March 29, 2008  (Re: Today's insanities)

You working today, I suppose.  The New York Times has an interesting little front page bit that you couldn't have missed.  It's the Treasury's new plan to expand the Federal Reserve's regulatory power over the markets while furthur weakening the SEC.  The article even lovingly refers to the Fed as a government agency, so you couldn't even argue this as a privatization issue.  Brillant, eh?

(for reference...)

I saw Tavis [Smiley] on Bill Maher last night.  He was holding it down, with the closet Klansman Bill obviously not taking anything he said seriously.  Bill, of course, is a bastard.  Talking to John Cusak about a film he is working on to expose Iraq contractors and media complicity (hint: it's about who owns the stocks in those companies), Bill wanted to play "devil's advocate" and proffered the theory that Americans are too stupid or lazy to know what's going on, as opposed to the media refusing to cover the issue in a nonconfusing, let's say "diffuse", way.  Definition of the so-called liberal elititist, "I'm right and you're stupid!"  Anyway, back to Tavis, he came out with some Pat Buchanan article he must have written in the Wright aftermath that basically said that Blacks are ingrateful and that America has done more for black people than any other country including but not limited to exposing them to : rule of law, Christianity, democratic ideals, etc.  When Bill and the panel dismissed this as typical Buchanan, Tavis retorts!  "That's my point." (paraphrase) "It's that double standard that when white people say ignorant or even hateful things in the media, they are dismissed as harmless old men.  But what Buchanan is saying is in major newspapers and MSNBC, and what Rev. Wright said was limited to a 8,000 member congregation.  Why aren't these harmless old men like Buchanan being alienated the way people like Rev. Wright have been?"  Bill tried to defend Pat calling him a "happy warrior" and pointing out how hard it is to dislike the man personally.  Which is bullshit in light of Pat's refusal to excuse Obama's insistence on how hard it is to dislike the man Rev. Wright personally.      

Then Dan Savage shows up.  He brings up an interesting point about [Elliot] Spitzer that it seems that only Democrat governors are subjects of FBI stings in the last couple of years (along with the Alabama guy), suggesting the FBI has been politicized as the Justice Department, and pointing out that the money spent surveilling Spitzer could have been better used surveilling the sup-prime scams.  He also noted that the reason why Spitzer will probably not be charged is that all or most of the warrants (courtasy of Patriot Act) used in the investigation were taken out for a money laundering case, which is what the FBI initially thought Spitz was doing moving bundles of 15,000 dollars from account to account.  But once the truth became clear, the feds settled to force his resignation through publicity.  Poor Dan was also laughed at a bit by Bill Maher because he admitted that he didn't know either Spitzer or "Kristen" were Jewish.  This is an important subject for Bill, who likes to remind his audience that he's Irish-Jewish, and doesn't seem to realize that not everyone is concerned with these identifications.  Once on the show, Harry Shearer, who is Jewish, admitted he had no idea that Ed Rendell was also Jewish.  It's not like they wear lapel labels.       

And for today's lesson in why rich white activists will never understand the black plight:  A woman is launching a civil rights suit against the TSA because they forced her to remove her nipple rings at an airport metal detector.  Like the group pushing the Passenger Bill of Rights because sometimes you have to wait on your airplane too long.  The spokeswoman for the PBR says that she "can't imagine"  more de-humanizing treatment.  Let's bow our heads and take a minute in silence.

Rubbing Shaq's weak ass!  Gives Kazaam a new meaning, "like a genie in a bottle..."        

I added Ha'aretz to my front page headlines so I can keep sane and a sense of reality about what "normal" Jews think.  Most don't seem to be in the chosen business.  Israel is actually having trouble with about 2,500 Jehovah's Witnesses, because it's not in the Jewish tradition to do missionary work.  But "messianic" Jews who do carry out missionary work have been targeted by ultra-Orthodox groups, including mail bombs. (!)  Like everybody else, they are a diversified people.  It's actually odd that people like Maher, and Christopher Hitchens, like to wear their Jewish mothers on their sleeves, even though they both claim to be atheists.  It apparently matters in the deeper Orthodox traditions.  The "chosen" title only goes matrilinearly, so mixed children with Jewish fathers don't count.  Most Jews don't regard this as an acceptable definition of Jewry, such as most Christians don't recognize the Trinity and other doctrines that once upon a time were life and death matters.  On a slightly tangential subject, can you imagine what some white Americans must think of Blacks if they only go off what they see on TV?  Especially now with the parade of Shelby Steele, Ron Christie type talking heads.  I would certainly venture a bet that there are now more Republican African-Americans on 24 hour news than Democrat, and muslims are out of the question.  Also slightly tangential, see if you can find the EU's condemnation of the recent Dutch anti-Islam film, where they make the distinction between "free speech" and cultural provocation.      

And if you get super-bored, the NYT has an online site devoted to CFR stories, including a very interesting one on cyber-warfare.  Recommended.

Actually Ron Christie is a former Cheney staffer, but it's all the same.  He's sold the soul.  And he's cross-eyed, which is only funny allegorically.

(Re: Greenspew)

Trolling Democracy Now [*} and found a debate between Alan Greenspan and Naomi Klein from 9/07 that touched on a number of issues.  Much of what Greenspan had to say is typical Kool-Aid insanity:  The trillions lost in Iraq only proves why we need to privatize Social Security, Chile's Allende government collapsed as a result of "inflation" (I guess that's one way to put it), that "hundreds of millions" of people around the world have been lifted from poverty in the last 8 years due to globalization (which seems to contradict the World Bank's own estimate two years ago), and that Bush is a successful president because he was smart enough not to interfere with the Fed (Honesty!)  There were a couple of quotes that are Machivellian enough to share.  "The term 'populist politics' is essentially another way of saying short term versus long term."  One assumes that "short term" means "you" and "long term" means "us".  Klein pointed out that Latin America did not collapse because of "populism", rather that was a result of IMF policies.  Speaking about the increased income inequality (Klein points out that when Greenspan entered the Fed under Reagan, the average CEO salary was 40 times that of the average worker, and in 2006, when Greenspan left the Fed, CEO salaries were over 400 times that of their workers), Greenspan blames the schools for being unable to train skilled workers and says that if we just open our borders to skilled labor from abroad, "...we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country."  You read that right.  Check the transcript if you don't believe me.  You tell me: does that make the slightest lick of sense?

(* In March 2008, I did not yet understand the online definition of "trolling", thinking it meant diving deep into a website.)

(Re: Where the money goes....[discussion on music industry economics])

Not Me wrote:

According to something called the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, cd's with a listed price of $15.99 (which means this info is probably old) are chopped up like this:

$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead        

So assuming someone goes the total indie route I'm calculating they could get a maximum of $10.80 per disc, with bonus chips if they write their material and get the publishing.   Where, then, did the cry for the $5 or $10 disc come from? Is it because they are just looking at manufacturing and royalty costs?  With downloads it is more interesting because you don't have overhead or manufacturing, which leaves a total of $8.39. From this perspective Amazons/Itunes $8-9.99 price does not sound too greedy.  Does it?

Me wrote:

It's interesting to see what goes into the overhead.  "That's over YOUR head, punks!"  You'd lose the retail and label profits, distribution would come down to maintaining a promotional website, I suppose.  I was thinking manufacturing wouldn't change because you would still want to offer the true fans an actual product occassionally, "boutique", and even if you only manufacture a few thousand copies, the extra funds could go into extra packaging specialties to sweeten the deal and make the fan feel special.  So, I think your math comes out all right.  The problem is the initial investment.  I think the way the biz is set up, you probably can't expect a profit for 2,3, maybe 5 years while you build a fan base while touring and, practically through downloads, giving your recordings away for free in order to build the necessary word of mouth.  That's quite some time devoted to slim living.

April 2, 2008

(Re: Sean Levert)

On the list of candidates for my sends is the update of the Levert story, where the family wants an investigation.  It looks like Levert tried to alert the guards he was having trouble and he was promptly restrained, probably sealing his fate.

How do they know what Sean Levert was doing in jail?  Is it that hard to find out?

A: Failure to pay child support.

Maybe he had a celly.  But why else would he have been knocking on his cell in the middle of the night only to die hours later?  The guards are not going to cop to ignoring his plea for help, so you have to rely on the possibility, the shadow of a doubt, and also the possible fact that he had no history of acting out in jail prior to this.  Also need to look into whether he was pepper sprayed.

A (from Wiki): "Levert became ill while incarcerated in the Cuyahoga County Correctional Facility, prior to his transfer to a state prison, reporting high blood pressure and hallucinations; he died six days after being admitted to the jail, on March 30.  The Cuyahoga County coroner ruled in May that his death was caused by complications from sarcoidosis.  The official Coroner's report also noted contributing factors of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and withdrawal from Xanax; he was 39 years old".


(Re: Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity agency)

On the political level, it is very interesting that one day (and it was a very late breaking, under the radar report) after the ACLU provides evidence that the Pentagon was working with the FBI on domestic surveillance targets, the DOD announced that they were closing down the Pentagon's domestic intelligence office, the Counterintelligence Field Activity office.  Read these stories, which have already kinda been pushed off the headlines by today's affairs, one of the perks of releasing stories in the previous evening.

I was thinking about your apathy regarding the Pentagon story, and I think you're coming at it from the wrong angle.  This shouldn't be a story about anger or outrage.  It really is something to celebrate.  Although the Pentagon would never admit it, or characterize it in this way, what essentially happened was that the ACLU effectively shut down the office for military domestic intelligence.  Sure, there will be another, may already be.  But this isn't something that should be taken for granted.  The blackout, on all the other news sources, for that Reuters story is relevent here.  I honestly don't think Americans will stand for the types of datamining that are going on, whether public or privately conducted, if only they were informed about them.  Right now it seems there is about a four or five year lag between what is known to the online hounds and what is popularly suspected.  And 9/11 doesn't have the same awe-inspiring fear factor it once did.  As Tavis said last week, "Americans aren't stuck on stupid."  Let's hope he's right.

(Bolded: lol)

[Re: Congressional hearing on EPA v. Big Oil)

Also it's worth checking on Congress and reading some of what the oil industry had to say in testimony (? were they under oath?) yesterday.  Ed Markey is becoming a new hero of mine.  Also, unnamed officials from the EPA testified that the department sent findings to the White House designating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, but that these findings were "halted abrubtly".  17 states and the cities of New York and Baltimore launched a lawsuit today against the EPA over the failure to enforce the Clean Air Act.

My new hero is Rep. Edward Cleaver who asked the oil execs yesterday "Whatever happened to SHAME?"  Democracy Now has a good run down on the testimony with a couple of interesting facts, like that while no oil company invests more than 1.2% of profits into renewable energy research (and Exxonmobile pays less than half of 1%), all of them invest nearly 60% of their profits into buying more stocks.  They also go into a discussion of solid crude oil, called "tar sands", which has only become economically feasible to process since the Iraqi invasion.  Taking this form of oil into account actually puts Canada, who has 174 billion barrels of the stuff lying around, ahead of Saudi Arabia as the number one oil reserve in the world.  The problems are that it is environmentally devestating to extract and it burns more carbon emissions than liquid oil.  But this has not stopped the oil companies from investing more into this "new" energy than all of the other renewables combined.  The Vice President of Exxonmobile, who inspired the SHAME question, announced quite honestly and matter-of-factly that oil and coal were going to make up 80% of energy resources for the forseeable future so the question should be how people are going to have to learn to deal with that.