Offcenter with Ehkzu

Democracy's tipping point

2012-01-30T15:58:00.000-08:00

The viability of any democracy is determined at election time by two things:

1. Does whoever's in control at election time jigger the election process to make sure they stay in power?

Across the country, every state government controlled by the Republicans has been engaged in strenous attempts to prevent the rampant voter fraud they claim has been giving Democrats an unfair advantage in elections. Only there isn't any--the efforts to uncover fraud are epitomized by Republican claims that 950 dead people "voted" the the South Carolina primary. After an expensive taxpayer-paid investigation of the claims, they discovered one (1): a guy who was dead all right--but had died after voting.

It's that way across the country, but waving this red herring has been used by the GOP to justify a variety of voter restrictions that just happen to crimp voting by demographics who generally vote Democratic.

2. Does whoever loses the election cede power peacefully?

The language the Republican leaders and their surrogates are using about President Obama doesn't just persistently misrepresent the facts--it uses incendiary language that has succeeded in making many millions of Americans hate Obama--not his policies, but the man himself. They've succeeded in making many rank and file Republicans believe that Obama actually intends to harm the country and intends to subvert the Constitution. Republican friends of mine call him a "fascist" and a "Communist."

This runs the risk of having a lot of Americans not accept the results of the last election or of the next.

Democrats faced when the Supreme Court chose a president of their liking in 2000. But Democrats believe in Democracy, whatever their other faults may be. I'm not as sure about the Republicans.

The Republican Ministry of Propaganda is playing with fire, just as it did when it decided its goal wasn't just winning elections, but of marginalizing the Democratic Party, so that it's no longer a factor in national elections. Scary stuff.

Then again, the GOP's secret soul is monarchist...

These are the guys who sided with the Crown during the American Revolution.

Ronald Reagan

2012-01-30T15:18:00.000-08:00

"Reagan's Shining City on a Hill" turned out to be a gated community for the 1%."
--Rev. Al Sharpton

Romney would make a decent prez IF...

2012-01-30T13:07:00.000-08:00

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/04/23/a-progressive-response-to-tea-party-contract-from-america/

Mitt Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts proved that he can work with a Democratic legislature and govern from the center. He's demonstrably intelligent. He has been abroad substantively (i.e. more than a beach vacation to a tropical resort). His experience as governor is applicable to being President (not as good as actually having been President for 3 years, but good). Likewise business experience is good on the face of it (especially if it were in export-oriented manufacturing, which it isn't).

All in all he'd probably make a decent president of the United States, IF:

1. Congress is certain of having a 51% Democratic majority in the House and a 61% Democratic majority in the Senate;
2. He's lying about his foxhole conversion to extreme right wing positions; and
3. No Supreme Court justice outside the extreme right wing faction (i.e. Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Scalia, plus, part of the time, Kennedy) retires before 2020. Several of the moderate justices are quite old, however.

#1 because, like school teachers who teach to the middle of the class, whatever that is, Romney's record is that he weathervanes--within the Republican framework, to be sure--whoever it is whose cooperation he needs to do his job.

#2 because he swears that he's now a right wing extremist, though it doesn't seem convincing to most right wing extremists; but I think we should take people at their word unless it's proven that they're lying, and having taken opposite positions in the past isn't dispositive. Suspicious but not conclusive.

#3 because President Bush II will be President by delegation until his Supreme Court appointees retire or die--possibly up to 30 years or more from now. Doesn't matter what a liberal Congress passes and a Liberal President signs into law if our right wing Supreme Court overturns everything. A Romney presidency with a Republican Congress will extend that delegated extreme right wing rule by another decade or two or three.

How to write comments and letters to the editor

2012-01-29T19:41:00.000-08:00

One online forum I participate in had a contributor enter George Orwell's rules for good writing. I didn't think they were really to the point for the ordinary Joe who wants to write a comment on a newspaper article's online Comments section or write a letter to the editor.

So here are my rules for you to use:

http://www.mylifeasafocusgroup.com/2011/11/writers-block.html

Orwell's stated rules echo that nemesis of college first year English class students, The Elements of Style (4th Edition) by Strunk & White. Orwell's rules focus on using good grammar and word choice.

I'd suggest a very different set of rules:

1. Don't write anything unless you really have something to say.

2. Make sense. It doesn't matter how beautifully you write, or how concisely, or with what beautiful word choice, if it's a defense of the idea that the Earth is flat. What you write should have some connection to reality, and the ideas you express should be organized logically in some way.

3. Use your own voice. The only thing worse than a Faulkner wannabe is a Hemingway wannabe. Be whoever the hell you are. If that's someone who uses tired old cliches all the time, do it. At least you'll sound like yourself. What you write should sound kind of like how you yourself speak.

4. Suit the language to the occasion. Locker room talk isn't a funeral oration and vice versa.

5. Write concisely if someone's willing to pay you to do so. It takes twice as much time to write something half as long. I'm glad to do that at the going rates for veteran editors.

6. Structure what you write. At the top, tell me what your topic is and what your point is, unless you want to be artful and hope that I'll stick around long enough to find out. Break your entry into paragraphs--at the very least, that shows me that you aren't just some rambling loon.

7. Use active constructions where it makes sense to do so, use passive constructions where it makes sense to do so. The way you organize a sentence also communicates what you want to focus on. Active constructions focus the reader's attention on the actor, passive on the act. Think about it.

8. If you want me to care about something you care about, tell me why I should care, not that you do. To put it more snarkily, hoist people on their own petards. Don't tell me how I fail to meet your standards--tell me how I fail to meet my own standards.

9. If you want to argue in writing, learn the rules before you get in the ring. A good start: Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.

Romney is right

2012-01-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

Governor Romney presents America with the 1% Solution: the solution the richest 1% of Americans offer the rest of us to solve America's economic problems.

Romney has repeatedly reinforced President Reagan's mantra that the government is the problem, corporatists like Romney the solution. He has stated repeatedly that Obama stands for the European Nanny State that gives people money who don't deserve it, sapping initiative and imposing foreign ideals on Americans.

So his solution is to downsize government, reduce regulation, cut back entitlements, cut taxes.

That last one is key: Romney's detailed proposals would cut his own personal taxes by tens of thousands of dollars a year for the rest of his life.

But that's a good thing, see, because if you don't cut Mr. Romney's taxes by a big chunk, he'll get all sad and won't create any more jobs. Or creatively destroy any more jobs, which is apparently just as good. Who knows, maybe he'd even move to a tax haven like the Cayman Islands, just to pick a tax haven at random...

I had no idea multimillionaires were so emotionally fragile.

Bottom line: anyone who doesn't subscribe to the Platform of/by/for the 1% subscribes to the Soviet Model of top-down Total Government Control of Everything. There's no in-between. Anyone who proposes an in-between position--like President Obama--is lying, according to Governor Romney--they're just dissembling about their Federal Government Uber Alles beliefs.

Your ONLY choice is between Governor Romney's 1% Solution and President Obama's European Socialist solution (according to Governor Romney).

A religious thought problem

2012-01-27T03:02:00.000-08:00

Suppose God Almighty showed up in low orbit, gigantic and undeniable, and spoke such that everyone alive heard His voice in their heads in their language, and He said:

"Guys, I just thought I'd drop by and clear up a few things. There is such a thing as good and evil, and for what it's worth I think you should do good and avoid evil. But when I organized the Universe I didn't put in a heaven. When you die, that's it. You're gone. I'm eternal--you're not. No heaven, no hell, no punishment, no reward.

"Now there is a hell, so to speak, in the span of your lives. Haven't you noticed that bad guys are never happy? That's the elegance of my design. As is the heaven of a life well spent.

"Sorry if this requires some revision in your various Good Books, but that's the way it goes. I'll check back in a billion of your years and see how things are going. 'Bye."

----------------

So--what do you think would happen then? Knowing that heavenly reward/punishment was off the table, what would religious people do?

Self-deportation

2012-01-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

NYTimes liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, writing about Mitt Romney, alluded to his "inane suggestion that illegal aliens engage in 'self-deportation'.”

And here, in one phrase, is the essence of how the Democratic Party has thrust so many American working stiffs into the eager embrace of the Republicans.

"Self deport" just means "going home" if your home is in another country. Why would anyone do that? Dowd, by calling the idea "inane" is saying nobody would.

Well, they would if they couldn't get work or social services. They couldn't get those things if we adopted India's cheap, highly workable national biometric ID system, using iris patterns instead of counterfitable cards. We can use it as a virtual border fence to prevent trespassers from cashing in.

This idea is only "inane" if it's impossible. So a 3rd world country can do it but we can't? I find that assumption to be the inane one. Every single illegal doesn't have to self-deport for it to work. If a quarter of 12 million people went home, that would still be a huge improvement. And the knowledge that it was so difficult to get by here without being here legally would help dissuade others from coming, while amnesty has had the opposite effect every time we've tried it.

And the idea that America is preferable to, say, Mexico, is soft jingoism. Mexicans love many things about Mexico--it's their culture, their people, their language, their village. Very few say they came here because they reject any of those things. Many say, actually, that they don't like American culture, people, or language. They only come because they have trouble getting ahead back home (mainly due to Mexico's extreme overpopulation crisis overwhelming the Mexican economy's ability to provide jobs for all those people).

And Dowd is summarily dismissing one of the very few ideas Romney advances that aren't bogus, when he presents so there are so many fat targets presented by him every time he opens his mouth--why? Dowd doesn't realize how out of touch this makes her look, not him.

Here in the Southwest we're drowning in illegals who don't even have a high school education. Dowd's job is safe. So's her neighborhood. Her wages aren't being driven down. Her union isn't being busted. And she wonders why blue collar Americans are voting Republican?

I'm voting for Obama because the GOP is even more delusional than the Dems. But it's not because of illegal immigration, where Romney's right and Obama's wrong. It's because of the GOP being so destructive to our economy and our civilization in nearly every other regard--and it won't really act on illegal immigration anyway, as the Bush era proved. They just talk about it when they're out of office--because the GOP's billionaire patrons love illegal immigration.

There are great Republican candidate out there...

2012-01-25T23:39:00.000-08:00

Just none who are running.

Why not?

Because they don't think they can beat Obama this time around.

Nobody Republican in the public eye will say so--they'll say Obama's doomed because no president gets reelected with unemployment this high (can you say FDR?), and then launch into a litany of his deficits as a president and as a human being.

But 'andsome is as 'andsome does.

If Republicans were really sure of his defeat, those hotter candidates would have tossed their hats in the ring. Candidates that excite Republicans. The current crop doesn't.

This doesn't make Obama a shoe-in in November. The Republican core strategy is to make him the subject not their guy, and a loose assortment of billionaires are going to flood the airwaves with a superslick campaign of ads and pundits for hire and a TV channel dedicated to pretty much nothing but his defeat, hoping to make him so hated, so much the personification of everything that's gone wrong in voters' lives, that they'll take a chance on the not very likeable candidate who emerges from the current tussle--still almost certainly Mitt Romney.

And the guys who aren't trying to get the GOP nomination know this. Yet they aren't running.

They're voting with their feet.

Obama should give credit where it's due

2012-01-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

President Obama missed a chance last night to give credit where it's due. He should have publicly thanked Governor Romney for creating the model for his healthcare legislation, and offered to share credit by calling it--in the word of, as I recall, Governor Pawlenty--"Obamnyecare."

And then the cameras would pan to the audience. Would the Republican congressmen applaud the praise for their probable nominee? Would they look like their heads were about to explode?

Inquiring minds...

Defend Life!

2012-01-23T15:05:00.000-08:00

On every anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, anti-abortion zealots demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court. Many carry signs like the ones shown here, printed up by the Catholic Church's militant social engineering organization the Knights of Columbus.

I doubt anyone who carries such placards is aware of the irony of what they're doing. Especially since nearly all of them would call themselves conservatives.

Conserve-ative. Someone who's centered on conserving.

All this is a tribute to the fact that some of our noblest instincts, instincts that evolved on a planet radically different from the one we live on today, are now instincts that betray us.

And it's a tribute to the fact that most people's reasoning abilities aren't much better than that of an adult crow.

If you hang a treat from a branch on a string, most adult crows can figure out what to do to get the treat without having to experiment. They look at the setup, fly up to the branch, and pull the string up with their claws and beak, and soon have the treat.

But if you toss the string over a higher branch, so the crow would have to pull down on the string to bring the treat up towards them, they can't handle that kind of two-step logic.

Likewise, these people who want to "defend life" see sonograms of a fetus that certainly looks like a human being, and they want to save it.

But tell them that the human race is expanding at the rate of over 140 people a minute (after deaths are subtracted), on a planet that isn't expanding, and whose ability to sustain us is actually shrinking, so that only by supporting Communist China's One Child policy and promoting its adoption worldwide can we even start to stave off world disaster...you can see their eyes glaze over.

You might as well show a spreadsheet to a chimpanzee and expect them to understand it.

We developed the instincts the "defend life" people express when the human race had shrunk to around 1,600 fertile females plus probably an equivalent number of males, after a Sumatran volcano explosion 80,000 years ago had pumped so much guck into the atmosphere that photosynthesis nearly stopped for several years and the world's animal life was starving to death.

Back then we needed a fierce will to survive and have kids and protect them against all odds.

Today's situation demands that we deny these powerful instincts.

But most people don't even try. They deny that there's an overpopulation problem, or that it applies to us, or that if there is magical new technology will solve it, or if it won't, God will reach down and solve it, and if He won't it doesn't matter because Earth doesn't matter--only Heaven. And God told us to stop abortion--it's right there in the Bible!

Actually the Bible only confers any rights at all on children when they're a month old--thus OK'ing not just abortion but infanticide. But that's in the Old Testament. In the New Testament...nothing about abortion. Just stuff about being nice to people, which anti-abortionistas assume includes fetuses, which no one in biblical times would have imagined. It's applying contemporary ideas to biblical terms.

Elaborate justification of anti-abortionism abound, of course. You can read one here. And you can read a detailed debunking of such stuff here. Starting with the easily verifiable fact that the word "abortion" appears nowhere in the Bible.

This isn't a problem for Catholics, because they don't use the Bible as their final word on God's instructions for us. They use the Pope's official pronouncements, which routinely override what's in the Bible. What's remarkable is how they persuaded Christian fundamentalists to accept the Pope's pronouncements.

Bottom line: when I see people like the two nice young ladies in the photo holding their Knights of Columbus "Defend Life" signs, I see a pair of very nice crows unintentionally--but effectively--promoting the destruction of the only place in the entire Universe that's available to the human race for life (along with the animals and plants we share this planet with).

Why nothing about Newt?

2012-01-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

I haven't said anything about Newt Gingrich because he's so unlikely to gain the presidential nomination of the Republican Party--and if he were to gain the nomination, it's hard to imagine the presidential race being much of a race.

At the very least it would mean that all that stuff the Republicans said throughout the Bill Clinton era about personal character being the sine qua non of what to look for in a president..was just talk.

The Economist endorses Mitt Romney

2012-01-23T00:17:00.000-08:00

The last issue of The Economist endorsed Mitt Romney for President. The Economist tends to be economically quite conservative / pro-business without all the Social Conservative baggage of the American conservative movement.

This was my comment:

The Economist's encomium for Mitt Romney seems to reveal a basic ignorance about the difference between parliamentary politics and the American system.

In parliamentary systems the prime minister is the CEO of the party that controls the legislature. So the PM speaks with the one voice of the government.

In the American system Congress can be and often is controlled by the opposing political party. And the American Congress can thwart most of what the President proposes--and vice versa. Hence all the talk about governmental gridlock.

Enter Mitt Romney. Currently Congress is controlled by his party: the House by an unstoppable majority, the Senate by a minority that can stop anything the majority does.

There is very little chance that this control of Congress by the Republicans will change this November--in fact they stand to gain a majority in the Senate.

Any consideration of the American presidency MUST take place in the context of Congress. He doesn't get to run the country by himself.

And if we get a Republican president coupled with a Republican Congress, Romney's unlikely to oppose his own Congress--no more than Bush was--especially considering the ideological fervor that currently controls the GOP. So even if Romney as Governor of a state with a Democratic legislature worked as a "let's all work together" smart moderate, that's not what we'll get from a President Romney riding the tiger of a Tea Party Congress.

Not to mention the fact that despite Romney's obvious intelligence, the things he's said during this campaign--both from a teleprompter and spontaneously--represent the most beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging, factually challenged reductionism and misrepresentation of facts. I'm not talking about political differences. I'm talking about him saying things are factually false--over and over and over.

And if we take him at his word...well, it's hard to believe a conservative European publication such as the Economist would back him, since he condemns Obama for taking ideas from--gasp--Europe. As if that's the worst thing you could say of an American president.

Is a blatant jingoist Europhobe really what you want for us? Or do you think he's just lying about that? In which case do you want a blatantly opportunistic, demagoguic liar--who accurately reflects what the Tea Party Congress believes--as our president?

Seems like the most small-c conservative thing you could wish for is a pragmatic moderate like Obama for 2012.

Why corporate welfare provokes so little outrage

2012-01-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

If I burgle your home when you're out and riffle through all your drawers looking for cash but only find one dollar, you'll still remember what I did to you for the rest of your life. Though the cash stolen was negligible, the invasion of your privacy and implied threat to your safety will still have quite an impact.

If I persuade you to invest all your money with me and I take it, as Bernie Madoff did, you'll certainly remember the one who ruined your economic life, as long as you live.

But what if I don't invade your home to steal from you, and I don't take all of your money. Suppose instead that I stole only one dollar from you--and from every other household in America--but that I did it by siphoning the dollar out of the taxes you pay.

I'll have stolen as much from Americans as Bernie Madoff did, but by spreading the theft around so broadly, and took it from you so quietly--you might not ever know I did it, or only find out decades later--it's hard to get worked up, even though the scale of the human crime is as big as Bernie Madoff's.

And that's what Wall Street's Masters of the Universe do. Their labor--called "investment" for tax purposes--is legally taxed (because they bribed Congress to make it so) at about half the rate of high-income managers in manufacturing and service provider sectors. Their assets are squirreled away abroad in places like the Cayman Islands, which is often--even usually--illegal, but takes large, sophisticated teams of forensic accountants to track down the malfeasance. Whereas IRS computers routinely catch most of the tax cheating done by average people. And successful GOP efforts at not just deregulation but defunding of regulatoratory agencies has hamstrung efforts to hold rich cheats to account.

I could go on, but the upshot is that by both legal but unethical and hard-to-nail-down illegal efforts, folks like Governor Romney take a dollar out of each of our pockets without disturbing anything in our homes or concentrating the loss in a few people who may squawk about it.

It's just a buck. Nothing to be annoyed about.

Right?

David Brooks wuvs the Mittster

2012-01-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a NYT column saying, basically that we shouldn't not vote for Mitt Romney because he's rich, because he's very, very hard-working, and because his ancestors were also very, very determined people.

Actually, 80% of the column was about Romney's virtuous forbears. Brooks didn't address the question of the means Romney's hard work employed, or their ends--whether/to what extent he helped build the economy vs. parasitizing it, and what all that money's doing in the Caymans if not to avoid taxes (investing in the Caymans is a bit problematic. I've been there. It's three tiny islands with scuba diving, virtually no agriculture, and a huge number of companies located there (it's a tax haven)--or, more accurately, these companies' headquarters are little post office boxes that receive mail addressed to the company. Well-paid Caymanian gofers check these post office boxes daily, then forward any mail to wherever the company actually is (somewhere that actually tries to tax companies, like America).

So his whole column was a straw man argument. I've never heard anyone for or against Romney claim that he wasn't hard working, or that his ancestors weren't. Here's my response:

David Brooks makes a convincing argument. I'll vote for Romney this fall.

Hannah Romney, that is. Or one of the Mileses. Or George.They all sound like good presidential material.

Unlike the descendant Mr. Brooks is thumping the tub for.

Wholly aside from questions about his business dealings, his conduct & statements during his current presidential campaign disqualify him.

All politicians lie, unfortunately. Including President Obama. So Romney being an opportunistic liar isn't enough. And at least he isn't a complete dolt, or a religious zealot who puts his faith at the center of his campaign, or an ideological wack job, or an adversarial firebrand who's an idiot's notion of a smart guy.

Nor is it his conservatism. If Eisenhower were running I'd certainly consider voting for him. And though Mitt Romney has changed many positions, they're all been within the Republican spectrum. So he isn't completely inconsistent.

No, it's the nature and promiscuity of his lies that lie at the core of his disqualification for the presidency. It's both his scripted, telepromptered and unscripted remarks. They reveal a towering sense of entitlement, crude misrepresentation of how our economy works & what the president is and isn't responsible for--& Romney's no fool, so he knows he isn't stating conservative principles that disagree with Obama's--he's just lying about the issues, the opponents...everything. Obama shades the truth. Romney steamrolls it.

We should adopt Finland's educational system

2012-01-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

This week's Dan Rather Reports on HDNet dealt with why America should adopt Finland's educational system.

Both the Republican and Democratic leaderships would reject this without even considering the reasons.

The Republicans have to reject it because so-called "American Exceptionalism"--a central pillar of the GOP Ministry of Propaganda's tenets--states that America is better than every single other country on Earth in every single aspect, and anyone who says otherwise isn't a loyal American and thus his arguments can and should be ignored.

The only exception to American Exceptionalism is Israel, whose policies are apparently the best on Earth--even better than ours--because another Republican MOP tenet is that America must support every single thing Israel does without question (and pay for it), and anyone who demurs hates Jews and should never be allowed to hold public office--and of course his reasons for demurring can and should be ignored.

The Democratic leadership, meanwhile, bristles at the very idea of holding up a foreign country's educational system as a standard because it might threaten the jobs of today's American teachers and administrators if you did so.

Not that they say that. Instead they advance a cloudy, dystopian version of the GOP MOP's "American Exceptionalism:" most other countries are too small to compare with America, they lack our diversity, or poverty, or....the reasons offered take more time to deal with than if you just looked at the other country's system.

Let's look at Finland anyway.

First, Finland because it tests in the top three of the world's nations consistently across the spectrum of standardized testing.

Second, Finland because it does this while spending vastly less on education than America does--about $8K per student vs. around $11K here.

Third, because the argument of scale is complete nonsense. Finland has a larger population than 32 of America's states, and in America education is done at the state level--so even without considering the larger states, Finland's lessons are applicable to nearly 2/3 of American states.

Fourth, because the diversity argument is also nonsense: many heartland states like Iowa, for example, have less diversity than Finland, yet Finland produces better-educated students for way less money than all of them, singly or in any combination. And Finland's students do better than those of all the other Nordic nations, all with comparable demographics. And it isn't monolithic. The country speaks three official languages and has 5% foreign-born people--and the schools with the largest immigrant populations do just as well as the homogeneous ones.

Amazingly, unlike the other countries at the top of the testing, Finnish students finish first without being grinds, and the teachers finish first without being paid much more than American teachers. But they're more highly trained than American teachers, and their jobs are vastly more enjoyable--less regimented, with smaller classes (average 20), shorter hours for both students and teachers, and far more scope of authority about what and how to teach. Students also get less homework BTW.

Nor are the "secrets" very exotic--they're actually much closer to what American educational reformers like John Dewey advocated than the principles American schooling goes by.

Secret number one: put the schools budget into the classrooms. Dan Rather cited a damning statistic: the entire Finnish educational bureaucracy numbers 600 administrators for 1,140,000 students nationwide, from primary school through university (which is, of course, free to students whose test scores qualify them for admission). That's a ratio of 1,900 students per administrator.

By contrast, Rather said that the Los Angeles Unified School district employs 3,685 administrations to oversee the education of 664,233 students. That's a ratio of 180 students per administrator.

Adopting Finland's approach would put 91% of America's educational administration bureaucracy into the classroom (or out on the street). In fact even school principals teach several classes a week.

But it would probably involve replacing many of America's teachers. In Finland you have to have a master's degree in education to be considered for classroom teaching. Despite the pay not being that high, being a teacher is prestigious. Teachers are considered cool when male and female Finns are polled about the most desirable profession for a spouse to have. So the idiot teachers you remember having--I sure do--wouldn't be there.

Another secret to Finland's educational system being so cost effective is that they spend next to nothing on special ed, nothing on standardized testing, and nothing on school sports. Special ed kids are mainstreamed, with extra teachers in classrooms giving help right there to kids who need more assistance. Teachers create their own tests. And kids' athletics are handled by the towns and cities, after school (and school days are shorter than ours), with just as much participation in athletics as you see here. It's just not considered a function of the schools.

Also, there are virtually no private schools in Finland, or home schooling. Public schools are esteemed by adults and considered both safe and fulfilling by students. Bullying is nipped in the bud. Arts are taught. A lot of class time is hands-on and individuated.

Teachers and students enjoy themselves and look forward to school.

Imagine that. You'd think conservatives would love an educational system that costs so much less and teaches the basics so much better. You'd think liberals would love an educational system that is just as good in the inner cities as it is in the affluent suburbs and takes individual needs into account.

Yet we just steam along, oblivious to the lessons we could learn if we didn't assume that the world consists of "America" and "here there be dragons."

You can read a lengthy description of how Finnish education works here or here. Or you can get the book on it from Finland's top educator on Amazon.

Should Mitt Romney reveal his tax return

2012-01-17T21:26:00.000-08:00

No law requires Mitt Romney to reveal his tax return.

And in fact, over the last decades, a Democratic presidential candidate wannabe (Jerry Brown) refused to. However, 34 presidential and vice-presidential candidates did--80% of the total. All the other refuse-to-disclosers were Republicans BTW.

Ironically, since until last weekend Romney said he wouldn't reveal his tax return, one of the pioneers in revealing his tax returns was Romney's own father when he ran for President.

Romney said today he'd reveal his tax return for last year after he had the GOP nomination tied up. He didn't put it that way, but that's what it boils down to. So he trusts Republican primary voters less than all voters? Interesting.

Some Democrats speculated that revealing his tax return would get him in Dutch with fellow Mormons if he underpaid the 10% off the top that the LDS church expects of members in good standing. This is bogus. No one in his ward--or any other ward--knows whether he pays the full 10% except for his bishop, who would never share that info with other ward members, much less the public. The only way for anyone to tell whether Romney is tithing properly is that he shouldn't have a Temple Recommend if he doesn't. But I bet he does have a Recommend. I'd be astonished if he didn't. So this line of attack is probably a red herring.

He did reveal that he thinks he pays around 15% overall. Not too shabby for a quarter-billionaire. This is why I don't understand the call by some rich people for a flat tax. We already have close to it, not on the books, but in effect, given all the loopholes available to the very wealthy and the lack of funding for the IRS to go after rich tax avoiders. It's just the W2 crowd that the IRS holds to a far higher standard of probity than the very rich.

Now all this talk about wealth doesn't automatically mean that Romney doesn't understand the world the rest of us live in. After all, FDR had the common touch...and FDR revealed all his tax returns.

Both Romney and FDR were born wealthy and never knew a moment's worry about financial solvency in their lives.

But I doubt FDR would have ever said something like what Romney said yesterday, as he was talking about his income:
"I get speaker's fees from time to time but not very much. Ha-ha-ha-ha."

His speaker's fees last year totaled $374,327.62.

Good for him to make that much money for speaking. Bad for him to think $374K is chump change--and for not realizing how out of touch with 99% of his fellow Americans it shows him to be...

The most important player in last night's GOP debate was the crowd

2012-01-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

The audience at last night's GOP debate was the real Player in the debate. They were loud--hooting and yelling, booing lustily at things they didn't like. If you didn't know it was a presidential debate you might have thought you'd dropped in on a cage fighting match.

You can get a taste of it here, as they boo black Fox moderator Juan Williams when he challenged Newt Gingrich for calling President Obama the "Food Stamp President," then loudly cheer Gingrich when he doubles down on it. It was obviously racist up and down the line, and the crowd was with Gingrich 100%, giving him a standing ovation after booing the black journalist.

This happened on Martin Luther King Day...

White Southerners have perfected the art of being racist without every saying one word they can't rationalize.and explain away to the credulous.

One small example: Juan Williams addressed Gingrich as "Speaker Gingrich." Gingrich then address Willams as "Juan."

So what you say? In the Old South it was SOP to undercut the dignity of blacks by always addressing them by their first name. Same as when in Romance languages you use the familiar tense with someone you aren't friends with. Conversely, if a black were to address a white by their first name...well, the black had better have his will prepared. That's the Southern context of this simple, easy to overlook thing.

I've heard Gingrich described as an idiot's idea of what a smart guy is like. Seemed that that in this instance.
His doubling down on his "Food stamp president" solecism was to state that Obama had put more Americans on food stamps than any other president.

As if the nation was in great shape the day he took the oath of office. As if the Presidency of the United States of America is a 13th century monarch with a term limit. As if the Republican House majority and Senate minority haven't labored ceaselessly to make government fail, regardless of the cost to America, in hopes that doing so would get them back the White House.

As if a lot of white southerners don't still using a certain word in their heads when they think about a black guy.

Such as the black guy who, intolerably, inexplicably, sits in the White House, as if he doesn't realize it's the White's House...

And BTW Republican smart guys like ex-Bush speechwriter David Frum are worried that these debate audiences' hooliganism will fire up Democrats and depress intelligent Republicans (they do exist--I'm married to one).

He should.

We stole Hawaii!

2012-01-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

One leftist cause you hear about in the West especially is about our land grab of Hawaii from its sovereign rulers a century or so ago.

I was just listening to a radio show about this on KQED-FM, and a caller made the point that it's ridiculous to act as if Hawaii would be a free nation today if we hadn't grabbed it .

If we hadn't grabbed it, Japan would have, or Britain, or Russia, or someone else. The country of Hawaii was completely incapable of defending itself against a large industrial country. If Imperial Japan had grabbed it--the greatest likelihood--there would be no Hawaiians to complain about America today--the Imperial Japanese government would have eradicated the locals and replaced them with Japanese immigrants.

This is just one of a zillion examples of the implied false alternative in politics.

Same with America and its American Indians. If it hadn't been us, another Western power would have moved in sooner or later, and still wiped out most of the Indians just by coughing on them, with or without military conquest.

As Dr. John said, "If I don't do it you know somebody else will..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wG55hfh2w0

Why Huntsman never had a chance

2012-01-16T10:09:00.000-08:00

Huntsman and Romney are both intelligent--a big negative for many Republican primary voters--but Romney is more than willing to say dumb things for votes, while Huntsman obstinately insisted on saying things that showed thinking behind them.

He doesn't get red-faced and shout Socialist! Communist! when Obama's name is mentioned.

He doesn't hate science, even though scientific research reveals things nobody wants to hear.

He doesn't say refer to half the country contemptuously as "Libs" or "Dems."

He didn't have his "independent PAC" (nudge nudge wink wink) carry out massive character assassination assaults on his foes while playing the genial smiling guy like Romney does routinely.

He doesn't treat any idea from anywhere but America as automatically wrong (this is what "American Exceptionalism" actually means). And he doesn't use the word "European" as a curse word, as Romney does.

President Eisenhower would recognize him as a Republican, unlike any of the other Republican contenders.

He's a conservative, not a reactionary.

Smart is unAmerican

2012-01-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

re: smart kids

I went to mostly working-class schools where having a 3-digit IQ was social suicide. Kids would routinely accuse me of cheating on tests because I aced them and they couldn't imagine anyone acing a test unless they'd cheated. The benefit of such a schooling is that you get to see what people are really like before they get socialized enough to conceal their feelings, which remain, under the hood, under all the rationalizations and fake "concern."

Of course many people don't suffer from the sin of envy, regardless of their own accomplishments or lack of same. But there's a streak of what I call "leveler" thinking in America, running back to our rejection of the claims of England's royalty that they were innately superior to the rest of us.

Unfortunately we went to the other extreme, often claiming that everyone is exactly the same except for accident of birth/education. To this day we spend billions on vast special ed programs with an infinitesimal return on society's investment, while gifted student programs with a proven high rate of return are the first to be cut if they existed in the first place. (Not that we should kick handicapped people to the curb--but neither should we waste vast sums of money based on pretending that we can educate their handicaps out of them.)

And both liberals and conservatives are often infected with leveler-ism--many liberals from an overreaction to racism and ethnic stereotyping, many conservatives from anger at scientists for telling them things they don't want to hear. And recent political campaigns have attacked politicians for being financially successful (Romney) or patrician (Kerry). Not to mention how many new prisons are being built while higher education funding withers and becomes out of reach for more deserving people every year. (While at the same time at least a quarter of students who do go to college are unable to learn at the college level, usually dropping out, wasting time and social resources.)

A great litmus test for leveler-ism can be found in reactions to a cheerful, polite 11 year old girl who happens to also be an interpretive musical genius: Jackie Evancho, from Richland Township, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

Because of leveler-ism, everywhere you turn you find people quick to deny that Jackie exists--that is, claiming that the real Jackie can't exist (AutoTune!), or if she does, it's with a built-in expiration date (she's ruining her voice!) that lets us feel good about our little Mary not being able to sing like her (much less ourselves). Call her a genius and watch the reactions. For way too many people, "genius" is un-American.

No wonder our math, science and language scores are so poor compared to most other rich countries.

And, getting back to politics, for many, being intelligent is an automatic knockout factor for a presidential candidate. Huntsman's nuanced positions doomed him with the GOP primary crowd; Romney only gets the grudging support he does by constantly repeating idiotic bumper sticker slogans I'm sure he knows are false. Clinton had to overcome the stigma of his Rhodes Scholar track record, while Bush II's academic mediocrity was a big plus for him.

We haven't had to deal with the royalty claims of the Hanovers for over 230 years, yet we're still getting our knickers in a twist over them...

Romney is right--experience counts

2012-01-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

Let's be fair. Mitt Romney's business experience and Olympics experience and governor experience are all relevant to what's needed to be President of the United States.

Not entirely relevant, mind you. Suppose you ran the country strictly on business principles. You'd eliminate rural postal service, end the so-called "war on drugs," withdraw all our troops who are abroad immediately and cashier most of them, eliminate at least half the military, eliminate social security and medicare, because both merely support unproductive people...

Not that I'm against all these things--but I bet most of the anti-government Republicans don't.really want government run strictly on business principles.

And of course you can apply the skills needed to hire and delegate and prioritize and analyze objectively to government issues and goals--especially if you have no fixed principles to slow you down.

However, if Romney wants to tout his business experience as having some relevance to the job of President of the United States, surely President Obama can tout his experience as being the President of the United States for the last three years as having some relevance to the job of President of the United States.

Let's see, which resumé is most applicable to the job being applied for?

The graph that launched a thousand rationalizations

2012-01-14T16:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/income-inequality-america

Here's the single best question to ask those who plan to vote for the Republican nominee. "Please explain how your guy would do something about this--or why this is a good thing. One or the other."

What the graph (derived from Congressional Budget Offices by the conservative publication The Economist) does is take the income disparities between Americans in 1979 as a given, then shows how that disparity changed in the succeeding 28 years. So it's not showing that all Americans made the same amount of money in 1979 (!). It's just showing how the amount of different has changed for different sectors of Americans.

One important thing it doesn't show directly is the fact that Americans have been working harder and harder through that timeframe--longer hours, more stress, more threat of being fired or laid off (the same thing 98% of the time), and besides the drop of income, the siphoning off of pension funds into CEO salaries and dilution of medical coverage.

What it shows is that nobody's doing much better than they did in 1979 except for the richest 1% of Americans, who have appropriated for themselves nearly all the improvement in GNP for the United States of America for the last 30 years or so. This coincides with the wholesale deregulation of business started by successive Republican administrations.

So the "job creators" turn out to actually be the "wealth just for themselves" creators. This makes sense, since more and more of America's biggest fortunes are centered on money manipulation instead of providing goods and services and the capital to start and build companies that provide goods and services.

From factories to Wall Street.

Why should I be happy with this? Why should I vote for someone who, like Mitt Romney, promptly calls me a socialist stuffed with envy and hatred of the American Way of Life if I dare to object? Were CEOs and Wall Street's Masters of the Universe grossly underpaid before 1979, such that they didn't want to start companies and stuff? I was around then and I don't recall anyone saying so.

At that time Reagan was saying that "Government IS the problem." That government meddling was stifling business; that it was taking money out of yours and my pockets.

So the Republicans took care of all that gummint interference, and whaddaya know--all that happened was that the 1% redistributed a big chunk of America's wealth right into their pockets. And then they call us redistributionists if we dare to complain.

I can understand this easily. Mitt Romney was born into that 1% and has lived his entire life in the 1%. So was and did FDR, but somehow FDR developed an understanding of how the 99% live. Ditto Warren Buffet. And George Soros. And others. But not most of the 1%.

And honestly, what's the overall pattern for the human race everywhere and everywhen? A small minority grabbing more and more for themselves and their cronies and relatives and less and less for everyone else. Absent that dreaded regulation, that's what humans do.

Now it's also what humans do when government goes overboard with the regulations, of course. Communism is authority with no checks or balances. What did anyone think would happen?

It's fascinating to hear rank and file Republicans twisting themselves into knots trying to justify this somehow.

But most do.

I think of them as being like the folks who'd line the sides of the road when their lord rode by on his way to the manor, touching their caps respectfully as he passed...and stoutly defending him to one and all.

What makes these people such bootlickers? What makes them think that the only alternative to being a vassal of the Romneys of the world is being a vassal to the Putins of the world? Or that there's any difference, for that matter?

So show them the graph and find out what they say. At the very least it'll make your next family reunion more entertaining....

The worst way to attack Mitt Romney

2012-01-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

...is to claim that he's a racist because the Mormon Church denied blacks the priesthood back in the day.

There's plenty to criticize Mitt Romney about. This isn't one of them. The LDS church definitively abandoned its racial discrimination policy on June 8, 1978. And decades before that it had officially supported full civil rights for blacks, and even before then blacks were free to join the church.

Today the church has many hundreds of thousands of members, particularly in the Caribbean, Africa, and Brazil. Look up Black Mormons in Wikipedia.

So ding Romney on classism, being the Layoff King, lying about Obama constantly, using underhanded propaganda techniques in all his speeches, acting like the nice guy while his surrogates do his dirty work...but not Mormon institutional racism.

It will only discredit legitimate objections to his becoming president.

And that's why I'm concerned. The MSNBC Ed Shultz show already has gone down this rabbit hole. It won't help.

And anyway, pragmatically speaking, all ten Black Republicans are going to vote for Romney no matter what you say and all the millions of Black Democrats are going to vote for Obama no matter what you say about alleged Mormon racism. So all such accusation really do is trigger the anger of white working class people at being accused of racism because some/many/all of their parents/grandparents/great-grandparents were racist.

I guarantee you it will backfire.

What does the GOP have in common with Arthritis?

2012-01-12T14:41:00.000-08:00

I keep looking for a metaphor to describe how rank and file Republicans keep attacking the people who are trying to save them.

It's Arthritis. Arthritis is an autoimmune disease, in which the body's defense mechanisms mistakenly attack the body's own joints instead of an invading organism.

All the autoimmune diseases are like this--firing away at the invader it thinks it's found out there in the dark, only it was your own wife who'd gotten up for a glass of milk and was just trying to come back to bed with you.

And of course the Republican leadership does everything it its power to foster this. Hence the constant description of Obama as some kind of European Socialist.

BTW what do you suppose our European allies think of the Republican presidential contenders constantly invoking Europe as the worst possible thing one could imagine?

As soon as Romney's elected, he'll have to go on an Apology Tour in Europe...

Is Mitt Romney a moderate? conservative?

2012-01-11T13:33:00.000-08:00

Romney is certainly a lifelong Republican, and every political stance he's ever taken falls within the Liberal Republican-Conservative Republican space.

But just where he is within that space isn't as hard to determine as some seem to think.

Just look at Republican opinion polls. However they tilt--there's Mitt, wide-eyed, earnest, and eager to tell you exactly why he's either always believed "it" or exactly what touching personal experiences led to his total reversal of position.

This isn't an entirely bad thing. The last thing I want in the Oval Office is an ideologue of any sort. President Obama--my own choice for 2012--has changed positions within the Democratic orbit, as Romney has within the Republican orbit. People do learn from their experiences, after all. And when experience contradicts preconception, I certainly want someone in office who'd sacrifice his preconceptions rather than reality.

Now all this does not mean Romney's a moderate. It's not "moderate" to become Far Right or Moderate as the occasion demands. It's opportunistic.

So I'd describe Romney's politics as "Republican Opportunist." You need the Republican part because I don't think he'd adopt the Democratic platform even if a majority of Americans said they wanted that in opinion polls. But he will go anywhere within the broadest possible definition of "Republican" as he thinks he needs to, in order to achieve his life's burning goal--which you might define as "serving his country and his people in the best way possible" or "get the highest office as he sees appropriate for his ego" depending on your own politics.

Therefore in talking with Republican friends, relatives and acquaintances, I'd recommend arguing with them when they say he's "really a moderate" or "really a conservative" Republican.

He's "really" a Romneyan.

In philosophical terms his is consequentialist morality. Antecedant morality means you do what you believe is right, regardless of the consequences. That's typically what bedrock conservatives espouse. Consequntialist morality means determining your behavior strictly according to what you think will result, which is more what liberals go by.

So in that sense I guess he's a liberal, but not in terms of political positions.

I still find it ironic that he's now so devoted to ending Obamneycare...

But none of this will matter if the Republicans succeed in making the election a referendum on Obama, demonizing Obama so much that people won't even care about the character and policy positions of the person they want to replace him with.

Which is why 90% of Romey's victory speech was about how bad Obama is, and only 10% was about how Romney would be an improvement.

What stump speeches say beneath the hood

2012-01-11T00:26:00.000-08:00

You can tell who a party's voters are by listening to the presidential candidates' speeches.

I was listening to Mitt Romney's vistory speech in New Hampshire, about how he was for freedom and--between the lines--Obama was for slavery.

Romney seems irony-blind.

The things he said were stuff I'm prettysure he knows aren't true, but they did make for a neat, simple, straightforward narrative, banging on the idea that Obama is foreign.

No, he didn't question Obama's nationality. He just did the same thing Bush II did to convince his followers that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11: association. He put Saddam's name into every sentence about 9/11 and his followers connected the fake dots. Now Romney is putting Obama's name next to "European" and "Socialism."

Which is less likely to work on educated, cosmopolitan people.

But it works like a charm on white guys without a college degree.

So the real deal with the GOP is not a "clash of civilizations" between the two parties. It's a war of words--words aimed at the inner insecurities of white men living in a browning country run by a guy who doesn't look like them. It's too simple to call this racism, though of course that's a factor with many--but not with many others. However, even with those others, there's a sense of unease, of a willingness to believe the worst of Obama...a willingness to construct rational-seeming arguments on top of that unease so they don't have to be looked at, so the many who actually don't want to be racist can tell themselves they aren't.

They just don't like "European socialism."

Funny that the "European socialism" of Northern European countries like Germany is doing great, making capitalist money hand over fist, providing medical care for everybody in an export-centric economy that's more resilient than ours, and in which a poor but ambitious, hardworking person has more social mobility than he would here.

It you want a reality check on my speculations, look at factcheck.org and politifact.com's research on the truthiness of Romney's attacks on Obama.

One more Big Lie--the one about how Obama didn't fix the economy. Um, he isn't king. He isn't even the Prime Minister presiding over a government united behind him.

The current American system enables an opposition party with a House majority and a Senate minority to throw enough grit in the gears to keep nearly everything from happening. It's not a "do nothing" Congress at all. It's a "block everything" Congress.

Which means Romney's arguing to let the foxes get back in charge of the henhouse. And the Layoff King is the First Fox.

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Interestingly, I came across this conservative LDS website that details his adjustment of his beliefs to suit the circumstances.

Mitt's strategy

2012-01-04T15:25:00.000-08:00

I've heard that Mitt wants to keep the "Anyone But Mitt" GOP faction divided for as long as possible, because with Newt and Rick and Ron--and, I guess, the other Rick still in the game, it continues to look at if the Far Right has no one to turn to besides Mitt if they want to beat Barack.

On the other hand, I've also heard that President Obama wants as many of the far right candidates to stay in the race as long as possible.

Why? Because as long as Mitt faces one or more competitors to the right of him, he doesn't dare change his political tune to a centrist one that would be more appealing to centrists. He has to keep talking to social and fiscal conservatives as if he's one of them, as long as he has this opposition.

Plus he can't just talk about Obama in his speeches if he has viable competitors. He can't act like they don't exist and get away with it if he keeps getting just 25% of the Publican vote in polls and primaries. He acts as if he has already won the nomination, and that only works if his competitors all drop out.

And because Mitt's been acting as if he's Mr. High Road while his surrogates have been down in the gutter with massive attack campaigns on his competitors, now he's got competitors who may be happy to lose the nomination as long as they can take him down. Newt Gingrich has already declared jihad against Mitt because of both his pretence of virtuosity and the reality of his gutter politics (which people outside the primary states mostly haven't seen yet).

So Obama may wind up with Newt, Rick and Ron inadvertently working for his reelection.

Divide and rule.

Ovama vs. Obama

2012-01-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

The Publican leadership knows full well that whoever wins the GOP nomination will be someone who doesn't thrill the average Publican voter. Most likely it will be Mitt Romney, whom a quarter of Publican voters believe is inescapably Hell-bound regardless of his deeds in this life, because he's a Mormon.

Of course these Fundamentalists believe President Obama is equally Hell-bound, despite his professed Christianity, because some believe he's a Muslim mole, others believe no Christian could attend a church Rev. Wright preached at, and many of them appear to believe that you can't be both a Christian and a Democrat (!).

You can win an election by either having a lovable, inspiring candidate--or by having a hateable opponent.

The GOP Ministry of Propaganda now knows they aren't getting an inspiring candidate regardless; so they must focus on making Obama the Anti-Christ incumbent--someone so demonic that rank and file Publicans will man the phone banks, give old folks rides to the polls. And meanwhile, behind the scenes, they must focus on suppressing the Democratic vote.

Because to win all you need is fewer votes for the other guy, in the right districts.

So wherever Publicans hold sway in a state they have jiggered the rules about voting to keep as many people as possible from voting if they're Democrats.

And the coming avalanche of secret money--blessed by the Supremes--will focus on painting Obama as being responsible for every bad thing imaginable, while the candidate will act like a nice guy. Possible since the dirty work done in his name won't be traceable to him. Because as long as the Supremes have their hyperconservative faction with five votes, President Bush II will remain in power in one branch of government at least.

Guess where those corporate pensions went?

2011-12-29T16:43:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I always bought the company line that American corporations had overpromised workers about pensions, and they had to cut them drastically for the companies to survive.

Now along comes a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal financial reporter who spent years digging through SEC filings and contractual fine print...

to discover that the corporations' pension funds vanished because top management stole it for bonuses. And by putting enough weasel language in the fine print of their agreements with employees, and through, um, "friendly" judges, they've managed to make most of this theft legal--and to make the average citizen side with the corporations.

Check out the Amazon listing for "Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers."

When good people do bad political things

2011-12-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

The average rank and file Republican and Democrat generally plays fair in his personal life, I believe.

Yet both parties have an element that wants to do whatever it takes to win.

They face a challenge: how do you get people who normally play fair to fight dirty?

One way is the way Bush II justified the vicious things he had his proxies do to John McCain in 2000 when both were vying for the GOP nomination. Bush II said, in effect, that it was a game, and the rules were that there were no rules. You can see this from the way he defended his actions when McCain confronted him over his dirty tactics.

But the most common way is to convince your rank and file that they face an existential threat. That they must circle the wagons and shoot to kill--that they must, as a political metaphor, declare "martial law" for the duration of the emergency.

This is why the Cuban communist regime still speaks in revolutionary language half a century after the revolution ended. And it's why the GOP harps about "gay marriage" and guns and God yada yada, so you'll be distracted while they're picking your pockets, and even if you notice that they are, you'll excuse it as the price of beating back the threat to your tribe.

The Democrats' rabble rousing efforts lack the intensity of the Republicans' but they still give it their darndest. The latest from FactCheck.org, summarizing the year's best whoppers, doles out prizes aplenty to both sides. And if you look at those prizes, you'll see the underlying pattern: to get you to feel there's an emergency that requires you to suspend your ordinary sense of fair play.

Look at it and see if that pattern doesn't jump out at you.

Leaving Iraq

2011-12-19T12:56:00.001-08:00

Former GOP presidential candidate John McCain said, of our pullout from Iraq this last weekend, "this decision of a complete pullout of United States troops from Iraq, was dictated by politics and not our national security interests. I believe that history will judge this president's leadership with the scorn and disdain that it deserves."

Once again John McCain proves that the Republican Party's last presidential candidate is a hothead lacking the character and the judiciousness needed for the job, as was true of the preceding GOP president, as was even more true of the GOP's last entry for vice president.

And it's an indictment of the GOP's seat-of-the pants, little boy acting tough foreign policy ideals.

The situation in Iraq is the hand President Obama was dealt when he took office, and the outcome was predictable from the moment the Republican administration chose to invade Iraq with a skeleton force--a force fully able to defeat Iraq's large, ramshackle military in combat, but waaay too small to be able to occupy and administer a nation of that size. As General Powell told him.

Senator McCain didn't say which of the two alternatives President Obama faced he would have chosen:
1. Declare war on Iraq's current government, or
2. Put all American soldiers in Iraq under the jurisdiction of Iraq's courts, the nonnegotiable condition for our troops staying that the Iraqi government set at the behest of the current Iraqi goverment's patron, Iran.

I don't find either of those alternatives acceptable. I'd love to know which one McCain wanted.

Iraq was bound to become something of a client state of Iran from the moment we invaded, given the fact that we invaded, and in the way we did--and because President Bush I told Iraq's Shiites to revolt during Desert Storm, then abandoned them to Saddam's tender mercies.

People who've been betrayed tend to remember it. And it means we pushed Iraq's Shiites into Iran's eager arms, even though Iraq's Shiites are Arabs and Iran's are mostly Persians, and thus have genuine tribal differences.

But Iraq's government is quite beholden to Iran under the table--and there isn't a thing we can reasonably do about it now. And it's the cake Bush baked. Obama's just serving the unpalatable slices to us.

And McCain should reserve his wrath for his own party and Chef Bush instead of shooting the maitre d'.

Now's the season when your conservative friends want to tell you Obama-as-Satan stories

2011-12-19T10:57:00.000-08:00

From now through the November election, many of your Right Wing friends/relatives/workmates want to tell people like me Obama the Horrible anecdotes they got from the Republican National Committee's paid astroturf websites and pundits and "think" tanks for hire.

Some of these stories are true, others true but taken out of context, some are spun by the GOP's Funhouse Mirror view of reality into a distorted view of the truth, some push guilt by association (usually a false association in the first place), and a lot that are flat out Pants on Fire False.

Okay. If we're going to discuss politics, this sort of thing is inevitable.

Especially for someone in my position, a Democrat living in a solid Democrat college town who voluntarily associates with the few Republicans who live in this town, who all know I'm a Democrat. I'm a lightning rod for them, frustrated as they are, knowing that their vote for President in the state of California makes no difference and never will.

Yet at some level they all believe that this anecdote they just got from PowerMax or some such is so powerful, so damning, that anyone hearing it will realize Obama is the scum he is. They're just bursting with animus for the guy. At my wife's church's Christmas dinner Saturday, a friend who's a very nice guy told me Obama is "a Communist." I didn't even argue it with him. I just pointed out that as a Democrat I was keen on all the GOP candidates, since each has crucial flaws that should enable Obama to win reelection.

But more (or less) seriously, whenever someone's dying to tell you something you have leverage.

So I propose that you tell your conservative friend that you'll willing to listen to his/her Evil Obama anecdote--if and only if they first tell you something about Obama that they find praiseworthy.

This should be a no-brainer for them. After all, these are the same people who were telling me Character is All when Clinton was the candidate. Why should Character suddenly become irrelevant when the Democratic incumbent happens to be a loyal family man--devoted husband and father.

And after all, this is the guy on whose watch--and with whose politically risky go-ahead--the bad man who was actually responsible for 9/11 was nailed. This is the guy who uses UAVs to kill one Al Quaeda leader after another, regardless of what country they're hiding in. This is the guy who OK'd having a Navy sniper nailing three Somali pirates who were holding an American sea captain hostage.

And this is the guy whose economic policies have been conservative enough that the American Left considers him a crypto-Republican. If he's such a Com-yew-nist, why do actual Com-yew-nists believe he's actually a Conservative?

So it should be easy for your right wing friends/relatives/workmates to meet your challenge that they tell you something they find praiseworthy about Obama before they tell you the Damning Anecdote.

.

At least 80% of Americans are Aempiricists

2011-12-19T00:48:00.000-08:00

Most so-called Atheists are Empiricists--that is, we derive our ideas from reality, not reality from our ideas.

The term "Atheist" was invented by religious people as a pejorative term, and for many of them it's meant as negatively as the N-word.

And it's meaningless. It means "someone who doesn't believe in God." Of course, to doctrinaire religious people, that's all they need to know about you. But why accept the other side's term for us?

We are empiricists. Don't let anyone call you an "'Atheist." Tell them what you are, not what you aren't. When they ask, "Do you believe in God, yes or no" tell them "Sorry, there's a word there that I don't understand. What is a "God?"

See, the word "God" is empirically undefinable. It makes no more sense to say you don't believe in God than to say you don't believe in Blibble, or [make the sound of blowing a raspberry]. Every single attempt to define "God" just produces piles of tautologies--definitions chasing their own tails.

I'm not what i'm not. I'm what I am. And that's an empiricist. I'm not "unchurched," I'm not "not French", I'm not "Not Red-Haired," ad infinitum.

And while we're at it, let's call religious people "Aempiricists." As Blake said, "Dip him in the river who loves water."

It's not the income disparity--it's the disconnect

2011-12-17T01:07:00.000-08:00

You know the scene in the movie when the bad guys unhitch the train from the engine and it chugs away, stranding all the cars in the desert? That's what's happened to America.

Only people keep talking about it as if the huge and growing income disparity between the wealthiest 20% and everyone else is the problem. It's not. It's the symptom of the problem.

What's most wrong with the current disparity is that the fortunes of the very wealthy have become decoupled from the fortunes of the rest of us.

Back in the day the head of a company did better if the company did better, & worse if it didn't.

But if your company's "product" is money manipulation, carried out by a small staff with big computers, instead of providing goods &/or services, there's no real connection to the well-being of the country.

If a manufacturer moves its plants abroad (to countries like China that block our own exports) & bribes government to make that legal & & even give it tax breaks to do so, then the well-being of American factory workers becomes irrelevant.

If a corporate CEO's pay has no relation to how well the company does--as is true for most of the Fortune 500 now--it doesn't even matter how well the company does, & platinum parachutes & conspiring boards of directors make top managements, collectively, a class that looks out for each other & to heck with the companies they helm & their stockholders.

And their kids don't serve in the military.

Unregulated capitalism morphs into crony capitalism where there's little social mobility & the captains of industry use their Croesian wealth to capture the government, which then works for them, not us. Travel in a bunch of 3rd world countries, as I have, & you'll see how this pans out.

Decoupling's the key. See?

www.blogzu.blogspot.com

Watch what you wish for, GOPers

2011-12-17T01:03:00.000-08:00

The GOP faced a challenge in shaping its four year campaign to defeat President Obama in 2012: some of its favorite themes had a poor chance of working.

Take that fine old standby, personal character assassination. When Clinton was the target it was a snap. He was quite the hound dog. Best of all, he lied about it under oath, giving the Republicans an excuse to impeach the President, even though what he lied about had exactly nothing to do with his presidential duties. They used personal embarrassment to set a trap, using the power of prosecutors to ask questions under oath that have nothing to do with the case being prosecuted.

But here we have a guy--President Obama with the effrontery to be a model husband and father, never divorced, never unfaithful, devoted to his kids, and raising them in a way any American conservative could be proud of.

Then there's the "soft on war" trope. Every Democratic president has gotten accused of being a peacenik. And then President Obama has the nerve to get Osama, send squadrons of UAVs over Pakistan and Yemen and elsewhere, nailing Al Quaeda honchos left and right. He even OK'd nailing some Somali pirates between the eyes out on the high seas, and upped the ante in Afghanistan. Bummer.

So now personal character is no longer spoken of. And to prove it, that Republican hound dog Newt Gingrich is leading in GOP polls right now. Whether he gets the nomination or not, the fact that he leads shows that Republicans could care less about personal character. They only talk about it when it suits them.

And the same goes for warlike manliness. Bush II had the fighter pilot swagger down, but wasn't competent as Commander in Chief. Not when he went to war with the wrong country. I mean, when the cops bust into the house next to the house they have the warrant to bust into it's bad enough. But when our President busts into the wrong country and costs us a trillion+ dollars and thousand of US lives, and tens of thousands maimed as well, it would really, really, really help if all that blood and treasure were expended on and in the country that had actually attacked us. No Democratic president in the last century has committed such a colossal blunder--especially when he systematically ignored all the info we had at the time proving that it was the wrong country. No wonder Saddam was surprised when we invaded. Just like the people in the wrong house.

There's plenty the GOP can and will use against Obama in the next election. They'll even try to besmirch his personal character. But that at least won't stick.

The prime target of the far right is not Islamofascists; nor is it the far Left; it's the politically active centrists

2011-12-11T00:12:00.001-08:00

More and more, the far Right is starting to function like a cult. First job of a cult is to separate you from conflicting ideas and people. After that, the steady stream of cult propaganda weaves members into a coherent narrative that describes the world and everyone's place in it. But cult narratives are always--always--false, whether they're Left, Right, religious, you name it.

So the cult has to silence your BS detector, and that starts with getting you to ignore, dismiss, and/or feel actively hostile towards anyone who dissents from the cult's narrative.

The average right winger isn't influenced by anything Michael Moore says--in fact, if he says anything they assume it's a knowing lie. Ditto Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama. Anyone even slightly left of center--and the center has moved waaay over to the right, though the far Rights believes the exact opposite.

Who's left? Liberal Republicans like Olympia Snowe, for one. And, right in the crosshairs, the two main fact-checking organizations: Politifact.com and Factcheck.org. Not because they always side with the Left. But because they don't always side with the Right.

That's far more dangerous to keeping cult members in line than self-identified enemies.

So the far Right narrative has to somehow explain all the articles appearing in those two factchecking sites that say Democrats and other left of center organizations and people have lied/spun/told half-truths.

And explain they do: the narrative says that these fact-checking organizations are completely in the tank for Obama and all them Lib-er-ul causes, and only criticize the Left to legitimize their criticism of the Right.

That is, you're either for us or against us, and if you aren't totally for us, you're totally against us.

And--there's no such thing as journalism. Only honest advocacy vs. deceptive advocacy. Thus if a journalist is a Democrat, everything the journalist writes is by definition Leftist propaganda. The idea of someone criticizing their own side is literally un-believable to them.

So if you wonder how people living in a democratic country can become radicalized Jihadi--look at American right wing websites, and in particular look at their coverage of Politifact.com and Factcheck.org.

The funniest part is when they say they've proven their point if fact checking sites criticize the Right, say, 59% of the time--the same argument they furiously condemn when it's used to "prove" racial/ethnic discrimination.

But also pretty ironic is the fact that the Left thinks these fact-checking organizations lean Right. This is unknown to far Right cultists because they get all their political information from right wing websites and pundits, and such information would clash with the Manichean (black & white) narrative of the cult.

The Congressional Budget Office also gets pilloried if they dare issue reports that conflict with the Republican National Committee's narrative...then cited as Gospel when they agree.

One way to tell whether a self-identified Conservative hasn't become a cultist is to ask them what they think of FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com. I wouldn't expect them to say these organizations never err. But I would expect them to say that both are committed to being nonpartisan and calling 'em as they see 'em, such that their errors, when they occur, are not part of a fiendish plot.

You can do the same with a self-identified Liberal, of course. Both organizations call out the Left frequently. I just read one of their reports on TV political show hosts and was dismayed to see how biased some of my liberal favorites were.

It's tough to commit to truth. It's easy to commit to tribe. Thus saith our DNA.

Our shrinking middle class

2011-12-06T09:54:00.001-08:00

In 1970, 65% of Americans lived in middle class neighborhoods.

By 2007, 44% of Americans lived in middle class neighborhoods.

Source: MSNBC citing research by Stanford University and NYTimes.com.

So Middle Class America has dwindled from 2/3 of our country to 2/5. And even all the serfs our government has condoned coming here from Mexico can't account for more than a drop in this bucket of bad news.

But a falling tide doesn't lower all boats. Over this time period America's millionaries and billionaires have seen their incomes soar, courtesy of their income redistribution scheme made possible by their capture of our government, with Congress passing laws to made many economic crimes now legal, and Republican administrations focusing nearly all their enforcement efforts on middle class tax cheats while leaving the real Players off the hook.

So the next timer a self-styled Conservative starts talking about Class War, ask him or her what diabolical Comyewnist scheme is progressively transferring America's wealth to its richest? And if you catch a bank robber and force him to give back the money he stole, would you oppose that because it's "income redistribution?"

The real problem with poverty and wealth

2011-12-03T02:04:00.001-08:00

Middle class people believe if you work hard and keep your nose clean and show some moxie you'll get ahead--you'll do better than your parents did. But middle class people also know they're dependent on how others do--that is, on how well society as a whole is doing.

Poor people on the dole are not dependent on how well society is doing. They believe working hard won't get them ahead--that good-paying jobs are not available to them--and welfare grants them the necessities regardless of how society as a whole is doing.

Rich people are not dependent on how well society is doing. They have a plush personal safety net that they believe will buoy them up regardless of society's vicissitudes.

So the poor and the rich feel decoupled from society. They don't care about the welfare of others, because it doesn't affect them. As Oscar Wilde said, more or less "I can bear the burdens of others quite well."

And when their welfare is cut off, the poor still feel decoupled from society, because they don't see a way up.

It is possible to couple the rich and the poor to society's welfare as a whole. The rich loathe this idea, and fight it every way they can. And being rich, they have the means to stop most attempts to attach them to society.
The poor loathe this idea if it forces them to work for their welfare--especially if you attach all the conditions to getting welfare that I'd attach. However, the poor don't represent a danger to the middle class, except for a certain amount of street crime (which is far greater in the ghettos of the poor, though). The rich who are decoupled from society do represent a danger to the middle class.

That's why, even though Americans work longer hours than those of any other industrialized society, and their hours have progressively increased over the last decades, they are no better off than their parents were in the 1970s, except for having the Internet and relatively cheap computers. On the other hand, they're far less likely to be able to get out from under their college debt and to buy a home. Our GDP has increased greatly since the 1970s but the rich have kept the increase for themselves, and captured government, so that the people we elect won't do what we want them to do, but instead serve their patrons.

My very right wing Southern father once defined society as where the rich and the poor decide what the middle class will pay to support them.

Was he wrong:?

The Left isn't right, but the Right has left all reason behind

2011-11-30T23:30:00.000-08:00

Take the Founders--and the Constitution--and America the Greatest Nation with the Greatest People and the Greatest Armed Forces and anyone who says otherwise isn't an American...

Most self-styled conservatives are Christians. Doesn't the Bible says not to worship idols? Yet they've made the Founders, the Constitution they wrote, and the country we live in into idols to be worshipped.

The Founders would be appalled.

Conservatives keep talking about what the Founders would say if they could see what we've made of their founding document.

That's an easy one to talk about, since the Founders aren't here to contradict you.

But if they were magically brought here and give a year or ten to get up to speed, here's what I think they'd say collectively:

The United States of America in 1790 had a population of under 4 million people, mostly farmers. In today's world such a nation would rank 128 in population, between the Republic of the Congo and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Its level of industrialization would place it near the bottom...maybe with the Malagasy Republic. And trade, except for a few luxury goods, was virtually nonexistent. The Atlantic Crossing took about two months, and a fair number of vessels didn't make it.

Same went for warfare. England found it incredibly difficult and expensive to wage war at such a distance. So the nascent America was protected by General Atlantic quite effectively. On land, stage coaches traveled at around 6 miles per hour over bad roads, such as they were.

Our Constitution was the Founders' second stab at a governing document. Remember the Articles of Confederation? Were those also divinely inspired? They didn't work so well.

It was also a time of turmoil and intellectual and technological ferment--nearly all on the horizon, though. And political parties didn't exist.

So the Founders crafted a document the second time around that did well as framing the needs of a small agricultural country with poor communications and no way to transport bulk goods cheaply, making nearly all commerce local.

It is an extraordinary idea to think that a document for governing such a nation at such a time would be, without modification, perfectly appropriate for a nation with 78 times as many people, vastly more territory, enmeshed in vast worldwide trade networks (including shipping in about half the oil we use from abroad), linked nearly instantly to a global communications network, dealing with a nation now embracing a multitude of religions (and nonreligions) and races and cultures.

Honestly, it's amazing that the Constitution works at all. But anyone who studies current events should realize that much of it is obsolete.

I believe that's exactly what any transplanted Founders would say today. They'd see our clinging to it as being as anachronistic as if they themselves had clung to the Magna Carta--another brilliant document for its day. And its deification is part and parcel of the tribalization of the GOP. If you don't fall down before these idols (Founders/Constitution/America the Perfect) or even say this document needs revision, they can denounce you as a tribal traitor and thus sidestep an actual debate over political positions they can't defend on their merits.

All of which reinforces my belief that conservatives are indulging en masse in a kind of illusionary nostalgia, while liberals are jonesing for gleaming utopian visions that are equally delusional.

A key goal in politics is to prevent debate

2011-11-25T10:48:00.001-08:00

Watch political campaigns closely and you'll see that party leaderships (and their patrons) want people to feel such hostility towards the opposition--people, party, platforms--that they won't even consider anything or anyone in the opposition.

Both party's ideologues always feel this way. The trick is getting people in the middle to feel that way too--enough to get 51% of the voters to vote reflexively.

The GOP has gotten much of the way there with President Obama. Just recently I had a Republican friend with a BA in Political Science tell me that President Obama is a Fascist, citing his "interference" in General Motors "on behalf of the unions" as proof. Another went out of his way to tell me how much he did not like Obama. "At all." I took him to mean that he disapproved of Obama not just as a president but as a person. Yet another--a devout Christian--told me that Obama is not a Christian, despite him saying so explicitly, because of Obama attending the Reverend Wright's church (the one one damned America in one of his speeches).

And then we have the recent spectacle of Michelle Obama and Joe Biden getting booed lustily when they attended a NASCAR race recently.

When President Obama debates Mitt Romney--or whoever-- next year prior to the election, none of these people are going to consider what the President says. They're already made up their minds that everything he says is either a mistake or a lie.

I plan to test my hypothesis by asking all the Republicans I know to tell me something praiseworthy about the President. If they're philosophical Republicans they should start by praising him as a family man, and laud him for his aggressive prosecution of military action against Islamofascists, including killing Bin Ladin. As well as his having appointed a few Republicans in his branch of government (former Secretary of Defense Gates, most notably)--something he's been doing since he was Editor of the Harvard Law Review. They would also laud his giving up smoking.

But if my hypothesis is correct most of them won't be able to think of a thing--despite the fact that when these people were voting for Poppy Bush against Bill Clinton, some of them were telling me that personal character was the key thing to consider, giving Clinton's hound dawg ways.

But now that we have a Democratic President who has been utterly faithful to his first and only wife and a devoted father to his two daughters, personal character has magically become irrelevant.

Which is why debates don't matter much. Not by the time both parties have a candidate at least. Remember, Al Gore won all his debates with Bush II.

The two most dishonest words in politics

2011-11-25T10:35:00.001-08:00

When you start a sentence with either "Honestly" or "Frankly," it means you're going to follow up with something not so great about yourself--a confession of some shortcoming or misunderstanding or prediction that turned out to be wrong.

But at least 90% of the time when politicians start a sentence with either word, they're about to "confess" about some shortcoming of their opposition--not themselves. They're bragging or bashing. Never confessing.

Meaning it's not the words "Frankly" or "Honestly" that are so dishonest, but the way politicians misuse them to attack others.

As a Democrat I'd love to believe that mainly Republicans commit this moral and syntactical error.

But frankly I'm not sure.

The real Republican candidate

2011-11-20T11:19:00.001-08:00

The Republicans you see in the campaign ads and in the debates don't include the one who will actually become President of the United States if any of these Republican candidates win the election. If any of them do so, the President of the United States will become Grover Norquist. He's the one who makes virtually every Republican member of Congress snap to attention when he enters the room. Not one of these putative candidates commands the devoted attention and slavish obedience that Mr. Norquist commands.

So if a Republican wins, whether it's Romney or Gingrich or Perry or whoever, he'll be the figurehead. Look behind the throne and you'll see Mr. Norquist.

Can a store clerk shoot and kill a fleeing thief legally?

2011-11-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

According to this week's "Dan Rather Reports" on HDNet, 27 states have enacted "Castle Laws" that enable home residents and store clerks to use deadly force to defend themselves. The law was also cited by a Texan who shot two fleeing burglars in the back, killing them. They were unarmed illegal immigrants robbing the man's neighbor's house. No one questions the fact that the police would not have arrived there in time to stop them.

In another case a man stole a 6-pack of beer from a convenience store. The clerk chased him out of the store and shot him to death. The thief we unarmed. The clerk was charged by the DA (because the thief was committing a misdemeanor, not a felony) but acquitted by a jury.

To liberals and conservatives, cases like these are unambiguous.

Liberals would say life is worth more than property, therefore you should only be allowed to use deadly force to defend yourself against certain deadly attack.

Conservatives would say a thief doesn't steal only from his victim--he steals from us all. There is a sociological basis for this thinking, embodied in big cities' "broken windows" policies. That is, the appearance of a breakdown of law and order propagates such a breakdown.

The 6-pack stealing thief was a habitual thief, as even his family admitted. Last July 4 at Lake Tahoe, I was waiting in a long line to use the Port-A-Potties when a couple of young men walked up, used the potties, and strode away, showing their contempt for the rest of us. No cops were there to stop them.

Bus services talk about large numbers of young men who habitually use the buses without paying, daring anyone to object.

Such infractions are even more minor than stealing a 6-pack from a convenience store.

But they engender helpless fury in everyone present who's obeying the rules. And our society isn't about to pay for a cop on every corner.

Most people strongly desire to live in a society where nobody cuts in lines, gets gas then speeds off without paying, and generally treat the rest of us as if the rules we live by don't apply to them.

I'm inclined to agree with the conservatives on this issue. I think minor theft of property and services, like broken windows in big cities, has a disproportionate effect on society.

And to be honest, I don't believe that every single person's life is worth more than someone's property. Every thing people own is generally something they worked for and which has meaning for them beyond its fungible worth. Suppose you had a scrapbook of pictures of your dead parents and no copies (yes, you should have made copies, but you didn't), and someone stole the bag it was in and you never saw it again.

Was that a felony? Nope. But if you cared about your parents, it would have felt like it, and the loss would have echoed around in your head for the rest of your life.

The six pack the clerk shot the guy for stealing was the third such theft in the space of a few weeks. You can't even get cops to come to your store and get a report, or, say, check for fingerprints.

So society as a whole faces the choices of (1) taxing people much more heavily and providing for that policeman on every corner; (2) telling people to suck it up and just endure the decay of our society; (3) enact Castle Laws and thus support vigilantism in the absence of comprehensive policing--also meaning that innocent people will get killed now and then.

For example, a few years ago an old coot shot off his shotgun through his front door because he feared the hooligans outside trying to break in. Turns out it was October 31--Halloween--and they were just trick or treaters that he killed. Not to mention the various times people (mostly old men) have shot their spouses in the middle of the night when the spouse got up to go to the bathroom and the one in bed mistook the returning mate for a burglar.

So if you support Castle Laws--and I do--you also must accept the fact that there will be tragic incidents like these. And that such laws must be written--and explained to citizens--very clearly, so people don't think the legislator declared open season on anyone passing by that you don't take a shine to.

Note that the first Castle law was in part a response to a previous law in some state that criminalized defending yourself with lethal force unless you could prove that it was as a last resort against a definitive existential threat to your existence.

states' rights

2011-11-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

States' rights is a misnomer. It's really Republican rights--the rights of the minority of Americans who are conservatives to not have their rights swamped by the populous, Democratic-dominated, urban areas.

Yet people continue to talk about this issue as if it has anything to do with states per se. You can see the falsity of this when Republicans get control of Washington, as during the Bush Era. Then they run roughshod over states' rights in their efforts to enact their social agenda.

Which is why we never get anywhere with states' rights issues--because we aren't talking about it honestly. It invites hypocrisy on both sides.

So when urban types say we should abolish the electoral college, rural types naturally bristle. The kind of society they prefer would indeed get dented by liberals' opposed social agenda.

What no one discusses is compromises that would give urban areas somewhat more voting power, yet without removing the imbalance completely.

Thus the real problem with the electoral college is its being coupled with our Winner Take All system, which disenfranchises all conservatives in liberal states and all liberals in conservative states.

Thus if all the states agreed to adopt proportional electoral college representation instead of today's winner take all system, it would preserve today's small state advantage--which they'll never vote to lose, frankly--but would empower the minority conservatives and liberals in all the states, and force the two parties to take them seriously--which they don't today. And it could conceivably happen, because it's truly a nonpartisan structural reform that empowers huge numbers of both conservatives and liberals.

For example, in my state--California--we always vote Blue for the President, representing the vast majority of the state's population. But a third of the state is conservative, and occupy a majority of the eastern 2/3 of the state, away from the coast. This conservative minority simply has no say in who becomes president. The liberal minority of Texas--about a third, I think-is similarly voiceless.

Proportional electoral college representation doesn't advantage either party, yet gives a huge number of Americans much more of a say in national politics.

It's the kind of reform fair-minded liberals, conservatives and moderates should go for. And if we propose things like this we also start to make the political dialog less polarized, which helps with other issues as well.

Nonpartisan redistricting is another. Today redistricting is seen by both parties as a tool for partisan advantage, ruthlessly wielded. Nonpartisan redistricting moves power away from both parties' Washington leadership and back towards the people. That's another nonpartisan reform we should be arguing for--perhaps ahead of more divisive issues.

a constitutional question

2011-11-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

Our Constitution is touted as a sacred document that must not be questioned--by those who profit from its current form.

Likewise, those who say anything not explicitly stated by the Constitution is un-constitutional are those who profit (ideologically or financially) from having this be the case. Not because they really think its current formulation is, literally and divnely, perfect.

Consider this: not one word of the Constitution says anything about political parties or corporations--neither of which existed when it was written.

Does this mean both should be banned? Or allowed to exist completely outside our Constitution's framework?

More reasonably, one would think we could use an amendment that explicitly accounts for and regulates the two forces that utterly dominate American politics today.

China cheats

2011-11-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

So now our government has made it official--China's primary source of technology is what it either forces American businesses to give them as a prerequisite for doing business with them--or steals it outright, through a massive, covert, ceaseless cyberwar conducted against us.

As many have known for a long, long time. The real question is what should we do about it? We're in an interesting position since the Republicans financed two wars and huge giveaways to the richest Americans by borrowing from the Chinese (and others--but the Chinese have a huge share).

We could mount a cyberwar to steal technology from the Chinese, but the reason they're stealing so much of ours is that theirs sucks. Of course we should invest massively in countermeasures, but should we do anything besides trying to build higher, better walls?

And if we do, what would be proportionate?

A start might be to revisit the treaty with Taiwan that Nixon abrogated in his efforts to suck up to the People's Republic.Of course at that time Chiang Kai Shek's government claimed sovereignty over mainland China, basically saying everyone had to choose between recognizing the PRC or Taiwan. Well, that was idiotic to be sure. But now Taiwan claims no such thing. At the same time its government is playing footsy with China and Chinese and Taiwanese business interests have become entwined, so it's not a simple situation. But just restoring our formerly close relationship with Taiwan would be a tiny start at reigning in China's imperial ambitions and rampant theft of American intellectual property.
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Note that the second biggest cyberthief of American IP is Russia. No surprise there either. Here again the trick is a proportionate response. After all, we can't even get an astronaut into space without going to the Russians hat in hand, due to our Republican government of 2000-2008 tossing our manned space program under the bus.

But I wonder if a covert op would be possible that ground Russian Internet access to a crawl as long as Russia's rulers continue behaving like a crime family posing as a government?

One principle I am sure of: governments should never complain about anything they aren't prepared to do something about. I look forward to seeing what the current administration does about these two thieving countries.

Republican politicians don't believe in up or down votes

2011-11-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

Both parties have been known to block legislation and appointments by preventing bills and nominations from coming to the floor for a vote. This is perfectly legal in our primitive system of government--and by "primitive" I mean the same thing as was true of American TV signals before we adopted digital transmission: as the first TV country we had the best signal available at the time--but the PAL standard adopted by other countries later was much higher resolution (ditto France's SECAM).

Likewise, our democracy has the lower resolution of early TV, with a lot of mechanisms well suited to a rural economy in the horse and buggy days, but unable to act decisively when the minority party chooses to gum up the works.

The Republicans have gone so far as to say "majority" means "60%"--something that would dumbfound the Founding Father, since the need for minority consent to do anything is simply minority rule.

And they have blocked so many pieces of legislation and nominations as to make it the default now.

To the extent that both major parties keep legislation and nominations from coming to a vote they oppose democracy and seek to impose their will on the American people when the ballot box doesn't support them.

Minorities have important rights in any real democracy. But control of government shouldn't be one of them.

Bali says Hi!

2011-11-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

Want to visit a foreign land that welcomes Americans--and not just for our $$$? Visit Bali, which, having had its economy also damaged (far more than ours) by Islamofascist mass murderers, regards Americans as brothers in arms. They also appreciate the fact that, unlike so many Europeans and Chinese, we don't talk down to them.

This was our 6th visit to Bali, and it was wonderful--apart from the nearly empty mosque nearby blaring out its harangues at astonishing volumes from before dawn to late at night. The Balinese Muslims who've been there for a while have been as friendly as the Hindu majority. But the outsiders from Java buying up land, building mosques, then using them to dominate the acoustic landscape at all hours are something else.

And they're typical of Islamic authorities in my experience traveling abroad. It was especially interesting because while there are increasing numbers of Javanese Muslims streaming into Bali in hopes of cashing in on Bali's tourist trade, the local mosque really was an empty shell with giant loudspeakers.

I don't think American mosques are hotbeds of terrorism. Most Muslims who immigrate to America are better educated and we assimilate them more than the Europeans do. But I know all of them would mount the giant loudspeakers given half a chance--a practice not mentioned in the Koran BTW.

That's what we need--strict enforcement of noise ordinances. I'd feel the same way about church bells if they started before dawn and were amplified like the mosques' harangues are. But they don't and they aren't.

So when mosques come up, be sure to raise the noise issue. Anyone who's traveled in Muslim lands will know what I mean.

What the Amanda Knox case reveals

2011-10-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Bigotry is part of every culture--America of course, and, as the Amanda Knox case confirms, Italy. Along with the way in which power corrupts, sexism, the human failing of confirmation bias, and the way in which institutions formed to serve noble goals gradually morph into self-serving institutions.

It's not just that Amanda Knox is innocent. It's that she should never have been accused, much less tried, much less convicted, much less imprisoned for four years. The murderer was Rudy Guede, an African-Italian drifter. He cut a deal with the Italian prosecutor to get his sentence reduced from 30 years to 16 in exchange for fingering Knox and her boyfriend.

This benefited the prosecutor, giving him the fame that a simple murder by a rapist from Africa wouldn't have given him. The prosecutor got to exploit anti-American sentiment, as well as Italian madonna/whore misogyny, combining to let him exploit the prurient vilifying of an American woman having sex with an Italian man outside the sacred circle of marriage.

American prosecutors in the 1980s did the same thing with all those satanic child rape & murder cults using daycare centers as a front, sending dozens of men and women to prison for decades--and every single one of which turned out to be, like Amanda Knox's case, not just false but heinous abuses of power by the State, in the form of prosecutors looking for re-election as being tough on crime + as a stepping-stone to higher office.

American prosecutors have almost unanimously fought DNA testing for inmates they'd prosecuted. And in Amanda Knox's case, the prosecutor is of course not admitting his perversions of justice, but is instead appealing Knox's reversal of conviction to Italy's supreme court.

And if I'd written this in Italy, he would almost certainly prosecute me for the felony of defaming his character--law in many countries (and routinely used in putative democracies like Turkey to suppress criticism of government).

Meanwhile the Kerchner family (parents/siblings of the murder victim) continue to imply that Knox done it--and continue to not revile the Italian prosecutor for cutting Kerchner's murderer's sentence almost in half, instead of demanding that Guede be tried now for perjury. They should have been standing shoulder to shoulder with the Knox family as soon as the DNA research (done at the instigation of the Knox family, not the Italians) made it clear that Knox couldn't have done it, despite her coerced confession.

But here we have confirmation bias at work, in which you magnify everything that supports your foregone conclusion, while minifying/dismissing anything that contradicts it. Of course it's not just the Kerchners. It's also how eye witnesses so frequently finger the wrong person; why doctors misdiagnose patients; why cops jump to conclusions and then ignore everyone/everything else.

Finally, confirmation bias colludes with another human foible--self-confidence that vastly exceeds the certainly that the real evidence allows us to have, because we like to be certain and we like to be right.

Italy has a long way to go to redeem itself. Firing this prosecutor for incompetence would be a start.

What do you think are the odds?

How to tell how decisive a leader any American president is

2011-09-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

American presidents are, legally, America's COO (Chief Operating Officer). That is, someone empowered with carrying out the laws--particularly on spending--enacted by Congress. He can't even put legislation in front of Congress--a Congressman has to do that. He can veto legislation, but it can be overcome by a supemajority of Congressmen.

And the rules of Congress are designed currently so that a minority of the Senate can block legislation and nominations, and even a majority of Senators could easily represent a minority of Americans.

Thus the Republicans' 109th Congress (2005-2007) had a Senate Republican majority of 55%, yet it represented only around 48% of Americans--a minority majority, due to the Republicans' domination of the more backward, small, rural states.

So it's hard to judge the leadership of an American president by his domestic accomplishments, while his more unfettered international scope shows us what he could do domestically under a parliamentary system--the form of government of all the countries with a AAA rating from all three American economic rating agencies.

Even when a president has majorities in both houses of Congress, he can still be hamstrung by an obstructionist minority in the Senate--something that doesn't happen in countries with parliamentary systems, where the head of government is by definition the head of whatever party dominates the legislature, and our quaint rules don't apply. There they need 51% of the votes. Here we need at least 61%--nearly impossible to achieve in a country as evenly divided as we are, and only approachable when one party's gross malfeasance comes to light and is rejected.

And in foreign policy President Obama has been surehanded and decisive--and a coalition-builder instead of a cowboy. The killing of Al-Aliki in Yemen today is just the latest example.

It costs more to have private sector employees do government work--even though they make less

2011-09-24T12:21:00.001-07:00

Federal employees make an average of 20% more than comparable private sector employees. Yet it costs more to have those private sector employees do work for the government. The reason: the government hires those lower-wage workers via middlemen--contractors--and when you add in the middleman's cut, it's almost always a lot more expensive.

This is a perfect example of how pols can lie with the truth--by omitting the context that proves the opposite.

At the same time this isn't a justification for government workers making more than private sector workers. In fact they should make less, to compensate for their higher security. Except now with rampant government worker layoffs mandated by Republinomics, the old "less pay for more security" equation is breaking down.

So if we do bring government worker compensation down we have to restore public sector job security--which makes sense to me. Both parts.

Meanwhile at the state and local level, the pension time bombs tick away, threatening to bankrupt cities and counties. It's a pity the GOP has a valid issue here--and that their real reason for pursuing this is to kill off a prime source of Democratic party funding-- but nobody should ever have believed that all goodness (or badness) reposes on either side of the fence.

How to hide big government spending

2011-09-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

Both parties--but especially the Republicans--have discovered a surefire way to hide humongous amounts of taxing and spending (if they're Democrats) or borrowing and spending (if they're Republicans): use contractors; and make it Secret.

Private contractors cost taxpayers 2 to 3 times as much as government employees doing the same thing, and once the ball's rolling, the private contractors can and will lure away the government employees who are left doing what they do, then flood Congress with lobbyists to divert even more tax dollars away from cheap public employees to expensive private ones.

Which is fine if all public employees are slackers and all private employees are hardworking and talented and devoted to doing a good job.You've always gotten great products and services from for-profit companies...right?

Plus if the work is classified secret, who's to know whether the contractors (and subcontractors and sub-subcontracotrs) are doing a good job? In which case the proper profit motive is served by getting as much for as little as possible (once you've made sure oversight is either suborned or missing).

Because the profit motive is amoral--something a lot of Bible-thumping Republicans seem to have forgotten. Not immoral, as some Leftists believe. Just amoral. Meaning that without effective oversight, capitalism naturally morphs into crony capitalism. Just as unchecked socialism morphs into...well, pretty much the same thing, doesn't it?

Liars

2011-09-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

The cleverest liars tell the truth--they just tell it in such as way as to get listeners to believe the lie they want you to believe.

This gives them "plausible deniability."

They do it by
1. removing context--omitting other truths--facts, reason--that would lead listeners to a different conclusion
2. trying to trigger powerful tribal fears and anger that lead listeners to an embattled "circle the wagons" mentality
3. exploiting people's inability to understand statistics (also known as innumeracy)

Examples are innumerable. A good way to find them is by going to factcheck.org or politifact.com and see where the liar didn't so much lie as pull the shenanigans I've described here.

You can't stop with simply checking the factuality of what is said. That the bottom line. You also have to make sure that the facts being cited are true in context, and aren't coupled with emotionally compelling narratives that lead listeners down the rabbit hole.

"Context disambiguates."

EDIT:
Perfect example this week. FOX TV saturated its coverage this week with a clip of President Obama saying "If you love me, pass this bill."

Well. What an egomaniac, huh?

Only problem is all those Fox viewers didn't get the context: Obama was giving an unscripted answer to someone in the town hall audience he was addressing, who shouted out "I love you!"

See? Without context: egomaniac; with context: clever off-the-cuff answer.

It's all about context. And the fact that clever propagandists don't hesistate to lie with the truth.

Debt and infrastructure

2011-09-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

It's conservative to avoid debt and to pay any debts you do have. It's liberal to finance one's goals with debt. And it's foolish to finance optional luxuries with debt. Maybe.

Of course if this is true, every family that purchased a home with a mortgage is liberal. If they were truly conservative they'd save until they had the cash for the price.

Precious few do, making them conservatives when it suits them, but not conservative as a hard and fast principle.

Likewise, the average corporate CEO is aggressively conservative. Yet what large, successful business hasn't financed growth with debt? What do you think stocks and bonds are? What do you think the Wall Street Stock Exchange is?

What I observed over 20 years of reporting on Silicon Valley companies is that the successful startups didn't use their venture capital borrowing to pay for fabulous offices, cars and perks for the management suite. They used that debt to buy company infrastructure, marketing, R&D.

But even when it comes to luxuries, suppose you discover your spouse has an incurable, mortal illness but is currently well enough to travel. Would you take out a second mortgage to take your spouse on his or her dream vacation? Or would you refuse, proudly citing conservative principles?

And how do you know your spouse doesn't have an undiagnosed cancer that, when you discover it, it will be too late for that vacation? This actually happened to our next door neighbors, such that their lifetime of scrimping and saving for world-traveling retirement years came to nothing. The husband spent the last year of his life in a hospital bed, waiting for a heart transplant that never came.

The fact is that reasonable people--and corporations--see debt as a tool that can be used or misused. Not as something that's automatically bad or good.

And one form of debt businesses and government incur that's not so obvious is infrastructure maintenance and repair.

In general this is a form of debt that can be hidden--yet failure to deal with it on a timely basis creates a balloon payment at the end.

Maintenance deferred is debt compounded.

For example, suppose a condo complex doesn['t meet current earthquake retrofit standards--it's built over garages and needs reinforcing that will cost $9,000 per unit. If this isn't done, after a significant earthquake doing the repairs at that point will cost six times as much--possible a lot more--perhaps accompanied by loss of life and irreplaceable possessions that can't be priced.

Our nation's infrastructure has maintenance needs that have been sacrificed for decades to the insistence on low taxes and the ballooning outlays for public employee pension plans that were implemented without being funded.

So that unmaintained bridge collapses in rush hour traffic, killing half a dozen people and maiming others, and must be rebuilt from scratch instead of being repaired. The dam fails. The potholed streets and freeways damage car and truck undercarriages and/or just wears them out prematurely, which individuals and companies have to pay for, thus passing the expense of those saved taxes to consumers and businesses on the downlow.

It's called being penny wise and pount foolish.

So when the President calls on the legislature to fund infrastructure maintenance, he's not calling to increase our debt--he's calling on us to pay debts we incurred when we built that infrastructure--and he's calling on the legislature to pay that debt with borrowing and/or taxing instead of incurring vastly higher debt by waiting for damaging deterioration and collapse to take place.

It is conservative to pay what you owe. And unless we're willing to do without those roads and bridges and dams and more, we owe the nation the maintenance of its infrastructure.

Why both the Left and Right are Wrong about Obama--and in the same Way

2011-09-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

Opinion polls for President Obama are down--down enough to make his re-election seem unlikely.

But when the polls just ask whether people are satisfied with his actions, they conflate people who are dissatisfied because he's a Socialist with people who are dissatisfied because he's a Corporatist.

That is, the Left in general are unhappy because he isn't opposing the Republican Party enough,
while the Right is unhappy because he isn't surrendering to the Republican Party totally.

Lumping those two kind of unhappiness together leads to a severe misunderstanding of what the polls point towards in the next election, and to what the electorate is thinking now.

And the unhappiness with President Obama from both Left and Right stems--at least in part--from the unconscious belief that President = Ruler.

And though he has the bully pulpit to be sure, but in terms of actual power he's more like the chief administrator of the country. He can't pass legislation. He can't even initiate legislation. He can't overrule judges. And in our particular country, even if all congressional Democrats always do everything he asks of them, Senate rules in particular make it possible for a Republican minority there to make the Federal government incapable of sending any legislation to President Obama's desk, and incapable of confirming any presidential appointees, producing a hogtied government that lives down to Republican claims that government can't do anything.

An American president only wields the kind of power people think he had when his party isn't just in a majority in both houses, but which has 61 votes in the Senate that can always be relied on (difficult to maintain with senators in battleground states whose seats are vulnerable), and which has a Supreme Court majority that can generally be relied on. Bush II pretty much had that for most of his disastrous reign. Obama never did, and even during the four months he had a nominally filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, he was being forced to deal with the economic crisis the Republicans handed him (and then tried to blame him for), and with the fact that they proved willing to cripple the country through routine obstructionism for political gain.

It was like seeing two boxers fighting but each under different rules, one willing to hit below the belt and bite and kick, the other not.

These are all process observations which you can evaluate regardless of the actual policies involved.

The bottom line is that ideologues don't think about policy, they think about personality. Right wing ideologues call Obama a Socialist, which is beyond ridiculous, but they don't really mean they think he really wants a Soviet States of America. They clearly don't understand what the word means, or that every single person in America who does say he's a Socialist also says Obama is not remotely one of them. Mainly they use the word because they associate it with opprobrium, making it more like a junior high school schoolyard taunt than a serious political statement.

And left wing ideologues call him a Corporatist because, just like their right wing brothers in thought, they see things in black & white. So for them centrists like Obama are seen either as one thing or another, or as confused.

They're shades of gray-blind.

How is India a more advanced nation than America?

2011-09-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

India is busily implementing a biometric universal ID, and we aren't even thinking about it.

From Wikipedia:

"Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique number which the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will issue for all residents in India. The number will be stored in a centralized database and linked to the basic demographics and biometric information – photograph, ten fingerprints and iris – of each individual.It is easily verifiable in an online, cost-effective way. So also, it is unique and robust enough to eliminate the large number of duplicate and fake identities in government and private databases The random number generated will be devoid of any classification based on caste, creed, religion and geography."

Upon completion it will cost, by varying estimates, $6-34B.

We need this even more than India. But it's being blocked by both leftists and rightists, who are certain that a universal ID will be immediately followed by the black UN helicopters swooping down to castrate our men and impregnate our wimmen.

It's ironic, really. The exact same people who claim that illegal immigration is a huge, huge problem are the ones who oppose a universal biometric ID the most.

10 years after 9/11

2011-09-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

On 9/11 the NYPD and Fire Dept couldn't communicate with each other. Today, all over America, we still don't have full communications interoperability at federal/state/local levels. The Republican Congress handed out the 9/11 largesse to the states with no strings attached, as a tribute to states' rights. So a dirty nuke in a van goes off in Washington DC and affects five states--and we'll get the same lack of coordination.

So they made sure the Federal Gummint stayed out of the way. And it's still out of the way. Why do people think this is a good thing?

Who loves overpopulation? Liberals...and Conservatives.

2011-09-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a summary of both sides' discussion of overpopulation in the last 10 or so national elections:

....

So it's not a problem, right? There's plenty of room for everyone! Come on down!

After all, if you fly over America, you see gobs of open space. Food is plentiful and relatively cheap, ditto water. What's the problem?

The alternative explanation is that it is a problem but it's not one that can be exploited for partisan advantage, because both sides have so much to lose from admitting what a problem it is.

Liberals used to say overpopulation was a big problem, but in the 1970s racialists told liberals they were racists if they complained about overpopulation, so that was the end of liberal opposition to overpopulation..

Moreover, a growing population is good for business--for union members in the building trades especially.

And Catholics and members of most other religions (regardless of party affiliation) believe in placing no restrictions on population growth. Hence the constant complaints by the American government--regardless of which party's in power--to China about its One Child policy.

Which leads to conservative opposition to even admitting that any country anywhere has an overpopulation problem.

First, it's religious. Second, it's business. The developers those union tradesmen work for love more population. And if anyone who opposes conservatives raises the issue, they love to brand that person a racist, since it gives cover to the racism that persists in the hearts of so many conservatives.

Recently the economic conservative publication The Economist editorialized in favor of population growth at a means of coping with the graying of advanced nation populations--without even considering the cataststrophic consequences of human overpopulation.

Overpopulation denial isn't just a national policy problem. Here in California the state legislature is firmly in the New Urbanist camp. New Urbanism is a movement that ostensibly seeks to remediate urban sprawl and energy-intensive long commutes by building up housing in urban areas and guaranteeing low income housing by requiring developers to include same in their projects as an unfunded mandate.

And the New Urbanism takes rapid, continual, unlimited population growth not just as a given, but as a Good Thing, since it adds jobs for unskilled laborers.

Consequently my state's legislature has created a regional organization called ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) dedicated to achieving the goals of New Urbanism.

It has found the college town I live in guilty of providing too many jobs--a terrible crime in the New Urbanism bible, apparently, because we provide more jobs than housing. So we're being required to cram more and more housing into the town, mainly through eliminated the kind of retail and office space that provided those extra jobs in the first place, and replacing them with high density housing, which then loads our streets with more traffic than they were designed for, and can't be widened, because the town it totally built up already.

It's also loading up our schools with more kids than they can accommodate, and our sewer systems, and power systems, and overburdening road repair schedules.

Plus our town, like most American cities, is having to pay out more and more money for lavish city worker pensions, causing it to skimp on infrastructure maintenance, even though that greatly increases the cost of maintenance when it's finally done.

All because no one in either party will even say the "O" word, much less admit the drastic steps that should be taken to deal with it.

Here, instead of adding housing, we should impose a moratorium on additional housing by denying water permits for it.

Nothing in the Constitution mandates accommodating limitless population growth by states, counties, or cities.

But the real problem is that dealing with overpopulation realistically goes against our instincts, which formed when the human race numbered a few thousand people, and the urge to procreate needed to be overwhelming. And we also have an instinct to trust our other instincts--that is, to be uncritical about them and highly suspicious of anyone who says things that go against them.

So it's easy for demagogues to use our instincts to further their goals, even though many of our instincts don't match our current circumstances.

Try bringing up overpopulation with people you know, and you'll see how their Procreate! Procreate! instincts kick in the moment you bring up the issue.

.

Why are people so scientifically illiterate?

2011-08-31T00:39:00.000-07:00

We may be so scientifically illiterate in part because we're not as smart as we used to be.

I read an article recently--in Scientific American I think--summarizing paleontology research that discovered that our brain size has actually shrunk since we adopted agriculture around 10,000 years ago.

No one knows why exactly but my hypothesis is that we needed to be smarter as hunters & gatherers than we needed to be as farmers, and our large brain size kills women, so it's actually advantageous to have our brains as small as possible (and yet maintain the advantages a human brain confers).

It kills women because if it were any larger women wouldn't be able to walk using inverse brachiation (the way gibbons swing through trees, only upside down), but it can't be any smaller without losing brain capacity, since it has to be developed in utero (which is, incidentially, why marsupials are, as a group, as dumb as a box o' rocks).

Also, since the invention of birth control and women's rights (not really possible until we developed the technology needed to let them have fewer kids and not die in childbirth when they did), the smarter the parents, the fewer the children overall.

For one case in point, look at people's frequently simple-minded reactions to America's current economic situation.

It's not their fault, however. We didn't evolve to deal with such numerically complex problems, and a number of brain heuristics (detailed in several books by cognitive psychologists) actively skew our understanding, just to make things even worse.

For one example, take Baye's Law (named after the Reverend Bayes who first formulated it), whose mathematics I certainly don't understand, except that it lets scientists and engineers evaluate probability when two different probabilities apply. Instead of merging the probabilities proportionately, most people just throw one out, in a form of target fixation.

To really understand current economics and how national policy has to juggle issues like debt, unemployment, immigration, public health, city planning, military spending/technology/deployment, fisheries management, agricultural subsidies and more, most people go into what programmers might call a stack overflow condition. So they just focus on one or two things.

Currently the Republican mantra is debt--as if that's the most important problem we face (it's not, huge as it is--unemployment is bigger, and overpopulation/permanent natural resource degradation even worse). It's easy to describe in bumper sticker slogans, and it helps with the real agenda of the GOP's paymasters: to stop government regulation in every way possible, thus by focusing exclusively on debt/spending, they can defund government agencies that try to limit corporate rapacity. But that's not what's said. What's said tries to pretend that the federal government of the biggest economy in the history of the planet can be governed by the same principles and platitudes used by individual familes.

This really reflects not just the scientific illiteracy of the citizenry, but the inability of most citizens to admit that they don't understand it. Instead they turn to bumper sticker slogans used like tribal chants (and I have seen the Democrats go tribal on us as well--particularly with illegal immigration), because it's emasculating to admit that you don't, can't, and never will understand how the U.S. federal government manages its spending and priorities.

And the unwillingness to admit one is over one's head leads to mental shortcuts and not doing the hard work needed to get anything like a handle on the situation. It also leads to anti-intellectualism, since intellectuals/scientists keep saying complicated things. Better to deny such people's worth than to accept their conclusions, which are so unpalatable, and getting moreso every day.

Cassandra was cursed by a god to always predict correctly--and never to be believed.

Scientists can relate.

For example, I live in a condo complex with most buildings built over garages. It doesn't meet modern earthquake retrofit standards. Yet we just lost a vote to spend about $9K a unit to apply a proper retrofit.

The retrofit was opposed fiercely by a group of Russian immigrant families who believed it was all a scam--that our Board was in cahoots with the engineering firm. Some of them are even engineers (though not in structural engineering or earthquake retrofits). But they still opposed it. We're 10 miles from the Hayward Fault, which has generated a 6.8+ earthquake every 140 years or so for many thousands of years. It's now been 143 years since the last one.

And they voted in a bloc against the retrofit, and went door to door around the complex lobbying people, telling their conspiracy theories and being 100% certain that their layman's understanding of the probabilities and dangers was far more valid than a bunch structural engineers with decades of experience in earthquake retrofits.

So we're not just up against scientific illiteracy. We're up against the average person's belief that their know better than the experts.

Same goes for the insanity of parents preventing their kids from being vaccinated, even though the claim that it leads to autism is complete nonsense. And these parents--some with liberal arts BAs--will sit there and say, smugly, "I know what I know."

Only they don't. And they can't learn what they don't know because they deny that they don't know it.

People love science and scientists until they hear things they don't want to hear. Then we get self-confident dim bulbs like Governor Perry ascribing the 98% agreement of climate scientists on human-caused global warming to a vast international conspiracy of those scientists to get grant money.

And a majority of Americans appear to believe Perry...

How are Tea Party types like the Japanese military in WWII??

2011-08-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

I've been reading comment threads on op-ed pieces in the Washington Post. Many comments, coming from the far right wing of the right wing, remind me of something I read in John Toland's "The Rising Sun," the definitive account of the Japanese in WWII.

After Hiroshima got nuked, a majority of the high command rationalized it away and refused to surrender. And then, even after Nagasaki got nuked as well, when they realized the jig was up, not only did many stiff oppose surrendering--a group of junior officers led a coup attempt to prevent the Emperor's surrender message from being broadcast.

All of these people considered themselves the truest of the true patriots....people who loved their country and their Emperor more than life itself (when the coup failed, a number of them committed hara-kiri).

Yet this group of people betrayed Japan when they led it down the warpath, betrayed it when they attacked America, betrayed it when they tried to prevent Japan from surrendering--and came horrifyingly close to preventing Japan from surrendering (i.e. compromising in any way), even after Nagasaki.

Nations can be betrayed by intentional traitors, selling our their country for money or an ideology that leads them to hate their own country. I have known left wingers like that, to be honest.

But nations can also be betrayed by people who would never dream of intentionally betraying their country...who see themselves as patriotic to their bones...and who see all who disagree with them as traitors.

And one of the great ironies of history is how often such people have brought their nations to ruin.

During the Vietnam war, there were Americans who watched and read the forced confessions of POWs and told the North Vietnamese when the POWs included coded messages Americans would recognize but North Vietnamese would not.

Those were intentional traitors, and they were responsible for suffering and even deaths of Americans.

Then you have JFK, Johnson, Nixon and McNamara--patriots all. Yet in the scathing military analysis of the Vietnam war conducted at the behest of the American College of War by Col. Harry G. Summers, "On Strategy," Summers shows how profoundly those patriotic leaders harmed America--and killed vastly more Americans--than the handful of intentional leftist traitors accomplished.

So yes, there are leftists who really, truly hate America, and who do what they can to harm it. There are also people who may or may not hate America, but who certainly place their ethnic group's advancement far over that of our nation.

But when it comes to harming America, they're pikers compared to today's equivalent of Johnson/Nixon/McNamara; namely Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.

The judgment of history is already coming in. America's hundreds of presidential historians are polled every few years on how they'd rank America's presidents. The last one, conducted in 2010, ranked Bush II 6th from the bottom (Obama ranked 15, well below Eisenhower & FDR, but 2 up from Reagan).

[fill in name of Democratic president/candidate] is weak, indecisive, phony

2011-08-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post's "Right Turn" columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote an entry comparing President Obama invidiously with Steve Jobs. I wrote this:

Assume, for the sake of argument, that Jennifer Rubin's regurgitation of Republican National Committee talking points is entirely correct. And that, with the benefit of the RNC's hindsight, we got to vote in the 2008 presidential election again.

I'd still have voted for Barack Obama.

Because in an American presidential election, you aren't voting for or against someone. You're choosing between 2 pairs of people.

And that choice was & still is far from difficult, since 1 of 1 of the pairs was Sarah Palin, AKA Governor Quitter--since, to be fair, I'd have hindsight about all 4 of them, right? To have 1 of the oldest presidents in American history with Palin a heartbeat away dwarfs the RNC/Rubin's talking points.

You don't have to a liberal to reach that conclusion. Palin is, was, & always will be, intellectually, temperamentally, and experientially unqualified to be President. Biden is. Obama is. And McCain was, I thought, until he chose Palin as his running mate.

American presidential historians--100s of them, both liberal & conservative--are polled periodically on how they'd rank the presidents. Last time was last year, & in it President Obama ranked 15, Reagan 17, & Bush II was 6th from the bottom. There were both Republican & Democratic presidents who ranked higher than Obama & lower than Bush II.

And if the historians were the cabal of Libruls that the Republicans would have us believe, Obama would have ranked higher & Reagan lower.

What this article shows is yet another example of how Republicans respect leaders with self confidence--as Bush II, McCain, Palin & current lead contender Rick Perry all have in spades.

But I thought it was Republicans who decried the Self Esteem movement--who said self esteem should be the product of achievement, not esteem for its own sake.

Frankly, I'd rather have a weak leader who understands the job than a bold, decisive halfwit. Naming no names...

BTW have you noticed that the Republicans ALWAYS describe every Democratic presidential candidate as weak & indecisive? And then they trot out their Man on a Horse, Perry being the latest--a man with the rugged good looks & breadth of intellect of Warren G. Harding.

Obama the weak & indecisive...the only president to achieve any kind of healthcare reform, no matter how mild, in 100 years. The man on whose watch we nailed the guy Bush II lets slip through his fingers. The guy who authorized the Navy to take out the trio of Somali pirates who were holding an American ship captain hostage. The man who has authorized vastly more UAV attacks--& successful ones--on our enemies than Bush dreamed of. The man who deported far more illegals than Bush did. And who helped take down Qaddafi without any American casualties.

The Left's main complaint is that he's too conservative. Takes chutzpah for Rubin to diss that.

He's not the best prez I could imagine. Just head and shoulders above his Republican alternatives, past and present.

-------------------------------------------

I should add that he showed effective leadership in the Libyan actions, which no Republican pol will give him credit for.

You can't prove humans change climate if you can't measure it

2011-08-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

One prong of the Republican war on science was the Bush administration drastically reducing the budget for Earth-watching satellites. The ones up now are living on borrowed time and not being replaced, except for a minimal complement, which won't be watching climate change--just here-and-now weather.

So even if we put up new ones, say, a decade from now, the continuity of observation will be broken.

It may happen that the late 20th century was in some ways the pinnacle of human scientific observation.

Think about this the next time you hear the science deniers ranting.

Evolution

2011-08-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

December 2010 Gallup poll, accurate to plus/minus 4%:

God created humans in present form             40%
Humans evolved with God guiding                  38%
   subtotal: 78%
Humans evolved, no involvement by God   16%
     subtotal going the other way: 54%

This came up yesterday after leading GOP presidential contender Rick Perry told Christian Fundamentalists he was one of them, using the coded language fundamentalists employ to communicate in public without everyone else quite realizing what's going on.

President Bush II did the same thing BTW. The difference being that Bush II probably didn't mean it as sincerely as Governor Perry does.

Egypt's nascent democracy is threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood. Our established democracy is threatened by people who are working just as hard here to turn back the clock.

But the use of coded language gives the fundamentalist politicians "plausible deniability." So we have to hope reporters nail down Governor Perry and don't let him get away with communicating in code.

Here the code is saying that "evolution has problems" and is "just a theory" and Creationism is another theory, so both should be taught in science classes, enabling students to think for themselves.

Exactly as modern astronomy is just a theory, and the terracentric universe with Ptolomeian epicycles should be taught alongside it.

Obama has failed!....Really?

2011-08-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

One Republican leitmotif, hammered on day in, day out, is that President Obama's policies have failed.

This ploy uses the assumed comparison.

That is, "failed" compared to what? Compared to the boom years of the Roaring 90s, sure, OK.

But that wasn't a possibility. The fact is that unless you state what you think a politician has failed compared to, you're blowin' smoke.

It's possible that Obama has failed to make America an economic paradise. However, it's also possible that despite our persistent unemployment, America is doing vastly better than it would have otherwise. What critiques of Obama's handling of the economy never prove is just what the alternative that he's being compared to, and how it would have been better.

Here's one way of looking at it: what is considered the safest place to put your cash today, worldwide?

US. Treasury bonds, that's what. S&P notwithstanding.

But also, it's not like Obama is our reigning monarch, or even prime minister. Even when he presided over a Democratic House and Senate, he still couldn't get his way without severe compromises, because Senate rules let a tiny minority stop everything unless your side can muster not a majority but a supermajority, and even if you have a nominal supermajority, one or two defections of senators in opposite-color states may well vote to save their hides instead of supporting their side.

And if Obama doesn't have full control of the levers of American government, he has even less control over the world economy we're inextricably bound to. So economic tumult abroad--such as the Arab spring sending gas prices soaring, sending ripples through the American economy every whichway--is entirely out of the American president's control.

This is why NYtimes columnist Tom Friendman is now arguing for a prime minister form of government for America--because ruthless exploitation of our system of checks and balances, starting with exquisite gerrymandering of congressional districts, has meant that neither party can be held fully responsible for what happens on its watch. It can always claim obstructionism by the other side, and it's often right. Both ways.

In a PM system one side can take us down the wrong direction rapidly, but at least you will know who did it--there's no evading the buck when it stops at the PM's desk. And if we don't like it we voters can then throw the bums out,.

Now both sides always have plausible deniability.

Just as the Second Amendment made sense for muskets but not for shoulder-mounted stingers and AK-47s, it may be that the beautiful mechanisms the Founding Fathers constructed don't work as intended any more, and will have to be drastically modified.

The irony is that it's the people who claim to be following the Founding Fathers' words and intentions most strictly who have brought us to this pass--who have done the most to break the very system they say they revere, not by the specifics of the policies they advocate, but by their unrestrained exploitation of every trick in the rulebook to effectively overturn the results of the last election.

And the measure of a democracy is what the side that loses the election does after that loss. Obama is the president, not Grover Norquist. Not until 2012 at least.

Let's get immigrants who actually like this country. Just a thought.

2011-08-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

[based on reportage in the LA times]

...and then there's the June soccer match at the Rose Bowl, between the US and Mexico. Both teams played with good sportsmanship. But the 80% Mexican (many with American citizenship, surely) spectators loudly booed the playing of the American national anthem, loudly booed the American team whenever it had the ball, and chanted obscenities at the American point guard. And then the award ceremony--at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena--was conducted in Spanish, just to complete the picture.

This was no fluke. A large Mexican crowd was even more boorish at the 2005 World Cup qualifier with America. In fact, there they even threw containers filled with urine at the American players.

I just wish all the enthusiastic advocates for illegal immigration had been there. Though no doubt they'd have figured out a way to blame America and Americans for it, now that I think about it.

It's hard to imagine how American attendees at these matches would have left with more warmth in their hearts for our southern neighbors.

Jobs and immigration

2011-08-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

Right now at least 14 million Americans are out of work, and at least half of them have been looking for over a year without landing anything. Countless more are underemployed--working below their training or at part time jobs when they want full time ones.

So in this environment, why are we allowing any immigration at all, except in job categories where we can't find enough Americans--mostly in areas requiring high levels of training/talent? I can see allowing such people to immigrate, and bring with them spouses and children they're willing to support. But why are we allowing any other kind of immigration until those 14 million Americans are employed (minus the ones who are total loo-hoosers)?

Can he get reelected?

2011-08-18T19:42:00.001-07:00

President Obama's like the guy who goes camping in Alaska with another guy, and one night a grizzly bear sticks his head in the tent, roaring, and Obama starts putting on his tennies, and the other say sez "Why are you putting your shoes on? You can't outrun a grizzly." And Obama replies "I don't have to outrun the grizzly..."

In polls, Obama loses to a generic Republican opponent. But he wins compared to every actual candidate.

And remember the propensity of Americans who are independent (36& of the electorate) to vote for a candidate of the opposite party to whichever one controls the legislature.

Honestly, at this point none of President Obama's initiatives matter, because we all know the Republicans will nix every single one of them. All he can do is stop the Republicans from handing us the fiscal and national disaster that they inflicted on us last time around.

So what matters is his veto pen. And even if he wields that half-heartedly, it will beat a GOP president's rubber stamp of anything a GOP legislature does.

And the president during the next term will almost certainly be nominating one or more Supreme Court justices, replacing one of the remaining aging liberals. The conservatives are mostly younger and healthier.
And given the one-sidedly corporatist tilt of the court, that will matter to independents.

Lastly, the association of American presidential scholars rated Obama #15 of all presidents--below Republicans like Eisenhower, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, but vastly above Bush II (6th from the absolute bottom) and slightly above Reagan (#17). So we could do a lot worse--like Governor Perry, whose handsome, presidential facade and interaural vacuum remind one of Warren G. Harding...or Governor Romney, who never met a principle he wouldn't abandon for electoral advantage....

Why no bankers in jail?

2011-08-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

In the savings & loan industry crisis there were around 1,000 felony convictions. In the mortgage/banking meltdown--40 times the size of the S&L crisis--there have been 10 felony convictions.

After 9/11, much of the FBI was diverted into terrorist pursuit--but the white collar crime resources weren't replaced, gutting the agency's white collar crime enforcement.

And then the Republicans replaced the staff of the regulatory agencies with antiregulation people.

Apparently they're still there.

--William Black, associate professor of law, Kansas U. or some such.

Bank robbers like business certainty--the certainty that no cops will be around to bother them as they're robbing banks. And when the bank robbers are the banks' executives? They crave the certainty of knowing no pesky regulators will be coming after them.

Might makes right (wing).

Immigration!

2011-08-18T15:49:00.001-07:00

BOTH parties lie constantly about immigration--especially illegal--for electoral advantage. Republicans exaggerate crimes in the Southwest to fire up their Anglo working class base; Democrats accuse anyone who objects to unlimited immigration and amnesty as racists on behalf of American voters whose primary self-identification is still as Mexican, to get them to see all Republicans as The Enemy.

Neither party has the best interests of America at heart--at least where immigration is concerned.

If they did they'd approve the following measures:

1. Reform legal immigration laws so instead of "family reunification" of whole clans being the source of 2/3 of all legal immigration, only immediate family members are considered--and when someone applies for a visa, he/she has to list everyone he/she plans to apply to bring over eventually/ then consider the applicant according to how much they can contribute to the US--and require them to prove that they can care entirely for any dependents they want to bring over.

2. Make it easy for people with highly desirable skills to immigrate here (especially people just graduating from American universities), regardless of race/ethicity.

3. Close immigration to people whose work category has higher than 8% unemployment of citizens. That means closing immigration to all unskilled laborers / people without the equivalent of an American high school diploma, since unemployment in that category is probably over 25% right now.

4. Don't grant citizenship to anyone who can't understand a ballot written in English; and print ballots only in English, because polyglot ballots foster Balkanization and ethnocentric demagoguery, and anyone who can't understand ballot-level English isn't qualified to vote in an American election, since all their information will then only come from non-mainstream sources--mostly ethnic demagogues.

5. Require all immigrants to demonstrate an understanding of the differences between their home country's values and ours, and to explicitly accept adopting our values--ruling out, for example, things like honor kiling and female genital mutilation, or murdering people who insult your culture's religious figures.

6. Mandate e-Verity nationally, so only people who are here legally can work legally.

7. Develop a biometric ID database system to catch those who are working here illegally. We now have the technology to implement this at the level of all social services providers and should do so.

8. Make illegal re-entry after 1 expulsion a felony.

9. Finance a system of free Planned Parenthood clinics throughout Latin America, including abortion on demand without questions wherever abortion is legal, and predicate immigration from any country on that country implementing effective population control measures (Mexico's population exploded from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000--providing the primary cause of illegal immigration here).

www.blogzu.blogspot.com

Hit's the rich wot gits the grayvy, hit's the powr wat gits the blayme...

2011-08-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

If you tell hardcore Republicans that America has about the same income distribution as China, even though most Americans--Republicans included--wrongly believe it's much more evenly distributed (show them a pie chart of Sweden and they'll say that's ours), many Republicans will still say say it's a good thing. That the extraordinarily low taxes on the most extraordinarily wealthy make America a business innovation magnet.

The irony is that while most Republicans see themselves as supremely solid, feet-on-the-ground people, this belief is so idealistic it borders on believing in the Easter Bunny.

True, it isn't fair to say "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Google looks like it got its money the right way as far as I can tell. Many other got there through utter ruthlessness--Microsoft comes to mind--but at least Microsoft makes goods and services, and they mostly work, and the world has arguably benefited from having a common small computing standard, even if it's far from ideal.

But many American fortunes came from chicanery--from insourcing profit and outsourcing environmental costs; from subverting Wall Street, whose purpose had been providing financing for makers of goods and services, whose purpose is now money manipulation; from the capture of government, such that not one banker is now in jail for systematically defrauding both their own stockholders & innumerable home buyers (even though Republicans put the entire blame on home buyers), and such that corporate lobbyists have actually written many of the bills passed by Republican legislatures; by many businesses getting much or most of their profit from corporate welfare, from amazing subsidies for certain crops to tricking local voters to pay for sports stadiums while the sports franchise pockets the profits--profits that only appeared because of the heavy subsidization; from phony offshoring of corporate headquarters to a mailbox in Switzerland; from, as Warren Buffet has complained, multibillionaires like him paying far lower taxes than most wage earners; from vast military boondoggles for useless weapons systems while soldiers in the field lack body armor and properly armored vehicles--with consequent loss of life and limb.

I could go on. There are innumerable ways for clever, well-financed tricksters to pick the public's pocket.

Yet all the average Republican can see is the penny-ante frauds of black welfare queens getting thousands of dollars of public money while the billionaires steal billions. And heaven help you if your tax return is off by $10, while literally hundreds of billions are lost every year to complex tax avoidance schemes, such that some corporations don't even pay taxes.

But welfare queens don't look like Republicans, while the representatives of the ultrarich (otherwise known as Republican politicians) do. Except when they're soliciting congressional pages, or other guys in bathrooms, etc. etc. (not that a fair number of Democrats haven't also been caught with their pants down--but at least they don't brag constantly about their superior personal morality).

So I get the impression that the average Republican voter isn't voting his principles, which rarely involve supporting the kind of chicanery few of them are themselves guilty of. They're voting their tribe--and not looking behind the nice suits and red ties. Trusting to the point of gullibility of their own leaders, which holding every Democratic politician to the standards they ought to also be applying to their own pols--and don't.

Vaccinations

2011-08-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

2% of California parents refuse to get vaccinations for their children, because they're fools--specifically innumerate fools who are willing to kill their children in order to "protect" them. What's extra ironic is that the highest level of non-vaccinating households is in Marin County, at 7%. Marin County combines high average incomes with no universities that I know of within the county's boundaries.

Given the overpopulation problem, the world can spare a few fools. After all, as Jack London said, "Never stand between a fool and his folly." But it's outrageous that our state governments allow these fools to endanger everyone else's children. Unvaccinated kids shouldn't be allowed in public schools. They should be required to homeschool their kids.

However, homeschooled kids should be tested every semester, and those who don't pass the tests should be required to go to public school and to be vaccinated beforehand.

I'm amazed that this is even being debated. We have laws against child abuse, don't we?

Here is where right wingers and left wingers agree--they say "our rights trump our responsibilities." Apparently the concept of the social contract is foreign to them (except for the perks). This is one of many ways in which ideologues act like spoiled children.

Would you get in an airliner that had unvaccinated passengers whose air you'd have to share?

Now the GOP has a manly man for a candidate

2011-08-15T00:45:00.000-07:00

"An ah'll promise yew this: ah'll work every day tew try to make Washington DC as inconsequenshull in your life as ah cayun."

--Texas governor / now presidential candidate Rick Perry

Yes, we need an inconsequential federal government. All those useless meat inspectors and FBI agents and air traffic controllers and white collar crimes prosecutors and park rangers....

I'm not defending our immensely useless "war on drugs" establishment (and I'm saying this as someone who's extremely reluctant even to take an aspirin), or our bloated military ever ready to take on the Soviet Union...

But Rick Parry wasn't drawing distinctions. He was talking as a Son of the Old South--the folks who secretly still loathe Abraham Lincoln.

Johnny Reb lives on.

President Obama has done no good--compared to perfection

2011-08-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

My extra-Republican accountant (and spouse) once observed that presidents are given more credit and more blams than they deserve for the course of the American economy.

That's because economic tides are caused by many influences--people and events--and presidents of the United States in particular get treated as if they get to put their ideas into action as if they're the prime ministers of parliamentary governments--or monarchs.

Thus the Republican presidential candidate mantra is that "President Obama inherited a bad situation and made it worse--and his party controlled both houses of Congress and the Executive, so he has no excuse."

Executive summary: this combines minimizing your side's misdeeds with a passive construction, while vilifying the other side through implicit comparison of the present situation with an idealized alternative that couldn't possibly have happened. In short, demagoguery depending on triggering people's tribal emotions so strongly that their reasoning ability--if it was there in the first place--gets disengaged.

The details:

Well, he certainly inherited a "bad situation"--but all Republican presidential candidates invariably fail to mention that this "bad situation" was created by the American government enacting the Republican Party's economic platform, and pursuing that course for eight very long years, and successfully blocking most subsequent Democratic efforts to change that course (except for the diluted health care reform package that passed--a notable achievement, to be sure, but more the exception than the rule).

In saying this I'm not exculpating the Democrats' role in helping Fannie Mae provide mortgages for people who shouldn't have gotten them, nor for Democratic pork, nor for the Democrats' role in supporting illegal immigration and its negative economic effects on American unskilled laborers of every race and ethnicity. But the Democrats were bit players in this drama, which mostly stemmed from financial deregulation--both through gutting regulatory laws and starving regulatory agencies of mandate and financing, and through turning a blind eye to the subversion of Wall Street from a source of capital for manufacturers and service industries, into a source of profit for Wall Street insiders through financial manipulation.

The housing crisis would have been confined to the banks holding the bad mortgages, but for the fact that the banks didn't hold the mortgages--they were bundled into packages that were rated AAA by Standard & Poors and the other rating agencies, then sold to investors worldwide, exchanging America's financial reputation for quick profits. This enabled the people who'd created the mortgages to outsource all of the risk to others. In countries that hadn't been deregulated, and hence didn't allow this practice--such as Canada--the housing crisis didn't affect them.

Then there's the "made it worse" part of the Republican mantra.

Says who:? Compared to what? The implication--and believe me, it's only an implication on purpose--is that it's proper to compare what's going on now to the boom years of the 1990s. It's left as an implication because it's ridiculous to make that comparison. That boom was a bubble, created by housing becoming overvalued,with the overvaluation treated as income by innumerable homeowners via second and third mortgages--partly because they could, partly because virtually all gains in real household income since the Reagan Revolution have been confined to millionaires and billionaires.

My own household did this, financing a camping vehicle this way. However, we didn't go overboard and we'd bought our home before the boom and in a highly recession-resistant area, preserving the value of our home. We could sell our home and pay off our first and second mortgages and still have enough to buy a house outright in a cheaper area such as Las Vegas Nevada. We don't plan to and don't need to, and it was mostly dumb luck that we're in this situation--but it means I understand how many people got into a jam with second mortgages.

Ultimately no one knows whether President Obama "made it worse" or "made it better." It's conceivable that his policies and actions prevented a far worse downturn. The fact that the Republican candidates don't even mention this possibilities--as if it's out of the questions--and hence without explaining why his actions didn't prevent a far worse downturn--proves to me that all the Republican candidates are engaged in demagoguery, not serious political discourse.

And the notion that President Obama is a monarch whose Democratic congressional majorities enabled him to do as he pleased depends on the listener understanding nothing about American civics. Especially since Republicans have stated repeatedly that the word "majority" is now defined as "60%," and even when the Democrats had 60% of the Senate, it was a squishy 60%, dependent of a few senators who had reason to fear that that they'd lose their jobs if they didn't succumb to the Republicans' frenzied, nonstop, abundantly--and secretly--financed propaganda campaign. And the congressional Republicans have abused the checks and balances of Senate rules to filibuster 80'% of Democratic legislation and numerous nonpartisan appointments. They have brought the legislative equivalent of total war to the operations of Congress by using legislative rules and practices in ways never contemplated by those who'd formulated such rules.

It amounts to the Republicans unhesitatingly sacrificing the common good of the country for Party advantage. They would say same thing, only swapping in the word "Democrats," except for the fact that Movement Democrats think the Republicans are crazed ideologues who accept America's downfall as unavoidable collateral damage, while Movement Republicans think the Democrats are enemy agents whose actual goal is America's downfall. As to who's right--look over the many fact checks at www.politifact.com and www.factcheck.org--both of which the Republicans consider left wing shills, not because they don't call out Democrats when they make misstatements--which both do all the time--but because they EVER call out any Republicans on misstastements. That is, you're either totally for us or totally against us.

This Total War policy is used to justifiy America being hampered in the short run for the benefit of "job promoting" Republican rule.

One other trick I've noticed concerns the idea of "acceptable debating points."

Meaning, if I bring up signals from Mars received through the fillings in your teeth as a source of political activity, no one's going to debate me. They'll just dismiss me as a loon, and rightly so.

The genius of the Republican propaganda machine is that they've delegitimized not just loony propositions, but also Centrist points like saying "Obama is not a Socialist." I said this to an educated movement Republican I know and he didn't even deign to contradict me,. He just snorted derisively. My saying Obama isn't a Socialist was automatically categorized with talking about Signals from Mars.

It's like the old Polish definition of "Anti-Semite" as "Someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary." Hating Jews was a given--the only discussion possible was to what degree.

The best way to win an argument is to frame the debate so you win before the discussion starts.
Have you quit beating your wife--Yes or No?

Thus today the debate is how much can we cut government spending without raising anything that could be remotely construed as "taxes"--not "What should the federal government do to create jobs?" And they've gotten half the country--and even the Democratic President, apparently--to agree that reducing the federal deficit is the only topic of national debate, with the implicit assumption that the federal government can't do anything whatsoever to create jobs, either by policy or by tax dollars, other than to cut taxes and "get out of the way" --i.e. to do exactly what the Republicans did from 2000 to 2008 that created this mess.

Talk about not learning from your mistakes.

Lastly, the fact that all eight Republican presidential candidates stated that they wouldn't accept any deficit-reducing compromise, no matter how close it came to all the Republican demands, if it also included any kind of tax increase whatsoever, no matter how small, tells me that not one of them is a legitimate alternative to President Obama--especially the two of them (Huntsman and Romney) who know better. The others are fools. These two have now shown that they're knaves.

And I'm really sorry to say that about Huntsman, who is plainly the most desirable Republican candidate from a moderate Republican perspective. I don't feel as bad about Romney, who's the embodiment of the corporate layoff artist played by George Clooney in the movie "Up in the air."

Proportionality

2011-08-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

In Syria, peaceful protests meet violent crackdowns; in the UK, violent protests meet peaceful crackdowns.

Both share a problem with proportionality.

The Syrian and Iranian and other despotic governments often respond to peaceful protests with murder.

But it's no improvement for democratic governments to respond to large-scale protests with ineffectual means, leaving residents and property owners with no protection.

Democracies have extra problems when the protestors belong to a group that has been discriminated against in the past. In the UK the protestors/vandals/looters are mainly black, though no one says so--but it you look at the security camera footage...they're mostly black. So perhaps the UK authorities hold back, terrified of being called racist.

Shopowners losing their life's work to thugs are not comforted by the proposition that this is OK because some of their ancestors might have been slave owners, while some of the thugs' ancestors may have been slaves.

In the case of the Syrian protests, the authorities don't have the slightest problem with murdering protestors--even with torturing them to death--even if they're children. This is monstrous.

It's less monstrous that UK authorities stand by helplessly, refusing to declare martial law and all that that entails, even though they've plainly been unable to maintain law and order. They're also afraid to admit that they're helpless. Instead they issue strongly worded communiques declaring the thugs' behavior is "unacceptable."

This is wordplay. Something is only unacceptable if you won't accept it. Allowing it to go on while you talk means you do find it acceptable, whether you want to admit it or not.

Civilization is the achievement of a profound bargain: the people give the State a monopoly of physical force, while the state agrees to use that force to protect its people. When the state fails to keep up its end of the bargain, it destroys more than shops and burned cars. It breaks the bargain we call civilization.

In the UK the authorities have a moral obligation to establish a modicum of public safety for its law-abiding citizens. This cannot be achieved without making being in public really, really dangerous for vandals and looters. They can't make it safe for both the thugs and the law abiding citizens, and by trying to do so they've only made it safe for the thugs and dangerous for the law abiding citizens.

And promising to hold the thugs to account at some point afterwards is cold comfort to those whose lives have been damaged or even shattered by the thugs. We look to public safety officials for public safety--not for eventual retribution. That's not the bargain.

You declare martial law when the force being applied against society overmatches the force normal local authorities have at their disposal. That's when you call in the army--not to do policing, but to wage war with whatever level force is needed--including deadly--to make the streets safe for citizens.

Thus far the United Kingdom has communicated the clear message that they hold the thug's lives and safety in higher esteem than that of their prey.

And whether the deadly shooting of a black UK citizen that precipitated this rioting was justified or not is not relevant to whether the state has an obligation to protect its citizens from vandals and looters.

Leftists will say that I'm saying property is more valuable than life. This stems from missing the forest for the trees. The question is, can I walk down a street in safety? Can I run a shop in safety? And if I can't, can I get a government that will guarantee these fundamental citizens' rights?:

Solomon's Choice

2011-08-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

The Republican Party has rewritten the biblical story about Solomon and the two women who claimed the same baby. In the original story, Solomon proposes to cut the baby in half. One woman agrees, so he knows the other one is the real mother and gives the baby to her.

But that's so old fashioned. In the Republican rewrite, Solomon gives the baby to the woman who's willing to have it cut in half, because he respects her thuggishness and knows the other woman isn't man enough to deserve the baby. So to speak.

I look forward to the Republican's rewriting of other Bible stories.

Of course they've already revised Christ's tale of the Good Samaritan....

President Obama needs to watch "Full Metal Jacket"

2011-08-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

The lesson of Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam move "Full Metal Jacket" is that the leader you follow in a jam isn't the nicest guy around--it's the ill-mannered jerk you think can save your hide.

Of course the problem here is that the ill-mannered jerk is the Congressional Republicans whose aim is to lead us over a cliff. But on a primal tribal level they seem to be strong, and the Prez seems to be weak--and people follow the strong, especially in an emergency.

When Obama was running for the presidency, I described him as imagining the job to be "Social Worker in Chief" while McCain saw it as "Wing Leader in Chief." I don't know what in Obama's character leads him to reject information about human nature that he must know is true on some level, even if he wishes it weren't.

But his efforts to compromise have met with exactly the same success as I had on my first substitute teaching stint, when I told the kids they could address me by my first name. I wish Obama had had my experience with being nice to people who only saw my niceness as weakness--nothing more or less.

I'll still vote for him, since I have no wish to be led over a cliff. But I have no confidence that the American people will "get" the nuances involved--especially since people's tendency to opt for a Tough Guy as their leader increases in proportion to the degree to which they believe they're in a crisis.

I listened to Rush Limbaugh for a painful length of time this morning (more than 10 seconds), and he didn't talk about President Obama resentfully or angrily or fearfully--he talked about Obama with contempt, with ridicule, with disdain. It was sad that a worm like Limbaugh could come to feel this way. He'll hate Obama no matter what Obama says or does. I just wish the hate was tinged with fear and grudging respect.

A plurality of Americans now call themselves "Conservative"

2011-08-06T23:11:00.000-07:00

That's the Gallup Poll's conclusion:

"U.S. Political Ideology Stable With Conservatives Leading

August 1, 2011

Forty-one percent of Americans thus far in 2011 self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate and 21% as liberal, continuing a slight advantage for conservatism seen since 2009. Many more Republicans call themselves conservative (71%) than Democrats call themselves liberal (38%)."

Of course this trend must be considered in the context of the Right's relentless, abundantly financed propaganda campaign. The Left tries to do its own propaganda campaign, and much of it is just as unfair as the Right's, but their bullhorn is microscopic compared to the Right's.

Now the Right counters that the mainstream media--the New York Times and most other major newspapers, and the major broadcast networks are all "biased," spinning the news leftward because most mainstream journalists are registered Democrats.

However, Democrat or not, the owners of the mainstream media are not Democrats. They're corporatists out for profit, not to promote leftist ideology. So while you can find bits and pieces of leftist bias in the mainstream media, by and large the bias is for whatever promotes profit--spicy scandal, puppies in wells, violent crime etc. That's not to say that these outlets don't editorialize from an often left-of-center viewpoint. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with these outlets' reportage.

Moreover, the Right maintains a constant campaign to attack any mainstream outlet that says anything they don't like, including barrages of letters and calls, and attempts to mount advertiser boycotts. Mainstream journalists talk about these behind-the-scenes campaigns with shock and awe when they've been the target of them.

So the rightward tilt of the American populace didn't happen because all these people are reading the Constitution and all the bills in Congress and all the Presidential decrees and Supreme Court decisions. They are the product of the slickest propaganda the world has yet seen, and if you watch Fox--as I do regularly--you'll see it in action.

But that rightward tilt still makes liberals plus moderates a substantial majority of 57% of the public.

This means that a conservative candidate's best strategy is to lean far rightward, inflame the base, and do everything possible to discourage moderates and liberals from voting, while a moderate-to-liberal candidates's only hope is to forge a moderate-liberal coalition, plus conservatives who are intelligent enough to realize that the Republican Party isn't conservative in fact, and hasn't been since Bush I left office.

jobs growth is not keeping up with population growth

2011-08-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

OK--jobs growth isn't keeping up with population growth.

That's what the pundits are saying, Right and Left.

But who said "population growth" is a given? American citizens aren't reproducing all that fast. Most of our population growth is coming from immigration.

So limit immigration to jobs growth minus citizen population growth.

Duh.

And while we're at it, limit the immigration we do permit to people who can actually contribute to America and dependents those people can support fully. So with an unskilled laborer unemployment rate of 1 in 5, don't admit any unskilled laborers, and use e-Verify to keep unskilled laborers already here without America's permission from taking American jobs.

Why is it that the pundits won't discuss the obvious?

a couple of thoughts

2011-08-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

I've been reading right wing comments on various articles about the debt limit crisis, the compromise that temporarily allayed it, and the S&P downgrade.

I'm far from defending President Obama's every move, but the virulent hatred and delegitimization I see expressed routinely against him and the federal government in general lead me to realize that another name for the average Tea Party guy could be "Johnny Reb."

Right wingers justify this by saying the Left did it to Bush II. Lefties certainly expressed powerful dislike for him, and delegitimization for his victory by Supreme Court fiat in 2000. However the difference is shown in the Left's acceptance of his victory in 2004, in which he certainly won the vote, even if you grant the level of vote suppression that some say went on. Also, no one claimed Bush wasn't an American citizen. That takes it to a whole new level.

-------------------------

Second thought: If you ask an American--Left or Right--whether they'd prefer the government of Iran to be "liberal" or "conservative" without them getting any further description of that government, wouldn't nearly everyone say "liberal?" How about Russia? Burma? China? Zimbabwe? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iraq?

So why would American conservatives wish that these countries would have a different kind of government than what they wish for us?

-------------------------

Third thought: I get the impression that the average Tea Party type person is terrified. They keep warning us not to do anything that might annoy the richest people in American, for fear that these ultrarich folks might let fewer crumbs dribble off their table onto the ground for us to scramble around trying to pick up.

They seem to worship these ultrarich people the same way that folks in primitive countries might worship the god of the local volcano--less out of love than out of fear, out of a desire to propitiate this cruel and capricious deity.

I wonder if they have the slightest idea what these ultrarich think of them and of what that deserve...how the ultrarich plan to repay their loyal followers for continuing to elect people who will fight to protect the perks of the ultrarich, no matter how much the rest of us have to sacrifice to do so.

Sociological research of the attitudes of the ultrarich indicated that they believe every cent of their wealth is deservedly theirs, just as your relative poverty is deservedly yours. They feel no sense of common purpose with Americans in general. Their children don't fight in our armed forces. And they feel no gratitude for those who do. They are profoundly disconnected from the America of the rest of us.

But their sock puppets in government mimic the appearance and speech patterns of the people you might see in church on Sunday, and if someone looks like someone you trust, well, you should trust them too, right?

---------------------------------------------------------

Fourth thought: Shouldn't "conservative" mean "someone who conserves?" Conservative Supreme Court Justice (and Republican appointee and former Republican legislator) Sandra Day O'Connor said "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."

That means she thought we shouldn't interpret it in a way that destroys us.

Yet today's conservative House seems to think that the Constitution is just that. How is that "conservative" in any way--to consider "compromise" a dirty word?

--------------------------------------------

The "supreme ruler" of Iran, Ayatollah Khameni, has said that he will never compromise in the slightest about anything, regardless of pressure or threats. And he has been true to this statement since day 1 of his long reign.

Of all the world's rulers, he's the one who most resembles the Congressional Republicans in this regard.

Think about it.

--------------------------------------

And when you speak with Billionairians, would you ask them how hard it was to give up Christianity for this new religion?

Leadership

2011-08-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

Speaking as a moderate Republican--that is, as a Democrat, since the GOP has declared moderate Republicans like me (and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Abraham Lincoln etc.) personae non grata in the GOP (which now stands for Greed Over Principles I guess)--I agree that President Obama should have shown more leadership.

So I turned to the dozen people running for the GOP presidential nomination to see what sort of leadership they afforded in this national crisis of choice.

Ooops. All but Jon Hunstman were MIA throughout the crisis, weren't they? And Huntsman's chances of nomination are zilch, since he's the closest thing to a moderate who's in the running.

So while President Obama could have shown more leadership, he showed some--and the GOP candidates (other than Huntsman)...none.

And don't tell me Romney did. He was like Russia declaring war on Japan after it was all over except for grabbing Manchuria and the Kurils. Now there's a man of, um, flexible principles, always eager to run to the front of the parade to pretend he's leading it.

The last national poll of hundreds of presidential historians ranked President Obama at #15--well below a number of Republicans as well as Democrats, so you can't accuse them of all being Libruls (Reagan came in at #17 BTW).

And the last Republican Prez, Bush II? He polled 6 from the bottom. He was quite the leader, though. However, when strong leadership isn't much good when it's combined with a mediocre intelligence and being proudly ignorant of macroeconomics, world affairs, and judging people (remember him "looking into Putin's soul"?).

You don't have someone like that in the race, but don't worry--Rick Parry, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman might run and provide more of that magic combo of ambition+mediocrity. Until then, you've just got mediocrity free of complications.

Except for Huntsman.

Good luck with getting him nominated by today's GOP.

The Republicans have proven that a balanced budget amendment is a terrible idea

2011-08-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

It would make sense to support a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as long as it had a provision for overriding it in an emergency, except for one thing: the Republican Party of today has proven that its congressmen can't be trusted to recognize an emergency that would require overriding it.

Or they might, but then they'd use the emergency as a hostage to forcing the majority to enact other legislation that a majority of Americans would oppose.

So a balanced-budget amendment is really a minority-rule amendment--especially since Republicans are considerably less inclined to compromise on legislation than Democrats are (as polls show is true of GOP rank and file as well).

Minority rule represents the death of democracy--the overthrow of its most central principle.

But it's easy to understand why Republicans might give up their belief in democracy, because a minority of Americans are Republicans--even when you add in the 45% of Independents who consistently vote Republilcan. A recent Gallup poll has the difference at 74 million people who usually vote GOP vs. 87 million who usually vote Demo. When they vote. More about that later.

So the only way Republicans can win is through the various minority-rule tricks you see them pulling all the time in the U.S. Senate, through whipping its own voters into a frenzy that guarantees turnout...and, less talked about, from doing every single thing in their power to prevent Democrats from voting.

That's why current the GOP is in a vote suppression campaign across all the states it controls, comprising laws ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud--based on no evidence whatsoever of actual voting fraud going on by more than a single-digit number of people in any given state. They're setting voter ID requirements aimed at preventing college students and poor blacks from voting, along with things like reducing advance voting provisions so people who work long hours won't be able to come in to vote, and even reducing polling places in Democratic areas. But since this campaign isn't going on at a national level, and is being done on the down low, it hasn't captured the attention of the national media, who are busy trying to find out where that lady who got away with murdering her daughter is.

And in general every law and rule that makes it impossible to pass a law unless a supermajority votes for it is a piece of minority rule. California state legislature Republicans have used our 2/3 majority requirement to pass budget bills for decades to get their way.

I'm not arguing that Democrats' idea of spending is good. I'm arguing that majority rule is good, as long as the minority's rights are recognized. The irony is that whenever Republicans get the slightest majority they treat it as a 100% majority with a mandate to ram through everything they want without taking the minority into any consideration at all.

So the Republicans are minoritarian when they're in the minority, majoritarian when they're in the majority. Again, this shows a profound lack of respect for Democratic principles in favor of reverting to raw tribalism.

And for us true independents, the worst thing about Republican obstructionism when they're in the minority is that it enables the Democratic majority to avoid taking responsibility for their actions--they can always blame what goes wrong on Republican obstructionism, thus getting cover for much of what they do wrong.

Parliamentary government is truly majoritarian, able to enact whatever rules/legislation the majority wishes, but with the minority able to force elections whenever the majority goes afoul of the electorate. I'm not advocating abandoning our two party system necessarily--just pointing out that Paliamentary forms tend to place credit and blame more squarely than we can.

The downside of that form is that you often get two major parties that are nearly evenly divided, thus giving small radical parties disproportionate influence--as seen in Israel for example.

So we're probably better off trying to tweak our system.

Meanwhile, though, don't forget to oppose a balanced budget amendment, despite its emotional appeal. It's really a poison pill with a sugar coating.

Which Americans hate Amercia?

2011-08-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

Many doctrinaire Republicans think Democrats--from Obama on down--hate America. Many doctrinaire Democrats think the same the other way.

In both cases, they're right and they're wrong. Most Americans, Left and Right, say they love their country. The trick is that both identify "their country" as their ideal of this country and those who share that ideal, not this actual country and its actual citizens, warts and all.

2011-08-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

As shown on the Jon Stewart show:

From the December 7, 2010 presidential news conference:

Reporter from the National Journal: How will these negotiations [about extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans] affect negotiations or talks with the Republicans about raising the debt limit? Because it would seem that they have a significant amount of leverage over the White House now, going in.

President: When you say it would seem like they would have a significant amount of leverage over the White House, what do you mean?

National Journal Reporter: In the sense that they'll say essentially we're not gonna not agree with [raising the debt limit] unless the White House is willing to agree to significant spending cuts across the board that will probably go deeper and further than what you're willing to do.

President: Here's my expectation--and I'll take John Boehner at his word--that nobody--Democrat or Republican--is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse.

---------------------------------------------------------

It is irrational to treat the irrational as if they were rational.

There is no such thing as the Tea Party

2011-08-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party doesn't exist. The next ballot you get, will the Tea Party be on it? It won't. In terms of national elections, for most purposes, there's only the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Each has factions. The "Tea Party" is a faction of the Republican Party, nothing more or less.

So it wasn't some "Tea Party" that held a gun to our nation's head and is now creating wave after wave of uncertainly rippling over the business world here and abroad. It was the Republican Party that abandoned its 2010 commitment to focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. It was the Republican Party that damaged our business standing in the world. It's the Republican Party that has adopted economic policies that run counter to what every mainstream economist says. And it's the Republican Party whose populist rhetoric strangely produces actions that line up perfectly with what America's 400 richest individuals--who control more resources than 90% of Americans--want. Isn't that interesting?

Until or unless the Tea Party becomes an actual party, it's just a part of the Republican Party--the part that's running the show.

A comment on the debt crisis that the NY Times censored

2011-08-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Curious about what sorts of comments on the debt crisis the NY Times censors out?

Here's mine, a response to an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman ("The President Surrenders"), excoriating the Republicans for extortion and President Obama for giving in to it:

I generally agree with Dr. Krugman's analysis of the Republicans, but he rarely acknowleges all the ways the Democratic Party has shoved so many Americans into the eager arms of the GOP. That aspect just seems invisible to him.

Illegal immigration is high on that list--pundits in the Northeast seem to have no idea what the impact has been here in the Southwest. In California, illegal immigrants, their children & grandchildren now comprise a majority of all students in our public school system. They're a majority of Los Angeles residents. This isn't multiculturalism--it's the supplanting of one society with another. For people like Dr. Krugman it's unthinkable to even complain about this--since only \"those sorts\" of people would object to their society being replaced by that of another country.

Especially when American blue collar wages have sunk below the poverty line due to competition from illegals. But Dr. Krugman probably doesn't have any blue collar acquaintances...

Nor does it help that in amongst the flagrant lying of the Republicans, nonpartisan factchecking sources like the CBO and factcheck.org also find Democratic politicians shading the truth.

I hate propaganda apparatchiks like Sean Hannity getting to have even the slightest element of truth in their vicious tirades.

And yet they do have a kernel of truth in some of their accusations.

Plus, I wonder whether Dr. Krugman's central thesis here is correct--that President Obama should have stuck to his guns on the debt ceiling. Viscerally I wanted him to do so, but we had 8 years of a visceral prez and that didn't turn out so well.

It may be best for him not to have let the US default on its debts, even though the Republicans' credible threat to do so was treasonous. It may yet be that the voting public will see through the Democrats' many missteps to the fact that the Republican alternative actually endangers the Republic.

Aaron Burr's starting to get real competition.

How cults work

2011-07-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

I once had a friend who joined a cult. That's when I discovered how cults work on people, up close & personal. I mention it now because the Republican Party--and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party--has gained some of the features of a cult:

1. Create an alternate reality--a set of plausible, emotionally persuasive, internally consistent (at some level) narratives. Make it simplistic. All your problems and all your society's problems are due to X (something which isn't your fault). The solution is simple: Y (something which will require no sacrifice from you--or which you can be led to believe requires no sacrifice from you--even if the cult orders you to assign all your worldly possessions to the cult, you'll enjoy shared prosperity of some kind which will amply repay that investment).

2. Isolate cult members from anything and everything that might point out that the emperor has no clothes.
    a. Do so by offering alternate information sources that all agree with the cult's alternate reality.
    b. Get cult members to reject all information from any other source.
c. If possible, get cult member to only socialize with fellow cult members.
    d. If the cult has taken the name of some heterogeneous organization, convince cult members that only the cult's members actually represent that larger organization, and that anyone else is trespassing--and your enemy.
    e. Get cult members to believe that the slightest compromise represents total failure--represents letting the camel's nose in the tent--that anyone who urges compromise is an enemy, even if they say they're fellow cult members.

3. Continuously get cult members to believe they're in danger from the cult's enemies---that is, keep them on a permanent war footing. Do this even when real danger looms--either discount that real danger or ascribe it to a plot by the cult's enemies.

Who does this? In the Muslim world, the Salafists do this, to the extent of believing anyone who speaks against their Prophet should be killed on the spot--and "speaking against" means "not totally supporting the Salafists' interpretation of Islam.

And as I said, here in the America the Republicans--and the immensely wealthy handful of individuals who fund them--have managed to create something like a cult.

Consider:

1. The President of the United States, Grover Norquist, elected in 2010 in a landslide (from a GOP perspective), and holding written oaths of fealty from a majority of Congressional Republicans, preaches that all of America's problems comprise The Government, which steals our money via taxes and spends it on People-Who-Aren't-Us (Mexicans, Kneegrows, Welfare Queens (mostly Kneegrows and Mexicans), Liberal Slackers, Foreigners (both here and abroad via foreign aid).

2. Fox News Channel provides a 24x7 propaganda outlet for the explanations of everything authorized by President Norquist and the Republican Party's paymasters, along with the vast majority of radio talk shows. Fox provides a wide spectrum of Right wing viewpoints, including Libertarian (John Strossel), Religious Right (Mike Huckabee), Tea Party (Hannity), faux Independent Doctrinaire Catholic (O'Reilly), Senate Republican (Van Sustern), Corporatist (Neil Cavuto), etc., but the best indicator is the putatively mainstream news programs put on Fox News every weekday morning, plus the Shepherd and Baier programs. Those are where the far right tilt can be seen without the distractions of hosts' charismatic personalities and particular concerns.

All of these programs regularly seek to delegitimize all other sources of news that don't hew to the far right line. They speak of "Mainstream News" with contempt, consistently, with particular emphasis on CNN being --according to them--a left wing operation. They also dump on self-declared nonpartisan factchecking organizations (especially factcheck.org and politifact.com), as well as polling organizations other than the reliably right wing one, Rasmussen.

The result is that is you seek to bolster a criticism of any right wing assertion by alluding to any putatively nonpartisan source, the average rank and file Republican will tell you that such sources are highly suspect and require you to "prove" your point otherwise. Or they'll just say "I don't believe you."

Also along these lines, they'll frequently refer to "the American People" and "The Constitution" when they actually mean only American citizens who vote Republican (i.e. including the millions of self-declared Independents who just happen to always vote Republican), and only the parts of the Constitution that they like, and as interpreted by far right wingers (who claim of course that they aren't interpreting it at all)--hence the call for a balanced budget amendment. Calling for an amendment means you don't think the Founding Fathers had all the answers; that the Constitution they wrote wasn't the be-all and the end-all, and may even be wrong in places. So much for revering it as a perfect, sacred document.

"Compromise" means "surrender" in Republispeak. When referring to Republicans it means "shameful, totally unacceptable, abject surrender to the Enemy." Hence statements rejecting any and all compromise. Meanwhile, when Republicans claim the Democrats won't compromise, they mean "the Democrats refuse to surrender to us 100% and want 10% of what they'd asked for." So again "compromise" means "abject surrender" here as well, only in the other direction."

Several other factors contribute to Republican success, down on the process level.

One is the fact that Americans are sorting themselves out, moving to communities of like-minded people more and more, making Red and Blue regions Redder and Bluer.

Another is our winner-take all voting system, in which slight majorities confer total victory, making it unnecessary to build heterogeneous coalitions.

And another is our 24 hour news cycle combined with modern imaging technology, enabling newscasts to instill terror in viewers vastly out of proportion to the actual dangers involved, simultaneously blinding them to worse dangers that can't be imaged as successfully.

Thus you can use ultrasounds to make embryos seem sentient, while overpopulation statistics are dry piles of numbers. Every gory crime from anywhere in the nation can get wall to wall coverage for days, terrorizing people, while the rapid depletion of the porous aquifer is invisible and unnoticed (until it's too late).

The result of all this is that it's becoming harder and harder to have a constructive dialog with a Republican.
Often your only hope is to try to get under their umbrella of paranoia--possibly by arguing within the Republiverse to show how their position on something actually runs contrary to their own principles or is too extreme--by their lights--an extension of those principles.

Good luck with that. Trouble, the Republican Ministry of Propaganda is so well-financed voices of reason get drowned out by their giant bullhorn, which makes you look like an oddball outlier compared to what they believe is not just true but axiomatic, and thus not to be questioned.

Starving Somalis

2011-07-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

Few show sufficient interest in understanding why a situation exists before they try to "fix" it. In computer science this is called GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out)--that is, when you apply logical processes to a mis-formulated problem, the results will not be useful, no matter how impeccable the logic.

As far as the famine in Somalia goes, pretty much all of the news coverage has failed to show any interest in why so many Somalis are starving, simply attributing it to drought.

Well, "drought" is our name for an area getting less rain than it had gotten previously. Except "previously" gets measured in decades--that is, a human timeframe, not centuries, the real timeframe for most climate cycles.

The plain fact is that Somalia contains more Somalis than Somalia can feed. That's what you get when the world's population quadruples over the last century or so--and even today is increasing by over 140 people EVERY MINUTE, even after deaths are factored in. And since more industrialized nations now have low birthrates, the statistical increase is vastly higher in the third world.

Moreover, the overpopulation itself contributes to climate change, as people chop down every tree for charcoal/firewood/huts, the topsoil washes off, and the herds of cattle and goats eat everything the locals didn't chop down, all resulting in desertification, which makes local climate drier.

No Somalis would be starving if Somalia's population were at a level Somalia could sustain.

But credible estimates now say that for Earth to sustain its current human population, we'd need 1.4 Earths.
So until you can come up with .4 more Earth to accommodate our race's fecundity, Somalia's only real "solution" is war, famine, disease, and starvation. Feeding Somalis with no thought to containing procreation only kicks the can down the road.

Yet humans continue to think at the level of chimpanzees, only reacting to what's under their noses, with no thought to causes or consequences.

Same goes for the conspiracy theorists who attribute the famine to Western sources (manipulating food prices etc.)--if Somalia weren't grotesquely overpopulated it wouldn't be dependent on foreign aid or theorized manipulations.

Now Western countries and NGOs are rushing to try to bring food to starving Somalis. Even if they do get past the paranoid Islamic fanatics who control much of Somalia, all this aid will do is contribute to future starvation and future aid attempts in an endless cycle, unless we address the root causes.

Business needs Predictability

2011-07-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

Wait, wasn't it the Republican Party saying every day in every way that the #1 task for government was to provide a stable, predictable environment for business so jobs would be created?

And now the selfsame party has taught businesses here and abroad that America's ascendant party is willing to put welching on our debts on the table? Even if they now agreed to pass a clean debt limit bill good until after the next election, considerable damage has already been done.

In business, what is your word worth? What happens to your business if your customers, suppliers and competitors find out that your word isn't solid?

When your neighbor starts waving a gun around, even if he doesn't shoot it--you're going to treat him very, very differently thereafter.

Especially when this crisis came from the Republicans tying our willingness to pay our bills to our incurring future debts.

But even if we cut up all our national credit cards we still have to pay our debts. Even if you disagree about whether we should have incurred those debts, that has nothing to do with paying our debts.

And if the deficit does matter--unlike what the #2 Republican said from 2000-2008--what the GOP has already done is driving interest rates up on government borrowing, because we're seen as less trustworthy now by foreign lenders.

Which will drive the deficit up as even more government income--i.e. the taxes we all pay--is diverted from actually doing things to debt service.

So the Republicans preach economic stability, then sabotage it; they preach deficit reduction, then raise our deficit wholly unnecessarily; they preach conservatism, then act like whirley-eyed bomb-throwing anarchists.

Should I just assume that when the Republican leadership says anything they actually mean its exact opposite?

taxing for the wealthy

2011-07-26T23:25:00.001-07:00

America has a $400B/yr. wealth budget where we give tax breaks for things deemed to be good social policy, including the home mortgage interest deduction; the second is money we don't pay on taxes for retirement money that's been set aside. The top 1% of taxpayers receive 45% of the wealth budget of the USA; the bottom 60% receives 3% of that.
--according to Dr. Thomas Shapiro, professor of law & social policy at
Brandeis University

If we'd had a balanced budget amendment in the 1860s...

2011-07-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

...the South would have won the Civil War. Lincoln went deep into the red to win the war. He also instituted the federal income tax to help pay for the war BTW. So the federal income tax is a Republican idea.

The nation's finances are exactly like your personal finances. Really?

2011-07-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Let's say for the sake of argument that Republicans are right to equate the finances of the United States of America with those of a private citzen's household.

And that's the rationale for trying to amend the Constitution of the United States to force government to balance its budget--because households have to balance their budgets.

If conservatives raise this issue with you, ask them if they're homeowners--and if so, how long it took them to raise enough cash to buy their home for cash.

Because if they bought the home on time, using a mortgage or two, that makes them hypocrites.

Yes, we should generally live within our means. But we also need the leeway to make exceptions--to buy a house, to meet an emergency, to take a second mortgage to finance starting a small business--things like that. To deny the federal government the leeway nearly all of us expect for our own personal finances simply expresses hatred of the government.

That hatred is felt by many white Southerners, still angry over the racial integration forced on them in the 1970s. It's felt by the 5,000 or so American citizens who own the bulk of America's wealth, because as a group they feel entitled to every cent of their income and no obligation to help the poor (this has been shown in polls of the very rich)--and they hate the federal government for trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to regulate their business activities in any way (particularly their penchant for corporate welfare, which is much more lucrative than actually producing and selling goods and services).

And this hatred for the federal government is also felt by many millions of voters who have been successfully propagandized by the Republican Ministry of Propaganda, such that they believe those who prey on them are actually their benefactors, and vice versa. This is easy to do because humans are easy to manipulate about such things. We want to identify with rich people. We don't want to identify with anyone who anyone might think of as a Loser.

So a balanced budget amendment has nothing--zero--to do with forcing government to observe the same rules that your own family or a business has to observe.

It has to do with hating goverment--a hatred the Republican Party leadership has been promoting ever since FDR's New Deal, which gave us Social Security among other things.

Let's call a spade a spade.

Abe speaks truth to power/$$$

2011-07-22T00:52:00.001-07:00

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes…. corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

– Abraham Lincoln

from a comment on a Krugman column, from

John Farrish

Lafayette, LA

July 22nd, 2011

12:53 am

School testing

2011-07-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

To be sure, we need testing. I think we should have a voluntary federal high school graduation exam that produces a federal high school diploma--that states your grade level of achievement in English, math, social studies, biology, and so forth. High schools can give diplomas based on attendance and grades. Then the graduate would be providing two diplomas to colleges and prospective employers. If there's a big disparity between them, and that disparity is statistically significant--that is, across lots of students--it will certainly draw attention to the teacher/school/district that has such a disparity.

Schools that don't buy into the voluntary federal test would be marked, even without financial sanctions from the feds.

That is, what really bothers me is former students with high school diplomas who can't really read or do arithmetic, or figure out a contract or a ballot. This cheats both the student and the college/employer.

Suppose the federal and state government do nothing about teachers/schools/districts where there is a big disparity. I bet the voters in that district will--especially when colleges and employers start telling them their kids' high school diplomas are worthless. That is, the world will revoke those schools' credentials even if the credentialing authorities don't.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

At the same time, a given teacher's students could do well or poorly for reasons outside the teacher's control. The real solution is principals who can and will get rid of poor teachers, based on the teacher's in-person knowledge--and holding principals responsible for their teachers' performance, since, unlike the teachers, they would be able to choose their teachers, while teachers can't choose their students.

This would mean treating schools by business standards--no tenure for anyone, and using the personal knowledge of your managers onsite to determine who's doing a good job. Teachers are not managers of their students, so the analogy applies to principals where you don't have tenure, but not to teachers.

With or without abolishing tenure, though, my federal voluntary system has the advantages of being relatively cheap and relatively doable. State and local rights are in no way infringed, especially since the testing wouldn't be tied to federal aid.

sealed fate

2011-07-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

Clever cult leaders' first priority is to isolate their followers from anyone and anything that might contradict what the cult leader says.

This goes beyond neutralizing active foes of your cult. It must include neutral parties as well, and even friends who don't toe the line 100%. "If you aren't for us you're against us."

Thus the GOP's efforts to rid itself of anyone who's a "RINO"--that is, any Republican who talks to a Democrat, cooperates with a Democrat, compromises with a Democrat, or advocates raising any taxes under any circumstances--especially including tax loopholes for the rich.

And thus the GOP's efforts to smear fact-checking sites like Factcheck.org and Politifact.org.

Ironic, since both sites frequently ding Democrats from Congressmen to the President. But that doesn't count because they also ding Republicans.

The lesson for GOP rank and file is you must get all your news and analysis from approved sources--anyone outside the circled wagons is suspect..probably a spy.

On the subliminal level the GOP propaganda machine cultivates personal animosity towards anyone who might contradict the party line, so that GOP tribesmen simply can't stand to hear the targeted person's voice. Paul Krugman & Rachel Maddow come to mind.This animosity then prevents them from taking in anything they say.

As part of this tribalism it cultivates black & white thinking. Thus, since Paul Krugman isn't factually correct 100% of the time there's no reason to listen to him any time.

Which brings me back to Factcheck.org. I've studied immigration issues for a long time and I believe factcheck.org doesn't always deal from the top of the deck on this issue. Yet elsewhere they seem to be solid, and they certainly criticize both Democrats and Republicans.

Yet I've seen GOP rank and file simply dismiss Factcheck.org out of hand because of some gotcha.

At the same time the national propaganda machine--and many conservative sites--quote Factcheck.org when it suits them. It's as if they put a filter over the site's output that clears away anything criticizing Republicans while delivering everything that criticizes Democrats.

That's consistent with tribalism, where tribal emotions wrap around every factual or logical consideration like a strangler fig around a giant rainforest tree.

Of course there is a Democratic propaganda machine and it does shade the truth, demonize the opposition, and try to encourage tribalism. They're just kind of half-hearted about it, while the GOP hasn't the slightest qualms.

And there is a reality out there. Thus the Lefties hated on Bush, the Righties hate on Obama. But the last nationwide survey of presidential historians showed a solid consensus putting Obama in 15th place among US presidents--and Bush II 6th from the bottom (above more than one crummy Democratic prez, to be sure).

My point is that despising one of the worst presidents in the nation's history--who needlessly sent thousands of servicemen to their deaths--is a very different kettle of fish from despising a president who, while not in the top bracket, shares a respectable high-middle ground (a few places higher than Reagan).

One represents a response to reality; the other a response to tribal dancing around a bonfire. Those are not equivalent.

"Tax hikes destroy jobs" --Speaker of the House John Boehner

2011-07-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the richest 10% of Americans pay half of all taxes.

Republicans cite this all the time.

They don't add this fact from the same source:

The richest 10% of Americans get 40% of all American income.

Which means that they only pay a little more on their income than do the other 90%. So we have nearly a flat tax, in effect.

And it means the constant harping on that 10% pay 50% is true but it's a lie when you say it and imply that everyone else is getting a free ride. We aren't. We're just getting soaked by the unquenchable greed of the richest.

Oh, and if "tax hikes destroy jobs," then tax cuts create jobs, right? One can't be true without the other.
Well, the Bush Era was historically lousy in jobs creation as corporate America closed our plants and shipped the jobs to China etc., even as taxes on the rich sank to historic lows.

But watch the face of a self-styled conservative when you tell them this. Momentary consternation, followed by challenging your facts, then discounting the source, whatever it is--even, as in this case, the nonpartisan CBO that Republicans cite constantly when a report favors their side--or can be cherrypicked to seem so.

Their commitment is to their ideology, not the truth.

I should add that Democrats have their sacred cows too of course. They just aren't trying to wreck our country quite as vigorously as the GOP is right now.

NPR should register as a foreign agent

2011-07-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm listening to a segment on NPR narrated by the legal daughter of illegal immigrants. She starts crying as she talks about her parents being "undocumented." 16 year old Alicia Martinez is the narrator.

When you listen to it you want to give her parents citizenship. She sounds like a great kid. They sound like great parents.

But this is argument by anecdote, and NPR does it constantly, along with our local PBS TV station.

My problem with this is that it's lying with the truth.

Because they never, ever run anything about illegal immigration that presents them as anything but saints walking on this Earth.

So each anecdote is true, but the accumulated weight of all these anecdotal accounts is wildly distorted.

Not one American has ever had a love one killed by an illegal immigration, or had their car totaled by an illegal immigrant drunk driver, or been unable to get unskilled work because it had been given to illegals, or discovered that the teenaged girls being trafficked had illegal alien pimps.

Either none of those things happen--and there an no illegal immigrants in the prison system--or NPR and PBS is lying with truth, using their repertorial chops to manufacture one-sided propaganda.

This is because Liberal America believes that if anyone's "rights" aren't honored, a police state will ensue, leading to Nazi death camps. This is so powerful a belief that it overrides any concerns about the consequences of such indiscriminate tub-thumping on behalf of anyone--anyone--who really, really, wants American citizenship.

Hello, at least two billion of Earth's population want American citizenship. And most of them would excite your sympathy if you looked at their individual case.

But we are different from Chimpanzees in that we're capable of thinking about long-term consequence; of understanding arithmatic; of realizing that short-term kindness can lead to long-term evil.

The fact that racists oppose illegal immigration of non-Anglos does mean that everyone who opposes illegal immigration is a racist. This is guilt by association, something liberals abhor--except when they do it....

Turns out corporate CEOs don't make 431 times the average worker's pay

2011-07-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

Politifact.com assessed a Leftie bumper sticker making that claim. In their article they determined that it was an exaggeration. They said it was the product of a liberal think tank comparing S&P 500 CEO wages with average American workers' wages--not average S&P 500 peons' wages. So it's comparing apples and oranges.

I did some back-of-envelope calculations and came up with 100--corporate CEOs make about 100 times what their own peons make. Which means that these CEOs get in less than four days what their grunt workers get in a year.

What is undisputed is the between WWII and the Reagan Revolution, CEOs made about 20 times what their peons made. Which is still what CEOs make in other industrialized countries. Our current ration has diverged so much from other industrialized countries that it now resembles that of Russia and Mexico.

Put another way, these CEOs have appropriated virtually all the rise in America's GDP over the past 40 years.

But as per my last entry, Republicans treat this as simply the Hand of Fate at work. Especially since this is the answer to the "fact" right wing commentators state hourly over Republican Radio and Republican Television: the statistic that a few percent of Americans pay the bulk of the taxes, and half of Americans pay no taxes.

First, that's a lie. Half of Americans pay plenty of taxes--just not income taxes. So many regressive taxes are built into our overall tax structure that they get soaked disproportionately. Second, the hyper-rich pay more taxes because they're appropriated virtually all of America's increase in GDP for forty years.

So when your conservative friends mention this trope about the rich paying most taxes, ask them what explanation do they have for the fact that they now get 100 times what their peons make instead of 20. Making 20 times as much isn't sufficient incentive? It is in other countries. It was in the 50s, 60s and 70s, which were full of economic increase and job creation.

Even at 20 times what the average worker makes, it means that CEO gets a year's worth of peon salary every 18 days.

Hard to believe that at such a ratio these CEO types would be just too depressed about their poverty to build companies and "create jobs."

One last thing: I was comparing CEO pay to American worker pay at comparable companies. But the average American S&P 500 companies has many of its employees abroad, mostly in third world countries.

So if you add that to figuring the ratio of CEO pay....you may find that the original figure of 431 is way too modest. It may be more like 1,000 times or more.

Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: the Hand of Fate

2011-07-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Democrats and Republicans may seem at loggerheads, but they agree that some things are just inevitable; nobody's fault; nobody's cause. Our only task is to adapt to these things.

They just disagree on how to apply this fatalistic principle.

Republicans believe that the Wall Street Crisis just happened. Movement Republicans believe it was entirely caused by Congressmen Barney [HE"S A HOMO BUT WE WON'T MENTION IT!!!] Frank, Nancy "Daughter of Satan" Pelosi, and the former head of Fannie Mae [WHO'S BLACK BUT WE WON'T MENTION IT!!!][unfortunately he's also a crook, to be honest]. But even relatively rational Republicans talk about it as just a cycle. Cycles happen. Part of nature, really. The same way they rationalize away human-caused climate change. Cycles.

Meanwhile, Democrats looks blandly at the transformation of America's demographics from 90% white to, soon, minority white (already achieved in California's publis school system BTW). As if white people has suddenly started having black, Latino, and Asian kids. As if who immigrates to this country is entirely some kind of force of nature--not the product of intentional policies planned and carried out with great determination by the leaderships of both parties, though for different reasons.

And don't you dare complain, because if you do it means you're exactly like Hitler.

What the Wall Street meltdown and the slow-mo extermination of Anglo America have in common is that their perpetrators and political allies don't want these events examined. They want you to shut up and not complain--just deal.

Because otherwise there'd be bankers in jail and the reinstitution of quotas for immigration from different countries--and a moratorium on immigration by unskilled laborers from anywhere and anybody from Latin Ameirca, since both greatly overlapping categories have already fulfilled any kind of rational quota for the next couple of centuries.

Can't have that. So instead we have the Hand of Fate, conveniently invoked by both parties whenever they want to pull something on the American People they always talk about as if they're on our side.

The debt ceiling gives a blank check to the ever-growing Federal government!

2011-07-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

Wrong. The debt ceiling is for our debts we've already incurred. That's why it's called the debt ceiling. At this instant our government's debts exceed revenues and fungible resources--as was also true, spectacularly, at the instant President Obama took office in 2008. This would remain true even if our federal government stopped spending anything it wasn't legally required to spend right now.

If you as an individual welch on your debts, you lose whatever assets your debtors can lay their hands on and your credit rating tanks. Then when you want to borrow money later on, you're going to pay the rates people with bad credit ratings pay--if you can borrow at all.

When a nation welches on its debts it can hang onto its assets unless it still has to borrow. But when and if it does, Whoa Nellie. And nations that welch on their debts always have to borrow. And the new higher rates ripple through the economy, affecting all but the very rich.

The time to question the need for a higher debt limit was when the deb were being incurred--when we went to war in two countries and gave the richest of the rich a sweet tax break, and put it all on the national credit card, passing the bill on to the next President, along with the reckless fiscal policies that the nation had to bail out when that bubble popped.

And the Republican Congress did vote to raise the debt limit--seven times during the Bush era. It appears that deficits don't count unless a Democrat is in the White House. Then suddenly it becomes the biggest crisis in American history. And jobs? Turns out that's not important at all. Which is logical. All the members of congress have jobs themselves, after all.

It turns out the goverment does have death panels!

2011-07-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

Well, we have one death panel: the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. They radical cuts they want to apply to Medicare and Social Security amount to a national death panel that says to America's seniors "If you were so foolish and immoral as to get old without getting rich--you are of no further use to society. Please board the nearest ice flow and float away. Stop trying to burden the wealthiest Americans' quest to become even wealthier with your whining."