Cool Physics: The Bathtub...

Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Bathtub...

Source: The Bathtub Theory of Economics and Life

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist

The bathtub: source of childhood delight in soap bubbles and added flatulence. In Grover-the-Grouch's special case, it is clearly the latter...

My apologies for the unannounced "blog break." Posting twice a day for any celebratory month can be taxing mentally. I'm back, somewhat refreshed and perplexed at the same time...

It can be said I spend a lot of time thinking about Sequestration from the search results that will now include this posting. Likely because I think it is the dumbest idea of self-inflicted immolation on the altar of libertarian, free market austerity I think humans have ever conceived! It requires "magical thinking"; fairies with pixie dust and exacting miracles on drive-through demand to pull off. The pixie dust is someone, somewhere in the "free market" writing a big enough check to cover what would normally be the "collectivist conspiracy" also known as a democratic republic. It should have healed Thomas Eric Duncan and the two nurses affected with the Ebola virus. Cutting $490 million from the CDC; $2.5 billion from NIH and STILL refusing to confirm or appoint a Surgeon General the NRA loves puts a huge dent in Tinker Bell's pixie dust. Nate Silver gives the stats why an Ebola travel ban is pointless. Pixie dust...

Yet, Nate Silver gives a republican takeover of the US Senate a 60% chance at succeeding, but he hedges with reassuring nuance. Meaning: at the worst display of stupidity and cognitive dissonance, brace for more austerity cuts, magical thinking, "shining city on a hill" cliche bull excrement; repeal of The Affordable Care Act putting 10+ million recipients back to square one of waiting for death; further slippage internationally in our technological competitiveness and likely a sham impeachment trial that will make us permanently a mockery in the pages of history. We'll be the Proverb, the Byword of how a government of the people, by the people and for the people perishes from the Earth for the racial disdain of the real-life Huxtables at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1400 is apparently the annex down the street). The charge has been levied back-and-forth from the last administration to the present, but Eric Fromm's treatise "Escape From Freedom" is instructive in this excerpt:

"The fact that somewhere else he declares that a boy should be taught to suffer injustice without rebelling will no longer strike the reader-or so I hope-as strange. This contradiction is the typical one for the sadomasochistic ambivalence between the craving for power and for submission.

"The wish for power over the masses is what drives the members of the 'elite,' the Nazi leaders. As the quotations above show, this wish for power is sometimes revealed with an almost astonishing frankness. Sometimes it is put in less offensive forms by emphasizing that to be ruled is just what the masses wish...While the 'leaders' are ones to enjoy power in the first place, the masses are by no means deprived of sadistic satisfaction. Racial and political minorities within Germany and eventually other nations which are described as weak or decaying are the objects of sadism upon which the masses are fed. While Hitler and his bureaucracy enjoy the power over the German masses, these masses themselves are taught to enjoy power over other nations and to be driven by the passion for domination of the world."

"Trickle-down = golden flow" as the working class ("middle class" a moribund label now) are taught to spit and stamp on those at the bottom that not for luck or grace they would quickly be, and will to their own self-delusion, not likely leave their current stations and social stratus without the advantage of connections the 1% nonchalantly enjoy.

Or in our case, why the country went insane in 2010 and seems determined to continue it in 2014.