A Bain Capital Paradigm

In a recent NPR piece presidential candidate Mitt Romney briefly weighed in with his perspective on the conversation and growing concern about income inequality: “I think it's fine to talk about those things [income inequality] in quiet rooms…”

Unpacked, this is a jaw-dropping window on his and his 1% ilk’s Bain Capital paradigm. It is identical to the “don’t worry your pretty little heads about it” school of thought, differing only in the percentage it disenfranchises, 99% rather than 50%. It endorses a paradigm in which the 99% of us are best suited to “quietly” slinging burgers for minimum wage, so that the 1% can be left to consider the issue of income inequality in “quiet” boardrooms as an agenda item between votes on outsourcing jobs, reneging on retirement obligations, and increasing executive compensation; in “quiet” private club libraries while sipping brandy and between banter about recent developments in offshoring profits for tax benefits and desirable locations for a 4th house; in “quiet” lobbyist offices between developing strategies to gut the social safety net and to hamstring essential government functions.

Finally, there is, perhaps, just a whiff of fear in Romney’s sentiment, a concern that the 1% is sensing loss of control over their “quiet” domination of the income inequality conversation. I hope I’m right and that his fear becomes ever more palpable.

Not a Category of Problems I'm Concerned With

I humbly submit for your consideration a new texting acronym: NCPICW (Not a Category of Problems I’m Concerned With); typically used as a sarcastic, grossly understated indication of a lack of sympathy for a matter brought up by one of the parties to a conversation.

Sample usage:

Party 1: Dude, we should so go protest Joe Paterno’s firing.

Party 2: NCPICW.

Party 1: Oh.

Alleged Christian

An Open Letter to the NPR Ombudsman,

This piece says of Governor Rick Perry:

“He is open about his deep Christian faith.”

NPR needs to be much more careful about how it presents such information in order to eliminate its obvious liberal, lamestream-media, bias. Recently, Fox commentator Bill O’ Reilly in discussing Breivik’s acts of terrorism in Norway and their obvious precedents, Mussolini’s dictatorship and Nidal Hasan’s bloody mayhem, clearly articulated that the standards of whether someone is reported by the media as affiliated with any particular faith should be both ad hoc and post hoc using a “no true Scotsman” analysis in combination with assessment of business card content.

To avoid maligning Christianity in accordance with these standards, the media including NPR must prepare its reports so that anyone, including of course Gov. Perry, can at any future time be credibly identified as unequivocally not-Christian, if some act(s) of his or hers eventually falls afoul of the criteria that Mr. O’Reilly and his fellow faith affiliation arbiters apply ad hoc and post hoc. Unqualified declarations of the faith affiliation of individuals in the media such as the one I have pointed out here can be used subsequent to such determinations to associate not-Christians as representative of the faith and thus those media outlets become, at a minimum, unwitting participants in what O’Reilly has identified as the “movement in the American media to diminish and marginalize the Christian philosophy.”

In keeping with this principle I urge NPR to revise its journalistic standards immediately to reflect that statements such as the one I quoted above shall be written as:

“He is open about his ALLEGEDLY deep Christian faith.”

‘Allegedly’ is written in caps in my example only to call your attention to its addition to the sentence in question. It can, of course, be in lower case in actual reports based on NPR’s usual capitalization standards.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter,

J@ne Futzinfarb,

Alleged Agnostic

America, It Was A Good Run Wasn't It?

They have learned well from our wealthy elite. What the Tea Party has completed is a straightforward leveraged buyout of America. Using the minimal capital of their role as a minority fringe in one party in one house of congress, they have exploited their opponents’ weaknesses - basic decency, moderate expectations, acting in the common interest, compromise - and aggressively leveraged the many-fold larger full faith and credit of the U.S. government to force themselves into a controlling management position, intent on profit, political and otherwise. In this position, and in order to realize their profits through a devastated national economy that will be blamed on their political opposition, they now require the U.S. to enact their management model, austerity. And if the subject of the buyout, the U.S., goes bankrupt, is destroyed, well too bad, their game isn’t for the weak, it’s all in the ideologically pure spirit of creative destruction. It’s a model that has worked wonderfully for our private sector economy, delivering the developed world’s greatest income inequality over the past four decades, why not simply implement it on a national scale? America, we had a pretty good run there for a couple hundred years, didn’t we?

Rentiers

This seems to me yet more evidence of the inexorable decline and increasing hollowness of our current economic model – our biggest rewards, obscene compensation, seem directed almost exclusively to those who are siphoning wildly inequitable rewards through mere structure, simply by virtue of their proximity to, intimate connections with, and greedy manipulation of massive resource flows: CEO’s of patent troll “enterprises” as in the linked piece but also hedge fund managers, CEO’s of health insurance companies, media magnates who pervert and undermine journalism, predatory lenders, corporations that find “clever” ways of avoiding their responsibilities for taxes, to workers and to their communities, CEO’s who actively undermine confidence in government while – often corruptly - profiting from privatization of its functions, and the suites upon suites of lawyers and lobbyists and sinecured legislators undergirding and enabling all this. It’s obviously an unsustainable model, and when it collapses it will mean real pain and suffering for all (or at least most). It’s cliché but also unfortunately rings true: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” These people are compensated so obscenely for not understanding, that the rest of us need to find some way to save us and to save them from themselves. Good luck with that.

Libertarian Summer Camp

Here is something that shines a bright contextual light on much of the current simmering libertarian delusion. The piece describes a libertarian summer camp that reminds us of nothing so much as one of those “Renaissance Faire”[s], where everyone gets to imagine that they are the lords and the ladies and the white knights. In both cases, their reimagining is explicitly designed to simply ignore the infrastructural ugly realities: the stench of raw sewage, the bloodletting, the suffering of the many for the temporary benefit of the few, the institutionalized inequities, the ignorance and the disease and the privation and the famine. So yes libertarians, by all means go play dress-up at your summer camp, but please stop trying to inflict on the rest of us the grim dystopia that would result from the realization of your adolescent willful fantasy.

In Which I Apologize to Lumbering, Oblivious, Slack-Jawed Troglodytes Everywhere for Insulting Them

Hey NOMA warriors. Yes, all you brave little NOMA warriors so disgusted that Richard Dawkins critiques religion without having committed decades of his life to theological exegesis; so offended that Sam Harris paints all religions with the broad brush of fundamentalist willful ignorance without having worshipped with your eminently reasonable clergy and congregation; so hurt that someone, anyone, from the reason/science magisterium has had the temerity to glance across your beloved magisterial divide only to register and point out the gaping hollowness on the other side. Where, NOMA warriors, is your critique of, your outrage for, your bitter invective directed at this troglodyte who has lumbered, oblivious and slack-jawed, willfully ignorant of reason and science and apparently even compassion, from the faith side of the magisterial divide, and bent on wreaking untold damage:

A lot of what Beard knows he learned in church. One Congressman, talking about global warming, recently said that God wouldn't allow man to do anything to destroy the planet. Beard told me, "It is the height of hubris to think we could." I asked him about nuclear war. He said: "How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible," he said, "But, can we recover? Of course we can."…Beard believes that "God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything."

Where is your opprobrium for inappropriately wandering across the magisterial divide now, now where it really matters because life as we know it on this planet hangs in the balance? Where are your calls to GTFOOTMYS? I thought not. Your silence belies the utter shallowness of your concerns.

The Flaw in "The Flaw"

I strongly recommend you listen to RadioWest’s interesting and informative interview with David Sington, the filmmaker of the documentary “The Flaw” (thank you RadioWest for podcasts), and I am enthusiastic to view the film. The one truly misleading and unfortunate aspect I found in the interview was the dismissive response that Sington gave when the subject of blame for the financial disaster arose. His (admittedly brief, and so perhaps not completely nuanced) interpretation seemed to be that the bankers and financiers and executives were as blameless as everyone else in this economic cataclysm, that they, too, were just helpless cogs in a system run amok.

That is simply not so. For decades some of us have been arguing that this is exactly the outcome to expect from deliberately engineered economic policies that seek to monetize everything principally for short term returns and in which no other values play a role, that place blind faith in the efficiency of free markets and their ability to magically transform unbridled greed into social welfare without recognition of the significant limitations of that model, that use circular and hypocritical reasoning to justify obscene compensation schemes and the greatest transfer of wealth to the wealthy in history, that privatize profits and socialize losses.

The “blameless meme” seems to me a way to rewrite history, really a way to silence dissent on economic policies and pretend there are absolutely no other voices than those of our current crop of economic elite. It suggests that literally everyone was swept up in the fiction of these economic policies; it is a very thinly disguised version of the increasingly popular (among the elite) “no one could have foreseen” escape clause.

But the blameless meme is just not true: Alan Greenspan (for whose quote before congress I suppose the film is named), in spite of his revisionist claim, didn’t discover “the flaw”. He was merely forced to finally admit that his many critics who already clearly understood it were right.

And similarly, those bankers and financiers and executives (and their confederates in government, academe, and media) willfully chose to ignore all the contradicting data and analysis and all their critics, elected to believe that “this time would be different” and that they were truly the masters of the universe. They willfully believed, advocated for, designed, participated in, and benefitted from the system that ran amok and those transparent fictions. It was, indeed, the banality of evil, and for this they are well and truly blameworthy.

In Which T. A. Frank Super-Glues Both Eyes Shut, Covers Them With Hands, And Encounters "Trouble" Seeing

Someone is suffering from a crippling inability to discriminate the relative plausibility of two different arguments. I think I can help. From T. A. Frank in TNR discussing speculation about whether right-wing rhetoric shares some culpability for the Jared Lee Loughner shooting:

There is of course one advantage to all such lines of argument, if argument is the word for it. They are entirely faith-based, which makes them pretty much irrefutable. But faith-based punditry works in more than one direction. Seven years after the massacre at Columbine High School—in which two senior students shot and killed twelve students and a teacher—CBS News invited Brian Rohrbough, who had lost his son Dan, to explain why he thought the shootings had happened. “The public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value,” Rohrbough said. “And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” Most liberals (myself included) would disagree with Rohrbough’s explanation for the shooting, but they’d have trouble explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive than explanations blaming Jared Loughner on rightwing hysteria.

Consider the title of this course “Explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive” 101: because there is not a single instance of a pro-choice advocate or biology teacher suggesting that high school shootings might be resorted to as a resolution of their concerns or expression of their principles in contrast with, oh, let’s take an example “Well it's [the second amendment] to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”

Not plausible. Plausible. Really, no trouble at all.

Bryan Fischer's Difficult Dilemma

The near universal condemnation of Bryan Fischer over a recent editorial is, indeed, unfortunate. After all, so many of the critiques seem to intentionally misunderstand his position on the Giunta Medal of Honor. But a straightforward reading of his editorial clearly shows that he was not dismissing that award. It's just that Mr. Fischer is also simply pointing out an apparently politically motivated (and not coincidentally, liberal) policy, leading him to question why we aren't also awarding Medals of Honor to brave service members exclusively for acts of heroism more consistent with traditional conservative Christian values.

In sympathy with Mr. Fischer's difficult dilemma, I have done a bit of research and perhaps I could suggest that he nominate Steven Green for a Medal of Honor for his decidedly unfeminine acts of killing people and breaking things in our names.

Seriously, GTFOOTMYS.

Of Climate Hawks and Chicken Hawks

Around the intertubes, some Very Serious People™ are apparently throwing in with those who have had their hair on fire about climate change for a decade and more. But first, of course, they need to very carefully preen and pose and harrumph and distinguish themselves from the riff-raff and Very Seriously weigh the singular and foremost issue in addressing potential global catastrophe: the appropriate marketing tagline to convey their newfound conviction (and, not coincidentally, to slight and hold at bay said riff-raff).

I suppose beggars can’t be choosers and those concerned about climate change should welcome anyone into the fold, no matter their little idiosyncrasies, but holy f**k. Clean energy hawk, or environmentalist, or climate hawk? The Lord of the Manor is holding up swatches of wallpaper while the servants are battling a flooding moat that is, quite literally in Pakistan, washing crocodiles and s**t into the place? And could there be a worse metaphor for how we approach climate change than with Donald F**king Rumsfeld’s brand of proactive attitude toward gathering dangers – his resolute indifference to the expertise of and consequences to others? Holy f**k.

Well, that’s out of my system. Door’s open, c’mon on in, welcome to the fold climate hawks.

Unsourcing

It seems at least plausible that a principal contribution to the burgeoning income inequality in the U.S. is offshoring and outsourcing. The mechanism is straightforward supply and demand economics coupled to the de facto compensation mechanisms for corporate executives: if a corporation outsources and offshores those functions and obligations that are typically performed by lower earning workers – custodial, secretarial, customer service, manufacturing, and so on – at lower cost (and almost invariably lower compensation to the workers performing identical functions) than it would incur by hiring its own employees, it simultaneously undercuts the compensation bargaining position of its own and its competitors workers in these lower earning roles, and it boosts corporate profits which are in turn used to justify increased compensation of the high earning executives. The executive rewards incentivize (for the executives) the repetition of this income diverging cycle.

What is only now becoming obvious (at least to me) in the unfolding mortgage debacle is that a significant portion of the U.S. corporate sector has added a third component to the outsourcing/offshoring strategy: unsourcing.

Unsourcing: deliberately failing to perform essential and/or long established and/or legally required corporate functions and obligations, usually as a means only to increase executive compensation. Usage: The Countryslide Mortgage Company recently announced that it will be unsourcing its processing and maintenance of mortgage documents in all future mortgage transactions. Executive bonuses totaling the GDP of Bolivia were distributed following the announcement.

In retrospect, I suppose, we should have anticipated this. Unsourcing is the easiest and least costly of the three strategies to implement. The corporation simply doesn’t fulfill its functions and obligations.

To flesh this out just a bit, my reading of the Daily Caller article linked above (disclaimer: have your favorite stomach remedy handy before reading - it’s sickening) is that one significant element now contributing to a potentially renewed and particularly virulent contagion of the financial sector is through the complete abandonment by – for lack of a better word – “banks” of their admittedly mundane but long established and essential clerical role in processing and maintaining documentation associated with the mortgages that they issued, bought, sold, sliced, diced and apparently pureed.

Now don’t get me wrong. On the scale of evil, unsourcing by Corporate America is probably not the worst. This unfolding economic dark night of the soul has unearthed evil upon evil: gambling, unconscionable greed, collusion, corruption, extortion, narcissism, deception, delusion, fraud, theft, malfeasance, misfeasance, and on and on. But somehow through all that I still, probably foolishly, retained a sense that if we could just peel off those rotting outer layers, thick as they were and difficult and unpleasant as it might be, that there was at least a tiny redeemable core at the center. But there is something so primal about unsourcing as a corporate strategy in such a central position in the economy, that now I am not so sure.

Update: More here.

U.S. Economy, 2010 (In A Nutshell)

What do you call it when the proudest infrastructure accomplishment of a country whose economy is imploding, primarily provides quicker access for retirees to gamble away their savings and is named for a friendly fire casualty from a deficit-fueled and unwinnable war?

Prescient.

Are you taking notes, China?

GTFOOTMYS

In response to the “shrillness and intolerance” of the New Atheism (NA), one of the distasteful conceits that has enjoyed a revival in defense of religion against the onslaught of the NA “barbarians” is that religion and science/rationality are non-overlapping magesteria, NOMA. The basic idea is “that’s yours to think about (leptons and quarks) and this is mine (how many angels can dance on the head of pin), and you stay out of my business (wine BECOMES the blood of Christ) and I’ll stay out of yours (covalent bonds).”

There are some pretty straightforward arguments that decimate the NOMA paradigm, but the fact that despite these it is stronger than ever, suggests it may not be a worthwhile front in the overall conflict.

So rather, than fight the NOMA paradigm in a frontal assault, I humbly suggest that a more productive approach might be to enlist, to challenge, the ardent NOMA proponents – for example, the Karen Armstrong’s, and the Francis S. Collins’s, and the Francisco Ayala’s and the whole Templeton lot for that matter – to live up to their grand NOMA ideals. If they are genuinely willing to live the NOMA ideals then I am genuinely willing to give them a second listen.

But let’s be perfectly clear about what that means in practice: when some s**thead two-bit cleric says of homosexuality:

"Some suppose that they were pre- set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our Father.”

a s**thead two-bit cleric utterly lacking in understanding of prenatal biochemistry, genetic predisposition, the empathy necessary to gracefully accept others living out their lives as they were born, and even, apparently, the reflective ability to experience cognitive dissonance at his infantile doctrine in the face of something like, say, spina bifida [yes, why would our heavenly father do THAT to anyone?], then the brave little NOMA warriors will in unison, very loudly, and in boldface font say unto him or her: “Get The F**k Out Of This Magesterium You S**thead!”

Karen? Francis? Francisco? Anyone??

Update: Shrill and intolerant. Guilty as charged.

Gambling

The structure of gambling necessarily engenders both winners and losers, the winners benefitting at the expense of the losers. It’s part of the visceral “joy" of gaming. What has America done over the past generation but eagerly, seamlessly, ruthlessly integrate the gambling ethos into our economy, so much so that even curbing the gambling will utterly destroy the economy? It must feel exhilarating, self-actualizing, so self-evidently proper and natural for the few to walk away from the table with their multi-million and billion dollar compensation packages won so effortlessly at the expense of all those hapless 50+ year old losers and all the rest. What have we wrought? What have we wrought?

An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

President Obama,

I urge you to reconsider your administration's extraordinary and, in my opinion, extreme position on invoking the state secrets privilege to prevent review of targeted killing of U.S. citizens.

If we have learned anything as a nation, anything at all over the last troubled decade, it is that our extensive intelligence apparatus and best functioning executive processes are not immune to even the most basic failures.

It seems to me that precisely because of the inevitability of these failures our government was and has been wisely structured with checks and balances and this is nowhere more true than in the competition between the rights of individuals and actions of the government with its overwhelming power and resources. The targeted killing policy simply discards this fundamental principle and in a stunning manner that is the most irreversible, unenlightened, anti-democratic fashion imaginable.

As a veteran or our nation’s armed forces, I clearly understand that we live in a dangerous world and that the most important of your charges as president is the safety of America’s citizens. But, again, such safety is always a competition between the rights of the individual and the actions of an overwhelmingly powerful and self-evidently failure-susceptible government. Any realistic reflection on this policy in consideration of history, politics, and our constitution can lead to no other conclusion but that it demolishes a cornerstone of our values as a nation and will ultimately have tragic consequences. Again, I urge you to reconsider.

Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome - ADKEAS

I humbly submit a new, brash, and untested hypothesis - that the existence of the tea-party, and particularly of the many tea-party enthusiasts enthusiastically embracing ideas that are patently counter to their own interests, is evidence of a heretofore unidentified chronic, devastating medical affliction: Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome (ADKEAS).

An Open Letter To My "Moderate" Republican Representative

`God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--
Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.

As you know from my missives to you on a variety of topics, you and I do not see eye to eye on many issues. Therefore you might be surprised to learn that I probably agree with you that the recently passed Health Care Reform bill is a stinker.

Now you might be thinking: “Great! The ‘stinker’ aspect of HCR is a winner, it even has my opposition constituents disgruntled” – and that a lot of folks like me will simply associate the stinkiness with your political opponents who voted for the bill. But, you know what? Some voters have the ability to be a bit more nuanced in our understanding of politics than when we voted for 5th grade class president, and I intend to make sure everyone I know is familiar with the following narrative of your role in HCR.

The background, and again, something on which I suspect we both agree: Americans currently pay more, a great deal more, per capita for health care than any other nation and yet more than 30 other countries have health care outcomes that outperform ours, and this situation is a serious and growing threat to the competitiveness of our economy, to say nothing of what it says about our values.

The leadership of your party, leadership you apparently willingly followed (considering your extensive voting record, public comments, and legislative actions and inactions with respect to HCR), opted to implement a strategy intended to do nothing less than simply ensure the defeat of any HCR legislation. This was in spite of your party leadership’s failure to advance any meaningful legislation to address the health care issues identified above during the many years when it was in control of the legislative and executive branches of government, the wide margin of victory by your political opponents - opponents who had made clear that health care reform was an agenda they would undertake - in the 2008 elections, the obvious attempts to forumlate the HCR bill in a bipartisan fashion, and the now painfully clear political miscalculation that the HCR bill would be defeated by a shameful partisan effort.

That is, when given the chance to improve a stinky HCR bill, to really do something on behalf of your constituents, even if it meant compromises on some issues, you instead squandered the opportunity in loyalty to party leadership whose judgement is now so obviously questionable. I will now and always think of and represent the stinking aspects of this bill as your legacy, a legacy you now so richly deserve.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

New Word: peud

OK, new word. You know that accursed and annoying ubiquitous blogging technique where a provocative or inflammatory word or phrase is crossed out, but still visible, and then followed by a more benign word or phrase, but of course the edgy insinuation is still stuck in your brain like the nauseating stench unpleasant aroma of dog poo in your nose long after you've scraped it off the bottom of your shoe? I propose we call these pre-emptive up-dates, or "peuds" (to rhyme with feuds) for short. You heard it here first.

Meanwhile, back at the 13.7 blog...

...Professor Kauffman continues his march to the sea (where fish are, no doubt, right now engaged in employing their swim bladders as exaptations to be turned into hummingbird beaks). There are many things about his posts that rub me the wrong way, really rub me the wrong way, but a big one is the incomplete and hence misleading logical construct used to formulate his "no law" assertions.

Since he is, apparently, an accomplished scientist, I am forced to conclude that he is intentionally misleading his nonscientist readers. The crux of his deception is an incompletely formulated syllogism (paraphrasing): - since the natural laws we understand and accept tell us there is, in principle, no way to deterministically predict future events, there is "no law [sic]". Leaving aside for now the inspired creationist jiu-jitsu technique of enlisting scientific principles and findings as their own enemies, it is crucial to recognize the unstated initial proposition in this syllogism: "If we admit as natural law only those principles that make deterministic temporal predictions, and - since the natural laws ..." That is the only proposition that can lead off his logical construct to arrive at a valid "no law" conclusion. But that initial proposition is, not, not even remotely, the general scientific understanding of what we admit as natural law.

C'mon, Stu!!! You know as well as anyone that when Peebles "predicted" the cosmic microwave background it wasn't a temporal prediction that two guys named Penzias and Wilson would be cleaning pigeon droppings out of their radio telescope 40 miles away in a few months! It was a "phenomenal" prediction: under appropriate conditions, a very specific and precisely circumscribed phenomenon would be apparent. THAT's what scientists nearly always mean when they use the term "predict" and phenomenal prediction is nearly always the form of scientific law.

Professor Kauffman's conspicuous finessing of this initial proposition looks to those sufficiently versed in this science "magic" thing, as nothing more than sleight of hand employed to fool the rubes nonscientists. Reading his entries, I just can't shake the sense that instead of using his role in the 13.7 blog in an appropriate dialogue with nonscientists, he's intent on scoring cheap shots against Steven Weinberg, located conveniently off camera blog, and advancing a pet economic model, by deliberately misleading - browbeating, really - some blog readers to a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of the general structure of science.

And finally there's this: be very, very wary of scientists and others who are eager to (mis)apply some natural or physical law to address what are fundamentally social issues. This is, for instance, what gave us the marvels of eugenics, and boy-oh-boy do I viscerally distrust the general thrust of a scientist invoking the principles of quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity in support of an economic paradigm. There is simply no mechanism, none, that would allow an understanding of the worldlines of events in the special theory of relativity or the superposition of quantum mechanical eigenfunctions to credibly inform an economic paradigm. If you resort to having these principles undergirding your economic model, to quote lolcats, "ur doin it rong". If Kauffman-economics grows legs, trust me, move your investment portfolio to mattress manufacturers. Or if Hank Paulson becomes CEO of Sealy-Posturepedic, maybe straight to mattresses.