No One Stands Up Against Stupidity

Sydney "goes dark" to draw attention to global warming. Read the story - the whole idiotic thing. If you don't feel the rage rising in you, clustering in a little knot of fury between your sholders, then you need a serious, urgent cynicism booster. (For a good one, check out Audiobuffer channeling Gordon Gekko).

First, a quick review of how ludicrous this is. The goal is to promote a campaign to have people turn out lights, computer monitors, etc. when not in use. The Sydney gov't claims it "could" cut Sydney's electricity use by 5% annually. Anyone familiar with gov't studies knows that number is probably greatly inflated. Besides, do people really respond to government ad campaigns? How much have we spent on the anti-weed ads?

Suppose it does cut Sydney's electricity use by that amount. Will it matter? Of course not - carbon is a global concern and China looks like it increases its usage by that amount every few minutes.

But there's a more fundamental problem. Opposition to global warming centers on stupid little tricks like this that cut down energy use - the idea being that the way to address global warming is to oppose energy use. That's a position guaranteed to fail. In most of the world, increased energy use is directly correlated to increased happiness. People getting TVs who didn't have them; people getting air conditioners who didn't have them; people farming with tractors instead of mules. Etc etc. That's where carbon's coming from, going forward; and how on earth do people think they're going to get in the way of the increasing spread of basic modern comforts?

The way we're going to solve global warming isn't by positioning ourselves against the things that make people happy. It's by doing what we've done best for the last millenium - inventing our way out of the problem. Geoengineering, baby. Check it out.

Shocked, Shocked

Is this really such a surprise?

I Stand Corrected

You've certainly proven your point about T.V. in general being more pornographic, almost across-the-board, than it was in the past, Matt. Re-reading my post, and yours, I can't imagine what I was thinking. Maybe it was a perverse version of "remember the good old days."

I especially like the Monica quote. You could have pulled up the bit about the cigar, though. Even pornier.

The big news item today is Congress' Iraq supplemental bill that sets a date certain, though it should be the rush to toss Gonzales overboard. Despite all of his very many flaws, Bush is right when he calls the House's measure a bit of political theatre. Everyone involved knows that no similar bill will pass the Senate; and even in that extremely unlikely event it would be vetoed. Faced with the prospect of having the Army run out of money for operations, or passing the bill Bush asked for in the first place, the Democrats, neurotic about being Swift-Boated again, will cave and provide the money.

On the other hand, Gonzales is legitimately interesting news for two reasons. One, it shows that an endorsement by Bush means nothing at all. The Republicans at every level of the party have abandoned him despite a relatively strong show of support from Bush. Two, it illustrates the overall management sloppiness of this administration, which I think is, in the end, even more harmful to the country than their actual ideology. Bush has infected the career bureaucrats with whom he came to Washington with his own incompetence and passivity. As a result, even routine political punishment morphs into a legitimate scandal. It's unreal. We've been watching the federal government slowly fall apart since, if you want to put a specific date on it, Jay Garner showed up in Iraq and the infighting between Defense and State got brutal. By the time Katrina made it obvious to the average American, the disfunction of the administration was already horrifyingly clear in Washington.

To bring it back to my first post - that's why people will gravitate away from Senators in the upcoming presidential election. They're desperate not for someone to give good speeches but for someone to run the government. I've heard comparisons to Dukakis' failed campaign on that issue; but Dukakis was running after 8 years of government that was, compared to this administration, blissfully well-run. I think the Democrats need to field one of their many excellent Governors if they want to have a chance.

Restrained T.V.?

The statement that T.V. is less pornographic depends on which channel you're watching. Clearly you're not talking about Jerry Springer, The Howard Stern Show, Southpark. Oh, what about that Monica Lewinsky episode, covered in oh so creepy detail by the likes of CNN:

"According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth...He stimulated me manually in the genital area."
-Kenn Starr Report, 1995

It's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

Clearly these images, and some in the above listed shows are at least as "pornographic" as a Playboy centerfold, or what you get in your hotel room for $9.99. The dividing line is that many of the shows will present their pornographic moments outside a larger context of sex - a breast here, a matter of factly uttered "vagina" there. Or, even more cleverly, networks leave it up to the imagination by merely providing a scenario and simulating it. You figure out the rest. Besides, the Spice Network, Hot Network and others are all television, but maybe you don't have the Dish Network?

Record $$ on Wall Street

Morgan Stanley's report steals the thunder from Merrill and its Street bed buddies for a short time and I can't help but wonder what nefarious schemes have contributed to this latest round of plus-sized profits. The pattern of obscene profits followed by equally obscene tales of corporate abuse is well documented thus far. Kellogg Brown & Root and the war contractors, Exxon and the oil oligopoly, Enron and the energy bandits - the list goes on. Behind every season of windfall profits lay the machinations of the smart (or just plain greedy) money.

The latest in this pitiful white collar collusion: Countrywide and its sub-prime pals. I saw first hand the reckless abandon with which stated income loans (where American business sensibility takes a back seat to those who are markedly dishonest with their credit) were lobbed to unqualified investors. After all, if brokers are motivated by commission and are not held accountable for structuring bad deals, then why care if you put some poor sucker in the whole with a no-money down, negative amortization loan? The banks, after all, are the ones approving the deals.

Watch as the M&A money that bloated the big investment houses this year turns out to be in bad faith as deals go sour over the course of the next year or two.