Liberal Demonology: the Koch Brothers

To hear some liberal-left individuals, the Koch brothers are just about the servants of Satan and his  (naturally) Republican and conservative minions.    Of course these brothers are very very wealthy   and not especially shy about proselytizing their political beliefs, which is, of course in the gospel of liberalism a type of foul apostasy especially if the political beliefs they hold are opposed to their beliefs.  Never mind that serious religious belief is itself in their minds an evil thing, but I should save that for another discussion on another day.   You might be forgiven (by Christians anyway) for thinking that liberalism is itself a kind of religion, and a not very tolerant one of infidels.  

So who are the Koch brothers?  And how do they differ from the Pepsi brothers?  I didn't know.    Fred C. Koch was a chemical engineer born in Quanah, TX in 1900.  His parents didn't even start out as Americans but were born in Europe of all places.  Young Fred went to the Rice Institute and then to MIT in Boston where he got his degree in chemical engineering.  He worked for engineering firms in Kansas and Texas and made his fortune by inventing a new thermal cracking process that allowed the easier conversion of crude oil into gasoline.  

Unfortunately good ideas are not always welcomed by those in the industry.  This made it possible for smaller producers to compete with the bigger players in the oil business.  So they did what most rich and powerful corporations unwilling to share do, they sued.   The litigation went on for years and forced Koch and his partners to work overseas where they made most of their money, building for example, thermal cracking units for the Soviets and for Europeans before the second world war.  

With the outbreak of war, of course, business was impossible in Europe or the Soviet Union so they came back to Oklahoma and went into the oil refining business.  This was the business which is known today as Koch industries.  

As for Fred Koch's political views, he only had to see what was going on in the Soviet Union to develop a healthy contempt for communism or anything like it.  This was in the 1950s.  For those of you who don't remember the 1950s it was a creepy time when the Soviets had strongarmed themselves to power in Eastern Europe, created a nuclear bomb with the material assistance of American and British scientists with communist sympathies. 

Klaus Fuchs

  Soviet and Communist rhetoric was kind of harsh.  Nikita Khruschev felt obliged to talk openly about destroying America and Europe with his nukes, and toyed with putting missiles in Cuba. 

  Not only that but we had some of the former Nazi scientists working for us, and the Soviets had some of the former Nazi scientists working for them developing all sorts of new weaponry undreamt of in 1939.  In 1957 they pulled ahead of the US in space science putting up satellites such as Sputnik and sending up dogs, chimps, and finally men and women into orbit around the planet.  

Well of course this gave rise to other excesses on the American side

with the evils of McCarthyism beginning to rear its ugly head, but in the context of the times, which is often ignored by modern leftists, the revisionist history is explained as just an outbreak of right wing meanness.   Actually it was kind of a reaction to the widespread Stalinist (and Trotskyist) cruelty and brutality that leftists in America for political reasons refused to acknowledge. 

The John Birch Society was one of those things that was an outgrowth of a semi-justifiable xenophobia on the part of Americans, which didn't make it entirely rational or fair-minded, but the fifties and sixties were a scarier and probably a more dangerous time than the present. Fred Koch got involved in the organization and was one of its founding members.  The JBS took on rather extreme and uncompromising positions with respect to, for example, the civil rights movement, which it viewed as communist inspired.  Free trade agreements were also opposed as was internationalism, such as the United Nations and similar matters. 

Fred died in 1967.  He had four sons, Fred, Charles, David, and William.    As adults the sons sued one another over the estate, and Charles and David are the ones still associated with Koch Industries and

operate the Koch Family Foundations, which annoy liberals so much in the present day.  Actually Charles and Fred each have their own family foundation.  Their current activities include supporting libertarian and conservative causes and candidates.  

It would be difficult to summarize all the political activities of the Koch brothers, but suffice it to say that they are libertarian, conservative and are opposed to the global warming carbon footprint reduction initiatives seen in many liberal circles.  They were also opposed to the Patriot Act as promulgated by George Bush, and gave millions of dollars to the ACLU for the purpose of opposing it.   They were also big contributors to the campaign of Governor Scott Walker and against his recall by the voters of Wisconsin. This was Walker's fate for having had the temerity to seek to reduce the bargaining power of the public labor unions in negotiating with state government which in other states such as Illinois have led to the inevitable collision of interests in lower taxes versus the insatiable demands of expanding government and its dependents.  

So other than using their money to promote political and social agendas in opposition to left wing environmental and pro-labor movements, what have they done wrong?  Is it a crime to have political convictions opposite to those of the current crop of left wing chicken little-minded environmental disaster mongers?  I don't think so. 

Thoughts of Love and Ethnicity

This being the eve of St. Patrick's Day, a fine American holiday, I inevitably end up exploring my own ethnicity in a way that the other white people seldom do.  You can be English, French, German, Armenian, Italian, Sicilian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Bengali, Mexican, Puerto Rican, etc.  And those are just some of the ethnicities in Chicago besides the Irish.  The Irish seem to be oddly suited for political life, and dominate state and City politics in Chicago, Blagojevich notwithstanding.  

And they drink a lot of green beer.  They dye the Chicago River green.  These hallmark holidays have a way of expanding to fill a whole month.  As soon as Valentine's Day is over (celebrating love and chocolate) we have St. Patrick upon us, who himself wasn't even Irish, but never mind.

  A poor little English boy minding his own business on the shore of the Irish Sea, he was abducted by Irish pirates (Arrr!!) and was made to mind pigs for them.  That would put you off pork for the rest of your life probably, but while over there, thus engaged he probably learned enough Irish to say things in their native language about Jesus and God as well as "Hey, I think your pigs got out of their pen and are eating your vegetables".   Eventually he escaped pig duty, and, taking holy orders in France came back to convert the Irish.  A little bit later when the Northmen were rampaging and hurting people along the coasts of England and Northern Europe, and the Islamic infidels were knocking on the doors of Vienna and pouring across the Pyrenees into France, the Irish kept the Christian flame alive in their little island.

In the long run, they certainly were given no great reason to love the English, who lorded it over them for centuries. For centuries the Irish and the Scots were playing the English off the French and Germans and doing their Celtic thing, which was essentially defined as being the opposite of English.  If the English were Protestant, they they were Catholic, if the English had eschewed the Stuarts, the Irish and Scots embraced them. And the English came over to Ireland many times in history in acts of tough love and rough wooing.  And of course the Irish mostly speak English as do the Scots, but are reluctant to admit it.  And Americans, being heavily Irish too, the wretched refuse from Europe's teeming shores, have been markedly ambivalent about the English and their royal family as well.  While America is safely a bastion of republican sentiment (not the GOP kind but the other kind) there are a fair number of closet monarchists in our midst, many of them Episcopalians.    

The Scotch Irish, the original hillbillies.

And though I can be convicted of being Scotch Irish on multiple counts, I expect it is questionable whether I can say I'm really "Irish",  I have a green shirt or two and wear one of them when the day rolls around but that is about the extent of it.  My ancestors from the Emerald isle were Protestants, who, being mostly poor landless, lowland Presbyterians Scots, were encouraged to move to Ireland and take the land of  the dispossessed native Irish who were on the wrong side of struggles with Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, and the Hanoverians after the restoration and other things like that.  Plenty of Irish of course have moved to Scotland and England too, but never mind.   Having lived there for a while, we left again, this time for America and settled in the Carolinas and the Appalachians, took our fiddles along, and our recipes for hard liquor. We may not be Catholic, but we can drink just as much as they can, and do other things that can be considered, well, Celtic.  And don't forget our brethren, so to speak, in Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, and the Basque country. 

It's almost dark,   Werewolf time

Which brings me to the question of "love", which is perhaps the most fuzzed up word in the English language, of which I am the linguistic prisoner.  I work all day in an environment where men and women tunelessly go on and on about love.  I make subversive fun of them in my own way as I absentmindedly go about my work.  When I say that I "love" children, for example, does that mean I want to molest them or serve them like veal with a spicy breading?   The witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel probably, when asked, would admit to loving children. 

The old woman said she loved children.

One does not love chocolate the same way one "loves" a woman.  It's all in the context I guess, and an English speaker is supposed to know one for the other.  A dog that is "good with children" is different from a dog that thinks children are good.    And someone says that they "love" you?  WTF do they really mean?  Maybe they just want to eat you with a fork and spoon and discard the undigestible parts in the morning garbage. 

We value people we love, I guess, which means that we want to preserve them and keep them from harm.  We may also want to keep them for ourselves, not willing to share them with others.  Indeed sharing the ones we love with others could put some of us in a murderous rage.  

I would be the first to admit however, that in the presence of a beautiful woman something goes "sproing" in my brain, and I'm not entirely in my right mind any more.  Only in retrospect or times apart when you get to reflect in calmer moments do you realize that your "love" is some powerful biological urge that drives you onward to ultimate ecstasy or disaster.  Anything that stirs the passions that powerfully is not a little dangerous.  It's all God's way to keep the human race going, this "sproing" phenomenon.   It's the reason also that babies are cute and Maurice Chevalier sings "Thank Heaven for Little Girls".  So if I ever stopped feeling this way, would I even be human any more? 

Climate Change "Deniers"

 Today in C-NET the new CEO of Apple weathered some criticism about his environmentally "friendly" spending by the company.  The headline (probably written by someone other than the writer of the article) says TIM COOK ADVISES CLIMATE DENIERS TO GET OUT OF APPLE STOCK. In other words, fuck off and let Apple continue its environmental left wing agenda in spite of its being a public company.  I guess those stockholders should go off and invest in Fox instead.  You read the article and there is NO MENTION of "climate denial" just that some stockholders are less than happy with the doctrinaire environmentalism of Apple (with heavy emphasis on the "mental".)

Who are "Climate Deniers?"  Basically anyone who takes issue with the hysteria over "climate change" and denies that our climate is changing.  Basically this somehow follows from  the "self evident" fact that the weather is changing.  We are supposed to obediently surrender to the "wisdom" of reducing our "carbon footprint" and stop putting carbon dioxide into the air.  Perhaps he is suggesting we spend more time holding our breath or stop breathing altogether.

.  In other words human activity is causing the climate of the earth to change  from its presumably Eden-like changelessness.  And so we must, to avert the disaster of global warming (as brilliantly envisioned in the science fiction movie "Artificial Intelligence" where it depicted a frozen Manhattan under several hundred feet of water).stop our carbon producing ways, plant more trees, and depend exclusively on wind and solar power.    And of course we should kindly persuade India and China to do the same, which of course they haven't because the atmosphere is kind of an international resource and good luck persuading them to shut down THEIR industrial economies.  Anyone opposed to this kind of lunacy is labelled in the famous words of Al "Liplock" Gore as "Climate Deniers"
in a not-so-subtle equating of his opponents with the manifest goofiness of the "Holocaust deniers" .   Need I add that Gore has a financial interest in the establishment of a market for "carbon credits" so one could say, like the oil and gas companies, his motives are far from "pure".

But of course in the beginning Adam and Eve were in the garden sampling the fruit trees until this snake fucked up their minds and God ordered them out.  Eden was a cool place where everything was okay and nothing unpleasant happened and nothing ever changed.  Animals didn't eat one another but lions and lambs napped happily together.  But humans had to go and screw things up, of course, with the help of course of the snake.  And of course climate never changed in that "Squandered Eden" and life was really good until of course we had the Industrial Revolution and started burning a lot of coal and petroleum. 

Well, I'm not denying climate or that climate is changing, only that there is very little humans can do about it. According to this article, since the polar ice caps have not COMPLETELY melted then it means that actually the previous ice age, which "ended" about 10,000 years ago, hasn't completely ended. Furthermore ice ages have been happening with interglacial warming periods for hundred of millions of years.   Also there is the Milankovich cycle, which postulates that every 41,000 years the precession of the earth goes through a cycle that leads to the warming and then cooling of the planet. Humans in significant numbers haven't been around for more than a few thousand years. What makes us think that we are going to change all this other stuff? 
Climate happens. And frankly it has been happening for a lot longer than humans have been a major force in the climate of the world.  Consider the data that science has regarding the ice ages.  

The fact is, (1)  yes, climate is changing, and (2) some things going on in this planet are beyond human control, and (3) you can't stop climate change by passing laws.  What you can do of course is weaken America's industrial engine until people from all over the world start coming over and taking pieces of it away with them.

I would compare the hysterical climate change-mongers to the masses of people who thought in those more innocent days of the 1910s that you could eliminate the social ills of alcohol by merely outlawing the stuff. The result was Prohibition.   What it proves is that outlawing certain things or practices will just lead to massive civil disobedience and a decay in the respect for law and order.  The climate change-mongers are just a more contemporary manifestation of this kind of lunacy.  It is the sort of thing that the voting public is susceptible to from time to time, alas. 

America is still a deeply racist country?

Arnade

Chris Arnade, writing in the Guardian, claims that, in spite of the fact we have finally elected a president of color, we are still a nation that is "deeply racist".  His evidence for this is overhearing some white guy use the N-word in reference to our newly elected President among other things, such as the persistent poverty of African-Americans.  A bar is a perfect place to get a relatively unguarded opinion about many things, and what better place than a bar to go after a funeral for a loved one. 

His father was a civil rights activist during the 1950s, a time when to do so was to put one's self in physical danger.  It was decidedly an unpleasant time and, yes, there were lots of pointy-headed white morons running around the south taking pot shots at those with the temerity to alter the established legal and electoral landscape that had been in force down there since the end of Reconstruction.  Yes, institutional racism was rampant in this country.  Even in the North there were businesses at which black Americans were not welcome. 

In my native Missouri, I remember a restaurant in Wentzville which was called "The Southern Air" and a truck stop on the long haul from St. Louis to Chicago called "The Dixie Truck Stop", both of which I suspect were veiled attempts by these businesses to keep blacks away.  (Interestingly the black rock and roller Chuck Berry bought the The Southern Air in 1980, then got into legal trouble as owner because of things that had nothing to do with race and more to do with video cameras in bathrooms). 

In any case, in former years, lots of white people did not want to sleep in hotels where black people slept, and did not want to eat in restaurants where black people might also dine, or (god forbid) have their little children go to schools where black children were also present. 

Georgia, 1950s

They did not want to sit on toilet seats previously sat on by blacks, and they did not want to drink from water fountains where a black person might have placed his lips.   Clearly such squeamishness was widespread in the old South and it richly deserved to be swept away.  

Even now there are lots of public restrooms where you are provided with paper seat covers so that in using such necessary devices you might be spared the ordeal of putting your naked white behind on a

seat that had previously been used by God knows whom?  A person of color?  A serial killer?  A child molester?  You never know what unsanitary and morally questionable human being might have used the public facilities.  Indeed some people are reluctant to touch the flush handles and so leave their waste for other people to discover.  (I hope you are not eating while reading this.)

Arnade's article concludes that racism is still omnipresent in America because of (1) the existence of poverty and the fact that unpleasant things still happen to people of color in this country, (2)  there is still a physical separation between white and black people in small towns, where the blacks still live on one side of the tracks and the whites live on the other, and (3)  there are still lots of white folks who will use the N-word in nasty little dive bars.  

Well boo hoo.  There are lots of places in this country where if you are the wrong color, it gets you stared at  as though you were a beast with three horns and five eyes.  America is color-coded still.  Blacks often form a large proportion of the very poorest of Americans.  However among both blacks and non-blacks poverty tends to be a great predictor of future poverty, and racism and ignorance are without question equal opportunity employers.  

 I worked as a math teacher at an all black school for a year on the South Side of Chicago, and while I was not treated badly by everyone, there were enough blatant racism down there to give me a chill. The school was a dumping ground for students other schools did not want.  They needed a body in a classroom to preserve the semblance of the idea that education was going on.  They hired me because there just aren't that many certified math teachers willing to attempt teaching kids in the ghetto.   At the end of year ALL the math teachers were fired, as if the zoo-like non-learning atmosphere there was completely our fault. 

But what was the cause and what was the effect?  In classical liberal fashion, these white northeasterners confuse cause and effect.  Is poverty and crime the result of racism or the cause of racism?  Racism is neither unique to white people nor unique to America, and guilt-mongering by very privileged white people in New York and Boston is not going to change that.

Racism is a many-splendored thing.   It blossoms in the ghetto as well as in white country clubs.  America may be a deeply racist country, but so is every other country in the world. There is nothing special or exceptional about America's version of it.   Get over it.  What I would like to ask one of these liberals holed up in their intellectual and moneyed enclaves in Northeast America is:  At what point would you expect racism to disappear from this country?   Is it the point at which people's differences disappear into unrecognizeable homogeneity and everyone is a medium brown color?  

I expect you would have a very, very long wait. 

 

The Alleged Wage Inequality between Men and Women

 "There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

 

 -Benjamin Disraeli

The use of statistics is a wonderful tool when your goal is to oversimplify and distort the often much more complicated reality of economics and human nature.  Our dear leader spoke once more in support of Lily Ledbetter and the idea that men and women SHOULD be treated equally in terms of pay and compensation and advancement. 

What he said was basically true, that for every dollar a man gets in wages, a woman gets around 71 cents, at least in the United States.  (Personally I don't remember the exact figure but that was the gist of it.)  The assumption is wrong however that (1) this is proof of the inherent sexism of the American workplace, and (2) that that old panacea for all societal ills, MORE LEGISLATION will fix this alleged "problem".  

What I am emphatically NOT saying, of course is that the workplace is fair.  I know this vividly from my own personal experience, and I am sure many of you could come up with examples of the outrageous behavior of managers and others that proves that the average workplace is far from a land of milk and honey where only sweetness and light are experienced. (And in the future I hope to outline my own personal experience with the sorts of crap storms that the poor employees have to endure, being out in the middle of nowhere and without an umbrella when the deluge cuts loose.)

So what do I mean about the fact of wage inequality not proving the inherent sexism of the American workplace? Just this:  Men and women are NOT the same, do not have the same tendencies, skills, or abilities.

   This really should be so obvious I should not have to elaborate, but as H.L. Mencken observed many years ago, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, so I will elaborate.  

Women tend to be smaller and not as physically powerful as men.  Nor do they, as a group tend to do the same sorts of things or enjoy the same sorts of things that men do.  Maybe some of these differences are going away.    


 I am talking about "central tendencies" of the populations of women and men, and in this respect I am not wrong.  You can argue all you want as to the degree to which these differences exist if you want, but my point is that they do in fact exist, and to ignore them is to do reality and justice an injustice.  

Consider, then, if you will, populations of men and women who are measured against certain parameters, like annual income, or IQ, or physical strength, longevity, height or weight.   In terms of these easily measurable things, men make more money, are no more or less intelligent than women, are stronger, don't live as long, are taller and weigh more than women.    However of course not all things are easily measurable.  Are women more rational than men or less rational?  Are they more intuitive than men?  Do they smell better?  Do they care more about their appearance?  Are women kinder to animals and children?  Are they as likely to commit murder and serious crimes?  Do they spend more time taking care of children?  Are men as physically disabled by pregnancy as women are?  Are women better looking than men?   Are their voices more pleasing to the ear than a male voice?  Are they better OB/GYNie's than men?  Better teachers, better parents, better whatever?  Yes and no.  It depends.  It is best not to make categorical statements.  

But getting back to wages, are women discriminated against?  Is there a vast conspiracy to cheat women of 29 cents out of every dollar of wages?  Yes women are discriminated against, and are discriminated in favorable ways too.  In other words, there are certain things women generally do better than men, and other things men do better than women.  Women are better at being women, for one thing.  And men are better at being men (in general I hasten to add).    

There are other things admittedly, where the discrimination is not justified and is wrong.  We are all the prisoners of gender.    The perceptions of employers and society in general, shapes their expectations as to what men and women do in life and in relation to one another.  A generation or more previously women were expected to get married and  have children, take care of those children.  The husband was expected to be the support of the family and the woman was supposed to be his "help-mate" and she still is in those among us who subscribe more thoroughly to the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In a more modern updating of that tradition, both men and women have careers and the care of children is either subcontracted out, or done in the spare time either partner has for the task.  Women however, are still the only ones who can, through their God-given physical and hormonal differences, bear children.  Men are never going to produce much milk, or get pregnant, regardless of how frequently they get screwed.  

In much of the Islamic world, it is even worse for women.   Women are expected to hide their bodies from men, so as not incite in them to unwanted sexual feelings. 

Indeed they are kept in cloisters in some cultures and not allowed out into the world at all.  In Saudi Arabia, for example, women are not allowed to drive automobiles.  And in other cultures things can be even more weird or unjust to men or women, depending on your perspective.    These are attitudes and value judgments that are not amenable to legislative remedies, however.   If you, as a woman choose to ride a bicycle through rural areas in Morocco wearing bermuda shorts and your hair uncovered, don't be surprised if little children pelt you with stones.  

So, in short, what am I saying?  Women and men, even in this country, tend to go into different lines of work, spend more or less time raising children, spend less or more time on their careers, and as  result do not, when summed up and averaged out to means, draw the same amount of money in income. 

An excellent book, read it.

Some fringe benefits of being female or in a relationship are not things you can quantify, and just because you can't assign a dollar value or a number to something does NOT mean it doesn't exist.  And just because some idiot who can use a calculator decides to calculate the mean dollar income of women and men and thus identifies what he or she thinks is a vast wage conspiracy against women, does not mean they know what the fuck are talking about.

Life is not fair, women are not the same as men, and groups have no rights, only individuals do. 

To impose "equality" on situations that are inherently unequal and never will be "equal" is to commit a very large injustice.  Now if only our President understood this.

The Minimum Wage

It is hard to argue with the idea that largely low skilled workers in hamburger restaurants should make $15 an hour, so that they can earn a "living wage".  People SHOULD be paid more.  And pigs should be able to fly. 

People enter into contracts regarding the sale of their labor all the time, and out of necessity they may take a job that isn't very well paid.  Would I want to work at the minimum wage?  Not especially, but then would I like to starve?  Or would I like to be the slave of a state welfare system that tells me where to stand and where to squat? 

Okay so let's raise the minimum wage to, say, $15 an hour.  What would be the effect of that?  Would the owners of the restaurants raise their prices to cover the extra cost of labor?  You bet they would.  Would patrons of these restaurants eat out as much as previously?  Not at all.

That'll be $8 please.

  If I discovered that a Big Mac had gone from say $3.95 to eight dollars, would I bother going to McDonald's drive through?  Not effing likely. More likely I would simply bag my lunch from home.   

  En masse the effect would be pretty disastrous for everyone in the food business except for those providing automated food delivery systems. 

These guys don't get a minimum wage

In other words it would be a bonanza for vending machines.  The absolute minimum wage is zero, and setting a high minimum wage

would just put millions of Americans out of work who no doubt are the ones who can least afford to take such a wage cut. And what would you replace all those minimum wage jobs with?  Oh probably food stamps, or maybe mass emigration to places where they understand the basic laws of economics better.  Or they would turn to crime, which, after all, usually pays a lot better than not having a job at all.  

In the long run of course, market forces would adjust to the new reality of a higher minimum wage.  Inflation would assert itself.  Everyone would want higher wages, and, because labor is inseparable from the costs of most items we buy, the price of everything would go up. 

This would impose a decidedly greater hardship on those on fixed incomes or on incomes not easily adjusted upward.  As a result there would be more people out there looking for part time jobs, but of course, since the minimum wage is so high, you might go months or years before finding a part time job.  So you will go on the dole, on food stamps, or turn to crime or other things that are not exactly legal.  Later the politicians will offer remedies for these problems which they themselves created, and will receive additional kudos by the morons who voted them into office. 

Which brings us to our Dear Leader the other night who advocated a higher minimum wage.  The only question I want to know is:  Does he really believe this minimum wage nonsense?   Does he ever actually speak to real economists?  This is not going to benefit anyone in the long run.  It is going to make it less likely that young people will find that first job, and it certainly won't improve the lives of those who live at the very bottom of the wage scale  or on fixed incomes.   It's only useful in whipping up the moronic masses who have no clue as to the economic realities under which they and their potential or real employers live.