Tag Archives: america

A 100,000 Year Obsession

A few hundred thousand years ago, human beings began to develop spoken language. Although the first words spoken are lost to (pre)history, they were undoubtedly related to food and the struggle to survive. As night fell over that first day of human speech, however, Homo sapiens all over the planet peered into the sky and uttered one of man’s deepest obsessions:

Woah, I want to go there.

Just as mankind was becoming self-aware, he was also becoming aware of the wonders of the unknown. Just beginning to grasp the concept of what is here and what is there, early humans must have been filled with awe to discover a place that was so far from here that it was beyond there. Driven perhaps by evolutionary tendencies, mankind began to collectively scheme about that space that defied their exploration.

Most of the world’s prehistoric sites are devoted to a study of the sky. Acting variously as solar or lunar calendars, these structures reflect one of the few unifying characteristics of human beings all over the world: the desire to understand space.

Hale Bopp Over Stonehenge. I can't find the original author to verify, but this looks like a perfect untouched photo.

For hundreds of thousands of years, structures eerily similar to the one above were constructed by cultures all over the world.

As time moved on — something we noted because of our study of the stars — human beings began to explore our planet. We traveled to every continent, conquered, retreated, and reconquered every land, and navigated every sea. All of these things we accomplished so easily and so quickly. Man, the great explorer, had seen every bit of Earth.

Except the outside.

Woah, he went there

Fifty years ago today, John Glenn became the first human being to ever see the whole planet from space. In a crazy moment of fierce competitive exploration, humanity had literally propelled a man into orbit around his planet of origin. Glenn returned to Earth safely three rotations later, and effectively became an instant celebrity. A hero.

Although Glenn had transformed the future of exploration forever (think about how the space race would have turned out if he had died from unknown space pathogens — a real fear at the time) and scratched the itch of man’s exploring spirit, his example only helped fuel man’s obsession with space. Although it took some 100,000 years of human history to send a man around the world in a rocket, it only took eight years to land a man on the moon after John Glenn’s spin around the globe.

Just as Glenn’s trip 50 years ago was a confidence booster for the American space program and the international community, the spirit of exploration for the betterment of our species must continue to serve as an inspiration. We can’t, as human beings, allow a 100,000 year obsession turn into a historical artifact. Sure, Newt Gingrich’s lunar colony plan is crazy, but one of humanity’s greatest accomplishment should never be abandoned. To quote an article I wrote last May (available here – http://www.meanwhileinwv.com/2011/05/former_frontier/),

… space exploration is something we need. The course of man’s history has been to continually grow and change; we can’t afford to let that stop now.

A 100,000 Year Obsession

Leave a reply

Woah, I want to go there.

Hale Bopp Over Stonehenge. I can't find the original author to verify, but this looks like a perfect untouched photo.

For hundreds of thousands of years, structures eerily similar to the one above were constructed by cultures all over the world.

Except the outside.

Woah, he went there

… space exploration is something we need. The course of man’s history has been to continually grow and change; we can’t afford to let that stop now.

Occupy Wall Street?

Leave a reply

With the end of season 1 of the Meanwhile in West Virginia Show in August, I decided it was time for me to go on a brief hiatus from writing on Meanwhile in West Virginia, choosing instead to pour my energy into developing Season 2 of the MNWV Show, buying a car, and taking care of the little things that pop in life. It’s silly for me to say that in the two months I’ve been missing from MNWV that the world has changed; even with the pace of interactions between peoples in a modern world, two months isn’t that long. Still, as the others and I at MNWV have found out, time moves much faster on the Internet.

Two months in Internet time is an eternity.

The Elephant in the Room, in some regards, has been the most obvious of these changes: the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

For a little over three weeks now, protesters in New York and around the country have spilled out into the streets protesting something. For their part, mainstream media have covered the events rather well; almost every day on the nightly news of the major networks, a portion of that night’s commentary and footage has come from the events of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spread across most of the states.

Occupy Wall Street is a strange little movement. While most protests in the US have been painstakingly organized to carefully make a point or petition for social change, the folks with Occupy Wall Street seem to have sprung up right from the sidewalk. Without the exact definition the media, politicians, and mainstream Americans are used to hearing from these kind of groups, the Occupy Wall Street (hereafter OWS) movement looks like a sloppy mess of messy, angry people shouting about percentages. If you happen to be asking yourself what these people are protesting, you’re not alone; with no organized structure and no specific platform, it can be difficult to sniff out exactly what these protesters want.

While Americans, the media, and politicians scratch their heads about exactly what is being protested, it’s (shockingly enough) Herman Caine that’s got it all worked out. According to a recent interview, the ex-CEO of Godfather’s Pizza claims that OWS is out to incite “class warfare“.

“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”

“It is not a person’s fault because they succeeded, it is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what is it that they’re looking for.”

Cain’s opinion and the American public beg the question: what is OWS looking for?

The answer has been one of right-leaning America’s favorite (however misunderstood) buzzwords since Obama arrived on the scene to slay the George Bush monster what seems like eons ago: socialism.

OWS is textbook socialism. Although a full analysis of the cycle of an economy through feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism is beyond the scope of this post, the OWS movement falls neatly in the progression from step 2 to 3 in the path to socialism (and her sister, communism).

According to Carl Marx, the man behind the origins of communist theory, there are certain conditions a society must meet if it is to move from capitalism to socialism. In an extremely simple look at the process, workers need to be educated, the economy needs to have a profusion of cash, and the workers need to have become completely fed up (or immiserated, if you prefer) at having been left out of that cash. The next step is a little fuzzy in Marx’s texts, but there is then basically a transition to a society with greater sharing of the capital made by the workers.

Occupy Wall Street: not quite this intense

If the abstract look at Marxism is a little too vague, let’s take another look at how OWS is applying this theory – whether they know it or not. The main premise of their protest is all about how the 99% (the workers or proletariat in Marxist theory) are being treated unfairly by the 1% (their employers, the bourgeoisie, Wall Street, etc.) and believe the situation can be made better if they receive a more fair share (more money, more jobs, free flow of capital, etc.). Whatever OWS is calling what they’re fighting for, it’s only part of what Marx would have considered the inevitable progression to communism.

So far, my look at OWS has taken for granted that Americans want socialism. At the risk of being redundant, though, I think it’s important that I point out an argument I made in one of my very first posts about socialism in America -

After the second World War, the tax on the wealthiest of Americans did not dip below 80% until 1964. At times the tax rate was as high as 92%!

With that money we built interstate highways, businesses, infrastructure… the best country in the world. The money our country brought in by taxing the wealthiest of Americans absurd rates kept us (mostly/relatively) out of debt and worry free, instead focusing on business, family, and staying afloat. (http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php)

In a nutshell, OWS is fighting for social programs that seem to have died out in America in exchange for needless wars and ridiculous spending on corporate America. It’s not simple enough to say protests are aimed at banks for denying loans or foreclosing on mortgages or even on employers for sending jobs overseas; the ultimate goal of the OWS movement is to restore the broken system of American spending.

The real problem with my original post on what I called “absurd” tax rates was that I provided no real information about what Americans’ tax dollars were buying. 80% tax in the middle 60s bought services and the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. An 80% tax in 2011 would only buy a few hundred years off the time needed to pay off the debt we have accumulated as a nation paying off the men, women, and corporation who have basically deprived average Americans from what they deserve and have had before.

At this point in the post, several of my readers are probably crying in anger (or worse, sending me angry email). Regardless of your political orientation, the larger message of this protest should be one of democracy. What the protestors are doing is absolutely crucial to the function of a democracy. According to Bishop’s last post, even he didn’t vote in the last election, pointing to some fundamental flaw in our power to petition the government. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the changes the OWS movement may be promoting, embrace the idea that average men and women can still work towards making a difference in a nation so broken.

Occupy Wall Street is fighting for a more fair future in America. Still, the larger message of OWS is more important than socialism, economic policy, or even employment: the citizens of this country can still fight for a different path. We can keep our democracy for another day.

Part 2: When Does A Recession Become A Depression?

Leave a reply

[powerpress url="http://www.meanwhileinwv.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/01-Song-of-the-South.mp3"]

There is no definition or agreed upon rule which determines the answer to this question. Just as in Part One of this series; America’s Two Great Depressions: An Intro, there is no finite method of measuring the terms recession and depression. If you Google the above question (hopefully you’ll find your way to this post if that isn’t how you found it already), you’ll probably come across the maxim among those who study economics:

“A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours.”

And while that seems to be nothing more than a humorous quip, that is basically how it works.

It’s easy for us, and the real economists as well, to take a step back and watch the markets, see what’s going on with the EU and the Greece mess, and to recognize that maybe that you don’t need to take that trip to Panama when Myrtle Beach will do at half the price. (This is a blog about West Virginia, it was a travesty that none of us had given the West Virginian Myrtle Beach plug.) We can look at all of that and recognize that times are tough, GDP is down, and all of that; hence, we recognize that we are in a recession.

However, once we, including the economists, start losing our jobs, can’t pay our bills, and have to worry about whether to get the medication we need or food to eat, it sure starts to feel like more of a depression than a recession. Before 1929, there was no difference between a “Depression” and a “Recession” any significant economic downturn was classified as a depression. In 1929, that all changed when one of those economic downturns turned into an economic swan-dive from which it took 12 years to recover.

The Great Depression saw some of the greatest human suffering in recent US history, and has never completely left the minds of the American people. With that knowledge, and with the certainty that the economy and stock market was bound to have downturns, due to its inherent nature of fluctuating, the word “depression” became taboo in economics. The fear was, and is, that the slightest hint of the word would create instability within the markets, and just by suggesting that we were headed for another depression would drive people away and could easily send the market into another devastating swan-dive.So economists created a distinction between a recession and a depression.

For better or for worse, a generally accepted rule is that a recession is any decline in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that is less severe than a depression, which is when GDP is declines by more than 10% for more than two quarters.¹

The above classification is a decent yardstick to begin with, but only in the sense that it’s a attempting to measure multiple miles with a yardstick. Economies are far too complicated for such a basic classification system. There are many problems with this system that I will address, but first, let’s operate within the above parameters.

GDP Percentage vs Quarter

The above chart shows percent change in US GDP. As you can see, between the 3rd quarter of 2007 and the 4th quarter of 2008, GDP declined by 11.1%, and while it rose slightly during the period after this chart, GDP remained declined by more than 10% for two quarters… So, according to the above parameters, were we actually in a depression?…

Well, not really. While at first glance this chart seems to suggest that we were actually in a depression, instead of a recession, there are two problems.

First, it doesn’t measure from peak to peak, only from zero. So, technically, the high we were at in 2007 doesn’t count, only the -6.3. So we only declined by 6%. Also, the above chart measures GDP, instead of Real GDP. Complicated enough yet?Real GDP, in a nutshell, is an economy’s Gross Domestic Product, adjusted for price factors (which include inflation, deflation, etc). ²

And there-in lies the problem with the accepted definition, in all honesty, it means nothing. GDP, is a worthless system of measure in and of itself; at least as an “end” product. As Kuyler just said, “GDP is like horse-power, its effective up to a point, but I just outran a Dodge Dakota with 400 horse-power compared to my 150 horse-power Subaru Outback.” It is a nice looking number, but in the end it tells us very little.

And GDP is an important number, it technically measures a country’s output, or how much it is producing, but we use it to measure everything from a country’s wealth to the living standards of its people.

So, to answer the Title-Question of this blog entry, “When does a recession become a depression,” we have a flawed system composed of flawed elements as the basis to derive an answer.

That just isn’t sufficient from my point of view. It is too easy for someone who is trying to answer this question to approach it to looking at only the numbers. This is a trap we all fall into.

For instance, when we purchase gasoline we get all excited when its $3.59 a gallon, but we all forget that hidden $.009. Likewise, it is easy to overlook the hidden elements of an economy, the most prominent of those numbers being the people on which that economy is built.

So the answer to the question? There is no empirical answer. No talking-head analyst on your television can answer that question for you.

To put it in the words of the band Alabama, “Well somebody told us Wall Street fell, But we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.”

The economy, like so many other things in life, is relative. What is true for you is not always true for your neighbors, and vice-versa.

So when does a recession become a depression?

Take a look at your life, the lives of your friends and loved ones. Take a look at where the country stands now, regardless of political philosophy and partisan lines. Take a look at where we are heading. You’ll be able to tell, I promise you. A good rule of thumb, if it feels like a depression to you, then it probably is. But you tell me, when does a recession become a depression?

Collateral Damage: Making Destiny Manifest

4 Replies

[powerpress url="http://meanwhileinwv.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Collateral.mp3"]

“Look what you people have done to my people.”

As white settlers began to fill out along the rivers and hills that ripple across the continent, the “American” identity took form. We were, and still quite are, proud bands of stalwart Europeans that had cut our umbilical cords with the Old World. White America grew and prospered under a sense of normality; that their way of life was the status-quo and others were novel, foreign, and often barbaric.

Barbaric.

Barbarians that ate white children and burned villages to the ground. Savages under the influence of the Devil himself perverting apple pie, baseball, and beef jerky to their sick liking. Stone-Age people who we’d be doing a favor by liberating their land from them while teaching them how to hold silverware in a proper manner.

Proper.

Sounds a bit like a well-spoken Archie Bunker, right? Well as much as America would like to call itself claim severance from pompous European righteousness and declared itself as a country by the people, that’s not happening. Looks like we brought more destructiveness from Western Europe than just small pox blankets.

European people have had a horrible track record of bigotry since the fall of Rome. Early Christians saw Jews as having received the judgment of God and were scapegoats for the death of Christ. Alien bands of Muslims began knocking on the doors of Spain and Byzantium, presumably to born the Holy Land to the ground and destroy every church in the land. Several papal scare tactics later, Crusades were launched, lives lost, and the rest is history.

Now lets look the England, our estranged mother nation. A “proper” and “anointed” group of people sent by the will of God to spread wealth and harmony to the Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Manx on the tiny British Isle. Don’t see any nations of those names anymore, do you? History tells what happened.

Continue reading →

MNWV E3 – Awkward Silence

Leave a reply

In this latest installment of the Meanwhile in West Virginia Radio Show, we tackle the cost of college and the fair price of services. We expound upon our experience as college-attending Americans, and the future of college in America.

Episode 3 – Awkward Silence

Coming Soon:

2 Replies

Post about Healthcare;
In the coming days I will be posting about healthcare, both private and governmental. I am currently in the research phase, so if there are any areas or ideas you would like me to include or address, let me know.

Palpable… Taxable

Leave a reply

Unlike my friends, I am not going to write about the abstract. Do not get me wrong, I sincerely enjoy abstract thinking and it leads to some absolutely marvelous end products. Philosophy fascinates me and I enjoy philosophizing; in the words of Descartes “Cogito Ergo Sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” I am sure that a number of my posts will be philosophical in nature, however, the vast majority (and let’s not kid ourselves, this is a form of media, which means that it should try to attract an audience from the majority) of people simply do not concern themselves with the abstract thinking. What matters to most people is the day to day palpable “things” that are immediately necessary to simply exist and forward “life*.”

The first thing, sadly enough, that comes to mind when I think palpable, which according to the New American Oxford Dictionary “means capable of being touched or felt (: a palpable mist), but it is often applied to whatever evokes a tactile response from the body,” is taxable. Yes taxes, the bane of the middle class, the forsaken ground where no politician dare treads for fear of an angry mob running him/her out of office with torches and pitchforks.

The word tax simply brims with negative connotations, especially in the United States of America. We have heard since the first days of history class the rally cry of the American Revolution, “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!” But in contemporary times, we seem to have forgotten the “without representation” portion of this battle cry. The founding fathers were opposed to taxation, just like so many of us are, but they were opposed to it because a group of people 4000 miles away were imposing unfair taxes on them while they were given no say in policy. They did, however, understand the need for taxation (at least those who wrote and voted for the Constitution, a disproportional segment of the Constitution is devoted to taxation).

Election season is upon us here in West Virginia, and the television advertisements, radio spots, and signage bombard us daily and will only get worse until Tuesday evening when the polls close. The one ad that I keep seeing and hearing that infuriates me beyond all else is some form of the following “Vote for me, I’ll lower your taxes.” I saw this on a bumper sticker today and felt like rear ending the driver, if we didn’t have taxes, there wouldn’t be a road for this imbecile to be driving on.

The great paradox of American thinking is that we shouldn’t be paying as much as we are in taxes (I’m included in this every time I get a sick feeling in my stomach on looking at the amount taken out of my paycheck), but we also think we are entitled to a great deal of services (which have been at their highest amount since FDR’s New Deal). We get mad when we hit potholes, the road isn’t cleared, the water supply isn’t up to par, our school systems suck, or emergency services are lacking and we go to our local governments and we raise 10 kinds of hell. But these people are POWERLESS to help us. They don’t have enough money to stay solvent as it is, let alone increase the amount of services. And it is our fault, we have figuratively bound their hands, because the only way they can provide the services WE DEMAND is revenue from our tax dollars, and we refuse to sacrifice a justifiable amount if we wish for these services to continue.

There are three option:

We can become Socialist and give every cent we make to the government in order from them to redistribute it and give everyone and equal quality of life. (Albeit one that would probably suck, thanks for that USSR**).
We can quit paying taxes altogether, and slip into anarchy. We can have all of our money to ourselves and get rid of government. We will just have to be okay with losing each and every public service that we currently demand from the government. (I’m looking at you Tea Baggers***).
Or we can shut up, elect people not based on insane promises that lead to anarchy, and elect people who understand the need for taxation, but also have respect and intelligence enough not to support frivolous spending. (This probably means looking away from partisan lines).

So we need to ask ourselves; do we want to become socialist, an anarchy, or can we survive by buying the slightly less expensive sports car without the butt warmer in order to make sure that we have all the services we need as a society to survive?

*I have a different definition of life, which will be explained later, and is why I used quotation marks.

** I know the USSR was communist, I was making a point.

*** Tea Baggers is a term used to refer to the “Tea Party” used predominately by Bill Maher. Props to you Bill.