ChickFest at Westminster

I had a good time watching the ChickFest on television. I mean the princely wedding, of course. I did not mind, I had the time and I am secure in my sexual orientation. I watched it on French language television to make sure I had plenty of smirking opportunities.

Weddings are important to women, of course and British royal weddings are right on the top of the ladder because of the massive display of bad taste and insincerity they allow. And think of the commentary on human nature of the fact that practically all women agree about what is not a woman’s greatest day. It’s not when she takes her first step; it’s not when she learns to write her name; it’s not when she reads her first book; it’s not when she graduates; it’s not when she discovers good sex; it’s not when she has her first child; it’s not … The greatest day in a woman’s life, they agree, is when she is able to tie man to her by legal and religious means thereby making escape difficult and costly. If I were a member of NOW, I would hang my head in shame.

I liked the show because there comes a point where very bad taste becomes attractive. It just takes a lot of it. The British monarchs are masters of this metamorphosis. There is no place in the world that gathers in one place so many military uniforms hanging on men who have never heard a shot fired in anger. And the bling on them would have triggered violent jealous rage in ghetto rappers if they had been watching. There is also no greater concentration of ridiculous hats on women’s heads. By the way, the old queen was true to herself with a bright yellow job.

The French commentators did not disappoint. They ran a mindless chatter of awful clichés in bad French for several hours. (This is a mean classist remark, of course.)The only good French spoken on the French channel was by the designer Karl Lagerfeld, who is German.

In my opinion – but what do I know, except from movies – the only aristocratic-looking guests were the father and mother of the bride, commoners both, of course. For all my pettiness, I agree that there was no harm done. It was innocent entertainment. Yet, it re-inforces my conviction that practically no woman can get on her high horses with me and demand to be taken more seriously all the time or even most of the time. Again, no harm done.

I even positively liked two things. The bells tolling for hours enchanted me and I thought having trees inside Westminster Abbey was downright cool.

Practical Sex Advice For Dudes

I am a frivolous man forced by the boringness of my intellectual betters to keep diving back into serious didactic conduct. I just spent a week and part of the weekend expostulating on serious ideological issues. I almost have a headache as a result. So, it’s time I pleased myself by doing what I do best. That’s giving sex advice to others, of course. This time, it’s to dudes. If you are female, you are required to stop reading here.

Guys, guys! Men who ask what women want are just not paying attention, they are slow-witted or, more likely, they are not using the abundant information around them. If you pick up women’s magazines at the barber, even if only to look at the titles and at the ads, if you keep an eye on women’s morning television shows at the gym, if you ask yourself who is buying all the cheap paperbacks with the lurid, salacious covers, you will soon find convergent answers to the question: What do women want? I am going to shortcut the study for you anyway. The answers below apply only to heterosexual women. (I tried to find out what lesbians want but they threatened to beat me up.)

First, as always, as from “forever,” almost all women want a man to their name. This astounding failure of thirty years of feminism is worth a whole scholarly essay on its own. I will do it some other time. I said “almost all” because I have come across a couple of women who learned from a bad marriage, or from a bad divorce, or more likely, from both, that their own man was more of a burden than they wanted to carry for occasional use. They are content to borrow one now and then, here and there.

Second, women want the man in their lives to declare sincerely how very, very sorry he is. It does not matter what he is sorry about, it’s the intensity of the emotion in the confession that matters. I urge you, brother-men, to not yield to this facile way to get points with your beloved. It’s habit forming; she will want more; there will be no end to it. And after a while, she will despise you for your weakness.

Third, all women want someone else’s breasts. Silly feminists will argue that this horrid patriarchal society has made women un-naturally chest-conscious. Nothing could be further from the truth. Breast envy is hard-wired. Cave women who lived in all-female herds and rarely saw a man used to sneak behind the bushes with a piece of torn mammoth pelt to fashion a Wonderbra of sorts. At any rate, the envy leads to surgery if it’s not checked in time. Don’t allow this barbarous practice; don’t show any tolerance of it, not even unconsciously. If you care at all for a woman, any woman, you don’t want her perfectly healthy flesh to be cut by a sharp knife and then delivered to an always hazardous healing process. Besides, I have seen on television that the results of breasts implant and breast modification are sometimes tragically grotesque. I mean uglier than any naturally shaped protuberances I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of ugly breasts in my life. I say so without meaning to brag.

Fourth, all women like earrings. They never have enough. Earrings are not dangerous, immoral, or generally threatening to a woman’s reputation. There are nearly no ugly earrings. Almost any woman’s face is lit up by earrings, even mediocre earrings. I have known this for years but almost at a subliminal level. For a long time, I was clueless about earrings, like many men. I thought buying earrings for a woman was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor also fraught with mis-steps. Not so long ago, I began experimenting by giving earrings frequently to a young woman to whom I am close. Specifically, I experimented with price. Amazingly soon, I discovered that there was not floor, no earrings so cheap that they would fail to put the woman in a good mood, at least for a while. I stopped the experiment at the rather shameful but astounding price of two dollars ($2). I stopped mostly because I had trouble finding cheaper earrings. Something else happened during the experiment: I became progressively and palpably better at choosing earrings. I am now so good at it I might just as well be gay.

Here is a good rule of thumb applying to just about everything: If you are sufficiently bad at something, you will improve quickly through practice. This goes for buying earrings the same as it goes for sex, the act.

Debating Leftistanis on Radio

Before I presented on my radio show the essay entitled: “Journey Into Leftistan,” also available on this blog, a man I stage in the essay contacted me through Facebook. John Wolfe offered to debate me on my radio show. ( “Facts Matter” comes on on Sunday on KSCO Santa Cruz, 1080 AM. It’s from 11 am to 1 pm. You can catch it on-line while it’s going on.)

Mr Wolfe’s offer was serious and I treated it lightly at first. I shouldn’t have done that. It happened because whenever I converse with someone who calls himself a “progressive,” I can’t control the devil in my that pushes me to toy with with his mind and try to make him cry. I shouldn’t. I will try to not do it in the future. Of course, I can’t promise anything, because of the same devil, obviously. In spite of all, I had most of the day to consider Mr Wolfe’s offer. I have decided to decline it. The reasons are listed below.

1     My radio station, KSCO, is right in the middle of Santa Cruz, one of the worst sixties time warps in the world. I am guessing my listeners don’t need more left-wing exposure. I am guessing they cannot avoid leftist viewpoints if they try. Why, we have the University of California at Santa Cruz on our hill! Angela Davis is a (quiet) full Professor of “The History of American Consciousness”there (o rretired from it). If you don’t know who she is, that means you are wonderfully young and possibly innocent. Look her up. It will be fun, I promise.

If a handful of my listeners tell me that my perception is mistaken, that they would like me to debate Mr Wolfe on air (if nothing else, for the sport), I will retract my decision.

2   Mr Wolfe and I almost certainly have irreconcilable differences with respect to basic values. I believe that the best way to avoid incipient violence is to threaten the would-be aggressor with overwhelming force, with much greater violence. I and the police forces of all civilized nations are on the same page about this. Mr Wolfe has shown on his Facebook that he is in favor of “proportionate response” to aggression. It means that if someone throws a stone through your window, you are only allowed to throw one stone through his window, if that.

If I debated Mr Wolfe on my show, I am pretty sure that our value differences would quickly bleed into the debate. That would be a waste of time for all, especially for the listeners. Values come from experience filtered through judgment. They never change through discussion.

3  Mr Wolfe has shown on his Facebook that he has access to a multitude of facts that have never reached my ears. This, although I confess to listening to National Public Radio several hours each day. That’s in addition to reading the WSJ, and Le Figaro every day, plus the Weekly Standard, plus Atlantic Monthly, and watching tons of American cable network television, and watching the French-language network TV5, also every day. And, of course, I rush to Al Jazeera in English on-line every time something new happens in the Arab world.

Given all this, I would have to ask Mr Wolfe to name his mysterious sources for his facts, and then, I would have to check them out. I am technically and intellectually incapable of doing this while on the air. Not doing so would be taking the serious moral risk of helping Mr Wolfe spread false rumors. Of course, I believe that facts matter, not a little, a whole lot. Incidentally, I am not calling Mr Wolfe a liar. I just know that many people, especially reformers, find whatever facts they need wherever because their bullshit detector is permanently on the “off” position.

4     If none of the above had any validity, I would still have to wonder whether it’s appropriate to give a tribune to someone with Mr Wolfe’s inexplicable emphasis. Here is what I mean: Mr Wolfe is obsessed with Israel and its misdeeds, real and invented. Even if everything Mr Wolfe and his friends alleged about Israeli atrocities were true, even if he they had left some out, even if there were twice more real killings by Israelis than they allege, the fact would remain that Israel in its whole existence would have killed fewer Arabs than Saddam Hussein in one average year. I am completely sure, Mr Wolfe never lifted a little finger to denounce Saddam Hussein’s massacre of Arabs. Mr Wolfe’s obsession is in itself objectionable even if he is right on everything. He would have to give me a legitimate reason for his obsession with Israel before I would give him the mike.

He might surprise me and do just that. I would enjoy making a tight U-turn on this one. In the meantime, no, I don’t want to give special airtime to “progressive” Mr Wolfe. If he bothers to call my show, as he could have done today, I will certainly bring him right to the head of the line, if nothing as a courtesy to someone who calls from far-away Tennessee. And, of course, he can use as much space as he wishes in a comment on this blog to this posting and to the one that preceded it.

Journey Into Leftistan

When I think of leftists, college professors protected from reality by the ivory tower come to my mind. But we are all limited by our own experience if we are not careful. Facebook is a wonderful means to take journeys through parts unfamiliar. That’s if you have the time, of course. I spend a good deal of last week taking a trip into the land of the special kind of American leftists who are obsessed with Zionism, Israel and its misdeeds, real or imagined. It was a worthwhile experience.

I could reproduce the whole exchange but then, I would be fairly obligated to comment and it would take me more time than I am probably willing to devote to this ethnographic study. So, here are the points of this week-long exchange that are the most salient for me.

The multilog took place on the Facebook of a Tennessee sometimes-politician and sometimes-radio show host. His name is John Wolfe. You can easily find  him on Facebook. Mr Wolfe obviously subscribes, in general, to commonly accepted standards of rationality; he is generally courteous, and he does not make direct anti-Semitic statements although some of his Facebook followers do.

His narrative of Israeli-Palestinian relationships is not frankly at an angle from what I know or think I know. Rather, his narrative is well off to one side. Yet, it falls within the parameters of how one might interpret known facts if one were strongly motivated. Here is an example:

Last week, Judge Goldstone, denounced a big chunk of the report named after him: The “Goldstone Report” The report had accused Israel of a number of war crimes and atrocities on the occasion of its 2009 military attack on Gaza. Judge Goldstone, of course, is a man respected for his immense courage on the occasion of South Africa’s transition from apartheid. Goldstone retracted himself on a specific point: He declared that it was not the case that Israel had deliberately, targeted civilians during its attack on Gaza. The difference between deliberate killing and collateral damage really matters to me personally. The US Air Corps bombed an area close to where I was living in Paris as a baby, thereby risking my life. In the one case, they were terrorists, in the other case, liberators. Well back to Mr Wolfe: When I pointed out the Goldstone retraction to him he replied with a reference to Judge Goldstone’s “fellow Zionists.” He never said why he thought Goldstone is a Zionist. Goldstone has a Jewish name, that’s for sure. That’ enough for left-wing Mr Wolfe to identify him as a potential enemy, erasing a lifetime of Judge’s Goldstone courageous service to liberal causes

Worry not, I think. Those people eat their own. They have done so since Stalin, in the mid 1920s.

I am an old roué. I always think I know everything, have heard everything. Well I am always wrong, it turns out. Here is the most arresting thing Mr Wolfe told me during our exchange on Facebook. I can only paraphrase but I am not worried about distorting what he said. (I am giving Mr Wolfe every chance to correct the record anyway.):

The Israeli attackers tried to disrupt the Palestinians’ genetic make-up by using depleted uranium bullets and phosphorous ammunition during their attack on Gaza.

What foresight, I say with admiration. They not only kill their enemies today, they mess up with their ability to reproduce and to produce more enemies tomorrow!

This is the kind of mental world many leftists in America live in. Their facts are defensible: It’s quite possible that Israeli soldiers used depleted uranium. We do it all the time. Same with white phosphorous although I am a little more skeptical there. (I would want to know how much, where. I would want to know what Humans Rights Watch has to say about it.) So the problem is not the simple facts they use. It’s the twisted, absurd, frankly if deviously insane way in which they weave them together. Unfortunately, this all sounds kind of familiar to me as the host of a conservative radio show. We have our own over-interpreters. I fend them off though. I make them think again or I make them cry. I sure as hell don’t feed their private fantasies.

The second salient statement of the week came from one of Mr Wolfe’s followers, “Bill.” He broke briefly into the fairly rational dialog between Mr Wolf and me with the following:

This is all I need is an elitist with a traditional education wanting to give advice to all who will listen and to many who will not.

He was referring to me of course. Of course, also, I never told anyone on Mr Wolfe’s Facebook about my truly enviable and downright mind-boggling academic achievements. Bill just intuited somehow that Wolfe’s adversary had benefited by a college education.

I thought of the bitterness, of the bile behind Bill’s impromptu remark. I looked him up on Facebook. He graduated from high-school in the early 80s. That makes him nearly fifty. Yet, he has a portrait of a fat Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan tin-pot, military crypto- communist dictator of Venezuela on his Facebook profile page, like an overexcited college sophomore. So, Bill’s pathetic little outburst (that I swatted distractedly with one hand) served as a reminder. Leftie Bill is no college professor leading a comfortable and protected life behind the fabled ivy walls

Many Americans feel that life has passed them by. Some blame this abstraction “society,” for ending up in dead-end jobs, living mediocre lives with no hope whatsoever. Some of them might even be right although it’s difficult for this immigrant to understand how that can be. Such societal losers will always be attracted by magical explanations involving diverse conspiracies. Some will blame bearers of a “traditional education,” like me, although we obviously exercise no power, except that we vote in large numbers and except, perhaps, as purchasers of goods. Some will be attracted to conventional communist explanations simply because they have not heard how real communism, as practiced, has vilified all communist explanations of reality. Others will, as many German losers did in the 1920s, fall back on the simplest possible explanation: The Jews did it!

Because it’s now easy to not be completely ignorant, their leaders, like Mr Wolfe, will herd them away from open expressions of anti-Antisemitism The leaders know anti-Antisemitism was spoiled by the damn Germans in the forties. They know it’s not acceptable in polite society. They know it makes you sound downright stupid. So the hopeless malcontents will be steered by their left-wing thought masters toward “anti-Zionism,” a round condemnation of every action Israel may take except lie down and die, if that. The poorly educated left-wing followers will grasp quickly the paradigm of anti-Zionism:

Jews:Bad/Arabs:Good; Killings by Israelis: Horrible/ Killings by Arabs: Understandable; Jewish Blood: Poison/Arab Blood:Sacred.

I am not describing a conspiracy here but a simplistic, primitive tribal culture.

All of which does not mean that it’s illegitimate to criticize Israeli policies. All of which does not mean that one is morally obligated to consider the creation of the Israeli state an act of immaculate conception. (Look up the term; it’s probably not what you think. You will thank me!) Personally, I think its foundation involved a sin against the small, ignorant, ill-represented Palestinian population. But a cat is a cat. You have to be drinking something funny to keep affirming it’s a coyote or a raccoon.

My radio show, “Facts Matter” comes on on Sunday on KSCO Santa Cruz, 1080 AM. It’s from 11 am to 1 pm. You can catch it on-line while it’s going on.

Air Controllers, Gaza Follies.

For some reason that’s not completely clear, my two-hour Sunday radio show tires me. (It’s “Facts Matter,” Sundays 11 to 1pm, KSCO radio Santa Cruz 1080 AM.) Similarly, lecturing used to tire me. I still don’t know why because I don’t believe there is such a thing as “mental fatigue” as such. Anyway, today, just two short observations.

Another time when a story treated as complex by the media seems simple to me. It’s about air controllers falling asleep on the job.

Human beings will fall asleep when they are just too sleepy to stay awake. It’s cruel to pretend otherwise. And the downright snoring is just the tip of the iceberg, of course; bet on it. For one who gets caught sleeping, there are ten, or one hundred who don’t get caught. And for one who actually falls a sleep, there are tens or hundreds who operate at diminished capacity, as we have all done.

From an organizational standpoint, there is only one reason for air controllers sleeping sickness: There aren’t enough of them. And air controllers are not like gold, released by Mother Nature in limited quantities. We can pretty much chose to train and recruit as many as we want. Just guessing but if there were 50% more of them, the sleeping and the near-sleep would drop by 90% . That would be big progress.

So, why doesn’t the federal government do it? Another guess: Air controllers cost a lot. I don’t mean just pay (which I did not bother to look up). And I think they should be well-paid, like all people exercising big responsibilities. I mean federal benefit packages that include acupuncture for their great-niece and the possibility to retire at 85% of highest pay almost into the 22^nd century. (OK, I made this up but you get my drift.) So, it’s a political decision or, like many problems of life, but not all, it can be solved by making a couple of straightforward decisions. Those who resist this line of thought are mostly interested in keeping the populace in the fog about the completely made-up mysteries of government.

Second item: Last week something bad happened in Gaza. Lots of bad things happen in Gaza but that one was really new. An Italian journalist (or blogger, the story I read was not clear) had been living there for a while. He had given himself the mission of interfering with Israeli atrocities. An Al Quaida affiliate grabbed him off the street and beheaded him on video. Sounds fair to me. What do you think?

Another thing happened last week in connection with the same horrid little corner of the globe. Judge Richard Goldstone withdrew his charge that Israelis had deliberately targeted civilians in their 2009 attack on Gaza. The charge was contained in a document called” the Goldstone Report,” of course. The withdrawal made no difference to western advocates of Palestinian extremists. They wish to fight to the last Palestinian. And to the last Israeli. Besides, Judge Goldstone is probably a Jew. Fucking Jews!

Note: I have no animosity against Palestinians. They are a people whom history – and their own blind and immoral choices – have treated badly. I wish their current Prime Minister well. It appears he has quietly decided that collecting garbage in the streets and from within his own administration is a better way to prepare a Palestinian state than pursuing the impossible sweet dream of throwing the Jews into the sea.

PS No, I am not Jewish. Look at my last name, for Christ’s sake!

French Movies, Sex, and the Welfare State

It’s hard to fully grasp white if you have never seen black, or green if you don’t know red or orange. And the understanding of water a fish carries in its tiny brain is probably not so great. (That’s except for flying fishes, of course. They exist; they are amazing.)

The same is true for cultures in general, including national cultures. I am pretty sure that observant individuals who have good knowledge of another culture understand best the culture in which they live. “Compare and contrast” always does some good. It does not matter much where the knowledge of the other culture comes from; it all works out the same. Thus many long-term immigrants we would expect to have a grasp of American culture superior to that of the native-born in general, with some predictable gaps.

I, of course, was reared in France. I know the French language as well as anyone and better than almost all younger French people whose vocabulary is astonishingly poor and whose command of grammar is often downright rustic. I have also a good access to Mexican culture because of many small conversations with California Mexicans, because of several long stays in Mexico, because of my readings of Mexican authors but above, all, because of my sometimes dedication to Mexican telenovelas. And here is an aside: Anyone who thinks telenovelas don’t tell you anything about the “real” Mexico is missing the relationship between a people and the art forms it develops and consumes. He might just as well say that “Dallas,” the soap, was not about American society. Was it about Estonia, China, Germany, Egypt, then? End of aside. Anyway, here again, being able to understand the language corresponding to the culture is essential. (Speaking it does not matter nearly as much.)

No, a little more bragging is sadly necessary. I have lived in this country for nearly fifty years. That’s longer than most American-born citizens alive today, I would guess. Nevertheless, there are gaps in my understanding of American culture. Much that normally happens in American society before high-school is hazy, second-hand, or absent from my mind altogether. That’s because much of it appears trite, or downright boring, not worth the effort of finding out about. Baseball would be an example of the latter. A friend who is a fan actually told me once, “ You don’t understand, Jacques, baseballis supposed to be boring.” ! Although I speak English with an accent (that gets worse as my hearing deteriorates), I would describe my understanding of the language as near perfect and my command in the use the same language as better than pretty damn good. At the same time, and contrary to a widespread but naïve impression, you don’t lose the fundamentals of your culture of origin by living in another society. And you certainly don’t forget your native tongue (although some seldom-used terms might slip your mind). Thus, I am a truly bi-cultural person person which allows me legitimately to pull rank on most of you. So, sit up and listen.

After a hiatus of ten years, I have French language television in my house again and I am watching it several hours a day. It’s not that its fare is so great. The social scientist in me just has to. Overall, French television has improved a great deal in ten years. Mostly, it now offers pretty good serials. They are clearly imitations of American serials, an improvement in itself, especially as regards tempo. They benefit from being often filmed in the admirable French countryside. And, for some reason, the French have always produced good documentaries. (The 2005 “March of the Penguins” is a French production.) I have even discovered in replays of French television a literary show that has no equal anywhere in America. It’s the very best that contemporary French culture has to offer.

TV5, the French language television channel also offers some Canadian and Belgian movies, and many more French movies practically every night. A high proportion of the latter are recent films. There are so many of those that, after a while, I feel free to generalize. My generalizations in turn are like the negative of American culture: What disappoints me, what disturbs me, what I miss in French movies are salient features of American culture that make up much of the pleasure of everyday life in America.

First, and strikingly, the French cinema is dependent for full effect on American popular music in English, a language few master. Two reasons, I think. The first reason is that French popular music today is devoid of the quality of soul. French audiences recognize soul but French composers and singers are unable to produce it. So, French film directors borrow it from where they can: here. They do in about 80% of French films I would say, even in films that feature otherwise good French popular music. The second reason I give for this reliance on American popular music is more tenuous but I believe it’s quite real. French society is old and aging fast. (Other European societies are aging even faster.) Not much happens in France on a day-to-day basis, or on a year-to-year basis, or during one’s own full childhood. Things are pretty much today as they were yesterday and the day before. This is charming to semi-literate American tourists who think it gives the country “authenticity.” This immobility is a source of sadness to many French people, including the young but not limited to them. They know that progress must give visual and especially, auditory signals. French directors, who live constantly with one eye fixed on the other side of the Atlantic, are vaguely aware of this deficiency. I think they watch their near-final product, decide it’s not moderne enough. Then, they add a couple of pieces of American popular music to signal, that their movie was not made in 1955.

Here is my second observation: As you might expect, French movies often contain scenes of unconstrained sex and and of unrestrained nudity. This fact almost never makes them even vaguely erotic. The French seem to have invented the passion-free, almost sexless, sex scene. I mean hot, perspiring, hard-breathing passion; I don’t mean anything more refined. When French films show nudity, which is often, as I have said, there seems to be no intent to show the naked human body in an attractive light. Sometimes, they almost seem to go out of their way to make nakedness seem vaguely disgusting, as if old-fashioned Catholic nuns were behind the camera. (New-fashioned Catholic nuns tend to be militant lesbians or else, they pretend to be.) The two dozen or so contemporary French directors who turn out almost all recent movies appear to have grown up without benefit of Playboy magazine. It’s puzzling and a little dispiriting. I am not sure what this lacuna means for French culture in general. Perhaps, it’s an expression of a lack of appetite for life. “La chair est triste, hélas et j’ai lu tous les livres, “ wrote the popular 19^th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. So, maybe, its an old thing within French culture and I am reading too much into a few movies. As the case may be, I have never felt that way about any American film. That’s never.

My third observation concerns oozing. I mean the quiet despair that oozes from many contemporary French movies except comedies and even from a few of those. Sometimes, dispair is the very topic of the film as in the fairly acclaimed: “La ville est tranquille,” staged in de-industrializing Marseille. More often, the cynicism and the hopelessness come thorough as if bleeding from the corners of the screen, in the assumptions of unimportant casual conversation between characters, for example. They also come through, of course, in the large proportions of those characters who happen to be unemployed, or not-yet-employed in spite of their advanced youth. And think about it: I am not referring to the poor or to conventional poverty. Nearly all the characters in all French movies are well-clothed, very well housed by world standards, excellently doctored, and they enjoy more than twelve years of freer than free education if they want it. (“freer than free” because most French post-high-school students receive a state stipend and subsidized meals while they pay no tuition.) And, as you might have guessed, the average French working or non-working stiff eats better in France than the average American banker in America. (A lot  better, actually!)

So, what I think I perceive, what I read between the lines in many French movies, what I think I would guess about French society by watching these movies even if I did not know the numbers, is a sense of futureless-ness. When people have nothing to look forward to, or only the next vacation, they become joyless about just almost everything. Of course, you would expect an underlying sense of hopelessness to be pervasive in all societies where a 2% economic growth rate is an occasion for official celebration. It has to be even worse when the feeling is that the end of the party – such as it was – is just around the corner.

Forty to thirty years ago, the French, like other western Europeans, chose security over everything else. It made them backward, inexpressive, and chronically despondent. As their nanny state unravels and their children keep having to pay the piper, it looks to them like everything is going to get worse. So, they have lost their appetite, even for sex.

PS     I don’t think things are going to become worse in France myself. I suspect that after a painful transition, the French will wake up and recover the vigor that was their grand-parents’ during the post-war years. That was when they acquired the economic means to enter resolutely the dead-end of welfarism instead of the open road of entrepreneurship and growth. Then, they will start making good movies again.

Update: The news on TV5, which is not exactly French television but television in French, continues to regal me with instances of staggering ignorance. Tonight, the anchor reminded us that fifty years ago, at the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro “repelled the American Army.” The ignorance is not neutral, it has a strong ideological bias. Guess which. Watching TV5 news has the merit of helping me appreciate the blond bombshells on Fox. They seldom say anything patently untrue and they are pleasant to look at (unlike naked women in French movies for example. See above.)

My show, “Facts Matter” is Sunday from 11 am to 1 pm. It’s on KSCO radio Santa Cruz, 1080 AM. It’s available on-line, in real time only. See you there!

Your Debt, My Debt, Tralalalala!

In the temporary agreement recently reached by Democrats and Republicans something like $38 billions were cut from the current budget. That’s only about $120 per American, spread over six months. It’s nothing to write home about but it’s good training for what’s to come. That’s the debt ceiling, an issue that will arise in a couple of months. The “debt,” the national debt, all federal, is simply the accumulation of federal budget deficits that is not paid back at a given time.

The federal government cannot by law spend money Congress has not appropriated. Much of the money it spends is borrowed. There is no shame as such for governments to borrow money. It might borrow to build highways, harbors and bridges and such. That contributes often to the productivity of the general economy. Also, traditionally, government bonds (titles to government debt) have provided safe investment for seniors. They are a source of harmless inter-generational loan: The old lend money to the government that uses it to create conditions that will benefit the young. The young pay back at a modest interest rate. Federal government interest rates are traditionally low because people and organizations trust, used to trust, that government would pay back the money it borrowed.

The Federal debt now stands at about $140,000 per American, man, woman, and newborn baby. That’s right, a baby born today already owes $140,000. That’s plus the share of my debt I won’t be able to pay back before the lottery-in-the-sky calls my number.

Unfortunately, government borrowing is mostly not as virtuous or innocuous as the description above implies. Much of it, most of it, I think, is simply debt incurred to pay for current expenses. The federal budget mixes rational debt similar to the debt I incur when I purchase a better tool to make me more productive, or a house I expect to increase in value, on the one hand, and money I spend on my credit cards to drink more expensive wine than I otherwise would, on the other hand.

Note that an individual such as I is severely limited in how much crazy spending he can engage in. All my life, bankers have restricted my borrowing to what I could afford or to debts backed by real collateral such as a house or a car. Credit cards could have been the exception to this rule of enforced wisdom except that I read the fine print and when I see annual interest rates of 12%, 15%, and now, I hear, up to 24%, my own rational self-control comes on-line. I slap myself a couple of times across the head and I go have a couple of beers with a friend (for which I pay cash), and the urge vanishes.

The federal government knows no such restraints. First, the law does not even allow the President to distinguish between the two kinds of expenses, to improve productivity and to live like a whore. That’s called he “line veto.” Many state governors have it, the President does not, an open door to federal fiscal irresponsibility. Second, the federal government is not normally put off by high interest rates it has to pay – until now. The reason is that most people, most organizations and, as we shall see, some foreign governments, believe that the US federal government can always pay its debts by raising taxes. With little perceived risk of default goes low interest rates.

Everyone knows the game has to stop somewhere. No one knows where. It takes political will to say, “The party is over.” There is such political will now, exceptionally, because of the Tea Party movement that is kicking the Republican Party into shape. It’s useful to understand the dimensions of what we as American citizens are facing. $140,000 is about four times the value of what we currently produce per American. If we taxed ourselves one third of what we produce annually just to pay off the debt, it would take more than 12 years. Of course, we would still have to tax ourselves further to support the most necessary federal services (of which, there should be few according to me and according the the Constitution of the United States). This calculation assumes that the rate of growth of our economy and the value of production by Americans remained stationary. If our economy grew at 3%, a modest goal but not a sure one, it would take only about five years. If our economy grew at paltry European rates of 1% to 2 % it would take much longer. So, economic growth rates matters a great deal. Anything that keeps our economy from growing perpetuates our collective indebtedness. That would include high taxation of the “rich,” and high taxation of corporations. And of course, I give these figures only to make our debt more concrete. There is zero chance Americans will want to dedicate one third of their earnings to paying off the national debt.

There are several predictable consequences to government indebtedness I review below. But first, a reminder: I am only talking about the “national” or “federal” debt. The debts incurred by states and local governments are not included. You are responsible for those also. Some states, including California, are proportionately as indebted as the federal government. Finally, keep in mind that the debs accumulated by Americans, individuals and organizations, are yet another, completely separate topic. You will be saddled with your debts, on credit cards, mortgages, etc, irrespective of the policies the federal government ultimately adopts vis-a-vis its debt. Here are the four main consequences;

First, the principal on the debt has to be repaid to some extent. That’s money out of your paycheck and not available for federal government services, including military services. Alternatively, it’s money obtained by raising taxes which undermines in turn our collective ability to pay the debt.

Second, with a high level of debt comes creditors’ unease and potential creditors’ reluctance to lend. The remedy is higher interest rates. The higher the interest the federal government offers creditors to borrow money, the more will have to be taken from you in taxes, just to service the debt. Or, the lower the level of services the federal government can offer. In spite of high interest rates, the greater the federal government’s obligation to all kinds of creditors, the more difficult it is to borrow more. At some point, not precisely defined, it becomes nearly impossible for the government to borrow at any interest rate. This might be a good thing, vigorous medical treatment, if inability to borrow signaled the end of borrowing. This is rarely the case, however because the federal government is in the habit of borrowing to pay off previous debt. Hence, at some point the fear that the government will default on its debt arises. It’s true that the federal government has never defaulted but other national governments have. If the Treasury announced: “ We will give you 10 cents on each dollar the government owes you; take it or leave it,” what would anyone do about it?

Third, instead of being scattered largely among its own citizens, the US federal debt is increasingly owned by other governments. I think that about ¼ of the debt is currently owned by the Chinese (Communist) government. Generally, I don’t worry much about governments holding a share of our debt. It’s a proof of confidence, after all. The Chinese government is different though. It has geo-political goals as well as economic goals. I am not afraid of China sending a fleet to collect but I can imagine circumstances when it would liquidate its American debt holdings suddenly, causing US federal titles value to plunge. In this scenario, I am guessing that many Chinese organizations and individuals would follow suite and also liquidate simply because they are generally ill-informed about the rest of the world.

The fourth consequence of high national indebtedness is both the gravest and the most insidious. The high interest bonds the federal government is forced to offer to the market to continue borrowing compete directly with productive investment. If the government offers me miserably low interest rates for my savings, investing in publicly held companies will look more attractive than if it does no. More or less every dollar taken by the federal government as debt does not go to developing American productive capacity, does not go to higher employment, does not go toward economic growth. Perversely, every dollar borrowed by the federal government today thus undermines the federal government’s capability to tax tomorrow. That’s because production and people who are employed can be taxed, whereas non-production and unemployment cannot be, obviously.

The effect of this third consequence is hard to measure and harder to explain but economists do it all the time and there is no doubt at all about the simplification above.

Two last comments: First, if the US economy grew at 4% for five years, we would see the debt problem recede in the background. We have doe it before; we could do it again absent anti-business government intervention. Second, contrary to a downright lie spread daily by the liberal media, in a slow economy, it’s the poor that suffer the most. The rich just go on vacation to the Bahamas instead of Monte-Carlo.

NPR is spreading alarmist rumors about Chernobyl cancers without attribution. The Japanese government has just raised the official seriousness of its nuclear problems to level 7. I am sure it has its own reasons. I don’t know what the move means and none of the usual media heads have bothered to find out either. At this point, and after more than 200 visits to my blog, I see no reason to revise my assessment that no Americans are in danger. (See: “Radiation and Health….” on this blog and also, “Radiation Danger….”)

Fed. Government Shuts Down and Not Much Happens

There might be a real government shutdown because the Republicans are holding fast, so far. The airways are full of speculation about whether or not.There is not much talk about the “what” of such possible cessation of federal government activities. That’s aside from the anticipated suffering of federal employees, of course.

The cold-hearted social scientist in me can’t help but be overtaken by curiosity. I  have been proclaiming for years that there is too much federal government, a lot too much. The President and the two houses of Congress are going to offer us a real-life experiment it seems. The experiment will be about what we miss when the fed stops doing business. Although many federal employees will do their best to dramatize the plight of ordinary citizens when they don’t work, a government shutdown will give us some idea of what the ordinary person suffers when the federal government does little. I can’t wait.

And, in case you are tempted to charge my natural curiosity and my insouciance to my being one of the selfish independently wealthy, get real. I am on Social Security and on Medicare. I stand proudly on the frontline of this mini-war between common sense and honesty on the one side and gross irresponsibility one the other side. Even then, I hope we will witness the unthinkable. Please!

The Down Jones was down 36 points on the news that no progress had been made in reaching an agreement on the budget. For those who don’t follow such thing, 36 points down is pretty muchwhat happens when any number of reach men go to the bathroom.

Things That Make You Laugh

A small group of vegetarian environmental activists swimming in tight formation behind a gray whale that’s just had a big meal of bad herring.

OK, I did not see this. I just dreamed it but it was a good dream and it could happen.