Steve's Live From Las Vegas

Flush from my success in being at least close to the first to predict that Reid would beat Angle in the 2010 Senatorial race, I’m now going to be the second that I know of to call this year’s race for the Presidency. The first I’ve seen is the Mesquite Local News, although you may have to dig a bit on their website to find it. (If it helps they published their predictions on January 5th 2012.)

I’m calling the election the same way those folks did: Barak Obama will get his second term. Can’t be, you say? He’s the most hated fake President in history, you say? I say, in quoting Caesar, that “a man willingly believes what he wishes.” Before you turn that against me, I don’t particularly approve of Obama either. That health care thing is sort of a ridiculous mess at best, and frankly a lot of Obama’s base is not happy with how he’s been doing business. But my prediction stands, and here’s why.

The economy is improving. Even in Nevada things are looking better than they were last year. All over the country new business are opening, taking advantage of cheap commercial real estate and depressed prices on supplies. New business means new jobs. New jobs means happier people. Happier people means the incumbent gets re-elected. But, hey, maybe that’s not enough. I understand that there are people who are philosophically opposed to Obama’s policies on Defense, Health Care, and being a black guy. Okay, I get it, but the economy isn’t the big reason why he’s going to get re-elected. That is

THE REPUBLICAN FIELD OF CANDIDATES.

I’d like to think that they were kidding me. I mean, you can’t really expect to elect somebody by running a circus like that? The only seemingly sane guy in the field is Romney, who might even make a decent President, but there are a lot of conservative Catholics and Fundamentalists who will never vote for him just because of their prejudice against his religion. They’re trying on Rick Santorum because they’re so desperate for a candidate who isn’t Romney. Honestly, I hold LDS, Catholicism, and Fundamentalism in the exact same regard. I don’t tell them what to believe, and I ask the same in return. I almost always get it, by the way, which is why I truly don’t care about the President’s religion. Adams and Jefferson were Unitarians, and how’s that make you feel? Wine and Cheese Parties in the White House, anyone? My point being that the Republicans are too busy trying to defend a group of factions within their own party to present any sort of candidate with the wherewithal and energy to overcome the benefits of incumbency. So, Barak Obama gets a second term.

I said Obama’s base isn’t all that happy with him. (You could watch Bill Maher’s talk show for evidence of that.) But they’ll never vote for any of the Republican field. What they’ll do is hold their noses and vote for him again, because really, Rick Santorum?

There you go. Once more into the breach!

I know, this movie was so last year. So it was, but I never went to see it. Neither did a lot of people. I always suspected, though, that it was a good one, if only because Johnny Depp was voicing the lead. Well now it’s on cable, which is where I caught it last evening. So, complete with SPOILERS for those who haven’t seen it, here’s what may be the longest movie review I’ve ever written. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. I’m sure there’s a DVD/Blue Ray combo pack out. They ought to throw in a CD soundtrack and score a perfect hat trick, don’t you think?

Rango manages to parody every western movie I’ve ever seen, including ones that were parodies in the first place. Then it also throws in elements of Star Wars and other things. I mean the real first Star Wars, the one where we meet Luke and the gang. Every western character you’ve ever seen is represented. Really. And I learned that the Spirit of the West is Clint Eastwood in a golf cart. Really. All of the characters are animals. There’s the obligatory Indian, of course. He’s a Crow. It was all damn funny to me. My evil home town, good old Las Vegas, has a cameo as, well, an evil town. Watch it and see.

While I was watching I wondered who was voicing all those characters. (Timothy Olyphant voices The Spirit of the West, even though it looks just like Clint.) To find out I visited one of my frequent stops on the web, The IMDB. (That’s Internet Movie DataBase if you insist.) Anyhow, a feature of the IMDB is to list “errors” made in a film. In this case the “errors” were virtually all comedic devices, which seems to indicate that whomever wrote the review either has no knowledge of comedy, no sense of humor, or is simply a pinhead. Maybe all three for all I know. I mention this because if you are a fan of comedy and how it’s put together you probably will enjoy reading the “errors” on the IMDB. Really.

It’s known who runs the world. If you’d like to see the names, click here! If you click that link, you’ll be taken to an article on NPR about a study in 2007 that revealed, for the first time, the closely interconnected group of 147 (it’s now down to 146 since Lehman Brothers folded) that controls about 40 percent of the world’s wealth. They list the names of the corporations, most of which are not especially surprising. Go ahead, you still have time to click and see. The link opens a new window, anyway.

More interesting than the existence of these companies is the companies’ motivation for cooperation. “Common business interests” is the reason cited. And otherwise, of course, Deutsch  Bank and Bank of America compete fiercely. The point of the study is that they all closely interconnected, with many of the companies represented on the boards of others of the group. Again, this cooperative competition is engaged in because they, and their shareholders, find such cooperation to be good business. It’s nothing like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” would have us believe. Besides being cooked up by the Tsar’s secret service, that entire publication is nothing more than an excuse for racist assholes to stay that way. No, it isn’t religion (as most people understand it, anyway) or some secret society (if you think Freemasons are running the world, you really don’t know anything about Freemasons) motivating the cooperation. It is what I have before called the True Religion of America — Business!

The people in those corporations are not bad, at least not because they’re in those corporations. The percentage of cheats, liars and thieves is probably about the same amongst those 146 companies as it is among Boy Scouts. Also, their employees come from all over the world. In terms of religion there are no doubt Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, Athiests, Jains, Wiccans and people who worship cheese working inside these companies. But each company really worships just one thing: commerce. If things make it easier to do business, things are good. If things interfere, not so good. It’s just Capitalism, which as an economic theory doesn’t need any explanation. Capitalism is run by a bunch of people just trying to do well buying, selling, or facilitating buying and selling. That’s all it is. Which means that a bunch of people are in an inadvertent cabal that controls much of what happens in International Commerce.

Good or bad? Depends, doesn’t it?  An evil conspiracy? ‘Fraid not. The good thing is that the little knot of companies that so influence everything that happens is now out in the open. Right where we can keep an eye on ‘em!

I can’t knock Steve Job’s influence on modern culture. The man was a consummate genius in figuring out what would make high-tech attractive to consumers, then putting together the package and marketing it with a level of skill that makes me wonder if some MBA school shouldn’t name a building after him. Obviously Mr. Jobs knew what he was doing, and people are now giving him credit for a wide range of innovation in modern computing and communications. Too bad he doesn’t deserve it.

That’s right, he doesn’t deserve much credit for innovation in technology at all. In packaging and marketing, absolutely, in persuading people to use products they’d never have otherwise considered, yes and in spades! But as for new technology, not so much. Take, for example, the mouse and graphical interface that many Apple users will insist was an Apple Computers invention. Uh, no. Steve Jobs was 56 years old when he died in 2011. Just for grins, let’s calculate how old Mr. Jobs was in 1964. That’s 2011 minus 1964, which is 47 years ago. His age, 56, less the 47 intervening years, leaves Steve Jobs at 9 years old in 1964. Keep that in mind as you read the next paragraph.

In 1964 an engineer at Xerox named Douglas Engelbart made up the first computer mouse. In 1968 he gave a public demonstration using a mouse, windows, and hyperlinks. (Jobs was 11 at that time.) His device received a patent in 1970, US Patent No. 3,541,541. By that time Mr. Jobs was 15 years old. As of 1970 Xerox Corporation, Engelbart’s employer didn’t see those devices fitting into their future business plans, so they released the mouse and GUI into the public domain. I remember the first time I was sympathetic with Microsoft Corporation as being the time Apple sued Microsoft for patent infringement over Microsoft Windows™. Notice I didn’t say merely “windows” because a number of GUIs over the years have called themselves “windows”. That suit was without merit, and the courts agreed. To this day some Apple users are indignant that this “travesty of justice” was allowed to stand. Hey, that’s one thing Microsoft definitely did not steal in those days, because you can’t steal something that’s in the public domain. I have no doubt that the first Macintosh computer was a slick and useful tool that attracted a lot of well deserved attention, but it was not innovative in a technical sense, only in a marketing sense. Microsoft, being purely geek driven at that point, almost lost everything and had to cobble together Microsoft Windows out of MS-DOS and chewing gum. It took them a while to catch up.

But catch up they did. By the mid 1990s, in a strictly technical sense, Microsoft’s software ran better and faster than Apple, but nobody who loved Apple would believe it because the marketing genius of Steve Jobs had convinced them that what they had was magical at the least. In fact, Microsoft had a “Pre-emptive multitasking” operating system, developed in tandem with IBM, available years before OS-X for the Mac was available. Even the justly maligned Windows 95 had some pre-emptive multitasking capabilities. The Mac OS all that time was still using the old “co-operative multitasking” model that also was used in, for instance, Windows 3.1. If a program froze, the entire computer froze, needing a restart to come back to life. That’s no longer true with any computer, but it became untrue with Microsoft and IBM computers years before it was untrue with Apple systems. Windows NT, which IBM delivered in a slightly different form as OS2, had the same capability you expect from any computer today, that of stopping the stalled program without affecting anything else running at the time. It had that ability in the mid 1990s. Apple OS X came out, when, 1999, or was it 2000? Apple uses technology very well, but it does not innovate.

In other areas, Apple has also adopted and adapted, but never developed new technology. Several years before the first I-Pod, which had a hard disk inside to hold the music, you could buy an MP3 player that used flash memory in place of a disc. Flash memory has a number of advantages in a portable device, chief among them being that jostling does not cause any damage, or even skipping, when you’re listening to an audio file. (Same is true for video, but the first IPod was just a music player.) It took Apple less than a year to release an IPod using flash memory instead of hard discs, by which time the Apple faithful were convinced once again that Jobs had been the genius to think of doing such a thing. As usual, he was not, but the packaging and presentation of the IPod was, and is, spectacular.

The IPad was not the first tablet computer ever produced. Toshiba, HP, Microsoft and others had struggled to get one accepted for quite a few years, actually. Microsoft has had software that works well with touch screens for a long time, now. Those Micros point of sale terminals you see all over the place are running a Microsoft OS, in fact. But the genius that was Steve Jobs knew how to put together a tablet in a way, and market it in a way, that people would queue up for hours or days ahead of the release date to get one. Even though an IPad is censored (by design) in that certain types of websites and certain content, particularly competitor’s software, cannot be run, the IPad remains the most successful and popular tablet computer available today. Oddly, I can run Apple software on my Windows OS, but Jobs wasn’t one to return courtesies, apparently. My Samsung with Android runs Flash, too. And I can download anything I can get to, whether it’s deemed acceptable by Apple or not. Those facts, though, do not deter the faithful from buying the latest thing from the best adapter of technology the world has seen in a very long time if not ever: Apple Corporation.

Okay, then. I’m not denigrating Steve Jobs or what he did for our society. I do want to go on the record as correcting for the record some of the misconceptions that are the natural byproduct of such genius-level marketing as Steve Jobs produced. In sum: Apple has never been a cutting-edge technology company. They have been a company that is unequaled in the ability to see how not quite brand new technology could best be applied to day-to-day life, and quite ingenious in marketing their products. Without Jobs, maybe the censorship will disappear. I hope so. As I writer I oppose censorship in any form, even if it comes from a genius like Jobs. On the other hand, I’m not sure that anyone will ever equal Jobs’ ability to see what the next big thing is before it even exists. Based upon that analysis, I’m glad I don’t directly own any Apple stock, if you get my drift. Otherwise, I might have to trade it in on some Google!

Chances are, fellow Americans, that you’d say “Yes, if America were threatened, I’d lay down my life for my country.” Interesting, isn’t it, how almost every American would agree with that statement. Apparently life is cheap, though, because a whole lot of Americans are saying, and loudly, that they are unwilling to pay any taxes to support their country. Kind of begs the question, for me, of just what it is you’re willing to die for, but not pay for? The flag? Cheap and available all over. The National Anthem? Dubious musically, and most people don’t even know the first verse correctly, much less the rest of the song. The natural beauty of our great land? Well, it’s there to be seen if you’d care to take the trip. The rest of America is all paid for by taxes.

If you like driving on an Interstate, you’re taking advantage of a socialist project. If someone in your family is getting Social Security payments, your family is on the receiving end of socialist largess. If you’ve ever been in the military, you’ve experienced a society run along socialist principles. Ironically, one guy who is about as far from being a socialist as you can get is Barak Obama, but lots of people call him a socialist. Making people buy insurance from private companies isn’t socialism. It may not be good, but it isn’t socialist. Funny how many people get that just plain wrong, isn’t it?

Moving on, if you like visiting places like Yellowstone, or Yosemite, or Everglades, or my favorite The Grand Canyon, you should know that the people who take care of those places and keep you safe during your visit are all living off of government salaries. Commercial flight in America is frustrating at times, but it is also ridiculously safe. That’s because a whole lot of people who are paid from tax money work hard day and night to keep it that way. And so far I haven’t mentioned Medicare, 100% tax paid, or Medicaid.

I started by mentioning Interstate Highways, and I also mentioned air travel, but virtually all of the vast and effective transportation system we use and enjoy is paid for by taxes. I read of proposals to privatize various aspects of transportation, and sometimes that happens, for a few years, or maybe a couple of decades at most. Transportation throughout history has been subsidized. The Romans, poster children for Lassiz-faire capitalism, paid for transportation infrastructure using taxes. It’s just something that has to be done.

So, what then? We need jobs, not history lessons, right?

So this: the wonderful transportation infrastructure of our country is crumbling. Remember that bridge in Minneapolis? It collapsed due to corrosion. Almost all of our bridges are corroded. And our roadways need repaved, or at least a lot of them do. And our train system is a joke compared to most of the world. Not just for passengers, either. Vast amounts of cargo travelling our rails are lost every year due to deteriorating roadbeds and rails. We need streets, traffic control devices, stadiums, parks, you name it, but they are all disintegrating due to age.

The “Greatest Generation” who fought WWII sacrificed for their country both ways: a lot of them died for America, and they all paid taxes to build a better world. The marginal rates were up to 89% in the fifties! 89%! But most people paid about 13%, because the tax was progressive: the more you made, the higher percentage you paid. Nobody screamed about “class warfare.” Everybody paid up. And they built a world that has been so good to their descendants that many of us don’t even know how good we have it, nor do we have any idea what the word “sacrifice” really means.

If we were willing to sacrifice a bit beyond paying lip service to glorious death in defense of America, we could both pay down the National Debt and repair all of that infrastructure. We’d just need to be willing to pay for the country we claim to love.

To me, the choices presented by the conservative wing of American politics just now amount to tearing apart the very things that make America a great nation. True, I’d like to get things as cheaply as possible, but in order for me to love my country, I need to have a country to love. To have a great country there have to be sacrifices made by the citizens. Real ones, not promises we’re unlikely ever to have to fulfill. You know, sacrifices like enacting and paying taxes like the Greatest Generation.

Elvis, schmelvis! There are more of us Boomers (more than fifty million, actually) than there were Elvis fans back in the day. Most of my generation has no doubt that they know exactly what’s wrong with the world, and furthermore, they know just what needs to be done to set things straight. You hear them at Tea Party rallies, on talk shows left and right, and in casual conversation. And of course they know these things because they looked in the one place that never fails to find their answers: within. Boy, oh boy, in the sixties and seventies there were gurus crawling out of the woodwork telling people that “the answer lies within.” Of course, they never mentioned that the question was something like “where can I find thirty feet of small intestines?”

I once got to spend some time talking to a scientist who had worked at the National Institutes of Health studying perception. In particular he gave a talk on synesthesia, which is when certain letters always have certain colors when they’re looked at (by people with synesthesia). Kind of a cool condition, really. But I got to ask him about what happens when a person perceives, say, a table. The gurus would have had us believe that a “table” was a different experience for each of us. But not according to actual empirical research. When any sighted person, no matter how otherwise twisted or mentally ill, receives the input from his eyes that represents a table, the exact thing happens at the receptor levels of his brain. That is, there is an object we call a “table”, and it is what it is and that’s all there is to it.

Or, put it another way, all that “answer lies within” stuff was a bunch of hooey.

An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed since college is the use of the word “we” or the phrase “the people.” I always want to ask: “who the heck are ‘we’” and then further, “what people?” Seriously, folks, in a word invented by the late Kurt Vonnegut, most of these “we”s and “the people”s are granfaloons. That is, associations that sound legitimate, but in fact have no basis in reality. You know, like most boomer mind games. Currently a popular mind game is to demonize “politicians”. According to Merriam-Webster, the actual definition of “politician” is

I’ve been remiss. Saw this movie in Burbank last Friday evening and failed to review it. So, here it is.

This is a pretty decent picture. The alien is ugly, though.

I’m happy to report that the above is true, at least to the extent that a fictional character is alive. If you like the guy, you’ll like the movie. If you don’t, skip it. If you do, take heart that the door is open for as many sequels as Johnny Depp can stand to do. Barbarosa is back, and Sparrow’s First Mate. There’s the dramatic setup: hero, sidekick, thorn in the hero’s side, and a new obstacle to be overcome each showing. Simple, but effective. Disney’s Official Site

My generation seems to be leading the charge, as we have for decades now, against government. Not that any higher percentage of us want to join the government, mind you, but everybody in our introspective club has the answer to almost everything. Fortunately, in my case, that is entirely correct, right?

The Great Seal of the United States

One thing that is true is that, after the first grading period, I didn’t have to hand in my homework in what was then called Civics class. Assistant coach Mr. Clausing let those who got an A on each test do their homework unsupervised. Good for him (less to grade), good for me (I’d never been an A student prior to senior year.) Since then I’ve taught U.S. Government to college students in Nevada, where you can’t graduate without passing the course. (Nevada government too, but believe me, that’s another story.) What I’m saying is that, in terms of how the United States Government is constituted, I actually do sort of know what I’m talking about. I’m no constitutional lawyer, but I do know some things, and of those things, here are a few.

First, we are constitutionally a republic. So we’re all republicans, so long as you don’t capitalize that ‘r’. The word republic is straight Latin, and originally was res publica, or public matter. That little word ‘res’ is still used by lawyers to mean “the matter.” Those crazy Romans, after they overthrew Etruscan rule, set up a “public” government for which they elected Senators. You can read thousands of pages of how they screwed up and wound up with an Imperium instead, but you may not need to. The people who wrote our constitution read it all, and they believed that they could put some checks in that would, they hoped, avoid the fate of the Roman Republic for the American one. That’s why we elect the Commander in Chief (CIC) of the armed forces, in fact. In the Roman Republic, loyalty to one general or another caused increasing strife and civil wars. Loyalty to J. C. Caesar was what got him named Dictator for Life, and of course what also ultimately got him killed and his adopted son, after more civil war, named the very first Roman Emperor. Now, you can hate the Prez, but if you’re in the military and the CIC says “jump” the only proper response is to say “How high, sir?” We’ve elected a few generals to the Presidency later in life, but none of them have been remarkable, other than Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. That you’ve gotta love.

Another check on the problems Rome faced was separating the government into three branches. The Judicial is appointed for life and paid well, which is why you can get a supposed ideologue who changes stripes once on the bench. I think that the only way to get removed from the Supreme Court is for the other justices to impeach you, so that’s never happened. Federal judges, of course, make laws all the time through our system of English Common Law. Which brings up something about which many seem to be confused.

I read complaints about activist judges all the time. “They use the bench to make law!” is the shout. Duh. Since before William the Conqueror that’s exactly what judges have been doing. The legislature, or sometimes the king, may pass a statue, but it’s always, since the beginning of time so far as our Constitution is concerned, been up to the courts to interpret what that statute means. Even if the law is the Constitution itself, it is subject to judicial interpretation. Or, put simply, judges make law because that’s their job. Heck, juries try accused criminals, judges just preside over the action. The big thing judges do is interpret law, and that can, as anyone can see, cause a lot of controversy.

The executive power is in the President and whomever he hires to help him out. At the top are Secretaries of this that and the other thing, but in reality every pencil-pusher working for the Federal Government theoretically reports, ultimately, to the President. Just like his generals and admirals. I believe that mostly, when people complain about ‘the government’, they are actually complaining about the President’s employees, one way or another.

Then there’s Congress. A Representative is only there for two years at a time, so those guys are always campaigning. They get to initiate any spending bills, which is why the big show right now is in the House. A Representative is there to handle the interests of a certain number of citizens, his or her constituents. One of the best things your Representative can do for you is to help you sort through problems caused by the Executive bureaucracy. Trust me, when they’re not posturing for the cameras or trying to raise campaign funds, those folks like nothing better than helping people get what they’re after out of their government. And these people have what we in Vegas call “Juice.” That is, they know guys who know guys, you got that? These people come closest to what most people think of as “doing a congressperson’s job.” That’s why the framers of the Constitution put them there, in fact.

Over in the Senate, they have six years per term. Long enough to really hack people off in the first three years and still look good come election time. Senators represent States, not constituents, even though they are popularly elected. And if Representatives have Juice, a Senator has a whole Orchard! All Senators use their considerable influence to further their interests. A good Senator aligns his interests with those of his State. That “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska may seem like an odd thing, but I don’t imagine that the people who would have been using the bridge thought so. A bad Senator uses his influence to further his own interests. Note that when a Senator thinks of his State first, it is these days frequently derided as “Pork.” But, really that’s what a Senator’s job is. What else would you have them do? Somebody has to get the roads repaired, hospitals built, parks kept safe and all that other stuff that government does apparently for free. (It isn’t free, but that’s for another time.)

All together then, we have a Judicial branch of government that interprets laws. Laws are either traditional or enacted by a divided-by-design Congress where Representatives spend their time grandstanding for the folks back home and Senators engage themselves in getting goodies for their States, and an Executive branch including the military which is the part of government that actually does things (or not, if you’re cynical.) If I wanted to design a system whereby a significant portion of the population was going to be sore about what government is doing at any given moment, I doubt if I could improve on what we’ve got.

The Side of The Great Seal that Conspiracy Theorists Like Best

But please, friends and critics, when you do launch into a great debate on the Issues Of The Day, keep in mind that our government is functioning pretty much as designed. Frustrating, ain’t it?

Come to the garage sale to benefit Las Vegas Basset Rescue!

Visit the LVBR Site