Without Comment

That Face You Get When...

Young American Taliban

Check out this photo:

It's from a collection of photos that were found in Nancy Lanza's home after the policed searched during the Sandy Hook investigation. It is not known whether this is Adam or not. Either way, I find this to be profoundly disturbing. What kind of seriously fucked up mentality brings you to a place like this?

Oh, right....the same as this one...

So, how much longer are we going to put up with this ideology?

Fantastic Words!

From a recent question on Quora...

I've long suspected that a lot of modern christianity is the result of people who want to be admired and respected like Jesus, but in their hearts they know that they have no intention of living up to Jesus' examples of humility, compassion, sacrifice and tolerance - 

So, the only way they can be "like Jesus" is by pretending, at each and every opportunity, that they're being tortured and vilified for their wonderfulness, by jealous moral inferiors. This is why they react with the righteous anger and the teeth gnashing and the wailing and the hysterics whenever they don't get their way - Every time somebody tells them "No, you can't do that", what they pretend to hear is "I HATE YOU AND I WILL CRUSH YOU AND ALL YOUR KIND INTO NOTHING !" 

Maybe it's best explained with this wonderfully accurate phrase that I once heard used by an arrogant prick, in a story by Mr. Howard Chaykin: "You can't talk to me that way ! Don't you know who I think I am ?!"

That last line from Mr. Chaykin pretty much sums up every conversation I've ever had with a conservative in general, let alone Christian!

Christians Under Attack?

I think there are several reasons why conservatives like to play the victim as detailed here by Bill Maher. The main one is they generate support by fomenting anger, hate and fear. What better way to do it then the garbage Bill points out?

'Tis a bizarre world in which they live. I'm very, very glad I don't go through life constantly feeling persecuted and under attack. Oh well...at least they have guns to fight off the imaginary monsters:)

The 411 On The Clinton Foundation

The attacks and childish taunting against the Clinton Foundation have gotten pretty silly of late. The right wing bubble has been spinning some pretty ridiculous yarns (see: lies) about the organization so I think it's way past time we examine the objective reality.  A good starting point is the foundation's site itself. Follow any of the links above the top banner and you can see all the work that they do in the world. It's pretty impressive and helpful to a lot of people...which is exactly why conservatives hate it as much as they do. As one begins to dig deeper into the foundation, several things become apparently quickly-all of which torpedo the myths about the organization we have heard so much about from the right wing bubble.

First, this isn't a personal, family organization. It is a large not-for-profit philanthropic entity that solicits contributions, establishes and runs programs and serves as a vast convening vehicle to mobilize other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government and private corporate assets to efficiently solve heretofore unsolvable, major world problems.

Second, Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with many other people, work for the foundation. It's not their personal organization. It's a communal one...something conservatives always have had trouble understanding:) They earn zero income and receive no benefits from the foundation. In fact, they donate much of their own personal money to the foundation along with many Democrats and Republicans as well as putting in many hours to ensure that objectives in helping people are met.

Third, contrary to the lies being told about the Clinton Foundation's lack of transparency, the organization is very open about the source of its contributions. Even though they are not required by law, the still post the contributors to the foundation. This is a great illustration as to exactly what happens when you are more forthcoming with information. They basically make shit up. No wonder she doesn't want to release her private emails.

Fourth, 88% of the monies collected by the Clinton Foundation are spent on programs and direct activities that benefit people in need in this country and around the world. Between the Foundation and its subsidiary organization, the Clinton Global Initiative, more than 400 million people in 180 countries have benefitted from its activities since its inception in 2002 - again: that's 400 million people! It has been committed to meeting a number of major world challenges and has active programs addressing climate change, economic development in some of the world's poorest nations, health, including the deliver of HIV/Aids medications at low cost to victims in the world's impoverished countries, general health and wellness and improving opportunities for women and girls. The Foundation has had a major impact on improving the Haitian economy both before and after its terrible earthquake.

This runs contrary to the mostly false statement that the Clinton Foundation spends very little on actual charity. The foundation is not set up like a regular charity that farms out its aid to other workers. They hire workers in house and pay them a salary. That's why their administrative costs are so high. As is most typical of right wing blog commenters, the wordsmithing and monkey word games are hauled out in the hopes of a "gotcha."

I'm wondering if this is going to backfire at some point, though. The continued attacks on Hillary Clinton will inevitably increase the image of her as a victim.

Walker Raising Taxes?

Scott Walker recently announced a $500 million dollar stadium deal for the Milwaukee Bucks, half of which will be funded by taxpayers. Somewhat perplexing, no? After all, isn't this the same Scott Walker who is "battle tested" and fighting for lower taxes? I guess $250 million dollars of corporate hand outs are OK:)

I guess funding basketball is OK but not education.

No Hiatus

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a report saying that has been no hiatus in global warming after all. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration readjusted thousands of weather data points to account for different measuring techniques through the decades. Their calculations show that since 1998, the rate of warming is about the same as it has been since 1950: about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit a decade.

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

"The reality is that there is no hiatus," said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

One key to claims of a hiatus is the start date: 1998. That year there was a big temperature spike; some of the following years were not as hot, though even hotter years followed in 2005, 2010 and 2014, according to NOAA, NASA and temperature records kept in England and Japan. This year is on pace to break last year's global heat record. The key here is this spike date which is exactly how the church of the climate deniers wordmith and right wing blog comment their way into some sort of an argument.

Remember, the linked report above is peer reviewed science (see: objective reality). The comments sections of a right wing blog is not (see: inferiority complex, envy of success and accomplishment).

Oh, and I had an email request to link this site again for those of you out there who want to torpedo the climate deniers with the detailed science. Click on the intermediate and advanced tabs and use that information in your next conversation. Witness the cognitive dissonance.

Remember, it feels like they are being physically attacked! 

Why Can't America Win Wars Anymore?

Why Can't America Win Wars Anymore? This question has been asked in many forms for many years (in MinnPost, the Atlantic, Ricochet, The Daily Beast, The LA Times, etc.). So let's look at the wars that we've won, and the wars that we've lost and see what we can learn.

We "won" the Libyan civil war, in that we bombed Qaddafi's military forces and helped the rebels overthrow and kill the dictator. But the place is falling apart now as various Libyan factions bicker with each other and ISIS is moving in to cause havoc.

We "won" the Iraq war, in that we destroyed the Iraqi military, killed lots of civilians, installed a puppet government and killed Saddam Hussein. But that puppet government turned out to be a puppet of Iran, not the United States. Now Iraq is falling apart again as ISIS fighters take over large swaths of Iraqi territory that the Shiite government can't hold because they have been treating the Sunni inhabitants of those areas like animals.

We won the Gulf War straight up: we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, crushed his army, placed a no-fly zone over the entire country and neutered his territorial ambitions for a decade. Some people think we "lost" because we didn't take Saddam out at that time.

But it was Dick Cheney, of all people, who so expertly explained why we had to leave Saddam in power in 1993: if Iraq fell apart, then Iran would gain power and then Syria would start falling apart, and then the whole Middle East would go to hell. It turns out the 1993 Dick Cheney was dead right: all the bad things the 1993 Cheney said would happen did happen when the 2003 Cheney invaded Iraq.

We lost the Vietnam war straight up. Yet for all the screaming about dominoes and the moaning about the blow to our prestige, "losing" in Vietnam has had a far more positive outcome than "winning" in Iraq. Communism has been defeated across the globe: China and Vietnam are now capitalist countries, with communist governments in name only.

The Korean War was a draw: we kept South Korea free, while the Chinese and Russians kept North Korea captive. North Korea is now a rogue state: a tyrannical feudal monarchy run by a deranged despot, with a ruling class that serves at the whim of the Supreme Leader and can be executed for offenses as trivial as falling asleep in a meeting.

We like to think we won WWII straight up. We freed western Europe and North Africa from the Germans. We freed Asia and the Pacific from the Japanese. But eastern Europe fell under Soviet control, and shortly thereafter China and much of Asia fell under communist rule.

To make sure we sustained our wins in South Korea, Germany and Japan we had to embark on a huge program of reconstruction and nation-building. We had to occupy these nations for years, babysit them while they wrote new constitutions, build numerous bases at tremendous expense and station troops there for up to 70 years -- and counting.

We like to think we won WWI straight up: we ejected Germany from the rest of Europe. But Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, and Germany fell into a terrible depression, partly due to an unreasonable treaty forced upon them by the victors, and 20 years later Germany started another war. WWI was supposed to the war to end all wars, and clearly it did not.

We "won" the Civil War in the United States, but to this day there are millions of Americans who celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America and a traitor to this nation. And these are the same people who today claim to be the "real Americans."

What do our victories and losses tell us? We can win wars to eject invaders and free people from slavery. We used moral suasion to convince the citizens of Germany and Japan that the Holocaust and the war crimes committed by the Japanese were wrong, and got them to change their ways. Stationing hundreds of thousands of troops there for decades made it stick.

But we lose wars that we have no moral standing in, or wars that prop up corrupt allies like South Vietnam. And wars never change anyone's minds about the rightness of their cause, or that a "way of life" based on the enslavement of human beings was worth fighting for. Incredibly, I'm talking about the American South, not Nazi Germany.

How does this apply to our current conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria?

We invaded Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda and bin Laden. We did that in short order, and therefore "won," but then we decided that we also had to get rid of the Taliban. We've been stuck there for 13 years now. (The Soviets were stuck with the same problem in the 1980s but called it quits when their country fell apart.)

We can't win in Afghanistan for two reasons: one is military, the other cultural. Militarily, Pakistan has been undercutting us from Day One in Afghanistan. For some reason Pakistan believes that an Afghanistan mired in eternal turmoil somehow diminishes the power of India, their sworn enemy. Now Pakistan is besieged by their own Taliban terrorists, who kill children by the hundreds. Both Afghan and Pakistani Talibans are essentially untouchable in their mountain aeries in western Pakistan.

Culturally, we have no traction in Afghanistan: we are perceived as invaders and Crusaders, an image perpetuated by American conservatives who keep making this a war between Islam and Christianity. The Afghan Taliban is not an invading force, they are native Afghan Pashto Muslims who have lived there for centuries. Yes, they're an evil misogynistic pack of scumbags, but it's still their country.

There the Americans are the interlopers, the ones using drones to shoot Hellfire missiles into wedding parties and bombing houses filled with children. Unlike the Germans and the Japanese, the Taliban didn't invade another country. We invaded them to get at a few foreign terrorists who were hiding out there. Our bombardment of an entire country to root out a small number of criminals puts us in a very poor light there.

And by the way. We were the ones who financed the Taliban and forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan. As Jon Stewart noted in "Learning Curves are for Pussies," the CIA says it's the only time doing such a thing worked.

It's the same story in Iraq. We are viewed as foreign invaders there. Some locals want to use us to destroy their enemies, but they don't like us, or trust us, or believe in democracy or the rule of law. If we destroy ISIS in the Sunni areas of Iraq, the Shiite government will send troops into those areas and kill the Sunnis for cooperating with ISIS. It's a lose-lose proposition.

We have even less standing to meddle in Syria, where our mortal enemy the Iranians are allied with our mortal enemy Assad who are fighting against our mortal enemy ISIS, and we're allied with people who used to say we were their mortal enemy, but now they'll only cop to despising us and cursing us for not giving them enough money and guns.

Viewing our successes and failures over the past century, it becomes clear that the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are not wars that we can win militarily. This is because these countries are made of ethnically and religiously diverse populations who have been at each others' throats for centuries, with lapses of atrocities when dictators like Saddam and Assad used their brutal powers to put a temporary stop to the internecine bickering.

To "win" these wars, we would have to replace the governments of these countries with an American-backed puppet government, along the lines of the post-WWII German and Japanese governments. We would have to segregate these countries into several separate provinces along ethnic and religious lines (Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Pashto, Turkmen, Alawite, etc.) , and forcibly repatriate millions of people into the "right" provinces. Doing this fairly is impossible because natural resources such as oil, water and farmland are not evenly distributed. We would have to trust the American government -- which Republicans keep telling us is incapable of doing anything right -- to pick ethnic and religious losers in a foreign country.

And then we'd discover that we already tried that a hundred years ago when the British divvied up the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Look how well that worked out!

We would have to spend a trillion dollars a year and station one or two hundred thousand troops in these countries for the next century in an attempt to force them to see reason. Meanwhile, our fighting men and women would face a constant barrage of IEDs and sniper fire as the local population tried to oust the foreign invaders.

You might think I'm making this all up, but Lindsey Graham's plan for the Middle East is what I outlined above, except he ignores the exorbitant cost and the number of American casualties. The South Carolina senator, Republican presidential candidate and self-proclaimed national security "expert" told NBC's Chuck Todd that we need to invade Syria and Iraq, and that we'll never get out. He has deluded himself into thinking that we can do this on the cheap, getting Turkey and Egypt to do all the heavy lifting, and that the people who have been attacking us for the last 13 and a half years in Afghanistan will simply stop shooting and bombing American soldiers in the Middle East if he's elected president.

This was George W. Bush's plan for Iraq. He pretended he could do it on the cheap, insisting that Iraqi oil would pay for it all. But he spent whatever moral currency America might have had in the Middle East by invading Iraq on false pretenses.

Military might can be used to eject foreign invaders like Germany from France, or Saddam from Kuwait. But it can't make people see reason, treat fellow citizens fairly or adopt a liberal democracy unless that's what they want. And right now, all anyone on any side in the Middle East wants is revenge.

U.S. Corporations Outsourced National Security to Russia

Yesterday I carped about how American companies have been outsourcing manufacturing and tech jobs overseas, and how they've begun firing Americans working in tech jobs and are replacing them with immigrants with H-1B visas.

Russian RD-180 Rocket Engine Being Test-Fired at NASA

It's gets worse. To boost profits and shorten development time, American aerospace companies outsourced the construction of rocket engines for launching U.S. military and intelligence satellites into space. But here's the rub:

After Russia annexed Crimea last year, Congress passed legislation that forced the Pentagon to stop buying Russian rocket engines that have been used since 2000 to help launch American military and intelligence satellites into space.

Now, that simple act of punishment is proving difficult to keep in place.

Only five months after the ban became law, the Pentagon is pressing Congress to ease it.

I'm all for cooperation in space -- the joint missions at the International Space Station with Russia, Japan and Europe are a great way to advance human understanding of the cosmos. But outsourcing the engines for our military rockets is stupidly greedy.

Of course, conservatives are all bent out of shape by this. After vacillating between hardons and hatred and for Vladimir Putin, they are blaming it all on Obama:

“I don’t know what the Pentagon’s position can be, except for them and the Obama administration trying to placate Putin,” Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said. He predicted that the legislative fight would intensify in the months ahead.

But corporate greed and laziness are responsible for this debacle. The Republicans' pals in the defense industry decided to put profit before national security.

The companies that formed United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that has a monopoly on military and intelligence launches, decided to buy rocket engines from a state-owned Russian company called Energomash in the 1990s. They didn't want to continue to build their own engines for the Atlas rockets -- they could make more money by using cheap Russian labor to build engines for our military rockets.

You know how American rocket scientists and engineers are -- they're all worried about safety and stuff, and they live in liberal California where houses cost a million bucks. They're so arrogant, they think they know everything and you have to pay 'em so much. It's much cheaper using Russian engineers who get paid peanuts, drink nothing but vodka and live in barracks in Samara (yeah, I'm just making that last part up).

Fortunately, SpaceX, the upstart company founded by Elon Musk, has now been cleared to compete with ULA for launching these sensitive payloads. And Musk's launch vehicles -- made in America -- are cheaper than ULA's Russian-based rockets.  If Congress doesn't pass a bill to allow ULA to buy Russian rocket engines, ULA will be out of a job and SpaceX will have the monopoly on launches.

Rocket engines aren't the only place we have a technological vulnerability. Our entire computing infrastructure is dependent on semiconductors, computers and networking hardware made in foreign countries, primarily China.

The United States invented semiconductor and networking technology, but to increase profits corporations sent the vast majority of semiconductor manufacturing overseas, mostly to China. Design centers soon followed, and now the United States is totally dependent on Asia for our computing hardware.

There's no way to know whether the state-owned Chinese corporations that build this equipment have installed backdoors in the chips, computers, and network routers our military is buying.

The lesson? Corporations have no loyalty to America. They're in business -- they keep telling us -- only to "increase shareholder value." Can you really trust people with our national security when they tell you straight to your face that the only thing they care about is money?

This is another reason not to be so trusting about free-trade treaties -- not only are we forcing American workers to compete with low-wage workers in countries like Vietnam, but are we opening the door for them to compete on contracts for critical military infrastructure? We don't know -- the treaty's secret!

The Criminalization of Joy and the Legalization of Intimidation

Once you think law enforcement in the South has reached the nadir of stupidity, someone in Georgia, Alabama, Florida or Mississippi turns around and shows that their intelligence and morality can sink even lower into the muck:

[T]hree people are facing charges and the prospect of $500 fines and six-month jail terms after they were accused of cheering during the [Senatobia High School] graduation ceremony, held at Northwest Mississippi Community College on May 21.

“We were instructed to remove anyone that cheered during the ceremony, which was done,” Zabe Davis, the chief of the campus police and a Senatobia High alumnus, said Wednesday. “And then Jay Foster, the superintendent, came and pressed charges against those people.”

As I read this, I immediately suspected that the people charged would be black and the perpetrators of this idiotic waste of taxpayer dollars would be white. As it turns out, Jay Foster, the superintendent, and Zabe Davis, the chief of campus police, are white. And, yes, the accused are African Americans, according to the report from WREG TV, which also indicates that the number of people charged was four rather than three.

Don't the cops in Mississippi have better things to do than put people in jail for expressing happiness?

Meanwhile, in Texas the governor is about to sign a bill that will allow people to carry guns on college campuses. But Texas is behind the times: Mississippi passed a similar law in 2011, and Northwest Mississippi Community College is one of the schools where you can pack heat as long as you got your certified instruction from the NRA.

That makes Mississippi the state where you can go to jail for shouting someone's name, but intimidating people with guns on college campuses is a God-given right, dammit!

It makes you wonder: if someone had shot those people for disturbing the peace in such an undignified fashion, would the cops have taken them in for questioning? Or would they believe it to be a clear-cut case of justifiable homicide?

I guess these proud family members -- instead of shouting the graduate's names -- should have fired their shootin' irons into the air in celebration. Who could possibly object to gunfire? It's a Second Amendment right! Freedom of speech is just the First Amendment, and everyone knows two is greater than one!

This is what white people just don't get about the situation of African Americans in this country. They have to put up with kind of crap every ... single ... day of their ... entire ... lives.

Firing Americans and Hiring Foreigners

For decades American manufacturing jobs have been going to places like Mexico, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and so on. Part of this was facilitated by NAFTA, but most of it is due to the vagaries of international trade, which is generally considered a Good Thing for our economy.

In recent years non-manufacturing jobs have also been fleeing these shores: many call centers and help lines have been outsourced to India (which American customers absolutely detest because they can't understand the accents), much software development has been outsourced to eastern Europe and India. Even legal research and medical image analysis have been outsourced overseas.

I have personal experience with this. In the early 2000s, after the company I worked for was bought by a British multinational, a policy came from on high that all American software contractors be replaced with Indian programmers from a specific contracting company.

But American corporations, like Disney World, aren't satisfied with this solution because some jobs just can't be outsourced to foreign countries. The employees need to be in-country. The solution? Bring in foreigners with H-1B visas and replace American workers with them.

[A]bout 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.

Yes, Disney (as well as other companies such as Southern California Edison and Fossil) is firing Americans, hiring foreigners for the exact same job and then forcing Americans to train their foreign replacements. For that last ignominy, they get a 10% severance bonus. Nice, huh?

What are H-1B visas?

According to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.

These companies are clearly lying to get foreign workers: they're laying off qualified people and replacing them with foreigners using the H-1B program. This isn't about finding qualified workers: it's about firing Americans and hiring foreigners for less money.

And American companies still aren't satisfied. The US Chamber of Commerce wants to double or triple the number of H-1B visas. They say they can't find enough qualified American engineers and programmers: what they really mean is they don't want to pay American-level salaries.

To make it worse, the H-1B program is a nightmare for many of the people who get the visas: they are essentially indentured servants. The Indian "in-sourcing" companies that snatch up many of the H-1B visas create phantom jobs and then try to shop around the employees they bring in on false pretenses. They tell the immigrants to falsify their resumes to get jobs they're not qualified for and then force the employees to pay the fees the companies are supposed to pay to get H-1B recipients into the country.

Now, I'm not some whack-job nativist who thinks that furriners are destroyin' Merica and we gotta take it back! In the 1990s I worked with several people from India and Pakistan who had H-1B visas. They were competent and deserving of the jobs.

But the H-1B program clearly has become a cesspool of corruption and greed. It must be radically reformed. But how?

The H-1B visa holders I worked with were directly hired by the company to work for the company. The corruption in the H-1B program is due to the way American companies treat workers: they don't want long-term employees, they want low-cost slaves they can dismiss at a whim.

So companies like Disney and SoCal Edison hire consulting firms and staffing companies, which are usually based in India, to find disposable employees at the lowest possible cost.

These corrupt middlemen should be eliminated. If a company can't find the employees it needs in the United States, then it should find and hire foreign workers themselves. If these companies need employees that badly, then they should be required to make a long-term personal commitment to them, to ensure that they remain gainfully employed for several years and won't be taking other Americans' jobs.

Right now these companies can bring in foreigners, employee them for a couple of months, and then lay them off. At that point the workers will be competing with Americans for any job, not just the one they were hired for. Companies are even using the H-1B program to fill low-wage jobs, not just tech specialists.

If American companies can't find Americans with the skills to do the jobs, they should be investing in the American education system and training Americans to do the job.

American companies like Disney have huge profit margins and are sitting on huge piles of cash. Instead of whining that they can't find enough programmers and have to get them from India, they should endow scholarships at American colleges and universities in the specialties they need.

Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, was paid $46.5 million dollars last year. That's enough to endow 2,000 scholarships at American public universities.

Instead of trying to get Congress to pass laws to allow them to import more wage slaves from India, or expecting someone else to create employees for them for free, American companies should be investing in the future of this country.

What Conservatives Want

Check out this video from a recent Iowa focus group comprised entirely of Republicans...



Let's see....

They are overwhelmed by the number of candidates

It needs to be winnowed down...no strong candidate seen

Don't care if the candidate attracts more women voters

Don't care if the candidate attract more minority voters

Scott Walker is "battle tested"

College degree doesn't matter

Marco Rubio is hot and the American Dream

Barack Obama has no integrity and has pushed things through

No one knows what Common Core is

Country should be run like a business

Huckabee will stick to the Constitution and Founding Fathers

Iowa pick is too conservative for the country


As I have always said, just let them speak...no spin is needed.

Secession Talk=Crickets

Like the adolescent who bitches about the roof over their heads, they all end up crying to mom and dad for help.

The Republican Brain Part Five: Smart Idiots

The next section of Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, is called "Smart Idiots" and it's honestly one of the most depressing sections of the book. It begins with a study of why motivated reasoning, which we talked about last time, occurs in individuals. Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, has a classification system based on how people reason with their moral and political values. Imagine a Cartesian plane like this one:

Now, imagine that the X Axis is a measure of individualism on the right and communitarians on the left. With the Y Axis, imagine egalitarians on the bottom and hierarchicals on the top. Broadly speaking, Kahan discovered that US conservatives are in Quadrant 1 (individual, hierarchical) and US liberals are in Quadrant 3 (communitarian, egalitarian). It's important to note here that individuals are really scattered all over the place and we're just talking about general groups.

Still, this explains so much to me personally. I've always wondered how a group of people who are so obsessed with individual rights are also so authoritarian. Now we know. They believe that a chief organizing principle for society is hierarchies, with the "right" people at the top. With so many US conservatives from the South, this clearly goes back to the Antebellum and all of its mythical structures.

So, how do these classifications apply to the issues of the day? One of Kahan's studies took groups of people and had them imagine helping a friend make a decision about three important topics: whether global warming is caused by human beings, whether nuclear wasted can be stored safely underground, and whether letting people carry guns either deters violent crime or worsens it.  The study subjects were then shown fake excerpts from a variety of "experts" on each topic.

The results were very telling. Only 23% of individual-hierarchicals agreed that any of the experts knew what they were talking about while 88% of communitarian-egalitarians accepted the experts as being knowledgeable and trustworthy. Right here is that instant and most adolescent reaction to people who are in authority and knowledgeable of which I always speak. Why? I simply don't get it. Are they that insecure about themselves?

What tends to happen in examinations of these issues is what Mooney calls the "My Expert v Your Expert" battle. Even worse....

When they deny global warming, then, conservatives think the best minds are actually on their side. They think THEY'RE the champions of truth and reality; and they're deeply attached to this view. That is why head-on attempts to persuade them usually fail. Indeed, factual counterarguments sometimes even trigger what has been termed the backfire effect: Those with the most strongly held but clearly incorrect beliefs not only fail to change their minds, but hold their wrong views more tenaciously after being shown contradictory evidence or a refutation.

This is very key information to have when having a discussion with a conservative these days. Remember, they feel like they are under physical attack. If they have very strongly held views, it will be worse due to the backfire effect.

Now, what's interesting about the backfire effect is that applies to conservatives only. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State found that when conservatives were shown more and more evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs and that tax cuts do not increase revenue, they were MORE likely to believe the claim than before. I can personally attest to tax cut-revenue BS sadly being valid. Yet, when liberals were shown evidence in the same study that refuted claims that George W Bush "banned" embryonic stem cell research (he never did), liberals didn't backfire. They weren't more likely to believe the claim and, in fact, wavered more given the new information.

What this tells us quite simply is that liberals are generally more reflective and tend to be more open to new information. Consider the basic definitions of each word in objective reality

liberal: not opposed to new ideas or ways of behaving that are not traditional or widely accepted

conservative: not liking or accepting changes or new ideas

I'm always willing to accept valid, unbiased and verifiable data regardless of whether or not it supports my ideology. I am speaking of information that the cold and rational part of the brain can analyze. I haven't seen any such data from conservatives on most of the issues I discuss and quite honestly dismiss nearly all of it as wacky, ideological nonsense. Speaking of which...

The split over whether Iraq had the touted

 "WMD," and whether Saddam and Osama were frat buddies, represented a true turning point in the relationship between our politics and objective reality. In case you missed it: Reality lost badly. Conservatives and Republicans were powerfully and persistently wrong, following a cherished leader into a war based on false premises-and then, according to these studies, finding themselves unable to escape the quagmire of unreality even after several years had passed.

The "cherished leader" line echoes what I have said previously about President Bush and conservatives. He was their savior...their white knight... yet, on his watch, we suffered the worst attack on our home soil in history, a city fell into the sea, and the economy collapsed. By any metric in objective reality, he was a colossal failure. Much of the anger toward Barack Obama comes from the massive cognitive dissonance occurring within their brains.

At this point, we come to the most depressing part of the chapter and the origin of its title. Mooney posits that there is a "smart idiots" effect when it comes to many of these issues. One would think that the more educated a person is, the easier it is for them to accept objective reality. In fact, the opposite is true. It is because they are extremely intelligent that they can come up with intricate counter arguments and employ confirmation bias to convince themselves that their belief system is solid. Never was this more true than with global warming.

Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the "radiative" properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation would otherwise escape into space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place,  but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can't explain what we are seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.

This is a great example of objective reality and thankfully one that is more reliable than people, especially the educated ones. Pew polls over the years have shown that Democrats accept this objective reality and Republicans do not. Worse, the more educated a Republican is, the more likely he is to reject the theory of man caused global warming. Astonishing...

Mooney offers further explanation of why this is the case. Even smart conservatives, for example, chiefly consume conservative news sources like Fox News. So, like anyone else, they are being conditioned. The more intelligent they are, the more resistant which does hold some good news for the rest of us in objective reality. We can, at least, attempt to persuade the less intelligent conservatives because the studies and the data show that they are easier to persuade.

What's even more vexing about this is that Kahan's studies sprinkled in other questions that were scientifically based but not very political. Nearly all respondents, despite their cultural background, answered the question with their colder and more rational System 2 brain. In fact, those who scored higher on the non political scientific questions but were individual-hierarchical distrusted climate science in greater numbers. Stunning!!

One big takeaway from all of this is the liberal line of "educate more people" needs to be retired. Becoming more knowledgeable will actually make it worse so the old idea about converting people with more education needs to go away forever. It won't work. They will just get worse.

In wrapping up this first section of the book, "Politics, Facts, and Brains,"  Mooney warns...

Motivated reasoning poses a deep challenge to the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, which assumes that voters will be informed about the issues-not deeply wedded to misinformation. We're divided enough about politics as it is, without adding irreconcilable views about the nature of reality on top of that. 

Add in all of the new media of the last two decades and it truly exacerbates the problem.

The next section of the book is called "The Nature Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty." It looks to be an even deeper explanation of the problem which is sort of a drag. At this point, I'd like to get to some solutions on how to go forward!

A Conservative Paradise

Reports are coming out of Iraq about life under ISIL. And it's a conservative paradise.

The Sunni Muslim terrorists appear to be following the same blueprint as they have in other conquered parts of Anbar Province: seize territory, execute “apostates” and “traitors” in a bloodbath, and then reassure terrified civilians by producing goods and services that surpass those provided by the Shiite Muslim-led government in Baghdad. 

But they're not all bad:

Quietly, quickly, the jihadists also are working to provide fuel for heavy generators, ordered shopkeepers to reopen, and have begun demolishing old checkpoints to make it easier to get around, according to telephone interviews with residents. 

Like Republicans, the ISIL terrorists are strict law and order types:

[They] imposed a long list of rules that can seem endless: no English teaching, no smoking, no unveiled women, no price gouging, no skipping prayers, and so on.

 And they're trying to restore some sense of normalcy as well:

Seven schools are operating, he said, teaching math and science along with religion, but abolishing English, history and any mention of evolution. 

Do the last two remind you of, say, Texas and Louisiana?

Are Republicans riled up about ISIL because the Islamic terrorists a real threat, are they just jealous that ISIL is able to do everything American conservatives can only dream about: shoot anyone they don't like, force women to obey their every whim, rewrite history and ban the teaching of evolution?

Same Number of Liberals As Conservatives

Gallup has been seeing some interesting polling numbers lately. First there was the abortion poll and now they have one that says, for the first time in their polling history, there are just as many people who identify as liberal as there are who identify as conservative.

“The broad trend has been toward a shrinking conservative advantage, although that was temporarily interrupted during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency,” Gallup noted. “Since then, the conservative advantage continued to diminish until it was wiped out this year.” It also seems to be affecting people who identify as Republican: only 53% of respondents said their views were socially conservative, “the lowest in Gallup’s trend”, and correlates with a rise in self-identified socially moderate Republicans (34%).

Hmm...I wonder why:)

Socially Liberal But Fiscally Conservative

I've always hated it when people say, "Well, I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative."

Really? How exactly are you fiscally conservative? Invariably the answer is that they think the government spends too much money. When pressed for details on where they would implement spending cuts and what that would mean to people and the economy, they get flustered.

This happens because they don't really know what the fuck they are talking about. They heard a bunch of people say the line and this is their (lazy) way of trying to sound relevant in a political conversation. There's no real problem on the first part. Most people are socially liberal these days. Check out this recent poll on abortion. Other than the 89 people running for the GOP nomination, who wants to be socially conservative?

But the fiscally conservative part is giant crock of shit. No one really is fiscally conservative...even conservatives!! They may talk a good game about cutting the budget but even your most hard core base member won't cut defense, medicare, or social security...AKA where most of our money is being spent. What they will cut is taxes to make it seem like the government will just have to make do with less money. The result of this is an increase in deficit and debt which is sort of like putting out fire with gasoline.

Here's a great piece Greta Chrstina about how crap this line is and how people that say it, really don't understand it.

Paging John Connor

Tad Simons recent piece in the Strib should give more than a few people pause. Why aren't more of us thinking about the dangers of artificial intelligence? Our minds quickly turn to seemingly more immediate concerns at first glance, no?

Sit and think about it for a minute. Gates, Hawking and Musk are all correct. We need to be thinking about it now.

Another Reason Nuclear Power Is Risky...

The headline in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune read:

Fired power plant worker arrested with explosives, ammunition

Contract employee at a nuclear power plant faces 4 terroristic threat counts.

It's sensational and misleading, to be sure: the worker wasn't targeting the nuclear power plant. He was targeting the local union rep:

Johnson told police he was upset with paying $3,500 a year for the union’s representation and that there would be trouble at the union’s meeting. He also denied that he planned to shoot anyone or threatened anyone.

But it does point out another serious problem with nuclear power.

Remember the Germanwings pilot a couple of months back who committed suicide by crashing his plane into a mountain? Suppose he had aimed his plane at a skyscraper in Düsseldorf instead of a mountain in France. It could have been Germany's 9/11, killing thousands instead of just (!) 150 passengers and crew.

Last fall a despondent FAA contractor set fire to the FAA radar facility in Aurora, Illinois, in a failed suicide attempt. The fire ground the air traffic control system to a halt (the contractor is expected to plead guilty).

Now, suppose the angry contract worker at the Monticello nuclear plant had completely lost it, but instead of  focusing his ire on the union, he decided to end it all by blowing up the nuclear containment at the plant, or the dry casks where the spent fuel is stored. They say the containment and those casks are strong enough to take a direct hit from an airplane. But how about a shaped charge planted by a deranged technician who has access to the guts of the plant?

This is the problem with nuclear power, and any technology that concentrates a huge amount of energy in a single location. How can we be sure that there are sufficient safeguards at our nuclear facilities to prevent a single disgruntled or suicidal employee from wreaking major havoc? We know right now that our aircraft are vulnerable to lone wolf attacks from the inside. By putting impenetrable doors on the cockpit to stop terrorists, we made it easier for suicidal pilots to kill hundreds.

Obviously it's not just planes and nuclear power plants that are vulnerable to insider attacks: are the nuclear and conventional explosives on Air Force bombers safe from suicidal pilots who might commandeer the aircraft and fire on an American city? Could our hydroelectric dams be blown up by nut jobs from the inside? The Johnstown flood killed 2,200 people when the dam broke after several days of rain. How many of our cities are sitting below large reservoirs?

Lots of people are worried about terrorists attacking our critical infrastructure, blowing up refineries, oil depots, chemical plants, etc., but very little has been done to mitigate these risks. Partly that's because the United States has had relatively few terrorist attacks in the last decade, and we've put it on the back burner. But we've had a slew of psycho suicidal whack jobs who have shot up movie theaters, malls, schools and so on.

By focusing on terrorist threats, are we missing a much greater danger from suicidal insiders? How sure are we that our nuclear power plants are safe from angry, unstable, underpaid contractor workers who are trusted to monitor the safety of the facility?

To quote the comics, Who watches the watchmen?