Guns Don't Kill People...

See, this guy gets involved in a custody fight with his ex-wife. So, he gets some guns, puts on a bulletproof vest, goes to a hair salon in Orange County, California, and kills her and seven other people there, innocent bystanders or employees.
He's still alive.
But, the knuckledraggers will tell you over and over again, guns don't kill people, PEOPLE kill people.
Now, imagine this rampage with a baseball bat, or even a knife. Many if not most of these people would be alive today. But in this psychotic country we console ourselves with the fact that we can "protect ourselves against the government" by buying as many guns and as much ammo as we want, even if we are a convicted felon.
It may be a cliche, but more and more Ned is convinced that the inmates really are running this asylum.

UPDATE: One of Ned's readers has admonished him for practicing medicine without a license, in describing American society as psychotic. He says it should be more properly described as sociopathic. Ned regrets the error.

Newt, Inc

One of Ned's loyal moles, burrowed deep into the education-industrial complex of the DC area, has sent Ned an incendiary portrayal, done of all things by the WashPost, of the history of that consummate insider, ultimate narcissist, and "born again" sinner, erstwhile National Blowhard Newt Gingrich. It is simply too flabbergasting a story for Ned to try to summarize it. So Ned will simply advise his many friends and loyal followers to go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/newt-gingrich-and-how-he-got-rich/2011/11/21/gIQAftOglN_print.html, and read the description of how someone who was kicked out of the job of Speaker of the House by his own party could now be mentioned by the political talking heads as a serious (we mean that, by the way) candidate for president.

Ned's malaise and the GOP

Ned has posted of little late, due mainly to his growing malaise at the failure of what passes for an intelligentsia in this benighted country to call the GOP knuckledraggers out for their clear intent to subvert the will of the people (such as it can be discerned) and destroy the effectiveness of the federal government. This has been made clear by the vile creatures themselves, who crawled out from under their rocks in 2009 and declared their intent to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama, mainly because a black man had the effrontery to be elected to be president. Obama didn't help his cause when he forced through an incomprehensibly complicated "health care fix." Most maddening of all has been the intolerable tendency of the media and talking heads to constantly decry the inability of "Washington" to work, and to wail and call the political system "broken." The only reason things have reached this sorry state has been the behavior of the GOP. Yet we constantly hear bleatings that politicians just need to work together for the "good of the country", ignoring the fact that the GOP has no desire to work for the good of the country, and wishes to see the people's faith in the federal government subverted and destroyed. To that end, recent polls show their plan to be succeeding as more and more respondents, mainly composed of unthinking rabble apparently, are bewailing the government and claim to be losing faith in it.
One is reminded once again of Shakespeare, who has said it all before. Mirroring the present GOP, Henry V, after planning his invasion of France to push his claims to the French throne, themselves instigated by his bishops fearful of losing their power and wealth, said, "France, being ours, we will bend it to our will; or break it all to pieces."
Such is likewise the clear intent of the present Republican racist, anti-intelectual faction.

The Damned Sneering Plutocrat Do-Gooders

Comes word today via the NYT that a Sneering Plutocrat couple, apparently having sleepless nights over the plight of the 'third world,' has decided to 'give' Stanford University $150 million to found some sort of BS think tank to support ideas to make people in poor countries rich. We are not making this up. One would think that such idiotic behavior, in the face of 50 million without health care here, with 16% underemployed and 9% unemployed, they would find some cause of value here in the USA. But no. They want Stanford (itself one of the richest private institutions in the words with a multibillion dollar endowment) to set up a foundation, and one of their first ideas seems to be some kind of plan to give money to Bhutan to fund planting hazelnut trees in the denuded Himalaya foothills, denuded by the Bhutanians themselves, of course, probably to provide the Chinese with cheap tropical hardwoods to make chopsticks out of.
Why is this important? Two things: first, it shows the folly of giving Sneering Plutocrats huge fortunes, flayed from the backs of workers, and then trusting them to give it to whomever they please, without the citizens of the country that allowed them to make the filthy lucre in the first place having a say.
Second, this tree-planting idea is cockamamie. Here's why. Hazelnut trees are not native to Bhutan, so they will be replacing a high-diversity tropical hardwood forest with essentially a monoculture. And the idea is of course that the Bhutanians will pick the nuts and make millions exporting them. To whom? You might well ask. Why, probably to US. And who will be harmed by this idea of subsidizing hazelnut growing in Bhutan? Why the hazelnut growers in Oregon's own Willamette Valley! That's right, friends, it is one of our main cash crops, and we make sure they harvest it doing as little environmental damage as possible.
Which is sure as shit more than we will be able to say about Bhutan. So the next time you go to the unemployment office in Salem, or Eugene, or Corvallis, say hello to those hazelnut growers in line for their unemployment checks.

Print Money And Give It Away

In an earlier series of posts, Ned suggested that the Fed simply create money and send debit cards to every one who filed a tax return last year. The debit card, for, say $500 would go to anyone with an AGI of less than $200K but that's flexible. The money would not be depositable, and would have to be spent in the month it came. Then, next month another card would come, and so on until the economy got 'back on track.' Now, this money would be income so it would be taxed by the state and the feds, swelling the coffers of government so they could hire more people or lower property taxes or something. At the same time, the Fed should announce that these measures would succeed and the country was growing again. That would make the stock market go up, people could then sell some shares and make a little money, taxable, which would help still more. Others would buy shares with their new money. If it caused a little inflation, that would help pay off the mortgages that have left some people underwater and unable to move to take advantage of some new job they may know about.
It seems that others are getting on Ned's bandwagon, but Ned asks his friends to remember that YOU HEARD IT FIRST HERE.