The graphic below was captured from facebook. The commenter "A" is my friend on the social network. I don't know his friends, "J" and "R," but their privacy settings are such that "Friends of Friends" can see their comments. That's a mistake, given that I can see the comments of "A," so I can see the comments of "J" and "R," who would probably prefer that I did not.



The unedited exchange in text form is as follows:

J: i'm looking forward to failing english becuase the teacher acts like english 1 is the highest english possable. its freeking stupid! the teacher told me i have to re-do my full essay or i get an F on it.

A: Send me your stuff, I'll take a look at it.

J: -.-;; thanks a.

R: http://tinyurl.com/4bmlayj
Teachers are dangerous u know that?
They ask u for ur opinion then grade u on it?
How can ur opinion be wrong when it is urs?
They offer their opinion of what they think it says but it is not correct it is only their opinion
Once u understand this u will know what i mean :-)
Teachers are overpaid and over rated for passing out theories and
making people offenders for workd that they do not even know :-)
A theory is not fact and a fact is not a theory:-)
Never in between will the two meet

Peace good nite good Luck from where dialogue from a play Hamlet to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." dialogue from a play written long before men took to the sky there are more things in heaven earth and in the sky that perhaps can be dreamt of and somwhere in between heaven the sky the earth lies the Twilight Zone
http://tinyurl.com/6glvgm8

Yes, indeed, let's give those heaving throngs of semi-literate students all the ammunition they need to blame the teachers. After all, even the progressives' dream-come-true President, Mr. Barack Obama, has triangulated his way onto the occasional anti-educator band wagon, wheeling his weather vane opinion to be on record in support of firing teachers in "under-performing schools." His appointment of Arne Duncan, the neoliberal bully who ran the schools in Chicago, as his Education Secretary sends the clear message that this is the time of open season on teachers in this country.

From the hyperbolic fantasy land drool in books like Waiting for Superman to school districts appointing former military personnel as superintendents, the solutions are hitting the book shelves and the classrooms, and the consensus has spoken: the villain in the collapse of education is obvious, and that evil—that unwashed mass of incompetent, lousy, lazy, over-paid, under-worked, dumb teachers engorging at the hog trough of over-taxed citizens' hard-earned money—must be taught a lesson.

The New Right of the 1990s that wanted government small enough to "drown in a bathtub" is on a serious roll, swinging budget axes at schools, eliminating the collective bargaining right of the teachers, and making the giant herds of cowardly Democrats head for the hills like so many whimpering dogs apologizing because they cannot bleed enough to make their tormenters like them.

Fair is fair: those teachers are directly and principally responsible for the lost generations of ignorant students in this country, right? Yet another wave of victimhood has found its perp, and yet another backlash of witch-hunting the bad guys may now proceed at full-throated, truth-is-with-us righteousness.

Before the pitchforks start the prodding and the torches burn the mob's own City of Reform to the ground, however, I shall have my say in my next article. I promise that I will offend every last person who reads it. I am not of a mind to be diplomatic in a world of hypocrites on both the Right and the Left. I am utterly weary of Sarah Palin and her sales pitch for hypocrisy on stilts, and I am every bit as sick of failed neoliberals like Barack Obama and those whose own hypocrisy compelled them to swallow his smooth-talking game of bait-and-switch.

I will tell you what the problem is with this country's education system, and I will tell you in no uncertain terms.

You will not like what I have to say; at least, I hope you won't.

Without the will to destroy your enemies in the moment of your greatest advantage, you ensure not their gratitude that you spared them, but instead their opportunity one day to smite you.

While you may believe that sparing wrongful men who preceded you is the expression of all that is good, all that is humane and even civil, in your feckless display of mercy and ambivalence, you put your own future at great risk; but far worse, you condemn those you pose to lead to suffer at the hands of those enemies you were too cowardly to shatter once and for all.

Whatever you wished to do for those who looked to you for leadership, history in its parsimony will dispense with your excuses and merely note your name in the pages of the defeated, the ruined, the failed. The names of your enemies will be lionized in the chapters of the victors: they—vile, mean, and awful as they were—not you, will write the history of our time.

Ours will be only the small work of burying our hope in the sullen grave of your failure.

If you are afraid to openly defy authority, you are not alone. Corrupt, wrongful, hopelessly irredemable authority is dangerous: it offers no apologies to the wronged, it makes no exceptions to the commoners, and it suffers no changes from its failures. When threatened, it lashes out, often without warning, in trivial circumstances. When embarrassed, it is quite ready to punish those who have exposed its venality. When held to account, it uses honesty as a tool of lies even as it uses lies as a resort of legitimacy in governance.

The people of the rightless sovereign—indeed, the peoples of all the world in that sovereign's shadow—do not live to be free if such freedom threatens their duty to comply, their purpose to serve, and their calling to conform. It will hold up fools, charlatans, and madmen, and they will make words that sound like yours. This will frighten and deter you, and you will question yourself, your reasons, and your fury. You will feel the need to stand down, to believe your thoughts, words, and actions are the same as those you would revile; and the state will ensure that you imagine the worst of consequences if you do not tame your wrath.

Yet that same sovereign will declare itself different from those it governs even as it claims its legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed: in its own wrath, in its own magnificent hyperbole, in its own madness, the sovereign must be exempt, and its exemption must extend even to morality. Whether it openly claims connection to some god or feigns detachment from any particular way of worship, it nevertheless holds itself forth as the fashions of so many gods always have. In subtext or boldness, the state that does not draw its rightfulness from natural law must of necessity author itself as a god above such law. In so doing, it must then, of equal necessity, author for its subjects their fates.

If you are afraid to defy authority, even when you know it has lost its way with no hope of return, you are not alone. Defy that authority, anyway.

Your fate has been written for you, but your destiny is yours to write.

State legislatures in Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, and several other states are now considering passing laws to permit firearms to be carried on college campuses. Students and/or professors, depending upon the particular state and the specifics of the bill, might soon be allowed to have guns while on school property.

That's right: firearms on college campuses.

Welcome to the fun house otherwise known as the 21st Century (otherwise known as the insane asylum).

As a teacher at both a state university and at a regional community college, this presents considerable challenges to me in my role as one who is, in the words of Lee Iacocca, "...passing civilization along from one generation to the next."

Passing civilization across the generations begins with the mundane. Setting classroom rules is one of the very first steps. At the appropriate time, I will add a section to my class syllabi entitled, "Firearms: Appropriate Use," which will set forth rules of engagement with respect to when, where, and how sidearms should be the education technology of choice in student/professor interactions.

To those not in the profession of teaching, this might sound complicated, but the emergent nation of top-down hierarchical management in matters subject to government funding makes the job somewhat clearer (read, for example, my article, "On Modern Education"). The state in which I teach is now imposing specific standards on me in my community college courses as part of the pop-academia fad known loosely as "assessment standards" (the second-generation cripple of No Child Left Behind). I must obviously have the new section in my syllabi reviewed by the college administrators who properly channel state mandates; but the working language as I see it will be something to the effect that students who draw their firearms in class, in my office, or otherwise in my presence will be the subject of severe consequences. I'm thinking that those consequences will include harsh words like, "BAD student. BAAAAAD STUDENT!"

I am not entirely sure I can set grading policies on this matter, though, given that the state is now being fairly specific not just about grades, themselves, I issue, but also about the categories (and percentage allocations within those categories) I am required to use for determining grades.

It's difficult, but I've been a college teacher for 30 years, so I'm sure I'll craft workable solutions that maintain the quality of instruction, the appropriate number of students who pass (so the school will keep its revenue stream up), and the overall ambiance that is the hallmark of my classrooms.

As the bonus, of course, I can maintain my own sense of grim cynicism while laughing my way through the expansive graveyard that is this remarkably self-destructing Empire in its twilight.

Am I the one to change the course of history? Of course not. I'm the problem.

I'm the teacher.

Rebecca Mansour, an aide to Sarah Palin, says of the infamous Palin Website graphic showing crosshairs over congressional districts targeted by the Tea Party Movement, "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights."

No, of course not.

A brief article at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer calls attention to a strange little side story (perhaps) related to the assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. It has to do with a YouTube video of one of those Tea Party "protests" at a health care reform town meeting hosted by Rep. Giffords. First, the video got marked "private" by someone associated with it, and now it has been removed entirely. What's even stranger is that, according to the SeattlePI post, the YouTube channel on which the video was being hosted was from the "AAPSOnline." That's the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a "conservative" political advocacy group involved in activities ranging from legal challenges to the federal healthcare reform legislation enacted last year to publication of articles linking illegal immigration to increased incidence of leprosy. The AAPS has also published articles claiming that legislation addressing climate change could be a threat to human health.

Wait. What? Yes, go to the AAPSOnline YouTube Channel and have a look at some of the issues that obsess this seemingly legitimate little group.

Despite a general willingness to publish rather questionable content, the AAPS apparently determined that something in that scrubbed video wasn't good PR right now.

My traditional Christmas card to all the readers here at The Dark Wraith Forums. I took the photograph for this post late this afternoon in the countryside, where a snowstorm was making the roads treacherous and the landscape starkly beautiful. I hope you like it.

Right now, your host here at this obscure, 21st Century frontier outpost and all-night diner is getting hammered by the weeks of final exams at the university and at the community college where he teaches economics, finance, and other subjects considered rather arcane and disreputable in polite circles. To keep hope alive, however, I am offering this open thread, along with some of the graphics I have recently created at the Cheezburger Network.

Enjoy the political commentary, and click on any graphic to get the code to republish it for others to see.















And finally, one from Thanksgiving just to let the esteemed President of the United States know the high regard in which I hold his spineless, authoritarian-leaning, center-right self.



As soon as I have finished administering and then grading my last round of finals, I will indulge in publishing a small frenzy of articles and graphics addressing the usual topics of America's descent into an authoritarian state, the looming economic problems facing the country, the latest and disastrous education "reform" mania, and the continuing carnival of hypocrisy writ large by the Tea Party and its beacons of stroboscopic imbecility. While I'm at it, I'll have more than a few choice words about Barack Obama.

I also plan to tell a few strange and interesting stories. At least one of them, I'll bet you'll have a hard time believing, so I'm not sure yet how I should go about writing that little piece.

Not to worry, though. I also have a dessert recipe post, complete with pictures, that I shall be posting at week's end. It's double Dutch apple pie. I might even put in a link to a picture of what I look like more than a year after going Medieval on my own sorry state of health and physique.

But that's all for later. Thursday night, I give my last final exam to a class of about 180 upperclassmen. The exam comprises 30 multiple choice questions, a section of work-out problems, and then five short essay problems. Every time I do this, I wonder why I put the students and then myself through such an ordeal, but then the obvious answer occurs to me: if I want to be good at predicting the future, I should participate in creating it.

Say what you have to say in comments; this is an open forum. If you're the last one out the door, turn off the lights, shut off the coffee pot, and put the cat out.

Wait. The cat stays in.

Oh, yes, and the coffee pot stays on. Ditto for the lights. This is an all-night establishment. Here at Al's Diner, the party at the end of history never stops.

Until, that is, history does, first.

Mr. Obama, stand up for us.

Just this once, cease your endless game of "balance," your wearisome two-step of "moderate" positioning, posing the way you constantly do as some sort of progressive—liberal, even—while predictably and unfailingly pandering to the siren call of a security state that drags us ever deeper into the inescapable maw that hungers to make a people with too much freedom into a docilized, unfree people.

We are not the terrorists you are looking for. We never were. It was the government—the government that you, sir, now head—that failed us on that awful day more than nine years ago. It was not we who destroyed those buildings; it was not we who killed our fellow countrymen; it was not we who conspired to let the blood of this wonder of constitutional democracy.

It was not we who hated this country.

Whatever war was to be waged against the vile maniacs who attacked us, it has now been nine long years, and that war continues unabated. Instead of having defeated that enemy, as we have defeated horrible and powerful foes in the past in far shorter order, this war against terrorism has not been won and has, in fact, become a war not just against hateful men and women who want to harm us, but also, with increasing aggression and disturbing escalation, against us.

That war now engorges itself with the despicable perpetuation that crafts us as the enemy waiting in every line, at every encounter with government, in every communication to strike. We have become the people of an occupied land, a populace that must be thoroughly demeaned, degraded, and diminished.

The war on terror is lost, Mr. Obama. If the goal were to protect our freedom, the war has been lost, sir.

The government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," in President Lincoln's magnificent words, now demands that we stand naked before its employees; it arrogates to itself the "right" to watch us in all our comings and goings in the commons; and it stands immune to retributive vengeance through law for anything it claims its enforcers do as "official duty."

Mr. Obama, cease your rhetoric. Set aside your thought that your policies are mature because you appease authoritarians. Dismiss those around you who tell you that anything is more important than the freedom of your nation's people to be left alone.

For once in your life, Mr. President, lead, and do so fearlessly. You are the only one who can set aside the chains of failed policies into which you have been brokered by those before you.

LEAD, Mr. Obama. Lead us back to freedom. If you cannot, then the consequence could very well be more terrible than you could imagine: we might have to find our own way back.

In his January 1961 farewell address, outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of what he described as an emerging "military-industrial complex." Less well known among many was his long-term, unwavering dedication to balanced federal budgets: subsequent to a tax cut in 1954, Eisenhower ignored the harangue for more tax cuts, even in the face of recessions and average economic growth less than that of the Truman years. Eisenhower understood that the economy was in the doldrums, but he also grasped that the balanced budgets he would realize in the final years of his tenure were the result both of responsible spending and of responsible tax policy. There was little justification to go along with tax cuts just for the sake of tax cuts as a Keynesian substitute for mature, steady control of the federal budget on both the expenditures and revenues sides. The bawl for tax cuts to boost the economy fell on deaf ears in the Oval Office of Dwight D. Eisenhower, even when the call came repeatedly from his own Vice President, Richard Nixon.

President Eisenhower's successor in office, John Kennedy, caved to the call of both Republicans howling for tax cuts and neo-Keynesians among his own Democrat advisers who firmly believed in federal spending and lower taxes as twin weapons in the war against lackluster economic growth. The tax cuts of 1964, largely the result of encouragement by Kennedy before his assassination, were an integral factor—along with spending on war and domestic social programs—in a nearly two-decade upward spiral of federal expenditures with inadequate tax revenues. As time went on through this period, the Federal Reserve would deviate from its exclusive duty in monetary policy of maintaining stability of the aggregate price level and instead steer perilously further into the slippery slope of financing excess spending by the government through accommodative monetary policy. Through the Administrations of Johnson and Nixon, followed by the flaccid "Whip Inflation Now" campaign of President Ford as the inevitable inflation became more and more embedded in the economy, few looked back at the leadership Eisenhower had exemplified, choosing instead to look to the urgency of the contemporary situation to justify one more round of this stimulus, that wage-and-price control regime, or some other doomed-to-fail way of replacing measured, mature macroeconomic policy command with slogans, patches, and promises.

It would take one-term President Jimmy Carter to appoint Paul Volker to chair the Federal Reserve Board before the only real remedy would come: a draconian, sustained, contractionary monetary policy regime. With the cure would come serious pain to augment the suffering of the economy. What had been "stagflation" that had settled in during Carter's term became a full-blown crisis of looming, stunningly hard recession as the draining of liquidity from the economy by the Fed sent interest rates to extraordinary heights. Few were those who credited Mr. Carter for doing what had to be done, and he was defeated by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 general election.

What had been nearly balanced budgets during Carter's last years became soaring deficits as President Reagan, with good justification, led the old-time Republican gospel choir in a successful push for deep tax cuts. It would not be until his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, became President that tax rates would be re-aligned to more responsible levels. His successor, President Clinton, would enjoy the longest sustained economic expansion in U.S. history, an economic boom time attended by low unemployment, low inflation, and strong tax revenues, not the least of which came from robust capital gains realized by investors in a surging stock market.

That unrelentingly good stock market embittered Alan Greenspan, Paul Volker's protégé and successor as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan testified before Congress that the stock market was exhibiting what he called "irrational exuberance," an utterly fallacious claim that incomprehensible numbers of investors making even more incomprehensible numbers of trades over months and years could possibly sustain "irrationality" at the scale of trillions of dollars in investment decisions. (To his credit, Mr. Greenspan kept a dead-pan serious look on his face as he made his absurd declaration to a gullible assembly of congressional committee members.) Although he did not use the word at the time, Mr. Greenspan might legitimately be credited with introducing the idea behind the vapid term "bubble" to describe, especially in retrospect, any price level increase theoreticians and critics find unacceptable and perhaps incomprehensible.

There was method in Greenspan's claim, though, despite the failure of his efforts—including the most consecutive increases in the discount rate ever—to stop the economic juggernaut of the Clinton years. With tax revenues continuing to close in on federal spending, largely because of tax revenues from capital gains, the Federal Reserve would eventually lose its most powerful tool for conducting monetary policy and, therefore, for being a major control agent of the macroeconomy. So-called "open market operations" by the Federal Reserve use short-term government debt instruments as the leverage for adding liquidity to or draining liquidity from the banking system. The Fed sells Treasury bills to member banks to drain liquidity, and it buys Treasury bills from banks to add liquidity; but if the government stops running budget deficits, the U.S. Treasury stops issuing T-bills (and pretty much all other Treasury debt securities, for that matter). Hence, without T-bills being issued by the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve has no instrument for executing open market operations, so it is effectively out of business as a driving force in economic policy-making.

It was with that in mind that, when George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton, not only did the Republicans call for tax cuts to deal with a recession that never actually happened at the beginning of the 21st Century, but Alan Greenspan was there with them, in late January of 2001 providing the assurance from the supposedly objective Chair of the Federal Reserve Board that the economy was, indeed, in such dire condition that the tax cuts were needed. The Republican-controlled Congress then had all the cover it needed, thin as that excuse was at the empirical level, to institute sweeping tax cuts that would last a decade to the real, underlying purpose of trying, as President Reagan had a generation before, to starve the federal government of the funds to pay for social programs.

The horror of the events of September 11, 2001, would fuel two extraordinarily costly wars and massive security expenditures in the homeland that would only exacerbate the widening federal budget deficits of the presidency of George W. Bush, leaving the U.S. Treasury bereft of any semblance of buffer when a real, powerful recession hit at the end of the Bush Administration.

The current President, Democrat Barack Obama, will cave to the Republican call to extend those massive tax cuts deployed ten years ago and which are about to expire. More likely than not, despite his protestations that he will draw the line short of extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, he will probably find no new political backbone and certainly no new reserve of political capital to make good on much of that vow.

For Mr. Obama and his team of advisers, extending the tax cuts will be nothing less than good Keynesian fiscal stimulus policy. In that regard, he will be much like his Democrat predecessor of a half-century ago. Unlike Jack Kennedy, though, Barack Obama will probably not be martyred, and he most decidedly will not be lionized in the decades and years after his short time in office.

In the end, President Obama will be no John F. Kennedy. More importantly to the future of this nation, he will never be Dwight Eisenhower.

In meager defense of Mr. Obama, not one Republican in office today could hold a candle to Mr. Eisenhower, either.

In America, every generation gets the leadership it elects. Consequentially, it gets the leadership it deserves.

Gross Domestic Product is defined as the total value of all final goods and services produced within a nation during a given period of time. The U.S. Commerce Department reported at the end of October that the United States GDP rose at an annualized rate of 2.0 percent in the 3rd Quarter of 2010, up from 1.7 percent in the second quarter. The Washington Post described this growth rate as "feeble," and the Los Angeles Times claimed that "most economists" consider a growth rate below 2.5 percent as inadequate to substantially reduce the unemployment rate from its historically high level of 9.6 percent.

The story is a little more complicated than that, and the outlook for the economy, while not bright, is not as bad—at least not in the short run—as some economists and political interests might suggest. The longer-term prospects aren't particularly attractive, but that goes to the old saying that it's always darkest just before it's pitch black outside. (The optimist's version of that old saying is, "It's always darkest just before the dawn," but this article is about economics, so optimists will be shot on sight.)

First, GDP is the sum of consumption, private investment, government spending (public investment), and net exports (exports minus imports). In the 3rd Quarter, all of the components of GDP except net exports showed good growth. Our thirst for those cheap imports is still sapping GDP growth, but that will change. The bad news is that the recovery of net exports over the next several years will present its own problems, and hints of those problems are already beginning to become apparent.

The U.S. dollar has been getting weaker against other currencies for several years, now. That makes our exports cheaper overseas, which means our net exports will get stronger. The downside is that, as our exports get cheaper in other countries, imports get more expensive here.

Businesses that have invested heavily in overseas manufacturing of products for domestic consumption will eventually have to start charging more for the goods they sell here in the United States. Retailers that have, over the past decade-plus, geared their purchasing toward foreign products to sell at their American stores will be forced to mark up those goods on their shelves. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that this is already happening.

The good news is that, if foreign products are more expensive on retailers' shelves here in the U.S., domestic producers of the same products will find their offerings more attractive as alternatives for buyers. Not surprisingly, though, that has a downside: as the foreign versions of products rise in price, domestic producers of the substitutes will have incentive to raise their prices, too. This is especially true in competitive markets, where constituent firms tend to be "price-takers," moving toward prevailing prices established beyond their individual control.

That's when a major force of consumer-level inflation begins to beat on the door, but only if the economy has a lot of liquidity that can allow consumers to buy at higher prices; otherwise, the pressure to raise prices has no fuel in consumers' pocketbooks.

That's where our central bank, the Federal Reserve, comes into the picture. In the short run, the Fed can use "easy money" to stimulate the economy, a policy of expansionary monetary policy it has been following aggressively to help the American economy out of the worst recession in decades. Unfortunately, in the long run, all that money pumped into the economy is nothing other than a vast reservoir of fuel for inflation because it will provide the liquidity by which the incentive of producers to raise prices will meet the dollars available in consumers' pockets to pay those higher prices.

The good news is that consumers really do not have those dollars to spend right now so inflation will not show up until they have considerably greater willingness to consume. That will come only when the unemployment rate falls quite a bit from its current level.

It works like the gears in a clock, then: inflation will stay subdued until the jobs picture improves, but once that happens, the power of consumption—accounting as it does for about 70 percent of GDP growth—will guarantee that the huge pool of excess dollars poured into the economy by the Fed will turn into an inflation conflagration.

Once the rising prices pick up enough speed to cause serious concern among the Federal Reserve's policy makers, the central bank will be forced to clamp down hard on the money supply to drain that ocean of excess dollars. By that time, though, inflation expectations will have become embedded in both the goods and labor markets (the labor markets will be the last to start realizing their share of inflation-driven price increases), so the Fed will have to crush the money supply not only long enough to drain the reservoir of excess liquidity, but also to drain the reservoir of expectations that the excess liquidity is still around.

The result will be a period of both high inflation expectations driving wages and prices higher along with stagnating economic growth as interest rates rise on the already embedded inflation premium coupled to a sharply contracted money supply. At the end of the 1970s, the term "stagflation" was used to describe this situation.

In the here and now, a modestly rising GDP is perhaps better news than one might think from hearing economists, pundits, and politicians talk. As long as the GDP rises anemically, the unemployment rate will not drop too swiftly; and as long as the labor market remains soft, consumer spending will not pick up speed with any vigor. When it does, price inflation at the retail level will start to rear its head seriously, given that the foreign imports upon which retailers have relied for so long will be getting more expensive, pushing the prices of domestic equivalents up, too.

When things will turn rather sour, with inflation getting noticed by the mainstream media, might be difficult to predict down to the month or even the quarter, but an optimistic guess would put the time frame somewhere around 2012 for the inflation to get serious enough for the Federal Reserve to finally react forcefully enough and long enough to tame it. The resulting economic slowdown, then, might start some time in the latter part of 2012 or in the first half of 2013.

A less optimistic forecast would put clear evidence of inflation at the retail level happening in late 2011 or early 2012. In that scenario, the Fed would have to start clamping down on the money supply by the Summer of 2012. As rough as that would be, what might become serious efforts to bring the deficit spending spree of the past decade under control would start to bite hard into the GDP (remember that government spending is one of the four components of gross domestic product). Rising interest rates, inflation at the retail level, and less government spending could all come together like the proverbial perfect storm to claw consumer confidence and business investment—essentially, the whole economic recovery engine—down to a crawl just around the time of the general election, when the current occupant of the White House would be hoping for all kinds of good news to get re-elected.

The Republican nominee would, of course, breathe polemical fire about the end of civilization as we know it, and the Democrat incumbent would find himself having to try a second round of soaring rhetoric about hope and change.

As an alternative, the President could take the even less useful route of trying to teach the American public about macroeconomics. This would be the same American public that just return to control of the U.S. House of Representatives members of the party whose last reign ultimately put the entire financial system of the world at the brink of cataclysmic collapse and drove the American economy into the worst recession in decades. Yes, that's the sort of class every teacher wants to educate without a cattle prod and a crate of detention slips.

Is that less optimistic forecast how it's all actually going to happen? Probably. After all, this is economics.

If you want happy endings, watch reruns of The Love Boat. If you want inspiring stories, watch reruns of Touched by an Angel.

If you want darned good forecasting—albeit with a generous but necessary dose pessimistic, cynical despair—learn economics from your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums, where misery loves company. It is far better to be with others when the future is bleak and there's nothing whatsoever you can do about it.

Remember to keep hope alive; otherwise, you'll have nothing to give up when all is lost.

As if it weren't enough that the government admitted in August that it was storing images of people scanned through their clothing at airports, now comes even more evidence of a deep, abiding sickness that pervades the mentality of those who govern by fear with impunity.

The graphic below was on the screen of a computer in a Transportation Security Administration office.



No, that's not funny. It's vomit bait. And no, it's not just one "rogue" employee's bad idea of a joke. It is exemplary of a pervasive mentality of a government that has no self-control and no idependent judiciary branch interested in or even capable of smiting its ever-increasing invasiveness in the name of this or that law enforcement demand.

This is what has come of our "war on terror." It is also what has become of our government whose thugs protect "the Homeland." It is also what has become of those who let their children go on airplanes. Sooner than you think, it will be what has become of those whose children go to school. Subjugation works this way. I wrote about it in my article, "Forced Nudity as Subjugation." That piece was not an exercise in hypothetical abstractions.

If we just throw up our hands, saying, "I can't do anything about this," then we have no one to blame but ourselves: the terrorists have won.

As much as it might offend those whose groveling fear would drive them to trade even their own children for a modicum of false security, those terrorists would be both the foreign and the domestic sickos. The government servants in the homeland version really do hate our freedom, at least the part that has anything to do with some fanciful right to privacy.

Competitive markets are not the same as "free markets." The difference is easy to spot: corporations and their shills will run like Hell from competitive markets; Republicans will never speak of competitive markets; and Democrats will slap any fix—no matter how complicated, expensive, and ineffective—on a problem to avoid modernizing and reforming antitrust law to crush the companies that have constructed non-competitive markets.

Competitive markets are brutal to the participants on the supply side.

Free markets are even more brutal to the participants on the demand side.

The bad news is this: now that the extremists of free markets are ascendant in public policy, you could very well get eaten.

The good news is thus: so could the imbeciles who put those Right-wing hoe-handles in power.

Lie low and avoid the chow line. The herd is about to be culled of its idiots.