Ben Carson's Hidden Message.

I have a speculation about Carson's recent rise in the polls. No, the neurosurgeon is not actually dumb enough to believe his grain-in-the-pyramids theory. He is playing dumb, on purpose. If you doubt it, just look at what kind of talk got Donald Trump to the top of the polls this summer.

Or, remember Rep. Todd Akin and his brilliant insight into female anatomy. For those of you who had forgotten, he had claimed that a pregnant woman's body magically knows whether or not the conception has been through rape, and if so, it can abort the fetus on its own accord. Well, that one was actually a case of bona fide stupidity, but that is not the point.

The point is, someone had voted for that guy! That is yet another reminder of what kind of clientelle Mr. Carson is attempting to serve.

America is a nation of salesmen! The customer is always right. So is the market. So are the voters. Bill Maher, smart as he is, has no chance of changing any minds or hearts by calling Americans dumb. Coming back to Todd Akin example, one might get a fleeting, horrifying suspicion that Bill might actually have had a point. Still, every businessman knows that antagonizing the audience is asking for rotten eggs in the kisser.

A businessman won't argue with potential buyers. He will adapt to the reality of their demands, reasonable or not. Adapting is so much more practical than trying to change the world.

Thus, I speculate, Carson doesn't really believe in his own pyramid theory. His real message is: I am not siding with a bunch of egghead academics. I am one of you, folks. You know, just another American. It works. His numbers are up. I guess, we shouldn't ridicule Carson for his egregious ignorance. Instead, we should be flattered that he is trying to so hard to be one of us.

Tormenting Animals: Because We Can?

It is indeed a philosophical question -- and irrelevant to some -- whether we should be allowed to subject animals to pointless suffering. The recent killing of the majestic lion Cecil is a shocking reminder that the question is there. Another reminder is routine cruelty of the meat industry to not-so-majestic cattle and birds, whose muscle tissue is served daily on burger buns all over America. On the other hand, our friends from the religious right scream that we are all higher beings, God's creation, and not animals at all. If we cannot earn the status, let us magically award it to ourselves anyway.

Cecil has been killed by a licensed hunter, in perfect accordance with the law, though the way in which he's been killed ought to be illegal: for the last 40 hours of his life, the lion had to to put up with the sharp arrow in his flesh.

Is anyone in the whaling industry paying attention? What about cattle? The law protects them against cruelty, but the political pressure to enforce it isn't there. If we need to eat them, fine. Can  we kill them humanely, for Christ's sake?! Can we only kill what we need to? Can we learn to treat each other decently, while we are at it?

``You call my children animals!'' a priest had once screamed at the biologist Richard Dawkins. He must have heard something that Dawkins never said: that we are nothing but animals. It is up to us whether or not we act as higher beings. Either rise to the level, or shut up about not wanting to share 96% of your DNA with a chimp. Mammals are,in fact, capable of compassion. Are you?

Anti-Hillary TV Ads Are Being Tested in Labs.

In this NY Times article, Ashley Parker and Amy Chozick write of a peculiar research lab, financed by a Republican strategist. The lab is testing anti-Hillary TV ads for effectiveness. They use paid "experimental rabbits" from various voter groups.

The article remarks that "Republicans are acutely aware that early attacks labeling Mitt Romney as elitist were impossible for him to shake in 2012." That might be, but I doubt that Hillary will be effected by such attacks to the same extent. After all, Mitt Romney's message was off-the-leash capitalism, which didn't sit well with the majority of the voters.

Obama has been elected and re-elected by the economic scare, by the recession. Just as his predecessor has been re-elected by the terror scare of Sept. 11th attacks. Not to say that every election has the scare which ultimately decides the outcome. Indeed, a notable exception is the comedy of the year 2000, when W made it into the office by flipping the state of Florida -- they couldn't find a coin -- and by court decision.

One important feature that differentiates Hillary from the other side is the lack of certain attitude toward a drowning person. The GOP candidates come across as if they were telling a drowning man to calm down, take a lungfull of air, practice his strokes down there, and swim for the nearest public beach, all on his own. God forbid, they might infringe on someone's freedom by heading for a private  beach instead.

The message of self-reliance and personal responsibility is certainly a right one. I tell my kids that, by and large, they are on their own in this world.

However, coming from certain politicians, that's how the message comes across. Especially, if it is used to as an argument against affordable healthcare. So, the negative TV ads portraying a candidate as "elitist and out-of-touch" won't stick to Mrs. Clinton as much as they've stuck to Mr. Romney. It's her message that counts, really.

Je Suis Charlie 2.0.

To the Muhammad Art Exhibit attackers: if you two can hear me down there in the pits of hell, you schmucks are the reason why the contest had been held in the first place!

No, I did not participate in the contest, and would not want to.

If I had a good neighbour who happened to be a Muslim -- you know, smiles and hellos every morning, doing each other little favours, that sort of thing -- he or she would be another reason why I would not join any contest of the sort: out of respect for that person's feelings.

As it is, I have no close relationship with anybody who practices the faith. But I keep hearing of the nutters willing to tell me what I can and cannot draw in my own home. Pamela Geller may not be the nicest person in America, but the fact remains that her group was attacked on American soil for exercising their constitutional right. Attacked in their own backyard.

Perhaps, AFDI deserved a peaceful protest by decent Muslims, and things could have been said to put the bigots to shame. Islamic activists could have emerged with a moral victory. Instead we had two filthy individuals, who identified themselves with Islam, who did what little they could to perpetuate the ugly stereotype.

Whoever hates that faith, whoever loves the stereotype had received just what they wanted last Sunday. The Fox-Newsesque bigots a-la Ann Coulter must be delighted right now. Seriously, all the extremists out there deserve to hear this: you are the real reason why the pictures of the prophet are being drawn by defiant artists all over the world.

This week's outrageous murder of Boris Nemtsov is but a tip of the iceberg, the bulk of which is missed by the English-lingual press. Along with Anna Politkovskaya and Sergei Magnitsky the man is now a victim of political terror.

The world's largest country, home to 150 million people, the country that gave us Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Aivazovsky and Kandinsky, the country with amazingly rich culture and history, is bound to swim in the filthy waste of its own moral degradation for years to come. Lack of  ordinary conscience in too many hearts and common sense in too many
minds is the underlying reason.

Suppression of free speech in the last year has reached levels unseen even back in 2012. Somehow, this has gone by largely unnoticed by Huffington Post, CNN, or Fox News. Moreover, the degree of support of such oppression among the common folk does not receive nearly enough attention in the west.

In this video, we see ordinary Russian citizens protesting the war in Ukraine. These people are bullied not by the police or the Security Services, but by their fellow countrymen. (The blue-and-yellow flag is Ukrainian).

Such is a nature of a dictatorship: oppression of people by their own kind, not just by the Evil Man Upstairs, be it Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin or Vladimir Putin.

The attackers in the video think they are being patriotic. They have no idea what is it they are doing to themselves, to their children. There is no law without free speech. There is no feedback and no way to govern effectively without free speech. They are handing their own government a terrible license to squash any one of them individually.

President Obama had to issue a statement of condemnation and a call for a transparent investigation, of course. He had no choice. Still, I am sure, he realizes that demanding justice of the current Russian government is nothing short of naive.

It is probably time to address the nation as a whole, because a significant portion of it -- though hopefully not a majority -- supports the policies of Kremlin.

High Incarceration, Low Incarceration.

In the much touted book Rich Dad Poor Dad -- which has also received quite a bit of criticism over factual errors (see here and here) -- Robert Kiosaki puts forth the importance of understanding cash flow. In essence, it means that the financial state of the individual can be viewed as multiple pools of money connected by pipes. The employer's pocket feeding into the individual's pocket, which in turn feeds the mortgage, the utility bills, et cetera. In order to be wealthy, one must understand that plumbing.

This is not a financial blog, but I wonder what we might have concluded had we applied similar reasoning to the penitentiary system in the United States. Consider the pools of the American people: pre-high-school, high-school, college students, working professionals, the unemployed, criminals at large, prison inmates.

Criminal history, depending on the offence may remain on the ex-inmate for seven years or longer, virtually precluding him or her from landing a decent job. A glass ceiling over impoverished communities becomes a pipe feeding from the pool of the prison inmates back into itself. Throw in some  suction from high-school into the criminal and prison pools, as well as weak economy which is sure to pump some people from the working professional pool into the prison system as well and we get one ugly picture.

The U.S. incarceration rate is comparable to that of the Soviet union during the reign of Joseph Stalin.

"Rape culture" or "Sexual anarchy?"

Today, I want to rant about a, shall we say, interesting article by Jeremy Egerer "The Irrational Modern Woman, Sexual Anarchy and 'Rape Culture.'"

Although the exact message of the piece is a bit amorphous, the author seems to assert a certain dichotomy, an either-or situation faced by  a modern woman of the Western world.

What dichotomy? Well, looks like there is more than one, which is the part that the author could have made clearer. Let's see:

"She demands liberty for all women to portray themselves as sexual objects and then complains when objectified by random men on the street ... She wants men to defend her against lewd sexual advances and then derides men for using terms such as 'slut' while she accepts them."

What exactly does that mean? I can but speculate, but I shall try. Cannot ask the author. Or, perhaps, I can ask the spoiled, insufferable modern gal herself? What is it you want, dear lady? Do you want to adhere to the dress code of a catholic school, perhaps even wear a nijab? Or do you want to put up with whoops and insults of intoxicated morons driving by?

It's not like they'd find a way to insult just about anyone on the sidewalk -- except, perhaps, a police officer or a group of sinister male teenagers. If only you presented yourself appropriately, those guys would have been the epitome of chivalry and gentlemanhood. See what you have reduced them to?

Do you want your dad/mom/priest to make decisions about your sexual behavior? No? Would you rather leave it to a rapist? No again? Who, then? Who is it that you want to be in charge of your vagina? You are  "driving every sensible male into a state of confusion." Mr. Egerer certainly sounds confused.

All right, all right, I may have exaggerated. In fact, reason has glimpsed through the clouds of Mr. Egerer's affliction.

"It may be argued," he says, "that the defining factor of 'rape culture' concerns the woman's choice, that her consent alone determines whether or not sexual advance is proper."

Indeed, dear sir. Indeed. It may very well be argued.  But, alas, it's must have been too cloudy in there, for in the very next sentence we read:

"... when every woman has a different preference, and all is possible, how may men be held morally accountable for woman's defense?"

Meaning, some women don't like their most intimate decision to be overridden by strangers, but some others, apparently, do.  "And any man with any sense of morality -- or even simply a brain -- is rightfully frustrated." I am so sorry, sir. You have my condolences.