This Just In!

Dumb comment, dumb journalism. In an article in the New York Times on drug smuggling through Indian Reservations on the Mexican border, a federal official proposes a breathtakingly stupid explanation for the growth of the trade.

Remember how they taught us in school that marijuana is a gateway drug? How once a user starts with a doobie, it's a quick, inevitable road of descent to harder and more dangerous drugs, with their accompanying degradation, crime, addiction, ruin, and death?

Well, apparently pot is also a gateway "business" now. From the New York Times:

“The cartels use the profit from marijuana to purchase cocaine in Colombia and Peru and the ingredients for meth and heroin from other regions,” said Elizabeth W. Kempshall, special agent in charge of the Arizona office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “So marijuana is the catalyst for the rest of the drug trade.”

You heard it here first, folks... our federal officials think Mexican marijuana smuggling in remote desert locations leads directly to Columbian cocaine and Peruvian heroin, and ummmm... methamphetamine from somewhere else. Little Jose can, with hard work, honest dealings, and a little luck, advance from that little saddlebag of weed strapped to his burro to a Lear Jet full of rock cocaine.

This is a breathtakingly stupid quote from a federal official, and an amazingly dim-witted job by the Times writer and editor to report it. This is prejudice disguised as fact. Perhaps if the smuggling problem were examined in the light and away from the stupidity, prejudice, and ignorance demonstrated by this kind of received wisdom, the problem would not be so intractable. We, as a country, have a bad drug problem. Asserting unsubstantiated claims of causation is counter-productive. Perhaps writing on marijuana leads to other, more egregious journalistic crimes-- like feeding undigested and unsupported federal agency PR to the unwitting public.

OK, It's Official. We Are So Completely Screwed

I have decided it's caused by some strange eventuality which our Panspermia Parents just didn't anticipate. I think it's perhaps caused by our society's penchant to stare at (and interact with) bright, blinky pieces of glass-- TV, computer screen, cellphone, mp3 player. Maybe it's caused by high fructose corn syrup in our diets, or by the fact that no one has to learn anything about the actual world we live in anymore-- no one learns geography, no one learns where food actually comes from, no one learns other cultures or even who their neighbors are. Maybe it's caused by the fact so little information comes to us that hasn't been filtered through the medium of corporate thought-cleanse.

What I do know is the world has turned mad! Insane!

The North Pole, and virtually all of the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere have melted, the people in the Maldive Islands are walking up to their ankles in water, and the conservatives say the issue is made up!

American voters elect a right-leaning (pro-business, militarist, law-and-order) centrist Democrat to power, who happens to be a man of color, and the right are painting him as the Leon Trotsky/Nikolai Lenin of our time. His attempts to pay off the bills of his predecessor are deemed a socialist putsch. While our cities crumble, our armed services are building new roads in Helmand Province in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We've built hundreds of schools in Afghanistan while the venerable University of California is collapsing. We have unmanned planes, piloted by joystick from Las Vegas, flying around over Pakistan, a country which is nominally our ally, unleashing hellfire missiles into civilian villages without warning, but we call the tactics of our "enemies" terrorism.

Anyone who wants to know the truth is immediately mistrusted--the truth is being withheld for our own safety. As our surveillance society moves ever closer to complete lack of privacy we're told only the guilty would care whether they're watched and tracked. Our "conservatives" have created a new xenophobic revulsion of immigrants and want to fence off our borders, but they don't admit that our economy can't function without the labor of those same immigrants!

Churches aren't big enough, and often involve having to drive into town among the untrusted, great unwashed masses of humanity, so we've got religion on TV, brought to us by the likes of Pat Robertson, who can explain to us how the Haitians sold their souls to the devil 200 years ago in order to take control of their country, and so it's logical that the Lord should punish them with great tribulation. I am reminded of the 89 year old, drooling, senility-addled buffoon who came to the Holocaust Museum in Washington with an antique gun and shot dead the security guard who held the door open for him. People with Alzheimer's say and do stuff every day that shouldn't be held against them. How about we get rid of Pat Robertson from the airwaves. How about we find some way to allow truth in the media.

Rupert Murdoch Ghettoizes Clowns, Cranks and Cinderella Commentators Under the One Big Fox News Umbrella

According to news reports, Rupert Mordoch has consolidated his stable of crying clowns, cantankerous cranks, recovering addicts, and now-- the ruby in the crown-- the Cinderella from Wasilla, under the madly blinking Fox News marquee. Apparently Fox has hired the previously unemployed Sarah Palin to serve as commentator and "contributor." Palin, obviously thrilled to have another chance to work at all (after the debacle of the McCain Presidential campaign, and her ignominious exit from Alaska politics), said (according to Fox):

"I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news," Palin said in a written release.

This is a brilliant gambit which will concentrate virtually all of the idiot political voices we don't want to hear under one roof, onto one channel, and perhaps I'll take the time to figure out how to program it all out of my TV remote control once and for all.

Thanks Rupert! And remind me again how we're supposed to know it's not Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live, and what we're watching really is FoxNews?

GOP Demand Least Likely to be Heeded

This weekend there has been some clamor in the news about the nasty, despicable, and overtly racist remark that was tossed off a couple of years ago by Harry Reid, a democrat who is now the majority leader in the Senate, regarding then presidential candidate Barack Obama. Mr. Reid is, like most of the fat-cat, powerful, connected, and overwhelmingly white power elite in Washington, DC hopelessly classist and racist. The US is at least another generation away from eradicating racism from its mainstream (something I still believe is possible and hope for), and possibly longer from the elite, where it's accumulated like an invisible arterial plaque for centuries. It's a lot to ask of our US Senators to embrace our society's actual values when they're allowed so much leeway on other ethical, moral, and human values. The voters send them to Washington to dole out the pork, enrich their cronies, do their best to keep anyone else from gettin' more pork than us, and try and keep from screwing up the system any more than it already is.

Well, Mr. Reid was recently called out on his dismal behavior from 2008-- when he still believed (with so many) that Obama had a snowball's chance in hell to be elected-- and was forced to apologize for his remarks, which basically said Mr. Obama was an attractive candidate because he had light skin and didn't "talk like a Negro," and implied thereby that we could perhaps trust the guy with lawn work around the house, or teaching our kids. Well now he's president, and Mr. Reid felt he had to apologize so he could get back to the job of doling out roast pork to fat cats.

The GOP however, will never settle for such an evasive and unrepentant whitewash of this egregious attack on the dignity of the president's office and person, and so have demanded that Mr. Reid step down.

The Republican Party chairman says Sen. Harry Reid should step down as the Senate Democratic leader over racial remarks Reid made about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

This demand was delivered by the Republican Party chairman, Mr. Steele, who is also black, so it must carry some moral weight.

I do not expect the Dems will heed this advice. Now, if we could just pipe down a bit and get back to the dinner table, could someone please pass me some more pork?

Thanks.

Los Angeles triples traffic fines to double income

Flim-flam is everywhere! In this article, the LA Times seems to be saying that new Red Light Traffic Control Cameras have doubled the city's income from traffic tickets. Reading past the headline however, reveals the city is being raped and robbed by the company that supplies the enforcement equipment and services.

The real story is the city nearly tripled the cost of a traffic infraction, and contracted with some company to install video cameras to catch red light violation perpetrators. however, the process of tripling the fines only seems to have doubled the income from the fines to the city. One suspects the rest has been siphoned off to the private firm who supplies the equipment. But there's more-- because now the average moving vehicle violation costs around $500, which makes it especially onerous to low-income drivers. The courts in LA are extremely backed up, and there's some indication the conviction rate on camera busts is only barely meeting the standards set forth in the contract. The company that originally won the contract with the city went out of business and is now owned by a competitor. And to top it off, there's no indication whatsoever that any of this has had any effect on LA's traffic problems. The only thing for certain is that more money from ordinary LA drivers is going into the pockets of the company that contracts out the services.

The privatization of government services is a bad idea! Period!

Why your banker is smiling

There's a lovely article in the New York Times this morning about how Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and other large commercial banks were selling mortgage backed securities to their customers and simultaneously betting heavily against them. They made billions of dollars in short-term profits by this ruse. The information was uncovered in a study made by UBS, which the article doesn't specifically state (but the implication is patently obvious) was one of the big "losers" in this same shell game.

It's a long article (4 pages in the online NYTimes), and it's presented in a very low key manner, but it's devastating in the way it points out the amoral behavior of the banks around whom-- and some might say because of whom-- the financial crisis swirled. One particularly damning thread looked at the way short-sellers of mortgage securities (i.e. Goldman) manipulated the market in such a way that owners of mortgage bonds were required to take losses on those securities (thereby enriching the short sellers) immediately whenever some adverse event affected them negatively. Where previously it took a major (and rare) "credit event" to bring about a booked loss, Goldman and company made sure it happened whenever there was a re-evaluation of the bond by a rating agency or elsewhere.

So, in a nutshell, the scenario is this: a Goldman salesman slides into your office, pulls out a sheaf of shiny flyers touting their new mortgage based bond fund, and gets you to sign on the dotted line by assuring you of the rock solid value and historical growth of that type of instrument. At the same time the salesman's colleagues are selling the instrument short, betting aggressively that the thing is going to plummet in value, and simultaneously devising plans to make sure they can squeeze the value out of the buyers in a step-by-step fashion rather than wait until the things implode into a black hole of valuelessness that could put Goldman's funds at risk.

Snakes, shell game operators, highwaymen, flim-flammers-- these are some terms that have described this type of behavior in the past. Today, sadly, these are just known as commercial bankers. Fie on the whole lot of them.

North Carolina voters stymied by ancient anti-atheism clause in state Constitution

North Carolina voters in a local election have hit a snag in their election for a local council seat. Who knew there was a centuries old provision in the North Carolina state Constitution that disallows placing into public office "any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God”?

Hahahaha... I can only laugh, because if I think about it any more deeply, I have to say it would make me vomit.

The politician in question, the writer Cecil Bothwell, was elected last month to the Asheville City council. He says on Facebook that he's an atheist, but publicly he's a bit more nuanced-- post-theist, is I believe the term he uses. Everyone seems to agree the US Constitution trumps in this question, and the US Supreme Court has been unequivocal on this topic for over a hundred years, that the will of the voter overrules religious tests. Whatever, it's lovely, and quite interesting, how key issues of the seventeenth century can come back and mess us up here in the twenty-first. All signs point to an epic and costly court battle brewing. The lawyers will just have to size up who the opponents are, so they'll know whom to bill.

Goldman Sachs pulls a fast one

According to many news outlets, Goldman Sachs has (if you go by what you see on Google News) folded under public pressure and are not going to pay their top 30 executives in cash bonuses this year. Nope, because they're good citizens and they hear the public's outrage at that kind of behavior. Nope, not Goldman Sachs, good corporate American citizens that they are, they're going to teach those their greedy execs a lesson and pay their top 30 executives an average of 80-100 million dollars each in stocks and not in cash.

You can just hear the relief among the American journalism crew. Congress won't have to intervene and pass some pesky laws or taxes on those bonuses. It's about time some of those uppity bankers heard the will of the people and stopped taking their pay in cash and started having to take their pay in stocks. Because to pay someone 100 million dollars in a year with cash is immoral and anti-American, but to pay them in Goldman Sachs stock, well there, that's right as rain. And that will guarantee they don't just take those ill-got earnings and spend them down at the local bar, casino, or whorehouse. They'll have to scrape by like the average American Joe, with 100 million dollars in Goldman Sachs common stock.

That'll teach 'em.

Sorry

It is with tears in my eyes and with a feeling of deep regret that I have to let my readers know that, alas, I also am one of the (apparently many) lovers of "the Tiger." I know, I said I wouldn't ever tell, and it's obvious this isn't a "kiss-and-tell" type blog, but since I saw how all the rest of the "multitudes" are coming out, I thought I should as well.

By the end of this week, I expect the full page of Google News will be plastered with this type of "revelation" from spurned partners finding relief by airing their guilty consciences with a public confession. Or maybe there's some money grubbing going on as well. Whatever. I've joined the crowd. The memories are precious, but I'm glad to get it off my chest. I can now hold my head high and move on.

The end of the Republican Party as a voice for conservatism

I've been saying it here for more than a year, that the Republican Party has come unhinged and unmoored by their commitments to clowns and freaks. They've turned into a tiny, marginal party of back-biters, mutterers, paranoids, and show business clowns. Sarah Palin is conducting her book tour as if its a presidential campaign. And the loony-fringe of rightists is embracing it as that because they're completely unable to see that they've lost their center. A book tour isn't a presidential campaign. And while selling 1,000,000 books constitutes a best-seller, that number of votes doesn't even get a governor (in a large state) elected nowadays. It probably doesn't even fund her advance, but who's paying attention to that?

Well, so anyway, some other bloggers are catching up with Random Mutters and offering that, well damn, they agree. The GOP has been completely destroyed by their far-right fringe. There's no longer any conservative voice in American politics that doesn't require obeisance to homophobia, anti-choice, anti-feminist, anti-science, pro-corporatism, pro-Rich-Get-Richer and over-the-top clown rhetoric from the Fox funny-politics hours. It's clear the party has been taken over by the tea-bagging, birther, "you lie" contingent, and it's going nowhere from there.

It's time that conservatives in the US figure out where they want their voices to be heard because the dim-wits in the GOP's right wing are going to float Sarah Palin as their candidate. Hello? Ron Paul? It's looking like you may be the only moderate voice to emerge in the Republican party. Yup! Ron Paul and "moderate" in the same sentence.