Matters of Faith

    It's interesting that no matter what jail you happen to be the guest of  there is one book they have to provide to you upon request.  They have to give you a Bible.  You could write an entire sociological volume on the ridiculous assumptions and aspirational hopes that go into that but I won't.  Let's just say, I've read the Bible a few times, mainly because I like to read.  I do prefer the wonderful and humbling prose of the King James.  Maybe I believe the word of God should take some intellectual effort to access.  That would be an intellectual conceit.  Conceit is a no-no.  That's pretty hard to miss if you read the thing but I like the King James.
    The Word of God and the Voice of God.  It has been said that at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in, 1918, when the cannons went silent in France that the silence of peace was the last time the Voice of God was heard upon the earth.  It's a beautiful thought that borders on the profound but it's not entirely true.  I believe the Lord and the Devil speak to all of us,  from time to time,  in just about equal measure. It's up to each of us to know who happens to be in our ear.  It's a difficult test especially since there is such shame in failing and, of course, our immortal soul is at stake.
    If I imagined the Voice of God, He would say just eight words: " What is it you don't understand about faith."  He has said that to me. So, I got that goin for me.
    The primary concern seems to be the disposition of our immortal soul.  It's a two-step sales process.  You've got to sell good works as a benefit to your fellow man.  That can be a hard sell to people who have the voice of the Devil in their ear.  According to evangelicals I've witnessed, you have to add in the threat of eternal damnation to close the deal.  They seem to think much less of people, God's creation, than God does. That's kind of a bleak outlook.  I like people.  Even the ones who hand me Bibles for no other reason than they have to.
    Here's the Good News.  It's pretty simple and therefore obvious,  which means it'll take a while to sink in.  If you think back to what things were like on the day before you were born you know what things will be like after you die.  There is no torture or other discomfort.  Your sins will only exist in the minds of those who have known you but so only will your virtues.  Perhaps the images of rejoining some sort of collective consciousness without the concept of self are correct but how would you know?  Why would you care?  Maybe that absence of caring is the whole point.  Maybe believing there is a point of some sort is the mistake; the conceit.
    I think our cares should be focused on the here and now.  I do believe virtue is it's own and only reward. The greatest reward is still a goal , even if it's the only goal, devoutly to be wished. That's a hard sell.
    Here endeth today's lesson.

https://bit.ly/JimRetzerBook

You're Getting Warmer.

    There has to be some clever way for a liberal such as myself to say I think Global Warming is bunk.  I know!  Ah bullshit!
    As a college student I got interested in semantics and statistics. I think most of what I've seen in support of the idea of climate change violates the principles of one or both of those subjects.
    Words mean things. The use of certain words in certain ways imply things. These guys keep saying significant this and significant that. I don't think that word means what they think it means. In a lot of these instances I think the word has been substituted for "trivial".
    NOAA and NASA have combined to demonstrate a "significant" rise in ocean levels over the last 1,000 years using satellite data. They do not refer to the obvious question of where they might have gotten satellite or any data a thousand years ago. They create a graph showing 3 inches on the depth side and 20 years on the time side. That shows a less than 1 inch "rise" over about a 20 year period.  The red line they graph over that period certainly does look dramatic, maybe even significant. They then extrapolate dire predictions for the next 50 years. Here's the hook. If their graph were constructed with a time frame of 50 years their red line would become nearly flat. They have semantically and statistically mixed apples and oranges and come up with a lemon. They may be right but you couldn't prove it with any of the data they presented.  Judging by their dire, straight faces they don't seem to be aware of their mistake.  They are sooo serious. They also seem to have not considered the thousands of archeological sites, docks, quays, seawalls that show no increase in sea levels.  I don't think they are deliberately misleading.  I think they have wandered outside their disciplines and reached unwarranted conclusions.  They may be victims of a follow the herd and publish or die mentality. Either way, they do seem to be trapped in an academic echo chamber. That's pretty common.
    Another thing: These various studies seem to build on previous studies based on maybe not faulty data but faulty conclusions from misinterpreted data.  Again: They may be right but you couldn't prove it with the data they present.
     That brings me to fossil fuels. The idea of the "carbon footprint" may be one of the dumbest things I ever heard. Yeah, put a matching sweater on your dog and kid.  However, it does have the effect of causing people to reduce their use of,  mostly, petroleum.  Economically that's essential.  I don't care what your bullshit reasons are; just keep it up.
    Here's one of the obviously ridiculous predictions about burning fossil fuels: Acid rain.  I live in Pittsburgh. For nearly a century it was a leading,  fossil fuel hazmat site. There has always been a prevailing westerly wind. If the dire predictions had any basis in reality there would be a wasteland just to the east extending to Three Mile Island and the average age of mortality in that wasteland would be 25.
    So, this all sounds like anecdotal data but in reality, it's empirical data that has been ignored. That is a distinction with a difference.
    I could be wrong but so far these guys haven't proved it.  Put another lump of coal on the fire Darlin. The dog and the kid have a sweater but you didn't knit one for me.

Politically Funny. Not Funny, Ha Ha.

    There was more going on in the '70s than people seem to have noticed.  Sure, the Boomers were encountering that "force of a million new ideas"  Chicago sang about  but a lot of their parents had already encountered that force.  A lot of their parents were the children of New Dealers.  Their parents had also been the beneficiaries of government subsidized higher education.  Can you say, "GI Bill?"
    I never liked Bernie Sanders. The guy couldn't sell sno-cones in Hell.  He proposed free higher education and could never defend against those who claimed it was too expensive and couldn't be done.
    It obviously isn't too expensive, it can be done, we have done it in the past and it produced a Golden Age.  If he didn't know that or couldn't express that why did he bother to bring it up?
    That's another question.  Why do we allow the sixties and seventies to be stigmatized as an era of sex, drugs and rock n roll?  Why do we allow a Golden Age of progress and creativity that underpins the world we now live in to be belittled?   You could make the case  ( But I won't)  that 1955 thru 1980 was a new Quattrocento.  Sure, I cut my hair.  I always looked like an unmade bed but I damned sure didn't get dumber.
    We did not expand or extend any rights to anyone who didn't have those rights to begin with.  We did limit people's ability to deny those rights as a matter of course.  We didn't deny  people's rights to injure or discriminate because they never had the right to do those things to begin with.  We just made them behave.  A lot of them sure didn't seem to like that much but people had been asking politely for decades.
    We took lowercase "a",  affirmative action thru the government to bring minorities, women and the poor into the mainstream of society.  Sure it was egalitarian and altruistic and all that but it was more importantly the right thing to do for all of our welfare, wealth and progress.  It's good to be on the side of the Angels but it's not a bad idea to be on our own side.  You just have to look at the economic resurgence of the southeast to realize the benefit of bringing 50% of the population into the economic mainstream.  You can make the case the northeast could do a better job.
    In nature, every action has an opposite but equal reaction.  In human nature, particularly politics, every action seems to have a totally disproportionate reaction.  Check out Shakespeare, Dickens or Tuchman.  There was a wave of racism, misogyny and contempt for the the poor that was deliberately but subtly appealed to by Reagan.  College kids, being college kids, overreacted to the political right and called for political correctness as though it weren't obvious racism, misogyny and classism were wrong and it needed pointed out. I repeat; college kids.
    I looked up political correctness so I wouldn't seem too dumb in this essay.  There's way too much reading that'll make you fidget out of boredom.  It turns out there is no "PC" movement.  Although, I guess if you need a term to use to cryptically appeal to racism, misogyny, classism and the like it's as good as any. There's no body of articles extolling the virtues of PC.   There is a plethora of  "scholarly" articles coming from the right employing amazingly twisted formulae to criticize resistance to bigotry, misogyny, classism.  Apparently,  if you want to defend those things as American Values you need a lot of verbiage and a simple, shorthand phrase. You need a handy enemy. Those scruffy college kids and those pointy head intellectuals in their "Ivory Towers" will do fine.  Especially,  if those "pointy head intellectuals" are holdovers from all that sex, drugs and rock n roll.  They, they must be commies!  And, and they're teaching our kids to be commies!
I'm tellin ya friend we got big trouble and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for P C!
    Good Lord!    All you really need is a funny definition of the word "correct".  Not funny Ha Ha and this bunch of Harold Hills isn't going to have the truth revealed to them in the final reel.  In politics, epiphanies are in short supply.

Millions and Real Stars.

    The average person is so nice it's hard to express and I can prove it.  Honest!
    A few weeks ago a regional lottery jackpot rolled over to about 560 million.  That's half a billion dollars.  Let's put that in a little perspective.  Mitt Romney is worth a quarter billion dollars. That means for a dollar you could be twice as wealthy as Romney. That kinda makes him look like he went about it the hard way.  All that "vulture capitalism" stuff does look like work.
    Every time the jackpots get high  we see the same comments about how unfair the lottery is.  You have a better chance of being hit twice by lightening.   It's an unfair hidden tax on the poor and gullible.  It is true, no one has ever seen Warren Buffett or Bill Gates buy a lottery ticket.  How'd ya like to be in front of or behind one of those guys in the lottery line?  Just give up and go home.
    It is true, they are long odds however,  someone does win.  Where else can you make a bet with a pay off that high in proportion to the the amount of the wager?  It's such a small price for a pleasant dream.  And what dreams!
    I love neighborhood-working class bars.  I, long ago, had my fill of  clubs and the like.  I like a place where the neighbors meet to watch the evening news and maybe play along with The Price Is Right, Jeopardy or Wheel.  The men generally look tired from honest labor and the women might even look long-suffering.  Everybody knows your name and if you're new there it won't be long before people do know your name.
    Thinking is, by far, the hardest work ever done but in the world of work once it's thought of someone has to dig the hole, pour the concrete, lay the block, frame it and eventually paint the whole thing.  I like them folks.  I think we can agree they are the literal backbone of this country.
    When those lottery jackpots get so astronomically high these people talk about what they would do with the money.  They all gripe about the immediate tax bite but that soon gives way to what they would do with the remainder.  Some would pay their debts, mortgages, car loans and such.  Most of the guys would buy new trucks.  I'd buy an old truck but the principle is the same.  Most would pay for their children's educations or pay their children's  mortgages and endow their grandchildren.  Most would do something for their local community. They would give more to their church or benefit a local school.  Some would travel mostly to visit scattered relatives or scattered children.
    Not one of them would try to take over Berkshire-Hathaway or corner the market on some commodity or buy Twitter.  They wouldn't run for President.  What they would do is, in a few moments, fund a lifetime of dreams they had always been working towards.  They would fund their American Dreams.  Their dreams are to fulfill what they had been doing to begin with.
    They're Americans and I am very proud to be one of us.  The price of admission to these true American  Dreams is only one dollar.  It's a very small price to pay.
 

Party On Ted !

    Someone,  I can't remember who, said one person can actually do very little but with a committee you can do anything. Yes, you can. The political parties prove that.
    Not just our political system but all parliamentary type systems devolve or evolve into partisan factions.  Adams  and Washington were wrong to caution against the inevitable.  There may be a myriad of individual parties in some countries but when it comes time to govern they become coalitions of left/right,  in power and  in opposition.  I don't think it's worthwhile to debate whether that circumstance is right or wrong.  It just is. When it comes time to do concrete things in the real world rejection of reality just isn't very useful.
    When you consider the United States is a 4 trillion dollar a year enterprise that can and does project power into any and every corner of the globe for good or ill that's about as real as it gets.  Leave your Utopian theories at home and get with the program or get out of the way.
    That's why the idea of a political independent just tickles me. Are you seriously telling me you want to be politically involved as long as you needn't bother to embrace anything that approaches political reality in your own nation? Puleeze!
    The only way a person who says they vote for the person not the party could vote in their own self interest would be totally by accident.  In the end, that's what it's all about when we vote.  We are making an effort to address our own and our fellow citizen's self-interest.  There's nothing wrong with that.
     Here's the way it works. The President appoints about 15,000 mid and upper level policy people outside of Civil Service. There is no concrete figure for the number of those appointees I can find.  The entire process takes upwards of two years.
    Gawd!  I'm boring myself.  Well, stick with me.  I light a cigar when I start one of these screeds and try to be done before it is.  I smoke cheap cigars.
    These people set the tone for the direction of spending priorities, policy, hiring and so forth.  It's a huge organization.  Something like 20% of the workforce and economy.  It's no wonder people discuss the power of government.  It does interest me that people try to paint it as some "other."  It's just you and me putting our money together to address our problems and do some good.  To think otherwise is just wrong.  Anyone involved in government who tries to tell you otherwise is lying or a fool.  Either one is dangerous.
    As time goes on and administrations change these appointees progress. Yesterday's Undersecretary is tomorrow's Secretary.  These people are drawn from the membership of the different parties. They advance thru the government as the parties move in and out of power.
    These competing management teams have different rates of success based on economic performance, management of the Treasury, effective use and maintenance of the military, preservation of the public wealth and lesser metrics.  You should pick the one with the best record, in fact, aside from rhetoric.

    It should be understood; none of this works without party discipline. It is a necessary and understandable feature of our model.
    Now you're thinking to yourself, what's that got to do with me?  I don't have the money to be involved. You really don't need money.  What you need is time and commitment.  Ninety percent of life is just "showing up".  How do you think a  "community organizer"  became President?  Or a peanut farmer from Georgia?  He showed up.
    Pick a party that best represents what you perceive to be your self-interests and get involved.  Join the committee.  If you find their message imperfect, lend your voice.  If you're committed and show a willingness to be involved they'll listen and respond.  People want to be led.

Westerns! Maybe More.

    I've been trying to say this since 1977. Maybe I can now. Let's see.
    I've been watching westerns all day.  Mostly the Duke; John Wayne.  I love that stuff.
    I love westerns because they are so black and white; so stark.  I don't mean in coloration.  I mean they are such perfect little morality plays. There is right and wrong.  Black and white. I don't believe in "shades of gray".
    Old newspaper photographs used to be composed of a matrix of dots of black and white.  Taken as a whole they produced shades of gray. At the end, they were just a series of black and white. A series of , yes/no questions. A series of ones and zeroes.
    I don't believe ( not just don't think) that in morality, there are shades of gray.  I think seeing it that way is just an intellectual laziness.  I think it's an unwillingness to answer each of those yes/no questions and accept the weight of those answers.  I think our public interactions are all questions of basic morality.
    Now, here's some vanity.  As a young student introduced to the tenets of philosophy and the various philosophers I conceived my own philosophy.  I called it," Intellectual Reductionism". Kinda a grand name don't ya think?  I still like it.  To be honest, expressing it, justifying it, never got much further than this point.
    I always thought I was being too amorphous in my thinking.  Here's the fat news.  I'm typing on a machine and you are reading on a device that relies on exactly that logic of yes/no, 1/0. Our digital world is held to that rigid, inflexible logic. We should follow suit.
    It turns out the Duke get's us in the end. It remains to be seen if we get it.

Job Creation? Hardly.

    I guess this could be called an exercise in semantics but I believe in semantics.  I think things should be called what they are.  I could spend an hour telling you why I think that but neither of us would be awake when I was done. Even my fingers would go to sleep.  I could be the first guy to put a laptop into voluntary hibernation.
    I was a remodeling contractor for 30 years.  In that time I did employ up to 5 people at a time.  I never "created" a job.  I did hire people to help me address an opportunity for profit.  I usually liked these people.  Some of them have since become life-long friends but I never employed them at pay one hour longer than necessary.  I don't remember that as anything but addressing the realities of our relationship.  I don't think I pissed anyone off.  Well, there were the two guys I fired in those 30 years.
That wasn't over an economic concern.  I just didn't like them much.  Nor they me.
    My point is, and I do have one, no one has ever just created a job in the private economy as an exercise in citizenship.  Business people hire people in order to address the opportunity for profit.  If a politician tells you he's a "job creator" or he wants to encourage the "job creators"  he's an outright liar or a fool, which may be worse.
    This lie or foolishness is always put forth as a means to fiddle with the tax codes in order to benefit the "one percent" for lack of a better term.  It's never worked as a means of employing more people and it can't work because for an idea to be effective it has to have underlying truth in conception.
    All of this means; if you want to create a job and thereby increase profit, create a customer.  We can do that partially by manipulating the tax codes but we have to do it in the right way for the right reasons.  The trick is, obviously, to put as much money as possible into as many hands as possible.  That creates customers and that's what creates profits.
    A note about my politics.  A lot has been said about the access the wealthy have to our government.  Most of it negative.
    The wealthy pay over 60% of the income taxes.  That works out to about 24% of total revenues.  If they don't have enhanced access they certainly should in any real-world model.  However, that also means 76% of our revenues come from the rest of us as a collective,  not as a single class.  We have to achieve a collective, coherent voice.  In one way we do that.  We produce about 99% of the consumer profit to that famous 1%.  Those numbers may not be exact but the concept is exact and should be recognized.  The numbers come from various reliable government offices.  The percentage math comes from my head.  That's probably inexact but close.
    My politics are aimed at finding that coherent voice by recognizing our coherent, collective concerns.  I think all of us, no matter class, accident of birth or other station in life have a right to that voice.

Wanna Get High?

    I've lived all over this country.  It's not bad.  It really is homogenous.  I, initially left the cocoon of small-town Pennsylvania 45 years ago.  Tourist- like travel is worthless. I can get as much by reading a travel book or watching a documentary. If you wanna know a place; live there, work there, make friends there, get high there.  Be a brief, unwilling guest of a local county jail or play golf at a country club. Play some poker or a board game. Play pool.  Get laid.  I recommend all of those things but getting cuffed and stuffed isn't as nice as the country club thing. The buffet is no where near as good and the hired help in uniform is not as polite. I will say they always call you sir and mister in a county jail but you can tell they really don't mean it.  The staff at a country club doesn't mean it either but they do try harder to hide it.
    Here's something that's true. I can walk into a neighborhood bar in any corner of this country, as a total stranger and within a half hour either meet someone who will sell me marijuana or direct me to someone who can. The same is true of various forms of other  drugs.  That's uniform. That, also, is America.  Any statement that doesn't acknowledge anyone who wants marijuana has been able to buy marijuana for decades is just silly.
    That implies a decades long, logistic and supply system that rivals Johnson and Johnson or Bristol Meyers.  It also implies an entrenched system of clandestine wealth and extensive graft that kinda boggles the mind. The truth is and has been that anyone who wants drugs can have drugs. Euphoria is popular. Go figure.
    This is something people don't get:  Generations now, have experimented with drugs. Anecdotally,  I'd say about 1%  managed to get into some sort of trouble. They were pretty spectacular about it but they were few. They were never the best and/or brightest of us.
    Here's what the legalization of marijuana really means.  They are watching, closely, how the issues of banking, taxation and transition from clandestine to mainstream income will be handled. They are also watching how authorities from the local level to the national level can be weaned from the graft and moved into legitimate profit.  A guy like Bill Bennett wasn't the drug Czar to coordinate law enforcement activity.  He was there to coordinate the graft.  A national clearing house for bribery.
    At the end of Prohibition the government changed the currency from the "foot longs" to what we are familiar with today. They didn't do that to save paper. They did that to bring the clandestine wealth from bootlegging back into the legitimate economy.  Have your 100's, twenties, tens and fives changed lately?  Do you really believe that was done to defeat the couple hundred millions that could account for counterfeiting?  I'm thinking the couple trillion in the underground drug money was the real reason. As it should be.
    In answer to your questions: No, I haven't been high in 15 years. I just got tired of it. I like scotch and a good cigar. But I also like money. This emerging, legitimate market looks like an investment opportunity to me. We'll see.

The Minimal Approach

    I was reading about economics today.  I don't recommend it.  I'm retired, 65, in good health and I have an internet connection.  You'd think I'd be watching porn but no.  I was reading about minimum wage laws.  At this point I normally say something like, "It's really interesting."   No, it's not.  It seemed an awful lot like work. So, I took a nap.  I did finish the little bit of research I'd set for myself.  I'm much refreshed.
    I became interested in the origin of minimum wage laws in general and in the United States in particular mainly because I wanted to advance a contrarian idea and didn't want to sound like too much of an ignoramus.  I could put you to sleep with what I learned.  Maybe I will.  If this essay works as a sleep aid, recommend it to your friends.
    One of the first things I learned confirmed my original thinking about the relations between management and labor. They're hostile; go figure.  The original wage laws were actually limits on maximum wages paid. They came after the plague years when labor was scarce. Over time, those various Acts were amended to become a minimum wage. That's when Kings were Kings and legislative bodies knew their place.  Not that I recommend that.
    That evolution of thinking and those Acts were based in noble ideals. National minimum wage laws in the U S grew out of the revolution in thinking the Great Depression engendered. That circumstance makes a difference in conception.  It saw the marriage of two ideas. 1: The value of labor needs to be recognized and protected.  2:  We, as a society, do owe help and support to our fellow citizens as a way of providing for the common good.  It seems so simple now but the decades of debate concerning just that issue will glaze your eyes over.  Add in the recent (at the time) and final debate over income taxes and the whole thing will induce a coma.  Apparently, the spectacle of the noble poor literally starving to death in the streets changed the consensus.  So, the two ideas of providing for and serving the general welfare and the minimum wage were married.  Like most marriages, the ideals didn't quite mesh but did get along.  Let's talk about the offspring.
    The offspring has been a form of socialist idea. Socialism just doesn't work.  Before you start thinking about my political persuasion look up the term "Socialism".  The way the term is used, at this time, in the United States is an insult to the term itself and an insult to intelligence. Puleese!
    Here's the deal. Our goal is to have capitalism function in such a way as it provides profit to entrepreneurs and provides a decent living to labor. It can do that if we make it do that in the proper manner.
    Here's the proper manner:  ( I bet you knew I was gonna say that.)  In the nearly 90 years since the Great Depression, we have had a debate about just how much help we extend to our fellow citizens  to actually serve rather than harm the common good.  I say it that way because that's what we have been really debating.  We have realized that poverty for some of us does not serve prosperity for the rest of us.. I should say that twice but I won't.  You should think about it at least twice.  We have established what entitles our fellow citizens to our financial assistance in order to serve all of us. In that connection, there are inescapable questions: Why is the owner of a fast-food franchise driving a BMW while the rest of us are paying for his employee's food stamps and driving  Chevys?  Why are the Walton family the richest people in America while we pay for their employee's health care?
    Abolish the minimum wage.
    If you employ an adult at a wage that entitles that adult to so much as one dime of assistance from the rest of us you, as the employer, should be taxed dime for dime, dollar for dollar in the amount of that assistance. That would be capitalism!  Things would cost what they actually cost to produce without government subsidy to payrolls. Government subsidy to payrolls and directly mandating levels of compensation is Socialism. Regulation of prices and wages by tying them directly to reality is Capitalism.
    Capitalism = Good.  Socialism = Bad.  Corporate Socialism = an obscenity.
 
 
 

Walk Like An Athenian.

    We've all been told that ancient Athens was the Cradle of Democracy. They had a chosen council of citizens that directed the city's affairs.  We sure don't talk a lot about the descent into tyrannical rule by "Men on Horseback".  We also  don't concentrate on how those citizens were selected.  First: Citizenship depended on wealth and class. Your parentage had to be right and you had to own property.  Universal suffrage is a relatively new idea.  The idea of selecting only on the basis of merit is a relatively new idea.
     The most important aspect of the selection is overlooked.  The members of the council were not voted for.  There were no campaigns, campaign promises or appeals to the emotions of the crowd.  I'm pretty sure all those things are at least, distasteful.  Frankly, the more people we have voting on the basis of 30 second Charmin commercials the worse off we are.  If you're clueless, do the rest of us a favor and don't vote.
    In Athens, these council members were selected by lot.  What this did was create a pool of responsible citizens who tried to inform themselves because at any time they might be called upon to make decisions for their fellow citizens and themselves.  That's a nearly total reversal of what we have now.  Most people think greed is the most corrosive motivation.  Most people slept through their survey philosophy course and relied on detailed regurgitation to pass.  In fact, the Will to Power is the most corrosive motivation.  I can think of a dozen recent examples of the damage that has been done and there are hundreds in history from before the Greeks to us.
    So, what should we do that we almost certainly are not going to?  We should fill local offices by lot from the pool of available citizens.  County and city council people and so on should be chosen by lot.  Out of that pool of people who have gained some experience, higher state legislative offices would be filled, again, by lot.  Congressional seats should be filled by members of that pool.  Executive officers would still be selected by popular vote but you would have to think those candidates would come out of those various pools of governmental experience.  That would all but eliminate greed and therefore corruption from the equation.  How do you pick an individual to bribe from a pool of potentially thousands?
    In a way, I am a Utopian. I actually believe, given the evidence, we live in, by any reasonable definition, Utopia.  Hey, that doesn't mean we can't make it better.
    That's why I think a detailed understanding of history is so important.  By not knowing what the Athenians actually did we built systems with an easily avoidable flaw.  That's pretty dumb.

    October 11, 2018;
    It turns out this is an idea and philosophy known as Sortition, that's been around for a long time. So I'm on the right track just a later train.

A Weak And Stupid God

    I was thinking about this Quetzalcoatl guy and Montezuma and Cortes. It's really kinda interesting.       This Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent god at the foundation of Aztec religion. There was a resurrection or return myth about him. That's interesting because it isn't all that frequent in religious mythology or dogma. Pick your term.
    If you waste enough time thinking about it we're lucky there is no such myth in Islam. Imagine what that could be like. These people are crazy enough. We could have some guy running around claiming to be the son of Allah.
    But we don't. I digress.
    So, this is what happened. Quetzalcoatl was to return some day born on white wings with great power. Cortes shows up in ships with white sails and firearms. We still are trying to deal with gun powder so you can see how it could have been an issue in a society that had never seen it.
    Montezuma is not just the head of the government but he's the head of the religion. Theocracy is a bad idea we're still trying to deal with.
    Cortes meets all the prophecies. He must be the real deal. He must be god returned. Montezuma fatally agrees.
    Montezuma is strangled by Cortes's men. It's a scene the drama of which has never been explored. It's a scene worthy of Sophocles, Euripides or Shakespeare. Imagine being murdered by god. The melancholy Mexican?  Maybe not.
    My thought was: What if Cortes was the reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl; was, in fact, a god and just wasn't very good at it?  What if Montezuma had spent his life worshiping a weak and stupid god and in the end, got what he could have reasonably expected, if not deserved.
    When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, Satan came to him and offered him dominion over the governments of the world. Jesus turned it down because he didn't wish to be under-employed. What kind of god needs something as puny and useless as a government to enforce his will?  What kind of god needs children to be forced to senselessly mumble his praises by rote?  What kind of god seeks dominion of these sad men's minds and wallets?  That god doesn't believe in the power of a willing embrace.
    What kind of omnipotent god is offended by a Mapplethorpe, a Flint or a Falwell or a Robertson? What kind of god is offended by Rushdie or me for that matter?
    Those gods would have to be weak and stupid gods no better than Quetzalcoatl.
    The God who has my faith doesn't need my poor support. He smiles on our lives even in our follies.

https://bit.ly/JimRetzerBook

Two Abortions

    My first mother in law hated me. Considering how things worked out I'm not sure I blame her.   Who knows?  She forbade us to see each other so we did.  We were in love and wanted to be together.
It being the late 1960's and it being the smallest of towns, we knew if my soon to be wife were to become pregnant her mother would insist we get married. So, no more trips to the gas station to buy rubbers for me!  Work, work, work!
    I have a 47 year old daughter as a result. She seems to disapprove of me but that's a different story. I'm not sure I blame her.
    As a young married couple raising a daughter we had two friends in particular. They were in love. That's a life-long bittersweet story that I'm not going to tell today.
    Her parents objected to their relationship.  Not because he was a bad guy but because they had plans for her education and future and a young marriage didn't suit those plans.  In the end, she fulfilled those plans beautifully.  She's a wonderful person who has been a positive influence in countless lives.  I think her parents were wrong.  She would have been fine with a child and a man she loved.  Too late to tell.  Too late.
    To be together they hit upon our plan.  They knocked her up.  They expected the usual shot-gun wedding.  They did not expect the shot-gun abortion.  It was 1971 in Pennsylvania. Abortion on demand was illegal unless certain conditions concerning the health and well being of the mother could be certified.  For the tidy sum of 4,300, 1971 dollars the certifications were made and the abortion was performed by a OB/GYN in a clean, prominent hospital.  No law proposed since Roe V Wade would effect that outcome.  The price of the doctor's integrity was set and met.
    In 1984 I met a beautiful, smart girl.  We were both at the bottom rung of new careers.  We both knew we would progress.  We did by the way.  She became an electrical engineer and, of course, here I am.
    We enjoyed living together.  We were in love.  We planned to marry and start a family when we were more financially secure.  To that end she took birth control pills.  She was a detail oriented, motivated person. She took her pills  as directed and we screwed away.  It was a lot of fun.
    She did have an occasional flare up of eczema.  When it got bad the cure was a visit to the doctor for a shot of cortisone in those days.  Now it's prednisone.
    So, she had the flare-up, we went to the doctor, got her a shot and we continued to screw. Did I mention it was fun!
    Then she turned up pregnant.  This is what we thought:  If all kids were planned there'd be about a third of the kids there actually are.  We were young, motivated and we had families who were great support systems.  Then we were told the cortisone shot had counteracted the birth control pills.  The chances were the end would be a very painful miscarriage and if the baby went to term it would be profoundly affected.  I don't know or care what your morality is. Our morality was to not threaten her health or to bring a profoundly affected child into the world.  To act on our morality we went to Planned Parenthood and I wrote a check for $268.  We were not happy and had someone confronted the woman I loved for that choice on that day they would have paid dearly for their convictions.
    The only morally ambiguous thing I see here is the doctor who sold his integrity.  I don't know that he was an immoral or amoral man.  I doubt if he thought about it in those terms.  I do know that we have never questioned our morally based decision and would dismiss as unwelcome any questions posed by others.  I certainly think the decision imposed in the first circumstance was completely, in the end, immoral. Nor was that any of my business and that's the entire point.

Real Estate Reality

    As a general rule the largest purchase a person makes in life is a home.  This essay refers to that type of real estate transfer.  It's surprising to me people don't understand it.
    I'll bet you think a buyer and a seller engage in a negotiation and arrive at a price that satisfies them both and a transaction takes place.  Fair market value is established by the famous "meeting of the minds".  Yeah.  That's bull.
    Usually, a buyer gets some understanding of what type of monthly payment they can qualify for with a mortgage lender.  That gives them a price range to shop in.  Being optimistic for the future and their future advancement they shop at the upper end of their qualifications.  They spend at their limit or even what they know to be slightly above.  Optimism and approval are the keys to putting them in the "sold" category. The housing bubble from 10 years ago proves that.  The optimism thing is a constant. It was the lack of caution in the approval thing that created the problem.
    As for the seller.  The seller, by some means or other determines what they might get for the property they own.  Probably the largest concern is not really connected to the current market or economic reality.  That concern is; what they need to fulfill their goals.  That means what amount after they pay their existing mortgage will let them progress.  That usually means local or national relocation and the purchase of another home.
    These circumstances are so common as to remain unsaid in the process.  In four years I only ever saw one cash sale for residential property.  That was pretty funny.
    I shared an office with a guy named Joe Thomason. He was a funny guy.  He'd worked as a casket painter interestingly enough.  He was very dry witted.  One day he had this older couple in the office. They were interested in a particular piece of property he had listed.  So, he put them thru the qualification process.  Job, income, assets.  All of their answers were wrong.  At the end of the process Joe said, "I'm sorry but you just don't qualify for the mortgage."
    To which the husband said, "Well, we were going to pay cash.  Would that be all right?"
    While he pulled a sales contract out of the drawer Joe said, without missing a beat, " Well, we can do it that way."  It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. I guess ya hadda be there.
    My point is; the purchase of a home involves a mortgage nearly in every transaction.  The buyer and the seller have their famous "meeting of the minds" and then the buyer applies for a mortgage.  The mortgage company sends out an appraiser to determine if the proposed loan is a good risk and he places a value on the property.  He uses a set formula to arrive at this figure.  Comparable sales, tax assessment, condition of the property, recent appraisals.  Anyone knowing that formula comes up with the same number.
    Now here's a hook.  Pittsburgh is an average market. 2.5 million people in the metropolitan area.. There are maybe three guys doing the appraisals for all the mortgage lenders in this or any comparable area.  They employ the same methodology.
     If the appraisal comes in low and won't support the required loan the seller has to come down in his asking price or the buyer has to come up with more cash.  The only flexibility is on the part of the seller.  The buyer isn't coming up, he's already spending at his limit.  He can't and why the hell should he?  There isn't going to be a second opinion.
     So, this is the reality behind realty.  A piece of property is worth what can be borrowed against it. When the people involved don't get that we get a housing bubble like 2007-8.
     It would take too long and you aren't smart enough to explain derivative markets to you. You would think the lesson is: Don't lend money to people who can't pay it back.  The real lesson is: Regulate, rigorously who these guys can lend money to and get them all off commission.

Things You Can See. Things You Can't See.

    The average person, world wide, lives and dies within 12 miles of where they were born.  It takes a certain type of aggressive personality to strike out into the world and break that paradigm.  I've always said that's why Europe isn't worth a squirt.  Anyone with any gumption packed up and left to come here two centuries or more ago.  The aggressive ones that were left killed each other in a couple World Wars or we went over and polished them off.  That kinda gives the lyric, "we won't be back til it's over over there." a whole new meaning.  It's over.
    Here's something I've seen that you can see.  I used to live across the street from a small store. You could buy snacks, drinks, handkerchiefs, reading glasses, post it notes.  What nots and you can cash checks and send money orders from there.  It's owned by a couple from Kenya. They claim to be brother and sister but who knows?  I've notice strangers to a new place tend to alter personal details to fit their new, place based, identity.  Nice people.  Highly motivated.
    The neighborhood is the center of Latin culture in Pittsburgh.  That means a lot of Mexicans.  Some legal.  Others, not so much.  We learn some low Spanish.  They learn some low English.  In ten years I haven't seen a rapist, murderer or drug dealer.  It's been my experience that those types of people, no matter their origin, tend to be private about their intentions but over time their intentions become clear with or without a language barrier.
    I have seen this on Friday afternoons.  These immigrants crowd the little store to cash their paychecks.  Never more than five hundred dollars; normally less.  They then crowd the counter to wire a majority of that money home to family and loved ones at least a thousand miles away.  These people's intentions are plain with or without a language barrier.  Write when you get work.
    My point is: If I see a guy who is willing to pack up, leave everything he knows behind to travel a thousand miles to a place where he doesn't know the language, doesn't fit the culture just to work to benefit his family, chances are I want that guy working for me. That is a literal, living expression of the American Dream.  Inside he looks more like me and you; much more so than some people can imagine.  The immigration laws are xenophobic in conception and completely un-American.  Bartholdi's mother had a better understanding of our values than the average American.  If you don't know who Bartholdi's mother was, stop now.  This reading is too advanced for you.
    To a certain extent I agree with the formulation , " If you can't speak the language get the fuck out of the country".  English as the language of the United States is just common sense.  I do not believe common sense should be common law.  We have enough trouble  and common sense isn't all that common.  Nor do I believe in bilingual education.  My step-father grew up in not just a Slavic speaking household but in a Slavic speaking neighborhood.  When he and his peers went to public school the first six months was spent teaching them English.  Then they were taught in English. I don't think I need to over sell the idea of being bi-lingual.  He was an unintentionally, articulate man.
    That entire episode illustrates what has happened over and over again in the American Dream. The first immigrant generation never becomes fluent in English . I remember someone saying how frustrating it was for a person who was witty and urbane in their original language to be forced to express themselves like an idiot in the language of their adopted country.  Their children assimilate.
    There is nothing new under the sun.  Xenophobia and assimilation are common, perpetual, really quite interesting and assimilation is always beneficial.