Category: Rants

Honesty time: aside from my regular "I can't believe how much free advertising the media give every new product from Apple under the guise of newsworthiness" comment I don't really care about their gadgetry enough to learn the nuts and bolts. The user-end complaints – coverage, providers, bugs, software, "apps", etc. – are irrelevant to me and I cannot claim to be knowledgeable about them. I look at each new shiny doo-dad they release and, through a combination of meager income and technological misanthropy, decide that I don't need it. But the iPad is worth looking at a little more thoroughly.

Apple immodestly bills all of its products as market- and life-changing windows into the future. With the iPod, they were right. In a good way. It fits a stack of 1000 CDs in the footprint of a deck of cards. That's awesome. Good show, Apple. Kudos. With the iPhone, they were right in a not-so-good way. The device portends a future in which everyone can mindlessly kill time on the internet during those few moments each day when we are not parked in front of a real computer. I don't go out with other humans a lot, and I find myself wanting to do it even less now that it is socially acceptable (and damn common) for one to whip out a spacephone and start tapping away in the middle of a conversation. A real conversation, that is. But why talk to people when you can stare at Facebook? The iPhone and its non-Apple equivalents are ushering in a future dominated by the fake cyber world that Americans, especially the younger ones, increasingly inhabit to the exclusion of reality. Life is just a bunch of inconvenient crap you have to do so that you can photograph it and post the pics on Facebook.

What is the iPad? I mean, beyond all the hype and the technical specs, what is it? It's a fancy multimedia device. It's a vehicle for digital music, video/movies/TV, go-anywhere internet access, eBooks, and so on. I will leave to better thinkers the arguments about Apple's creepy obsession with top-down control of its technology, what with the computers that can't be opened and tinkered with and the very pointed (albeit not terribly successful) efforts to sell you music and movies in formats that are useless on non-Apple hardware. The more important question is what this thing says about us and our vision of progress. The iPad is the device you've been waiting for your entire life…as long as all you want to do is stare at the internet and buy shit unceasingly.

Let's not kid ourselves; its allure, if any, lies in the fact that the screen is much bigger than an iPhone. No more eyestrain or furrowing one's brow to watch videos on that tiny screen.
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Bigger touch-screen buttons for our fat American fingers. The last obstacle between you and never having to interact with or look at your surroundings again – the physical limitations imposed by the iPhone – are gone. That's the big achievement. That is the future. It is a future in which we are constantly staring at YouTube videos, episodes of 30 Rock, or the latest bestselling pap. We will plow through it so that we may buy more crap from Apple and plow through that as well. We will pause only to Tweet our mind-numbingly inane thoughts about standing in line at the grocery store or the latest Vince Vaughn "comedy."

This is the future, alright. We can rationalize our iPads the same way we rationalized our iPhones – "It'll be useful if I need to look up directions, or something!

Totally worth it!" – but the end result will be no different.
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We will use this device to further distance ourselves from reality and from one another. We will use it to buy lots of shit in furtherance of that goal. The future is here, and the future is an expensive synthesis of Americans' two favorite activities: staring at lit screens and incurring credit card debt. Today's "World of Tomorrow" has no flying cars or moon bases. It's just a bunch of fat fuckers with no social skills staring at a screen and paying dearly for the privilege.

So, this happened:

Every time I think I am not going to dignify Sarah Palin's ridiculous existence with any more attention she draws me back in. Let's try to count them.

1. Sarah Palin raked in a $100,000 fee for this speech, which sounds suspiciously like she did absolutely no advance preparation. Either she didn't bother writing a speech at all (or, let's be honest, having one written for her) or did so on the 10 minute limo ride over to TeabagCon2010. There's a small handful of people on this planet who can give a major speech before a large audience (not to mention TV cameras) without practicing. Sarah Palin isn't one of them. This sounds like she did everything except moon the crowd, give them the finger, and say "Thanks for the 100 grand, assholes!"

2. Why would she have notes unless the questions were screened and pre-approved in advance? She wouldn't, of course, which means that the questions at a Teabagger convention were too difficult for the person who wants to be the next President. The questions were variations of "Governor Palin, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?" And she knew what was coming. And she needed notes to answer it.

3. She wrote "Energy. Budget Tax cuts. Lift American spirit." on her hand so she wouldn't forget her own "vision" for the future of the conservative movement she claims to lead. I can understand if someone wanted notes about the names of foreign heads of state or the GNP of Chile. But she needed notes to recite her own talking points in response to questions she knew were coming.

4. Marker-on-hand? Really? What is she, an 18 year old fratboy cheating her way through an Econ 101 midterm? I find it hard to believe that, you know, note cards or something were not viable alternatives. After 18 solid months of Obama teleprompter jokes I guess she painted herself into a corner, though.

5. Her notes at the ready, Palin treated the audience (of 1100! What a movement!) to hot, steaming nuggets of brilliance like this:

I think, kind of tougher to, um, put our arms around, but allowing America's spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we're not afraid to say, especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we're not afraid to say, you know, we don't have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.

That is exactly 100 words and it is one sentence, a sentence given in response to a question about the priorities of a hypothetical "conservative majority in Congress." In short, Congress needs to be praying for divine intervention more regularly. That'll help.

There was one instance in my five years of teaching on which I did absolutely no preparation at all for a lecture. Really, I might sound like an idiot semi-regularly but it's never for lack of preparation. Except for that one time. It was an unqualified disaster. Ad-libbing in front of 150 people for an hour is not a good idea. I walked out of class that day feeling like I should return my salary for the past hour ($6) to the State Legislature, as I could not consent to receive payment for rendering services of that quality. Despite our meager salaries, teachers and professors put a lot of time into preparing a lecture. The rule of thumb for doing the bare minimum is Prep Time = 2 x Class Time. What I'm getting at is not that we should get a cookie for doing our jobs, but that if someone paid me $100,000 to speak for 39 minutes and do some softball Q & A, I'd probably spend some time preparing. That and her extra chromosome are what separate me from Sarah Palin.

I half-expected Wired magazine to be humiliated out of existence back in 2000 after the dot-com bubble burst; what clips of dancing hippies set to "Purple Haze" are to the 1960s, a progression of Wired covers is to the 90s. It was the unofficial bible of whiz-bang Capitalism 2.0 with its zooming electrons and democratized stock market that was going to make us all rich by increasing indefinitely. Yes, those were the heady days – fresh off the defeat of communism by a coalition of free markets, Ronald Reagan, and C+C Music Factory – in which Technology fused with a new, messianic loathing for regulation to create a system fresh out of Milton Friedman's wet dreams. No one really understood it, but all we needed to know is that it made everyone in the suburbs rich, it obsoleted Second Wave notions like unions and job security, and it was not shy about letting us know who the new Masters of the Universe were. That's where Wired came in (with Fast Company a close second). But this time the plutocracy wore jeans instead of tuxedos and played frisbee in the office. Look how fucking cool they are!

You'd think that the intervening decade since the collapse of the great NASDAQ-fueled version of the middle class white guy's American Dream would have taken the edge off of Wired's institutional hubris. It didn't change the magazine one bit, it turns out. It just made them irrelevant. But it's good to know that somewhere in the background of the collapsed bubble it helped create Wired is still peddling its unique brand of tech-obsessed glibertarianism.

So now that the economy has executed a controlled flight into terrain under the direction of our neo-Gilded Age betters, to whom can we turn for guidance? Why, to the same people, of course! If you've ever seen Wired or were awake at any point between 1990 and 1999 you'll know that the answer to our current malaise lies in our ability to harness the limitless American entrepreneurial spirit. Harness the shit out of it.

In keeping with the anti-Second Wave mantra of the faith, Wired is eager to remind us not to turn to government or any kind of collective answers to these problems. We'll be saved individually and collectively when we harness our inner Carnegie. Yes, in the New Industrial Revolution, Atoms are Bits, the factory is your PC, and you are the CEO of You, Inc.

In the age of democratized industry, every garage is a potential micro-factory, every citizen a potential micro-entrepreneur. Here’s how to transform a great idea into a great product.

The key to becoming financially independent is – stay with me here – inventing an awesome product and then taking advantage of all the eCommerce doo-dads that allow you to make it a reality! It's just that easy.

1) INVENT Stop whining about the dearth of cool products in the world — dream up your own. Pro tip: Check the US Patent and Trademark Office Web site to ensure no one else had the idea first.

So, to review: the first step in this process is to think of a brilliant invention. On only two occasions in my life have I heard worse advice. One involved a recommendation to invest heavily in Franklin Mint products. The other involved urging me to talk to a girl at a bar who had open, obvious herpes sores all over her mouth. But the Wired-sponsored new Industrial Revolution will work as long as all of us, or at least most of us, think of a brilliant invention that lots of people will want to buy. The wealth will trickle down, though. I mean, after Henry Ford started a motor company with a great idea he made a lot of employees financially successful too.

4) MANUFACTURE The garage is fine for limited production, but if you want to go big, go global — outsource. Factories in China are standing by; sites like Alibaba.com can help you find the right partner.

Oh.

Well, I guess everyone needs to start at step one. I have the feeling that we're going to make it through this recession just fine…as long as there are 50-some million brilliant ideas out there so unemployed, underemployed, and financially drowning people can grab one like a lifeline, email it to China, and sit back waiting for money to fall from the sky.

A century of research in psychology offers ample evidence that with enough time, repetition, and peer pressure, people can convince themselves that just about anything is normal, socially acceptable behavior. The dumpy guy in the next cubicle or your cookie-baking mom are perfectly capable of rounding up the Jews or surrendering their lives to the Great Leader if enough people around them are doing likewise and there are enough messages that it's OK. Hannah Arendt wrote extensively on the banality of evil – the idea that Nazi Germany, for example, was composed of normal, even boring people for whom the deviant had simply become normal. After a few weeks they don't even notice the smell of the crematoria.

That said, please recognize that the use of a Nazi example does not mean that I am about to imply that Republicans are Nazis. They've just created an atmosphere in which the aberrant has become so normal that no one even questions it. Surround yourself with enough crazy and apparently no one stops to wonder, "Hey, are we completely goddamn bonkers?" after a while. Or they ask someone even crazier and are reassured accordingly.
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I don't believe that DailyKos/Research2000 is the finest of all polling organizations, but the operation is pulling large enough samples for all of us to be sufficiently alarmed by their recent poll of self-identified Republicans. In short, there are about 1/3 of Republicans who have some grounding in reality. They believe President Obama was born in the US. They don't believe he should be impeached given the complete absence of Constitutional cause for doing so. About 40% of them don't believe "President Obama wants the terrorists to win."

The other 2/3, well, they're quite the other thing. They hold some seriously wacky beliefs. Beliefs of the "The moon landing was faked" variety. As you examine the poll results the raw numbers are startling enough – 24% believe the President "wants the terrorists to win" – but take a look at the "not sure" category. Another 33% are not sure. They're entertaining the idea. It's plausible enough to avoid ruling it out.

Almost 80% believe or aren't sure that Obama is a socialist. Three out of five don't believe he was born in the US. 20% believe ACORN "stole" the 2008 election and a whopping 55% consider it plausible. 86% think or aren't sure that Palin is more qualified (although that's technically subjective, so let's let it slide). 64% think he is or may be a racist who hates white people irrespective of the fact that he is, you know, half white. A whole 58% – look at that, a modest majority! – believe their state should not secede from the union. 21% demand immediate secession while another quarter, well, they're a-thinkin' bout it. 8% think gays should be allowed to teach. A majority oppose (or aren't sure about) teaching sex education in schools. Any kind of sex education. I'll tell you what 77% do think should be taught, though…
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creationism! 31% (plus 13% unsure) believe contraceptives should be illegal. Well, that should help things!

This should alarm Republicans. It probably does alarm the 1/3 of them who, you know, understand the difference between reality and paranoid conspiracy theories peddled by sweaty idiots on cable. They feel outnumbered and rightly so. These are the kinds of beliefs that belong on the lunatic fringe of any respectable political movement, yet pure insanity is now the solid majority of the GOP.
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It is mainstream. Hear enough conspiracy theories about how some dime-store group called ACORN could "steal" an election won by 150 Electoral Votes and it becomes, well, normal.

Academics have a hard time studying the presidency. There are few cases, little data aside from election results and administrative activity, and the recognition of the overwhelming importance of something as subjective as "leadership." Presidential scholarship usually ends up in the hands of historians who write what amounts to long-winded journalism about the men in office and political scientists who have a hard time getting their colleagues to pay attention to them.

Unfortunately a lot of the factors that lead to success in elections and politics are subjective. Leadership is like obscenity. We can't define it but we know it when we see it. What makes people watch a Bill Clinton speech and like him? What made so many Americans buy George W. Bush's honest, regular-guy horsecrap? What made John McCain appealing as a Senator and so unappealing as a presidential candidate? Like the bobbleheads on TV we can all throw out some plausible explanations, but if required to produce empirical evidence we'd come up empty. Yet these qualities, things like charisma and leadership, are the difference between the expected and unexpected in our elections.

The 8th Congressional District of Florida is a Republican's wet dream. It's not only in Orlando, it's in the suburbs of Orlando. Minivans, subdivisions, strip malls, and moneyed white people as far as the eye can see, all in the artificial shadow of Disneyworld. This is Reagan's America in a nutshell and at best the Democrats might hope to sneak a Reagan Democrat in during an anti-Republican landslide. Right? Well, after 20 years under Republicans Rick Keller and Bill "Clinton Impeachment" McCollum, the district elected Alan Grayson in 2008. If you're not familiar with him, Grayson is a major pain in the GOP's ass, one of the loudest, crudest, most outspoken ultra-liberal Democrats in Congress. Grayson is the current It Girl of the progressive community and his name alone is enough to get the average left-leaning blogger in a tizzy.

As you might imagine, the Republicans have made a lot of noise about making Grayson a target in 2010. It makes a lot of sense given the demographics of the district. Surely his victory in the Democratic landslide of '08 was a fluke. The problem is that they can't get anyone decent to run against him. The people in his district love him (and it can't hurt that he's wealthy when it comes to scaring challengers). There are currently eight people in the GOP primary – including a few teabagger types – and the best they can do is State Rep. Kurt Kelly. Grayson's odds of winning are pretty good to say the least.

How? How is it that the same Democratic Party enthralled with the sage advice of the Liebermans and Bayhs and Harold Fords of the world – move to the mushy center, and fast – can count Grayson as one of its safest freshman in a district George W. Bush won with 55% of the vote…twice? I'd suggest that Grayson does well because he has those "leadership" skills and his constituents respond to them. Sure, they might not agree with his policy positions on everything or his vituperative attacks on Dick Cheney, but he means what he says and he's not afraid of anyone. Maybe voters would rather see an elected official with a spine than one who caves at the slightest hint of opposition. Maybe a guy who doesn't back down seems like a better advocate for the district's interests than some ideologically compatible but spineless douchebag. Who'd you rather have in your corner when Congress decides to yank funding for the local pet project – Grayson or Harold Ford?

Nah. Surely the key to electoral success is to bend over in front of the opposing party at every conceivable opportunity.

What can I say about the President's half-assed "spending freeze" proposal that hasn't already been said about AIDS? While I've never been a fan of this guy, it would take a herculean effort to get me to ponder – not accept, but at least consider – the charges of his conservative opponents in 2008. Does this guy have the slightest idea what he's doing?
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Are we going to try a new macroeconomic policy every six months, or are we just slap-dashing bits and pieces of different policies together and hoping that the sum will be greater than the parts? This is just the latest in a string of attempts to "govern from the center" (i.e., do nothing) and it manages to be bad economics and bad politics simultaneously. That's hard to do; I guess Obama really is special after all.

On the one hand, as Ron Paul (!!!) was astute enough to note, the odds of much spending actually being cut by the time Congress caters to the demands of each individual member are slim. On the other, it signals that Obama had the balls for all of about 6 months of governing with any sort of coherent policy of his own. Now, with 58 Democrats in the Senate and an 80-seat majority in the House, he's moved on to full-blown Republican appeasement. Time to "reign in spending" and a bunch of other shit that Republican voters aren't going to care about anyway.

I mean, why stick to your guns or follow through for the people who voted for you when you can bend over trying to appease people who hate you no matter what?

Maybe the problem, as his supporters are slowly discovering, is that he had no guns to begin with. As I said repeatedly during the election, he offered us nothing but four years of centrist New Democrat bullshit. And he's delivering.

Reich and Krugman have plenty to say about why the economics are fundamentally unsound. Politically, this will pretty much guarantee the Democratic base sitting out the next couple of elections while winning the President exactly zero support from the right in the process. I'm not sure what he could propose that would be a bigger insult to the people who voted for him than a freeze on all non-military spending. Obviously if it's time to start tightening out belts (to achieve deficit reduction that voters won't even know happened) we should start with everything other than Iraq and Afghanistan. Idiot.

It's not the act itself that matters; anyone with a working knowledge of Congress understands that this will result in very little reduction in spending (if any). It's the absence of principles, absence of a backbone, and willingness to cave to the slightest political pressure that augurs badly for the next couple of years.
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You can't beat the Republicans at being Republicans. If voters want Republicans they'll vote for them. That our political choices since 1980 have been Republican and Republican Lite says everything we need to know about our current economic predicament and the overwhelming disinterest in politics among voters to the left of Trent Lott. Of course the teabaggers are excited. You would be too if you always got what you wanted, win or lose.

Remember the 1990s? One of the central tenets of the new, hi-tech capitalism we embraced so jubilantly after our heady victory over the forces of communism was the democratization of the stock market. Prior to the mid-1990s, buying stock was a laborious affair hamstrung by limited information (no internet meant getting daily prices from the newspaper) and formidable barriers to entry. Much like early internet users were considered to be technologically advanced people with strange, mysterious skills, pre-1990s stock owners were regarded with no small amount of awe. Few people bought and almost no one "traded.

"

The exclusivity of the market ended in two waves. First, the country went Mutual Fund loco in the late 1980s, allowing a wider audience to buy stocks while someone else did the work. Second, the transition of the internet from a rare technology to an omnipresent part of life gave everyone a chance to play Gordon Gekko. Along came NASDAQ, AMEX, E*Trade, Scottrade, Ameritrade, and dozens of others. We were all liberated from reliance on outmoded Second Wave institutions like Social Security or pension plans from our employers (that our employers were simultaneously liberated from the cost of providing one was just a happy coincidence). Instead we'd plot our own financial destinies in just a few minutes per day, everyone sharing equally in the munificence of The Market and becoming a fast tradin', self-made millionaire in his or her spare time.

It turns out, of course, that giving a bunch of people who know not their assholes from a hole in the ground didn't create a society of millionaires. It created millions of new investors who didn't know what the fuck they were doing. The only beneficiaries were the institutional investors who made billions off amateurs buying and selling idiotically based on the recommendations of TV and magazine "analysts." Uninformed demand was a terrific way to drive up prices; the pros enjoyed the ride, sold high, and got the hell out before John Q. Public's investment came crashing to Earth. In short, democratizing stock ownership has not and was not intended to spread wealth. That was merely a canard. The only thing it has accomplished is to make the people who were already wealthy even moreso. Massive herds of people buying what a loud guy on TV tells them to buy is a godsend for people who know better.

If you fancy yourself an investor – and I do, albeit a long term buy-and-hold one – you can probably anticipate where I'm headed here.

Anyone seen the price of gold lately?

Although gold predates the stock market as a mode of investment by several centuries, it is only recently that Americans have been swept with the paranoid, frenzied, Galt-goin', Paul-votin' urge to physically hoard gold (and silver). With the general public egged on by shameless shills who stand to make a fortune from herds of new buyers, precious metals are no longer the exclusive province of survivalists. Every patriot worth his salt is burying some gold in the yard ahead of the inevitable collapse of the worthless fiat dollar. That Glenn Beck is paid by retail gold outlet Goldline International to hawk gold on the air is no cause for suspicion. That prices have quadrupled in a decade matters not a bit. That anyone buying at these prices stands to lose a fantastic amount of money is irrelevant.
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When money ceases to exist and gold is the only currency with any value, Uncle Larry and his buried treasure will have the last laugh!

Someone once gave me a useful piece of financial advice: if your cabdriver is talking about the wisdom of a particular investment opportunity, it's time to short it. Fads become bubbles and bubbles become crashes. The only people who win are the ones who got in before the hysteria and are sharp enough to sell high. It may be inconceivable that anyone would be stupid enough to buy at $1,200/ounce, but something tells me the average teabagger rally has more than enough candidates who qualify. The guise of democratization – "Finally, a chance for the Everyman to own gold!" – is as cynical as it is effective.
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