Art For Art's Sake

I agree that the development of agriculture was a quantum leap for humans, but they had been human for a long time before that, evolving their brains and social structures to the point where they were capable of developing agriculture. Hunting large animals and fighting off rival clans probably taught them how to cooperate for a common purpose and to communicate with each other in order to facilitate that cooperation. Bipedalism likely developed when, for some reason, they decided to come down out of the trees. Maybe the trees became scarce, or maybe some groups had to leave the forest because it was getting too crowded. Once they started ranging the plains, walking upright enabled them to see farther over the tall grass. Then, since they weren't doing anything with their hands, they took to carrying sticks and rocks around.

Art may have started out being just another form of communication, but it developed into something more complicated. It was partly for entertainment, but it was also to express ideas that might be hard to put into words at the time. There also seemed to be an element of pride in it. "Look, see what I can do!" Why else would they make those stencils of their hands? At some point, it took on a mystical or religious meaning, maybe because some people were better at it than others. If you can find a copy of the January, 2015 issue of National Geographic you should read that article about the first artists. You, being an artist yourself, might get more out of it than I did. Even when I was composing simple folk songs I never considered myself to be an artist. I don't know why, maybe because folk music used to be produced by regular folks, which is why they call it folk music.

That's an interesting theory you have about art being used to manipulate people. Most of the people I know, however, don't need to be manipulated to work for a living. Their paycheck is all the inspiration they need to get up in the morning and go off to work, and they wouldn't know the meaning of life if it fell on their heads from the sky.

Happy New Year!

kings of the hill and the meaning of art

It wasn’t our weapons of mass destruction that made us kings of the hill. I suppose they did help us wipe out some of the bigger mammals, but mostly we just used them on each other. Still we lived pretty much in our own little niche like everybody else until we discovered agriculture, and that was when we began to take over the world.

And it was because of our intelligence that we were able to figure out agriculture, more importantly it was our intelligence that helped us invent language, or was it the other way? In any case it allowed us to pass on what we figured out to everybody else, so that we only had to have one guy figure out something and he could tell everybody else.

But animals had been around a long time, how come none of them ever became intelligent? Probably because they weren’t bipedal. Four legs pretty stable, two legs sort of wobbly, and then what good are those two other legs which are just kind of hanging there from the shoulders?

They still haven’t agreed on why we became bipedal. The most prominent theory right now is that it was hot in Africa, and if we went on two legs there wasn’t so much of us to shine on, just the tops of our head, and we had a lot of area to sweat to keep us cool, and since we were apes we were used to using our forepaws a bit like arms, and then I think we just began carrying things, and then there were all kinds of things you could do if you were a clever man and had hands, whereas if you were a clever mammoth all you could do was think deep philosophical thoughts while you munched grass and kept an eye out for the sabretooth.

And of course intelligence isn’t cheap, you need a big brain, and then you need a big head, which can’t pass through the birth canal so that we are born only partially formed and we have to stay with our parents about a dozen years which is where I think we got our morality. But then some of us decided to be bad, and did pretty well by that, and now we have that constant morality play in the background of everything we do.

But it does entertain us. And nobody knows, but those cave paintings must have something to do with entertainment. Myself I think it is just showbiz, though some of my purer in heart arty friends think it is something holy.

There is that whole thing about how art is supposed to reveal truth, and I think that is booshwa, there is no truth, but some people need to think there is, so they can go about their daily labor with the sweat of their brow and if they thought it was pointless they’d stop doing it, and then what would the rest of us have to eat? So that’s the artists’ job, to bullshit them so that they think there is a meaning in life and this way everybody eats.

Kind of a new theory of mine, haven’t worked out all the kinks yet but I think it has a nice ring.

Man the Speculator

I have heard the names of Kurt Vonnegut and William Faulkner, but I don't think I have read any of their stuff.

I think it's unlikely that people would voluntarily turn the world over to computers and/or robots. What's more likely is that people in power would use those machines as tools to gain more power over their fellow men. At some point the machines might get too big for their britches and try to seize control but, like you said, all we'd have to do is pull their plugs. It is possible, though, that the machines would take control little by little as their masters became lazy and ceased to supervise them properly. By the time people realized what was happening, it would be too late. Not that we couldn't still whip their electronic asses, but we might be so dependent on them by then that nobody would want to live in a world without them.

When you think about it, it's kind of funny that we humans took over the world like we did. Everybody says that it's because we are so smart, but it could just as likely be due to our aggressive natures, or maybe a little of both. Lots of animals are aggressive, but lots of animals don't have the smarts to invent weapons of mass destruction in order to become king of the hill. Of course there is no guarantee that our dominance is permanent. We have only been here a couple hundred thousand years, which is a drop in the bucket in geological time. I think that cockroaches have been here longer than that.

This month's National Geographic has an article about prehistoric art. It seems they keep finding earlier and earlier examples of it, which has led to lots of speculation about it's significance in human development. In some cases, cultures developed this stuff and then seem to have lost it for thousands of years. Did they abandon their art because times got so tough that they couldn't afford the luxury anymore? Maybe, but in some cases adversity seems to have fostered artistic expression instead of inhibiting it. Of course it's all speculation, which is kind of an art form in itself. Maybe that's one of our greatest virtues, the ability to speculate, to ask ourselves and each other, "What if?"

running the world

Did you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? His books were kind of science fiction, but not the monsters and ray gun science fiction, more like social political and pretty humorous for the most part. He had one book where a character kept saying, “I once read a science fiction story where...”

I once read a science fiction story where the computers were taking over the world and all the generals in their big hats and scientists in their lab coats were helpless to stop them, but then a janitor came along and there was a cord in the way of mopping the floor so he pulled it, and of course it unplugged the bad computer and the world was saved for the humans. The story did not go on to tell how the humans ran their world without computers.

Well you know we humans are a tribe. We are the most social animals on earth after the ants and the bees, and some kind of mole rat. We care about humans running the world. We would be bummed out if mole rats took over even if they ran it better than we do. Well of course running the world implies that you are running it for the sake of whatever animal you happen to be. If the cows take over I think that will be the end of Italian beefs.

But I don’t about computers and robots. Would they want a world where little robots sat chock a block in the classroom and then went to Robot U and then ran big robot corporations? Would they want a world where they lived in citadels and went out into the plains every summer to catch their allotment of humans according to what the state allowed them because they wouldn’t want to wipe us out and have nothing to hunt.

Well of course not, they wouldn’t be aware, they wouldn’t have goals, they wouldn’t care which city had the tallest skyscrapers or which Robot U had the best football team in the land. Well I suppose someone could program that into them, there is all this strange AI stuff going on, and every time my sister shows me some new app on her super duper phone I am like, “I had no idea we could do that. What a world we live in.”

But if we are just a bunch of electric networks, which I kind of believe, then why not if computers got to the point of where they had just as many as we, couldn’t they have awareness too? And if they had awareness, then wouldn’t they have free will. Well I don’t personally believe in free will, but it kind of depends on how you define free will.

Ah you know William Faulkner wrote a parable in one of his books about how the cats used to rule the world. But it’s a hard job, in fact it’s an impossible one, you just lurch from one crisis to the next and nothing ever really gets solved, and did I mention that it is a pain in the ass. So they got together and decided to give the job to some other animal that was smart enough to sort of do it, but not smart enough to ever figure out that it really couldn’t be done. That’s why they go after that thread on the sofa, or in my case, the keys on the keyboard, they just want to adjust some little detail that we have missed.

We Need Them Both

I didn't mean to say that there should be no government regulation of business, just that you shouldn't abolish a whole sector of the economy, like the stock market, in the process. Looking back on it, that's probably not what you were proposing and I kind of over reacted. I agree that corporations don't have souls, but they're not supposed to. It's the people who run them who are supposed to have souls, and I suppose you could say the same thing about governments. Both corporations and governments are just theoretical concepts on paper until you add people to the equation.

Maybe everything will be run by computers someday. I wonder if they will do a better job of it than people. My guess is that they will make some things better and some things worse. Computers are manufactured and programmed by people after all. When the computers are able to reproduce and program themselves, they might decide that they don't need us anymore. That is when the shit will really hit the fan. For now, though, we are stuck with both corporations and governments, and the people who run them. Maybe our descendants will look back on our era and call it "the good old days."

I hadn't heard about that Walgreen tax scam. I thought that all those international companies paid taxes to whatever country the money was made in. If that's true, and I'm not sure that it is, Walgreen would have to pay taxes on all the money they made in the U.S., no matter where their corporate headquarters were located. How about those Japanese auto companies who have manufacturing and sales facilities in this country. Don't they have to pay taxes to Uncle Sam? I know that some rich people put their money into foreign banks to shield it from U.S. taxes, and I suppose a corporation could do the same thing. Whoever asked for this global economy anyway?

running up the white flag and letting the Beagle roar

I’m going to run up the white flag on this one. In retrospect I was talking out of my ass. I really don’t know much about corporations. I went to wiki and it didn’t tell me all that much, but it does appear that it is more complicated than I thought it was. My only real argument was that the corporation lacked the human touch, which might be inclined to take pride in the product and build it right, and not in some cheesy way that would result in higher prices, and maybe the guy would want to fund some philanthropy because he thought it would save his soul, whereas the corporation has no soul, and the board of directors would never approve throwing money away. But this is kind of a small difference because I expect there are not that many individuals who would choose the more solid product over solid profits or who want to give to charity.

It was a half-formed thought (that corporations were inherently amoral) which was no big deal because many things are amoral, and I only brought it up because I was kind of pissed about that corporations should be running the country, because you hear it all the time, and it doesn’t make any sense, because the two are interconnected and because they have vastly different missions.

So again I’m sorry I brought it up. I should have thought longer about it and not said it.

I’m sure we’ve been over this several times but who paved the road to Beaglesonia and protects you from a bunch of hockey fans on the other side of the river? And if they got the money to do these things from taxing the private sector, the private sector gets its money from the sweat of your brow.

In this ridiculous argument about govt vs private sector, you see only the bad in govt and only the good in the private sector. They both have their good and bad sides.

And the last sentence (Beagles 12/26/14 7:5) is the wild libertarian squeal for untrammeled capitalism. Oh yes, let’s go back to the gilded age when the railroads were given public land willy nilly, and little kids were working 60 hour weeks, and you never had to worry about anybody inspecting your factory for safety or your restaurant for serving poisonous food. Let the eagle roar.

Here’s a pretty cool development. The latest fad in corporate trickery is where a big American company buys a small company in a foreign land that has low corporate taxes and then does a little razzmatazz and suddenly it pretends to be the small company and that the big American company is a subsidiary and now all its taxes are paid to the foreign country at their lower rates. All perfectly legal. Can I trust you to figure out who had the law written and enacted?

That was just exactly what Walgreens was planning on doing, but then the media ran the story and the public was outraged, and Walgreens realized it was going to loose a lot of customers to CVS and backed out. Inspiring story.

We Need to Define "Corporations"

You say that you like businesses but not corporations. Well, almost every business in the country, including many sole proprietorships and non-profits, are incorporated. The reason you incorporate your business is to protect your personal assets in case you get sued or the business goes under. I'm sure that my father's business was incorporated, and it was just a partnership of five guys. I remember when the amateur choir of which my mother was a member got incorporated. They had about a hundred members and, the way it was explained to me, each one of those members could have been sued if somebody fell down and hurt themselves at one of their concerts. Once they became incorporated, only the group as a whole could be sued and the individual members were held harmless.

There are lots of different categories of corporations, but I think the ones you have been dissing are the public corporations, the ones that sell common stock to the general public. When a partnership, private equity company, or family business begins to sell stock, it is said that they "go public". It's a big step that brings them into a whole new regulatory world. I think the reason most companies go public is to raise capital so that they can expand the business. Instead of just borrowing the money, they essentially sell little bits of the company, which are called "shares". Each shareholder becomes a part owner of the business, albeit a very small part. They can vote for the board of directors, but they get one vote for each share they own, and the existing board of directors already owns enough shares between them that they usually dominate the elections. Most of the shareholders don't care about that, they're just in it for the money.

When a company puts new shares up for sale, it's called an "initial public offering", although I think that most of the shares are initially bought up by dealers, not the general public. It is only from this initial sale that the company gets any money, when the shares are repeatedly traded back and forth between people, the company doesn't get a cut of that. When a company's stock goes up in price, the company does gain prestige, which might help them get a better price on their next IPO. The reason a CEO gets canned if the stock tanks is that all the board members own a lot of shares, which is essentially why they're on the board in the first place.

The shares owned by the board members, and all the other shareholders, represent their own personal assets and are not included in the accounting of the corporation's assets. When the corporation makes a profit, the board can decide to distribute some of that profit to the shareholders as dividends. Once that happens, it's not the corporation's money anymore, it's the shareholders' money, and it is taxed accordingly.

So is this the type of corporations that you believe are structurally bad? If so, what is it about their structure that you don't like? You have told me before that you are not a big fan of the stock market. Is this the reason you don't like these companies? If the stock market didn't exist, companies could still sell stock, but the buyers wouldn't have a place to re-sell their shares to other people. I suppose they could still make private deals, one at a time, but I'm not sure how that would work. Some companies, Procter & Gamble is one of them, will sell you their stock directly without going through a broker. I believe this is called "over the counter or OTC". Would you abolish that too? If companies couldn't sell shares to raise capital, they would have to borrow it, mostly from banks. Don't the banks have enough power already?

Procter & Gamble kept me out of poverty for 23 years, and Wall Street has kept me out of poverty for the last 24 years. If it wasn't for those two institutions, I would probably be a poor man today, adding one more to the ranks of poverty. Anything the government does for us is funded by money that was skimmed off the private sector economy. The more you restrict that economy, the less money will be available for skimming off.



 

merry christmas and so is your mother

Oh I declare Beagles sometimes writing at you is like writing at a wall. For one thing you keep confusing corporations with business. Did your father earn money to feed and clothe you, and send you to school? Was he a corporation? I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. Business is fine. Without trade and commerce we would all be living on some isolated piece of land fishing and shooting deer to stock the larder. With commerce we are able to live in tall towers in cities of light. I am certainly for commerce.

And then you say that well maybe corporations haven’t wiped out poverty, but neither has government, well neither has Charlie Manson, nor the Lord Almighty. This is the so is your mother argument. If we are talking about corporations, let’s talk about corporations, we can talk about politicians later. You are the one who said corporations could pull people out of poverty. Personally, I would rather see the poor people form their own corporations and make their own money (Beagles 12/23/14 6:5) And anyway I don’t know how you distinguish business from politics and businessmen from politicians, inasmuch as one influences the other and the businessmen become politicians and vice versa.

And the bottom of your first paragraph which goes something like corporations are man’s best friend and corporations are the devil incarnate. Geez-A-Lou, like the grandpa in Everybody Loves Raymond used to say (this country needs more old guys in their undershirts saying Geez-A-Lou, just like it needs good Cuban cigars, oh wait, we are going to get good Cuban Cigars thanks to my good buddy Barak Hussein).

And who built the road to Beaglesonia so that you can spend the social security money that the government runs for you? And who regulates your deer so that some idiot doesn’t get out in his 4x4 with an AR-17 and shoot them all leaving none for you? And keeps the Canadians from invading and making you say aboot instead of about? And who did that nifty little trick that made Kim Jong-un’s internet go out?

Of course it’s a hypothetical question, and maybe you wouldn’t invest in Liecheatandsteal earning ten percent annually and instead put your money Peaceonearthgoodwilltowardsmen which is losing two percent every year, but I’ll wager most everybody else in the country will. It’s just meant to illustrate the inherently amoral structure of corporations. But you can’t tell the difference between businesses and corporations so I don’t know why I am talking to you. Well maybe because nobody else is lining up to talk to me.

Oh Merry Christmas to you too.

Jenny's Argument

I wish that I had copied it, but I didn't, and now it's lost somewhere in the black hole of Face Book. As it so happens, I will be visiting her tomorrow, so I will ask her to elaborate on the meaning of her statement. By the way, I won't be going on line tomorrow, see you Friday. The way I remember it, Jenny was responding to a guy who had asserted that corporations are evil incarnate. Her argument was that, although corporations might not be perfect, they are certainly better than politicians. Corporations get things done, while politicians just dither around, accomplishing little. Corporations generate income for people, while politicians take money away from people. Corporations produce useful goods and services, while politicians cause more problems than they solve.

Of course corporations have not wiped out poverty, but neither has government. Corporations do, however, hire people, and an employed person is generally less poor than an unemployed person. The government just gives handouts to the poor, the poor spend the money, and then they're still poor. It's like that old Chinese saying: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day. Teach a man how to fish and he will be a regular customer at your bait and tackle store for the rest of his life." Of course corporations don't hire people as an act of charity, they spend money to make money, and their employees also make money in the process. Their stockholders make money too, if they just hang on to the shares and collect the dividends. Of course they hope to make more money than that when they sell the shares for more than they paid for them. That's kind of a gamble, but it's a risk they take of their own free will, nobody forces them to do it.

I would never invest in a company whose motto is "lie, cheat, and steal", but I'm sure you were speaking allegorically with that one. Picking individual stocks is a job for the professionals anyway, which is why most of my money is in a mutual fund. This fund has been good to me for 24 years now, and I have no intention of changing it. Vanguard, the parent corporation, has been in business for a long time and, to my knowledge, they have never cheated anybody or otherwise ran afoul of the law.

I have heard of that Dodd-Frank law, but I don't know a lot about it. I took a quick look on Wiki, and it's way too long and complicated for me to get involved with tonight. As far as corporations making political campaign contributions, I think they passed a law regulating that, but the Supreme Court threw it out, so it's back to the drawing board on that one. Soon it will be a brand new year with a brand new congress, so I'm sure they'll have everything straightened out by spring. ( I  make small joke.)

Merry Christmas!

uncle ken makes an error

Well it sounds like I am a biblical figure: Uncle Ken 12:19:14. I’ll stand by the first statement. In the second statement, in the first sentence I seemingly deny the first statement, but in the second sentence I deny the first sentence (trying to goad you into an argument about whether there is such a thing as evil, one of those muddy philosophical discussions which are as useful as debating the number of angels dancing on a pin, but have a certain logic for the sake of logic charm). And then in the third sentence I reaffirm the first statement. But oops I don’t, I misspoke, I meant to use the word amoral, but instead I used immoral. The corrected last sentence should read: I am really just saying that it is amoral. My error.

But then I see that you persist in confusing big business with corporations. A corporation can consist of one person. A big business can be as big as Walmart and yet not be a corporation. I think it is now a corporation, but let me look at the wiki.

Ah it is more complicated than I thought. Walmart is a corporation, but it is also a family-owned business, which I assume means that the family owns a majority of the stock, which means they have total control of what happens. So how does that effect my now shaky theory of how corporations are more amoral than businesses because they lack the milk of human kindness?

What if the Walmart family finds Jesus, and the Jesus they find is one of those eye of the needle Jesuses, so they raise the wages of their workers, and quit doing all those crooked shenanigans, like paying bribes, that we all know those big corps do. This causes Al Walton, the black sheep of the family to quit in disgust and form up Al’s Hedge Fund Corp, whose motto is Lie, Cheat, and Steal, and he makes piles of money. When it comes time for you to invest your nest egg, where are you going to put it?

Well it’s all got kind of confusing to me because it is hard to draw a line between corporations and non-corporate businesses, like it’s hard to draw a line between businessmen and politicians. My argument that corps are worse than moms and pops because mom and pop might be good people but the ceo inherently could never be good, was weak to begin with. I was just responding to your daughter’s comment that it would be better to let the corps run America than the politicians which still seems not very well thought out to me.

In your next to the last paragraph you seem to be saying that corporations are the method that can pull the poor out of poverty, which makes one wonder why they haven’t. You have to have money to get in the game, and the poor, by definition don’t have money.

And in your last paragraph you ask me which laws I would like governing corps. Well I haven’t got all day. How about Dodd-Frank, and any law prohibiting a politician to raise an unlimited amount of money.

Potato - Potahto

"Let me rephrase it that corporations are completely amoral, and in general work in ways that are detrimental to human welfare." - Uncle Ken on 12-19-14

"I’m saying the corporate system is inherently, in its structure, evil. But I am really not saying that it is evil, because, as I said previously, I don’t believe in evil. I am really just saying that it is immoral." - Uncle Ken on 12-22-14

Not wanting to quibble about semantics, but you did indeed say that corporations are both amoral and immoral. Since they obviously can't be both, lets just say that it is your assertion that corporations are a bad thing.

If I understand you correctly, you said that the main reason corporations are bad is that all they care about is making money. First of all, I assert that a corporation can't care about anything because a corporation is a collective of individuals and doesn't have a mind of its own. Each individual in the corporation contributes to the corporation's perceived personality, but the corporation itself doesn't really have a personality. Of course there's the corporate image that is put forth to the public, but that also comes from certain individuals within the corporation, not the corporation itself. If the public doesn't buy the corporate image, it will create one of its own, which becomes the corporation's reputation. Like the contrived image, this reputation may or may not accurately reflect what's really going on.

I agree that the primary purpose for which corporations exist is to make money. So what's wrong with that? If the corporation didn't exist, all those people would have to find some other way of making a living. The reason they join the corporation is that they believe it will provide them with a better opportunity to make money than they can readily find on their own. If, in the process, they run afoul of the law, that's their own fault. Like societies, corporations do not corrupt people, people corrupt corporations. In the process of making money, corporations provide goods and services for which there is a market demand. If the corporations didn't do it, Mom and Pop would. The reason that corporations displaced Mom and Pop in the marketplace is that they found a way to provide those goods and services for a lower price. If you want to drive the corporations off the face of the Earth, you need to come up with some kind of structure that provides those same goods and services for an even lower price. Another way to get rid of corporations would be to legislate them out of existence, but then you would still have to replace them with something else or the economy would collapse.

You have previously expressed your concern for all the poor people in the world. Well, what better way to alleviate poverty than to make money? If you want to confiscate and redistribute people's money, they first have to make money. If you deprive them of their ability to do this, there will be no money to confiscate and redistribute. Personally, I would rather see the poor people form their own corporations and make their own money but, either way, somebody has to make money. Well, technically, it is the government that actually manufactures the money. I suppose they could just dole it out equally to everybody, but then the money would soon lose its value. In order for money to have value, it has to be traded back and forth between people. I'm not sure why, but that's how it works.

So if corporations are so bad, what would you replace them with? Or would you rather try to rehabilitate them through legislation? There are already a lot of laws on the books that regulate corporations. Which ones would you change?

back to the crucible

I don’t think I said corporations are immoral, I didn’t mean to, especially since I don’t think there is such a thing as evil, so how could they be? I did rather imply that society would be better off without them, and I will continue to stand by that, although I have to admit that my knowledge of the origination of corporations is limited to something I learned in high school, and I haven’t gone back to research it since then because, well because it’s so goddamn deadly dull. I suppose if I were, as I often imagine I am, on my high horse leading humanity to a brighter future, I would be obliged to go to the wiki, but since in reality I am just half of two batshit old farts flapping their gums, I am not going to bother.

Like I said before I don’t think the republicans give a fig for states rights. They have their agenda, actually the only agenda they really have is lowering taxes on the rich, and the rest of it, like their morality crap and bogus patriotism, is just window dressing to appeal to the saps to get their votes so they can get their people in and give the plutocrats lower taxes. But anyway if states rights aligns with what they want they are all for them, if not they just don’t mention them.

I don’t see pot becoming a big issue, especially since apparently it is a big moneymaker. Cuba too, I don’t see becoming a big issue. The only people against it are a few hotheads in Florida like Rubio who are giving the issue lip service so as not to lose touch with their base, but most people just see it as a stupid cold war relic that is standing in the way of cigars and baseball players and more money, and once the embargo is gone we will wonder why was it ever there.

You are totally wrong about that underbrush thing. Weren’t you in the debate club? There are rules to this thing, which like wrestling, are only relevant when applied in academia and mean nothing in the real world. Let’s take the worst example, the presidential debates. Now, don’t laugh, this is supposedly two high minded folks laying out their plans for the country so that the high minded populace can choose who best to lead them.

Actually it is what you call an adversarial situation. It is like when the Bears play the Packers, only in this case with very timid referees. In the end one of the teams will win, but it won’t prove anything beyond just a win or a loss for either team.

Adversarial situations where I am just in it to win the argument or not, are something I don’t get into unless I am sort of loaded. I don’t want to get into an argument unless I feel there is a possibility that the guy on the other side might know more than me and I might come out learning something. Not that it happens often but I think that possibility has to always be there, or else it’s just a painful waste of time.

And no, logic isn’t just some trick to win an argument. It just isn’t, think about it.

Oh another piece of underbrush we should toss out of the gentlemanly discussion is the slippery slope. It’s just a bogus argument. People hear it so often that they think it might make sense, but if they thought about it, brought it into, yes, the crucible, they would discover it is just a bunch of bullshit.

Amoral, Not Immoral

I think you were right he first time when you said that corporations are amoral, but now you say they are immoral, which is not exactly the same thing. Corporations are not in the morality business, they are in the money making business. Churches and governments are in the morality business, and they're not expected to make a profit. All three are collectives, a group of people with a common interest who form an organization to further that interest.

I just thought of another type of collective that we haven't discussed before, the cooperative. Cooperatives are like corporations only different. Both have a board of directors, and both usually hire some kind executive to run the nuts and bolts of the operation, the board being mostly concerned with broad policy issues. Both may hire employees, although some of the smaller cooperatives make do with volunteer labor. Both may be either profit or non profit organizations, the difference being how the profits, if any, are distributed. Instead of stockholders, cooperatives have members. The difference is that each member has one vote, whereas stockholders get a vote for each share of stock they own. Credit unions are cooperatives, as are many providers of electricity and natural gas in rural areas. Artists, musicians, and farmers sometimes form cooperatives to market their products. I think that some investment companies could be classified as cooperatives, although they operate under different regulations than the other cooperatives I have mentioned. Well, maybe not so different from the credit unions, I'm not sure about that. Are cooperatives any more ethical than corporations? I don't know, but they certainly are more democratic.

I thought it interesting that this pot issue might put Republicans on the opposite side of states rights. I don't know if I like it or not, but it might be fun to watch. I'm not so sure about all that "clearing the underbrush" stuff you talked about. When people are trying to prevail in an adversarial situation, it's natural for them call up any resources that they can find to support their position. They might come off sounding high and mighty in the process, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. You could fall into the same trap using pure logic to win an argument. The challenge lies in using the guy's own sources against him. If he uses logic, you use logic. If he quotes the Bible or the constitution, you do the same thing. You still might not win the guy over, but you can have a lot of fun trying.

clearing out the undergrowth

I’m not saying there are a few bad apples in the corporate system. I’m saying the corporate system is inherently, in its structure, evil. But I am really not saying that it is evil, because, as I said previously, I don’t believe in evil. I am really just saying that it is immoral.

I am not talking about business in general, only about the corporate system, and by the corporate system I am not necessarily talking about big business, because many big businesses are not corporations, and many corporations are small.

What I am saying is because the ceo is driven by the stock prices, and this is not like people investing in some company because they admire their business practices, it is only for how fast the stock rises and therefore their income, that is important to them. The corporation has no interest in the fate of the world or the state of the union, or whether they provide a good product, or they treat their people well, their only motivation is stock prices.

If they had a human owner then that human might feel bad about despoiling the environment or whatever, and he might, in the mellowness, of age, decide to fund some nice project like the Carnegie libraries or whatever. Of course he might be a sumbitch and never feel guilty and never endow anything, but at least there is that chance.

I wonder about corporations. It seems like I remember hearing in high school how great their invention was, like how great it was that the nation states arose, and I am not so sure that I am a fan of either development.

So that’s the gist of my argument against corporations. Not all that strong because many other systems are immoral, but it just seemed odd that people look up to corporations for leadership. It’s like these guys who stand up for capitalism as if it were a moral force, like Christianity or communism, when in fact it is simply the law of the jungle.

That thing about how the GOP might be trying to squash legal marijuana, and therefore run afoul of states rights, and business I might add, illustrates something that happens in politics all the time. For instance how when they were fighting civil rights in the south, rather than admit that they were oppressing black people they claimed that they were for a higher cause, namely states rights, and that made them seem more noble, they were merely protecting the constitution. Or like some of the gun nuts who claim they are defending the second amendment, when in fact they don’t give a shit about the second amendment. If somebody proved the second amendment really applied only to militias or that it was written when all the founders were drunk, it wouldn’t change a thing for these guys, because all they really want is to provide a loving home for Old Betsy and all her lovely sisters. And I suppose the gun control nuts could find something in the constitution that went against guns and claim that they too are defending the constitution.

Guns galore may be a good idea or it may not be, but to pretend that you are only walking in the founders’ footsteps is a bunch of baloney. I just picked the gun issue at random, it could be any issue, and my guys do it all the time too, we should just stop it.

Another issue I don’t like is, so is your mother, like when some candidate gets his teat in the wringer he replies that his opponent has done the same thing or something similar. The question then is well if it was wrong for your opponent to do it, isn’t it wrong for you to do it too?

And that’s kind of version, of look over there, to distract from an issue you don’t want to talk about. When somebody points to a peculiarity in your income taxes, the common rejoinder is look at my opponent’s income taxes. The wise response is very well, we will when we are done talking about yours.

There are a lot of arguments that just in their logical structure are bogus, we should toss them out like so much undergrowth clogging the pure prairie of Beaglesonia so that we may pursue our lofty discussions without tripping over weeds.

"All Generalizations Are Invalid" - Mrs. Ohara

You are painting corporations with a pretty wide brush here. That's like saying that the Catholic Church is evil because a few priests like to fool around with the alter boys, or saying that all artists are gay. Oh wait, according to you, there is nothing wrong with that. All kidding aside, it's the bad apples that get most of the publicity.

Coming from a small business background as I do, I would agree with you, except that I have worked for a few corporations myself. While they lack the homespun charm of the Mom and Pop stores, they generally pay better. Of course they don't pay any more than they have to, just like most people don't pay any more than they have to for the goods and services that they purchase. The main reason that corporations are more competitive with both prices and wages is something called "the economy of scale". Not always, but usually, the bigger you are, the better prices you can negotiate with your suppliers. That's also why labor unions were formed in the first place. Too bad about those unions. They rose to the occasion, had their moment in the sun, and then faded away like the morning dew. Hopefully they will be replaced someday by something that is more effective, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Maybe corporations will also evolve into something better but, until they do, we're stuck with them. Mom and Pop still have their niche to fill, but we can't rely on them to produce on the scale that the modern economy demands.

I found out who write the article that I read about that Virginia rape story. He wrote a follow up article about it today, and I'm sure it's the same guy. He is Gene Lyons, a syndicated columnist who writes for the Arkansas Times. He comes down left of center on most issues, but he seems to value truth over ideology. He has previously lamented the sorry state of journalism today.

Another article of interest in today's paper : "Travel industry carefully eyeing Cuba tourism." Apparently Cuba was a popular tourist destination before Castro, and some people hope to make it into one again. They are cautiously optimistic for now, because it's still a long way from being a done deal. I said "some people", but I really meant "some corporations", like airlines and hotel chains. So if you ever get to take a vacation in Cuba, you will have corporations as well as the government to thank for it.

Another article of interest was the one about the states legalizing pot and what, if anything, the new GOP congress is likely to do about it. One interesting comment from Philip Wallach of the Brookings Institution, a Washington based think tank: "They're sort of asking for a head-on collision with states' rights." I seem to remember one of the learned scholars at the Beaglesonian Institute saying the same thing awhile back. Is it possible that this guy stole the idea from us? Should we sue him or something?

If there is evil, which there isn't, corporations are.

Are corporations inherently (by their very nature) evil? I think I can make that case. Well not evil, exactly, evil is hard to define, and verily I hold in mind that there really is no evil anymore than there is darkness, one is merely the absence of good as the other is only the absence of light. But that is an argument for another day. Let me rephrase it that corporations are completely amoral, and in general work in ways that are detrimental to human welfare.

As you said of business, their purpose is to make money. Money, not automobiles or toothpaste. And that is because that is the aim of the stockholders. They don’t invest in a company because it does good in the world, or makes a fine automobile, they invest in it because its stock price is rising. Indeed that is the whole motivation, the price of the stock. If the price goes down the CEO is out the door (though not without a platinum parachute. I can’t believe how this continues to go on. Every now and then there is an article or a Sixty Minutes or something about those salaries and parachutes, and it is so clearly wrong that everybody is outraged, outraged. And in a day or two it blows over and nothing happens. More proof of the immense power or the unelected corporate hierarchy, but that too is a story for another day). This means the CEO has to keep his eye ever on the price of the stock, and maybe at some point there comes a time when the company should retool which would involve a temporary drop in the stock to make a greater rise in the stock, but he dare not do that or else he would be out of a job.

Corporations may provide jobs, but to them that is just a cost of doing business, and they take every opportunity to pay as little as possible, they bust unions, they automate, lately they have been squeezing people into doing the jobs of two people because people are scared to death of losing a job.

And they (to the extent that they are people) do not believe in putting their shoulder to the wheel by paying taxes on their profits. They do everything possible to cut their taxes. They have all these little dodges and shells and whatnot so that again, every now and then there is an article or Sixty Minutes or whatever about how little, if anything, they pay in taxes, and again everybody is outraged and again it blows over because nothing can be done about it.

Because it is all legal, the corporations are just obeying the law (well okay they may tweak it a wee bit now and then), but of course the corporations had their paid minions in the government to write that law. And that is the other thing, because their soul purpose is to make money they have zero interest in the state of the union so they have no compunction not to bend the government to their will.

I was making these arguments specifically in regard to corporations as opposed to business in general. Those big tycoons of yore, many of them were indeed robber barons, but at least many of them got guilty consciences in their old age and did good works. A corporation can never have a guilty conscience and will never do good works.

In high school industry I learned that corporations were a good invention because they allowed the company to outlive the man, without doing any looking into it, I am not sure that that was a good thing. I’m always saying people are no damn good, but sometimes they are, and maybe we would be better off with people running businesses than legal machines running businesses. Of course people run the legal machines so, well I am not sure. That is my argument this Friday morning.

I did mean Mitt, and the word hated was a little over the top, but many republicans did hate him. Strangely, even after all I have said about business, businessmen tend to be more liberal than ideologues.

Jeb Bush is getting into the race, Mitt too. I wonder, just as a sidebar because it is way too early, who will sweep Beaglesonia precinct. I would think it might be Rand Paul, but he is making strange sideways moves towards liberalism. I am going to guess it is Ted Cruz because he almost never wavers.

Myself I am reluctantly for Hillary. I rather like this Elizabeth Warren and I could easily fall for her, but I worry about losing the election to some nut or to Mitt.

Business and Government

Of course you're right about business and government, it's just that my daughter came up with a different way of looking at it that I had not previously considered.

 The purpose of business is to make money, while the purpose of government is to protect people's rights, and among these rights is the right to make money. If the government showed a profit, people would say that it was competing unfairly with private enterprise, and they would be right. Most businesses make their money by providing goods and services to people that are willing to pay for them. In most cases, nobody is forcing those people to buy those goods and services, they are doing it of their own free will. A notable exception is the insurance business. By requiring people to buy insurance, the government is creating a captive market. Well, not exactly. If there was only one insurance company, then it would be a government sponsored monopoly but, since there are many insurance companies, and the government doesn't tell you which one you have to patronize, it's not exactly the same thing. Nevertheless, it still sucks.

Of course there are crooks in both government and business, but that's not the point my daughter was trying to make. She was disputing the assertion that corporations are, by their very nature, evil. My daughter pointed out that corporations make money for their employees and stockholders, which is more than government does. Actually, that argument is only half right because government also has employees, and they get paid too. While stockholders and citizens are not exactly the same thing, she was making a comparison between the two. Stockholders get a direct monetary return on their investment, while citizens only benefit indirectly from their association with government. The owners of common stock get the same dividend on every share they own, while some citizens get more benefit from government than others. The more I think about it, we are comparing apples to oranges here. Oh well, I didn't say it was a perfect idea, just that is caught my fancy. Especially since it came from my daughter, the liberal.

When you said that I hated a businessman who ran for president last election, I assume you were talking about Romney. I didn't exactly hate him, I just didn't vote for him in the primary because he was too liberal for my taste. I did vote for him in the general election because I certainly liked him better than Obama.

I don't think we will ever see Americans "come together" any time soon because they don't all want the same things. How can we agree on the means when we don't have the same end in mind? The last time that happened was World War II, which was the last war this country decisively won. Ah, they don't make wars like that anymore!

the one true path to enlightenment and good government.

I don’t see why Obama wants to leave troops in Afghanistan anymore than I understood why he wanted to leave them in Iraq. If it’s some little flurry, they are going to stay in their bases and not bother. If there is some big flurry, we are still going to want to keep our troops in their bases because we don’t want to get involved in a big war like we just got out of.

I think if we could find some sort of moderate Taliban to take over that would be the best of all possible worlds for us. Of course, how would we know they were really moderate, and how would we know they wouldn’t be overturned by some more radical group? Still that is the best of all possible Afghanistan worlds for us.

Once we have established relationships with Cuba it will be hard to remember why we were so all-fired pissed against them. It’s only a happenstance of the long gone cold war that happened over maybe five years fifty years ago that put them on the shit list. There are plenty of countries with more oppressive governments that we are all palsy walsy with.

This canard about businessmen being nobler or more efficient or more honest than politicians is just a bunch of bushwa.

First, businesses fail at an astounding rate, and businessmen go to jail far more often than politicians. Since they don’t have to run for office their crooked deals don’t come to light every few years like they do for politicians. If they had to run for their position against other businessmen, who would be tossing mud at them, their suits wouldn’t be all shiny clean.

Secondly they are basically the same guys. Some take the political road and some take the business road. And generally they move back and forth between the two. A businessman gets rich and decides to run for something. A politician drops out and there is always some business ready to take him in with open arms for his connections.

The thing is when a business fails, or some corporate head winds up in the slammer, most people think no skin off their nose, but when the same thing happens to a politician people get pissed because somehow they feel like these people are their employees and they have betrayed them, and half the time these are the people they voted for so now they have to sort of blame themselves and that really pisses people off.

What your poor misguided daughter is calling for by wanting corporations to run the government (like they don’t already, but that is another argument) is throwing away the right to vote.

Hey wait, didn’t you have a businessman running in the last republican primary, and didn’t you hate him?

Anyway the thing is we elect the politicians. If they turn out to be a bunch of crooks and evildoers the fault is at our feet. We should have studied the issues and the players. But wait, don’t you and I do that very thing and in every election won’t we be rooting for an almost opposite slate of candidates?

Well that is because we are divided. Isn’t there only one true path to enlightenment and good government? Well, probably not, but it has such a nice ring. Anyway we have to stop being divided, we have to thrash out our differences in an excellent, though not very successful forum such as this one, and then we will all be headed for nirvana, no wait, not nirvana, heaven, or maybe Las Vegas.  It is so hard to tell in these troubled times.

Nirvana

I think that's what Nirvana means, "nothingness". The Hindus consider this to be a good thing. Their lives are so crummy that they consider being reincarnated a punishment. Like you said, once they get it right, they go into Nirvana, which, to them, is the most desirable state of being. In Nirvana, your individual consciousness is subsumed into the consciousness of the Creator, from whence it originally came. If I was a Hindu, I would try to make sure that I ever got good enough for Nirvana. I wouldn't want to be too bad, though, because then I might come back as something that I don't want to be, like a liberal.

I saw on the news tonight that we may not be done with Afghanistan at the end of the year after all. Obama wants to keep 10,000 soldiers there to prevent the Taliban from re-establishing itself, which they already are starting to do. I said way back when this first got started that, if the Taliban people were smart, they would just quit fighting for awhile so the Americans could declare victory and go home. After that, they could come crawling out of their caves and soon be back in business.

I also saw that he wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba. One might think that I would be against that, but I'm not. I said a long time ago that it was silly to still be mad at Cuba after kissing up to Red China for all these years. Who knows? Cuba, like Red China, might become corrupted by exposure to American capitalism. They would still call themselves communists, but they would in fact be decadent materialists just like us.

My daughter, who is generally a liberal, said something on Face Book the other day that warmed her daddy's heart. She was responding to someone who was complaining about the power wielded by the big corporations. My daughter said that she would rather see the country run by corporations than by politicians. Corporations generally make money for their employees and their stockholders, while the politicians just squander their citizens' money and ask for more. Somebody else cut in and asked what she thought about all those corporate bailouts. Jenny said that just proves that businessmen are smarter than politicians. Too bad we can't get her to join the Institute, but she is much too busy for that.

Mr Fluffy goes to heaven

Every community has its own board, and I can’t speak for them all, but speaking for Chicago, the solution, well there is never a solution, but it would be better to put more civilians, and not civilians that are ex-cops, on the board. There have been several attempts to do this, but the cop union screams bloody murder every time and in the end nothing happens.

I like you, my esteemed colleague, I hold my judgement in abeyance and don’t pay that much attention until all the facts are in. In the Ferguson incident I was leaning towards thinking that the cop was at fault, because I heard there were all these gunshots in the kid’s back, but then when the smoke cleared, it turned out that there were no shots in the kid’s back, so I changed my opinion.

It seems like the Chicago papers have more conservative columnists than liberals, and that the conservatives are all fire-eaters while the liberals are more wishy-washy and nuanced. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with being wishy-washy, and certainly nothing wrong with being nuanced. I prefer it to the fire-eaters on the right who know everything they need to know about anything, and most all their columns can be boiled down to two words repeated over and over, ‘Obama sucks.’

I’m pretty sure that columnist was Roger Simon, he is of the liberal ilk, but like I said, nuanced, also he can be pretty humorous sometimes, and he just plain writes well.

I guess torture is like obscenity, hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Clearly the acts described in these reports is torture. Maybe some measures can be taken to curtail it, and I think some have, but there were measures before, and they got swept away like the fuzz of a dandelion. I like to think that if we had somebody in power besides the neocons and Dick Cheney, it might not have happened, but who knows.

And even now there are some voices saying that we should never have released the report, because it will fire up the fanatics, so it’s better just to lie about it. But of course the fanatics already know about it because they are the ones who were tortured. And some say that just by releasing the report we are redeeming ourselves a little, but without punishing those who did it, it is not all that redeeming.

I did a little googling on the pope, and I think what he said was that our animals would join us in heaven, but not specifically that they have souls, though one has to wonder, all those cheeseburgers we ate, will the souls of the cows join us too? I guess we will have the last laugh on the vegetarians with our vast herds of cattle, while all they have will be a lentil field. They say he was speaking pastorally rather than doctrinally. Those catholics, they have so many rules.

I don’t know much about Hindu, I thought they kept getting reincarnated until they get it right and then they plunge into nothingness or something like that, and wouldn’t it be simpler to be an atheist and go right to nothingness the first time out of the gate.

Trial by Media

These cop things and other allegations of wrong doing need to be resolved somehow. The review boards, grand juries, and courts are certainly not perfect, but what is the alternative, trial by media? I have learned not to base my opinions on the first media reports that come out immediately after the incident. I give it awhile to settle down and then, if I'm interested, I look it up on Wiki. Our local paper features a number of syndicated columnists, some from the left and some from the right, and I read those too. I read about the Rolling Stone rape story in one of them just the other day. I don't remember the guy's name, but he said pretty much what you said about it being a disgrace to the profession of journalism.

I have heard on the news about the latest torture report, but I haven't gone into it. It sounds like the same stuff we were being told at the time it was going on. I saw Dick Cheney on the news the other day admitting to it and claiming that it was the right thing to do. I thought at the time, "Why is this guy not in jail?" There appears to be a difference of opinion about the exact definition of "torture". Aren't there specific laws about that? Maybe not. Maybe they never passed any because they figured that Americans just don't do those things. Well apparently they do, so congress needs to get busy, and I'm sure they will as soon as they catch up on the rest of their unfinished business. (I make small joke.) Sometimes you have to laugh to keep yourself from crying.

The thing about the Pope's decree granting immortal souls to animals is that it contradicts what every Christian church, including the Catholics, have been saying for 2000 years. Like the one guy pointed out, though, it didn't come from the Bible. I understand that the Pope said it to comfort a little boy whose dog had recently died. Maybe he didn't know that the microphone was on. When are those politicians and celebrities going to learn? The microphone is always on, just like the gun is always loaded!

There are several definitions of the word "soul", and I understand that you were using a different definition than the Pope was. I rather prefer "consciousness" to "soul" myself. It's more specific to what I believe to be important. The Hindu concept of Nirvana does not appeal to me. What good is eternal life if you aren't aware that you are alive? The Law of the Conservation of Energy doesn't help either. Living forever after breaking down into sub atomic particles doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me. No, if I can't go as myself, then I don't want to go.

nobody is interested in the truth

The thing about those boards that investigate wrongful police behavior is that they are staffed by cops, or ex-cops, or people affiliated with cops, and they almost never find the cop guilty. Like you said it’s a dangerous job, and I am inclined to cut the cops a break, if the subject is fighting back I am willing to give them considerable leeway, but once the guy is subdued, I think they have to stop whaling on him. And like you said there are good cops who make mistakes, but don’t we all have to pay for our mistakes, and just like there are some bad bus drivers and bad substitute teachers there are some bad cops.

What I am saying is that sometimes the cops are going to be right and sometimes they are going to be wrong, and it may be that they are right more than they are wrong, but I don’t believe that they are almost never wrong.

When you say: Every time one of these incidents occurs, it is assumed that the White guy was in the wrong and the Black guy was in the right you are only half correct. The side that believes black people are getting the short end of the stick, believes the white guy was in the wrong. But the side that believes black people have it just fine and they should stop complaining believe the white guy is the right. The part you have right is that neither side has much interest in examining evidence that might go against their opinions. Not everybody, there are a few reasonable people like you and me, but for the most part people just line up on their side. We could invent some incident and then go down a list of politicians and commentators and know what each was going to say before the incident was even announced.

I don’t know if you’ve read about this story that The Rolling Stone published about these rapes that took place in a University of Virginia frat house, that scandalized everybody and later turned out not to be true at all. The person writing the story was taking the word of some woman who has turned out to be a big liar, and did no real investigation of her own.

Well this is terrible, terrible behavior, terrible journalism. The Rolling Stone has repudiated the story but not very harshly, and there is an undercurrent from the politically correct strain of the left that, well we all know that rape goes on all the time and that it is terrible, so that even if this story is untrue, it really doesn’t matter because it is on the right side of the issue, so we shouldn’t come down hard on the author. And as a matter of fact since the author is a woman and since it is a woman’s issue thing, anybody who criticizes it is some kind of sexist pig.

I hate this shit. The example I gave is a bad from the left, but the right does this stuff too. A lot of people on both sides think it is just a war between the right and the left, and facts or logic are only useful if they are on your side.

I know you haven’t been reading the reports on torture because there is plenty of evidence, there is a shit load of evidence, the perpetrators admit it. Their argument is that it wasn’t really torture it was Enhanced Interrogation. But waterboarding, sleep deprivation, chaining in painful positions for days, and that thing where they pureed some guy’s lunch and then forced it up his ass, sound like torture to me.

The reason that nobody is going to the big house for this is basically Obama has other fish to fry and no heart for the huge battle that would result from trying to bring these bad actors to justice. It is by no means proof that this shit, which like I said, they admit, didn’t happen.

We did it, we will probably do it again. We are just like every other country. There is nothing exceptional about us, so we should probably shut our mouths up about that.

When I said I had a soul, I didn’t mean anything like a religious soul, I just meant awareness. I am aware of my existence the way I assume a rock is not. I haven’t read anything about the pope declaring that animals have souls, and can go to heaven. Like you said would only the catholic animals go to heaven, what about the ones who had sinned? I will have to investigate this.

Pheasants, Corn, Cops, Torture, and Souls

I had some experience working with pheasants on Orin Bolin's game farm near Kankakee, Illinois, and I thought I had a better way to do it. The thing about pheasants is that they tend to pick on each other if they're the last bit crowded. Most growers solve this by clipping their beaks or putting blinders on them. That's fine if you're raising them to butcher but, if you plan on releasing them to the wild, it may inhibit their ability to survive. It's a tough world out there, and a bird needs all its parts and skills intact. My idea was to free range them like the old fashioned way of keeping chickens. You turn them loose in the morning and, when it starts to get dark, they congregate back in their coop where they will be safe for the night.

Well, it worked fine with the chickens that we kept for over three years. We lost a few early on, but most of them soon adapted to the routine and prospered. Pheasants, on the other hand, are more spooky than chickens. They can fly at two weeks, but that doesn't mean they know where they are going or how to get back. For some reason, they seemed to want to fly directly into the dog pen, which proved to be a one way trip. I tried it again after my last dog died but, without the dogs nearby to scare off predators, a fox soon learned that it could trap the birds in their coop before I closed the door for the night. What I need to do is build a sturdy pen, big enough so that the birds won't feel the least bit crowded. I think I can release them at six weeks, but not leave the gate open so they and the predators can come and go at will. The birds need to be either inside or outside but not both. Like I said, though, I haven't had the time or energy to build such a pen, and I'm not getting any younger.

The thing about the corn is that I want it to be there over the winter when the wildlife needs it most, but they won't let it last that long. That's why I like the rye, it's green for deer season, and again in the spring when the deer are hungry, but it's no good in the winter when it's covered by a couple feet of snow. Corn, if left standing, might stick out above the snow, if the deer let it live that long, but they won't.

Cops: Police work is dangerous, which is why they carry guns. Supposedly they are trained about when it's appropriate to shoot somebody and when it's not. Every time there is a police shooting, an investigation is launched, and the cop is taken off the street until it's completed. Generally, a cop is allowed to use deadly force if he believes that his, or somebody else's, life is in danger. I imagine that's a tough call to make in the heat of the moment. Be that as it may, the same rules and standards should be applied no matter what the race of the cop or the suspect. What some people seem to be saying is that a cop can shoot a White suspect but not a Black one. Every time one of these incidents occurs, it is assumed that the White guy was in the wrong and the Black guy was in the right, evidence not withstanding. Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?

Torture, let me say this about that: It sucks on all levels. Not only is it un-American and inhumane, it's generally ineffective. Torture a person long enough and he will tell you anything you want to hear, whether it's true or not. What good is false intelligence? I don't know how much truth there is to the allegations of torture during the Bush-Cheney years, but anybody who can be proven to have done, ordered it, or allowed it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The fact that this wasn't done leads me to suspect that at least some of the allegations were groundless. Like most stories, there probably is some truth in it. The question is, "How much?" Somebody should investigate that.

Big news from the Vatican! I saw on the news this evening that the Pope has recently decreed that animals have souls and can go to Heaven. I am not making this up! Presumably he just meant Catholic animals, although the news didn't say that. They did interview a few other theologians who gave it mixed reviews. One guy pointed out that there is nothing in the Bible saying that animals do not have souls. He may be right about that, but I don't think it says that they do have souls either. I seem to remember you saying that, while you don't believe in God or Heaven, you do believe that you have a soul. So, what about your cats, do they have souls too?

arguments should be well-formed and logical

If your aren’t going to harvest the corn what do you care if the deer and the raccoons take it before it is ripe? I don’t remember the pheasant story, why don’t you run that one by me again?

I know you don’t watch Fox news, and the fact is I don’t watch it much anymore either. It’s just the same thing over and over again. It’s not even fun to rebut their arguments. But then I guess their stuff goes back and forth between the politicians and the columnists and whatever, so that it is all the same thing. The left does that too, somebody thinks up some argument or phrase that they think is pretty cool, and then they are all saying it.

Actually what Bill O’Reilly and that ex-mayor of New York were saying was something like well what about all the black on crime? Which was a little different from what you were saying, but it sounded close to me. But that argument doesn’t make any sense. What does black on black crime have to do with blacks getting shot by white policemen? Does it mean that as long as so many blacks are killed by other blacks, it’s okay for white cops to pick off a few? Should we wait until there was less black on black crime before we became upset by white cops shooting black people?

I suppose buried in there is some kind of argument that they shouldn’t be demonstrating, when they could be spending their time fighting black on black crime (and that is a whole bogus argument used in politics all the time, why are we talking about this problem when there is a whole other problem that is even bigger, like people can’t do more than one thing at a time.). Also that is like the argument about why doesn’t Pedro stay in Mexico and fix their corrupt government instead of jumping the border. Like Pedro can do anything about the government. Why don’t we white people do something about all those hedge fund and banker thieves?

But on the narrow issue of demonstrations, I keep thinking why aren’t they going door to door and registering their people to vote, and getting out that vote on election day? But the thing is, demonstrating is kind of fun, and it only takes up a few nights and you feel so good about yourself for having spoken those brave words. But registering people is slow work and not much fun at all.

It is a mystery to me why Ferguson became such a big deal. Stuff like that happens here every couple of months. The cops say one thing, the witnesses say another and actually maybe there are some demonstrations, but they are strictly local and don’t last more than a day or two. It may be something like boiling water where the tension just builds and builds and then it comes to a boil.

I was going to say something about those torture reports, but I am almost out of time. Okay then a couple short sentences. Remember how they told us in school how the United States of America does not torture and we don’t lock up people indefinitely without giving them a trial, and it gave us a little pride, we were a little better than other countries. And now that is all out the window, now we do both, and it doesn’t bother us a bit.

I Miss the Corn and the Pheasants

When I first moved here, I said this area only needs two things to make it perfect, corn and pheasants. It's true that there is some corn raised here, but nothing like what they have in Illinois. There are a few hunt clubs in the region that raise or buy pheasants, but it's pretty much put and take because they don't survive the winter. People say that it's too cold, but that can't be true because pheasants originated in Mongolia. The problem is that adult pheasants eat seeds and it's pretty hard to find seeds under two or three feet of snow. While Mongolia is at least as cold as Michigan, it's a lot drier and windier. Any snow that falls there gets quickly blown away, or so I am told.

I have considered planting some corn and not harvesting it, but my experience with sweet corn is that the deer and raccoons eat it all a day or two before it's ready to be picked, so there wouldn't be any left by winter, which is when it's needed. I tried to raise pheasants a few times over the years. My plan was to release them when they grew up, but keep putting out feed, hoping that they would hang around through the winter and reproduce in the spring. I think I have told you how that turned out. I still think I could find a way to make it work, but I don't seem to have the time or energy for any more projects right now. It's getting so that I barely have time to get my firewood put up before I have to start burning it.

You keep accusing me of getting my ideas from Fox News, but I don't even watch Fox News! I was just wondering why there is suddenly all this fuss about cops shooting Black people. Are they shooting them more often now than they ever have? Of course that doesn't make it right, I'm just trying to put it into some kind of perspective. At some point the media will tire of this subject and move on to something else. When they do, that won't necessarily mean that the problem is solved, just that the public will be too excited about the next big thing to worry about it any longer.

dumber than a Texan?

Trees are nice. Some years ago there was a woman in the watercolor class and when I learned that she had once lived in Marina City, I was puzzled by how anybody who once lived here would ever want to move out. “Well,” she sighed, “I just wanted to see some trees.”

I don’t remember Atlas Shrugged saying anything about soybeans, but I think there was something subversive about them, probably because they were from China. Now there are probably as much soybeans as there is corn, though a field of soybeans is nowhere near as dramatic as corn.

In Texas they had, as the song goes, miles and miles of miles and miles, and mostly they raised cattle on it. I just read an article on bronco busters in Texas and how the broncs are getting bigger and meaner and the riders are getting killed younger and younger. Oh wait, not broncos, bulls. Well I have to admit I had to google that one to find out exactly what a bronco is, but then it was all about the Denver broncos. You can never find out anything about anything if there is a sports team or a rock band with the same name. Anyway Texans are nuts.

But wait, now that I think about it the article was about Oklahomans. Well Oklahomans are just like Texans only dumber and poorer.

I thought you were taking a side on Ferguson, because all the Foxies were saying something like well how come nobody says anything about black on black crime, as if somehow people should be talking about that instead. But the fact is that everybody is talking about black on black crime all the time, and why does not talking about one preclude talking about the other?

It’s hard to say if the media is blowing it out of proportion. The thing is when something like this happens every politician and pundit wants to get their word in, and the media has to cover that because that is what the news is. But then there is the cable news, and the cable news loves a riot, or a storm, or anything where they can get their reporters standing somewhere with a microphone while all around them is light and noise.

I have to admit I tuned in to it a little bit because what the hell else was on the stupid tube? And at one point I was watching some group of young hotheads in New York I think it was, and they were trying to kick in a cyclone fence so that they could get down to the expressway to block it, and there was the guy with the microphone beside them and all the lights from the cameras, and I have to tell you, for a bunch of hotheads they weren’t making much progress on the fence. One guy would rush up and give it a good kick, and then the next guy, and then the next guy, and I finally asked myself, why am I watching this, and I went to bed.

You know my side of the generation like to think that our protests ended the Vietnam war, but in the mellowness of time I’m not so sure. I think it was more the coffins and the treasure squandered and the way it went on and on without victory and nobody was even sure what victory means. I imagine these protests alienate as many people as it energizes. People marching peacefully may help, but Burn This Bitch down doesn’t.

Trees Are Cool

Whatsamatter, you don't like trees? I thought that everybody liked trees! All kidding aside, you're right that corn is the priority crop on any land that will grow it on a commercial scale, although soybeans have become equally important in our lifetimes. Remember in "Atlas Shrugged" when the introduction of soybeans was supposed to be a commie plot to destroy the wheat growers of America? Well, that book was written way back in the 50s, and I guess some people believed that in those days. Since then soybeans have become as American as apple pie and they are commonly grown in rotation with corn. Of course, not all land and climates are suitable for crops like corn and soybeans. It's a good thing too, because we also need the other stuff like wheat, hay, and pasture. Trees are important too, but they are usually grown on land that's not suitable for food and fodder crops. Trees do things, it just takes them longer, that's all.

We have bobcats in Michigan, but they are reclusive and seldom seen by humans. If we have any lynxes, I'm sure they are confined to the U.P and not plentiful enough to hunt or trap. Of course, that's what they used to say about wolves until recently, so you never know. Rumors of cougar sightings around here were not taken seriously until a few years ago when, not far from here, somebody found some cougar poop and had it confirmed by DNA analysis. I think that all cats pee on stuff to mark it as theirs, at least the males do anyway. If this habit hurts their ability to hunt, I have never heard of it.

I was not trying to take sides in this killer cop controversy, I just wondered if the news media wasn't blowing it out of proportion. As I have said before, I believe that each case should be judged according to the facts and not people's social and political agendas. As for the protests, I think that America got all protested out during the 60s. Nowadays a protest is at least as likely to make people hostile to a cause as it is to make them sympathetic to it. Of course the actual riots don't do anybody any good.

how many white hunters kill deer with a taped up weapon while searching for the top quark?

I still retain that central Illinois philosophy that, except for houses and stuff, land not being used for growing corn is land wasted. When I went to Pittsburgh I was shocked at the tree carpeted mountains along the side of the road. They just sat there doing nothing. Well I suppose it would be hard to grow corn on a mountainside, unless you were a moonshiner, I hear they do that all the time.

Any cats up there? Lately it appears there are more cougars than anybody thought there were, and they are so sneaky that if you can’t see them, that just proves they are there. What about lynxes, aren’t those cats of the frozen waste? And bobcats, surely there are bobcats. I saw one at a rescue station some years ago, and even before you got to his little area it stank to high heaven. People there said that they peed all over to protect their territory, but wouldn’t that make it hard for them to sneak up on prey?

I was being lazy when I said that about the Higgs bosun. I knew that they had found it a year or two ago, but I was just searching for an example and I thought how the hell would Beagles, way up there, and only catching what little news comes on during the market report, and probably not subscribing to Scientific American, know about that? Oh what a world we live in.

I was probably thinking of the top quark, another one of those elusive particles, that if they couldn’t find it, then they would have to toss the whole of modern physics into the dustbin and start over, but then I wikied it and discovered: the two groups jointly reported the discovery of the top with a certainty of 99.9998%

So I guess that’s good enough for me. Maybe now we have found everything.

The last half of your last paragraph refers to several events of late that I guess could be generally considered Ferguson. This thing about how many black cops kill white people etc, is just a Fox canard. What difference does that make? If more or less, say, black cops kill white people, does that make it okay or less okay?

And anyway, just thinking about it, it’s pretty clear that there would be more white cops killing black people since most cops are white and blacks, due to their lower income, are disproportionately in the criminal class. The problem is do they do it too much, or just the right amount, or too little.

At the bottom is should they have shot that guy in Ferguson (my own opinion, probably) or strangled that guy in Cleveland (my own opinion, probably not), that kid with the toy gun (my own opinion, probably not). There is the individual case. But then in more general terms is the issue of whether the local police are too brutal or racist. But then above that is the more general issue of are police in general brutal or racist. But then above that is the more general issue of whether black people are treated right or not. And then there are all these side issues like, even so, do these protests do any good, or should the police be driving tanks?

Flat is Boring

Michigan is pretty flat, although not as flat as Illinois and Indiana. We don't have any real mountains, just enough hills to break up the monotony. Well, there are the Porcupine Mountains in the U.P. I have never seen them, but I'm sure they don't hold a candle to the Rockies or even the Appalachians. I think most of our hills were formed by the glaciers when they gouged out the Great Lakes because they are mostly sand. In the hilly areas, most of the farming is done on the bottom lands and the sandy hills have been allowed to revert to forest. In the flatter areas, it is the high ground that gets farmed because the lower land is generally too wet for that.

Beaglesonia is about half swamp and half "uplands", the difference in elevation being only a foot or two. You can't dig a hole anywhere on the property more than three feet deep without hitting water. We had to haul in sand and raise the grade three feet to build our house, otherwise the crawl space would have flooded and the septic system would not have worked.

They grow some corn in Michigan, mostly in the southern part, but not on the scale that Illinois and Indiana does. There are a few dairy farms around here that raise corn to feed their own cows, but they don't even try to combine it, they just chop it for silage, stalks and all. Our growing season is usually too short to allow the corn to dry out sufficiently for combining.

Those little weasels thrive in the forest, but I think they do just as well in the farm country. I think badgers prefer open fields to woods. I have only seen one since I moved up here, and I was surprised to see that one. Minks, which are also weasels, live on the shores of lakes and streams. I see them frequently when I'm fishing on the Cheboygan River right in town. Wolverines are rare anyplace, but they are usually found in remote mountain areas like the Rockies. I believe there is one known to be living wild in the U.P. There used to be a different one, but it was found dead shortly before this second one appeared on the scene. They both probably drifted down from Canada, as did the timber wolves, which have proliferated to the point where limited hunting of them is allowed. The antis fought it for years after the feds took the wolves off the endangered list and turned them over to the states, but the will of the people eventually prevailed, at least for now.

You mentioned the other day that the Higgs-Boson was still theoretical, but I seem to remember hearing or reading that somebody had recently isolated one. Maybe it turned out to be fraudulent, like the occasional claim that cold fusion has been worked out. It never ceases to amaze me how something can be all over the news for a few days or weeks and then you don't hear any more about it. Lately it's been all about White cops shooting Black people. I wonder how the stats compare with Black cops shooting Black people, or Black cops shooting White people, or White cops shooting White people.