There is no God, there is no Devil. Angels don’t watch over us nor do demons thwart us. The only true evil in this world is the human race.

If you don’t want to be sad for the rest of the day, you probably shouldn’t read this article, Bullied Canadian teen leaves behind chilling YouTube video.

Amanda Todd, the girl in the video, chose to leave this world at 15 years old.

I wish it weren’t raining.

There was one dynamic of last night’s debate—any debate in this campaign—that I completely missed. There is no way anyone would have said that Biden was the clear winner. The reason is that half of the political commentators were going to say that Ryan won, because they are Republican.

Last night, Steve Schmidt noted that Republicans would think that Ryan won and Democrats would think that Biden won. That’s true as far as it goes. But half of that statement could have been made before the debate started. The Republicans are so partisan that they simply could not have found Ryan anything but wonderful.

Contrast this to last week when Democrats were apoplectic about Obama’s performance. Admittedly, Democrats are constitutionally more inclined to be self critical. But Republicans—as I’ve noted many times—are only interested in power and so they are always on board with the party talking points.

Of course, the mainstream media can’t have an opinion about such things. Facts: Democrats and Republicans each say they won. Conclusion: tie!

What I find particularly frustrating about the debate coverage is that much is made of the fact that Ryan seemed to know what he’s talking about. All I can gather from this is that being able to string together intelligible sentences means that one knows what he’s talking about. I thought Ryan was talking in circles. He didn’t want to admit what his economic policies implied and he simply didn’t know what he was talking about regarding foreign policy.

There seemed to be a special kind of expectations game going on here. Ryan was supposedly a smart guy before the debate. During the debate, he was greatly downgraded. But instead of grading his debate performance based upon his starting level they use his ending level. “See: he was no worse than he turned out to be!”

It appears that whenever Democrats and Republicans debate, the best Democrats can do is tie. Republicans will always claim victory. Thus the mainstream media will always always claim a tie—unless the Democrats accept defeat.

From Kardashian breeding and birthing to live colonoscopies on the news, our narcissistic society has become a too crass. TMI has become WTMI[1]. I have been told intimate stories that will be in my mind forever. I’ll be senile, lying in my hospital bed thinking, not of my children whose names I may not remember — oh no. Instead I will be tormented by the vivid description of a friend’s sexcapade that involved plastic sheeting on the floor and lots of baby oil. I did not ask for that burden — it was thrust upon me like a hillbilly onto a reality show.

Why do I mention this? Because I clicked this link: Olivia Wilde on that time when her vagina died. I had hoped that maybe it would be, at the very least, an interesting story about a scientific breakthrough in vagina transplants. But no.

What kind of a man is able to efemmulate[2] a woman like that?

The good news is that Olivia and her soon to be ex-boyfriend are having “sex like Kenyan marathon runners.” Such a vivid, yet confusing metaphor. Sex while running? Taking notes while watching Kenyan marathon runners have sex? It doesn’t matter. It is her apparent need to say these things to anyone but her best friend that truly baffles me.

More of a very brief glimpse into the life of a woman without a social filter:

I had no idea that men using their protrusions like some kind of witching wand was a behavior that required anyone’s permission, much less something they could be prevented from doing. If women can “shut all that down” to avoid a rape pregnancy, men should have a penile power switch. If they do it must be on their backs where they can’t reach it and women don’t know where exactly it’s located.

I must disagree with Olivia’s lust-besotted advice. While a woman’s uterus is a proven and effective search and locate device, it isn’t wise to listen to one’s vagina. She isn’t looking for a long-term commitment that would very likely end in body-abusing pregnancies and inevitable boredom, she just wants to get laid.

[1] WAY Too Much Information

[2] “Effemulate” is an orignal word of my creation. Should you want to use it, please contact me regarding usage fees.

Thanks to Black Flag:

It always surprises me – although I don’t know why – whenever I read another example of how judgmental, ignorant, intolerant, hypocritical, and self-righteous some people are. I am aware of those same character flaws in myself but I’m not nearly as horrible as those people. As a person of reasonable tolerance and some intelligence, I don’t spend my time speculating about other people’s sexual orientation or possible sexual preferences. Gay or straight, I do not want to know what goes on in anybody’s bedroom. As a matter of fact, I prefer to look at everyone as asexual because it’s just less gross. Anyone who spends any time wondering what other people do to pleasure themselves or another is a person I would avoid. That person is a pervert.

Aside from pedophiles, rapists, sadistic murderers, animal abusers, and Ann Coulter, I think people should just be left alone to live their sad, innocuous lives. Don’t hurt me or anyone I care about and I will not intentionally hurt you. Words to live by.

I understand that some unfortunates are born with the capacity for murder and mayhem, while some learn to be cruel through experience and suffering. No one chooses to be a psychotic killer. No one chooses to be a pedophile. No one chooses to be gay. WAIT! Do not think that I am in any way implying that homosexuality is bad or evil. I’m merely saying that we are who we are – good or bad and “good” or “bad” are subjective terms. I think pedophilia is horrifying; it doesn’t necessarily follow that a pedo is a bad person. Does that make sense? He (or she) has a terrible predilection, but it may be something that can be controlled; castration pops to mind, but therapy and medication might work too.

Regardless, we have very little control over who we are. We don’t choose to love our children. We (most of us) do choose not to drown them and just suffer through the pain of raising them. None of us have any control over who we are attracted to. Everyone has known someone who is with a total wanker. That’s why the truism “there’s no accounting for taste” exists. I was born with a natural aversion to root beer. I didn’t choose to find root beer one of the most disgusting flavors ever created by man. If I had indeed had a choice I would have chosen to enjoy root beer so I wouldn’t have to listen to the never-ending astonishment, “You don’t like root beer?!” No. Call me a freak, but I like beer without the root.

What started all this rambling about choice is LZ Granderson’s article, Oops, I left my sexual orientation at home. I think it’s worth reading.

Here’s an excerpt:

(I’ll bet he wishes he went with deaf instead.)

My only pedantic little point of contention is the phrase “non-scientific”; are there scientific methods out there?

I am just glad that I chose to be a straight, blue-eyed white female. (Good call!) I’m also glad that I chose to be born in California instead of bumblefuck Kentucky. And what’s with all those stupid bastards who chose to be born Asian and gay in South “Kill Me Now” Dakota?

Jonathan Chait has written a scattered article that has one interesting thing to say: the differences in polling between the swing states and the nation as a whole are not mysterious. Chait claims that this is just because in the swing states, voters couldn’t get away from the campaign. As a result, they didn’t learn anything in the debates. I have a slightly different take.

Obama did not lose any support because of the debate. Instead, Romney solidified support he already had. There was a group of 3-4% who supported Romney but weren’t willing to go public with it. They liked what they saw at the debate so they joined the Romney bandwagon. The endless campaigning in the swing states already pushed such people into the Romney camp.

The good news about this is that there are similar Obama supporters. At this point, they will still claim to be undecided. And now they are just waiting for Obama to give a decent enough debate performance to allow them to go public: “Yeah. I guess I’m an Obama supporter.” Of course, the down side of this is that Obama could continue to suck and so they won’t even vote. But expectations of Obama are so low, I don’t see this happening.

This is why I’m not that excited about the VP debate tonight. If Biden does very well, it will help a little. But people will still be waiting for a good Obama performance. On the other hand, if Biden does poorly, it could really hurt.

Update (11 October 2012 3:44 pm)

I will be doing a sort of live blogging thing over at The Reaction tonight. In the meantime, Nate Cohn over at The New Republican has a thought provoking article on the current presidential polls. He suggests that part of Obama’s decline is not real. Instead, it indicates that Obama voters are so depressed that they are less likely to participate in poll surveys. He provides a very compelling argument. Only time will tell. Regardless, it gets back to what I was talking about above: it may take an Obama debate victory for the polls to turn around.

Newsweek is out! And what is the news on the cover? You can read it in the image on the left: “Heaven Is Real.” What you can’t see in this image is the subtitle, “When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.” It is written by a neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander—the man with the after death experience.

This is a cover story about a thoroughly studied phenomenon—near death experiences. But this is new! It’s by a man who didn’t believe in near death experiences before he had one. Wow. This is like a man who doesn’t believe claims that people on LSD don’t in fact talk to God. He says, “They just have hallucinations and think they talk to God.” But then he takes LSD and goes around telling everyone he really did talk to God.

I can’t decide what I find most annoying about this. Take your pick! It all comes down to the same thing: they are wasting space that could have been used for actual news. I suppose I should give them a little credit for the fact that whatever they covered would have been crap. But crap about something is better than crap about crap.

Do you know the Social Security Paradox? It comes up all the time regarding reform of the program, but almost no one notes the paradox. Here it is: in order to stop future benefit cuts we must cut future benefits now.

The worst case scenario is that at some point in the next 50 years, Social Security will run out of savings and only be able to pay 75% of promised benefits. This is 75% of the benefits at that time, so they are inflation adjusted. This is a problem, but not a catastrophe. And it is absolutely not the case that there will be no program for young people. That is, there will be Social Security for people retiring in 50 years, unless somehow all the Very Serious People get their way and “reform” it out of existence.

C. A. Rotwang[1] has written an incredible article about liberal efforts to “tweet” Social Security, Mr. President: Tweak This! Right off the top, he notes that the program will be short by at most 1.6% of GDP in any year. The actual amount of money doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we are currently taking in too little money in federal taxes. In the last part of 1990, total federal taxes were 21% of GDP. Today, they are down below 16%. So just by bringing taxes up slightly, we solve any shortfall.

But such ideas are off the table. Republicans just want to destroy the program. Liberals want to “tweak” it. As I’ve noted in the past, just for the sake of fairness, we should get rid of the payroll tax cap, which is currently set at $110,100. This makes the tax highly regressive. Most people pay 12.4% (half directly and half via their employers).[2] For example, if Mitt Romney was paid a salary, he would only have paid payroll taxes on the first $110,100 of his estimated gross income of $20.9 million last year: $13,652.40. That would mean that unlike regular people paying 12.4%, Romney would have paid 0.065%. Of course, since all of his income was “capital gains” he paid nothing at all.

Ideas like this are simply off the table. The rich have far too much power in Washington and they will never allow their taxes to be raised in this way. (At least they won’t do it without a major fight from the rest of us.) So the liberals—The good guys!—propose three ways to “tweak” the system:

1. Reduce inflation adjustments;
2. Raise the retirement age;
3. Means test.

Note that each of these tweaks do what I talked about regarding the Social Security Paradox: reduce future benefits to prevent reduced future benefits. Rotwang discusses each one of these in details and shows that they are all substantial. For example, according to a study by David Rosnick and Dean Baker at CEPR, increasing the retirement age from 67 to 70 would result in an 18% reduction in lifetime benefits for couples in the bottom 20% of the income distribution.

The main point of the article, beyond pointing out that Social Security is not in crisis, is to show that the “tweaks” of Democrats have big benefit cuts concealed in them. Rotwang ends:

Government keep your damn stinking hands off my Social Security, indeed!

Update (10 October 2012 2:09 pm)

I had a little email correspondence with Dean Baker:

I may just have to post those pictures. He can get in line for those royalties.

[1] Rotwang is a brilliant robot inventor in Metropolis. So I don’t know what is really going on at Huffington Post.

[2] I am only including the Social Security part of the payroll tax. Additional money is taken out for Medicare.

When people think of unions, they think of salaries and benefits. And indeed, unions do improve wages for union and non-union employees alike. But have you ever wondered why a lot of companies are willing to match union pay in order to stay non-unionized? If the company is going to pay the same, why not just allow the union? It is because unions are most important in their ability to stop employers from abusing workers.

Age Discrimination—at 35!

I remember back in 1999—when I was 35 years old—I was applying for a job with a high tech company. They made a very big deal about my age. They were concerned that I wouldn’t “fit in” with their group. But they really wanted me because I was such a high tech badass. Eventually, they hired me and I went to work in a group of 13 people. Out of this group, almost all of the work was done by one other guy and me. The other guy was, of course, “old” like me.

Both parts of this story are typical. First, high tech companies do not want to hire older workers. Most of the time they are not so up front about it. And most of the time it isn’t because they are worried about group cohesion; they are worried about salary. Second, there is often a huge gulf between the knowledge and skills of the old and young workers.

I find this all particularly interesting in light of the conservative obsession with raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare. It is certainly true that most white collar workers could easily work until they are 70. The problem is that there is a big difference between biological and cultural norms. A computer programmer could work past 65 and might even want to; but most corporations don’t want to employ such a programmer. Of course, most companies don’t wait that long. Usually, white collar workers get the ax in their 50s.

RadioShack and the Globalization Lie

Al Lewis at the Wall Street Journal wrote a column about a typical case, Getting Sacked at RadioShack. It tells the story of David Nelson, a guy who started at RadioShack in 1979. He worked his way up through the company, becoming district manager and supervising 51 stores. In 2008, when Nelson turned 55, a new regional manager came in. After the first month, he gave Nelson a negative performance review—the first Nelson had ever received. After the second month, he gave Nelson another bad review and fired him. Nelson managed to get the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to represent him in court. Last month, the court found against RadioShack and made them pay Nelson $187,000 in back pay. Of course, that means Nelson had to wait 4 years for this justice. I’m sure he has lost far more than he’s gained. But it is a much happier story than that of most people who are illegally fired.

Lewis ends his article with something of an apology for RadioShack—talking about how poorly the company is doing. I don’t see how this belongs in the article. What’s more, all of my tech friends and I were horrified years ago when RadioShack switched to being mostly a phone reseller. It was clear at the time that the company was trying to cash in on a short term opportunity at the expense its long term health. But this is what you get when companies are managed on a quarterly time scale.

I think the point of noting RadioShack’s bad situation is a way of saying, “Globalization is hurting everyone; workers just have to get used to it.” Note that Canada has basically the same level of unionization as it did 50 years ago; unionization in the United States has plummeted; no one has ever explained why the US would suffer more from globalization than Canada. What’s more, corporate profits are way up. The management of places like RadioShack don’t fire people like Nelson because they have to in order to survive. In fact, Nelson’s position wasn’t going away. They were just getting rid of him because they could replace him with someone younger and cheaper.

Unions Protect Us

All these stories highlight the one systemic problem facing the middle class here in the United States: unions are dying. There are only two ways to protect workers’ rights. The first is for the government to intervene aggressively in the work place. That is not going to happen. The other is to strengthen the ability of workers to organize. Over the last 60 years, we have made it much harder for unions to organize (both through legislation changes and lack of enforcement). If there is any way forward it is through stronger unions. Note that conservatives are almost all against unions when they should be for them.

Unfortunately, unions are running scarred. Union members are just trying to hang on to the little they still have. Non-unionized workers tend to resent unions—often thinking that no one should be unionized rather than that everyone should be. And this resentment is something the right has been very good at promoting. Now the main coverage of unions in the media is about how public sector union pensions are killing us. (Funny that when Wall Street was handing out big bonuses to the people who caused the crash of 2008, we were lectured on contracts and how we had to fulfill our obligations. But when it is ordination workers’ pensions, contracts don’t matter that much.)

David Nelson is an object lesson for all of us. In most circumstances, a company would not screw up. In most circumstances, they would have fired Nelson in a way that would not have allowed him to sue. And regardless, the whole of the Republican Party is against even having the right to seek legal redress, as we saw with Lilly Ledbetter. This is not a war we can each fight alone. The situation is dire. We must organize so that we will have the right to organize.

Noam Scheiber at The New Republic has a really good review of Bob Woodward’s new book, The Backscratcher—Bob Woodward’s Anti-Obama Bias. More than just a review of The Price of Politics, it is a good refresher on the debt ceiling debacle, which has made me rethink my harsh criticism of Obama. But mostly, the article is about Bob Woodward’s bias against President Obama.

Scheiber puts forward two aspects of Woodward that make the bias contradictory. First, Woodward is a typical elite boot-licker who “reflexively flatters the powerful.” There is no doubt about that! But Scheiber claims that Woodward is against the current most powerful man in the world because of a particular attitude of Woodward’s class:

There is little doubt of this, but I have a different take that compliments it: Wordward follows public opinion.

This is base upon the “Bush at War” triology. The first, Bush at War made Bush out to be a great leader—Dwight Eisenhower or even George Washington. The next, Plan of Attack was slightly critical, but still mostly adulatory. And the third, State of Denial was quite critical. This just happens to have been the way that America felt about Bush.

I haven’t read much of Woodward’s books since All the President’s Men. What I have read—even his non-political writing such as the insipid Wired—has been standard, middlebrow fair. So of course what we get on the second half of Obama’s term is the typical upper middle class complaints that Obama is just sorta missing something; we don’t know quite what it is; but we’re sure it isn’t that he’s black. (Not that Woodward would ever go anywhere near the race question.)

I’ve long wondered about the comparisons that people naturally make between Woodward and Carl Bernstein. These arguments usually go something like, “Isn’t it amazing that Bernstein hasn’t had much of a career but Woodward has become a titan of political reporting.” I don’t accept this. It’s true that Woodward has this position. But it is because he panders to a particular class of Washington insider. He is the towering figure he is because he does not threatened the elite. Bernstein has had a respectable career with some minor successes that did ruffle feathers. Woodward is only willing to ruffle the feathers of dead birds like William Casey.

And so, it is not surprising that Woodward would go after Obama. And what will happen if Obama wins reelection and the economy recovers? Woodward will write a hagiography of Obama.