Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

As ideas, memes, and trends trend on Facebook, it’s hard to keep up.  It’s sort of frustrating when you see that something has become such a part of the zeitgeist, part of the current vocabulary,  that everybody is just using its initials and assuming you knnow what it means.

Such with MMT.  I had to ask first what it stood for, and then what it meant.  Fortunately, I was on a thread with people who were genuinely interested in spreading ideas, and not just giving sarcastic answers which amount to “Ha! I knew that weeks ago.  Boy, are you behind the times!”

Basically (and this is probably a gross oversimplification, I’m not an economist), the idea is that if the government decides on a project, the money comes into existence automatically.  The government spends the money, and the work gets done.  Nobody asks where it comes from, and they keep up with taxes, and traffic tickets and such, to keep up  the illusion that the government, like a family  or individual or small business, has to take money in before they can spend it.  What needs to be there (even though  the money doesn’t) is the resources.  For instance, if the government wants to wage a war, there needs to be  factories which will manufacture the airplanes and the bombs for the government to funnel its automatically minted money into.  If some insist on cash,  they can print more.  Health care is  perfectly affordable, as long as there are enough doctors, nurses, hospital beds, and medicines.
And so on.  It’s pretty obviously true.  Money is not a real thing.  It has always depended on people believing in it.  And we do.
I would just add that people who are talking about MMT as if this is a new idea should read more Buckminster Fuller.  He had a formula for calculating the world’s wealth and I can’t find it right now on google but it was something like W=RxTxE.  Wealth equals all the resources that are available, times the current state of technology, i.e. the knowledge of how to use and manipulate them, times energy, which he spoke of in terms of manpower but, really, manpower is barely relevant any more.
It’s a rich planet.  It’s a very wealthy time in history and likely to get more so.  We can either get it together and create a utopian paradise, which would be as easy as having the will to do so, or committing mass suicide as a species.  Our choice.

It was a fairly accomplished day in a couple of mundane ways.   I got several  chapters  of a translation done.  That is, a proofreading.  My  wife has already done the translation.  Still, it’s a bit of work.  My wife speaks impeccable English, but it still winds up as a page of squiggly marks  by the time I’m done.
I also got started on my Rheets: 2018 book.  Now, I do one of  these a year, and they are listed for  sale on Kindle along with my other poetry books, but I  wouldn’t recommend them.  In fact, I should  probably  withdraw them, because it’s more of a writing project than a serious attempt at poetry.  What it is, is every day  after I finish writing this blog, I go over to Twitter and write a  two  line poem on  whatever the blog is about, and link to it.  At the end of the year, I’ve got 365 two line poems (more or less, in the course of a year I may miss a night or two) and they sort of serve  as a time capsule of  the year.  So, today I moved all of 2018’s rhyming tweets (hence Rheets.   The first year I did this I  called them Twoems but since nobody at all was reading them, I changed the name, which,  it turns  out, was not the reason nobody was reading them, but Rheets has stuck) over to a separate  word file.  There’s still  a lot of formatting to do, an introduction to  write, and a cover to design, but I’m farther along than I have ever been on  January 2nd.

2019 started with a major personal win.  My next book  of poetry is finished and has been sent to Create Space for approval, which is pretty  much automatic, so I should be able to announce in a couple of days that it’s available on Amazon and Kindle.
So, The Quest for Enlightenment and Stuff will join Poems from Prague, The Guru Kalehuru and Other Poems, The Alchemist’s Notebook, Four Syllables on Water, Tarot Poems, 155 Sonnets, Pink Snow, The This of the That, The Meaning of Life in Easy English, Uncle Willie’s Very Silly Animal Poems, Geology, Wild Pigs of Fukushima, and Paradox in my continuously growing books of poetry that nobody reads.
Whatever, I think they’re all good, and hope that someday they are discovered by a wider audience.  If anybody is reading this  blog and would like to check them out for free, all you have to do is click on the box that says ‘Poetry’ which is right next to the box that says ‘Home’, and they’re all there.  Or will  be, sometimes I get a book or two behind.
I hope it’s a sign that the rest of the year will be similarly productive.  Another book  of poetry or two, although none have even been started, maybe a novel which is my New Year’s resolution every year and never happens (‘Lose Weight is another), and I definitely plan to put together a collection of favorite blog posts but that is turning out to be more tedious work than I thought it would be.  I’ve been writing a blog a day for 9 years and as I read back through them, there is an amazing consistency.  Few stand out as horrible.  Few stand out as great.
O.K., I’ve hit my 250 words for today.  Good night, world.

I hope that 2019 will be better than 2018, and I certainly wish everybody, personally, the best, but in all honesty I don’t think it will be.
We all knew that the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in the U.S. was going to be a protracted and painful affair, and confirmation of that came today.  Elizabeth Warren, hated on the right for her economic policies and on the left for the way she stabbed Bernie in the back in 2016, announced her candidacy today.  It’s probably a politically astute move to announce her candidacy early, and give everybody a chance to get over the negatives before everybody else jumps into the fray, but it’s a sure sign that the Democrats haven’t learned shit, and don’t intend to.
I had arguments with people on Facebook which reminded me, word for bitter word, of arguments I had with Hillary supporters in the Spring and early  Summer of 2016.  They are already starting with “If she gets the nomination you will have to support her,” to which my answer is now pretty much the same as it was then: Fuck you.  I’m not going to support somebody I don’t like.  That is over.
Elizabeth Warren is not exactly famous for standing up to the oil companies.  Her opposition to the Dakota pipeline, if it existed at all, was muted.  She voted for the ridiculously bloated military budget.  I don’t know where she stands on MedicareforAll and a Green New Deal, and those are important issues.  If she’s a progressive (and she does talk a good game on economics) then she’s got a long  way to go to prove it.
And from her opening remarks, it seems clear to me that  she doesn’t even intend to try.

It would be beautiful if we had some international means of communication, where every person could communicate with all people and we could examine a subject from all angles and come to an intelligent solution.
Oh, wait, we do have that.  But, it’s not working, and that’s because most people aren’t very good at this public debate thing.  Everybody’s determined to push their own point of view (which I see as pretty natural, and I’m guilty of it, too), and they’ll do so with straw men arguments, ad hominem attacks, and any other logical fallacy it’s convenient to use at any point in the discussion. Plus, there are spammers and trolls.
I suspected that we were dealing with one of those this afternoon, of the type called a ‘concern troll.’  You know, they act like they’re on your side, but they’re not.  This one was all “I voted for Bernie in the primary but he’s just got too much baggage to run again” which is simply not true.  They couldn’t hang any scandal on him in 2016, and there hasn’t been any since.
There was another thing she said that made me think she  was a Clintonite and her whole “I voted for Bernie in the  primaries” was a flat out lie.  In response to somebody else’s comment, she referred to his ‘veiled sexism.’  I read back over his comment and I’ll be damned if I could see where he’d mentioned gender at all.  So, I guess ‘veiled sexism’ means “I could hear it even if you never said it” and I’m not sure if that counts as a straw man argument or if it deserves a category all its own.