I’ve been asking who we’re attempting to save with this bailout idea, and I’m not liking the answers I’m getting.

Paul Krugman has some good insight into why Keynesian economics are the best way of attempting an economic recovery. I’m not disagreeing with him, I think he’s right on the money, so to speak, saying that pumping money into project work will circulate money in such a way that the economy is allowed to recover. That’s my two cent translation of the information regarding that particular school of thought, but it gets the basic point across.

What I don’t understand is banks. The primary economic purpose of banks is theoretically to lend money (and to a lesser extent to store it, though that really is just a way to the end goal of lending it). For many years after our last major economic disaster, banks weren’t allowed to double as investment firms, since saving and risking aren’t exactly two concepts that go hand in hand, no matter what some weaselly fuckers tell you. Retirement and pension funds have been dumping money into “safe” investments for years in an attempt to beat out our fiat currency system’s built in inflation — but at some point, the backing financial institutions moved to solely using a rating system which couldn’t identify so called “toxic” mortgages and other nasty non-earners. And so we watch everything take a nose dive.

But the banks simply aren’t loaning money fast enough to satisfy an economy which had made the transition from cash and carry to the so-called “ownership society.” We’ve been pumped so full of the get-rich-quick mentality along with the Futurama mentality that mortgaging your life for a house and a few cars used to actually make some sort of twisted sense.

I just don’t see where this is going. Most retirement funds are mostly gone, and it’s been shown pretty well that asshats like AIG are going to pay back the important people first. So, we’re going to dump incredible, unbelievable loads of money into paying off brokerage firms that bent us all over to accelerate the upward motion of wealth, moving money from retirement accounts and house payments to the hands of a small group of uber-elites. The same people who are going to profit from this are the same people who aren’t going to loan money to anyone. And banks are in a state of denial, assuming that *anyone* is going to pony up 1:1 assets for their garbage. What was deal about attempting to keep people in their current mortgages by working out repayment plans instead of renegotiating them down to a *sane* value?

If we’re going to have the Federal Government bail out individual accounts through the FDIC, why not simply fund the FDIC at a greater rate instead of starving it as we’ve racked up 20 bank failures before the third month of 2009 has finished? Companies are hoarding money, people are hoarding money, no one is going to *spend* said money. As near as I can figure the main beneficiaries of the current banking system are the very, very rich, and at the current FDIC cap of $250,000, we’d be more or less resetting the game. Incredibly rich people might lose out, but I don’t see everyone else doing so badly.

What about businesses? They need credit to function, don’t they?

I’m starting to think not. Most business start with investor funds and grow to pay them back, so we might have to clamp down on executive level pay, but maybe, just maybe, we might see more equality for workers.

Do I think this has a chance in hell of happening? Hell emphatically no. Everyone from the President on down to the dregs of Congress has their pecker firmly lodged in the great behemoth that is the banking system, and I don’t think they really want to see their money go down in flames. I mean, why would you slave away at a forty hour work week, when an MBA and puckering for a few buttcheeks will have you making “real” money that lets you get “real rich.”

I’m thinking that the only thing that keeps the American machine working is that the cogs of the machine have dreams of being at the helm. We promulgate the fiction that everyone can be rich, yet the reality is that most will spend their sweat equity making a very few incredibly wealthy. The dream of America used to be living without opression, now it’s attempting to use the spectre of Naked Capitalism to step on everyone else to get ahead. Remember, every time you get richer, someone else gets poorer.

I really have come to dislike bowling as sport or pastime. I can’t figure out why, but I seem to forget everything I’ve learned at the immediately previous bowling experience. And it’s things like that which make me inclined to believe that it’s a “sport” more of either dumb luck, raw repetition, or some curious combination of the two.

There’s also very little class ever associated with the game or those who champion it, much as the mullet-festooned NASCAR afficionados in their brightly colored baseball and feed caps, anxiously craning their necks to armchair jockey their favorite driver past the finish line.

I usually assume that a game is a sport when the players need to be in peak physical and mental condition to compete. There seems to parade an endless array of sociopaths and slightly out of shape senior citizens, along with their few but loyal youthful compatriots, anxiously awaiting heavy and dinged plastic to almost miraculously emerge from the possibly labrinthine underbelly of their establishment of choice.

I don’t pretend to understand it, but I suppose thst I’ll have to keep playing, at least as long as I have to. There’s only so much pointless frustration and endless second guessing I can deal with before I’m ready to throw in the towel. At least until *that* becomes a sport.

This saturday night I had the pleasure of going to see Gordon Bok, one of the finest living folk singer/songwriters, at the Connecticut Audubon Society location in Glastonbury. I’ve been a fan of his since his Bok/Muir/Trickett days, and haven’t gotten a chance to see him live since seeing him at The Sounding Board. And yes, his voice is just as awesome as it was back then, and his storytelling skills have improved with time.

Besides two children who were dragged by their parents, I was the youngest person in the room by at least ten or fifteen years, which was a little disconcerting. I did, however, get to sit in the third row and get some great shots. They’ll be up on flickr when I get the chance.

I hate Windows Mobile. It’s a horrible, horrible operating system. Phones and devices based on it are just as awful.

My Blackberry started exhibiting very odd behavior and disconnecting from the mobile network about every 30-45 seconds, so I flashed the firmware and shouted some incantations of the dockworker variety before giving up and pronouncing it dead. My job was nice enough to furnish me with a replacement, which unfortunately runs WinMo.

I think I’m going to send a map and flashlight to Dan Hesse so that Sprint can have some help finding and removing its head from its rectum. After some initial idiotic comments from Hesse regarding how Android “[isn’t] good enough to put the Sprint brand on…” (which interestingly makes me wonder what kind of dog food they do put their brand on), I’ve been cursing about the lack of Android on the Sprint network. I’ve used the T-Mobile G1, and that phone, despite any of the “it’s not an iPhone” mooks’ commenting, is a very nice phone with a nice open platform.

Can you hear me, Sprint? I don’t know why you’re dawdling, but you might as well bury WinMo. It’s a horrible, horrible platform coupled with awful phones. Also, ditch HTC if you can. I’d rather see Motorola or Nokia (or even … ugh… Samsung or LG) try their hand at an Android phone. You’re not making any friends by making us wait for a decent phone technology.

(As a sidebar, whoever came up with that lame rollerball on the Pearl and Curve should be taken out back and shot. It’s horrible. Well, not as horrible as the roller on the side of the 870x models, but still pretty horrible.)

I have packaged up haproxy for the newest released versions as of today for the Linksys NSLU2.

Stable: http://www.mediafire.com/file/bmhtdnzndu2/haproxy_1.3.15.8-1_armeb.ipk
RC: http://www.mediafire.com/file/dmdynmtdjdm/haproxy_1.3.16-rc1-1_armeb.ipk

The adaptation of my favorite graphic novel “Watchmen” is premiering tonight as a motion picture. I have mixed feelings about it, as the creator has disavowed all film adaptations of his work, and apparently Snyder changed the ending. You’d think after a travesty like V for Vendetta that directors would keep it in their pants and learn to respect good writing. Just because you can script Keanu Reeves saying “whoa!” for a few hours doesn’t mean you can out-write Alan Moore.

That being said, there’s always the chance that it’s going to be amazing. From the trailers, it does look as though it has all sorts of whizz-bang Hollywoody special effects, which should at least give me 2 hours 45 minutes worth of … something.

Keep in mind that when Hollywood does comics, they always have to try to “out do” the source material. And if you don’t believe that, remember the following highlights from days of yore while you’re waiting in line for the people who just heard of this thing a few days ago to purchase their tickets:

• Batman and Robin – Nipples on the batsuit and the Governator playing a 90-pound weaking scientist. Bob Kane must have soiled himself just being within a few miles of any theater playing it.
• Hulk – Just because you’re related to the legendary Stan Lee doesn’t mean you’re qualified to direct anything. It took a complete remake of this a few years later to take away the stink.
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – No better way to eviscerate your source material than to completely disregard everything about it. Character development, what’s that? Let’s make Sean Connery into a badass instead of a horrible opium addict! Yeah! That’ll be better than the original! Schmucks.
• Superman Returns – The original costume was going to be thrown out because someone found it, I quote, “too faggy.” And Superman was originally slated to have goons attack the bad guys in his ice palace. I couldn’t make this drek up if I tried. If that’s not enough, let Kevin Smith tear it up for you.

For anyone keeping track, I’ve been delicious-tagging any new story I come across which describes something awful going on today with the tag “bastards”. So, here is the link for that ever-growing list, if you’re ever bored and have nothing better to do than lose faith in humanity:

Another 30 billion ducats down the toilet. I’m not sure exactly what banks are supposed to do anymore, but I could swear it used to have something to do with loaning money to allow economic movement. Banks won’t lend money to anyone without sparkling credit, which means most people couldn’t get a loan.

Why the hell are we giving these weasels money? Their primary job is to lend money, and they can’t do that, instead favoring the primary job of funnelling money to CEOs and wealthy investors. I think AIG should probably have considered that it’s making a serious case for nationalization in that the company is proving a complete lack of responsibility in the fiscal responsibility department, while lecturing “irresponsible borrowers” about the same fiscal responsibility at the same time.

Well, we’re going down in flames. I hope you bastards had fun while it lasted.

(As a side note, I hate anything referring to “bailout” in a positive light. It’s not a positive thing. It’s slinging shit into an enormous chasm, and saying otherwise is wishful thinking of the highest degree. These people never cared about anything other than themselves, and nothing is going to change that. Talk about limits on investment banker salaries (for producing gornicht) and they’re up in arms, but everyone is hot on cutting autoworkers’ salaries… )

It seems to be the fashion for people to hem and haw about how the United States is spiralling downward towards (horrors!) socialism. I’m still trying to figure out what the big deal is.

Capitalism is, by definition, survival of the wealthiest. In its purest, most unadulterated form, capitalism involves certain entities becoming very, very successful, while supressing others who would aspire to become as successful. It’s a very selfish philosophy in that it stresses the survival of the individual over the survival of the society, much as most Western religions stress the survival of the self (notions of individual souls) over the Eastern philosophy empasizing the sum total of everything over the notion of the individual. So, if capitalism is such a selfish thing, why do Americans as a people seem to despise socialism, when its implementation would benefit the majority of its population?

“Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” – John Dickinson

As was pointed out to me a few months ago, the American dream wasn’t always the greedy acquisition of money up to and including disadvantaging other people to reach that goal; it was originally the right to live without fear of persecution, with the ability to persue one’s individual dreams and aspirations.

To clarify a bit further, I’m not advocating scrapping capitalism in favor of a socialist system. I’m merely pointing out that prostrating ourselves at the altar of pure, unbridled capitalism has a very predictable outcoming — the upward movement of money from a large pool of people with a decent amount of money to a very small group of people with far more money than they could ever spend. Rules and regulations in America have existed since the genesis of this nation to attempt to keep those with power from using that power to harm or disenfranchise those without power. “Conservatives” who would prefer to strip the Federal government of oversight power do so at an incredible harm to those who are not fortunate enough to be born into or exploit their way into money.

Lastly, I’d like to put to bed another notion about Capitalism and taxation which has been irritating me… Those on the top of the financial food chain seem to be very unhappy about shouldering a larger percentage of the tax burden than those on the lower end of the spectrum. There’s a very simple explaination to this, which brings everything very sharply into focus:

In capitalist societies, those who are rich make their money off the backs of poor people.

No one is worth 10 million dollars a year — they simply can’t produce goods and/or services to equal that number. A banker never really *produces* anything for anyone, instead taking the role of enabling production by loaning money to those who would actually produce goods and services. That is, if they are actually lending money to anyone. Something seems really wrong with banks having CEOs earning tens of millions of dollars or more. I think if they weren’t hating the idea of universal healthcare because they might be a few mansions short of keeping up with their snooty CEO friends paying for their share, they might not be such bad people. But back in reality, they’re just horrible people.

I just came back from an impromptu trip to Fort Lauderdale to attend the funeral service for my grandfather, Israel “Irving” Liss. He was born in a small town in Russia on December 20, 1917, and survived a pogram, emmigration to Israel, and eventually moved to Brooklyn. He was a professional soccer player, playing for the New York Americans after coming back from decorated service in the 101st Airborne paratroopers. And I did not know most of this a week ago.

For reasons which still aren’t apparent to me now, familial estrangement kept me from knowing my grandfather as well as I would have liked. I do remember his dry humor, his penchant for anything vintage or collectable, and his kindness to me, no matter what the circumstances. I’m happy to have reconnected with my uncle and cousins… But I think I’d be foolish not to carry a lesson away from all of this: never take your family for granted, you only get one of them, and it’s surprising the things you wished you knew about them until it’s too late.

*Update: I put an entire set of photos online of this, and am posting more as I receive them — *