He Is Saying Things That Need To Said

There are so many things to love about Peter Brown Hoffmeister's recent piece that was banned from the Huffington Post that I don't even know where to start. He is saying things that need to be said and forcing us to confront a very deep fissure in our culture. In many ways, he speaks to the heart of the problem with young men in this country and how a few of them end up going on shooting sprees.

He should know. He was one of those young men and he made it out and became mentor and teacher himself. Correctly, he identifies the ingredients that get these young men to the point of shooting people and it's not just the guns.

Now I am not anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson. I’m not suggesting that everyone who plays a video game will act out that video game in reality. But I am saying that it is very dangerous to allow troubled, angry, teenage boys access to killing practice, even if that access is only virtual killing practice. The military uses video games to train soldiers to kill, yet we don’t consider “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ training for addicted teenage players? A high school boy who plays that game 30 hours per week isn’t training to kill somebody?

Now combine that with a mom who buys into the whole "live free or die" horse hockey and decides to allow their son access to a large quantity of weaponry and you have a disaster. Why is that the parents of these shooters never have their feet held to the fire? In the final analysis, it's primarily their responsibility. Nancy Lanza was a complete and total failure as a parent and her incompetence resulted in the deaths of 26 people.   There are thousands more like her out there and they truly, truly suck. They need to stop sucking. Yesterday.

Where are the parents in this situation or others like this one?

I was walking behind two teenage boys in the hall at my high school the other day and I heard one talking about slitting someone’s throat. He said, “I just came up behind him, pulled out my knife so quietly and cut his throat.” The other boy said, “Yeah, then I killed everyone else in less than, like, 10 seconds. Just slaughtered them.” 

I looked at these two boys: Tall and awkward. Unathletic. I knew that they weren’t tied-in socially, that they both struggled in classes and with peers. Yet they were capable of incredible and sudden violence on screen. Together, they could slit throats and shoot everyone. I asked one of them later, and he said that he played Call of Duty “an average of 40 hours per week, at least.” 

Is this what we want angry, adolescent boys to do? Do we want to give them this practice? Do we want them to glorify violent actions, to brag about violence in the school’s hallways? Or even worse, given the perfect equation of frustration + opportunity + practice, do we want them to do as Weise, Roberts, and Lanza did, and act out these fantasies in real life? Do we want them to yell, “I am the shooter” as they enter a crowded mall – as Roberts did? Or dress like video-game shooters – as Lanza and Roberts were – before heading into a murder spree?

When I was an awkward teenager, all I thought about was sex. All my friends were the same. We smoked pot, listened to music and were obsessed with progressing around the bases in terms of carnal escapades. That is definitely not the case today. Sex is very verboten subject with teenagers and they are much less sexual active than they were in my generation. There are drugs, of course, but they are viewed so negatively by our culture that the deviance takes on a truly ugly hue for the kids that do them...even marijuana. I can't help but think that if some of these kids just smoked some pot and made out with their girlfriends or boyfriends, they might be more at peace.

Hoffmeister closes the piece with a direct appeal to parents. I agree with it completely and I will close with it as well.

Get kids outside. Take them out and let them wander around in the woods. Let them canoe across a lake. Let them backpack through a mountain range. Give them a map and compass assignment. Give frustrated youth an opportunity to challenge themselves in the natural world. Have you ever heard of a school shooter who’s hobbies are kayaking, rock climbing, and fly-fishing? If that seems absurd – and it does seem absurd to me – we might be onto something. I don’t think that those hobbies can create a school shooter. There’s just something abut the natural world that defuses anger. I know this because the outdoors helped saved my life. An outdoor diversion program for troubled teens started the process when I was sixteen. Camping and hiking and climbing helped me mature further as a nineteen and twenty year old. And now, as the director of a high school outdoor program, one of my student leaders said recently that “the outdoor program saves lives.” That’s not me. That’s nature. Kids need the outdoors. Help the young people. Get them outside.

Amen.

Wow. Stacey Campfield is really a douche...

Giving Me Pause

It's Sunday and I find myself this morning not being a very good Christian. Repeated more than any other command in the Bible, we are supposed to love thy neighbor. After reading this, I have to admit I'm finding it very hard to love Karl Denninger, one of the chief founders of the Tea Party Movement. Here's what Mr. Denninger had to say about Francine Wheeler, the mother of Newtown shooting victim, Ben Wheeler

Listen up, you incompetent and defective sack of meat -- your son is dead because you are unfit to be parents. You sat silently by while your state and our nation erected signs telling people who are criminally insane where they can find the maximum number of defenseless people to murder. You are personally, jointly and severably responsible for the consequences. You are unfit to possess a uterus and your husband is unfit to possess testicles.

Every time I think the Right can't get any lower, they somehow manage to find a subbasement. I suppose I could rip into him for being so despicable but it's obvious that this man is terribly unhappy. As I have said previously, conservatives don't do well with children.

They also seem to have a significant problem with denial, specifically DARVO.

You, Mrs. Wheeler, having willingly and intentionally refused to take responsibility for your acts of omission and commission that led to your son being murdered by a madman now have the audacity to stand in front of the nation and demand that everyone else give up their children to murderous goons as well. Go to Hell Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler and take your state and its alleged laws with you.

That's right, Karl. It's not Adam Lanza's fault that he killed all those kids. Nor is it his mother's fault. It's the fault of the parents of the victims. So much for individual responsibility.

The ugly is really coming out with this issue and I've realized that it's the case with others as well. When confronted with unpleasant truths about these situations, the Right categorically refuses to reflect and, sadly, digs in deeper. With the gun issue, liars and gun grabbers are everywhere with civil war imminent. Useful idiots like me are foolish because we don't operate in a state of full panic mode about the federal government 24/7.

The insecurity of these folks is so monumental that we are likely to see even worse behavior than Mr. Denninger's latest mouth foam. The threat they perceive isn't there but it's so very real to them that it makes me wonder just how bad they will get. I'm still leaning towards them all being big, cowardly babies but this latest attack certainly gives me a great deal of pause.

Like Colonel Potter said about Colonel Flagg, "I think someone mixed some locoweed into his feed."

For The Children

Lately, it's become obvious that the Right doesn't do well with children. One would think that they would considering that they claim to want kids to become educated about civics and history. The problem, of course, is what they really want is for children is to be brainwashed with their horribly misguided and flawed ideology. And when children see the mistakes of this ideology (remember, they are smarter than we might think;)), they tend to move in a more sane direction.

Seeing those young eyes staring them in the face is a stark fucking reminder of just how much these issues affect the lives of children across the country. It completely torpedoes the Right's fact free zone and drives them insane. So, for example, when the Right sees frightened kids writing letters to the president asking about school safety after Sandy Hook and standing with him at a speech, they irrationally lash out, behaving like adolescent bullies. Accusations of children being used as "human shields" or "props" began to fly along with the customary bemoan about how it's all "for the children." Well, guess what?

It is. 

Since these policies will have a profound affect on their future as well, I think it' fantastic that kids are involved, even at a young age, and regardless of their political stripe. That's why it's always important to treat them respect and not berate them, or their parents, when they try to become involved. The fact that I have to remind certain people of this gives you an idea about the level of mentality we are dealing with here.

Case in point is Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield. Mr. Campfield thought it might be a good idea to tie welfare benefits to grades so he put together Tennessee Senate Bill 132. Shocking that a child, who would be directly affected by this, got involved. Take a look at what happened.

 

After this protest, the bill was thankfully withdrawn but this incident is an excellent example of why the Right doesn't like to leave their bubble very much. They know that their views are truly deplorable and quite unacceptable to ...well...humans. It makes complete sense that their "courage" to say these sorts of things doesn't extend much past the comments sections of blogs.

Nonetheless, I extend a challenge to all the Stacey Campfields of the world, many of whom are located in the right wing blogsphere. Come out of your safe, little worlds and say more things in public like this to children. You need a wider audience. The 2014 elections are just around the corner and we'd like to take back the House!

His Biggest Worry?

One would think that Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III would have his hands full with the likes of North Korea and Chinese computer attacks but his attention is on a far greater concern.

Locklear , in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’ 

“People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.

Well, you can add him to the list of American leaders who are trying to take away our freedom through a secret plot to control the world economy through renewable energy.

Wait...what?

Tea Party group boycotting Fox News for becoming ‘too liberal’

A Deal On Guns

Sens. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey have released the details on a gun bill which I believe goes a long way to addressing the very serious problems we have with our nation's gun laws. It also addresses the concerns of the Right regarding universal registration.

The Manchin-Toomey proposal would require background checks for sales at gun shows and online, but it will exempt personal transfers from such checks.

That eliminates the problem of being able to tell whether or not to tell if someone did a background check when a family member sells his gun to another family member. This would also be true if someone sells their gun to a neighbor or a friend. In all of these cases, knowing the person you are selling the gun to makes it a littler easier to live without a background check. My hope is that responsible gun owners won't engage in personal transfers if they think that they buyer, even if known to them, is mentally unstable. If they do anyway, well, the responsibility lies with them.

It also calls for the creation of a “commission on mass violence” that will study the sources of, and ways to prevent, the mass shootings that have plagued the country over the last decade.

Definitely needed. The core of this should be our mental health as a nation. The first question at the first meeting should be why are we such a violent culture? Substantive answers on this question with thorough analysis leading to direct action could work to reduce the demand for guns and, thus, eliminate the need for bans and other regulation.

For those worried about a national registry...

When a sale occurs, the buyer and seller would meet at a federally licensed dealer, who would conduct the check. The dealer — not the government — would keep control of the sales record, as has been the process for the last four decades. 

So, the gun dealers keep the records and, if there is a crime committed, the police can inquire with them.

Schumer negotiated several changes to the initial Manchin-Toomey proposal, including striking language from the agreement allowing concealed permit holders to carry their weapons in other states, and limiting Internet sales to five guns per year. He also worked to make sure there is a 72-hour window for performing background checks except for gun-show sales, which will be cleared in 48 hours initially. 

These are all good things that needed to happen long ago.

So, all commercial sales of guns without a background check will be considered a felony. If this law passes, it's going to prevent gun violence and make it harder for criminals and unstable people to acquire guns.

More Cypresses and Fewer Newtowns

Every time there's a shooting at a school or a college campus and 10 or 20 people die, the NRA tells us that the problem isn't guns, it's crazy people. Or video games. Or mean moms. They'll trot out statistics that say that hammers kill more people than shotguns or rifles.

Of course, that's a total load of horse hockey, and here are the numbers they cite, for murders in 2011:

• Shotguns: 356
• Rifles: 323
• Handguns: 6,220
• Other guns: 1,684
• Knives: 1,694
• All forms of blunt objects, including hammers, golf clubs, tire irons, Academy Award trophies, pool cues, candle sticks, lead pipes and so on: 496
• Explosives: 12
• Total firearms: 8,583
• Total murders: 12,664

Because the FBI statistics don't separate out the numbers, there's no way to know how many murders were committed with just hammers, though it's obviously less than shotguns or rifles. But the NRA phrases things in the most misleading way possible, implying that hammers kill more people than shotguns and rifles, and by extension, all guns.

It is a statistic that is totally misleading. Guns kill 67% of all murder victims, and hammer-like objects kill only 3.9%.

Note that explosives killed only 12 people, yet we have far greater government oversight of the sale of dynamite and fertilizer than we do of guns. (That's due, in part, to that self-proclaimed patriot Timothy McVeigh, a man who sounded all the same notes the NRA is sounding today.)

Which brings us to the atrocity of the day. a kid in Cypress, Texas went nuts and stabbed people at a Texas community college Tuesday. At least 12 people are in the hospital, and two are still in critical condition.

So far, no one has died. But if this kid had had a gun, we know from long and bitter experience that there would be a much higher body count. Because guns are so much better at killing people than knives. Or hammers.

Better gun control laws will simply give us more Cypresses and fewer Newtowns.

No reasonable person thinks that proposed legislation for background checks, smaller magazine capacities and assault rifle bans will stop all killing. We're not saying no one can have guns. We're just trying to reduce the number of guns in the hands of nut jobs, terrorists and criminals, knowing that it will only reduce the carnage, not eliminate it altogether.

But that's still a worthwhile goal: we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on medical research, hospitals, fire departments, and police departments, trying to reduce the number of people who die, but knowing full well that we won't be able to save everyone. If background checks on all gun purchases will cut down the eight thousand gun deaths each year by one thousand or two thousand or three thousand, it's well worth it.

And it's not just the loss of life. Reduced carnage will also save billions of dollars each year in lost wages, hospital costs, orphans going on Social Security, funeral expenses, expensive death penalty trials, endless lawyers' fees on appeals, prison guard salaries, and so on.

In the Sixties and Seventies conservatives warned that losing Vietnam would mean total world domination by communism and the destruction of freedom. Conservatives are now warning that background checks on gun purchases will lead to a communist takeover of our government and the destruction of freedom.

The slippery slopes and domino theories about gun laws and freedom are just the conservatives crying wolf about Vietnam all over again. The same people who had a vested interest in continuing the carnage in southeast Asia (gun manufacturers and their NRA shills), have the same vested interest in continuing the carnage in our streets and schools today.

What Are You Going To Do?

For those of you who are against any changes in current gun laws, I'd urge you to pay close to attention to the woman who introduces the president in this video. Her name is Nicole Hockley and she is the mother of one of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Take a good look at her face as she introduces the president. This is a woman with very deep sadness that is going to be with her for the rest of her life. Do you really want to be the person that tells her that we can't change the gun laws in this country because of some paranoid fantasy you are having?

She is not going to stop. She will never give up. That's what mothers do who lose their children. It's what fathers do as well. They are not going to go away unless you compromise on background checks and gun trafficking. Worse, if there is another shooting and nothing significant has changed, the number of people that support families like the Hockelys will mushroom and stand to lose significantly more than what your ginned up fears created by paid clowns have created.

With this speech, it's also time to stop looking at the president as having some sort of secret agenda to disarm the country. That's a giant load of paranoid bullshit that is not going to happen. I realize this will likely fall on bubble ears but he's simply trying to prevent more criminals from acquiring guns. You, on the other hand, are doing the opposite.

So, it's time for your come to Jesus moment. What are you going to do?

The Future Looks Fantastic

Remember Zach Kopplin? Well, home boy just made the big time by being a guest on Bill Maher last Friday and he as fantastic. In fact, he reminded me of many of my ex-students who are now around his age. Zach Kopplin is a young man who gives me a great deal of hope for the future of this country and is a stellar example of how smart the young generation is today despite popular misconceptions.

Check out this clip which someone in the bubble put up on YouTube in the hopes that would expose Kopplin as an atheist but it ended up exposing (ahem) something else...

Interesting

What is it with gun nuts and bad luck?

It's About Time

Props to Governor Malloy for calling LaPierre exactly what he is: a clown that is paid by circus owners. Moreover, people like LaPierre and their supporters are loud bullies that only understand this type of language.

Being cordial is the same thing as appeasement which ends with all too predictable circumstances.

And That's the End of the Whole Ayn Rand Business...

Hands down, the best and most accurate summation of Ayn Rand I have ever seen.

Way to go USA

What type of country do you want to live in? 

Oh Really?

Republicans Make Reporting the Truth a Crime

ALEC is at it again. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a front for Big Oil, factory farms, prison corporations and their Republican shills, is ramming through another set of laws in state legislatures that will make reporting the truth a crime.

This time they're criminalizing the documentation of animal cruelty on video. Even when that cruelty is quite frequently a crime in and of itself. ALEC and Republicans in state legislatures are trying to -- and in some states already have -- make it illegal to record crimes such as the following:

Video shot in 2011 showed workers dripping caustic chemicals onto the horses’ ankles and clasping metal chains onto the injured tissue. This illegal and excruciating technique, known as “soring,” forces the horse to thrust its front legs forward after every painful step to exaggerate the distinctive high-stepping gait favored by breeders. The video also showed a worker hitting a horse in the head with a large piece of wood.

The Humane Society turned the video over to federal prosecutors and the perpetrators of this crime plead guilty within a week.

These laws would also make it a crime for legitimate employees to record crimes they observe, criminalizing whistleblowing. Finally, ALEC is trying to brand groups who investigate animal cruelty -- like the Humane Society -- as terrorists:

One of the group’s model bills, “The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to “defame the facility or its owner.” Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry.”

Factory farms are afraid that they'll lose business when these videos go public, as one of McDonald's egg suppliers did when a video showed chickens living in cages surrounded by the carcasses of dead birds.

Are some of the videos selectively edited and inflammatory? Certainly. But unlike the videos made by Republican operative James O'Keefe, who destroyed ACORN by falsely portraying ACORN helping a pimp evade taxes, factory farms really do these things. It's true that many of the practices that look terrible are actually the best practices and are completely legal.

But, as one ag lobbyist pointed out, surgery on humans is particularly gruesome. Why then isn't ALEC passing laws that make it illegal to film open-heart or plastic surgery? Patients might forgo necessary treatment when they see a man's chest cracked open for heart surgery, and plastic surgeons  might lose business when people see a woman's face literally stretched and pulled up over her forehead! And nothing is more disgusting than watching a doctor casually vacuum out some fat dude's gut with liposuction.

As I've written here before, factory farms can be a force for good if they clean up their act. Animals raised for food are not pets, and farm animals cannot receive the love and attention we lavish upon our cats and dogs. But if factory farms catch heat because they burn the beaks off chicks, so be it. Some people might be disgusted and swear off eating meat forever. But 99 out of 100 will go to McDonalds the next day and buy some Chicken McNuggets.

These laws are unconstitutional because they blatantly violate freedom of speech and freedom of the press. They make it illegal for undercover reporters to do their jobs and employees to document crimes committed by their employers.

For years Republicans like O'Keefe have been promulgating lies nonstop, but now they're passing laws to make it illegal for people to report the truth. They're calling people who are trying to stop violence terrorists. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised: it's been 1984 for almost thirty years now...

The new United States

Here is a wonderful short that sums up what the United States looks like in 2013. Enjoy!

The Bible?

Like many Christians in America, I tuned in to watch the History Channel's epic mini-series, The Bible. After a few minutes into the first episode, I realized how naive I was in thinking that it would be even mildly intelligent. I mean, Noah was Scottish, for pete's sake!

They made a small effort to make the characters...ahem...browner...but really, the main ones were white with Jesus looking like the usual seventh member of the Allman Brothers Band. Worse, the devil was black and looked like...well...

Can we ever get to the point in this country where being a Christian means taking an honest look at the historical times of the Bible and chucking all the western myths that go along with it? I'd like to see some scholarly and intelligent depictions as well ass analyses of the stories of the Bible rather than the those like this series from the History Channel which are made for someone with the maturity of a second grader.

File Under: Who the FUCK Cares?

If there is one thing that really drives me nuts about liberals, it's their PC bullshit. I haven't had to put up with much of it of late because my various circles are all very laid back. Occasionally, though,  if I'm over at the U for some reason, I'll make a comment about porn and the people there will be up my ass with a tweezers in less than a second.

"Don't you know that porn subjugates women?" they ask.

"Considering that women are the primary owners now of the porn industry, I'd say that's incorrect," I reply. I then add in examples from all the women I know that love porn and then the mouth foaming really begins. Fortunately, this is really the most I have to deal with it and that suits me just fine....that is, until, last week.

What a giant pile of horse manure. More importantly, who the FUCK cares? He called one of his long time friends good looking. Well, guess what? She is good looking. And so is he. In fact, she's fucking hot!! How's that, jack wagons? She is a fantastic ass and is very shagable, to channel my inner Austin Powers. But I guess we aren't allowed to say or even think such things because that leads to the raping and subjugation of women.

Who are these "critics" that forced him to apologize? If anyone knows, I'd appreciate a link so I can give them a piece of my mind. The extent to which things get exaggerated in this country boggles my mind. I thought we had come out of our repression about sex and were a much more open society where you can say things like, "Hey, she's a dime!"

More importantly, given all the misery in the world, don't we need all the compliments and positivity we can get?

Why, Again?

So, it seems that Rand Paul is gaining some cohorts to filibuster any new gun law that comes up in the Senate. What is he afraid of? I thought that getting some Democrats on board with any bill was going to be tough. Further, I thought that polls about gun safety don't matter and most of the public knows that all gun bills are secret plots to send law abiding citizens to re-education camps. He should be completely relaxed and simply allow and up or down vote, right?

Hmmm.....

To Hike or Not To Hike

There have been lot of rumblings of late regarding the minimum wage. The president has suggested that it be raised to $9 per hour. Elizabeth Warren has been a staunch champion lately on this issue has been summarily raked over the coals by the usual collection of mouth foamers with the same bullshit argument that claims they know something about economics and that liberals know nothing. Well, here are the facts, based on the simple economics they claim to grasp so easily.

If the minimum wage is set below the market equilibrium, it will have no effect on the efficiency of the market. Even though the government has set a price floor, the market is bearing a higher price so it doesn't matter. Yet, if the price floor is set above the market equilibrium, unemployment will occur because employers would be induced to higher fewer workers, given the higher cost they must now pay their employees. More people would enter the labor market and jobs would be scarcer.

So, the question becomes...where is the market equilibrium? Well, with so many different markets out there in this country, it would depend on which market you are talking about and that's why the mouth foamers can get away with painting with such a broad and dishonest brush. If there is to be a minimum wage increase, then there should be a series of studies that examine the market equilibrium for those markets most affected my the hike. I would think the service industry and the retail industry would be good places to start.

State By State

With the signing yesterday in Connecticut of the nation's most comprehensive gun law, it's become obvious that the issue of gun safety and the drive to reduce violence related to guns is going to occur on a state by state basis. Connecticut now joins Colorado and New York in tough enforcement on assault weapons, magazine size and background checks. In addition, beefed up security provisions at schools were also included in the bill.

The feet dragging and hand wringing at the federal level seems less important now since the states are getting the job done without them. Certainly, there will be states that have more relaxed laws and some that have more restrictive laws. This presents us with a unique situation in which we can now compare which laws are effective in reducing violence and which ones are not by comparing the states.

With this Connecticut law, we now have a "Day One" from which to work and measure the effectiveness of a truly robust gun safety law. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, particularly in terms of the cherry picking that is likely to start occurring any second now:)

19 Years Later

Say the word "Rwanda" and the first thought that comes into your head after that is usually genocide. But recent gains in health care in the tiny African country are so staggering that I'm hoping the first thought will now be of a more healthy nation.

19 years later, however, Rwanda is on pace to become the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to meet all of its health-related Millennium Development Goals, and the tiny pocket of Central Africa has posted some of the world’s most staggering health gains in the past decade, outpacing nations that spend far more per capita on healthcare.

In the past decade, deaths from HIV have fallen 78 percent – the single largest decline in the world during that time frame – while tuberculosis mortality has dropped 77 percent, the most significant decrease in Africa. 

Between 1994 and 2012, they wrote, the country’s life expectancy climbed from 28 years to 56 and the percentage of the population living in poverty dropped from 77.8 percent to 44.9 percent. 

Amazing! But how did this happen?

The government took the aid that was pouring in and put it directly into social programs and enacted universal health care for the small nation. In addition to the numbers of above, the chances today that a child in Rwanda will die by the age of five has fallen 70 percent.

These are all truly remarkable accomplishments that demonstrate how real results can be achieved very easily within a generation if government corruption is kept to a minimum and level headed leaders are put in charge. The rest of the countries in Africa should follow this model and bring their nations into the increasingly prosperous global marketplace.

Life?

Ever since I can remember, I have always wondered if there was ever life on Mars. Being the closest planet to us, I guess I have just assumed that perhaps at one time it did. Now it looks as though that was the case.

CheMin and SAM identified some of the key chemical ingredients for life in this dust, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon, researchers said. Intriguingly, the mix also suggested a possible energy source for indigenous Martian life, if any ever existed in the area. "The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for micro-organisms," Paul Mahaffy, SAM principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.

So, not just the possibility of life but also an energy source for that life. Stunning! I'm hoping that as more tests are done we will learn exactly what kind of life existed on Mars. And perhaps there will be more discoveries as Curiosity continues her mission?

Texas Murder Shoots Holes in NRA School Gun Plan

At the same time speculation is rife over whether white supremacists were killing prosecutors in Texas, the NRA has announced its plan to reduce gun violence in schools. Of course, the NRA's plan is to put more guns in schools, in the hands of people whose main job is teaching kids. Just like the main job of Mike MacLelland, the Dallas-area prosecutor who was murdered Sunday, is prosecuting murderers, pimps and thieves. MacLelland had started carrying a gun to work because another prosecutor had been killed.

So, we'll ask the Sarah Palin question, with absolutely no disrespect for the brave victims in Texas: how's that gunny-savey thing workin' out for ya?

In July 2012, MacLelland won a life sentence against an Aryan Brotherhood enforcer. MacLelland then indicted 34 Aryan Brotherhood members in November (the US attorney in the racketeering case has just withdrawn in fear of his life). On Jan. 31, Mark Hasse, another Kaufamn County prosecutor, was gunned down. MacLelland believed the Aryan Brotherhood could have been responsible, and started carrying a gun. Police had been stationed outside MacLelland's home for weeks, but the protection ended recently. I don't knock MacLelland for carrying; I probably would have done the same thing. What else is there to do, other than run like a coward? But carrying a gun is simply not effective protection when patient, determined assassins are after you.

Futher fueling the possible white supremacist connection was the murder of the chief of Colorado prisons on Mar. 19, and the subsequent shootout in Texas, when the killer, Evan Ebel, was stopped and killed by police two days later near Dallas.

We don't know if the Aryan Brotherhood, a white prison gang involved with prostitution and drug running and apparently run by men currently in jail, has anything to do with the Texas killings. Many are saying these actions don't fit their profile. And today another person of interest was identified in the case, a former local official who lost his job in a corruption probe.

What the slaying of Mike MacLelland does tell us is that guns can't protect you. The bad guys can always bide their time, hide in the shadows, snipe you from 200 yards away, wait until you're otherwise distracted, and then gun you down like a dog. They're not going to schedule a shoot-out with you on Main Street at High Noon and settle things like real men.

By demanding people be able to get guns without background checks, buy laser sights, bulletproof vests and infinite amounts of ammo online, the NRA is allowing bad guys like the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican drug cartels, domestic and foreign terrorists, and crazies like James Holmes to arm themselves to the teeth.

The idea that a good guy with a gun is the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a delusion.  Because the bad guy with a gun usually believes with all his heart that he's the good guy. And the fact is, the good guy can easily turn into the bad guy after one too many drinks, getting cut off by some idiot on the freeway, suffering a bad divorce or age-related dementia, or mistaking a cellphone for a gun.

Which is why the NRA plan will increase the number of children killed by guns in schools, due to weapons dropped in bathrooms (which appears to happen all the time), weapons left in desks where children can take them, good guys suddenly snapping for the reasons listed above, or disturbed kids bashing the good guy in the back of the head with a chair and taking the gun. And if an Adam Lanza does break into the school, clad in Kevlar and sporting an assault rifle with a thiry- or hundred-round clip, the good guy with the gun is probably the first guy to get shot.

The murders of Mike MacLelland and Mark Hasse were well-planned and executed. Much the way the assaults at Columbine, Aurora and Newtown were well-planned. When bad guys have time to plan and have access to massive firepower and protective gear it's impossible to prevent them from killing. The only way to stop them is to prevent them getting the weapons in the first place.

More guns equals more death, as has been well-documented in suicide and domestic violence statistics. The math really is that simple.

How To Torpedo A Weasel Question

Yeah, not really a good idea to fuck with the son of a teacher.

,

What Kind of A Culture?

What kind of a culture produces a person who had all of this weaponry? Ours, I guess. Why? More importantly, if we are a Christian nation, how does any of this fit in with a philosophy grounded in peace?

What Would He Say?

The Christian Science Monitor had a cover story a couple of weeks back titled, "What Would Mao Say?" that was most illuminating. The first three paragraphs say it all.

Yang Youwei owns a slaughterhouse, holds a big chunk of shares in a nearby coal mine, sits on the coal mine board, and runs the company that sells the mine's production. He drives a black Rolls-Royce. He walks like a capitalist; he talks like a capitalist. He is easily the richest man in this small village 300 miles south of Beijing. And he is also Yangjiaxiang's top communist, secretary of the local party. 

Welcome to the paradoxical world of today's Chinese Communist Party.

Modern day China is an excellent illustration of why there is virtually no chance of the world ever seeing a truly totalitarian government ever again. Sure, we still have our stragglers like North Korea and Iran as well as failed states in Africa and the Middle East but these are obvious outliers. If want to be in the global marketplace, you have to adapt and that means embracing capitalism, unfettered trade, and free markets. If not, you are going to be on the outside and much less prosperous. This is why I chuckle and shake my head when I hear the Right blow bowel after bowel about the looming threat of communism. It failed. And even a country like China, with all its military might and government control, can't stop it.

Mao would be outraged and likely confounded, as the article notes, to see how terribly wrong he was in his vision for China. What would he say?

He would be speechless.

Hallelujah!

I was very heartened to see this recent piece in the Atlantic about how our culture has finally shifted away from the "bumbling dad" stereotype. In many ways, we had become like the sex kittens and brain dead secretaries of the 1960s and 1970s.

I remember the old days, when the only media dad was a bumbling dad, flummoxed by diapers, mystified by breakfast cereals, as incompetent at managing a household as his wife was hyper-efficient. In sitcoms, and in the commercials that aired during sitcoms, Dad was comic relief; everyone knew that power in the home (economic power, especially) resided with Mom.

I have been lamenting this for years. It's such a stereotype, not simply of dads, but of all men that feeds the malaise that is the Michael Jordan Generation.

Now, though, it seems like things have changed.

Now, however, the marketers have realized their error, and dads—involved, caring, competent dads like me—are coming to the foreground. We see them with their daughters in car commercials, and with their daughters in other car commercials, and sometimes they even use Google! And not just to, you know, Google stuff. At last, we fathers have been recognized as an important demographic deserving of the attention of America's most creative capitalists.

The car commercial that comes to my mind is the one where the dad is telling his daughter, who is shown at age 6 or so, not to text while she drives. Suddenly, she is no longer 6 but 16. That's how dads really are...like Cliff Huxtable....not Benny Hill.

I really hope things stay this way. Men are not baboons who exist only to eat, watch sports and sleep on the couch while the wife does everything that requires competence.

An Easter Reflection

Of all of the holidays we celebrate in this country, I find Easter to be the most disconcerting. I think the main reason for this is the lead up, particularly Good Friday. Far too many Christians seem obsessed with the brutal death of Jesus. They seem a little too much like modern day snuff film devotees and that disturbs me.

I find His death to be completely disgusting and horrible. I don't need to relive it over and over again. Nor do I feel the need to be reminded of His resurrection. I've accepted his death into my heart and believe that he died for our sins. Anything after that strikes me as repetitive and insecure. I guess I'd much rather focus on the amazing way He lived His life and how we can expand His message of peace around the world. I suppose that makes me a lousy Christian in the eyes of many but I don't care.

Being a believer doesn't carry with it the requirement that other people approve of your faith.

Amazing!

A wonderful message to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. We are doing His works and greater than these!

 

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.

Oh Really?

COSTCO'S PROFIT SOARS AFTER CEO BACKS MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE

How Far We Have Come...

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.

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..

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yes, They Are!!

Fox News VERY Upset That The Economy Is Recovering

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:

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.

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.

Logical Fallacies

I came across this site the other day after one of my ex-students (who reads this blog and Kevin's blog) pointed it out to me. She told me that the posters there and here can be characterized by this photo and the caption below it.

MY DAUGHTER NEVER GAVE BIRTH TO A PLATYPUS AND THAT'S WHY YOU SHOULDN'T MAKE CHEESE IN CANADA!

Sadly, that's what it feels like at times.

The GOP's Real Agenda?

Tim Dickinson: "After watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials..." 

"Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda - which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks - is moving forward under full steam."

I hope he's right because that means we'll take back the House in 2014.