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Live Blogging The Emmys*

September 22, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

–*It’s nice to see Charlie Sheen presenting something other than blood in the urine.

–*Let’s face it. John Hamm should be nominated in both best actor and best actress categories, because nobody on “Mad Men” gets near as many lines as he does.

–*The audience laughs and laughs at a musical number starring the Lonely Island and Michael Bolton and Akon, hoping that the laughter turns soon into some understanding about what the musical piece is about.

–*Let’s have a montage of every drama on TV right now to remind them what they aren’t watching when the Jersey Shore is on.

–*Scott Caan is a douche. But that’s OK, it makes him a casting slam dunk.

–*The Emmys celebrates scripted television, serialized Saturday Evening Post fiction, CB radio, betamax video, DDT and kitschy knickknacks from the 50s.

–*A new category: most self-righteous dialogue on a show featuring a female lawyer.

–*A new category: most coy penis jokes on a show featuring female doctors.

–*A new category: the most disgusting and also highly unlikely forensics scenario that can be conceived by a murderer or the writer of a CBS crime show. CBS will be the clear winner.

–*The new Charlie’s Angels ask, “Would the world be a worse place if we recycled ideas?”

–*Oh, yeah. “Friday Night Lights” keeps winning everything.

–*This is Jane Lynch’s time. Unfortunately, it’s also Snooki’s time and Michele Bachmann’s time. So, really, this is not a very good time.

–*”Women’s Bathroom Spy Cam” is really lowering the bar on TV dramas this year.

–*The nominees for best stock market crash are, October 1987, September 2001, September 2008, February 2011 and August 2011. There are no winners.

–*The producers of the TV show “Glee” admit that the show is now only 60% glee.

–*Gloria Steinem called the new Playboy Club show sexist. That’s not fair. It’s way more stupid than sexist.

–*The “In Memorium” segment reminds who died, but also allows us to finally put some names to faces … “Oh! That guy died?”

–*JWoww insists that the success of Jersey Shore is really hanging on her shoulders.

–*Jane Lynch coyly suggests that the cast of “Entourage” are Lesbians.

Posted in Comedy | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Media Darlings Likes “The Retributioners”

September 18, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

Our friend Maggie Hames reviewed several new TV shows at the site “Media Darlings” yesterday and gave an incredibly nice shout out to the “The Retributioners,” calling Stephanie a “Mary Tyler Moore for the 21st century.” I love reading Maggie, who has helped ease me into the role of parent as culture vulture a bit more easily with such cool columns as “Apps For Babies.”

She also says that our show is miles above two new NBC sitcoms, “Up All Night” and “Free Agents.” I have to say, I’m a bit bummed by that: I was hoping that “Up All Night” might be a new show for me to fall in love with, not only as a new parent facing the same issues, but as a huge Will Arnett fan who has watched all the episodes of “Arrested Development” twice. But Maggie says the show lacks pragmatism. “Get a nanny!” she yells at the screen.

As for “The Retributioners,” we’re glad that the show keeps giving good karma, even though we haven’t put out a new one in a while. Maggie needs to write a new blog called “How to keep your Web series going when you’re a new parent.”

I’m trying to work the baby into the plot some how. Maybe an episode in which Stephanie gets even with Xander for her post-partum depression. You all like that? Raise your hands!

Posted in Film & TV, The Retributioners | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Republican For A Day

September 13, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

The 9/11 Tribute In Light

This is a bit of an update to yesterday’s post. The cowards at “The Rumpus” didn’t post my comment. So you can officially file that site under the heading “Glib, small-dicked wussies masquerading as dissenters but secretly afraid of dissent.” Yes, a cumbersome file name, but I’m not much of a bureaucrat.

Again, I’m not one for sad anniversaries, but I have noticed that I do commemorate 9/11 in a very special way. Every year, I seem to become a Republican for a day. This isn’t by design; it simply seems to be the nature of the arguments I have. When far leftists tend to discuss Sept. 11, they usually have one of two problems: 1) Even if they kindly acknowledge it as a mass murder (thanks, pinkos!), they still have to carefully couch their language so that it meets the prescriptive of their doctrinaire worldview (America’s behavior on the world stage means this action was understandable). Or 2) They deny we were attacked altogether and insist 9/11 was an inside job.

I tried to pulverize that first argument yesterday, though I left out a couple of side notes: If the writer for the Rump Ass considered his “compassionate celestial” view more carefully, he would have realized that a celestial view isn’t a compassionate one at all. It’s simply indifferent. I would challenge the writer to interview a family member of one of the 9/11 victims, to ask specifics of how their loved one died, and then dare ask the question: “Did you know, when your husband ran back into the building to save those last three people on the stairwell, who America was giving money to in El Salvador in 1983?” As it happens, I did interview family members after 9/11. It caused me great anguish because I felt their pain in many ways was none of my business. I should have known, however, that I was helping keep their memories alive. This clod at The Rump Ass, however, brags about his unfamiliarity with those who died, and therefore his Wittgenstein-like refusal to speak of things he knows not. It’s for a very simple reason. If he ever had to interview a family member or write a profile of somebody at Cantor Fitzgerald who died instantly and had never even heard the name Osama Bin Laden, he would go back and look at the horrible article he wrote for the Rump Ass and he would destroy it. He would print it out and dip it in kerosene and burn every word and bury the ashes in quicklime. And he would have wished to god he had not spoken with such glibness and vanity about compassion being selective. He would have realized he traded empathy for doctrine. This guy says, 150,000 people died around the planet on 9/11, so why are 2700 Americans special? Should I similarly disregard anybody who died in Rwanda in 1994 because each of those days saw thousands of deaths elsewhere? Does it not bear remarking that most people don’t die horrifically everyday for political reasons when they are struck down by machetes or trapped in buildings that have turned into ovens? The Rwandans just wanted to kill each other, so why should I care or hope my government should do anything about it? If the author chooses not to show compassion for political reasons on 9/11, then he would have to spread that dispassionate view equally to Rwandans. Can he? Would he?

But let’s look at No. 2, the 9/11 Truthers. I was once working with a filmmaker from Germany on a Long Island movie, and we hit it off. Then on the subway ride home he tried to convince me that no men in caves could have brought down the Twin Towers, and that it was obviously a controlled demolition. I was thoroughly disgusted. It was a bit like finding out you’ve hit it off with a racist or an anti-Semite or a cannibal. One of the first things any engineer, philosopher, writer, linguist, philologist or doctor would know in his respective field is the rule of simplicity. It’s called Occam’s Razor and it means you don’t overcomplicate simple insight to fit a theory. Engineers don’t try to improve on the Pythagoras theorem by changing the numbers in gravity. Writers don’t come up with a hundred jargon words to say “The dog walked down the street.” Doctors don’t triple check a broken arm by opening a person’s heart. And a real thinker doesn’t remove the plane from a plane crash. This is logic so simple that my infant son would know it. And yet every time I’m on this here CB radio called the Internet I must confront people who say that the Twin Towers were brought down in an inside job, theoretically because g-men had days and days and days to plan and ably overcame bureaucracies and witnesses not noticing the tons of explosives being placed around the complex. The smoking gun: George Bush wanted war in Iraq. Therefore he destroyed the towers. There. It’s proved.

The fact that so many Americans believe this is truly chilling. These people are also, we presume, driving cars and raising children and handling knives. If you point out the fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, they have the easiest retort in the world–they simply add you to the plot. Dehumanize you and your argument. George Bush has programmed you. It doesn’t occur to them that if you simply agreed with them to avoid confrontation, you would be much more of an automaton, much more a tool of somebody else’s will.

Why do people complicate simple insights? Helplessness. When the world seems bigger than you are, when you personalize complex events and the world makes you feel small, vulnerable, feckless and inferior, a conspiracy theory is one of those things that gives you false sense of power. You are suddenly part of a group of people who know a secret. Having joined a group, having become a joiner in the worst sense of the word, you ironically enjoy a feeling of false emancipation. You think you are a free thinker, even though you haven’t done the work free thinking requires: due diligence, proving steps, finding chains of causality, finding the simplest explanations. Having your ideas put up to scrutiny.

It is doubly repulsive because the Truthers, I think, are the people who made the world safe for another detestable “-er,” the Birther movement. I see these two buds inextricably intertwined like roses on a trellis. It was the Truthers who created a toxic polemical environment where even proof of Barack Obama’s citizenship with a birth certificate was no longer proof. Witnesses were no longer witnesses. Hospitals are no longer hospitals. Hawaii is no longer a state.  The real insight is that Barack Obama is black, and so how could he be president, ask the Birthers, of “our” country. The same logic is at play with Truthers. “George Bush wanted a war, so how could 9/11 have really been plotted by the people like Islamist extremists who made categorical confessions of their own guilt?”

The rest is window dressing. Truthers pull out lots of meaningless specific heat capacity calculations to prove their theory that paper fires don’t melt steel. You try to tell them that steel doesn’t have to melt in order to stop doing its job, and for that you’ll get called a Manchurian candidate. Or they point out that falling debris can’t fall down on top of more debris with the speed of gravity because the building itself is “the path of least resistance.” In other words, the Twin Towers should have fallen over on their sides if they were destroyed by planes. Never mind that a house of cards wouldn’t fall over “on its side” if you knocked it down. Never mind that if you watch videos, the impact points of destruction start from the top and move down, where the falling floors cumulatively add new destructive weight, whereas controlled demolitions start from the bottom (using gravity as a weapon, perhaps the best weapon). Raise your hand if you saw the Twin Towers crumble from the bottom.

But again, by getting into these arguments, you remove the planes (some people actually try to do that too, by making 9/11 the world’s greatest advertisement for PhotoShop ever). To remove the planes makes you a non-thinker. A partisan who places himself at the center of a paranoid web of strange facts and non-facts. I’d feel better frankly, if many of these people just admitted they were lying. Then they would merely be scumbags. Instead, they poison the sort of thinking required of enlightened individuals to synthesize, dialectically, a better world. They’re making us all stupider.

I thought to further my contribution to a better world, I might offer some of the better Web sites debunking the Truthers. Here is one from a site called “Implosion World.” They say they are independent. So to Truthers, that means they’re probably part of the plot.

And then there’s this wonderful YouTube video that gives common sense descriptions of what happened when the planes hit the towers. If you are a non-Truther, I bid you a nice time enjoying your brain.

Posted in Global Affairs, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

An Awful Article About 9/11

September 12, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

The 9/11 Tribute In Light

It’s human nature to politicize things that ought not be politicized–even the weather. I have personally come to believe that politics is not evil incarnate or the instrument of the devil, as Bob Dylan once put it, but as natural a process as cell division in biology. Some day, a scientist will show the direct parallels between a cell’s meiosis and a polity dividing. It starts with memes, symbols, words, and codes. Soon, people are debating, disagreeing, self-identifying and self-segregating around those semions, just as surely as haploid cells divide in meiosis. Because I’m not a scientist, I had to content myself with writing a novel about this process. It’s called “The Ghost and the Hemispheres,” and I’m shopping it to agents now.

But we are political and we do seek out political differences, perhaps because of a genetic imperative to innovate. That’s why I should have expected a horrible, recrudescent strain of 9/11 backlash articles like this shitty one. Like a good leftist speaking in the codes of his faith, just like Michele Bachman does to her flock, the guy runs at the mouth with a lot of the same predictable schtick about the evils of American exceptionalism. Not stopping to figure out that it was outsiders who decided to single us out in 2001.

Maybe I should confess that I agree with 20% of the piece, specifically the idea of Sept. 11 as a dubious cultural rallying point. I have not been much enamored of the 10th year anniversary memorials for 9/11. The author calls it the “pornography of grief,” which is a nice touch. But mostly he slips into the kind of pedantic, “told-you-so” moralism that characterized the far-left writings after 9/11. Lest we forget, this kind of attitude smeared the entire left wing in 2002 and 2003 and allowed warmongers to launch their immoral war because they could easily con the political center into thinking everybody on the left was crazy. As a left-winger, I get pretty torn up when liberals are wrong, as many of them were when they said the United States deserved the attacks in New York and Washington for all of its sins. I’m sure there’s a folksy phrase for this fallacy: Maybe killing Peter to pay back Paul.  So I wrote this long tirade in the comments section of the Web site:

“This is an execrable piece. A piece that trades one fell morality for another like chips in a poker game, when in fact, as none of you can evidently see, the writer is willing to abdicate his morality altogether to settle petty political scores. He is unwilling to apply a simple categorical imperative that the murder of thousands of innocent people for religious reasons is wrong. If you think the Iraq war was wrong, as I do, for the simple reason that the United States wasn’t attacked by Iraq, then you must be willing to assert that the murder of thousands of Americans in for one man’s specious political calculation and religious chauvinism was wrong. The idea that “they hate us for our freedom” is stupid. The idea that Osama Bin Laden’s motive was the freedom of the Palestinians, whom most of the Arab world regularly spits on, is just as stupid. Bin Laden built himself up on American power and then turned on it. He decided to make thousands of Americans victim of an internecine squabble with his own government. To make him the moral voice of the oppressed Vietnamese or the Chileans is an act of stunning stupidity. But let’s talk about your celestial view. Isn’t Putting 9/11 into “perspective” a bit like putting the Manson murders into “perspective”? Yes, it was sad that a pretty pregnant lady got stabbed, but Charles Manson was right, the black people are oppressed, while rich white people are drinking champagne. This article offers the supreme intellectual dishonesty that anybody who lives in the United States and is willing to walk into a tall building, even to work, is worthy of being burned to death by jet fuel or defenestrated from the 87th floor for what has happened in Nicaragua, East Timor, Panama, Angola, El Salvador and Vietnam. There is no philosophy or ethics or morality that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of this viewpoint, and for the author to invoke unnamed children dying in huts is particularly pitiful; he’s not making the point that people should be equal but that misery should be. It’s anti-humanism at its worst. And if the author stops to think about it, it’s also an imperialist outlook. He’s not speaking FOR anybody. He’s just speaking against the United States as a sometime participant. And knee-jerk anti-patriotism is just as bad as knee-jerk patriotism. You all let that sink in. If you can. We all grieve in different ways; some of us get over it more quickly than others. I live in New York and did not choose to watch all the coverage tonight because I don’t want my grief to be preserved in amber. But if somebody else decides they want to be part of the grief–to give to charities, to comfort friends or to simply imagine that it could have been them (because if you’re an American, it could have been), then that’s his choice. If you decided that you did not belong to a country that day, that’s fine too. But be warned: you’re sounding a lot like a Tea Partier, who gets to pick and choose when he belongs to a commonwealth or the human race. The Tea Partier may decide to opt out when its time to help fund health care for everybody, but you, my friend, have decided to opt out when it comes time to show pain for 2700 people dying all at once. So today, you have made the Tea Party look good, the left look bad, and put your hatred on display for all to see. I only hope they can.”

I don’t normally read this site, and I don’t usually pick fights on bulletin boards, but usually keep my polemics to myself at this, your 24-hour Rasmussen station. But when my Facebook friends on the left started coughing up some of the old shit from their scarred lungs, I decided to go ahead and speak up. To lie down and do nothing while somebody is selling you a bill of goods is … un-American. And on certain occasions, I’m proud to be one.

Posted in Global Affairs, Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Remember …

September 11, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

The 9/11 Tribute In Light

Here’s something I don’t post very often: A story I wrote almost ten years ago–five short bios of rescue workers who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. As I posted last year in a more personal account, the Sept. 11 attacks caused me, at the time a not-so-serious journalist, to confront a more serious world. One of the hardest things I was asked to do by editors at the time was call up bereaved families while the story was still in progress. For a long time, I shrank from that task. Chasing grief was not something I had ever wanted to do as a writer in New York City; all I had ever wanted to do was be creative. But with mayhem all around, with ashes of the iconic towers snowing down on my neighborhood and with no real idea of what I was doing, I had to finagle a subway ride into Manhattan and go interview people. I had to come to grips with my limited talents and see if there was something (anything?) I could offer the world as a writer to deal with something so monstrous and inhuman when I’d led my life before chasing whimsy. One wonders at a time like that how competent he is, how necessary in the vast scheme of things, when all around there is need and he hasn’t prepared himself. One wonders, I hate to say, about things he hoped he’d never have to, even about topics he’d shunned since his teen years. I wondered for a time what is masculinity, and would I have served the world better as a warrior or a burly firefighter rather than a cowering writer in my garret. These are the psychological wounds that 9/11 inflicted on some of us, too.

And as I confronted these problems, nearly wanting to collapse with heartache, instead, I made myself write something; I made myself be part of the world.I’d ask you to click the first link to see the brave men (and women!) who didn’t have to think about it, because they were too busy acting on instinct to save people, and for that died.

Posted in Global Affairs, history, Self Absorbed Ramblings | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

The Planes Had Autumn In Them

September 9, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

The planes had autumn in them

Like a rose,

Shed its thorns in fury

They had in their bellies harvest

Reapers with shaggy trotting horses

To bruise and knuckle corn

Forlorn tanks of ambrosia, white under

The supple blue storm

Sheaves and tow and kindling wood

A lock of blonde hair pushed under a snood

Buckling coats and leather and boots

To knees high

A man walks between two full towers

Where the bees with industry multiply

Amid thickening motes of sour apples,

Pumpkins and melons that dapple

A small Pennsylvania meadow yard.

A spider like a cross

Hangs between the silos,

Below, two little red hands,

Smashed in child grip, the plane

Falls before it can transmogrify,

Like the sport of doves wherever

In dovecotes they linger

A child that sees the world’s bones

In the bones inside his fingers

And a man sprog is born

In an old woman’s labor.

When she cries, it cries

And like music from the

Jawing instrument of the ass

His noisome vapor promises retribution tonight

That God himself will rattle the cities

And gorge himself on the empire of glass

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

What Did We Learn During the Republican Presidential Debate Wednesday?

September 8, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

–*Governor Rick Perry has executed 234 death row inmates, some of them presumably guilty.

–*If pilots, stewardesses and passengers had been armed on the airlines, 9/11 would never have happened says Ron Paul. Also, if babies were armed, there would be no child molestation.

–*As people born free in nature, we should not submit to the government giving us health care and unemployment insurance, providing for the general welfare, giving us R&D money, establishing a Congress, building roads, delivering mail, setting borders, putting out fires, setting standards, striking coinage or stopping raw sewage from running through the streets.

–*No, government’s job is mostly to sit back and watch as we make cheese by the river and occasionally shoot each other in the face, usually over a woman.

–*Cherchez la femme!

–*Obamacare has sent Christians to re-education camps where Mandarin children with machine guns decide who lives and who dies.

–*Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. By that definition, so are pensions, mutual funds, charities, banks, savings & loans, and anything else that doesn’t require you to haul a giant piece of gold around like a big turd.

–*Texas has such a booming economy, says Rick Perry, that he had to import a lot of people with real educations from socialist countries like California to come operate it.

–*Abortion is a states rights issue to be decided by the Congress.

–*The founding fathers were against abortion, says Rick Perry (even though abortion wasn’t illegal in most states until the mid 19th century).

–*The financial crisis was a systemic crisis caused by inept leadership, says Sarah Palin (even though that’s a complete contradiction in terms).

–*Government spending crowds out investment.  And here we thought a world of shitty investments crowded out investments.

–*Ron Paul shows clearly how being NO. 2 in the polls can look a lot like No. 10 if you’re watching Fox News.

–*Ron Paul wants to return to an era of government deregulation, retrenchment and all the other things that made our Great Recession so great.

–*Socialized medicine and the bailouts and Acorn and states’ rights and 9/11 mosque and Islamization of America …

–*We need government out of our lives … but one of these candidates would probably invade Iran.

Posted in Politics | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Goodnight, Irene … Or Should I Say, ‘Please Leave’?

August 27, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

My wife and I have been provisioning all day for the monstrous Hurricane Irene. How temperamental is she? She keeps changing her category! This storm is such a raging bitch that not only have 370,000 New Yorkers been ordered evacuated, but the New York Times has momentarily given away free storm stories on its Web site. This evil hurricane is already messing with our Web business models!

This has been a summer of firsts for me. Not only have I had my first baby, but three days ago I experienced my first earthquake, and this weekend, I’ll face down my first hurricane, and all at an age where you stop having firsts. It probably also bears mentioning that you shouldn’t be dealing with any of these things in New York City, perhaps even the baby part.

My wife and I are thankfully not in one of the flood zones, but we have big windows on a high floor and are wondering if we will have to be spending the weekend bodily shielding our baby Xander against flying tempered glass.  New York supposedly upgraded its building codes in 2008 to stiffen them against hurricane winds, but in a city where pragmatism must be mixed into politics like milk into chocolate, many existing buildings didn’t have to meet these codes. At the height my wife and I live, there’s a danger of glass, gravel, and other items flying off adjacent roofs (even those of shorter buildings) and creating a debris field. We hear different pieces of advice about how risky it is to stay where we are, but at this point, we have few choices. I’ll let you know if things start flying through our living room.

I’ve spent most of the day stocking up. It’s strange how people predicting the end of the world recently (Glenn Beck comes to mind) have been admonishing you to invest in gold. But after spending the day looking for larder items, I’d say the smarter money is on peanut butter. That and bread seem to be the two items my neighbors can’t live without, and every store I’ve been to today has been robbed of its creamy spreads and whole wheat breads. Where other nonperishable items like beans and soup and Chips Ahoy remained, peanut butter seems to be the rock star staple food of the nascent storm survivalist. How you gonna eat gold, after all, when the flood comes?

When you are provisioning, I’ve found it helps to be counter-intuitive. Most stores I went to had run out of flashlights and D batteries by 2 p.m. today. But if you were willing to walk into one of the tiny newsstands, you found lots of D batteries. And my wife said there were tons of flashlights at Gracious Home. I found it better to look for each prized survival item at the place where it was most novel. Water at the health and beauty store. Batteries at the bodega. Cereal at Bed, Bath & Beyond. If anything, however, today’s shopping lesson was a bog standard lesson in supply and demand. Items that are unremarkable one day become as valuable as silver the next.

Another lesson for you disaster watchers is to listen to the voices in the street for the stirrings of public skepticism. There are a few lone voices out there who insist Mike Bloomberg, our billionaire mayor, is fear mongering and exaggerating the threat of the storm. The city has launched New York’s first mandatory evacuation ever from the flood zones in all five boroughs and mass transit will shut down at noon on Saturday. In a mordant moment at a press conference Thursday, Bloomberg said that he’s asking residents of those areas to leave so as they do not, you know, die. But skepticism of his motives has already risen among those who feel he’s making up for a botched response to last winter’s Snowmageddon.There’s a lot of dismissive sneers by those who say we’re having our chains pulled. New York hasn’t seen a major hurricane in decades.

It makes you think briefly about politics. To doubt something that’s factual (indeed, to ignore myriad satellite pictures and weatherman showing you exactly how Hurricane Irene is going to hand your ass to you) is something damn near instinctual among us. Perhaps political parties grow from these abundant small disagreements more organically than we think. I wrote earlier this year after the Japan earthquake about the need to politicize acts of God, comparing the event to Hurricane Katrina. Is there something good about doubting people who would take you out of harm’s way? Does it help us to constantly question and be skeptical of things insight tells us are true, in hopes of constantly making insight better? Is it better to have a foil political party or group always saying “Nay,” no matter what the question? Is this what actually makes democracy work?

Perhaps we don’t choose the dialectic. Perhaps it chooses us.

I’ll leave with that thought and hope Hurricane Irene does not choose me or my family this weekend. If you don’t hear much from me in the next couple of days (and hate seeing egregious spelling errors sitting uncorrected in the post) it’s because my power is likely down or because my son won’t let me type for two seconds. In fact, I’m amazed I wrote this much.

Posted in Math & Science, News, Politics, Self Absorbed Ramblings, Society | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Earthquake Haiku

August 24, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

On Tuesday, the United States’ East Coast was struck by a 5.8 earthquake centered in Virginia that sent tremors all the way up to New Hampshire and all the way down to South Carolina. It’s the worst earthquake the East Coast has seen in decades.

Is that an earthquake?
Or twenty secretaries
Coming back from lunch?

Thought I lived in the
New York City Area
Not San Francisco

I was in Red Bank.
My office mate thought I was
Kicking my desk hard

Is that an earthquake
Or do you always kick things
When you are thinking?

No dams have broken
But water sloshed in glasses
Says the New York Times

Buildings swoon, neighbors
hug; no wait, they are hugging
Cause the Dow Jones jumped

Day of infamy:
America mourns the loss
of prized knickknacks

If I die in Red
Bank, it won’t be the quakes but
crossing the damn street

FEMA probably
Stayed on vacation I guess.
What’s the point, really?

If you didn’t sleep
Through it, you are likely
Forever changed.

Posted in Global Affairs, Math & Science | Tagged | 1 Comment »

Downgrading the U.S.A.

August 15, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

I sat helplessly last weekend on my couch holding my baby in awful anticipation of the carnage that would surely be wrought in the stock markets Monday. Sometimes I knock capitalism, but I do so as a grudging participant. Full disclosure: I own mutual funds and get sick when I see my savings plummet in a couple of days of panicked selling.

My Clark Kent job during the day is financial reporting, and I’ve gained some perspectives over the years about economics. But what I’ve learned mostly is that it’s a difficult subject that one wants to approach with curious humility. As Jesus said in “Paradise Regained,” the wisest of us admit we don’t know anything, and although he was likely not talking about U.S. Treasury bonds, he could well have been. Why? Because the financial experts with the Ph.D.s also didn’t know what would happen if the U.S. were downgraded; the best of them admit that they can only guess based on their experience and incomplete data and pure prognostication. No two experts will agree about what the sovereign debt going from the holy AAA to AA+ really means.

So let’s go over what we do know.

1) Monday, panicked investors, scared of downgraded government bonds, fled the stock market … to invest in downgraded government bonds. That’s a bit like burning a village to save it.

A bit of finance 101: There are two values to a company–its stock price and then its intrinsic value based on what the value of all its inventories, cash flows, etc. are. Everybody panicked not based on the intrinsic value of the companies they held but because they knew other people would freak out. Not knowing the price of catastrophe, they created one. They decided out of pure fear to abandon stock holdings regardless of whether these companies actually held bad government debt on their books.

In actuality, the credit of many U.S. corporations is probably better than that of America right now. Chances are, a lot of these companies we fled Monday had good balance sheets, growing sales and less debt than they did a couple of years ago. But the one thing that ties liberals and conservatives together, evidently, is an adrenal gland. Monday, we all turned into rats in a burning building and cleared out. After buying high, we sold low. Some investors figured it out Tuesday and went back. But it was likely rich people taking advantage of suckers, getting deals, and getting richer.

Government debt will indeed become more expensive–for the government that is. It will now cost more for the United States (i.e., you and me) to borrow, which could indeed chill the economy at a crucial time. But most of the world hums along assuming that the mighty U.S., the biggest economy in the world, can still pay its bills. Double AA is still a far cry from deadbeat dad. Sure, more expensive debt could mean money doesn’t flow around as much. But there are a lot of economists who say that’s not such a bad thing. Having a world awash in cheap money forever, the way we have in the past few years, is not possible or desirable. In  fact, it’s one of the reasons we are in our current economic crisis, because we can’t use interest rates already at zero as an incentive anymore by lowering them. A weak dollar means that everybody is looking for better places to park their money. Could be stocks. Could be gold. In any case, those assets will become inflated again–priced at something beyond what they are really worth, exhorting suckers to buy in and create, to wit, a new recession scenario.

2) Standard & Poor’s cannot be entirely trusted when it downgrades U.S. debt.  The company made not merely an analytical decision to downgrade on Friday, but a political one–and I’m talking about the politics of S&P. I used to work at Standard & Poor’s, not as an analyst but as an editor, and though I wouldn’t dare create my own credit analysis of the United States, I did read the company’s press release, and I do know a few things about the culture there and the hurt pride in its ranks when it was caught with its pants down in 2008. The company had before the financial meltdown given high ratings to mortgage backed securities that were not remotely deserved, and this echo chamber of positivity allowed a lot of shitty paper to be passed around like botulism to some of our biggest financial institutions. Standard & Poor’s, as well as the other credit agencies, are in a strange position. They can behave like quasi-government organizations, because they serve a quasi-regulatory function: U.S. corporations must by law have credit ratings if they want to borrow. For the same reason, it is assumed that S&P, Moody’s, etc., offer completely objective opinions on companies’ creditworthiness. But that myth was shattered in 2008. Standard & Poor’s is not a monastery; it is the single most profitable subsidiary of McGraw-Hill. And the public is not its main customer–the companies being rated are. I would never attack the integrity of my former colleagues or slight their intelligence and probity, but the whole process at the credit agencies is fraught with conflict of interest in the agency’s desire to please the corporations writing the checks. Since the credit crisis struck, obviously S&P has had to do a lot to improve its image. So it had something to prove two weeks ago when it slashed U.S. credit. The stakes were raised when the U.S. government (who, we find out, did get to review their own rating) found mistakes in the accounting and the agency had to backtrack. At the end of the day, S&P couldn’t look like the borrower was again dictating the terms, and so Standard & Poor’s practically admitted in its press release that Washington in-fighting had as much to do with the downgrade as the financial facts on their face. S&P said a pox on both your houses (of Congress). It sounds awfully superficial and defensive.

3) But hey, as long as we’re blaming politics, let’s finally admit: The Tea Party Republicans are psychos.

Remember, the debate over the U.S. and its creditworthiness has to do not over whether the United States can pay its bills (it certainly can) but about whether it will. Lots of people, including the Congressional Budget Office, said very plainly last year that if you want U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP to skyrocket to 80% and beyond, all you have to do is keep George W. Bush’s odious tax cuts in place. People mistakenly think that the blame is equal here: Democrats spend, Republicans won’t tax. But only one side of the Congressional aisle showed its agenda so egregiously, using the threat of economic collapse to get its way: the GOP. Not hard to expect, since Republicans have not compromised on tax issues in, I don ‘t know … ever. Barack Obama (who, like Bill Clinton seems to draw bigger ire from crazy Republicans even as he does exactly what they want) has thus found himself trying to make medicine not with responsible, moderating budget balancers but with a Manson Family elected to office using the simplest, stupidest, most meretricious rhetoric there is on out of work American gulls. Michele Bachmann, et al., have now practically admitted they are willing to destroy the American economy for ideological reasons (protecting the rich with the absurd conviction that they are protecting all of us). Here’s news, Republicans: income taxes have not gone up in years and years and years. In fact, Barack Obama cut them in 2009 and extended Bush’s deep cuts at the end of 2010.

And it hasn’t helped at all. The economy does not care. What is needed is economic activity to create jobs, and the government spending you so despise IS economic activity.  Your piggish unwillingness to concede this fact, something understood by most business people and most economists (if you bothered to read one book or earnings call), has you teetering on a bizarre precipice between cognitive dissonance and schizophrenia. Many Republicans were outraged that Newsweek ran a picture of Michele Bachmann this week with crazy eyes. Well, the news, this week, is that professional pregnant woman harasser Michele Bachmann is crazy.

The New York Times is as confused as ever about the Tea Partiers and what they want. Two years ago, the paper wrote a piece on these scrappy town hall rebels and decided they were just honest libertarians disgusted with both parties and government overreach. Now, evidently, the paper or the Tea Partiers themselves have changed their mind. The movement is  just rock-ribbed Reaganites, who didn’t really care about spending that much, they really just wanted low taxes and a strong military. In other words, they don’t want the government to spend money unless it’s on things they want the government to spend money on. I’m not the New York Times, so I don’t have to patronize them: Tea Partiers are stupid. They are stupid down to the crust on their toenails and the slime on their outhouse doors. Libertarianism as they define it is anarchy. Socialism as they define it is 8 hour work days and child labor laws and affordable health care and banking regulations. They have no philosophy other than disgruntlement, no basis for the arguments they make other than faith. They demand Social Security and a strong military and refuse to pay for both. They demand entitlements for themselves but call any other form of government assistance “wealth redistribution.” It is likely that their aging parents, if still alive, are getting 50% of their income from Social Security, and their answer to that is: “Government is the problem.”

4) And so I come to the last point. Comedy works in 3s, but I’m adding a fourth because this is unfortunately not funny: Last week was your own fault, America. Blame Congress. Blame Barack Obama. It’s a waste of time. It’s you, America. You clearly wanted a war in Iraq you would not pay for, along with a prescription drug benefit you would not pay for, and these things are still source of most of our budgetary woes. (No, it’s not Barack Obama’s health care plan.) You wanted affordable health care but changed your mind when presented with the ugly details. You protect rich people because you think one day you could be Madonna. Yet you, as if your eyes were warped by an optical illusion as you stand under a skyscraper, don’t really understand how big it is–how much richer the rich are and how much they have the game stacked against you.

John Boehner is not the devil. He’s just an elected reflection of your confusion. Barack Obama is not the antichrist. He’s a man you ask to do everything, and whom you hate when he doesn’t accomplish it … and sometimes hate when he does. So stop griping, America. Own up to your own part in this and enjoy the second job you’re going to have to take at night to live the way your parents did.

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