A Documentary on Taxation

It might be useful to literalize the notion that we pay a third of our income to the government. In this vein, a film depicting people working directly for all the government departments instead of paying taxes (indirect work) could also be amusing. Four months total for the government, eight months for one's family. That would be 3-4 weeks under a drill sergeant or commanding officer, another 4 weeks under orders from the local nursing home or retirement resort, 2-3 weeks attempting to impart knowledge and values to the new and rising generation, a delighful 2-3 weeks supporting the duskier races in their slums and ghettoes and prisons, and on and on and on... Being assailed by the hundreds of federal agencies one after another, then by hundreds of state and local agencies could create a memorable image.   

Horizon Shifters

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/jewish-genius/ An excellent piece on what strikes me as a fascinating mystery: why has a small Semitic tribe had such vast influence over mankind's intellectual development? Note particularly the statistical oddity that, for a normal distribution (like IQ), a modest advantage in averages translates into a great advantage at the far ends of the distribution. For example, assuming the Ashkenazim possess average IQs of 110 and gentiles run at 100--this means that a member of the former group is 13 times as likely as a member of the latter group to manifest a 160 IQ (which is 1 of 30,000 gentiles and 1 of 2,300 Ashkenazi). The ratio would be 7:1 at 145 IQ and 4:1 at 130 IQ. You see the pattern. This may largely explain the huge disproportion in Jewish Nobel prizes and Fields Medals relative to any other group. Also, these numbers match what I recently found in looking at gentile vs. Jewish acceptance rates at the top 10 American universities. Supposedly, half of such students are accepted on academic merit. This means the top tenth of a percent of gentiles are accepted--their average IQs exceed 146. At that level, statistics would lead to the expectation of a 7.5:1 acceptance ratio. Jews have a 14 fold greater acceptance rate, meaning the top 1.4% make it in. This would instead imply a 13 point gap in average Jewish-gentile IQs, assuming meritocratic standards are applied equally to Jews and gentiles. But, it's likely that the Jews work harder and have more admissions through legacies and university employee preferences--so the gap probably is closer to 10 points after all. I may post some of the stats I gathered later.

On Iran

I think it would be worth a try to finance insurrection by Iran's powerful non-Persian minorities, though I doubt it would work. Our real options, I suspect, are an air war with a minor dilatory effect on their nuke program or a ground war that dismantles it (and perhaps installs a proper regime)--to make things simple we should also break up the country on ethnic lines, to achieve stability and an American exit, and to weaken post-war Iran. The other road is to appease our way into a nuclear arms race among the Middle Eastern nations. 

The CIA Factbook says there are 15 million Azeris, 8 million Kurds, and 5 million other non-Persians in Iran. The total population is 78 million. Without the Kurds and Azeris it would be 55 million. If the Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Syria united, the new Kurdistan would contain about 15 million, a respectable force, especially given their substantial oil resources. There are 15 million more Kurds in Turkey, who might also break away in future. New Kurdistan's main weakness is a lack of access to the ocean if the new state's borders are set according to current population distributions. And the new Azerbaijan would have 24 million, also with oil. Both of these new nations ought to be sustainable and would weaken Iran and Iraq. The Turks derive no benefit beyond pride from controlling part of Kurdistan. They would be spared the expense of borders with Iran and Iraq, and the expense of fighting the endless Kurdish insurgency. Unfortunately, on this plan, the Iranians would not lose any significant part of their oil and gas reserves.

Criminal Law Reforms: African Style

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/books/michelle-alexanders-new-jim-crow-raises-drug-law-debates.html?ref=books Basically, she's saying that if arrest rates do not adhere to disparate impact standards, they're racist. She claims that the only major reason more blacks are arrested is racism and that drug laws must be repealed because blacks have disproportionate arrests under those laws. I will pass over her idiot imputations about the whole system being an anti-black conspiracy. This entire line of reasoning signally fails to break with the long tradition of blaming white America, and only white America, for black problems. Instead of constructive criticism of the black community, black leaders persist in destructive criticism of black-white relations. Blacks have chosen to adopt a parasitic role in America. It's unhealthy for them. It's unhealthy for their hosts.

The Conservative Climate

This climate change denial is just a case of anti-science populism, driven by the fact that conservatives believe reductions in emissions will rob them of their last freedoms. Aggressively opposing efforts to conserve the environment is not conservatism, it is selfish stupidity. Keep in mind this problem could largely be solved by going nuclear--especially by using either fast breeder reactors or liquid flouride thorium reactors, for both of which we have effectively unlimited fuel supplies. A massive system of nuclear reactors could also produce liquid fuels for transport and allow America to be energy independent and environmentally responsible. The military certainly believes in climate change and has policies in place to guard against the international security contingencies it will create.

As a general principle of thought and action, conservatives ought to think of ways to improve the world, rather than inflexibly hold to all that is just because it is. If conservatives continue their present braking strategy, the socialists will once again take the initiative on an inescapable issue and transform it into another step toward dystopia. Instead of choosing a conservative response to the threat, they will be run over again by the socialists. The current conservative "leadership" deserves to be run over.

Israel and Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/opinion/israels-last-chance-to-strike-iran.html This is the take of a former Israeli fighter pilot, one who bombed Iraq's nuclear facility in 81'. I agree with everything he says, except his conclusion. In the end, Israel cannot rely upon the U.S. for protection. A sovereign nation must assume the necessity of self-reliance. As Machiavelli put it, with Israel's position corresponding to that of the prince: "since men love at their convenience and fear at the convenience of the prince, a wise prince should found himself on what is his, not on what is someone else's." And Israel has a decidedly (and I would add, necessarily) Machiavellian tradition in foreign relations.

A Review of Omeros

I've toyed with a Jamesian intonation in this review:

 

Mr.Walcott is essentially a poet of nature, magnificent in description. He has here, with, I believe, substantial success, attempted to write an epic of the Caribbean. As the title indicates, Homer forms a major source of inspiration for the author. The grand Greek epics echo in the background, linking Old World to New, Ancient to Modern, Pagan to Christian. But the narrator of Omeros is explicitly a part of the story he tells. Though his life intersects with those of his characters only tangentially in the narrative, his story as he tells it contrasts in the way of an autobiographic realism with the semi-mythic stature of many of the fictional characters he creates (who are, however primitive, nevertheless representationally convincing).

   The flashing brilliant originality and fresh beauty of his metaphors of the sensuous world constitute our author’s undeniable power. He gives us inimitable pictures of Caribbean life, invents and conveys unseen, unthought-of relations, paints his pictures with a luxuriant imagination, enlarges our perception of the world, offers up such insights, so many new connections, such profuse, ingenious metaphors as seem quite palpably to be actual additions to life. Thus, Mr. Walcott succeeds in what may be deemed the most vital function of a poet: his originality lights new vistas and suggests “another way to see.”

   Nor does this faculty, this extraordinary gift, the ability to create and recreate the external world fail to manifest a nearly proportionate strength in imagining the internal world, the soul of man. His fountain of metaphors flows unimpeded when he handles this other, more profound world—little of his magic is lost in the transition. I do not wish by any means to suggest that he is the greatest of moralists or psychologists, for he is neither; he does not reach the depth or scope of Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Yet his characters live, as do those of any good novelist. Whether we consider the simple, overtly fictional natives of St. Lucia who are depicted as living through the transition from the pre-industrial, pre-tourist, colonial world before the world war to the loud, mechanized, polluted, tourist-dependent modern world, or whether we turn our bemused attention to the pseudo-fictional mixed soul and complex consciousness, the sensitive social conscience and aesthetic appreciations of the narrator, life inheres in the human world found in his pages. I should suggest the former characters act in Mr. Walcott’s Iliad, set on the island, while the narrator figures in his own Odyssey, one which transports him through the European colonial powers, the United States, St. Lucia, and their intertwining histories. And there is more than this, including characters encountered during the narrator’s odyssey and an especially deep portrait of an elderly English couple resident in St. Lucia through their declining years. In passing, I may mention that this ambitious, encompassing historico-geographical epic contains such a range of historic allusions as will not be available in the memory of the educated reader. But this individual ought still to catch and comprehend most, at least, and sufficiency, of the intended meaning without reference.

   Much of the poem traces, through the consciousness of the narrator and two of his characters, an English immigrant to St. Lucia and a native black St. Lucian, the history of St. Lucia, with an hallucinatory view of the original slaves’ experience, and an history of the Western world since Homer. These journeys into history lend perspective to the elegiac tone which pervades the poem. Much has been lost by the African slaves and their descendants, and by the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples—their lives, their freedom, their culture. The characters represented as contemporary natives of St. Lucia also bear something of the burden of these past losses, while facing future threats to their culture and their environment from the tourist trade. Mr. Walcott’s poetic sensibility registers all these changes as losses, though the narrator, in a moment of introspection, recognizes his fellow islanders may see the alterations wrought by time less sentimentally, less nostalgically—being too poor to afford the spiritual luxury of a backward glance, and being, as well, quite unconscious of the scope of the changes. Each of these historical odysseys form a series of glimpses of imperialism’s ravages in the New World and Africa, and, indeed, in the nations and cultures which unleashed this exercise of power which, it is suggested, continues even today in a less barbaric, more clandestine and corrupting form under the guise of global, free-trade capitalism.

   There is in 'Omeros' a measure of moralizing (if rarely overt and unqualified) not found in Homer himself, though often enough found in the greatest writers, as, for example, Dante, Milton, Vergil. At all events, this mode of writing is perhaps never actually an inspiration to great poetry, but at best provides moral cover and the appearance of social benevolence. Mr. Walcott largely leaves the reader to draw his own moral lessons from the stories and histories presented. He knows no remedy for the sufferings of the past, though reverberations persist. Only these shadows sometimes beg new reckonings, salutary exfoliations of certain social and psychological layers. His suggestions in this path derive not from abstract principles, a priori presumptions, or categorical imperatives, but from that peculiarly human form of imagination, empathy. Empathy, enriched by our poet’s powerful imagination, sets upon past and present without malice or resentment, trusting the reader to see the moral landscape for himself, and then to feel it. Passing through all heavy challenges, the swift narrative current does not flag and does not concede its right to brilliance and beauty.

   To sustain a high level of poetic creation through the length of an epic and to overcome so many self-set difficulties--these mark Omeros as one of the preeminent literary achievements of our time. Of course, to invite comparison with Homer always makes for a reckless risk, one perhaps only Dante and Milton survived fully intact. Yet, Mr. Walcott possesses considerable strengths and wisely veers far away from Homer in his intricate narrative interweavings, his autobiographical version of an Odyssey mixed with an antiheroic Iliad, and his pursuit of such psychological interiorities as were still unthought of in Homer's time. One of these considerable strengths, and not the least impressive mark of greatness, is not only to accomplish the rare feat, but to do so with ease and panache, cheerfully to meet any figure or circumstance that may appear on the horizon, evading no aspect or element of the task--and thereby to manifest a complete soul, a spirit capable of matching the age and transmuting it into the finer material of art.

Slavoj Zizek and How Not to Recycle Other People's Ideas

  

My take on Slavoj Zizek's latest essay, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie:

 

"It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse."

This makes no sense. Increased productivity has no necessary relation to the rate of unemployment. Capitalism redeploys workers rendered redundant for whatever reason to other jobs. Capitalism is even capable of inventing new types of work as technology, economy, society, and government evolve. The only kink in the machine, the reason why the percentage of the population that is employed has entered a period of decline in the rich world, is the socialist interference in the capitalist system in the form of welfare programs which induce an unwillingness to work in much of the population.  And the idea that labor is pricing itself out of the system, attributed to Fredric Jameson, only occurs, once again, due to socialist interference in the balance of demand and supply of labor. The socialists and their union base demand wages above the market rate and consequently find that the number who are employable declines. Effectively, the unions are a rentier class, who collect their rents primarily from non-union workers, but also from each other. Zizek wants holders of intellectual property rights to be considered rent collectors, but doesn’t bother to explain the trade-off between such rights and the incentive to create intellectual property in the first instance. This is once again rudimentary economics. I wonder what percent of the advanced economies now operate on the basis of IP income streams. Surely it increases, and the structure of this part of the economy, including the legal structure, becomes ever more important to abetting productivity and ensuring justice.

He is, at last, correct about the transition from the old capitalism of small businessmen and small farmers (owners) to the new capitalism of large businesses and big government employing the former class of owners as salaried employees. This process is far from complete and may turn in another direction, but the trend began with the industrial revolution and gathered pace in the early years of the 20th century.  He follows this with a generally accurate summary:

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

 

Directly after this Zizek presents the most interesting analysis offered in the essay (an analysis which doesn't happen to be his):

 

The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure which demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merit and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will be free of resentment: on the contrary, it is in such societies that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

The first sentence above overstates the case that jobs are awarded without reference to competence—though I concede competence is rarely the only factor and increasingly in our “no-accountability” world not even the first priority. The problem is mainly confined to the large non-capitalist and anti-capitalist sectors of the economy, especially government, non-profits, and unions. Dupuy adopts a counterintuitive line of psychological analysis, but I think it contains much of the story. However, to complicate this perspective with a further injection of reality, it seems to me that in addition to these four procedures of justification most thinking people also sense that some part of most instances of socioeconomic superiority is grounded in superior merit, a merit that they recognize as reality, not a social construct. But these defenses against social humiliation are no doubt effectual at virtually every level of the social and intellectual scales. How far a strenuously merit-based system of social organization would incite envy and instability has never been tested. Most men, though, consider their lives to be just as valuable as the lives of more accomplished men—and this fundamental fact sets a limit to how much less they would consent to receive in power and status, regardless of externally derived measures of merit. Certainly, humiliation may lead to instability and revolution—recall the nationalist pride that was one of the main passions driving the collapse of the Soviet Empire, or the 2011 revolts against contemptuous dictators throughout the Arab world.  

Zizek’s concluding paragraph is useless. He’s conflating multiple problems as one issue of capitalist instability. Instead, what we see is a typical example of capitalism’s boom and bust logic, involving an especially severe bust for the advanced economies (but decidedly not severe for most emerging economies). In addition, we see the strains imposed on capitalism by excessive socialist welfare policies and union protections—these parasitisms have grown so large in many places as to be unaffordable. Finally, adding to the strain, we have the quasi-capitalist (or state capitalist) competition of the emerging world’s businesses with the rich world’s businesses. These are the three main factors underlying our present economic malaise. The salary disparities Zizek mentioned in his inane attempt at a conclusion have little to do with the problem, howsoever unjustifiable they may be. On the whole, the only really useful part of the essay was lifted entirely from good Monsieur Dupuy, Zizek having spent most of his words playing the semi-clever malinterpreter of this incoherent ramble through the remnants of Marxist thought processes.

 

 

The Spirit of the Age

David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction is a long, detailed, complex essay from 1993, but still current in its fundamental arguments. Here I summarize it with some commentary. I remember being irritated with the pervasive culture of irony in America since College in the mid-nineties. This essay discusses the origins of this cultural pathology. It derives from the ironic, rebellious postmodern movement of the early sixties provoked into existence by the rampant hypocrisy in American popular culture—corporatism, bureaucratization, racism, domestic spying, and phony television shows too. This postmodernist countermove may even have impacted some of these issues, though the trendlines were already in place from other sources of power. But, postmodern sensibilities definitely impacted television. In fact, it largely dominated televisual culture by the eighties.

Now that postmodernism’s irony has infected popular culture and attained ubiquity, however, its purely negative nature becomes a problem. It is useful for “ground-clearing,” not for any positive or constructive mode. Any long exposure, such as we have been subjected to for decades and “one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow…oppressed.” All values are laid waste, except irony. But is irony even a value? It is a tool (of destruction), not a value, and its long tyrannical reign has made a wasteland. “And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unstaisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker face.” If asked what he means, “most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How very banal to ask what I mean.’…And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony…: the ability to inderdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.”

“What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.” This is television giving people what it thinks they want. “But, the harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, shticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving…It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century America’s biggest fear was of anarchists and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting ballots for Stalin: how do you vote for no more voting?”

Though the essay discusses some intimations of the coming Internet Age, it’s neither quite accurate nor very detailed in analyzing this eventuality. The internet represents a massive interposition upon the long rule of televisual culture—though it is far from sufficient to end this reign. Thus far, the internet’s impact in this direction has manifested in the transformation of certain details of this culture, rather than undermining its commitment to its now traditional ironic stance. For example, TV shows are far more convenient by virtue of DVRs, Netflix, iTunes; ephemeral entertainments like those YouTube specializes in have grabbed market share; technical quality has improved, accelerating the talent and money shift from cinema to television. Notice that these changes have made the televisual-type of experience--image intensive fantasies--more appealing on multiple levels. The ability to tailor entertainments to individual tastes and the endless quantities available increase the sense of dependency on this televisual culture. Given that the ironic tone seems potent enough to hold fast through the upheaval, what we have is more entropy. “Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing, so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture.” Wallace wants cultural values, since without values there is no culture. But where do cultural values originate if not in moral and religious values and beliefs? An atheistic or agnostic society therefore can only have a dead or dying culture. And by a dying culture I mean the memory of a culture, of a time when culture was still possible.

This is the Way the World Ends

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/how-ready-are-we-for-bioterrorism.html?pagewanted=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1320145648-K5idnXUdyKqBqlIIQsGvhw

The Bio-Defense establishment’s official position seems to be that a smallpox outbreak would be the worst case scenario bioattack. The article mentions a simulation of such an attack done a few years ago, which concluded that a million Americans would die. Calling this the “worst case” might be right if the simulation were modified to “a genetically engineered smallpox outbreak”—the toll would be higher. No one knows by how much!

Diseases can be “improved” for virulence or communicability or survivability or vaccine resistance or treatment resistance—or, theoretically, any other imaginable traits—by means of genetic manipulations. This has been possible since the 70s. And, today, it’s not even difficult to modify diseases. It is difficult, however, to achieve genetic modifications that will produce desired results. That is, transposing genes within an organism’s DNA, as a mechanical operation, is cheap and easy. Finding out which modifications will “improve” the beast remains difficult and expensive because so many non-linear variables come into play, and precise calculation of their interactions is impossible—the Soviets had to do extensive animal testing to determine what effects various modifications would have when exposed to animal immune systems and the natural environment. So, the worst case might involve a more virulent, more communicable disease not susceptible to conventional treatment, a disease that might kill far more than a million Americans. Even back in the 60s, per the article, before genetic engineering was possible, America had achieved weaponized tularemia (presumably by means of rapid, selective, experimentally-guided evolution) to the point that 50 pounds of it, properly disseminated, would wipe out 60% of a megacity.  

Protection against crude attacks with unmodified agents may well provide a high probability of effective defense for a couple more decades (though something more than a black swan risk is present already). The Muslim world is unlikely to muster anything but amateur-hour efforts within this time frame. Attacks from other quarters are improbable. But, back to the lingering black swans. The thing is, there are multiple black swan risks out there. A sample of contingencies: an accidental release of a bio-agent from a government lab (dozens of governments work on dangerous pathogens, offensively or defensively, and America alone has dozens of such labs), a pathogen developed in an “entrepreneur’s” garage and released, a deliberate release into the environment that escapes intended limits (eg, a controlled test of pathogen characteristics), a government employee deliberately steals, then sells or releases a bio-agent.   

The article discusses the dilemma of whether to focus resources on vaccine defenses or therapeutic defenses. Yet it fails to mention one of the prime determinants of the relative efficacy of these two approaches: the impact of the threat of genetically modified disease agents. Do vaccines against the variola major strain of small pox, for example, have a high probability of success against a genetically modified variant of the disease? And how difficult, in the context of a bio-arms race, would it be to develop small pox variants that would resist a known, stockpiled vaccine? I suspect the answers to these questions, if they’ve been considered and if they’re knowable, are classified.

The article concludes with a hint at the clash between political decision-making processes and cost-benefit processes. What translates into political capital tends to starve ugly, obscure issues until the piper comes round at last. “How to balance the unlikely but catastrophic potential of bioterror with the steady advance of natural disease is one of the most puzzling challenges for biodefense policy going forward.” This is an unavoidable question, except I would say the “steady retreat of natural disease.” The only significant inroads natural disease has made in the last 100 years are those related to poor nutrition—consequent upon mere stupidity (including the stupidity or conspiracy of doctors) and torpor. Natheless, sichlike common health issues, never out of sight and never out of mind, exert great gravitational pull on the common politician.  

Another part of the problem seems to be a matter of bureaucratic influence on policy decisions—like this Fauci genius spending 70% of biodefense funding on common diseases afflicting public health. Fauci is a public health bureaucrat, not a defense bureaucrat—so he spends what he can on public health. Bureaucrats generally fit the mold of defective wind-up toys—little action, no thought. Also, moving up a notch to the political sphere, it’s lovely to discover that Obama has ended centralized direction of biodefense. What we have is a few part-timers in the White House overseeing the program and trying to coordinate multiple mutually antagonistic bureaucracies. Well, I suppose it’s over-optimistic to expect Obama to take an interest in something other than handouts and labor unions.   

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

--Gerontion