My Annual Xmas Poem, Read by ME!

In case you have forgotten how to read, or, like me you are old and can't ever find your reading glasses, here is this year's Xmas poem read by me.  Happy Solstice!

My Annual Xmas Poem

It's that time again, time for me to offend old friends and new with my annual Xmas poem.  Last year's poem was written from my perspective.  This year it is not, as you will be able to tell by the brand of beer the narrator has in his fridge.

An Idiots Xmas

Twas the night before Xmas, I was in a bad mood

For my house was quite empty, no TV, no food

No tables nor chairs for resting my bum

I’d gone and done something that’s clearly quite dumb

12/21 should have been the last day

For people on earth to work and to play

Now this year my Xmas will be pretty rough

Cuz I’ve given away all of my stuff.

I’m living on Budwieser, ramen and Chickletts

Investing what I have left in lottery tickets.

I was bumming about the big Mayan lie

When I saw something strange up in the sky

Then on my roof I heard a loud boom

And down through the chimney and into my room

Crashed a guy I believed in with never a pause

There on my carpet stood old Santa Claus

With red suit, black boots, white beard and all

He looked just like when I’d met him down at the Mall

I said “ Santa, I’m so glad to see you this year”

He said “Shut up schmuck, do you have any beer?”

I went to the fridge and grabbed a Bud Light

And gave it to Santa, full of delight

He looked at the can and shook his white head

“You call this a beer?  God your brain is dead!”

He sat on the floor, and took a big drink

I hoped he would give me a friendly wink

But instead he said “Look, kid, I’m visiting you

Cuz you must stop believing stuff that’s not true

Not just the crap from some crazy Mayan

But all the mechegas that you’ve been buyin’.

You bought the predictions of Harold Camping

And in seach of Sasquatch you’ve been out tramping

You visited Scotland to look for Loch Ness

And Homeopathy’s made your health a mess.

You believe in astrology and ESP too

And alien autopsies at Area 52

And that the earth is 6000 years old

You accept any crazy shit that you are told!

I slumped on the floor and let out a sigh

I had to respond to the big jolly guy

“But Santa,” I said, “I’m sure there is proof

There is stuff on the internet that shows the truth

Of witches and ghosts and reincarnation

And that Obama was born in some other nation

And that antioxidents can cure all ones ills

And there’ll be a Super Bowl for the Buffalo Bills”

Santa finished his beer and looked down at the floor

I hoped he was done, but no, he had more

“I can only assume your brain has been hacked

You can’t tell a rumor apart from a fact

You invested with Madoff, you stupid chump

And believed stuff you heard from Donald Trump

You think folks can fly like in the comics

You even believe supply side economics

Your lack of good sense I find quite vexin’

Why, you’re so stupid you could be a Texan!”

I was so sad to see that Santa was pissed

I said “Perhaps you’re right, some things I have missed

 but like most Americans, I’m dumb as a stick

Real or counterfeit, how do you pick?”

“Science” said Santa “Would be a good start

And think with your brain, and not with your heart

It you can’t prove it’s true, then give it a pass

Try taking your head out of your ass

Do research and make sure the pieces all fit

Because the world is full of bullshit

Here’s my one wish for this holiday season

Give yourself over to knowledge and reason

And now here’s something you might find funny

there really, for sure, is an Easter Bunny!”

Then Santa stood up and gave a big clap

Reached out his hand and gave me a dope slap

And he was gone before I could retort

So I just sat down to read The Drudge Report.

OH, one more thing, I’ve left a loose flag

Yes, Jeff Pliskin, Paul Ryan’s a douchebag!

Well, there it is, always inspirational.  Hope you enjoy your Solstice, Xmas, Hannukah, Kwanza or whatever, and may your New Year be awesomely groovy.

Why I Am Voting For Obama

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I will be voting for Obama next Tuesday.  My conservative friends back in Clarence, NY all think I am a raging liberal, which I am not, mostly because I never bought into the GOP history of the town we grew up in.  In fact, I find both parties mostly repulsive and incompetent, but the GOP ideas are far more backward, dangerous, and threatening to liberty and equality in this country.  I thought I would lay out some specifics on why I am voting for Obama.....which mostly boils down to "Because he is not a Republican!".

ECONOMICS

Neither party has any history of doing anything sensible when it comes to economics, and I don't expect them to start now.  The Democrats are addicted to throwing money at problems, then refusing to stop or change programs that are no longer workable. The GOP is addicted to tax cuts, to the extent that they will gladly let education, health care, and infrastructure die in the name of Grover Norquist purity.  If Romney were serious about cutting tax rates and doing away with ALL deductions, he would be worth paying attention to.  However, he has refused to specify which deductions he would have to kill, because the only way his plan is revenue neutral, as he claims, is if he does away with tax-free health insurance from employers, and with the mortgage interest deductions.  This is a good idea, but this waffling weenie does not have the guts to either say or do this job.

My fear is that a Romney presidency would allow too many of the dangerously destructive economic ideas of the right to become reality. As a society, we must invest in human capital, and we must have infrastructure that allows us to conduct business, and Obama is correct when he said "You didn't build that".  Romney spent a full year sucking up the right wing nuts in his party who think tax cuts are more important than good roads and bridges, and these guys are just wrong.  In addition, Romney's main economic advisers are the same guys, Hubbard and Mankiw, who worked for W., and we know what an economic miracle they produced.

Certainly, we need to deal with the deficit, particularly the ticking bomb of future entitlements.  Simpson-Bowles was a good start but Ryan voted against it, and Obama ignored it, and Romney had taken every position under the sun.  So, on economics both candidates get a fail from me!

IMMIGRATION

Here is the sensible way that immigration should be handled:  As a free market issue.  Neither party wants to do that.  The GOP's desire to run all immigrants back to where they came from is clearly based in the underlying racism of the party, particularly the Tea Party.  Meanwhile Obama has deported more people than any other Prez.  But at least Obama has had the good sense to allow children who were brought here by their parents illegally, and who we have already paid to educate, to stay in the country so we can get the benefit of their skills and knowledge.  The GOP, Romney included, has their heads extremely far up their asses, and apparently sees nothing but brown people who don't speak English invading their towns.  Romney even proudly has the guy who wrote the Arizona and Alabama immigration laws on his list of aids.

Restrictive immigration policies are bad economic policies.  That is a truth that this country needs to accept!

SOCIAL ISSUES

This is, and has always been, the main reason that I tend to hold my nose and vote for Democrats.  As long as the Religious Right is driving the social bus in the GOP, the party is unworthy of serious consideration.  And the GOP is getting worse in this regard, not better.  Social conservatives are wrong about everything.  There is no God or Christianity in the constitution for a reason!  These idiots want to teach creationism as science, replace policy with prayer, and treat people who are different like second class citizens.  The Dems positions on these issues has not been great either, but they almost kept God completely out of their platform, which is where the fictional character belongs.  And to Paul Ryan and all the other assholes who claim to be followers of Ayn Rand AND good Christians....CAN YOU STUPID FUCKS NOT READ?  She was a committed and outspoken Atheist!

FOREIGN POLICY AND NATIONAL DEFENSE

Of the many things that George W. Bush fucked up, this was where he was worst.  It is not the job of the US to tell everyone else in the world how to behave!  But that was Bush policy, and that would also be Romney policy.  In addition, we already spend more than the rest of the world combined on military spending, much of it as make work jobs to build weapons the military no longer needs.  We don't need to spend more, as Romney clearly believes.  And we don't need to start more wars, as Romney also seems to believe.

Foreign policy is a tricky, complex issue that even well informed Americans have trouble comprehending.  What the GOP calls Obama's "Apology Tour" was a much needed effort to show the rest of the world that we were not going to behave like the arrogant idiots who ran this country for the previous 8 years.  Bringing back the NeoCons, who are advising Romney, will be a step back to the destructive, expensive policies of w and his band of morons.  We can not afford that!

THE TEA PARTY

This band of ignorant buffoons poses the greatest threat to the progress of this country in my lifetime.  Schooled only in Rand, Hayek, and the Bible, these idiots seem to think the 19th century was a really great time to be an American, and want to take us back there.  Any politician who would seriously even talk to this group of yahoos is unworthy of anyone's vote.  They have become the heart of the GOP, and Romney is now trying to run away from the year he spent sucking up to them to get the nomination.  Maybe Mitt would govern as the moderate who didn't do all that great a job in MA, but who knows.  The bottom line is, an Obama presidency is the best insurance that we have that none of the horrible ideas these guys spout come to be.  Just their positions on immigration and money (the gold standard is second only to Communism as the dumbest economic idea I can think of) are enough to impoverish the nation.

That's my thinking.  What's yours? The President can  not magically manage the economy to make unemployment go down, and if you think he can, then you are probably too stupid to be allowed to vote.  But, the President can steer the country toward long term good, or bad.  We had 8 years of horrible with George W. Bush, and Romney seems to want to return to too many of those policies.

A Few Words About Social Security

A few weeks ago my friend Maggie put one of those billboard thingys that you often see on Facebook on her page.  It had to do with Social Security, and it seemed to me to be very simplistic, so I said that in response, to which Maggie replied "Oh do explain, professor".  So, for Maggie and everyone else, here is a brief explanation of the facts and myths of Social Security, and my opinion on how me might "fix" it.

Myth #1 Social Security is a savings account set aside for you.  Social Security was designed as a "pay as you go" system, where money is taken from workers today and given to retired folks.  While you work you pay in, and when you reach 65 you can sit on your ass at the early bird special and collect.  Many are confused I think by the statement we receive every year.  So, to say it is "not an entitlement" is not really true.

Sorta Myth #2 There is a Social Security Trust Fund.  In the 1980's, when the folks in Congress were a bit less dim than they are today, they actually looked at the problem the Baby Boom generation was going to create for Social Security.  So, they increased the amount taken out of our checks, and until recently Social Security took in more than it paid out.  The problem is that the extra money, according to law, was loaned to the rest of the government.  Remember Al Gore saying "Lockbox" about 200 times during the 2000 election?  He was talking about some way to sequester that money so it would be there.  Now, the situation is that officially there is this trust fund, but it has all been loaned to the Federal Government, which means that it must be repaid by taxpayers.  So we owe ourselves a shitload of money.

Myth #3  Social Security is Broke.  This is technically not true. Under current rules it has enough money in that "trust fund" to pay benefits for about 20 years ( the actual number depends on whose projections you look at, and projections that far ahead tend to be inaccurate).  And it could pay lesser benefits for many years beyond that.  So when people say "Social Security won't be there when I retire" it is pretty much nonsense.  The problem is that we now have so much Federal debt, that the burden of paying it off along with paying social security and medicare in the future will mean the government won't be able to do anything else.  But it is not SS that is broke.  It will, though, under current rules, not be able to pay the benefits it now pays (adjusted for inflation) in the future unless something is done about it.

You May Not Know This But....

• When SS was created in the 1930's and the retirement age was set at 65, the life expectancy was around 65, which means about 50% of people would never collect a cent.  Today it is close to 80 years.
• Because of the baby boom and social changes, the number of workers paying into the system for each retiree has dropped from 16 in 1950 to about 3 today.
• At a bit over $110k per year of income, they stop taking social security taxes out of your paycheck.  If you have never made that much money, or don't work in payroll, you probably are not aware of that.  So, if you make $110k per year, you  and your employer (or just you, if you are self-employed) pay the same amount into SS as Lebron James, Bill Gates and Lady Gaga.  So SS is a regressive tax.

How I would "Fix" it...

• Raise the age.  A year or two of paying in versus taking money out is a substantial amount of money.  And clearly, folks who are 65 today are in far better health than those in 1938.
• Raise or do away with the income cap for paying the tax.

I'll be honest: I haven't done the numbers, but I am pretty sure those 2 fixes would go a long way to allowing future retirees to receive the same benefits as the ones today do.

Now, anyone want to get into Medicare's problems?

NO, I Did Not Forget What A Paragraph Is!

For some reason Blogger has decided not to put the paragraph breaks that I used into my last two blog posts. Fucking great work guys! Sorry they look like shit and are hard to read.

What I Learned From Our Little Fire

With the fire that started last Tuesday on the mountain near my house under control, thanks to the great efforts of a bunch of fire fighters, it is kind of amusing to look at the way it affected me and my neighbors when we got a "pre-evacuation", reverse 911 call at around 5:30 that evening.

 I was working on the Banjo Billy Bus that day, and at about 3pm I saw a plume of smoke coming up over the mountains. It was clear that the fire was on the other side of the mountain, so I was not terribly concerned. By 5pm, when I again was where I could get a view of what was going on, I could see that my neighborhood on the southern edge of Boulder was now covered in smoke, enough smoke so that it was now impossible to tell exactly what was burning. Oh, and did I mention that it was an extremely hot and windy afternoon, the kind that is perfect for spreading a fire? As a matter of fact, those very same conditions caused the fire in Colorado Springs to blow completely out of control that afternoon and destroy about 350 homes.

 As I finished my tour in downtown Boulder my phone rang. My step-brother Jim, who lives in Superior about 8 miles from me, was calling to offer help and a place to stay if I needed it. At this point all I know is that there is smoke over my house, and I had seen some neighbors heading home early while I was finishing my tour. "Do you know something I don't know?", I asked. He said he had heard there were pre-evac calls. So now I am in a hurry to get home, and the "pre-evac" call comes a few minutes after Jim's. The call says to prepare for possible evacuation. What the HELL does THAT mean?

 It turns out it means a lot of different things to different people. To me if meant trying to figure out on the way home what I absolutely would be screwed if I lost. When I got home, adrenaline pumping, I grabbed a bunch of files from my file cabinet (financial stuff, stuff I'd written long ago, my REAL birth certificate) and threw the in a suitcase and put that in the car. Then I took pictures of everything in the house. Then, I had a sandwich while I tried to think of what else, other than some clothes, I had to take if I had to go. Sad thing, or maybe happy thing, is that I just don't have that much stuff I can't replace. Some of my neighbors, by the way, either grabbed all their stuff and left, or loaded their cars and had them parked, facing out, ready to go.

So, now it's about 7:30, I've done all I can think to do without a real evacuation order and......what? I thought I'd relax and watch some TV, like maybe CH 7 in Denver which had switched to full-time coverage of "Colorado Burning", dumping their regular programming. And what do I see trying to "relax"? A bit about the fire near my house, but nothing new. Mostly they are showing bunch of horrible video of the Waldo Canyon fire that now threatened to burn Colorado Springs and had caused evacuation of the Air Force Academy. And the tale of how that fire got whipped from small to disastrous in just minutes. Oh, and every ten minutes they cut to the weather guy, who to me is saying "It will never, ever, rain again in Colorado, high winds are coming, and we are all doomed". Thinking back on it, there is a good chance that is not what he actually said, but that's what I heard. But it was all very relaxing!

 The other form of entertainment was standing outside on the street with my neighbors and staring up at the mountains, looking to see if there are any flames on this side of it, and cheering on the slurry bombers. There were. Near the top, but still, remember the weather report said wind and no rain. We were doomed!

 And that's what I learned from the fire....that it is impossible to relax when you think that you may have to run from your home at any minute. Even though logic told me that the fire was on the other side of the mountain, and we had watched the slurry bombers laying fire retardant on our side of the mountain, and any fire would have to go through a lot of sprinkler systems to get to my house, I could not relax. I did fall asleep, mostly because my adrenaline rush finally wore off. But then I woke up in the middle of the night and looked out my window at the mountain, where I could see flames.

In the history of Colorado wildfires, this 300 acre fire is nothing. But it freaked us out here in Shanahan Ridge like our pants were on fire. Which makes me really feel for the people who live in areas where fire has actually attacked. Imagine the weeks of this some people have to live through. It also gave me even more respect for my friends Dave and Maggie, who run the murder mystery company I work for. When the area of the mountains west of Boulder was on fire in September of 2010, they not only kept their shit together, but they managed to grab all the stuff that the murder company would need to do the show we were scheduled for at the Boulderado that Friday. And they were sure their house was on fire when they left. When they called me on Wednesday after they had been evacuated to ask for my help in making copies of something for the script, I was shocked that the show would go on. Hearty folks, those mountain people.

Later this week I hope to write a bit more about how bad the fire threat is, why, and how unprepared we are for this. There has been a lot of good stuff written in the Denver Post about it recently. But now, with smoke no longer rising over the mountain, I think I'll relax.

Political Ads Appeal to our Lazy Brains

Sometimes, a bunch of stuff from different sources comes together in my brain. My "slow" brain, that is. I recently started reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, which is based on the idea of two types of thinking which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates quickly and automatically, with very little effort on the part of the thinker. You see a guy in a red shirt and your brain goes "red shirt" without much thought. Or you can add 2+2. System 2 gets involved to in more in-depth thinking and problem solving. It requires more effort and concentration. If you had to multiply 123x456 in your head, you need system 2. There is some interesting research in his book about what happens when the two different systems are at work that is far too extensive to go into here. But one thing that is interesting is that the two systems arrive often arrive at different answers. A popular example is solving this problem:

A boy buys a bat and ball for a total of $1.10. The bat cost $1 more than the ball. What did the ball cost?

If I made you answer that in 2 seconds, there is a good chance you answer it with system 1 and say "10 cents". However, if I give you a minute to think about it, and you are not too lazy to use system 2 to think about it, you will come up with the correct answer of 5 cents. Some people, however, would be too lazy to bother to switch on system 2, and stick with the wrong answer. Last night I was reading "TF&S" right after watching Jeopardy, during which I was bombarded at every break with ads from Obama and Romney providing conflicting, shallow and misleading information about Romney's performance as Gov. of Mass, during which I posted on Facebook about how they must assume we are idiots. As I read, what goes on with political advertising became apparent, and was reinforced this morning when I read Factcheck.org Director Brooks Jackson's piece "Why the Truth Still Matters". Political ads are designed to work on System 1. Almost all political ads take selected facts about a candidate and make those appear as if that is the candidate's entire story. Okay, those are the closest to honest ones. Others, mostly being run now by the Superpacs, take things completely out of context, or just outright lie. Either way, the 20 second ad that says "Romney, job creator", which during Jeopardy in this swing state is followed by "Romney, job destroyer" are trying to plant that connection in your head, and assume you will not apply system 2 thought to the situation and actually think about what was said. And they definitely assume you are too lazy to look up the real facts. I guess there is nothing surprising about that, except that when it happens when I'm watching Jeopardy I really have to wonder who is placing the ads. The whole point of the game is to get your system 2 brain operating at full capacity and full speed. It is not a system 1 type of show. So, why are they wasting their money insulting those of us who enjoy the brain exercise of Jeopardy with their ads. Do they really think Jeopardy watchers are so dumb and lazy they will buy this bullshit? Or do they just have so much money to spend they need to put ads somewhere? Maybe I am just exhausted from living in a swing state all these years. Those of you who live in safe states, consider yourself lucky, even if your guy is going to lose in your state. At least you don't get this constant barrage of crap that makes you hate Democracy by November! Meanwhile, I am looking forward to finishing the book, and maybe it will explain how Jeopardy contestants are able to think the way they do. Or maybe former Jeopardy contestant Budd Bailey can explain it to us.