Republicrats v. Depublicans, Part Deux

The leader of the most transparent administration in American history has stepped up to the teleprompter once more. Demonstrating that when our way of life is menaced, even by our largest trading partner, Mr. Obama is prepared to act swiftly to protect us from the crafty, conniving Canucks. This is why it only took him seven years to rule that we're not about to let 'em build a pipeline to transport their nasty, tar sands-derived oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Mr. O. made this courageous decision in spite of the fact the State Department has concluded that the pipeline will have no effect on global warming, one way or another because, one way or another, this oil has and will continue to be extracted, shipped and refined by somebody. His decision will ensure that boom times will continue for anyone involved in transporting oil via rail even though pipelines are proven to be more efficient, and considerably safer. He will not be swayed in spite of the fact constructing the pipeline would've generated a bunch of construction jobs, the exact number of which depends on whom you choose to believe. Anyway, as he has pointed out, these jobs would only last for a couple of years, though I must admit that the construction workers I know would be willing to trade a non-essential body part for a couple of years of well-paying, guaranteed work. As a matter of fact, I personally know of several citizens of Flyoverland who would be willing to sell one of their kidneys if it were legal...

...Which baffles me because the official unemployment rate is down again and many economists think that a 5% unemployment rate, allowing for all the folks in the process of trading a great job for an even better one, effectively constitutes full employment. I must have too many friends in low places.

The point is that despite the fact we Americans overwhelmingly support the building of the pipeline in poll after poll, Mr. Obama, once again is not afraid to ignore us, to save us from ourselves. He has courageously decided that we will not inflict Mother Earth with this particular 1,200 miles of pipeline even though we are already continuously expanding the 2,500,000 miles of pipes running under our feet. Now he has street cred he can use at the upcoming twenty-first meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Unlike the first twenty conferences, the world has a chance at reaching a workable consensus this time because China, that generates more carbon dioxide than the USA and Canada put together, recently promised that although the numbers will keep rising, they will peak soon and then start going down -- by 2030 at the latest. Barry made Jinping pinkie swear.

Meanwhile...

The Republicrats, the party of small government, continues their bipartisan alliance with Big sugar, and Big Gubmint Depublicans.

The Gubmint began subsidizing the American sugar industry in 1934, a temporary measure to aid farmers in the midst of the Great Depression. The price supports, quotas, and loans enjoyed by the industry, that the GAO says costs us almost $2,000,000,000 dollars a year, are alive and well 81 years later. Congress, demonstrating that they're capable of bipartisan cooperation when it's important -- or when it's needed to buy votes -- remains committed. For example, Marco Rubio, the Florida Republicrat senator running for president (alleged Rightie) and Al Frankin (proud Leftie, a Depublican of Saturday Night Live fame, that somehow became a senator from Minnesota) stand united to protect the sugar interests in their respective states. Which means that if you live in the USA, you're paying at least twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world. One of the rationalizations offered for this program is that it protects American jobs, and it does -- as long as the jobs are in the sugar industry. Unfortunately, the U.S. Dept. of Commerce estimates that every job protected in the sugar business results in three jobs lost in the candy business.

Egads! exclaims the gentlereader, how is this possible? Information Costs.

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."  Henry Hazlitt

When the phrase information costs is used by an economist, it refers to the fact that a given weasel, or group of weasels, can gain an unfair advantage in the market because while the advantage may be huge for them, it often goes unnoticed by the market as a whole. This is because we must choose our battles carefully since it's impossible to win them all.

The market is us. Or rather, the market is us, interacting with -- us. Filthy rich, desperately poor, or somewhere in between -- we all make choices, from moment to moment. Which burger joint should I go to? Who should I marry? How much will I pay for sugar? Who should I vote for? We choose based on available information.

The good news is that we're living in the dawn of the Information age. The bad news is we're living in the dawn of the Information Age.

Time is the cost of information.

Having an actual life, a given gentlereader may be too damn busy to know, or care, how economists define the term information costs. Having an actual life, a given gentlereader may be too damn busy to know, or care, that sugar costs too much -- as long as it doesn't cost enough to matter to a given gentlereader.

Step One.    The weasels donate some of the money you pay them to politicians.
Step Two.    The politicians use the money to buy your vote and get elected and/or stay elected.
Step Three.  The politicians pass laws that help the weasels maximize their profits.

Repeat.

Move along, move along --  nothing to see here but pillars of the community protecting American jobs.

Or, more succinctly:

The weasels make a killing by gently extracting a small amount of your money and giving some of it to politicians to buy your vote with your money.

Have an OK day.                                                                                      

©Mark Mehlmauer 2015



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Dude...

This post is addressed to a young man that recently turned 15. I and the other grups in your life have been rendered stunned and slack-jawed. How is this possible? How is it possible that my first grandkid, a boy that was born just a few months ago, will be driving in another year and our worries and anxieties are about to become worries and anxieties squared?

The first bit of unsolicited advice, the subject of this post (be forewarned, there will be more) I would offer you is hidden in what I just wrote. Unless you're the type of person that can create a new life and then walk away and leave the heavy lifting to others (and you're not) once you make a life, or even just become responsible for one, there's no going back.

You will be, on the best days, at least mildly obsessed with this kid until the day you die. There will be a limited (if you're lucky) amount of days when it feels like you've had your heart ripped out of your chest without the benefit of an anesthetic.

Moral considerations aside, at least for the moment, the technology for preventing unintentional impregnation is available at just about any convenience store. There's a morning after pill available at most drug stores in the event that passion overrides rational choice, as your DNA hopes it will. I know that acknowledging that a huge, honking factor in any world-class romance/hormone saturated world-class case of the hots, particularly among the newly fecund -- your DNA's determination to replicate at any cost -- is a world-class buzzkill. It's also settled science, ignore it at your own peril. The bottom line is that you can't escape biology, and at this point in your life, your actions are just as likely to be determined by what mother nature wants as they are to be the rational choices you need to make to avoid having to decide what your take is on abortion. While I'm at it can I get a shout out for STDs! Nature's own all-natural souvenirs of ill-considered fornication.

Please be careful. Your DNA has an unfair advantage that makes anything the New England Patriots can dream up seem pathetic in comparison. You may have heard that the human brain is not fully mature until a given human is about 25 or so, more of that settled science stuff. More importantly, the last area of your little gray cells to reach full maturity is the prefrontal cortex, the part that you make (hopefully) rational decisions with. You're gonna' be obsessed with sex -- be it just lust, a need to nest, or something in between -- for several years before the "smart" part of your brain catches up.

It gets worse.

You are part of a culture that has gone from a fairly rigid, conservative, sexually repressive view of the subject in question to an if it feels good do it, sexually drenched culture in a very short time. While you were born into the later culture and take it for granted, there are all sorts of grups out there that have lived through some version of both and feel as though the baby got tossed out with the bathwater. And though we've lost our consensus we have to share the planet with cultures that advocate standards that we consider to be hopelessly primitive; they think we embody the morals of the infamous dwellers of Sodom and Gomorrah. What a mess.

Before I continue I must deal with some housekeeping. If any of my tens of readers are annoyed by a post written specifically for a kid young man who is very important to me, sorry, but it's partially your fault. If you did a better job of promoting this blog and growing my audience, I would have to worry about alienating my huge following, my advertisers, and my publisher. Unfortunately, I don't have this problem. so I can write what I please.

Also, you've no doubt noticed the word grups in my second sentence. This ain't a typo it's just me and my love of invented words again. I vaguely remember an episode of the original Star Trek TV show in which the kids on some distant planet fear growing up because you turn into a grup -- which turns out to be a grown up -- and grups kill callowyutes (kids). Oh, and callowyutes has nothing to do with Star Trek, it's what happens when the word yutes (youths), from the movie My Cousin Vinnie, has a chance to marinate for a few years in the three pounds of neural cells that live at the top of my body.

And now, back to our show.

There's another major reason to avoid unintentional impregnation, the potential for dramatically negative effects on the kid. Multiple reputable studies by multiple reputable social scientists and the organizations they work for (and common sense...) have drawn the same conclusion: The best way to ensure that your kid grows up to be successful and well-adjusted is to raise them in one of those boring old traditional mom and dad marriages.

Now, this doesn't mean that a kid from a non-traditional relationship can't also grow up to be successful and well adjusted. This is a damn good thing because it's estimated by the Pew Research Center that currently slightly less than half of the kids in the USA are growing up in an Ozzie and Harriet (look it up) sort of household. There isn't actually an Ancient Chinese Curse (but there should be) that goes: May you live in interesting times.

I would posit that the most important moral and ethical consideration here is not whether or not you fornicate, though if you choose to I highly recommend fornicating with someone(s) you're at least deeply in like with, but that's another post. What's most important is that you avoid replicating your DNA with little or no thought as to what sort of quality of life Dude Jr. is going to have.

Have an OK day.



[P.S. Gentlereaders, I've experimented and will continue to experiment with various formats, column lengths, and the like. While my primary motivation was/is developing my writing style, I've always given (minimal) consideration to what I thought a potential publisher and/or advertiser might want to see. 

One of the reasons I don't run ads on my website anymore is the fact I've decided to just let the column happen and go where it (and Marie-Louise) wishes it to go. 

If there are some readers out there that think my shtuff is worth sharing and/or worth a buck or three, fine. If not, so be it.]


©2015 Mark Mehlmauer   (The Flyoverland Crank)

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This Is Embarrassing...

This is a free bonus post. You will not be charged extra.

It looks as if the fact that I accidentally rendered what should've been this weeks post into Tralfamadorian is just the tip of an iceberg of issues. Having spent the better part of last week as a guest of the Tralfamadorians has caused even more problems than I realized.

The guys assured me that their excellent, high speed, WiFi connection was totally secure and that I should feel free to use it and the Chromebook they loaned me to do anything that I would be comfortable doing in my highly fortified lair here in the Ohio mountains.

But now I've got cascading problems because everything I did on their ship was rendered in to Tralfamadorian and I sent out some emails, among other things, written in a language that is used by only a handful of secret scholars that work for the actual powers that be on this planet and the resulting mess is much worse than I realized.

Also, the post in question was a collection of short subjects but I can only remember one of them. You see the Tralfamadorians have, what they claim, is a much more sophisticated version of a Neuralizer, the device the Men In Black used in the movies of the same name to erase memories of people's encounters with the MIB.

I was assured, by no less a person than the Braylyn him or her (it's complicated) self that only stuff they considered to be classified would be blocked out and that any side effects would be negligible. Well, I'm here to tell you, I'm having all sorts of memory issues and as to other side effects, well, don't get me started.

I was left with a customer service number to call in case of problems but when I call the phone is answered by what I can only assume is someone from Tralfamadore's equivalent of a third world Asain country. They speak a language that sounds like squeaks and whistles to my ear and the only thing I can make out is an occasional, "Hello, my name is Sally."

The only topic I can remember is that I wanted to recommend Scott Adam's blog to my tens of gentlereaders.

Now, pointing my limited readership to the blog of one of the world's most successful cartoonists (he's the guy behind Dilbert if you didn't know) might not be the best possible marketing move on my part. I mean, being a successful cartoonist with a strip that's literally published all over the world ought to be enough for anybody.

But no, he also publishes books and writes an interesting blog. But as I clearly state under my Welcome Who Is This Guy Anyway tab, my goal is to provide enlightened infotainment to my gentlereaders. Mr. Adams offers the best explanation I know of for the success of the Donalds current reality TV project, The Republicrat Primary Show

Scott Adams, a trained hypnotist, and both a student and master practitioner of what Dale Carnegie called how to make friends and influence people, uses the Donalds rise to explain and illustrate how to sway the masses primarily via emotional manipulation.

He even provides his readers with the titles of the books that can serve as textbooks if you wish to put your own home study course together.

At this point, I could easily generate several paragraphs, and I think I did, giving you my take on Mr. Adams take but since he does it so well it would be like putting legs on a snake. Instead, permit me to take a shortcut around that potential mountain of bonkercockie and arrive in Bottomlineburgh having saved us both some time and trouble.

As you're probably aware, it's settled science to state that we homo sapiens react to sensory input, of any sort, gut first brain later. This, as far as I know, is my own term, and it's also a deliberate, vast oversimplification on my part that reduces the results of multiple fields of study to a catchphrase.

I'm not embarrassed to go even farther and reduce a catchphrase to an acronym, GFBL. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do in the service of his gentlereaders.

GFBL simply refers to the fact that, on the whole, we react emotionally, instinctually, physically, intuitively, automatically, etc. (this is a measurable phenomenon) before we (hopefully) react rationally and logically.

Mr. Adam's thesis is that the Donald, as well as no shortage of other folks, deliberately employ techniques that take advantage of this knowledge. The only defense we have is to know how it's done and who is doing it. I will be exploring the subject in future posts but Dilbert's creator can easily explain the Donald to you in the meantime.

Have an OK day.


[P.S. Gentlereaders, for 25¢ a week, no, seriously, for 25¢ a week you can become a Patron of this weekly column and help to prevent an old crank from running the streets at night in search of cheap thrills and ill-gotten gains.

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©2015 Mark Mehlmauer   (The Flyoverland Crank)

If you're reading this on my website (where there are tons of older columns, a glossary, and other goodies) and if you wish to react (way cooler than liking) -- please scroll down.