Why Picking Sides in the Middle East Is Hard -- and Pointless

Remember last year when John McCain was stomping around the world insisting that the United States help the Syrian rebels and attack Syria, this very instant? Flash forward a year later, and the Syrian rebels, now calling themselves ISIS, have swept into Iraq, murdering thousands of innocents based solely on their religion. Now John McCain is stomping around the world insisting that we attack ISIS, this very instant.

Tea Party and Libertarian websites are now claiming that McCain was consorting last year with the very ISIS terrorists he's now advocating we attack. Not long after these photos were taken it was discovered that the terrorists McCain was palling around with  were "bad rebels" that were holding Lebanese Shiites hostage.

Now, I'll be the first to criticize John McCain for his buffoonish impulse to get the United States to butt into every conflict around the planet: from the ISIS invasion of Iraq most recently, to the Russia-backed rebellion in Ukraine and Crimea, to Egypt, to the Syrian revolution, to the Libya revolution, to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

But I can't claim to know whether the Syrian rebels John McCain met with were good guys or bad guys. Obviously, neither can John McCain.

That's why we don't just pick sides, rush in and start dropping bombs every time John McCain says so. It's very difficult to know who the good guys and the bad guys are when we have utterly no idea who any of them really are, or what their history is. And even if we think we do, they wind up switching sides on us. If we had supplied those Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weapons when McCain said we should, they would now be using them against the U.S. aircraft that are now bombing their mortar emplacements to protect Yazidi civilians and Kurdistan. Unfortunately, they may still be using U.S. weapons because ISIS may have captured some when the Iraqi army cut and ran.

George Bush had the same problem of knowing who the good guys were when he invaded Iraq. He took the word of Ahmed Chalabi about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that Chalabi was an Iranian agent and had lied about everything. The main reason that ISIS is able to invade Iraq is that the Iraqi government that George W. Bush installed is run by an Iranian puppet, Nouri al-Maliki, who has used his power to oppress Sunnis in Iraq. He appointed Shiite loyalists to lead the army instead of competent officers, and used the army to attack Sunnis. When ISIS invaded the Sunnis did nothing, and the Iraqi army fled in disarray. The Sunnis don't like ISIS any more than they like Maliki, but they figure they'll be able to eject a small number of foreign terrorists, as they did during the "Surge," once the Shiite Iraqi army has been ejected.

Remember George Bush's "Surge" in Iraq to stop Al Qaeda? The reason that succeeded was not because we increased our troop levels, but because Bush reversed course on the Sunnis who had once been allied with Saddam. Instead of treating them like enemies, we used their hatred of Al Qaeda (whom they viewed as foreign terrorists trying to take over their country) and made allies of them.

However, the Maliki government trashed all that after the United States left Iraq, by denying Sunnis any real say in the Iraqi government and persecuting them. And why did the U.S. leave Iraq? Because George Bush signed an agreement that said we would: the Iraqis were tired of an American occupation and our meddling in their internal affairs. Barack Obama was obliged to abide by Bush's agreement, no matter how much John McCain blustered.

We knew there was a distinct possibility that the majority Shiites would oppress the minority Sunnis after we left, but it's impossible to use force to make people behave reasonably -- unless you stay there and babysit them for 50 or 60 years, like we did in Europe and Japan. Can we really afford to occupy every country in the Middle East?

Pretty much the same thing happened in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. The U.S. allied itself with several groups, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's nascent Al Qaeda, to force the Soviets out. After the Soviets left, we let the Taliban have a free hand and they imposed an oppressive theocracy on Afghanistan. Was Afghanistan better off under the Soviets or the Taliban? At least the Soviets would have kept Al Qaeda out.

We crossed bin Laden by stationing troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War to eject Saddam from Kuwait, and thus inspired him to hate us and spawned 9/11. I'm not saying 9/11 was our fault, I'm just saying that no good deed goes unpunished in the Middle East. Time and again we knowingly allied ourselves with bad guys to deal with a more pressing problem, and it always comes back to bite us in the end.

This is why invading Middle Eastern countries has such poor outcomes. Many of the people who live there aren't united by any concept of national identity: they don't consider themselves Iraqi, or Afghan, or Syrian. Instead, they are motivated by religious identity or extreme ideology -- Sunni, Shiite, Alawite, Wahabi, Christian -- or by ethnicity -- Kurdish, Persian, Turkish, Arab, Pashtun -- or even by local tribal association.

As such, all alliances are viewed as temporary, merely to gain their splinter group an advantage toward their ultimate goal of exacting retribution for grievances that have been boiling over for centuries and millennia.

This is why the United States cannot successfully pick sides in the Middle East. There is no loyalty to the concepts of equality, justice and freedom, only a fervent devotion to a particular cause or group.

This should serve as an object lesson to Americans. Republicans have been criticizing Maliki for practicing exactly the kind of divisive all-out political warfare the Tea Party has been practicing against Democrats and even fellow Republicans.

We have to stop thinking of ourselves first as conservative or liberal; Tea Party, Democrat, or Republican; Christian, Jew or Muslim; white, Hispanic, or African American. We have to think of ourselves as Americans first and foremost, and acknowledge that other American citizens are just as American as we are.

And then work together to make sure this country doesn't devolve into the same sort of cesspit that Iraq and Syria have become. We have to stop splintering apart, and start coming together.

Until There Is Plurality...

The political world is all in a tizzy today as Hillary Clinton described the president's decision not to support the Syrian rebels early on as a "failure." Let's set aside the fact that her motivations were purely political and likely planned far ahead of time by both her and the White House. What I'm wondering today is this: what action would have been better and why?

The issue here is the massive growth of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in both Syria and Iraq. Many of the president's critics seem to think we could have prevented this from occurring. How, exactly? We tried taking over Iraq and staying there for years and that didn't work. We've been nation building in Afghanistan for nearly 13 years and that hasn't worked. In Libya, we helped the rebels get rid of Gaddafi and that didn't work.

And who exactly we were supposed to arm in Syria? The rebels weren't even soldiers and were made up of doctors, lawyers and ordinary citizens. They wouldn't be able to fight against the power of a state run military. Further, the various factions in Syria (as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya) all hate each other and are mostly enemies of the United States, the one exception being the Kurds in Northern Iraq whom we are now arming and assisting with an air campaign.

In looking at all of this information, a pattern emerges. These turbulent countries are filled with people who don't like each other. Juxtapose this simple fact with the two Arab Spring countries that haven't had any of these issues-Kurdistan and Tunisia. These two countries contain citizens that do like each other and thus, have a desire for plurality. They are also two nations that have zero involvement from the United States which likely also contributes to their sunny disposition.

Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are never going to be stable countries until there is a desire for plurality in each nation. No sole power on earth (especially the United States) can force that on people. We can, of course, protect the innocent and our interests as we are right now in Iraq but until we get the buy in from the world community, there is nothing to be done.

Blaming President Obama for all these problems and calling his policies a failure is ludicrous.

Putting the Investment Lie To Bed

For the past six years, Wall Street has enjoyed one of its longest bull markets (64 months at an increase of 191%). This is fourth on the list behind Dec 1987-March 2000 (150 months, 582%), June 1949-August 1956(87 months, 267%), and Oct 1974-Nov 1980 (75 months, 126%). While the top 7 percent of our country have seen a 28 percent increase in their net worth, the rest of us in the 93 percent have lost 4 percent of our net worth. The gap between the top one percent of earners and everyone else is the widest its been since 1928.

According to conservative ideology, all of this wealth at the top should pay off in our economy in the form of investments, right? We should be seeing massive job increases and a ton of economic growth. We are told, time and again, that wealth increase at the top means better days for everyone else.

Where are the better days?

Apparently, they only exist inside of the right wing bubble because the last six years should illustrate to everyone that this assertion is a complete fucking lie.

Crater Mystery Solved

The craters were a mystery: they started appearing in the Siberian permafrost, one almost a hundred feet across. Some people thought they were from meteors. Others said they were caused by aliens. Still others said they were caused by underground missile explosions.

Residents claimed to see the area smoking, and then there was a bright flash. Others said a celestial body fell there.

Well, now we know. The craters are caused by the explosion of methane gas, freed by the melting of permafrost, which in turn is caused by global warming. Temperatures in the arctic have gone up drastically: for example, Alaska's average temperature has increased 3.4 degrees in the last 50 years, and winter temperatures have increased 6.3 degrees.

Confirmation comes from Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Center of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia. The hole was discovered last year, after abnormally hot summers in 2012 and 2013. Plekhanov measured a methane level of almost 10% at the bottom of the crater. The normal atmospheric level of methane is 0.000179%.

This region of Siberia is home to huge natural gas fields. Permafrost, which covers millions of square miles in Alaska, Siberia and Canada, has large deposits of methane hydrates trapped in its ice. As temperatures rise due to global warming, the poles are heating up much faster than the lower latitudes.

This is not a new story: for years scientists have known that arctic lakes are emitting methane; there are lakes in Alaska and Canada that can be set on fire.

The permafrost is melting at an alarming rate, and as it melts, the methane hydrates will melt as well, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide. The melting also allows bacteria to feed on the plant material in the thawed permafrost, creating even more methane and CO2.

This is one of the feedback loops that climate scientists have been concerned about. As we warm the planet by entrapping more heat with the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, we are accelerating the production of greenhouse gases from natural sources.

Methane hydrates are also found at the bottom of polar oceans. The oceans are heating up as well, and if the oceanic methane hydrates melt the problem will get a lot worse a lot faster than any of the climate models are predicting.

Koch Brothers Fail to Buy Tennessee Supreme Court --- This Time

The Koch brothers spent about a million bucks to buy three Supreme Court seats in Tennessee. They failed, but not by much. And they're raring to go again.

This is the result of the U.S. Supreme Court's inane rulings that corporations are people and speech is money. The Kochs failed this time, but it's just a matter of time before they and their ilk control the entire judiciary with their millions of dollars.

The Koch's front operation, Americans for Prosperity, is trying to buy elections across the country, from seats in state legislatures from Alaska to Florida, to a levy for the Columbus zoo, to city council races in Iowa. They are trying to stage a corporate takeover of the United States of America.

Thankfully voters in Tennessee saw through this. But only because opponents were able to spend enough money to counter Koch lies.

It's appalling that the conservative members of the Supreme Court are so blinded by their ambition to force their conservative ideology on the country that they are allowing corporations gain control of every facet of government, from the legislatures (with ALEC), to the executive branch and their stranglehold on regulation, and now the judiciary.

The Supreme Court's decisions are the height of foolishness because in the end, corporations are not people: they have no loyalty to this country, and will turn the United States into a corrupt puppet of corporations. If the Kochs have their way, the United States will go the way of China, where every government official is on the take, the air is filled with toxic sludge from coal plants, corporate farms just dump dead pigs in the river, and the food is tainted with feces, toxins and filth.

All in the name of the false "freedom" from those regulations that keep our food, air and water clean.

Even if the Koch brothers were angels with the purest intent, conservatives have to know in their heart of hearts that this is wrong. When corporate money becomes the sole source of power, the people of the United States will lose -- even the conservatives. When the Koch's oil reserves run dry, they won't be the richest kids on the block anymore, and then it'll be tech guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos calling the shots. Or Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. Or the cabal of Wall Street bankers who brought us the Great Recession with their unbridled incompetence, greed and gall.

Or worse, Carlos Slim of Mexico, Li Ka-Shing and Lui Che Woo of Hong Kong, and Alisher Usmanov of Russia. Yeah, it'll be illegal. At first. But only until they buy enough politicians and judges to get the laws changed.

Just like the Koch brothers did.

Good Words

From a question on Quora...

Have you read the bible? There's some great inspiration and thought provoking ideas, but if you've read it in it's entirety, you can't really deny it's full of some things that are really terrible ideas, including a man marrying his daughter to her rapist and justification of slavery. We hear talk in this country of living my Biblical principles, but that is dangerously vague. Which ones? Which sects interpretation?

In fact, many aspects of the bible are in direct opposition to the Constitution. I think if the founders of this country wanted or intended us to follow biblical law, they'd have clearly stated so by quoting and referring chapters and verse. Since they clearly did not, then I think it's safe to say that they did not intend for the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy .

Amen.

Stupid People, Large Groups

Contrasting a Democrat and a Republican

John Walsh, up for election to the Senate for Montana, has ended his campaign. Walsh is embroiled in a plagiarism scandal with his master's degree at the Army War College. This allows a non-scandal-plagued Democrat to run instead.

Contrast Walsh with Scott DesJarlais, a Republican from Tennessee who appears to have defeated his primary opponent by the barest of margins:

Pundits expected DesJarlais to get crushed after his campaign funds dried up (his opponent out raised him by $1 million) when everyone learned the sordid details of his personal life. Court documents showed that DesJarlais admitted to at least eight multiple affairs, encouraged abortions and threatened his ex-wife with a gun during a fight. The former practicing physician was also fined and reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for having sex with his patients.

Are Tennessee Republicans the biggest suckers ever, or do they really not give a damn about the things they say are important: a pro-life philosophy, family values and integrity? They had a chance to stand up for what they believed in, and tens of thousands of them voted for a despicable, lying, cheating, abortion-mongering womanizer who threatened to kill his wife. How can they excuse this man's constant lying hypocrisy and sheer immorality? In most states DesJarlais would be in jail for having sex with patients, or would at least have lost his license. But Tennessee merely slapped him on the wrist with a $500 fine.

Even more hypocritically, DesJarlais is undergoing treatment for cancer, while trying to torpedo the health care law and deny health coverage for tens of millions Americans who finally have it under the ACA.

This election shows what Republican "family values" really are, at least in Tennessee: old white men can do whatever they hell they want and screw everyone else.

Well, at least nine women.

And That's The End of the Voter Fraud Myth

31 out of 1,000,000,000 ballots cast. That's how many credible incidents of voter fraud were found in this recent investigation that covers the years 2000 to 2014. Mr. Levitt welcomes anyone to check his work.

So, that's the end of the quaint (lie) notion that there is rampant voter fraud in this country and we must have photo ID YESTERDAY!!! (unless we are talking about absentee voter fraud in which case Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes suddenly makes a cameo appearance). Levitt notes the following.

ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.

Uh Huh:)

Bastion of Capitalism Issues Report on Income Inequality

Recently there has been a lot of discussion of income inequality, with the work of Thomas Piketty drawing a great deal of attention. Conservatives have derided this research, labeling Piketty and other economists like Paul Krugman pointy-headed liberal Marxist pseudo-voodoo-economists.

Well, another organization has entered the fray with its study on income inequality, and it backs up Piketty's conclusions:

Higher levels of income inequality increase political pressures, discouraging trade, investment, and hiring. Keynes first showed that income inequality can lead affluent households (Americans included) to increase savings and decrease consumption (1), while those with less means increase consumer borrowing to sustain consumption…until those options run out. When these imbalances can no longer be sustained, we see a boom/bust cycle such as the one that culminated in the Great Recession (2).

Aside from the extreme economic swings, such income imbalances tend to dampen social mobility and produce a less-educated workforce that can't compete in a changing global economy. This diminishes future income prospects and potential long-term growth, becoming entrenched as political repercussions extend the problems.

Which hyper-liberal organization issued this report? Why, none other than Standard & Poor, the bastion of capitalism that provides financial market data and bond ratings, and issues the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Why does S&P say that income inequality is bad?

To be sure, it seems counterintuitive that inequality is associated with less-sustainable growth, since some inequality, by providing incentives to effort and entrepreneurship, may be essential to a functioning market economy. But beyond the risk that inequality may heighten the susceptibility of an economy to booms and busts, it may also spur political instability--thus discouraging investment. Inequality may make it harder for governments to enact policies to prevent--or soften--shocks, such as raising taxes or cutting public spending to avoid a debt crisis. The affluent may exercise disproportionate influence on the political process, or the needs of the less affluent may grow so severe as to make additional cuts to fiscal stabilizers that operate automatically in a downturn politically unviable.

The S&P report doesn't recommend drastically increasing taxes on the wealthy, though it notes that policies like George W. Bush's capital gains and dividend tax cuts have exacerbated inequality. It concludes:

[S]ome degree of rebalancing--along with spending in the areas of education, health care, and infrastructure, for example--could help bring under control an income gap that, at its current level, threatens the stability of an economy still struggling to recover. This could take the form of reallocating fiscal resources toward those with a greater propensity to spend, or toward badly needed public resources like roads, ports, and transit. Further, policies that foster job-rich recoveries may help make growth more sustainable, especially given that rising unemployment correlates with rising income concentration. Additionally, effective investments in health and education promote durable growth and equity, strengthening the labor force's capacity to cope with new technologies.

This is the exactly the policy prescription that Barack Obama has been pushing since 2009, which the Republicans have fought tooth and nail. Not because they really believed it was a bad idea, but because they knew it would work and they could not abide giving the president any kind of victory, even if it meant hurting the country and the people they had sworn to serve.

Could You Live In This House?

Not me...yikes!!

Comcast: Common Carrier or "Information Service?"

In an attempt to grease the skids for its merger with Time Warner Cable, Comcast is expanding its Internet Essentials program. This allows poor families (defined as having kids eligible for free lunch) to get basic Internet for $10 a month. This is an implicit acknowledgment that the Internet is now a basic requirement for modern living, a public utility like phone service, clean water and electricity.

There's been a lot of discussion on the role of the Internet recently, with the recent court decision on net neutrality. Back when the Internet started taking off, there was an argument to be made about how it should be free from niggling regulations while it got off the ground (from Forbes).

The Clinton Administration’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 sorted this mess out and launched the age of modern Internet policy – trusting market forces and technological innovation to the maximum extent. It was an act of incredible political maturity. Its authors knew something remarkable was about to happen and that government could best serve it by stepping back and letting private investment happen.

So the 1996 Act drew a line – the old phone system would remain regulated as a “common carrier,” but the emerging new world of “information services” would be allowed to develop on its own free from utility-style requirements such as government oversight of prices, forced sharing of infrastructure with competitors, or rigid traffic management rules. As a result, we have seen over $1.2 trillion in investment since the 1996 Act, and the innovation, growth and new services the Act’s framers imagined.

It's been almost 20 years now, and things have shaken out. It's now clear now that the Internet is a utility, and that Comcast is a common carrier like any telephone company. Want proof? Millions of people get their telephone service over Comcast's cables. It's one of the big selling points in Comcast's marketing: they have their "Triple Play:" for $89/month in my area you can get (up to) 50 mps Internet, 140 cable channels and nationwide long-distance telephone service.

It's a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment that Comcast is completely unregulated and can jack up the cost of its phone service any time, while CenturyLink, the phone company that provides my DSL through essentially the same kind of network, is subject to intense scrutiny every time they want to change their rates.

Back when the Internet consisted of 2400 baud modems dialing up through the phone system it made sense to see how things would work out. Now we know: Comcast charges their customers ever more while charging content providers like Netflix for sending you data over the line you already paid for. That means you pay Comcast twice: once for the line, and again through your Netflix subscription, because Netflix has to pay blood money to keep Comcast from slowing their data stream to a crawl.

Cable companies have been raising their rates at four times the rate of inflation. They excuse it by telling us that they're adding new channels and hardware -- but all the new channels are basically useless repetitions of the same nonsense, which I don't want anyway, and our house has been hooked up with the the same coax cable for almost 40 years.

But I have no choices: unlike the phone company, which lets me pick which features I want to pay extra for, Comcast changes its channel line up constantly, making me pay for channels I will never watch. That's the power of the monopoly: Comcast is the only cable company in my city, and it's the only way I can get reliable local television service -- satellite doesn't work very well with things called "rain," "trees" and "hills."

It's nice that Comcast is making Internet affordable for poor people with kids. But what about poor people without kids? And the rest of us?

Clearly, the FCC should reclassify Comcast as a common carrier and not an "information service," since it provides telephone and telecommunications services such as email and Facebook, which is a glorified party line.

How Climate Change Changed Tom Steyer

Here's a great piece from Tom Steyer on how climate change altered the course of his life. A very worthwhile read from a man that is a living example of how wealth can be used in pursuit of actually solving problems as opposed to making them worse.

The Blamestream Media

And their solutions to our problems are...?

Palestine in 1896

Very interesting!

 

No Republican Party Anymore

Exit Stage Left

What a fantastic end to this Congressional session, eh? Let's see...they did...absolutely nothing. The good news for all you Tea Party and libertarian types is that your ideological mission of having the federal government do as little as possible has been accomplished.

The bad news is that you now have to face your voters:)

Making The Connection Between Insanity and Guns

The End of A Great Conservative Tactic

There have been a couple of great questions on Quora of late that most effectively are ending a much used conservative tactic. The strategy more or less goes like this: say the most anger, hate filled, fucked up paranoid thing you can think of and then society will fall in line with the "liberals are just as bad" meme because of our culture's nauseating sense of fairness. Essentially, it absolves conservatives of their responsibility of being intransigent assholes. Yet, a question like this and its answers illustrate the most effective way for combating this strategy.

I especially liked this answer.

The GOP seems to have come to the point at which they may legitimately need psychiatric help. I've agreed with some Republican policies in the past and, at times, wouldn't have minded voting for a centrist Republican. But the crazies in their party have scared me to the extent that I would rather vote for a centrist Democrat over a centrist Republican just to keep the crazies at bay. 

The more neurotic elements of the GOP seem to be clinging desperately to past norms in a world of rapid cultural change. Maybe they think that the only way they can do this is by vehemently preserving everything that reinforces the status quo and violently rejecting anything that threatens to change it (alternative lifestyles, alternative fuels, diverse religions, etc.). 

This extreme sort of thinking isn't conducive to dialogue.

Yep.

Red State Deadbeats

It's well established that red states receive more than their share of government money, mostly because they have lower taxes and depend on the federal government to make up for it. Red states are also poorer, in large part because they don't invest in their citizens' futures. Red states also have higher divorce rates, due to the higher divorce rates among conservative protestants. Red states also have higher teen pregnancy rates, because they make it harder to get contraception and abortion.

Now it turns out that red states have significantly higher numbers of deadbeats. A study by the Urban Institute found that states in the South have a much higher proportion of residents with debt in collection than the Upper Midwest and Northeast. Data from the TransUnion credit bureau were examined.

In states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Nevada (which was really hammered by the financial meltdown) more than 40% of the population has debt in collection. States like Minnesota, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Hawaii, South Dakota have 19-25% of the population with debt in collection, while states like New York, Oregon, New Jersey, Iowa, Washington, California, Utah, Wisconsin, etc., have debt in the 26-35% range.

Why is this? A lot of it has to do with history: red states have historically been more rural, more poverty-stricken, less well-educated. But that's because of the taxing and spending policies they've chosen. Even though states like Texas claim to have an economy that's going like gangbusters, it doesn't trickle down to the average person, who's swimming in unpaid debt. These states also have more laissez-faire lending and business practices, which allows their citizens to get into financial trouble more readily.

But it makes you wonder: how much of it is general societal attitudes? Who's more likely to worry about debt? A wishy-washy liberal who wants everyone to like him, or a self-centered red-neck who doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks?

I guess that's why the conservatives need all those guns: they've got to keep the bill collectors at bay.

Stop Being Mad All The Time

Captain America Statistics Song

Pissing Off The Young People

It looks some young voters in North Carolina are pretty pissed off at the state's new voter ID laws.

Joining a challenge to a state law alongside the N.A.A.C.P., the American Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department, lawyers for seven college students and three voter-registration advocates are making the novel constitutional argument that the law violates the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 from 21. The amendment also declares that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.”

I wonder how many more groups conservatives can piss off:)

More importantly, the article illustrates how deeply flawed voter ID laws are. Quite literally, the infringe people's right to vote.

Taxes and Infrastructure

Go Minnesota!

Props out to my home state for being much further along in energy efficiency and renewables than other states.

Today, Minnesota gets more of its power from wind than all but four other states, and the amount of coal burned at power plants has dropped by more than a third from its 2003 peak. And while electricity consumption per person has been slowly falling nationwide for the last five years, Minnesota’s decline is steeper than the average.

The Obama administration’s proposal would reduce power plants’ carbon pollution 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Minnesota set similar nonbinding goals for its entire economy seven years ago: a 15 percent reduction by 2015, 25 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050. (Minnesota measures carbon differently; by federal standards, its reductions would most likely be greater.)

And that's not all...

Utilities must produce 27.5 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. And they must wring enough waste out of their service areas — for instance, by helping customers insulate buildings or install efficient lighting — to reduce electricity sales every year by the equivalent of 1.5 percent of their revenues. 

Some economic sectors like housing and farming so far have failed to meet the carbon reduction targets. Not so the power industry. “The utilities are on track to meet both the renewable energy standard and those emission reduction targets,” said Frank L. Kohlasch, the environmental analysis manager at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Some utilities intend to beat the 2025 goal handily, he said.

Go Minnesota!!

Changing An Idealogue's Mind

From a discussion on Quora...

Sure- you cannot change an ideologue's mind, they have to do that themselves. But, if you provide calm, reasonable evidence, their own mounting frustration demonstrates- even to themselves whether they admit it or not- that their argument- and thus their point of view- has no basis in reality. 

And, those who read along here and other places, also see the argument is looney. Sometimes, the lesson being taught is lost on the supposed recipient, but the audience learns very well.

Exactly why I allow open comments:)

Return To Sender

Ukraine and Gaza: A Brief Analysis

I've had several thoughts I've wanted to get out about the situations in Israel and Ukraine but I thought it prudent to wait a bit for events to unfold. AP News has two great pieces up which summarize the ongoing issues with Russia over the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the Israeli operation in Gaza as of this morning.

My first reaction when I heard that the airline was shot down by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine was anger. We know what these guys are doing and they are bragging about it as Nikto noted the other day. Shouldn't we work with Ukraine to target these anti-aircraft missiles and take them out? Obviously, the answer is no and it's because we really need the buy in from Europe. This is a regional problem and the EU, in particular, Germany, haven't really shown much of an interest in escalation due to the Russian natural gas supply they need. This sentiment was recently echoed by Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble.

"Economic interests are not the top priority. The top priority is ensuring stability and peace," Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Classic double speak. The Germans are more interested in making sure they stay on the Russian energy teat and are hoping that somehow all of this just works itself out. Until they and other EU leaders change their mind and are willing to make sacrifices, we will be largely powerless to do anything. Honestly, they are being tremendously naive

Israel's efforts in Gaza are the exact opposite of naive. They recognize the problem and are moving to eliminate the threat with best possible speed. I make no bones about being fervently pro-Israel and completely support their mission to end the rocket launches by Hamas. No doubt I feel tremendous sadness over the loss of Palestinian children but the blame for that is largely on Hamas who purposefully place their base of operations near innocent civilians to score PR points with anti-Semitic press outlets.

At the very core of Hamas's ideology is the destruction of Israel. They are no different than Nazi Germany and if they are serious about helping their people, they will stop being violent and start advocating within the political process peacefully. That is the one area where Israel needs to be flexible. I've written about this previously but the only way I see out of this mess is a one state solution. There will never be a country of Palestine. Tareq Abbas is right

In the long run, Israel is going to come out much better as a result of this conflict. Vladamir Putin, however, will not. The EU may be dragging their feat but the writing is already on the wall. This was Putin's massive failure and miscalculation and the Russian economy is going to pay dearly for it.

Good Question

Here is a great question from Quora...

If the United States is in crisis, as the Republicans tell us, why can't they come together with the president and support policies that will help? Why can't they work with the president to fix it?

The best answer so far...

It is the crisis that Republicans are creating. I'm not trying to be cute and flip the question back at you. This is my sincere, objective judgement of the state of the nation. I'm more than willing to concede a point to anyone, but all is hear from Republicans is arrogance, contempt, dishonest tactics and a political agenda based on insulting everyone that disagrees....disagrees with a profoundly ignorant set of petulant obsessions.

One thing he forgot was the shrill cry from conservatives that it's actually the Democrats that are all these things but I supposed that could be put under the category of dishonest tactics.

There was also this brilliant comment on this answer.

The far-right lurch that the Republican party took with the Tea Party faction is troublesome. Germany experienced a similar faction in 1920 and there are several parallels in attitudes and policies shared by both. Rationalizing that they are different in different times does not remotely diminish the destructive right-wing actions. A party not working in concert with the leaders of a nation are harming the nation with its bullying and lack of cooperation, plain and simple. Anyone, even with a diminished ability to think, sees no leadership in an approach that has nothing constructive to add, only blocking tactics.

This is exactly how totalitarian governments are born. And they always start with accusing the other side of being totalitarian:)

Nuclear Plant Shut Down by Hot Weather

The knock against solar and wind is that you can't depend on them when you need them: the sun doesn't shine at night, and solar cells are less efficient when it's cloudy. And the wind doesn't always blow. That's why conservatives always tout nuclear power as the always-reliable panacea that will always be there.

We've seen time and again that this is false, with the accidents in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear plants are frequently shut down for maintenance, sometimes for months, a problem which will only get worse over time. And nuclear plants will have to shut down when they run out of storage space for their waste.

Now we have news that Scandinavian nuclear plants are being forced to shut down because of rising ocean temperatures:

OSLO (Reuters) - Sweden's top nuclear power generators have been forced to cut output because of exceptionally warm weather in Scandinavia, and their output could be reduced for over a week, their operators said on Wednesday.

Oskarshamn, part of Germany's E.ON and Forsmark, operated by Swedish utility Vattenfall have both cut output because warm sea water temperatures are limiting their ability to cool down.

"For each degree above 23 decrees Celsius in the cooling water, each unit has to decrease power by 3 percent," Forsmark said in a market message. "It is uncertain how long this will last, but according to meteorologists, the warm weather will last for at least 11 more days."

So, just when they need these nuclear power plants the most, they have to shut down. Not all that reliable. The same thing is true for coal plants, which use hundreds of billions of water annually for cooling.

As ocean temperatures rise due to global warming this problem will only recur, necessitating design changes to get cooling water from greater distances and depths.

Are "Toothless" Sanctions Working Against Russia?

Russia's central bank raised interest rates for the third time this year to combat the eight percent inflation rate Russia is suffering. Russia's stock market has fallen more than seven percent this year.

Will this cost Putin popular support in Russia? There are already some signs that not all Russians support Putin's actions, with the front-page apology for the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 that was printed in Novaya Gazeta. Of course, it is the same paper for which four reporters have been assassinated since 2001 for their coverage of Russia's bloody and ruthless war in Chechnya and their criticism of Putin.

The main problem is that Europe is dependent on Russia for oil and gas, and they're afraid to impose the hardest-hitting sanctions against Russia. France and England are now bickering over who's being soft on Russian, with Cameron criticizing France for selling warships to Russia and Hollande accusing England of being a haven for Russian oligarchs.

How To Deal With Right Wing Blog Commenters

From a recent question on Quora, regarding engagement with intolerant conservatives...

My typical tact is NOT to "communicate" with them. Ignore them. Leave them be. You're wasting your breath. (Or, at least that's how I feel.) 

Let narrow minded fools remain that way until they're ready to pay attention, and still don't allow one's self to be goaded into an argument with such fools under false pretenses. 

Some people only look for evidence to support their already established conclusions and will talk you and themselves in useless circles (usually a tact absorbed by watching or listening to too many conservative media outlets). 

You can't "fix" or communicate with someone who refuses to listen or pay attention and respond in a meaningful manner other than repeat the same (parrot) rhetoric without driving yourself nuts and eventually realizing it's pointless and hopeless. 

The same as is said about bullies in school: Ignore them. Eventually they'll go away, fall in line (need attention, parrot normatively), or get caught in their own trap (talk themselves in circles until blue in the face and suffocate themselves in parroted, self-loving, auto-erotic asphyxiation). But, if you feed the beast, it will remain and torment you until your dying day (including one's own need to argue with and "fix" or communicate in hopeless parroted rhetoric). AND, the longer you stay in this zone, the more you become like them...

Sounds like someone has been in my comments section:)

How To Respond To Open Carry Activists

"Gun rights activists do not have a history of institutionalized discrimination."

Exactly right. But they do like to play make believe and that victim card, don't they?

How the Average Person Sees an Open-Carry Gun Nut

Chad Pickering shot a 17-year old girl for telling him to stop trespassing. He had ridden his lawn mower through her yard while wearing a .45 caliber pistol in a holster.

Last Monday night he hid outside her house and when she came out onto the deck he shot her three times, hitting her in the chest, thigh and ankle.

Pickering confessed to the murder attempt after police found the pistol hidden in air vent in his house. He told police the "bitch" came to his door and threatened him, so he hid behind a pine tree outside her house and "I waited and I waited and I waited."

The girl survived and is out of the hospital, but it may be months before she can walk again.

Who was this guy?

Pickering filed for bankruptcy last year in Wisconsin, listing $45,000 in liabilities, much of it unpaid medical debt. In 2011, Pickering pleaded guilty in Wisconsin to two counts of driving under the influence.

On his Facebook page, Pickering listed his job as a correctional officer at Northwestern Minnesota Juvenile Center. A call and e-mails to that center’s director, Bill Frey, were not returned Thursday. But Frey told the Valley News Live that Pickering was a part-time correctional officer from May 20 to June 9.

On Facebook in July, Pickering shared a message from a group called “Cold Dead Hands” that blasted gun control. Pickering urged voters to “ditch the retards that are taking this country down the drain.”

I guess Obamacare came a year too late for Chad Pickering. I wonder if this shooting would have even happened if Pickering's life hadn't been such a hell because of medical problems?

In any case, it's clear that Pickering carried a gun openly to intimidate people. And when that failed to shut them up, he took it a step further: he couldn't stand to be humiliated in front of his kids by a stupid teenage bitch who was unimpressed by the size of his weapon. He showed her!

It makes the average person wonder how many of these open-carry gun nuts are just like this guy, human time-bombs waiting to go off.

The fact is, it's people like Pickering who are taking the NRA down the drain. Too many of their most irate and vocal members are cast in the same mold: excitable and unstable people who should not have deadly weapons.

Why do respectable gun owners let these fruit cakes control the gun debate?

Diversity According To Fox News

Good Words

From a recent question on Quora (why are there so many shootings in the United States?)

Across the democratic developed world the vast majority of guns are hunting or sport firearms. Switzerland, often cited by gun advocates, is an anomaly since it's had a long history of required military service and the requirement a trained adult properly maintain and store their issued firearm - improper handling being an offense. Switzerland is an anomaly. 

American ownership is radically skewed towards the ownership of guns with an intent to use them against other people. The whole (inane in the light of facts) 2nd Amendment argument - blurred by the NRA to the point it's authors wouldn't be able to recognize (nor stomach) it. A lack of confidence in its democratic institutions, and in its people's respect for them, led American (white property-owning) men to entrench their right to bear arms against their democratically constituted elected authorities - which since has been stretched into blanket coverage of the right to arm themselves against their next-door neighbor.

Institutionalized paranoia.

Exactly right.

His conclusion is even better.

Simply having loaded guns lying about leads to 2 of every 3 gun-related deaths in the United States. Those are the unintentional homicides. Over 20,000 such deaths in 2013 alone. With a majority of gun homicides ruled not premeditated the rate attributable to ease of access alone is realistically higher. 

But it isn't a gun but the thought behind ownership that makes U.S. ownership so disproportionately destructive. The hunting rifle my grand-dad shouldered as he trudged through the backwoods of the Canadian hinterland nearly a century ago was carried with a vastly different intent than an assault rifle with 40 round magazine in the same rear window as a '2nd Amendment' decal which seldom leaves the suburbs. 

There is, in other words, a face-palm obvious statistical correlation between a gun being at hand and gun tragedy - but the violent intent behind possessing weapons of war primes the violence pump predisposing the entire culture to a greater likelihood of violence. A fact born out by 'cold. hard ...' fact.

So, can we change?

John Walsh Weighs in on Guns

Glenn Beck Continues To Walk The Walk

Something I didn't think I would EVER say...Glenn Beck continues to impress me. He has personally taking it upon himself to help the children that are illegally crossing our border. Throwing aside his anger, hate, and fear peddling, Beck is now doing exactly what conservatives should be doing if they want to be relevant in any future elections. And he is acting like a Christian. I hope that more conservatives take his lead. Ted Cruz is doing it.

Because if they continue to do stuff like this for the next few months, I think they might just take back the Senate.

Good Words

From a discussion on Quora about racism...

Lack of forthright censure is the equivalent of tacit approval.

And that would be why the people that howl about race baiting being a more prevalent problem than racism in this country end up being accused of being racist.

Because they ARE.

Don't Be So Smug: Or, We've Had Our Own Flight 17...

It's now clear that Russia provided the SA-11 antiaircraft missiles that Ukrainian rebels used to shoot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, and that Russian troops trained the rebels in the use of the weapons.

Immediately after the missile attack Ukrainian rebels bragged on social media about shooting down a plane. In this now-deleted post Igor Strelkov ("Igor the Gunman") said, "We warned you -- don't fly in 'our skies,'" and "Peaceful people were not injured." Yeah, right.

Rebels were also recorded talking on radios about shooting the plane down.

After the Russians realized their horrible mistake, they took down their gloating posts and brought the weapons back across the border into Russia. The separatists have also been covering up their mistake, taking the bodies of the wounded and and the flight and data recorders, apparently on orders from Moscow. They have been denying access to the crash site to rescue workers. It also appears that the crash site was looted by thieves who stole the victims' credit cards and personal belongings.

So what should happen now? There's actually a precedent for this: several countries have shot down civilian aircraft by mistake. Including the United States.

In 1988 the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655. The Vincennes was engaged with Iranian gunboats when a radar operator mistook the Airbus A300B2-203 for an F-14A Tomcat fighter jet.  This was during the Iran-Iraq war, and there was a lot of tension in the area: the Iraqis had recently killed 37 Americans aboard the USS Stark (by mistake), and another American frigate had been struck by an Iranian mine.

The Vincennes issued radio challenges to the airliner, but since it was a civilian jet flying on its normal flight path, the pilots had no idea the Vincennes was trying to contact them: they just kept flying. Receiving no response, the Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles; one struck the airliner. Everyone aboard was killed.

The United States never admitted fault, but issued a statement of regret and paid $61.8 million in reparations. It was a standard non-apology apology.

Russia can (probably rightly) blame it all on incompetent separatists, but they created the conditions that caused this travesty, so Russia needs to dip into its vast oil profits and pay reparations to the victims. They must also remove their troops from the border, take back all the weapons they've provided the rebels and stop egging on the crazies in eastern Ukraine.

But John McCain has been his usual idiotic war-mongering self, calling the United States "cowardly" for not sending more weapons in the area. Suppose we had sent one of our missile batteries to the Ukrainian government and they were the ones who shot down Flight 17. If we send weapons into Ukraine it will only make the situation worse, creating opportunities for similar accidents that the Russians will proclaim as atrocities against them and theirs, which they'll use as ammunition against us. (We are just so lucky that McCain lost the 2008 election. We would have started 23 more wars by now.)

We should be ratcheting down the violence, not arming everyone to the teeth. If we learned anything from the cold war, it's that arms races only assure mutual destruction. If we want to hurt the Russians where it really hurts, we should treat them like the international pariah and menace to navigation they have become.

If Putin doesn't pull back his troops and stop supporting the terrorists who shot down Flight 17, Russia should be labeled a state sponsor of international terrorism, Russian assets in the United States, Europe and Asia should be seized and we should hit firms that cut oil deals with Russian oligarchs with gigantic fines.

Minimum Wage Increases Don't Hurt Job Growth

Data from the Department of Labor shows that states that increased the minimum wage have experienced job growth:

In a report on Friday, the 13 states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have added jobs at a faster pace than those that did not. The data run counter to a Congressional Budget Office report in February that said raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as the White House supports, would cost 500,000 jobs.

Nine states had minimum wage increases tied to inflation (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington), while four more states (Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island) passed legislation for the increases.

Do I think that these increases alone caused greater job growth? No. But they didn't lose jobs as conservative ideology dictates. Why?

Probably because the minimum wage is way too low. It has fallen so far behind inflation, even though inflation hasn't been a real factor for decades, that wages on the low end are a real bargain in the United States.

It's also clear that giving poor people more money has a positive effect on the economy, because those workers spend every penny they get. If you give one million minimum-wage workers a thousand bucks each, that's one billion dollars that are plowed right back into the local economy: they spend it all, on the basic requirements of life. Food, shelter, clothing: that's what minimum-wage spend their money on.

These days, if you give a billionaire an extra billion dollars it doesn't improve the local economy whatsoever. He'll buy some T-bills, try to stage a hostile takeover or merger, or buy some high-yield bonds in Spain or Greece (yep, they're not dead yet). He'll do a joint venture with some Chinese company, or cut a deal with a Russian oil tycoon. He might spend a few million on an fancy apartment in New York, a villa in Majorca, or a yacht in Miami. If he's a sports fan, he might buy a basketball team, and make another billionaire a little bit richer.

What he's not going to do is build a factory in the United States that makes real products, because he doesn't want to pay people salaries that they can live on in the United States. But this is a false choice. Germany has showed that you can pay a decent wage, have unions on corporate boards, have a health care system that covers everyone, while being flooded with immigrants, and still have one of best export economies in the world.

Yes, increasing the minimum wage to some ridiculously high number would cause jobs to be lost. It's also true that rich states can support a higher minimum wage than poor states. But no one is proposing to jack up the minimum wage to 20 bucks across the country. The $10.10 that President Obama has proposed is still far below a living wage: any company that can't pay it has a business model that depends on passing on their labor costs to the federal government in the form of Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and the earned income tax credit.

No Such Thing

We Are A Christian Nation

I'm most happy this morning to link this piece from Politico in which we see a return to compassionate conservatism. I've always held out quiet hope that people like Glenn Beck and Hugh Hewitt would come around and it looks like they have.

In an op-ed for POLITICO Magazine on Thursday, Hewitt argued that now isn’t the time to discuss the border fence he has long advocated. 

“Right now the country ought to act to end the humanitarian crisis of tens of thousands of what are, in effect, orphans and strangers in our land. The very young among them should find ‘forever families’ right here, right now. They should become Americans,” Hewitt wrote. 

Exactly what Jesus would do!

On his Tuesday evening broadcast on his cable channel TheBlaze, Beck directly addressed the parents of child immigrants, tears in his eyes as a scrolling marquee translated his monologue into Spanish, begging them to keep their children at home for their own safety. 

“Please would you consider doing the hard thing as well would you resist the temptation to flee or break up your family, please don’t hand your child off to a smuggler in the middle of the night,” Beck said. “I can’t sleep at night thinking about your son or daughter and so I and about 150 volunteers and multiple semi-trucks are going down to our border and we will see your child … and we will care for them.” 

Care for them...that's right. That's what we do in this country.

Because we are a Christian nation:)

Centuries of Denial

More Good Words

From a Quora question...

Look, when you adhere to this Real American Patriot mantra that sets up a straw man of "liberals" as: stupid, ignorant, anti-American, ominous, elitist, and generally a threat to the country and the very fabric of our nation....why wouldn't you call for "the Liberal president's" impeachment over your preception of his so-called failures? According to the article he is described as "abusive" and Americans are described as being like a battered wife that's "had enough." That sounds like a totally reasonable analogy - yeah, Domestic Violence scenario is exactly what liberal Obama represents. So apt! Why wouldn't you want to eliminate your sworn enemy, a direct threat to your nation?? 

If you drone on and on and convince yourself that your side represents Real America and you are on the side of righteousness and all things good and you constantly talk about having to "take your country back" this is absolutely the natural progression. 

Ideology is formed through a process of repetition of formalized language and ideation. 

You can find evidence of this assertion in my comments section.

Exiting Stage Right?

After years of Tea Party tomfoolery in Kansas, the chickens are coming home to roost. In 2012 Governor Sam Brownback cut taxes on the wealthy by 25% and eliminated all taxes for business profits reported on individual tax returns.

All this was supposed make the Kansas economy boom, but the state was one of only five in the country to lose employment this year, and employment has been below the national average for Brownback's entire term. Net growth in business registrations is down.

This year the state took in $335 million less in taxes than expected, and is now hacking away at its schools and colleges. Moody's cut the state's debt rating. In short, Brownback has been a disaster for Kansas.

It's so bad that hundreds of responsible Kansas Republicans have endorsed Brownback's Democratic opponent, Paul Davis.

In one poll, Davis is leading Brownback by six points statewide. A quarter of registered Republicans are turning to the Democrat, and independents favor Davis by 19 points.

This is how hyper-conservative shills for the oligarchs like Brownback will eventually lose, even in states like Kansas. They are being driven so far right by the cash dangled in front of them by the Koch brothers (they're headquartered in Wichita), that real Republicans and independents will eventually become disgusted and abandon them.

Their denial of science, their insistence on long-discredited trickle-down economic policies that benefit only the wealthy, their inherent racism -- expressed most vehemently these days in their screaming tirades against children fleeing social and economic chaos, and their insatiable desire to force their religious beliefs on everyone else are all alienating the young, the middle class, women and even many libertarians.

It's only a matter of time. The only question is how much damage they'll do to the economy, our physical and educational infrastructure, and the climate before they finally exit stage right.

Good Words

From a recent Quora question...

There are many arguably valid interpretations of the Constitution, and there are lengthy treatises available on the history, compromises, and application of each of the Amendments throughout the course of American history.

Somewhere, one of my old commenters, that went by the handle "Not My Name," is picking up the pieces of his exploded head.

In later comment from the same author...

I don't believe that there is a "right" or "wrong" interpretation (well, if you said that the 2nd Amendment gives you the right to keep elephants, that would be "wrong"). Keep in mind that even the Founders disagreed on what ultimately was placed in our Constitution -- the entire document is nothing but compromises that took many different viewpoints on government and rights and created what we now see as the Constitution.

Gee, that sounds pretty familiar...:)

Impeach!

It's Time...

Every year thousands of kids get the wrong dose of medicine in the United States. Some of them are made sicker, some of them don't get better or stay sick longer, and some of them die. Why?

The United States uses an arcane and outdated measurement system. The English system is used for some things, but the metric system for other things. Science and medicine use the metric system, the United States military uses the metric system, most manufactured products use the metric system, including cars, bicycles, computers, etc., but plumbing and carpentry supplies are still manufactured to English specifications. This means that Americans have to own two sets of tools, and are constantly wondering which set they need. Our speed limits and maps all still use English.

The same problem exists in medicine. The dosages for liquid medications are sometimes prescribed in milliliters, but most frequently in teaspoons or tablespoons. Pharmacists can mix up teaspoons and tablespoons because the abbreviations are so similar (tsp. and tbsp.) and physician's scribbles are often difficult to decipher. Even if it's written correctly, anyone who's ever done any baking knows how easy it is to mix up teaspoons and tablespoons, which can result in dangerously wrong dosages.

To make things worse, parents often use a regular teaspoon that you eat cereal with instead of an actual measuring teaspoon. They just eyeball half a teaspoon instead of finding an actual half-teaspoon measuring spoon. Because children have such low body mass, and some medicines are so powerful, an overdose can have serious consequences, resulting in injury and even death.

To fix this many professional associations are recommending all liquid medicines be administered in milliliters (mL). Whenever you get a prescription for liquid medicines you would get a small measurement cup with markings in mL. A study recently found that parents dosing in mL made far fewer mistakes.

Dealing with multiple measurement systems causes errors. The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because one subcontractor provided data in pound force seconds instead of newton seconds. In the United States patient weights are recorded on scales that read in pounds, but dosages for medications are typically calculated in milliliters per kilogram of body weight, which means doctors have to convert your body weight into metric and then convert the calculated dose back into English.

None of this makes any sense. Nearly every product you buy in the store is marked in both English and metric, since manufacturers want to be able to export without having to repackage goods for different markets.

Even more idiotically, there are multiple English systems in common usage. Ships and aircraft still use "nautical miles," which are 800 feet longer than "statute miles." There are U.S. gallons and imperial gallons. There are regular feet and "survey feet." And then there's the profusion of different units: chains, rods, acres, fathoms, yards, fluid ounces, dry ounces, pints, quarts, cups, gallons, BTUs, blah, blah, blah.

We should just dump all that crap. Most everyone in the United States is already familiar with the metric system anyway: we buy cars with 2-liter engines, 9-millimeter pistols, and two-liter bottles of soda.

The metric system is so much easier to use. If you pick up a 16-millimeter wrench and it's just a little too big for the bolt you're tightening, the 15-millimeter wrench is the obvious choice. But if the 5/8" wrench is too big, do you pick up the 3/4", the 1/2", or the 9/16"?

If you want to increase a recipe by a quarter and you need 1 1/2 cups of sugar, and you can still remember how to multiply fractions from middle school, bully for you! But you wind up with 5/4 x 3/2 = 15/8 of a cup. What a pain to measure. You can convert to decimal to avoid fractions, but how do you measure 1.875 cups? With metric, 300 grams of sugar is easily converted: 300 x 1.25 = 375 grams. Things like flour are better measured by weight instead of volume anyway, because of settling. Adding linear measurements is just as much fun: how long is 12 3/4" plus 3 1/8" plus 2 5/16"? Wouldn't you rather add 12.75, 3.13 and 2.31?

"But what about football?" someone in the crowd yells. "We can't change yards to meters and ruin our glorious tradition! You can't have a first down at the 45.72 meter line!"

Amazingly, soccer has solved this problem: the field (or pitch, as the Brits are wont to say) is still measured in yards. For example, the centre circle is 10 yards from the centre spot and the rules provide a metric equivalent (9.15 meters). So, even if you drive 20 kilometers to a football game, you can still sit in your reserved seats on the 50-yard-line.

Sports like basketball and volleyball have updated some of the measurements. Internationally the basketball court is 28 x15 meters, but the rim is still 10 feet (3.05 m). The volleyball court is 10 m on a side (29' 6"), but the net is still 7' 11 5/8". That's 2.43 meters, in case you're wondering.

Because fractions are used in English measurements, it can be confusing to notate and interpret measurements on computers (like, for example, 7' 11 5/8"), making it easy for errors and misunderstandings to creep in. Plus, I've never had a calculator that adds fractions, but they all add metric just fine.

We should just bite the 9-mm bullet and switch to metric.

Who Knows More About The Constitution?

The Rats That Coulda-Woulda-Shoulda

Have you ever come home to find your dog with his head hung low, looking guilty, only to find that he chewed up your slippers? Or heard about a cat that adopted a baby squirrel? Or a dog that saved a kitten in a ravine and nursed it? Or the rabbit that pined away after her sister died?

Many people dismiss outright the idea that animals can have emotions at all, much less display altruism: it's a dog-eat-dog world, after all. Animals are slaves to instinct, and attempts to anthropomorphize their behavior is misguided. These folks admit that animals can feel fear and rage, but more complex emotions, such guilt, jealousy, envy, love and regret are beyond their ken.

But evidence is building that animals do in fact have emotions, very similar to humans. A study conducted at the University of Minnesota has tested this. The experiment was structured to determine whether rats could feel regret:

“What we found is that when a rat makes a mistake of its own agency, then the rat is able to recognize that mistake, and it thinks about the thing it should have done,” said A. David Redish, a neuroscience professor at the University of Minnesota.

Researchers thought that rats looked like they were feeling regret during another experiment, so they constructed a study to test it. They discovered that not only do rats look like they have regrets, the rats are actually thinking about what they should have done.

The experiment involved making rats decide whether to wait for their favorite food, or eschew the wait for instant gratification.  The researchers measured brain activity in the rat that indicated memory of the preferred food.

Of course, it has to be this way. In order to learn, animals have to be able to make mental associations like this.

When a pet bounces up and down excitedly to see you come home, or sulks after getting yelled at, it's clear the animal is experiencing genuine emotions that are no different from human ones. You don't see that kind of behavior in insects or lower animals, though even lizards and turtles can recognize individual humans and prefer their company: it might not be love, but what can you expect from a cold-blooded animal?

It's a fair question to ask whether these are "real" emotions, or just brain chemistry associated with the learning process. Mammalian brains release endorphins that result in pleasure, and adrenalin is involved with the fear response. Oxytocin (the "love" hormone) is present in mammals and works the same way as it does in humans.

But it's also a fair question to ask whether that same mechanistic biology that operates in human really makes us substantially different from other mammals. Psychopaths lack basic human emotions such as empathy, regret and remorse. They're often described as animals who have no souls.

Our legal system concurs with this judgment: people who express no remorse for their crimes are often given longer sentences, or even sentenced to death for their lack of empathy.

Which makes you wonder: is the cat who saved a little boy from a dog attack more human than Ted Bundy?

No Thanks, Gun Humpers

Not only that but I think I speak for many Americans when I say that these idiots are the last fucking people I want "defending my rights." I'd rather have them defend against early onset diabetes and seriously consider salads.

Well Said, Bernie!