Tripping over facts while drinking your own Kool-Aid...

I've watched a lot of great ideas go south as a result of reality. The eight years between January 2001 and January 2009 are an example; Cold Fusion is another. Tom DeLay's lame imitation of Fred Astair; the Yugo; the Michael Richards' TV show. I think you're getting the picture.

Add the Barrack Obama administration.  A lot of the facts come from the Bush Administration, but still -- very disappointing. And, ironic -- I've been preaching in various forums available to me that the jobs data was totally whack, for example. People out of work getting MBAs -- does anyone sense the irony besides me? Sending people back to school who were loggers before to get degrees and certificates in Computer Graphics? Really...the idea that the future of America is virtual is vapor. Pure vapor -- hell, virtual vapor. I was preaching that in 1998! Today, The Times announces that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently gotten in wrong. Hooorah! Defeatists 1, Government Bureaucracy -10000. It's a Pyrrhic victory, of course.

When the United States economy fell into recession at the beginning of 2008, many economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, refused to believe it was happening. They pointed to the employment numbers, which showed only mild job losses for the first half of that year...Recessions, they said, do not come with such mild job losses. ( AXE Comment: If the gas gauge says full, and the car won't move, accept that some goddamn thing is wrong. And, I'd don't know how to make this clearer -- if you've driven your Bugatti Veron flat out for the last hour and suddenly lose power and coast to a stop and the engine won't turn over, bet the gauge is fucked first. The measurement is usually wrong. )They were right. Unfortunately, it was the job numbers that were wrong. (AXE Commentary: Great, I was right. BFD. I'm not Obama, I have no leverage to fix this clusterfuck. Not that he does, but he can bitch about it from the bully pulpit. I have the Defeatists. ) On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered its latest revelation that the jobs picture was far worse than it had previously reported. Using newly available data, the bureau now estimates that during the 12 months ended last March, the economy lost 5.6 million jobs, 824,000 more than the 4.8 million previously reported...(AXE Snark: What's a 824,000 job error to an accountant or a statistician? A rounding error. What is it to a human being? Tragedy.) It now appears that during the first half of 2008, when the recession was getting under way, job losses averaged 146,000 per month. That is nearly three times the average of 49,000 jobs shown in the initial estimates. How did the government get it so wrong?

They got it wrong because they are fucking Hobbits who obtained their positions during the last 30 years, 20 of which were in the control of Reagan and Bush2 and their various advisers. Remember faith-based governance? Laffler Curve? Supply Side Economics? Ketchup is a vegetable? Karl Jaspers Karl Jaspers, the German Existentialist besides Heidigger, the one who wasn't a Nazi, provided an explanation as did Morris Massey, the OD guru about generations and learning. (Only one of these guys is dead, I think. In the 70s, Massey would show up at conferences and people would come up to him and say, "I thought you were dead." He ultimately theorized that they were confused because two important cultural  figures had in fact joined the Norwegian Blue in permanently pining for the Fjords...Maurice the Cat, star of 9 Lives Cat Food Commercials and the actor Raymond Massey.) It's actually a pretty straight forward proposition -- everything you do is influenced by everything you've ever done. If for 30 years you've been calling red ambergris, guess what -- to you, red is ambergris.

Going back to my gauge analogy, the measurement can be accurate, reliable and repeatable, but if it isn't measuring the right thing, well, the measurements aren't just meaningless, they are absolutely dangerous. Real people will make decisions on this stuff, and GIGOGIGOGIGO!

Now usually some twinge of optimism sneaks in at this point, but I'm out of it. I don't believe that we can do the fundamental things necessary to fix this mess. I'm enough of a Marxist to believe that systems collapse based on their own internal contradictions. What we observe in so many ways is the triumph of what Teddy Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth." The system can't be changed until we can elect Philosopher-Kings whose only reason for running for office is to do good and do right. Power, ego, and all the perks have no place in governance. Unfortunately, Christ, Socrates and Jefferson aren't available.

Now, I do have some ideas -- confiscatory income taxes, government financing of all campaigns down through junior high student council, execution or exile for corrupt politicians or bureaucrats, mandatory IQ and basic skills tests for government employees and elected officials, and a series of constitutional amendments to "fix" some systemic problems. Little things like mandating marginal tax rates necessary to pay the government's way within 20 years of the expenditure; taxing corporations that lay-off workers; requiring severance, blah blah blah. Not going to happen anymore than the ascendancy of the philosopher kings...time for a defeatist old favorite -- a little Yeats, I think, is appropriate for the moment.

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?