Hold your nose and support it

Yesterday's New York Times editorial advocated supporting the Senate healthcare reform bill, despits its many compromises and omissions. Liberal economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman said pretty much the same thing.

I posted this comment (#29 on their website):

I watched the Senate debate the healthcare bill for most of the day. Doing that and then going to www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com to can be quite an eye-opener. Basically, these rigorously nonpartisan sites call various Demos on shading the truth now and then--while the 'Publicans emit one whopper after another.

So while neither side is a cynosure of probity they aren't morally equivalent. It's like comparing a pickpocket to Bernie Madoff.

Of course Madoff is a piker compared to the GOP and their patrons. Madoff just bankrupted every friend he had in the world. The GOP did a number on the whole country--particularly their own rural rank and file supporters.

Supporters who buy every line the GOP feeds them.

For example, it turns out the GOP senators were shocked! Shocked! to discover that the Demos cut back room deals with compromises to the legislation and goodies for pivotal senators' home states to get this legislation through.

Duh.

And then the constant posturing as deficit hawks, proudly presenting themselves as the champions of the little guy and protectors of his pocketbook. These are same guys whose #2 man during the Bush era said "Deficits don't matter."

And all of this with the same wide-eyed innocent look my son had as a kid when I saw him chinning himself on the towell rack, tearing it off the wall, then stoutly denied he'd done any such thing--with tears in his eyes at this impugning of his innocence. Hello, I SAW him do it!

What's scariest is I bet the R-Senators could pass a lie detector test. They've figured out how to compartmentalize their minds, I guess, keeping their own, um, indiscretions and venality firewalled from their righteous wrath as the Demos' shortcomings.

Another leitmotif was their nonstop whining about the Demos' unseemly haste. But they controlled Congress from 1994 through 2006 without enacting healthcare reform. So I guess their sense of proper pace is to be measured in decades...or, perhaps more accurately...never.

Best of all is their constantly citing opinion polls showing public approval of healthcare reform has been steadily dropping. I'm sure it has, and no wonder: the GOP's padrones in the Healthcare Insurance Denial industry have been spending over $1M a DAY for lo these many months.

And the American public is the product of the American educational system, which has been stripped of political science content by left and right wing special interest groups, with the resulting texts and curricula so inoffensive they've also become bo-r-ing as your senile Aunt Martha who repeats her entire conversation about her bowel movements that day every five minutes as long as you're there.

Today's NYTime editorial is fully synchronous with the factchecking websites I cited at the beginning of this screed. That's not always the case, but it is here, and I appreciate the non-doctrinaire liberal but realistic stance it takes--much like Paul Krugman has. An inability to compromise scuttled the Clinton healtcare plan, getting us decades of more of medical bankruptcies and routine insurer claim denials. Including one that stuck my spouse and me for $1,500--so I know whereof so many people speak.

I'm a NYT reader of long standing, and a political centrist who checks out what both sides say before drawing conclusions. So this comment should probably represent the mainstream of comments here.

But by the time they close the comments this thread will have been flooded by enraged rants by people who loathe every syllable the NYT editorial board has ever written.

Here's a tip: most of them aren't actual NYT readers. They're blog trolls. Some are loo-hoo-sers who flame for fun, because it's the only social contact they have. Others were sent here by right wing blogs and noted economist Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity et al. And it's possible that others are blogtrolls for hire. I hope the NYT puts a good investigative reporter onto that last possibility. I'd like to know whether it's true.

Whichever way the trolls arrive here, they can create the impression that NYT readers don't agree with this editorial.

Maybe that's the idea.

Welcome to the Trolliverse

Recently (OK, I'm a slow learner!) I've started to realize that comment threads online are often stuffed with comments that appear out of place--i.e., they seem to be not written by valid participants of that forum, or by actual readers of that publication.

You've probably noticed the same, at least subliminally.

It's becoming clear to me that many forums are stuffed with ringers, falling into three groups:

1. Lone operators, usually ideologue cranks, who have no life. They go to forums to flame real participants in hopes of triggering powerful angry responses. This achieves what's known as negative intimacy. Same thing as some angry divorced people strive for with their exes.Negative intimacy is safer emotionally than positive intimacy. It requires no social skills. And there's no risk of rejection. In positive intimacy you tell someone "I like you" and the other can say "Well I don't like you." Crushing. But if you tell them "You suck" nothing is risked. So on a primal level it's safe.

You can spot them because usually they're functioning on a more primitive level than the people they're attacking, so it quickly becomes clear that they're interlopers. I once got such a flame for this blog. I had to edit out a bunch of cursing in order to run it.

Often the flamers pick up enough of the language used by people on the forum to parrot it--thus with global warming forums, they use terms like "junk science" and "scientific method" but they don't actually know what these mean. But they don't need to--they just need to wield them such as to generate a response--the angry response they need. Or at least think they need.

2. Volunteer ideologues directed by like-minded websites or talk radio hosts to mount a blitzkrieg attack on designated forums. This is a version of a DNS (Denial of service) executed on a human rather than programmatic level. The purpose is twofold:

a) to simply disrupt the conversation and deny one's opponents a forum by filling it with distractions, chatter, and vicious attacks;

b) give the impression that a large part of the public--or at least of the constituency of that website/special interest group--is actually against the issue most valid participants of that website actually advocate, or vice versa. It's fifth column work designed to sow dissension and despair and make people feel like they alone hold their beliefs--to doubt their beliefs.

3. Paid hit men (and women) who do the same as #2. I did some digging on the Net and found links to a couple of sites that offer this service. The ones I saw appear to be rightist/corporatist. I don't know whether they'd do the same for someone on the other side, but I suppose it's possible. And I don't know if there are left wing services that do this for money.

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For example, Scientific American Magazine's website recently ran an op-ed piece about global warming and the Copenhagen conference. The comments thread was flooded with global warming deniers along with extremely hostile attacks on anyone advocating acting to mitigate global warming, along with general attacks on scientists as a group.

I've subscribed to the magazine for decades, and I know what its audience is like. These attacking commentors were obviously not Scientific American readers. Not necessarily because they were global warming deniers, but because of the character of the attacks.

I asked one of these guys point blank in the comments thread whether he actually read the magazine, and his response showed to my satisfaction that he didn't.

The first time the LA Times permitted comments on opinion pieces, the comments were flooded by psycho spamming. They had to shut down the comments threads and try to figure out how to deal with this. I don't know whether they've come up with a plan.

Some of the most insidious are Creationists on forums discussing evolution. They get fed questions to ask, ask them, then scientists waste countless cycles trying to reason with them. But all they ever get is the next set of superficially scientific-sounding questions. Thus they tie up the forum by moving the subject towards their set of preoccupations, which no one who understands evolution has.

It's easiest to spot such trolling on a website whose subject matter you know a lot about. But really, trolls--whether paid, volunteer, or unemployed guys living in their parents' basement--generally come off about the same.

They all fight dirty--and it shows.

Healthcare reform and party reform

Paul Krugman advocated liberals holding their noses and supporting the Senate's highly compromised healthcare reform bill. He got numerous comments. Mine got zero recommendations from readers. Here it is:

Professor Krugman is exactly correct here about everything he's touched on in this op-ed piece.

Let me add one more reason to pass it: the GOP (short for Greed Over Princoples) has utterly abandoned anything a Republican of Eisenhower's time would recognize as Republican or conservative.

Moreover, the tactics being used to try to defeat healthcare reform are nothing short of despicable. Nearly every word that comes out of Republican leaders' mouths, or that appears in the $1.4 million/day ad blitz against healthcare reform, is a baldfaced lie. I don't expect readers to believe me--they shouldn't. But believe www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com. Both have proven to be utterly nonpartisan, mainstream factcheckers and truthtellers.

There are conservative arguments to be made against the current form healthcare reform is taking, but the GOP isn't making them. Instead they've resorted to fearmongering demagoguery.

Only if they lose this fight is there a chance for GOP reform. America needs a conservative political party. Right now the GOP isn't that. So if you're a Republican voter, bite your lip and contact your congressman in support of the Senate bill.

How lies that work...work

Lots of people will believe complete fabrications from political operatives. But only under certain conditions:

1. The lie has to be part of a plausible narrative--a story that supplies motive, means, opportunity, and a timeline.

2. You have to hear it repeated a zillion times, from multiple sources.

3. It has to dovetail with your worldview.

4. It has to appeal to your more juvenile instincts.

5. It has to trigger powerful emotions--especially the ones the average chimpanzee also experiences.

6. The lie's envelope of justification has to provide you with cover (i.e., you can't hate Obama because he's a Negro--but you can hate him if you can say it's because he's a foreigner who holds office illegally).

7. Usually the lie stands on the shoulders of other lies that have already been established in your head.

8. It has to forestall your listening--actually listening--to refutations of the lie. This is usually done by claiming that anyone debunking the lie belongs to the enemy tribe, and because therefore his motives must be bad, you don't have to pay attention to his logic or his facts.

9. It helps if the lie appropriates the other side's language. Thus attacks on climate change by human activity often call climate warming proofs "junk science" when it's the denial that's the junk science.

10. And it also helps if the lie is part of a cascade of related lies. You put out Lie A and the media pick it up and run with it for a week or two; meanwhile investigative reporters are digging for data. But the moment they start to publish their fact-checking refutations, you come out with Lie B. Stir and repeat as needs. For example the "Obama's not American" campaign went though a series of morphs in this manner.

11. For the most vile lies, have people with no known connection to your party promulgate them, while Party leadership says well, they don't know, but where there's smoke there's fire, and we must investigate this "controversy." Then if the lie is successfully debunked, you can claim clean hands, Pontius Pilate-style.

12. If anyone calls you on your lie, fly into a rage at the manner in which the person called you on it. Sean Hannity is particularly adept at this--maybe it's an Irish thing. Then attack the truth-teller's motives. Make the debate personal and tribal, so that a viewer feels like he'd be betraying his political tribe by giving in.

Political lies are carefully crafted to satisfy all these requirements, then disseminated through sophisticated campaigns, with the lie's envelope shaped to fit the venue--academic types to push it on PBS, rabble rousers to do same on Fox, with further shaping for demographic slices like fundamentalist Christians, or, for the left, the more Luddite Greens, say.

Healthcare reform under the hood

The press talks about the healthcare reform effort in Congress as being a contest between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

But another way to look at it would be to see it as a contest between the healthcare insurance industry and the voters. From this viewpoint you could say that the healthcare insurance industry owns nearly all of the GOP congressmen and enough of the Democratic ones to prevent the most meaningful aspects of reform from passing.

GOP congressmen and pundits deny this hotly of course, and point to public opinion polls supporting their opposition to healthcare reform.

But what they never mention is the $1.4 million a day the healthcare insurance industry has been spending for months and month on shaping public opinion--just as they did the last time this was tried.

And that opinion-shaping takes the form of scaremongering lies that have been thoroughly debunked by nonpartisann factchecking organizations like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

They also have as a partner in crime the Angry Billionaires' Club--America's richest 1/2 of 1%, none of whom need any social services, and who want to preserve the Third World income distribution profile America now has. They have invested countless millions of dollars in a PR campaign to make Americans fear and distrust government in toto, and to voluntarily abandon the only things that protect individual Americans from being exploited the way workers were in the England of Charles Dickens.

So whenever government tries to regulate any business sector, the industries involved can tap into this free-floating government distrust that has been inculcated by the minions of the Angry Billionaires' Club for decades.

Listen to congressional opponents to healthcare reform and you'll see how they invoke this general distrust of government--reaping the harvest created by this careful cultivation of the American foundational attitude towards a distant and uncaring government on the other side of the Atlantic back in the 18th century.

Bank regulation

President Obama is pushing for bank regulation reform. Liberals will applaud this while calling for even stricter regulation, while folks identifying themselves as conservative will condemn it as Socialism.

But I've figured out how to translate GOPSpeak into actual English. "Socialism" once meant "government owning big business." That's how Marx/Lenin/Mao etc. defined it.

But in GOPSpeak "Socialism" now means “any regulation of business whatsoever.”

The rightists’ screeds will contrast evil "Democrat Party So-shul-ism" with the “Free Market.” This now means “Big business owning government.” Not explicitly of course. However, if government hops whenever the Masters of the Universe say "frog" that's what it means. That's what "too big to fail" means.

Which the big business owners and CEOs pulling the GOP’s strings think is just ducky—and the natural order of things. This is what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston lays out in his book Free Lunch: How the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill).

And the GOP will get the people most oppressed by big business—small business owners and rural Republican rank and file—to enthusiastically endorse these perversions of the language, because the GOP has learned how to get people to betray themselves and their loved ones and their future generations.

They accomplished this hat trick through three principles. They’ve discovered that even the most flat-out outrageous lies will be believed by half the people and than some, as long as you and your cohorts repeat them constantly, weave them into an emotionally satisfying narrative, and get the public to turn a deaf ear to the truth-tellers by invoking tribalism.

Tribalism is built into our DNA. It’s what gets us to excuse darn near anything someone we think is on our side does, and disbelieve everything someone we think is in the other tribe does. This is why the Republican attacks on the Democrats are so venomous and personal—they don’t attack the principles the Demos are espousing. They attack Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, saying their names with the same inflection you might use to describe dog droppings you just stepped in.

After all, you aren’t going to listen to someone you loathe—someone whose tribe is out to get yours.

And the tribe the GOP has built isn’t America. It’s just American self-identified conservatives. Well, in GOPSpeak “American” and “the American People” now means “people who vote Republican.” Democrats aren’t American. They’re enemies living here illegitimately. That’s why the nonsense about Obama not being a citizen has persisted so strongly. GOP rank and file FEEL that he isn’t American. They did the same thing to Kerry, and Gore, and Clinton, and Dukakis---just not quite so overtly.

Adam Smith, the bespoken deity of the Right, would have endorsed this NYTimes editorial, because he understood that the true enemy of Capitalism isn’t Socialism—it’s Monopoly. And that’s what banks too big to fail are homing in on.

But it’s fitting that the GOP has perverted its core beliefs so much that often not much more than the names are left. It has become, philosophically, a big hollow shell, whose only principle now is to obediently rage against anything that might even slightly constrain the richest 1/2 percent of Americans.

Look at the right wing rants about business regulation in the right wing blogosphere. Aren’t most of them consistent with what I’ve laid out here?

LawnOrder

We could greatly reduce prison populations--and cut off organized crime and much of terrorist financing--at the knees by decriminalizing drugs for adults. Of course this would require accepting reality--something ideologues rarely can do.

But here's a thought I haven't heard elsewhere: maybe--just maybe--conservatives could countenance this if at the same time all crimes committed under the influence of mind-altering substances (including alcohol) were classified as premeditated, since the perp had to decide to get bombed.

This fits with true conservatism--i.e. leaving up to individuals to decide their own fate, while holding them fully responsible for the consequences of their action on others.

How about it?

Bilingual education = Spanish education

If you need ammo for arguments over bilingual ed, here's a thorough examination of what happened here in California after an anti-bilingual education initiative passed:

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_bilingual-education.html

I once taught in a school that was half-Mexican (and I don't mean Mexican-American), and bilingual ed there was a crock. It was a club for Spanish-speaking kids to kick back and bide their time until they left school, usually long before graduation.

Blingual ed is yet another example of how your worst enemies may be those who declare themselves to be your strongest advocates.

"Climategate" reveals a hoax, all right...

...but the hoax is the one perpetrated by whoever paid Russian hackers-for-hire to acquire several climate scientists' emails, then construct a plausible but false narrative from selective quotes taken from 13 years of correspondence.


But don't take my word for it. I'm not a climate scientist. Nor do I command the research facilities of Politifact.com and Factcheck.org, which have earned a reputation for both thoroughness and even-handedness. Even a cursory search on their websites shows how much they hand out praise and blame to both sides as truth dictates.

Here are their conclusions about Climategate. If you have any doubts left, go to their sites and get the full story. I check them out weekly myself.

From Politifact.com:

"The e-mails do not prove that global warming is a hoax. In fact, there's overwhelming evidence that temperatures have been rising and are continuing to rise. Just take a recent report issued by the United States Global Research Program, an arm of the government that, since 1989, has been coordinating and integrating federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The report states that "global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. ."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/dec/11/climate-change-e-mails-and-copenhagen/

From FactCheck.org:

"A Dec. 3 Rasmussen survey found that only 25 percent of adults surveyed said that "most scientists agree on global warming" while 52 percent said that "there is significant disagreement within the scientific community" and 23 percent said they were not sure.

...[But] "over the 13 years covered by the CRU e-mails, scientific consensus has only become stronger as the evidence for global warming from various sources has mounted.

"Reports from the National Academies and the U.S. Global Change Research Program that analyze large amounts of data from various sources also agree..

.In advance of the 2009 U.N. climate change summit, the national academies of 13 nations issued a joint statement of their recommendations for combating climate change, in which they discussed the "human forcing" of global warming and said that the need for action was "indisputable."

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/

Many young Adult Mexican-Americans call themselves "Mexican"

The Pew Hispanic Center has released the results of its 2009 survey of Latinos aged 16-25.

As recently as 1940, Latinos represented only 1/2% of Americans. Now they're the largest minority, at over 15%--mostly from illegal immigration and subsequent amnesties, along with our Constitution granting automatic citizenship to children of illegals.

Some highlights of this year's Pew survey:

2/3 were born here (of parents who came mainly in the wave immigration starting in 1965).

40% of native born Latinos say they know one or more gangbangers (possibly including themselves).

52% call themselves "Mexican" or "Guatemalan"--wherever they or their parents came from--rather than "American" or "Mexican-American" or "Hispanic" or "Latino." Even third-generation youths are split on this, with just 50% calling themselves "American."

52% say they speak English not very well--or not at all (the survey was conducted in English and in Spanish).

17% dropped out of high school
(vs. 9% of blacks, 6% of whites, 4% of Asians).

23% live in poverty
(vs. 28% of blacks, 13% of whites, 8% of Asians).

"Young Hispanic females have the highest rates of teen parenthood of any major racial or ethnic group in the country." 26% of females have had children by age 19
(vs. 22% of blacks, 11% of whites, and 6% of Asians).
"On average, Hispanic females are projected to have just over 3 children in their lifetime."
(vs. 2.2 for blacks and 1.9 for whites).

"Latinos make up about 18% of all youths in the U.S. ages 16 to 25.
However, their share is far higher in a number of states.
They make up
51% of all youths in New Mexico,
42% in California,
40% in Texas,
36% in Arizona,
31% in Nevada,
24% in Florida, and
24% in Colorado."

(California's education statistics are in the tank, largely due to the enormous impact of these educationally indifferent youths.)

68% are Mexican in origin; 42% or more of their parents are high school dropouts (vs. about 1/4 for other Latino youth).

About 3% were incarcerated in 2008
(vs. 7% of blacks and 1% of whites).

Around 17% are illegal aliens.

50% of male Latino youths believe the man should have the final say in family matters (vs. 24% of the females).

49% to 71% believe abortion should be illegal, depending on whether they're mainly Engiish speakers or Spanish speakers.


To be sure Mexico has its share of doctors, engineers, legitimate business owners and the like--but they're not moving here. Instead we're getting--as this poll demonstrates--Mexico's least educated laborers, doing work American laborers won't do--for starvation wages, that is. And we're getting them because Mexico's population has quintupled since 1940. The Mexican government, faced with fifty million more people than it needs, figured out--correctly--that we're so stupid we'd be glad to serve as their relief valve.

Mexico's government encourages people to come here by hook or by crook, distributes comic books showing them how to do it, and supports their efforts through a network of consulates. And tells them they're not illegal immigrants because the Southwest is actually part of Mexico that we stole from them, so they're just taking back what's rightfully theirs.

I'd love to have Mexican doctors and engineers immigrate here. But we don't need any more peasants--from anywhere. Look at the unemployment rates for American unskilled laborers. I believe it's pushing 20%--one out of five. How can anyone with a conscience promote taking in more unskilled laborers when we can't employ our own unskilled laborers?

Danish climate change conference useless

The upcoming climate change summit in Denmark will talk about fossil fuel use, carbon taxes and suchlike. Woo hoo. What won't be discussed is overpopulationm, the root cause of global warming. If the human race had stabilized at 1900 population levels, we wouldn't be talking about global warming.

But neither liberals nor conservatives have the courage the face up to acknowledging this, because the solutions go against our instincts.

And we always follow our instincts. Evolution deniers claim that there's no "missing link" because we thinking humans and lower creatures. Well, just walk down a city street and look around. Missing links abound. They're the ones who deny the reality of anything that might inconvenience them.

It's not a clash of civilizations

For there to be a clash of civilizations, there have to be at least two civilizations. There aren't. We have a civilization. They have a tribe. The difference is that civilizations live by principles. Tribes live by loyalty. A civilization can criticize its own people. I can shout "Obama sucks" or "Christ was a jerk" from the rooftops and nothing will happen to me (outside the deep South that is).

But if I shout "Muhammed was a clown" in the Middle East I'll be killed--probably on the spot.

The Taliban bombed a women's market in Peshawar, Pakistan, murdering 114 poor women and children. And many if not most Pakistanis--even middle class ones--blamed it on the Jews, or the Indians, or the Americans, as part of a Western plot to destroy Pakistan in particular and Islam in general. They refuse to believe that a fellow Muslim could be so evil. And until they do, they're a tribe fighting our civilization.


We all remember what happened when an obscure Danish newspaper published a group of cartoons depicting/satirizing Islam/Muhammed, of which the one shown here is about as harsh as it gets (Danish imams poured gasoline on the fire when they went to the Middle East armed with the Danish cartoons--plus some far worse ones they cooked up themselves and added to the Danish ones).

There were violent riots throughout Muslim countries. Millions took to the streets. People died in the riots. The cartoonists and their publishers had to go into hiding after getting credible death threats in Denmark.

On the other hand, after the October bombing of that women's market? Nada. If a drone kills three civilians and a Taliban general, there are demonstrations and pop songs written against America.

Pakistani pop music is full of denuciations and videos that are anti-American, anti-drone, anti-India, anti-Mossad. Not one word mentioning the Taliban. Of course anyone who did so would be murdered by the Taliban.

So our drone attacks are met with fury over American interference in Pakistani sovereignty, while the Talibans' murdering civilians and, for example, destroying 200 girls' schools are all blamed on outsiders--us, Jews, India.

So yes, the drone attacks make Pakistanis furious. I'd rather they didn't. But as long as we target them carefully, they may represent our best option among a bunch of options that are all bad, but among which we must choose.

Last note on this: frequently the criticisms of what we do there take the form of pointing out that whatever choice has been made will have terrible consequences.

The problem is that every single option we have--including precipitous withdrawl--has terrible consequences. So such criticisms are shallow and unproductive. The question is always, which terrible consequence is the least terrible.

But that's rarely asked.

If you want to read someone who doesn't agree with Obama about Middle East policy, yet who isn't a ranting idiot, check out NYTimes centrist columnist Tom Friedman. A debate between him and the president would be far more illuminating than the potshots the Republican leadership keeps taking.

Eminent domain

Our founders incorporated the idea of eminent domain so we could build roads and dams and the like. It required the few to sacrifice for the many.

But rich people quickly figured out that the easiest way to make money was to suborn government and bamboozle taxpayers.

Now, eminent domain often requires the many to sacrifice for the few.

Thus, as David Cay Johnston (Pulitzer Prize for reporting) points out in "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and stick you with the bill)", President Bush made his personal fortune through raising taxes in Arlington, Texas to pay for a sports stadium that never made a profit for the city's taxpayers, after stealing 200 acres of private property from property owners through eminent domain ("stealing" though giving the property owners pennies on the dollar for their land), enabling Bush to make nearly $18 million at taxpayer expense, which he paid lower taxes on than a secretary does on her wages.

The Republicans keep claiming they're against such misuses of eminent domain. That's what they say in public. But in private, across the country, they've got their hands in taxpayers' pockets, rummaging around for personal profit.

And BTW taxpayer-subsidized sports stadiums NEVER pay off for the taxpayers--the subsidies just serve to enrich the sports teams' billionaire owners. And often local Democrats (on city councils) are only too eager to get in on the bonanza.

Read Johnston's book and you'll see the gory details.

Republicans are like 3 year old boys ___Democrats are like 10 year old girls

The Republican leadership encourages Republicans to think and act like three year old boys. Three year olds, above all else, want to do what they want to do--and they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do.

That is, to paraphrase a text on anarchism I read in college, a child sees freedom as "freedom from (authority)," while an adult sees freedom as "freedom to (accomplish your goals)."

In promoting blind resentment and distrust of government, Republican leaders commonly say stuff like "I don't want some bureacrat in Washington telling me what to do." The odd thing is that this directly contradicts the conservative's respect for authority. They accomplish this sleight of brain by describing the authority as illegitimate if it's elected by Democrats. Authority is only to be respected if it's Republican. This represents the abandonment of conservative principles in exchange for raw tribalism. It's also anarchistic. And if you've ever worked in a church's nursery for 2-3 year old kids, as I have, you're also recognize it as the behavior of--as I said--three year old boys.

The motive is simple. The Republicans' main campaign donors are billionaires who have no need of government services, and who want to spend their money on themselves instead of paying taxes that will fund government services. But they can't win with campaign slogans like "Billions for Billionaires, diddly squat for thee," so instead they cultivate distrust of all government.

Then Republican rank and file will gladly vote to strip away every protection individuals have against being exploited by powerful billionaires with squadrons of lawyers--all in the name of an autonomy only a billionaire has without those protections. It's a neat trick.


Democrats, meanwhile, want you to think like a 10 year old girl--you know, the kind who brings a stray pregnant cat home and has no comprehension of how many more cats America has than it needs or can care for. All heart, no brain. Thus we have to cater to the needs of anyone who is or has ever been discriminated against by anyone anywhere, while excusing any bad thing that comes along as a consequence of all this catering to special interest groups.

Thus we're supposed to welcome people who respond to Mexico's population explosion (from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000) by moving here illegally. Never mind world overpopulation. Never mind Mexico's responsibilities to its own citizens. Never mind our responsibilities to America's own unskilled laborers. Never mind the huge demographic shift being foisted upon us by this mass migration. Never mind the huge negative on schools and hospitals and social services organizations in general. 10 year old girls don't care or understand about such things. They only see a poor little Mexican kid with big eyes like the paintings sold in tourist areas next to the seascapes and clowns. A poor little "person of color," who is therefore saintly, just as a "person without color" is some kind of beast oppressing the former group.

In other words, nevermind consequence.

So we get the party of 3 year old boys vying with the party of 10 year old girls.

Great. Just great.

It's the tribalism, stupid...

In a recent Gallup poll, 59% of Pakistanis said the US is the biggest threat to Pakistan--only 11% said it was the Taliban. A majority of Pakistanis--and this includes the middle class there, not just uneducated poor people--blame the recent spate of bombings there on outside forces--Mossad, India, the CIA, the West's "War Against Islam" etc.

This confirms my growing belief that a majority of humans in developed countries and even more in poor ones are primarily tribal in their orientation. Tribalism excuses everything anyone on your side does and ascribes only evil motives to anything the "other tribe" does, and always blames one's own culture's troubles on "outside forces."

In the South at the dawn of racial integration in the 1960s and 70s, White Southerners usually blamed the Blacks' struggle for equality on "outside agitators."

And today Republicans blame America's ills all on foreigners--mainly Democrats, who they regard as not actually Americans, abetted by the United Nations and international banks etc.

Partisan Democrats aren't much better, never acknowledging any legitimacy to conservative thinking even when it's correct, as with illegal immigration.

It's tribalism that blinds people to reform efforts, and to the idea of using principles rather than tribe as your central philosophy.

Justice for all--if they have the scratch

For many years, middle class Americans have been vaguely aware of how poor, uneducated people get railroaded by the legal system, with overburdened public defenders mainly there to propose plea bargains because prosecutors routinely amp up the charges to terrify defendants--it's a well-oiled conviction machine.

What the middle class has not faced is the fact that if they are accused of a serious crime, whether they're guilty or not, it will take their life savings--including selling their house--to mount a competent legal defense.

They tell themselves "It can't happen to me." And mainly it doesn't. But no one makes movies about this, do they? It's an invisible Sword of Damocles hanging over all our heads.

But people should realize this, because if you ever get a traffic ticket and choose to fight it you'll get a lesson in how the courts have become convction machines. Again, guilty or not, it's nearly impossible to get a traffic commissioner to find you not guilty. And if you choose to appeal your conviction you'll wind up spending $10K to fight a $400 ticket, because nothing short of that will work at the appeals level.

Our system now provides all the justice money can buy. A fortune won't get you off necessarily. But it will get you a competent defense. Otherwise you can kiss your assets goodbye.

Think about that the next time your local DA brags about how "tough on crime" he or she is.

How much is that pundit in the window?

We view Congress and elected offices in general as seats of great power. Even if you have serious beefs with Congress...still, a visit to the chambers is going to affect you. You'll feel a bit of awe.

Thus it's hard for the average American--Democrat and Republican--to understand how America's richest 1/2 of 1% see Congress.

They see it the way we might look at a pet shop.

They go there to buy Congressmen, then take them home and train them. And like any good pet owner, they rarely beat their pets. They learn the tricks needed to discipline and control them. And of course sometimes a pet becomes intransigent--it might even attack its owner. Such pets must be dealt with, of course.

Meanwhile, most pets, like a good German Shepherd or Siamese cat, say, try to maintain their dignity while keeping their pet perks coming. It's quite a trick but the best pets learn how to do it.

And of course while you may come to feel a lot of affection for your pets, and they may feel quite at home around you, you never forget that they are not your equals. They're your treasured pets, nothing more, nothing less.

Then, once the Masters of the Universe have mastered the art of acquiring and training CongressPets, they use the same tricks on voting blocks and pundits. Make Mexican Americans think they'll be lost without your guidance--and that they can't trust anyone but you and your peeps. Make Fundamentalists think that God will smite our nation for its pornography and ho-mo-sex-uality (except for yours, of course, which is to be forgiven, since you're my peeps) unless you put your trust in me, who looks and talks just like you (except in my private life).

And the pundits will get in line too, of course. It's just a matter of figuring out the carrots and the sticks appropriate to the particular person.

Not everyone's for sale, to be sure. But they tend to get ground down by the river of money flowing around them. To make small, unimportant compromises at first...

The next time you see a Congressman spouting off on TV, think of how the powerful people you never see see him. Or her.

I'm not saying this to say it's hopeless. Just to help you see others' perspectives. And the magnitude of the task reformers face, both in and out of government.

Now there's a good boy. Here's a chew toy. Sit!

Lou Dobbs Show et morte--progressive victory?

The Leftosphere is gloating over Lou Dobbs' ejection from CNN. By their accounts he's a "nativist" who hates all foreigners and all immigration, and everything he says is "hate speech." Particularly pleased are organizations aimed at extracting special favors for Mexican citizens living in America illegally, along with all others with Latin ancestry--as long as those others support these special interest groups.

But the Devil is not as black as he is painted, as they say. Dobbs opposes illegal immigration--not all immigration. He opposes flooding the country with unskilled laborers who drag down the wages of American unskilled laborers. He has wandered off the deep end on other topics, such as playing footsie with the birthers for a while. But most of what the Leftosphere says about him is exactly as distorted and demonizing as what they accuse him of being.

Physician, heal theyself.

Dobbs probably did need to leave CNN--IF CNN places itself as the neutral "news station of record" placed at the equipoise between MSNBC and FOX.

But that's another falsehood, because CNN has other hosts--notably Rick Sanchez--who ceaselessly editorialize on behalf of Mexican citizens living here illegally.

So if CNN gets its pro-illegal activists to knock it off or gets rid of them, then Dobbs should also have exited.

Otherwise CNN has simply caved in to special interest groups.

Do drones help or hinder the war on terror? Do we need a national conversation on drones?

The left is up in arms (so to speak) over drones--particularly armed ones. They say drones set back the war on terror, alienating the people we're trying to protect with indiscriminate killing.

Certainly the jihadis are up in arms (not so to speak) over drones--and their propaganda machine is in full cry trying to stop them, since drones are killing the leaders who normally stay out of harm's way as they send their forces into battle.

Note that I'm talking about "forces" and "battle." But I'm not talking about war. Because there is no such thing as a "war on terror"--that's a nonsense term coined by propagandists. Wars are conducted against states. But here our enemy is a loose confederacy of non-state actors, some with state support, some not, all working under the aegis of militant Islam. Their goal is an Islamist empire run by them. Their enemy is, among others, evey living American citizen.

We can't fight this amorphous non-organization with armies, except in special cases. Nor are local police departments equipped to deal with such international groups.

So we're waging a new something--call it a quasiwar, perhaps. And that requires new tools, including what many tag as "drones." The military prefers "UAVs" (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Drones were radio-controlled aircraft used as targest in figher pilot training mainl

The need for public debate isn't so much for UAV technology pro and con as to educate our public about the nature of this quasiwar, which 8 years of Bush did little to illuminate.
What's really needed regarding UAVs is a vastly better propaganda effort to show Muslims how many innocents Islamofascists expressly target. It's not collateral damage for them, as innoncents killed are for us. Innocents are the target for them. That's a crucial difference, and we need to do a vastly better job of talking about that.

Is Major Hasan responsible for his actions? Are we?

The Major Hasan case once again raises a fundamental conflict between liberals and conservatives.

It's an article of faith for conservatives that we are and must be completely responsible for our actions. This total responsibility apparently kicks in at the moment of our 18th birthday.

But it's an article of faith for liberals that we're depraved on account of we're deprived (as Stephen Sondheim neatly summarized this debate in "Officer Krupke" from West Side Story).

Who's right?

Neither. But I'm right. The bottom line is: people do what they do for many reasons, including outside influences, moral reasoning, brain chemistry, etc. We can get into endless arguments about degrees of culpability in crimes because of this--but we don't need to--IF we reorient the criminal justice system around public safety instead of its current orientation around punishment.

Anyone with life experience should realize that some people are truly unable to control themselves--as is the case with those afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome. I've heard that at least 20% of prison inmates are mentally ill. I'm guessing it's even higher.

Or take someone whose brain chemistry is intact but whose single mother was, say, a meth addict, and this someone has never heard a kind word or felt a gentle touch in his 18 years of life. He isn't compassionate because our society has failed to give him any personal experience of it in his life.

But--and it's a huge but--even if you believe that no one is responsible for their bad behavior--that it's society's fault, or bad genes, or rotten parents--that doesn't mean we can tolerate letting dangerous people run around loose.

The question should always be: is this person or organization dangerous to the rest of us? If so, they must be made safe for the rest of us. That could mean prison, or a mental institution, or a halfway house, or supervised probation, or something else. But as long as someone's a danger we must act.

So, for example, a habitual drunk driver with scads of DUIs is a candidate for doing whatever is needed to keep them from driving--even if that means putting them in a low-security jail of some sort. The same goes for street people with no visible means of support and a string of very expensive (for us) trips to the ER for alcohol poisoning or ODs.

If anything, I'd advocate taking a lot of people off the street who are now running around loose--but letting loose a lot of people who are no danger to us.

Doesn't that make sense? Many police departments are called departments of public safety. I advocate taking that seriously. And sidestepping the useless wrangling lefties and righties constantly carry on.

As for Major Hasan--he's already been show to fit the profile of a mass shooter--a loser in his personal life, unable to form/hold relationships with women, physically unprepossessing (i.e. kind of chunky and short), showing signs of disordered thinking and religious obsessions that worried his peers greatly. Whoever assigned him to go to Iraq with this sort of background should be cashiered, by the way. I bet the person who did it was just trying to get Hasan out of his/her own jurisdiction.

But Hasan, regardless of whether he's insane or a terrorist, will never see freedom again--surely there's no disagreement on that front. And while I oppose the death penalty if there's the slightest doubt, there's isn't a smidgen in this case. He did it. And even if he's insane, he deserves to die, because it's immoral to force jailers to risk their lives around him.

Note that for an insane person he planned and executed his attack very effectively. To kill that many people--most of them trained soldiers--in such a short period of time took careful planning and execution that was both quick and methodical. And quite capable. That's not the kind of insane that I saw when I lived in Berkeley.

So from a public safety viewpoint I believe you can justify the death penalty in cases like this, even if you leave retribution/vengeance out of the equation.