Thanks to a boatload of free publicity from Professors Natelson and Juras of the University of Montana, I and many others are now aware of the Kaimin, the campus newspaper, and more specifically of its Bess Sex column, by Bess Davis. I should probably go to the archives to find the really salacious stuff, but I’m nearly 59 years old, and I just don’t have the energy. It feels a bit creepy.

Today’s column is pretty tame, urging campus couples to use condoms, or to avoid “riding bareback”, as she calls it. That’s good advice for young couples. (It’s an “advice” column.) Other than abstention, which few take seriously, promotion of the use of condoms is good public policy.

I’m a long-time observer of the way people behave, and become shrill and annoying when I see powerful people bombing and killing weak people and stealing their stuff. It’s all part of being the youngest child in a family, sensitive to injustice. Humans are capable of all forms of depravity, and also of justifying that depravity, and of even going so far as to claim that depravity is virtuous.

That’s part of what driving the professors – the notion that depravity is taken for granted. They are Victorian in their outlook, and open talk about sex, free indulgence – it’s all depraved in their eyes.

But sex is hardly something to get upset about. Since the 1960’s and the advent of the pill, it’s become easier to have sex without consequence, and social norms have softened. Many enlightened men now understand that women enjoy sex too, and occasionally have orgasms. So I’m told. And women are more open about it now, and men are taking this openness as an invitation. In olden days a girl who openly enjoyed sex was considered either a tramp or the “town pump”; now it is now understood that even good girls have sex, and enjoy it, and want it to be safe and protected.

But some things don’t change, and the current Bess Sex column hits on an age-old theme – honesty in a committed relationship, and trust. That part, it seems, has not changed. Women still want men to be faithful, and Bess acknowledges that men are often not faithful, and urges the use of condoms. Buzzkiller.

What little I know of computer programming can be put in a bean bag and still leave room for lots of beans. But I do know this – higher quality accounting software keeps a record of all transactions, including those in which transactions are deleted. There’s always a trail for the auditors to follow. They know who did what, and when it was done.

Election machines have such audit logs. But Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) machines have an additional feature – a built-in “Clear” button that allows traceless deletion of the audit logs. (And five of the company’s models delete the first deck of ballots automatically – it’s supposed to be used to delete the test deck before actual use, but in practice deleted real votes.)

So the machines don’t count votes correctly, and can easily by tampered with.

No self-respecting voting machine manufacturer would allow such sloppiness. It’s so common, so basic, so well-known, that such a flaw could only be there by design.

Current versions of Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) have such design flaws. All of them in 34 states.

How ’bout that.

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Colbert means to be comical, but the idea of wealthy people “Going Galt” is in itself laughable. They should do so, if only to learn that wealth production goes on without them.

I have an idea for a novel – it will be called “Atlas Shoveled”. In it, all of the garbage collectors in the country go on strike, and the country slows to a crawl and eventually comes to a dead halt. They agree to come back to work on one condition – that they be paid a living wage and given some benefits, like health care. We give in. The country goes on as before, and wealthy people again undertake their wealth-producing activities.

I’m trying to get my feeble mind around this – in the current meltdown, one thing was obvious to any who even casually observed: Deregulation was in whole or in large part responsible for the mess. But there existed in ancient Greece and in our country today people who are very good at the art of obfuscation. They were then known as Sophists, and though once admired for their skills, “sophistry” today is not something to admire. In fact, it is the root of the words “sophomoric” and “sophisticated”, the latter not intended as any kind of compliment.

So I happened by Dave Budge’s the other day, expecting the sophists to be hard at work, and came across his most recent entry, How Regulation Is “Killing” Banks. If I may be so bold as to summarize, at the root of our failure to contain the financial meltdown is a law passed in the wake of Enron’s collapse, Sarbanes Oxley. Part of that law requires that public financial institutions use “mark-to-market” accounting for valuation of assets.

Mark-to market has been the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) standard since December of 1991. It’s not new. Sarbanes Oxley did not create it, but simply moved it from Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to public law.

What is Mark-to-market (m2m)? It is simply a requirement that assets be valued at the their fair market value on any given day. If a bank owns a stock that it purchased at $100 a share, and it is only worth $25, it has to value it in its financial disclosures at $25. Similarly, if the stock is worth $150, that is its mark-to-market value. (It should be noted that Enron got in trouble in large part by inflating the value of its off-book partnerships by deliberately setting them up in such a way that they could use m2m to overvalue them.)

Well and good. It runs contrary to the previous standard accounting practice, which conservatively required “lower of cost or market” in asset valuation, never allowing companies to recognize gains until realized. That’s too conservative, probably. The problem with m2m arises, however, when we have a meltdown, a panic, when investors won’t touch supposedly toxic assets, when their immediate value is zero. In that situation, m2m creates a huge vacuum, and entire companies are sucked under. It may well be that their assets will fetch considerably more down the road than now, but m2m won’t allow for future valuations, or even for a discounted present value of future cash flows from those assets. So the requirement that banks use m2m, in effect, killed the banks.

So, sayeth the Budge. Hence, “Regulation is “Killing” Banks.” The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is obfuscatory rather than revealing. It pushes off to the side all of the problems that led us to the crisis we are in, and lays it all on a practice meant to inspire transparency in accounting. M2m is but a small part of the problem – the larger problem was lack of transparency – trillions of dollars in unregulated financial assets that were mostly invisible to people outside the banks. When real estate prices began to collapse, when mortgagors began to default, we began to become aware of the problem of these assets. They were not assets at all. And they were not insured in any meaningful sense. M2m did not cause that – in fact, m2m was a neutral force in the matter, as few knew and even fewer stated openly that the exotic-toxic asset valuations were suspect.

Even so, FASB and the SEC relaxed m2m requirements late last year. It’s no longer an issue.

There’s really very little that can be done in a meltdown but to do what we have done – start bailing. Investors are a panicky lot, but mostly savvy. They were fooled by the banks, but not by m2m. In fact, had we had true m2m, we would have known about the problem long before we did. Investors now are mostly scared by the fact that we seem to be in the midst of a collapse. Me too.

In the comments section of the post, The Budge says

I’m say[ing] that it [Sarbanes Oxley] may have exacerbated the problem taking it from a manageable market event to a $8 trillion dollar bailout.

A practice that came about in 1991 exacerbated a meltdown in 2008? Where was the Budge in 2006 and 2007, when m2m was showing the investing public huge financial gains?

And it was a “Manageable market event”?! I have accused him in the past of generally putting all market failures in the lap of government. In this post, I accused him of putting his eggs in a “non-disproveable hypothesis” in order to obfuscate. Later, he tells me (before a shunning) that

The reason the investment banks became too big to fail was because of the collusion with government…

Got that? I’ll do a sterile translation – the reason we had a meltdown is because the regulators failed to regulate, allowing financial institutions to become too big to fail. The Budge believes in regulation. I can take that to mean nothing else. If the regulators had not colluded with the bankers, there would have been regulation, and perhaps no meltdown.

But let’s not forget, regulation is “killing” the banks, and this was a “manageable market event”, so absence of regulation was really not that important anyway.

The Budge is educated, smart, erudite, seemingly well-reasoned. And a practitioner of the art of sophistry, in my ever-so-humble opinion.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” ~ John Maynard Keynes

I disagree with Keynes that capitalism is a “belief”. If one were to strip away all belief, and leave men to their essence – what you would have could be called capitalism, laissez-faire brand. The nastiest of men would rise to the surface and come to dominate us all. In fact, that is what happens in spite of higher belief systems. It’s a simple working principle of human existence that power accrues to those who desire to be powerful, and that those who harbor such desires often (not always) do so for malevolent purpose. In fascist states, beasts take center stage for all to see. There was no mistaking Franco or Pinochet for a democratic ruler.

In democracies, the beasts are often off-stage, holding strings, putting up friendly faces to cover their essential nastiness. Such were the roles of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush – front men, velvet gloves covering steel fists.

So philosophies have sprung up over the years, the goals of which are to somehow harness this system of nastiness so that we can all benefit. Some systems go so far as to crush our spirits under collectivism. But the beasts are waiting in the bushes and spring upon us again in the collectivist systems, and we end up with communism. It was identical in all aspects to tyranny everywhere and through all time, except for that name.

Odd, however, and contradictory, that communism toppled with hardly any bloodshed. That messes up my pretty picture. All it took was a congealing of popular movements, and the beasts stepped aside. That’s an interesting phenomenon – I beg for any conservative to explain it. And then I ask if any popular movement, be it for single-payer health insurance or unionization or to simply get our country to stop its brutal occupation of Iraq – if any of that can succeed in our country. We may be the majority, but we do not rule.

It appears on the surface that people of Russia and Ukraine and Romania had more ability to command their own fate than do we ours. Is all of this democracy around us really an illusion?

Virgil, who put together the dismissive musical chart in the post below, has also done the same thing with books. booksthatmakeyoudumb is also a product of his fertile mind.

I see in his chart at the top and towards the far right (of the chart) that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged scores high. That book is a foundation-crumbling tome that in the end may be as damaging as Das Kapital. It’s still got appeal for the young, one of whom went on to become head the Federal Reserve, and whose activities had a large part in fomenting our current crisis.

The book has a mesmerizing effect on young intellects. The same can be said of Scientology or Marxism, but most people outgrow youthful siren songs as the complexities of life become apparent. I am sure I would have fallen for it had I read it before I did in my thirties. But Atlas lingers in its devotees, it seems. They don’t discard the wooden characters full of false emotions. The economics are as suspect as the attitude of Rand herself about love and attraction and altruism.

Rand’s heroes – Galt and Roark and Reardon, are the engines that drive the economy and culture. Rand was full of contempt for most people, especially ordinary people. She saw no value in them, and had them living as remorra on the sharks who give us our sustenance. She created a cultural meme that has spawned many offspring. Her ugly philosophy underlies the supply side, the flat tax with special favors for the investing class, and the very notion of “trickle down”.

All of us have benefited from the creative efforts of a few, but little of that creative effort would have come about without a system that fosters mutual aid. Bill Gates epitomizes the successful entrepreneur, but he merely took a software developed by others used on a product that came about in large part (not totally) because of government-sponsored research, and built a business model around it. That model was dependent on patent, a government protection, and monopoly, the natural end-product of unregulated markets.

The same can be said of pioneers of aviation and communication. The Internet that allows me to publish my lightly-read prose came about because of government, but it took the private sector to make it into a wonderful toy even adolescents can enjoy. If it were government alone, the Internet would be a dreary tool used for back-channel communication among embassies and colleges. If it were the private sector alone – there would be no internet. The research that spawned it was expensive, and none involved could see a profitable outcome.

Atlas constructed an imaginary world, one that formed a Utopian vision for those who bought in. Rand herself thought it would transform our world. It has succeeded to a small degree. It is like a perfume that lingers long after the ugly aunt who overuses it has left the room.

I suppose it was inevitable – people list their favorite music on Facebook, and the average SAT scores for colleges are published in other places. It only took Virgil at CalTech to put it all together into a chart of SAT levels and musical tastes. He took the ten most-mentioned favorite musicians from many colleges, and made a chart

Check it out at musicthatmakesyoudumb – the chart is far too big for this page.

It’s mostly non-informative – most musicians are somewhere in the middle. But there are some outliers – Sufjan Stevens and Ben Folds, who I don’t know, and Dylan and Radiohead and U2 and Counting Crows are on the far right of the chart. It appears that the lowest scorers follow Lil Wayne, Gospel, Hip Hop and Beyonce.

Draw your own conclusions. Mine: It’s tongue-in-cheek. As the author says, correlation ≠ causation. And hip hop has got to be a form of protest. Why else would it exist?