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.