Republican commentator Charles Krauthammer was chortling over the situation in Wisconsin where the governor is about to get a bill passed that virtually destroys Wisconsin's public sector unions.
My comment:
And so the Party of Lincoln and the Party of FDR have devolved into the Party of Billionaires and their mouthbreathing patsies duking it out with the Party of Public Unions and Racial/Ethnic groups and their guilt-obsessed white enablers.
Yay.
Since 1990 the goal of the Republican Party hasn't been to win elections--it has been to destroy the Democratic Party at the national level.
Step 1 was to get themselves a Supreme Court so far-right that it would give the GOP virtually unlimited, secret funding.
Step 2 is to destroy the funding base for the Democrats, which today is the public sector unions--a goal Krauthammer approves of.
Step 3 is to reward the GOP's billionaire patrons with things like the privatization provisions buried in the Wisconsin union-busting bill.
Because we don't have public funding of elections, each party has become the captive of its funding sources and does their bidding, meanwhile trying to convince their voters that they're serving them.
The GOP has been brilliant at focusing all the blame for any issue on whatever the Democrats did to contribute.
Thus the 15% of the economic meltdown that's the fault of the Democrats has become 100% of the problem in the eyes of its undereducated base.
But, time after time, the Democrats hand the GOP its red meat issues on a platter.
So in this case we have the plain fact that many public sector unions--especially the ones with the most Republican voters, ironically (cops, prison guards, firefighters)--have gamed the system, with unsustainable results.
Here in California, for example, pensions are often based on income during the last year of work; so a cop will put in insane overtime in his last year and retire at age 45 with a $150,000 a year pension-for-life.
Democrats will point out that this is penny-ante theft compared to what the money manipulators on Wall Street gouge out of the economy.
And they're right. It's like equating pickpockets with bank robbers.
But they're also wrong. For one thing, pickpocketing is still wrong. For another, it's strategically idiotic, because the overpaid city maintenance worker leaning on his broom while his city gets deeper and deeper in debt is highly visible to voters, while the billionaire hedge fund manager and his crimes occur far from public view.
The Democratic Party must lead the charge to public sector union wage and pension reform to bring them in line with private sector compensation.
If it did so instead of reflexively defending union perks down the line, Democrats would take the wind out of the GOP's sails.
Instead the Democrats play right into the hands of the GOP's propagandameisters and devoted shills like Dr. Krauthammer.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Public employee unions--challenging issue for centrists
Here's my problem as a centrist:
1. It's clear to me that the real motive by the Republican leadership in Washington is to do a kind of fiscal Sherman's March to the Sea against the Democratic Party by eliminating its major source of funding: public employee unions.
2. But it's equally clear to me that the public employee unions really do, on the whole, get both more compensation and more security than their private sector equivalents, and that the conflation of public and private sector unions ignores a critical fact: private sector employees are working for rich bosses, while public sector employees are working for ordinary taxpayers--many of whom are in trouble right now, or looking over their shoulder.
So it's brilliant of the Republicans to wrap their efforts to permanently marginalize the Democratic Party around a legitimate beef. But it puts centrists like me in a quandry. I don't want to see the GOP get away with this, but the public sector unions have got to give on this--or their intransigence will destroy the Democratic Party.
Remember when American Motors' union members voted to strike, because they didn't believe the bosses there who said they'd close the company if they did?
Well you may not--because American Motoers doesn't exist any more.
You have to know when to hold and when to fold. Public employee unions have got to give way on plush pensions and overcompensation where it exists--otherwise we're handing the GOP a loaded shotgun and begging them to point it at us.
1. It's clear to me that the real motive by the Republican leadership in Washington is to do a kind of fiscal Sherman's March to the Sea against the Democratic Party by eliminating its major source of funding: public employee unions.
2. But it's equally clear to me that the public employee unions really do, on the whole, get both more compensation and more security than their private sector equivalents, and that the conflation of public and private sector unions ignores a critical fact: private sector employees are working for rich bosses, while public sector employees are working for ordinary taxpayers--many of whom are in trouble right now, or looking over their shoulder.
So it's brilliant of the Republicans to wrap their efforts to permanently marginalize the Democratic Party around a legitimate beef. But it puts centrists like me in a quandry. I don't want to see the GOP get away with this, but the public sector unions have got to give on this--or their intransigence will destroy the Democratic Party.
Remember when American Motors' union members voted to strike, because they didn't believe the bosses there who said they'd close the company if they did?
Well you may not--because American Motoers doesn't exist any more.
You have to know when to hold and when to fold. Public employee unions have got to give way on plush pensions and overcompensation where it exists--otherwise we're handing the GOP a loaded shotgun and begging them to point it at us.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Fox News has no bias at all--say some
On an Amazon.com Science Forum thread titled "Why are people here so scientifically illiterate?" one poster said:
I defend Fox News because these claims about it are lies. It does not, and never has, depicted Obama as "foreign" or "just short of a terrorist," though of course the job of good news companies is to be "suspicious" of politicians.
I defend Fox News because these claims about it are lies. It does not, and never has, depicted Obama as "foreign" or "just short of a terrorist," though of course the job of good news companies is to be "suspicious" of politicians.
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Feb. 24, 2011 10:21 AM PST
Ehkzu says:
Of course it does. I watch it regularly, and it might as well use the tagline "Fox News, where we tell you what Obama did wrong today."
Where it gives a fig leaf to shallow apologists is that it doesn't come out and say so. Instead it uses the same technique that Bush II used to convince a majority of Republicans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11--he didn't say it. But every time he mentioned 9/11 he mentioned Saddam Hussein.
Most people are associative thinkers, and the juxtaposition is enough.
On Fox News, we have to differentiate between the programs that present themselves as news programs and the ones that present themselves as opinion ones. On the opnion ones the Satanification of Obama is blatant, characterized by GOP shills like Sean Hannity in his fawning interviews of right wing demagogues, where, instead of challinging their outrageous and unsubstantiated lies, eggs them on.
The supposed news programs are more subtle. That's where they present this guy said / but that other guy said juxtapositions--as if both points of view have equal merit--supported by the lack of any fact checking of the competing claims. Some reporters, like the host of Fox Sunday, make a stab at actual probing questions, but even there they lean right, and right against Obama.
I could teach a class in news bias using just Fox News on the right and, say, Pacifica Radio on the left.
I will acknowledge that I see a distinct leftward tilt at MSNBC programs like Rachel Maddow's--where, as on Fox, the hosts presume agreement of the viewers, such that many assertions are taken as a given. CNN generally stays balanced, however, after having gotten rid of both Dobbs and Sanchez. NPR/PBS do well nationally--programs like Washington Week in Review are scrupulously nonpartisan, while Inside Washington and several others give both parties substantial air time and the opportunity to rebut each other, with hosts that do their job instead of just sitting there or siding with one side or the other.
But Fox stands out for pandering to far right self-styled conservatives.
I see right wingers making legalistic defenses of their propaganda campaigns all the time, and it always takes the form of David Marshall's "Who me?" argument--that is, if the bias doesn't take the form of explicit statements, there is no bias--none whatsoever.
Apparently such people never learned terms like "innuendo" "false equivalence" and "framing."
For the details substantiating my claims here, read George Lakoff's The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics, and The Republican Noise Machine : Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, written by a repentent elf in the anti-Santa's factory.
This is one area where my BA in Sociology comes in handy all the time. I was trained to spot slanted reporting of any sort. In college the commies I knew told me I'd believe the news until I was actually at the place being reported on. They were right. During the free speech movement in the '60s, at UCLA, I'd attend a rally where only one of the speakers was a screamer and 1% of the audience had beards. Guess what I'd see on the TV news that night?
Now in that case it wasn't so much due to right wing bias on the part of the media as sensationalistic bias--something partisans frequently miss. News organizations are considered profit centers by the multinationals that own nearly all the media today. And their watchword isn't "slant news to help one side" it's "If it bleeds it leads; if it thinks it stinks."
Which is why I mainly watch NPR.
Which is why the Republicans want to kill it--not because it's left wing, which it is not (despite some lamentable lapses like firing that commentator recently, and a tendency to get weepy over illegal immigrants)--but because it isn't right wing, which it is. Not.
Where it gives a fig leaf to shallow apologists is that it doesn't come out and say so. Instead it uses the same technique that Bush II used to convince a majority of Republicans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11--he didn't say it. But every time he mentioned 9/11 he mentioned Saddam Hussein.
Most people are associative thinkers, and the juxtaposition is enough.
On Fox News, we have to differentiate between the programs that present themselves as news programs and the ones that present themselves as opinion ones. On the opnion ones the Satanification of Obama is blatant, characterized by GOP shills like Sean Hannity in his fawning interviews of right wing demagogues, where, instead of challinging their outrageous and unsubstantiated lies, eggs them on.
The supposed news programs are more subtle. That's where they present this guy said / but that other guy said juxtapositions--as if both points of view have equal merit--supported by the lack of any fact checking of the competing claims. Some reporters, like the host of Fox Sunday, make a stab at actual probing questions, but even there they lean right, and right against Obama.
I could teach a class in news bias using just Fox News on the right and, say, Pacifica Radio on the left.
I will acknowledge that I see a distinct leftward tilt at MSNBC programs like Rachel Maddow's--where, as on Fox, the hosts presume agreement of the viewers, such that many assertions are taken as a given. CNN generally stays balanced, however, after having gotten rid of both Dobbs and Sanchez. NPR/PBS do well nationally--programs like Washington Week in Review are scrupulously nonpartisan, while Inside Washington and several others give both parties substantial air time and the opportunity to rebut each other, with hosts that do their job instead of just sitting there or siding with one side or the other.
But Fox stands out for pandering to far right self-styled conservatives.
I see right wingers making legalistic defenses of their propaganda campaigns all the time, and it always takes the form of David Marshall's "Who me?" argument--that is, if the bias doesn't take the form of explicit statements, there is no bias--none whatsoever.
Apparently such people never learned terms like "innuendo" "false equivalence" and "framing."
For the details substantiating my claims here, read George Lakoff's The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics, and The Republican Noise Machine : Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, written by a repentent elf in the anti-Santa's factory.
This is one area where my BA in Sociology comes in handy all the time. I was trained to spot slanted reporting of any sort. In college the commies I knew told me I'd believe the news until I was actually at the place being reported on. They were right. During the free speech movement in the '60s, at UCLA, I'd attend a rally where only one of the speakers was a screamer and 1% of the audience had beards. Guess what I'd see on the TV news that night?
Now in that case it wasn't so much due to right wing bias on the part of the media as sensationalistic bias--something partisans frequently miss. News organizations are considered profit centers by the multinationals that own nearly all the media today. And their watchword isn't "slant news to help one side" it's "If it bleeds it leads; if it thinks it stinks."
Which is why I mainly watch NPR.
Which is why the Republicans want to kill it--not because it's left wing, which it is not (despite some lamentable lapses like firing that commentator recently, and a tendency to get weepy over illegal immigrants)--but because it isn't right wing, which it is. Not.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Planned Parenthood--helping the helpless or fortress of genocide?
As you can imagine, this article's comment threat flowered with the usual poster waving.
I said:
Consider this comment by a so-called Pro-Lifer:
/>>barbaracjohnson74 wrote:
/>>...Both poor women and rich women have two legs and can keep them locked from their respective love-making partners. All women, therefore, whether poor or rich, have to be responsible for their own conduct. In other words, put a zipper on Pauline, if not a chastity belt. The author's tears in this article for poor pregnant women are simply not persuasive.
2/23/2011 3:23:52 PM
Now consider this pro-lifer's call for people to take responsibility as you read these tidbits, all verifiable through mainstream (not wacko bloggers) information sources:
1. 32,000 rape victims become pregnant annually.
That's 88 pregnancies from rape per day in America. The number doesn't count "coerced sex" of wives and girl friends.
2. Last April 19, CNN reported that a 10 year old girl in Mexico who'd been raped by her stepfather was denied an abortion by local authorities because Mexican law forbids abortions after four months.
According to "barbaracjohnson74" I guess this 10 year old child must have been asking for it. Now she just has to suck it up--though no 10 year old's pelvis is developed enough to carry a pregnancy to term without damage (possibly lifelong), but she should have thought about that beforehand, right? [I'm just trying to think like the people who call themselves "pro-life"]
Cases like this can be found throughout the Latin American countries whose social policies are directed by the Catholic Church.
3. Last June all the major news outlets reported that the Catholic Church excommunicated a nun/hospital administrator for Okaying an abortion, saying "An unborn child is not a disease ... the end does not justify the means."
The woman, suffering from pulmonary hypertension, would have died shortly without the abortion. The fetus, 11 weeks along, could not have survived the mother's death.
Now there's one heckuva pro-life church, huh? BTW child rapists are not automatically excommunicated.
You can't make this stuff up.
4. A survey on abortion attitudes last year by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life revealed that three out of ten active churchgoers believe that abortion should not be illegal in all or most cases.
OTOH one out of four Americans with no religious affiliation say that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.
So this isn't a religious vs. nonreligious--nor a political one either. One out of five Democrats oppose abortion, while 29% of Republicans support abortion being generally available.
So all the anti-lib-er-ul invective on this thread is kind of dim-bulby, eh?
5. Nearly all discussion about abortion is based on one side saying women should have control over their bodies, while the other says a zygote--a microscopic one-celled dependent organism should have exactly the same legal status as a one month old baby.
(Note that less than half of all zygotes become babies--the rest die spontaneously, or fail to implant, or are so genetically defective that they can't survive childbirth. So none of these were even potential "babies."
But there's a third opinion: that the world in general and America in particular are in the midst of an overpopulation crisis so extreme that all the world's nations should adopt China's One Child policy.
This has nothing to do with "a woman's right to choose," one way or another. People like are saying it's an emergency that trumps the moralizing on both sides.
America's population has quadrupled since 1900. Many if not most of the measures we've taken to get these people food and water are not sustainable. Porous aquifers are collapsing all over the country. Fisheries are collapsing. Hi-tech agribusiness has polluted waterways and water tables, and large scale monoculture--often of cloned plants--puts us at risk for disease or parasite epidemics like the one that will eliminate the banana we normally eat within a decade or so (as happened to its predecessor in the 1920s).
If you don't understand what I said here you are not qualified to say whether America is overpopulated or not. I realize none of this is obvious. Neither is terminal cancer in its early stages.
We are cantilevered over the abyss. Normal life seems to go on, but under the hood a bunch of really bad things are happening that will eventually make opposition to abortion look suicidal.
Overall the world can sustain about a billion people without environmental degradation. We have seven billion.
Want to see the future? Visit Haiti.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Vaccines cause autism! Really?
Today millions of Americans--mostly middle class, college educated mothers--believe that vaccines cause autism. This fact is a stunning indictment of both the kind of college education liberal arts majors get, and of just how close to chimpanzees our minds remain.
There's a daytime medical show on TV by someone named Dr. Oz. I just watched woman after women in his middle class audience say, in effect, "I don't care what anybody says--vaccines harm babies so I'm going to protect mine by not letting him get vaccinated."
These people have hung swords by a thread over their babies' cribs--and then gone through their neighborhoods hanging more swords by more threads over all their neighbors' babies cribs as well. The epidemiological impact of these fools' actions threaten to drag America back into the 19th century once these human time bombs start attending school and coughing in our own childrens' faces.
And that "I don't care what anybody says" part is telling. We evolved to not only have "instincts" about threats around us, but to trust those instincts implicitly--even though those instincts evolved to assess threats in circumstances totally different from the ones we live in today. This flat dismissal of medical information and statistical reality shows how we just cease to think when our emotions get triggered.
Moreover, our minds connect dots all the time--even dots that aren't connected.
Some con artists have made a lot of money off peddling this "vaccines cause autism" horsepuckey. I guess P.T. Barnum was right.
There's a daytime medical show on TV by someone named Dr. Oz. I just watched woman after women in his middle class audience say, in effect, "I don't care what anybody says--vaccines harm babies so I'm going to protect mine by not letting him get vaccinated."
These people have hung swords by a thread over their babies' cribs--and then gone through their neighborhoods hanging more swords by more threads over all their neighbors' babies cribs as well. The epidemiological impact of these fools' actions threaten to drag America back into the 19th century once these human time bombs start attending school and coughing in our own childrens' faces.
And that "I don't care what anybody says" part is telling. We evolved to not only have "instincts" about threats around us, but to trust those instincts implicitly--even though those instincts evolved to assess threats in circumstances totally different from the ones we live in today. This flat dismissal of medical information and statistical reality shows how we just cease to think when our emotions get triggered.
Moreover, our minds connect dots all the time--even dots that aren't connected.
Some con artists have made a lot of money off peddling this "vaccines cause autism" horsepuckey. I guess P.T. Barnum was right.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Calling Social Security an entitlement is a lie
Most people understand "entitlement" to mean something for nothing--benefits you get that you didn't pay for.
That's true of government benefits for poor people who aren't taxpayers. It's even more true of taxpayer-financed subsidies for giant agribusinesses. It is not true for Social Security.
Social Security, at its core, is, in effect, a mandatory government bond we pay into during our working lives. Then, after we retire, the government returns our own money to us until we die. If we last long enough we'll outlast the money we paid in. But even there, the government got to play the float with our money during all the years we paid into it--so if you add in the interest accumulated by our money while the government had the use of, it takes even longer for us to outlast our own contribution.
Now to the extent that you outlive getting back the money you paid in plus the interest that money could have made--that's an entitlement. And to the extent that SS benefits are extended to family members who didn't pay into it--that's also an entitlement.
But mostly it's not. Moreover, the baby boom bulge in the ageing of our demographics was anticipated decades ago and factored into increased SS payments from then forward.
So when the Republican shills state that Social Security is "running out of money" they're lying. The current dip below income and outgo was factored in long ago and is coming out of a whopping Social Security surplus produced by those increased payments. Even with no changes in the current system the Social Security fund won't be exhausted for many decades.
The problem, of course, is that government--Republican and Democrat--has been borrowing from the Social Security fund for decades. That's not the problem of the Social Security fund, however, nor of recipients, any more than the need of the government to honor its bonds is the problem of the bondholders.
Thus the real problem with Social Security is that the Republican Party's patrons don't need it, since they're billionaires, and they hate it, because they believe the only valid purposes for government are border defense and ensuring that billionaires get the corporate welfare they've come to expect. Anything else they regard as stealing from them--as do the oligarchs ruling Russia, Mexico, Haiti, and other countries with an income distribution like ours.
We could solve Social Security's longest term issues just by raising the income cap on it. Since most Republican Party members--as opposed to the leadership--are or will be Social Security recipients, it's interesting to see the GOP leadership's success in getting its rank and file to vote to cut their own throats. Makes me understand Jim Jones and his followers better...
That's true of government benefits for poor people who aren't taxpayers. It's even more true of taxpayer-financed subsidies for giant agribusinesses. It is not true for Social Security.
Social Security, at its core, is, in effect, a mandatory government bond we pay into during our working lives. Then, after we retire, the government returns our own money to us until we die. If we last long enough we'll outlast the money we paid in. But even there, the government got to play the float with our money during all the years we paid into it--so if you add in the interest accumulated by our money while the government had the use of, it takes even longer for us to outlast our own contribution.
Now to the extent that you outlive getting back the money you paid in plus the interest that money could have made--that's an entitlement. And to the extent that SS benefits are extended to family members who didn't pay into it--that's also an entitlement.
But mostly it's not. Moreover, the baby boom bulge in the ageing of our demographics was anticipated decades ago and factored into increased SS payments from then forward.
So when the Republican shills state that Social Security is "running out of money" they're lying. The current dip below income and outgo was factored in long ago and is coming out of a whopping Social Security surplus produced by those increased payments. Even with no changes in the current system the Social Security fund won't be exhausted for many decades.
The problem, of course, is that government--Republican and Democrat--has been borrowing from the Social Security fund for decades. That's not the problem of the Social Security fund, however, nor of recipients, any more than the need of the government to honor its bonds is the problem of the bondholders.
Thus the real problem with Social Security is that the Republican Party's patrons don't need it, since they're billionaires, and they hate it, because they believe the only valid purposes for government are border defense and ensuring that billionaires get the corporate welfare they've come to expect. Anything else they regard as stealing from them--as do the oligarchs ruling Russia, Mexico, Haiti, and other countries with an income distribution like ours.
We could solve Social Security's longest term issues just by raising the income cap on it. Since most Republican Party members--as opposed to the leadership--are or will be Social Security recipients, it's interesting to see the GOP leadership's success in getting its rank and file to vote to cut their own throats. Makes me understand Jim Jones and his followers better...
Empiricism is the ism for me
I've been fooling around on Amazon.com's customer forums. There are a number of ones in the Religion forum about atheism, and I've been trying to persuade self-styled atheists to give up the word and call themselves empiricists instead, because it lets you avoid saying you work on a set of a priori assumptions, just like religious people do.
Here's what I said:
I have no beliefs whatsoever, and I make no assumptions either.
That's my starting point--I call it "empty hands."
I find my "self" feeling like it's right behind my eyes--like the bridge of a ship, I suppose.
I find that I have what feel like perceptions.
They save me from pain and help me find pleasure.
That is, I see what looks like a solid vertical surface in front of me. If I try to treat it as if it doesn't exist and just walk forward, I bang into it and hurt myself. If I treat it as if it does exist, I don't hurt myself.
From there I construct everything else, out to learning that the universe--perhaps only this universe--is 13.7B years old.
At no time do I deny that I may be some metabeing's dream, due to pop out of existence abruptly when it/she/he/whatever wakes up. At no time do I deny that I might be the only conscious entity in the universe, dreaming my life. Or any of dozens of other science fiction/fantasy scenarios.
Because it doesn't make any difference to my behavior. If I act as if I and all around me exist in the more or less conventional understanding of same, per what the physicists and biologists etc. tell us, that comports most closely with me finding pleasure and avoiding pain--including purposely enduring pain for longer-term pleasure goals (I'm a long-distance bicyclist).
Likewise I find that if I behave morally, pretty much, I experience more pleasure and less pain, even though that's not always true in the moment. But as a four-dimensional being (plus, perhaps, a bunch of extra sub-Planck scale dimensions), I don't exist only "in the moment." My memories and validated anticipations accompany me through each moment.
I still have empty hands as far as assumptions go. My understandings are 100% provisional. But I'm smart enough to have an extremely refined set of pleasure-seeking/pain avoiding algorithms worked up, such that I can say that "there is no supernatural agency" after long and thorough reflection on the matter. I'm not 100% certain of that--only 99.9999% certain.
But that level of certainty, even if not ultimate, is enough to make calling myself an agnostic hypocritical--parsing words like a defense attorney, not as a scientifically-trained person. I deny no possibility of the nature of existence, or of what or who might lurk behind the Great Oz's curtain. But all probabilities are not equal. That's why I never buy lottery tickets, but I did buy a home. And with every passing day, scientific advances shrink the probability of anything not having a naturalistic explanation dwindles even further.
I could elaborate on this path from "empty hands" and assuming nada to being a knowledgeable adult at great length. But I hope this will suffice.
As for whether the human race will emerge from its long dream of gods and heavens...I honestly don't know. I am certain that progress is not certain--that what people understood in Athens in 600BC was way ahead of what people thought they knew in Gaul in 900AD--and that American Christianity, the active, churchgoing religion of half the country, has become pregressively more fundamentalist, even as the other half of the country has become more secular (including the many people who profess to some kind of religion but aren't active churchgoers).
Here's what I said:
I have no beliefs whatsoever, and I make no assumptions either.
That's my starting point--I call it "empty hands."
I find my "self" feeling like it's right behind my eyes--like the bridge of a ship, I suppose.
I find that I have what feel like perceptions.
They save me from pain and help me find pleasure.
That is, I see what looks like a solid vertical surface in front of me. If I try to treat it as if it doesn't exist and just walk forward, I bang into it and hurt myself. If I treat it as if it does exist, I don't hurt myself.
From there I construct everything else, out to learning that the universe--perhaps only this universe--is 13.7B years old.
At no time do I deny that I may be some metabeing's dream, due to pop out of existence abruptly when it/she/he/whatever wakes up. At no time do I deny that I might be the only conscious entity in the universe, dreaming my life. Or any of dozens of other science fiction/fantasy scenarios.
Because it doesn't make any difference to my behavior. If I act as if I and all around me exist in the more or less conventional understanding of same, per what the physicists and biologists etc. tell us, that comports most closely with me finding pleasure and avoiding pain--including purposely enduring pain for longer-term pleasure goals (I'm a long-distance bicyclist).
Likewise I find that if I behave morally, pretty much, I experience more pleasure and less pain, even though that's not always true in the moment. But as a four-dimensional being (plus, perhaps, a bunch of extra sub-Planck scale dimensions), I don't exist only "in the moment." My memories and validated anticipations accompany me through each moment.
I still have empty hands as far as assumptions go. My understandings are 100% provisional. But I'm smart enough to have an extremely refined set of pleasure-seeking/pain avoiding algorithms worked up, such that I can say that "there is no supernatural agency" after long and thorough reflection on the matter. I'm not 100% certain of that--only 99.9999% certain.
But that level of certainty, even if not ultimate, is enough to make calling myself an agnostic hypocritical--parsing words like a defense attorney, not as a scientifically-trained person. I deny no possibility of the nature of existence, or of what or who might lurk behind the Great Oz's curtain. But all probabilities are not equal. That's why I never buy lottery tickets, but I did buy a home. And with every passing day, scientific advances shrink the probability of anything not having a naturalistic explanation dwindles even further.
I could elaborate on this path from "empty hands" and assuming nada to being a knowledgeable adult at great length. But I hope this will suffice.
As for whether the human race will emerge from its long dream of gods and heavens...I honestly don't know. I am certain that progress is not certain--that what people understood in Athens in 600BC was way ahead of what people thought they knew in Gaul in 900AD--and that American Christianity, the active, churchgoing religion of half the country, has become pregressively more fundamentalist, even as the other half of the country has become more secular (including the many people who profess to some kind of religion but aren't active churchgoers).
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Somali piracy--a new solution: UAV carriers
There are three problems in East African waters:
1. Piracy
2. Overfishing from non-Somali vessels
3. Toxic waste dumping.
The current solution for piracy:
1. Going real fast/evasive maneuvers
2. Various nonviolent defenses, from acoustic weapons to firehoses and barbed wire.
3. Armed guards on board.
4. Patrols by various navies with various degrees of cooperation and various policies.
The current solution for foreign fishing and toxic waste dumping:
Nothing that I know of.
Some interesting solutions have been offered on this thread, but nothing that would address all three problem. And addressing all three problems would be politically effective--it would be seen in the third world as much more even-handed. It would also be just, for what that's worth.
My solution would address all three problems and solve some additional challenges as well.
It is building and deploying a UAV carrier task force. A UAV carrier would be about the size and capabilities of an assault carrier/helicopter carrier. These aren't exactly tiny but they are a less than half the size of a supercarrier. I spent five hours touring such a carrier a few months ago, and I'm sure it would serve the purpose perfectly after conversion from carrying choppers and Harriers to carrying UAVs (plus a few choppers).
The purpose would be to patrol the coastline from which the pirate motherships and skiffs are setting out into an area the size of Europe. Navy destroyers can't do that cost-effectively. It would take hundreds, if not thousands. UAVs can do patrols like that on teacups of fuel, at an altitude from which they can't be seen or heard.
You have four types of vessels involved:
1. Pirate skiffs
2. Pirate motherships (usually stolen)
3. Pirate motherships with captured crews on board.
4. Captured freighters the pirates are taking back to their port.
Of course UAVs can't exactly capture vessels. Nor can they always tell an innocent fishing trawler from a pirate mothership until it goes into action--usually at night--much less whether a pirate mothership has a captured crew on board.
But UAVs can follow ships for long periods. Once they're revealed at pirate vessels, the hunter UAV's info is relayed to a killer UAV--the kind we use to kill terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. It would come in and sink any pirate skiffs, then disable the mothership by blowing off its rudder/prop assembly.
Then the UAV carrier could coordinate with a Coast Guard-type vessel to go there and board the mothership. If the pirates surrender peacefully, they could be dropped off at the nearest coastline. If they put up a fight they would be killed on the spot. The ship would be towed to a friendly port and either sold as salvage or repatriated to its legitimate owners after paying cost of recovery.
Currently all our armed forces are rapidly developing and deploying many kinds of UAVs. UAV carriers would be extraordinarily useful and relatively cheap. Using them to solve this problem would also help us develop and refine tactics for using them.
Likewise, ships dumping toxic wastes in Somali waters would be stopped, confiscated, and sold, the value being used to defray the cost of patrolling. Ditto foreign fishing boats--though in this case they could be given a warning first, dropped from a recon UAV, and if they don't leave immediately, confiscate those too.
Pirates would be biometrically ID'd before being released on the nearest coast, wherever it was (Somalia, Mozambique, India, Yemen, whatever). If caught a second time they would be tried and executed by the assault carrier's captain, under centuries'-old law of the sea. Not killing them the first time would serve the purpose of securing the safe release of innocent crewmen being held captive on captured ships.
1. Piracy
2. Overfishing from non-Somali vessels
3. Toxic waste dumping.
The current solution for piracy:
1. Going real fast/evasive maneuvers
2. Various nonviolent defenses, from acoustic weapons to firehoses and barbed wire.
3. Armed guards on board.
4. Patrols by various navies with various degrees of cooperation and various policies.
The current solution for foreign fishing and toxic waste dumping:
Nothing that I know of.
Some interesting solutions have been offered on this thread, but nothing that would address all three problem. And addressing all three problems would be politically effective--it would be seen in the third world as much more even-handed. It would also be just, for what that's worth.
My solution would address all three problems and solve some additional challenges as well.
It is building and deploying a UAV carrier task force. A UAV carrier would be about the size and capabilities of an assault carrier/helicopter carrier. These aren't exactly tiny but they are a less than half the size of a supercarrier. I spent five hours touring such a carrier a few months ago, and I'm sure it would serve the purpose perfectly after conversion from carrying choppers and Harriers to carrying UAVs (plus a few choppers).
The purpose would be to patrol the coastline from which the pirate motherships and skiffs are setting out into an area the size of Europe. Navy destroyers can't do that cost-effectively. It would take hundreds, if not thousands. UAVs can do patrols like that on teacups of fuel, at an altitude from which they can't be seen or heard.
You have four types of vessels involved:
1. Pirate skiffs
2. Pirate motherships (usually stolen)
3. Pirate motherships with captured crews on board.
4. Captured freighters the pirates are taking back to their port.
Of course UAVs can't exactly capture vessels. Nor can they always tell an innocent fishing trawler from a pirate mothership until it goes into action--usually at night--much less whether a pirate mothership has a captured crew on board.
But UAVs can follow ships for long periods. Once they're revealed at pirate vessels, the hunter UAV's info is relayed to a killer UAV--the kind we use to kill terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. It would come in and sink any pirate skiffs, then disable the mothership by blowing off its rudder/prop assembly.
Then the UAV carrier could coordinate with a Coast Guard-type vessel to go there and board the mothership. If the pirates surrender peacefully, they could be dropped off at the nearest coastline. If they put up a fight they would be killed on the spot. The ship would be towed to a friendly port and either sold as salvage or repatriated to its legitimate owners after paying cost of recovery.
Currently all our armed forces are rapidly developing and deploying many kinds of UAVs. UAV carriers would be extraordinarily useful and relatively cheap. Using them to solve this problem would also help us develop and refine tactics for using them.
Likewise, ships dumping toxic wastes in Somali waters would be stopped, confiscated, and sold, the value being used to defray the cost of patrolling. Ditto foreign fishing boats--though in this case they could be given a warning first, dropped from a recon UAV, and if they don't leave immediately, confiscate those too.
Pirates would be biometrically ID'd before being released on the nearest coast, wherever it was (Somalia, Mozambique, India, Yemen, whatever). If caught a second time they would be tried and executed by the assault carrier's captain, under centuries'-old law of the sea. Not killing them the first time would serve the purpose of securing the safe release of innocent crewmen being held captive on captured ships.
How to foster democratic revolutions in Iran and elsewhere
Our government should make a high quality movie about the American Revolution--only make it in several versions, using for the actors ethnic Arabs for one version, Persians for another, Pakistanis for another, and Afghans for another (yes, I know Afghans speak several languages), speaking in their own languages.
The screenplay should subtly emphasize the aspects that are most relevant to current conditions, including the British contempt for the colonists and efforts to muzzle the press and enforce its ideas through military force.
Distribute the film on DVDs but also excerpt it, in short chapters, on YouTube and other social media.
It would absolutely have to sound natural and appropriately colloquial to each target audience.
Wouldn't that be an interesting propaganda project?
We really need to let peoples suffering under tyrants know that we've been there, done that. And overthrew ours. Yet by making it strictly historical and talking about events of over 200 years ago we can avoid being accused of trying to pull something over on people over there. We can say we're just trying to share our history with people of other countries.
The screenplay should subtly emphasize the aspects that are most relevant to current conditions, including the British contempt for the colonists and efforts to muzzle the press and enforce its ideas through military force.
Distribute the film on DVDs but also excerpt it, in short chapters, on YouTube and other social media.
It would absolutely have to sound natural and appropriately colloquial to each target audience.
Wouldn't that be an interesting propaganda project?
We really need to let peoples suffering under tyrants know that we've been there, done that. And overthrew ours. Yet by making it strictly historical and talking about events of over 200 years ago we can avoid being accused of trying to pull something over on people over there. We can say we're just trying to share our history with people of other countries.
Dispatches from the Amazon.com political forums
An Amazon.com forum thread started with claiming that Republican Party people were dazed and bewildered about how to react to the Egyptian revolution and President Obama's response. The thread quickly devolved into partisan rock-throwing that revisited events of the past 50 years, with some right wingers taking credit for all the good (or describing disasters as Good Things), while blaming all Democrats for everything bad always in every way. I finally weighed in with this response:
Q. Who won the war in Iraq?
A. Iran. And Iraq's Kurds.
Q. Who lost the war in Iraq?
B. Iraq's Christians, middle class, women, Sunnis, Turkomen, and Gypsies--and Al Qaeda.
If George Bush II had been an Islamofascist mole he couldn't have done a better job for that cause. He took a just war--against the people who actually attacked us--and let Bin Ladin live by diverting resources away from Afghanistan--then validated everything Bin Ladin (still alive) was saying about us by invading Iraq--then validated everything Von Clausewitz said about war by violating all his rules of war in the Iraq invasion and occupation--then turned most of the Muslim world against us along with many people among our allies with an invasion based on willful falsehoods--then left Iraq largely under the influence of Iran's despots, albeit on the sly, which is how Iran does things--as, for example, its being the world's leading sponsor of terrorist organizations.
And if Bush II were an Islamofascist mole it would explain how his incompetent occupation of Iraq resulted in the virtual elimination of Iraq's million-strong Christian community, which had been there for around two thousand years.
And today in Iraq a woman can't walk down the street unless she's wearing approved conservative Muslim garb--otherwise she'll be murdered. That wasn't the case under Saddam, a secularist for most of his reign.
So Bush II did more harm to the Christian religion in his eight year reign than all the other presidents of America combined.
So if you hate Christianity--yay Bush!
Of course in reality Bush didn't intend to kill all those Christians. Any more than the average drunk driver intends to kill the busload of schoolkids.
But: "by their fruits ye shall know them."
Note that the choice wasn't between invading Iraq under false pretenses or letting Saddam's vicious misrule continue. We could have used his taking constant potshots at our recon aircraft as justification for occupying the Kurdish part of the country and the Shiite south. That would have been easy and relatively cheap.
We also could have taken more time and lined our ducks up better with our allies--and, especially, we could have waited until we'd wrapped up in Afghanistan instead of giving the Taliban a chance to regroup by trying to make war on the cheap--which out to be by far the most expensive way.
But these alternatives required a president who could speak to people who weren't already his followers. Bush II couldn't do that (unlike his dad).
And as for Vietnam--try the brilliant, purely military analysis by Colonel Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. According to Summers we lost that war through a combination of top brass incompetence combined with arrogant civilian interference by McNamara et al.
All this "My Side Good, Your Side Bad" stuff is idiotic. The world is complicated, the problems are complicated, the needed actions often nuanced--and rarely what's advocated by either the extreme Left or Right, who try to derive reality from their ideas instead of deriving their ideas from reality.
The biggest problem America now faces is how much its voters fall for propaganda--mostly from the Right's patrons, but also from the Left's, at least in Blue states.
Propaganda works because the effective campaigns pander to people's fears and prejudices. No one wants to hear bad news or accept any responsibility. Both the Right and the Left are obsessed with their rights and care little for their own responsibilities--just those of others.
So stop working off cartoon versions of reality.
Egypt is a prime example. It's complicated. Islamofascists could win. Even a fair democracy there will be anti-Israel in all likelihood. But what if it inspires Iran's masses to overthrow the Mullahs there? That would be amazingly wonderful, whether you're a Democrat or Republican.
We have to thread our way through this issue with tremendous care.
Thank heavens this has happened while we have a president with a three-digit IQ. My fave for the job at this juncture would be Eisenhower, but he wasn't available.
On the other hand, imagine if the GOP had won the last presidential election, and its elderly candidate had augured in, and the President of the United states during the Egyptian revolution was the Republican Party's choice--Sarah Palin.
Now if that doesn't make you feel like you dodged a bullet, I dunno what will.
Q. Who won the war in Iraq?
A. Iran. And Iraq's Kurds.
Q. Who lost the war in Iraq?
B. Iraq's Christians, middle class, women, Sunnis, Turkomen, and Gypsies--and Al Qaeda.
If George Bush II had been an Islamofascist mole he couldn't have done a better job for that cause. He took a just war--against the people who actually attacked us--and let Bin Ladin live by diverting resources away from Afghanistan--then validated everything Bin Ladin (still alive) was saying about us by invading Iraq--then validated everything Von Clausewitz said about war by violating all his rules of war in the Iraq invasion and occupation--then turned most of the Muslim world against us along with many people among our allies with an invasion based on willful falsehoods--then left Iraq largely under the influence of Iran's despots, albeit on the sly, which is how Iran does things--as, for example, its being the world's leading sponsor of terrorist organizations.
And if Bush II were an Islamofascist mole it would explain how his incompetent occupation of Iraq resulted in the virtual elimination of Iraq's million-strong Christian community, which had been there for around two thousand years.
And today in Iraq a woman can't walk down the street unless she's wearing approved conservative Muslim garb--otherwise she'll be murdered. That wasn't the case under Saddam, a secularist for most of his reign.
So Bush II did more harm to the Christian religion in his eight year reign than all the other presidents of America combined.
So if you hate Christianity--yay Bush!
Of course in reality Bush didn't intend to kill all those Christians. Any more than the average drunk driver intends to kill the busload of schoolkids.
But: "by their fruits ye shall know them."
Note that the choice wasn't between invading Iraq under false pretenses or letting Saddam's vicious misrule continue. We could have used his taking constant potshots at our recon aircraft as justification for occupying the Kurdish part of the country and the Shiite south. That would have been easy and relatively cheap.
We also could have taken more time and lined our ducks up better with our allies--and, especially, we could have waited until we'd wrapped up in Afghanistan instead of giving the Taliban a chance to regroup by trying to make war on the cheap--which out to be by far the most expensive way.
But these alternatives required a president who could speak to people who weren't already his followers. Bush II couldn't do that (unlike his dad).
And as for Vietnam--try the brilliant, purely military analysis by Colonel Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. According to Summers we lost that war through a combination of top brass incompetence combined with arrogant civilian interference by McNamara et al.
All this "My Side Good, Your Side Bad" stuff is idiotic. The world is complicated, the problems are complicated, the needed actions often nuanced--and rarely what's advocated by either the extreme Left or Right, who try to derive reality from their ideas instead of deriving their ideas from reality.
The biggest problem America now faces is how much its voters fall for propaganda--mostly from the Right's patrons, but also from the Left's, at least in Blue states.
Propaganda works because the effective campaigns pander to people's fears and prejudices. No one wants to hear bad news or accept any responsibility. Both the Right and the Left are obsessed with their rights and care little for their own responsibilities--just those of others.
So stop working off cartoon versions of reality.
Egypt is a prime example. It's complicated. Islamofascists could win. Even a fair democracy there will be anti-Israel in all likelihood. But what if it inspires Iran's masses to overthrow the Mullahs there? That would be amazingly wonderful, whether you're a Democrat or Republican.
We have to thread our way through this issue with tremendous care.
Thank heavens this has happened while we have a president with a three-digit IQ. My fave for the job at this juncture would be Eisenhower, but he wasn't available.
On the other hand, imagine if the GOP had won the last presidential election, and its elderly candidate had augured in, and the President of the United states during the Egyptian revolution was the Republican Party's choice--Sarah Palin.
Now if that doesn't make you feel like you dodged a bullet, I dunno what will.
Teenage pregnancy--is it all the fault of permissive Lib-er-uls?
I read a sad blog entry by an inner city teacher about how few of his kids had any future, and particularly about how many of the girls got pregnant--on purpose. He didn't say this, but that's a common phenomenon. Even the ones who know about birth control often want to have kids. A few kids, and it's welfare-o-rama. No need to work for chump change.
And kids love you. It's like making pets who can talk. And these are often people who haven't had anyone love them in their lives. Honestly you can't blame them for desperately wanting something most middle class people take for granted.
Here's my response to the entry and to its many comments, at least half of which were diatribes about how liberals were 100% responsible for this sorry state of affairs due to their promotion of immorality:
Anyone who thinks this is a purely a problem with them day-um libruls needs to read some Charles Dickens--or look at today's living condition for the poor and uneducated in the third world.
In particular they need to think about the fact that it was conservatives shipped our manufacturing jobs to China, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands etc., and then made sure that we wouldn't stop illegal immigration (which conservative rank and file don't want, of course--but their corporatist "leaders" do)--illegal immigration guaranteeing that whatever unskilled work was left in our country wouldn't pay enough to live on.
They need to think about the fact that the income disparity between 98% of Americans and the top 2% has increased by a factor of 20 since I was young. This enormous wealth transfer hollowed out the middle class, forcing wives into the workplace, and made life nearly impossible for the underclass. In the "recovery" from the 2000 recession, all of that recovery went into the pockets of the ultra-rich while everyone else's wages stagnated.
Moreover, the laws on the books nationwide discriminate heavily against the sorts of recreational drugs legislators don't use, with no relation to their actual relative danger.
But all this doesn't let liberals off the hook. True, the welfare state was an earnest attempt to solve the horrors of 19th century industrialization, and a lot--most--of it needs to be changed radically. However, every program spawns people who make their living off administering that program, and who will lobby for it endlessly.
And liberals are so terrified of being called racist that black and now Mexican hustlers have worked race-baiting for all it's worth--and it's been worth a lot.
And everyone, liberal and conservative, are to blame for quailing at any real solutions, because they'd be so draconian.
For example, how do you conservatives feel about a universal biometric database with DNA sample on record? Among other things, that would enable us to connect every child to a dad, honest or deadbeat.
How about facing the fact that not everyone was born with what's needed to live free? Some people require institutionalization--anything from a group home to full-blown asylums, depending on the severity of a person's mental problems. Crazy people are neither evil nor "differently mentally enabled." They're crazy, and we're on the hook for institutionalizing them humanely, not letting them run around buying guns and shooting people just because gun nuts think it's OK for nuts to have guns if that's the price of not regulating gun ownership.
And some people aren't crazy, but still lack mental equipment needed to live on their own successfully.
Today between a quarter and a third of prison inmates are mentally ill because conservatives believe mental illness is a moral decision and liberals believe nuts should have the same rights as anyone else.
And no one's willing to face the fact that schools can't fix society. Worse, we sacrifice the kids who can be saved in a hopeless effort to rescue those for whom it's too late.
Not that we have to be prescient. We just have to reserve schools for those who are willing and/or able to show up regularly and to let other kids get an education, putting the rest into workcamps euphemized as on the job training.
I taught in ghetto schools myself once upon a time, and the classes were contained riots because every one of them contained a handful of kids with fetal alcohol syndrome or some other defect that made them unable or unwilling to control their behavior. Keeping them in the class sacrificed every other kid there.
As for the fact that so many ghetto girls choose to have kids--I have a solution. Liberals and conservatives aren't going to like it, which says something already.
Let anyone who believes they can't look after themselves--or who doesn't have a proper home, and/or can't prove they have a means of supporting themselves--enter The System. Reserve welfare for those who are crazy or infirm (and who need institutionalization then). For the able bodied--and that includes teen mothers--when they present themselves to the state for care, the state becomes their surrogate parent and they surrender the right to have more kids (with contraceptive implants, to vote, and to sign contracts.
That is, they surrender the full rights of an adult citizen. The state provides them shelter, three meals a day, and work. If they won't work and are able bodied they go on the street, and if they become vagrant they enter the criminal system then.
In the workfare system they get 40 hours of work a week. Any kids they have get daycare while the parents work. And parents are expected to earn both their own keep that that of any kids they have.
This sounds conservative, but it's more expensive than giving them welfare and letting them fester in urban squalor. So no, conservatives won't like. And it takes away their rights, and conservatives love their rights, just like liberals do. They have that in common.
The trick is the same as when your child pretends to be sick to get out of school. Let them stay home but don't let it be fun.
Plus if they become the state's ward, the state gets to send them wherever their work is needed.
Anyone can leave the system whenever they wish, but then they have to acquire honest means of supporting themselves and their kids.
And when I say "them" I mean both the fathers and the mothers of any children.
Anyway, you get the drift. Nobody will enter The System because they think they'll get a free ride. They won't.
I know a Mormon missionary who spent 18 months in Mississippi and he came back discouraged--not about his religion, but about the underclass people he lived among there. He discovered that most of the girls--and I mean girls--planned on having four kids by the time they were 16 (!) for maximum welfare benefits, and then kicking back for the rest of their lives.
I guess that's an improvement on Dickens' 19th century England, the alternative conservatives proffer--but we can and should do better than that.
And kids love you. It's like making pets who can talk. And these are often people who haven't had anyone love them in their lives. Honestly you can't blame them for desperately wanting something most middle class people take for granted.
Here's my response to the entry and to its many comments, at least half of which were diatribes about how liberals were 100% responsible for this sorry state of affairs due to their promotion of immorality:
Anyone who thinks this is a purely a problem with them day-um libruls needs to read some Charles Dickens--or look at today's living condition for the poor and uneducated in the third world.
In particular they need to think about the fact that it was conservatives shipped our manufacturing jobs to China, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands etc., and then made sure that we wouldn't stop illegal immigration (which conservative rank and file don't want, of course--but their corporatist "leaders" do)--illegal immigration guaranteeing that whatever unskilled work was left in our country wouldn't pay enough to live on.
They need to think about the fact that the income disparity between 98% of Americans and the top 2% has increased by a factor of 20 since I was young. This enormous wealth transfer hollowed out the middle class, forcing wives into the workplace, and made life nearly impossible for the underclass. In the "recovery" from the 2000 recession, all of that recovery went into the pockets of the ultra-rich while everyone else's wages stagnated.
Moreover, the laws on the books nationwide discriminate heavily against the sorts of recreational drugs legislators don't use, with no relation to their actual relative danger.
But all this doesn't let liberals off the hook. True, the welfare state was an earnest attempt to solve the horrors of 19th century industrialization, and a lot--most--of it needs to be changed radically. However, every program spawns people who make their living off administering that program, and who will lobby for it endlessly.
And liberals are so terrified of being called racist that black and now Mexican hustlers have worked race-baiting for all it's worth--and it's been worth a lot.
And everyone, liberal and conservative, are to blame for quailing at any real solutions, because they'd be so draconian.
For example, how do you conservatives feel about a universal biometric database with DNA sample on record? Among other things, that would enable us to connect every child to a dad, honest or deadbeat.
How about facing the fact that not everyone was born with what's needed to live free? Some people require institutionalization--anything from a group home to full-blown asylums, depending on the severity of a person's mental problems. Crazy people are neither evil nor "differently mentally enabled." They're crazy, and we're on the hook for institutionalizing them humanely, not letting them run around buying guns and shooting people just because gun nuts think it's OK for nuts to have guns if that's the price of not regulating gun ownership.
And some people aren't crazy, but still lack mental equipment needed to live on their own successfully.
Today between a quarter and a third of prison inmates are mentally ill because conservatives believe mental illness is a moral decision and liberals believe nuts should have the same rights as anyone else.
And no one's willing to face the fact that schools can't fix society. Worse, we sacrifice the kids who can be saved in a hopeless effort to rescue those for whom it's too late.
Not that we have to be prescient. We just have to reserve schools for those who are willing and/or able to show up regularly and to let other kids get an education, putting the rest into workcamps euphemized as on the job training.
I taught in ghetto schools myself once upon a time, and the classes were contained riots because every one of them contained a handful of kids with fetal alcohol syndrome or some other defect that made them unable or unwilling to control their behavior. Keeping them in the class sacrificed every other kid there.
As for the fact that so many ghetto girls choose to have kids--I have a solution. Liberals and conservatives aren't going to like it, which says something already.
Let anyone who believes they can't look after themselves--or who doesn't have a proper home, and/or can't prove they have a means of supporting themselves--enter The System. Reserve welfare for those who are crazy or infirm (and who need institutionalization then). For the able bodied--and that includes teen mothers--when they present themselves to the state for care, the state becomes their surrogate parent and they surrender the right to have more kids (with contraceptive implants, to vote, and to sign contracts.
That is, they surrender the full rights of an adult citizen. The state provides them shelter, three meals a day, and work. If they won't work and are able bodied they go on the street, and if they become vagrant they enter the criminal system then.
In the workfare system they get 40 hours of work a week. Any kids they have get daycare while the parents work. And parents are expected to earn both their own keep that that of any kids they have.
This sounds conservative, but it's more expensive than giving them welfare and letting them fester in urban squalor. So no, conservatives won't like. And it takes away their rights, and conservatives love their rights, just like liberals do. They have that in common.
The trick is the same as when your child pretends to be sick to get out of school. Let them stay home but don't let it be fun.
Plus if they become the state's ward, the state gets to send them wherever their work is needed.
Anyone can leave the system whenever they wish, but then they have to acquire honest means of supporting themselves and their kids.
And when I say "them" I mean both the fathers and the mothers of any children.
Anyway, you get the drift. Nobody will enter The System because they think they'll get a free ride. They won't.
I know a Mormon missionary who spent 18 months in Mississippi and he came back discouraged--not about his religion, but about the underclass people he lived among there. He discovered that most of the girls--and I mean girls--planned on having four kids by the time they were 16 (!) for maximum welfare benefits, and then kicking back for the rest of their lives.
I guess that's an improvement on Dickens' 19th century England, the alternative conservatives proffer--but we can and should do better than that.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
What's wrong with the rich
No nation's economy does well when any important sector of that economy becomes decoupled from the fortunes of the rest of it. That's why all those third world countries with a tiny ruling elite squatting on top of legions of starving peasants find their economies getting driven into the ground.
Here we have two important sectors (and a third less important one) decoupled from the rest: our billionaires and our unionized public sector workers, followed distantly by our permanent welfare class (who the billionaires and the public sector workers would like us to obsess about and ignore them).
What's wrong with America's billionaires is that their fortunes are no longer tied to ours. They make their money multinationally, and often from economic manipulation rather than by producing goods and services.
Most of them don't live here--they have homes in a bunch of countries, and bop about from one to another for lengths of time dictated by their tax attorneys. They aren't inconvenienced by all that travel--many of them have never set foot on a commercial airliner. And their money--already vastly more than even they can spend, or their heirs--is hedged internationally. They care about the world economy, but one country's economy--even ours--couldn't matter less to them.
It wasn't always this way. Back when the rich only made twenty times what their company's entry level people made, and when they didn't have golden parachutes, they were like ship captains.
The captain of a ship is likely to take care of the ship and its crew--at least minimally--because if the ship sinks--he sinks. Even if he survives its sinking, there he is bobbing on the sea in a lifeboat or a life vest.
We need to have every American's fortunes tied to the fortunes of the economy and the rest of us. They need not to have this.
Thus far both the billionaires and the public sector workers have won. And we've lost. Hands down.
This should not be a Republican-Democrat Conservative-Liberal issue. Eisenhower certainly would have agreed with me about this, for example.
And note that the Republicans champion the cause of the billionaires while the Democrats champion that of the public sector workers. So both parties are aligned against the rest of us as regards this issue.
I propose that by making our cause "coupling" everyone to the economy, regardless of party or power base, we can make this a bipartisan issue.
Here we have two important sectors (and a third less important one) decoupled from the rest: our billionaires and our unionized public sector workers, followed distantly by our permanent welfare class (who the billionaires and the public sector workers would like us to obsess about and ignore them).
What's wrong with America's billionaires is that their fortunes are no longer tied to ours. They make their money multinationally, and often from economic manipulation rather than by producing goods and services.
Most of them don't live here--they have homes in a bunch of countries, and bop about from one to another for lengths of time dictated by their tax attorneys. They aren't inconvenienced by all that travel--many of them have never set foot on a commercial airliner. And their money--already vastly more than even they can spend, or their heirs--is hedged internationally. They care about the world economy, but one country's economy--even ours--couldn't matter less to them.
It wasn't always this way. Back when the rich only made twenty times what their company's entry level people made, and when they didn't have golden parachutes, they were like ship captains.
The captain of a ship is likely to take care of the ship and its crew--at least minimally--because if the ship sinks--he sinks. Even if he survives its sinking, there he is bobbing on the sea in a lifeboat or a life vest.
We need to have every American's fortunes tied to the fortunes of the economy and the rest of us. They need not to have this.
Thus far both the billionaires and the public sector workers have won. And we've lost. Hands down.
This should not be a Republican-Democrat Conservative-Liberal issue. Eisenhower certainly would have agreed with me about this, for example.
And note that the Republicans champion the cause of the billionaires while the Democrats champion that of the public sector workers. So both parties are aligned against the rest of us as regards this issue.
I propose that by making our cause "coupling" everyone to the economy, regardless of party or power base, we can make this a bipartisan issue.
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