Power, legitimacy, and Orly Taitz

So Orly Taitz is throwing a conniption fit after the ruling against her. The problem is, there simply won't be a ruling in her favor, *ever*, because a judicial coup of that magnitude would utterly destroy the legitimacy of the court system in the eyes of the majority of Americans -- and that aura of legitimacy is the only thing that allows courts to have power, since they possess neither armies nor police forces, the only other possible source of power (i.e., *guns*). Without legitimacy, courts can issue rulings, but who will enforce their ruling? They would be in the position of Gorbachev after the coup against him, rattling around in their vacant halls issuing proclamations and orders to the waitstaff, proclamations and orders utterly ignored as the Soviet Union crumbled around him.

To understand what I am talking about, you must understand the fundamental nature of power. There are two sources of power: The will of the majority, or the will of a significant armed minority with guns. Laws -- whether we are talking about the Constitution or laws in general -- have power only because either the majority agree that they should have power, or because a minority with guns force the majority to accept them at gunpoint.

This reality has been responsible for a number of unpleasant incidents over the years where extremely popular actions that pretty much violated the Constitution were papered over by the courts because if they'd issued rulings, the rulings would have been ignored and thus destroyed the aura of invincibility that motivates many people to comply with laws that they don't agree with. Plessy V. Ferguson, the "Separate but Equal" ruling that justified Jim Crow, *had* to be ruled the way it was. The only other alternative would have been to force desegregation upon the majority of Americans at gunpoint, and courts don't have the guns to do so, the President does. And the President is going to deploy those guns only if the majority of voters support him doing so, because otherwise he's going to get impeached or at the very least not re-elected. The majority of Americans supported and demanded Jim Crow in 1896, and the President would never have deployed the Army to enforce the overturn of Jim Crow laws. So if the Supreme Court had ruled any other way in 1896, they would have destroyed their legitimacy. It was not until attitudes changed after WW2 and the majority of Americans realized that legally-mandated racial segregation was an atrocity that the courts could overturn that ruling.

And that is why, even if the election of President Obama did violate the Constitution as the birthers claim (BTW the birthers' claims are nonsense, but just pretend for a moment), there will be no judicial coup done by our courts. The majority of voters elected Obama. Attempting to overturn the election of a sitting President via judicial decree after it's already a done deal would result in a Constitutional crisis that likely would end the authority of any Supreme Court that tried to do so -- they would issue their order, but who would enforce it? The FBI under the command of the President? The Secret Service under the command of the President? The U.S. Army under the command of the President?

It's not happening. Period. Anybody who ever lived under a dictatorship, like Orly Taitz did, should understand that much about power -- a judicial coup without majority support and without guns is about as likely to happen as flying pigs. Well, other than flying pigs at a Pink Floyd concert. If Pink Floyd held concerts anymore, now that they're all 90 years old or something. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Power Penguin

Excellent advice

Governor Secaucus Fats(R-asshole) sez, "Get the hell off the beach. Use common sense and get to safety as soon as possible." And he's absolutely right, for one of the few times, like, ever. You New Jersey twits who have never lived through hurricanes don't have a clue, yo. This Hurricane Irene that's bearing down on your butts is a bitch. Like, a really killer. Just sayin'.

Governor Christie now officially graduates from my list of Republican Lizard People to my list of just plain assholes. The difference is that lizard people inherently are alien sociopaths, while assholes are human -- they're just, well, assholes.

-- Badtux the Common Sense Penguin

Google is an Islamist plot

Did you know that Google is an Islamist plot to impose sharia law upon the United States? Neither did I... until Glenn Beck said so.

Yes. Google. Is an Islamist plot. A sinister conspiracy. Eeeeeevil. Between that and his delusional notion that the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings are part of a vast plot to create an Islamic caliphate, Beck ain't just jumped the shark -- he's jumped a whole row of shark tanks. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Insanity-scryin' Penguin

The racism of the Christian right

We already know that the Christian Right are professional victims, whining about imaginary "discrimination" against Christians every time they aren't allowed special privileges that nobody else gets. A zoning ordinance prohibits erecting a 50 foot cross on a residential lawn or some shit like that, and they turn water into whine big-time, just like their Holy Savior. Nevermind that I can't erect a 50 foot tall statue of the Great Penguin on my lawn either, because the law prohibits all structures taller than 40 feet in our neighborhood. Do you hear me whining about discrimination against Tuxologists? No? If Christians don't get special privileges and special treatment compared to all other groups, the Christian Right whines about how victimized they are by being expected to obey the same laws as everybody else. Oh wah! If whine were wine, these self-entitled fatheads would have drowned in a whole fuckin' *sea* of wine by this time.

So anyhow, there's another thing about the Christian Right that nobody seems to want to touch with a ten foot pole: Most of'em are racist fucks. They really do believe that shit about black people bearing the "Mark of Cain" and thus being inherently evil. They're quick to point out that they allow black members in their churches and no longer shoot niggers on sight but instead co-exist peacefully with them and shit like that, but have you attended one of their churches recently? It's like you poured a few grains of pepper into a sea of salt, and the few blacks you see there are largely there for business reasons -- i.e., they work for the church, sell stuff to the church, whatever, but they're just there showing the flag. I mean, c'mon, who wants to voluntarily go to a church where everybody, like, thinks your color is a sign you're inherently evil and thus spend all their time babbling prayers at ya trying to drive the evil out and make you white like them? That's some sick shit, yo!

So anyhow, that's the background for that sick Christian Taliban bitch Bethany Storro, who burnt herself with acid to make herself even more of a victim in order to better proclaim her faith in Christ, and then blamed a big fat nigger woman for the acid attack because, like, all niggers are inherently evil so of course it was a nigger that done it, wot? Thus pulling together two threads of the contemporary Christian Right in America -- their professional victimhood, and their utter and total racism -- into one unholy and evil package. Kinda like Susan Smith, but at least Storro only hurt herself, not her kids -- thankfully.

And to quote some other Christian who is pissed: "Why is it that crazy people always want to step up and spread the word about Jesus? It’s hard enough being a Christian without the acid tossers, Koran burners, Sarah Palins, and the kill-a-grown-azz-person-to-protest-abortion types trying to be representatives." Well, I think it goes with that whole believing-in-imaginary-friends bit. What's charming in children is just fuggin' nuts in adults...

-- Badtux the Christian Taliban observin' Penguin

We must not censor discussions

Okay, so Joe Teabagger suggested that the problem with America was too many deadbeat black people, and the solution is to create work farms where all black people are interned. We must seriously discuss the pros and cons of this policy proposal, despite the fact that it's, well, unconstitutional, immoral, and disgusting, because to do otherwise is censorship, and we as responsible journalists should never engage in censorship, even if it's censorship of someone who is clearly insane and babbling nonsense. Because our responsibility as responsible journalists is to validate utterly insane positions by discussing them, not say "That's fucking insane" and ignore such whackjobs.

-- Badtux the Journalist Penguin

The pernicous stupidity of Financial Times

Financial Times claims that Germany's banking sector is insolvent.

Reading stories like this absolutely astound me. The trash on the books of the German banks is worth exactly as much as it has ever been worth -- i.e., not much. All that can be really said about it is that the fact that the trash has to someday be written down to its real value will be seriously annoying to whoever owns the trash at the time -- which likely is *not* going to be the German banks, but is almost 99.9% certain to be the European Central Bank (ECB).

Yes, this means the ECB will show paper losses on their equivalent of the Federal Reserve's "cash for trash" thingy. So what? The money lost never existed in the first place, until printed by the ECB in order to exchange for trash. Easy come, easy go.

For those cretins who claim, "but printing all this money will create inflation!" -- err, no. The money "exists" on the books today (in the form of the artificial values of the trash on the banks' books). You aren't "printing" money by exchanging cash for trash, you're simply changing money from one form into another, since you're silently un-printing the newly printed money when you write down the trash. The end result has no (zero) effect upon inflation, because there isn't a single Euro on bank balance sheets that wasn't already there even if just fictionally as artificially high values on trash.

Indeed, the only thing that trash-for-cash does is prevent *DEFLATION*, since banks writing down the trash is the same thing as un-printing money insofar as effect upon their balance sheets is concerned. Printing money to make up for the un-printed money is just status quo. So why do we continue to get stories like this from the likes of the Financial Times, and from conservative finance writers in general? It's as if the invention of the printing press in 1450 completely escaped their notice, nevermind the invention of computers by Alan Turing and John Von Neumann, which made printing money even easier because it doesn't even require paper anymore!

-- Badtux the Baffled-by-stupidity Penguin

U.S. Afghan status as a Powerpoint slide

The April 2010 report to Congress on Afghanistan was 150 pages of gobbledygook, but Cmdr. Jeff Huber points out that it could have been quite readily summarized with the following bullet-pointed Powerpoint slide:

• Our Objectives Are Unachievable
• Our Strategy Is Hallucinatory
• This War Has Nothing to Do With National Security Whatsoever
• Find and Execute Face-Saving Exit Plan ASAP!!!

As far as I know, there has never been a shred of evidence that the Taliban (who we're fighting in Afghanistan) had anything to do with 9/11. That was Osama bin Laden and his bunch -- who, BTW, are in Pakistan right now, not Afghanistan. So why are we in Afghanistan, again?

- Badtux the Baffled Penguin

It's as if Japan attacked Pearl Harbor... and we declared war on Mexico!

Even employed benefit from social safety net

One thing I hear often from the Ayn Rand sheep is that they don't want to pay for a real social safety net because people ought to be rugged individualists and stuff. Thing is, they're hurting themselves when they say shit like that.

One thing I’ve repeatedly noted on here is that the lack of a social safety net in this country is what has rendered the current downturn so severe here. I mean, look. Arizona pays $240 per week MAX unemployment compensation, which won't even pay the CORBA bill for health insurance, much less mortgage and car payments. The downturn wasn’t this severe in Germany, or in France, or in Japan, or any other 1st world country. Just here. The biggest reason for the collapse in consumption here in the USA (but not anywhere else) has been that people are stashing money away as fast as they can in case their own job is next on the chopping block, thereby making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But people are scared that if they lose their job, they’ll lose everything — and are doing what is rational when there is no social safety net to back them up, which is exactly the wrong thing to do if we’re trying to keep people employed.

In other words, even employed people benefit when we have a real unemployment insurance system for the unemployed, one that would pay your health insurance and mortgage and car payments while you look for a new job, instead of the current ridiculous thing where no state pays enough unemployment compensation to keep you from losing everything when you lose your job. They benefit because it increases the chances they'll *keep* their jobs, rather than have to make sure their resume is up-to-the-minute up-to-date for fear their job is going the way of the dodo. This fucked-up "unemployment insurance" mess, if fixed, would benefit *everybody*, even the Randbots. Yet they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot than admit that government has a place in smoothing out the fluctuations of the business cycle. Typical. Just typical. Ideologues. Every single one of'em, more interested in imposing their ideology upon the rest of us than in, like, actual REALITY. No different from the old Soviet commies, in other words. Which is why, like the old Soviet Union, the United States is currently in a slow-motion collapse. Once ideology becomes more important than reality for a nation's leaders, that's pretty much The End. Alas.

- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Gold bugs in unicorn-land

Reading someone else's blog, I came across this gem:

I'm not at all sure what kind of money system would work best, but I prefer gold and silver coins. Deflation is the best thing that can happen to an economy. The cause of this catastrophe and the many others that have preceeded it are gov’t intervention and money printing.

And another gold bug strikes, demonstrating once again that gold bugs have no understanding of money behavior at the zero bounds or, indeed, any understanding of money and its function in the economy. Sadly, they are more influential than people who have an actual understanding of the issues that occur at the zero bounds. It is as if the denizens of the mental asylum have been released and set to making policy.

In the real world, as vs. the bizarro world universe that they live in, we know that a small and predictable amount of inflation is needed in order to drive money out from under mattresses and into the economy where it can contribute to meaningful economic activity. In the real world, as vs. the bizarro world universe that they live, we know that money under mattresses is just lumpy mattress stuffing insofar as its contribution to economic activity is concerned, and gold is just a shiny metal that has no magical properties insofar as its utility is concerned other than its usefulness in making dental fixtures and plating electronic connections (or as I’m fond of saying, “you can’t eat gold”). In the real world we know that the gold standard causes a positive feedback effect upon the natural up and down cycle of money supply caused by fractional reserve lending and its money multiplier effect, where bank lending expands and creates inflation during upturns and contracts and creates deflation in downturns, while the printing press can smooth out those wild inflation-deflation cycles that typified the 19th century economy and thereby actually create a more stable money supply than the gold standard did. In the real world we know that a modern economy cannot function without fractional reserve lending because that is how a modern economy marshalls current assets in order to create future assets in a much more nimble manner to meet demand than is possible in an economy without fractional reserve lending, where you must wait to slowly accumulate capital before you can make the capital investments needed to match supply to demand. But that is not the world that gold bugs live in. They live in a medieval world without fractional reserve lending, without a modern economy, and appear bound and determined to drag the rest of us there.

In the real world, we should not have to deal with delusional people who live in fictional universes of their own making and make unsupported (and unsupportable) statements of “facts” that have no data to support them. Those people should be relegated to the same status as that crazy guy beneath the freeway underpass who is pushing the shopping cart while wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and muttering to his invisible friend, because they have as much attachment to reality as that guy. Unfortunately, we have to keep explaining how things work in the real world as vs. in the fictional universe they’ve built inside their heads over and over again, because that fictional universe is *pretty* (oooh, gold, shiny shiny!) and has superficial plausibility to people who have never looked at the data and, indeed, lack the statistical expertise to properly evaluate the data. And unfortunately, some of these people appear to be our leaders. SIIIIIIIIIIGH!

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

More Republican cretins

What is it about Republicans and failed businessmen (or businesswomen, in the following case)? Republicans are always whining, "we want to run government like a business", then run politicians for office who failed at every business they ever ran. Case in point: The Republican nominees for the Senate and Governorship in California.

Let's look at their gubernatorial candidate first: Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay. Meggers is most famous for paying $2.5 billion for Skype yet somehow forgot to buy the source code or intellectual property rights, meaning she actually paid for, err, nothing, resulting in a $1.5 billion loss for eBay when they finally managed to get rid of whatever it is of Skype that they actually owned. Indeed, virtually all of her strategic initiatives ended up being disasters, the only parts of eBay that actually work and make money are the parts that existed before she arrived at eBay (that is, the core auction site and associated PayPal payment site). She at least did not run eBay into the ground -- but looking at the record, it is also clear that she is a lousy businesswoman.

Carly Fiorini, the Republican candidate for the Senate, is even worse. She is most infamous for being the most hated CEO in HP history, who spearheaded the disastrous Compaq merger that almost destroyed HP and ended up being run out of town due to her mismanagement, leading to triumphant headlines like "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" when she was shown the door. That's just how hated she is here in the Silicon Valley -- she is widely considered to be an imperious fool who is nowhere near as smart as she believes she is, who refuses to listen to anybody and has no patience with actual facts when she has decided to act. She was, in short, an utter disaster as a businesswoman, and there's no indication that she would be anything better as a Senator.

Yet both of these women bafflingly have a good chance of winning this fall. Why is that? Discuss.

-- Badtux the Baffled Penguin

Tuesday gloom and doom econo-blogging

The big names in econo-blogging have been weighing in on Obama's 2010 and 2011 budget proposals, and it is not pretty. I cannot find one of the real econo-bloggers (those with a record of being right with their predictions based on the numbers) who think this budget is anything other than an utter disaster. Some highlights they've mentioned about the disaster:

1. The budgets continue the disastrous Bush tax cuts that gutted the Federal Government's ability to fund its operations out of cash flow, therefore guaranteeing long-term deficits ultimately funded by printing money (because in the end that's what is going to happen) for as many years as the eye can see. Short-term we have no problem -- total U.S. government debt is only half of GDP, or roughly 1/8th of what Japan's government debt is. Long term, we cannot basically exempt over 50% of Americans from paying taxes and have a solvent government. No nation can function when half the nation is a bunch of deadbeat freeloaders. That way lies Somalia territory. Indeed, the primary cause of the deficit is the Bush tax cuts combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- without those, the deficit would be eliminated by economic growth within five years. Yet Obama wants to continue both the Bush tax cuts AND the wars. Inexplicable.
2. The budgets HALVE the amount of money available for unemployment payments and Medicaid. Basically, this means that a huge number of people currently drawing unemployment checks because there are six applicants for every job opening will end up on the streets. We are talking about scenes of utter misery in the next year that will rival anything that we saw during the Great Depression. And Medicaid rolls are going up because of families being unemployed, yet Obama is cutting Medicaid? The public hospital systems, which are dependent upon Medicaid money, are going to utterly collapse because the states are bankrupt and cannot finance Medicaid all by themselves. For large numbers of poor people, health care is going to go from being extremely inconvenient to obtain, to being absolutely impossible to obtain. The U.S. is already looking more like a second-world emerging nation insofar as healthcare stats are concerned. This is going to be an utter disaster, putting us down on the bottom of healthcare stats with nations like Nigeria, Somalia, and Haiti.
3. The budget has no -- ZERO -- help for ordinary Americans. All it has is tax cuts and credits that predominantly go to the rich, tax cuts and credits that I've previously explained will do nothing -- nada, zilch, zero -- to create jobs because what's stopping job creation is a lack of demand, not taxes.
4. The budget will, at a conservative estimate, cause a 1.5% rise in unemployment.

In short, President Obama is about to kick America in the balls and guarantee that he will go down in history with Jimmy Carter as a failed President. He has done nothing -- NOTHING -- for ordinary Americans during his Presidency, with the exception of a too-small stimulus program that has thus far spent less than $100 billion on real actual stimulus as vs. bullshit tax cuts to the rich or to people who already aren't paying taxes. And by basically adopting Republican policies that are "conventional wisdom" propagated by right-wing cretins who flunked elementary school math, he owns the disaster that is going to unfold during the next two years.

In short, President Obama has disappeared into an alternate universe -- the Washington Bubbleverse, where unicorns are real, cotton candy grows on trees, crowding-out is occurring despite the last Treasury auction being at 0% interest, and the printing press (for monetizing deficits in the face of a $6 TRILLION dollar asset value collapse and resulting deflation) has never been invented. Unfortunately, that alternate universe that he has disappeared into is not the REAL universe, where people are hurting and need help, need jobs, need hope. All Obama has given us is bullshit and a knife in the back.

I am with Brad DeLong: I am fucking scared. Because the Democrats are basically destroying any hope that the American people have... and when that happens, bad shit happens. BAD shit happens. As in, food riots and thousands dead because people simply will not voluntarily starve to death just because right-wing ideology says they're supposed to and Democrats seem to be embracing that same right-wing ideology. Bad shit as in blood in the streets bad shit, the sort of bad shit that happens in Iraq where people with no hope strap bombs to themselves and walk into the middle of crowds and blow themselves up bad shit. BAD BAD BAD shit. Like that housepainter with the funny mustache taking over in Germany back in the 1930's kind of bad shit. Right now, our government has basically ceased to exist as a useful entity, but we don't have a substitute for it, and things are going to crumble, and crumble badly, as public order collapses as unpaid civil servants in the bankrupt states walk off the jobs to try to find food for their families. I might sound apocalyptic as hell right now. But just tell that to President Sarah Palin when she takes office in 2012, which is practically guaranteed now.

I weep for the nation that could have been... but which shall not be. United States of America. It was a good 220 year run. Too bad it's over now.

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

Leno/O'Brien

Who gives a shit? Turn your damned TV off. It's just a waste of time and makes you stupid (yes, we have scientific proof of that). Sheesh!

-- Badtux the WTF Penguin

Saturday Musical Social Commentary

I hiked a lot of miles today so I'm tired. I'm heading to bed.

This song reminds me of a song I need to record called "Hypnotize me." It starts, "hypnotize me mesmerize me dirty up my mind/tell me what I think today and tell me what I feel/ Tell me who to hate today and tell me who to kill / Welcome, to the United States of Delusion / Where every day's an illusion / Bathe me in your cool blue glow and tell me what to think and know / Welcome, to the United States of Illusion."

Or something along those lines. Same basic theme anyhow. Now you know why I don't own a TV. Voluntarily submitting myself to be mind fucked simply is not something this penguin has any desire to do.

-- Badtux the Orwellian Penguin

Yet more fiddling...

What, does Obama have a goddamned FIDDLE factory in the White House basement now? The State of California is bankrupt. Income tax collections have fallen FIFTY PERCENT since this time last year, and sales tax revenues are flat only because of a massive hike in the sales tax in April. Pretty soon the state declares bankruptcy and puts hundreds of thousands out of work. Yet the Obama administration refuses to give any assistance to California. This is how Obama is going to protect American jobs? By putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work, between the state employees and the contractors paid via state highway and health funds? Not to mention that California's crumbling infrastructure isn't going to fix itself, and Obama's stimulus program ain't gonna do jack shit if there's no state employees left to apply for it and issue contracts to road contractors and such. And not to mention the fact that there will be no -- zero -- Medicaid left and thus people dying on the streets due to lack of health care, schools will have to shut down for lack of money, the universities will be shuttered, it will be the right-wing paradise that is Somalia with no government anywhere.

I can hear some tighty righties stroking their rods just thinking about it, even though their pasty flabby basement-pallored asses would be the bitches of the thugs and goons of the gangsters released when the prison guards walk out for lack of pay, but as for anybody sensible, letting California collapse just isn't an option. But it appears that our so-called "leaders" in Washington D.C. don't agree.... more fiddles, they shout! Fiddle louder, they shout! As they fiddle us right to the death of the United States as a nation from their bubble universe in Washington D.C., fiddling every bit as loudly as the citizens of Rome did as their Empire collapsed around them. But Rome went from a city of 1.5 million to a few thousand miserable survivors huddled in its ruins in less than a century. Is that really the fate that our so-called "leaders" want for America? Complete societal collapse and the deaths of 95% of the population? Because they sure are fiddling loud for that fate...

-- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin