Wednesday, November 7, 2012

On Gender, Etc

[This is from my forum post today.   Kinda proud of it.]

For example, what is male and what is female? Simple to decide, huh? Except not always. 

There are those infants born with unclear gender. Look at the prof's pictures above.

There are adult women who look like they have small penises, because of heredity or hormone exposure during gestation or later steroid use. Many women bodybuilders and athletes have enlarged clitorises to the point where you would not be sure what they were. "Is that a, uh, mouse under your skirt?"

Biologically, a male is a specially developed female. All the differences develop from the same structures. In a sense we are all females. And males and females both have an X chromosome. To an extent, gender is decided by whether one has one X chromosome or two. The "Y" chromosome doesn't seem to do much. So men have very little to brag about. When you add in the fact that extrachromosomal inheritance is through the mother and that includes the mitochondria that are critically involved in the cell's energy and in athletic performance, it truly is a woman's world. (The Bible got it wrong; man would have been formed from woman.)

Things can go wrong when a male is formed from a female. And so there are intersexes and those of indeterminate gender.

In the Olympics -- again we talked abut this -- it was at one point decided to do a chromosome test, a barr-body test, to determine if an athlete was male or female. Did you ever think deciding that would be so much trouble?

When the Bible says that we are male or female, it simply was not comprehended by the writer that gender is not always clear. Understand? As I said, in biblical times infants born intersex or with what were seen as malformations did not live long. If you were a mid-wife, what would you do? A monster, a sign of the displeasure of the gods or the work of the devil. For the good of society you'd remove the kid as quickly as possible and leave it somewhere to die. That's what they did. That's what everybody did. That's what is still done many places.

We are kinder and gentler with better surgery and we take care of such cases with some strokes of a scalpel, humanely, or what we mean to be humanely.

What happens if the coin flip is wrong, and a child surgically altered into a girl thinks she is a man? Happens. One of the dirty little scandals of modern medicine. YOU would forbid to him/her the option of marriage. Is that fair?

Is it fair to require that a doc make a prospective bride or groom get nekked and poke around in their innards in order to decide if they are the proper gender to get married?

I say [screw] that; let whomever marry whomever without some judge or lawyer or government official worrying about whether they are really male and female.

Lemme make it clear: real life can be ambiguous. The Bible and religious authority doesn't deal with ambuguity but fictional absolutes. Pi = 3, the Bible says, except that it isn't so.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Memorial Day

It is tempting to join in the politically-correct sentiment and say that "freedom is not free," but that is a statement quite political in nature, uttered by those who have political axes to grind.

It is tempting to say that our military personnel risk their lives and impact their families in order to protect us, but that is not correct: Ulysses Grant said it when he called the Mexican War in which he served "a shabby little war" of his part in which he was ashamed.

Most of our wars and "police actions" have been shabby little wars that were never wars of national defense, but of ill-advised aggression and swagger, undertaken for political reasons.

Memorial Day is when we celebrate with prating inapposite words those sacrificed on the altars of ego and foolishness.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Presidential Election Going to the Dogs?

Columnist Kathleen Parker says it is.  All the hoopla about Romney's dog and Obama eating dog meat.  http://lubbockonline.com/editorial-columnists/2012-04-24/parker-dogs-drive-presidential-race-issues-yield-absurdity#comment-220652

I have a cat of a breed that was raised for meat and fur over in France.   When times get hard and you can't get beef or pork at an affordable price, it's good to have some kind of meat on the table.   And I guess cat is better than rat.   Best to let the cats dine on the rats then you can have yore pic of rat-fattened cats.

Same with dogs of course.  We turn up our noses at eating dog, and prefer to gas hordes of dogs at "animal shelters."    Maybe if we ate our surplus dogs, we'd have better appreciation of life.  Is mass killing followed by disposal into mass graves all that much more "humane" than eating them?

Anyway.  Back to politics.

Parker is too young to remember, but a lot was made of it when LBJ pulled the ears of his dogs because, he said, he liked to hear them howl.    And anyone who is spotted mistreating his dog will not be elected president.  Don't be so sure this side of a candidate's character is all that irrelevant. 

If Romney's dog survived the experience of being hosed down with water and dried off on top of the car in a 55 mph wind that could give the pooch hypothermia, all that means to me is that Romney doesn't have much sense -- not that he is a deliberate pet-abuser.
   
One reason why this event was latched onto by Romneyphobes is because Romney is such a mystery.  
Do you know what it is that Romney actually works at?   I don't.   Romney had an office at Bain Capital, but, we are assured, was not in charge of lay-offs at companies that were being scavenged by Bain.   So what did he do? 

Romney could have invited the press into his office, shown them the papers lying on  his desk and gone over a typical workday in the life of Mitt Romney.  "I look at these print-outs to decide if a company is undervalued as to underlying assets so as to give us a good profit by buying the company and selling off those assets."  But no.   No details, no explanation.   Why?? 
 
What does the man do?  What are his skills?  What are his interests, other than running for office and being a Mormon?

Romney claimed he was an expert in economics.  What does that mean?   What area of economics?  Academically, he has a JD/MBA from Harvard, and seems to be more qualified in management than economics.   But we are not told exactly what he did at Bain Capital. 

Friday, March 30, 2012

The other nite I caught about 30 seconds of Charlie Rose on PBS with his guest, former sec Jim Baker. Baker was telling how Reagan's policies were pro business and fostered business expansion while Obama's are otherwise. That's an opinion you hear a lot of.

I want to comment about "the Reagan recovery."

In the early years of Reagan's 1st term, the economic outlook was dismal. We had just had inflation that was killing us, killing savings, causing interest rates to be high and unpredictable. At times it was good to have savings; I remember getting 15% interest (yes, that is fifteen percent, not 1.5% or the .15% that you might get now) on 10K CDs at the local bank. All the while there was an atmosphere of uncertainty and gloom. Marty Zweig came on Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street Week and looked hang-dog and as though he was chain-chewing Rolaids and said "there are good investments out there, if we can avoid a depression."

Then, inflation came down and the stock market soared and the recovery began; if I remember correctly the longest bull market except for the one in the 1930s when the stock market roared back even as the nation was still in depression. It got to where investors hoped to see appreciation of 70% a year, and shopped for mutual funds that showed that kind of record! (The influx of money into a highly successful fund of course drove the fund down, but few were thinking about that.) Totally crazy and unsustainable, but that's how it was.

Back to the point. What Baker overlooks is that this is a very different time. The structure of our economy is different. The savings rate is different, consumer debt is different, the proportion of wealth in home equity is different. The financial sector is wildly different from 1981, in its percentage of the economy and in the variety of securities that have been invented since then. The distribution of wealth among our citizens is radically different, with a greater percentage of the wealth belonging to the wealthy.  The middle class is disappearing.

And energy costs. Energy cost is a multiple factor in every human activity, and when energy costs are high, the cost of everything grows higher disproportionately. Reagan was lucky that the price of oil dropped early in his presidency, and that drop set off the boom in the stock market.

It was more than luck. The Saudis wanted to buy fighter planes and AWACS aircraft, and there was opposition to letting them have state of the art military tech. King Fahd's plane landed near D.C., and Reagan went on board to have a secret pow-wow with Fahd. What followed was this: Saudi Arabia would get it's planes; and perhaps linked to that, they increased oil production and undercut OPEC, lowering energy prices world wide. In my opinion, that, more than anything else, was the secret to the business recovery of the Reagan era, not Reagan's policies per se.
..........................................................................................................................................................
Rig count.   The number of all petroleum drilling rigs in use.   A measure of how actively the industry is searching for oil.
  
You used to find this number every week in the Lubbock Avalanche Journal.  Now you can find it at various places such as http://www.ihs.com/products/oil-gas-information/drilling-data/weekly-rig-count.aspx and http://investor.shareholder.com/bhi/rig_counts/rc_index.cfm

The current U.S. rig count is 1979 as of March 30, 2012, from the Baker Hughes website.  That is close to what it was through the period 2001-2008, during the Geo W. Bush presidency.

Here is a comparison of the decade 1973-1983 compared with 2000 through 2008.   This is from a Rigzone article dated December, 2008 and is from Baker-Hughes.
[img]http://images.rigzone.com//images/news/library/other/13/5606.jpg[/img]

As you can see, the rig count soared during the Carter presidency and then plunged drastically about 1981-1982, the early years of the Reagan presidency.    Why?   The price of oil fell sharply on world markets.    Why?  The price of oil dropped drastically at that time because Saudi Arabia exceeded OPEC's targeted oil production.   Why did the Saudis increase production?   Because of a secret deal with Reagan.   Ronald Reagan destroyed the oil industry in West Texas -- or more accurately, set it back by decades

Curiously, no one burned Reagan in effigy in Levelland or Brownfield.

And some accuse Obama of being hostile to the petroleum industry and to business in general?

Monday, March 26, 2012

More Walter E. Williams Vomitus

Some Walter Williams columns kinda sorta make sense even if they are based on flawed reasoning. This column doesn't pass the semi-rational test. http://lubbockonline.com/editorial-columnists/2012-03-26/williams-cities-liberal-agenda-dont-serve-black-residents#comment-216063

Williams uses crime as an index of how "the liberal agenda" has failed. But criminal laws are the same, whether one is in Detroit or in a wealthy white Republican enclave in the same state. Miranda rights are exactly the same.

Indeed, you will find that a particular crime is likely to bring a stiffer sentence and higher probability of conviction if the defendant is black. So in Scarsdale, a white defendant is more likely to get probation than a black defendant in Buffalo. This is the reverse of what Williams is claiming.

If you look at the realities of arrests and sentencing and the criminal justice system as a whole, whites get more liberal justice than blacks.

Why then did the murder rate increase after the 1950s? Was it liberalism? Or was it the growth of the drug culture? Was it increased prosperity in the black population? Were more blacks able to buy guns than before? Was it because of the flight of whites from inner cities? Increasing population? Was it because of the pervasiveness of modia and advertising and the bitterness blacks felt about being denied a part of the American dream? All of these are possibilities.

And an economist should be aware that the structure of our economy has drastically changed. The trend has been toward more low-paying jobs and high-pay highly skilled jobs with little in between, which has been a total social and economic upheaval in this country.

Wiliams doesn't come out and say that a higher black crime rate was linked to the civil rights movement and an end to segregation but he might have; the correlation is there, and he is basing his argument on correlation.

Mr Williams is a rare species, a rara avis, because he is black and conservative and Republican. And so newspapers like the AJ can put his column up against their masthead and feel righteous and PC as they accomplish two ordinarily incompatible goals, having a black columnist on their editorial page and at the same time serving up more conservative drivel.


No Choices Come November

I'd love a choice to Ivy-League Obama and his Wall Street Whiz Kids.   Romney Incorporated is more of the same, plus lower taxes on the rich and less regulation of big companies and big markets.  Sanctorum and the Grinch are way out in Nuttsville, USA. 

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Legalize Cannabis?

Here be a comment I posted to a letter to the editor of the local newspaper.

Like policemen, prosecutors have a rather limited and jaundiced viewpoint of their fellow humans.

Quite likely, more than a few of Mr. Spears' fellow lawyers and judges, and even prosecutors and policemen, have used and are using marijuana. His experience was with the sad cases, where defendants abused every illegal substance they could get their hands on.

I've never used marijuana, but to me when it comes to harm, marijuana is not in the same league with alcohol and tobacco, which are all too legal to market, sell, possess and use.

And if you talk about gateway drugs, the true gateway drugs are -- alcohol and tobacco.

The drug war is having two significant effects. (1) It has made many Americans criminals, as Robertson says. (2) It has created and feeds a monstrous criminal enterprise that profits on the American appetite for illegal drugs.  

In my opinion, we need to trust and to educate our people to make good choices. We need also to give our own farmers some of the profit available and put as many narcotrafficantes out of business as we can.

The reason why so many dollars go south to profit criminal enterprise is our failed drug policy. Drug laws are little obstacle to the stronger laws of human nature and supply and demand.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Trade Imbalance and Consumer Goods

Economist/conservative columnist Walter E. Williams wrote this week that the trade imbalance is not worth worrying about, since dollars flowing abroad go partly or mostly toward purchases in and from the USA.

I think Williams missed the point, an gave us a faulty analysis.   My own perspective is that the consumption-based economy is destroying us, and a significant part of that viewpoint relates to imported consumer goods.   Here is my response to what Williams wrote:
 
Williams wrote:
"When I spend $100 at the grocery, my capital account (money) goes down by $100, but my goods account (groceries) increases by $100. My grocer’s goods account decreases by $100, while his capital account increases by $100."

But this is not true of consumer purchases in general, and much of what we Americans buy from abroad are consumer purchases.

With consumer purchases, when you spend $100 you get an item that is worth LESS than $100, that you cannot resell for the same amount that you paid for it, even if it is in excellent condition, because it is now used. So your $100 buys consumer stuff you can immediately resell for $80-95.

Virtually NO consumer purchases have a chance to appreciate in value.  Guns 'n' gold excepted, and gold and gems sold to consumers has such a high mark-up that it is useless as a store of value.

When Sony -- to use Williams' example -- buys American stock or American real estate, they are getting an item that may well GAIN in value, not instantly depreciate.  

And so we are like the Indians who sold the Island of Manahatta for $20 in trinkets: exchanging guns for glitter; trading what is genuinely valuable away for junk that gives us brief pleasure but has little other value; or, to look at it another way, buying the contents of next year's Goodwill donation or garage sale.

And so-- we constantly impoverish ourselves, getting the worse of each consumer purchase, because we have an consumption-based economy. Williams may be a good bookkeeper, but he is not an economist.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Flawed Thinking About the Imbalance of Trade

Today in his syndicated op-ed column, Walter E. Williams argues that there is no trade deficit.

Williams wrote:

"When I spend $100 at the grocery, my capital account (money) goes down by $100, but my goods account (groceries) increases by $100. My grocer’s goods account decreases by $100, while his capital account increases by $100."

But this is not true of consumer purchases in general, and much of what we Americans buy from abroad are consumer purchases.

With consumer purchases, when you spend $100 you get an item that is worth LESS than $100, that you cannot resell for the same amount that you paid for it, even if it is in excellent condition, because it is now used.    So your $100 buys consumer stuff you can immediately resell for $80-95.

When Sony -- to use Williams' example -- buys American stock or American real estate, they are getting an item that may well GAIN in value, not instantly depreciate. 

And so we are like the Indians who sold the Island of Manahatta for $20 in trinkets:  exchanging guns for glitter;  trading what is genuinely valuable away for junk that gives us brief pleasure but has little other value; or, to look at it another way, buying the contents of next year's Goodwill donation or garage sale. 

And so-- we constantly impoverish ourselves, getting the worse of each consumer purchase, because we have an consumption-based economy.   Williams may be a good bookkeeper, but he is not an economist.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Rewards of Low-IQ Campaigning

Nobody ever makes any money or gets elected by betting on the intelligence of the American people. A cerebral rational candidate running a rational campaign always loses.

What counts are baseless accusations repeated often. If a voter hears the same thing often enough, it becomes true whether or not it is.

You never want to confuse voters with facts. Elections are not about facts; they are about emotions and cultivating prejudices.

You pay campaign managers a fortune to identify groups with a beef, or a screw loose, and figure out a way to target them with a message just for them that won't drive away the support of other groups you need.

The most effective tool is the 30 second sound bite. You make a statement and don't have to qualify or explain it, or defend it; just make it and stop. What you say will have more impact on voters than your opponent's long tedious explanation of why your statement is not true.

Are voters today less informed? I think so. One reason is beause we are so barraged with information that we shut out all but the simplest most emphatic messages. The ideal campaign message consists of just one word or phrase.

"Socialist!" was good.

Another good one is "baby-killer." Santorum has been using that. Gingrich. Randy-Neugie. Here's CNN's debunking of the accusation:

"After researching and analyzing the issue, two independent fact-checking groups, Politifact and Factcheck.org both determined it's not true to claim Obama supported legislation that said "any child born prematurely ... can be killed." In fact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact rated the Santorum's assertion "Pants on fire" -- its rating that a statement is "not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim."

"Then there's the part of Gingrich's statement that the "elite media" ignored the story in 2008. In fact, a search on Nexis shows at least eight times when it was mentioned or discussed in detail on CNN during the 2008 campaign."
From http://articles.cnn.com/2012-02-24/poli ... M:POLITICS

Not that debunking matters. What matters and what is remembered is the accusation. Comprehending the debunking takes too much time and IQ points.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

The American Revolution as Class and Economic Struggle

[Under construction]

To an extent that has been under appreciated, the American Revolution involved class and economic considerations.   For example the Regulator Movement of North Carolina.    Quote about a petition drawn up by the Regulators of Anson County, NC:

"in violation of the law restricting the amount of land that might be granted to each person to six hundred and forty acres, much of the most fertile territory in the province had been distributed in large tracts to wealthy landlords. In consequence "great numbers of poor people are necessitated to toil in the cultivation of the bad Lands whereon they hardly can subsist." It was these poor people, "thereby deprived of His Majesties liberality and Bounty," "  http://www.web-books.com/Classics/ON/B0/B866/SouthwestC13.html

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Birth Control Politics and Reality

You for or against allowing employees to have the option of health insurance covering contraceptives?

From the point of view of employers and those footing the bill, it sure makes sense to have such coverage. Pregnancy leave and paternity leave complicates the lives of employers, and when it comes to insurance costs, more contraception is preferable to more births.

How about the religious aspect?

Well, sure, if someone doesn't want the coverage they are not forced to get it; neither are birth control pills forced down their throats.  B.C. is optional not mandatory.

So what's the problem?

The only problem I see is that, for HMOs, a Catholic provider would be expected to provide contraceptive prescriptions. How much of a problem is that?

Isn't that a matter of the patient-doctor relationship? Do Catholic hospitals attempt to prevent doctors admitted to practice there from writing prescriptions for birth control pills or devices? Do Catholic hospitals, clinics, doctors and pharmacies have a sign in the window saying "NO contraceptives available here!" I doubt that occurs much in practice. 

How many Catholic doctors refuse to write birth control prescriptions? If they reflect the beliefs and practices of the general Catholic population, not many. The use of birth control is overwhelming among American Catholics as it is.

For the thoughts of the Catholic electorate, see http://content.usatoday.com/communities/....ops-obama-hhs/1

It is interesting that Catholic doctrine in this is controlled by a handful of men who are claimed to be mostly celibate except for the occasional attraction to young boys. It is interesting that one outspoken female voice in support of Catholic doctrine is that of a nun. What could be less detached from reality?

In a test of strength between the Catholic Church and the will of the American people, or even the will of American Catholics, the church loses. 

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Trump [heart] Romney!?!

So Don Trump plans to endorse Romney?

This relationship has all the marks of a put up job. So a wealthy capitalist plans to endorse -- guess who! Surprise!-- a wealthy capitalist.

We were kept in suspense for this? All those stories, doubtless fed by Trump himself, about Trump being dissatisfied with the GOP field and making another run?

Pretty obvious, wasn't it, that we've been played by a self-proclaimed master of self-trumpery. The P.T. Barnum of 5th Avenue.

And what, precisely, is the effect of Trump's endorsement? How many Trump constituents can Trump deliver to Romney? I'd guess one, Trump himself, and maybe not that.

Read more: http://lubbockvoices.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=bewaretheheat&action=display&thread=30&page=1#ixzz1lFZouB5R

Monday, January 16, 2012

Monday Morning Quarterbacking; Jan 16 Reflections on the GOP

Been reading about Perry's appeal to try to get on the Virginia ballot. Joined by Huntsman (who I guess will now drop his appeal) and Santorum.

Virginia's requirement of 10,000 signatures including 400 from each county is a heavy burden. One can understand how the state doesn't want any Tom Dick or Harry with a few hundred bucks to spend on pure vanity taking up space on a ballot. But 10,000 signatures to get in and on is like saying "Don't matter if you're ready for the big time, if you're not big time now with an organization already in place in our state, you don't get to play." The high roller buy-in philosophy. Totally anti-democratic imo.

I halfway listened to a short Perry interview on TV yesterday. Pleasant man, rugged good looks. But; you know how sometimes you talk to someone who seems a little off? How their responses to your words don't quite match up with what you said, as though they are distracted or self-obsessed or in some small way mentally impaired? That's kind of how Perry sounded to me. Pleasant but a mite tiched in the haid.

Somewhere iin this thread I mentioned "interesting candidates." Who do I call the interesting GOP candidates? Those with interesting ideas to put forward. The adventurers. A new or different point of view. Those who are in the vanguard or the forelorn hope as opposed to mainstream candidates who construct a platform out of planks provided by polls or significant blocks in the GOP electorate.

The interesting: Definitely Ron Paul. Bruce Johnson. Huntsman. I would once have included Herman Cain but his half-baked ideas didn't wash and in the perspective of time it looks like the whole Cain escapade was a testosterone and status fueled vanity run, amteur nite at the Bijou for everybody in his campaign.

Some say Ron Paul is good on domestic economics but naive about foreign policy. I say the opposite, that the strength of his ideas is in foreign policy.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Marines Urinating on Taliban Fighter

I haven't seen the video;  I only know what it is said to portray.  I am not out to court martial anybody over that.

The guy is dead.   Could be piss, could be flowers and medals, doesn't make any difference to him.  Dead is dead.   And as for respect for the dead, that is an empty quantity, with significance only for survivors.

How much respect ought one to feel about the body of an enemy who was out to kill you?   

The natural human reaction is tear into the body with teeth and fingernails, to defile it, to burn it, shit on it, piss on it, throw it in the garbage dump.

For that matter, isn't one's own prestige enhanced by the hatred and lack of restraint shown by an enemy?   So what happened was in the screwy way of war an honor to the Taliban fighter.

As a practical matter, a diplomatic matter, it is not a good idea to be caught urinating on a fallen warrior.   Poor propaganda for us, good propaganda for the other side even if it was all meaningless.   And with more negotiations between invaders (us) and invadees (the Taliban) in store, this doesn't help.

Problem is, of course, that the Taliban is an idea and not a person.   You can kill a person or persons but it is much harder to kill an idea. 

In the war of ideas this counts as a lost battle.

Rep. Giffords and that Crazy Old Coot

You probably heard about that old buzzard in Arizona who says Gifford makes him want to vomit.   One ought to feel sorry for the guy, having been stewed in his own  untraconservative bile for decades.  There ought to be medications available to treat his illness.   Hell of it is, he's right.   About Giffords staying in office that is.  

It may be good therapy for Giffords to have the goal of coming back and reclaiming her house seat.   But it's not likely.   She has been severely damaged, and one has to question any vote she may ceremonially cast.   The higher order function, the verbal function is not there, and may never again be there again.   She should have resigned her seat long ago.