I like Forbes - but why do they like me?

I am unembarrassed about monetizing my site. I'm not the sort of person that thinks that good hard work should go unrewarded in order for it to be seen to be good. The thing about advertising of this sort is that it doesn't pay off at all if you don't have something worth reading. Well, that's the theory anyhow.

Nonetheless, I'm writing this to confess that I'm as surprised as you probably are. I signed up on a lark, thinking it was about as likely as being accepted by Pajamas Media.

In this article I aim to speculate about the reasons. I assume that Forbes pays a lot of mind to alternate voices and employs people at least as smart as I am. While it's editorial bias is toward a conservative sort of complacency, I don't think they are entirely capable of blinding themselves to the obvious - that a major shift in the entire economic structure and indeed, the very basis of wealth is inevitable, probably sooner than any of us will be entirely comfortable with.

Forbes is definitely on my list of reliable sources; on the rare occasions that I want a solid, conservative business viewpoint. However, as an ethics blogger, they are primarily useful to me as an example of the power of positively not thinking about ethics.

It's kind of amusing, to see how very correct Jesus was about the rich man, the camel and the eye of the needle. I'm in no position to criticize, by the way, my life has included some embarrassingly pointed lessons regarding the peril of thinking within the box you think you have earned the right to think within.

Perhaps that's why my blog passed the vetting process. Advertising is a form of validation, especially as it's directly linked to the Forbes.com name. I can't imagine how else it could have, I rarely write about Business and Finance directly, unless it's something of a Jerimiad. But the more I write about ethics, the more I realize how very profitable - and I mean that quite literally - it is to practice ethics religiously. Ethics, really, is no more and no less than the art of making correct decisions.

Indeed, as I look back, I can think of several times that if I had been more skilled in explaining what I knew to be true - well, my boss would have been a very wealthy man, and I would have been quite comfortably supported by a tidy nest-egg and a paid-off earth ship.

You see, - and sometimes it seems silly and futile to insist on this point - I am a fiscal conservative. I'm also something of a social conservative, though I have little or nothing in common with Social Conservatives who wish to engineer society to make there socio-religious preferences compulsory. What my conservatism amounts to is a reflexive dislike of sudden, unpredictable change, to the extent that I've spent a great deal of my life learning how to anticipate it so that I could be conveniently elsewhere.

Mostly, though, I'm a Libertarian in all senses; I believe that ultimately government should serve individuals, not groups, not corporations, not pressure groups and certainly, especially, primarily - not it's own agendas.

All individuals. Even the filthy rich. Even the desperately poor. Even the hapless and apparently useless. Because, well, we are all networked, all of us are five degrees from everyone else - and with the relationship between persons being that close, it really is damned unwise to pretend you can isolate yourself from the consequences of heedless, inconsiderate action.

Worse yet - the consequences of unethical decision making tend to be diffuse and unpredictable in time and space. It's far, far more difficult to protect your interests from the blow-back of an unethical decision than to do the right thing in the first place.

Furthermore, though the blow-back is unpredictable in time, the general "progress curve," the rate of social and technological change we currently experience, tends to make all consequences more dire. The up-side is that ethical decision making will tend to reap far greater rewards far sooner than conventional wisdom would suggest. Still, it's an obvious idea, one that our nation was actually based on, the idea that the fundamental unit of society was the individual.

I'm a Constitutional conservative. Not in the Alito sense, but in the sense of someone who has a decent, if casual background in the writings of the founders and their intents - which was primarily the intent for the Government to secure the rights and liberties of individuals, in the belief that, aside from being intuitively right, ethical and morally proper, it was also the simplest way to ensure a minimax outcome - the most possible approaches to social, cultural and structural issues at the minimum global cost.

My view of the last thirty years - which has been a view from the bottom tier of the pyramid, or close to it most of that time - has been that the presumptions of the Regan Revolution have proved to be deeply and irredeemably flawed. For, if you strip away the rhetoric, it amounted to this, "Look good, smell good, talk a good line and put your conscience in your pocket." And we have allowed a government to grow up with those very same values - the idea that "money has no smell" and that the worth of a constituent is measured in their ability to generate campaign funds. Furthermore, we have abandoned ourselves to the tender mercies of centralized planners and social experimenters who are neither persons of good will or even of satisfactory qualification - were there any satisfactory qualification for such a thing.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, none of that is true. In Middle America, ethics still work and honor and one's good name matter - because if nothing else, if you cannot be trusted, there's someone else who can be. And if you are truly criminal - well, even if the law might shield you, it may come down to an axe-handle to the kneecap.

I mention that since an appeal to conscience is, obviously going to be met with a well-practiced defense. So let us consider instead the steel fist in the velvet glove, the probable alternative when justice is apparently evaded. That fist is called "consequence." This nation is set up for a perfect storm of consequence, so long as those who have the ability to use capital leverage to make some important changes fail to do so.

Now, here's where I part company from the average Liberal. I don't have anything against rich people. Making money is a damn useful skill. Even knowing how to use money effectively is a damn useful skill. The military refers to it as "logistics." I just object to it being seen as the only thing that matters - and I try to remember that when I think of my own pretty nifty skill-set.

Alas, that skill-set doesn't include the financial arts, and I'd love to have someone to take care of that for me. But frankly, it would be a complete waste of my time to try and play on that pitch. I'd be roadkill, and it wouldn't be any fun.

And damn, if it's worth doing, it ought to be fun.

But past a certain point, it becomes more than a bit silly, if not outright dangerous, if you are willing to set aside all principles, all common-sense rules, and every other consideration to pile up wealth for ... well, for what?

I still don't understand where the satisfaction is in creating messes like Enron or Tycho. We can shrug our shoulders, and say, well, obviously, they were sociopaths. Alas, this is very true. It was true, it was obviously true, and yet somehow, nobody did or said anything much, until the utterly predictable occurred.

Here's where I think the current wealth culture has missed the boat entirely. It's as if the idea of profit has been entirely divorced from the greater realm of society and the people that make it up. Far from being accusatory on that point, I'm apprehensive. For frankly, even the legitimate "winners" in this game are isolating themselves to the point of utter irrelevance to the vast majority of people in this nation, while setting themselves up as perfect marks for those who can and do exploit the gullible.

Let me underline that with an except from Forbes.

Top Suburbs To Live Well
Matt Woolsey, 03.26.08, 12:01 AM ET

By This Author Matt Woolsey What The New Lending Limits Mean For You In Depth: Best Places To Buy Foreclosed Homes More Headlines RSS News Feed

Piedmont, Calif., atop the Oakland Hills, boasts good schools, plenty of parks, and safe streets where the local kids gather and most of the police's attention goes to errant skateboarders.

---

I wonder if that's how ghettos were marketed back in Europe, to wealthy Jews who very much preferred to not be reminded that there were indeed surrounded by poor and hungry Gentiles that their religion - as it existed at the time - said they need not concern themselves with. Not, of course, that being concerned would have helped all that much - but that's not the point to this comparison.

Mostly, the lesson here is the temptation being presented you, the opportunity to freely associate with "like minded people" and thereby voluntarily consign yourselves to irrelevance and of course, a willful abandonment of any rational sense of self-preservation. Instead, you prefer to trust the noble and self-effacing good will of your shepherds. You have unwittingly become captive resource, one that's permitted to live in relative splendor so long as it doesn't interfere with the people who matter, those who see themselves as born deserving of the right to control everything they can. That control depends on you not noticing critical flaws in their policy and being persuaded that those flaws are the fault of those who bear the cost of those flawed policy. As long as you subscribe to such willful isolation, you will be permitted to believe that you do actually matter. Just so long as you don't.

You will be tolerated - just as I am - to the extent that you provide cover to those who do, a "peasantry to swim within." For myself, I'm permitted to exist to prove that it's still possible to criticize the powers that be and live. But of course, that doesn't make the criticism any less germaine. For myself, I'm willing to trade on the complacency of those who think venality, corruption and greed will triumph over good, honest dealings.

Your willingness to "get with the program" is enforced by the cultural perception that the rest of the country is plagued by crime and infested with evil criminals - the sort who wear sweat clothes and flash gang signs. Oh, and Islamist radicals.

Willy Sutton was once asked, "why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." he replied. Well, you are where the money is. But please note, it's not the Willy Suttons herding you into complacent little ghettos which emphasize the appearance of safety. Someone is aiming to make a pile off of you - and they fondly expect you to thank you for it.

How do I know that? The thing I do well is to put together seemingly unrelated things and see how they fit in a larger pattern. Sometimes it's almost obvious - as in the example above.

The cognitive dissonance of juxtaposing that article with links to the best places to buy foreclosed homes was left there because I never pass up a free clue-by-four. And because Willy Sutton and later free-lance communists were able to remain free and inconvenience the wealthy banks for years due to the fact that the poor had no particular reason to protect the banks - or the wealthy who's wealth depended on them.

Now, I have not the predictive facility to say for sure if we are headed for another Great Depression, but I'll give better than even odds that we are in for a Staggering Dislocation, and the last place I'd want to be is in a poorly-secured complacent ghetto where the appearance of law and order is valued over actual law. That makes you enemies you don't even KNOW about - like the New Orleans residents turned back into the floodwaters at gunpoint by sherriffs who knew that white trash and nigras had no place in their town.

In that whole event and that one example of starkly immoral actions by government, we should all wonder in who's interest it is for our government to be making policies that have the direct and predictable effect of shattering a once cohesive and reliable social matrix - the very thing that most folks who hark back to the values of the 40's and 50's are indeed thinking about.

If you were allowed to belong to the dominant culture at all - wealth and privileged mattered a great deal less than they do now, or perhaps more importantly, skill, ability and proven merit were valued more, and it was understood that when separated, neither mattered all that much, really.

Our nation invested in improving it's most valuable form of capital - it's citizenry, and that paid off staggeringly well. Mind-bogglingly, unbelievably, stunningly well.

But now it's devil take the hindmost, because nobody seems to want "their taxes" to go to the "undeserving," where "undeserving" is "not me, not mine, and not immediately." That is the sort of mean-spiritedness that makes a culture fly apart at the seams, into vicious fragments of violently competitive demographics. I don't choose to live in Somalia for a reason.

So, now that I've troubled your mind - I sincerely hope - what do I suggest? What courses of action show promise?

Well, first of all, I have a very practical suggestion. Take yourself and your kids on a cruise to someplace like Africa - or South-Central LA. Take some time, make some friends, make some connections, and figure out a way to invest money to do some good. Hell, as you need to train your kids to administer capital wisely and well, this is a perfect way to do it. In a place like Bangladesh , India, south America or any randomly chosen Indian reservation, there are people with amazing skills and no money to spread the word. A budget of five-hundred or a thousand dollars for your kids to invest will pay off in many delightfully unexpected ways.

So go shopping, and invest some money in bringing your scores to market. You do have excellent taste, right? An eye for value? The sense of who is a worker and who's a poseur?

You see, nobody has the right to ask you to change who and what you are, or the things that matter to you. Nobody has the right to compel you, via taxation or pressure beyond your own, unavoidable fair share of the load in keeping this great economic engine turning over for the good of us all. It's in your very immediate interest to make this society work - and to ease the path towards welcoming a future of global, free and fair trade between individuals. The alternate is a pile of worthless paper and a very uncertain future.

What I'm asking you to realize about yourself is that your wealth brings a skill-set that is far more important than you might realize. Just get out of your comfort zone, abandon both complacency and enui and find out where you are needed. Because, well, you are. Desperately. And there is no feeling like it.

Right now, there are incredible opportunities in green and appropriate technology, approaches that are often being developed in the third world, for lack of access to the expensive, energy-intensive solutions we are so fond of. What is needed is a transfer of expertise and skills. For instance, bio-digester technology is cheap in the third world because labor is cheap, and all these things are built by hand. There's no way we could afford a bio-digester built that way to deal with our organic waste disposal issues - but a little appropriate gee-whizmatroncs would change that. We are talking technology that with the right investments could be realized in five to ten years as practical answers to issues of climate change, the intersection of national security and energy resources and the sort of peace that a full stomach and a well-engaged mind brings people.

And there is going to be an absolute HEAP of money - great, steaming, obscenely deep piles of it - in providing clean water and energy to urban areas at affordable prices. Los Angeles and Las Vegas rise to the top of my mind, but really, every Southwestern state has this issue. Every single current approach is some variety of megaproject - and they won't work.

What is needed is not just an elegant solution, but entire portfolios of elegant solutions. Elegant solutions tend to be green by definition because green approaches waste as little as possible. When you think of it, waste heat, wasted water, wasted organics - all of this might as well be money flushed down the toilet.

Quite literally.

I'm old enough to remember the howls of outrage in my resource-based home-town when teepee burners were banned, as being both serious pollution sources and a not-insignificant fire risk to the resource base itself. Then someone got a brilliant idea, and the press-to fire log was born, as was pressboard. Suddenly, chips and sawdust were too valuable to waste, and the entire engineered wood industry was born. That happened pretty darned suddenly, too.

Well, that's the situation here and now. And I'm pretty much convinced that at this point corporate America is too invested in doing things the way they have always been done to change - at least, of their own internal will.

Corporations are ponderous things, and this is the sort of challenge that needs as many possible approaches as can be imagined, because, well, there is not going to be one universal ideal solution, no market that can be structured or dominated.

The web - and global demands in terms of dignity, human rights and a widespread resentment of damn incompetent exploitation have come together to present individuals worldwide to pretty much work around authoritarian constraints. Increasingly, the "legality" of the imposition of constraints on the free action of citizens is becoming moot, as government - domestically and more generally - has lost a great deal of respect for it's ability to do it's supposed job while becoming far to intent on interfering with our personal lives at the expense of doing anything very useful.

The same is true of multinational corporations - to the extent that the distinction serves to make any difference.

Yet this apparently desperate situation - and it is quite desperate - is fraught with opportunity. Perhaps even more appealing is the realization that those who are on the front lines of hewing out a new way of coping with the demands of a rapidly emerging global culture are those who will be able to shape it's nature.

The demand for food, housing, stable social networks, well-regulated and reliable market transactions, transport, distribution, energy and communications are growing exponentially - and with no end in sight. Get your money working on something that doesn't involve the technology, mindsets and economic philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

You may be tempted to hear this as "learning to make do with less." Actually, what I'm saying is quite different. Every great leap forward in our history has been about learning to do better with less - less effort, less risk, less waste, fewer man-hours and a broad and general increase in both personal liberty and general living standards.

I do not aspire to a return to feudal culture and subsistence agriculture - as some silly-fringe Libertarians do. Nope, I aspire to the far more likely and easily realized, which is a future where we need far less energy to do what we want, and have far more options as to what that could conceivably be.

I aspire to a future where nobody needs to go hungry or feel useless - and the more options there are, the more likely that will be. I see a future in which the capability to be violent is seen as the insurance of peace - not a means to it, and certainly not a major economic sector. Rather, I foresee a return to the philosophy of the citizen-soldier, and a general commitment to policies that do not require us citizens to suck in our ponderous guts and go out and do or die. Our mercenaries and proxy armies have brought us little net profit as a nation and a culture, if any, compared to the cost. It's time we stopped pretending that acting unethically towards others is in any way defensible - even in the boardroom.

The business of business is the bottom line: The bottom line is human value.

It's a very simple idea, so very simple that only a Harvard business degree and a few years of martini lunches could conceal it from you. Alternet articulates:

Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted February 7, 2008.

Excerpt from Page 2:

Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it's comfortable. Life is easier."

Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican -- yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.

Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE -- in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico -- have laid waste to that country's grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.

The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong.

"Wrong" would imply a widespread, honest confusion about the reality of supply and demand; the impact of restricting access to markets and using the power of government and vertically integrated economies to gain control over entire market sectors, with the ability to dictate wages and prices.

A better term would be - if one is willing to be charitable - a self-deceptive masturbatory fantasy for those who's idea of "winning" dictates that there be "losers."

That's not capitalism, it's theft. In any truly capitalistic exchange, in any truly free market exchange, every party walks away with a profit defined in terms they most value.

Now, a little fraud and graft is tolerable - but not when it's the dominant form of business and governance. Society, business, culture and indeed, the public peace all depend upon people being confident that their investment of power and tax money will bring an adequate and just return for them and a better life for their children.

We are not speaking of an abstract "value," of luxuries and indulgences. We are literally counting in terms of the statistics of life and death, quality of life indexes, infant mortality rates, the incidence of stress-related disorders and of course, the great American sport of "going postal."

All of these things are the consequence of a system of accounting that neglects the consequences of where the money comes from, where it goes, and what it does between here and there.

People do work for you. People buy things from you. People invest in your ideas. If you are hurt, out of work, or just want a decent lunch that hasn't been spat in by an unhygienic slave laborer with a constant, low grade infection - that is also a "People thing."

So the welfare of the people you and your business depend on IS your business.

Literally.

No successful business, nation or economy has ever been or could be a "zero-sum" operation. The result has to be better that what could be done by subsistence-level individuals or small groups. Fortunately, this is pretty easy; the sum is greater than the parts. But only if the person or group in overall charge recognizes that every one of the parts must be visibly better off than they were before being made part of "the sum."

They are your suppliers, your workers, your consumers and your relations, they are your cousins, your customers, your publicity, your quality control; they do everything that you cannot do to make or do whatever is that, as an Important Executive, you do.

The welfare of the country you are based in and live makes your business possible. And even if you "offshore" your business, that simply means that you have another, probably more needy population to be responsible to and for.

You couldn't do it without them. Indeed, there wouldn't be any point, because given an entire business community like you, the only people able to afford your product would be those who were competing with you, or unwilling to settle for your plebeian, mass-produced substitute for craftsmanship.

The fact is, only an economy as robust and as huge as that of North America as a whole could have withstood the depredations and outright looting cheer-led by the Regan Revolution.

Well, the Irish might have been able to "make do" by taking in each other's laundry, but it's pretty much impossible to make do by taking in each other's bullshit.

Without people willing to do for you, you would be doing something far less important-seeming. If you wish it put more charitably, and in all honesty, with equal accuracy; the very real skills you have in critical thinking, decision-making and entrepreneurial risk-taking are worthy of great reward and recognition - but not so much reward that it costs people more to have you around than doing whatever it is you do than to make do for themselves.

You can conceal a negative value for a while, by monetizing the rewards and taking out the costs in seeming intangibles and indirect consequences - but remember, all your peers are doing the same thing - and being forced into gated enclaves filled with Stepford Republicans as an inevitable consequence.

The definition of a "ghetto" is a place where a certain sort of person is forced to live, for fear of the consequences of straying. It may be well-padded, filled with comforts and luxuries - but the more concentrated you are, the more obvious it becomes that it might be more profitable to loot the place than to depend on you for a job.

The US religion of Evangelical Reganomic corporatism has brought matters to that point. The vast majority of people in this nation would be better off if they were rid of people who think of them as a class to be manipulated and exploited.

We have been here before, and I would have thought that the results of dealing with the matter before would have been obvious - even to a Harvard MBA. The post-war "economic miracle" was no miracle, it was the result of people centered policies. Ironically enough, it was a great time to do business, if your idea of the point of being in business was to build a business. Of course, if your entire goal was to suck all the economic value from the area around you into your own pockets, leaving the company and the entire region an empty husk - well, that would be the more "modern" pattern; the ethics of Enron, the values of Ted Haggard, the vision of "trickle-down" voodoo economics.

But I guess you just can't put a price on a good education, the wonders it does perform. Apparently the real magic of Harvard (and Yale, of course) is four years of the conscientious elimination of conscience and the inculcation of an ethic that considers the only ethical duty of a company to be to it's shareholders - and even then, only to the extent that they are more likely to catch you fiddling with the books.

But shareholders are not the only people that invest in or make sacrifices for companies, and increasingly, the neglect of that reality is coming due. It's not just shareholders, it's "stakeholders." And if you look around the business community you will find that the most enduring, most genuinely successful people and businesses are those who understand that if you wanna get, you gotta give, that the only honest deal is where both sides walk away feeling better than they did walking in and that the worker is worthy of his hire - and her self-respect.

I mean, if you don't believe me, ask Armand Hammer. The man has made billions by being ethical. Not in spite of it, because of it.

But then, Hammer has never tried to compete with sociopaths - and it's a sad fact that is the current corporate ideal, despite the clear idiocy of trying to shackle sociopaths to the corporate plough.

People always seem to make the mistake that no mater what the values expressed by the leader of a "team" or a "corporation," that loyalty will buy them an exception from the application of misrule.

Not hardly, not ever, not once in the history of human civilization has this ever been true. The tales of Gilgamesh illustrate this point, if Shakespeare and the Bible are too current for your tastes.

But oddly enough, they don't teach much history or literature to MBA candidates, and no critical thinking that doesn't involve spreadsheets.

Even so, it should be obvious to the great majority that the current situation is unsustainable; an economic and social disaster approaching like a slow-motion avalanche. Just as the Great Depression, the people who will be most completely crushed will be those who are the imprudent and the foolish, the gamblers and the grifters.

Our nation - indeed, our continent - is in an economic position where we cannot afford people who cost us more than the contribute. If that's possibly true of an illegal immigrant flipping burgers, how much more true is it of some party apperatchnk like Chertoff or Brown; pundits as incompetent as Kristol or vicious and vapid twits like Malkin and Coulter?

The people with influence, who trade on their influence, who have profited by the appearance of influence - well, this is where we are, based on the directions they gave. Quo Bono?

Should they not share in the negative profit their hard work has brought to us all?

Armageddon is Nigh: VP Cited by Sadly, No!

Sadly, No! cites VodkaPundit Steven Green re Huckabee and Iowans, It is a magnificent rant, if damn near a decade belated.

It seems the VodkaPundit has discovered why us "Godless Liberals^TM*" have dismissed the center of these Disunited States as "flyover country," or less politely, Dumbfuckistan.

It's not because of what party they support, VP. It's why they support it!

They are stupid dumb fucks from Dumbfuckistan and they vote as stupidly as the damn fool churches they belong to.

WHAT PART OF "SIBERIAN PEASANT" DO YOU NOT GRASP, VP?

I know you have read all that cold war history stuff, and I bet you have read "The Gulag Archipelago" and all kinds of anti-commie-pinko stuff. So I know you know the concept. So when you ask "what the fuck is wrong with you people," well, if you would just think on it, you would realize you already know. It's just that before, the stupidity worked in favor of furthering YOUR interests, so you pretend that people this stupid don't exist.

Dear Iowa Republicans,

I’ll put this in language even your tiny little Iowa brains can understand: What the f*** is wrong with you people?

The news coming out of Des Moines (literally, French for “tell me about the rabbits, George”) tonight is distressing in the extreme. 32 years ago, your Democratic brethren took one look at Jimmy Carter — the worst 20th Century President bar Nixon, and the worst ex-President ever — and declared, “That’s our man!”

Three decades later, and along comes Mike Huckabee. Same moral pretentiousness, same gullibility on foreign affairs, only-slightly-less toothy idiot’s grin. Then you so-called Republicans took a look at Carter’s clone and said, “That’s our man, too!”

And by a pretty wide margin. […]

Mike Huckabee? Really? We’ve seen this game before, and its name is… every other single stupid, un-winnable candidate you’ve ever picked — which is most of them.

So I repeat the question: What is wrong with you people?

All my love, you corn-sucking idiots,

VodkaPundit

Hell, they grow corn for ethanol, because of government handouts, when they could sew switchgrass and do not a damn thing nor spend a cent for 11 months of the year, and then take advantage of a free DEA ethanol license to ferment and distill it into fuel. Or they could figure out how to ferment the agri-waste instead of the actual corn. It's not like you have to drink the stuff - and making corn into ethanol is a waste of good corn liquor, as well as being a net energy loss.

But never mind, welfare pays the difference.

Never mind that they think they are different than people in inner cities getting "crop support" for children of suspiciously dark colors. (They grow WHITE corn in Iowa!) Somehow, the crop of actual people is less worthy of government price supports and subsidies than surplus corn.

There ain't no hate like the hate of a really stupid WHITE "welfare queen" for an actually deserving inner city welfare recipient of nonspecific color - assumed, of course, to be "black" in every sense of the word.

---

*"Liberal" in this instance is anyone for whom reality trumps Rovian talking points and the common "wisdom" about coastal values spread by Ann Coulter, Bill O'Rielly and Rush Limbaugh. Or in other words, "liberal" in this sense includes Barry Goldwater and Adam Smith.

Or in other words, a "Liberal" is anyone who is both too intelligent and not cynical enough to blow smoke up the asses of the corn-fed idjuts of Dumbfuckistan.

In that sense, and ONLY in that sense am I Liberal, much LESS "progressive." What I AM is a centrist, politically, with a strong bias toward anti-authoritarianism.

This is not due to disrespect for worthy Authorities. On the contrary.

It's due to an understanding of how difficult it is to be Knowledgeable, wise, authoritative and worth following that I feel it proper to discourage people from delegating their personal authority and power to those who neither deserve it and are clearly both unqualified and uninterested in the hard work of exercising power in the interests of "the little people."

I'm neither left, nor right. I'm a cynical, distrustful individualist who, having been exposed to competent governance, knows the depths of uselessness our own government sinks to.

I am, in other words, a Libertarian and further, a person that realizes that all good things, all things of worth, all good things that occur are as a result of the efforts of individuals working in concert or alone, and governments, marketplaces, roads, churches and corporations are all means to those ends, contrivances for leveraging the efforts of individuals. As such, it is the individual who concerns me, not any sort of fictional "corporate entity."

----------------
Now playing: Eric Clapton - Signe
via FoxyTunes

Bumperstickers. I Digg Bumperstickers.

From digg , referencing this item
which references this photo:


by jeliel on 11/02/2007

Why the burials, the 127.0.0.1 was truly EPIC

Hide 1 reply to this comment (most popular has -3 diggs)

-3 diggs

by sgtbutterscotch on 11/02/2007

I feel dumb, what does that mean?

Hide 1 reply to this comment (most popular has 1 digg)

• +2 diggs

  by mhuggins on 11/02/2007
  Oh man, why are you on digg?

  Reply to this comment

Being something of a geek myself, I will first digg this, and then stumble the whole.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, AlphaMale. Buy a cup.

AlphaMale has made an interesting debut into the Blogospere, with a premise and post that's like to get him in a face off with a lot of sistas doing "that thing" with their heads.

There is a growing number of sisters that have purchased into the theatrical theme "Something New" (whereas the ideal mate for a sucessful independent black woman is a white man), which suggest that black men are all uneducated, unsucessful, unloving or sex crazed. Believe it or not, there are websites and blogs galore that support this idea along with the mass media. Personally, I am liberal and feel that a person should be with whomever they choose. But, the reason that these themes suggest getting a man of non-color is almost always justified by the degradation of black men as a whole. I recently read a blog on this site where black men were accused of being the creators of racio-misogyny (the hatred of a race of women). I can say in all honesty that SOME black men are perpetuators of this evil, but the belittling of black woman began long, long before them. I'm not going to go into the history but with very little research you should find supporting evidence like uhh....slavery and jim crow laws.

But being politically incorrect about race allows one to say things that cannot otherwise be said - so stop and consider if there might be something to it. I was moved to comment from my own perspective and with a light touch. But on a more serious note, many of the problems associated with the Black struggle are cultural, and some of those cultural struggles and limitations are part and parcel of Black Culture itself.

On the other hand, speaking from an external perspective, it's a damn rich and valuable culture, commanding more influence over our general national culture than mere numbers would suggest. So when I say there are problems with Black Culture, I'm not saying adopt WASP solutions. Those "solutions" have their own costs and I, personally, don't think they are all that great a trade-off.

Besides, Whiteface is just as offensive and inherently undignified as Backface.

But I see AlphaMale's concerns to be not so much an example of racial perspective, but "in the box" perspective. And I'm a member of a minority who's distinguishing feature is the inability to see boxes.

More to the point, though, there has never been a better time to do business and succeed as a minority anything; the internet makes it possible to detour around racial and cultural chokepoints a nearly automatic process. It's lowered the capital barrier, and it's certainly lowered the research and education barrier.

That is to say, it is now as possible to become truly self-educated as it was in Jefferson's day for someone with access to a library, except that it costs a hell of a lot less to get into the library in the first place.

Let me show you two ways - just off the top of my head - where an urban kid of any color and the ability to hustle can make some decent money, as a path toward building their own urban empire. Seriously.

Cafepress.com and Zazzle.com are two examples of online business opportunities where the only requirements are willingness to work hard and either your own talent or access to talent and inspiration.

My sites are here and here. I'd appreciate your patronage, especially if you become rich and famous. And of course, if you are a musician, you probably know all about Myspace and YouTube as maketing venues. There are probably thousands of other opportunities out there, from online marketing to small-scale import-export.

But I'd advise against dedicating your life to becoming rich. I'd rather advise you to dedicate your life to taking what you have and who you are and using that to make the space around you just a little better. That alone tends to generate capital, not just money, but more importantly, it generates social capital. Now that's a form of capitalism you won't hear much about from most capitalists. Just the really smart ones, like Warren Buffet.

I mean, it should be a shame when you die, don't you think?