CDC News Release

CDC News Release - (Amended per censorship ruling):

After generations of bigly ["evidence-based"] research it has been found that from ten weeks on, the developing kovfefe ["fetus"] is highly snowflake ["vulnerable"] to environmental factors.  Though some dispute this research, it is clearly founded solidly on fake news ["science-based"].  

Entitlement Cuts

The confusion around entitlements has begun in earnest once more.  Here are some important facts:
- Social Security is an entitlement
- Medicare is an entitlement
- Veteran’s benefits are entitlements
- Unemployment insurance is an entitlement

This is not an opinion, and it’s not a pejorative; it is reality of their budget classification.  In the examples above (‘Contributory’ entitlements), an individual is ‘entitled’ to the benefit because of a contribution that they have made.    

There are also ‘non-contributory’ entitlements, for which one qualifies through need, rather than because of a prior service, or monetary contribution.  These include Medicaid, SNAP, housing assistance, WIC, Head Start, among others.   

This confusion is no accident.  Those who aim to cut entitlement spending hope to ‘divide and conquer’ the opposition, by pitting us against one another.  They have found powerful—if unwitting—allies in those who can believe that their entitlement can be spared, if only we will stop calling it an entitlement.  

Be assured, that as willing as those currently in charge may be to make cruel cuts to the non-contributory entitlements that help the most vulnerable among us, it’s the big fat pots of money in the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds that their sponsors are after.  They must be stopped, but will not be stopped by denial, or confusion around labeling.  

Entitlement cuts (and the word ‘reform’ has no place here) are as malevolent as the pending tax code changes.  They are elements of an effort to restructure our society, further skewing the already lopsided distribution of wealth, in favor of the tiny, extremely wealthy plutocratic class.   

Christmas at the Trumps

The family in the White House observes many of the same holiday traditions that less disturbed people do – but with just a little twist.  

With the season upon us, they will enjoy watching classic movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Carol.  But they all know to not let the old man watch the final act of either movie.  He doesn’t believe in these endings, and watching them gives him nightmares, making him wake up throughout the night, shouting ‘Fake News! Fake News!’   

So Melania or one of the kids will distract him, while somebody changes the channel.  If he asks, they just tell him that that he saw the ending, and that he didn’t miss anything important.  They assure him that Tiny Tim died, but not before the Cratchit family was bankrupted by medical bills.  Or they tell him that George Bailey jumped off that bridge, but it didn’t matter anyway, because he had never been born … and that all is well in Trumpsville.  

Sure, it’s a little deception, but it helps him sleep like a baby … an evil, highly dysfunctional baby. 

Victim-Drop Contest

Since our elected leaders are clearly not going to do anything about the epidemic of mass slaughter in our country, maybe we could at least use this phenomenon as a way to raise revenue.  

Sometimes charities have a ‘cow flop contest’, where they lay out a grid on a field, kind of like a Superbowl pool, with numbers along one axis, and letters along the other.  People place bets on which square the cow will bless with her first poop, and the person who guesses correctly wins the pot (less whatever goes to the worthy cause).  

We could do something like this, except, instead of a grid, have the country broken down into precincts or something – and try to guess where the next mass murder will be.  To keep it interesting, there would have to be a minimum … onesy-twosey murder suicides would not count.  Maybe say it has to be at least ten innocent people.  This way, the contest wouldn’t be over the day it started, but it shouldn’t last more than a month or so, then you can start over.  

For a grand prize, along with the cash, maybe the NRA could offer a high-powered semi-automatic weapon!

Systemic vs. Systematic

Today’s Vocabulary Lesson:

Among the most confused word pairs in our language are ‘systemic’, and ‘systematic’.  But these words have very different meanings.  ‘Systemic’ refers to a problem or phenomenon that affects an entire system, rather than one specific part.  ‘Systematic’ refers to an action plan executed methodically.  

For example, the prevalence of guns in our society, their fetishization, and their easy access by anybody who wants one pose a SYSTEMIC threat to our safety.  When this threat is manifest—whether in a mass killing, or in the tens of thousands of individual deaths by firearms that occur each year—it triggers a SYSTEMATIC response by the gun industry, acting through its NRA arm, and the lawmakers they sponsor; preventing any change.  

I hope that helps you understand the distinction between these similar words.  

Afghanistan and Trump

Since the days of the Great Game, in the mid-1800s, Afghanistan has been known as the ‘Graveyard of Empires’.  Go ahead and Google the term.  They drove out the British Empire twice, Imperial Russia, then the Soviet Union, and have managed to maintain a stalemate with us and our allies since 2001.  Whenever there are no foreign powers to fight, the multitude of competing warlords, tribes and other factions stay sharp by practicing on each other. 

Last night, the Current Occupant of the White House demonstrated that our engagement in that country is yet another critical issue about which he has absolutely no understanding. 

He said, "Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition, attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge."  These crowd-pleasing words sound great, but they are goals, not a strategy – and they are the same goals we have had all along.  The closest thing to a change in strategy is giving the military more autonomy.  But this still does not define what victory would look like, or how to achieve this.  It just means he will have somebody below him to blame when it doesn’t work. 

He cited the service men and women who have lost their lives as reason for staying there to see the battle through.  This is eerily like British and Soviet reasons for overstaying their missions – and very much like the ‘peace with honor’ criteria that kept us bleeding in Vietnam for seven years after our leaders knew it was not winnable.  It defines an escalating cycle of commitment for an unwinnable (and nebulously-defined) war that is already the longest in our history. 

Capitalism and Concentration of Power

A couple points, Dan:

1)      Labor is as fundamental to the workings of capitalism as is entrepreneurship members of the labor force are no more ‘spectators’ than are entrepreneurs, or the bankers who back them.  As economies of scale progress—and the fundamental forces of market competition drive out smaller, less-efficient competitors—there is a natural concentration of power.  Ironically, once the market is highly concentrated, the competitive mechanisms that drive capitalism’s most positive attributes wither.  In other words, unregulated capitalism contains the seeds of its own demise. 
Regulation may act to counter this destructive concentration, but often it is only applies after the power and wealth are so concentrated that the regulators are coopted, and thus ineffective. 

2)      A major intend of the education (what used to be called ‘normal’ schools) was always to provide trained ‘obedient’ workers – what are often called productive contributors to society. 

Thus ends my standard counterpoint to your Schmieding rant.  You’re welcome!