Open Mic September 14

In his tax plan today, I think, the Romi­noid just iden­ti­fied the ‘mid­dle income’ indi­vid­u­als who are tar­gets for his love and have a place in his lifeboat at those mak­ing $100,000 to $250,000 a year.  In truth the mid­dle income range in the US is ~$30,000-$100,000  per year.   He just quoted the top 1–2.5%.  How do you get to be Freudian slip prone with num­bers?   Nobody is this inept, he must be a clever Obama plant who is part of a con­spir­acy to plunge the US elec­tions into a landslide.

Michael, Mainer..

per­haps you are right about Romney’s stud­ied igno­rance.  But isn’t pur­pose­ful igno­rance in an oth­er­wise intel­li­gent man, giv­ing Rom­ney the ben­e­fit of the doubt, the equiv­a­lent of stu­pid­ity?  Isn’t it your respon­si­bil­ity as a human to dis­cover the real­ity of the world around you, and to the best of ones abil­ity, not suc­cumb to ide­ol­ogy and igno­rance while you inhabit it?  What dumb­founds me about Rom­ney is that such a wealthy, priv­i­leged man is so abysmally igno­rant.  One can see at a glance why roy­alty is a pre­scrip­tion for dis­as­ter in a com­plex world, given this man’s short­com­ings and intel­lec­tual laziness.

In any case, here is a list of Romney’s for­eign pol­icy advis­ers.  I’ve really come to think of Rom­ney as that char­ac­ter in Men in Black who is in actu­al­ity a sim­u­lacra oper­ated by a tiny alien in his head.

http://​www​.guardian​.co​.uk/​w​o​r​l​d​/​2​0​1​2​/​s​e​p​/​1​4​/​m​i​t​t​-​r​o​m​n​e​y​-​f​o​r​e​i​g​n​-​p​o​l​i​c​y​-​a​d​v​i​s​ers

You know, I have an almost vis­ceral dis­taste for inject­ing reli­gion into any dis­cus­sion of pol­i­tics, given the instinc­tive response it engen­ders in some.  But given this Bacile morons rev­e­la­tion as a Cop­tic Chris­t­ian, try­ing to hide his film as a Jew­ish enter­prise with an Evan­gel­i­cal as his front man, I won­dered if reli­gious over­tones don’t per­me­ate this whole event to the point that by ignor­ing them, you debase any dis­cus­sion.  In par­tic­u­lar, I’m won­der­ing how Mr. Romney’s Mor­mon faith informs his opin­ions and per­spec­tive on Islam.  What prompted me to raise the ques­tion was a quoted sta­tis­tic I saw that in the early 1980’s there were less than 100 Mor­mons in Egypt, a coun­try of 68 mil­lion peo­ple and that the Saudi Secret Police had arrested and deported the Mor­mon Stake Leader from Saudi Ara­bia in the mid 1980’s.  I won’t tes­tify to the truth of either fact, but it did give me cause to won­der if there was in under­ly­ing reli­gious antipa­thy between Mor­mons and Islam.  I’ve never heard about it, if there is, but more than one Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ary has been mur­dered in the Mid­dle East for a lit­tle too much Gospel spread­ing.  Can the mine fields be avoided in such a dis­cus­sion, or is it bet­ter avoided?

OMG, to coin a phrase,

the Court just rule Walker’s Union Bust­ing Law UNCOSTITUTIONAL!
http://​www​.politico​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​0​9​1​2​/​8​1​2​4​1​.​h​t​m​l​?​h​p​=l1 

short­chain,

maybe that used to be the lot of pro­fes­sional  math­e­mati­cians, but a lot of them are/​were on Wall Street as Quant Gnomes at a lot more than $250,000 per month.

short­chain,

I’ll take your word for it.  I cer­tainly stepped over enough of them liv­ing in their offices and sleep­ing in broom clos­ets when I was in grad­u­ate school.  The only group/​crew/​gaggle I ever had any inter­ac­tion with was this strange crew in Santa Fe led by this non lin­ear mechan­ics mapping/​graph the­ory fel­low named Kauf­man, I think.  I never met him, but they were all into reform­ing the way traders mod­eled Wall Street.  They were just pos­i­tive they had the golden goose for squeez­ing.  From what you say, some­thing else came out of those geese.

Let’s sup­pose you posed the ques­tion about say Terry Jones a dif­fer­ent way.  Sup­pose the dis­traught com­rade or rel­a­tive of a soldier/​diplomat killed in the tur­moil cased by burn­ing a Koran shot and killed Jones.  Know­ing the facts, would you con­vict the killer, and if so of what.  I did not say ‘was he guilty’, but if you were on that jury, would you con­vict the griev­ing accused.