As IF Times

link Ripped apart by financial crisis, Greek society in free-fall | Fox News.

Post the surprising (to some, including me) 2012 election results, one issue is abundantly clear.  Reality is an abstract concept to just over half of the U.S. electorate.  There is so much wealth in the U.S. that so called bread and butter issues do not move the populace here as would be the case in any other part of the world.  Unlike the feckless Greeks in the linked article, people in the U.S. are more concerned with the real meaty issues of their existence, at least as reported by the media.  Access to condoms, the support of a big yellow muppet and various and sundry straw bogeymen posted by the Democrats were the galvanizing issues for the liberal base.  Issues such as crushing debt, burgeoning unemployment, collapsing industries and spiralling living costs, well, those are things only poor countries have to worry about.  To Americans, those issues are minor annoyances like spots on glasses in the dishwasher.  No wonder the world hates them.

Now,  it appears that America is headed towards the path of collective Statism as practiced in the oh so avant-garde and successful European nations…such as France, Spain, Portugal and of course, Greece.

Some pretty smart people got this wrong and there is now the expected post mortem of how the intellectual case for a change in a demonstrably disasterous direction failed to resonate with just over half of the voters.  Most of the hand-wringing on the  part of the conservatives centers on the perceived need for the GOP to be more inclusive of a changing demographic since statistics showed that the ‘old white guy’ base was shrinking.   While this may be statistically correct, it would be erroneous to believe that the worldview espoused by the conservative movement is exclusive to any demographic and favorable only to the shrinking whites.

The very success of the societal experiment which is the U.S., is based on the set of values and beliefs that were the foundation of its early proponents.  In no other society on the planet at the time of America’s founding were people allowed to rise to whatever level in life that their individual efforts allowed them.  That may sound trite today, but back in the 1700’s, if you were born a cobbler, well let’s just say you’d better enjoy smelling feet for the rest of your life.   To this very day, the allure of America is so compelling that people from all over the world immigrate (legally or otherwise) to create their own destinies from their own efforts.  The foundation of the nation was premised upon equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.  It was also based on the foundation of strong families and adherence to moral principles of social behaviour.  Why would these values be challenged as obsolete now?

If anyone thinks that the election results were all about philosophical differences and not about partisan wagon circling,  they are either working for the media or still a Lance Armstrong fan.  Both are delusional.  As but one example, Jesse Jackson Jr., the senatorial candidate from Illinois has spent the last 8 months or so of his term serving his constituents from a ‘rehab’ hospital, while coincidentally ducking an ongoing cloud of spending corruption accusations; a cloud that will  manifest into a plea deal of some kind soon.  Despite this minor handicap, our hero is re-elected in a landslide by his constituents.  Let’s be clear here.  The man was not serving his peeps in any capacity, yet his support base put him back in office as if he was the “slow” nephew in need of a job.

When you hear that various demographic constituents must be catered to, it’s essentially code-wording for “we have to buy this group off”.  As we’ve made note of in previous pieces, this slice and dice tactic of politicians has created a landscape in which pitting one population segment against another is the preferred (and successful) path to political power.   Instead of working for a strong collective good, this process begets a society which becomes Lord Of The Flies.   It is glaringly Orwellian that the various demographic groups that bleat for ‘equality and fairness’ are actually pushing for policies which would make them special and unequal from everyone else.  Whether you are Hispanic, Black, Asian, a woman, gay, young, old, poor, single, bipolar or a union worker, there should not be explicit policies in place that enable you to jump the queue to personal success.   Acceding to one particular group will only escalate the demands by the other groups for ‘equal’ treatment.  It may all come back to the notion that the U.S. is too wealthy, that instead of everyone fighting to create a larger collective pie,  factions are fighting for their perceived entitled share of the existing one.  It’s all fun until there’s no pie left.

While the results of the election have consequences well beyond the term of the administration which are genuinely alarming, it is also true that the population demographic is dynamic.  The Hispanic contingent is growing as are the Asians.  As the demographic bubble moves into maturity, that maturity will bring with it the creation of families.  This will move the curve away from singles and when that happens, it is likely that genuine economic issues will once again be more important than the narcissistic faux issues that are played today.  This is hinted at by statistics that showed that married women voted conservatively whereas single women voted for the Democrats.  When that happens, the natural order of people is to consider policies and philosophies which support and nurture their children and families.  These values are conservative ones and there will be a return to such sensibilities and to people who support them.  Let’s not all jump on the irrational bandwagon just because of an unfortunate vote.

link Italian court ruling sends chill through science community | Reuters.

In today’s “you can’t make this stuff up” arena, comes this story about scientists being imprisoned for not predicting an earthquake.  In most jobs, if someone screws up, they get two week’s notice and then shown the door.  In Italy, apparently they are held to a higher standard.  The article tells the story of these unfortunate scientists who gave the town an all clear signal but then only 3 days later, the big one hits.  Talk about shaky forecasts.  What they should have done in hindsight was to recommended to the village what they do in this part of the world; that is tell everyone the big one will most certainly hit any day and to purchase as much disaster insurance as possible.   What’s the downside? Tell everyone the worst.  This medieval court outcome should send shivers to anyone exposed to the prediction racket.  I’m sure Italian stockbrokers, doctors and even weather forecasters are just a little bit more nervous today.  Imagine a stockbroker making a bad market call  and then phones home to tell the wife that he’ll be home… in about 3 to 5 years.

Well if they’re going to put scientists in the clink for not predicting disasters, maybe there will be a push to call journalists out for not exposing BS from politicians.  If we apply the logic of this Italian court ruling to these shores, maybe some reality gets forced back into the media business.  If media knew that political pronouncements were whoppers and failed to warn the public of such, then perhaps there should be consequences. The very reason for the majority of the scribblings on this site is because of the proclivity of media to promote stories that range from subtly coercive to outright pants-on-fire untruths.  Of course when politics are concerned, there’s an expectation of fabrication or exaggeration, but the media are not supposed to be complicit.

In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,  Dorothy Rabinowitz for example illustrates the kind of guffaw provoking fairy tales that are pushed out for public consumption every day.  As she artfully points out, the fibs are not even subtle any more, they’re Bunyanesque in their affrontery.  We quote at length  from her article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443684104578067041987322754.html?mod=googlenews_wsj here:

“…In the 1967 film “A Guide for the Married Man,” a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: “Deny! Deny! Deny!”—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he’s shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.

“What are you doing,” she wails, “who is that woman?”

“What woman, where?” the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, “What woman?” Confused by her spouse’s unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she’s asking him what he’d like for dinner.

For much of the past four years, the Obama administration’s propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script.

All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years…”

As we said, we expect politicians to have big noses, but it’s supposed to be the job of media to point that out.  There are still naive people in this day and age who think that if something is in print or on TV, it must be true.

And speaking of BS, the greatest whopper still getting mileage is the fiction of Global Warming.  Exactly the opposite of the Italian scientists, the GW crowd are predicting doom and extinction every time a penguin goes missing.  We still experience ‘respected’ scientists and of course politicians who are beating the “we’re all going to die” drum.  The narrative is that, despite millions and millions of years of the earth’s existence, the influence of man in the last blink of time, in geologic terms,  will be the undoing of the planet.  Somehow through the ages, the earth has survived earthquakes, great freezes, meteor strikes, bad weather and shifting of tectonic plates, but now, because we’re running a few cars, the earth will collapse and extinction will come to all life.

All we’re saying is that if scientists can be imprisoned for acts of omission, things they have no control over, then we should also incarcerate people for acts of commission, in which perps had complete knowledge of their duplicitous stories and still pushed them out.  This is all backwards.  Let’s fire the incompetents, but jail the liars.