No, No... Look Up Here...

This fetching young lass is having her face appear all around the internet. In a number of cases it's as a visual designed to illustrate something people feel is wrong with the Consumer Electronics Show being held this week in Las Vegas. Namely, Booth Babes. "A year after the BBC first highlighted the issue scantily clad women are still a staple of electronics and technology shows around the world," we are told, as if a year should have made all the difference.

The message is one that we've heard many times before, that using women in sexy outfits to show off technology (among other things) is sexist and degrading. And some well-meaning guys have chimed in with the observation that they'd be unlikely to remember the actual product being marketed after such a display. I realize that they're trying to be helpful, but if the sight of some partially-exposed breasts are enough to torpedo someone's short-term memory, it's not only the exhibitors at CES that one should be disappointed in...

The message that there shouldn't be booth babes because men's tiny little caveman brains can't see anything other than their tits seems to shame those who attend trade shows more than it shames the executives in charge of such things. In this vein, I think a better message would be "If your product is so uncompelling that you have to nestle in between a woman's breasts to have it be noticed, why should I waste money on it?" Get the trade show attendees to adopt that attitude, and the Booth Babe issue will take care of itself. And likely more besides.

Shaky Ground

“This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel,” Graham said on CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday. “Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking on most issues regarding foreign policy.”
Hagel Independence Attracts Obama as Israel Issue Looms

In an interview with his hometown newspaper on Monday, the Lincoln Journal Star, Mr Hagel said his record showed “unequivocal, total support” for Israel and that his critics had “completely distorted” his record.
Obama names Hagel and Brennan to lead Pentagon and CIA

The degree to which, to succeed in American Politics, one must be seen as properly supportive of Israel is, to many people, a strange and disturbing thing. Were it simply a facet of American foreign policy that people believed was living in the past, endlessly fighting and re-fighting the Cold War in the Middle East, I suspect that there would be less discomfort with it. After all, government is often a lagging indicator of things here in the United States, and the idea that not everyone had gotten the memorandum that the Soviet Union was no more would strike many people as sad, yet basically par for the course.

Instead, there is a lurking suspicion that what's really at work here is a need to appease a segment of the conservative/evangelical Christian community in the United States that's actively hoping for the End of the World, and therefore wants the United States to take an active role in fulfilling Biblical prophecy. To be sure, I don't think that many people are actually concerned that the United States government is actively working to bring about literal Armageddon. (Since you'd have to take several parts of the Bible as literal truth.) Instead, I think that it plays into people's fears that there is a deeply religious, and thus somewhat non-rational, backstory to American foreign policy, driven by the need to please people who are living even further in the past than the Cold War.

It's indicative of an interesting fault line in the American electorate, and one that shows no sign of closing anytime soon. We will see what happens if the tectonics become more active as time goes by.

Keyword Chaos

Everything, it seems, is a keyword for an advertiser somewhere.

Driftwood

Lines

Despite all of the sturm und drang coming out of Washington over the past several weeks, the "Fiscal Cliff" was never the problem. This chart is the problem.

The two blue lines need to cross until the United States has paid off or significantly paid down its Public Debt, and then they need to stay together (barring some sort of real emergency). Either the light blue line needs to go up higher, the dark blue line needs to come down lower or both. But there is no other option.

There are multiple ways to skin this particular cat - all that matters is that the cat is skinned, one way or another. The longer we wait, the more drastic the measures that need to be taken are going to become. We're really already past the point where it's possible to place all of the burden on one group or another. We're all going to have to pitch in.

Which is never going to happen. (I'm aiming for realistic here, not brain damaged.) At least, not until it absolutely has to, and maybe not even then. If international banking and investing has taught us anything, it's that if you promise a high enough rate of return, the fact that you stiffed the last set of chumps for a few billion (or trillion) dollars won't be an obstacle to other people lending you money. It's been said that the United States does the right thing after it's run out of other options. I'm starting to think that the smart money says that the "right thing" won't happen even after the other options are exhausted.

We live in a society where people will, with a straight face, describe waving enough money in someone's direction as a form of coercion. And no matter what happens, there is someone waiting for every dollar of government outlays who is convinced that they'll drop dead on the spot if they don't get it. And someone else who's convinced that every dollar of government revenue is condemning some hardworking soul to a life of poverty. Raising revenues and cutting outlays both have large constituencies that are lined up to oppose them at every turn, backed by a public that is easily convinced that it will all work itself out in the end.

Which it might. After all, there was a surplus, however brief, during part of the Clinton administration, and there's nothing that rules out another economic boom like that in the future, which allows the government to pay down the public debt without people really feeling the pinch. But that isn't likely to happen by itself. We're going to have to roll up our sleeves.