No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Thought for today

Regarding the never-ending Democratic primary campaign, if the numbers were reversed and Barack Obama were as far behind Hillary as she is in fact behind him, would the campaign still be dragging on today? No, obviously not.

First, because Obama would surely have the good grace to withdraw and solidly support Clinton as the nominee. Secondly, because Obama or any other candidate would have been pushed out of the race by now. The Democratic Party leadership would have taken him into a back room and told him in no uncertain terms, "Look, you can't possibly win at this stage. All you can do is damage the party and lose the election for us. We're shutting you down right now."

Hillary Clinton has been shown extraordinary patience and indulgence by the leadership, because of who she is and who her husband is. Therefore it is deeply dishonest of her to whine that she is a victim of sexism and what not (especially when she constantly resorts to dog-whistle racism). She entered the race with an overweening sense of entitlement, and expected to be crowned nominee by Super Tuesday. It didn't work out that way, so now she is threatening to take her ball and go home. Either she is blackmailing the party to give her some prime position in Obama's cabinet, or she actually wants Obama to lose so that she can run again in 2012. Either way, it's a pathetic and unedifying spectacle, which casts serious doubt on her fitness to lead the United States.

I don't want to get into permanent Hillary-bashing mode, but she urgently needs to see the writing on the wall and stop sabotaging the sanity-based community's hopes of reclaiming this country. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!

Getting off Scott free

What a shocker! It turns out that the George Bush Junior administration was all about lies, spin, and propaganda. Who knew? Umm... just everyone who hadn't drunk the Bush Kool-Aid and Jesus Juice.

Come on, is it really so "earth-shattering" to learn yet again that those corrupt criminal traitors lied us into a quagmire war that has cost us thousands of lives and trillions of dollars while almost infinitely enriching their corporate cronies? Or that they betrayed a covert CIA agent, thus making us vastly more vulnerable to WMD's, and conspired to commit perjury and obstruct justice? The only thing Scott McClellan's book does is highlight the political cowardice and inaction of the Democrats, and their refusal to do their clear duty and impeach, indict and imprison the bastards.

I have less than zero respect for McClellan. If he was genuinely disturbed by all the criminality and lying that went on during his tenure, he had every opportunity to speak out and resign. He's just sensing which way the wind is blowing, and trying to cash in by turning like a weathercock.

And of course I don't buy the White House's "more in sorrow than in anger" response for a second (except, of course, for the bit about Junior being puzzled). The dwarf butler is going to find a horse's head (or some other part of the anatomy) in his bed very soon. Already we're seeing the first breathless hints that McClellan is an Obama mole. Will the whole incident end up as this year's Dan Rather memos?

Anyway, my dearest wish is that the Scumbush and the Dick-in-Chief will stand trial in an international court for crimes against humanity. McClellan's tawdry behavior, if nothing else, reminds us that it's still not too late to start.

Jagged Little Hill

The prospect of being "greeted as liberators" has become a distant memory and a hollow joke as the long, grueling quagmire grinds on. A large majority wants this nightmare to end, but the commander in chief is stubborn and in denial. Yes, Hillary is still campaigning.

The Clintonistas now want HRC (Her Royal... something) to be rewarded for breaking the rules in Florida and Michigan, and Obama to be punished for following them. Good grief! As I said before, why won't that bloody woman go away? She is intelligent, she knows she can't win at this stage - all she can do is damage the party and hand the election to McCain on a silver platter. Maybe that's her plan? Sabotage Obama so that McSame wins, and she can run in 2012 on a platform of undoing the harm he did (and she enabled him to do)?

Clinton's campaign wants the delegates apportioned just as she won them in both primaries, which would help her argument of electability to superdelegates - or so she and her advisers hope. She would take an edge in the popular vote if those states counted - as long as caucus voters nationally were not counted and the uncommitted vote in Michigan, where front-runner Barack Obama's name did not appear on the ballot.

Jeezus. I suppose next the Bunny Boiler from Hell will argue that black votes should only count as 3/5 of a white vote, while lying through her teeth that she has won more votes, depending on what the definition of "vote" is. And of course the gender card must be played:

A group of high-profile Hillary Clinton supporters, Democratic fundraisers and Florida Democrats is planning to hold a day-long rally Saturday outside the Washington hotel where the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee Meeting will be considering the fate of votes cast in the Michigan and Florida primaries to call attention to what they say is the exclusion of women's voices from the democratic - and Democratic - process and the disenfranchisement of Michigan and Florida voters.

Will no-one rid us of this shrewish woman? Is there no end to her cynicism and hucksterism?

I wish Hillary would go to this part of Michigan.

Who needs the bible?

I recently read two interesting books. One was The Reason-Driven Life, a humanist response to Rick Warren's execrable "The Purpose-Driven Life". TRDL is by Robert Price, a former fundamentalist pastor who overcame his conditioning. He hesitates to call himself an atheist, and has an obviously deep affection for the bible, which he knows far better than most fundamentalists, along with a wide knowledge of other religious traditions and of secular philosophy (and Cthulhu). The book shows Price to be a decent, common-sense person with a ready and sometimes devilish wit, so it's no surprise that the fundamentalism didn't permanently "take".

The other book is The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs, a secular Jew in New York who decides to spend a year following the bible as literally as possible. He lets his beard grow, throws all mixed fibers out of his wardrobe, and scours the scriptures for obscure rules to check off his list (such as whirling a chicken over your head and having it slaughtered to take away your sins). Though he starts out as an agnostic, he forces himself to pray, observe the sabbath and so on, and gradually finds himself slipping into a theistic mindset despite the sometimes bizarre and disturbing behavior he observes among ultra-orthodox Jews and Christian fundamentalists.

My overriding impression on reading this book is that Judaism is an incredibly anal religion, at least if you are at all fastidious about following it to the letter. Shouldn't morality - or rather, ethics (see this post for the distinction I make between the two) be all about how you treat your fellow creatures, rather than how slavishly you follow some ancient, irrational and pointless set of taboos?

But it seems that for many Jews who rigidly follow the hundreds of laws that are given in the bible without explanation, the sheer pointlessness of the laws is the point. Yahweh is testing you, and if you obey the laws without question or complaint, you have passed the test. I would say you had failed, but that's just me. Still, I can't understand why a vast, cosmic, eternal being who created this incredibly complex universe, of which the earth is an insignificant part, would get his nose out of joint if some guy eats a cheeseburger.

Jacobs, to his credit, recognizes that some commandments in the bible are just plain barbaric and should not be followed, e.g. the commandment to beat children. (He tries to discipline his two-year-old with a nerf bar, and gives up after one attempt.) But I started getting annoyed as he devoted more and more effort to finding excuses for the bible. He feels bad about shunning his wife because she is menstruating and therefore "unclean", but rationalizes that he is sitting shiva for a lost potential life. I'm sure that makes his wife feel special!

A disgusting example of the degree to which rationalization can be taken is when religious leaders discuss the notorious passage in Deuteronomy commanding the Israelites to subdue other cities, slaughter all the males and non-virgin females, and take the virgin females as sex slaves. (That is, if the city isn't on Yahweh's list of cities given to the Israelites as an "inheritance"; in those, you just slaughter every living thing.) Some religious teachers simply take the opening words commanding the Israelites to use the ploy of "proclaim[ing] peace unto" the city, focus on the word "peace", pretend the rest of the passage doesn't exist, and claim that this proves the biblical god is a god of peace!

Admittedly, there are places where it's possible to find wisdom, poetry and beauty in the bible - though I would say that in the vast majority of cases, it's more a question of what you read into the bible than what you find in it. I'm sure you could find wisdom in Mein Kampf if you put enough effort into interpreting it and twisting it to say what you want it to say.

Why not simply admit that we are trawling and cherry-picking the bible to find passages that validate what we already believe? Why not acknowledge that we have outgrown the threadbare and moth-eaten security blanket that is the bible? Even Robert Price seems reluctant to make a clean break.

Sure, we can enjoy the bible as a historical document. We can admire the few nuggets of poetry in the slag-heap of savagery, violence and ignorance. But, come on, what kind of person needs to consult some ancient dusty scroll to know that murder, theft, and lying are wrong? The bible has nothing to teach us about morality that we can't figure out for ourselves, and it becomes more irrelevant every year as technological advances pose problems that the bible's authors could never have imagined.

Here's to a lifetime of living a-biblically!

The poll delusion

Pharyngula seems to have become Poll Freeper Central during the last few weeks, but as PZ himself points out, this poll shows the meaninglessness of internet polls. Mali, Rwanda and Yemen are 100% atheist? I doubt it.

Mind you, if God really did exist, he could freep the poll himself and make every country 100% theist...

No more appeasement!

One thing I really like about Barack Obama, he won't take any crap from rethugs. I'm sick and tired of Neville Chamberlain Democrats who appease the neonazi-cons and cave faster than a West Virginia coalmine in response to their schoolyard taunts. Somehow I can't see Hillary answering McCain back as forthrightly as Obama did.

It's funny how, when the Democrats ran a genuine war hero in 2004 against the cowardly war-dodging George Bush Junior, who couldn't even handle a cushy sinecure in a champagne unit of the National Guard and went AWOL to avoid a drug test, the punditocracy sneered that Kerry was wrapping himself in the flag and that his Vietnam service was some cynical ploy to run for president years later. Now, all of a sudden, war experience is relevant again. Fine! Let's revisit Junior's rank cowardice and duplicity. Let all the facts come out, without discussions about memos and typewriter fonts.

Anyway, I'm getting sick of McCain hiding behind his war service while stabbing the military in the back with his votes against benefits for them, his record as Junior's lapdog, and his eagerness to "bomb bomb bomb" Iran while staying in Iraq a hundred years.

Let's face it, the rethugs are wrong on every issue. Years of absolute power have exposed them as not only absolutely corrupt, but absolutely incompetent and unable to achieve anything of value. The only thing they're good at is bullying, blustering and shouting down everyone else - and they get away with it because far too often, sane people don't answer back and point out their lies and ignorance. When someone does stand up to them, they melt down.

I look forward to Obama taking on John McCain and giving him hell. This campaign should be interesting!

"My friends, John Hagee is no longer my BFF"

While I'm pleased that John McCain has belatedly distanced himself from holy hatemonger John Hagee, I'm struck by the contrast between the media's all-Wright, all-the-time feeding frenzy and the muted coverage of this much more significant story.

Barack Obama never sought out Jeremiah Wright's endorsement, but the McCain camp actively wooed Hagee, and McCain repeatedly said he was proud and honored to have Hagee's nod.

Hagee's long history of making odious comments has been discussed extensively by progressive bloggers for several months, so it could not have been a secret to McCain. The fact that he only repudiated the comments when they got some wider exposure speaks of political cowardice, not courage or leadership. McCain feels he must suck up to the most deranged, mouth-foaming elements of the Christian extreme right, unless their insanity goes so far over the top that it hurts his electoral chances.

People like Hagee with his millions of followers and millions of dollars in donations pouring in every month, and his constant incitement of hatred and violence, are far more dangerous to America than a hundred Jeremiah Wrights. Only racism can account for the widely disparate reporting of the Wright and Hagee stories, and the blatant double standards.

The media will trip over itself in its rush to bury the Hagee fiasco in the memory hole. Fairness demands that we hang Hagee and the equally despicable Rod Parsley like a pair of albatrosses around McCain's neck from now until election day.

Scientology is a cult

A 15-year-old boy in England has been charged by police, under some sort of hate speech law, for calling Scientology a cult.

By Xenu! How incredibly stupid. The international criminal conspiracy known as Scientology is far worse than a cult. At least cults are usually started by people who are sincere, if insane. But the corrupt, sinister and dangerous cabal of Scientology is a criminal enterprise that has ripped off millions of dollars from its victims by cynically wrapping itself in the cloak of religion and recycling the space-opera potboilers of some has-been hack as sacred mythology.

The sorry spectacle of British bobbies harassing a teenager for speaking the truth is a perfect example of why it is so harmful and wrong to give religion a special place of privilege in society and exempt it from valid criticism. And the cosy relationship between British Scientologists and some of the top policemen in London makes this prosecution all the more outrageous.

Let me say in solidarity with the victim of this abuse of police power:

SCIENTOLOGY IS A CULT!

Sore Loserwoman

It's very sad, but nowadays whenever Hillary Clinton appears on my TV screen or I hear her voice on the radio, I have the same reaction I used to have to Margaret Thatcher: "Oh god, why won't that bloody woman go away."

I still have some grudging respect for her. She's tough, resourceful, and in this campaign at least, she never - NEVER - quits. If Al Gore or John Kerry had fought one-tenth as hard against George Bush Junior, we'd have been spared at least four nightmare years of the extreme right's corruption, criminality and incompetence.

However, she's made it plain that her personal ambition trumps everything, the good of the country and the Democratic party be damned. Her arguments as to why the rules should be changed and the voters should be ignored are getting increasingly shrill, desperate and unhinged.

For one thing, Hillary's crowing about winning big states is disingenuous. Apart from Texas, the big states are solidly blue anyway. But because of our undemocratic electoral college system, small states have disproportionate power, and the fact that Obama wins them is a big plus for him.

It's even more disingenuous, and self-deluding, for Clinton to congratulate herself for attracting the votes of more conservative, more religious, lower income and less educated white voters. Let's face it, these people are voting for Hillary because Obama is black. In the general election, they will desert her and vote for McCain.

And of course her demands that the rules be changed with regard to Florida and Michigan - after she refused to play by the rules, she now wants to punish Obama for following them - just shriek of an overweening sense of entitlement that very much rubs me the wrong way. She asks why Obama can't "close the deal". Well, let's remember that she was originally supposed to come down in glory to claim the throne, squash Obama like a bug, and have the whole thing wrapped up by Super Tuesday. Why did she never come close to sealing the deal?

My greatest fear is that once Obama gets the nomination, the Clintons will actively sabotage him and work to hand the election to John McCain, so that Clinton can run again in 2012. That would be a crime against humanity! The world is on the brink with climate collapse, oil depletion, and neonazi-con induced geopolitical turmoil. We cannot afford to give Junior four more years, or even four more minutes, of a third term.

Three more points to bear in mind. First, I guarantee that if Hillary steals the nomination, her Karl Rove attacks against Obama will disappear instantly, and she will be all sweetness and light to McCain - he's so experienced, he would make a wonderful Commander in Chief, and so on.

Also, it's difficult for those of us in the reality-based community to understand the incredible depths of frenzied, mouth-foaming rage and hatred that the mere mention of the name Clinton evokes in the lunatic extreme right. Any conservatard who has died in the last twenty years will come crawling out of his grave to vote against Hillary.

Finally, if Billary succeeds in twisting arms in the smoke-filled back rooms of the convention and snatching the nomination from Obama, the result will be a tidal wave of disgust and resentment from a huge segment of Democratic voters. They will stay at home on Election Day, McCain will win in a landslide, and his coattails will bring in legions of brain-rotted ultra-far-right maniacs, plus the Supreme Court will be turned at a stroke into a rubber stamp for the most extreme forms of theocracy and corporatism.

After eight ghastly years of the worst administration ever, this election should be a foregone conclusion. The only way the Democrats can lose is by nominating Hillary Clinton.

With friends like these...

John McCain claims to be a "maverick" who doesn't take money from special interests. Liar! His top campaign managers and advisors are all well-connected lobbyists. They are making a huge investment in the Forked Tongue Express in the hopes of an even bigger payoff if McCain becomes president - and you and I will be footing the bill with our taxes.

Aimless and clueless

The state of education in Arizona has been absolutely dismal for as long as I can remember. Up to a few years ago, students could graduate from high school without being required to demonstrate that they had learned anything at all during their years in school.

Eventually, Arizona introduced the AIMS test as a requirement for graduation. The results were abysmal, with tens of thousands of students failing. So how did the educational authorities respond? By raising standards? No, by repeatedly dumbing down the test to the point where anyone who wasn't suffering from terminal brain death could pass it.

Unfortunately, that still leaves many students - 6,000 this year - unable to graduate. So now the legislature, in its infinite wisdom, is considering a measure to allow students who have failed the test to graduate. Thus destroying the last vestige of the test's relevancy. Why not abolish the damn thing and be done with it?

"I'm not really good at math," said Cami, 18, who was on hand for Tuesday's Senate vote. "I feel like I'm being penalized for something I'm not good at."

Ohmygod, like it's totally not fair to not give me a diploma just because I didn't like learn anything! Sheesh! How does this Scottsdale princess expect to get through life if she can't even count the change in her designer purse when she goes to the mall?

Is anyone surprised that Arizona ranks as the dumbest state in the union? Or that all the good jobs have gone overseas?

Never before in human history was so little sacrificied by such a moron

This headline speaks for itself:

"President Bush said yesterday that he gave up golfing in 2003 "in solidarity" with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq, concluding that it was "just not worth it anymore" to play the sport in a time of war."

Bush added, "Now watch me fall off my mountain bike!"

If there was a liberal media...

It might look something like this.

The more things change...

I never thought I'd see a more cynical, hucksterish partisan political slogan than "compassionate conservative" (except perhaps for "fair and balanced"). But, as always when I think the rethugs have hit rock bottom in terms of sleaze, dishonesty and venality, they plunge to new, jaw-dropping depths of brazen chicanery.

After years of rethug corruption, criminality and incompetence have driven the US into the ground and left the vast majority of people crying out for change, the 'thugs are claiming that only they can deliver that change - the change that their unbelievable ineptitude, arrogance and lawlessness has made urgently necessary in the first place. Believe it or not, they are unveiling a platform entitled "the change you deserve."

Now, we of the sanity-based community know very well what change the 'thugs think we deserve. In a nutshell, they exist to enrich the wealthiest 1% by screwing everyone else - and you're lucky if you are left with pocket change. Sadly, there will always be sufficiently many people stupid enough to be taken in by this malarkey that they pose the risk of swinging the election to the ultra-corporatist John McCain. Roll on a third Junior term!

The party agenda is part of an effort to show that Republicans have ideas beyond simply blocking Democratic initiatives and supporting Mr. Bush on his multiple veto threats, some of which are looming over bills that could be before lawmakers this week.

Unfortunately, the reality is the 'thugs do not have any ideas beyond mindless obstruction and sabotage when they're in the minority in Congress - witness yesterday's vote against motherhood. Next targets of the rethug hate machine: baseball and apple pie. Tonight, a Fox Noise special: mothers - why do they hate America? What I really want to know is, why are rethugs constantly pulling these petty, infantile and mean-spirited tantrums, sabotaging the people's business that they have been entrusted with, and getting away with it?

After the incredible damage they've done to the US and the world, the 'thugs ought to be political lepers from now until the end of time, with no more power or influence than the Leninist-Trotskyist party. If only the useful idiots who keep voting rethuglican could realize that they are committing suicide at the polling booth. Only when that happens will we start to see real change!

Well, that didn't work. I guess Allah is stronger than Yahweh.

This sure as hell looks like satire, but it's apparently a genuine news story.

The half-dozen activists -- Twyman, a former Miss Washington DC, the owner of a small construction company and two volunteers at a local soup kitchen -- joined hands, bowed their heads and intoned a heartfelt prayer.

"Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices," Twyman said to a chorus of "amens".

"Prayer is the answer to every problem in life... We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high," Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days.

"Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world," he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, "We Shall Overcome".

"We'll have lower gas prices, we'll have lower gas prices..." they sang.

God is brain-dead

Walk around any large city and you will see mentally disturbed street people hanging around, picking fights with imaginary companions, and what not. Suppose I told you of a man who spends hours every day standing at a wall, rocking back and forth repetitively, droning on and on in a monotone directed at some invisible person that no-one else can see. You would probably conclude that the man is deluded, at the very least obsessive-compulsive, and in need of treatment lest he harm himself and possibly others.

But suppose I tell you that the wall in question is the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Suddenly the man's conduct is not only normal and understandable, but praiseworthy. He is a holy man, and his piety and devotion should be an example to us all.

Likewise, think of the religious festivals in the Philippines or in Shia Muslim countries where hundreds of men whip their bodies to piles of bleeding mangled flesh while working themselves up into a frenzy of ecstasy and/or grief over something that supposedly happened centuries ago. Stripped of the religious context, the event could only be explained as an outbreak of mass insanity.

Religion, it would seem, is socially sanctioned lunacy. Of course there is a spectrum of religious beliefs and practices, from the most knuckle-dragging fundamentalism to the most refined and ethereal obfuscations and semantic masturbation of the theologians. But at the heart of religion of any stripe is an irreducible core of irrationality. What is theology but an elaborate attempt to rationalize the beliefs that the theologians start from, and take for granted as unquestionable? And the more fundamentalist and dogmatic the religion, the more it can be identified with mental illness.

Religion - at least of the infantile type that the vast majority of believers never move beyond - is little more than a projection of one's own inadequacies and hang-ups onto an all-powerful parent figure in the sky. If you were lucky enough to have loving, caring parents, then it's easy to believe in a loving god who will answer your prayers like Santa Claus dispensing presents. If you're a rigid, judgmental person, then you worship a vengeful god who will cast all who displease you into the Lake of Fire to scream forever in infinite agony.

God is in fact a kind of cosmic Terri Schiavo. We look at his artificially-kept-alive body for a sign. We delude ourselves that his random twitches and involuntary grunts bespeak profound wisdom and love. Our obsession with him keeps us in an infantile state of dependency and prevents us from moving on, from connecting with the only people who can make our lives meaningful: ourselves.

It's time to pull the plug on God!

The Wright stuff

Quick thought: only the rethugs could get away with calling a black man elitist and out of touch with ordinary people, while running a smear campaign against him that can only be called a lynching. Jeremiah Wright has been a godsend for the lunatic extreme right, allowing them to wallow to their black hearts' content in the racism that is at the core of their beliefs, without being called on it.

But I must say my respect for Barack Obama has risen enormously. He has taken everything that Hillary and her rethug bedfellows have thrown at him, and maintained his dignity instead of letting them drag him into the gutter with them. He is far and away the most presidential of the three candidates, and he will make a terrific president.

Grand Theft Country

A new book, Free Lunch, by investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, gives a chilling insight into the personality of Dick Cheney, and by extension of the Bush kleptocracy. The date is March 2001, shortly after Bush and the Dick-in-Chief took power despite losing the previous year's election. Already, energy deregulation laws written by Enron and bulldozed through state legislators around the country by hard-right corporatists have lead to electricity bills soaring to astronomical levels, along with blackouts and brownouts. There is widespread economic suffering by consumers, small businesses are closing their doors, and large corporations are laying off thousands of workers.

At a bipartisan meeting on Capitol Hill, representatives tell Cheney of the hardship faced by their constituents, and beg for relief. Cheney coldly refuses to take any action; this is the free market at work, and the free market is sacred and inviolate. Then Representative Jay Inslee produces a fax which is the smoking gun showing that this market is anything but free. A utilities expert has found that the fraction of generating capacity in California that is offline at any given time is almost a third, over ten times what it typically was before the new laws took effect. This is clear evidence that the market is being manipulated, and that the scarcity of electricity which is causing so much suffering is being artificially created to enrich energy brokers like Enron. In other words, Cheney has just been presented with prima facie evidence of criminal wrongdoing. How does he respond? He refuses to read the fax, and verbally shoots Inslee in the face with a sneer: "You just don't understand economics."

This is just one of many horrifying stories in Free Lunch which lays bare the rotten, corrupt reality at the heart of the rethugs' lofty rhetoric about free markets. What we have is a fixed market, rigged to enrich the already obscenely wealthy at the expense of the vast majority who have to work for a living. Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars are taken from taxpayers and shovelled into the coffers of sports team owners, big box store owners, golf course owners, hedge fund managers, you name it. What was once government by the people, of the people and for the people, is now government whose sole raison d'être is to take from the many and give to the very wealthy few.

Right-wingers claim that a rising tide raises all boats. In reality, we have a tidal wave of sleaze, greed and corruption that is lifting the luxury giga-yachts of the richest one-tenth of one percent to the stratosphere, while drowning ordinary workers. This process has been going on for decades, but has vastly accelerated under the Junior regime. A tiny handful of well-connected cronies now owns the majority of wealth in the US, while millions of workers are falling into poverty, schools and libraries are closing, bridges and railroad lines are collapsing, and almost everyone is worse off now than when Ronald Reagan asked his famous question.

That's what you get for putting those greed-crazed criminals in power. If you're not a millionaire, the invisible hand is flipping you an all-too-visible finger.