Reprint: Gun Violence Again. Because Freedom.

Observations By Others

[Many people around the world collectively distrust and dislike Americans -- "Because Freedom", the usual reply of troglodyte animals like this knuckle-dragging liar -- but actually, they feel that way towards us because we are a loud, brash, childtime culture. With guns.  And little compunction to have adult conversations about limiting their number, availability or use in our society.

[Freedom has nothing to do with it. We're a violent culture, subliminally and overtly. That's why other people in other places fear and distrust us -- because a large number of us are children, with guns.

[This reprint is from December, 2012, and June of 2014, and I am sick of reposting it.]

 (Photo: AP, via The New York Times)

There are no real words for what happened in Connecticut, yesterday. There is plenty to say about how it happened.

I overheard someone at work (a classic gun nut owner who believes Negros persons of color will overrun his part of the planet) observing that "this [presumably, massacres committed by unstable individuals with firearms] is the new normal".

On PBS' The News Hour, a professional psychologist asked to comment said (and I'm paraphrasing) that "It's important to say... this kind of tragedy doesn't happen every day... that schools really are safe places."

I reject the first comment. The second remark made me think: This fellow doesn't go to many Inner City schools, then -- massacres with 27 dead don't happen every day, that's true; but there are shooting incidents, and kids packing, and metal detectors, and education occurring against a solid backdrop of poverty and violence, every day. 

The psychologist on News Hour was, I thought, trying to suggest themes parents might pass on to reassure their children (Don't worry, Timmy; It Can't Happen Here) -- that planes can crash, but the odds of going down in one, or having one crash on top of you, are hugely in your favor. And largely, that is true.

But planes do crash. Ships sink. Trains collide and buses plunge. Whenever that does happen, there are NTSB investigations, reconstructions and root-cause analyses. There are discussions with engineers and manufacturers about what to do to increase  the chances such a tragedy doesn't happen again.

Only in cases like Sandy Hook does our national debate begin and end with, "Guns don't kill people; the people using them do". And that's it -- Pilot Error, essentially, is the public finding; and any other meme is just filler in the media. That, and people repeating, "It doesn't happen every day."

I'm sure that fact is a comfort to the extended families of twenty children, who died because they were shot with high-powered handguns. Twenty children.

I grew up around guns. I've owned firearms; at various times because I was required to carry them, but afterwards had no sane reason to keep them. I don't want them in my home.

We live in a world of high anxiety, and there are persons who want to exploit those feelings of danger, threat, and imminent disaster:  Gun manufacturers, and their lobby, the NRA, are at the top of the list.  Mike Huckabee and the rest of his fellow Xtian evangelical ilk; there are 2012 World-Enders, predicting massive earthquakes and crustal displacement and 'coastal events', and ultimately few survivors.

There are White Power fascists, and Survivalists, and the people who manufacture and sell them freeze-dried food and plans for bunkers to shield against the EMP bursts from North Korean-launched warheads, detonating high above the USA.

What happened in Sandy Hook yesterday has happened before -- in Columbine, in Denver; In Virginia; in a mall in Seattle last week; at a Dairy Queen in the Northwest. There may not be massacres, but annually there are many multiple-victim, firearm homicides in America.

And they will keep happening, until something changes about how firearm ownership and possession is discussed, and regulated, in this country.

The debate is not about Operator Error.  It's not about something that happened "over there" in another city or state. It's about twenty dead children.

Along those lines are two, other very pertinent observations -- one, a part of the discussion at TPM Prime (Subscription Required):

Memekiller:  ...for me, it's all about the NRA. I'm anti-NRA, not guns, and am offended by the strangle-hold they have over our politics. And I'm angry that Democrats have ceded the issue, only to have the NRA, if anything, put twice as much effort into unseating Democrats and Obama who, if anything, loosened rules on guns ...

... And the gun culture the NRA fosters... Would the prevalence of guns be as frightening without the culture of paranoia and conspiracies they perpetuate? It's not just about freedom to own a gun. The NRA culture is a cult of xenophobia and insanity. They don't seem to be aiming their message at responsible gun owners so much as the disgruntled and those prone to paranoia. They are less about developing an advocacy group than they are about assembling a well-armed militia of the mentally unstable.  

And the other, at The Great Curmudgeon :

Broken

Our discourse, that is. Fortunately, we have DDay trying to repair it.

Just to pick at random, here are a couple headlines at the Hartford Courant site just from the past 24 hours: Woman Shot, Man Dead After Standoff In Rocky Hill. Armed Robbery At Hartford Bank, Two In Custody.It’s not that school shootings like this are abnormal. They are depressingly normal. The fact that there were no shootings in one day in New York City recently was seen as a major achievement, which shows you how desensitized we have become to gun violence as a normal occurrence of daily life.Just a reminder. The NRA is an industry lobby for the gun industry. The industry that makes consumer products largely designed to kill people.  Not deer. Not rabbits.

People.   

by Jay Ackroyd (@jayackroyd)

_______________________________________________________________________

Dujuan Downer

News You Will Not See

Word has reached Before Nine™:  That crazy Typhoon Dujuan has made landfall on the China coast, and has fallen into a Depression. 

We know what it's like.  And we are very sorry that it didn't work out.  Counseling and meds may help -- you're in The East; try some of that herbal stuff.

But, look: You competed well in the international meteorological arena.  Not every pitcher is a Don Drysdale; not every golfer is a Se Ri Pak; not every writer is a Donna Tartt and not every painter is a Rothko or an O'Keefe. Not every major weather system turns into a Katrina.  

You know? Just have to keep that perspective. 

_________________________________________

 

Leonard Cohen At Eighty-One

Halleluja

(Sorry; I Do Not Know The Credit For This. It's A Great Photo)

 Actually, he was 81 on September 21st.  I'm late, lighting this match lit in the wind, saying remember, remember; while he's still here.

I knew him as a poet before hearing him sing, then realized I'd already been listening to his music and didn't know it. Years on at college and I knew the lines of every song, on his albums -- but his poetry is what originally slipped into my pocket and stayed; it was that comfortable and familiar. And almost forty years on, he's still working; he still gives back.

One line that keeps returning for me, with humor and rue , as the years move on and grow shorter: The future seems unnecessarily black and strong / as if it had received my casual mistakes / through a carbon sheet.

Remember; remember. And, Halleluja; anyway.

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Hot And Bad And Doing Everything You Want All Night Long

... Probably Get Some Interesting Traffic With That Lead
 

 (And you thought there would be Porn For You at the end of this. Ha Ha; no )

Over at The Big Picture, a financial blog offered by Barry Ritholz which I've mentioned before (see the post immediately below), is a bright spot in that part of the Internet created by and for actual, sentient humans.  There are others -- but TBP deals with finance, investment, and the occasional non sequitur side trip into this world we inhabit along with with trees, Gorillas, Carly Fiorina, 'Duran Duran', Fire Ants, and the New York Review Of Books.

One of those side trips is a post by Morgan Housel, a guest author, "We're Living Through The Greatest Period In World History", which has been posted around the Net in various places.  Herr Housel is an trader / investment kind of guy, and I would imagine is compensated at an, uh 'much higher level' than the average Jack or Jill.

Housel offers fifty (count 'em, 50) points to prove this thesis. I read some of them, nodding, as Dogs will do; while others left me thinking Oh Jesus God No; The Fuck You Talkin', Man? 

Reading Housel's thing at my Place Of Witless Labor™, I nearly did what I'm about to do (offer a partial rebuttal, one other thing Dogs do) -- but held back, because my Overlords would not like me to spend my time in this way. They're about to Reorg our department, and so it's about Peas and Queues and such-like these days.

Anyway; I'm not going to go through Housel's entire list of 50 proofs as to why we're living in the bestest fun times ever; but as a preface, I'll just say that perception is subjective. He presents a variety of facts about America -- that we work less, are wealthier; live longer; spend huge amounts of leisure time; have fewer homicides, and live in bigger apartments.

But the statistics have no context; there's no explanation of how they came to be, or whether they're true for a majority of the population. They simply are.

If you're a Syrian refugee, shivering in a field on the Hungarian border and trying to keep your family from starving, whether these are the bestest, most fun times humanity has ever had is sort of an open question. But Herr Housel isn't thinking about people and places outside our borders. He's speaking to an American audience, about how awesome it is to be Here. Not a great deal of compassion in that view -- more like, "Hey, I got mine, Jack!"

__________________________________________________

"U.S. life expectancy at birth was 39 years in 1800, 49 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950, and 79 years today. The average newborn today [lives] an entire generation longer than his great-grandparents could." (Yes, but apparent reported rates of dementia [including what would become known as Alzheimer's Disease], cancer, emphysema, diabetes, and Glaubner's Disease, were lower in 1900. And, a lack of fast food meant anyone named Ronald McDonald was guaranteed not to be a clown, and no one would invent Spandex for a long time.)

"The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51. Enjoy your golden years — your ancestors didn’t get any of them." (How do you know how those people experienced their lives? And thanks to the Social Security Act, brought about by that Franklin Roosevelt, most Americans will have at least some guaranteed income in retirement; all of the Republicans on the debate stage this week would like to end SSI and replace it with funds managed by Goldman-Sachs. And they would like to strangle puppies. Because Freedom.)

"... Infant mortality in America has dropped from 58 per 1,000 births in 1933 to less than six per 1,000 births in 2010, according to the World Health Organization... more than 200,000 infants now survive each year who wouldn’t have 80 years ago. That’s like adding a city the size of Boise, Idaho, every year." (And this population increase is a good thing, Pilgrim?)

"No one has died from a new nuclear weapon attack since 1945. If you went back to 1950 and asked the world’s smartest political scientists, they would have told you the odds of seeing that happen would be close to 0%..." (While that's a good thing, it's hard to feel terrific about the proxy wars between East and West between 1950-1989 (Korea to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan), and the "War On Terra" ever since.)

"According to the Federal Reserve, the number of lifetime years spent in leisure — retirement plus time off during your working years — rose from 11 years in 1870 to 35 years by 1990. Given the rise in life expectancy, it’s probably close to 40 years today. Which is amazing: The average American spends nearly half his life in leisure..." ('Leisure' is sort of a plastic term; again, kinda depends where on the socioeconomic food chain you are.  And it's about your health. Most of us like being alive, no matter what those conditions may be -- but it's a question of the quality, rather than quantity, of that 'life in leisure'.)

"We are having a national discussion about whether a $7.25-per-hour minimum wage is too low. But even adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was less than $4 per hour as recently as the late 1940s. The top 1% have captured most of the wage growth over the past three decades, but nearly everyone has grown richer — much richer — during the past seven decades." (If you define "nearly everyone has grown richer" as more people being able to purchase consumer electronics [cellphones, tablets, PC and laptops; iPods, and large-screen Teevees] and have access to services [cable television, data connectivity], then I guess that statement might be correct. However, if you define "richer" in other terms -- that pesky Quality Of Life, again -- then, not so much. 

(Over the past 12-plus years, 90% of income in all forms, not only wages, has gone to the  top 1% of America's population.  But, most of that 90% has gone to the top one-tenth of one per cent -- about 320,000 men, women and children.  Reading this, chances are you're not one of them.  If you are, burn in Hell. Or, you know, not.)

"Worldwide deaths from battle have plunged from 300 per 100,000 people during World War II, to the low teens during the 1970s, to less than 10 in the 1980s, to fewer than one in the 21st century..." ([Sigh] Just one soldier dying per 100K of population, in a world of 7 Billion people, is 70,000 combat deaths.  It's true -- in 2015, more people worldwide die in accidents or of various diseases than soldiers in combat; but that figure doesn't take into account civilian deaths as well:  Since 2001, roughly 1,000,000 people have died in various 'little' wars.  That's less than 0.025% of the world's population, by the statistics -- but try telling that to the families of one million people.)

"Median household income adjusted for inflation was around $25,000 per year during the 1950s. It’s nearly double that amount today. We have false nostalgia about the prosperity of the 1950s ... If you dig into how the average “prosperous” American family lived [then] ... you’ll find a standard of living we’d call 'poverty' today." (The nostalgia is only false if you measure living in terms of personal wealth; what you can buy. There's a Yin and Yang about the Present and the Past -- for every technological advance or collective rise in living standards, there's something we've lost that we'll never get back. 

(Having smart phones, digital and wireless telephony, may be more "efficient" than analog, copper-wire PBX systems -- but when we make the leap from using keypad and mouse to voice-recognition systems like SoundHound or Amazon's Echo, people will constantly be talking into thin air, and another layer of social distance will be reduced by the intrusion of more sound. Get ready for it.)

"...the average American house or apartment is twice as large as the average house or apartment in Japan, and three times larger than the average home or apartment in Russia." (That idea is such a comfort if you live in a place like New York City, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, or Kiddietown, and pay thousands of dollars for a tiny studio or millions for an 'average' home.)

"The average American work week has declined from 66 hours in 1850, to 51 hours in 1909, to 34.8 today, according to the Federal Reserve. Enjoy your weekend." (Herr Housel implies that the reduction in working hours came about because -- I dunno; technology; or, because The Owner Class really are a crew of enlightened beings who believe the welfare of their serfs employees is paramount. Or, "social progress".  Whatever. Housel doesn't say.

(It's worth remembering that reductions in the length of the work week occurred after generations of organizing and incessant pressure by labor unions on the Owners.  We have an 8-hour day; a 40-hour week; paid lunch and rest breaks; workplace safety codes and Workman's Compensation; "labor-management partnership"  -- all because union members risked their lives (and gave them up) to strike, picket, and pressure the Owners into making those concessions.

Thomas Anschutz, Ironworker's Noontime (1880)

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

(They were bought with blood. By now, everyone takes them for granted and assumes they're a right -- not an agreement which the Owners could decide to ignore.  Because Freedom.  And in a world where labor unions don't swing as much weight as they did between 1869 and 1984, it could happen.

(And, everyone I know works way longer than 34.8 hours a week. Perhaps just not in Herr Housel's office.)

"Adjusted for inflation, the average monthly Social Security benefit for retirees has increased from $378 in 1940 to $1,277 by 2010. What used to be a safety net is now a proper pension." (One dollar, in 1940, had the buying power of $17.24 today -- or, that $378 average monthly SSI payment would have been worth $6,517 today.  And if you think $1,277 in 2015 is a 'proper pension', please see "Rich People: Burn In Hell", above.)

"If you think Americans aren’t prepared for retirement today, you should have seen what it was like a century ago. In 1900, 65% of men over age 65 were still in the labor force. By 2010, that figure was down to 22%. The entire concept of retirement is unique to the past few decades. Half a century ago, most Americans worked until they died." (Hey; pal -- I got a news flash for you: No matter how 'unique' you believe retirement to be, these statistics are less meaningful when you consider that American workers, whose employer-offered 401(k) or 403(b) retirement plan savings were reduced in the Crash in 2008, will have to work years longer to make up for those losses and delay retirement. 

(After Social Security, these savings plans are the primary method available for workers to create additional income in retirement.  Over time they've replaced the union pension system (as the number of union jobs in America shrank), and what were once traditional pension plans of employers (now, too expensive; cuts into profits).  Unfortunately, salaries and wages in America have been flat for most American workers at least since 2005, making it harder to save and replace their losses from the Crash.)

"You need an annual income of $34,000... to be in the richest 1% of the world... To be in the top half of the globe you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it’s $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000. America’s poorest are some of the world’s richest." (I swear to god; I'm not even going to go there.)

"Only 4% of humans get to live in America. Odds are you’re one of them. We’ve got it made." (Unless you're black, and getting pulled over for a traffic violation.)

Oh, and --  Hillary !  Jebby ! 

______________________________________________

Reprint Reprint: Our Lords, At Play In The Fields

How Brightly They Do Shine
[A Reprint Of a Reprint from July, 2010, just because I'm really in a mood about Our Fabled Elders and Betters, and because I can. Not that anyone cares.)

"It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed." —Kin Hubbard, Offered As The "Quote Of The Day", The Big Picture

Barry Ritholtz, whose blog I look at frequently, is an investment advisor whose take on America's class of super-rich occasionally rotates between gently mocking derision and moderate envy.

I've never been able to figure out what prompts him to gravitate in one direction or another, but I think the idea is that in his universe, it's no sin to be rich -- but it is if you were dishonest and rapacious about it.

If the quote above, gracing Barry's website this morning, was posed to him as a choice, Barry wouldn't be voting for Poverty. Quite the opposite. Neither would the poor little guy above (How's Poverty working out for him, by the way?). The happy people above don't have to choose wealth; they're too busy shopping.

While that kind of choice would hardly be news (most persons would choose physical comfort over penury), for the kind of world he lives in, Barry understands it's those with money to invest who butter his bread. Just something to keep in mind.

Barry Ritholtz: Good Head For Da Numbers, Dis Guy

Barry's a smart guy, believes as strongly in free-trade capitalism as one can, believes that business is about psychology and competition; and feels that predicting in advance the tidal shifts of money washing around in the markets is The Great Game, and it's all about Making The Right Call, because that's what other people pay him for: He's a principal in a modestly-sized investment advisory business in New York, and he blogs about the kinds of data, the solid (and suspect) numbers, and utterances and divinations of Big Names in the financial world.

Apparently, Barry and his Firm do rather well (God forbid it should be otherwise), and while I don't like the fish tank Barry's chosen to swim in or many of its other creatures, as a former financial analyst Dog, I can appreciate the idea of making decisions based on the most reliable data, and because he seems more fact-based than not I at least pay attention to his take on things.

It's my guess that Ritholtz feels too much of the Free Markets' decision-making is based on misleading interpretation of data provided by government and business, and poor analysis of the real data that is available -- all of which obscures what is really going on behind the curtain. I can appreciate that.

And, he's been critical of the greed and excess that effectively destroyed America's Middle Class, and has so heavily weighted The Game in favor of our Masters Of The Universe©. Barry was sounding skepticism, and then an an alarm, about the Markets and the underlying derivative/real estate Mambo long before the crash.

He's even written a book about it, Bailout Nation. It's a good book, and I recommend it. It's not a Manifesto, and it focuses on what happened in the last days of the Lil-Boots Bush regime, and the early days of Obama's administration -- and how the U.S. Government has effectively paid taxpayer's money to save failed financial organizations led by greedy, sociopathic losers; hence, the 'Bailout' in the title.

[Please Note: Those are my characterizations of the times and events, by the way, not Ritholtz's. His research is solid and his occasionally acerbic observations are worth the price of admission. Buy the book; you'll learn things.]

Cover Of Bailout Nation (via SamSederShow)

To sum up: I appreciate Ritzholtz' drive for accuracy, and seeking better fact-based methodologies for sussing out market trends: Again, it's what he's paid for. At the same time, I don't much care for the industry he's a part of; it's my right to wrinkle my nose and growl at it, deep in my throat, as much as it's his right to jump in his particular tank and swim.

---

Barry and his family are in The Hamptons for their Summer vacation. The fact that you may not know or care where the Hamptons are is an indication of your Wal-Mart-shopping, Beer-Swilling, Mall-trolling, Fox-News-believing, worker-bee, Drone-peasant status.

For You: Trip To Cardiovascular Surgeon You Can't Afford, Not Included

The Hamptons are an area that encompasses the eastern end of New York's Long Island, and above that, across the Long Island Sound, the south shore of Connecticut. It's a fabled place of summer fun for the wealthy, and a tradition for the East Coast's Hereditary (and Noveau) Rich -- just like Taking That Second Job, and Wondering How To Tell The Kids We're Losing Our Home are for the rest of us.

The actual Wealthy -- Old-Money Bluebloods and the Mega-Noveau Riche Hedge Fund Managers, Pop-Rock Starz Of The Moment, and Hollywood Mega-producers -- own homes there. There are no McMansions for these people,who manage the architects and designers they hire, and are concerned with "getting it right". They don't have to live within a construction budget imposed on them by a loan officer, and don't have to (Ca-Ching!) refinance to upgrade. They can afford what they want, right away.

The Bright Spot: Rising Sea Levels Will Put These Places Underwater

The less (but still respectably) rich who can't afford a Second Residence (not yet; but we have hopes for them; yes, we do) can lease a home in the area for the three-month Season (for some high-end properties, the cost is over $100K per month), then return to their co-op apartments in the West Seventies or trendy lofts in Soho and TriBeca.

Rich Hamptons Girlz, Partying With Their Kind Until Dawn

And, Barry is there, in the thick of it all. He blogs about it -- as much to proudly announce Je sui Arriveste!, as to report the season's activity an indicator that America's Elders and Betters have started 'living large' once again. The fear of appearing to be too conspicuous in their consumption -- of being heard to grunt too loudly at the trough -- seems to have abated since the 'unpleasantness' of 2008.

Out here in the playground of the rich and famous [Barry tells us], the schism between the two Americas is about as clear as one can ever see.

[Please Note: The photos below are not part of Ritzholtz' blog post. They, and their captions, are part of Before Nine and added as visual counterpoints.]

The slowing economic growth may be what most people are focusing on, but the brutally apparent trend here is on luxe spending. Conspicuous consumption may have had its setbacks the past few years, but it's on full display out here.

For Them: So Pretty, And Softshell Crabs A La Stone Creek;

And, The Best Cardiovascular Surgeons Money Can Buy

We went to several very nice, quite pricey restaurants. In Quogue, the Stone Creek Inn on Tuesday night at 8:30 was jammed. The parking lot was a teenage boy’s wet dream: Bentley GTs, Maserati Quattroportes, Ferrari SuperAmerica (dude, what was with that ugly gray?). Out here, 911s are de rigeur, and MB S550s are cars you give the nannies; they all get parked in the back. The restaurant was filled with beautiful people wearing designer clothes, oodles of jewelry (middle aged white guys should never use the word bling).

Oh, and way too much plastic surgery — everyone had a kinda surprised look on their faces.

2009 Maserati Quattroporte (Top); 2009 Bentley Continental

GT (Bottom); Barely Legal Mistresses, Always Optional

On Wednesday night, Starr Boggs in Westhampton Beach was jammed. It was a different crowd — more family, less “fabulousness.” Perhaps it had something to do with their prix fixe only menu (Sun, Tue, Wed) — both joints are 5 stars, but Starr Boggs cost about half of Stone Creek, where I didn’t get the sense that anyone ordered from the prix fixe menu.

...I found it particularly notable that the mid-line restaurants were only half filled; the action was all higher end places...

At East End Jet Ski, the girl who worked there said they had been reasonably busy. BTW, if you are thinking about dropping $5,000 on a waverunner, spend $75. Its great fun for a half hour, but I am less sure I would want to spend a summer on one . . .

Regardless, whatever disinclination to spend the wealthy may have had in 2008 and early 2009, it has been banished here.

We're defined by our choices and actions. I guess, with all due respect, we choose to invest our lives in what we believe most important -- the wealthy (certainly, those Ritholtz describes) have already done that. It's about, you know -- bread, and butter, and all that.

---

Have You Seen The Little Piggies

No One Was Surprised

 "Now The DOJ Admits They Got It Wrong"; Bill Black, September 10, 2015
As posted in The Big Picture, 9/13/15

By issuing its new memorandum the Justice Department is tacitly admitting that its experiment in refusing to prosecute the senior bankers that led the fraud epidemics that caused our economic crisis failed. The result was the death of accountability, of justice, and of deterrence. The result was a wave of recidivism in which elite bankers continued to defraud the public after promising to cease their crimes...

It is now seven years after Lehman’s senior officers’ frauds destroyed it and triggered the financial crisis. The Bush and Obama administrations have not convicted a single senior bank officer for leading the fraud epidemics that triggered the crisis. The Department’s announced restoration of the rule of law for elite white-collar criminals, even if it becomes real, will come too late to prosecute the senior bankers for leading the fraud epidemics. The Justice Department has, effectively, let the statute of limitations run and allowed the most destructive white-collar criminal bankers in history to become wealthy through fraud with absolute impunity. This will go down as the Justice Department’s greatest strategic failure against elite white-collar crime.

The Obama administration and the Department have failed to take the most basic steps essential to prosecute elite bankers. They have not restored the “criminal referral coordinators” at the banking regulatory agencies and they have virtually ignored the whistleblowers who gave them cases against the top bankers on a platinum platter. The Department has not even trained its attorneys and the FBI to understand, detect, investigate, and prosecute the “accounting control frauds” that caused the financial crisis...

A commenter at The Big Picture noted:

Iamthe50percent

The Obama administration are just corporatists with a liberal social agenda, but ... with a regulatory agenda indistinguishable from Bush. Don’t listen to (R)’s that call him a Socialist. He’s not. Rahm Emanuel is the prototype.

Any questions?

___________________________________________________________

Annual Reprint: Long, Strange Trip

(Originally posted September 11, 2010)

Nine-Eleven

On November 22, 1963, I was on the playground for 10:00AM recess at my elementary school when teachers called classes back inside prematurely. After a few minutes, the school's public address system was broadcasting the carrier for CBS' radio network, announcing the shooting of JFK in Dallas and, ultimately, the audio portion of Walter Cronkite on CBS television announcing the President's death.

Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? was a fixture in the cultural landscape for a large number of people (now referred to by the younger set as 'Bloodsucking Useless Boomers') for a long time, due to the magnitude of the event and because it was shared in real-time by the cutting-edge media of the early 1960's.

So, September 11th, 2001: Where were you on 9-11? I had gotten up to go to work around 5:30AM PDST, and as usual turned on KQED-FM's NPR news. After stepping out of the shower, I heard a report that a plane appeared to have crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York -- I've been in Manhattan and had seen how huge those buildings were. To me, "A plane" meant a Cessna, or similar light aircraft.

I remembered seeing a 1945 film newsreel about a B-25, flying through dense fog, directly into the Empire State Building. A similar incident at the WTC would be tragic, I thought; but it was an accident, for crying out loud, on the other side of the continent, distant. No one in their right mind would deliberately kill themselves, I sighed, and I shaved.

At some point the report was updated; I heard the words "jet airliner", which moved the entire event in my mind from 'Cessna-going-off-course' to the category of Did-You-Call-The-Coast-Guard-About-This?-It-Was-No-Boating-Accident.

Turning on CNN, I sat on the edge of an armchair, watching an image of the WTC towers from CNN's Manhattan headquarters, and other shots from a helicopter hovering over the Hudson. A few minutes after I sat down, I watched as the second airliner slammed into the second WTC tower.

Images Like This, and Worse, Were Broadcast And Published

In Europe, But Not In America (Photo: UK Guardian, 2001)

No joke: Aside from Holy Fuck, the only thing I recall thinking was, This is what standing at the curb in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, watching the Archduke Franz Ferdinand being shot, must have been like. I knew immediately that what I was seeing was another line in the sand being crossed, an event with consequences that would be immense. The dice were in motion in the Crapshoot that is our Universe, and what I was watching was the proof.

It also seemed unreal, a Hollywood special effect -- as if CNN would break for a commercial at any moment;  it would turn out to be this generation's War Of The Worlds broadcast.

I sat watching as the South and North towers collapsed (Wikipedia's timeline of the events puts that at 6:59 and 7:28 AM PDST, respectively), flipping back and forth between networks for coverage of the airliner plowing into a wing of the Pentagon. Finally I left to make my way to work on mass transit.

On a BART train, I was amazed at the languid attitudes of the crowd of commuters -- reading books and newspapers, a few tapping on laptops -- as if it were just another Tuesday morning. No one appeared stunned; there was no conversation about what had just occurred.

Finally, I turned to a woman sitting opposite me, reading a folded copy of the (pre-Little Rupert) Wall Street Journal, and asked if she was aware of what had happened that morning. "Yes," she replied, adding in a please-pass-the-salt voice, "There are supposed to be more of them [i.e., airliners] in the air to hit other targets."

Had anyone estimated how many? "No," the woman shrugged, and went back to her WSJ. I don't know what surprised me more, her matter-of-fact attitude, or her piece of news.

---

That was September 11th -- a red line on the American calendar in so many ways, the culmination of a large number of threads in our history, and the pacts and choices successive administrations have made since America decided to follow an Imperial course.

The attack on the Trade Center towers could have been another kind of defining moment for America. Our government and institutions could have taken it as an opportunity to press for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy; we could have opened a dialog with others, rather than dictate to them.

Lil' Boots, 2004 Republican Convention:

Feared And Bigger Than His Daddy, At Last

I'm not suggesting it coulda been a Kumbyah moment; I am saying that it was a crossroads moment, and that our choices mattered. But, the government was run by men who had no interest in anything except power (personal, partisan, and financial) and policies that meant the use of force in furthering that power. What else could we have expected from the likes of President Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld? From the PNAC crowd, Fat Karl Rove, Little Tommy DeLay, and Lard Boy?

And the Leader, "the Decider", had been photographed years before, sucker-punching an opposing player in a rugby game when he was 'legacy' at Yale -- his "character isolated by a single deed". He was pious, insecure, frequently agnered if not shown sufficent 'respect' due a member of one of America's elite old-money families -- and he was a Zero, an empty-suit front man whom the PNACers and the Imperial strategists could manipulate.  There was little chance any rational strategy would come out of Lil' Boots administration.

(And remember, these geniuses had been pushing Lil' Boots to invade Iraq just days after he was appointed to the Presidency at the first inauguration. September 11th was simply an excuse.

And, they believed it would be simple, 'Roses All The Way', 'Greeted As Liberators' ... so no one planned for occupation, or fighting an insurgency for seven years; or for the effect on the U.S. military of multiple redeployments and 'stop-loss' denials of separation. They never conceived of failure; therefore, it wouldn't happen.)

So what followed from 9/11 shouldn't have been a surprise: An utterly unnecessary, even illegal invasion of Iraq, supported by intelligence about WMD's invented by right-wing operatives to create a causis beli, and pushed in the national media by sociopathic egos 'journalists' like Little Judy Miller, and pundits like David Brooks and William Kristol, and Little Tommy Friedman, to name but a few.

Palettes Of $100 Bills, Baghdad, 2003 (Photo: UK Guardian)

And let's not forget the $12 Billion in cash (at least; no one really knows), piles of U.S. currency shrink-wrapped and paletted and airlifted to Iraq. Some $9 Billion in cash cannot be accounted for. And all the cool new powers used by that dry-drunk, Frat-Boy younger son of an American ruling-class dynasty; or all the power available to President Cheney.

There was plenty of money to put in C530's and airlift it: 363 Tons of it. There was plenty of money being made from the war, and tax breaks to the wealthy, which reduced tax income to the government; but there was no money  and Lil' Boots wanted to cut health care, cut social programs that continue the ideas of the New Deal, and privatize Social Security... because there's just no money to pay for it.

And there's Guantanamo, 'black airlines' flying suspected terrorists to secret CIA prisons, and the extra-legal, secret program of 'renditions'. Let's not forget Abu Ghirab. Let's not forget people like John Woo, whose written suggestions created what he still claims is a "legal" basis for torture as national policy.

Civilian Casualty Of Baghdad Suicide Car Bomb, 2007

And what followed wasn't just prisons and a lack of due process for terrorist suspects, but developing a matrix of information [Note: This was posted before Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of surveillance performed by America domestic and foreign intelligence agencies] -- based on the unprecedented data-mining of domestic email and cellular and telephone traffic, of banking records and public record databases; the rise of a government/corporate State surveillance and intelligence apparatus that outstrips the wildest dreams of the Gestapo and the KGB.

Obligatory Cute Small Animal Being Interrogated At

Undisclosed Location By CIA In Middle Of Blog Rant

And, very little seemed to be about defeating Al-Qaeda, capturing or killing Bin Laden and Al-Zwahiri -- otherwise, we would have finished the job in the mountains of Tora Bora in October of 2002, and Iraq would never have mattered. We would have kept Lil' Boots' promises to the Afghans about rebuilding their country, instead of ignoring it -- at least half the reason the Afghan Taliban were able to come roaring back, and are now as strong as they were in 2001, if not stronger.

The 'Go-Go', Lil' Boots Bush years were about a larger Rightist agenda; it was about deregulation, defense contractors, and higher profits; and it was about Fat Karl's dream of rigging elections for permanent Republican rule of the United States.

Victory, to these assclowns, had a very different meaning -- and little of it was military.

But let's not forget, too, how dissent or criticism of what would become that unnecessary war; of even more power given to people with poor impulse control, was looked upon in the immediate aftermath of September 11th.

• Andrew Sullivan (9/16/01) -- The middle part of the country--the great red zone that voted for Bush--is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead--and may well mount a fifth column.
• Robert Stacy McCain (9/27/01), columnist for the All Perfect Great Father Moon Washington Times -- Why are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for enemies, when our nation's worst enemies--communists proclaiming an anti-American jihad--will be right there in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday?
• Robert Horowitz (9/28/01), Los Angeles Times -- The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans is on the hands of the antiwar activists who prolonged [the Vietnam War] and gave victory to the communists... this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within.

Those who dissented, who believed the country was manifestly on a wrong track, were smeared as 'helping the enemy', a 'fifth column' for Islamic fundamentalism. "You are either with us, or with the terraists", as Lil' Boots so bravely told other governments of the world after the World Trade Center attack.

The chittering hatred all sounds like standard Tea Party rhetoric, now. From their point of view, to dissent and criticize is only permissible when you're attacking the Left -- and that socialist, illegitimate ruler in the White House; the dirty hippies; all those "in rebellion against god".

Our economy continues to implode, and it has never been clearer who is benefiting from the policies of the Right; but, then, it's been a long, strange trip from September 11th, 2001. Few things should surprise us any longer.

Another Lil' Boots quote:

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: In history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause)

-- George W. Bush, Address To Joint Session Of Congress

Is that appropriate as an epitaph for those who wish to do America harm?

Or, does it speak to how we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, and led; will it end up being our epitaph, a closing quote for the United States Of America?

There is no ‘populist’ version of a world where some few are born booted and spurred, and the many are born saddled, and ready to ride, and that's precisely the world which conservatism is trying to preserve.

Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)

End Of The Enlightenment

A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.

I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.”

“We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

-- Oliver Sacks, "My Periodic Table"; New York Times, July 24, 2015

In Jewish tradition, it's said that if you save a human life, you've saved the universe, whole and entire.  What happens, then, when a life goes out? Oliver Sacks, MD, passed away over the weekend; in his passing, I'm fairly certain not many people understand what we've lost.

Sacks was among a shrinking number of scholar-scientists, the last in a lineage of European --  men and women -- and (this, a bit of a trope) generally English intellectuals, educated in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Donnish, possibly eccentric, but clearly brilliant; frankly curious about the world and passionate about the why of a thing, driven to chronicle and understand it.

They were often polymaths, prodigious writers, frequently (unless it was their principal method of expression) also fair composers of music or art. They understood the importance of clear thought and speech, of how to argue and to reason and explain what they'd found in their exploration of the world.

(This same category of person could include Newton, Pitt, Einstein; Goethe; Mary Wollstonecraft or Jane Austen; William and Henry James, among others -- but Dr. Samuel Johnson pops into my memory for a moment: Language and clarity of thought was his obsession, and a lifelong struggle with what was most probably Tourette's Syndrome -- a condition caused by "dysfunction in cortical and subcortical regions, the thalamus, basal ganglia and frontal cortex", per Wikipedia.)

For Sacks, the mystery which captured his attention (Sacks described himself when working as 'obsessive') is what we carry in our skulls -- the electro-chemical seat of all pleasures and terrors, Bardo and Paradise: the brain --  and he knew well how much we do not know about that organ, or anything else.

In a series of books over roughly thirty years, Sacks presented popular chronicles of the scientific aspects of neurology by sharing tales of his patients. On one level, they were 'medical mystery stories' -- Why do these things happen to us? -- principally about his patients' rare or notable afflictions, and that often these same people developed gifts of insight or ability due to those same conditions.

But, while every tale noted the pathos of their circumstances (Sacks the physician used his obsessive intellect with a dispassionate eye), they were also stories which presented his patients' conditions with real compassion: Sacks the man never forgot that they suffered, laughed, were persons with lives both before and after they began to experience the world in an uncommon way.

Riding Kiddietown's public transit over those same thirty years, I've seen only three individuals which I could say with confidence had a neurological condition (as opposed to those with apparent psychological ones, including the drivers). Principally, the outward signs are motor tics or repeated hand gestures, some relatively subtle and others very manifest. We live in a culture that glorifies physical perfection, High School-like popularity, wealth, and youth -- and looks down with distaste upon or ignores anything less. By presenting rare and notable neurological conditions in his books in a way that made it possible to see the human beings they had happened to, Sacks made it more likely our response to the person on the bus, repeatedly touching the side of their face, or whose head spasms to the left every few seconds, would trigger that same compassion, in us.

A friend recently repeated to me something once said by their best friend, a physician: We're all just one blood test away from a reminder of mortality. Sacks' chronicles remind the majority of us of our luck in this Game, so far (There, But For The Grace Of God...), but also a momento mori that our lives are a Dice Game, and that at some point after thousands of throws at the table that luck will give out. We will not live on Sugar Mountain forever. We will suffer all that flesh is heir to.  Sacks understood that; and even if this is a Game where no one gets out alive, he was still grateful to be here.

Sacks discovered he had cancer in 2006, a rare form which echoed aspects of the human condition that had fascinated and driven him: an ocular tumor, a melanoma, in one eye. Nine years later, it reappeared as multiple metastases in the liver.  This past February, he published a short essay about it in the New York Times ("My Own Life"), and followed it with others in July ("My Periodic Table"), and a final word about Shabbat this past month."I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence", Sacks once wrote, "other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still 'speak' to people after my death."

Whether something else exists or not, Now he knows what we do not. I hope he was able to see the spread of the night sky again before leaving.

And, it's another Mensch that leaves us. As I've said before, we live in a world with a limited supply of Mensches.

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August

Hi Mom

Your day.

Parker and Ward

Virginia

I've already had to repost my thoughts about Sandy Hook after yet another rampage by some angry nutjob.  I'm not going to do it every time we see the effects of combining Angry Nutjob with Firearms, or I'd be reposting it every week, it seems.  But I will quote myself:

Only in cases like Sandy Hook does our national debate begin and end with, "Guns don't kill people; the people using them do". And that's it -- Pilot Error, essentially, is the public finding; and any other meme is just filler in the media. That, and people repeating, "It doesn't happen every day."

I'm sure that fact is a comfort to the extended families of twenty children, who died because they were shot with high-powered handguns. Twenty children...

What happened in Sandy Hook yesterday has happened before -- in Columbine; in Denver; In Virginia; in a mall in Seattle last week; at a Dairy Queen in the Northwest. There may not be massacres, but annually there are many multiple-victim, firearm homicides in America.

And they will keep happening, until something changes about how firearm ownership and possession is discussed, and regulated, in this country.

The debate is not about Operator Error.  It's not about something that happened "over there" in another city or state. It's about twenty dead children.

 Per Reuters:

Two journalists, reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward of Roanoke CBS affiliate WDBJ7, were shot during a live interview on Wednesday by a disgruntled former station employee who later killed himself. The woman who was being interviewed was wounded and hospitalized.

Parker's father, Andy Parker, urged state and federal lawmakers to take action on gun control, especially to keep firearms out of the hands of people who were mentally unstable... "How many Alisons is this going to happen to before we stop it?"

The United States had about 34,000 firearms deaths in 2013...  with almost two-thirds of them suicides, according to the [CDC]...

The last time there was a push at the federal level for tighter gun control was following the massacre of 26 people, mostly children, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012... [the legislation] was rejected in April 2013 by the U.S. Senate, including by some lawmakers in [the] Democratic Party.

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