Good Question

Here is a great question from Quora...

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

The best answer so far...

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

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

There was also this brilliant comment on this answer.

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

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

Nuclear Plant Shut Down by Hot Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are "Toothless" Sanctions Working Against Russia?

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

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

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

How To Deal With Right Wing Blog Commenters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like someone has been in my comments section:)

How To Respond To Open Carry Activists

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

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

How the Average Person Sees an Open-Carry Gun Nut

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

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

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

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

Who was this guy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diversity According To Fox News

Good Words

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

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

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

Institutionalized paranoia.

Exactly right.

His conclusion is even better.

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

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

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

So, can we change?

John Walsh Weighs in on Guns

Glenn Beck Continues To Walk The Walk

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

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

Good Words

From a discussion on Quora about racism...

Lack of forthright censure is the equivalent of tacit approval.

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

Because they ARE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minimum Wage Increases Don't Hurt Job Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Such Thing

We Are A Christian Nation

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

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

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

Exactly what Jesus would do!

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

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

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

Because we are a Christian nation:)

Centuries of Denial

More Good Words

From a Quora question...

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

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

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

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

Exiting Stage Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Words

From a recent Quora question...

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

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

In later comment from the same author...

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

Gee, that sounds pretty familiar...:)