Friday, March 19, 2010

ONE of the local loonies had another letter in the paper yesterday repeating the same tired mantra that Obama is a liar turning the country into a socialist state. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad, according to Brett Arends in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. A quotation:

Will the [health-care] bill really "turn America into a socialist country"? It's easy to laugh at this notion, of course, but let's look at it from another point of view. Even if that were correct, should you really sell everything and flee?

Socialism, or social democracy, or whatever else you want to call it, doesn't seem to have hurt stockholders overseas too badly. Over the past 10 years, according to MSCI Barra, stock markets across socialized Europe have produced total returns of about 2% a year in U.S. dollar terms, according to MSCI Barra. The figure for France is just over 2% and for left-wing Britain and Holland nearer to 3%. Pinko Denmark has boomed by 10% a year.

Meanwhile, here in the land of the free, investors have made zero.

Addendum II...

A book that seems worth reading: Ill Fares the Land — "a dying man’s sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties."

Addendum ...

WOW! Cool column by Mark Morford on the way Texas writes (sorry, re-writes) history textbooks. A quotation:

... Yes, everyone knows that history is slippery and spurious to begin with, all about context and spin and who's telling the tale. History is, after all, written by the victors.

What they don't usually add is how history is then revised by the politicians, gutted by the church leaders, molested by the power mongers, skinned alive by paranoid militants, poorly codified by the speechwriters and then spun, torqued and diluted by countless mealy "experts" before being shoved down the gullet of unsuspecting youth, where it is partially digested like so much liquefied school lunch meat, only to be wrongly half-remembered later in life by the most insane among them, who then quickly gets his own talk show on Fox News. And lo, the circle of life continues.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

HEY, let's be sure to bitch and moan about some school manager getting a piddly 10 percent pay raise from taxpayers — while the CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois' corporate parent got a 62 percent increase in total compensation last year, to $8.7 million, and at least one Wheaton business's premiums went up 45 percent. Ah, but this is just one of the wonders of the greatest health care system on earth, right?

Sunday, March 14, 2010

From the Bushite right: Lies, lies and more lies.

AN interesting comment from the several hundred in response to Frank Rich's column on the above subject:

Fred Drumlevitch
Tucson, Arizona
March 14th, 2010
9:59 am

The most important question isn't how such bald-faced attempts to rewrite history can be so shamelessly put forward by Republican politicians. The "big lie" technique has become standard operating procedure for both right-wing politicians and corporate CEOs, so its occurrence shouldn't surprise.

Rather, the investigation should focus on how so many Americans can be so deficient not only in their knowledge of formal history, but also in their powers of analysis and their memory of relatively recent events that shouldn't have been forgotten. That is relevant not only to the lies of the Bush regime then and now, but also to the lies of tomorrow, whether from the old guard or from new actors on the political stage with whom we may not yet even be acquainted.

Could it be that lead poisoning, senile dementia, and Alzheimer's are much more widespread than believed? Could be, but the most parsimonious explanation is woefully extensive popular ignorance coupled with insufficient training in reasoning and analysis. We are witnessing the consequences of a widespread failure of education, a populace that seems to pride itself on how little it knows, and a mainstream news media that is all too happy to serve its corporate masters by catering to, rather than disrupting, that popular ignorance.