posts in most recent order

Prosecute but stop the rhetorical disection.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

This week there’s lots of buzz online about people who fabricated intelligence to prove that Mr. Trump was a Russian asset in order to damage his political opportunities. This hoax can be lumped into the category of unprosecuted happenings from the last decade or longer. Many Americans are waiting to see if prosecutions will happen this time in this one category. We’re pretty tired of rehashed old news without judicious outcomes.

I have become convinced over many years now that our politics are not above board. Whatever a politician says and whatever the news coverage is about politics, it’s all false. There’s no humor and no interest left in politics because there’s no honesty. Humor makes fun of honest appraisals and interest can’t be generated without honest assessments. Without honesty, the stakes and the facts are fake and there’s no reason to listen to any of it anymore.

I would like to refocus on something entirely different. I would like all my and likewise all of our collective energy to go into making good things happen for me and likewise for all of us in the United States. Because it’s been a while since that was part of our experience.

For years, government statistics continually lie about the number of unemployed people by ignoring the longterm unemployed. Government statistics in 2015 had rosy assessments about future jobs that never came about but little acknowledgement about that failure. When less than 27% of degree holders can find a job related to their training, investing in a university education has become a waste of money and time.

If the Secret Government Agencies, like the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security etc. have all grown out of bounds, if they are doing things that are illegal and therefore criminal, then is anything that they are trying to do worth doing at all? Probably not. Can anyone measure power by the amount of damage that can be inflicted on the other side of whatever group so consistently that there’s no room for real prosperity building?

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Isn’t government power supposed to be on the side of prosperity instead of destruction? Because it hasn’t been for a long time now. It looks like our government is full of bad guys doing stupid bad things.

I’m glad that some of the election shenanigans will be addressed. However, I will only pay attention very briefly when the people perpetrating various forms of deception and treason are in jail. Then I will merrily ignore those jailbirds completely while I try to rebuild my life by making good things happen that these political people have been doing their best to prevent me from doing.

When the government wastes our resources doing bad things instead of good things, good things don’t get done because they are crowded out by all that nonsense. Please no more political news stories on broadcast media. Just set up a website that describes charges leveled, fines levied and jail terms meted out for guilty verdicts.

Instead of talking about politics, let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about jobs. There’s been a labor blockade here in the U.S. for decades. It’s time for that to end. Internet job ads are supposedly 85% fake. Maybe that should be illegal. Hire everyone and train them. Hire old people who have a rich life experience but who can’t collect pensions until they are 67 years old. Hire young people who need experience and training. Hire people to do what needs doing. Pay them.

Stop using social media to make people crazy and disagreeable. Social media has been providing different information to different groups in order to foment discord and increase site traffic. That should be illegal. Stop that. I’m all for the first amendment but it’s not ok to constantly try to set the world on fire.

Let’s move on towards a new prosperity. Don’t make people take sides anymore. Help people work together for a better America.

The Feds ignore popular opinion and attack Iran.

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Lately, whenever I write anything about American politics, I am aware that our government is ignoring my opinion. No matter what eloquence or reason I bring to my writing, no one in government is listening even when their ears should be burning. That makes it hard for me to feel motivated to write about politics. I do not want more war. Many Americans have expressed this. In my case, I don’t want people here or elsewhere to feel helpless to stop wartime violence and many of us feel this today.

One of the more persuasive arguments that I heard regarding Iranian conflict was about leaving Tehran alone. This argument was about water scarcity in that region. President Trump had started warning Iranians to leave Tehran. Telling people to leave a water available area for a water unavailable area in order to save themselves from a military attack is a heartless thing to do. Water scarcity made evacuation into an unviable proposition. Perhaps President Trump decided to attempt a bomb obliteration of Iran’s nuclear enrichment factories as an alternative to attacks against a populated city. Is there some compassion in that choice?

In any case, Israel’s preemptive strikes against Iran weren’t legal according to global treaties that oversee warfare declarations. And the U.S. jumping in is also, I suspect, not quite allowed by global rules of engagement, much less the rules stated in our Constitution.  

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If war determination can be imagined as a scale that weighs the worth of diplomacy vs. violence, it seems that our leaders feel a need to press down hard on the
side of violence instead of diplomacy. Why is that? Why can’t our leaders use diplomacy anymore? Have they been too long planning for war so that they can’t bear to avoid dropping those bombs?

I feel frustrated today. I hope that war in Iran will shrink instead of grow. But I also hope that rules will matter in government once again as they should. The Constitution matters. Diplomacy is an important tool to prevent violence. Secret meetings full of power hungry men may always choose war engagement but this choice should be moderated by rules of engagement and diplomacy that diminish violence.

Even if you’re sure you can beat the other guy in a war contest, it is better to avoid wartime engagement. Your opponent may not be as weak as you imagine. You can lose. And war engagement only in the case of having a just cause limits the waste of resources that can easily be catastrophically wasted in unnecessary wartime struggle. Don’t we all have better investments to make in our society?

ADDENDUM: 27th June 2025

I’ve recently heard that our recent bombing of the nuclear sites in Iran was a long term plan, 15 years in the making. The bombs used were specifically desiged for their use to bomb those hardened nuclear facilities. And bombing was meant to prevent an expansion of violence from the Middle East into a nuclear catastrophe. It was well considered, planned for a long time, and may have succeeded in reducing the length of war exchange between Israel and Iraq. What’s next? Is it too optimistic to hope for peace in the Middle East?

Can we salvage anything?

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Let’s say a big storm comes into town and a tornado sweeps away a whole block of houses. People will rebuild because, we hope, they have insurance to do so. Some insurance policies have loopholes that cover wind damage but not flood damage. Some of policies will have large deductibles. But even if the whole house is lost, usually it will be rebuilt even if not all the costs of the rebuild are covered. Also, people have jobs and a way to begin again by slowly paying off the costs of a catastrophe over time. That’s often true even without insurance.

Bad governance is worse than a tornado. Why? Because all the strengths that a person would bring to build up their life are diminished by taxes, regulations, and policies that undermine an individual’s chance to get ahead during life’s many challenges. The economy itself is harmed by overgrowth of government which takes money out of the economy and uses it for political influence. We have seen that government charges seem to multiply and never end.

A person’s life and their ability to work is finite. Government these days is a constant attack on people’s vitality. It’s not like a tornado that shows up and wrecks things all of a sudden. Instead, it’s a constant drain. What are we getting for those government taxes? I see a government that refuses to account for its spending, refuses to stop spending when the treasury comes up empty…so spending nonexistent money into deficit, a government that is taking tax money and passing it around to NGO’s as a way of defrauding Americans, a well published group of government fraudsters parading their frauds in an unstopping brag of what evil they can do and never be stopped by the common man.

Just look at how things have gone since 2008. The government subsidized failing banks after real estate derivatives caused insolvency. That cash write-off was supposed to save the economy. But prosperity has never returned. A small group benefitted from the 2008 Great Recession. But the new policies that saved the banking sector led to an interruption in the rule of law for bad bankers. That failure of law has proceeded and worsened since then. Derivatives themselves were experimental and even though they have multiplied everyone’s problems, they have widened consequences which has seemed beneficial to the smaller number of people that should have been harmed by the derivatives losses. In any case, derivatives probably are illegal under the Constitution because they lead to money creation. We should stop derivatives trading.

Rule of law fails continue. More negative consequence results from that. Now lawfare in the courts seeks to interrupt any kind of repair to malgovernance. People in government positions continue making one bad decision after another. How do we salvage a mismanaged economy that continues to be mismanaged? Why is the government trying to manage the economy at all? Markets are supposed to do that. What happened to those? Those went away when the government started interfering by promoting some interests over others.

Human beings have never been perfect. We sometimes want to do crazy things. We sometimes want other people to do crazy things with us. Because of that, we need limited government where the government can’t mandate a bunch of crazy. When the nation started, there was a national dedication to limited government power. That was a better way. Limited governance power can get more accomplished along a safer and wiser course than unlimited power which under fascism leads to more bickering and more malinvestements that destroy resources and diminish our national strength.

Public private partnership is a kind of fascism. It is powerful people in positions of power over the less powerful. Rule of law governance is law applied equally to all. Under fascism, powerful people seek to be above the law. This is wrong. Or the law can weaponized to attack political competitors…lawfare. We should stop our fascism. End the partnership between government and corporations. Public private partnerships should end. Government should not decide economic winners and losers.

We need a return to representative voting where real votes aren’t manipulated through digital means. We should return to paper ballots and manual ballot processing. President Trump has signed an executive order to do this, but I’m seeing little change. Electronic voting persists despite its clear threat and past damage to legitimate voting.

We need to repeal bad laws. We need to avoid new laws being written by AI. The flood of bad laws we’ve been experiencing with thousand page legislation bills signed into law by a body of Congress that doesn’t read what it signs should end. Ridiculous legislation should end and we should return to necessary and proper standards.

The idea that government can do anything and the only road to prosperity is through government partnership, government programs, government interference in everyone’s life isn’t working out for America. We should end this overreach.

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Rebuilding American jobs now requires tarriffs.

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All the way back to the earliest period in American history, we used tarriffs to protect infant American industries. It is an old idea but an idea whose time has come again.

The practice of the United States to charge no tarriffs on other nations that do charge us tarriffs for our products pushes against American labor and acts as a subsidy that pays American corporations to hire cheaper labor abroad.

This helped in the earlier part of the neoliberal period to offset some of the risk courted by those who went abroad for cheaper labor resources. During the entire neoliberal period free trade has been a longterm goal. When other nations charged tarriffs on American products we promoted free trade by not charging a reciprocal trade tax and many of our U.S. corporations outsourced their production lines. This reduced the labor marketplace in the U.S.

That no tarriff policy allowed corporations to hire workers abroad, obtain supplies for supply lines located abroad, hire foreign workers and bring the finished product back to the U.S. as a cheaper product to sell to American consumers. Why is it time to change now?

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Economies all around the world grew when American and European companies hired and paid foreign laborers. It wasn’t great for already developed economies but it was fantastic for underdeveloped ones. However, after vast economic growth in far away places, labor prices have gone up everywhere. The reason that China sited manufacturers moved to Vietnam was because China labor became more costly because the Chinese economy grew and inflation made the Chinese laborer more costly than before. The idea that labor abroad would always remain cheap was a fallacy.

Now it’s time to charge reciprocal tarriffs again because the United States can’t afford to subsidize outsourcing labor outside of the United States. We need to promote American jobs and bring manufacturing home again. By charging a tarriff, the U.S. encourages corporations to hire American workers. Why do we need manufacturing at home?

There are many reasons to bring our labor home, for example we would have better national security with products we need to run our economy closer to home, better economic performance when laborers at home have more money to spend on American goods, better quality of those goods that are found closer to home with regulatory oversight. American products were once known as robust, easy to repair and easy to supply. Those advantages have been missing from outsourced supply lines lately. It’s time to bring those advantages back.

What about disadvantages? Higher pricing will happen but it is easier for Americans to cope with that when there are more jobs and more homebased opportunities.

People who benefitted by charging a tarriff on American products and who fear reciprocal tarriffs complain that they deserve to continue to be free riders like under the old system where they could tax us and we did not respond in kind. But all such advantages are temporary as they can now see.

Economies are large and complex and flexible. Feedback from new tarriffs will take a while to take effect. Slowly, American industry should recover from it’s long malaise. Investment in new manufacturing will cost something and will have to be paid for. American workers eventually will grow in number as homegrown industries once again employ them to make the things that we all need.

ADDENDUM: April 10th, 2025

It appears now that President Trump’s tarriff stance has changed and moderated. He has relaxed tarriffs for all nations except for China.

Also, his rhetoric regarding tarriffs is somewhat different from what he is doing. It now appears that the straight tarriff description is completely inadequate to describe Trump’s tarriff charges which are mostly aimed at restoring a trade imbalances after years of unbalanced trade. The United States has imported more than it exports for decades.

Nevertheless, the recent tarriff negotiations are aimed at providing new reasons for manufacturing to be relocated from abroad back to the United States where more jobs are desperately needed.

After globalization advanced, it became more difficult to sort out trade imbalances. American companies partially owned a lot of companies performing value added manufacturing in foreign locations but selling finished product at home.

If American companies could avoid tarriff declarations by owning companies manufacturing product abroad and then transferring finished product in-house without a declaration, then how could a straight tarriff policy address that imbalanced trade outcome?

Once banking went international and manufacturing went international, sorting out trade imbalances became perhaps somewhat of an intractable problem.

Hence very strange rhetoric. It’s somewhat hard to see what needs to be done to restore employment at home. The idea of tarriff as a policy to establish fair trade and restore American employment is a place to start but perhaps not a place to finish.

Social credit system foreshadowed by job market problems.

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For years in the United States getting a good job was a matter of training to do a job that required a lot of training to do. Becoming a doctor of medicine took ten years of university and residency training. Becoming a scientist required several years of training. Getting a bachelor’s degree was the entry level requirement for a lot of good jobs and further university training was required for the best paid jobs, like engineering and pharmacy and teaching and nursing. Some jobs had their own entry level training and even if they didn’t pay well at first, you could eventually earn well after you were familiar with the job.

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That started to change with hostile takeovers that erupted in American businesses under financialization. The return on investment for an education was damaged when businesses were liquidated across the U.S. and well trained people became unemployed. That was pretty bad for a lot of otherwise employable people. The average time spent in a job went from a long time to less than four years, even in jobs that required five years of training.

The next blow to the American job market was AI screening and cancel culture and DEI and other ways of screening out job applicants instead of screening them in. When an algorithm rules out candidates who have no idea how to get past the algorithm, it becomes more and more true that getting a good education doesn’t lead to good employment anymore. Getting hands on training might not lead to long term employment either. That destroys the return of investment in training at American universities and also on-the-job.

Nowadays, the application process is contaminated, according to Kim Komando, with 40% fake job advertisements. In fact, a lot of people have no idea how to get a job these days. The job market is broken.

What I have been thinking is that the lack of legitimate job opportunities may be a gateway to aid the establishment of a social credit system. What if all you had to do to get a job in the context of a new social credit system is to get the appropriate ap on your phone for social credit credentialization? Wouldn’t that encourage you to bend the knee to a new social credit system?

As we see the American job market languishing through another year of having confusing mechanisms of application in an environment with little success in finding rewarding pay, rewarding benefits or even any position at all, it’s worth wondering what this is leading up to. Could it be a motivation to join social credit credentialing when it comes on the scene in the near future?

Neoliberals see Americans as their giant vending machine.

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Addiction is nothing to joke about and being addicted to an infinite flow of money isn’t a funny problem. I saw a Joe Rogan Show clip today where Elon Musk refused to reveal all that he knows about all the ways our neoliberal government has been using America as a giant vending machine. There have been so many ways to steal non-existent money and put Americans on the hook for it. The U.S. went to a fiat monetary system during the Nixon Administration. We continued to pile up debt and Congress avoided restraining spending with a real budget. Omnibus spending bills became commonplace and now inflation is the result.

Without a budget, there’s no accountability for spending. DOGE has been revealing all kinds of spending shenanigans but Mr. Musk said that if he undermined all the grift pathways, by revealing them and shutting them all down, someone would surely think it is time to end Mr. Musk’s life. He has become unnerved by the things that he now knows from the DOGE investigations. Or at least that’s what it looked like and sounded like in the podcast.

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Some of those government and NGO spenders must have thought that they would never stop spending other people’s money and ruining other people’s chances. They wanted to do it for as long as the country had a leg to stand on. So ordinary people who go bankrupt because of huge medical costs should just realize that they made mistakes in their life….not that government policies have increased the cost of healthcare. When a young person can’t buy a house or pay for an education, that young person should think that they made mistakes and they shouldn’t believe that the government’s use of the country’s treasury as a resource of infinite spending and debt has ultimately been disastrous for them.

There are many other examples. Homelessness is a pretty serious penalty for ordinary people to face because the government followed disasterous outsourcing-of-labor policies encouraging corporations to move abroad. Neoliberals just wanted to couple economics (soft power) and politics (hard power) into an unbeatable one-two-punch motivator to get the world to shape itself into something that big bureaucrats wanted. And that something would bring new opportunties to the bureaucrats themselves. Just like an infinite vending machine should.

I wrote in my book, Political Catsup with Economy Fries, which I published in 2015, that putting politics and economics together the way the neoliberals are doing doesn’t create prosperity. It can game the system for insiders but it destroys markets by undermining market feedback mechanisms of profit and loss and brings corruption into politics. So here we are.

I am sorry, Mr. Musk, that the jockeys of infinite spending are mad at you. I think that you were right to delegate the DOGE work to a lot of other people. Perhaps you could start training and multiplying the number of helpers you have to stop the use of America as an infinite vending machine. America has never been able to infinitely sustain so much waste and abuse as we have seen these last twenty years.

A disturbance in the flow of money (out the back door).

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The Department of Government Efficiency has been having a busy week. According to a Trump spokesperson, DOGE has set up a website that provides transparency with regard to their findings. Elon Musk has been declaring that he’s interested in finding the truth in the way government departments handle money. He’s been finding inappropriate dispursements that aren’t labelled as to who they went to or even how much…a sign of fraud and abuse. And there are more monetary abuses than missing payment information which are being revealed much to the chagrin of those who were enjoying dipping into that money flow.

Because so much money misuse has been uncovered so quickly, I am cautiously optimistic. I hope that the DOGE is using it’s powers judiciously and appropriately. I am hoping that they are stopping people from stealing more money. I am hoping that those who have been stealing from the public’s coffers will be identified and prosecuted. Apparently many who may be guilty of such crimes have begun to panic. So far though, it appears that DOGE is mostly just trying to stop the outward flow of inappropriate payments to who knows who what and where and some other government departments will deal with prosecuting the people who have been stealing and dealing in these monies.

Whenever someone says that they are worried that DOGE is acting inappropriately, I just wonder if that person or group is guilty of taking some of that easy to get cash that has been bleeding the United States into poverty. Did that person have a cash connection? President Trump stated optimistically that some of the treasury accounting may have exagerrated the deficit and debt and therefore, the United States may be in better financial shape than any of us thought.

I heard at least one group attribute this statement to some other outcome than discovering cash resources previously unaccounted for. That someone would disparage found money made me doubt the impartiality of that opinion. Because a lot of people have been taking money inappropriately. Secret money, secret money connections, secret money destinations, bribes, influence. Balancing the books finally is something that makes me feel less helpless as I have long watched problems developing that are affecting us all and I feel a little happier about a potentially better tomorrow.

Go DOGE!

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100% Confidence.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

I buy books at Christmas. I have 12 of them from Christmas 2024. Some of them are classic fiction that is entertaining and some of them are new fiction. One of them is advice about how to have better health. Some of these books are filled with timeless truths.

Believe it or not there are timeless truths even today despite the narrative wars in our media that can be so confusing. I have finished the health book, finished 3 fiction books (reading the fiction aloud after dinner with my husband) and now I am wading into what seems to be books filled with timeless truths.

It’s nice to be reassured that timeless truths still exist. One of these books is Quadrivium: the Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music and Cosmology by Miranda Lundy, Daud Sutton, Anthony Ashton and Jason Martineau. It is four books inside one cover. It is already wonderful even though I’m only in the second book.

Imagine living in the past without media distractions and finding rhythm in number ratios inside the sounds in music, or being inspired by looking at the lovely faces of classical geometric forms. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Ventruvian Man, paired with Circling the Square from 1490, well after the Roman age where man was the measure of all things. You can still overcome all distractions and see the world that way now.

The other book that is filled with timeless truths is How to Solve it: A New Aspect of Mathematic Method, by G. Polya. Don’t let the word Mathematic scare you away from this gem. It is filled with common sense approaches to solving problems with unknown causes. This applies to mathematical questions but could equally apply to mechanical problems or really any problem where a solution is needed and is being sought out. Human beings are problem solvers. This book is about formal questions that you or I can ask to get to answers. Don’t give up, this book says, try a question to pry loose some part of the answer.

Of course, if you want to understand ideological change over U.S. history, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, by me, Mel Scanlan Stahl. It will bring you to where you can understand how we got to our political here and now.

Victorian morays have no business in today’s politics.

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I keep hearing about attacks against Trump candidates for office. During the first Trump Administration, the Brett Kavanaugh accusations were motivated politically and a lot of accusations can be made for political reasons. While I think that a person’s morals are important, they are no longer relevant to appointments when baseless accusations are clearly being made to block people. Matt Gaetz just dropped out of the Attorney General candidacy because of accusations. These accusations arose after his candidacy threatened the Washington D.C. establishment. There were no criminal convictions to disqualify him. I think he shouldn’t have dropped out. And I think that entertaining the notion that baseless accusations should be heard is ridiculous. This isn’t the Victorian Era. And the reason that Washington D.C. needs to be changed is because of corruption regarding public service. That’s the kind of corruption that we need to focus on rather than accusations of private impropriety. Let’s stop allowing interested parties to play the game of virtue signalling, chasing down rumors and entertaining falacies for the purpose of blocking needed change.

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How secure is your life if you can’t find a good surgeon or afford a good lawyer?

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If you were in a terrible car accident, would you be able to get the medical interventions to repair your body that you need in order to return to a normal life? Or if you had an unexplained medical problem, could you get the help you need in order to resolve it? Would you trust your doctor to order tests that would help you instead of just ordering as many billable tests as the doctor can to increase their profit? Would the Doctor give good advice if the need was for something simple? For example, if you had sinusitis would he order a CAT scan and surgery if rinsing your sinuses with saline would have been sufficient to repair the problem?

If someone sued you in a frivolous lawsuit, could you find and afford a good enough lawyer to win your case? When you hire someone to work on your house can you do anything if they take your money and run without doing any of the work? What if the work is grossly below standard…could you get your money back from the first guy and still hire the better worker after that?

How much of what you have tried to achieve in life can be protected in a nation that isn’t practicing rule of law governance? NONE. All the good hard work you did in the past just might be for nothing. How can you protect yourself when you do anything now or in the future? You can’t. The reason that I make this point is because Joe Biden is trying to issue a Pardon for his son Hunter Biden retroactive to cover any crimes he may have committed over the last several years. If he can do this, how much rule of law operates here in the U.S.? What can any of us do if there isn’t really legal oversight or legal consequences for certain groups, like politicians, bankers, healthcare experts?

You can keep on going. You can keep on trying. And you will. But there aren’t any guarantees or even realistic assurances when investors can monkey around with real estate prices and double triple or quadruple the prices or the government can regulate cars out of existence or beyond your price range, or taxes keep going up, or groceries cost twice or three times as much, or AI systems boot you right out of any hiring pool of applicants for employment that you are qualified for without explaining their unknown reasons (and 40% of job ads online are fake, but no consequences to advertiser for lying to applicants). Etc etc etc.

Lets hope that things get better.

Our ability to make them better through our work and careful money savings or investment has been harmed by frauds of many kinds and by monopolies. Does making good choices still bring success? Can diligent efforts by ordinary people to do the right thing still work towards bringing them success in a system without virtuous markets or a system without moral politics?

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