Fish for Friday

Russian billionaire
Roman Abramovitch's yacht

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Naysayers who derided "trickle down economics" may be amazed to learn it worked exactly as designed, and did it much more completely and effectively than anyone could have imagined: "Report: World's 85 richest have same wealth as all of bottom 50 percent."
    Oh wait, you thought cutting tax rates on the rich was supposed to create more entrepreneurial investment and better jobs for all and the money was supposed to flow down through the ranks to the less fortunate? So you thought people like former president Ronald Reagan and his ultra-rich backers were actually going to devote their lives to creating tax laws that would take money away from themselves and their offspring and instead give it to others? Say that out loud and see if it even makes sense. And try to think of where you have seen any studies or facts that prove "trickle down" actually works. Or that it even could work, even in the most perfect mathematical formula.
    If the reality that the lowest tax rates on the rich since the 1920s has created the greatest economic disparity since the 1920s doesn't convince you, here is a bit of rather detailed reading that will explain it: "Finally, A Rich American Destroys The Fiction That Rich People Create The Jobs."

Krugman on: "The Myth of the Deserving Rich." Excerpt:

There is an obvious desire to believe that rising incomes at the top are kind of the obverse of the alleged social problems at the bottom. According to this view, the affluent are affluent because they have done the right things: they’ve gotten college educations, they’ve gotten and stayed married, avoiding illegitimate births, they have a good work ethic, etc.. And implied in all this is that wealth is the reward for virtue, which makes it hard to argue for redistribution.
    The trouble with this picture is that it might work for people with incomes of $200,000 or $300,000 a year; it doesn’t work for the one percent, or the 0.1 percent. Yet the bulk of the rise in top income shares is in fact at the very top. Here’s the CBO:

    What’s a sociologizer to do? Well, what you see, over and over, is that they find ways to avoid talking about the one percent. They talk about the top quintile, or at most the top 5 percent; this lets them discuss rising incomes at the top as if we were talking about two married lawyers or doctors, not the CEOs and private equity managers who are actually driving the numbers. And this in turn lets them keep the focus on comfortable topics like family structure, and away from uncomfortable topics like runaway finance and the corruption of our politics by great wealth.

Robert Reich: "David Brooks is Dead Wrong About Inequality." Excerpt:

David Brooks...in his New York Times column last Friday, argued that we should be focusing on the “interrelated social problems of the poor” rather than on inequality, and that the two are fundamentally distinct.
    Baloney.
    First, when almost all the gains from growth go to the top, as they have for the last thirty years, the middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power necessary for buoyant growth....

And Krugman again: "Why We Talk About the One Percent." Excerpt:

No wonder lawmakers don't care about basic needs like health care, food stamps and Social Security. "More than Half of All Members of Congress Are Millionaires."

I'm so glad my grandparents moved from Indiana in 1907: "Breaking Math: The Time Indiana Nearly Passed a Law Declaring 'Pi = 3'." Excerpt:

The bill died not because someone pointed out that using "3" just wouldn’t work because it’s drastically different than the correct real world value and everything would break, but because …
    The bill was postponed indefinitely and died a quiet death. According to a local newspaper, however, "Although the bill was not acted on favorably no one who spoke against it intimated that there was anything wrong with the theories it advances. All of the Senators who spoke on the bill admitted that they were ignorant of the merits of the proposition. It was simply regarded as not being a subject for legislation."

Sunday Un-funny: "The GOP’s War on Science Endangering America: Climate Change, Evolution, Regulation." Excerpt:

There is no secret that oil, gas and coal billionaires are pooling millions of a dollars a year to do propaganda to the public to try to convince them that burning fossil fuels is quite all right. If they were proper human beings, they’d get out of that business and invest in wind, solar, wave, and geothermal. But they’re not. They’re greedy and want us to burn through their reserves of fossil fuels. If we do that we could well make the climate unstable for future generations and even threaten human life on earth. You have to be a monster to kill your great grandchildren.
    But the American public can only be bamboozled this way because it isn’t very well educated, and certainly not in critical thinking. Critical thinking isn’t encouraged by our elites because their class interest lies in people being malleable sheep and accepting the status quo created by the billionaires.

This is a classic I’d heard of for years, and finally found. Enjoy! "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Excerpt:

The Double Sufferer. The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

[Article on the article in Wikipedia: "an essay by American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964; it served as the title essay of a book by the author in the same year. Written at a time when Senator Barry Goldwater had won the Republican Presidential nomination over the more moderate Nelson A. Rockefeller, Hofstadter's article explores the influence of conspiracy theory and 'movements of suspicious discontent' throughout American history."]

In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. A recent New Yorker article discusses "The Intelligent Plant." Excerpt:

The sensory capabilities of plant roots fascinated Charles Darwin, who in his later years became increasingly passionate about plants; he and his son Francis performed scores of ingenious experiments on plants. Many involved the root, or radicle, of young plants, which the Darwins demonstrated could sense light, moisture, gravity, pressure, and several other environmental qualities, and then determine the optimal trajectory for the root’s growth. The last sentence of Darwin’s 1880 book, The Power of Movement in Plants, has assumed scriptural authority for some plant neurobiologists: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle...having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements.” Darwin was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and “brain” on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.

Mysteries of the Human Body:
    The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razor blades. The reason it doesn't eat away at your stomach is that the cells of your stomach wall renew themselves so frequently that you get a new stomach lining ever three to four days.
    The human lungs contain approximately 2,400 kilometers (1,500 mi) of airways and 300 to 500 million hollow cavities, having a total surface area of about 70 square meters, roughly the same area as one side of a tennis court. Furthermore, if all of the capillaries that surround the lung cavities were unwound and laid end to end, they would extend for about 992 kilometers. Also, your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.
    Sneezes regularly exceed 100 mph, while coughs clock in at about 60 mph.
    Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil. Your body has enough iron in it to make a nail 3 inches long.
    Everyone has a unique smell, except for identical twins, who smell the same.

Your blog mentioned "Pastafarians" and "The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" a few months ago, so I thought you might enjoy this story "Motorist's Intentionally Awkward Driver's License Photo Goes Viral." Most of the piece is about an intentionally awkward DMV photo prank, and it is worth a read and a laugh, but it is in the next to the last paragraph where "Pastafarians" will be proud to see their alternative religion finally taken seriously—in Texas of all places.

Michael McClure

There’s time before the Super Bowl to finally replace the unsingable “National Anthem.” The obvious choice comes from Michael McClure:

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until three,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town?
I'm counting on you, Lord, please don't let me down.
Prove that you love me and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town?

Everybody!
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends,
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

Best recalled as done by Janis Joplin:

I’d much rather have James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice," but truth in advertising must prevail…..

Speaking of the Super Bowl, what's that fishy smell?—no, wait, it's something else....

Derek Parfit

I need to read this again, but thought you would find it interesting: "Why We Procrastinate." Excerpt:

The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.”
    Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made.

I finished reading an eBook last night. It was free, from Kindle, which has a lot of free eBooks. I have started to read their eBooks, not because they are free, but because someone spent at least a year of their life writing these books and I feel someone should take the time to read them. There are a lot of good writers and good stories. Maybe I see myself in them, although there are much better writers than I am in that section. I don't know, it seemed like the right thing to do.

"The Bear" is an unusually involving film about animals that will give you a fresh perspective on their world:

Tomb of the Prussian royal family

Siegfried's baby photo

Limerick of the Week:

He was seven weeks old and quite fluffy
when he came to our house as a puppy;
    and today, behold,
    he is five years old;
we know that we're, and think that he's, happy.

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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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