America’s Most Odious
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Preface
Donald J. Trump is not on this list only because he is much so more than odious.
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- Grover Norquist* Because; in any list there has to be a number one. Though it was tough choosing a number one, no one is more deserving. Using one’s intelligence to bully, to manipulate others, is the most odious of things any human can do. Bastard even had them sign an oath not to raise taxes lest he primary them.His tax scam wasn’t even his idea. He got it from Howard Jarvis who got it fishing around for something to replace yelling communism when he found that no longer worked, which was something he, Jarvis, learned from watching Richard Nixon, who, if he were still alive would have been high on this listing. So, too, Howard, if he were still alive. Lineage and legacy.Norquist has done great harm the Nation, while doing quite well indeed for himself. Under Jarvis’s Prop 13, California schools went from top to the bottom in a few years. Norquist helped do the same to schools across the Nation. Using those oaths, he coerced legislators to act in a manner that caused hunger and suffering, increased the National debt, whilst, all the while, making the wealthy wealthier. Quid pro qou, Norquist was benefactor to the rich, and they to him. Grover turned his, Jarvis’s, crap into gold.
- Newt Gingrich Trump wasn’t the first, won’t be the last, politician who was both a pathological liar and a sociopath, and who knew how to manipulate the media. Newt Gingrich rode into Washington on the New Southern Republican, nee, Dixiecrat, ticket in 1978 without a scrap of scruple on, in, or about him. In a trait common to too many southern politicians, there was nothing beneath the man. Gingrich made people like Senator McCarthy look like paragons of virtue. He is, rightfully so, credited with playing a key role in undermining democratic norms in the United States, and hastening political polarization and partisan prejudice, And, no Judy, it wasn’t the Democrats doing it, too. There was never a stoop too low for Newt to take. He has kept at it for more than forty years now.
- Mitch McConnell* When history is full writ, Mitch McConnell will probably be dead. Which is too bad, since what good is hell if he can’t feel the pain and we don’t get to watch? It would be well worth the price of admission to see Mitch, Mitch alone, burn. Leaving aside the question of misuse of personal intelligence, this man has pandered to his poor and ignorant constituents with one hand, and taken money from the rich with the other. Nothing is beneath him. To Mitch, it was most important to thwart Obama, lest he, Obama, did something that was for the good of the nation. It was completely OK for Putin to interfere if it meant Mitch got to stuff the Courts for his The Federalist Society, nee, The KKK. Mitch blamed Trump’s impeachment on the Democrats; refused to let witnesses to be called for the trial in the Senate. This is a man who didn’t want to provide enough pandemic relief lest it endanger economic servitude as practiced in southern states. So what if people of the working class died from the virus while working for nothing so that some rich bastard could benefit? That’s the way it’s supposed to be, eh, Mitch? Loved stealing the Yankee’s dollar, he did; bragged about doing so in his debate with Amy McGrath. Still re-fighting the Civil War, Colonel McConnell is ‘rising again’.
- Rush Limbaugh The grifter’s grifter. For more than forty years now, daily, Rush has been working the hinterland’s AM ‘Lame Brain Circuit’ up into a frenzy, and, making himself a personal fortune doing it. Rush was Trump before Trump was Trump. While Trump was chasing porno stars, Rush went to the Caribbean to diddle underage prostitutes. He was Mr. Right-Wing propagandist about the time Roger Ailes was hawking the idea to Nixon. Denigration of Democrats was Rush’s Spécialité de la maison; his raison d’être. Chelsea, Hillary, Michelle, Malia, Sasha, …; he especially loved to denigrate the wives and daughters. Rush Limbaugh is a misogynistic, racists, bastard who has done everything he could to polarize the Nation. One to whom Donald J. Trump awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Limbaugh, like Grover Norquist, has held tremendous political sway without ever being elected to anything.
- Charles Koch Charles Koch is a Libertarian; got it, and his wealth, from his father. In brief, Libertarians believe that it’s whatever you can get by with is OK, i.e., as long as you don’t get caught; and they believe in benevolent dictatorships. In democracy, if, and only if, they get to control it. Toward these goals, Charles and CO have funded the likes of the CATO Institute, along with a long list of other libertarian institutes. Through contributions, he has co-opted numerous universities and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Last week it was announced that Charles had experienced a come to Jesus Moment and regretted some of the things he had done to affect national politics. Too late, Charlie, Dante recently confirmed your irrefusable reservation for that special place.
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Dick Cheney Cheney is the only person ever to have selected himself as vice president; he knew the Bush family well. A serial draft dodger, Cheney loved war as long as someone else was doing the fighting. Got his first taste of War as Secretary of Defense for Bush I; loved it. A real Chicken Hawk, he was. Early in Bush II’s Administration, as Vice President in charge, Cheney lied, lied as few had ever done before, the Nation into the Iraq Invasion. Afterwards, made lots of trips to the war zones in Iraq; he loved to visit the troops on the battlefield. Cheney was then, still is, really big on torture. Why, Lord, did you let this miserable man live this long?
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Doug Collins Why Doug Collins instead of fellow extremists Darrell Issa, Jim Jordan, or Trey Gowdy? All of these fellows are given to expressing indignance known only to scoundrels; all are professional practitioners of character assassination; all are mendacious, nee, born liars, to their very cores. In all cases, their constituents knew what they were getting when they voted for them; share the blame for the harm they have done. So, what sets Doug Collins apart from, makes him the stand-in for, the rest? Because, on top of all else that he and they are, he alone is a Baptist Preacher.
- Lindsey Graham Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz? Both are certainly deserving of the odious distinction. Smarm and sleaze ooze from their very pores. They can’t even stand one another. Both need be kept in a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid, else they ooze all over everything and everybody. Cruz, because of the ambition curse; Graham, because he was born that way and can’t help himself. Given their absence of character, neither can be held responsible for their actions; so, it is clearly the fault of the folks that sent them. Texas, South Carolina, what hath we, the Nation, done to you that deserves your sending us these two sorry critters to foul the chambers of the US Senate? Though loathsome, the both; Lindsey get the slot because he’s been around the longest.
- Bill Barr Hark! From what, from whose, cellar cometh this fat toad? Certainly was not from the princess’s kissing of the prince. ‘Twas from childhood, or, so we’re told. Consigliere to Bush I, saved both Bush’s and Reagan’s arses. Barr was fetched forth from the cellar by Trump to replace Jeff Sessions in the co-opting of the Justice Department. Sessions wasn’t toad enough for the job; chickened out when it came to the overtly criminal part. Not Bill Barr; he stepped right up. First off, by sabotaging his best friend, Robert Mueller’s Report; from that moment, Trump knew that he had his Attorney General. Barr intervened in the Stone and Flynn cases; and removed Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney in order to protect a Turkish Bank as a favor to Erdogan from Trump. Now, Trump need only say, there, pee on that one my loyal lackey, and Bill peed. No New York City mafioso ever had a better consigliere. The nation has never had a more amoral Attorney General. Eric Garner’s death, George Floyd’s death, … unworthy of his time, or of the law; Lafayette Square, …; there is nothing beneath this cellar dweller.
- Sarah, nee Huckabee, Sanders Why not Kellyanne Conway, instead? Lying does come as natural as breathing to the both. Kellyanne’s been at it longer, been around the longest. At this point, it is not clear that she even knows that she’s lying anymore. There are indications that Sarah may on occasion know that she is lying. She admitted as much to the Mueller team, while under oath.
*Leadership Institute Alumni. Other alumni include: Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon (James Dale Guckert), Karl Rove, Steve Stockman, Mike Pence, James O’Keefe, new members of the 113th Congress, and elected officials in all 50 states.
Where are Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon?
Joel,
It’s intended to be DIY. Feel free to copy, change the order, add others, …
Ken:
Is that what you are doing? Quint is playing bmaz. The Quint post reads like The Rise and Fall of the Greta Powers – US Edition
Ken,
We’re gonna need a bigger blog.
We could add on.
You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I’m telling you why
Mariah Carey – Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (Official Audio)
Santa Claus is coming to town
He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice
Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you’re sleeping
And he knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake
sounds like an ever-vigilant regime
Other than Santa Claus, ol’ Adolf the Rednose Nazi was an infamous list maker.
How about Newt Gingrich’s lil’ buddy William Jefferson Clinton?
You know, the guy who kicked Dick Gephardt to the curb and worked hand-in-glove with the Republican minority (this was in 93) to pass NAFTA and later GATT and WTO status for China. Who signed off on “The End of Welfare As We Know It”. Who signed off on banking deregulation in 1999. Who could have sustained vetos of any one of a number of these and other congressional actions that have gutted the prospects of the average working person.
Yes, yes, I know. Bob Dole would have been no better and probably even worse. But still…
I never thought of them as a list. But now that you mention it…
Coberly,
It has always been easier to unite behind an enemies list than to organize, plan, and execute to get better outcomes.
Coberly,
Forty years ago I wanted to see a mud wrestling match between Milton Friedman and Noam Chomsky, but it never happened. Nowadays, a mud wrestling match between Charles Koch and George Soros would be the logical equivalent to some extent, but lacking the same charm. Midget mud wrestling is just more fun to watch, although not as much fun as hot chicks in bikinis mud wrestling.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone and my condolences to all the mother turkeys who lost their young ones to this holiday season.
[For all those who like myself prefer reading over listening to a recording the link below and just one short excerpt out of a very long interview.]
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/16/934584373/transcript-nprs-full-interview-with-former-president-barack-obama
Transcript: NPR’s Full Interview With Former President Barack Obama
November 16, 202012:02 AM ET
…NPR: So I’m not going to ask you what advice you’d give to Joe Biden, because presumably you would tell him yourself, but you’re a proponent, you’ve always been a proponent of people power. Is there something that you think citizens should be doing right now?
BO: “Well, look, getting a handle on this public health issue is going to require all of our cooperation. It’s been tough for the American people because they haven’t been getting one clear set of guidelines and information, and all of us, no matter how well-informed or conscientious we’ve been, have at times been confused with a bunch of conflicting notions of how we should be dealing with this.
I think priority No. 1 — and I’m confident Joe will do this. He’s got Ron Klain as chief of staff who was my point person for dealing with the Ebola crisis, understands this stuff. All of us as citizens need to work and get behind a clear plan for getting this pandemic under control. Because if we can get the pandemic under control, the economy then is in a position to start bouncing back. But beyond that, what I think all of us as citizens are going to have to do is to really start examining what can each of us do, whether it’s at the local level, in our own families, to step back from the demonization of each other, the bitter partisan divides that we’re seeing, and ask ourselves: What role can we play in rebuilding social trust? And look, it’s a hard thing to do. And again, I don’t want to make mass media as the boogeyman. But, when you look at these information silos in Facebook and other social media and the rabbit holes that people are following, the denial of facts, the belief in wild conspiracy theories like QAnon getting real traction, each of us have some responsibilities to start thinking carefully about not being so gullible and just accepting whatever it is that we’re seeing pop up on our phones…”
Ron
Oh no! WE are most odious?
I think I may be and I have people very close to me whose poverty is self-caused (to an extent) and give some credence to the Right’s opinion of poor people.
but self-caused doesn’t mean they “should have known” how to avoid it. my view is that most people are no match for the forces of modern economies. they need help… WE need help understanding and dealing with those forces. In some cases the help will be ignored or rejected… I’ll let you know when i figure out the answer to that. Don’t wait up.
oh, as for those who have avoided poverty. don’t fash yourself. you were lucky. you were able to follow the little blue line in the concourse laid out for you by others… before the paint faded and the waiting room was moved.
Coberly,
I will certainly admit to quite a bit of luck along the way, but something that both liberal and conservative ideologues always seem to forget is that there is no way for 99% of people to be among the top 1% of the distribution, whether by wealth or by intelligence. My attitude about these things is neither from the left nor right, but rather from Gestalt psychology. The short version is that circumstances have almost everything to do with outcomes, but the long version is that circumstances are woven into a complex fabric of experiences that make each of us who we are.
Some approximation of equality of opportunity can be managed in a proactive manner, but not by dummies. As long as we have a bias towards appointing the dummies that we find inoffensive to our sentiments to be the stewards of public goods along with such a restrictive definition of public goods, then nothing is really going to change. IOW, I would be all for creative social engineering if society were not so damned stupid to begin with.
Rather, if human beings cannot be reasoned with because they lack the necessary intellectual underpinnings, then eventually they will be intimidated into change, not necessarily the best kinds either and not intimidated by other human beings so much as by reality in general. After flailing about for a few more centuries if humanity is lucky enough to survive their own stupidity, then they may figure it out.
To be more specific, then I believe that massive environmental disasters, perhaps along with nastier global pandemics, will take more human lives than all the military powers in all the wars in history within the next hundred years.
For now though we are far better at perpetuating the cycle of poverty than ending it. There are many ways that we can perpetuate the cycle of poverty and our contemporary ideologies seem capable of discovering them all. There are very few ways to end the cycle of poverty and mostly they remain secret except in a few locally managed programs.
All the public figures that were important to me in the sixties were on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list, notably MLK, Stokely Carmichael, and Abbie Hoffman.
Ron
glad you are out there. you seem to see things much the way i see them. maybe we could figure out the rest if we had the time.
while sharing your pessimism about the intelligence of both the people and the “elite”, i think i can think of things that might work.
a minimum wage that is a living wage would help… until the landlords figured out they could now charge even higher rents, and the predators found new ways to prey.
but (i think) so much progress was made by the New Deal and by the Civil Rights Act that we should not despair of ever making things better. we would just have to find a way to keep them better.
i may have been too old for Stokely and Abbie, but I think MLK had the right idea, and I wish we could remember it… or find another MLK.
north and west Chicago was a foreign country to me. we had richer relatives out there we saw once in a while. i never noticed they were richer until quite recently when my more or less voluntary poverty sometimes looks a little low-rent to me.
This is a link to Frontline’s on McConnells revenge for Bork
I found it informative; more than a little upsetting.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/supreme-revenge/
ken:
I find any commentary by Flake and Collins to be weak tea at best. Confronted on an elevator by two women, one of who was assaulted, Flake would not answer to the damning evidence. Even with the prospect of his departure from the Senate, Flake (an apropos name) would still, still not do what was so obviously right. Murkowski (not in this Frontline exposé) and Collins are well known to vote against a motion in Committee and then herd-vote with Republicans. Feet made of sand for all three.
McConnell has a past and no one has ever tackled it and neither has he placed himself in a position with someone where he can be leaned on in a way where he will collapse under the weight of it. He needs pushback from the people he is threatening in a vocal and physical manner with a forefinger to the chest and told “go ahead you SOB.” Passive aggressive bullies can be brought to heel too. You may lose, but, you will maintain your integrity. I have paid the price a few times.
We, the American people and voters (as McConnell would term it) are being sold out by the very person who uses the term as one would a piece of toilet paper flushed down the toilet after being used.
Coberly,
Today’s AB thread “What Trump’s claim of a ‘stolen election’ means for activists today” has a much better handle on what needs to be done than I generally see. Compiling an enemies list is definitely not constructive, makes for lots of cheering, but awful optics for recruitment. Positive means are necessary to achieve any viable momentum.
We have more voters and they have more activists. So, who wins the most elections?
ron
re positive: something i have been trying to say for some time. feel like a tree falling in the forest.
currently listning to phone ms from another scammer. four in the last hour.
something very wrong in this country,
watched an economist recently. say something like a huge percent of american business was essentially criminal. another thought i have been having, but then i am not an economist so i don’t have the data.
Coberly,
I am not particularly optimistic about what is next, but I am hopeful.
Back in the fifties there was a conscious decision by politicians supported by economists to achieve greater economies of scale at the expense of reduced competition. In 1954 a Republican Party run federal government rescinded the dividends tax credit which in effect multiplied (in a relative sense) the capital gains tax preference, the difference between investors choosing to hold securities for interest or dividends income rather than selling for capital gains windfalls.
The Democratic Party had rescinded the dividends tax credit in 1936, but then reinstated it in 1939. The dividends tax credit originated with the income tax in 1913.
Shareholders of healthy, profitable firms almost always realize capital gains when they sellout for M&A. Shareholders of troubled firms ordinarily realize capital losses when they liquidate their holdings. Shareholders never paid income taxes on losses. The capital gains tax preference relative to dividends is a blatant bias towards corporate consolidation. JP Morgan hated competition. Apparently that has been contagious.
Consolidation to reduce competition is a naturally corrupting evolution. We have introduced economies of scale into wealth consolidation, political power, and corruption.
Ron
you are way ahead of me on this. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think you could explain it to me here in a comment.
i hope you don’t mind knowing more than i do. i know about as much about business as justin knows about physics. i don’t like to say that in public because then people think they can’t trust me on SS… showing that they have no idea what i have been talking about.
fwiw i am agnostic about competition. i get the point in principle, but i don’t think it always works out for the good in the real world. either way.
i thought the proof given for free trade in economics 101 was elegant, until NAFTA forced me to think about it, and then i realized math was worthless without facts.
BTW,
I hope that you know that phone scammers are not American business. Sometimes they are criminals from the US, but most are offshore criminals. I like to listen until they invite me to press “1” to talk to a person, so that I have a real person to insult rather than just unload on a computer voice.
i used to do that. just to waste their time. then i realized i was wasting my time. talked to a lot of american voices. tried to ge them to tell me where they were calling from.
currently getting about seven calls per hour from the same scam whether i pick up the phone or let it go to the answering machine. unplugging the phone at least stops the ringing. but i can still hear the message. and when i go to erase the messages, the answering machine won’t let me erase them unless i listen to at least the start of each one.
of course i could throw phone and answering machine in the trash, but that still leaves comcast trying to charge me a hundred dollars a month for wi-fi connection.
got some weird scam from famous credit reporting company. thought it was someone pretending to be them, but no, it was them. they told me my credit score had fallen but wouldn’t tell me why, offered to help me raise it back…???you’d recognize their name if i could remember it.
as for “foreign”.. i get that , but if we can find Osama and send him a drone (oops, that wasn’t the real Osama, just some tall sheepherder in a white sheepherder suit) we ought to be able to find the foreign telephone scams and send them a drone or seal team.
Coberly,
If you like to read then by all means read John Maynard Keynes, but that is a lot of reading. “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” is a good place to start. Keynes was less mathy in his economics writing and a lot more common sense than you would likely think. But he is detailed and, although an easy read for me, not generally so accessible to folk that did not grow up on a diet of science lit. He is well worth the effort for those that want to know more about economics, but at a certain age then it is just time to cut our loses and enjoy the little time that we have left.
Competition is certainly imperfect, while monopoly and monopsony are absolutely perfect for the ownership class, just not the wage class. I was never snookered by the free trade scam, nor was Keynes. It was always just global price arbitrage with the exception of food and raw materials. Financialization and price arbitrage are the cornerstones of rentier capitalism. As we have recently found dependence upon trade for essential goods merely for the purpose of price arbitrage is moronic, a point that Keynes made very clear.
P.S., Food and raw materials are bulky, expensive to transport. Trade for such things does not produce economic rents, so is not worth investment. Such trade only occurs where these goods are in demand well in excess of supply.
Ex-CIA Head John Brennan Calls Ted Cruz ‘Simple-Minded’ in Twitter Row Over Iran Killing
It is typical for you to mischaracterize my comment. Your lawless attitude & simple-minded approach to serious national security matters demonstrate that you are unworthy to represent the good people of Texas.
https://www.newsweek.com/ex-cia-head-john-brennan-calls-ted-cruz-simple-minded-twitter-row-over-iran-killing-1550905
P.P.S. “Food and raw materials” as used above are exclusive of Veblen goods such as caviar or fine diamonds. Economic rents are endogenous to the price of Veblen goods.
Ken,
“…John Brennan Calls Ted Cruz ‘Simple-Minded…”
[Not exactly a revelation there, but still worth a laugh.]
Coberly,
We only get two or three scam calls per day, so I guess I should be grateful.
P.P.P.S. Veblen goods have long been recognized as a special case leading to such arrangements as luxury sales taxes, which is to say that private capital shares its economic rents with the state to make amends. With luxury goods the economic rents are collected from the wealthy, for the wealthy, which the state allows for a cut of the take.
Vietnam War excise tax
Ron
i tried to read Keynes MANY years ago. I did not then, and may not now, know enough about economics or business to get anything out of it. the words produce no real-world connotations in my head. dictionaries don’t help. i am not the kind of person who thinks he understands something because he can repeat in order the words he heard.
might be worth another try, but as you cruelly say, might be too late.
as for the phone scammers… seven calls per hour, from the same source, is something new. i can’t imagine they aren’t having some kind of glitch with their own computer. still, my conspiracy riddled brain thinks someone (big) must be making money out of this for there not to have been a stop put to it years ago.
that is what call-blocking is for or your list of contacts and everything else goes to voice mail
Run
i don’t do very well with modern solutions to modern problems. every time i try to access some website that is going to perofrm a needed service it sends me into a black hole i don’t know how to get out of. since i did a little programming back in the wayback i know what these are… they are BAD PROGRAMMING and they make me too angry to want to go there again.
as for Vietnam excise tax… I guess I wasn’t paying attention to taxes back then.
But when CRFBstarts yelling about the Budget deficit, I start thinking about a Budget Emergency Patriotic Surtax mostly on the Super Patriotic (aka rich budget hawks).
can’t understand why nobody thinks of that instead of a Stimuuls Tax Cut to encourage cororations to buy their own stock.
Coberly,
If reading Keynes is a struggle, then it is not for you. I was warned that Keynes was a difficult read, but found him easy as a breeze to read instead. I had also been lied to by conservative friends about Keynes sufficiently that I put him off until late in life at the Economist View commenters Seth and Goldilocksisableachblonde recommended reading Keynes to me. I had a developed great respect for the opinions of each of them.
By the time that I actually read Keynes, then everything that I read by him was not only familiar thinking, but it echoed my own thinking. Apparently I had been absorbing Keynes from my environment for all of my life. It is hard not to like someone that is telling you what you already know or believe. Rather than confound me, Keynes makes me chuckle endlessly like saying “I know…I know” to a ghost.
Keynes, the friendly ghost :<)
Coberly,
“… i did a little programming back in the wayback…”
[What languages? I started with COBOL in 1968, then (Univac 1005) SAAL assembler, very little Fortran, IBM 360 assembler (both DOS/360/VSE and MVS), some Easytrieve, very little RPG (I not II), and in the end endless SAS from 1980 through 2015. I stopped counting overall lines of code after I passed the million mark.]
“…BAD PROGRAMMING…”
[What do you expect from people that do most of their typing with their thumbs?]
Coberly,
“… I did not then, and may not now, know enough about economics or business to get anything out of it. the words produce no real-world connotations in my head….”
[Not to beat a dead horse, but it occurred to me that your problem reading Keynes might be a more fundamental matter of approach.
Remember way back when you were first learning to code? I do not imagine that you read the entire programming manual cover to cover to learn to program, but that might have been useful if you suffered from insomnia. Technical literature is organized with not only a detailed table of contents, but also an index to cross reference related information. In the case of Keynes’s General Theory, then I believe that the table of contents would be sufficient.
You have most likely absorbed the general framework of economics already (e.g., capital stocks and flows, investment, interest, expenses, market price). I began reading GT with chapter 12 from which the following excerpted paragraph is taken.]
*
“…Thus the professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere, of the kind by which experience shows that the mass psychology of the market is most influenced. This is the inevitable result of investment markets organised with a view to so-called “liquidity”. Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of “liquid” securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is “to beat the gun”, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow…”
*
[That was enough to get me hooked on Keynes once I stopped laughing at the ironic resonance I had with him, a famous intellectual and I, a radical autodidact.]
probably would have hooked me.
i am guessing that if i started now i would find much of it familiar as to policy, but i still don’t know much about the real world of business or investing.
hell, even Nixon was a Keynesian.
as to programming, i gave it up about the time all the rage was to write comments every other line so your boss could tell what you were doing, assuming he was a complete idiot. after that i only wrote for my own uses in an engineering office where the bosses downtown said they could see no use for a computer in an engineering office. by the time the bosses decided computers might be useful after all, everything was pre-packaged . the bosses bought a new package every year. and shortly after that we no longer were allowed to think at all… just enter data so the downtown experts could guide our little feet every step of the way.
I learned enough about business and investing to not want to manage either people nor my own retirement plan.
I started IT (data processing in the day) as an operator, where I first learned COBOL and SAAL in my spare time to assist in balancing and editing input batches into operational processes that I ran. Late in 1972 I got a job as an actual programmer. I kept ahead the micromanagement curve hopping jobs and making my way into IBM 370 systems programming by January 1978.
By January 1981 I was writing SAS programs to process MVS system log data in managing systems performance and media conversions. By late in 1984 I was beginning hardware capacity planning along with occasional analysis of specific application performance problems that were evading the abilities of systems and applications programmers. By then what I was doing was so far over the heads of my management that I got left alone to do my work for the next 31 years, even with the advent of an outsourcer taking over the management of facilities.
Northrop Grumman, who managed me (more or less), from June 2006 on, did relieve me of the financial end of hardware capacity management while I retained just the reporting and demand forecasting. Perhaps that was supposed have been a snub. That is how my boss, who did take the NG employment offer in June 2006, saw their play. However, I rejoiced losing the burden of budgeting and procurement.
The only career for me better than the one that I had in IT for 47 years is the one that I am having now in retirement.
Ron
in a way i envy your success. but i think, whatever talents i might have, i am not temperamentally made for success.
i was once given a sort of promotion, or pre-promotion, that brought me in from the field to an office where the boss complimented my work
and i kept thinking of Wilde:
“I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.”
Coberly,
Hey, don’t envy me. I was just trying to survive. I got lucky in so many ways for just a high school grad from a median income family.
The biggest break that I got was from the assistant provost marshal of the 101st Airborne Division. My fellow LEOs had set me up with some bad advice to just let the Korean ROKs pass through the Phu Bai gate at Camp Eagle without stopping to search their truck. After all, they were allies, Fen great allies at that. That came back at me later when they were stopped with stuff they apparently procured on post illegally. The desk sergeant chewed me out and a few days later I was called in to be interviewed by the assistant provost marshal. However, he interrogated me about my solo on the back gate a few days earlier and never even mentioned the incident with the ROKs. Satisfied that I was committed to base security and the war effort, instead of standing for disciplinary action I had acquired an ally of my own. I believe that the XO was somehow on my side as well. The CO and top and most of my fellow LEOs wanted me gone, preferably in either the field or the stockade. I declined to participate in black markets for drugs and prostitution, which had made me a threat to the MP status quo in I-Corps. About one week after my last run in on Christmas day there was a guy waiting at the gate as darkness and closing approached. I asked in what he was waiting for and he told me “A CE” which I knew to be a computer hardware repairman. We talked. I put in for a transfer and the top and CO expedited my transfer to the 101st Admin Co to work as a computer operator, which had been my civilian occupation before I was drafted.
Hell that is just one of my many amazing turns of fortune. I can tell you about luck now. I have survived bunches of bad situations including a few that should have been terminal. I do not know the name of my guardian angel, but I know he is there. But the career stuff came about mostly by standing so far above the competition that it was not even a contest and much of the rest was knowing when to hold them and when to fold them. I am lucky as hell just to be alive. The compartmentalization of my checkered past away from my employment was the balance.
The moral to this story is that almost no one is what you think that they are, particularly if you only know them online.
Also, I succeeded because I stopped paying attention to the little blue line that they had drawn for us in about the sixth or seventh grade. That did not mean that I would not take their money, but I did not need their lame advice.
Ron
well, there you are. i toed that line for far too long because i did not know anything else. i did begin to see earlier that the blue line was not an honest game.. but i still didn’t know anything else.
finally got off it in graduate school when i realized i was not a genius and did not want to be a professor. after that i found it dangerous to be different in any way, especially knowing more about my job than the boss. but i had some help from angels along the way too.
don’t worry about my being envious of you, just a part of me would like to tell the angels that their care was not wasted. they were on the blue line too and expected me to do good if not great things. but the only way i ever found to do good was to get off the blue line.
and yes, it helps to remember that nobody is what we think they are.
Coberly,
I bailed on status quo plan for two reasons. First, I did not like how they treated my dad, illiterate with no formal education yet with genius hands for masonry, gardening, hunting and fishing, household handyman, and training dogs to hunt. Second, I learned that a gifted kid just in the top 1% on STEM aptitude and only about the 96% overall could get a PhD and still be no better than a lab tech in R&D, a gofer for a genius PhD. However, before I learned about opportunities in the newly emerging data processing field, I was just planning on working in a factory until I ran the factory. I took interest in computer programming when I was given an Algol text book while still in junior high school, but had no idea of the coming scale of jobs until I was looking for a job after I dropped out of college first semester. My goal for starting college was to get a bed to sleep in away from home in Richmond VA, but the job turned out better than planned.
yes
i noticed that a few thousand years ago. sometimes i try to tell people.
the “uneducated” already know it and don’t care. the ph.d.’s don’t wanna hear it.
Coberly,
Take care.
Wife returns to work tomorrow (still from home but not leisure) after 9 days off. I get back to my work too. She also has the week between Xmas and 1/1/21.
Merry Christmas.