Cowboy Confessional

A dentist – who in the future will surely occupy a lower ring of hell – prescribed for me temporary medications that require avoiding alcohol for two weeks. Three weeks back a bone doctor slapped a leg cast around my fractured fib and thus I’m forced to stay in at night. And the Devil is keeping me celibate (well, gotta blame it on somebody). Isolated, sober and hard up.

No wonder monks act so odd. Pleasure deprivation warps a mind.

Incidentally, and for purely promotional purposes, I’ll mention in passing that depravation is an underlying theme in my book AFTERLIFE. My theory and subplot is that ghosts, having lost most of their temporal sense and being forcefully disconnected from their loved ones, are bored and in large part isolated (they do have the company of other ghosts, but ghosts are notoriously bad company and only exacerbate the protagonists postmortem predicaments). This is part of the reason so many spooks seem insane – because they are, having gone madder than monks.

With my social life on hold, I have had way too much opportunity to think and tink with technology, and now I wonder if modern information tech fosters, restricts or puts human interaction in silos? Accidental interaction is if nothing else, exciting. Not always pleasant, but often engaging. To quote myself – a sure sign of growing, isolation-induced insanity – “The unexpected is the essence of adventure.” Getting mugged might be disagreeable, but it certainly livens your day.

Take television – please. Thanks to digital roll-out of this particular dementia, the local cable company – which is operated by Somali pirates – sent a letter telling me how to acquire the necessary gear. I ordered it online, it was delivered to my doorstep without a knock, I installed it myself and activated it with a phone call though a computer voice prompted system. I implemented a whole suite of new technology without once speaking to or seeing a person.

The World Weird Web has that effect daily. We can absorb the full scope of inhumanity from the comfort of our couch. Want human humor? Drop by YouTube and see what’s funny. Want human lust? You’ll trip over it with a misguided Google search. Want human stupidity? C-SPAN streams congressional floor votes.

Want humans and humanity? Technology erects filters against that.

When technology is not preventing Homo sapiens pack animals from communing, it is cutting the herd into isolated groups. Facebook gives us tools for keeping abreast of the meaningless moments in the lives of friends and family … and nobody else. MeetUp let’s us meet new people, but only people we want to meet. Much of our online activity is destined to isolate us from the infinity of individuals.

Randomness has been removed, and to our detriment. Have a look at page four of AFTERLIFE. The art there is the handiwork of Mister David Preston (who the brave can locate at Dammit Jim Productions). I met David by chance at a coffee shop and have since developed a fond friendship. I write songs for his movies and he tosses art work into my books.

And we are so different we would never have met through the inhuman human hunting ground that is the Internet.

Thankfully there are still people who make humanity their way of life. My college buddy Steve is also a southern boy, hailing from Mississippi, though I suspect he has more Cajun the Mud Puppy in him. One day we wandered through a crafts fair in Richmond, Virginia, stopping to admire a display of rather crafty wares. We chatted with the creative old timer who was so southern his drawl would be unintelligible to Englishmen. After forty five minutes we knew about him, his cousin Betty and her bursitis, how his daddy fought in the Big War, and when his heifer was due to calf. He knew me and Steve to about the same depth.

As we walked away, Steve said “You know, Yankees would never understand taking the time.”

Or taking the opportunity.

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When should government reverse itself? Evidentially never (it was a trick question).

According to a few sources, about one half of one percent of Barack Obama’s so-called ‘stimulus’ plan has made its way to the streets. The odds that 0.5% of even a trillion dollars would have any effect on an economy that constitutes nearly 25% of world GDP … well, the odds are lower than congressional approval ratings or Paris Hilton’s kickers.

This should trouble the current and blessedly temporary administration. Subtle signs are emerging that the economy has bottomed out and is beginning a recover. Housing prices have stopped falling and in some markets have bounced upwards. New housing starts are rising. The stock market has leapt upwards in anticipation of a revival. Unemployment appears to be peaking.

Zero of this is due to government spending. Well, maybe not zero. Perhaps 0.5% of the recovery can be blamed on Obama.

It is no secret that government produces nothing once hot air, reneged promises and humorous scandals are discounted. It is the better half of the marriage of The People and government that does all the real work. The government as an entity would perish if the people simply declined to sell to the government, work for it, or pay taxes to it.

In short, the turning economic tide is due to 306,786,088 Americans adjusting their work, spending, savings and investments. As always, it works durn well.

Ignore for a moment that Obama’s ‘stimulus’ bill never was one. It was merely the largest patronage package ever emitted out of the sphincter know as The Beltway. Given that the economy is reversing and that almost none of Obama’s billions are being spent, the need for stimulus is gone or greatly diminished. For economic reasons there is no need for this trillion dollar deflowering of the American worker to continue.

Yet it will. Nobody with their hand in the public pocket, picking it to promote their party and patrons, will reverse course and end a stupidity in progress. Which will be Obama’s downfall he has little option in the aftermath of fiscal folly but to raise taxes, pump-up inflation and launch the ‘misery index’ to stratospheric levels. With his party in power pervasively, there will be no excuses … no Republicans to blame. The yoke will soon enough be his to wear.

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It is not morally wrong to cheer as an evil opponent self destructs. It is however a lousy tactic. The un-statuesque Napoleon once said “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” and his observation gives me pause – vile nemeses are seemingly self destructing all around the globe and I hesitate to distract them.

The Taliban, Al Qaeda’s intellectual kin, are busily assassinating their own. Ayman “The Hymen” al-Zawahri once commanded to his disgruntled troops to attach Tripoli. Now the Taliban are offing Taliban. Take the unfortunate Qari Zainuddin’s, whose career was cut short by acute lead poisoning – seems he involuntarily consumed a several rounds of AK-47 ammo. Zainuddin had the utter lack of grace to lead about 3,000 fundamentalist in an ongoing crusade against anyone remotely out of step with sharia. But he also displayed bad form in criticizing his superiors for being more brutal than himself.

Never a good idea to antagonize your boss, especially when the boss is armed.

Capping compatriots is a sign of organizational dysfunction. When Al Qaeda in Iraq started collapsing, Osama’s central command called for jihad on jihadists. Threatening your team mates has a peculiar demotivating effect. Killing them even more so. Above all other calamities that can befall a movement, interdepartmental homicide seems to be an early indicator of demise. It doesn’t matter how good a terrorist organization’s dental plan is if member’s are at least six feet away from an in-network provider.

In Iran we see a weirder set of similar symptoms. The Ruling Mullahs (which is not the name of a punk rock band) are fracturing slightly slower than the Taliban, though one has to wonder if their kindred spiritualism will produce the same final outcome. While revolutionaries were being shot in the streets for the sin of supporting a patriarch of Iran’s original Islamic revolution, the maniacal mullahs were arresting children of yet another. For reasons only apparent to syphilitic minds, Iran’s clap clerics decided to indirectly harass Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and the chair of the Assembly of Experts, a group of gurus responsible for electing, monitoring and in untested cases dismissing the Supreme Leader of Iran.

You could say Rafsanjani is an ‘insider.’

There is apparently little love lost between Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Iran’s Lunatic in Chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Perhaps the head goons in Iran’s caliph clique – the ones who tossed the Iranian election to Mahmoud – simply fired a warning shot over Rafsanjani’s administrative bow. Yet metaphoric shots fired as real bullets fly is an omen. The same fissures that divided Al Qaeda in Iraq divided the Taliban once Pakistan kicked their butts back down the Swat valley.

Now familiar fractures are in Iran’s façade.

I suspect the mullahs are feeling a tiny bit threatened. Iran’s recent and thoroughly rigged election was thrown so ungracefully, it appears to have been a panicked reaction. The Persian democratic groundswell was in no small part encouraged by an outbreak of the stuff in the region. To the west is Iraq, a rapidly stabilizing democracy and one that Tehran’s madmen failed to topple during the insurgency. To the east is Afghanistan where both Osama and the Taliban have spiraled into organizational cannibalism as a wobbly democracy grows. Iran’s mullahs know they are next and in an attempt to prevent democracy have initiated their own self-destruct sequence.

None too soon, or at least that is what some lower caste subjects in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Syria and other domino states may be thinking. If Iran swings toward freedom as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have done in eight short years, other depots for despots might succumb to the momentum. The face of the Middle East has already changed faster and more thoroughly than anyone could have dared wish a decade ago.

The whole joint may be unrecognizable in another.

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Nothing like a broken leg to afford some extra studio time.

I was thumbing through my recording roster to see what I might work on next and decided to punch-up Purgatory of Your Love, not out of affection for the tune but because it supposedly had the least amount of necessary overhaul.  But like a writer who intends to pen a poem and delivers a seven volume dissertation on the essence of love, so to goes studio time.

In this latest (and hopefully last) version of this song about romantic malady, I went south with the bass, keeping it simple and spooky, to carry the weight of depression from the mixing board into your soul.  Since my keyboard skills are limited, I also went light on the total ivory note count and once again discovered that less can be more.  It occurs to me that Johnny Cash was doing the same thing with pianos on his last records.

Purgatory of Your Love

If you have ever felt good about romance, this will put and end to it.

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With Obama’s help I could be wearing a solid gold cast. That is what my share of $1.6 trillion dollars would buy.

Sadly, I am currently sporting a plain plaster variety, having cracked a fibular while in combat with a larger opponent. For all my martial arts training, it is irony personified that that I was broken during a light sparing session. A lesson to other roughnecks: never allow a larger opponent to stay in a head-to-head position where they can charge forward like a blind bull.

Like 85% of Americans, I have private health insurance. For whatever maladies Americans face, our capitalist system has assured that the vast majority of Homo sapiens roaming the American tundra and in the concrete canyons of our big cities have coverage. Contrast this with any third world country or Compton, where people are allowed to die in the streets, this accomplishment of capitalism is compelling.

This perspective is not discussed by Obama. Politicians avoid perspective because it has the nasty habit of preventing legislative larceny. Thus they rely on large, scary sounding numbers routinely amplified with words like ‘crisis’. Barack and other capital courtesans have of late been repeating the sound bite that ‘there are 45 million uninsured Americans.’

Obama’s cure costs a mere $1.6 trillion dollars.

(A brief aside. Long ago a sitting senator joked “A billion here, a billion there, and soon we’re talking real money.” In the last year we have routinely talked about trillions, thanks to a series of government interventions into non-catastrophes. Obama is capitalizing on our collective fiscal desensitization. After all, what’s a trillion dollars between friends and future serfs?)

A trillion and a half bucks is a big investment even by beltway budget standards. Since this is coming out of your pocket, it might be worth examining who these 45 million uninsured people are. You deserve to know – you are their financier (click the chart to get a bigger picture of the fraud de jour).

According to the Census Bureau, there is a little north of 300 million head of humans in The States. Subtract Obama’s alleged 45 million uninsured individuals and you can calculate that 85% have coverage. Various governments insure or repair roughly another 5% through existing programs like Medicare or through prison infirmaries (these estimates are based on government statistics concerning safety net healthcare programs and national incarceration rates).

There are also a significant number – about half – of young adults who can afford to buy insurance but opt not to. Young men and women have other priorities, namely stylish clothing and copious alcohol consumption. The alcohol is a primary tool to get other young adults to remove their stylish clothing.

As interesting as the mating habits of the young and inebriated may be, their uninsured status is completely voluntary. In California, one of the more expensive states in which to be insured, a twenty-something specimen in their vertical and clothed condition can walk into any insurance office and buy a major medical policy for $100 a month. Unclothed applicants might receive a discount. That young adult’s priorities are slightly misplaced is predictable, amusing but not a public policy issue.

This leaves about 5% American residents – as opposed to Americans – uninsured and not covered by existing government programs. This five percent is approximately 16 million mortals, which oddly enough is roughly the number of assumed illegal aliens in residence.

Divide a few of these numbers and you discover that over the ten year budget horizon, Obama plans to purchase insurance for structurally uninsured individuals at a rate of $833 per person per month, or about eight times the going commercial rate. Oddly this speaks well of Obama’s plan given most government run programs are not nearly this financially efficient.

Nobody is accusing Obama of trying to pick the national pocket to support and encourage illegal immigrants and immigration. We have to take Obama on his word the he intends to have the government underwrite 45 million folk. To do so would require insuring those who can afford it, effectively transforming independent and self-sufficient young citizens into a dependant class. Minting disciples among the young is an effective means to manufacture loyalty.

Just ask Nicolae Ceauşescu, though his final outcome was not entirely to his liking.

Let’s assume for a moment that the structurally uninsured could skim by on major medical coverage and that their rates are not much different than most middle aged men. Sixteen million mammals could be covered for the relatively low sum of $19 billion over a ten year stretch, or about 1% of what Obama wants to squander.

A trillion here, and a trillion there. Pretty soon we’re talking about Obama’s budget.

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