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Dinesh and Newt, Cup and Can

September 17, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

There’s an old slang phrase, “cup and can,” which means “best of friends.” As in, “My friend Snooki and I are cup and can.” “Frick and Frack.” It’s a tidy metaphor. A friend is one who offers fuel for another, like the can fuels the cup.

I thought of it not only because I just bought an awesome new slang book but also, I can think of no better image to describe Newt Gingrich and really bad “academic” right wing writer Dinesh D’Souza, two thinkers thick as thieves–accent on the “thick.” One wrote a grouchy, inarticulate and easily ignorable right-wing diatribe (like many of his other stupid diatribes, which in the past have suggested African American slaves had it pretty good). Newt, who ought to have known better, got a belly full of it. Between this article and his recent recantation of his belief in the First Amendment because of the Park 51 Muslim center, he is fueled and full and off to the races, and has now proudly cast his lot with the racists in his party. That’s almost a textbook definition of the right wing these days: a place that makes a safe bosom for racist behavior.

I almost hate to bring attention to this awful piece of writing, but how can you ignore it when it made the cover of Forbes? When people with good names start offer apotheosis to such horrible idiots, it provokes the rest of the media to comment. Yahoo and Slate had to follow with blistering put downs, so why shouldn’t I? Basically Newt reiterated the obscenely stupid message that Barack Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial intellectual framework,” has been taken directly from his estranged father, and that the link has been revealed by the genius D’Souza. If this sounds like an empty piece of pseudo-intellectual bullshit to you, then I ask you to reconsider. It actually reveals scads, not in its content per se, but in what Gingrich thinks of Republicans. They seem to be so stupid, they will enjoy the bouquet of ugly racial overtone, the taste of academic-sounding jargon, and the finish of Freudian cliche. Barack Obama, who gave money to banks to stop a meltdown, and who shepherds the world’s biggest economy, is still in his heart an African like his father trying to uproot the Belgians from Congo.

The Slate article mainly attacks D’Souza’s past attempts at passing off agitprop as academic research, and is a great read. I will stick to the crazy money stuff here.

From D’Souza’s article:

“The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%.”

Let’s get this straight. Obama is taken to task for spending money on hundreds of dollars in stimulus that have done nothing because unemployment is still high. In fact, the stimulus has raised unemployment.

So my first question: How did this person get an article in a business magazine? A little bit of fact checking will tell you why high unemployment has nothing to do with the success or failure of the stimulus–no, you can lay the blame squarely on the feet of American companies, flush with cash, that are still not hiring you or your Uncle Ernie. Instead, they are hoarding their money and delaying new hires to keep their costs down. This means overworking the remaining laborers (your tired Uncle Ned) and otherwise keeping their earnings per share high and their stock prices burnished so that overseas investors will wade back over.

Obama may in fact be in part to blame, but it’s not because of the stimulus, which most analysts agree saved us from a new Great Depression. No, he’s to blame because the stimulus bills didn’t force banks at gunpoint to lend and didn’t force companies at gunpoint to hire. He trusted capitalism to work, it seems. Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy mostly consumed with trying to get France out of Algeria.

For those of you still not in the know: The unemployment rate is indeed higher, but that has nothing to do with the stimulus and everything to do with the fact that the rebound in employment always lags the rebounding market, sometimes by a year, sometimes longer. It’s part of the healing process of an economy, and yes, Uncle Ernie, it sucks. Jobs come back last. Everybody who’s ever spent one semester in B-school knows this, but for some reason it’s too difficult to relate this to the American people. Everybody thinks they won’t understand. Newt and Dinesh know they won’t. Dear conservatives: You’re being mocked.

If you haven’t been paying attention for the last two years, then we should refresh your memory. The unemployment came after a market crash. The market crash was caused by our largest banks going insolvent after buying bad real estate debt. This is not something a president fixes in two days. And to the extent he fixes it at all, he would be doing it with this same stimulus money that gives Dinesh such a soft-off.

The unemployment rate was lower when Obama took office because the recession was still young. Companies were just starting to lay off. Again, not proof of Obama’s leadership problems. They were going to go up no matter what he did. Why unemployment has remained high for so long after the crash is something that confuses economists, but it’s been getting greater with every recession since George H.W. Bush was in office and it has everything to do with globalization, not failed stimulus. When the jobs come back online, they go to cheaper labor overseas.

So onto the next piece of shit somewhat disingenuous argument. From Dinesh:

“Yet [Obama] wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren’t paying their “fair share.” This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair–to the rich.”

I’ve said it elsewhere and don’t want to sound like a bore, but Obama is not foisting a spending spree on anybody. Taxes are going up to pay for two Republican wars and a prescription drug benefit. The Congressional Budget Office has said repeatedly that if the Bush tax cuts, which never should have been passed in the first place, were allowed to continue, then our deficit would climb up to 90% of GDP over the next 10 years. This is a plea by people in the know who run our budget, not the evil plan of an anti-Colonial crypto-Kenyan black guy who wants the Italians out of Ethiopia.

D’Souza also says that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of federal income taxes and 10% of Americans pay 70% of federal taxes, which is unfair to the rich. Let’s do some math: In 2005, if you were lucky enough to be among the top 300,000 Americans, you made 440 times what the average person in the bottom half of the income universe did (see my story “Bye Bye Beaver,” down below for more on this) and you all collectively took in as much as the bottom 150 million Americans combined. The average income of the top 1% in 2005 was $1.1 million, while the median household in the U.S. has stayed around just over $50,000. If you were in the top 1%, in 2007 you took more than 20 cents of every dollar earned in America, while the rest of us divided up the dregs. Also, if you are in the top 10%, you were among the only people to see your earnings increase.

So if you are paying only 40% of federal income taxes, part of this is by default: You have earned the right to pay it by making so much god damned money. In fact, seems like you’re doing pretty well.

I’m on a tear about the math. But let’s be clear–Newt, a major contender for president, has just forwarded racist samizdat worthy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and passed it off as a critical historical review. To say that a president who is deliberative, maybe to a fault, is actually still a Luo tribesman in his heart, full of black rage, is just as bad as calling him an uppity Negro. The fact that this story hit the pages just as two completely bat shit crazy Tea Party candidates made waves with their primary victories in the East Coast should give us all pause. The Tea Party is a platform with lots of anger and without many ideas. Actually, if your platform is just “liberty!” then that’s a pretty explicit way of saying you have no platform at all. They talk about taking back America. Too much of that rhetoric uses subtle forms of racism like this horrible article. Pseudo-academic histories like D’Souza’s actually further prove how intellectually bankrupt conservatives have become. We’re a long way from Reagan.

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Bye Bye Beaver*

September 15, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

Why is the middle class disappearing? Why are women suddenly making more than men in their peer groups? Why is consumption in China all of a sudden looking like it could outpace the U.S. one day?

These questions might seem unrelated, but they’re not. They are all the signs of the anti-Christ.

No wait. What I meant to say is that they are the predictable results of capitalism. But it’s an easy mistake to make.

We all remember “Leave It To Beaver.” The classic nuclear family protected by middle class trappings and postwar prosperity wrapped up in pretty shirtwaist era dresses. A whole slew of new articles have been appearing in the major magazines pointing out what a lot of you already know, which is that Beaver is dead. And no, I don’t mean that he died in Vietnam after getting a punji stick infection. I mean the American dream of the 1950s–to have one breadwinner with economic security and a stable pension who can also provide for a family with two or three kids, all of whom can afford college–is disappearing. It was a reality so recent and so palpable that it seems now with each passing year to have been a pernicious joke played by God or the Shriners to make us feel that much worse now that it’s disappearing.

But it seems in retrospect Ward and June lived at an inflection point in history–a vast expanding post-war boom on the one hand and a strong labor movement on the other that protected workers, where a floor was set on wages. Where one of the world’s best educational systems allowed a smart person to go to class, and more important, allowed him to leave his class, too. Ward cringed when the Beaver wanted to be a garbage man. Why? Because American upward mobility has been the siren song drawing immigrants up through dry bone desert nights and the recurring source of American pride for both left and right. It’s one of the few things we all agree on. That and Willie Nelson.

Now it’s being chiseled away at, and everybody’s got their own parochial ideas about why it’s happening. Timothy Noah at Slate is currently publishing an incredible series on the vanishing middle class that I highly recommend. The good news about him is that he approaches new ideas with intellectually curious humility, not the dismissive, counterintuitive arrogance of lawyers (like many other Slate writers). In this particular case, he tries to examine all sides of the issue.

First the right wing: to the extent that they care at all, they seem to think the vanishing middle class is an immigration issue. It’s simple supply and demand. Paco the wetback is coming over here to pick your grapes and tomatoes, and because he’s bringing his cousins, the dollar that would go to your cousin gets divided up into nickels. After all, the tomato doesn’t care.

This concept is so easy to understand that I can almost forgive you for believing it.

I give you an other image: Paco the Wetback Accountant, crossing the border with his clothes in a plastic bag, dodging concertina wire and rattlesnakes and the Minutemen all so that he can come over to set up an office of beaverboard in a strip mall and steal your tax planning clients with his cheap Mexican calculator.

Sound stupid? Yes, immigration would be harming our middle class, but only if 1) Immigrants were coming to America with middle class skills (they aren’t), and 2) They were fanning out across the U.S. (they aren’t).

But let’s skip the loin and go right for the ribs: right wingers don’t care if there’s a wealth disparity anyway. The rich right wing have got the fundamentalist tenets of capitalism on their side which says, “If I have the capital, I’m already doing my job. You can party in my house. But don’t forget who owns it.”

You might say, “So what? That how capitalism ought to work!” But you might also know people (as I do) in all walks of life who are overpaid at their jobs. Similarly, I think the rich are vastly overpaid for the work they do in our economy. At the end of the day, the main thing they want is to suck more off the top than they put in. That’s what private equity investing is. I drink your milkshake.

Those conservatives who aren’t rich … well, they confuse me. They seem ready to fight and die for the most insignificant tax breaks you can imagine. They are either perversely wedded to ideology or ready to give up better roads and schools for a plasma TV.

For more proof about how conservatives don’t care about wealth disparity, you only need read an article by the rare one who does–say, a National Review writer who brings up the shrinking middle class issue to his fellow conservatives and gets himself roundly booed for it. Read how he sheepishly has to apologize that he’s not arguing for socialism. For conservatives, there is no middle ground between a discussion about wage disparity and collective farming.

Liberals have their own problems to work out. My personal feeling was that Ronald Reagan ended the middle class by cutting taxes on the rich and destroying labor when he fired air traffic controllers. But that’s an oversimplification, too, because wages started to stagnate in the 1970s, before Dutch took office. Still, the periods in the U.S. when there is an aristocratic tendency toward wealth disparity have usually been those periods when government was least involved, in other words, when Republicans are in charge, the poor see income stagnate and the rich don’t. That’s not because they’re stealing. It’s because they are letting the engine run without controls. And over time, the engine diminishes the rewards to those with redundant skills (in other words, regular people) and rewards those with the capital (mostly the rich, even if, like me, you have a mutual fund and benefit slightly).

When your labor is redundant or commoditized or can be taken over by a machine, your value declines. This is as true for doctors as it is for mechanics. To be paid more, you have to offer something that is not routinized. You have to find a place where the market could be working better and see how you can be taking advantage of it. This is one of the beauties of capitalism because it creates wealth where there wasn’t any before. But when it decides that your labor isn’t necessary any more, screw you. A doctor surrounded by lots of other doctors won’t make more money. Only a frontier doctor will. Problem is, the frontier is gone.

Today it’s in China, a country with a 60% rural population rapidly urbanizing and rapidly creating a consumer culture–which is the economic potential of a supernova. What you call the American dream will in 50 years be called “The Chinese Dream.”

The nice thing about America circa 1950 and its nice middle class was that the lines were blurred enough that anybody could conceivably jump classes (up or down) according to what their spirit desired. If a stupid Marxist attacked you for your bourgeois indulgences like perfume and chocolate, you could rightly say “a world in which everybody could chase perfume and chocolate indulgences would be a pretty sweet ass world.”

To keep your middle class, you need new industries to be borne up and you need more ways for more people to participate in it. It means giving business incentives, but it also means educating your people and safeguarding their wages with rugged regulation. There is no way around this. If we ignore it and let the anti-government fanatics have their way, America is going to become a world of plutocrats and look more like one of those tiny countries with a landed class that sells rubber and coffee and lives off the backs of peasants. Despite what flag-waving faux-patriots at Fox News say, our greatness will surely be over.

*My original title for this post was “Kiss Your (Middle C)lass Goodbye,” but then I saw after the fact that the Huffington Post already took that headline a few months ago. This is the problem with trying to be original. Too many other people do it first.

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted in Business and the Economy, Global Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Where Was I on 9/11? A ‘Journalist’s’ Tale

September 11, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

As I get older, I feel less enthusiastic about marking the anniversaries of horrible events (or even good ones). I hope that doesn’t sound callous, especially since I didn’t lose any friends or family members in the Twin Towers. But at some point, grief becomes self-perpetuating. I have known people who have built entire shrines to their grief as a way of holding on to it. I was familiar with this behavior on Sept. 11, 2001 from reading. I know it first-hand this year after losing my mother in a car wreck. Grief is something you have to let go of. And anniversaries are just one more way of preserving grief in amber.

But for documentary purposes, I’ll tell you that as a New Yorker, I went through periods of shock, depression, mania and denial due to the terrorist attacks, if not nervous breakdown. I’ve heard there are studies suggesting that the closer you were to the towers on Sept. 11, the greater your chances of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. I was two miles away, for whatever that’s worth. And looking back, I sometimes wonder if I indeed suffered from it, if not from some milder, derivative form of despair.

I was a freelance journalist at the time, living in downtown Brooklyn. I had just finished up a morning Web feed for a financial news site when a friend called and told me to turn on the TV. Seems the World Trade Center had been hit by an airplane. I walked to the Brooklyn waterfront and found not one but both buildings gashed, with flames licking up the sides–vast walls of flames that it takes you a moment to realize are as tall as small buildings themselves. But why two crash sites? I thought at first that maybe one plane had sliced through Tower 1 and hit Tower 2 (though the trajectories didn’t match). The radio said two planes.  “That’s impossible. Surely I’m hearing it wrong.” Terror wasn’t in my thoughts.

Though I knew about Al Qaeda and the bombings of the U.S.S. Cole and the African embassies, I never really understood Osama bin Laden, a former U.S. ally whose beefs still seemed too esoteric and obscure to me. He didn’t seem to be a guy fighting against colonialism or for the freedom of his people but rather a self-important freebooter who felt double-crossed by the American military. He seemed so proud, blustering and overly sensitive that he had probably felt double crossed a lot in his life–by the Americans, by the Saudis, by his family. People like that make great sociopaths.

I then made what in hindsight turned out to be a foolish decision. I decided to go back home and call a few editors to see if there was anything I could write about the emergency. I have never been much of a spot reporter, but 2001 was the year I had quit my job with the intention of being more of a go-getter.

So I ran home thinking, again foolishly, that the fires, still burning at that point, would be contained. “Why sit here and watch it burn?” I thought. “It’s not like the towers are going to collapse.” In 1993, the World Trade Center had already been attacked, when a terrorist loaded up a van full of explosives. The destruction underground opened 100 foot holes five stories tall. And yet the towers stood. And a B-25 Mitchell had hit the Empire State Building in 1945 without felling it.

My bad. As we all found out later, the math changes when the most vulnerable beams are all on the outside of your building. They didn’t have to melt. All they had to do was fail. I raced home to find out from the radio that  Tower 2 had indeed fallen right where I’d stupidly left it. Shows how good a spot news reporter I am. I ran home from the real story.

I then sallied back outdoors to see from my cramped Brooklyn vantage point what Lower Manhattan had turned into. Many TV cameras have caught the images of that day, so I doubt I could do them justice with poetic ruminations of destruction. But what had been lower Manhattan was subsumed in a dark purple-yellow cloud with some buildings sticking up out of it. It looked as if part of the sky had been erased by a furious illustrator unhappy with the work he’s done. But it was obvious from the columnar shape of the cloud that what had been erased was a building.

A guy nearby on the Brooklyn waterfront said “I know there’s a God now because I’m over here and not over there.” It sounds horrible, but the graveyard humor started before both towers had gone down.

I headed north to my friend Michael’s house. He  lived much closer. Before I got there, it started snowing–not precipitation but pulverized concrete, getting into my eyes and piling up on the cars. Winter in September. And overhead of course, the lighter material was flying away–reams of paper. You could only imagine what was printed on it. Thousands (millions?) of pieces of paper flying away on top of the rising heat. With Brooklyn suddenly enmeshed in clouds of the destroyed Tower 2, I had to go indoors with my friend and watch the final destruction of Tower 1 play out on television like the rest of America. I knew by that point we’d be going to war. Some friends and I went to the water front again when the skies had cleared a bit. “This is the new skyline,” said a guy with a video camera. “Guess we better get used to it.”

I went back home to attend to e-mails flooding into my box from friends and family asking me if I was OK. On the map, I looked very close to the destruction, especially to people out of state.

At some point I cried. I don’t remember what set it off. I think it was a friend’s letter asking me what they could do. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but then a friend from Texas gave me a virtual slap upside the head: “You’re a writer. Write about it.” As it happens, I had only one writing gig at that point at a nurse’s magazine. Not exactly what I had in mind. But they wanted a story. All of a sudden I was a real reporter covering a life and death situation.

So I lay down on the floor and had a panic attack. Not only was I going to have to write about something I hadn’t come to grips with, but I was going to have to become a spot news reporter instantly, which I hadn’t been before. My chest hurt and I felt when I got up like I was going to fall over. At some point, though, I made it to the George Foreman grill, and shoved a piece of chicken into it, then ate the bland, vulcanized thing for the protein. It was the bit of strength I needed to get out the door.

I somehow got a subway train to Manhattan, which coughed me up in Greenwich Village, but most of the routes downtown were barricaded at Houston Street. Nobody was allowed to go south, even if they lived there, and I couldn’t convince the cops to let me through. It was the middle of the afternoon and the day was still, all things considered, quite pretty. The traffic was diverted and in the middle of Sixth Avenue, the usual river of taxis had dried up. In the middle of the empty thoroughfare was a young man who had set up an easel and was splashing across his canvas a giant expressionistic acrylic version of our national tragedy while it was still in progress. More gallows humor (or coping?)

I went to St. Vincent’s hospital and found a press area, defying the press credential requirement and jumping into the pit. I asked doctors and nurses what kind of injuries they were seeing. Turns out, there weren’t many. Sept. 11 was extremely binary in its casualties list (at least during the first day) Either you died or you didn’t. You can read the story I wrote on it here if you like. It’s not Pulitzer material, but it got me through the day.

Drinks were free that night. We told more inappropriate jokes. We asked each other if we were OK. Some people hooked up. Others just walked around. The next day was like a Saturday at Disneyland. People walked around with their kids in a light so soft it was almost impressionistic. People called friends they hadn’t called in years. Even I called an ex with whom I’d had an acrimonious break up. I don’t know why. I had to make sure she was OK.

I met Stephanie a few months after the attack and went back to work full time and can say now that 2002 was one of the best years of my life, following 2001 which was undeniably the worst. I came through it better, but different.

I am extremely clear headed about the political questions raised by 9/11. Whatever America has done in Chile, Nicaragua, Vietnam, East Timor, Angola or Cuba, you can’t possibly take the side of a murderous religious fundamentalist, somebody who wants to revive a medieval caliphate, and think it’s OK for him to murder American civilians to right American wrongs. If you are one of the people who think America had 9/11 coming, I don’t count you much of a thinker. I think of you as doctrinaire and sad.

At the same time, the burden of introspection on Sept. 11 was unfortunately on those who were hurting the most. Only a few brave contrarians pointed out back then that Afghanistan was going to be a mess if we invaded. Now we have that mess. People cried war, because at the time we figured at least 10,000 people were dead and surely that was an act of war. Logic didn’t bear this out, however, since no government per se had attacked us. Ultimately I backed our president’s incursion into Afghanistan because the Taliban were at least undeniably protecting the people who attacked us.

Not so, Saddam Hussein. Americans still in pain 20 months later were still not thinking critically at all, and they let George Bush and his cadre of think-tank neoconservatives take advantage of us by leading us to war in Iraq. We know in hindsight that we were vulnerable to manipulation. It’s very, very hard to say we should have anticipated it from Day 1.

But the political realities are just one thing that have made me grow up. More important was that 9/11 made me realize  how much I love my city. Moving here and becoming part of New York with its bustles and frustrations had been a dream of mine since I was little. Learning the city means making it a part of your body–you have to know the rhythms, the steps, the hustles, the battles. You have to know when to step back from the subway. You have to know when to fight city hall and when not to. When you make the city so much a part of your own body, perhaps it just makes sense that you would hurt when it hurts. The strangest thing I can say about 9/11 is that, even though I didn’t lose anybody close to me in those planes or in those buildings, I took the attack very personally. This great metropolis they had built was in my mind, despite its flaws, a paradise. And to see so many ideals ripped down at once–the aspirations of young people, the aspirations of peace makers, and the aspirations of people who build things like tall buildings–was the saddest thing to me as a New Yorker and a young person, too. Soon, I wasn’t young anymore.

Photo: The 9/11 Tribute in Light

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BP: It’s Not Easy Being Green

September 10, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

Did any of you see this “oops” moment in the investment world–how many socially responsible investors and “green” mutual funds were actually invested in disgraced oil giant BP when the Deepwater Horizon exploded? That means if you were an investor trying to plow your money into environmentally sensitive businesses, you might have been unhappy in March to find yourself part-owner of a giant oil company with a bad safety record.

We wrote a couple of articles about it at the magazine I write for, Financial Advisor, where I’m the senior editor. The situation is not as simple as it seems, and if anything, it should remind you that economics make even stranger bed fellows than politics. The reason many socially responsible investors were holding BP was not just so they could boost returns and screw the planet. It is part of a broader engagement to get those companies in the biggest polluting industries to play ball. BP had a stated willingness to lower its greenhouse gas emissions and discuss climate change, unlike some of its brethren in the industry. The bad news is that the company had a crap safety record. This set off warning bells, and many socially responsible funds earlier this year started thinking of dumping the company before something really bad happened.

Before they knew it, something did.

I’m sure The Wall Street Journal article on the story is better than mine, but if you do want to read my story and get more esoteric facts about how socially responsible funds score and rate their holdings, you can see it here.

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Decathect

September 8, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

According to Webster’s dictionary, “cathect” means to invest something with emotional energy. Contrariwise, “decathect” means to take away your emotional attachment to something, perhaps anticipating that you’ll lose it. You can decathect from anything. Countries. The linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. Your dinner. Your friends. Your president.

Why do you care? You’re probably busy at work, after all and don’t have time. Well, I mention it for two reasons. One is that you probably decathect from things all the time. Remember your friend who didn’t invite you to her wedding? I bet you decathected from her and decided not to invite her to yours. To use a much more pressing global political example, many groups, for example, the Serbians in the 1990s, have found they must decathect from the idea of a greater nationalism when they cannot realistically unite with their fellow ethnic groups in other countries. Decathecting is a silent friend and a silent killer. We do it every day, almost as much as we rationalize. A lot of us Democrats are going to be decathecting from Congress if we lose it in November. Also, if I go downstairs for a bagel later and find out that they ran out hours ago, I’m going to have to decathect from that wonderful butter-, rosemary-, poppy seed-, onion- and garlic-encrusted bread right then and there.

The other reason I’m talking about it is that I wrote a song called “Decathect.” Why? Because it’s kind of different. There’s no singing in this song. And I’m not playing the guitar so much as attacking it, not playing in chords so much as playing around them. I’d call it an atonal song, but I’m sure Arnold Schoenberg, the atonal master, would berate me for playing a few chords here and there. But the idea was to “decathect” from the chords, from the guitar and from song structure.

So if you don’t like it, now you know why. Click here to play: Decathect

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Bieber Fever Turns Deadly, Says CDC

September 7, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

Scientists are working rapidly to sequence a genome to confound the insidious disease.

The Centers For Disease Control in Washington issued a health bulletin Wednesday warning that so-called “Bieber Fever,” has turned deadly in the United States, killing scores of young teenagers, and is now reported in record numbers in adolescent and child populations.

The fever has resulted in at least 10 fatalities across the country, mostly among young people but also some adults. Newly infected patients should in the next few weeks expect to suffer from dysentery, widespread skin lesions, leprosy, anemia and markedly enlarged spleens.

“We’re dealing with a rare disease in which the host body becomes infected by metacyclic promastigotes during blood feasting,” says Dr. Richard Kohen director of communicable disease control at the CDC. “In the visceral stage, these parasites migrate to the vital organs and the body just starts to shut down from total Bieber consumption.”

The protozoan parasites of Bieber fever that overtake the host body have become increasingly drug resistant, said Kohen, who said past treatments of antimony-based drugs have so far proved ineffective to the horrific disease, one in which large large open sores, known as “Bieber bowls” criss-cross the face and shoulders offering weeks of agonizing torment to the patient.

The phlebotomine sandflies that carry the disease are normally found on petting zoo animals and other doe-eyed young mammals. There are currently no vaccines for Bieber fever, though scientists hope that by studying the robust Bieber viral DNA they can sequence the parasite’s genome and concoct a robust carbohydrate version of the vaccine that will save victims before they drown in their own bodily fluids, suffer organs exploding in supperating balls of pus or find their faces melting right off their skulls.

Beiber fever has been identified in at least 50 countries with a total population at risk of some 583 million. In other areas, the disease is known by some of its local folk names such as “Beiber leprosy,” “Spotted Beiber,” and “Chupa Mi Culo.” Many of these areas lack available resources of vaccine and treatment, mostly sodium stibogluconate therapy that hampers the parasite’s ability to absorb food from the surrounding host cells. But some strains of the disease, such as the dreaded “Diffuse Cutaneous Bieber Fever,” also known as “The Canadian Death Rattle,” have become resistant to drugs.

“This is a very smart parasite,” says Kohen. “It just kind of creeps up on you with its seemingly innocuous symptoms and warms your body up. Just when you are most susceptible and weak, that’s when it does the most harm and pretty soon it is turning your body against itself.”

Kohen advises teens to be wary of blood-feeding hematophagous animals and phlebotominae, especially those with the familiar Bieber bowl trademarks. Meanwhile, scientists are preparing with the help of a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find out how exactly Beiber fever has spread, what are its major gateways of transmission, and why people are so, so, so susceptible.

“This is an insidious, fiendish attack on human host cells,” said Kohen. “It doesn’t just make your spleen larger than your liver. It gets into your very heart and makes you shake, shake shake until your body just totally gives out.”

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted in Math & Science, Music | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Game Theory

September 7, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

A few years ago, I wrote a blog in which I listed funny but fictional mathematical paradoxes, for instance that a surprise birthday party thrown for oneself isn’t a surprise party unless no one shows up. Funny, and insightful, and I hope worthy of Bertrand Russell or Rodney Dangerfield.

But if you remember, further down the list I wrote something that wasn’t fake at all, but instead so horribly true it’s hard to laugh at: “Two groups working successfully by themselves will fail when they combine their efforts. This is also known as democracy.”

This idea appears to be as timely as ever, since a brace of new blogs and studies tell us that partisans on both sides of the political spectrum currently hold lots of horribly irrational beliefs about government. The Daily Kos, a liberal political blog, recently conducted a poll of Republicans to find out how many wacky ideas they have. Turns out they have several, the most famous of which is that Barack Obama wasn’t born in this country, so was never eligible to be our president. It’s a powerful, if false, statement–showing a helpless and disenfranchised Republican mind trying to regain his sense of personal potency now that his party has imploded, his economic and political ideas have proved disastrous and his self-esteem ranks up there with that of famously depressed drunk Billy Joel. The Tea Party might make you believe again, if they had any beliefs.

But Kos’ tidy avoidance of 9/11 truthers reveals a big mathematical problem all its own. By focusing only on weird Republican ideas, at least half (maybe two thirds) of his number set is missing (a set that would sink a hole in the floor, as surely as a toxic potion of Bertrand Russell’s antinomy sank number set theories). Ilya Somin writes here that “ignorance and irrationality” actually beset partisans of both political stripes, and goes on to mention some of the stranger parochial beliefs of sectarian leftists, including the desire of some for secession and their disturbing ideas about the influence of Jews on the economy. Somin gives a great compelling argument for why these beliefs flower, mostly that voters don’t have incentives to acquire new knowledge that hurts their team. In other words, it’s game theory at work. Voters aren’t thinkers but sports fans rooting for their own groups; they don’t care if the Yankees win because some kid in the stands unfairly snatched a pop fly away from the opponent’s outfielder.

Selective information gathering (shunning bad information about your guy and drinking up bad information about the other guy) allows Democrats to ignore the fact that it was some of Bill Clinton’s policies that helped cause the financial crisis (even if he was following a deregulation path set by Ronald Reagan). By the same token Republicans are currently blocking reform that would actually help Republican constituents, hampering economic stimulus packages that would create jobs, pounding the table for tax cuts that would make the deficit 90% of GDP over the next 10 years, and destroying legislation that would curb out-of-control medical costs. Why do they do this? They are afraid to break ranks, lest they help opponents. Somin says that you vote for your team because there are greater payoffs to being part of a team than constantly breaking ranks to do the right thing. What payoff do you get following the shifting sands of statistics? Being friends with statistics is like being friends with Mr. Spock. You don’t get a lot of joy out of it and he won’t watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” with you.

I have problems with Somin’s points, too, though. The most important is that it’s very static and doesn’t look at how people occasionally play red rover and cross sides, nor does he see how the changing paradigms lead to political stability. He doesn’t look into game-breaking patterns or ask why they happen. When George W. Bush signed immigration legislation that for once pointed to a rational path to citizenship, liberal pundits were quick to support him, and it gave skeptical Republicans the fig leaf they needed to finally turn on him, the way New York turned on former Knicks coach Pat Riley when he went to Miami. The 9/11 attacks also undermined the game, briefly unifying left and right (unless you count the relatively small number of Afghan War opponents). There is also a rather large political center he’s forgetting–a group that comprises mushy weenies who can’t make up their minds; Hegelian synthesists who wait until they have as much information as possible before making a plan of action (or inaction); people blithely ignorant of politics under all circumstances because they have better things to do with their time; and those who don’t have a dog in the fight for one reason or another, perhaps recent immigrants whose desire to assimilate overshadows their feeling about who runs the Senate postal committee.

Why else do people join teams? Again, because they feel helpless against prevailing political winds. It’s often noted that people in totalitarian societies turn to bizarre religious ideas in the form of millenarian movements. (When the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua, they had to contend with Virgin Mary sightings among Catholics who decided their nation was under the influence of Satan, and of course, much earlier several Jewish millenarian movements sprouted up in the Middle Ages as a result of anti-Semitic persecution). It’s exceedingly silly when conservatives call Obama the anti-Christ, but consistent with political powerlessness throughout history. When you can’t have the Earth, you take the fight to heaven, where you promise to tap whup ass another day on heathens and grassroots community organizers.

And how else would you describe a 9/11 truther if not as quasi religious? After all, perhaps one of the most salient descriptions of a religious person is his dedication to post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies. If the world is here, there must be a God who made it. If I got cancer, it’s because I did something wrong. If I only sire girls, my young Tudor dynasty must be cursed. If the 9/11 attacks helped George Bush declare war, he must have planned them all by himself. My belief in this is so strong, I can ignore something as important as two plane loads of people smashing into the Twin Towers and countless radio and cell phone dispatches laying the blame squarely on a group of radical Islamists. The belief is unfalsifiable, therefore comes very close to being religious. You show me a truther (or a birther), and I’ll show you a tongue-speaking, snake handling, eyeball-rolling-back-in-the-head Pentecostal.

What’s scary is that within the liberal and conservative spheres, the need for team loyalty is such that you see no negative feedback on the local level when false information flies around. If you read the right wing blogs these days, for instance, it’s frightening how many false assertions go unchallenged by Republicans on these sites who ought to know better or who might feel the need to challenge inaccuracies the way, say, Wikipedia readers do. If you read “The American Thinker” for instance, you’ll find lots of unchallenged statistical red herrings proving that global warming doesn’t exist, and seemingly nobody smart enough there to raise objections against their compeers. You’ll also find that the recession wasn’t caused by undercapitalized, overleveraged Wall Street banks at all (as everybody over the age of 12 should know) but was evidently caused by ACORN forcing banks to lend to poor people. I want you to ponder the stupidity of a person who can demonize one “get out the vote” organization so completely. First it was responsible for mass voter fraud (not possible) then white slavery (patently untrue) and now the financial crisis.  Next thing you know, ACORN will be responsible for the Holocaust, Alzheimer’s disease and your dad’s hemorrhoids.

The fact is, as, again, everybody over 12 should know, subprime lenders popped up everywhere to take advantage of rising housing prices for the very same reason candle makers churn out more candles for Christmas. They were seeking opportunity from market inefficiencies.  It was not a plot by poor people–it was a nasty asset bubble sadly characteristic of the U.S. economy these days when the U.S. dollar has shrunk, when foreigners thus flood our country with money to buy these assets cheap (causing them to swell) and Americans themselves meanwhile spend more than they produce by borrowing against such inflated assets. It was a systematic error was caused by cheap money, and it ain’t the last bubble you’re going to see, folks. It’s the market at work. It’s capitalism gone wild, and without regulation, it’s going to happen again and it’s going to fuck you and your family.

There are many conservative-leaning economists who know this. Why do they not step up to challenge other conservatives? Do they not have guts? Or does the game require them to go mute and turn to zombie-economists? (There’s a movie pitch for you!)

These problems with communication, misinformation and denial have led some people to argue that ignorant people just shouldn’t vote at all. I can’t get behind that idea. Why? I truly believe there’s a rational impulse floating under the game theory. When people aren’t happy with their own guy, they don’t vote. That’s a good thing. It could be that people only vote when they’re angry, but that’s not such a bad thing either. Voting against something is a way of introducing negative feedback into the system. I don’t want the Democratic majority to be knocked out of office this year. But I’m also angry that when I voted in a bunch of liberals in 2008, they didn’t act more like liberals–throwing more money into job creation and suspending bipartisanship with people who were not going to help.

If Democrats lose their substantial majorities now, there’s now going to be gridlock. Is that bad? Not necessarily. It likely means the horribly destructive Bush tax cuts will expire, and we will start balancing our budget. At some point, the economy will recover and it will be no thanks to Republicans or Democrats but to market forces beyond the control of both. Higher taxes won’t stop it, just as they didn’t stop the Internet boom. When the jobs come back online, of course, you will be paid less and you will likely be working in the service industry. You can thank globalization and Ronald Reagan for that. On the other hand, sooner or later, Republicans will look at cap and trade not as a punitive measure wrought upon them by hippies but just another business opportunity like so many others that help a market economy thrive.

We might have to lean on the rudder to get the ship going in the right direction, but we’ll have a political center offering ballast to keep the ship upright. As long as this center doesn’t disappear (or let itself be bullied), then it’s very possible common sense ideas can come to pass. It took us 15 years to figure out Vietnam was an incredible cock up. It only took us seven to figure out Iraq was messed up.

Even in game theory, it seems, there’s progress.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Leaving Iraq, “Leaving Babylon”

September 4, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

To celebrate the end of military operations in Iraq, I suppose it might be apropos to once again offer up the song “Leaving Babylon,” by ER Salo Deguierre, a tale of intrigue set against our troubles in the Persian Gulf. It’s not an anti-America song, as some might surmise on first hearing. It’s more a look at extreme thinkers and how they so easily switch sides. Because, to an extremist, the content of his thoughts is not as important as his extreme feelings. I’m looking at you, Michael Savage, David Horowitz and John Voight.

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“Kansas, 1921” by Salon De La Guerre

September 1, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

One of the things you might not know about ER Salo Deguierre is that he’s not just interested in ripping off Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground all the time. No, ol’ Salo has a soft side, too. In fact, he quite loves folk music.

It was 1992 when I first saw a brilliant movie that I highly recommend called Dogfight (starring the late, great River Phoenix in one of his best performances, working alongside the equally phenomenal Lili Taylor). As the credits rolled at the end for this devastating tale of lost innocence in the 1960s, I heard for the first time the dulcet tones of a maestro guitarist named John Fahey and my life has never been the same. I spent the next 17 years not only trying (and failing) to play the way he does but also to figure out how an instrumental guitarist with nobody backing him could sound like a symphony. I wondered for a long time, after listening closely, if his symphonic sound had any relationship to the type dreamed up by Sonic Youth troubadours Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. I was pleasantly surprised later to find that my intuition of a musical connection was not misplaced; Sonic Youth acknowledged at some point that they had indeed used a lot of John Fahey’s alternative tuning approaches to create their own totally original sound. Their debt to him turned out to be so great that they even played shows with him in his waning years (one of which I got to see on my 27th birthday, the best present ever).

John Fahey never sang (he didn’t need to), but until I come up with a guitar sound as fulfilling as his, I have to unfortunately do some croaking on my own material, hoping that if I combine some halfway decent picking skills with a halfway decent vocal, I’ll have something better than both. My results in this pursuit have mostly been a mishmash, but in the last few months I’ve come up with something I don’t mind sharing.

I wrote this song about 10 or 11 years ago but left it unrecorded until this year. It’s about pain, poverty, class resentment. American history, basically. Just click to play.

“Kansas 1921”
By Eric Rasmussen
Copyright 1999

Go inside the house and get our best wooden chair
Before he comes up our porch
And takes off his bowler hat
And sits down and tells us tales of distant Washington
We’ll feed him corn and watch his face

Seems so long
Since dad’s been dead
But how happy he’d be
To have known a president
On a whistle-stop campaign
In this brave new year of 1921
Just to see our land and give us blessing

Oh ho, high wind, high wall
Won’t you take my hand and pull me down
There’ll be warm spring wind comin’ round

Punch another hole inside your old leather belt
You’re as thin as a bean
And your pants are fallin’ down
And you might run into rich folk in town
Don’t you ever stop to think of who you are?

Try to think that you was raised better than
You was raised
Tie that dog up in the wood
Kick him if he ain’t been good
Lick your fingers, push your hair behind your ears
Don’t smile when they look you in the eye

Oh ho, high wind, high wall
Won’t you take my hand and pull me down
There’ll be warm spring wind
Comin’ round

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Dear Iraq

September 1, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

What can I say? It’s been no fun at all. And yet all horrible things must come to an end.

It was a messy relationship; maybe we shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. You were violent and volatile, ruled by a tyrannical father. We were idealistic and naive and had been hurt before. But still, we were impulsive; we took the plunge quickly. We were addicted to drama. And you had no choice. You just fell for us.

But oh how quickly things change. You became much too hot to handle. You spurned us almost as soon as you welcomed us. First you threw roses at us, and we thought it meant you loved us. But maybe you just meant, “Please don’t kill me.” As soon as our honeymoon ended, you turned schizophrenic. You acted like you didn’t know from one minute to the next what you wanted or who you were or which mosque you should attend. Sometimes you wanted your mean father back; sometimes you just wanted to blow us up. You turned to outsiders who poured poison in your ear and said lots of nasty untrue things about us and offered to help you get rid of us in horrible ways. You craved our stability and guiding hand and mentoring one moment but hated us for it at the same time. A typical Pygmalion relationship. We should have known, you can’t carve the perfect lovers out of stone. You have to let them just be who they are. Even if that means letting them hate you. Or letting them go.

The Flag of Iraq


We acted like the boss, but we weren’t. We couldn’t even get you to take out the garbage. You were so passive aggressive you put roadside IEDs in it.

You were insecure. And by that I mean your internal security forces were politicized and mercenary and graft-ridden. You were unstable. And by that I mean you had a nasty case of pyromania. It’s never as sexy as Def Leppard makes it out to be. You were proud and had to fight for every inch of property. You wouldn’t get organized. When somebody tried to help you get organized, boom! They were dead to you.

You crumbled into many mental and physical states. We binged (on oil) and you purged (each other of heretics). We were very curious to see your dad’s guns. Turned out he didn’t have any. Later, you did away with your dad entirely, and it wasn’t the victory either one of us thought it was going to be. In fact, it just made our relationship that much more sour.

Sometime in the second year, we knew, both of us that, that our relationship was a mistake. Yet we were too proud and embarrassed to end it. We insisted foolishly that we could make it work. Sometimes we went at each other without having enough protection. Isn’t that America all over–giddy and never properly sheathed.

But it’s silly to ask now what might have happened if we hadn’t gotten involved. That was a long time ago, and the choices can’t be unmade. We’re different people now, and can’t live in the past. Our mistakes are ours, and they make us who we are. Hopefully they help us become better. And hopefully we can end this bad blood on good terms, with no mutual recrimination, without debts and without too much rotting infrastructure. You seem to have gotten your shit together a bit. We went into debt trying to make you happy, of course, but we’ll be OK, because we work hard and have good government jobs to tide us over.

But we’re finally pulling the plug. This is it, Iraq. We’re leaving you. We’ve fallen in love with somebody else and her name is Snooki. She’s a mess, too, but we think we can help her. In the meantime, don’t cry. We hold no grudges toward you. After all, we have to thank you for not lasting anywhere near as long as our horrible engagement with Vietnam. That was probably the worst relationship ever. So wipe the tears from your eyes, Iraq. In the words of Luther Vandross:

We’re so in love but wrong for each other
Each hurt that heals brings on another
Both of us abusing
Both of us using
Darling
It’s time to stop pretending
There’s just no way to rewrite our ending
We’re caught in this game
And we both know we’re losing, but

How many times can we say good-bye?

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