I see a lot of argument online about budgets and government priorities and so on. A lot of it confuses me because people are using things that look like math – but are actually just bad argument and yelling. I’m going to try to summarize what I understand of the rabid conservative financial worldview, but with no numbers. Forgive me if I leave some stuff out:

The world is inherently fair, and you get what’s coming to you. Money is an indicator that you worked hard. Money is a reward for sustained good behavior over time. Most people are bad, lazy people. Therefore, most people don’t make much money. The reason that CEOs, business owners, and rich people have so much money is that they deserve it for all their hard work. Those people worked for every penny they have. Similarly, poor people deserve every ounce of their suffering. The world is fair.

Since the good people are in charge of the businesses (see above) businesses don’t need to be regulated. We can trust them to do the right thing without supervision. However, the employees (being lower paid and therefore bad) need a firm hand. We can’t have the workers unionizing – since that would interfere with the flow of money to the people who do the real work: owners and management.

This is why we negotiate with the football players unions. The people in that union make a lot of money, so we should listen to them. Also, FOOTBALL USA USA!

Since we’re talking about good and bad (money is a metric of morality), we can and should bring God into it. God likes rich people better. Rather, rich people are rich because God likes them. Don’t let that confuse you with the whole “we deserve it,” thing above. Just relax your mind and let it wash over you. Rich people deserve all of their blessings and wealth because they worked for every penny. Or their parents worked hard and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Everyone knows that good people have good kids. That’s why when other people’s kids do drugs, they need to be locked up for life – but when good people’s kids do drugs they need treatment. Anyway, the reason they were able to work so hard was because God liked them and gave them strength.*

We can expect the spread between rich and poor to continue to widen because the country is becoming more sinful. In fact, in America we ought to expect it because we’re letting all those non-americans cross the border. Non americans don’t even register on the moral compass because God is American. That’s the fundamental reason that we need stricter immigration policies, to keep the bad people out. Note, however, that when rich people sin – it’s just an opportunity to demonstrate God’s power to forgive. If they had really sinned, God would have taken their money away. That’s why we don’t need to prosecute anyone for the debacle on Wall street in 2008. That was the bad poor people’s fault. Now they’ve lost the houses they couldn’t afford, so justice is done.

All that said, there is hope: If you’re quiet and good and don’t use contraception, and if you go to church, and (most important) if you lower the tax rate on the rich people, then those same rich people might be nice to you and create more crap jobs at minimum wage. If you keep the taxes where they are – the rich people will withhold God’s blessings of money from you and slow down the economy and it will all be your fault for what you made them do.

Social services are just free stuff for people who can’t afford it. These are actually counterproductive because they send the wrong message to people dying of exposure and easily treatable diseases. Those people should have been good, rather than bad. If you reward bad behavior, people just become more bad.**

Got it? Good. Now go argue about abortion or something while the banks take billions of dollars in profits this quarter.

And remember, the more of your money your banker pays to himself, the better it is for you.

* It would be best not to consult any of the major world religious texts on the matter of God’s feelings about money. You’ll probably get all confused.
** Also, don’t consult world religious texts on compassion, altruism, or similar topics.

That big chewy hairball of rage that I wanted to hawk up the other night – but was too jetlagged to choke out? Jim Wright nailed it. There’s plenty of profanity in there, as there should be. It’s appropriate to cuss. We’re dealing with a substantial minority of the electorate who are actively working for the destruction of the republic. Yes Tea Party, I’m looking at you. Their agressive, bigoted, blind stupidity is starting to show results. We were within a hairsbreath of a full-on government failure because of those no-compromise, no-thought jackasses.

These morons are an abject example of why our Founding Fathers designed a republic instead of a nation ruled by an enraged mob made up of ignorant selfish …

It’s a good read. Doubly so if, like me, you’re suffering from outrage fatigue. I’m happy that someone can still muster that level of rage. Me? I just go play in my garden and think about how I don’t have kids. If I had kids, I would probably worry more.

Also: For the record, our country did not “win” because those turds nearly brought down the system but then failed to pull the trigger. I spent a decent part of Thursday and Friday on the phone with federal customers who were trying to figure out how best to mothball some rather stable and robust systems. We did not “win” because we failed to lose in the worst possible way. People give Obama flak for wasting precious minutes caring about his basketball brackets.

I want my money back. For congress. Keep the NPR and Planned Parenthood parts.

In addition, as Scott points out in a comment to the last post, all this posturing and brinksmanship was over less than 1% of the budget. Our structural issues are closer to 1/3 of the budget. In order for 2011 revenue to cover expenditures under current tax law, we would need to cut about 42 times more. Think about “1,600 billion” rather than “38 billion.”*

Even Dwan’s Circumcision Principle doesn’t help us here. I believe that you can lop the to 10% off of just about *anything* and it’ll still work okay**. The same does not apply to cuts of 33%. You take 33% off the top of anything except mint or bamboo and it’ll just give up and die. If we cut deep enough to “fix” the problem, right now, we would kill our whole economy. That’s a Bad Thing, no matter which of the “hoorah go USA” American teams you’re on.

I do think that we need to address those structural issues. Doing that probably does mean massive changes in what it means for us to have an “America” at all. For the last 80 years or so, America has stood for a fairly progressive set of social services coupled with globally low taxes and an enabling environment for corporate growth. It’s clear to me that we’re going to dismantle some of the apparatus of the “welfare state” in the next decade or so. Some of it probably does need to go. Other pieces, not so much. It’s also clear that we’ll need to raise taxes across the board. That, and closing some rather embarassing tax loopholes might get us by.

The idea of cutting vital social services while in the same breath giving a tax break to the top income bracket is just a slap in the face.

More seriously: In any social change movement, there need to be two types: Firebrands on the hilltops, but also conciliators in the trenches. The gay rights movement got this exactly right. Sure, you need the chaps and dildos on parade in San Francisco to get people to pay attention and to draw the bigots into the sunlight. However, you also need the respectable neighbors who quietly put a rainbow flag sticker in their window. The sticker that you don’t notice until you stop over to thank them for looking after the house while you were away – like you have for the past 25 years. The ideologues define the argument, but in the end the conciliators work out what it means to have a civilization under a slightly different set of rules.

Give us time. We’re pretty smart, as a society. We’ll work it out.

The problem today is that the news cycle is too short and the national attention too fragmented. Few people in positions of power appear interested in actually sitting down to do the adult work of running a government. Ideologues don’t compromise. That’s why we nearly closed the passport office over a structural budget issue that’s been visibly building for the past 30 years.

The financial meltdown was just another dead canary in the national coal mine. We can’t run as a nation of debtors forever. At some level, we all need to take the haircut. Those with higher incomes need to pay more taxes. Those with lower incomes need to accept a lower level of social services and a lower amount of free and easy debt. The bastards who have pulled bonuses for steering the ship into the shoals need to be in prison.

Anyway, I can’t summon the rage anymore. Bad for the spleen. Go read Jim’s page. I think I’ll post about my brewing and my garden for a while.

* It bugs the crap out of me when people casually switch units and timescales in the middle of an argument, as in Reid’s $10T savings (over 20 years). For that reason, all numbers in this post are relative to 2011.
** With acknowledgement to Scalzo’s guillotine conundrum

I want to work up a really pithy post on the ludicrous insanity going on on capitol hill. I really do. However, I am savagely jet lagged and waiting to get on a red-eye flight back to Boston. Under these conditions, I can’t trust myself to hold together a coherent argument.

I’ll let Paul Krugman do it for me. Please go read this and also this about the Republican Plan to Screw The Poor and Give Their Money To The Rich.

In other news, check out this awesome Latte:

After writing that last post about Libya, I find that my heart has hardened somewhat. A piece of it comes from further reading on the specifics of the situation in Libya, including Friedman’s excellent piece on the two sorts of nations we meet in that part of the world. I find myself having trouble believing that we can, or should, be picking sides in what is fundamentally just another chapter in a fight hundreds of years old. If we are to intervene then we must understand our motives. Merely stopping indiscriminate killing doesn’t cut it. That would (as pointed out by Al Jazeera) necessitate intervention in Gaza among other places.

So we need a plan. A coherent reason that differentiates Libya from, say, Rwanda. To date, I haven’t seen one.

More broadly though, as I considered, I realized that there was a gap in my mind between ‘launching cruise missiles’ and ‘killing people.’ They are, in fact, one and the same. We anesthetize ourselves from the reality by hiding behind technology. We think it’s somehow not murder to lob a few bombs over the wall to settle down those noisy neighbors. In reality, I think that the ethics of murder are the same – whether you do it with your own hands or not. If we leverage technology in the act – does that really change the fact that we’re choosing to orphan children and create widows?

Now let me be clear: There are cases where killing is justified. Self defense is the classic one, and national interest is not far behind. I’m no doe-eyed softie about these things. I’ve said for a while that what we invade, we should occupy. Furthermore, I’m eternally grateful to our service men and women for what they’re willing to do. I think we owe them better reasons than have been offered so far on Libya when we ask them to kill on our behalf.

I don’t think that our interests, self-defending or otherwise, are clear enough to for us to kill people in Libya. If the interest was always there, and if this is merely our excuse to do what we’ve wanted to do for 30 years, I suppose that’s an example of why I’ll never make a living as a politician.

On a vaguely related note, if you read and agree with the NY Times, but you get all incensed about Fox News, you should check out Al Jazeera. If, on the other hand, you listen to Fox News and get all aggravated by the NY Times, go check out Al Jazeera. It would do us all good to realize that both “sides” of the American media agree on 95% of the narrative. Looking at the international news makes this abundantly clear.

I think that the US and the rest of the world are probably doing about as well as can be expected with Libya. There is no unconditionally correct answer here. No matter what we do, people will die violently and chaos will win the day for months and years to come. If we’ve learned nothing else from Iraq and Afghanistan, it must be that the “you break it, you buy it” rule is in full effect.

It fills me with sorrow to see troops – American or otherwise – thrust into harm’s way. Men and women, Americans and Libyans, are going to be injured and killed in the coming weeks. Perhaps more important, we’re busily creating yet another generation that will remember the American weapons that killed their fathers and uncles.

Qaddafi has been batshit crazy for a very long time – to the continuing gentle detriment of the Libyan people (his contributions to world fashion, notwithstanding). Now that he’s actively crushing his people under tank treads and promising to hunt them down in their closets – “something” must be done.

Of course, we should recall that nothing actually has to get done when “something” must be done. Rwanda has been home to child soldiers and campaigns of punitive rape for the last decade or so. Somalia is a boiling pot of starvation and violence. North Koreans are starving under a dictatorial fist, etc, etc, painfully etc. When Obama says “we cannot stand idly by,” he might more accurately say “we choose not to stand idly by, this time.” That picking and choosing brings questions of national interest to the fore. There are a lot of reasons that we’re willing to attack Libya, while we let Rwanda burn. Some of these reasons are good, while others are less so. This sort of decision requires a calculus that takes into account a variety of ‘imperatives,’ most of which are far from moral. Do the economics of an invasion work? How about the logistics? How will it play in the primaries?

As an aside: For a quick and dirty measurement of your moral well being – consider the gap between when you hear about a catastrophe or invasion, and when you start taking hard-nosed action to profit from the human suffering. A longer gap is better.

I was moved to a small snort of happiness when I heard on the radio that France and Britain were taking the lead on military operations over there. It was pleasant to think of the civilized world stepping forward, with the US as one of many strong hands of support. We’ve been overextended in our military operations for a long time now. Kids younger than 11 have never known an America that was not actively “at war.” I include the scare quotes because, of course, America “going to war,” is quite different now from even the Korean war – to say nothing of the national focus and commitment that won the World Wars. Of course, this morning I hear that it’s American cruise missiles being launched. We’re in the third front of our war in the middle east.

In my dream world, congress will do something remarkable on Monday.

When the US is involved in removing a dictator or knocking over a government, we need to acknowledge that we’ve chosen to shoulder responsibility for a generation – call it 50 years.

To that end, even as military force evolves, congress should immediately start the long term thinking: America should commit to providing security and reconstruction, and support for a new Libyan government. When we remove a government, we will need to occupy the country and impose peace and order for exactly as long as it takes for a new government to stand up. We should expect to be providing full-on occupation “services” for three to five years.

Along the way, we need to do everything in our power to support the long term success of the country we invaded. We need to start with infrastructure. We should build roads, power plants, hospitals, food production, and schools. In 25 years, we want a powerful ally in that region of the world – not a bitter and sore former victim. We should commit to at least a decade of rebuilding, and to 50 years of active support. I want the generation whose fathers and uncles are being killed now to know, unambiguously, that we are there for the long-term good.

Also important is that we not do this on the backs of the people we’re attacking. Congress should commit the nation to not take any resources from Libya as we do these things. There is no way to avoid claims of reckless American imperialism – we’re just in it for the oil – that drum is already being beaten. A clear statement from the top – before we even go in – could help shape policy decisions. We should never go to war for profit – and congress should make that massively clear before the first American boots hit the ground.

All of this will be expensive and difficult. We’re already in a tight spot with the national budget – and this will make it harder. Yes, some of those dollars will come out of social security payouts. Yes, infrastructure built in a foreign country means that we will delay still further necessary repairs to our crumbling bridges and roads. We will, and should, see higher taxes and American sacrifice on the home front as we first attack and then rebuild Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.

That’s the core of the moral calculus that should go into an invasion. We’ve decided to go and kill people with cruise missiles. I think it’s the right decision – to stop a murderous and insane tyrant. Doing the right thing has a cost – and that cost is that we take responsibility for the long term. We’re breaking it, we’re buying it.

Let’s get it right this time.

I was an early adopter for 23 and me, got my first set of genome data back in April of 2008. Now, I’m nowhere near the real leaders in the field, but I was there when it started to get cool. Got the T-shirt, but not the tattoo.

So I just received the data from my v3 spit kit data. They made me pay this time around, but that’s cool. Soon enough, this stuff will be a $25 question at the local pharmacy. For the moment, I’m happy to break open the wallet to move science along.

Initial analysis at the level of “is it there?” against the v2 kit:

Set 1 but not set 2: 569. Set 1 in both: 595966 total: 596535
Set 2 but not set 1: 407807. Set 2 in both: 595966 total: 1003773

So, that looks to be a great deal more data with only a small loss. There were only 50 SNPs where the two kits made different calls – so that’s good.

What does it mean? Who KNOWS? But it’s more DATA!

Seriously. 400,000 additional data points without reference or explanation. What’s not to like?

I got to spend some time last week in the urban catastrophe that is Detroit. While I was there, I felt the usual sadness – seeing the skinny bones of a once rich and proud city. I find that words are inadequate to convey the feeling of fallen empire that I get when I drive south on Woodward Ave – down from Seven Mile to the core.

I can understand, at an intellectual level, the economics of abandoning a skyscraper or a factory. The owners leave it to rot in the same way that an underwater mortgage holder might walk away from a single family home. In some ways it’s simpler. There is no funeral or emotional attachment when a corporation goes under. Creditors descend, and a sort of sky burial ensues. Everything of value is divvied up. In this city, the buildings were not deemed valuable enough to keep or repair. It was literally easier to build new someplace else than to use those grand old structures. The vultures didn’t want these parts – and so they stand and rot.

When a family or an individual has to give up on a property, I can usually trace the karma – the causes and conditions. When it’s a city, a civilization, walking away from mile upon mile of its infrastructure – something else happens in my mind. It feels different.

It takes a powerful civilization to erect up a building even 10 stories tall. The optimism embodied by that sort of construction is palpable. Teams of hundreds of people, over months and years, give blood sweat and tears to build each and every one of those buildings. The capital accumulated over hundreds of person-years of efficient and careful work is poured back into stone and mortar. This is not the product of some village, scraping from harvest to harvest. These stones were laid by a culture that could afford art. These are beautiful buildings. The masonry and stonework in particular is striking.

Done properly, we build a series of steps for our civilization to climb.

What has taken up residence at the bases and fringes are villages. Ferndale, Royal Oak, Highland Park, and others. Out by 9 mile, they get semi-affluent. In the core, things are rougher. The defining characteristic is one of those tropes that I love in dystopian fantasy – people living among the remnants of a civilization that they could not rebuild. The communities are strong, and the people good – but the situation as a whole evokes a darkness and failure that cuts to my core. It turns out that what I love for its goosebump-inducing in Bladerunner is heartbreaking in person.

At some level, we failed. The efforts of those thousands of people are being thrown away – along with the efforts of the hundreds of thousands who grew their food and thought it was important to do better than the generation before.

We’re letting our staircase rot.

This weekend, I attended PAX East (AKA “bitch PAX”, in contrast to PAX Prime, which occurs in Seattle and is marginally older). PAX is short for the Penny Arcade Expo. It was created by the authors of Penny Arcade, a consistently funny and incisive comic strip about (mostly) video games. PAX is kinda sort of an industry event. There’s an exhibit floor, and even some booth babes and schwag, but that’s truly not the point. There are also talks – but they’re also not the point. There are people in homemade costumes, and impromptu fun all over the city – and that’s totally the point.

It’s the oddest sort of conference I’ve ever attended.

PAX is, as mentioned by multiplexer, some odd sort of anti-conference. When I go to Supercomputing or similar shows, I try to “win” the conference. I pre-schedule which talks to attend, I pre-stage and plan with colleagues and shudder business contacts. I skulk my way into parties. I stealth and scheme into supposedly closed meetings. I pretend that I know what I’m doing, and I play my pied piper song. I bust ass to get every ounce of energy out of that conference. I did that with PAX last year, and I had a terrible time. Because, well, there’s no “there” there. The talks at PAX are highly, highly specific. There’s really no such thing as a ‘general interest’ talk at PAX. Most of the talks are more like old-home weeks for a room or two of friends. They’ve been doing this thing for decades, and this is just the latest of many homes for their running party. Even given that, most of the talks are pretty interesting, if you relax your mind a bit and accept that you don’t know anything. There’s a depth of community there that even I found hard to punch into.

The scene is the thing. PAX, properly approached, is a great, ultimate house filled with a positive vibe. In the house are tens of thousands of interesting and creative people. Most of them are not the sort that I hang out with day-to-day. Most of them do not do the things that I do, exactly, for fun. All of them are simply given enough space to do their thing. There was table upon table – an aircraft hanger’s space – given over to tabletop games. In that room there were dice players, card players, painted figurine players, and players who wouldn’t be caught dead with any of those loser dicers, dealers, or model clowns. There were two huge rooms dedicated to XBox, Wii, and PS3. There were mid sized rooms dedicated to classic consoles and even classic stand up arcade games. I played Asteroids, Zaxxon, and even Moon Patrol. I played a crazy-ass desktop vector graphics ancestor of Asteroids.

I played a lot of first person shooters (FPS) on the XBox. If I have a gamer niche, it’s the FPS. Bulletstorm is rad once it gets going. Halo 3 and Halo Reach are lame and – for lack of a better word – overdone. Bulletstorm is violent and ass-clenching in a way that I haven’t seen since Gears of War came out. I felt a vague tinge of guilt when there were 12 year olds watching me try to throw an alien to its death on a cactus for some kind of “skillshot.” Oh well. Their parents should have known.

I played the Kinect version of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). That may find its way into my living room at some point – at the same time as some really solid curtains. There were Rock Band and DDR stages. People sat peacefully, watching people they didn’t know play air guitar and dance onstage. Some people were freakishly good – not the sort of ‘good dancing’ that you can develop at home alone. These were real dancers. Some were pretty lame. Everyone got applause – some with the vigorous “awwright, let someone who knows the system up there!” that got them off the stage with smiles – but OFF.

I played a “learn to play” session of Dungeons and Dragons (fourth edition). I’ve never in my life played any sort of role playing game before – and I didn’t really go into it expecting to have much fun. I went with it – and in pretty short order I was helping to create a story with a bunch of people I barely knew. By the end of two hours, we had created a funny little social dynamic that had nothing to do with me as some kind of consultant geek and nothing to do with – well – whatever the rest of them do for a living. Two hours flew by, and I was sort of sad that it ended. My rogue was badass, but also sort of a moron. I liked him.

I’m the very least of the gamers – just like I’m the least of the martial artists and the least of the technogeeks – but I feel fortunate to be accepted in their tribe.

I had the opportunity (ha!) to spend a few days at my grandfather’s house in Detroit this week. He’s been dead for years, and the care of the property has fallen to me. The house is a two family brick structure with independent street numbers. Three bedrooms, a dining room, a living room and a kitchen on each level. Current assessed value, according to the city, is $24,000. Salable market value is less. Comparables in the area have been going the last couple of years for $10k. It’s near 7 mile and Woodward. Check it out on google maps. If, in the satellite imagery, you see a car parked on the street, odds are good that it’s worth more than most of the houses.

This is the next block over, last summer:

This is one of the worst neighborhoods, in one of the most blighted cities in the country. Unlike Flint, Detroit clings to life. A dense urban art and cultural scene has sprung up. In its defense, I did see a couple of police cars while I was there. That’s new. Also, the mayor is not currently indicted. That’s good too. Just a couple miles up the road, Royal Oak is flourishing.

I talked with a shopkeeper who sold me some truly awesome t-shirts. He commented that Detroit needs to turn from an “industry,” back into a “community.” I sorta like the image.

I have a tenant. She’s a member of a community of Catholic nuns – living a life of service in the city. I treasure the opportunity to interact with them, and to occasionally do something worthwhile for them. I treasure it so much that I can usually shut my eyes and not worry too much about the rent. This time, I was able to get a little basic home repair done. I fixed an electrical circuit – bringing the basement lights back online. As I was doing the work, I had strong flashes that the most immediate translation of “Lucifer” is “Light Bringer.” There I was, in some sort of urban hell, playing Prometheus to the clergy. You can’t make this stuff up.

In the evenings, I slept in the bed that was my mother’s when she was a little girl. In the summertime, with the windows open, I’ve heard gunfire through those windows. Out back is the tree under which my parents got married. This time of year, I shivered and turned up the space heater. The furnace for the upstairs unit is off for the duration – and I have no interest in the adventure of getting it fired up.

While I was doing my repairs, I realized that I needed a common electrical component. I had already been to the hardware store (a good 20 minute trip each way), so I went back into my grandfather’s little workshop, dug around in the drawer labeled “electrical, small.” I found what I needed and I got the lights on before I had to catch my plane. Thanks grandpa. He, at least, left a well organized mess for me to deal with. I guess it’s better than the alternative.

Life is an adventure, to be lived to the fullest. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Anyone who is paying any attention at all realizes that there are a few different systems of justice in the United States. In case you’re not paying attention, or you don’t have the time and inclination: Let me break it down. There are four major classes in America.

At the bottom, we have what I like to call “the slave class.” This includes people in the country without full documentation and citizenship, as well as anyone working in technically illegal professions. These folks live in fear of having to go to the police, because “justice” will immediately circle back to their inferior status. “Yes I know that you were beaten within an inch of your life, but hey, we’re gonna deport you first. Who beat you? Who beat who?“

Ever wonder why the working conditions are allowed to be so bad in hotbeds of work for undocumented immigrants? Ever wonder why they don’t just go to the authorities? Yeah. That.

In this bottom regime, the left and right are pretty opinionated. Conservatives seem to err on the side of “they’re sinners, they go to hell, who cares about their human rights?” Liberals err on the other side, “love your neighbor, even the undocumented one who cleans your house.” Something like that.

One step up from there, for people with fairly ordinary amounts of money, we have the regular “letter of the law” criminal justice system. The usual punishment is jail time – sometimes ridiculous amounts of it. Sometimes you can pay a fine, but there’s always a very real risk of the tooth removing, sphincter loosening variety of incarceration.

This is where I live. If I were to commit crimes. I would go (thanks “Office Space”) to Pound me in the ass federal prison.

Whether it’s stealing from a local store, doing illegal drugs, paying for sex (did you hear the Charlie Sheen version, where he doesn’t pay for the sex? Instead, he pays the girls to leave. he’s a lovely human being, more on that some other time) embezzling, failing to pay your taxes, or whatever. This is the world of relatively balanced complaints from the right and the left. The right complains that the system does not perfectly convert crime into jail time, that sometimes mercy is shown. The left complains that the system is stupid in that it punishes someone more harshly for peacefully sitting at home and “banging 7 gram rocks,” (I just can’t get over Charlie Sheen. He’s a slow motion trainwreck) as it does for crippling a pedestrian with a motor vehicle. There’s no difference between victim-free crimes and actual victim riddled crimes. However, in favor of the criminal justice system – we can look at the laws and argue about whether they are right or wrong. We can change them through legislative action.

Up another level, we have the justice system for people with lots of money. Except that this isn’t a justice system, it’s a treatment and rehabilitation system. Take Mr. Sheen, yet again. He brags about using illegal drugs, paying for sex, and so on. He seems likely to be a serial domestic abuser. He’s going on TV to gripe about getting laid off, and I expect to see the novelization soon. Seriously. I would buy that crap. “Terrestrial sphere?” Who talks like that? See also Paris Hilton and OJ Simpson. At a certain level you usually go into the treatment path rather than the punishment path – except for particularly egregious crimes.

The left and the right are generally united that this is a bad thing of small magnitude. Nobody cares, really, about Charlie Sheen. We’re entertained by him – and we’re not willing to rock the boat to be sure that he does time with Bubba the pot peddler.

Finally, at the top, we have the folks who make the rules. The Wall Street bankers. The big oil CEOs. Kings of industry. Their crimes are so large and so broadly distributed that – and this is sphincter clenchingly obvious: they are not even perceived as crimes.

No Wall Street executive (or vice) has gone to prison for costing the majority of the country years of their retirement. No one will ever stand to account for invading Iraq instead of Afghanistan. No one will be negotiating with Bubba over fouling the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, for driving various species into extinction, or for quietly nodding and ignoring the continent sized Pacific gyre of plastic trash.

The entire preceding three classes, the left and the right, and every major issue of the day – all of these are merely a smokescreen to prevent us from looking too hard at this top class.

Wake the hell up, people.