Bernie Madoff’s Accomplices

Most people call them his victims or his investors, but they’re his accomplices. Most people talk about how their trust got them fleeced, but it was their greed that drove their trust.

The ABC news show 20/20 just did another piece villainizing Bernie and implicitly sanctifying the people who lost money with him. He smoked pot! He didn’t seem remorseful! He got happy ending massages!

They went after his wife pretty good too. I consider his wife just another investor, no better and no worse than any of the others. The only difference between the rest of them and her, and the only reason she’s still in Bernie’s corner, is that she still has hope of a payday from him.

ABC insinuated she was a more conscious accomplice than the rest of the investors, trying to smear her, but there’s no evidence that she was actively working the scam with him. If you don’t sympathize with her, I can’t understand why you sympathize with the rest of them.

Michael Jackson, R.I.P., P.Y.T.

In the middle of a meeting today, while I was talking, someone  turned a laptop screen toward me, with the headline MICHAEL JACKSON DEAD, and it cracked me up in the middle of a sentence. Then the meeting was derailed for 10 minutes.

Totally inappropriate that my first reaction was laughter. Forget inappropriate, inexplicable. Unlike most people, I got nothing against MJ.

I am one of the few people who, if I had to bet, would bet that MJ didn’t molest those little kids. I’ve taken more than a little crap at parties defending this reasonable opinion.

I even own Invincible and I think that the album just before that with Scream on it is really really good. I was never a huge fan–would never have paid for a concert ticket, and I thought Thriller was way overrated–but I liked his stuff even after everyone was going Ick!

My wife texted me about this. She texts me about twice a year, usually WTF ARE YOU? EVERYONE’S WAITING.

I got home tonight and every cable news channel has pre-empted normal programming to cover this like a presidential assassination. Every channel is channeling every other channel–forget about those molestation accusations, a Great Man has passed. Even the jackals are subdued and have ceased howling for one night.

I can’t work because the internet is totally hosed. I lose my VPN every 30 seconds. I’m typing this into Notepad because I can’t reach my blog. MSN and Yahoo refresh only occasionally. This means a 5 am morning for me.

Really, this is this big? Like Elvis? I’m watching everyone who dismissed him a decade ago suddenly having a near-Kennedy got shot moment.

I’ve always thought of MJ as tragic. He would probably have had a much better life had he been only as talented as his siblings.

MJ reminds me of the little boy in Jerome Bixby’s story “It’s a Good Life.” That great horror story was cartoonishly made into a hopeful parable in The Twilight Zone movie. In the movie version,  Kathleen Quinlan, playing a hot visiting schoolteacher, rescues a little monster who was born with the ability to erase his mouthy sister’s mouth if she mouthed off or to wish people who really annoyed him into the cornfield. At the end of the movie, the little monster and the hot teacher drive off to a sunny future where she will teach him to tame his id. The original story didn’t end so sunnily.

MJ never got saved by his hot teacher.

He had talent too big for his frame, predators around him all his life, nutjob Jehovah’s Witness parents, and the worst case of body dysmorphic disorder in all history. Oh and a bazillion trazillion holy-kamillian bucks.

This is another one of those times when I am grateful for the number of people who can check my BS and refuse to grant my wishes unless I first climb down out of the bell tower.

It just hit me: all these Hollywood news media ghouls really do feel guilty and that’s why they’re making such a big deal of this. They hounded this guy and now he’s dead and they smell their own stink on his corpse.

What a Silly Bunt

Barbara Boxer, of course.

Her famous dressing down of a brigadier general who had the temerity to address her respectfully is one of those moments that clarifies many things.

The general had been dealing with Her Snottiness in typical military fashion–pretending that even the rudest bunt should be treated like a lady.

Boxer took loud, stupid, extended offense to being called “Ma’am.” Boxer had been superciliously obnoxious to the general for a while before the clip we’ve all seen. He was unruffled, before and after being called on the carpet by this crazy lazy political wench. That she should spend this much time in government and have so little contact with the military that she thought “ma’am” from a general officer indicates disrespect…. I can’t finish this sentence.

Fuck you, Senator Barbara B. Boxer Antoinette.

Father’s Day

I guess I have to say something about Father’s Day after trashing Mother’s Day. So here goes.

Father’s Day is the sloppy seconds of holidays.

If American men weren’t such pussies, we’d treat Father’s Day like the insult it is. Instead, we put up with it like we really are that married guy on every commercial whose wife and kids are always smarter, better, snottier and still benevolently if sarcastically indulgent of our knuckle-dragging ways.

Charity and Chastity – who needs either?

I keep getting suckered by the poor and the victimized.

When the tsunami (you know the one) happened, I sent money. I’ve bought $500 worth of soccer balls for Iraqi kids who probably put C4 in them and rolled them at a stray dog as practice. After 9/11….well, I’m too ashamed to talk about it.

I’m not against helping the victimized. I’m against me doing it. There are plenty of other people who will do it. Way more than plenty. If you have half a brain, you should think about causes that matter that people don’t flock to. After 9/11, the blood banks and banks were overflowing. You don’t need to pile on. It’s so tempting because the circumstances are so heart-wrenching. That’s exactly the time to resist. Others will more than take up your slack.

Never again will I give money to a victim or the poor. If something really bad happens, I’ll exorcise my empathy by giving more to causes that are chronically starved, counting on the masses to handle this like they handle voting for American Idol.

Go thou and do likewise.

Big Lies and the Lying Liars Who Sell Them

I saw Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, stumping for the stimulus on one of the talking head Sunday shows. He’s got the elevator pitch down:

• Government must do something to “jump start” the economy.
• Disaster is certain if government does nothing.
• Every reasonable person, right or left, and every economist, agrees with the above, it’s just about the details.
• It doesn’t matter if all of this will mostly help people who don’t deserve it. If we don’t save them, they’ll take the rest of us down with them.

This isn’t just throwing good money after bad. This is:

• protecting those who deserve to lose everything
• preventing us from finding out who all those people are
• not doing a damn thing to help those who in good faith have been seriously screwed already (like ordinary people and their mutual funds that own bank stocks)
• setting up huge new entitlement obligations that won’t ever go away
• setting up huge new teat-sucking corrupt constituencies that won’t ever go away
• teaching the greedy and stupid at all IQ and income levels that they can get away with it

We would be MUCH better off if Rendell, Emmanuel, Little Timmy, and all the other parliamentary whores were dispatched to Circuit City to hand out $10,000 in freshly printed US currency to every third person at random. It’s not just about the amount they’re planning to spend, it’s about who they’ll bless and who they’ll blame.

People (most of them economic ignoramuses) love to blather about “market failures.” Well, if there’s one thing that the market is great at dealing with, it’s failure. Market justice is swift and ruthless. The bailouts are all about preventing justice for those who are “too big to fail.” There’s never been an American administration so blatantly in bed with the fatcats as this one. The market didn’t fail here. The asshats in Washington have prevented the market from meting out its usual justice to their friends.

And most liberals have proven they’re nothing but political fanboys. They’ve swooned over Obama like teen girls over Miley. This is the most save-the-establishment screw-the-people administration ever. My liberal friends, who used to argue with me and hound me at every turn, now say, let’s not ruin the party. None of them want to talk about it.

Objectivism

In case you couldn’t already tell from my generally pissy attitude and contempt for almost everything and everybody, I have been influenced by Objectivism.

(Obejctivism is the name novelist Ayn Rand gave to her system of philosophical teachings. She summed up her philosophy as a commitment to objective reality, reason as the only way to understand and deal with that reality, serving your own self-interest as a perfectly legitimate moral goal, and free market capitalism as the best political system.)

Rand was a notoriously difficult person. By the time she died, there were dozens of former disciples and friends, many of them well-known intellectuals, who had been booted out of her life for various offenses, mostly heresy.

Ayn Rand is one of my life-heroes. That crazy bitch spoke truth to power like nobody’s business. There is no one better than Rand at teaching you to trust your own BS detector.

I’ve introduced several friends to Rand. Reading her typically has an immediate, bracing impact on their personalities. I’d say Rand is the intellectual equivalent of anabolic steroids. Can be dangerous, but effective, and not as dangerous as everyone tries to tell you they are.

Few people who’ve read her are indifferent to Rand’s work. It’s pretty much a love her or hate her thing.  The people who hate Rand do so for good reason–they suck. They are puffed-up poseurs terrified of pinpricks to their bubble ideologies. I think Rand-hating is a pretty good litmus test.

Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus (it’s well over a thousand pages), is one of the top 2 or 3 bestsellers of all time. It was published in the 1950’s and still sells enough copies every year that it would remain on bestseller lists except it’s too old. Amazon has it at #252–the Amazon list doesn’t discriminate against the elderly. More interesting, there are 1800 reviews of the book. I haven’t read the reviews, but I’ll bet they’re incendiary, on both sides.

I’ve seen it reported several times recently that Atlas Shrugged is jumping off the shelves this year as conservatives and libertarians urge their friends to read it in light of the Obama administration’s asinine policies.

Anyhow, if you’re a young person, get the book, especially if you’re in college. Your teachers will HATE seeing you carry it around. If you’re older, you better read it if a young person in your life is, or watch out when they do!

If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it is that Atlas Shrugged is one of the most subversive books ever written.

Liberty Mutual vs State Farm

Watching the NBA finals tonight I saw an ad from State Farm Insurance. The backing track is Michael Jackson’s “I’ll Be There.” It’s a montage: candlelight vigils, heroic hurricane victims, Koman walkers with waterbottles and pink T-shirts, somebody rolling Billy Barty across the 20 yard line, some woman with a half-burned photo album, a mom soldier getting off the bus hugging her kid, a guy helping his kid dunk a basketball, except it seems the guy must be 9 feet tall, the way they filmed it. Excellent ad. I mean, I really liked it until I thought back to the Liberty Mutual ads that run several months ago. 

You know–those “pay it forward” ads where someone did something nice for someone and someone else saw it. Then they did something nice, but different and appropriate to the situation. Then someone else saw that, and did something else that was creative and decent and small.

I really  hate the State Farm ad. It’s a montage of unrelated heart-wringing moments. A couple of them are insurance-related. Most of them are random feel-good and politically correct or at least inoffensive. What they’re about is associating the insurance company with heartfelt moments.

The Liberty Mutual ads were about associating the insurance company with doing the right thing. They had a consistency and decency and creativity that made me go Wow! The State Farm ad makes me go Awwww…

Hard-working Americants

There’s an implicit American assumption that, except for the fat-cats, all Americans who have full-time jobs are equally hard-working and deserving of…stuff.

Fat-cat has now been operationally defined by President Obama as anyone with a household income higher than $250K. I disagree. I think people who make between $250K and half a million should be called pudgy cats, and only those over the half mil mark should be considered fat cats.

In my household, we’re not pudgy cats yet, but we’ve been trying hard to get there. We got not-a-penny from Bush’s rebates, so that gives you a clue as to our minimum household income. Maybe we’re just husky cats. But…had the Bush largesse been based on average hourly wage, I bet we’d have gotten some of that govenment cheese.

I don’t get paid hourly, but I get paid pretty damn good, if you pro-rate what I make against 40 hours a week. I can’t remember the last time I worked only a 40 hour week. Oh, wait…I can. It was my last vacation. Not every vacation is like that, but about half of them are.

It’s worse if I schedule the vacation far in advance. Sure as hell, there will be stuff that must be done that wasn’t in the schedule 6 months ago. This means when I go on travel vacations, I appear to be a hugely important workaholic. This is nice for improving my image with my in-laws as working hard to support their daughter, but it makes for some pretty exhausting vacations if I try to keep up in the fun department.

Together, my wife and I work more than 80 hours a week–in a short week.  She works part-time, nominally, and I work full-time. On average, it’s more like 110 hours, and that’s not padding it out by counting commuting and the other BS that people like to report when bitching about their long work weeks. And I’m a conscientious objector and slacker–I work less than most of my peers, and resent it more.

My wife’s in medicine, works three 12 hour days most weeks and then is on call (usually called) on the weekends–another 10 hours on average that she actually gets called. I’m a computer geek, and I catch crap for slacking at 60 hours. I don’t think I’ve worked less than 70 hours a week in the last 3 months, though that’s not the usual. But it’s recurrent, a few months every year. Yesterday was 13 hours, from morning to evening elevator ding, never leaving the building and eating lunch at my desk. I made up for it with a 9 hour day today, ding to ding.

We are index fund, 401K maxing kind of people.  So we’ve already been punished for our part in the banking debacle–by losing near half the value of our carefully accumulated savings. We don’t have any debts to be written down, except our mortgage, which won’t be, and we won’t qualify any more for Obama’s mortgage assistance than we did for Bush’s rebate.

The median household income in this country is about $50K a year. My wife and I are way above that. But I’ll bet on a per-hour basis, we don’t make all that much more than those households holding down the median. If you take into account all the years of education, 7-day work weeks (of which I’ve had a couple of dozen this year), 13 hour days (only one this week so far for me, she has them 3x a week regularly),  my wife and I, for all our investments in education, diligence and excellence have probably gotten a 25% to 35% hourly wage premium over the workers who adhere to the median.

We are fortunate–we’re both still employed just like we were last year. If we both lost our jobs tomorrow, we’d be fine for a few years even if we didn’t bring in another penny of income. We’ve saved 20% or more of our inccome annually for the last decade.  We will, of course, have a good percentage more of our dwindling nest egg taken by various sneaky means to help people who are “less well off” than we are. Mostly, these are people who, for the last several years, have driven more recent model and more expensive cars, have much more expensive TVs, newer appliances, many more and more expensive vacations, 50% more square footage in their decades-newer houses, and who have managed to do it all on half or less of what we make, just by using their credit cards and their parents and their willingness to keep paying high rates of interest to implement their own stimulus packages.

When you’re talking about the difference in America between people who make low- to- mid 6-figures and people who make mid 5-figures, the difference in most cases really is just extra focus and consistent hard work over a period of many years.

All my life, I’ve paid taxes to help the truly poor. I haven’t particularly liked doing it (see my previous posts about the poor), but it’s been an acceptable burden. Now, I’m being asked to bail out the somewhat-lazy and shallow middle class–those who are capable of working full time, who have enough self-discipline and self-respect to hold down decent jobs, but who have then decided to stop there.

They have the time to enjoy expensive toys, aren’t shy about buying them on credit and have speculated repeatedly in the bubble equity in their houses. Here’s the thing: for the last several years, there’s been no lifestyle difference between me and the missus and these guys, except our house is smaller, our cars are older, I don’t have a boat, and we haven’t ever gone in for an all-inclusive vacation or cruise. My toys are all paid for cash and slightly more shopworn than those of my neighbors, and we have less time to play with them.

We can’t afford to book vacations at the last minute–we fly Southwest and book way in advance. Every vacation where we have flown for the last several years has been to see family. We borrow cars and round robin with friends & family when on vacation. We try to treat friends and family for putting up with us, using all that not-Avis not-Marriott money when we’re on vacation. I end up working too much on vacation because we can’t afford to pay $900 a ticket instead of $200.

I’m sure there may be someone who reads this who thinks, what a cheap bastard. You’re right, I could afford $900 a ticket. It wouldn’t break the bank, endanger my next month mortgage payment or make a dent in my current lifestyle.

Here’s what I have to say to that someone, a la Jeff Foxworthy…

You might be an irresponsible adolescent if you have more than $1000 in credit card debt.

You might be an irresponsible adolescent if you have less than 20% equity in your home, even with the recent downturn.

You  might be an irresponsible adolescent if you qualify for any government assistance that you didn’t qualify for 5 years ago.

You are an irresponsible adolescent if you’re hoping right now that some Obamanista change in government policy is going to save you.

Barack Obama’s Night Out

Barack took Michelle out for a night on the town. They went to a Broadway show, got a nice hotel in New York. Obama reimbursed the government for their trip, less transportation and security, which probably cost taxpayers a couple of hundred grand.

Every time Barack goes anywhere, the right wing cha-chings.  Barack is all about green and so he should be traveling around in a bullet-proof Prius and wiping his ass with tree bark.

Maybe this is a good strategy. The right could make the Obamas hunker down in the White House for the next 4 years. If the Obama’s want a change of scenery put a tent out on the East Lawn. And bring Michelle a spade so she can head out into the shrubbery. That would make Rush Limbaugh happy. Ok, it would give me a chuckle too.

What did it cost each time Bush wanted to go to Texas and clear brush? Who cares?

Barack and Michelle deserve a night out, more than now and then. And we should pick up the tab to protect them while they try to have a normal marriage.

Today, I parked next to a car that had this bumper sticker: I’ll respect your president like you respected ours. I actually hung around for 10 minutes, all I had, hoping the owner would come back. I get the sentiment and the resentment. But proving you can be as big a butthead as everyone you think is a butthead is still being a butthead.

I thought, I could reason with this person. I share their anger at the horrible, fascistic, jingoistic, toddler-rules way the left behaved for 8 of the most perilous years America has had. The left was ridiculously, childishly irresponsible in their hatred of George Bush.

And all you people who think we red-state types overreacted to the Dixie Chicks diss of GWB on foreign soil? We under-reacted. If you don’t get that, you’re another teenager-at-heart, courageous because coddled. I don’t mean you’re evil or even stupid, just that you’re not an adult.

Getting back to the right-wing adolescent with the stupid bumper sticker–

How about this instead:  I’ll respect your president though you never respected ours.