Atheist Meditations

I'd like to begin this rant - I mean blog - with a personal story. I was preparing a blog this morning based on the USA Today headline 'Jobless Rate Falls Unexpectantly.' I've long held the prejudice that economics and psychology are two industries of tremendous bullshit, and planned to skewer the 'dismal science ' with my caustic wit. The fact that nine thousand fewer American's lost jobs last month than some wankers in Washington predicted, I thought, is a sure example of economic techno-babble trying to put a happy spin on the shitty news that 300 and some odd thousand people did lose their jobs. Plus, the article I was reading stated that "Businesses are taking a cautious approach given the widespread attention given to the problems on Wall Street and in the housing industry, but they are not acting as if they expect a recession. . ." Yeah right, I wrote, like any business makes decisions based on such abstract notions. Most are concerned with immediate factors in their immediate business environment.

Then this lousy feeling started to grow in my belly. I re-read the article and found that sentence continued with an "or, are seeing a significant decline in revenues that requires cutting back on the number of workers" That pretty much shoots the shit out of my second attack. Time to go back over the jobless numbers. 9000 divided by 311,000 is 0.0289 or almost three percent. Fuck, three percent is rather significant. Maybe, as I read more related articles, our economy is a complicated beast with about 300,000 people losing employment every month and almost the same amount finding new work. Time to press delete on that post.

Thus I drove to work doubting myself and angry that I was a half hour late with nothing to show for it.

Some of my readers may be familiar with the wonderful Amber series by Roger Zelazny. I really enjoyed those books as a kid and was fascinated by the 'logrus' (I've got a tribal tattoo on my back of it.) The logrus was a black tentacle sort of thing that members of the Court of Chaos could use to reach out into the millions of parallel worlds to find the one thing that they were looking for. I loved that and and one of my 'pleasant fantasies' is that my own consciousness worked that way. The total mind could understand more than the conscious mind could comprehend at one time, and often I would find myself absorbed with something that would have serendipitous value later.

I was a terrible student, rarely ever doing reading assignments or homework. I do not know how many times I would find myself drawn into a page of my textbook in the boredom of a teacher's lecture only to be called upon during Q&A on that exact topic. The one time I grabbed a condom for my wallet before a first date was the . . .

Anyhoo, I'm sure you'all get the meme.

I get to work and sitting in the office is this yesterdays Wall Street Journal with a teaser in the upper corner about Dick Cheney's response to Allen Greenspan's new book where he criticizes Bush for over-spending ( the accusation of over-spending to a republican is like accusing a democrat of beating a harp seal's skull in - them's fight'n words ) Mr. Cheney quickly shot off an editorial to the WSJ titled 'The Real Bush Record."

I read it, I had to, and almost as soon as I got past the bland statements of respect and friendship for Mr. Greenspan that I'm sure come straight from our Vice President's unnaturally preserved heart, he gets to invoking 9/11.

Aimed at our country's financial sector, the attacks were followed by the closing of stores and shopping malls, and the cancellation of thousands of flights. In the three and a half months between 9/11 and Christmas nearly a million Americans lost their jobs

The logrus strikes.

311,000 people filed new claims for unemployment last month. During the last recession that number was as high as 450,000 in a month. 'Nearly a million Americans' losing their jobs in three and a half months is not a fucking shocker. If anything, it shows how little the terrorist attack did actually unbalance the economy.

Mr. Cheney, almost certainly knows this. He also knows that 'a million Americans lost their jobs' makes a nice paragraph ending statement (or at least his staff writers know.) Yet he will use that foolish statement as the prime argument for the first of his two columns. Even when writing to a readership as erudite and conservatively tight as the Wall Street Journal, he doesn't mind talking down to us as if we were retarded.

He does more of that shit as he continues to argue Bush's fiscal responsibility. "[A]nd that's why he has steadily reduced the annual rate of growth in non-security discretionary spending." That's not a big deal, since obviously 'non-security' spending would be the areas of government where the money spend actually fucking accomplishes something. Probably in a manner that has some sort of oversight and record-keeping. Bush, Cheney, and their corporate board of directors are much more interested in the kind of spending that they've so mastered in Iraq: zero fucking oversight, no-bid contracts to loyal friends and pet corporations, billions that just 'get misplaced', and nothing to fucking show for it.

Maybe that's what Mr. Greenspan was driving at. Bush's spending has been reckless because as a nation we have abso-fucking-lutely nothing to show for it. Iraq and the entire Middle East are much worse than if we had just left them the hell alone.

Curiously, Mr. Cheney omits any acknowledgment of Mr. Greenspan's most controversial statement, that the Iraq Crusade was largely about oil and, unfortunately, the current political environment makes saying that difficult.

He ends with praise for Mr. Bush's 'superb' efforts to coax Congress into reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I'll end with thanking the god I don't believe in that these three institutions escaped the sort of 'reform' that Bush and his Coterie of Corruption would have inflicted.