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| The Bike Comics Show will be on view at Black Dog Cafe, corner of 4th and Broadway, in downtown Saint Paul, from June 1-30, 2012. The opening reception will be on Friday, June 8, at 7pm to celebrate Twin Cities Bike Walk Week. The show will consist of drawings, cartoons and comics about bicycles by local artists Ken Avidor, Roger Lootine and me. Summit Brewing has promised us 4 cases of free beer, so come early, check out some comic art and have a beer while supplies last. You can see a poster for the show at-- http://www.andysinger.com/bike_comics_show_poster.jpg I'm going to India in November (2011) to witness Carfree Day in Mumbai and do artwork for The Greenmile Foundation, its chief organizer and sponsor. You can check out their website at-- http://www.carfreeday.org.in/ I'll post a few pictures on facebook when I get back. I will be exhibiting and selling stuff at SPRINGCON-- May 21 & 22 (2011) at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in the Grandstand (1265 Snelling Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55108), 10am-5pm both days. This is an annual comicbook convention hosted by the Midwest Comic Book Association with artists, vendors, exhibitors, and crazy people walking around in superhero costumes. It's lotsa fun. I'll be sharing a table with David Steinlicht, Crop Art guru and creator of "In This Corner," "High Horse" and other comics. Come visit us! 4 PAGES IN A NEW BOOK! I have 4 pages in the new book "Superheroes, Strip Artists & Talking Animals" by Britt Aamodt:  It's a collection of short biographies and cartoons by 23 Minnesota Cartoonists including Kirk Anderson, Ken Avidor, Roger Lootine, Terry Beatty, Peter Gross, Will Dinski, and many others. The book is published by Minnesota Historical Society Press. You can get a copy at: mhspress.org I WILL BE AT MCBA SPRINGCON I will be at the annual comic convention at the state fairgrounds' "Grandstand" on May 15th and 16th, from 10am to 5pm both days, selling original sketches (for just $5), books and other stuff. Come visit my table and hang out. Save me from the superhero costumed masses! iPhone App available for my cartoons! Daryl Cagle and his site "Politicalcartoons.com" is now offering an iPhone app for my cartoons that will enable you to get the latest cartoons and past cartoons on your iphone. See-- http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/andy-singer-cartoons/id356087365?mt=8 If you don't wanna blow the 99 cents, contact me. I have a few promotional codes for it that will allow you to download it for free. I WILL BE AT MCBA FALLCON I will have a table at the annual comic convention at the State Fairground's "Grandstand" on October 10th and 11th. Come visit, yak with me and buy some books, or original art. The entrance to the Fairgrounds and Grandstand is at 1265 Snelling Avenue. Also, speaking of original art, the Comicopolis show (mentioned below) has been extended thru Fallcon weekend to at least October 16th. If you haven't checked it out, it's an excellent show with some great deals on original comic art. See it before it disappears! COMICOPOLIS "FrameUps" gallery in Minneapolis is hosting a show of comic art. It will feature original drawings by myself, Kirk Anderson, Ken Avidor, Roger Lootine, Shannon Brady, Kevin Cannon, Will Dinski, Brittney Sabo, David Steinlicht and Steven Stwalley. All originals will be for sale ...as well as books and mini-comics by all the participants. The opening reception will be Friday evening, August 28th from 6-9pm. The show will run through Friday, October 16th. FrameUps is located at: 4325 Nicollet Ave. S Minneapolis, MN 55409 Come hang out and see the show! For more info go to-- http://www.frameups.net/ My trip to the INAUGURATION ...and MMAA going out of business: The Funny Times sent me to Washington DC in January to do a 2-page comic about the Inauguration. It appears in the current (March, 2009) issue. I hope to post the comic in April or May. There's an account of my 5 day experience on the Funny Times website, complete with photographs. Check it out at-- http://www.funnytimes.com/inauguration_1.php In mid January, the Minnesota Museum of American Art abruptly closed down due to the economy and a lack of funding. It prematurely ended the "Hot Ink" show (described below). It is unclear whether and where the MMAA will reopen. Check their website (below) for details. "HOT INK: Comic Art in Minnesota" is a show of cartoon originals and comic books at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in downtown Saint Paul. It features work by 16 local artists including myself and is on display through March of 2009. In addition to originals on the walls, the museum put couches, reading lamps and a coffee table full of contributor comics in the middle of the gallery. I post a few photos below. If you get a chance, check it out. I spent over two hours reading through just some of what's on display. Best of all, it's FREE! For more information check out the MMAA's website at-- http://www.mmaa.org/   October 4th and 5th, I shared a table with Kirk Anderson at the Minnesota Comic Convention at the State Fair Grandstand. Kirk was the editorial cartoonist for the Pioneer Press for over 6 years and did the comic "Banana Republic" for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Here he is freaking out at all the adults walking around in super hero costumes--  CARTOON SHOW at Black Dog Cafe and Wine Bar, August 15th-- September 10th In honor of the upcoming RNC convention, I just put up a show of over 40 political cartoons at Black Dog Cafe in downtown Saint Paul. I am sharing the space with the Minneapolis Poster Offensive, who is showing 30 of its posters. There will be a reception for both shows on Friday, August 29th from 5pm until we all pass out. I will be selling books, original cartoons, sketches and other stuff. Below are some photos of the show, as I set it up. For more information on the location of Black Dog and the two shows see these two links-- http://www.blackdogstpaul.com/events/news-73.shtml http://www.blackdogstpaul.com/events/news-13.shtml Check it out!    THE MINNESOTA DFL PARTY DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT TRANSIT ...and amusing Senator Steve Murphy Doublespeak (5/7/08, by Andy Singer) By politicizing the I-35 bridge collapse and blaming it on a lack of road funding, the State Democratic Party (DFL) and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) managed to pass 660 million dollars per YEAR in new highway funding over Governor Pawlenty's veto. Of course a lack of funding had nothing to do with the bridge collapse. The real cause of the collapse was that MnDOT put 8 lanes on a bridge designed for 4 (in two separate lane expansions), leading to a failure of gusset plates on the bridge. See the NTSB report-- http://www.ntsb.gov/Recs/letters/2008/H08_1.pdf Even if lack of maintenance had been an issue, MnDOT has plenty of money. It simply choses to spend this money on new construction projects and lane expansions rather than on maintenance. This is the conclusion of independent audits by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Minnesota Legislative Auditor. The Minneapolis Star Tribune said (quote)-- "A 10-year review of spending at the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) shows that money for road and bridge construction has gone up every single year, no matter the state's economic straits. In 1997 the state spent $368 million on road and bridge construction. By 2007, it had soared to $760 million." ..."Compare that with operation and maintenance of said roads and bridges, which stood at $213 million in 1997 and, by 2007, with a few dips and peaks, hit (just) $218 million." (August 11, 2007 Star Tribune, formerly at--) http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/mips_mobile_story.php?story=1357484 The Minnesota Legislative Auditor’s report confirmed the Star Tribune account, saying that “…despite MnDOT's ‘preservation first’ policy, more than half of highway construction spending since 2002 has gone toward system expansion and less toward preservation.” http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/02/19/transpoaudit/ So all of the DFL's $660 million gas tax increase will probably go towards the construction of new pet highway projects in suburban and rural DFL districts ...or it will free up other money for these projects. To buy off urban DFL legislators, the DFL chair of the Senate Transportation committee, Steve Murphy, agreed to throw in a metro sales tax for transit that will amount to less than $100 million per year (a sixth of what was given to highways). Unfortunately, Governor Pawlenty's veto of $70 million in bonding for the Central Corridor LRT threatens to nullify the new transit funding ...and the DFL is blaming Pawlenty for potentially killing the Central Corridor project. ...But then the DFL then turns around and offers to spend $100 million on a new parking for the Mall of America!!! Hello! In a year or two, nobody is going to use this new parking lot and fewer people will drive to Mall of America as gas may well cost $5 or $6 per gallon. Based on rising gas prices, peak oil and global warming, the legislature should be doing everything it can to create automobile alternatives and help people reduce their driving. Instead the DFL is paying to build more highways and parking spaces. The message is clear-- they've got $100 million for a parking lot but can't find $70 million for Central Corridor LRT. Outside the metro area, the DFL clearly doesn't give a damn about transit ...and if the Central Corridor project fails to get funding, the DFL shares a large part of the blame. Amusingly, last week, the presidential candidates exchanged barbs over McCain's and Clinton's proposal for a Federal gas tax holiday this summer. Obama rightfully pointed out that the "tax holiday" was a gimmick that would mean very little to average drivers and would cut off funding and jobs for road (and transit) projects. McCain replied, also rightfully, that many of these highway projects amounted to unnecessary legislative pork and diverted money away from maintaining existing roads and bridges. He then went on to (wrongfully) blame a lack of maintenance for the I-35 bridge collapse. Geeze, I wonder if he got that idea from Democrats like Senator Steve Murphy? ...who also blamed the collapse on a lack of funding (back in August of last year), saying that-- "We're going to have to swallow the bitter pill, take the political hit and raise these revenues," Murphy said, adding that another bridge collapse "is a likelihood, and we don’t want that." http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291947,00.html "...years of underfunding our transportation infrastructure has contributed to its degradation. I've called upon our leaders to have the courage to publicly support the increased transportation revenue needed to ensure that our roads and bridges are safe." http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/11150726.html Afraid of lawsuit liability for the bridge collapse and/or for political reasons, all the Minnesota politicians rushed to criticize or correct McCain's remarks. In a moment of complete reversal and double speak, Steve Murphy said to MPR-- "In no way, shape or form does it look like (the bridge collapse has) been a lack of resources. Now, there may be have been some judgment calls along the way that may have precipitated the collapse of the 35W bridge, but we don't know that, and we certainly can't put our finger on the lack of money." http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/05/01/pawlenty/ AKKKKKKK!!!!! AN OPEN LETTER TO THE SIERRA CLUB BOARD OF DIRECTORS (4/10/08, by Andy Singer) Dear Sierra Club Board, I want to bring an extremely important environmental issue to your attention. It is an issue that the Sierra Club's board has failed to adequately address and I would appreciate your response as to how you might address it. It is a complicated issue to articulate that involves highway building and financing issues, so my letter is long. Please bear with me. To understand the problem, I first need to give you some background. I will include links to various other sources and articles if you wish to verify what I'm saying or investigate the issue further. In the United States, the transportation sector is perhaps the biggest source of particulate pollution and greenhouse gases. It is also a major source of water-pollution, species extinction and a host of other environmental problems. For the most part, "transportation" in this country equals "cars". By some estimates, one out of every seven barrels of oil pulled out of the ground around the world is burned up on American highways. To address this, the Sierra Club and most major environmental groups have overwhelmingly focused on three things: 1. increasing "CAFE" (Corporate Average fuel Economy) standards; 2. alternative fuels and; 3. increased emission standards. While this is good, as far as it goes, there are several problems with this approach. First, environmentally friendly alternatives to gasoline simply don't exist. At the moment, almost all "alternative" fuels create more greenhouse gases and pollution than they save. The corn or other agricultural products used to make ethanol require huge amounts of water, pesticide, fertilizers and mechanical energy to be grown, harvested and processed. According to Michael Pollan and others it takes almost a half-gallon of oil to produce a bushel of corn and more energy to process the mash into ethanol. So the net savings in fuel, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution is almost non-existent. Add to this the upward pressure on food prices and the clearing of land (often rainforest) for planting ethanol crops and ethanol ends up being worse than just burning fossil fuel. Only biofuels that are manufactured from industrial or agricultural waste products can reduce greenhouse gas emissions ...and technology for the mass-production of these is at least a decade from being ready. Also, the quantities of ethanol that can be produced from waste are no where near what is required to meet to current consumption levels. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18784732 Hydrogen is not an energy source but is merely a very inefficient battery, meaning that you must put more energy into it than you get out of it (as compared to traditional electric batteries). Whether the hydrogen is "environmentally friendly" depends on how the energy used to create it is manufactured. Right now the energy is made from nuclear power and coal. Because energy is lost converting the electricity to hydrogen (and back), hydrogen thus produces more greenhouse gases or toxins than fossil fuels. If it is made more efficient and the energy is generated from solar or wind power, then it has potential. But again, this is decades away from happening at a mass-produced scale. Traditional batteries used in hybrid cars are enormously toxic to the environment, use up finite rare mineral resources (for anodes, cathodes and plastic housings) and require a lot of energy to produce and dispose of. The newer Lithium-ion batteries developed for plug-in hybrids are better but still have issues that need to be resolved. At best, hybrids are a "conservation method" that can reduce the growth in transportation energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission. They are not a solution, however, as they don't deal with the growth in "Vehicle Miles Per Person" (something I'll explain shortly). This leads to the second more important problem with the Sierra Club's focus on CAFE standards and alternative fuels. It ignores the fact that over 40% of the greenhouse gas and pollution that a car creates is created in its manufacture and disposal. (Study by the Environment and Forecasting Institute in Heidelberg, Germany). Huge amounts of energy and petroleum must be used to forge the steel in a car's frame and make the plastics in its interior, body and tires. While a car's metal parts can be recycled, the plastic and tires (now numbering in the billions) choke our landfills and often catch fire. Furthermore, greenhouse gas and pollution are created in the manufacture of the concrete, asphalt and roads themselves. All this pavement displaces greenspace and becomes a heat sync for solar energy, further contributing to global warming. The paving of the US (and the planet) for cars is proceeding at a breathtaking pace. The automobile's inherent need for space-- to maneuver, drive and park-- creates spread-out, inefficient, land-use patterns that waste space and can only be negotiated by car. No matter what fuel you run a car on, you cannot change this basic fact-- that cars create sprawl. Sprawl, in turn, increases "Vehicle Miles Per Person" (VMP), which now stands at over 14,000 miles per year, per driver (double what it was 25 years ago). Sooner or later, the growth in VMP will overwhelm any savings that you can create with increased CAFE standards or alternative fuels. The Sierra Club and environmental groups have failed to seriously address the growth in highway building and sprawl and they have failed to take on the state highway departments that enable it. Besides increasing VMP, highways have gutted our cities, divided habitats and destroyed the kind of dense, walkable, bikeable communities that are necessary to make public transit effective. Therefore, the only way to really address transportation sector climate change and pollution is to reduce automobile use. The only way to do this is to stop building new highways and new highway lanes and put this money into transit and automobile alternatives. While local Sierra Club chapters may oppose individual highway projects, the national (and state) Sierra Club organizations have a long history of aiding and abetting highway construction. I'll give you two recent examples. In California, the legislature and governor killed a bonding proposition for high-speed rail and, in its place, balloted a 11.3 billion dollar bonding proposition for new highway construction. To buy off the support of environmental groups, they threw in 4 billion dollars for transit (only a third of highway spending)-- http://ca.lwv.org/lwvc/edfund/elections/2006nov/pc/prop1B.html The Sierra Club (and League of Conservation Voters) quietly endorsed the measure, which voters approved in November 2006. If the Sierra Club and other environmental groups had vocally opposed it, they have enough clout in California that it would not have passed. Instead they were convinced to make a sorry compromise that will result in 11.3 billion dollars in new paving, including awful projects like a new bore for the Caldecott highway tunnel in the East Bay hills (which the local chapter of the Club is opposing)-- http://www.ebbc.org/?q=node/401 In Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (like CALTRANS in California) is constantly agitating for more money. As in other states, they will say that this money is for "maintenance" of existing roads but this is a lie. In fact, they have dozens of new construction projects going on around the state in any given year. In 2007 they spent 3.5 times more money on expansion than maintenance. An August 11th piece in The Minneapolis Star Tribune said (quote)-- "A 10-year review of spending at the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) shows that money for road and bridge construction has gone up every single year, no matter the state's economic straits. In 1997 the state spent $368 million on road and bridge construction. By 2007, it had soared to $760 million." ..."Compare that with operation and maintenance of said roads and bridges, which stood at $213 million in 1997 and, by 2007, with a few dips and peaks, hit (just) $218 million." (August 11, 2007 Star Tribune, formerly at--) http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/mips_mobile_story.php?story=1357484 The Minnesota Legislative Auditor’s report confirmed the Star Tribune account, saying that “…despite MnDOT's ‘preservation first’ policy, more than half of highway construction spending since 2002 has gone toward system expansion and less toward preservation.” http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/02/19/transpoaudit/ In fact, MnDOT, as all state highway agencies, is a political and financial juggernaut that gets what it wants out of the legislature. When the I-35 bridge collapse occurred, MnDOT and the state Democratic Party (a slave to state construction unions and engineering firms) went on a full-court press to try and raise gas taxes. In Minnesota, as in 90% of U.S. states, gas taxes are dedicated to highway building in the state constitution. So, if you increase fuel taxes, you automatically increase highway building. MnDOT tried to blame the bridge collapse on lack of money for road maintenance. However, the real cause was that the agency put 8 lanes on a bridge designed for 4 (in two separate lane expansions), leading to a failure of gusset plates on the bridge. See the NTSB report-- http://www.ntsb.gov/Recs/letters/2008/H08_1.pdf Even if maintenance had been an issue, the agency was spending the lion's share of its dedicated funding on new construction so the issue was not a need for money but how that money was being spent. Nevertheless, using a compliant state (and national) media, MnDOT and state Democrats were able to convince voters that the state needed to raise gas taxes. Once again, to bribe the Sierra Club to go along with a huge highway bill, they threw them (and other transit advocates) a few crumbs for transit. In exchange for increasing state highway spending by $660 Million per year, the legislature agreed to allow a metro sales tax increase for transit that will ultimately amount to less than $100 million. The state Sierra Club went along with this horrific bargain and endorsed the highway bill. They joined "Progress in Motion" a group funded primarily by asphalt companies and construction unions. See the "List of Participants" at-- http://www.transportationalliance.com/progressinmotion/participants.htm With the help of the Sierra Club, the gas tax passed over the governor's veto by ONE VOTE! Again, if the Sierra Club had vocally opposed the gas tax increase and demanded that the legislature deliver a "clean" transit funding bill, not attached to a highway bill, the highway bill would never have passed. Eventually, construction interests in the state would have had to support transit funding (by itself) or get nothing. Instead, the Sierra Club supported what will amount to 6.6 billion dollars of new highway paving during the next 10 years. To add insult to injury, the governor and legislature have recently turned around and cut off other bonding and legislative funding to transit basically nullifying the transit sales tax increase. I could tell you half a dozen other recent stories of state Sierra Club chapters making sorry compromises with state highway departments and legislatures that have either backfired or resulted in billions of dollars in new highway construction. The problem is the Sierra Club's national policy on transportation, highways and land use. As it stands, the Club has just a vague statement on transportation goals that says what the club supports but does NOT say what it opposes. It allows state chapters too much wiggle room to make bad compromises like the ones I described, even if they are entirely contrary to the Club's stated goals. See-- http://www.sierraclub.org/policy/conservation/trans.asp Compare the Transportation policy statement to the Club's policy on offshore oil drilling, which clearly states in its own section that the club "opposes development and protection of the oil resources of the Outer Continental Shelf and any inland areas from which oil resources cannot be extracted and transported to market without danger of substantial environmental damage resulting." It then proceeds to give specific conditions that must be met before any offshore petroleum exploration can be supported by the Club-- http://www.sierraclub.org/policy/conservation/offshore.asp These specific statements of opposition and specific conditions for Club acquiescence limit state chapters from endorsing bad offshore drilling deals in exchange for environmental offset bribes from state officials. It is the same with the Club's policy on coal mining, nuclear energy and many other issues, all of which spell out in no uncertain terms what the club opposes. What is needed in transportation is a similar, unequivocal policy statement, enforced by the board, that the Club opposes any new highway construction or FUNDING for new highway construction with no exceptions (or unless very stringent conditions are met). The Club must demand state transit funding bills that are "clean" and not attached to huge increases in highway spending. The Club needs to recognize that State Departments of Transportation and their billions in dedicated fuel taxes, tab fees and MVSales taxes are Environmental Enemy Number One. The club must advocate for state versions of the federal "ISTEA" legislation (the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act) that will divert some portion of state gas taxes to transit. At the same time, the Club must advocate for "fix it first" laws that bind state DOTs to spending their dedicated funds exclusively on maintenance. The national progressive transportation lobby group “Surface Transportation Policy Partnership” has authored many studies on the need for "fix it first" laws. Here's one from 2003-- http://www.transact.org/library/roadconditiondecoder.asp If the club doesn't reign in state highway builders and road building, the resulting increase in sprawl and Vehicle Miles Per Person will overwhelm any achievements in CAFE standards or alternative fuels. The club currently wastes its time and resources fighting individual highway projects instead of fighting the funding (on a macro level) that pays for those projects. I urge you to adopt new policy statements on transportation and highways that specifically oppose new highway construction and highway funding (unless, perhaps, very stringent "fix it first" laws are enacted with the funding and a state DOT can prove, by independent audit, that none of its money is going to new highway or lane construction). Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. I look forward to your response. A SATIRE/PARODY PIECE I SUBMITTED TO "THIS I BELIEVE" ...an often serious and pretentious feature on National Public Radio (Andy Singer, 3/19/07) I believe in skepticism, …but I’m not sure. I believe that needing to state your beliefs is a sign of fear and insecurity. I believe, if my life had some useful purpose, I wouldn’t be writing a radio show to tell them about my beliefs. I believe in Jerry Rubin’s saying, “Never trust anyone over 30.” …Which is why I don’t trust myself. I believe I’m not sure what I believe. ...But, most of all, I believe in humor. Specifically, I believe in the kind of humor that gets to the core of a serious issue and then laughs at it—the kind of humor that strips away pretensions, opens your eyes and enables you to see the world in a new way. I believe it’s important not only to laugh but to laugh at yourself and allow others to laugh at you. Most politicians, orthodox religious folks or people in positions of power don’t like to be laughed at. Heck, most of us don’t like to be laughed at, including me. Don’t laugh! The best comedians can laugh at themselves, however, and they often derive their most incisive humor from this. I’m thinking of people like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Gilda Radner, Dave Barry, Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, Mel Brooks, Tom Lehrer, and Paula Poundstone. I LOVE you guys! You’ve helped me survive 41 years on this planet. Humor dissipates pain and anxiety. It’s gotten me through a lot of hard physical and emotional times. When we stop laughing, the pain and anxiety builds up inside us and we start acting crazy. It’s no coincidence that repressive governments or religious groups often try to censor humor. Eliminating laughter helps them keep their populations under control. They go after cartoonists like Honoré Daumier, comedians like Lenny Bruce or, more recently, Bill Mahr and Tom Toles. They claim these humorists are “unpatriotic.” If they can’t arrest them, they orchestrate hate-mail campaigns to try and get them fired from the newspaper, radio show or TV outlet that publishes them. Orthodox religious mullahs issue fatwas for their execution …all in an effort to stop the laughter! Because nothing disarms power like humor and satire. …But maybe humor uselessly dissipates rage and energy that could be better used to challenge power and fix problems? As a skeptic, I can’t be sure. We skeptics can’t be sure of anything …but, on the bright side, we’re open to everything. Uh, where was I? …Oh yeah... Humor is very personal. What one person finds humorous, another might find revolting or insulting—like the campfire scene in the Mel Brooks film “Blazing Saddles” or that scene in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” where an academic historian is lecturing about medieval history and a medieval knight on horseback rides by out of nowhere and kills him! …Now THAT’s funny! Lastly, I believe that humor is destroyed by any attempt to describe it. So I’ll stop right here. Suffice it to say, I hope we all keep laughing. PERSONAL NEWS (Andy Singer, 1/16/07) I haven't been able to update the site or write and draw as frequently as I'd like. This is because I'm enrolled in a one year paralegal program, learning about Real Estate law, Intellectual Property law, Civil and Criminal Litigation, Wills, Trusts, Probate, Healthcare Law, Environmental Law and all that jazz. I did 12 credits in the fall and currently have 4 credits for January Term. I start the last 12 credits in February. Fun fun fun. One interesting factoid I learned is this-- "In 2000, the Brookings Institution estimated that at least 50 percent and possibly as much as 85 percent of the value of American companies is attributable to their intangible assets, such as intellectual property." (Intellectual Property for Paralegals, Deborah E. Bouchoux, Thompson, 2005). If true, this means 50 to 85 percent of the American economy is essentially built on thin air-- pure Enron-like smoke and mirrors. Companies routinely conduct "Intellectual Property Audits," which attempt to assess the value of a company's copyrights, trademarks, patents and trade secrets. In many ways it is the ultimate form of "Creative Accounting" and a way to artificially inflate a company's assets. Thousands of companies DO inflate their assets and we see the huge sums of money paid for Google or YouTube or AOL. ...But if technology changes or other countries, companies or individuals start to ignore our patents, trademarks or copyrights (or hack into trade secrets), the value of US companies will plummet. I also read a fun case-- Hustler Magazine v. Fallwell, 485 U.S. 108 (1988), written by Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The thought of Him, Sandra O Connor and the high court seriously examining a fake advertisement describing Jerry Fallwell screwing his mother in an outhouse is very funny ...and the opinion contains some great musings on the history of cartoons and freedom of speech. Check it out! "PATHOLOGICAL NARCISSISM" (Andy Singer, January 11, 2006) In the last 4 years, many people have accused the Democratic Party of being "Wimpy" in its opposition to President Bush. In the first three and a half years of the Bush administration, this was certainly true. In the last year and a half, however, something quite different is happening. Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards and others who supported the Iraq war are acting tougher and more hawkish than the Republicans. I chalk it up to what psychologists call "Pathological Narcissism". This theory says that people don't want to think badly of themselves and those that they love. Sometimes, they become so afraid of self criticism that they build up elaborate lies or self-delusions to avoid having to face their mistakes, traumas or short comings. When refusal to admit wrong causes a person (or Country) to become delusional it's called "Pathological Narcissism". The Psychologist M. Scott Peck (who died recently) wrote about this phenomenon in his book "People of the Lie" ...and felt like it was the root of human evil. He was on the Congressional commission that investigated the Mai Lai Massacres during Vietnam. There he witnessed Pathological Narcissism on the scale of an entire Platoon, where many soldiers and commanders who participated in the massacres where simply unable to face up to what had happened. Today, we face Pathological Narcissism on a national level. President Bush got a majority of Senate Democrats, the media, so-called liberals like Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Salman Rushdie and others to endorse his war ...and he got a majority of the US public to agree to pull the trigger. In so doing, he made us all complicit in his atrocity. While a majority of the public has woken up, many Democrats, pundits and others feel they must continue to defend the war or lose face. They argue that "The war has simply been mismanaged", that "ousting Saddam was worth it", that "Saddam was acting like he had WMD", that "Our intelligence seemed reliable", that "The possibility of WMD could, itself, justify what we have done". In reality, however, we invaded a sovereign country on a made-up pretext, ignoring overwhelming international objections. In the process, we killed five thousand of our own troops and perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqi troops and civilians ...and we permanently maimed tens of thousands more. We have now destabilized an entire country, plunging it into a partial civil war of car bombs and death squads. That's a tough pill to swallow. Every nation has bad things that it just doesn't want to admit. The Turks don't want to admit they slaughtered Armenians. Israelis don't want to admit that they took Palestinian land by force in 1948 and 1968, despite their former prime minister Itzhak Rabin (and many others) admitting to taking part in forced expulsions as young army officers. The US has TONS of stuff it doesn't want to admit-- what we did to native Americans, to African Americans, to the Vietnamese, to Iranians, to the Nicaraguans ...the list is endless. Now, many people, including leading Democrats are having a hard time admitting what we've done in Iraq. As anyone who has gone through Alcoholics Anonymous or any 12-step program will tell you, the first step towards improving your life is to admit your mistakes to yourself and to other people. Only then can you face reality and make positive changes in your life. The Democrats and many others need to first admit they made a terrible mistake-- that a mixture of manipulation, fear and arrogant paternalism made them believe that they could impose Democracy and "Regime Change" on another nation. We can't even solve chronic poverty in a single US city ...how could we possibly have invaded and rebuilt an entire Mideast nation about which we knew nothing?!? Once we admit our mistakes, we will be able to see the current situation for what it truly is and have the potential to improve it. Hopefully the Democratic party will admit its mistakes, do a little soul searching and the "Pragmatists" (like Howard Dean, John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer and others) will come out on top. If not, we are going to be in this mess for a long time to come. |
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