When Democrats Attack

So much for the new climate of civility in political discourse. I guess all it takes for that to go out the window is one party feeling that they are in danger of losing an argument. Then the big guns come out. Pelosi accuses republicans of trying to starve 6 million old people. Obama uses his bully pulpit to attack Paul Ryan, even though he hasn't read Ryan's budget proposal. It's laughable the way that politicians resort to demonizing their opponents any time they feel like a simple debate won't go in their favor. I'm anxiously awaiting the quote from Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that "Republicans want to kill poor babies, then serve them to old poor people as their last meal before they kill them in order to save money on social security." You know it's coming soon. These are the times when I miss Alan Grayson. He was a bottomless pit of mindless, accusatory rhetoric. At least the democrats aren't trying to blame Bush for everything anymore.
I know, I know, the republicans do the same thing. It makes great theater. I do have a slight problem with the reaction of people that aren't really paying attention. There are people that actually believe some of this crap. These people vote, they discuss politics, they protest and hold signs. I can't help but think that they must know better. They have to understand, on some level, that the drivel coming out of Washington is designed to deflect, to divide, and to demonize the opposition without having any basis in reality. There are no facts, there is no real debate going on. One side calls the other fat, the other responds with "I know you are but what am I", and so it goes.
This grade school rhetoric is kind of amusing. Seeing supposed grown-ups, the people that are supposed to be our leaders, reduce themselves to nothing more than schoolyard bullies praying no one stands up to them is pretty funny. Sad, but funny. They lessen themselves by doing it, that's the funny part. The sad part is that they lessen their office, their position at the same time. How can we take a representative seriously when so many of them sound like morons. Look up some of the quotes from Grayson, Pelosi, Reid, et al during the so-called debate over healthcare. Listen to some of the quotes by members of the republican party in reference to Obama over the last few years. Listen to Donald Trump. On second thought, please don't. Can we take any of these people seriously?
I've said before that I love this stuff. I think it's hilarious when the talking heads go at each other and cross all boundaries of social decorum. On the other hand, I don't enjoy it so much when our leaders do it. They should be above the fray, shouldn't they? Shouldn't we be able to trust them? Shouldn't we be able to maintain at least a modicum of respect for the people we elect to run the country? The more they open their mouths, the harder and harder it is for me to believe that anyone would color in the circle next to the names of any of these people on election day. I don't know if it says more about us than about them, or if it only means that the alternative would be worse. Where do these people come from? All I know is that if these are the best we can come up with, maybe we should try something else. maybe we should try to find one good man or woman (there's got to be one out there somewhere right?) and name them dictator for life. We may not be happy with their decisions all the time, but at least we wouldn't have political spitball fights masquerading as political debate anymore.

What is a socially responsible corporation? Let's start by defining socially responsible. In my opinion, to be socially responsible, one must do something that benefits society. Makes sense, right? If you are socially irresponsible, that would detract from society. Well, what is society? Is it a simple majority of all the human beings on the planet? Is it everyone on the planet? Is it confined to one's community or nation? Is there a certain percentage of any group that would constitute society? These are important questions. For my purposes, I'll define society as the group of people that are most affected by any decision or action that one undertakes. This may be simplistic, but it's my theory, so I'll make up the rules as I go along. What does it mean to be responsible? Does it mean that you sacrifice your own interests for the interests of others? What if your interests coincide with the interests of others, and by sacrificing them, you are also harming a great number of other people. If Exxon/Mobil stopped drilling for oil, many people would be happy. No more destroying the environment. No more adding to the carbon footprint of mankind on the earth. Blah, blah, blah. What about the many thousands of people that would lose their jobs? What about the tremendous spike in the price of gasoline that would accompany the closing of one of the largest suppliers of oil in the world? What about the rise in price of everything that needs to be delivered somewhere in order to be bought buy people all over the world? Would any of the people adversely affected by this consider the decision to be socially responsible? I don't think so. So is responsibility dependant upon your perspective? Maybe. Let's move on. What is a corporation? A corporation is an entity that is created for one thing, and one thing only. That is to make a profit. A corporation cannot be evil. It cannot be good. It can only be exactly what it is. It can either be successful, in which case it enriches a great number of people, in addition to providing a good product for a good price to millions of consumers, or it can go out of business. Unless of course, it is considered by some to be too big to fail, which is another argument entirely. A corporation has no morals. It has no conscience. All it does is try to make money. People within that corporation can have feelings of social responsibility or empathy. They may even make decisions that reflect their own personal feelings and goals, but once those decisions start to hurt the bottom line, there will be repercussions. That is the way things work. At least they would work, if we would let them. And that, in my opinion, is the problem. We have too many people in too many positions with too much authority over things that they have no concept of. Why should Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, AKA the village idiot and his ugly, stupid stepbrother, have anything to do with finance? Neither one of them has ever even held a job. Why should they have the power to decide the future of millions of people that actually live in the real world? What does some career government bureaucrat know about what creates jobs, or costs jobs, or anything that exists outside the sphere of their limited experience? Nothing. And yet, for some reason we entrust these people with the power to pick who should survive and who should die in the corporate world. Why is that? Why do we listen to a complete moron like Joe Biden, no disrespect intended. I'm sure he's a lot of fun at cocktail parties, when he can stay awake of course. And why do we totally disregard the opinions of men who have spent their entire lives studying what makes an economy work and what doesn't? Maybe I'm getting a little off subject here, but why do we expect people that have no idea what they're talking about, to know what they're talking about? So, to be socially responsible, a corporation must benefit society. Even an evil corporation like Exxon/Mobil creates a great deal of benefit to society. Heck, even Walmart helps society, if by helping you mean creating something beneficial to the vast majority of people. When corporations are forced by government bureacracies and special interest groups to expend scarce resources in a vain effort to prove that they are benefiting society in a way that satisfies these very special interests, it costs us all. When Walmart has to pay millions of dollars to hire consultants to prove that they are making an effort to be more socially responsible, over and above the many and varied benefits that they bestow on society simply by existing, who pays the price? Not Walmart, they just pass the cost on to the very people that are supposedly being looked out for by the politicians and do-gooders. So who is being irresponsible? The corporation, which is just doing whatever it can to increase it's profit, because that's what it's supposed to do, even if it means spending millions or billions on a pr campaign to make them more palatable to the social and political elites, or the social and political elites, who make the rest of us pay in a material way for their own easement of conscience? Walmart, by it's very existence, brings a great deal of good to a great part of it's society. The one's that demonize Walmart, and companies like Walmart, do nothing but detract from the benefits provided by Walmart and other corporations. Who is really being irresponsible here? I guess it depends on your perspective, but from where I'm standing, give me more Walmart, and much less government.

Contrary to popular belief, I do not hate the environment. In fact, in an indirect way, it's how I make my living. If people didn't want to see healthy trees, pretty flowers, and lush green grass, I wouldn't have a job. So no, I don't hate the environment. What I do hate is environmentalists. Maybe hate is too strong a word. Maybe it's just dislike. There are so many different kinds of environmentalists it's difficult to keep them separated in my mind. Some of the ones I don't mind so much are the Ed Begley Jr. type. They live the way they want us all to live. They are very annoying at times, but at least they're not hypocrites. Look, if you want to recycle, go ahead. If you want to eat only organic vegetables, knock yourself out. Just don't tell me I should be doing the same. That's just going to make me do the exact opposite. If you tell me I need to recycle to save the planet, I'll tell you that if noone in the country recycled for the next 100 years, we could fit all the trash created in an area the size of Columbus, Ohio. This would actually be an improvement for Columbus, but that's a story for another day. I don't recycle, and part of the reason is people like you telling me I have to. Organic vegetables may be fresher, tastier, and better for you than the canned variety. I don't care. I like my vegetables preserved in a can so that their expiration date can be measured in nuclear half life. That's because I don't like vegetables. I haven't eaten one on purpose, other than a potato or 2, in about 15 years. I need them to last a long time in the cabinet. As I said, these people don't bother me too much. I think they would gain more traction if they just tried to lead by example, instead of tsk tsking us and trying to guilt us into being more environmentally conscious. Look, Ed, I get that you love the environment. I think it's great that you can power your entire house with solar panels, windmills, and some kind of turbine you had hooked up to your excercise bike so you can get a good workout while you save the planet. Most of us don't have the time, money, or the OCD that you do. We just don't care all that much. Another type seems to feel that animals are more important than people. These are the folks that don't mind diverting precious water from farmers in California in order to save some kind of bait fish that may or may not be disapearing from some area. Sure, save the river smelt, or whatever it is, and let's not worry about the farmers. They're only growing food to feed people. People don't really need to eat. And let's not allow fishermen to use the bait fish as bait anymore either. They're only catching fish that may go to feed more people. I don't really see what their problem is with the last one. If the smelt is so wonderful, why shouldn't the fish get to eat it? Shouldn't their last meal on earth be a good one? These are the same people that don't want to drill for oil in ANWAR because it may disurb the caribou. First of all, who really cares about caribou. Second of all, any oil we can extract and refine in our own country reduces the amount of oil we have to buy from Saudi Arabia. They take the money we send and spread it around to great organizations like Hezbollah and Al Quaida. Thirdly, drilling for oil has become such an advanced science that, if you had a pool beneath your backyard in Southern California, BP could get it out from somewhere in the Nevada desert and you would never know it was there. It wouldn't even cause your swingset to lean to one side. I could go on and on, but I want to get to my favorite environmentalist of all. That's right, the man who invented the internet, Al Gore. I know he didn't exactly claim to have invented the world wide web, but it's still funny to say. Here is a guy that rode Bill Clinton's coattails for 8 years, waiting for his chance. He was vice president to one of the most popular and charismatic presidents of recent times. Regardless of where you stand politically, everyone loves them some Bubba. He finally got his chance. His opponent was some hokey, spoiled brat son of an ex-president who couldn't put together a sentence longer than 4 words without misspeaking, mispronouncing, or, in the opinion of many, misleading his audience. No way could a yokel from Texas defeat this intellectual giant in an election, until he did. So what did old Al do? He sued of course, and thankfully lost. Of course, had he won, perhaps we wouldn't have been subjected to his new career as the patron saint of global warming. Thank goodness the rest of the country noticed that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes before they managed to push through the cap and trade bill. Sadly, Al managed to make a boatload of money by lying to the public about the imminent threat of climate change, but he wasn't alone. Do you really believe that knucklehead could have come up with a scam of that magnitude on his own? He was just the face of that charade. The thing I remember most about him is a video I saw of him answering an Irish reporter's question with a question. (once a politician, even a bad one, always a politician) Al was talking about the plight of the polar bear, how it was nearing extinction. The reporter had the temerity to point out, quite correctly, that the polar bear population was actually increasing and asked Al to explain his point. Al responded by asking him, "But do you feel that the polar bear is endangered?" This pretty much sums up the entire climate change fury. Never mind the facts, how do you feel? Reasoned discussion has no place in this argument. You are either with us, or you, sir, are worse than Hitler. I don't hate the environment. I don't hate environmentalists. I don't hate Al Gore. Well, maybe a little. And I don't hate polar bears. Human beings are on the top of the food chain for a reason. We have managed to create something on this planet that no other species has accomplished. Someday, another species may come along that is smarter, stronger, and more adaptable than us. Let's enjoy our time at the top. The planet was here long before us, and it will be here long after we're gone. I don't care about river smelts or recycling. I'm not worried about the environment or environmentalists or Al Gore's bank account. I care about people, and the only thing I think about when I look at a polar bear is how it tastes. Maybe on the grill with a little cajun seasoning and some rice pilaf on the side.

I've been thinking a lot lately about choice and fate, decisions and destiny. I don't know why. Maybe it's turning 40, I mean 29 again, but it seems like the line between the two is getting blurrier and blurrier.

For instance, when I moved from Mass to Indiana, I thought it would be a better life for my family. Turns out, it has been. Maybe not in every way. We still have problems, still struggle from time to time, but the problems are different, the struggles seem less strenuous. On the flip side, we miss our families terribly. We made a decision to do what we thought was best for us and our children, and in some ways it has turned out that way. In other ways it hasn't.

What if we had stayed in Massachussetts? We would still be struggling to get by. But maybe something good would have happened there that won't happen here. Maybe we missed out on our 'big break'. Maybe our 'big break' is waiting for us here in Indiana. Maybe it's somewhere else. Maybe it's nowhere. Maybe we don't have a 'big break' in our future. Maybe there is no such thing as a 'big break'.

If I were a pessimist, which I have been accused of being, I would say that it is our destiny to struggle through life. It is fate that keeps us in the position we are in. We have no choice but to try our best, and accept what life gives us.

If I were an optimist, which I most definitely am not, I would say that it could have been much worse. I could have moved to California, maybe Nancy Pelosi's district. That, I am sure, is one half step removed from hell on earth. We could have stayed in Mass and lost everything, what little we had, when the economy collapsed. We could be in much worse shape than we are, so we should be grateful for what we have and not anger the gods by wishing for more.

Thankfully, I am neither a pessimist or an optimist. I am a realist. This means, basically, that I don't believe that my 'fate' or 'destiny' is controlled by anyone but myself. I made the decision to move to Indiana. I will accept the consequences. I made the choice to work where I work, to do what I do for a living. If I don't like it, which I don't, It's up to me to change it, which I may. The point is, it is up to me. No force or forces outside of myself control my life. I am free to decide my own future. If I decide poorly, it is not becaused I am cursed, or destined for failure. It is because I made the wrong choice. It means I need to pick myself up, dust myself off, and try again.
We all make bad decisions in life. We all make good decisions too. We can't blame the bad ones on fate and accept credit for the good ones. If we did that, we would all be democrats, and then where would we be?
I think that too much time is spent, wasted really, on trying to figure out who is to blame for a given situation. That applies to every situation, whether it be personal, political or 'something else that starts with p'. (sorry, I'm a sucker for alliteration, and for groupings of 3, but I couldn't think of anything that fit). We need to stop living in the problem, and start living in the solution. (God, I sound like Tony Robbins don't I?).
I will end with this thought; (no more parentheses, I promise) no matter the direction your life takes, regardless of what happens, it can all be traced back to one decision, one choice you have made that set the engine in motion. Once that engine is in motion, it may take a lot to stop it and get it going in the other direction, but we all have the power within us to do just that. All it takes is another choice, another decision, as difficult as it may be, and your life will turn in a different direction. You may not be happy with it, but at least you know it was all up to you.

A memo to me

Time is abstract - A construction of humankind. It does not exist outside of us. It is merely a way to measure the gap between birth and death, to parcel it into neat, tidy sections as we travel through our lives.
Time is motion - it is measured by revolutions of the earth, orbits around the sun, beats of the heart. It is constant and irreversible. Graying hair and aching bones reminding us that it is, above all, limited.
Time is relative - It seems like yesterday that I was in my early 20's, with my whole life in front of me. 5 hours shovelling mulch from the back of a dumptruck into wheelbarrows in a cold rain seems like an eternity.
Time passes, quickly or slowly, depending on our perspective. Our attempts to mark time, to trap time, to explain or define time, are merely rages against the dying of the light.
Time does not march on, but we do. To what or when is up to us. Time is not precious, but life is, so live it well, before your time is up.

"Two paths diverged in a silvery wood. I chose the one less travelled, and that has made all the difference." What would have happened if he didn't? Where would we be if Robert Frost the poet turned out to be Bob Frost, the accountant, or the tax attorney, or the gas station attendant? Wouldn't the entire world be a little grayer? A little less poetic? I think it would.


We all make choices every day. Each one of us decides their own fate. Sure, there are things beyond our control, the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan come to mind, but for the most part, we are in control of our own destiny.


So, what if we're not? What if all the world is some Calvinist, predetermined scenario that has already been decided? What if we have no choice but to choose what we have been assigned to choose? What does that do to the sentiments of Frost?


It means that he didn't choose anything, the choice was made for him. And so the path was not "less travelled" it was preordained. takes some of the romance out of it, doesn't it?


I've been reading a lot lately about Quantum Physics, the theory of relativity, and time - Quick sidenote - I am a dork - and it has got me thinking about things I normally don't think about.


As far as I can tell, Einstein postulated that time, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I agree with this (I'm sure Einstein will be relieved) because I have experienced it myself. The hour between 11:00 and noon is of decidedly different duration depending on your perspective. A hungry person will see time dragging, while a person with a lunch meeting that they are not completely prepared for will see the moments tick by far more quickly. Time is relative.


Time, as we use it, is basically a construction of human conceit. We assign arbitrary ticks to the tocks of our clocks, and use them to set our watches, our dates and our lives. Each revolution of the earth is a day, each orbit around the sun is a year. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. These are all numbers plucked out of the air and settled on as a way to measure the unmeasurable. Why is it that 1 year of our lives equals 7 years in a dog's life? It is indefensible in any rational sense. But why is a tree called a tree, a building a building. We need to define things in order to express them to each other. To make them make sense. At my old job, we had a term called the 'fas 5 minutes'. If the boss said he would be there in 5 minutes, you better get comfortable, it was going to be a while. His idea of 5 minutes could be anything from 10 minutes to an hour and a half. But we all understood it, and could set our watches by it, sort of.

There is no universal time. Einstein was the first to come up with that idea. Science is a funny thing, especially physics. It turns out that there are 2 kinds of physics, theoretical and experimental. Experimental physics is the excercise of measuring and testing. Comparing the data and the results, and coming up with a conclusion. Theoretical physics, like that of Einstein and Niels Bohr, is more a process of coming up with some idea, rationalizing it in your mind, explaining it in a paper, and then waiting for the real scientists to either prove or disprove it. I'm not knocking it. Einstein and Bohr were brilliant men. The theories they came up with have certainly stood the test of time. They have been accepted by pretty much the entire scientific community. But then again, so was global cooling. I mean global warming. I mean climate change. you get the idea. Just because someone a lot smarter than any of us comes up with an idea, it's not necessarily the gospel truth.

Quantum physics, to me, and I'm certainly no expert, is a way to introduce the inexplicable into scientific eqations. To define what cannot be defined. I think it's mainly a way for scientists to insert God back into science, without calling it God. The Big Bang was caused by something, but what was it? What can be happening in a state of total inaction? If there was nothing before the big bang, how did the big bang happen? Let's come up with a series of indecipherable equations to explain it, rather than allow for the reintroduction of the supernatural.

It turns out that there are a lot more things that science cannot explain. For instance, not every scientist believes that there is no possibility of matter travelling backward in time. They all agree that it is possible to travel forward. One simply has to travel for a period of time at or near the speed of light and then return to where you started. You will have aged, say 10 years if you travel at 80% of the speed of light, while the earth would have aged 20 years. You are in the future. The past, however, poses another problem. If you can travel into the future, you should be able to travel into the past, right? Superman did it in one of his movies. It made perfect sense to me. He simply flew in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation faster than the earth was rotating. He travelled to the past. Most scientist's won't allow for this. The reason that they give? It would cause a paradox. The most famous example of this is the "Grandmother Paradox" Say a man travelled back in time and killed his grandmother. He would never have been born, right? If he was never born, how could he have travelled back in time? Aside from my objection to the whole idea of grannycide, this seems a flimsy base on which to build a scientific argument on.

Some scientists have postulated the existence of parallell universes to get around the paradox argument. They suppose that there could be an infinite number of universes existing side by side. Each universe would contain separate histories, different presents, and far different futures. According to this scenario, one could go back in time, if one were so inclined, and butcher one's dear little granny with no ill effects on their own existence. In the universe where they are a cold-blooded murderer, they would not exist in the future but in the present, and in the universe that they left, they would cease to exist from the time they travelled back. Got that?

This brings me back to Robert Frost. If there is a universe where he became a professional wrestler, a baker, or an underwear model, I don't want to be in it. I like the one where he is a poet. But who decides which universe we inhabit? Are we in more than one at the same time? Can we go back and forth between them? Is everything we have ever done, or will ever do, already playing out in some form at some other place and time in another universe? What does that do to free will? If we are already doing something before we decide to do it, do we really have any choice but to decide to do it?

This is making my head hurt. I'm going back to economics and politics. Philosophy is so much more straightforward than science.

Why do people hate Walmart so much. I can't understand it. It's like Bush derangement syndrome, but with an inanimate object. I've been reading in the Boston Herald that Mayor Menino isn't sure if he wants to allow Walmart to open stores in Boston. I don't understand it at all. It makes me think of Robin Williams old stand-up routine, you know, before he started making movies and stopped being insane. He used to say about cocaine and it's addictiveness, "Hey, it costs a ton of money, but it makes you paranoid and impotent, so give me more of that."
With Walmart, it seems to work in reverse. "Hey, they provide tens of thousands of jobs, give great deals to consumers, and make a ton of money for everyone associated with them, let's get rid of those guys."
I'm not surprised that Menino has a problem with Walmart coming to Boston. Trying to be nice here, but he's definitely not the brightest bulb in the chandellier. What I have a hard time getting is the intellectuals that demonize the chain. I know they don't shop there, they don't need to. They have a ton of money. It never ceases to amaze me to see that the more money one has, the more noble one can afford to be.
They don't need the great deals, or the jobs, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of them own stocks, so they're making money off it too. But they all harp about how Walmart abuses it's employees, and destroys the small town, Main Street type stores while they cash their dividend checks.
First of all, if you've ever been inside a Walmart, you've seen the people that work there. Most of the employees are High School or college kids just getting started in the work force. They are getting valuable experience that will help them a great deal in the future. they are learning things like responsibility, showing up at work every day, working with others, and getting a resume started at the same time. They don't earn much money, because they are not worth much money right now, but with the experience they gain, they will be worth much more in the future.
I also see a lot of middle-aged women working there. They are, I can only assume, just getting back into the workforce after raising some kids. Either that or they are trying to help supplement their household income with a little part-time work. Again, they are not being paid any less than they are worth in that context.
The other main component of Walmart employees seems to be senior citizens. They are obviously trying to make some extra money in addition to their social security check, or just trying to get out of the house. Either way, I don't see any other companies busting down the door to hire them.
What do all three of these groups have in common? They all are low-skilled, or no-skilled labor. They are, for the most part, looking for part-time employment. And they all seem to be pretty happy with their situation. They'd probably rather be working at Walmart than not working at all.
No, Walmart does not offer most of their employees health benefits. Hardly any company does for part-time workers? Why should they? They get people lining up at the door to apply without offering them. Should they do it to be "socially responsible"? Let me break some news to you, corporations are in business to do one thing, make money. The more the better. They do this by creating a product that people want, and seling it at a price that people can afford and are willing to pay. Walmart makes money because it offers quality stuff at low prices. They can afford to do this because they keep their costs low. Part of their cost control is hiring people from the 3 groups mentioned above. If they are taking advantage of their employees, I'd guess there are about 33 million Americans that would love to be taken like that. That's how many people in this country that are unemployed. And that's probably on the low side. Many economists argue that the true number is closer to 66 million. Some of those people may even live in Boston. But thanks to Mumbles Menino, who is, after all, only looking out for the little guy, they will all be protected from that evil job that Walmart wants to give them. Thanks mayor.