathematical models and hawking them as valid predictors of future activity. As Greer points out:
Economics is particularly vulnerable to this sort of malign feedback because its raw material—human beings making economic decisions—is so complex that the only way to control all the variables is to impose conditions so arbitrary and rigid that the results have only the most distant relation to the real world.
He cites the example Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). Two noble laureate economists constructed mathematic models one claimed “were so good that they could not lose money in the lifetime of the universe.” Unfortunately, the model failed to factor in history, i.e. countries sometimes default on their debts. Russia did, and LTCM tanked.
The reason we need high priests is that we simply don’t know what the fuck is happening. It’s all so confusing. The truth is we don’t know if we’ll survive to see tomorrow morning. This is especially true of our financial retards who are like little boys who love building intricate structure out of blocks just so they can send them crashing to the ground.
The high priest of economics is a godsend to them. The economists unroll their complex formulae and our fund managers, whose concept of history is Sunday’s Giants game, are reassured that the current bubble is forever.
The story is told of the man who, when he walked into work every morning would be hit alongside the head with a two-by-four wielde by his boss. It was the same thing every morning, Monday through Friday. Then, one day, the boss wasn’t there, so the man waited for him to appear.
The employee must have been an investment banker.
One of the problems is that economists believe that the past never happened. The past is a dream lost in the mists of time and has no relevance to the present. Their vision is a pinprick of light that sees only the fleeting present they mistakenly believe can be captured and held in place by complex mathematical models.
Greer quotes John Kenneth Galbraith who said that, “[I]n the financial world, the term ‘innovation’ usually refers to the rediscovery of the same limited set of bad ideas that always, without exception, lead to economic disaster.”
This is especially true of bubbles, be they housing bubbles, dot.com bubbles, South Seas bubbles or tulip bubbles. Every time a new bubble surfaces, economists put on their priestly robes and mumble that four-word incantation that is the precursor to disaster, “It’s different this time,”
It never is.
However, as Greer points out, bubbles are golden eggs for economists. As asset prices soar towards the galaxy, economists are the seers assuring us that the current bubble is constructed of high-carbon steel and will never, ever burst. And the first thing a people with no sense of history do after the bubble has popped is to forget that it popped so they are primed and ready for the next one.
Economics is a branch of the social sciences, surely history’s greatest oxymoron. They filled the vacuum left by the collapse of religion and are just as invalid.
Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy is a product of quantum physics, but it certainly describes the fatal flaw in the social sciences. The principle states, “Absolutely precise measurements are impossible, due to interference to the measured quantity which is inevitably introduced by the measuring instrument.”
In other words, as soon as an economist opens his mouth, the phenomenon being described is changed by his statement. But that doesn’t stop economists from constructing their mathematical models and hawking them as valid predictors of future activity. As Greer points out:
Economics is particularly vulnerable to this sort of malign feedback because its raw material—human beings making economic decisions—is so complex that the only way to control all the variables is to impose conditions so arbitrary and rigid that the results have only the most distant relation to the real world.
He cites the example Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). Two noble laureate economists constructed mathematic models one claimed “were so good that they could not lose money in the lifetime of the universe.” Unfortunately, the model failed to factor in history, i.e. countries sometimes default on their debts. Russia did, and LTCM tanked.
The reason we need high priests is that we simply don’t know what the fuck is happening. It’s all so confusing. The truth is we don’t know if we’ll survive to see tomorrow morning. This is especially true of our financial retards who are like little boys who love building intricate structure out of blocks just so they can send them crashing to the ground.
The high priest of economics is a godsend to them. The economists unroll their complex formulae and our fund managers, whose concept of history is Sunday’s Giants game, are reassured that the current bubble is forever.
The story is told of the man who, when he walked into work every morning would be hit alongside the head with a two-by-four wielde by his boss. It was the same thing every morning, Monday through Friday. Then, one day, the boss wasn’t there, so the man waited for him to appear.
The employee must have been an investment banker.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Saving Big Pharma
I’m not gloating because this is not something to gloat about. However, even as far back as July, 2008 I knew Obama was a dud. He was just another charming corporate Democrat who had no intention of messing with the status quo.
Well, guess what: his do-nothingism scored another victory, Thursday, when the Senate Finance Committee voted down an amendment to the health “reform” bill that would have required Big Pharma to give deeper discounts on drugs sold to older Americans.
If you remember, Obama cut a closed-door deal with Big Pharma in June in which the drug companies agreed to $80 billion in reduced costs over the next ten years, a cut that wouldn’t even put a dent in their bloated profits. In exchange, the drug dealers agreed to support the health care reform bill.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, introduced an amendment that would have upped that discount to $100 billion.
Well, holy shit! You would have thought his amendment wanted to sell the United States to al Qaeda.
The reason for voting the amendment down is telling. According to Senator Thomas Carper, Democrat of Delaware, asking the drug companies to contribute more to the public welfare would “undermine our ability to pass comprehensive health care reform in this Congress.” It seems Big Pharma would pull their support if the government did a sensible thing like using its purchasing power to affect deep discounts, something any corporation worth its salt (think Wal-Mart) wouldn’t hesitate to do.
Let’s see if I have this straight: seventy-percent of the public wants health care reform, yet Congress is more worried about Big Pharma’s tender feelings than the wishes and desires of the public it purportedly represents.
My, this has a familiar ring to it.
Big Pharma was right there waving the bloody flag of potential unemployment if it was forced to sell its over-priced drugs at a fair price. A spokesman said, “If our contribution to health care reform exceeds $80 billion, you reach a point where you risk sacrificing someone’s job for some else’s health insurance.”
It is always amazing how our corporate oligarchy is quick to whine about lost jobs whenever any sort of reform is suggested, but will not hesitate to lay off tens of thousands of workers if it will ads a point or to two the profit margin.
I’m sorry to say that my senators, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, was one of three Democrats to vote against the amendment that would have saved our seniors, whose retirement accounts have been savaged by our corporate masters, a few bucks. Well, when he comes up for reelection, I’m voting for Rush. At least I’d know what I was getting.
Well, guess what: his do-nothingism scored another victory, Thursday, when the Senate Finance Committee voted down an amendment to the health “reform” bill that would have required Big Pharma to give deeper discounts on drugs sold to older Americans.
If you remember, Obama cut a closed-door deal with Big Pharma in June in which the drug companies agreed to $80 billion in reduced costs over the next ten years, a cut that wouldn’t even put a dent in their bloated profits. In exchange, the drug dealers agreed to support the health care reform bill.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, introduced an amendment that would have upped that discount to $100 billion.
Well, holy shit! You would have thought his amendment wanted to sell the United States to al Qaeda.
The reason for voting the amendment down is telling. According to Senator Thomas Carper, Democrat of Delaware, asking the drug companies to contribute more to the public welfare would “undermine our ability to pass comprehensive health care reform in this Congress.” It seems Big Pharma would pull their support if the government did a sensible thing like using its purchasing power to affect deep discounts, something any corporation worth its salt (think Wal-Mart) wouldn’t hesitate to do.
Let’s see if I have this straight: seventy-percent of the public wants health care reform, yet Congress is more worried about Big Pharma’s tender feelings than the wishes and desires of the public it purportedly represents.
My, this has a familiar ring to it.
Big Pharma was right there waving the bloody flag of potential unemployment if it was forced to sell its over-priced drugs at a fair price. A spokesman said, “If our contribution to health care reform exceeds $80 billion, you reach a point where you risk sacrificing someone’s job for some else’s health insurance.”
It is always amazing how our corporate oligarchy is quick to whine about lost jobs whenever any sort of reform is suggested, but will not hesitate to lay off tens of thousands of workers if it will ads a point or to two the profit margin.
I’m sorry to say that my senators, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, was one of three Democrats to vote against the amendment that would have saved our seniors, whose retirement accounts have been savaged by our corporate masters, a few bucks. Well, when he comes up for reelection, I’m voting for Rush. At least I’d know what I was getting.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Statistical Sophistry
Numbers are all the rage. Our airways are flooded with numbers that explain, analyze, categorize, interpret and order. Numbers never lie, we are told; they are better than the Ten Commandments and more accurate. The Commandments are fuzzy and ambiguous, too open to contradictory interpretation to qualify as efficient guidelines. (Is it Thou shall not kill or Thou shall not murder?)
No, numbers never lie, they just distort. The first rule of statistical analysis is, “If you can’t think, count.” The result is a statistical sophistry that pawns itself off as truth.
· If the banks are insolvent, simply stop marking their toxic assets to market, mark them to model and, suddenly, they are solvent.
· If you redefine “unemployment” to exclude certain categories of the jobless, the numbers suddenly look better.
· If you exclude food and fuel from the Consumer Price Index, you tame inflation even though our out-of-pocket expenses are increasing. But, that’s not inflation because the statistics say it isn’t. It simply means that we’re spending more.
· If students get good test scores, they’re smart, even though they can’t think.
It all boils down to the bottom line. If that looks good, it is good. You can’t quantify the gut-wrenching experience of hunger or poverty, all you can do is count the number of poor people using a statistical definition.
The nice thing about statistics is that they never smell of unwashed bodies or resound with the cry of a hungry child. As such, they fail to engage us or stir us to action. Okay, so 80 percent of the world lives on less than US$2.50 a day. Isn’t it a shame that 25,000 children die daily due to poverty related conditions?
All they are is dry numbers, numbers we hear so often we’re numbed to them. Nothing to be done except fold the newspaper, gulp down the lost of our coffee and leave for work, confident that the economy is improving because the numbers tell it is.
Corporations print their spreadsheets on thick paper so the blood of the innocent can’t soak through. War is bloodless if reduced to body counts and metrics. As long as an enterprise gives its stockholders a good return on investment it makes no difference how destructive to people and the environment its activities are.
The numbers lead us around by the nose. They measure our lives and tell us how to think. If Obama’s numbers are up, he’d doing a good joy; if they’re down, he isn’t. If a movie grossed $45 million dollars on the day it opened, it must be good. If “Dancing with the Stars” gets good numbers, it a success no matter how badly the show sucks.
Numbers rattle around in our empty minds like dried beans in a tin can. They dazzle and confuse as they goosestep across screens and paper in rand and file order. They are the dry tit we all suck on in the belief it is giving us sustenance, and we mistake the dust we that fills our mouths for milk and can’t understand why we are losing weight.
No, numbers never lie, they just distort. The first rule of statistical analysis is, “If you can’t think, count.” The result is a statistical sophistry that pawns itself off as truth.
· If the banks are insolvent, simply stop marking their toxic assets to market, mark them to model and, suddenly, they are solvent.
· If you redefine “unemployment” to exclude certain categories of the jobless, the numbers suddenly look better.
· If you exclude food and fuel from the Consumer Price Index, you tame inflation even though our out-of-pocket expenses are increasing. But, that’s not inflation because the statistics say it isn’t. It simply means that we’re spending more.
· If students get good test scores, they’re smart, even though they can’t think.
It all boils down to the bottom line. If that looks good, it is good. You can’t quantify the gut-wrenching experience of hunger or poverty, all you can do is count the number of poor people using a statistical definition.
The nice thing about statistics is that they never smell of unwashed bodies or resound with the cry of a hungry child. As such, they fail to engage us or stir us to action. Okay, so 80 percent of the world lives on less than US$2.50 a day. Isn’t it a shame that 25,000 children die daily due to poverty related conditions?
All they are is dry numbers, numbers we hear so often we’re numbed to them. Nothing to be done except fold the newspaper, gulp down the lost of our coffee and leave for work, confident that the economy is improving because the numbers tell it is.
Corporations print their spreadsheets on thick paper so the blood of the innocent can’t soak through. War is bloodless if reduced to body counts and metrics. As long as an enterprise gives its stockholders a good return on investment it makes no difference how destructive to people and the environment its activities are.
The numbers lead us around by the nose. They measure our lives and tell us how to think. If Obama’s numbers are up, he’d doing a good joy; if they’re down, he isn’t. If a movie grossed $45 million dollars on the day it opened, it must be good. If “Dancing with the Stars” gets good numbers, it a success no matter how badly the show sucks.
Numbers rattle around in our empty minds like dried beans in a tin can. They dazzle and confuse as they goosestep across screens and paper in rand and file order. They are the dry tit we all suck on in the belief it is giving us sustenance, and we mistake the dust we that fills our mouths for milk and can’t understand why we are losing weight.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The Return of the Lip-Sticked Pig
She's back! My Wingnut beauty with the finest boobs in on the American political scene has returned. Yes, Sarah Palin surfaced in Hong Kong speaking to a group of global investors where she scored a trifecta by proving she was alive, could find Hong Kong and could speak to a group investors for more than five minutes without being thrown off the stage.
At least we think she spoke. The event was shrouded in so many layers of secrecy, nobody’s sure she even showed up. The press was barred and no copies of her speech were distributed. Only selected dribbles of her speech were allowed to leak out. (One of the dribbles was that she assured the investors that many average Americans don’t like health care reforms that infringe on our free enterprise system. By average Americans she meant CEOs making mega-billion dollar salaries. In her world, that’s about as average as you can get.)
An advisor denied that her appearance had any political overtones. She just happened to be in the neighborhood and dropped by for a chat.
What is so thrilling about her appearance is that it marks the kickoff of a new breakthrough in political campaigning. For decades, there has been talk of marketing a presidential candidate as a commodity like deoderant. The downside is that the candidate actually has to appear in public. With the GWB campaign, this turned out to be a disaster.
Political operatives learned their lesson, so with Sarah Palin we could well be seeing the introduction of the virtual presidential campaign in which the candidate is never seen in person until Inauguration Day. The campaign is conducted in a hermetically sealed bubble. During speeches the press is confined to a Free Speech Zone; after the appearance, aides handout press releases describing the appearances that the press is expected to print verbatim if they want future access to the Free Speech Zone.
Hell, if we can reduce war to a video game, why can’t we do the same for a presidential campaign? There’d be no more embarrassing slips of tongue, and the press releases would paint a picture of a candidate with an intellect is as big as her boobs.
However, the important thing is that she’s returned. If she keeps popping up, it may be time to bring Belacqua out of retirement.
At least we think she spoke. The event was shrouded in so many layers of secrecy, nobody’s sure she even showed up. The press was barred and no copies of her speech were distributed. Only selected dribbles of her speech were allowed to leak out. (One of the dribbles was that she assured the investors that many average Americans don’t like health care reforms that infringe on our free enterprise system. By average Americans she meant CEOs making mega-billion dollar salaries. In her world, that’s about as average as you can get.)
An advisor denied that her appearance had any political overtones. She just happened to be in the neighborhood and dropped by for a chat.
What is so thrilling about her appearance is that it marks the kickoff of a new breakthrough in political campaigning. For decades, there has been talk of marketing a presidential candidate as a commodity like deoderant. The downside is that the candidate actually has to appear in public. With the GWB campaign, this turned out to be a disaster.
Political operatives learned their lesson, so with Sarah Palin we could well be seeing the introduction of the virtual presidential campaign in which the candidate is never seen in person until Inauguration Day. The campaign is conducted in a hermetically sealed bubble. During speeches the press is confined to a Free Speech Zone; after the appearance, aides handout press releases describing the appearances that the press is expected to print verbatim if they want future access to the Free Speech Zone.
Hell, if we can reduce war to a video game, why can’t we do the same for a presidential campaign? There’d be no more embarrassing slips of tongue, and the press releases would paint a picture of a candidate with an intellect is as big as her boobs.
However, the important thing is that she’s returned. If she keeps popping up, it may be time to bring Belacqua out of retirement.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The Whimsical World of Pop Culture and Yuppie Nihilism
Sunday, I checked out the premier of HBO’s “Bored to Death,” and I was. But it did occur to me that we are seeing the emergence of a new genre that is joining those traditional television staples the western and the sitcom. I call this new genre is Yuppie Nihilism. It began with “Seinfeld” and is continuing with “Curb your Enthusiasm.”
In the series, Jason Schwarzman plays a bored writer whose girlfriend leaves him because he drinks too much and smokes pot. Incapable of despair, he becomes a self-styled, if unlicensed private detective.
Schwarzman is playing a type, the Yuppie. So, what's a Yuppie? Mort Sahl once said, “A Yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been reviewed yet.”
Yuppies are more than that. They are the bored children of prosperity raised in a virtual world of screens and malls where freedom is reduced to choosing what logo you want to wear on your ass.
Technically, they are not nihilists. A nihilist has the sense not to believe in anything. Yuppies at least believe in the virtual. However, since the virtual is an empty void, they qualify. This belief in the virtual is why traumas like real-life relationships with their hidden thorns and ambiguities are so difficult for them. If it doesn’t play like a TV commercial, they have trouble handling it.
They are chronic avatars of pop culture, which must be distinguished from popular culture. Popular culture is organic and is bottom up. It is the product of a people’s struggles and tragedies and finds expression in their unique music. Pop culture is a top-down corporate creation that has been carefully packaged and sanitized as a bland “Bread and Circuses” designed to numb the masses. To claim that pop culture gives us insight into a people’s psyche is like believing that a turd floating on the ocean’s surface tells us all we need to know about its depths.
Back in the 50s, when psychoanalysis was all the rage and a grey conformity was de rigueur, artistic creativity was treated as a neurosis. Artists were unfortunate souls who simply couldn’t adjust to the good life. The cure for this neurosis was to conform. The “suffering artists” became a cliché reinforced by a few artists who actually led self-destructive lives. It was an idea that died in the maelstrom of the sixties.
But this doesn’t stop Schwarzman from doing his damndest to resurrect the stereotype. His character has published one novel and is too indecisive to start on a second. He is so mired in his arrested childhood that he is like the steel ball in a pinball machine, bounced from bumper to bumper. In the process he shows as much life as the ball.
One wonders what will happen to our bored children now that their economic bubble is popping, and they can no longer afford their logos and gadgets. Will they finally grow up, or will they start listening to Rush and Glen and discover that the only meaning they can discover in life is the white rage of the petulant child whose parents have turned off the T.V.?
In the series, Jason Schwarzman plays a bored writer whose girlfriend leaves him because he drinks too much and smokes pot. Incapable of despair, he becomes a self-styled, if unlicensed private detective.
Schwarzman is playing a type, the Yuppie. So, what's a Yuppie? Mort Sahl once said, “A Yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been reviewed yet.”
Yuppies are more than that. They are the bored children of prosperity raised in a virtual world of screens and malls where freedom is reduced to choosing what logo you want to wear on your ass.
Technically, they are not nihilists. A nihilist has the sense not to believe in anything. Yuppies at least believe in the virtual. However, since the virtual is an empty void, they qualify. This belief in the virtual is why traumas like real-life relationships with their hidden thorns and ambiguities are so difficult for them. If it doesn’t play like a TV commercial, they have trouble handling it.
They are chronic avatars of pop culture, which must be distinguished from popular culture. Popular culture is organic and is bottom up. It is the product of a people’s struggles and tragedies and finds expression in their unique music. Pop culture is a top-down corporate creation that has been carefully packaged and sanitized as a bland “Bread and Circuses” designed to numb the masses. To claim that pop culture gives us insight into a people’s psyche is like believing that a turd floating on the ocean’s surface tells us all we need to know about its depths.
Back in the 50s, when psychoanalysis was all the rage and a grey conformity was de rigueur, artistic creativity was treated as a neurosis. Artists were unfortunate souls who simply couldn’t adjust to the good life. The cure for this neurosis was to conform. The “suffering artists” became a cliché reinforced by a few artists who actually led self-destructive lives. It was an idea that died in the maelstrom of the sixties.
But this doesn’t stop Schwarzman from doing his damndest to resurrect the stereotype. His character has published one novel and is too indecisive to start on a second. He is so mired in his arrested childhood that he is like the steel ball in a pinball machine, bounced from bumper to bumper. In the process he shows as much life as the ball.
One wonders what will happen to our bored children now that their economic bubble is popping, and they can no longer afford their logos and gadgets. Will they finally grow up, or will they start listening to Rush and Glen and discover that the only meaning they can discover in life is the white rage of the petulant child whose parents have turned off the T.V.?
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