WWGD: What Would Gumby Do?

These days, we seem to be lacking in true American heroes that help us define our existence. I mean, there was George Washington who cut down a cherry tree and, um, didn't lie about it. Okay, you can only get so far on that one. I mean, the other day, I was robbing a liquor store and then the police caught me and asked me, "Duane, did you rob this liquor store?" And all I could think to myself was what would George Washington say? He would turn to the police officers and tell them that yes, he robbed that liquor store with his Gatt, stealing the $14.72 out of the cash register to fund his overwhelming crayon sniffing habit. Well, I realized that I was in possession of the two Misty Green crayons that I had previously sniffed, and there was little I could do but either tell the truth, as my George Washington idol would demand, or I needed a new role model. And immediately I realized that George Washington couldn't fill my needs. I needed someone different. Someone like Gumby.



You see, when faced with such a dilemma, Gumby wouldn't just stand up and say, "Yes, officer, I robbed the liquor store." No, he would realize that others depended upon him, like Pokey, the orange horsey that pal'd around with Gumby. Not only that, but there was also Prickle, Gumby's dinosaur friend, and Goo, whatever the hell that strange blob character was supposed to be. The point is, Gumby had friends that counted on him, as do I, like my stuffed animals, like Elmer the frog and Joshua the often misunderstood penguin. If Gumby was asked if he robbed the liquor store, he would have used his powers of elasticity to find a way out of the mess, quite often by morphing himself into a train or a wall or whatever else he thought of at the time.



You see, Gumby was always aware that the blockheads were out to get him. They were evil, and they would use whatever powers they could find to beat poor Gumby. Unfortunately, they would do anything, like accuse Gumby of robbing liquor stores. Okay, they never actually accused him of that, but if they thought they could get Gumby to admit to it, they'd accuse him of robbing liquor stores, so poor Gumby would have to avoid admitting to it, much like me.

Because the blockheads of the world are always out to get the inner Gumbys in us. We know, and they know it, but unfortunately that type or argumentation never holds up in a court of law. Believe me, I've tried.

So, whenever you are faced with some theoretical complication like a potential criminal case involving a liquor store robbery, or maybe an actual liquor store robbery, remember the important letters of WWGD, or What Would Gumby Do? Gumby would never admit to robbing the liquor store because that's just not Gumby. George Washington would admit it but that's just because he's not as smart as Gumby was. He took the rap for that whole cherry tree thing, and where is he now? Do you see him on TV these days as the role model for anything? Not a chance. The cherry tree lobbyist group totally screwed him over, turning completely against everything he stood for. Because the cherry tree lobby is so powerful in our government, poor George Washington these days stands for everything against cherry trees, like corruption and illegal wire tapping. But not Gumby. If you polled a lot of people about anything involving Gumby, you'd get nothing but great results.



Need I say more?

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The Problem with Solving the Economic Mess

Personally, I think the problem is that no one actually has an answer here. Rather than try to figure out a unique solution to what has shown to be a product of the failure of several different types of systems, the users of the old systems keep praising the old systems as the only way to solve the problem that the old systems caused. All of our economic models in the past really don't solve a perception problem, which is the biggest problem that is the real big elephant in the room. We can talk about tax cuts all day but without a job to cut taxes on, it doesn't really make a difference. We can talk about increasing spending, but if there's no income to continue that spending, then it becomes temporary and ends after a short impetus. The problem is that people realize this now. They realize that the money geniuses weren't really geniuses but were just good at saying what was necessary to keep the other money geniuses capable of taking advantage of the happy thoughts that were being produced. Once the happy thoughts turned into sober realizations, the whole house of cards started to collapse.

What is needed is a new solution that moves away from making money off of greed rather than solid production. When the people making all of the money are the ones who have no idea what the companies are actually doing, other than from some spreadsheet, there is a problem. But because people kept making money off those spreadsheets, no one cared. Years and years ago, sober rationalists were trying to explain that you can't keep firing engineers and hiring more executives who don't produce anything just because the company is big enough to keep being traded high on the stock market. When all of those engineers realized the money was to be made in managing rather than producing, we had a real problem on our hands. We STILL haven't addressed that, nor are we ever going to because people still want to believe that money can be made from talking about business rather than producing solid items that businesses can sell. People have become experts at selling the labors of business but somehow thought it would save money to get rid of the laborers. This isn't a marxist sort of complaint, but a logical kind of complaint.

No one in this globalized world has realized the impact this has made over the last few decades. There's a reason why smart, sober people kept claiming that we have a lot to fear from China and India. These are the places where a lot of the production force has existed, and it's slowly ushering out the executive corporations that used to think they could move all their labor over there. Now, they have huge factories we built and slowly these countries have moved out the companies that built those factories, allowing the factories to be taken over by homegrown executives who now have the resources to produce items that we no longer can produce ourselves because we stopped doing it a long time ago, thinking someone else would do the grunt work for us.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that because I get so tired of the Keynesian versus whatever logic that keeps getting thrown about. I've been complaining about this for a very long time now, and I finally just gave up because everyone knew better.

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Fixing the Republican Party Without Turning to Partisan Drivel as a Solution

I truly believe the Republican Party needs an influx of new blood running to replace its current crowd of leadership. Sometimes, I feel half-tempted to run for office as a Republican, just because I feel that the Republican Party needs to get back to the ideas of what made Republicans rally around similar ideas that weren't so dividing. But there are way too many skeletons in my closet that I'd never have a chance, so I end up discouraged because we keep ending up with the wrong people with the wrong ideas.

The Republican Party lost a lot of its direction when its leadership started to realize that it could have a more direct impact on national affairs by running for national office. In the era prior to the 1960s, there was always a belief within the party that Republican ideals were best spent on focusing on state issues as a challenge to national control. Gary Jacobson's first edition of The Politics of Congressional Elections actually predicted that Republicans would start taking more national offices because of the attractiveness of Congressional office that were developed by Democrats in power that wanted to make their positions more comfortable; before this, Republicans saw no reason to leave their state positions which also meant leaving their direct access to businesses they were running in their respective states. With PACs giving more money to Republican challengers (and pratically none to Democratic challengers but only Democratic incumbents), it made sense that Republicans would eventually become more prominent in national offices. Unfortunately, once they got there they started to become part of the power structure that they so much heralded as the problem when they stuck mainly to state affairs.

That's the problem now. The Republicans who took national offices (and I mean mainly Congress) have now become part of the power structure they used to criticize, so it is really hard for them to make any type of logical argument that government in bloated when they're now a major part of that problem. Unfortunately, instead of targeting "government", as they had normally done, they're targeting the government in power as a more partisan base type of argumentation so that most of what they say falls on deaf ears, even the ears of those who happen to be Republicans. Right now, it sounds a lot like after-election whining because they haven't figured out how to go back to their Republican roots and find what they actually would historically challenge. And the reason for that is that they are part of the very problem that they need to realize is the antithesis of being a Republican.

The GOP's time for a comeback is when the GOP's population realizes that they're following false gods (always love it when I can throw in a Stargate reference). Their leadership is trying to rally them around a flag of Republicanism that doesn't stand for Republicanism anymore. If anyone speaks out (like I am right now) and challenges that leadership, then they're cast out as traitors or Democrats in Republican clothing. We ran into that during the George W. Bush Administration. If you ever challenged the Republican leadership, the Republican leadership had a cadre of people ready to go on the attack by calling you out as a traitor and insignificant. You're a traitor because you spoke out against the Republicans, and you're insignificant because you still identify yourself as Republican, the Democrats don't want or need you, and the leadership of the Republican Party now sees you as the enemy.

My problem these days is that no one seems to be representing the state-rights interests anymore because the Republicans have stopped talking about these issues unless they are part of a list of specific issues they tend to covet as talking points. The Republicans should be up in arms about federal desires to challenge state acceptance of marijuana policies, just as they normally get up in arms about, well, arms, like issues concerning the 2nd Amendment. By choosing to accept one issue and ignore the other, they show that they're not about state rights, but they're about talking point issues, and the Reagan-era and pre-Reagan era Republicans don't find any comfort in these types of arguments, so the issues become partisan and ludicrous because if people fall into hypocritical arguments, they often lose the fight before it begins.

Anyway, I felt this needed to be said because no one else will say it. Instead, we'll get lots of partisan drivel about...well, do I really need to say more? We know how these arguments go, and we know why they end up in name-calling with people making arguments where they call out someone by name before the person even makes an argument.

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What Defines a City?

I know we don't think about this very often, but what exactly constitutes the foundation that allows an area to consider itself to be a city? Is it because it is a geographically located area that has a government that defines it as city-hood, or is it something else? I was analyzing the base code for the game Civilization the other day when I started to wonder what exactly causes one to proclaim "THAT" is a city. And once that area is established, what serves to constitute its borders and end?

In Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, those questions don't really have obvious answers. First off, we don't really even have established national borders in many places because in quite a few cases those borders have been established by common acceptance and through traditional understandings that come from mapmakers who have created what they designated as specific boundaries. While this might work in a place like the United States that has pretty solid borders with Mexico and Canada, how do you establish those boundaries in a place like Sub-Saharan Africa where the borders change on an almost hourly basis? And then you have places that are established in the minds of international organizations, like the UN, yet are further divided based upon ethnic and religious differences in the population itself.

Which brings me back to the idea of a city. One thing I noticed about the base code of a city construction tool is that someone down the line decides "this is a good place for a city" and then starts to build. Then people build alongside that first settlement until others have gathered enough dwellings so that a community can be considered. In olden days, you might have a border built around that village, town or city, but nowadays we rarely have that. If you drive into San Francisco, you drive across an imaginary line that might have a sign stating "Welcome to San Francisco," but does that really mean that you have entered a city or left one? Something that has happened in the last few decades is urban sprawl where people have kept their ties to main cities by building suburban dwellings on the edge of these cities, so that they are attached, yet not legally a part of the city. Are those dwellings to be considered a part of the original city, or are they completely separate?

I think of places like Daly City, which is located right outside of San Francisco to the south. Yes, it is its own city, but it relies on the proximity to San Francisco, so do we really have the right to say that it is separate when it is a part of the economic picture upon which the larger city relies?

Living in a place like Seoul, South Korea is exactly the kind of place that makes this argument. There are so many people here, and the city incorporates so many different districts (it is reported to be the second largest city in Asia, and one of the top five in the world). When traveling through it, there is never really a sense that you're in one big city, but that you're traveling through a lot of different areas that happen to be politically connected by some points on a map somewhere. What makes that city really a city?

An interesting argument that Kaplan makes in his book is that cities of the future are becoming something much different than they've ever been before, as they become larger and larger, yet cannot maintain the healthy lifestyles of so many people. Quite possibly, we're looking at a need for ruralization of the population in many sectors of the world, yet more and more people are continuously moving to the larger cities in hopes of jobs, food and survival, making it harder to survive due to fewer jobs and scarcity of food.

In this context, will cities need a reexamination, so that we define them by functionality rather than political expediency? Are cities of the future doomed as they become unsustainable, and if so, will the rural areas be able to compensate for the return of so many people to their former roots?

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Korean M&Ms May Be Racist

"...which is why you should never actually lick a nuclear fuel rod," said Chief Engineer Akmar Hurreisaba.

In other news, it was reported today by our Legospaceman affiliate in Seoul, South Korea (the Korea with all the artillery weapons aimed at it by the evil crazy guy in the north), that the popular brand of candy, M&M's, which is owned by Mars, Incorporated, may actually be racist. With this story is the legospaceman.

Legospaceman: Yeah, Bunny, it's true. This reporter was analyzing a package of peanut M&Ms purchased in South Korea for...um...quality purposes, when he discovered that the picture on the front of the bag shows five happy M&M characters lounging around together. What wasn't realized, until a second look, was that there are six M&M characters, and one of them was missing. It turns out that M&Ms "forgot" to include the brown M&M character.

Now, while this could have been a simple mistake, or perhaps a casting problem during the shooting of the picture, such as a situation where the brown M&M failed to show up for the photograph, we then started examining the other different bags of M&Ms to determine how frequent the brown M&M was missing. It turns out that on all other bags of M&Ms in this particular convenient store in Seoul, South Korea, the brown M&M is not included on the package. But wait until you find out what we discovered when we opened the package."

Bunny Anchorwoman: We will return to this story after this message about how much better Reese's Pieces are than M&Ms candies.

(small pause for a commercial break where capitalist scum try to sell things to you)

Bunny Anchorwoman: And we're back. It turns out that the legospaceman uncoverered more interesting details.

Legospaceman: Yes, Bunny, I did a check of the M&Ms website, and it turns out that even though there is a brown M&M in the packages, the official website no longer acknowledges that this brown M&M exists. Something is seriously wrong here, and we're only beginning to uncover the mystery behind this obvious cover-up.

Realizing that just checking web sites was not going to be enough, so we sent in our undercover reporter and we managed to meet up with a well known person named...well, Bob. Here's a picture of him.


Yes, it turns out that Bob was the original brown M&M, and he wants his story known.

This is not all, the legospaceman also did a quantified study of the bag of peanut M&Ms he bought and discovered that brown M&Ms make up 32% of the entire bag, even though the bag includes representatives of 7 different colors of M&Ms. We will bring you more on this story as it develops. Back to you, Bunny.

Bunny Anchorwoman: Thank you, legospaceman. Let's hope Bob gets what's coming to him. No one should ever have to go through that sort of thing. Now, in fashion news, it appears that attractive women are starting to get all the attention again. With this story is....

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The Problem With Wanting to Change the World

One of the immediate problems of wanting to change the world is that you are immediately in competition with a whole lot of people. These people want to change the world, too, but they think their ideas are better than your idea, so instead of thinking, "hey, two really good ideas," they think, "uh, oh, competition. Must destroy the other idea before it challenges mine." That's just from the people who want to change the world. Then you have to compete with the conservatives. I don't mean the Republicans, but conservatives, people who don't want things to change. This is an interesting class of creature that watches a building fall down and then says that we should build another building just like it because change is bad. They see the goodness in doing things as we've always done it, and quite often their argument (sometimes true) is that, "well, I had to do it, so then should you." Or my other favorite conservative argument: "If there was a better way to do things, someone smarter than you would have already thought of it."

Imagine that you have figured out how to make the world a much better place. You recogize the problems, and you realize, after lots of thought, brainstorming and communication with others, just how to fix things. Well, that's where the problem comes in. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to do anything. Everyone is convinced that things will eventually work themselves out because that's how things are supposed to be. It's like the old George Carlin bit about how the world was unable to develop plastic on its own, so it created humans to do it for the planet. Now that it has plastic, it doesn't need us anymore. The detractors are much like the Earth argument here, thinking everything will eventually work itself out because the planet normally figures out what it wants and gets it anyway.

So, how do you convince the naysayers to listen to new ideas? Or more important, how do you get anyone to listen to anything that isn't already considered singing to the choir?

The radicals seem to think the answer is to protest, to throw things around, to resort to anarchist tactics that cause the mainstream to sit up and take notice. But the only notice they really tend to take is that more police with riot gear are needed to bash in a few more heads. I remember during the run up to the war in Iraq, Woody Harrelson climbed the Bay Bridge (think it was the Bay Bridge) in San Francisco and stopped traffic. People were upset. Not about the war. But at Woody for causing a traffic jam during a commute hour. In other words, no one really cared.

So what else can one do? Write articles for academic publication? Who reads that stuff? Other academics. Generally, no one cares about that sort of tripe. Oh, academics will talk about it amongst themselves, and they'll argue some theory over this and that variable, but in the end, unless the person writing is a well known academic with tons and tons of publications and a fan base already, no one cares.

What else can you do? Get a job with the State Department? Not really going to help, unfortunately. In order to work for the State Department, you have to step into a paradigm that already has an accepted mindset. If you do not partake in that mindset, you're not wanted. You don't make the cut. They ask you to leave. If you go into the State Department with the sole purpose of changing it, may as well just start packing before you arrive. You COULD stay in the State Department for 30 years and THEN suddenly spring on everyone your great ideas that you've been holding close to your chest all of those decades. Think about that one for a second. If that was really the case, you'd probably no longer believe what you did 30 years ago; you become a part of your environment. The one who survives with ideology intact in that type of environment was someone who never fit into it to begin with.

So what can you actually do? I'll be honest. I don't know. I don't think anyone wants anything new. I don't think anyone cares. I think the only people who care are the other people who have a "better" idea, and once you try to get them together with other idea-minded people, they become bitter enemies because each one must emerge as the victor in "new" ideas.

So, I'll just leave it at that.

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US Tit for Tat Policy With North Korea Does Not Work

Christiane Amanpour, CNN's Chief International Correspondent believes new policy incentives are necessary to keep North Korea in check. In other words, she feels we should set up benchmarks that North Korea can meet and then those will keep North Korea from continuing on its confrontational trajectory. Now, I generally like Amanpour and find her reporting to be decent, but I have to state that I totally disagree with her analysis and with the constant chatter that is coming out from those who consider themselves to be "experts" on North Korea.

Here's a part of her article:

North Korea now says it is slowing down its disabling of Yongbyon and that it will engage in "action for action."

Some analysts now say that despite North Korea's "provocative" rocket launch, the U.S. and its allies should launch new policy incentives and expectations with clear benchmarks for North Korea's nuclear disarmament.

Why should I have an opinion on this? Well, I used to be a counterintelligence agent in South Korea some decades ago, and I dealt with this sort of thing first-hand some time ago. The situation was no different back then. We were making the same mistakes back then, and we're going to continue to make the same mistakes in the future.

First off, we have to stop trying to "reward" North Korea for not doing certain things. They don't care. North Korea is a nation that has always gotten the rewards it achieves by doing something that pisses everyone off, and then they wait for the rest of the world to reward them. And it usually works. It's like the Bizarro interpretation of game theory's tit for tat where you continue to reward a partner for continuing to play the game, even if that partner falls out of the game a few times. In this tit for tat, we're all tat and haven't received a single bit of tit (okay, that didn't sound good, but the point still stands). We keep rewarding the player for not engaging the game, as if we're convinced that if we continue to keep upping the ante and offer more rewards, that player will somehow jump back into the game again.

It doesn't work that way. They have no incentive to jump back into the game when they know they're going to be rewarded anyway.

Twenty years ago, North Korea was facing a famine because they happened to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, and they suddenly realized that most of their arable farmland is on the side of cliffs, meaning they have nowhere to grow the rice they need. So they needed food from outside. When China and the Soviet Union were their allies, this wasn't so bad. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. So they were left begging from China. Now, China is having enough trouble feeding its own. North Korea is now relying on South Korea and Japan. Japan gave up on North Korea, pretty much just giving North Korea the middle finger and saying it wasn't worth it. North Korea responded this last week by shooting a Taepodong-2 missile through Japanese airspace, claiming it was a satellite that was going to transmit North Korean nationalistic music back to the motherland, claiming it succeeded, even though the missile never even came close enough to inserting a satellite into the atmosphere.

Today, North Korea has as much ability to feed itself as it did 20 years ago, and what nations have discovered is that a lot of times the food aid sent to North Korea was sold to fund the military complex that is literally the entire economy of North Korea.

So what is the solution? Stop the tit for tat game and let North Korea come to the table on its own. North Korea is already isolated so that military action is national suicide for North Korea, so if they take that direction, it was because they were planning for it long ago, not because they felt they needed to. By not engaging them in discussion, you let them do whatever it is they want to do. Engage China in real diplomacy, and let China know that North Korea is THEIR neighbor, so if they want their neighbor to run around with nuclear weapons, that's pretty much going to be on them.

All diplomatic efforts need to cease with North Korea immediately. If they come to the table and want to engage in diplomacy, that's another thing. Let them. But if they're going to play the hard to get girl at the dance, then let that girl sit in the corner and watch everyone else dance for awhile.

For too long now, our foreign policy has attempted to threaten, cajole, bribe and shame North Korea to do what we desire. Stop doing that immediately and within a few years North Korea will have to approach the table all by itself. The whole quasi-nuclear test and the missile launch were all responses to all of our previous attempts at cornering North Korea into compliance.

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Most Definitely Going to Be Out of a Job

I had another one of those debate days today where I teach debate to the young Korean kids. It went well, but instead of the boss being there when I finished up (he usually closes up on Sundays), his secretary was there instead. She told me that the boss told her that the business was definitely failing, and that he's probably going to have to shut the whole thing down very soon. I inquired further from her, and she thought we might have a few weeks left before the business is kaput.

I'm not all that surprised. Yes, it does put me in a bad situation, but I've had enough warnings before this that it's not hitting me out of the blue. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do next. All of the schools have already started up in Korea here, so getting a solid job right now is pretty much not going to happen. I'm not even sure how to go about transferring a visa here in the first place, even if I can.

So, chances are pretty good that I'm going to have to book my own flight home and somehow fend for myself when I get home. I don't even know where to go right now. California doesn't seem like a great idea with its job market right now, but nowhere seems like a really great idea with the job market right now.

It's too bad things didn't work out, but it appears they didn't. I just now have to figure out what to do after this so that I can ease myself into the impact rather than have to take it head on.

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The World's Leaders are Meeting at G-20 and Why I Don't Feel We Really Should Care

The world is in pretty bad shape right now. We all know that. But it's in bad shape for a whole bunch of different reasons. Economics is really the least of our problems. Sure, it sucks that finances are in bad condition, but so is the world. And so is each one of our countries in that world.

One of the problems that they won't address in this economic summit is the wealth disparity that exists in each country and across the world. It's really bad. There are very poor people and there are very rich people. Those in the middle? Not so much as there used to be. They mostly tended to coasts into the poor category.

But no one cared when it was happening because the only people who were listened to were the ones who had the money and the power. No one cared what the poor thought. No one cares now. Are there poor representatives at the G-20 summit? Nope. Maybe a poor country that might get a seat in the balcony, but that's about it. No, the people who are going to attend are the rich ones, and these rich people are going to talk amongst themselves to figure out how they can get back to making themselves rich again.

Obama has one good idea and that's to state that the United States is no longer going to be the consumer that it once was. But that's probably not really even his choice. The number of people who are capable of being that type of consumer has dwindled, and people have started to realize that charging up huge credit card balances is not conducive to long term happiness. So, that's really a symptom to something that was going to be happening anyway. So, really, nothing new has been revealed here, unless everyone else going to the summit was going there with the hope that the US president was going to announce that gratuitous spending was going to be the answer out of the crisis, and it was going to be one way (with the US taking the brunt of the spending and giving it to other countries).

There are massive protests going on at the G-20 summit, and the funny thing is, the media is covering these protests as "events" rather than as movements. There's a big difference. An event happens once, and you don't focus upon it again. A movement happens over time, and if you don't pay attention to it, it becomes revolutionary. The media doesn't cover these things very well. I've been shaking my head all week long as I've seen EVERY dispatch from CNN read that "anti-capitalists, anarchists and environmental activists" are preparing for protests. It also appears that CNN appears disappointed that the protests were not as violent or disruptive as they predicted. So, as expected, the impact of protests will be marginalized because no one burned anything down or overturned any cars. And one wonders why people don't protest anymore, unless they intend to do actual violent protesting.

Right now, there's a huge row over the fact that France and Germany are about to leave the summit because, well, the summit isn't actually causing anyone to do anything. Gee. What a surprise. They feel that the summit is coming across as one of those "feel good" expressions that world leaders often do when they don't actually want to do anything substantial. Okay, they haven't said exactly that, but that's the point they're actually trying to make but their press secretaries are too polite to come out and say so.

Look forward to lots of "exciting" speeches that don't do anything. I'm hoping that they'll invite Jimmy Carter to write a strong letter of protest and displeasure at those that did bad things, like bankrupt entire sectors of business, putting thousands of people out of their homes and jobs.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program of America's Top Sous Chef.....

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