You explain it,

because, frankly, I cannot. It's a profound mystery.

doot doot DOOT

dee doot de doo DEET

I'm getting eerily close to going a year without posting

So I suppose I better do something about that.

Wall Street Isn’t Worth It | Jacobin

Wall Street Isn’t Worth It | Jacobin

"I argue that society as a whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and received much smaller returns. A political strategy based on cutting the financial sector down to size has more promise for the Left than any alternative approach now on offer, and is a necessary precondition for a broader attempt to make the distribution of wealth and power more equal."

One of the interesting suggestions is the elimination of favorable tax treatment of capital gains. Currently, income received as a capital gain is taxed at a lower rate than regular income, and one of the tenets of right-wing taxation is the elimination of capital gains taxes. Even quasi-lefties like Matt Yglesias support the same thing.

This treatment, though, creates a tremendous economic incentive to make money through capital gains rather than regular salaries. Doesn't this extra incentive create many of the problems associated with a robust financial class. I mean, does this money really go to spurring innovation and jobs or just to line the pockets of the financiers?

What It's Like to Fail

What It's Like to Fail

The author went from relatively successful sitcom writer (for Roseanne) to homeless and back to a stable, but lower class existence. It's an inspirational story, though it highlights how the US lacks real safety nets for the poor.

As an ethical matter, we have a system of little safety and security, we should provide better for the poor.

Potential Gingrich-Santorum Voltron Candidacy Spoiled by Pride

The Secret Gingrich-Santorum 'Unity Ticket' That Nearly Toppled Romney - Businessweek"

"Gingrich thought that he belonged on top of the ticket. “Our reasoning,” says Walker, “is that we had won a major primary at that point [South Carolina] and people like Rick Perry were coming on board. Perry had just endorsed Newt.”

To Santorum’s team, however, the Gingrich campaign was a sinking ship, and their own man was the obvious choice to lead the ticket. “At the end of the day,” says Brabender, “we won 11 states and tied two others. He won two states, which makes it only logical that Rick was the one who had earned the right to go one-on-one with Romney.”"

Who could imagine that the vanity of two men running for president would spoil such a special thing.

Private sector parasites

Michael Lind, Private sector parasites on Salon.com:

Unfortunately, with the exception of some leftist and liberal economic thinkers who distinguish “rentier capitalism” or “financial capitalism” from “industrial capitalism,” conventional political discourse doesn’t distinguish among profit-earning “makers” and rent-extracting “takers.” Many progressives and populists indiscriminately denounce “big business” and “the corporations” as though a productive consumer electronics manufacturer were no different than a company that monopolizes the tolls from a privatized municipal parking meter system. At the same time, the center-left, whose upscale supporters tend to be credentialed upper-middle-class professionals, tend to ignore the antisocial aspects of the rent-extracting schemes of the professional guilds — medicine, law and the professoriate — as well as of their elite accomplices, the credential-granting universities.

On the right, the greatest triumph of the rentier interests has been to redefine “capitalist” to mean, not productive entrepreneur or successful industrial company executive, but “anybody who makes money” — a category that includes not only investors in productive enterprises but also rentiers and a third category of speculators in unproductive assets (Picasso paintings and Persian rugs, as opposed to machine tool factories).

I don't know what I think about this, but it was provocative enough.

It's always fun to pile on David Brooks

David Brooks Wishfully, Wrongly Believes the Chinese Have No Word for 'Nerd'

Whenever you hear someone explain that a concept is so foreign to this or that culture that people cannot even use their language to describe it, it is safe to assume your passport has just been stamped for entry into the Land of Bullshit.

David Brooks is great and writing things that have the ring of truth to them, that just make sense. Unfortunately, the truth is often nonsensical, even jarringly so. So it's safe to say that Brooks is basically a potato head.

I'm oppressed because I can't oppress

Peggy Noonan lauds the Superbowl Paul Harvey ad. One of the many reasons to adore the speech?

Because it explicitly put God as maker of life and governor of reality, again un-self-consciously, and with a tone that anticipated no pushback. God, you could say anything in Paul Harvey's day.

Paul Harvey couldn't go on the radio and say "By the way, there's no god, and often religion causes people to do terrible things." Paul Harvey couldn't go on the radio and say, "We should give gay people the same rights enjoyed by everyone else." This is a classic example of oppression paranoia, like the war on christmas. Because mainstream culture no longer 100% reflects your beliefs or points of view, you think you're being oppressed.

A Classic Dancing Chicken Moment....

A fellow with Down syndrome writes "An Open Letter to Ann Coulter," taking her to task for using the slur "the retard" in reference to Obama:

Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.

This sort of quote makes me want to throw up my hands and declare humanity a lost cause of vicious misery. These may be my issues talking, mind you.

Enforcing Gender Norms in the Legal Profession

Findlaw's Greedy Associates blog gives advice to prospective Harvard Law students who will have a Skype interview

Dump Hello Kitty for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Take a look at what's on the shelves behind you. Your interviewer will see these things. So you might want to consider replacing the giant plush Hello Kitty doll, and replacing it with some library-borrowed law books.

Of course, it is a feminine thing that signals your utter lack of competence. Lawyering is serious business, little lady. Another tip from the same post suggests that the interviewee wear khakis for their interview. That's not gender-specific at all, is it?

Mitt Romney and Tax Avoidance

What's Really Going on With Mitt Romney's $102 Million IRA - Atlantic Mobile

Zakaria said the "larger point at play" worth discussing is "that it shows that people like Mitt Romney and you have access to advice, mechanisms, strategies to build wealth that really ordinary Americans don't have access to. And that when you couple that with his agenda, which is to cut taxes further for those people, it gets to the heart of this idea that there are two Americas, one for the very, very, very rich and one for everyone else.""

Exactly. The preferential tax treatment of investment income is a joke. The joke, of course, is on us.

Jonah Goldberg cheats a little

Jonah Goldberg got caught in a lie:

On the dust jacket of his new book, "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas," best-selling conservative author and commentator Jonah Goldberg is described as having "twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize."

In fact, as Goldberg acknowledged on Tuesday, he has never been a Pulitzer nominee, but merely one of thousands of entrants.
....
It's not uncommon for Pulitzer entrants to claim to be nominees. Here's how it works: Though there are only three nominees, known as nominated finalists, in each Pulitzer category each year, there are more than 2,000 entrants. One could say that all of them were "nominated" by someone. If all Pulitzer entrants could be called nominees, any publisher could give all its authors that honorific by submitting an entry form and a check for $50.

It's just seller's puffery, but when you accuse your ideological opponents of dishonesty, maybe you shouldn't cheat on your bio.

Creamed Corn

As to the origin of the word "garmonbozia" itself, neither the word or any of its parts seem to be derived from any known words in any language, although many have tried to associate it with "maize" or other words for corn, since creamed corn seems to be the physical manifestation of garmonbozia.

Twin Peaks FAQ: "Fire Walk With Me"

Erlend Øye - Thirteen - Red Square, Moscow

The Coffee Cup Satire

Allysia Finley: Coffee Is an Essential Benefit Too - WSJ.com.  This satire has been making the rounds.  It goes like this:

Can you believe the nerve of employers? Many of them still seem to think that they should be allowed to determine the benefits they offer. I guess they haven't read your 2,000-page health law. It's the government's job now.

That's a good thing, too. Employers for too long have been able to restrict our access to essential health services like contraception by making us pay some of the bill. Really, it's amazing that we aren't all dead. Now, thanks to you, we'll enjoy free and universal access to preventative care just like workers do in Cuba. Even so, there are still many essential benefits that the government must mandate to make the U.S. the freest country in the world.

The article then goes on to make a bunch of nutty suggestions about things that employers should be required to provide to their employees, from fitness club memberships to the titular free coffee.

This kind of satire is thoroughly frustrating, because it demonstrates a lack of understanding. The only reason to write this is to provide partisan opposition, not to criticize policy.

Health insurance provided by employers is essentially subsidized by the way the tax code treats employer-provided care. The health insurance that your employer provides you isn't a part of your wages - it escapes taxation free and clear. If you tried to buy your own health coverage, you don't get the same tax exclusion, and so it becomes heinously expensive to purchase your own health care. As a result, we have a system where employers provide health care.

So what can a consumer of health care do to take control in this system? Employees have no real say in what coverage their company offers. Your options are to buy your own coverage or find a new job with an employer who does offer the services you need. The first option is incredibly expensive, because you will be penalized by the tax code. The second option is ludicrous. Even if a person were able to effectively research new employers' plans and actually get a job with the new employer, nothing prevents the new employer from changing the plan and effectively ruining your efforts.

So the Affordable Care Act sets up basic standard packages of care, so that people can be assured of a basic set of services. And this is where the dishonesty starts. Is the WSJ seriously opposed to setting basic standards of health insurance packages? Why?

It isn't a free market. Nobody can go buy their own coverage, nobody can pick and choose packages. You get what your employer wants to give you.

Is that fair? Maybe not, but then your issue isn't really with the Affordable Care Act, your issue is with the system of employer-provided health care. Why don't you go pick that fight, instead?

But ultimately, how can you conflate basic health services, the services provide by physicians and pharmacists, with drinking coffee. The juxtaposition indicates shortcomings not in the ACA, but in the WSJ.

Meow

Charles Murray's plan to save white America...

Charles Murray speaks about his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, decrying the lack of values among the poor. He sets forth some solutions in the New York Times

Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless. We don’t need legislation to fix this problem, just an energetic public interest law firm that challenges the constitutionality of the degree as a job requirement.

After all, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that employers could not use scores on standardized tests to choose among job applicants without demonstrating a tight link between the test and actual job requirements. It can be no more constitutional for an employer to require a piece of paper called a bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even guarantee that its possessor can write a coherent paragraph.

This part struck me as weird. In truth, the Supreme Court could make no such decision, and has made no such decision regarding standardized tests.

The cases that Murray's referring to all deal with cases of racial discrimination. Employers canned their black employees and then pointed to tests or educational standards as a fig leaf to cover their actions. The court didn't invalidate the tests, they were just found to be pretexts.

It's a weirdly revealing misunderstanding. Murray misinterprets a case about racial discrimination as being a case of meddling in businesspeople's discretion. It's just creepy.

Charles Murray's plan to save white America...

Charles Murray speaks about his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, decrying the lack of values among the poor. He sets forth some solutions in the New York Times

Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless. We don’t need legislation to fix this problem, just an energetic public interest law firm that challenges the constitutionality of the degree as a job requirement.
After all, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that employers could not use scores on standardized tests to choose among job applicants without demonstrating a tight link between the test and actual job requirements. It can be no more constitutional for an employer to require a piece of paper called a bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even guarantee that its possessor can write a coherent paragraph.

This part struck me as weird. In truth, the Supreme Court could make no such decision, and has made no such decision regarding standardized tests.

The cases that Murray's referring to all deal with cases of racial discrimination. Employers canned their black employees and then pointed to tests or educational standards as a fig leaf to cover their actions. The court didn't invalidate the tests, they were just found to be pretexts.

It's a weirdly revealing misunderstanding. Murray misinterprets a case about racial discrimination as being a case of meddling in businesspeople's discretion. It's just creepy.

Jonah Goldberg: The fight over contraception coverage - latimes.com

Jonah Goldberg: The fight over contraception coverage - latimes.com

is a funny read. Mostly because it contains these two phrases:

The lying demonization of Republicans...."

and

As Ramesh Ponnuru writes in "The Party of Death"

and yet the former doesn't refer to the latter.