A wonderful message to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. We are doing His works and greater than these!
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
A Tax Increase Conservatives Should Love
I've been following Joe Nocera's Gun Report (and the Hammer Report) at The New York Times. Regardless of your take on guns, it's often funny in a morbid and depressing way.
One of the common factors among the incidents I noticed was the involvement of alcohol. It seems that an awful lot of shootings, including domestic violence, accidental child shootings, and gang shootings, involve drunken spouses fighting, drunken parents playing with guns and drunken or high gangbangers evening scores.
Turns out that it's not a coincidence. In an interview with Mark Kleiman on the Washington Post's website, some interesting statistics stand out:
Kleiman: Half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did…Of the class of people who go to prison, a lot of them are drunk a lot of the time. So that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it if they had not been drunk. It’s just that being drunk and committing burglary are both parts of their lifestyle. Still, alcohol shortens time horizons, and people with shorter time horizons are more criminally active because they’re less scared of the punishment. Most people who drive drunk are sensible enough to know when they’re sober that they shouldn’t be driving drunk. It’s only when they’re drunk that they forget they’re not supposed to drive drunk.Maybe the NRA should change their motto to "Guns don't kill people, drunks kill people." Oh, wait, that ship has already sailed: the NRA endorses carrying concealed weapons in bars.
Kleiman's recommendation?
Taxation is just about the perfect way to control alcohol use. It’s not complete, because you need controls for the real problem drinkers. But if we tripled the alcohol tax it would reduce homicide by 6 percent. And you’re not putting anybody in jail. But instead we spend our time talking about doing marijuana testing for welfare recipients.All this murder and mayhem caused by drunks costs American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year in workplace productivity losses, law enforcement, prisons, traffic deaths, health care and so on.
In addition to directly reducing the damage to the economy by reducing public drunkenness, tripling the alcohol tax would also raise $17 billion in revenue, helping to recoup law enforcement and health care costs caused by drunks and the beer companies that feed their habits.
Everyone agrees that the people who cause problems should pay for them. So conservatives, especially the most conservative Southern Baptists, Mormons and Methodists, should love an alcohol tax increase.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
An Environmental Case for Factory Farms
Environmentalists generally hate giant factory farms. These massive livestock operations cause all kinds of environmental and health problems. Gigantic chicken, hog and dairy farms are notorious for catastrophic manure spills that kill millions of fish, pollute water with high levels of nitrates that cause spontaneous abortions, cause Salmonella, E. Coli, and cryptosporidium contamination, emit hydrogen sulfide that can cause brain damage in those exposed and even kill them, contribute to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that degrades fishing and shrimping, and so on.
But there are large dairy operations that environmentalists could grow to love. The New York Times has an article about one of the largest dairy farms in the country. Fair Oaks Farms, which has 30,000 dairy cows, uses the methane from cow manure to generate the electricity that powers their entire operation, as well as fueling the tractor-trailers that take the milk to processors in three states. That saves two million gallons of diesel fuel alone per year.
Minnesota Public Radio has a story about the Crave Brothers cheese farm, which uses an anaerobic digester to process manure and waste whey to create methane that's burned to generate all the electricity for the farm's operations, as well as 300 additional households. The remaining waste is used as fertilizer and bedding for the cows.
In these operations potentially toxic manure is neutralized and turned into fuel and fertilizer in a sustainable and carbon-neutral fashion. Instead of taking methane and crude oil from deep within the earth that will be burned once, constantly increasing the amount of dioxide in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming, these farms use the natural carbon cycle to power their operations. Sunlight makes their crops grow, which takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; the cows eat the crops and produce manure; methane is extracted from the manure; the methane is burned and put back into the air as carbon dioxide; and the cycle is complete. The farms' operations can be carbon neutral.
There's a certain minimum size required for such an operation, from both an economic and efficiency standpoint. The larger the operation, the more steps in production you can colocate on the farm (growing feed, producing milk and meat, and more industrial process like cheese making or slaughtering), the more efficient the carbon cycle will be. This form of electrical cogeneration is a perfect way for factory farms to redeem themselves and become heroes of the environmental movement instead of the archvillains.
However, factory farms are guilty of other sins: they use antibiotics simply to increase weight gain, and they confine animals in inhumane, crowded and dirty conditions, rather than allowing them to wander aimlessly through idyllic grassy fields. There's no excuse for indiscriminate antibiotic use: the practice is quickly creating superbugs that are immune to our entire arsenal of antibiotics. Instead, farms should keep animal pens clean, which has been shown to be just as effective in increasing weight in poultry and is essential to proper dairy operations in any case.
The problem with aimless wandering is that manure will be dropped over large areas, making it less efficient to collect it for methane generation. The animals are part of a giant food- and electricity-generating machine, sort of like the people in The Matrix.
We should avoid unnecessary cruelty to animals, and maybe we can find a way to efficiently generate electricity from free-range cows. But if we can't, and the choice is between confined cows and a 10-foot rise in sea level in the next 40 years, the choice should be obvious. If environmentalists want to stop indiscriminate fracking, expanded use of coal and nuclear, they have to be open to all forms of carbon-neutral energy generation.
Even if it makes Bessie sad.
But there are large dairy operations that environmentalists could grow to love. The New York Times has an article about one of the largest dairy farms in the country. Fair Oaks Farms, which has 30,000 dairy cows, uses the methane from cow manure to generate the electricity that powers their entire operation, as well as fueling the tractor-trailers that take the milk to processors in three states. That saves two million gallons of diesel fuel alone per year.
Minnesota Public Radio has a story about the Crave Brothers cheese farm, which uses an anaerobic digester to process manure and waste whey to create methane that's burned to generate all the electricity for the farm's operations, as well as 300 additional households. The remaining waste is used as fertilizer and bedding for the cows.
In these operations potentially toxic manure is neutralized and turned into fuel and fertilizer in a sustainable and carbon-neutral fashion. Instead of taking methane and crude oil from deep within the earth that will be burned once, constantly increasing the amount of dioxide in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming, these farms use the natural carbon cycle to power their operations. Sunlight makes their crops grow, which takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; the cows eat the crops and produce manure; methane is extracted from the manure; the methane is burned and put back into the air as carbon dioxide; and the cycle is complete. The farms' operations can be carbon neutral.
There's a certain minimum size required for such an operation, from both an economic and efficiency standpoint. The larger the operation, the more steps in production you can colocate on the farm (growing feed, producing milk and meat, and more industrial process like cheese making or slaughtering), the more efficient the carbon cycle will be. This form of electrical cogeneration is a perfect way for factory farms to redeem themselves and become heroes of the environmental movement instead of the archvillains.
However, factory farms are guilty of other sins: they use antibiotics simply to increase weight gain, and they confine animals in inhumane, crowded and dirty conditions, rather than allowing them to wander aimlessly through idyllic grassy fields. There's no excuse for indiscriminate antibiotic use: the practice is quickly creating superbugs that are immune to our entire arsenal of antibiotics. Instead, farms should keep animal pens clean, which has been shown to be just as effective in increasing weight in poultry and is essential to proper dairy operations in any case.
The problem with aimless wandering is that manure will be dropped over large areas, making it less efficient to collect it for methane generation. The animals are part of a giant food- and electricity-generating machine, sort of like the people in The Matrix.
We should avoid unnecessary cruelty to animals, and maybe we can find a way to efficiently generate electricity from free-range cows. But if we can't, and the choice is between confined cows and a 10-foot rise in sea level in the next 40 years, the choice should be obvious. If environmentalists want to stop indiscriminate fracking, expanded use of coal and nuclear, they have to be open to all forms of carbon-neutral energy generation.
Even if it makes Bessie sad.
Missing Kubrick
I miss Stanley Kubrick. He was, hands down, my favorite filmmaker and I wish he had lived longer or, at the very least, made more films during his time with us. But he made what he made and his body of work is still several levels above everyone else's filmography, in my humble opinion.
Of course, this recent piece over at the Atlantic is more than a little salt in the wound of missing Kubrick.
However, it's Kubrick's interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for "hot swing" and other variations of jazz outlawed as "jungle music" by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as "travel letters," which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick's title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.
Kubrick and World War II? That would have been mega! Considering what he did with Vietnam and World War I (in Full Metal Jacket and Paths of Glory, respectively), the mind can only wonder in awe. Throw jazz into the mix and I'm really lamenting today at a Kubrick-less world..
Of course, this recent piece over at the Atlantic is more than a little salt in the wound of missing Kubrick.
However, it's Kubrick's interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for "hot swing" and other variations of jazz outlawed as "jungle music" by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as "travel letters," which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick's title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.
Kubrick and World War II? That would have been mega! Considering what he did with Vietnam and World War I (in Full Metal Jacket and Paths of Glory, respectively), the mind can only wonder in awe. Throw jazz into the mix and I'm really lamenting today at a Kubrick-less world..
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Bursting the Health Care Bubble
The cost of American health care has been back in the news since Steven Brill's Time article "Why Medical Bills are Killing Us" was published. The Washington Post has a feature that shows the problem in 21 charts.
The charts compare the prices insurance companies pay for office visits, hospital stays, procedures and drugs in the United States to prices paid in nations with comparable health outcomes (most have longer life expectancies than the United States). For example, an angiogram costs $35 in Canada, and between $173 and $2,430 in the United States. A routine office visit is $10 in Argentina ($30 in Canada) and $68 to $176 in the United States.
Those numbers are astonishing, but if you compare the lowest price in the US to the second highest price, the United States sometimes comes in lower. For example, the costs of C-sections, hip replacements and knee replacements, the lowest cost in the US is less than the cost in Australia. The cost of an MRI in the US varies between $522 and $2871. Which means the lowest price Americans pay for MRIs is actually less than South Africa ($1072), Switzerland ($928) and New Zealand ($554).
The reason that there's just a single price for all those other countries is that prices are set centrally. In a big country like the United States it's harder to set a single price for medical care. The health care markets in elderly Florida and child-oriented Utah are much different. And that's why Medicare reimbursements can vary widely from state to state. And they can vary even within the same state.
So we should expect some regional price variability in the United States. But there's no way in hell that MRIs should cost some Americans five times more than other Americans. The problem is much deeper and more endemic than price gouging: it's the basic model of employer-provided health insurance.
For example, I recently had surgery. We have a large deductible policy, so we get all the bills. One from the hospital was asking for $9,000. However, the insurance company rejected that and would pay only $4,000, which the hospital immediately accepted. Now, one wonders why the hospital bothers to bill for $9,000 when they know full well it's going to get less than half that.
But the real point is that the insurance company dictates the price to the hospital. Instead of a faceless bureaucrat in Washington setting the price for my surgery, a faceless bureaucrat at my insurance company sets the price. If either faceless bureaucrat decides they won't pay for the procedure I need, I'm out of luck.
And don't think that you can just go somewhere else to get what you need: most people get health care through their employer, which means they have no choice in the matter. But if I pay for my own healthcare — and I do — I can't just switch to another one that will cover the procedure. Because insurance companies can deny coverage to applicants who have pre-existing conditions. That is, until 2014 when Obamacare fully phases in.
But that brings us back to that huge price range. Why are prices so wildly divergent in the United States? How can one American company provide an MRI for less than a fifth of the cost of another company? Is the expensive MRI provider simply gouging insurance companies that are bad at negotiating, or is there collusion between the insurer and the provider?
In the United States general inflation has been nearly non-existent for decades. That's due to globalization, a flat labor market and companies like Walmart whose business models depend on driving down prices. Yet health care costs, dictated by large insurance companies, have been rising at an annual average of 10% or more for most of that same period (though the rate of growth has declined recently -- perhaps in part because of the passage of Obamacare).
The only justification for the existence of health insurance companies is that they're supposed to keep down health care costs. But these apparently worthless middlemen have utterly failed to do that, and have been consistently failing for two decades.
The fact is, health insurance companies have had no motivation to keep costs down. Their only motivation is to keep profits up. If costs go up, and they can pass those costs on to consumers by increasing premiums, that's what they'll do. And that's what's been happening. And increasingly insurance companies are buying health care providers. Which means they've have absolutely no motivation to reduce costs to their customers.
Until now. Because Obamacare has placed limits on premium increases.
There's been a lot of fearmongering that Obamacare will drive many companies to stop providing health care coverage for their employees. That might actually be a good thing: if we buy our own insurance, it will make insurance companies responsible to the people who actually receive medical care, rather than the CEOs of the companies that employ them.
Right now all the people involved with setting prices on American health care are wealthy insurance company execs, wealthy employers, wealthy hospital directors and wealthy doctors. They're all scratching each other's backs without any concept of how expensive all this medical care is for regular people. But the reality in other countries — and even in the US — shows that costs could easily be halved. Corporations deduct the cost of health insurance from their taxes, which means that we the people are actually paying for outrageously high medical system. Patients, the real customers, have no say. The market forces that are supposed to keep costs in check simply do not function in health care.
The world economy has been the victim of one economic bubble after another: the dot com bubble in the Nineties and the real estate bubble in the 2000s. But the biggest danger facing the United States economy is the health care bubble, not only because it will drive up the cost of Medicare, but because it makes American businesses less competitive globally. The health care sector been eating a bigger and bigger chunk of the US economy, and will soon swallow up 20%.
That has prompted more and more companies to get on the health care bandwagon, and become involved in the elderly and disability sectors of health care in particular (the "growth" sectors). If you've every watched cable TV during the day you know what I'm talking about. The SCOOTER Store, which sells power wheelchairs, floods cable TV with hundreds of millions of dollars of ads every year. These ads promise that they'll get the government to pay for your powered wheelchair, or they'll pay for it themselves. Yeah, right.
According to an article on the CBS website, the Senate Special Committee on Aging has been investigating this. Apparently the SCOOTER Store has been "bulldozing" doctors into writing powered wheelchair prescriptions for patients. I've seen how this works first-hand.
When one of my sisters had a stroke at age 49, she lost the ability to speak, to walk, and the use of the right side of her body. She had to use a (regular) wheelchair to get around, which was difficult with only her left hand. Two of my other sisters, having seen the SCOOTER Store's ads, were outraged that the government wouldn't buy a powerchair for my sister.
Instead, my sister's doctors prescribed physical therapy. And it worked. Now my sister gets around with a cane, rarely uses the regular wheelchair and can even walk short distances unassisted. If my sister had been given the powerchair right off the bat she'd never have walked again.
According to CBS, the SCOOTER Store agreed to return almost $20 million to Medicare for chairs that should never have been bought. But the even greater crime is the terrible medical outcomes for people who got powerchairs when physical therapy was in order. Being unable to walk drastically lowers your quality of life, increases the risk of complications like blood clots and lowers your lifespan because of the inability to get proper exercise.
The real problem here is not that the government helps people, but that corporations use the misfortunes that befall Americans to make themselves rich at the expense of the American taxpayers and to the detriment of the health of the very patients they're supposed to be serving.
The charts compare the prices insurance companies pay for office visits, hospital stays, procedures and drugs in the United States to prices paid in nations with comparable health outcomes (most have longer life expectancies than the United States). For example, an angiogram costs $35 in Canada, and between $173 and $2,430 in the United States. A routine office visit is $10 in Argentina ($30 in Canada) and $68 to $176 in the United States.
Those numbers are astonishing, but if you compare the lowest price in the US to the second highest price, the United States sometimes comes in lower. For example, the costs of C-sections, hip replacements and knee replacements, the lowest cost in the US is less than the cost in Australia. The cost of an MRI in the US varies between $522 and $2871. Which means the lowest price Americans pay for MRIs is actually less than South Africa ($1072), Switzerland ($928) and New Zealand ($554).
The reason that there's just a single price for all those other countries is that prices are set centrally. In a big country like the United States it's harder to set a single price for medical care. The health care markets in elderly Florida and child-oriented Utah are much different. And that's why Medicare reimbursements can vary widely from state to state. And they can vary even within the same state.
So we should expect some regional price variability in the United States. But there's no way in hell that MRIs should cost some Americans five times more than other Americans. The problem is much deeper and more endemic than price gouging: it's the basic model of employer-provided health insurance.
For example, I recently had surgery. We have a large deductible policy, so we get all the bills. One from the hospital was asking for $9,000. However, the insurance company rejected that and would pay only $4,000, which the hospital immediately accepted. Now, one wonders why the hospital bothers to bill for $9,000 when they know full well it's going to get less than half that.
But the real point is that the insurance company dictates the price to the hospital. Instead of a faceless bureaucrat in Washington setting the price for my surgery, a faceless bureaucrat at my insurance company sets the price. If either faceless bureaucrat decides they won't pay for the procedure I need, I'm out of luck.
And don't think that you can just go somewhere else to get what you need: most people get health care through their employer, which means they have no choice in the matter. But if I pay for my own healthcare — and I do — I can't just switch to another one that will cover the procedure. Because insurance companies can deny coverage to applicants who have pre-existing conditions. That is, until 2014 when Obamacare fully phases in.
But that brings us back to that huge price range. Why are prices so wildly divergent in the United States? How can one American company provide an MRI for less than a fifth of the cost of another company? Is the expensive MRI provider simply gouging insurance companies that are bad at negotiating, or is there collusion between the insurer and the provider?
In the United States general inflation has been nearly non-existent for decades. That's due to globalization, a flat labor market and companies like Walmart whose business models depend on driving down prices. Yet health care costs, dictated by large insurance companies, have been rising at an annual average of 10% or more for most of that same period (though the rate of growth has declined recently -- perhaps in part because of the passage of Obamacare).
The only justification for the existence of health insurance companies is that they're supposed to keep down health care costs. But these apparently worthless middlemen have utterly failed to do that, and have been consistently failing for two decades.
The fact is, health insurance companies have had no motivation to keep costs down. Their only motivation is to keep profits up. If costs go up, and they can pass those costs on to consumers by increasing premiums, that's what they'll do. And that's what's been happening. And increasingly insurance companies are buying health care providers. Which means they've have absolutely no motivation to reduce costs to their customers.
Until now. Because Obamacare has placed limits on premium increases.
There's been a lot of fearmongering that Obamacare will drive many companies to stop providing health care coverage for their employees. That might actually be a good thing: if we buy our own insurance, it will make insurance companies responsible to the people who actually receive medical care, rather than the CEOs of the companies that employ them.
Right now all the people involved with setting prices on American health care are wealthy insurance company execs, wealthy employers, wealthy hospital directors and wealthy doctors. They're all scratching each other's backs without any concept of how expensive all this medical care is for regular people. But the reality in other countries — and even in the US — shows that costs could easily be halved. Corporations deduct the cost of health insurance from their taxes, which means that we the people are actually paying for outrageously high medical system. Patients, the real customers, have no say. The market forces that are supposed to keep costs in check simply do not function in health care.
The world economy has been the victim of one economic bubble after another: the dot com bubble in the Nineties and the real estate bubble in the 2000s. But the biggest danger facing the United States economy is the health care bubble, not only because it will drive up the cost of Medicare, but because it makes American businesses less competitive globally. The health care sector been eating a bigger and bigger chunk of the US economy, and will soon swallow up 20%.
That has prompted more and more companies to get on the health care bandwagon, and become involved in the elderly and disability sectors of health care in particular (the "growth" sectors). If you've every watched cable TV during the day you know what I'm talking about. The SCOOTER Store, which sells power wheelchairs, floods cable TV with hundreds of millions of dollars of ads every year. These ads promise that they'll get the government to pay for your powered wheelchair, or they'll pay for it themselves. Yeah, right.
According to an article on the CBS website, the Senate Special Committee on Aging has been investigating this. Apparently the SCOOTER Store has been "bulldozing" doctors into writing powered wheelchair prescriptions for patients. I've seen how this works first-hand.
When one of my sisters had a stroke at age 49, she lost the ability to speak, to walk, and the use of the right side of her body. She had to use a (regular) wheelchair to get around, which was difficult with only her left hand. Two of my other sisters, having seen the SCOOTER Store's ads, were outraged that the government wouldn't buy a powerchair for my sister.
Instead, my sister's doctors prescribed physical therapy. And it worked. Now my sister gets around with a cane, rarely uses the regular wheelchair and can even walk short distances unassisted. If my sister had been given the powerchair right off the bat she'd never have walked again.
According to CBS, the SCOOTER Store agreed to return almost $20 million to Medicare for chairs that should never have been bought. But the even greater crime is the terrible medical outcomes for people who got powerchairs when physical therapy was in order. Being unable to walk drastically lowers your quality of life, increases the risk of complications like blood clots and lowers your lifespan because of the inability to get proper exercise.
The real problem here is not that the government helps people, but that corporations use the misfortunes that befall Americans to make themselves rich at the expense of the American taxpayers and to the detriment of the health of the very patients they're supposed to be serving.
A Change, Regardless
The last few days have seen quite a bit of hand wringing, mouth foaming, frustration and outright anger at the fact that Congress left for spring recess without passing a gun bill. This impotence is compounded by the fact that the bill will not include an assault weapons ban and now likely not an ammunition clip limit. Gun control advocates are fit to be tied and Michael Bloomberg has taken to the airwaves with all of his cash in an attempt to stunt the NRA. I find it amusing that Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, is so nervous about this that he had lowered himself to go on Meet The Press last Sunday.
Even Roger Simon over at Politico has blown at least three bowels in his recent piece.
I should point out that, unlike Dracula, LaPierre neither kills people nor drinks their blood. It is just my personal belief that the NRA’s gun mania has led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children in this country.
Strong words, indeed and clearly accurate. But what good will they do? None whatsoever.
Yet, I find myself strangely optimistic these days. The way I see it is these things take time. Politico has another piece up about how Washington waited too long. Yes, that would have been really smart. Cobble together a new law and rush it through in the hopes that there will be no problems with it down the line in order to capitalize on sentiment. No thanks. I'm glad they didn't. I'd rather they spent some time on passing a law that can have a more profound effect. An assault weapons ban would not do that.
Speaking of which, has anyone considered that Newtown may have changed our culture, in terms of gun violence, so much so that this type of event may never happen again regardless of what new laws come out of Congress? Perhaps I'm being naive but I think we may have turned a corner, as we did with 9/11, and, in the final analysis, it's going to come down to local communities watching out for each other.
For example, I have a friend named Jane whose oldest son, Mike, shares many of the same traits with Adam Lanza. He has some serious mental health issues, plays violent video games for hours on end, and has access to multiple guns. He came after his dad once with a knife. His parents are divorced and he has been violently angry about it since it happened. After Newtown, I was speaking with Jane about Mike. The shooting at Sandy Hook shook them to the core and and they have gotten rid of all their guns save for two hunting rifles which are now under new lock and key up north at their cabin. Mike is no longer allowed access to any guns at any time. They have also become more energized about his mental health issues and everyone seems to be doing better.
They aren't the only ones who have changed a result of Newtown. The gal that cuts my hair (what little of it there is:)) has a brother named Bill who has a large collection of guns. He takes dozens of pills and drinks constantly. He's made threats against her and their parents. After Newtown, they went to the local police and got restraining orders against him. He used to be a firefighter in town and still has friends in law enforcement. They now visit him on a regular basis to see how he is doing and are trying their best to get him into a mental health/drug rehab program. Newtown made everyone in Bill's life more engaged.
These two stories are small, I know, but I think they are indicative of a sea change. I disagree that people have already forgotten and moved on. They cynics can go fuck themselves. Substantial, cultural shifts occur locally at first and so they seem to take too long and then suddenly it just happens. Look where we were four years ago with gay marriage. Look where we are now. Look where we were 20 years ago with cigarettes. Look where we are now. Look where we were 30 years ago with drunk driving. Look where we are now. The same thing will happen with guns, with or without new laws.
Even before Newtown, violence was dropping. It's going to continue to drop. Less people own guns and, in the future, even less will. People like Wayne LaPierre and other gun rights supporters aren't really as relevant anymore as their opponents make them out to be. They are built up into these gigantic ogres but they are only human after all. And, since they only have a single thought in their head, they will be quite unable to adapt to any cultural shifts that come down the pike regarding guns. It's happening right now and they can't even see it which is why they are reacting the way they are.
So, even with the inaction on the refinement of gun laws, today finds me hoping for the best. I realize that I may sound flip in my optimism with people dying every day from gun violence, some of which could certainly be prevented with new laws, but the responsibility for that isn't on me. Nor is it on all the people out there who want universal background checks on all gun purchases or other changes to our nation's gun laws. We all know full well who is responsible and so will history.
It's time to start thinking fourth dimensionally and take comfort in the fact that this is just a mere moment in time. Change is coming, regardless of what is happening right now. The horrible events of Newtown have changed our culture. We just don't fully realize it yet.
Even Roger Simon over at Politico has blown at least three bowels in his recent piece.
I should point out that, unlike Dracula, LaPierre neither kills people nor drinks their blood. It is just my personal belief that the NRA’s gun mania has led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children in this country.
Strong words, indeed and clearly accurate. But what good will they do? None whatsoever.
Yet, I find myself strangely optimistic these days. The way I see it is these things take time. Politico has another piece up about how Washington waited too long. Yes, that would have been really smart. Cobble together a new law and rush it through in the hopes that there will be no problems with it down the line in order to capitalize on sentiment. No thanks. I'm glad they didn't. I'd rather they spent some time on passing a law that can have a more profound effect. An assault weapons ban would not do that.
Speaking of which, has anyone considered that Newtown may have changed our culture, in terms of gun violence, so much so that this type of event may never happen again regardless of what new laws come out of Congress? Perhaps I'm being naive but I think we may have turned a corner, as we did with 9/11, and, in the final analysis, it's going to come down to local communities watching out for each other.
For example, I have a friend named Jane whose oldest son, Mike, shares many of the same traits with Adam Lanza. He has some serious mental health issues, plays violent video games for hours on end, and has access to multiple guns. He came after his dad once with a knife. His parents are divorced and he has been violently angry about it since it happened. After Newtown, I was speaking with Jane about Mike. The shooting at Sandy Hook shook them to the core and and they have gotten rid of all their guns save for two hunting rifles which are now under new lock and key up north at their cabin. Mike is no longer allowed access to any guns at any time. They have also become more energized about his mental health issues and everyone seems to be doing better.
They aren't the only ones who have changed a result of Newtown. The gal that cuts my hair (what little of it there is:)) has a brother named Bill who has a large collection of guns. He takes dozens of pills and drinks constantly. He's made threats against her and their parents. After Newtown, they went to the local police and got restraining orders against him. He used to be a firefighter in town and still has friends in law enforcement. They now visit him on a regular basis to see how he is doing and are trying their best to get him into a mental health/drug rehab program. Newtown made everyone in Bill's life more engaged.
These two stories are small, I know, but I think they are indicative of a sea change. I disagree that people have already forgotten and moved on. They cynics can go fuck themselves. Substantial, cultural shifts occur locally at first and so they seem to take too long and then suddenly it just happens. Look where we were four years ago with gay marriage. Look where we are now. Look where we were 20 years ago with cigarettes. Look where we are now. Look where we were 30 years ago with drunk driving. Look where we are now. The same thing will happen with guns, with or without new laws.
Even before Newtown, violence was dropping. It's going to continue to drop. Less people own guns and, in the future, even less will. People like Wayne LaPierre and other gun rights supporters aren't really as relevant anymore as their opponents make them out to be. They are built up into these gigantic ogres but they are only human after all. And, since they only have a single thought in their head, they will be quite unable to adapt to any cultural shifts that come down the pike regarding guns. It's happening right now and they can't even see it which is why they are reacting the way they are.
So, even with the inaction on the refinement of gun laws, today finds me hoping for the best. I realize that I may sound flip in my optimism with people dying every day from gun violence, some of which could certainly be prevented with new laws, but the responsibility for that isn't on me. Nor is it on all the people out there who want universal background checks on all gun purchases or other changes to our nation's gun laws. We all know full well who is responsible and so will history.
It's time to start thinking fourth dimensionally and take comfort in the fact that this is just a mere moment in time. Change is coming, regardless of what is happening right now. The horrible events of Newtown have changed our culture. We just don't fully realize it yet.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The GOP Autopsy
I saw this headline and just about busted one.
Republican Party ‘autopsy’ report says voters find it ‘scary’ and ‘narrow minded’
No, they weren't describing some of the people that post in my comments section. They were, in fact, describing how the American people perceive the Republican Party today, according to this report done by the GOP itself.
In addition to "scary" and "narrow minded," they also view the GOP as being the party of "stuffy old men." Hmph...I wonder where they got that idea?
Republican Party ‘autopsy’ report says voters find it ‘scary’ and ‘narrow minded’
No, they weren't describing some of the people that post in my comments section. They were, in fact, describing how the American people perceive the Republican Party today, according to this report done by the GOP itself.
In addition to "scary" and "narrow minded," they also view the GOP as being the party of "stuffy old men." Hmph...I wonder where they got that idea?
Fantasy Feedback Loop
Michael Tomasky's recent piece is quite brilliant as it exposes the three big lies that we hear all the time from the Right. Before we get to the lies, though, he links a piece which torpedoes, once and for all, the notion that government budgets and family budgets are comparable.
But over a lifetime, the individual is supposed to be working to pay down debts and build wealth, so he or she can afford to stop working in old age. Thrift and saving (and a downward trajectory for debt balances) are virtuous traits in people, because of our life cycles.
But the government does not have a life cycle; it plans to exist indefinitely. So it makes much more sense to compare the government to a corporation, which also plans for indefinite existence and therefore may have debt as a permanent part of its capital structure. There is not necessarily an expectation that a firm will decrease its debt load over time, and if a company keeps growing, its debt load may keep getting larger without being a sign of financial distress.
Right. I'd further add the point that the nature of each debt is different as well as I have said in the past.
Now about those lies...they are: we have to balance the budget, public investment is bad, and jobs will result from accomplishing the first and adhering to the warning of the second. As Tomasky notes, each of these assertions is the dead opposite of reality.
Here is a report from the Congressional Research Service that details how short and middle term deficits are completely sustainable while also noting that our deficit has fallen from 10 percent of GDP to 7 percent of GDP since 2009. We are headed towards 4 percent of GDP. Truly, not a problem. There's also some great information in this report regarding the alarm bells on inflation.
The austerity programs we see in Europe aren't working so the idea that public investment is bad is simply wrong. If you want an idea of what steep reductions in government spending do, take a look at Great Britain.
These reductions in government spending are actually worse for jobs as well. I've shown what happens to the economy and how that actually decreases revenue and makes it harder to balance budgets. So, they really have it back asswards on this one.
So, now we are at the point when we have to ask why. Why do they think this way?
Different reasons. I think someone like Ryan must actually believe all this. He is such an ideologue that I assume he wakes up at night after having reread John Galt’s sermon in a cold sweat thinking about debt and inflation and interest rates (the CRS report also explains why these dystopian fears are canards, too). I think a lot of the Tea Party people just hate government and think poor people are irresponsible, and they came here to chop away and haven’t given it much more thought than that; it just seems intuitively right to them that when you’re in the hole, you cut spending. Then I think there are other Republicans who know better but play along anyway because it’s all the rage in their circles, and because if they don’t play along they’ll be primaried, and possibly beaten, by someone who does believe it.
So, it's largely about emotions. As Tomasky notes
Looking back over that last paragraph, I see that what I have described is a rather mad situation—kind of a fantasy feedback loop where the critical mass of people sustain a fiction and the few who know it to be fiction put their position at risk in saying so. And this is how our country is being governed.
Sad and pathetic.
But over a lifetime, the individual is supposed to be working to pay down debts and build wealth, so he or she can afford to stop working in old age. Thrift and saving (and a downward trajectory for debt balances) are virtuous traits in people, because of our life cycles.
But the government does not have a life cycle; it plans to exist indefinitely. So it makes much more sense to compare the government to a corporation, which also plans for indefinite existence and therefore may have debt as a permanent part of its capital structure. There is not necessarily an expectation that a firm will decrease its debt load over time, and if a company keeps growing, its debt load may keep getting larger without being a sign of financial distress.
Right. I'd further add the point that the nature of each debt is different as well as I have said in the past.
Now about those lies...they are: we have to balance the budget, public investment is bad, and jobs will result from accomplishing the first and adhering to the warning of the second. As Tomasky notes, each of these assertions is the dead opposite of reality.
Here is a report from the Congressional Research Service that details how short and middle term deficits are completely sustainable while also noting that our deficit has fallen from 10 percent of GDP to 7 percent of GDP since 2009. We are headed towards 4 percent of GDP. Truly, not a problem. There's also some great information in this report regarding the alarm bells on inflation.
The austerity programs we see in Europe aren't working so the idea that public investment is bad is simply wrong. If you want an idea of what steep reductions in government spending do, take a look at Great Britain.
These reductions in government spending are actually worse for jobs as well. I've shown what happens to the economy and how that actually decreases revenue and makes it harder to balance budgets. So, they really have it back asswards on this one.
So, now we are at the point when we have to ask why. Why do they think this way?
Different reasons. I think someone like Ryan must actually believe all this. He is such an ideologue that I assume he wakes up at night after having reread John Galt’s sermon in a cold sweat thinking about debt and inflation and interest rates (the CRS report also explains why these dystopian fears are canards, too). I think a lot of the Tea Party people just hate government and think poor people are irresponsible, and they came here to chop away and haven’t given it much more thought than that; it just seems intuitively right to them that when you’re in the hole, you cut spending. Then I think there are other Republicans who know better but play along anyway because it’s all the rage in their circles, and because if they don’t play along they’ll be primaried, and possibly beaten, by someone who does believe it.
So, it's largely about emotions. As Tomasky notes
Looking back over that last paragraph, I see that what I have described is a rather mad situation—kind of a fantasy feedback loop where the critical mass of people sustain a fiction and the few who know it to be fiction put their position at risk in saying so. And this is how our country is being governed.
Sad and pathetic.
Monday, March 25, 2013
A Tale of Two Tapes
Two videos have shaped the political landscape in the last four years: the ACORN "sting" video and the Mitt Romney 47% video. Both have back been in the news in the last couple of weeks, and the difference between them is instructive.
The ACORN "sting" video was made by James O'Keefe, and posted on Breitbart.com in 2009. It purported to show how ACORN employees helped a pimp evade taxes. The video essentially destroyed ACORN. In reality, the video was heavily edited, a complete lie and fabrication. The people at ACORN only pretended to go along with O'Keefe, and immediately reported the incident to the authorities. California authorities cut a deal with O'Keefe and the woman who accompanied him to get at the man who ordered the sting, apparently Andrew Breitbart, but Breitbart died, escaping prosecution. The video is back in the news because O'Keefe finally paid $100,000 for his loss in the civil suit filed by the ACORN employee that O'Keefe slandered. O'Keefe went on to commit a number of other video hatchet jobs on Shirley Sherrod, Mary Landrieu and others.
The Mitt Romney 47% video was back in the news because the identity of the man who recorded it was revealed: Scott Prouty, the bartender at the ritzy fund-raising meeting where Mitt Romney uttered those fateful words about the 47%. Unlike O'Keefe's video, Prouty's involved no trickery or lies. Romney really said all that stuff. The interesting thing is that Prouty didn't think the important part was the 47% part:
The 47% video wasn't the nail in the coffin for Romney. It hurt, but the last straw was high Democratic voter turnout. In the end, O'Keefe's and other Republicans' attempts to suppress Democratic turnout failed miserably. People like Karl Rove were so confident that the fix was in that they refused to believe the results when Fox News called Ohio for Obama in 2012.
Republicans have a long history of dirty tricks. Watergate was only one of Nixon's many dirty tricks. Nixon's thugs even coined a new term, "ratfucking," for their tactics.
Republicans even use dirty tricks on each other: Bush used them against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary when his pollsters asked voters, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he fathered an illegitimate black child?" That episode provided the impetus for McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform: the only reason McCain was a "maverick" on campaign reform was because he was screwed over by Republican dirty tricks and wanted revenge.
And the dirty tricks keep on coming. The Daily Caller website pulled a Breitbart when it released a video that featured prostitutes saying that New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez paid them for sex. The prostitutes were paid to lie, and apparently The Daily Caller instigated the charade, though there's not yet a smoking gun linking the site to the lawyer who arranged the video, but apparently a mystery man named "Carlos" is involved.
The best example of a Republican dirty trick was in 2004, when CBS newsman Dan Rather was taken in by fake documents about Bush going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. It was a perfect ploy, because the falsified documents actually told the truth, but since they were fake and Rather was so easily duped by them, it discredited the entire story, defused the issue of Bush's military service during the Vietnam war, and destroyed Rather's career.
It turns out that Rather was right in the end. Bush really did weasel out of his commitment to serve in the Texas Air National Guard, which his father wangled to keep W. out of Nam. Whether it was because W. was so strung out on coke he couldn't land a plane anymore, or because he went off to play politics we'll never know. The funny thing is, Bush himself doesn't know either.
The ACORN "sting" video was made by James O'Keefe, and posted on Breitbart.com in 2009. It purported to show how ACORN employees helped a pimp evade taxes. The video essentially destroyed ACORN. In reality, the video was heavily edited, a complete lie and fabrication. The people at ACORN only pretended to go along with O'Keefe, and immediately reported the incident to the authorities. California authorities cut a deal with O'Keefe and the woman who accompanied him to get at the man who ordered the sting, apparently Andrew Breitbart, but Breitbart died, escaping prosecution. The video is back in the news because O'Keefe finally paid $100,000 for his loss in the civil suit filed by the ACORN employee that O'Keefe slandered. O'Keefe went on to commit a number of other video hatchet jobs on Shirley Sherrod, Mary Landrieu and others.
The Mitt Romney 47% video was back in the news because the identity of the man who recorded it was revealed: Scott Prouty, the bartender at the ritzy fund-raising meeting where Mitt Romney uttered those fateful words about the 47%. Unlike O'Keefe's video, Prouty's involved no trickery or lies. Romney really said all that stuff. The interesting thing is that Prouty didn't think the important part was the 47% part:
Prouty felt Romney's attitude was telling, and didn't like that he made a crack about speeding up his service soon after arriving at the fateful dinner party on May 17, 2012. However, what offended Prouty was Romney's description of touring a factory in China where workers are packed into dormitories surrounded by barbed wire (to keep out all the people desperate to work there, the bosses told Romney). "He just walked though this horrendous place and thought, 'Hey, this is pretty good,'" said Prouty.The differences in the motivations between O'Keefe and Prouty are telling. O'Keefe was ticked that ACORN registered voters in minority areas, helping increase Democratic turnout in the 2008 election. Prouty was angered at how Romney treated the help like dirt, especially compared to Bill Clinton, who actually acknowledged their existence.
The 47% video wasn't the nail in the coffin for Romney. It hurt, but the last straw was high Democratic voter turnout. In the end, O'Keefe's and other Republicans' attempts to suppress Democratic turnout failed miserably. People like Karl Rove were so confident that the fix was in that they refused to believe the results when Fox News called Ohio for Obama in 2012.
Republicans have a long history of dirty tricks. Watergate was only one of Nixon's many dirty tricks. Nixon's thugs even coined a new term, "ratfucking," for their tactics.
Republicans even use dirty tricks on each other: Bush used them against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary when his pollsters asked voters, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he fathered an illegitimate black child?" That episode provided the impetus for McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform: the only reason McCain was a "maverick" on campaign reform was because he was screwed over by Republican dirty tricks and wanted revenge.
And the dirty tricks keep on coming. The Daily Caller website pulled a Breitbart when it released a video that featured prostitutes saying that New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez paid them for sex. The prostitutes were paid to lie, and apparently The Daily Caller instigated the charade, though there's not yet a smoking gun linking the site to the lawyer who arranged the video, but apparently a mystery man named "Carlos" is involved.
The best example of a Republican dirty trick was in 2004, when CBS newsman Dan Rather was taken in by fake documents about Bush going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. It was a perfect ploy, because the falsified documents actually told the truth, but since they were fake and Rather was so easily duped by them, it discredited the entire story, defused the issue of Bush's military service during the Vietnam war, and destroyed Rather's career.
It turns out that Rather was right in the end. Bush really did weasel out of his commitment to serve in the Texas Air National Guard, which his father wangled to keep W. out of Nam. Whether it was because W. was so strung out on coke he couldn't land a plane anymore, or because he went off to play politics we'll never know. The funny thing is, Bush himself doesn't know either.
A Failed State
Rebels have seized control of the Central African Republic and President François Bozizé has fled the country. They met little resistance as the country is one of the most impoverished in Africa.
Once again, a strong man who promised democratic elections has seen power slip away. This cycle has been repeated so many times since the great colonial push at the turn of the last century that it's pretty much routine at this point. As has been the case in the past, the people will end up suffering as the rebels will plunder and loot what little wealth there is in the CAR.
My question is this: what can the Global North do, if anything, to prevent things like this happening? Investment? Their heavy dependence on foreign aid has actually made things worse. We could also simply shrug and say, "Oh well. It's their country. If they fuck it up, so be it."
It seems to me, though, that in 2013 we can come up with a different paradigm and it starts with building a sustainable, free market economy there. France should be heavily involved as they are primarily responsible for leaving a power vacuum upon their exit. The country certainly has plenty of food crops on which it could build an agricultural market. The diamond trade could also be more heavily regulated as 30-50 percent of the country's diamonds leave under illegal circumstances. Improvements in their economy will lead to more democratic policies. Prosperity tends to do that.
Being a landlocked country presents a challenge, of course, but I think that the Central African Republic should be used as an example of moving forward in the Global South. With yesterday's events, I've now seen this film far too many times and it's clear we need to do something different.
Once again, a strong man who promised democratic elections has seen power slip away. This cycle has been repeated so many times since the great colonial push at the turn of the last century that it's pretty much routine at this point. As has been the case in the past, the people will end up suffering as the rebels will plunder and loot what little wealth there is in the CAR.
My question is this: what can the Global North do, if anything, to prevent things like this happening? Investment? Their heavy dependence on foreign aid has actually made things worse. We could also simply shrug and say, "Oh well. It's their country. If they fuck it up, so be it."
It seems to me, though, that in 2013 we can come up with a different paradigm and it starts with building a sustainable, free market economy there. France should be heavily involved as they are primarily responsible for leaving a power vacuum upon their exit. The country certainly has plenty of food crops on which it could build an agricultural market. The diamond trade could also be more heavily regulated as 30-50 percent of the country's diamonds leave under illegal circumstances. Improvements in their economy will lead to more democratic policies. Prosperity tends to do that.
Being a landlocked country presents a challenge, of course, but I think that the Central African Republic should be used as an example of moving forward in the Global South. With yesterday's events, I've now seen this film far too many times and it's clear we need to do something different.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Healing
The recent cover story of the Christian Science Monitor is simply magnificent and speaks very deeply to great power of community in times of crisis. The local church as an extension of supportive faith is vital to healing and Newtown United Methodist is an excellent and most illustrative example of how well this can work.
I was very moved by this piece and took a great deal of comfort in how much love there is in Newtown in the face of unspeakable horror.
I was very moved by this piece and took a great deal of comfort in how much love there is in Newtown in the face of unspeakable horror.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
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