jims musings

I note the Reuters head­line today: “Nearly 3/4 of BP spill gone from Gulf.“
How inter­est­ing. I thought the world was end­ing, lis­ten­ing to some pun­dits talk. Don’t let a good cri­sis go to waste!
This is the cat­a­stro­phe some wanted:

And this is what hap­pened:

This dis­con­nect is impor­tant to understand.

I strongly rec­om­mend you get a copy of Sagan’s “The Demon haunted world” and read it. It will help.

Recently saw Cameron’s Avatar.
The story is quite sim­ple and is right­fully com­pared to Dances with Wolves, but that is not why you see this film.
In a sen­tence, Cameron has turned film-making upside down. There is no longer any lim­i­ta­tion to telling a story, none. With this one (very expen­sive) film, Mr. Cameron has:

1. Single-handedly brought 3D film into the main­stream. Start­ing now, non-3D movies will be passe, like black and white.
2. Nearly oblit­er­ated the need for sets or even actors. Sure, cost will con­tinue to drive the use of phys­i­cal sets and breath­ing peo­ple, but their days are num­bered. In a decade, a high school senior will have access to sim­i­lar capa­bil­ity on his home PC, what­ever that looks like.
3. Won him­self another pile of oscars.

Pre­dic­tion: This film sets a new stan­dard for ‘the view­ing expe­ri­ence’ which will not be sur­passed until direct sen­sory input is cre­ated… giv­ing an Avatar expe­ri­ence to each moviegoer.

So, it seems that the Amer­i­can pub­lic is slowly becom­ing dis­grun­tled with lob­by­ists in Wash­ing­ton. Fur­ther, the notion that lob­by­ists rep­re­sent the root of what is wrong with our gov­ern­ment seems wide­spread.
I step for­ward now to say: Baloney. It’s pop­py­cock, I tell you. Flim­flam.
I’m not say­ing that lob­by­ing is not a prob­lem; I also believe most red-blooded Amer­i­cans would vomit if we knew all the back-room under-the-table wheel­ing and deal­ing that takes place as leg­is­la­tion is writ­ten and polit­i­cal back-scratching… scratches.
The prob­lem is the amount of influ­ence Wash­ing­ton has in the daily life of Amer­ica. The found­ing fathers had fan­tas­tic exam­ples of this when the coun­try was founded. They were inti­mately famil­iar with Eng­land and France. They had read their Plato, Addi­son, Cicero and Aris­to­tle (not to men­tion Mills, Smith, Thucy­dides, Hobbes, Mon­tesquieu and Kant). The knew very well that the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment ought not be involved in the daily life of its cit­i­zens. That respon­si­bil­ity was reserved to the States.
We destroyed that notion with the Civil War, the 17th Amend­ment and the New Deal. The Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment is now involved in the daily life of its cit­i­zens through taxes (income, social secu­rity and medicare), health (HIPAA, Medicare/Medicaid, NIH), real estate (Fan­nie Mae/Freddie Mac), schools (Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion, No Child Gets Ahead), energy (EPA, DOE), base­ball (Fed­eral Base­ball Club of Bal­ti­more, Inc. v. National Base­ball Clubs (Supreme Court,1922),Federally Con­trolled Sub­stances Act)… the list goes on. And on.
So, with all those fin­gers and ten­ta­cles reach­ing across the coun­try, there is lit­tle won­der why so many peo­ple and busi­nesses have an inter­est in what the leg­is­la­ture is doing. Thus, we have lob­by­ists, lots of lob­by­ists.
In 2008, there were over 14,000 pro­fes­sional lob­by­ists who spent $3.2 Bil­lion try­ing to influ­ence con­gress. I would like to point out that these num­bers are the known amounts. I imag­ine there is more under the table. They say a bil­lion dol­lars doesn’t buy what it used to, though.
Per­son­ally, though I find these devel­op­ments dis­heart­en­ing– the rise and impor­tance of lob­by­ists– it is all pre­dictable and ulti­mately change­able.
My pre­ferred change would be for con­gress to devolve its influ­ence and power back to the states. This is very doable and I think would be for the greater good, but for rea­sons of pol­i­tics, power and per­sonal ambi­tion will never hap­pen.
The more likely course is for things to sim­ply con­tinue until a cat­a­strophic event forces change– like 9/11. Iner­tia is a pow­er­ful force; P=mv, my friends. There­fore, the only rea­son­able thing to do is lobby con­gress your­self. This isn’t as hard as it sounds.
Here’s how:

• Write a let­ter.
  Keep it short and to the point. Short hand­writ­ten let­ters are best, and remem­ber to be spe­cific about the action you want your Con­gress­crit­ter to take. Make sure to include your full address so that they know you live in their dis­trict. Some have even been known to respond to email sent through their web sites. (House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Sen­ate)
• Make a Phone Call.
  You can call a U.S. sen­a­tor or rep­re­sen­ta­tive by con­tact­ing the Capi­tol Hill switch­board at 1–202-224‑3121. Once you are con­nected to the right office, ask to speak to the staff mem­ber who han­dles the issue you are con­cerned with. Clearly have in mind a spe­cific request of your representative.
• Meet with your Con­gress­crit­ter.
  Hard when con­gress is in ses­sion, but leg­is­la­tors spend a good deal of time in their home dis­trict office. Make appoint­ments with sec­re­taries and keep your mes­sage focused. You can also attend pre-scheduled town hall meet­ings; call their office for schedules.

The recent excite­ment in my life cou­pled with the hol­i­day sea­son has con­spired to pre­vent me from post­ing much. I have started a cou­ple of posts, which I hope to have up soon. I’ve been giv­ing much thought lately to our cur­rent eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion and what to do about it. To that end, I’ve read a cou­ple books– one of them excel­lent– and I will get that essay posted ASAP.

The past cou­ple weeks have seen tremen­dous… excite­ment in the stock mar­ket.
Every­one is act­ing as though it is all a sur­prise, and yet we’ve known for months, even years, that prob­lems were brew­ing. Maybe, at this point, every­one is just stunned at the mag­ni­tude of it all. I sup­pose the same occurred in 1929–1930.
Heaven help us if those days come again.

I hear ‘Wall Street’ get­ting blamed a lot. Some­what less, ‘politi­cians’. Much less, ‘greedy peo­ple who wanted to buy more than they could afford.’ I believe the root cause is some­thing much more, and more var­ied than these.
For var­i­ous rea­sons, mostly polit­i­cal, we decided it was a Good Thing to loan money to peo­ple with bad credit or who couldn’t afford the loan. The ‘we’ in ques­tion is the tricky part. The ‘we’ ulti­mately starts with those that have money. For the most part, these peo­ple are those that are man­ag­ing large invest­ment accounts and Giant Pools Of Money. Their job is to make the money grow. This is done by invest­ing it.
In July 2003, then-Fed chair­man Alan Greenspan con­cluded his semi­an­nual mon­e­tary pol­icy report to con­gress by saying:

…the FOMC stands ready to main­tain a highly accom­moda­tive stance of pol­icy for as long as it takes to achieve a return to sat­is­fac­tory eco­nomic performance.

The con­text was, the Fed­eral Reserve had low­ered rates to spur eco­nomic growth, and peo­ple were won­der­ing what the Fed was likely to do in the future. Chair­man Greenspan is telling those peo­ple that rates are likely to remain low ‘for as long as it takes.“
So those peo­ple with money are left hang­ing. They need to make their money grow. The money they man­age, by the way, was around $30 Tril­lion in 2000. Safe invest­ments were needed, and needed on a vast scale.
Enter the CDO– Col­lat­er­al­ized Debt Oblig­a­tion. To see what this is and where it came from, a time­line is helpful:

1977 — the Com­mu­nity Rein­vest­ment Act (CRA) is signed into law. The CRA was a sig­nif­i­cant part of a series of laws intended to increase lend­ing to lower-income peo­ple. (The 1968 Fair Hous­ing Act, the 1974 Equal Credit Oppor­tu­nity Act and the 1975 Home Mort­gage Dis­clo­sure Act are some others.)

1989 — the Finan­cial Insti­tu­tions Reform Recov­ery and Enforce­ment Act of 1989 came about because of the sav­ings and loan cri­sis of the 1980s. It increased pub­lic over­sight of the process of issu­ing CRA rat­ings to banks. It required the agen­cies to issue CRA rat­ings pub­licly and writ­ten per­for­mance eval­u­a­tions using facts and data to sup­port the agen­cies’ con­clu­sions. It also required a four-tiered CRA exam­i­na­tion rat­ing sys­tem with per­for­mance lev­els of ‘Out­stand­ing’, ‘Sat­is­fac­tory’, ‘Needs to Improve’, or ‘Sub­stan­tial Non­com­pli­ance’.
This law greatly increased the abil­ity of advo­cacy groups, researchers, and other ana­lysts to “per­form more-sophisticated, quan­ti­ta­tive analy­ses of banks’ records,” thereby influ­enc­ing the lend­ing poli­cies of banks. Over time, com­mu­nity groups and non­profit orga­ni­za­tions estab­lished “more-formalized and more-productive part­ner­ships with banks.”

1992 — the Fed­eral Hous­ing Enter­prises Finan­cial Safety and Sound­ness Act required Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac to devote a per­cent­age of their lend­ing to sup­port afford­able housing.

1994 — the Riegle-Neal Inter­state Bank­ing and Branch­ing Effi­ciency Act repealed restric­tions on inter­state banking.

1995 — var­i­ous changes were made to the CRA reg­u­la­tions to reduce paper­work and com­plaince bur­dens. One of the changes allowed the secu­ri­ti­za­tion of mort­gage debt– com­bin­ing many mort­gages together and sell­ing shares of that over­all debt (and asso­ci­ated monthly pay­ments) as low-risk secu­ri­ties. These secu­ri­ties are gen­er­ally called CDOs and had very high credit rat­ings– often AAA, or as good as gov­ern­ment bonds. They also had higher inter­est rates than gov­ern­ment bonds.

1997 — First Union Cap­i­tal Mar­kets and Bear, Stearns & Co launched the first pub­licly avail­able secu­ri­ti­za­tion of CRA loans, issu­ing $384.6 mil­lion of such secu­ri­ties. The secu­ri­ties were guar­an­teed by Fred­die Mac and had an implied “AAA” rat­ing. The offer­ing was sev­eral times over­sub­scribed, pre­dom­i­nantly by money man­agers and insur­ance com­pa­nies who were not buy­ing them for CRA credit.

1999 — the Finan­cial Ser­vices Mod­ern­iza­tion Act became law. This law allowed banks to do every­thing under one roof — invest­ment, com­mer­cial bank­ing, and insur­ance ser­vices. (The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act had made that illegal.)

Octo­ber 2000 — in order to expand the sec­ondary mar­ket for afford­able community-based mort­gages and to increase liq­uid­ity for CRA-eligible loans, Fan­nie Mae com­mit­ted to pur­chase and secu­ri­tize $2 bil­lion of loans.

Novem­ber 2000 — Fan­nie Mae announced that the Depart­ment of Hous­ing and Urban Devel­op­ment would soon require it to ded­i­cate 50% of its busi­ness to low– and moderate-income fam­i­lies.” It stated that since 1997 Fan­nie Mae had done nearly $7 bil­lion in CRA busi­ness with banks, but its goal was $20 billion.

2001 — Fan­nie Mae announced that it had acquired $10 bil­lion in CRA loans more than one and a half years ahead of sched­ule, and announced its goal to finance over $500 bil­lion in CRA busi­ness by 2010, about one third of loans antic­i­pated to be financed by Fan­nie Mae dur­ing that period.

2007 - Ben Bernanke sug­gested fur­ther increas­ing the pres­ence of Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac in the afford­able hous­ing mar­ket to help banks ful­fill their CRA oblig­a­tions by pro­vid­ing them with more oppor­tu­ni­ties to secu­ri­tize CRA-related loans.

Feb­ru­ary , 2008 — the House Com­mit­tee on Finan­cial Ser­vices held a hear­ing on the Com­mu­nity Rein­vest­ment Act’s impact on the pro­vi­sion of loans, invest­ments and ser­vices to under-served com­mu­ni­ties and its effectiveness.

April, 2008 — an FDIC offi­cial told the com­mit­tee that the FDIC was explor­ing offer­ing incen­tives for banks to offer low-cost alter­na­tives to pay­day loans. Doing so would allow them favor­able con­sid­er­a­tion under their Com­mu­nity Rein­vest­ment Act respon­si­bil­i­ties. It had recently begun a two-year pilot project with an ini­tial group of 31 banks.

Wow. What’s hap­pen­ing between the lines is that in 2003, the Giant Pool Of Money des­per­ately wanted a place to put its money, just when the CDO was becom­ing a pop­u­lar invest­ment vehi­cle. The Giant Pool Of Money had found the finan­cial ver­sion of crack cocaine. By 2006 tril­lions of dol­lars had been invested into these CDOs. Worse yet, in the last cou­ple years, stan­dards for loans had been adjusted down­wards so far that almost any­one could get a loan.

Then the party ended. The default rates got so high (finally) that banks stopped buy­ing the CDOs. The train came to a crash­ing halt, and defaults on debt cas­caded higher and far­ther up the hier­ar­chy. Bear Stearns– one of the first to get into CDOs– crashed in May. Oth­ers followed.

The uncer­tainty about the debt sit­u­a­tion has caused the Giant Pool Of Money to stop lend­ing. No one is will­ing to buy the CDOs, so their value has plum­meted. Afraid of col­lapse, or some the col­lapse of oth­ers, banks are hold­ing onto their cash. Nobody wants to lend.

And if banks aren’t lend­ing, busi­nesses which need money– to build a new plant, to buy a ship­ment of iron, meet pay­roll or what-have-you– may go out of busi­ness. If credit is hard to come buy– car loans, credit of appli­ances or com­put­ers– then con­sumers won’t spend. If con­sumers don’t spend, then the econ­omy plummets.

Fear of all that is dri­ving the mar­ket down­ward. See­ing the mar­ket take a nose­dive causes peo­ple to sell– dri­ving it down fur­ther. The global econ­omy has been caught in a neg­a­tive feed­back loop. At some point, A) cooler heads will pre­vail, the gov­ern­ment loans and stim­uli pack­ages will have salu­tary effect and things will sta­bi­lize and improve some­what, or B) we’ll sink into a ter­ri­ble finan­cial morass which future gen­er­a­tions will call ‘The Greater Depres­sion’, ‘Great Depres­sion 2′ or per­haps a Hol­ly­wood title, ‘Return to the Great Depression.’

Time will tell. Mean­while, his­tory has shown that those with cooler heads, those that think ahead, usu­ally pre­vail and often come out ahead.

So, keep your wits about you.

I’ve been say­ing this for years now, but am only now get­ting around to post­ing this thought online.

Mankind has reached the pin­na­cle of soci­ety. Actu­ally, we prob­a­bly reached it around 1980, give or take a decade.
It is this: Air con­di­tion­ing, tele­vi­sion and beer. These three things keep Amer­i­cans (and other west­ern cul­tures) sedate and com­pla­cent. Take one away, and every­thing will come unglued.
“Why should I go out there and protest? It’s much more com­fort­able here, in my Lazy Boy.” These three com­forts rep­re­sent the pin­na­cle of soci­ety. After obtain­ing these lux­u­ries– really, what is there to com­plain about?
Think about it. Where do we see mass protests? Coun­tries where this magic recipe is incom­plete. In west­ern coun­tries, in the rare rally or demon­stra­tion, who is involved? Largely the poor, or peo­ple who eschew the ben­e­fits of mod­ern life. (Yeah, you gra­nola I-don’t-eat-it-if-it-casts-a-shadow peo­ple, I’m talk­ing about you.) Lets call these ABC — Air con­di­tion­ing, Beer and Cable TV. There are vari­a­tions, of course, but it cap­tures the essen­tials.
The dan­ger is, gov­ern­ments are aware of this fact, and will exploit it. This sounds evil, but the iron law will require it. Gov­ern­ment will expand and increase its pow­ers, and it will do so along the path of least resis­tance. Gov­ern­ments have already learned they can do almost any­thing, so long as ABC is pre­served.
Ask your­self this ques­tion: what are you will­ing to let peo­ple get away with, if they leave your ABC alone?

In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed how deficit spend­ing causes infla­tion. I’d like to take a moment now to talk about money itself. Get your popcorn.

Remem­ber, the paper dol­lar is a Fed­eral Reserve Note. This is not the same as a dol­lar. The descrip­tion of the Fed­eral Reserve Note from the U.S. Trea­sury web­site is revealing:

Fed­eral Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, sil­ver or any other com­mod­ity, and receive no back­ing by any­thing. This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for them­selves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal ten­der, Fed­eral Reserve notes are “backed” by all the goods and ser­vices in the economy.

In other words, the value of the dol­lar is rep­re­sented by the econ­omy of the United States. More specif­i­cally, by the tax­ing author­ity of the United States Gov­ern­ment– the abil­ity of the gov­ern­ment to pay its debts and oblig­a­tions. Viewed another way, a Fed­eral Reserve Note is equiv­a­lent to a share of stock in a cor­po­ra­tion. Just as shares of stock can rise and fall in value, the value of the dol­lar can change, too.

Deficit spend­ing is sim­i­lar in effect to that of a cor­po­ra­tion issu­ing more shares. The over­all value of the stock decreases, because the num­ber of shares has increased but the value of the com­pany– its rev­enues– has not changed. How­ever, if that same com­pany later increases its rev­enues, or if shares of stock are taken out of cir­cu­la­tion, the value of each share of stock will increase. The value of the dol­lar can change in a sim­i­lar manner.

1933, by the way, is when the United States made indi­vid­ual own­er­ship of gold ille­gal and began to move away from a gold-backed cur­rency. Alan Greenspan once said this about the gold standard:

…under the gold stan­dard, a free bank­ing sys­tem stands as the pro­tec­tor of an economy’s sta­bil­ity and bal­anced growth… The aban­don­ment of the gold stan­dard made it pos­si­ble for the wel­fare sta­tists to use the bank­ing sys­tem as a means to an unlim­ited expan­sion of credit… In the absence of the gold stan­dard, there is no way to pro­tect sav­ings from con­fis­ca­tion through inflation.

There is one other impor­tant item. Dur­ing the course of the oil shocks of the 1970’s, Pres­i­dent Nixon man­aged to con­vince Saudi Ara­bia and Iran (and thus OPEC) to accept only U.S. dol­lars as pay­ment for oil. This link between oil and the dol­lar is very impor­tant today. The dol­lar is now essen­tially backed by oil, rather than gold. Because of this, a weak dol­lar means expen­sive oil, and sec­ond, the U.S. must main­tain good rela­tions with Saudi Ara­bia so that Saudi and OPEC con­tinue their dol­lar pol­icy. If OPEC were to accept other cur­ren­cies, the dol­lar would loose much of its value. (In 2007, Iran attacked the U.S. dol­lar by accept­ing other currencies.)

Okay. Now comes the hard part– decid­ing on a mon­e­tary pol­icy.
I’ve shown that deficit spend­ing causes infla­tion. I’ve talked about how the value of the dol­lar changes in the mar­ket­place, and how to drive the value up or down. Mon­e­tary pol­icy is choos­ing a strong dol­lar or a weak dol­lar policy.

If you want cheap imports, cheap oil, cheap for­eign vaca­tions, decreas­ing U.S. exports and man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs to flow out of the United States, you want a strong dol­lar. If you want expen­sive imports, expen­sive oil, expen­sive for­eign vaca­tions, domes­tic man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs and increas­ing U.S. exports, you want a weak dollar.

Next essay: Mon­e­tary pol­icy. Stay tuned!

From 1862 (the Civil War) to 1973, the United States had some form of draft for mil­i­tary ser­vice.
Just for review, in that 90 year period the United States fought:

• The Civil War (1861–1865)
• The Spanish-American war (1898, “Remem­ber the Maine!”)
• World War I (1914–1918, though the U.S. didn’t really get involved until 1917)
• World War II (1939–1945, though the U.S. again was late to the party but ended things with a bang)
• Korean War (1950–1953)
• Viet­nam (1960–1975, tak­ing over from the French)

Mil­lions of peo­ple, mostly young men, were inducted into mil­i­tary ser­vice through the draft. Dur­ing World War II, 200,000 per month were drafted. Ulti­mately, twelve per­cent of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion served in the mil­i­tary dur­ing World War II (16 mil­lion from a total pop­u­la­tion of 130 mil­lion). Pres­i­dent Nixon dis­con­tin­ued the draft, with con­scrip­tion ulti­mately end­ing in 1973.

I don’t intend a his­tory les­son, but it is impor­tant to know what has gone before so I can make my point.

This long period of com­pul­sory ser­vice, with mil­lions serv­ing, forced Amer­i­cans to expe­ri­ence each other. Over the decades, an Amer­i­can con­scious­ness was forged. Amer­i­cans came to know one another– the farmer in Kansas had an idea of what New York was like, because he had known a buddy or two from New York. A dock worker in Seat­tle knew some­thing of life in Florida, because his CO was now a store keeper in Miami. Mil­i­tary ser­vice had a way of mak­ing peo­ple get to know one another.

Amer­i­cans were a diverse group of peo­ple in the 1950’s, but there were cer­tain things that were sim­ply just under­stood. Vic­tory in the Cold War would have been unlikely with­out this shared, Amer­i­can, expe­ri­ence. Every­body knew the Rus­sians were scary.

Now, with the draft ended, there is no Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence. The clos­est we have today is the Col­lege Expe­ri­ence, but this is very dif­fer­ent. Despite their attempts at diver­sity, uni­ver­si­ties will attract cer­tain types of peo­ple. Har­vard will attract not only the very sharp minds, but the very sharp minds of a cer­tain social per­sua­sion. The same with Cal­Tech and MIT, Notre Dame, Bay­lor or BYU. The mil­i­tary itself has become a vol­un­teer ser­vice, attract­ing those that believe mil­i­tary ser­vice is impor­tant. Since 1973 the Amer­i­can con­scious­ness, the men­tal pic­ture a given indi­vid­ual has of the needs and wants of the coun­try as a whole, has been slowly erod­ing away.

The out­come is pre­dictable. Those that do not go to col­lege will find them­selves in the lower income groups, dis­cour­aged at being shut out of the Amer­i­can Dream (I’m being very suc­cinct, I know). Those that go to col­lege will have years of expe­ri­ence with peo­ple like them­selves– and end up mis­tak­enly believ­ing that all Amer­i­cans share per­spec­tives and beliefs sim­i­lar to their own. Polar­iza­tion of belief, and decreased will­ing­ness to under­stand other per­spec­tives, will become the sta­tus quo.

As fea­tured in many films involv­ing World War II, there was always the guy from Brook­lyn. But what hap­pens to New York when the day comes that nobody gets to know that guy? Do New York­ers then become a peo­ple dis­tant from Los Ange­lenos? More likely, assisted by the Inter­net, we will see an increas­ing social frag­men­ta­tion not by region but by intel­lec­tual bent.

What will the future Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence be? I wel­come comments.

So… surf­ing around my favorite sites, I came across a lit­tle review and com­men­tary on Robert Kaplan’s book The Ends of the Earth. The book sounds inter­est­ing; what really caught my atten­tion was a pro­found obser­va­tion made by Kaplan: that basic main­te­nance– paint, pick­ing up the trash, etc. — is a sign of a belief in the future.
In other cor­ners of the earth, main­te­nance is not done. While in Africa twenty years ago, I saw hun­dreds of dead cars scat­tered in ran­dom places along town roads and in the mid­dle of the Serengeti. Some had obvi­ously been sit­ting for years. I learned that most of the cars merely needed sim­ple main­te­nance– a water pump, a new bat­tery, a car­bu­re­tor adjust­ment. At the time, these prob­lems were chalked up to a lack of edu­ca­tion, although that didn’t seem cor­rect. After all, not every­one in Amer­ica knows how to fix a car.
In the years since, I have learned that there are many cul­tural and per­sonal atti­tudes which are essen­tially defeatist. “That’s how life is”, “I’m a loser” or “God wills it to be so.” For what­ever rea­son, how many bil­lions trap them­selves into poverty or accep­tance of the sta­tus quo and put forth no effort to change things?
The Amer­i­can spirit, some­times described as a “can-do atti­tude”, is the oppo­site per­spec­tive. “I can change this, things can be bet­ter” is the hope­ful, opti­mistic pos­ture which seems to be com­mon in west­ern soci­eties. Per­haps this is why democ­ra­cies tend to elect lead­ers who present a belief in a brighter future. We respond to opti­mism and eschew pes­simism.
Indeed, this is a core mes­sage of Chris­tian­ity. A faith which informs us that a bet­ter world exists beyond the one we now inhabit. That if we fall short of divine com­mand­ment, we can pick our­selves up, repent, and keep climb­ing up. That ulti­mately, the wrongs of the world will be set right and we will be rewarded for our efforts. This requires a deep belief in the future– believ­ing that more exists past the por­tal of death.
It seems to me that a faith­less or pes­simistic atti­tude would dis­cour­age under­stand­ing of seem­ingly sim­ple con­cepts like Cause and Effect. If you believe that you are going to fail a test, why would you study? If you believe every­thing is in the hands of God, and there is noth­ing you can do about it, then why try? If you believe the future is fore­or­dained, then why lift a fin­ger? Per­haps this would also encour­age oth­er­wise ridicu­lous behav­iors– that with­out some magic tal­is­man or rab­bits foot, events will be stacked against you? I can see how a fear of the future could encour­age super­sti­tious beliefs and a accep­tance of mag­ics… tired and fear­ful, peo­ple will turn to the super­nat­ural in a futile effort to bring rain, encour­age love or avenge wrongs.
Another response to the faith of fail­ure is blame. Shift­ing respon­si­bil­ity for self to another per­son is a poi­son that leads to accep­tance of vic­tim­hood. This is really just a ver­sion of “God did this to me,” except you now can point your fin­ger and feel hate. I can only imag­ine what a dark and scary world these peo­ple see.
Unfor­tu­nately, chick­ens, can­dles and beads do not change the future or improve life. Nor does the expec­ta­tion that some­body else is respon­si­ble to fix your life prob­lems. The most pow­er­ful magic that a per­son can wield is work– work to make, work to repair, work to improve. We are agents respon­si­ble to cre­ate our own future.
This is the foun­da­tion of west­ern civ­i­liza­tion, that a per­son has con­trol over their future. Beware those that would have you sur­ren­der your future– through debt, through drugs, through sub­tle per­sua­sion over the ulti­mate good that will be done… once you relin­quish your future, you have sur­ren­dered your self and will become nothing.

Peo­ple just don’t under­stand drag. I know it’s not exactly an intu­itive con­cept, the fric­tion induced by a pass­ing fluid, but jeep­ers, can’t peo­ple think about drag just a lit­tle bit?
I’m not even talk­ing mach tran­si­tion drag, where shock waves and reflected shock waves need to be con­sid­ered, let alone high-mach drag where the heat from fric­tion can melt alu­minum and steel. Just your every­day basic drag, which of course increases with the square of veloc­ity.
In short, the big­ger the thing, and the flat­ter the front, the more drag it will have.
Okay?