Kimball Corson
05/19/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

A Tribute: My Wife of 28 Years

When I left the US in the early 2000's, digital cameras were not yet the vogue. I knew that taking prints of pictures to sea was a disaster and that negatives fared little better. Therefore, I have very few pictures from the film days before I left, except for a few my youngest daughter photographed and sent to me in digital form.

That I have so few pictures from the film era is a lamentable situation. Actual prints I had have long been destroyed by humidity and water. All I have now are digital photographs which I can keep on terabyte external hard drives in water and humidity proof containers.

The one that I post here is one of the very few I have that was scanned of my last wife of 28 years when she was about 28 just before we were married. She was a beautiful, athletic women, with a dynamite figure to more than match, and for many, many years we had a truly great life. So I put up this picture here, such as it is, and only wish I had some more and better photographs from the earlier period of us and our many adventures, e.g., riding off on horse back for days into high wilderness country with only food, bed rolls and rifes. She was a great horse woman. . . and swimmer and diver, too.

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Kimball Corson
05/18/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

The Infamous KiKiPoo, Traveling Companion and Boat Raqueteur.

She chews small wires. She kills and eats live fish. She gives her first bite of kibble a hard death shake. Her parents were seriously feral. She is sweet and loving toward me. She greets me at the boat's edge when I return in my dinghy. She thinks and acts like a big cat. She is yellow-eyed and prehistoric. When she yawns, the inside of her mouth looks like that of a snake. Her parents are Mexican and probably into the drug trade for mice somehow.

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Kimball Corson
05/18/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

What Libertarians Don't Understand

Briefly, two things: economics and democracy. Two very big failings, indeed.

As to economics, they in fact -- to one serious degree or another -- believe the hyper streamlined, distallate of Hayek and the anti-empirical Austrian School. However, as Milton Friedman, Lionel Robbins, Gunar Myrdal and many other economists of different persuasions agreed, Hayek was a poor economist. It is ironical in the extreme that he should be the de facto guiding light and guru for the lost generation who are the libertarians.

In truth, economics is very messy, with competing central tendencies and often odd, conflicting or ambiguous empirical results, highly depended on the methodologies used. Methodological correctness is key and very difficult to attain and it can still yield odd, conflicting or ambiguous empirical results. Controlled experiments are not possible. Without getting your hands very dirty working with the data, one gets no sense or feel for these things or markets or how markets in fact work. Not even the theory is free from doubt. For example, the core notion that a macro equilibrium of all markets can be established to exist is empirically doubted.

Working long and hard with the data does however give one a sense of relationships, tendencies and directions that Hayek, the libertarians and the Austrian School wholly lack. The Austrians and libertarians don't do serious numbers, much less mathematics.

Libertarians miss the boat here with their simple minded economic connections and relationships which are too largely nonsense.

Libertarians also do not understand democracy. Two main points here: 1) The minority does not get to decide it is their way or the highway. They feel they have to get what they want or they will wreak government or shut it down. Abusive use of the filibuster has stymied the majority without seriously protecting the minority. That is just one example. We have seen the attitude time and again. No serious alternative program; simply block and hamper all opposition efforts. It is the majority's right to rule unfettered. 2) The further idea too is not no or no more taxation. It is no taxation without representation. The minority has representation but it wants to block taxation the majority wants.

We have huge misunderstandings on both these score by libertarians. They just don't get it. They don't understand economics or democracy. They only understand what they want. A very benighted viewpoint.

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Kimball Corson
05/15/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

How Republicans Are Sinking Our Ship

In the new book, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism," the well known and respected Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who is a conservative senior scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, have been making big waves in Washington and elsewhere with a new book bluntly stating a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles.

As they carefully show, the political dysfunction in Washington is the fault of the Republican party, largely because of its transformation into an extremist force that is "dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Other conservative scholars agree privately. There can be be no cooperation to serve the national interest when one party sees no distinction between the national interest and its own agenda and goals.

I have been arguing something like this for years. It doesn't take clairvoyance to see it.
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Here is an example demonstrating perfectly and after the book what is being said here. "'The evidence is that the Republicans will be [too scared to compromise] after what happened to Sen. [Richard] Lugar,' [ex-President] Clinton said, referencing the six-term Indiana senator Mourdock defeated last week. 'We will see, with two or three other primaries, what happens. Obviously, I think there should be a big, bipartisan coalition for this. We may just have to wait till the election is over.'

"Mourdock, the state Treasurer who was enthusiastically backed by Tea Party groups, thumped Lugar in the primary, running on a promise to avoid compromising with Democrats.

"The Republican position that tends to prevail in these primaries was expressed by the gentleman who beat Sen. Lugar, who said, 'I'm just against compromise, we need to stop it, it's weak, it's foolish, our views are irreconcilable, we have to force the American people to choose which one of us is right' -- if that prevails, we're toast. We'll look like a bush-league country.'"

So is an ideologically driven Republican electorate the real problem? Have Koch & Friends -- with their huge propaganda machine and funding of the Tea Party and various Tea Party candidates -- sealed the fate of the Republican party? At the barest minimum, they certainly haven't helped, I suggest. I believe they are seriously causal.

The machinery of government here is seriously broken. Expect little from our federal government. It is unable to do anything really sensible politically because of the Republicans.

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Kimball Corson
05/15/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

1984 Has Arrived

We know that the Department of Homeland Security is developing secure internment facilities in the US for holding large numbers of prisoners for up to several months. DHS is also hiring military security guards for these facilities. We additional know some of these guards will be trained in how to "re-educate" selected prisoners. Now, we discover the Army has developed a "Re-education [Internment] Camp Manual" but it is designated as "Not Intended for Public Release"

The Fort Leonard Wood Public Affairs director, Tiffany Wood, has misrepresented the facts by saying the Manual's provisions only apply outside the United States. For that reason, several with access to the manual have leaked provisions of it making clear that her statement is false.

The Manual details how to treat detainees incarcerated in prison camps both abroad and inside the United States.

The manual outlines how officers are to develop programs to "indoctrinate" "political activists" incarcerated in detention camps into developing an "understanding and appreciation of U.S. policies and actions."

These are not good developments.

Our government is clearly planning for us to get seriously out of line. I wonder why?

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Kimball Corson
05/15/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

My Life Takes Shape

One of the two felons who were out on probation and who attempted to rob and murder me aboard my boat late one night, has entered into a plea agreement and will testify against the other who hasn't in the latter's trial now set for August 14, 2012. If found guilty, the sentence is 20 years to life on the attempted murder charge.

In the meantime, I will finish getting my reconstructive dental work done so I am ready to go when the trial is done.

After the trial, I will leave for Tonga where I will say goodbye to friends there and swim with and photograph the great humpback whales with my Hero camera in late September before heading to Fiji for the cyclone season.

My life assumes some chronological shape.

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Kimball Corson
05/14/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

An Idea Whose Time Is Coming

Pornographic cinema is one thing, conventional cinema, another. It is time that something like both merge together so we have a real cinema verite. Porno is corny. Conventional cinema is calculatedly blind on multiple sides. Why not a full and real cinema verite?

I mean skillful, well-done drama involving real people with real problems and real lives, including their real sexual lives, bath and behind closed doors, realistically woven in and fully included. It is an idea whose time is coming. Cold Mountain and The Human Stain both with Nicole Kidman each move in that direction but they overly romanticize and foreshorten the sexual aspect and edit too much out, including aftermath. All very stilted and posed. Open, full and complete, and at all ages and in all contexts. The way we live in fact, is what I urge.

What? Are we afraid of ourselves? Our bodily functions? Do we fear we are too close to apes and chimps? Are we ashamed of ourselves? How primitive. We need to get over it and on with our lives. Jesus did shit. Mary, too.

Real and full lives is what I am taking about, with the sex and all else fully included -- not the cinematographic, edited pap we are fed.

It's coming time . . . we get on with all of real life and fully address it, cinemagraphically.
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This post drew over 450 comments on Facebook.

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Kimball Corson
05/14/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

Not The Kind of Pussy-Brain Connection I Had in Mind
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photo not mine.

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Kimball Corson
05/08/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

Why Current Female Movie Stars Look Like They Do

Voluptuousness -- in the vein of Jane Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Sophia Loren -- is out. The boyish looking girls are in -- Gwyneth Paltro, Jodie Foster and Nicoile Kidman are examples here. Why the shift in the feminine ideal. John Travolta has inadvertently provided us with an explanation of why.

John has battled rumors about his sexuality for years, but now he is facing serious allegations from an anonymous male masseur who is suing him for assault and sexual battery, seeking $2 million plus punitive damages after Travolta is said to have "began rubbing the masseur's leg, touched his scrotum and the shaft of his penis" after having stripped naked during an appointment. The lurid details are not the point however. What Travolta said is.

Travolta allegedly told the masseur that he "got where he is now due to sexual favors he had performed when he was in his 'Welcome Back, Kotter' days," and that "Hollywood is controlled by homosexual Jewish men who provide favors in return for sexual activity."

That Hollywood is dominated by Jews at the top is undenied, even by Jews themselves. As one recently said, "Yes, we control Hollywood" and "we are proud of it."

But now Travolta has taken us a further step toward understanding why current female stars look like they do.

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Kimball Corson
05/07/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

The gaps are considerable. Keep in mind these are stated only and likely not actual preferences.

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Kimball Corson
05/07/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

My Favorite Sports Have Changed

Having spent some significant time now in other parts of the world, my viewing preferences in sports have changed. First, I should say in regard to American sports, I have been biased against "freak" sports. i.e., those where you need much of the team to weigh 250 pounds and up and look like fire hydrants or be 7 feet tall and most gangling.

Here is my before and after list:

Before

Baseball
Football
Basketball
. . .
Soccer

After (with observations)

Rugby (fast, fun, no freaks, varied action, always some action)
. . .
Baseball (too slow, but thoughtful with fast reflexes)
Football (freak sport, violence punctuated by committee meetings)
Soccer (slow action, too much running along slowly kicking the ball)
. . .
Basketball (freak sport, looks monkeyish at full court)

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Kimball Corson
05/07/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

The Role of Super-Pacs: Obama's Disadvantage

Obama lacks a good super PAC loaded with cash to engage in negative advertising against Romney. Super PACs are the political the hit men in elections. Why? Two reasons.

Super PACs offer two characteristics that make them ideal attack dogs: 1) legally unrestrained fundraising and 2) distance from the candidates they support. They can accept unlimited donations from corporations, unions and individuals, and they do not need to obtain a candidate's approval for the messages they are putting out.

"In the Obama-Romney election, each side will try to slaughter the other. Super PACs, and similar tax-exempt, independent-expenditure organizations - named after section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code -- are better equipped to finance harsh advertising because they are legally prohibited from coordinating with the candidate and his campaign." NY Times

Obama has raised a lot of money -- $191.7 million as of March 31. But his super PAC, Priorities USA, had collected a paltry $8.99 million by the same date. This is chickenfeed compared to Romney's super PAC, Restore Our Future, which had raised $51.9 million as of March 31. Restore Our Future has demonstrated a far greater ability to raise money than Priorities USA, and there are a host of super rich conservatives prepared to invest large sums to defeat Obama.

Obama needs to repair the situation or he will be murdered with too much negative attack ads funded by conservatives "independent of Romney." And there is fodder. Too, Obama is not getting much big money from large doners. They have disappeared on him, although he excels on smaller donations.

If he does, this will be how Obama loses.

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Kimball Corson
05/07/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

The Horror of What Is Happening

It had its earlier nominal start with Newt Gingrich. More contemporarily, it has been strongly redoubled by Republicans Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, joint authors of the immaturely titled and unintentionally self parodying book, "Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders." If the title conjures up images of the Wild West and shoot outs at OK corral, it is not far off the mark.

Gingrich, these Young Guns, the Tea Party Republicans and the huge number of other Republicans in Congress who have also signed Grover Norquist's pledge of 'no new taxes so that government can be cut down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub' - are the core cadre of Republicans who are out to destroy government as we know it, if they cannot get the legislation they want to do the same thing.

No matter that they are a minority. Their guerrilla legislative tactics, spoil sportism, hostage taking, resentment of Obama and take no prisoners approach in Congress are rendering government dysfunctional. That is the thesis of a new book by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, entitled ""It is even Worse Than it Looks . . ."

As Mike Lofgren, a thirty year veteran Republican congressional staffer has put it this way: "It should have been evident to clear eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less like a traditional political party in a representative Democracy and more like an apocalyptic cult or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe."

A perfect example of the new Republican style was this cadre's opposition to raising the debt ceiling unless they got the deficits cuts they wanted. They didn't give a damn if America's credit rating could be (and was) damaged in the process. They wanted government cut.

As former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel said in the Financial Times, his party has become "irresponsible" and he was 'disgusted" by their antics over the debt ceiling. Gone are responsible and moderate Republican leaders like Eisenhower, Bob Dole, Everitt Dirkson, Howard Baker Gerald Ford, Hugh Scott and others who were pragmatic and who would and could work things out. As the well respected political historian Geoffrey Kabaservice explains it in the title of his book, "Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party" -- the term moderate Republican has become an oxymoron.

On the debt ceiling crisis, Speaker of the House John Boehner - the man in the middle -- and the less radical elements in the Republican party were only able to team up with the Democrats and - to stay with the metaphor - "head the Young Guns and their gang off at the pass," at the last minute, but too late to prevent Standard & Poor's from down grading US creditworthiness, in large part for our dysfunctional government, as Standard & Poor's explained it.

I could go on, but you know enough to fill in the blanks yourself. Paul Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee. Eric Cantor is the House Majority Leader. Kevin McCarthy is the Republican House Whip. These Young Guns are at the levers of power in their party. They and their Republican colleagues I describe are deliberately sinking our ship of government. They want government to fail and are becoming emboldened at their effort.

What they want is to destroy the federal government as we know it and the Norquist Pledge makes that clear. All but 13 Republican members have signed the Pledge and three Democrats have. That is a total of 338 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate, as of late 2011. Make no mistake about their goal: it is to starve the "beast" of government down to a size where they can destroy the rest of it. They hate the US government with a passion. Their patrons, the rich, conservative Plutocrats in America, want to rule and control and the US government stands in their way.

Now here is the real horror of it, as described by Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein in their book: The American voting public is badly out to lunch and can't keep matters straight, at least in the face of the myriad Republican lies and propaganda. This is proved by what happened with the 2010 midterm elections:

"In 2010, an angry and frightened electorate had put the Republicans in the majority in the House and strengthened the GOP's hand in the Senate. What that produced was a year of hostage taking and wrangling in Congress, misdirected steps to deal with the deficit and nothing whatsoever to remedy the public's greatest concern - chronic unemployment. Democracy's most essential power - the ability of the citizenry to "throw the bums out" - proved wholly inadequate to the task of governing effectively." Mann and Ornstein

These are the grounds to believe that America is in very serious trouble unless something like Abe Lincoln's dictum is true that most of the people cannot be fooled all the time. But is that enough in these circumstances? Republicans have been voting against their own interests for years now.

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Kimball Corson
05/04/2012, Pago Pago, American Samoa

Although Religionists Urgently Attempt to Deny It, Faith Is a Partial Rejection of Reality

Truth and knowledge make it clear that "faith" is a partial rejection of the world and it is coupled with a partial and commensurate retreat in to fantasy and wishful thinking. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Faith means not wanting to know what is true [in some regards]."

But here is how some religionists defend against this obviousness: "This is an extremist position and is not what theologians typically mean by the word "faith." In his classic book, "Stages of Faith" James Fowler provides a deeper insight: "Faith is a person's or group's way of moving into life. It is our way of finding coherence in and giving meaning to the multiple forces and relationships that make up our lives."* Now how is that for amorphous mumbo-jumbo. In fact, faith is belief in things unseen or that cannot be established as true. There is great imprecision of thought in this defense.

The same such defender goes on to argue in a most backasswards fashion: "A leap to faith is leap is a courageous move toward what is true, and begins by accepting things exactly as they are, with as little ego distortion as possible, and without the impulse to immediately condemn, reframe or ignore." Yet, this is precisely why Nietzsche argued that the church's dedication to truth was its ultimate undoing. This chap is attempting to reverse matters.

The same author finally argues, again absurdly: "The leap is also toward the trust that creation is inherently good, and that if you approach the world with the desire to know and accept what is true, that all will proceed well, even if you do not understand -- or even want -- what shows up; even if it means that you will need to re-examine some deeply held beliefs." This is no more than the old saw that we should just trust in the Lord and things will all work out for the best, rephrased in much more decorous language.

The quality of thought here is abysmal.
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From an article by Rabbi Alan Lurie entitled "Is Faith the Rejection of Reality?"

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Kimball Corson
05/04/2012, American Samoa

How the Supreme Court is Screwing Up the ACA Case

Why aren't the provisions of Medicare Part D, which impose a penalty of 1% for each year that an eligible participant postpones electing a private drug insurance company from which to purchase a private insurance policy, a clear and fully applicable precedent relating to the ACA individual mandate? The answer is, as a friend points out, initial enrollment is voluntary; however, this penalty become mandatory thereafter in later periods so there is no changing your mind: you must buy the insurance or pay the fine, just like under the ACA. Too, the purpose is the very same: to force people to purchase insurance that regulates health care in interstate commerce This part D provision has been in effect for several years. But there are other and better examples of positive Congressional mandates in American law.

Then, in 1792, a Congress that included 17 framers passed a law requiring nearly every "free able-bodied white male citizen" age 18 to 44, within six months, "provide himself with a good musket or flintlock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges," along with balls and gunpowder. A rifle could be substituted. The purpose was to establish a uniform militia and the Commerce Clause could be deemed to support the requirement. But there are better examples yet.

In 1790, the first Congress, which included may framers of the constitution, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen, and, worse, in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves." This is very directly on point.

Supreme Court approval should be tanking if the Justices don't know or understand these matters. Too, they have already applied the wrong standard of review. The standard the Justices are clearly applying is "de novo" review, that is, total re-review from the beginning. The proper standard of review in a case like this is did Congress have a "rational basis" to believe the Commerce Clause supported the legislation. This more deferential standard applies because the ACA was voted on and passed by representatives of the people who were voted into office by the people, unlike Supreme Court justices who are appointed. Justice Kennedy understands the problem, if not the law.

Justice Kennedy got to the heart of the matter by saying "Assume for the moment that this [the requirement to purchase health insurance] is unprecedented [a mistaken assumption as I show], this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed [not!] -- the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce. If that is so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification [de novo review] ? I understand that we must presume laws are constitutional [the rational basis review standard], but even so, when you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this, what we can stipulate is, I think, a unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?"

There is the standard of review problem in a nutshell, with Kennedy making the wrong assumptions and presumptions and the Court consequentially proceeding in the wrong manner.

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