Posts from — April 2013

As I was doing my morning reading over at Eschaton there was a simple text ad that struck me:

“Immoral Sex Acts Taught in Elementary School?” was the main message in a large font, then in a smaller font was: “Please Click Here To Sign The Petition.”

While I personally have nothing against “Immoral Sex Acts”, I really wouldn’t be comfortable signing a petition to teach them in elementary school. I think they should wait until middle school, so the students would have some experience to relate to what the poor embarrassed teachers, usually physical education instructors, are attempting to explain. Waiting will also assist researchers by providing the current slang terms for such acts, rather than trying to ask questions based on the approved names for “Immoral Sex Acts”. If you teach kids about “Immoral Sex Acts” in elementary school, the kids might not try them and will miss out on some of the angst of growing up. I mean what kid wants to do something that was taught in grade school when you are trying to revolt against adults.

The other problem is that no one wants their mouthy 8-year-old telling the world that his/her parents are involved in “Immoral Sex Acts”. It just creates problems with the neighbors.

😈

Over at CBS they had a piece reporting that the price of gold has had a big drop. It is now selling for just over $1,500/ounce while it was over $1,600 during the Yukon Quest and Iditarod [several of the prizes involve ounces of gold].

The piece also talks about the drop in the price of oil, and the record highs of the stock market, while the yield on 10-year T-bills is down to 1.72%.

Gold usually drops when the economy is expected to improve, and the stock market matches that sentiment, but oil goes down when demand is expected to drop because of weak economic conditions.

The only thing that makes any real sense is the T-bills, which is most probably a result of people fleeing the Euro after the ‘Cyprus solution’ went into effect. T-bills would seem to be one of the few things that is selling well. If we had people in charge who knew what they were doing, we would be selling more T-bills, not destroying our economy to reduce the number that are available.

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All Things Considered had a segment on data collection and mining today. They included a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” This incessant collection of data is pointless.

It was pointed out that the data doesn’t really provide any context, and search algorithms can’t determine them from the raw data. Google gets on my nerves when I decide to price something, mostly for other people because I can create better search terms to find what they are looking for, than they can. Every site that uses ads tied to the Google system will be filled to overflowing with banners and boxes for whatever I searched for. Amazon gets really annoying after I get something for my Mother. There is no way of really getting the point across that I really don’t want to buy any more CDs from artists that my Mother likes. I really miss the local record store where I could get this stuff with cash and not be pestered to buy more of it.

They interviewed an individual praising the utility of electronic medical records. Nice concept that is totally worthless because, as I was reminded on Friday, the bloody ‘health care professionals’ don’t bother to read it.

While I was out and about trying to deal with the US ‘health care system’ without murdering anyone [it wouldn’t, of course, be murder if I remember to shoot them, because this is Florida :evil:] and then installing a new gas stove, other people were paying attention to the world.

Lambert at Corrente noticed that in addition to cutting Social Security benefits, Zero’s new budget also creates automatic IRAs for people who aren’t currently enrolled in one of the existing con games that Congress set up. Apparently, if you don’t check the appropriate box and/or submit the proper form, the government is going to start deducing money from your pay check and giving it to a manager to ‘invest’ for you. While past performance doesn’t predict future returns, given that the professional financial sector managed to smash the global economy about four years ago, why would any sane person trust them? They will earn management fees from these accounts whether the accounts grow or decline, so why would they care?

Now I have Nancy Pelosi joining Debbie Wasserman Schultz trying to convince me that the Republicans are a threat. Ladies, the biggest threat I face is the current President. If you want to be taken seriously, you had better start publicly complaining about what the White House is doing. If you want to take back the House in 2014, you had better part company with the ideas contained in the Obama Budget.

Paparazzi

Go away!

[Editor: JR really doesn’t like having his picture taken.]

Friday Ark

You are born with a finite amount of time on the planet, but you don’t normally think about that until you are older. If the oil companies are given a depletion allowance for selling the oil that they pump out of the ground, based on the fact they can only do that once and it reduces their supply, why don’t workers get a life depletion allowance, because every hour at work is something they will never get back.

Andrew W. Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He was a banker and industrialist [founder of Alcoa], a very conservative individual when it came to economics. He wrote a book on taxation, and is often cited as the founder of supply side economics. With all of that he made the case that capital gains should be taxed at a higher rate than earned income. His thinking was that capital didn’t die and could earn forever, but people did die, and therefore needed to keep more of what they earned because their ability to earn was limited. Think about it.

Speaking of time, it would be really nice if the medical profession realized that their patients also have a limited amount of time. You will be charged if you miss an appointment without giving them notice, but there is no corresponding monetary exchange if they stretch a half-hour appointment into three hours. Too many doctors overbook, just like the airlines, and there should be penalties for the practice.

The front that dumped snow in the North and tornadoes in the Midsouth, provided me with some nasty thunderstorms. I shut everything down this evening because the close lightning strikes don’t do anything kind to computer equipment, even with surge protection. They can induce surges in the wires of your CAT 5 cable, even with twisted-pair and shielding, as I discovered to my loss a year or so ago.

Digby has Zero’s latest excuse for cutting Social Security, and no one is buying it outside of the Villagers.

Apparently the “longtime Obama aide” who is attempting to deflect the building anger has the historical perspective of a mayfly. The Hedgemony, the guys who were in office when Zero was elected, tried to sell privatizing Social Security. The Shrubbery put on his ‘show and tell’ claiming that US Treasury bonds were not real assets, so there wasn’t an actual Social Security Trust Fund. Of course, the people behind the attempt have at various times thought that Enron stock and Lehman Brothers bonds were ‘real assets’. The gang that convinced the world of the need for a war against Iraq, got their heads handed to them when they messed with Social Security.

As Duncan keeps saying the problem is ‘People got no jobs. People got no money.’ Start really putting people back to work fixing the infrastructure using all the money that people are throwing at us to get those US Treasury bonds, and all of the problems go away. Putting more people out of work with austerity, and taking money from Social Security recipients is just going to make things worse. From Duncan again: “Contractionary Policy Is Contractionary.”

I’m sorry, but pretending you are the IRS and all I have to do is go to a bogus web page and enter my my bank routing information to receive a refund for an overpayment is not very credible. The IRS uses the US Postal Service for these types of transactions and always suggests that you might want to use the amount in question to offset the next year’s tax liability.

The whole e-filing business has certainly given people some wrong ideas about how the system works, especially the con artists. If they paid taxes once in a while they would know these things.

She came back yesterday to post on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. She hadn’t posted since April of 2007 after she had moved to Syria.

It is good to hear from her and know that she is safe, but painful to know what the US has done to her country for no real reason.

While the Air Force is grounding a third of the fighter fleet, an air show trade group is complaining to Congress about the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels flight demonstration teams being grounded with all shows cancelled.

To combat the threat of attacks by drones, that we started, the Navy is deploying a laser weapons system that probably won’t work through rain, smoke, or fog, and might even take out satellites or high flying aircraft if it misses its intended target.

Senate Republicans are already saying they are going to filibuster the Democratic gun bill even though they haven’t seen it. Zero’s constant courting of Republican Senators doesn’t seem to be having the hoped for effect.

One of the good things to come out of this mess it that it looks like they are going to have to hold a lot of bake sales if they want to bomb Iran.

[SNAFU – Situation Normal – All F**ked Up]

The banner from the Internet Defense League is at the top of the page, and will be there today and tomorrow.

The Fix The CFAA site gives you some of the background of what has become a ‘bait and switch’ by Congresscritters. Instead of trying to fix the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as they said they wanted to, the House Republicans are making it worse at the behest of their corporate owners.

I was in law enforcement for ten years and this law can be used to prosecute anyone for anything related to a computer or cell phone. Cell phones got included when a court decided that they met all of the basic requirements of being a computer. To date no decision has been made concerning universal remote controls, but I can see a US Attorney trying if it would impress voters or the media.

The problem with prosecutors in general is that they are political. They are using their office as a stepping stone to a higher office, and will overreach if they see a political advantage in doing it. The War on Terror™ has generated a lot of bad cases that have nothing to do with actual threats against the US and too much to do with free media for prosecutors running for office or looking for a judicial appointment. The CFAA is so vague that it is easy for a prosecutor to abuse it and create a Federal felony case out of a state-level theft of services misdemeanor, which is what happened to Aaron Schwartz.

This is a bad law originally written before the Internet that was made even worse by changes after 9/11. There have been no changes to it to reflect the current reality of computer use and common practices.

I have corresponded from time to time with Debbie Wasserman Schultz since she was in the Florida legislature in 2000. I initiated the contact because she was on the relevant committee when JEB Bush was trying to steal the vote in Florida for his brother by conspiring with the Republicans in the legislature to call a special session to overrule the vote counting by selecting a slate of electors. Debbie and her Democratic colleagues fought that tooth and nail, but the voters and legislature were both overruled by the Supreme Court.

She is now in the US House of Representatives and has risen quickly in the power structure.

Yesterday she sent me an e-mail that started “The biggest threat to middle class families today goes by two words: Ryan Plan.” Asking me to sign a petition opposing the plan.

She obviously hasn’t been paying attention to the news, because the Obama Budget is a much bigger threat to working and middle-class families than what ‘Ayn Rand Paul Ryan‘ has cobbled together. Calling the collection of PowerPoint slides that Ryan came out with a plan is a bit of a stretch, and it was DOA when it was rolled out. The Obama Budget, OTOH is an existential threat to the Democratic Party and every worker who is paying or has paid their FICA taxes.

Get back to me, Debbie, when you have the petition opposing the Obama Budget. Show me that the Democratic Party hasn’t become a cult of personality for Obama, and still has some principles.

Like the corporate CEOs that Zero idolizes, he is going after the retirement programs of the military and Civil Service employees. They were already talking about changing those programs before they decided to attack Social Security.

The reason is the same – to avoid paying those programs what is owed. The three programs together own 26% of the bonds covering the national debt, and Zero intends to stall making the payments on those bonds when they come due. They can get away with it by controlling the pension programs and slowing the outlays. They will be defaulting without admitting it, and that is the real reason they are doing this. The deficit is the excuse they are using to cover what they are really up to – raiding the employees’ pension funds.

The ‘moral hazard’ of defaulting on debts only exists for the ‘little people’, not the ‘masters of the universe’.

I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of days this Gaius Publius cross-post to Naked Capitalism: Like Nixon to China, It Takes a Democrat to Put the First Knife in Social Security. It makes the point that the ’emergency’ about Social Security is the need to start paying back all of the money that was looted from the trust fund to pay for Bush’s tax cuts and wars. The ‘surplus’ that Clinton left was all Social Security Trust Fund payments, and other taxes hadn’t quite been enough to cover the cost of government.

So when the Shrubbery cut taxes and got involved in two unfunded wars, he was blowing through the retirement funds of the workers. All of these games are to avoid repaying the money that the Republicans borrowed under the Hedgemony.

As Yves noted today Zero has put cuts to Social Security and Medicare in the middle of the budget debate.

I realize that there are still a few people around who haven’t figured out that these cuts are Zero’s idea. He was talking about ‘fixing’ Social Security when he was a candidate in 2007. This, together with his voting record, is the reason I rated him a moderate to conservative Republican in January of 2008. and why I have never voted for him.

If Joe Biden actually wants to run for President in 2016, he is going to have to resign when this becomes official. You have no chance of winning the Democratic nomination backing Social Security benefit cuts. Democrats running in the 2014 election are going to be facing a massive negative campaign based on these recommendations. It could cost them the Senate, and give the Republicans a bigger majority in the House.

Someone needs to sit Zero down and explain to him that no ‘Grand Bargain’ is going to last more than two years because every two years there is a new Congress that has no obligation to go along with anything done in the previous Congress.

You should check out Class War Kitteh, especially this one [via Lambert at Corrente].

From the Social Security Administration FAQs: the maximum you could be paid on Social Security in 2012 was around $30,000/year. The minimum is $1. The average payment is about $14,500/year. A full-time minimum wage [$7.25/hour] job pays $15,000/year. People receiving Social Security make less on average than high school students flipping burgers, but they are somehow responsible for the deficit.

I have already talked about chained CPI, and why it wasn’t relevant to Social Security recipients, especially when the Bureau of Labor Statics tracks the CPI-E [Consumer Price Index for the Elderly]. Social Security recipients are already losing ground using the CPI-W [CPI for Workers in metropolitan areas], so the chained version makes it even worse. What sort of changes do the Villagers think that a group that makes less than minimum wage will be able to make?

Update: From Duncan, the median annual payment for Social Security is $13,500. Half the people make less than that and half make more.

Also the current Federal Poverty threshhold for an individual is $11,490.