Why do we see things so differently?

I am continually surprised by the reactions of people to political events. I didn't used to pay much attention to politics myself and stayed vaguely aware of what was going on but never really got to thinking about what was really happening until Waco.

My wife and I happened to have taken the day off to do some decorating and were watching as the tanks started their assault. We watched live and saw with our own eyes how the fire started throughout the building at the same time. A few minutes later, reporters were raising the spectre of the fire having been started by the beseigers. "What?" I thought. How on earth were these supermen supposed to have travelled through the entire compound in seconds, carrying large amounts of incendiary devices past armed cult members and then dashed all the way back through the now burning building to emerge unscathed and unseen? All of a sudden, my rose-tinted spectacles shattered and I realized that the media was not reporting the news, not even trying to offer both sides of the story; they were molding the minds of the people who expected (and believed they were getting) unbiased reporting.

Since then, I've watched the trend grow and grow. Murrow was precient. Media celebrities mix carefully selected facts with carefully crafted opinions and the mega-corporate-controlled outlets present the result as "news." Most people are not paying enough attention to notice and think they've been told the "fair and balanced" truth.

There was a hope that the internet would change that but overall it has done little but add overt and covert partisan messages that appeal to those of similar leanings and repel those who disagree.

Political debates tend to bring this trend into the light rather dramatically. I remember watching the Bush/Gore debates and being told that Bush "won" because he was so much better than anyone expected of a hayseed while Gore "lost" because he talked about numbers and facts. We were actually told that a better-than-expected hayseed who stumbled over his words would make a better president than a slightly boring but clearly intelligent and knowledgable "policy wonk." And the majority, it would seem, bought it hook, line and sinker. After all, these media celebrities know what they're talking about, don't they?

Last night's debate was remarkable for seeming to break the trend. As debates go, it was, on the surface, far less one-sided than most others I have watched. And yet all the polls I have seen, even the one on Fox News, have Obama the clear winner. Either the die-hard Republicans are hiding their heads because of last week's financial and political meltdown, or they are actually realizing that there is more to leadership than "a good guy I'd like to have a beer with."

So often in books, the great silver-tongued magician is revealed as the evil tyrant and the veil falls from the eyes of the spellbound who look around in wonder as they realize that they had it all wrong. This morning, I seem to see that happening for real as I read the posts and view the commentaries. Of course, there are still plenty of people who believe, and who will never admit, even to themselves, that they have been hoodwinked for so long. They will remain convinced that trickle-down economics works, that Saddam Hussein sponsored 9/11, that global warming has nothing to do with carbon emissions and that Clinton's lies were impeachment-worthy while Bush/Cheney's torture, cronyism and lies are OK.

I need to re-read "The Emporer's New Clothes." Were there people in the crowd who steadfastly denied he was naked after the little boy pointed out the truth?

Present and Unaccounted For

John McCain, the man who admitted he knew little about economic matters, shortly after assuring us that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" and then "clarifying" his statement with "I meant the American worker", claimed the economy is in such crisis that he had to suspend his campaign, skip out on tonight's Presidential debate and dash to the White House to save America.

So saying, he bailed on Letterman and, pausing only to appear with Katie Couric and give a speech in New York, he caught a night's sleep in the Big Apple and, after a no doubt hasty breakfast, rushed his self-deprecated economic "expertise" to the White House where he spent a couple of hours saying nary a word (!) and looking like a deer at a headlight manufacturers' convention.

With the way things went yesterday, it's hard to imagine how his absence could have made things worse. Considering that his contribution consisted of sitting silent, it's not totally clear to me that he couldn't have just gone on digging his hole deeper on the campaign trail.

On second thoughts, perhaps he did that anyway.

We can't wait! We must act now!

Where have I heard those words before?  "Immediate passage of this bill is crucial."

Don't stop to read it or anything time-wasting like that, just pass it.  The world will end instantly if we don't pass this by COB Monday.

In the last eight years, that kind of thinking has cost us trillions of dollars in Iraq and has seriously eroded our domestic security and civil liberties.  Dennis Kucinich says he is the ONLY person in Congress who had his staff read the Patriot Act (sorry, the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and please stand with your hand over your heart as you say that) from cover to cover (before refusing to sign it, I might add) and, as no-one has jumped up and said "I did!", I have no reason to question the fact.  Now we have yet another opportunity to blindly accept another staggering opportunity to throw another trillion of borrowed money at a problem without stopping to read the fine print.  This from the people who pushed de-regulation so far that fine print is regularly used to surgically remove any rights the signer might have had should things not turn out quite as advertised.

Did you notice how quickly the big guys leaped back in to the market once word was out that we, the taxpayer, were going to make everything all right?   My thoughts on the market are for another rant, though.  For now, lets hope that Dennis Kucinich is paying attention.  And let's hope that with a little sleeve-tugging he can get the attention of his fellow lawmakers before they stampede us over yet another cliff.   

Incidentally, does anyone wonder where all this money is actually going?  I mean in detail.  Is it going to pay off the mortgages of homeowners about to be foreclosed on?  Or is it going to shore up the coffers so that large shareholders can protect their portfolios?  Methinks the latter is a tad more likely.  Still waiting for that trickle-down to reach you?  Keep waiting folks.

It's easier to fill a hole than to build a mountain

My wife and I try not to go shopping together. Whenever we do, we end up buying something that neither one of us would have had the nerve to bring home and try to justify the expense to the other. Somehow, that sense of well-being that comes with spending money you don't have on something you don't need just overwhelms us.

Seems Congress is the same. Whenever the prospect of throwing a few hundred billion at something comes up, partisan lines dissolve and it all gets approved in a day. Just say the word "crisis" and follow it up with "it'll cost billions to fix" and they're at the table, pens ready. Now even those who think that free health care is "Socialism" are eager to buy every bad loan in the country at some arbitrary price that might or might not be even close to their actual value. Isn't the government going into the property business "Socialism?" And didn't we just finish committing $3 trillion dollars to an unnecessary war? Now another trillion or two is going to go to bail us out of the mess that de-regulation built. Did I miss something?

Oh, and where are all these trillions coming from? All those countries round the world that are in to us so deep that they can't afford to see us fail. Ermm, does that sound familiar? Who do they think is going to bail them out when we start defaulting on our national subprime lending?

The old "always a bigger fish" is only true until you get to the biggest fish of all. And we're getting mighty close.

I'm having trouble these days trying to decide whether to put my money on global warming or global financial meltdown as the ultimate cause of H. Sapiens going the way of the dodo. Either way, I'm hedging with a fat investment in global stupidity.

Oh, we forgot to fix the voting machine problem - again.

Here we are, less than 2 months short of another sure-to-be-a-narrow-margin election (???), and the people who are responsible for election fairness have just woken up after 22 months in a Rip van Winkle-worthy coma to notice that we haven't done anything about the problems we saw in the last election. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. And, at risk of repeating myself, the one before that. Indeed, the "improvements" that were introduced after 2000 made it impossible to provide any valid evaluation of vote counts, nor did they address the many thousands of disenfranchised voters who are, yet again, going to be left out in the cold.

A study in Florida two years ago proved that Diebold machines were eminently hackable by a reasonably competent programmer, just by modifying the code on the magic chip, and that such a change would leave no trace but would accurately pass its "fixed" numbers all the way up the chain.

In New Hampshire, as mentioned in my last diatribe, the executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee paid people to jam the phone lines so voters could not get directions to their polling places. In Ohio, thousands saw the doors close in their faces because machine breakdowns slowed down the voting process too much. In Florida, thousands were struck off because their names matched those of felons (sounds a bit like the no-fly list, another Republican masterpiece).

And now we have 6 weeks to get it all fixed. Oh, sorry, that's not enough time, we'll just have to live with it as it is. Still, it's good enough, isn't it? After all, most states show a difference of more than 10,000 votes and we can't be that far wrong (can we?). And in those other states? Well, they do tend to be the swing states that make up that elusive 270 electoral vote number but that's just co-incidence. Isn't it?

As that great democratic leader Joseph Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."

What are the odds?

It's abundantly clear that most people in and out of the media don't understand probability. Those that do tend to take advantage of that weakness to "lie with statistics."

"X doubles cancer risk!" (from 1 per million to 2 per million) - pretty scary stuff, eh?

It works the other way too. This story tells of as unlikely a coincidence as I can imagine but doesn't even mention its improbability. To anyone who can do simple math, it reeks of tampering. A democratic call center in NJ had its number incorrectly entered in the phone book. By one of those coincidences that just seem to happen over and over, the number in the book just happened to be that of a sex chat line.

OK. Stay with me a minute while I try to keep it simple. Let the number of phone numbers in the book be N. Let the number of wrong numbers in the book be W. Let the number of sex chat lines in the area be S. The odds of getting your number printed wrong is W/N. The odds of a random number being a sex chat line is S/N. The odds of YOUR number being misprinted as a sex chat line is (W/N) x (S/N). Lets say there are 100,000 numbers in the book. Let's be really generous (to the argument, not to the proofreaders!) and say this is an appallingly badly proofed book and 1 in 1000 (.1%) are wrong. Now lets say there are also as many as 500 (.5%) sex chat lines in the book (this is New Jersey after all). So the odds of any number being misprinted as a sex chat line is .5% x .1% or .0005%. That means that there would be a 1 in 2000 chance of this particular circumstance happening somewhere in the book.

But it's not that simple. I'd be willing to bet that more than 99% of wrong numbers involve a simple transposition of two digits (23 => 32) or a single wrong digit. It took three digits to change the dem's phone to the chat line number. Now we're at something on the order of 1 in 200,000. Can you say "a little unlikely?" Yet the media just report on it as an amusing oddity without even the hint of foul play.

I'm not suggesting that any of these numbers or percentages are anywhere close to accurate. Someone with more time on their hands than me might want to find out the true numbers. All I'm saying is that it's more than a little (?) suspicious that such a transposition took place here. And let's be honest: it would hardly be the first time someone in the Republican party had played a little fast and loose with the phones of the opposition.

Taking credit for the surge

Just an image that occurred to me (we won't go into what that says about me).

GWB stuffs half a trillion dollars into the toilet and pours a couple of gallons of sulfuric acid on top because someone told him there was a monster down there.

Then he and McCain take credit for calling the plumber because now, thanks to them, we can flush.

The saga of de-regulation

1980. Ronald Reagan elected President. "The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are: "I'm from the government and I am here to help."

From the day Reagan was elected, we started to see a slow but inexorable erosion of governmental regulation and oversight which flipped into high gear under George Bush II and which is still espoused by John McCain (except when it sort-of isn't).

For the Adam Smith fans out there, let's look at what happens in the real world when an unregulated corporate world gets to play Free Market.

2008
Today: "Investigation finds FAA rushed jet approval" "FAA knew about the 'deficiencies' ... in part because of an overly close relationship with the manufacturer ... pendulum swing away from vigorous enforcement of compliance, toward an industry-favorable cozy relationship."

Today: "Wall Street plunges despite AIG bailout" "... after it lost billions in the risky business of insuring against bond defaults ... Goldman Sachs [] and Morgan Stanley remain under scrutiny" "AIG on the line for others' losses" "an exotic type of insurance to cover losses from investments tied to mortgages ... didn't envision that [it] could have gotten so out of hand"

This week: Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, WaMu teetering

This year: Foreclosures out the wazoo - "homeless" no longer only applies to down-and-outs.

This decade: How many Katrina "survivors" are still living in trailers and on welfare because FEMA had its funding and its experienced leadership taken away? Remember the mine collapse caused by over-zealous chiseling away at support walls? How many cranes have to fall in New York? How many highway bridges have to collapse? How many lead-heavy toys and bacerioactive vegetables have to poison our families before de-regulation gets a bad name?

Here's a little story of my own. My wife and I moved house in 2001. We got quotes from several movers and selected one (Sabra) that seemed competent and gave a reasonable quote (a little under $3000). They would bring 3 trucks, one with a trailor for my lawn tractor. The third tractor turned up at 7pm (only 11 hours late) and did not have a trailor. They tried to get the tractor into it with the hoist and nearly destroyed it before giving up and having to come back and pick it up the next day. We eventually left for our new home at 2am. They arrived there on the dot of 9 the next morning and presented us with a bill for over $6000. Cashier's check only, no cash=no belongings and a daily fee for storage if we didn't fork over the cash (on a Saturday). The difference between the quote and the bill was apparently based on several rolls of packing tape and some bubble wrap (?!). After "discussing" this at length with the movers and the owner of Sabra, we learned that thanks to DE-REGULATION, we had no leg to stand on and we had no choice but to pony up the six grand. On later talking to the previous owners of our new home, we learned that they had been treated to exactly the same scam by Nationwide.

We have had almost 30 years of De-Reagan-ulation and it's time to give Adam Smith a wake-up call.

Lest you think I'm over-reacting, let's remember Michael Milken and the Junk Bond Rip-off, Enron and the Great California Brown-out, the old Savings and Loan Fiasco (starring John McCain and his Keating Five), 8 and 9-figure bonuses for CEOs of failing companies - the list just goes on and on.

Basically, this last three decades has proven conclusively that, left to their own devices, our business leaders regard morality and ethics as expendable and expensive, getting in the way of piling up the old personal wealth. I wonder how many libertarians there were in feudal England. The only real difference between then and now is that Might is measured in dollars instead of soldiers. The serfs are still powerless against the Overlords.

Let's not let the Deregulators put us off with commissions and more tax-cuts for the wealthy. The only thing that's trickled down is disaster.