Book time

What! I’ll have to wait until October to be rattled again, ugh…J/K, do what you gotta do…I stayed out of the 9/11 thread because I just finished deciphering Emil’s put-downs with all the tools of the lexicon I had available to me. And I’ve never heard of Bill Bryson either.
I found a link to another forum a while back that should keep me entertained between lulls while “working” at home; I usually stay up late working.
Soleri was right about skyscraperpage forum…I don’t quite understand some of the posters’ thinking as they rejoice over medium density 5-story buildings planned for RoRow (a new term I just learned for Roosevelt) in a forum named skyscraper forum (???). However, it looks like the City is planning to narrow Roosevelt, widen the sidewalks, build shade-structures and plant trees. Things that are strongly needed to encourage more development, walking, and safer biking in the neighborhood.

Come on folks. Someone start a guest blog thread.
Stick your neck out, take a risk.
No guts, no glory.
Make Jon proud, get some of them big words out here for us to wrestle with.

I was waiting for azrebel to start something. Watcha got?

Well, the big fight today, apparently is over Krugman. My 2 cents:
https://deconstructingthemanifest.blogspot.com/2011/09/krugman-paradox.html
There. I did my part.

Petro, and I did mine where I always do, the comments: https://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/paul-krugman-9-11
PSF, an idea: we pitch Roosevelt Row to the Korean community. We call it R’uh R’oh.

Well, I really *was* trying to start something over here, but rebuke noted.

Petro, sorry! No rebuke intended.
So, does anyone disagree with Krugman? Be brave (said the spider to the fly).

You did good Petro. I will never forgive the “patriots” of this country from coming down on the Dixie Chicks when they had the audacity to say what many Americans thought, ” sorry world, we have a nut for a President and a lot of people are going to die around the planet because of him”.
Agree that Krugman could have waited a day before his post, but it needed to be said.
eclec, you don’t want me starting a thread. It will always deal with “too many damn people. we need to get rid of all the people”.
So for now we go with Petro’s thread until someone can wrestle it away from him.
P.S. I had plans to marry all three Dixie Chicks, but they never returned my called.

Oops, soleri – *my* bad. These are paranoid times, heh. I just thought I wouldn’t have been able to “sell” my paradox idea if I tried to boil it down to a comment.
@azrebel:
Part of my point is that striking while the iron is hot made his observation more poignant, that the provocation was the thing. (He might be regretting it in hindsight – indeed his latest thoughts today demonstrate a bit of walking back – but I celebrate his incontinency :)).

Probably not going to get too much disagreement over the Krugman issue over here, though, ’tis true.

Documenting Krugman:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/about-that-paul-krugman-allegation-of-911-shame/2011/03/03/gIQAdwBMNK_blog.html

Krugman??? I’m appalled ya’ll ain’t glued to the tube watching the “CNN Tea Party Republican Presidential Debate.”
For a second, I thought I had on Fox News. Tea Party debate just sounds oxymoronic since they are all the same.
Soleri, I’m all for a Korean inspired RoRow especially if it encourages a Seoul super-density community.

Isn’t that Rogue dude supposed to be working on a book??

Discipline is hard.

At least Seoul is trying to improve their city. I was thinking more Scuby Doo for RoRo! The right-wing nutjob sites have their panties in a twist over Krugman. I certainly don’t disagree with him.

Wow, so Rick Ungar of Mother Jones has his in a twist too. Pussy. Krugman was right not to allow comments. He knew what he did and what the response would be. He’s got the biggest balls of them all!

https://www.gorevidalnow.com/
Vidal on 9/11. Interesting who won’t publish him.

Well, I have no idea how to add a link to this page, so please go to Truthdig and read Chris Hedges column today. It is powerful.

Be sure to check out the comments:
https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/soundeconomywithjontalton/2016193031_is_social_security_a_ponzi_sch.html

Wow to those Seattle Times comments…for a second I thought I was reading extremist neo-con logic on AZcentral.
Didn’t think that existed in Western Washington; ignorance IS bliss…

Is the new book a standalone or a continuation of Mapstone or sequel to Pain Nurse?

Great column refuting the Ponzi scheme allegation, Mr. Talton. I do wish you had included a hyperlink to the CBO data/report however.

Re: Seattle Times comments – it is to weep. Low-information meets compartmentalization meets demagogue-fed pseudo-ideology. Argh! What happens when education becomes trade-schooling. But, it’s just what the corporate designers of education wanted, after all.

The new book is the second Cincinnati Casebook (after “The Pain Nurse”). I’m at 52,643 words. Gah!

As long as we’re still discussing 9/11 issues, I’m going to post this here — didn’t get any bites at the end of the last thread (nothing about Bryson here):
In a recent interview with the Arizona Republic’s Dennis Wagner, U.S. Attorney Paul Charleton recounts the shift in intelligence resources and tactics, including placing “terrorism suspects” under constant surveillance in the hope of catching them “spitting on the sidewalk” so that they could either be imprisoned or deported. “Only providence knows if we stopped any attacks, but it’s been a decade without a major terrorism event in America.”
https://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2011/09/10/20110910september-11-us-attorney.html
There are questions as to how finely tuned such tactics are and whether innocent individuals are being targeted on the basis of anonymous tips (good way to get even with a personal enemy or competitor), hearsay, or statements made under duress.
Of course, I am VERY glad that the United States has gone a decade “without a major terrorist event” (evidently, acts of right-wing domestic terrorism such as Andrew Joseph Stack III flying a private plane into the IRS building in Austin just last year don’t count).
That said, the very absence of such attacks, by well organized, well funded, highly militant Islamic fanatics with big-time access to all kinds of military-grade weaponry and explosives (from battlefields in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere), many of whom are willing to die in the course of carrying out an attack, strikes me as a bit odd, especially given how much they are said to hate America. Almost, indeed, inexplicable.
Another recent article, about the reported plot by Al Qaeda to send three terrorists to the U.S. to conduct a 9/11 attack, mentions that “Intelligence analysts have looked at travel patterns and behaviors of people who recently entered the country” and that “counterterrorism officials were looking for certain names associated with the threat, but it was unclear whether the names were real or fake”.
Excluding Alaska, the United States has a 4,000 mile long land and maritime boundary with Canada, large portions of which are notoriously underpatrolled, many of which present ideal conditions for persons crossing individually (separately, to meet later) or together, without having to present passports, visas, or any identification. Of course, they still have to get into Canada (unless they are recruited there).
The 2,000 mile border with Mexico is under considerably greater surveillance, but remains porous enough to allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to enter the country each year. Several recent news articles have noted that an unknown number of immigrants have begun entering California by sea, blending into the small-boat fishing community and arriving on unfrequented beaches at night by raft, rowboat, or motor launch, without running lights; a practice which authorities admit is very difficult to detect. (Even less so when small craft contain, say, three individuals instead of an overpacked boatload of Mexicans.) It’s quite easy to get into Mexico by sea or even by land from Central America (many countries of which are also fairly soft targets for human smuggling); and thence from Mexico into the U.S. by one means or another.
Note that a base of operations in the United States is not a requirement for a terrorist attack, provided the terrorists are not assembling a car bomb and/or cooking up explosives from scratch. One individual wearing a vest packed with plastic explosives and studded with thousands of small ball-bearings (assembled outside the country), walking into a crowded Starbucks on a busy Monday morning, or several wearing business suits and carrying briefcases containing machine pistols and grenades, could do a lot of damage. Conducting one such operation a month would have a devastating effect on American morale. There are other venues which could potentially provide larger casualties with very little increased security risk.
I’m not giving away any information or ideas which wouldn’t have already occurred to a distributed terrorist group like Al Qaeda, some of whose members reportedly make an avocation out of sitting around cooking up plots against the United States.
What I’m getting at is that there have been no such attacks in the last ten years, according to U.S. Attorney Charleton. Isn’t there something just a wee bit peculiar about that?
I know that a number of Islamic terrorist plots have been prevented from being carried out. Others were carried out and, through an odd incompetence (considering the availability of jihadists with considerable practical battlefield experience with improvised munitions, as either tutors or agents) involved bombs that smoked and burned but failed to explode. Many (though not all) of the attacks that were plotted but not carried out, involved individuals virtually recruited by the FBI in undercover sting operations. (No complaints there: nobody twisted these guys’ arms to carry out an attack, and it’s good to get them off the streets even if we’re dangling bait to do so; but on the other hand, it doesn’t say quite the same thing about either the threat level or the competence of counter-terrorist operations.)

@Emil – yes it is rather odd, isn’t it? I mean, GB has had a rather nasty history with terrorists who seemed to be able to frequently put their dedication on display.
I think maybe the “fear factor” here in the US has much to contribute to this. Our paranoia feedback-loop seems to be well developed, and I mostly blame the magical-thinking population for that – and that includes the apparatchiks at all levels in law-enforcement and media. No need for a conspiracy from the top, although fear is a useful meme so I can see why it isn’t actively discouraged.
So, I think that pervasive fear exaggerates the threat on the one hand and, on the other, the hightened irrationality and hair-trigger nature of our law-enforcement (along with the hair-trigger report-on-your-neighbors phenomenon) probably discourages the more rational – if I may use that word – of the would-be warriors.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-great-recession-in-five-charts/2011/09/13/gIQANuPoPK_blog.html
There are some interesting charts to ponder here. Income inequality is exploding (while political participation is sinking). I’m trying to imagine a president who could use these as a teaching tool for a nation driven insane by the right’s racialized class warfare. Arizona is now the nation’s fifth poorest state. Any correlation here between the increasingly extreme Republican politics of this place and poverty? You know the answer.

Emil and gang,
If you are hinting that there may be a program of exaggerated fear-mongering going on here in the US, then I would add that I firmly agree.
Even people in small towns are afraid of the Muslim boogy-man.
However, let me ask you, if a trio of middle-eastern men were to wander into a small community here in AZ, who would be in more danger, the three men or the population of “armed to the teeth” residents of the small town?
Personally, I wouldn’t stand too close to those middle-east targets if I were you.
I just hate how cowardly America has become. Trading liberty for safety is the most un-American and cowardly thing a person could do.

Emil, no fair double posting. If you post an item and the universe moves forward, the earth rotates and your post is missed, that is a risk you take. The only person who can cause earth to rotate backwards, thus going back in time is Superman. Then again, has anyone ever seen Superman and Emil in the same place at the same time????
( : – )

A little off topic, but let’s look at it as a small weather break in our news program.
Since I have no life, I have been monitoring the storm cells which approach the valley and their eventual demise. The radar images are unbelievable.
I would venture to say that if it were not for the heat island, we would have, should have had twenty plus more heavy rain storms this monsoon season. The cells approach the valley in powerful fashion. As soon as they approach the heat island, they begin to slow and disappear. I mean to tell you they go from full blown 30,000 foot thunder clouds to little wisps in no time at all.
We just had an August from hell. A little rain would have made a big difference in temps. If all the (ha)boobs in the city can’t connect the dots on this connection between heat island and no rain, then may they and their relatives spend eternity walking behind a herd of camels with stomach issues.

Good luck with your newest novel! And thank you for the Hunter S Thompson quote! My favorite Hunter quote is; “When the going gets wierd, the wierd get busy.” And the wierd have been VERY busy these days!

Emil,
The absence of attacks does not logically follow that the trash canning of the 4th Admendment prevented said attacks. I think most jihadists or Taliban or whatever they are called prefer to defend their homes against US occupation and guided missile attack. I think the 9/11 (middle-class well-educated Saudis)hijackers might be the exception to the rule, but US law enforcement has made it the standard.
I am more puzzled why there hasn’t been an influx of sophisticated weapons into Iraq and Afghanistan to down our planes and helicopters. Are our supposed enemies using the same economies as Bin Laden? That is letting the US spends itself into a hole while tearing itself apart internally? Or have they ceased to care and are tending to their own economies and peoples?
Currently reading Chalmers Johnson’s “the Sorrows of Empire”. So far an excellent read.

eclecticdog wrote:
“I think most jihadists or Taliban or whatever they are called prefer to defend their homes against US occupation and guided missile attack. I think the 9/11 (middle-class well-educated Saudis) hijackers might be the exception to the rule, but US law enforcement has made it the standard.”
Most jihadists and (Afghanistani) Taliban, perhaps, but not most terrorist organizations (including Al Qaeda). In fact, one routinely sees attacks similar to what I described reported in the newspapers, occurring overseas; but not, for some reason, in the United States.
“I am more puzzled why there hasn’t been an influx of sophisticated weapons into Iraq and Afghanistan to down our planes and helicopters. Are our supposed enemies using the same economies as Bin Laden?”
Good question. Apparently there has been some use of shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles and apparently one downed aircraft:
“One internal report in September 2005 warned that Taliban commanders in Zabul and Kandahar provinces had acquired missiles they called “number two Stinger”, for about $1,000 (£650) each. Nine months later came the first of at least 10 near-miss reports.”
https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-taliban-missile-strike-chinook
Still, ten such attempts isn’t nearly as much as one might imagine. The article also notes that the U.S. and its Afghan allies have been buying up old SA-7 and Stinger missiles from the 1980s (“which may no longer be operational because of battery failure”) from tribesmen for $5,000 to $15,000 a pop (presumably non-Taliban tribesmen, though where money is an issue one never knows).
The real question is from whom do they acquire such weapons? RPGs are much easier to get. According to the article, “As fighting intensified in April 2007 one unidentified source told an American officer that seven Manpads purchased by Iran from Algeria had been landestinely transported from Mashhad in Iran across the border into Afghanistan. Other reports, also unconfirmed, accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence of supplying weapons or missile-trainers to the Taliban.”
But even if those unconfirmed reports are true, that’s small potatoes; and why take such a large diplomatic risk for such a small potential military return? The article notes that the U.S. distributed 2,000 Stinger missiles to anti-Soviet Afghani rebels in the 1980s, and dozens of Soviet helicopter gunships were shot down. I know that the Taliban are a bit behind the curve technologically, but even if “dead batteries” was a valid reason for Stingers and the like to stop working, you’d think that someone in the ISI or the Iranian Republican Guard, or some scientist or technician from another country but sympathetic to the Taliban and hostile to American occupying troops would be able to solve that little problem for them. Perhaps there weren’t that many unfired missiles left?

azrebel wrote:
“If you are hinting that there may be a program of exaggerated fear-mongering going on here in the US, then I would add that I firmly agree.”
I wouldn’t characterize my remarks thus. I simply find it deeply puzzling, given the premises, that no such attacks have occurred in 10 years.
Al Qaeda is said to have recruited nineteen committed individuals, along with countless other abetting parties; funded them; trained them; inserted them; and supported them while they took numerous steps in furtherance of a highly complicated plot.
I can see why changes to U.S. domestic security arrangements would make such a plot difficult to carry out today; but I can’t see why a series of considerably more basic but no less morale sapping attacks such as those I described, have not occurred in 10 years. Not one such attack, so far as I know. Even the (apparently rather effective) targeting of Al Qaeda leadership using assassinations (e.g., drone attacks) took years to erode the leadership base; and each such assassination might logically have been expected to provide the motivation for a revenge attack on the United States.
If anyone comes across a link suggesting an answer to my question, I’d be interested.

Emil wrote:
“Al Qaeda is said to have recruited nineteen committed individuals, along with countless other abetting parties; funded them; trained them; inserted them; and supported them while they took numerous steps in furtherance of a highly complicated plot.
“If anyone comes across a link suggesting an answer to my question, I’d be interested.”
Oh, well, ya know, when you put it like that – there is the “9/11 Truther” perspective, which would hold that the seminal attack couldn’t have been pulled off by Al-Qaeda alone, either. And there are, um, if I recall, some links on that… 🙂
But I’m not going there – please don’t beat me up for light-heartedly bringing it up. Your phrasing practically begged for it, and I’m rascally that way…

ELECTRIC DOG, I have two of Chalmers Johnsons books on my night stand
as soon as i finish The Red Market, Some of The Dead are Still Breathing and The Charles Bowden Reader.

ELECTRIC DOG, I have two of Chalmers Johnsons books on my night stand
as soon as i finish The Red Market, Some of The Dead are Still Breathing and The Charles Bowden Reader.

I’ve been lurking on Jon’s blog for several months now, enjoying the readers’ comments and the back and forth of discussion, but too intimidated by the depth of discussion to consider throwing my two cents in. If you’re looking for a Phoenix-based blog with a definitely lighter, but also at times serious, tone, I would humbly recommend taking a look at http://www.thunderstrokes.com. Readers of this blog who remember Jon from his days as a columnist at the Republic may be interested to read the “Repaying the Debt” post I wrote as a tribute to him and his influence on me while he was here. It may not be a blog of the same intellectual import as The Rogue Columnist, but I’m guessing you may find some entertainment value there, if nothing else. Sorry if this seems like a shameless solicitation in behalf of myself, which it is, but I’m smack in the middle of a quest for readers.

Kevin, that’s a nice blog you have there. You’ve put a lot of work into it. It’s a little bit too “nice” for us Rogue bloggers. If and when you decide to get “down in the mud” a little more, let us know, we’ll play.
Just remember for all you “writers” out there, you need us “readers”. We’re part of the equation. Also, don’t assume that we are all as smart as Emil and soleri. Go easy on those big words. A twelve letter word is exciting every so often, but mostly stick to four letter words. After all, this is Arizona.

@Kevin:
I too was a fan of Jon’s column back in my Phoenix days. I also get the “intimidation” factor – these folks ’round here are wonky as hell.
I know about “questing for readers,” too, heh.
Welcome, and dive in… I do.

Petro, I wasn’t suggesting that Al Qaeda couldn’t have pulled off the World Trade Center demolition. I haven’t been talking about that event, and I hope that such a discussion doesn’t get started here.

The State Press reported today that Governor Brewer is asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit over two of her proclamations; one declaring May 6, 2011 as an Arizona Day of Prayer, and the other declaring January 17, 2010 as a Day of Prayer for Arizona’s Economy and Budget.
No word on whether she plans to proclaim a Day of Prayer for the Arizona Cardinals.

Life Lesson # 1.337
I was just in the garage and I was tightening up the nuts on the wheels of a rolling table we have in there. While I was at it, I tightened the nuts on some shelves, a wheelbarrel and a vice.
Which got me thinking……………as you travel through life, it is best that you have your nuts tightened, otherwise they may fall prey to some calamity.
Just thought I’d pass it on.

Emil, I was teasing – no worries.

While rummaging around in a second hand store today i becane the proud owner for 2 bucks of a copy of “A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I am ten pages in and rolling
For the ever optomistic phxsunfan a great up beat piece ob urban dwelling in the magazine, Scientific American called Street Savvy by the editors. The September issue focus is on Urbanization.

https://www.truth-out.org/between-race-and-reason-anti-intellectualism-american-life/1314634662
This essay discusses anti-intellectualism as an American tradition dating back to Jefferson and the Federalists. It’s a little gassy but it does provide a perspective to understand our current political predicament. Is Obama a victim of an inherently American flaw?

Rogue Columnist readers following the national debate on deficits and taxation might find the following letter of interest. I’ve restored two sentences (in brackets) that were apparently cut for space by The State Press:
* * *
Dear Editor,
Regarding John Gaylord’s opinion piece, “Looking At Taxes and the Right to Be a Billionaire”, the top 1 percent of American households receive 24 percent of the nation’s personal income. President Obama’s attempts to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire on the top 1 to 2 percent of households (a modest increase of less than 5 percentage points to the top marginal tax rate) were rebuffed by conservative Democrats when the Democrats held the majority, and are now rebuffed by the Republican majority. Both claim to be afraid of “killing jobs” by taking money away from affluent individuals who might otherwise invest it in businesses.
What’s often overlooked is that many of these individuals are already investing it, not in businesses, but in the U.S. Government, which, as a means of deficit financing, borrows money from wealthy individuals eager to park some of their excess cash in a safe place (U.S. Treasury securities). It should be obvious that money available as a loan, to be repaid with interest, is also money available as tax collections, free of obligation. Borrowing the cash increases the deficit: obtaining it through taxation reduces the deficit, since taxes collected are not repayable and higher federal revenues decrease the need for federal borrowing to fund the budget.
If low taxes in and of themselves spurred economic growth, then Nevada, which has zero personal and corporate income taxes, should be an economic powerhouse; instead, unemployment there has been increasing and stands at 12.9 percent. [Note that in its reliance on housing, construction, and retail as a source of economic growth, Nevada resembles Arizona. By contrast, California, which has higher personal income taxes than Arizona, remains the number one state for manufacturing.]
Supposedly, the ever increasing reliance of politicians on a small core of wealthy donors doesn’t affect their judgment or policies. If so, politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, should stop acting as the first line of defense for wealthy interests; or else they should stop pretending to be deficit hawks.
Regards,
Emil Pulsifer (reader)
* * *
Note that I don’t think this is the time for economic austerity, which is clearly counterproductive (witness the economic slowdown following austerity measures by state and local governments and decreased demand from consumers hit by higher energy and food costs).
I included a tie-in to the deficit issue because the hypocrisy of Republicans and conservative Democrats on this issue offends me deeply, and because it’s timely and offers a way to make the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for upper income households more palatable to moderate conservatives (whose participation is, as a practical matter, important); and because my idea for stimulating the economy by means of direct redistribution of income, via an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, wouldn’t play well in Peoria. One thing at a time. Let’s get the tax increase and show that the sky didn’t fall as a result.

The anti-intellectual piece is excellent

“While rummaging around in a second hand store today i becane the proud owner for 2 bucks of a copy of “A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I am ten pages in and rolling.”
That’s the way to do it. If I had paid close to $10 (instead of the 50 cents I did pay) for a used copy of Thunderbolt Kid, I’d have been cranky too. Of course, I applaud cal’s patronage of local independent bookstores, but for someone like me on a shoestring budget (Pedro?) that isn’t an option.
I try not to spend more than 50 cents (if that) on books. One method is to visit the book corner of city library branches (some have better collections than others, so look around). These book corners stock two types of books: (1) former library copies which have been discarded because (a) they weren’t checked out often enough and the space was needed for more popular titles; (b) they had too many copies; (c) damage (rare); (d) other; and (2) books donated by the Friends of the Library — these were never circulating copies. These are bargain priced, especially the paperbacks. (Of course, the library has a lending library, too, for those who just want to borrow and read a book, but the stock isn’t identical.)
This is also a good way to browse and try books or authors that one wouldn’t ordinarily take a chance on.
Used bookstores that accept books (and sometimes CDs, videotapes, video DVDs and game DVDs) for trade and offer trade credit are another good way to reduce the purchase price. A few bookstores will permit purchases using trade credit alone. It’s best to investigate to find out what kind of books they’re looking for. Hardcovers will get you big trade credits if accepted, but unless it’s a newly published book which isn’t yet available in paperback, it’s likely it won’t be accepted since this kind of stock takes up shelf space and moves slowly due to its higher resale price.
Yard sales can be another source of super-cheap books, but those are hit or miss; many don’t have books, and those that do frequently offer only bestseller list stuff like they sell in airports (which is fine if you like Daniel Steel and Stephen King but if like me you don’t, they won’t even be any good to obtain trade credit with, since they already have more of that sort of stock than they need and won’t accept it for trade).

“Is Obama a victim of an inherently American flaw?”
Is Rick Perry currently the frontrunner in the Republican Primary?
Does “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” offer $1,000 prizes for knowing that the Sun is the closest star to the Earth? (By comparison, does the British version of the program?)

What would Watson say?

My goal is not to have anything when I move on into whatever galaxy awaits Iowa farm boys. Daily I try and unload some more crap I don’t need. So Emil whatever books my heirs don’t want, their yours. I will leave a note for my executor to mail them to whatever post you would like. Given that my folks were Roosevelt Democrats and believed the little man was never going to get up, I set out at 9 to prove them wrong. Consequently my desire to (over)achieve overcame my lack of intellect and all though not wealthy I did make a few bucks. Hence I recently passed on to my grand kids about a 100 first editions signed by the authors. And I have a motor home full of books ranging from Joseph Conrad to James Baldwin, Ayn Rand to Karl Marx, a whole bunch of Mad Comic magazines and some great Frazetta art books along with some Gahan Wilson political cartoons to mention a few. I do frequent many used book stores from coast to coast. Locally I have been loyal to Changing Hands for 30 plus years. And Mike that owns the Book Gallery is always good for a really rare book and some good conversation. He also has a shop at 50 West main in Mesa. Sven at Bards books (7st and Osborn just north) has a growing selection and is like Mike a nice soft spoken smart guy. And of course next door to Bards is the best Americano in Phoenix, at Urban Bean. For 25 cent to 99 cent VHS tapes it’s Half Price books. And although Half Price over prices their rare books U can work deals with them, if U demonstrate u can get something for less on line. But my second most favorite store as of today is Hoodlums. Great guys Steve and Chris can help you find most any vinyl music or movie DVD’s. So far Bryson and A Walk in the Woods reminds me of a coarse Garrison Keller. But the book has some good facts and for most folks Humor, I suppose.

“So far Bryson and A Walk in the Woods reminds me of a coarse Garrison Keller.”
I warned of the occasional gratuitous vulgarity when describing Thunderbird Kid, but you said then that Bryson’s language was terribly tame, and accused me of (possibly religious) oversensitivity, before bragging (if one can brag about such things) about how often you said the word “fuck” — in the first grade at school.
Now, you complain of coarseness relative to Garrison Keiller (which isn’t difficult to achieve, considering the fastidiously old-timey style of his radio program).
I don’t think you really have an opinion about Bryson. You are simply being contrarian, even when it involves contradicting yourself.
“But the book has some good facts and for most folks Humor, I suppose.”
Meaning that you wouldn’t know, because you don’t understand or appreciate humor, either as a writing genre or as a thing in itself.
I would appreciate it if you would steer clear of the book titles I recommended, because your remarks, clearly made in bad faith, are mere provocations, not expressions of genuine opinion.

Anyone ganderin’ the Wall St. occupation today?
https://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/09/17/live-blogging-occupywallstreet-nypd-block-protesters-from-getting-near-the-banksters/

(sorry if double post, but original uncharacteristically doesn’t show right away.)
Anyone ganderin’ the Wall St. occupation today?
https://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/09/17/live-blogging-occupywallstreet-nypd-block-protesters-from-getting-near-the-banksters/

Oh, rolled into two pages (oops.)

“My goal is not to have anything when I move on into whatever galaxy awaits Iowa farm boys.”
A goal? Is there a choice?
First time I’ve heard of a hole in the ground being called a “galaxy” but maybe that’s one of those Iowan things, like alcoholic beverage control.

Is Arizona misrepresenting its job creation numbers?Just askin’

“Anyone ganderin’ the Wall St. occupation today?”
No, but thanks for that. It appears to be a misnomer, however, since according to comments the protesters have confined themselves to a park, per agreement with the police.
I often thought, reading American media accounts of recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, which were highly sympathetic to protesters occupying central city squares for days and weeks on end, with no permits and obviously contrary to standards for legal assembly even in the United States (much less authoritarian countries like those), that some level of hypocrisy was involved, since American police would quickly clear out such protesters using whatever escalation of force was necessary. Any resistance by protesters other than chaining themselves inertly together or to anchoring objects, would be regarded as rioting and would be met with systematic suppresion by police and, if necessary, national guard.
Mind you, I agreed with the media coverage and sympathized with the protesters, who were indeed exercising direct democracy. I just don’t believe that American media — much less the police — would be half as sympathetic of such protests if they took place here.
Of course, one could argue that under authoritarian regimes, direct democracy is the only practical option capable of spurring change, whereas here in the United States there are ostensibly effective legal channels for political agitation; but even if one accepts that premise, the hypocrisy remains.
Even peaceful protesters aren’t immune. Here’s a photo gallery of peaceful environmental protesters conducting a sit-in at a congressman’s office, having burning chemicals dropped into their eyes with coldly clinical efficiency:
https://nopepperspray.org/photos.htm
CS gas, which is prohibited in war under the terms of the 1997 chemical weapons convention, has been used (along with other riot control techniques such as pepper spray, batons, tasers, sound cannons, etc.) quite recently, as against crowds at the G-20 Financial Summit protest in Pittsburgh in 2009.
The United States has a long and quite bloody history of suppressing labor protests, even including use of the U.S. Army on behalf of wealthy property holders. So I’m more than a little skeptical about claims of moral superiority.
This bloody history is documented in such sources as Sydney Lens’ “The Labor Wars” and also in sections of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”.

“Is Arizona misrepresenting its job creation numbers?Just askin'”
I’m sure that Brewer and Friends are trying to misrepresent the latest drop of one-tenth of one percentage point in the state’s unemployment rate: but as reported by today’s Arizona Republic almost all of that is due to hiring in the public sector, specifically to seasonal hiring in the educational professions. Apparently, the seasonal spurt in hiring is taking place earlier than usual this year, and because of this is included in the latest survey data.

“the protesters have confined themselves to a park, per agreement with the police.”
Agreement under duress. Protesters are committed to a peaceful presence.

Nice deflect boys.

U R right emil. I vote to put u in charge of the world with Watson as your faithful servant.

I remember reading that Guardian piece about intellectualism. Hell, even Glen Greenwald gave kudos to Sarah Palin last week!

“Hell, even Glen Greenwald gave kudos to Sarah Palin last week!”
@eclecticdog, you’ve peaked my curiosity with that bit of snark (I assume it’s snark.) I’ve poked around, but I can’t find it – got a link?

Petro, actually it wasn’t snarky at all! I know, I’m amazed too. The link:
https://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/15/carville/index.html
At the bottom under point (2).

The typical non-Rogue reader:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/17/keith-olbermann-bill-maher-republican-voter-bubble_n_967598.html

Gracias.

@eclecticdog:
Amazed that Palin made a good point, or that Greenwald acknowledged it?
(Me, I’m amazed that Palin said anything that I agree with. Maybe she is dangerous, after all, in that “Godwin’s law” kind-of-way, I mean.)

Here’s my response to Robert Robb’s column today on Social Security.
https://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2011/09/17/20110917perry-off-base-social-security091811.html
Mr. Robb is correct that Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, but he failed to give the correct reason, which is this: unlike a private financier, the U.S. Government has the sovereign power of taxation and the sovereign power to borrow (very nearly at will); these powers guarantee that, unless the economy itself implodes beyond redemption, it will be able to meet its obligations, whether to Social Security recipients or to defense and aerospace contractors.
Robb wrote: “Payroll taxes are projected to be able to pay 75 percent of benefit obligations. That’s the worst-case scenario for young adults — they may only get 75 percent of what their Social Security benefits should be under existing law…Social Security has a built in corrective. If nothing else is done, benefits ultimately will be cut by a quarter.”
There is no automatic cut in benefits when payouts exceed tax collections. Social Security has run a deficit on a cash accounting basis in many past years: there was no automatic benefits cut. It’s scheduled to run a deficit this year, and in future years: there has been no benefits cut, automatic or otherwise. Benefits are determined by formulas in statutory law. However, the Congress can change such formulas (and the benefits, retirement age, etc.) unilaterally. It has already done so many times over the decades. Theoretically, Congress could cancel all benefits tomorrow (those who think the trust fund prevents this should see below). However, that would be political suicide, so it isn’t going to happen.
Robb wrote: “Because benefits will increasingly outstrip payroll taxes, paying them will increasingly require the general Treasury to borrow money to pay back what it owes to the Social Security trust fund.”
This is wrong in nearly every particular. Let’s sort it out:
First, the fund needn’t decrease its balance even when benefit payouts exceed tax collections. That’s because there are two components to the fund’s income: (1) tax collections; (2) interest paid by the government on the trust fund balance. All Congress has to do is pass a law increasing the interest payments on the balance, to offset the cash deficit, and voila, the trust fund depletion is fixed. This doesn’t cost the government a dime, because the government owns the trust fund balance and pays itself (not the public) interest on that balance; it creates the interest the same way it creates the balance: through an accounting fiction.
Look for this “fix” some years hence, when both parties are done scaring the electorate to get what they want: in the case of Democrats, tax increases, and in the case of Republicans, spending cuts. Note that this is an imaginary fix but since the problem of the “trust fund” is imaginary too, it doesn’t matter. The trust is not a source of benefits funding: benefits are funded by means of tax collections, fees, and borrowing, like all other obligations of the government.
Second, the government doesn’t have to borrow just because Social Security runs a cash accounting basis deficit. After all, the Defense Department doesn’t support itself — at all — but nobody argues that the DOD is causing the government to run deficits. The government runs a deficit only when TOTAL government spending on ALL government programs and purchases exceeds TOTAL government income from all sources (taxes, fees, and voluntary payments such as are made by subscribers to certain Medicare programs).
There are a large number of ways, other than cutting benefits, get the deficit under control. Taking the cap off Social Security is a good start. Currently, payroll taxes need only be paid on the first $106,800 of earned income. Extending the payroll tax to include non-earned income (e.g., capital gains from sales of stocks, bonds, derivatives, etc.) — but only for the top 1 or 2 percent of households by income — would be another step forward. Changing the income tax so that the wealthy pay the intended rate is another: at present, those who make their money from capital gains rather than wages or salaries (e.g., financial speculators) pay a capital gains tax on their income, which is 15 percent, not the 35 percent top marginal income tax bracket rate. Fix that so that they pay the same as if their income came from a company wage or salary. Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the top 1 to 2 percent of households, so that the top bracket increases from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, is another step forward toward fiscal responsibility and deficit control.
That said, there IS an element of fraud to Social Security. It doesn’t involve an inability to make good on obligations — only that would make it a Ponzi scheme. It involves misrepresentation where the so-called trust fund is concerned. The government owns the collected payroll taxes. Those go into the general fund and are spent; the government then writes itself an IOU for the amount and deposits this in the form of “special Treasury securities” in the trust fund: but the government owns this balance, not the public. It then pays itself interest — also created through the stroke of a pen — on the balance, and the combined total becomes the new balance.
The fund balance is not a source of funding — for Social Security or anything else. It is not an obligation to the public: because it is owned by the government, the government can do what it wants with the balance, including tearing up its IOUs if it ends Social Security tomorrow, or for that matter, increasing the fund balance by increasing the intragovernmental interest it pays itself. The fund balance does not determine benefit payments. In short, it is irrelevant except as a perennial propaganda device used by both parties to attempt to gain tax increases or benefit cuts. It does not represent government debt to the public, and including it in discussions of debt burden on the public is disingenuous.

@Emil – did you send that in to the Republic as a “guest column” rebuttal? You ought to. I used to do that all the time, and got a few published, to boot.

Petro,
I’m amazed she made good points. Greenwald, altho folks consider him one of those gay married terrorists or leftist at a minimum, I think is pretty fair and puts a lot of consistant thought into his columns. If the right-wing wackadoodles really what to be upset they should read him on Obama instead of fictional news.

Given Emil’s superb takedown of William Bill, I put out my Social Security column with some trepidation:
https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/jontalton/2016222532_biztaltoncol18.html

That was a good analysis Emil. I’ve often thought the cap on earned income was unfair as this article demonstrates:
https://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/09/17/retirement_heist_interview
The bastards have been lining their pockets with the working man’s retirment pay since the halycon days of vulture capitalism. My own experience on lump payments is that mine was laughably small after 12 years of work. It should have been double (not to mention they screwed me and others out of our severance packages when we were all outsourced).

“William Bill”
ROTFLMFAO

Re your latest SS column, Jon:
Yes, it is, at the end of it, more a question of moral commitment, rather than one of hard economic calculation.
But that is true of politics in general, irregardless all of the baroque wonky posturing, isn’t it?
“We all take care of each other, whether badly or well.” – Me

The one bad thing about responding to one of Rob Bob’s columns is that only two people get to see the post, Rob Bob and his Mom.

Ha Ha. Now when someone on this blog mentions Kafka, they’ll have to say whether they mean the writer or the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Very nice column on Social Security, Mr. Talton. In it, you wrote:
“Over the next 75 years, even with the retiring baby boomers, Social Security’s shortfall is 0.7 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If ever we had a manageable economic problem, this is it.”
I managed to locate this in the 2011 Social Security Trustees’ Report (p.20 of the PDF):
“Through the end of 2085, the combined funds have a present-value unfunded obligation of $6.5 trillion. This unfunded obligation represents 2.1 percent of taxable payroll and 0.7 percent of GDP during the 75-year valuation period.”
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2011/tr2011.pdf
Note that “combined funds” refers to OASDI (that is, the Social Security retirement program and the Disability Insurance program).
Note that this is described as an “actuarial shortfall”. It seems to involve calculations based on trust fund balances. I prefer the following formulation (from p. 11):
“OASDI cost is estimated to rise from the current level of 4.8 percent of GDP to about 6.2 percent in 2035, then to decline to 6.0 percent by 2050, and to remain between 5.9 and 6.0 percent through 2085.”
All else remaining equal (a big assumption given questions about GDP projection that far out) this suggests an annual cash deficit by 2035 on the order of 1.4 percent of GDP. This supports your concluding sentence without involving the so-called trust fund balances.

Thanks for the Salon link to the Great Pension Heist story, eclectic dog.

Meanwhile…..
https://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/what-else-should-phoenix-sheriff-joe-arpaio-investigate

Thanks, Petro, I suppose a “My Turn” (guest column) submission to the Republic is a possibility.
Somehow I had the impression that it was reserved for established commuity figures and activists, local politicos, chamber of commerce types, and so forth, but perhaps not.
(Sunday’s was a typical arraignment of government by a Mesa businessman running for the U.S. Senate. It conflated Bush era spending with Obama’s, completely ignored the extraordinary economic circumstances that have made it a necessity, and excoriated “Obamacare” and the Environmental Protection Agency.)
If you have any hyperlinks to your published ones I’d be interested in reading them.

A while back when the London riots happened someone wrote a penetrative column. Excerpts:
“Call it the logic of opulence: a paradigm of plenitude centred on more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. Its glittering, unattainable fever dream seems to have driven the rioters mad. As one told the Guardian, “Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that’s worth loads of money?” Indeed: why, given a poisonous compact tattooed into the deeper calculus of everyday culture, not? Hence, as many have pointed out, the mob hasn’t exactly been looting bookshops, but the stuff of faux-luxe, mass-designer plenitude: plasma TVs, fast fashion, video games.”
“If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their hearts have fractured.
I call it a Great Splintering — not purely an economic phenomenon, as in “Great Contraction,” but a social one: an era when social contracts are being torn up, abrogated, betrayed, abandoned, by accident, by design, by “regulatory capture,” or simply by polities too gridlocked to progress. Broken social contracts aren’t just tidy abstractions, empty of visibly real consequences, disconnected from the noise and clamor of our messy human lives. As they break, yesterday’s ways of living, working, and playing rupture; yesterday’s organizations, from corporations to banks to nations, creak and crack.”
— Umair Haque
https://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/08/the_great_splintering.html

Alas, Emil, my contributions to the Republic predated the most of online era of newspapers, but I found that I preserved one from 2001 surprisingly close to its original format (a riposte to a then-Drug Czar Barry McCaffey syndicated column):
https://www.clubhousewreckards.com/wreckard/editorials/drugczarignoresreality.htm
And there is the one from ’95, about Tent City, that I transcribed in a blog post (I think this is a repeat for this forum, my apologies):
https://deconstructingthemanifest.blogspot.com/2009/02/comin-atcha-sheriff-joe.html
In any case – I can testify that the “My Turn” columns are pretty much open to the public, since I was (and remain) a nobody.

We’re running out of steam and we still have 11 days to go.
We could solve the immigraton issue, if you want. Maybe a guest worker program with turnstiles at the border, costing 25 cents to ge in or out. Might as well fix the deficit in the process. Quarters always have a way of piling up. They do in my truck anyway.

I think Stanton’s in trouble. From the coverage, it sounds like he’s trying to cleverly triangulate and just fend off Gullett’s “city hall baaad” crap, rather that talking about the city’s real challenges and opportunities.
Thoughts?

In my opinion, Stanton’s platform took a big turn for the worse about 2 weeks before the August election. He started out by talking ideas-what’s wrong with the City and how we fix it. Then, shortly before the election, his platform became “lobbyists are bad, don’t vote for Gullett.” Perhaps a lobbyist as mayor is not the best scenario (although I don’t see why a lobbyist mayor would necessarily be any more beholden to his client’s interests than a mayor who is married to a lawyer at a large commercial law firm, who I imagine has clients that are impacted by City policy).
In any event, I’d rather hear why you are the best candidate rather than why the other guy is the worst based solely on his line of work.

Politics has been about “The other guy is worst” since, well, let me think, since about the early 1800’s ?? I’m thinking maybe 1801.
I’m over here in the east valley tying to get Pearce out of office, so please forgive me if I don’t have time to get the latest milquetoast into the office of Phoenix Mayor.
( : – (

Petro, thanks for the links to your My Turn columns (or versions thereof). I found the first person descriptive Tent City essay from 1995 to be of particular interest. There was one section I wanted to ask about:
“Many times an hour, inmates came into the tent hawking cigarettes, marijuana, speed, cocaine, boxer shorts, socks, sweat shirts, “Ladmo” bags – Joe Arpaio’s cold lunches – oranges, apples, nicotine patches, blankets, and anything else one can imagine to bring comfort to the incarcerated.
“A game was played between the officers and inmates regarding enforcement, partly cat-and-mouse capriciousness, partly, I’m sure, enabling a “selective enforcement” window to assist officers in controlling truly troublesome inmates.”
I always find it fascinating that so much lawbreaking goes on under the direct control and supervision of supposedly law-and-order types like Sheriff Arpaio.
To be fair, I suppose that Tent City lacks the security features of, say, the typical indoor prison; and some of those prisons also seem to have smuggling problems.
That said, I’m baffled and offended by the security lapses described here. My philosophy of penal administration is that jails and prisons should be strict but humane, and fully under the control of the guards and administrators.
First, how do the inmates get these items (especially illicit drugs)? I’d like your informed opinion, but in giving it please differentiate between what you personally witnessed and what was told to you by others (e.g., inmates, guards, activists, lawyers).
There seem to be only a few options:
(1) Inmates smuggle them in personally, perhaps in cavities or in their stomachs (later passed out in bowel movements);
(2) Corrupt guards (or other jail employees coming into contact with the inmate population (e.g., cooks);
(3) The items are smuggled in via items entering the jail, whether sent by friends and relatives to inmates, or passed by delivery persons or tradesmen to trustee inmates who oversee jail supplies or otherwise have unsupervised access to outside visitors.
(4) The items are smuggled in over outside fences directly to inmates using pre-arranged plans that rely on code-signals (e.g., whistles) to determine when it is safe to pass the items over.
Of course, any combination of these is possible and, always, collusion by corrupt jail employees (especially guards) makes it so much simpler.
Second, how do inmates keep such items without them being discovered and seized? How often do searches occur, how systematic are they, and do they involve searching the persons as well as the quarters of inmates (and if so, how intimate are these personal searches)?
Third, how do inmates use illegal drugs without being observed and/or detected by guards?
Fourth, to what extent would you say that security lapses such as these are the result of administrative or enforcement failures, and to what extent are they the result of fundamental limitations of method imposed by the civil rights of inmates? From what I understand of the abuses that routinely occur in Arpaio’s jails, I wouldn’t imagine that the latter entered into it, but I wanted to ask for the sake of thoroughness.
Fifth, to what extent is the jail drug trade controlled by inmate gangs? Is anyone allowed to smuggle in and/or sell drugs there, or do the gangs require membership and/or a piece of the proceeds? If the jail drug trade is organized and enforced by gangs, then not only are the smuggling methods circumscribed, but the cooperation of corrupt jail employees (especially guards) seems even more likely, because these activities are organized, systematic, and regular, and thus more likely to be detected than a large number of individual hit-and-miss efforts.
Sixth, is any attempt made by jail authorities to gather intelligence on inmate drug activities, whether via plants among new inmates or through visual or audio surveillance? This would be especially effective if known gang members are targeted, particularly if jail-based gang intelligence officers check the criminal backgrounds, known associations, and tattoos of inmates for gang affiliations.

I’ll expound a little on Tent City. There are two tent cities: one mainly for DUIs and the other for felons. Both have work-while-you’re-jailed programs. Inmates returning from work-release are processed differently — they are patted down at the gate. I think most contraband comes in this way now.
I only spent a day there, so my experience is short. But, although there is no smoking, cigarettes are plentiful and cost a buck a nail. There were also quite a few card games, about one per tent, and there are approximately 40 tents that each hold 50 inmates. There is a limit on how much money you can hold inside, but obviously this is easy to get around and a card sharp could increase their holdings to boot. The guard staff is small for the DUI side and remarkably out-of-shape (round and short). The graveyard shift was noticably younger and trimmer though. I’m thinking maybe only a half dozen guards tops are active on the DUI side.
My brother managed to get himself locked up for a year before the split was made. Contraband came over the fence or, you could climb the fence in your jail clothes and walk over to Circle K to get whatever you needed (wearing of street clothes could be and sometimes was considered an escape attempt – if you were caught). But this was before racist gangs began running the felons’ side of Tent City.
He was present during the first riot. It began over an unannouced search and inmates knocking over a locker onto an officer so contraband could be taken and hidden. I wouldn’t want to be a snitch on the felon side. Help is too far away and insufficient if a snitch is found out. They would be dead or badly injured and that would go for any violence in Tent City.
I’ll close by saying the dinner was horrible. I ate what I could, but threw most of it away.

Abdul, we would like for you to place a bomb in a video camera and blow up the leader of the Northern Alliance.
Ok, who’s going to run the camera?
You.
OK. Nice knowing you.
********************************
Abdul Jr., we would like for you to place a bomb in your shoe and blow up an airplane.
OK, will they be Air Jordan’s? Ha Ha, get it?
Abdul Jr., shut up.
OK, nice knowing you.
******************************
Abdul III, we want you to put a bomb in your shorts and blow up a plane.
OK, you’re kidding right?
NO.
OK, nice knowing you.
******************************
Abdul IV, we want you to put a bomb in your turban and blow up the former president of Afghanistan?
OK. You do know I suffer from migraines, right?
Yes, this will fix your migraines.
OK, cool. Nice knowing you.
********************************
OK, who volunteered for the bomb up the butt?
Abdul V, well, I didn’t volunteer, but I’m next in line. Can we talk about the fuse?
No.
OK, nice knowing you.
*****************************
*****************************
These are people we want to intoduce to a “Democracy” ???
Now that’s funny.

A couple of things- first, is anyone blogging about the Thomas/aubuchon Az bar hearings, or doing frequent summaries?
Second, a bit about Rehnquist. (There was a bit about operation eagle eye over at digby yesterday.) Do any of you remember the corporation commission impeachments in 1964? It was a pretty drawn out process. It went from the hearings in the house committee on commissions, to the house hearings, debates and impeachment, to a trial that lasted a month. Rehnquist argued the entire trial except for a few hours by one of the two other prosecutors. He was a solo practitioner at the time, probably had made SOME money by then, but the whole thing must have taken a good chunk of a year, and a fair amount of lost income unless someone was paying the bills, so to speak. Buzard and Williams were acquitted on all counts, but never ran again. The really interesting thing, and probably one of the main reasons for the whole trial, was the was Rehnquist got to make accusations against Duke Senner ( wh had been a commissioner but was running for reelection to congress in the fall) when a) Senner wasn’t on trial and couldn’t defend himself and b) charges were made by a very biased and unreliable witness under legislative immunity. Very cute. It was a pretty shady piece of work and, as such, it probably impressed kleindeinst, Mitchell and Nixon.
It’s never mentioned in the few bios I’ve scanned. It was an interesting episode that would make a great article somewhere. I looked at the trial transcript at the Az bar assn library when I was in town. In any case, it needs to be included in the standard bios because of his book on impeachment and presiding at clinton’s trial, and because it was obviously a major undertaking of an important jurist.

@Emil – always love a thoughtful read, and thank you for the questions.
First, eclecticdog’s input rings pretty accurate (‘though the Circle K trips sound a bit, ahem, over-the-top – this I never witnessed – but then again it sounds like his account predates my experience by, what, around a year? – if he is referring to the riot that I think he is.) The reaction to my article that I alluded to *does* illustrate that the TC environment was volatile and subject to frequent upgrades by the Sheriff’s Office.
With that last bit in mind, it is important to note that I’m writing about the Tent City of over fifteen years ago. And I will indeed stick with what I personally witnessed, unless noted otherwise.
(This is going to be a long one. I’ll split into multiple parts.)
There was a mixture of convicts at the time I was there, though the schism was more characterized by length and character of sentence, with the work-release (street clothes) inmates separated from the orange-jumpsuit folks with more severe, and I assume, longer-term, sentences. Not DUI vs. felons, exactly (I tented with assault and theft convicts, for example.)
On smuggling:
Most of your speculation is on-the-money, although nothing as draconian as body-cavity or ingestion was necessary. When we work-release folks were re-admitted in the evenings, we were lined up against the fencing and brick wall outside the dining area in the ad-hoc admitting area, given a menacing speech about contraband, and then after some judicious visual assessment (the guards were so very arrogant in their ability to detect the guilty ones), about 1 out of 10 of us were selected for pat down, shake-out-your-shoes, searches. Occasionally, some cigarettes, money or other such was discovered, and these folks were marched off for their punishments.
(Moving to another post…)

Here’s one place where guard corruption appeared. There was one fellow from my tent that was a consistent cigarette-supplier (buck-a-nail, as eclecticdog says – $10 for a joint), who I personally witnessed was selected for the pat-down. There was an obvious pause when the officer got to his belt-line (he smuggled the cigarettes by folding his sweats around a few packs), and then the officer moved on. My friend (who was serving time for running an auto-strip shop), was quite the braggart afterwards about that one. I assume he was bribing them somehow, but it really wasn’t clear to me exactly *why* he got away with it. He did enjoy uncharacteristically (for inmates) jovial banter with the staff, however.
I heard rumours and anecdotes about over-the-fence tosses, but never witnessed one. They seemed apocryphal to me – I just couldn’t see a person risking their own freedom by trespassing so close to the facility for a buddy, but, well, who knows with some people.
It is my *opinion* that most of the contraband came in from work release folks. The combination of arbitrary and discretionary searching, high reward, and relatively light punishments were a perfect recipe.
(Moving to another post…)

On light punishment, I can give a personal example. I never had the nerve (or motivation) to smuggle anything, but I was a naughty inmate – every evening I had a dinner at home with my lady which included a joint and a couple of beers – until I was caught two weeks into my one-month sentence. A little too red-eyed, they detected alcohol on my breath and I was marched off to the breathalyzer. Thus began a couple hours of verbal abuse (“What do we do with this guy?” “He’s in here for a DUI and he’s drinking.” “I guess we’ll tell the judge to activate the other 60 days of his sentence.” “Revoke his work-release status.” etc.) Around 11 pm they finally made me scrub the dining area and lavatories, about a four-hour gig (I had to get lined up at 7 am for work-release the next morning.) That was pretty light (my tent-mates stayed up and waited to review my fate – they really were a charming bunch of guys :).
On searches:
Searches were rare, and usually only initiated by some provocation. These silly men sometimes got a bit careless and blatant with their hawking or snorting or smoking, and the guards had to react if only to maintain some self-respect. For the most part, they really didn’t give a shit. As I noted in my article, the tent areas were notoriously un-policed, which meant that they were “policed” by the most aggressive inmates. Very nerve-wracking. I think they (the guards) liked it like that, the sociopathic creeps.
Or provocation by a prominent editorial in the Sunday paper. Heh heh.
(Moving to another post…)

You (Emil) said:
“…and to what extent are they the result of fundamental limitations of method imposed by the civil rights of inmates? From what I understand of the abuses that routinely occur in Arpaio’s jails, I wouldn’t imagine that the latter entered into it, but I wanted to ask for the sake of thoroughness.”
Hahaha. That was great. Some questions answer themselves.
As to gang control – my experience was that if you kept your head down and didn’t try to act like you owned the place, the other inmates, gang folks included, pretty much left you alone. I think the high-turnover of the street-clothes population probably kept organization at a minimum, anyway. A lot of the non-smuggled items for sale (food, underwear, blankets, etc.) seemed to be more of a product of trustee violations than any organized criminal violation.
“…is any attempt made by jail authorities to gather intelligence on inmate drug activities…?”
Not. At. All. From what I observed, all the officers cared about was not being disrespected. They were as criminal as the rest of us.
Cheers!
(End thread hijack.)

Nice posts Petro. I was in Tent City about 8 years ago and my brother was there about 20 years ago (I think it may have been the first year Tent City was open so the learning curve was just beginning, for my brother and the jail!).

Thanks, e-dog!

Petro, etc., just wanted to let you know I appreciate your comments. I’ve been working on a response to Robb’s last column, so I’ll be a little delayed getting back to you, but I will.
P.S. I don’t care about blankets, etc.; I just don’t like the idea of criminal gangs trafficking in drugs running jails or prisons.

Thank you, Emil.
“P.S. I don’t care about blankets, etc.; I just don’t like the idea of criminal gangs trafficking in drugs running jails or prisons.”
While I don’t/didn’t read any judgmentalism into your comments and questions, this reminds me of a joke (not exactly relevant to your point, but I want to share it anyway):
Man runs into questionable-looking chap on the streeet, asking for money. First reaction, “Why should I give him any money? He’s just going to spend it on alcohol or drugs.”
Upon further reflection: “Wait – that’s how *I* was going to spend it!”
😉

I know of some instances where this issue was a problem (small, but still a problem nonetheless) in which a very small percentage of G.I.’s were gang affiliates or members who joined the military for training and to get drugs smuggled into the U.S. on military aircraft from certain foreign nations.
Thus, it isn’t difficult to entertain the idea that members of the Sheriff’s Department also have been compromised by gangs/cartels to smuggle the most illicit of drugs into jails and prisons. And it seems that the prison/jail drug trade is a lucrative endeavor. A few crooked “cops” could allow a significant amount of contraband into facilities.

Emil, as for why no terrorist attacks have occurred in the U.S. since 9/11, that fact may stem from intelligence tracking of money originating from Arab nations (Saudi Arabia). Not saying that is the case, but much of the money for Al Qaeda operatives can be traced back to a handful of Middle Eastern nations (and they likely weren’t the only countries who contributed to the finances of terrorist plots.
How do you think many of the hijackers payed for flight training? Notice, how many of the attempts made recently (underwear bomber, shoe bomber) have failed terribly? Lack of money can be a serious deterrent.

@phxSUNSfan:
I don’t doubt that what you say is true. It is lucrative, and absolutely where there is lucre you’ll see organizational muscle staking its territory.
I would just like to make the point that even if those who wish to crusade against the evil of organized crime were 100% successful in quashing this influence, the vacuum created by the demand side would be instantly and irrevocably filled by relatively innocent folks. And not for the money. Some people simply get satisfaction in providing “recreational options” to folks.
There’s social capital in it, even for – perhaps especially for – jailers. It’s a pretty thankless occupation.
This is not directed against your comment, of course – that was merely informational.
Just a reflex from my old activism days.
🙂

I’d only counter, Petro, that the consequences -if caught- for jailers and like professionals far outweigh the feel good rush of endorphins from helping someone recreate. In this case, I would say tangible compensation (or in the case of gang affiliates, loyalty) would be the bottom-line, especially given the risk. Perhaps there is a small element of what you describe occurring…after all, people do some strange things.

@phxSUNSfan – good point.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Guess where most people in poverty live? Hint: It’s not in the inner cities or rural America.
It’s in the idyllic suburbs.
A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That’s one-third of the nation’s poor.
And their ranks are swelling fast, as jobs disappear and incomes decline amid the continued weak economy.
https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/23/news/economy/poverty_suburbs/index.htm

@AWinter: Isn’t it ironic? While not a few “white-flighters” stock & ammo up for the “end-times,” when imagined hoards of hooligans would empty the cities and covet their homesteads (that’s a broad brush – don’t mean everyone, of course, but I’ve known a few personally, dating back to the ’70’s), the truth is that during collapse, migration is commonly the reverse.

Test.
I just tried to post a copy of a reply to a Robert Robb column on taxation, but even though I saw a message saying that it had been posted, when I went looking for the “posted” comment it wasn’t there. Also, I noticed that I can’t get to Rogue via the address “.com” anymore but only “via .typepad.com”

I’m going to hold off comments until I am sure that those comments will actually be posted. It seems to me that the same kinds of technical errors popped up the last time that Mr. Talton went on hiatus. Gophers?
P.S. Pedro, my main objection is to violent gangs running any aspect of prisons, including running a drug trade. I don’t think prisoner on prisoner violence should be permitted, and for that matter, guard on prisoner violence except in the case that it is required to stop a physical assault.
Frankly however, individual drug use (especially of something like meth) can increase aggressive behavior by inmates both toward their fellow prisoners and toward guards. It isn’t something that should occur.
I’ll take a look at your comments and get back to you, as soon as I am assured of being able to do so. (I’d like to see that reply to Robb appear, also.)

Emil,
Typepad is reporting no posting issues. So post away.

@Emil, I *do* agree with the thrust of your observations, especially:
“…drug use (especially of something like meth) can increase aggressive behavior by inmates both toward their fellow prisoners and toward guards.”
There are more anecdotes about my time there (’nuff relayed in this forum, tho,) and the only fight I did observe involved a tweaker (two?) Me no like meth! (I would be remiss to note, though, that pot added no harm to the ambience 🙂 – but I understand your issues with the economics of it.)
(BTW – I checked my bookmark for this site and it’s “.typepad.com” – unchanged for years.)
On another note – the #OccupyWallStreet protests are maturing rather well, one week in. Solidaritat, rogues.

OK, we’re in the home stretch. six days to go.
Let’s keep the stories coming.
I’ve never been in jail, but I did get a speeding ticket in 1970. I was innocent.

Typepad may not be reporting any posting issues, but I am (twice yesterday and now a third time today after I tried to post it, got a message stating that the comment posted, and then couldn’t find the comment when I went looking for it.
I’ll send you an email copy and maybe you can get it posted. Please make sure the lines aren’t double spaced (I always have to hit the delete key once at the start of each blank line when cutting and pasting from my email to this text editor.)

“(BTW – I checked my bookmark for this site and it’s “.typepad.com” – unchanged for years.)”
As deeply reassuring as it is that your bookmark hasn’t changed in years, that doesn’t alter the fact that, yesterday, I couldn’t reach the website by the usual shortened address of .com but had to use the full address.

Emil’s lost post:
Here’s my reply to Robert Robb’s column last Wednesday in which he compared the relative contributions of the top 1 percent and the middle class (want to guess who won?). A link to his original column follows. My documenting hyperlinks appear at the end.
https://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2011/09/20/20110920robb092111-obama-debt-plan.html
A reasonable discussion of the federal tax burden on different economic classes would include all federal taxes, not just one element (income taxes) chosen to make it appear that the top 1 percent is overtaxed and that the middle class isn’t pulling its weight.
According to Robb’s own source, the Tax Policy Center, the middle quintile (i.e., the middle 20 percent of the population) gets 14 percent of the country’s personal income; and they pay 13 percent of their income in total federal taxes (including payroll taxes). So in fact, far from riding on the coattails of the rich, they pay a basically flat tax, in which their tax burden roughly equals their share of income.
That isn’t quite the whole story, however, because the 14 percent income share is AFTER taxes, whereas their effective tax rate (13 percent) is calculated as a percentage of PRE-tax incomes. If we consider income share before taxes, to be consistent, we find that the middle quintile gets 11.5 percent of the country’s income. So, they actually pay more taxes, as a percentage of their income, than they receive as a share of national income.
Mr. Robb says that the top 1 percent get 16 percent of the country’s income and pay 24 percent (23.6) of all federal taxes, but Robb has failed to inform the reader that the 16 percent income share is after taxes; this exaggerates their tax burden in the mind of the reader. The pre-tax income share of the top 1 percent ranges from 20.4 to 23.5 percent (depending upon the exact recent year and the methodology of the estimator). Thus, in paying only 23.6 percent of all federal taxes, progressive taxation virtually evaporates.
Just to be scrupulously fair, we can also express the tax burden of the top 1 percent as a percentage of their pre-tax income, as we did with the middle quintile above, instead of as a share of all federal taxes paid by all households.
According to Robb’s source, the top 1 percent pays 18.6 of its pre-tax income as income taxes; but it pays just 2 percent of its pre-tax income as payroll taxes. In part this is because Social Security does not tax income above the current cap of $106,800, whereas the pre-tax incomes of the top 1 percent begin at $516,190 (per Robb’s source) and go upward from there without limit. In part it is because, unlike the middle class, most of the income of the top 1 percent doesn’t come from wages and salaries (rather, from financial and other investments).
When income taxes and payroll taxes are combined, we find that the top 1 percent pays 20.6 percent of its income on those federal taxes, compared to a pre-tax income share ranging from 20.4 to 23.5 percent. Where combined income taxes and payroll taxes are concerned, the top 1 percent is taxed at a rate that ranges from flat to less than their pre-tax income share.
The Tax Policy Center tables also include an item called “corporate income taxes”, which are “attributed to households according to their share of capital income”. I neither endorse nor reject this, since the methodology remains obscure to me. Taxes on such income account for nearly another 7 percent of the pre-tax income of the top 1 percent (the middle quintile, as might be imagined, has virtually no capital income and thus pays virtually no such taxes). If one includes this, then their effective tax rate of 27.4 percent on all federal taxes is only mildly progressive when compared to their pre-tax income share of 20.4 to 23.5 percent.
This brings us to the issue of tax rates on investment income versus income from work (i.e., wages and salaries). According to an analysis of 2009 IRS data by Robb’s source, 3/4 of those in the top 1 percent get more than half of their income from non-work activities (e.g., investment). The percentage of non-work income generally increases as one goes higher in the top 1 percent, so that when considering the income of millionaires and billionaires, the issue of how their income is taxed becomes genuinely important: is it taxed at the top marginal rate of 35 percent that applies to work income, or is it taxed at the 15 percent capital gains tax rate applied to non-work investment income? Note that 15 percent is also the marginal rate of the second-lowest income tax bracket, applying in 2010 to income ranging from $8,375 to $34,000. Do we really want millionaires and billionaires taxed at the same rate as shoeshiners and schoolteachers? (If it is argued that schoolteachers benefit from deductions and tax credits, the same can be said of millionaires and billionaires, not to mention more creative accounting and investment schemes that leaves their pre-tax income share generally understated.)
Mr. Robb claims that investment income isn’t really taxed at a lower rate than wage income, because corporate profits are taxed before being distributed as dividends to individuals, when they are taxed again.
Well, quite aside from the fact that dividends are only a fraction of investment income, and that not all corporate profits are taxed at the corporate level (the profits of S corporations are only taxed at the shareholder level after distribution), this is nothing more than the hoary old fallacy of double taxation. Corporations exist as separate legal entities to limit the liability of shareholders, and for this privilege they are taxed separately. The real question is whether millionaires and billionaires should be paying a rate of 15 percent on their incomes, the same as a schoolteacher, simply because their incomes derive from financial speculation or other investment, rather than work. Common sense suggests no.
Mr. Robb also argues that capital gains income (e.g., profits from the sale of stocks, companies, real property, etc.) isn’t undertaxed at 15 percent, because “capital gains are taxed on their nominal value, ignoring the effect of intervening inflation”. However, the rate of 15 percent applies to investments held as little as one year: and quite aside from the fact that inflation during such a period is normally quite small, investors have already figured inflation into their investments, and the profits taken can be huge. Why should income from the sale of a block of stock valued at tens of millions of dollars in profit be taxed at 15 percent, the same as the income of a schoolteacher making $30,000 a year?
Now we arrive at the fascinating question of whether tax rates on the affluent, either currently or as proposed by President Obama, are too high. Mr. Robb argues that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the top 1-2 percent doesn’t return us to Clinton era tax rates (which Robb also claims were too high) because elements of the Obama healthcare law included small additional tax levies applicable only to the nation’s wealthiest. Fair enough, but how does this compare to the “bliss years” (for conservatives) of the Reagan administration? (Note that under Reagan’s aegis, real GDP grew at 32 percent and disposable income grew by 22.7 percent; nearly identically to growth under Clinton (31 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively), according to conservative commentator Mona Charen.)
The top marginal personal income tax bracket is currently 35 percent. Under Clinton it was 39.6 percent (and under Obama also if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire for the top 1-2 percent). Round upward the Obama supertaxes on the rich, contained within the healthcare bill but not yet taken effect, to 5 percent. Even though these supertaxes on the affluent are actually payroll taxes applied to income taxable by Medicare, not general income, let’s play fast and loose for Mr. Robb’s sake and tack it on to the top marginal income tax rate, getting 44.6 percent.
BUT — and here is where conservative readers might want to have a fresh diaper handy — for the first six years of the Reagan administration the top personal marginal income tax rate ranged from 70 percent to 50 percent (mostly the latter since it was lowered to 50 percent shortly after he took office). The long-term capital gains rate ranged from 28 percent to 20 percent, compared to today’s 15 percent. Not only did the sky fail to fall, but (with a bit of help from Keynesian stimulus — in the form of deficit fueled defense spending) it grew like gangbusters. Apparently, Reagan knew something Robb does not.
Those examining the question of tax fairness might also wish to consider how income share has changed over time. In 1979 the middle quintile received a share of national income more than twice that of the top 1 percent; as Mr. Robb’s own source attests, the situation is now reversed, with the after-tax income of the top 1 percent exceeding that of the entire middle quintile.
Finally, Mr. Robb suggests that instead of raising taxes on the affluent, Obama should raise additional revenue by decreasing tax rates while eliminating deductions. Of course, this is code for shifting the tax burden further onto the backs of the middle and working classes. The proposed deduction eliminations don’t just apply to the affluent, and one could close deductions for the wealthy without lowering the top tax rate. The reason that additional revenue is generated, despite the lowering of tax rates across the board, is that the deduction eliminations proposed (e.g., home mortgage deduction) apply to the broad population more than to the affluent. Thus, the share of taxes paid shifts downward, increasing the effective tax rates of the bottom 75 percent or more of the population even though their nominal tax rates have decreased, while meanwhile the rich still have their tax dodges but pay a lower marginal rate, thus decreasing their effective tax rate.
Quite aside from the astonishing social injustice this involves, it’s bad economics. Increasing the effective tax rates of the middle and working classes can only decrease their disposable income, thus weakening consumer demand. Most of the structural weaknessess associated with the recent recession (weak housing market, weak consumer demand, high consumer debt-to-income ratio, etc.) still exist. A further significant decline in aggregate economic demand could easily tip the country into recession again. Indeed, the current stagnation is likely attributable to austerity measures by state and local governments combined with gasoline, food, and other commodities inflation; all of which has largely offset federal stimulus efforts.
By contrast, the wealthy by definition have excess cash not used for consumption. When taxes on the rich are increased (though President Obama’s proposals are modest), that transfers excess cash from individuals using it to bid up the price of paper assets) to middle and working class individuals who have unmet consumption needs, and who spend it on the goods and services of local businesses.
Done properly, such taxation creates new aggregate demand, not just temporarily, as with a stimulus, but permanently. Businesses respond to increased consumer demand by hiring and expanding, and new businesses start up trying to get a piece of the increased consumer spending. The economic certainty of a permanent, increased income stream to businesses would also make bank loans to small business easier, since the banks would be more certain of recovering their principal with interest. Taxes increased on the affluent could be redistributed directly to the bottom 1/3 of working households via the earned income tax credit (EITC). Even if some of the redistributed funds are used to pay down debt, that increases consumer demand by freeing up other income that would have been used for debt service instead of consumption (money is fungible).
Sources (documenting hyperlinks):
Note: the reader is cautioned not to confuse the national share of taxes paid by a particular group, with the percent of that group’s income paid in taxes (the latter is the group’s effective tax rate).
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=2980 (effective average tax rates)
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=2994 (shares of federal taxes and after-tax income)
https://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2010.pdf (pre-tax income shares including low-range estimate of pre-tax income for top 1 percent; also shows state and local taxes; note that the TPC tables above are for 2010 and this is 2009; also, differences in methodology result in some differences in figures.)
https://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2007.pdf (upper range estimate of pre-tax income for the top 1%)
https://www.taxfoundation.org/files/fed_individual_rate_history-20110323.pdf (Personal income tax rates (historical))
https://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/2089.html (Capital gains tax rates (historical))
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/07/26/the_golden_age_of_clinton_110703.html (Reagan and Clinton era economic growth stats)
https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (Bonus link on wealth and income distribution)
* * *
Regards,
E. Pulsifer

Innocent azrebel? Are we all REALLY innocent?

Here’s how this simple hometown blog works:
The blog is hosted on Typepad. The url is run by Go Daddy. While they may have periodic trouble, in the main they are very reliable.
I have no producers or other propeller heads behind the scenes. It’s just me. This blog makes no money.
For friends of the blog, I am willing to help if time allows. So if you can’t make a post, email me and I’ll do it.
Still having problems? Relaunch your browser or use a different browser. I use Firefox, but have Safari as a backup.
Finally, you should be able to find me at http://www..com or http://www..typepad.com
Questions? Email me.

Petro, thanks for your patience while I worked out that Robb comment. I usually learn a lot while researching and analyzing the columns of Robb and MacEachern, much of whose inspiration, I suspect, drops over their transom courtesy of an endless stream of talking points, studies, and reports by countless well-funded conservative paper mills. Even more so, since they are philosophically sympathetic and thus disposed to accept such things without adequate personal research.
In the case of these local columnists, I prefer to imagine, instead of mustache-twirling, cynical villains, that even arch-conservatives are no less subject to being deceived by a slick and constant bombardment of disinformation. That’s why I send a copy of my comments via email, just in case. It’s also a more productive outlook, I find, because attibuting a malign, ulterior motive or agenda is insulting and may cause someone to put their guard up and be less willing (or able) to objectively consider your arguments.
MacEachern even incorporated some of the material into one of his recent columns (notably, a reluctant admission that federal spending under Obama so far has been nearly the same, as a percentage of GDP, that it was under Reagan) — and in this he did a creditable service by debunking the conservative meme on this point instead of propagating it.
That said, these are not issues that can be competently resolved with a dashed off email expressing the offense one has taken, together with a few vague counterclaims and opposing principles. I don’t know how long it takes them to write one of these columns, but my online time is limited and formulating a satisfactory reply can take days sometimes.
Anyway, now that’s done with, I’ve read through your answers regarding your experiences at Tent City and I thank you.
If I understand you correctly, Tent City is understaffed; the guards lack both effective guidance and a professional protocol; searches for contraband (especially illicit drugs and weapons), whether personal, residential, or in the general facilities, are unsystematic, haphazardly applied and infrequent; and the tents themselves are essentially unpoliced.
I wanted to ask you about the last item, since it appears to be a matter of deliberate policy. You said that the guards abandon the tents to the most aggressive inmates, who “police” the tents in place of the guards.
I’m not clear what sort of policing the latter might entail, since it seems unlikely that such inmates would enforce jail policy on behalf of the staff: perhaps you meant that the most aggressive inmates are allowed to establish a hierarchy in which their own preferences and arbitrary rules are enforced through violence or the threat of violence?
I’ve never understood the penal philosophy — seemingly adopted by Sheriff Arpaio — in which violence against inmates, whether by other inmates or by guards, is allowed as a form of deterrence to recidivism. It’s completely unprofessional to abandon control of any sort of prison, jail, or holding facility to the inmates, and suggests an arrogant disregard for law in supposing that inmates sentenced by society (or by their judicial agents) to confinement, should be subject to arbitrary and capricious violence at the hands of either their fellow inmates or guards, as an additional form of punishment.

To phxSUNSfan, I don’t think that lack of financing could explain the lack of operations of the sort I described, especially not over ten years, during some significant portion of which their finances were in considerably better condition than at present. It really doesn’t take a lot of money to get guns and grenades and ammo and kill a lot of civilians; it takes planning and individuals willing to go and die for their cause.
That said, here’s a link to a Forbes article on the subject (published last year):
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0301/terrorism-funds-finance-osama-al-qaeda-bankrupt.html

Rogue says, “This blog makes no money”.
How about you partnering with PayPal and charging by the word to post comments on the blog. I know a couple of persons who will have you walking in tall cotton in no time at all.
( : – )

@Emil,
I enjoyed the information you articulated in the response to Robb. Your diligence in details always stuns me. (Glad MacEachern noticed your material. Once had a rather uncivil email back-and-forth with him back in the day over some lie he catapulted in “Quick Hits” – backed him down, but he never publicly retracted.)
“I wanted to ask you about the last item, since it appears to be a matter of deliberate policy. You said that the guards abandon the tents to the most aggressive inmates, who “police” the tents in place of the guards.”
I want to remind all that I was describing the state-of-affairs 15 years ago. I understood back then, as a matter of fact (in a personal letter from an inmate’s mother, forwarded by The Republic), that the reaction to my column somewhat altered the situation.
“I’m not clear what sort of policing the latter might entail, since it seems unlikely that such inmates would enforce jail policy on behalf of the staff: perhaps you meant that the most aggressive inmates are allowed to establish a hierarchy in which their own preferences and arbitrary rules are enforced through violence or the threat of violence?”
Exactly what I meant – thanks for clarifying.
@azrebel:
You funny. 🙂

Thank you Petro, that will be $2.20. Make the check out to RogueRelief2011.

Petro, I should perhaps make it clear that Mr. MacEachern retracted nothing. That was the delightful thing about it: he wasn’t correcting himself, he was (effectively, at any rate) correcting a misleading conservative meme that was sweeping the nation and that had appeared locally in two columns in the Arizona Republic, one by a local columnist and the other by a state politico, if I recall correctly.

I’m really pissed off because I just spent about 45 minutes editing something to post, and it didn’t post because (apparently) the blog software isn’t accepting comments with URLs imbedded (although there were only two), or perhaps it’s comments with URLs over a certain length (there was one long one).
PLEASE try to get your act together here and maybe I’ll try reposting the item. I don’t want to send it via email because, first, it contains a whole lot of improper line breaks which need to be edited out (took me 15 minutes or so) and second it will appear with double spacing. So just bite the bullet and get it fixed, won’t you?

P.S. In case I haven’t made myself clear, the blog software SAYS that the comment has been posted, but it ISN’T THERE when I look for it.

P.P.S. This ISN’T a local problem with my browser.

Test
Test w. URL
https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/index.html

TECH SUPPORT TO THE RESCUE
Are you having computer issues? No problem. Take the following steps to cure your problems FOREVER.
1. Pack up the problem computer, monitor, keyboard.
2. Obtain a card table, generator, 25 ft. power cord.
3. Drive out to the desert.
4. set up computer on card table, plug in to generator and turn computer on.
5. Standing with friends armed with shotguns, Ak-47’s , AR-15’s, SKS’s ask the computer one last time to work properly.
6. Wait for response.
7. If no response, blast the computer into the next century.
8. Put out the grass fire at the base of the card table.
9. Take the video tape of the event and show it to all the new computers you purchase. You will find that the new computers will not give you any trouble at all. After all, they ain’t dumb.
Your welcome.

Here’s yesterday evening’s post (again), this time with the third item and the (long) accompanying URL deleted.
* * *
A pair of recent, recherche news items which ought to gladden the hearts of certain Rogue Columnist readers:
(1) An item which appeared in the “Phoenix Republic” (community insert of the Arizona Republic, “Building A City Of The Future Could Call For Breaking Rules”, appearing 9-23-11. Some excerpts and a hyperlink to the full article:
“They were in the Valley to describe their Autonomous City, a proposal for a self-contained city that won the $10,000 first prize in the inaugural Arizona Challenge architectural competition… Autonomous City would be built as a circle. The center would be a flexible space, suitable for agriculture or festivals, with change possible each year. Rain and treated water would be stored in small lakes, available for residents as needed. Rooftops would use rain, not shed it. Solar and wind power would be generated just outside the circle. Instead of taking food, water and power for granted, residents would know exactly where they came from. ‘Consumption and production are no longer divorced from one another,’ team member Drew Adams said. ‘It empowers a sense of ownership rather than the perception that we’re dependent on others for survival.’ …A team from the University of Arizona placed its community between two washes, with cisterns in each neighborhood to collect rainwater. Harvesting 13 inches of rainfall, Tucson’s average, the community could support 13,000 people in a 2-square-mile area, team member Aaron Liggett said. …The Harvard and Arizona teams both envisioned smaller communities scattered over an area based on what local resources can support rather than a massive metropolitan area with Phoenix and Tucson growing toward each other.”
https://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/RobertLeger/142583
(2) A paragraph from the free, local single-sheet “Coffee News” appearing 9-23-11:
“If you visit remote villages in Turkey’s Rize province, the only place you’ll find a television set is in a guest house for tourists in the Black Sear village of Senyuva. The entire areas is against having televisions, saying their presence may damage community relations. Folks there listen to the news on radios, and spend the rest of their time chatting, singing folk songs, and dancing. The Senyuva village headman says citizens weren’t pressured to give up their TVs. ‘It was a personal choice and in this way, we live like we used to”, he says. There are also no roads because they don’t want to increase pollution.”
(No URL available.)

Incidentally, just to let you know, in light of suggestions to restart my browser and all that: I use multiple computers with multiple browsers at multiple (independent) library systems — it’s how I access the Internet.
So, when these problems persist over a period of days and in different independent locations, and I’m doing nothing differently than I have done countless times successfully before, reasonable inference (given conventional premises) requires one to conclude that it’s a problem at the server end.
I do recall something nearly identical happening once before, some time back, and Mr. Talton was able to have the problem fixed after submitting more than one “ticket” to the blog software host.

A URL test:
https://www.univeros.com/usenet/cache/alt.binaries.ebooks/10.000.SciFi.and.Fantasy.Ebooks/Robert%20A.%20Heinlein/Robert%20A%20Heinlein%20-%20The%20unpleasant%20profession%20of%20Johathan%20Ho.pdf
Test, test.

Another news item of interest, from the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:
“For years, economists have told Americans worried that cheap Chinese imports will kill jobs that the benefits of trade with China far outweigh its costs. WSJ’s Justin Lahart reports that counties throughout the U.S. have seen employment declines that can be attributed to the importing of inexpensive goods from China. Reuters photo.New research suggests the damage to the U.S. has been deeper than these economists have supposed. . .The study rated every U.S. county for its manufacturers’ exposure to competition from China, and found that regions most exposed to China tended not only to lose more manufacturing jobs, but also to see overall employment decline. Areas with higher exposure also had larger increases in workers receiving unemployment insurance, food stamps and disability payments. . . The authors calculate that the cost to the economy from the increased government payments amounts to one- to two-thirds of the gains from trade with China. In other words, a big portion of the ways trade with China has helped the U.S.—such as by providing inexpensive Chinese goods to consumers—has been wiped out. And that estimate doesn’t include any economic losses experienced by people who lost their jobs.”
https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204010604576595002230403020.html
Take note: as much as two-thirds of the trade “savings” from lower prices lost WITHOUT even considering the indirect economic effects of individuals losing good paying manufacturing jobs, whose loss of significant disposable income then depresses local non-manufacturing businesses, leading to further job loss and decline of consumer demand.
This ignores my own theory, using simple logic (perhaps too simple?), that outsourcing to China MUST arithmetically result in a net loss to American workers (considered as a whole) despite price decreases. The reasoning runs thus:
Premise #1: Any collection of companies outsourcing to China saves X dollars in total (collective) labor costs.
Premise #2: Companies do not relocate operations to a far away, foreign country like China with a diffferent infrastructure, language, laws, culture, and ethos, simply to maintain existing profit margins — they uproot company operations like this — in a wholesale fashion — only to increase profit margins and thus stock values.
Premise #3: Companies cannot increase their profit margins by passing along ALL of the labor cost savings to American consumers, but only if the total price savings to consumers is somewhat less than total labor cost savings to the companies.
Premise #4: American consumers are also American workers, who depend upon their work incomes to fund their consumer purchases. Total labor cost savings to outsourcing employers therefore equals total income loss to American worker-consumers, even if the loss to the latter is only temporary.
Premise #5: New employment of displaced American worker-consumers pays less on average than their old employment; in part because new employment of manufacturing workers tends to be in the service sector rather than the manufacturing sector and such jobs pay less on average; in part because displaced workers are starting at a new company and, as new hires they tend to be paid less than long-term employees who have worked their way up the ladder at a particular company; in part because many such workers are entering new fields where, as inexperienced entry-level workers, they command a lesser wage; and in part because the displacement of large numbers of workers bids down the wages and salaries of such workers, since an excess of applicants creates an employers’ rather than a workers’ market. This is especially true if unemployment is already high.
Conclusion: Total price savings to American worker-consumers is less than total cost savings to employers who outsource to China and places like it. Therefore, the total buying power of American worker-consumers declines.
Corollary: Domestic demand must be supplemented by foreign demand (e.g., China’s rising middle-class) and/or by employers and stockholders whose incomes are independent of manufacturing site since they derive from stock values and these in turn depend on company profits, not where factories are based. The first redistributes income from American worker-consumers to the Chinese population; the second redistributes income upward from American worker-consumers to the American owner class; the latter results in increasing disparities in income and wealth between the two economic classes, and since the consumer demand of the owner class is largely fulfilled (else they would not have excess cash) domestic demand declines unless offset by demand by foreign consumers.
(I’m almost out of online time tonight, so unfortunately can’t include a few caveats and subtleties. Also, I’m posting this as is without a read through.)

I have been troubled by two items in particular involving China:
1. Being part of the Motorola family by marriage, I was very upset that Motorola and other companies handed over valuable missile technology to China during all the Iridium launches in that country. In the name of foreign relations we gave them 50 years of free missile technology which will come back to bite us in the future.
2. This and other advantages were handed over to China by Bill and Hillary Clinton,(China’s biggest lobbyists) for lots and lots of money. The Clinton’s sold out America for cash.
Young, idealistic,(misguided) soldiers give their lives for this country’s ruling elite. The ruling elite won’t even risk taking a check unless it is certified check.

Also, just to keep you up to date with the employee head count in Arizona. Motorola, once employing 25,000 Arizonans, now employs 75 people in AZ.

“Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Neither do I.”

ONE MORE DAY !!!
If this had been a Pay-per-Say blog, Rogue would have made $380 on this thread alone.

I’m already beginning to miss the 1st and 5th amendments.

“Jobs Plan Would Prevent Recession, Economists Say”
…The plan “prevents a contraction of the economy in the first quarter” of next year, said John Herrmann, of State Street Global Markets in Boston, who took the survey. “It leads to more retention of workers than net new hires.”
…”The important thing to consider is: What happens if we don’t do anything?” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said the program “very well could” forestall a recession in early 2012.
https://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2011/09/28/20110928jobs-plan-prevent-recession-economists-say.html
Yet, the administration continues to do a poor job explaining the purpose and goals of the bill in a realistic fashion, leaving conservatives free to attack using a straw man argument, saying (correctly) that the bill will not revive the economy.
Right — it will simply prevent relapse into recession, but isn’t that important to accomplish until more fundamental, structural changes in the economy — assuming any are forthcoming — can significantly reduce the unemployment rate?

In remarks on the mild slowing of the Chinese economy, the International Monetary Fund advises China to “do more to spur consumer demand, in part by improving social services to help relieve pressures on families to save disproportionate amounts of their income to cover their needs.”
https://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2011/09/23/20110923china-slowdown-fears-hit-markets.html
In other words, the Chinese government should spend more on social programs (e.g., health, retirement) so that Chinese consumers have more disposable income available for domestic consumption NOW.
The article also notes that “massive stimulus spending launched in response to the 2008 global crisis is still washing through the economy, driving sales”.
Not exactly a prescription for fiscal austerity, is it? One wonders why this advice hasn’t been given to the United States, or, if it has, why it hasn’t made its way more prominently into the media and into political policy debates.
The article notes that China is forecast to account for about a third of global GDP growth this year.
Don’t expect China to lead the economies of Europe and the United States back to health, however: “despite China’s rising power, experts say its economy is still not big or strong enough to fully compensate for meltdowns elsewhere, since its own investment and spending is only one-sixth that of the European Union and United States. . .To make up for a 3 percentage-point drop in growth in those economies, China would have to grow by 18 percent this year”.

Is the United States Postal Service a deserving poster-child for government inefficiency, or is it the victim of Bush era legislative changes designed to undercut it, along with a decrease in mail volume due to both the recession and its aftermath (and perhaps to changing advertising models as well)?
“In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required USPS to set up a fund that would cover 75 years worth of retiree health benefits through a yearly payment of $5.5 billion.
” ‘We’re the only federal agency that has to pay $5.5 billion to fund our retirement 75 years out so we’re paying for retirement now for people who haven’t been born yet,’ said rally participant Lamont Green, a member of the American Postal Workers Union.
” ‘The Postal Service is only a federal agency when it comes to giving money out, but we’re not (considered) federal when it comes to anything else.’ Green said. ‘We don’t get money from taxpayers, we’re self-funded, but they want us to continue to pay $5.5 billion a year. In essence to that, we turn a profit every year but our profits are sucked up by that $5.5 billion.’ ”
https://www.statepress.com/2011/09/27/downtown-rally-spreads-awareness-of-postal-crisis/

eclec, about the only amendment that hasn’t been trashed is the third amendment. It states that, hold on, oh oh there’s a soldier at the door with a suitcase. Nevermind.

More evidence that the real goal of the Right-wing Kookocracy in the Arizona state legislature isn’t the “local government control” and other constitutional principles they cite when trying to evade federal laws, but the simple expedient of advancing their own political agenda come hell or high water:
“Bedbug control is off limits to town and city councils.
So are sprinklers in new homes, political signs in the public rights of way and flexibility with building impact fees.
The Legislature this year took on the role of a super city council, passing one-size-fits-all laws that crimp the ability of local elected officials to deal with residents’ concerns.
…The result was a massive intrusion by the Legislature into what should be local affairs. One-fifth of the bills signed into law this year affected towns and cities.”
Few, if any, improved life for Arizona residents. Many did the bidding of special-interest groups such as homebuilders, apartment owners and politicians themselves. Most had unintended consequences or increased costs for residents or local government.
All took control of local affairs away from residents, who can more easily change their city council than they can the Legislature.”
More here:
https://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/SREditorials/143461

(Had an “Emil moment,” so if this is a double-post, my apologies.)
#OccupyPhoenix:
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2011/09/30/occupy-phoenix-the-weather-is-agreeable-and-the-bastards-need-a-kick-in-the-ass
Here is a country – nay, world – wide-list:
https://deconstructingthemanifest.blogspot.com/2011/09/its-all-happening-bombs-bursting-in-air.html