Haiti

Does anything more have to be said? What a horrendous catastrophe! And the suffering in the aftermath of the massive earthquake is unspeakable. Why do the worst possible things always happen to people who are already beat down? Some commentator today pointed out that this was a prime example of how disasters in poor countries are always far, far worse than they are in developed countries. Example: in the substantial San Francisco earthquake of 1989, 63 people were killed. In Haiti, they haven't got a clue what the final tally will be, but 45,000 to 50,000 is what's most commonly reported. May God have mercy on them all.

Here's a quick way to get some assistance to Haiti, if you've got a cell phone:

Haiti Text-To-Give Numbers, via Gigaom and Mobile Giving Insider

•Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
•Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
•Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
•Text HAITI to 20222 to donate $10 through the Clinton Foundation
•Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
•Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
•Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International
•Text RELIEF to 30644 (this will connect you with Catholic Relief Services and instruct you to donate money with your credit card)

Other ways to donate here. And there are a number of other links listed at Trench Warfare.

This is Insanity

I will save you getting out your calculator. The numbers add up to $1.05 trillion and counting. And, mind you, not of penny of it was budgeted during the Bush years. It was all done by special appropriations, as if the country were Scrooge McDuck with a huge basement of cash reserves.

We have a host of crippling economic evils in this country, more plagues than Yahweh visited upon Pharoh, and we are increasing our commitment to the fruitless conflict in Afghanistan. This is so self-evidently insane to me, that I'm actually almost struck dumb trying to counter those who argue that these horrendous expenditures are necessary. And now we've got serious discussion of widening the wars we're fighting by committing US troops to Pakistan and Yemen*.

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."   -- Friedrich Schiller

*It's a small commitment of troops being proposed for the moment, for "training." Do you really trust the Pentagon on something like this?

GULP!

Europe beckons. My dear wife and I are planning a trip to Europe in the fall, probably October. We have been talking about this trip for a while. We lived in Germany for three years, so we've seen a lot of the continent. There are innumerable places we've been to, some several times, that I would go back to. Any place in The Netherlands, for example. Venice, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Paris . . . we saw all the major capitals. Today we had the first sit-down meeting with the travel agent who is going to take care of us on this trip. Our goal: spend roughly 30 days over there--if you're going, go. A week in Europe, although better than nothing is barely enough time to get acclimated--and see places we've not seen before. That would be a hell of a lot of places, but our sights are set on Ireland, the south-of-Paris part of France, plus Normandy; Spain; Portugal.

I just thought you might be interested in costs these days. These are all euro countries, and as of today, a dollar buys .68 euros, or another way, $1.42 buys one euro. Who knows what it'll cost later on. (I've already told Susan that if the dollar really tanks against the euro, trip is off.) Here's the rough guesstimate of various costs we talked about today.

• air fare, US to Europe & return  ==  $1000 each
•  air fare, Ireland to continent  ==  $200-300 each
  
• lodging (hotels, b&b)  ==  $125/day
• 10-day train pass (for the continent)  ==  $600-800 each
• food  ==  $100/day
• car + gas (Ireland)  ==  $250/wk + $4.78 per gallon

Not included: other spending like shopping and miscellaneous expenses.

All of this is, shall we say . . . daunting.

Two Holy Mackerel Stories in Today's News

The first one's a Whoopee! The Obama administration in a fit of unaccustomed dedication to justice is fixing to slap a $120 billion fee on the nation's huge banks to partially reimburse we taxpayers for TARP losses. The bare outlines are clear enough: the too-big-to-fail banks whose asses were saved by hundreds of billions of taxpayer losses are expected to announce not only record profits for 2009--what bank could not profit borrowing money from the Fed at zero percent interest?--but also correspondingly huge bonuses for CEOs and executives. So with the coming announcement we poor strapped taxpayers, who have been savaged by massive unemployment, foreclosures, and a myriad of woes connected with what the too-big-to-fail banks visited upon us, will finally get some glimmer of pay-back. Not nearly enough, but the Wall Street fat cats are already screaming. And you can bet that their tools in Congress are going to do the same.

The second one's a we-shoulda-seen-this-coming. Guess who is going to become a regular commentator on Fox Faux News? Right, boys and girls, our favorite bubble-headed dingbat, the former governor of Alaska, and still the favorite of Tea Party dunces everywhere: Sarah Palin.  Listen, I think any commentary on this would just be superfluous. Is this a surprise? No. Will this boost Fox Faux News ratings? Yes. Will this confirm for the thousandth time that this woman knows next to nothing about anything? Of course. Will it help to fatten her already bulging coffers from the sale of her ghost-written bestseller book? Of course. Is there justice in the world? Hell, no.

Update I: Palin debuted on Fox , as a "news analyst" (I cannot help but pause and just savor the unspeakable irony at work here) with another right-wing immortal, Bill O'Reilly. According to reports, she was, to put it kindly, less than glib and way south of insightful, and he was his usual horse's ass self. I'll bet the Nielsen ratings went through the roof.

Update II: I just heard on NPR in an interview with Timothy Geithner, that the fee being charged the piratical scoundrels of Wall Street is now $90 billion over the next ten years. And of course this is just fine with him. It's "fair." In view of the fact that the big banks are going to pay out $50 billion in executive bonuses this year, this doesn't seem all that burdensome, does it? This is what happens when they've got you by the short and curlies, brothers and sisters.

Chewing . . .

Quoting blog-friend Montag:

To live is to create; to create is to become immortal.
To become one with God in immortality is to create with Goals defined by a lifetime of struggling to be a moral person.
Therefore, if we desire immortality, our lives are the Moral quest and struggle; everything else is secondary.

He's a profound guy--you can find him on his blog "A Father Talks to His Daughter about God,"*-- and I have to confess sometimes he's out there so far or down there so deep that he loses me. But the kind of observation above is common. Thoughtful and chewy, full of delicious complexity if you get to thinking about it.

Create what? Suppose the creative activity, whatever it is, produces nothing but dreck. Does that count? And isn't every person living? What does a Manchester wino, a 90-pound crackhead, or some other species of human flotsam create? Ah, maybe we who struggle to be moral persons inhabit a world peopled by millions of zombies, not living, not creating. Those who deny the possibility, much less the goal, of oneness with God. Much less the existence of God. Having kids . . . isn't that creation? So the scumbag who fathers 30 bastards, does the observation apply to him, or to the herds of single mothers who bought their condition with promiscuity? Goals defined by struggling for life to be a moral person. There seems to be a wide disparity of notions about just what a "moral person" is. Who defines what this is? So is a person who's confused by the disparity and discouraged thereby from struggling . . . are they creators?

I'm not being a pill, just playing with semantics here. Deep thoughts require unpacking, and in my opinion, doing this kind of unpacking in search of precision is a worthwhile endeavor. 

None of which is to say, I don't agree with him and his conclusion here.

*At one point, he was seriously entertaining the notion of changing the name of his blog to something, one presumes, that could be written horizontally on a beer can without running into itself coming around. I and several others successfully dissuaded him. And so, one of the coolest blog titles out there is still with us.

Well . . .

. . . where have you been, you might be asking yourself if you're one of my nine or ten regular readers. I have two reasons to report, one more or less unavoidable, the other avoidable, but not really. You know about it already. I just finished telling you all about the Great American Fantasy League on Thursday. Well, yesterday, Saturday, virtually all day long was taken up with this game. I didn't really have a grasp of the scope of its complexities until I spent all those hours to play a nine-inning game. True enough, it was a wild game (which the Rangers lost, of course, 11-7 in the ninth because pitching fell apart), but my instructor was thorough, and, I have to confess, sometimes  . . . well, a bit too thorough. Plus he tended to editorialize, so the lesson probably stretched out longer than it might have. Worse, I still don't think I've got a real great handle on how to play yet.

The second problem was with technology. The other day being at my most careful to transfer my wife's printer from the top of the dryer where it spent Christmas season, I dropped it to the floor. So long faithful printer. The replacement, a spiffy new wireless printer from HP, arrived last Thursday, way before I thought it would get here, and I spent 4-plus hours trying to get the damn thing configured for this computer. My frustration level was high, and of course I stewed about the problem even when I wasn't in the same room with it. It did not get to working properly till late this afternoon when my son-in-law, an expert in these matters, came over and worked very fast magic on it. I'm happy to report that everything seems to be fine now. The new printer is an HP Photosmart Plus B209. It's slick. Wireless--that's a miracle right there. Plus printer and scanner. Amazes me the kind of sophisticated stuff you can buy for $150. Hi tech stuff for computers and including computers is about all that's gotten better and cheaper over the years. Everything else has gone the other way on both counts.

That Giant Sucking Sound

Not only is she damned cute, she's also damned smart and damned outspoken. I'm talking about Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel which is the watchdog on the bank bailouts. (Actually, I don't know what kind of powers this panel has, but my suspicion is that they are advisory only, otherwise we'd have heard more about this body.) She's got a piece in the Huffington Post about the disappearance of the middle class. Something that five years ago people would have scoffed at. Today, it seems almost common knowledge that the vaunted American middle class, middle brow and all, is fading away under relentless assault by the silk hat crowd, the fat cat class, you know, those people the taxpayers of the U.S. bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and whose asses we still kiss. That giant sucking sound you hear is the middle class going down the drain.

Here are some facts:

• Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. 
• One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. 
• One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. 
• One in eight Americans is on food stamps. 
• More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. 
• The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street. 

Wanna know how the middle class has been slowly beaten down during the past generation? It's all here.

•  Wages have been flat since the 1970s, despite rising productivity from workers.
  
• Core expenses, though, are way up--twice as much for mortgages and health care, for example.
• To hold on more and more families put a second parent into the workforce, but this increased all kinds of expenses such as child care and taxes with the result these families have been squeezed all that much harder. And they've cut back across the board: less on food, clothing, furniture, appliances.

But while the middle class tread water at best,  the fat cats in big banking were doing just fine, thank you. And it was at the expense of the middle class: they've made an obscene fortune out of consumer credit. "The industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts. And as we all know, when the shit hit the fan, the bankers got bailed out by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

And almost beyond belief, here we are about a year after this, and these very same villains are spending millions watering down any attempts in Congress to pass meaningful financial reform laws. And they're succeeding. How is this possible? Bill Moyers had a couple of guys from Mother Jones on his PBS Journal Friday night --David Corn and Kevin Drum--talking about this very thing. It's called incestuous relationship between Wall Street and Washington. I have to tell you, after what I heard, I'm not at all encouraged that anything ever stopping these blood-suckers. (You can read all the Mother Jones articles right here. There are five of them, all the results of investigative reporting of the financial industry. If they don't make you mad as hell, you have reptile blood.)

Like I've Got Time for This

I'm talking about another time-consuming activity I'm about to take up. It's called the Great American Fantasy League, and what it is is 26 baseball nuts, all of us members of SABR*, each the manager of a fantasy league team made up of the all-time greats for that franchise. I will manage the Texas Rangers, and I already know that it will be as fruitless trying to win my division (7 teams) with the very best the Rangers ever had, as it seems to be with the real Rangers. Just as in real life, pitching is 75 percent of winning, and since 1961, when the expansion Washington Senators which became the Texas Rangers in 1971, the franchise has had pretty crappy pitching, although scoring runs was never a problem. (I've got a long history going all the way back to when I was in grade school of playing board and computer baseball games: APBA board and computer version, Diamond Mind computer baseball, and another game my brothers and a neighbor kid named Frank Vicari whose name I don't remember. But I do remember designing and drawing ballparks and uniforms and putting out a "newspaper" with game write-ups and stats. (Used to type them up in columns on a typewriter via hunt-and-peck.) Crazy!

I'll know a lot more about the game after I'm "trained" over the phone by playing a couple of games with tutor. You need this kind of help because, as you might expect, accuracy and realism are fundamental. So the game is based on a lot of math, and it's got a whole bunch--a very big bunch--of contingencies built into it. Games take about 2-3 hours to play, and of course, you have to keep full records which are sent to the league headquarters where they're compiled into reams of statistics. The schedule is 162 games, played one game per week. I'm taking over the team after 66 games, and guess what? The Rangers have the worst record in the league. You have to be a baseball nut to understand what a fun thing this is going to be. I fear I have to plead guilty on this count. Crazy again!

*Society for American Baseball Research

This Ain't the Year . . .

"Five days into 2010 haven't quite offset my hangover from our seasonal consumption binge, wherein history's richest, ostensibly Christian culture spent billions more on gifts, wars, and provoking terrorism than feeding the poor in spirit or pocketbook. In an odd parody of Christmas giving, Senate Scrooges gave unsubsidized, uninsured families a lump of coal, a coercive medical insurance scheme with penalties for defiance."

Thus begins yet another sobering reflection on the baleful effects of religion on our times by Robert Becker in today's Smirking Chimp. What is is about religion? he asks at one point. Admittedly, as he admits, too, it is an ancient question: "How can religion induce so many to sacrifice their lives while killing others, all the while deluded everyone does God's will?"

I'm not going to pretend that I know the answer to the question. This I do know, and in this I agree with the writer of this piece: God is unknowable by the very fact that he is God. So anybody who claims they know the mind of God is by definition deluded. But in our fractured times--and what times have not been fractured?--it's so comforting to know that God is on our side. This is a fiction that people have been willing to believe for centuries because they are just as willing to put their faith in the religions that tell them so. And the oceans of blood that have been spilled because of this fiction is beyond belief.

Becker quotes Aldous Huxley in the essay: "At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols."

Amen.

We begin this new year with the supposedly Christian U.S. waging hi-tech war against two low-tech Muslim nations. Oh, these wars are about resources, to be sure, but the religious aspect of these conflicts cannot be denied. It's my God vs. your God, and by God, we're not going to stop killing you and your babies until we've proven that our God is stronger than yours. It sounds so ridiculous this way, doesn't it? But isn't this what's actually going on? If you doubt it, just turn on your TV or even better, your radio, and listen to some of the fundamentalist preachers out there. And then recall how many millions of Americans subscribe to these beliefs. And then think about all the Christians in the U.S. who would not describe themselves as fundamentalists who would nevertheless endorse the notion that religious war is actually a sane notion.

In short, barring literal divine intervention, this ain't the year the human race is going to wise up about God. I'm thankful God is ineffable and transcendent or he would be really pissed off at our arrogant imbecility.

Two Bon-Bons

Two of my most favorite guys in the whole wide world have hugely enjoyable and informative columns out. Of course neither is going to make you shout "Hooray! Things are going to be so much better in 2010! A new decade is just what we need!" No, these reports are not likely to spur that kind of reaction. What they will do, however, is impress you with the quality of the writing and reporting still possible in the swamp of mediocrity and mendacity that the once-honorable profession of journalist has sunk into. These pieces--and you should definitely treat yourself to reading them in their full glory--will probably stir a welter of different emotions, none of them happy, at the state of the nation. I guess it's my job to keep you posted on these things, lest someone in a burst of hallucination gets the idea that matters in the good ole US of A are improving and that we can look forward to a return to "normal" any time soon. Indeed, what is "normal" is in the process of being redefined. And we don't know what it's going to be yet.

Matt Taibbi first, on the ongoing financial catastrophe. There's more than enough blame to go around, he says, and trying to pin the mess on Fannie and Freddie, as some are now attempting is simply wrong. But before the details, he's got this wonderful description:

. . . what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

And now Glenn Greenwald on the general subject of the corrosive fear of terrorism and what it's doing to the country. Here's the general thesis:

Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive.  Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens:  please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe. . . .

What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result.  Policies can always be changed.  What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States.  Reducing the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more consequential than any specific new laws.  Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism:  the desire to vest unlimited power in political authority in exchange for promises of protection.

Not a pretty picture at all, is it? But that's where we are now and where we're going, friends. Read this piece. It's scary.