Mugged by the Debt Moralizers

Politics/USA/Economics: For the millionth time, a summary of concisely what is so wrong and stupid about the right-wing/Republican/Tea Party ideology that nevertheless has swept the recent elections.

Clearly, this is a challenging subject for good God- and Debt-fearing Americans to understand so I will try to put it in common sense, Joe-the-Plumber-style English.

Although the Republicans claim to be the one with 'common sense' and 'business sense' rather than these pie-in-the-sky hippie Communist Democrats, they are apparently unable to grasp the most basic fundamental business and economic principles.

Yes, what seems immediately obvious that you should do when you are in debt, cut spending, is not necessarily true in the real world of free market competition.

Households are not businesses, and countries are not households.  Countries are a lot more like businesses than they are like households.

For an example, if you have a business that is suffering in the recession, you could slash spending, fire workers, cut hours, cut services etc.  But all this may in fact cause your business to simply shrink and never come back, because simultaneously your better capitalized competitors are able to take some losses in an attempt to gain market share from you.

In fact, though it is obviously a risk, it may be most prudent to take a loan, yes modify your businesses priorities, and perhaps cut the profit margin, but aim to gain customers from the other businesses who are stupidly simply decreasing their standards of service in an attempt to survive.

To survive in the free-market, it is not enough to simply survive, you have to beat your competitors, at all times, in all seasons, or they will destroy you.

Similarly, the US cannot simply cut all spending and shrink the government to nothing as Republican Tea Corp would like.

To do so will cause us to fall behind further in the world to a point that we may not recover from, with stiff competition from China etc.

The Tea Party has a valid point that the US is too dependent on debt, yes, they do.  However, they are many decades too late on this point.

In fact, it has been the Republicans, esp. Reagan and Bush II, who have created this mess, by allowing huge deficit growth in the good times, which was the right time, as every good and seasoned businessman knows, to save money and pay down debt.

As a Spanish proverb says, the "times of the skinny cows" (el dia de las vacas flacas) is always around the corner and THAT is when the real winners make their moves for long-term sustaining success, as Warren Buffett often tells you, by spending when everyone else is scared to or unable to.

It's not a good situation thanks to the Republicans of the past 30 years, it's not good to have to borrow through a recession when you are already heavily in debt.  This is precisely the kind of company that usually goes out of business and Warren Buffett would not buy.

On the other hand, there are always the intangible assets of a company: a brand, a leader, an ideal, things that cause people to invest in them even when they show no fiscal responsibility and very little business sense.

This is exactly the kind of company Buffett does buy, but he goes in and reorganizes them with his very left-wing mindset.

This is the kind of company the USA is, for myriad of historical reasons, and that is why we will be able to get out of this mess even if we have to go in debt up to our eyelids.

But the longer we let the know-nothing, proud to be uneducated right-wing control things, the longer the suffering will be, the more often these crashes will happen, and perhaps one day it really will be too late for the USA.

Unfortunately the knee-jerk masses only want to gyrate from one extreme to the other always too late and make everything worse than it is, just like watching a stock market crash, and only a few have the intelligence and perseverance to come out on top in the long-term.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/opinion/01krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Hitchens Dances on Falwell's Corpse

Religion/Politics/Death: Bravo to Hitchens for this eulogy, and to Anderson Cooper and CNN for giving him so much air time. Looks like Hitchens will have his own show any day now, he's on there almost every day, loved by Cooper and Dobbs. Good for them, they may regain some tiny measure of respect using him this way, though strange they give him so much time to speak alone without a counterpoint, what happened to objectivity?

http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/05/christopher-hitchens-anderson-cooper-jerry-falwell.php

Asians perceive the world differently and more holistically than Westerners

Sociology/Biology: Asians see the world much differently than Westerners.

"Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The key thing in Chinese culture is harmony, Nisbett said, while in the West the key is finding ways to get things done, paying less attention to others.

And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago.

In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.

Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen.

So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.
Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did."

Very interesting that agriculture 2000 years ago can still have such a powerful impact on our cultures, and what this portends for the future could be huge. May explain Asian facility for computer programming among other things?

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/ap_050822_asian_american.html

We Are Going Backwards: Abortion Rights Travesty

Abortion: We should be very worried about the Supreme Courts latest Abortion ruling, the media has not given it nearly enough coverage.

Sure it's just one, fairly uncommon procedure, but reading this opinion piece you get the idea that the government SHOULD NEVER BE INVOLVED in such painstaking medical decisions as we all hope never to have to make and NO ONE takes abortion as lightly as the anti-abortionists believe.

Banning 'partial-birth' abortion is just one small step of many the anti-abortionist fanatics have been making lately and electing any more Republicans will be the deathknell to the rights of women. It may be already too late but hopefully it's not.

Remember this when you go to the polls in 2008 and please don't let anyone else forget it, lives are at stake here and we are talking about grown women's lives, mothers and wives, not the unborn.

And please don't miss the hidden agenda - the right-wing only opposes abortion because they need more poor and desperate lives to send to their grist mill in the middle east so that a draft of wealthy children will never be necessary to protect their enormous investments.

If you are not rich and you vote Republican you are being used, plain and simple, and someday you may be royally screwed because of it.

I love how people insist the Republicans are the party for individual liberty.

Isn't it interesting that they only support liberty when it helps the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

Why is having a gun a more important right than having healthcare for your family?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-neil6may06,0,2723837.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Urban Sprawl is Good?

Urban Planning: Urban Sprawl may actually not be such a bad thing, despite being universally derided as one of the evils of our time.

"The notion that sprawl necessarily brings with it higher energy usage, increased
car travel, longer commutes and more traffic and pollution, for example, is
difficult to sustain. If this were true, commuting times would be shortest in
the densest cities and longest in the most sprawling ones. In fact, the reverse
is closer to the truth. Commuting times in American cities are substantially
lower than those in European cities.

There is no paradox here. As cities have spread out, jobs as well as houses have moved from the centre. There is no inherent reason why low-density living needs to lead to more energy use or produce more pollution than high-density living. In fact, at low enough densities it is possible to imagine urbanites producing almost all of their own energy through solar, wind and geothermal power, harvesting water and returning waste water to the ground locally, all without the vast centralised systems that were necessary to sustain the dense industrial cities of the 19th century that we now often mistake for the natural urban state."

While it is true that American commuting times are significantly lower, it is because we all use cars rather than public transportation, so it is fairly irrational to cite this as proof that sprawl is not bad for the environment, without including some statistics about actual fuel/public transportation usage.

Most likely, as with all things, a middle-ground is the best approach, and that is precisely what the anti-sprawl New Urbanism movement is supposedly trying to achieve, though I'm not impressed with its progress so far.

The problem is that companies still put a great deal of importance on being located in the city centers.

One would think that by being higher density than most American cities but not as much as New York, London would be ideal, a New Urban community already. But apparently the problem is that people simply live too far from their jobs, and I'm not sure what the solution for that is.

The desire for many businesses to stick together with others in their industry in defined commercial zones which may be too expensive for its workers to live near is the main problem.

I believe the Internet will be the eventual solution here, enabling people to work from home and for companies to communicate with other businesses without being located near to them.

Of course it is true that one day if solar technology becomes more viable low-density living will be better for the environment, but that day is not here yet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1696761,00.html

Americans with Passports Vote Democratic

Politics: 60% of Americans with passports voted for Kerry, only 35% for Bush.

This red state/blue state thing can seem pretty complicated at times but perhaps it's not.

Perhaps it's as simple as the fact that many Americans (Red staters) are too isolated from the rest of the world, totally surrounded by our uncommonly wealthy & happy country and simply unaware of the real world that makes them so stupid as to vote for someone like Bush.

This is an encouraging sign: since the world is getting ever smaller, international travel ever more common, and people ever more aware of the rest of the world thanks to the Internet among other things, this statistic gives me hope for the future of the USA.

Of course, a simple trip to Europe or Mexico or Canada certainly doesn't automatically change your mind but it at least gives people who know nothing but those ingrained American idiocies that socialism=evil and poor people=they deserve it a good chance to see the other side more openly.

LINK

Uncle Ben Finally Gets a Promotion After 60 Years

Racism/Media: Salon presents a visual history of racist spokescharacters as Uncle Ben has now been promoted 'from fictional cook to fictional CEO' of the fictional Uncle Ben's company (Owned by Mars.)

Always interesting to see how much things have changed in a mere 100 years, and have not.

Today we see racist advertisements of the past as unbelievable, yet we still don't have many black CEOs, and a surprisingly interesting segment on the Tyra Banks show yesterday about children's views on race showed that we still don't really see blacks being as smart or as likely to be good leaders as whites.

For all the good or bad effects Affirmative Action may have had, it hasn't really changed our view of blacks as poorer and less successful than whites, because it hasn't really changed the facts. There aren't many Black CEOs. I don't agree with Affirmative Action because it is purely reverse racism, but perhaps if the media at least presents the possibilities of blacks being CEOs, the reality can follow. At least we don't have to worry about fictional whites being left out, and the effect may be even greater. Or not.

So, I applaud Mars' decision to promote Uncle Ben as a CEO now instead of merely retiring or making him somehow less racist. It certainly took long enough though, what was the impetus? The Imus debacle?

Let's see if the remaining 'racist' brands try to up the ante, Aunt Jemina for President? They'd sure make a nice couple with Uncle Ben as First Gentleman...

Link