tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61153758695535918392024-03-13T13:01:05.901-05:00Taking PlaceRamblings of Disaffected Grad StudentsRagothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.comBlogger180125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-65987379636270602802011-12-09T16:41:00.003-06:002011-12-09T16:48:52.515-06:00The GingrinchI realized, once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, that given his entire history and numerous quotes and policy stances, that Newt Gingrich really is the archetypal bad-guy from many a children's story and fairy tale. Hence, I have decided, and am no less pleased than Punch, that Mr. Gingrich's name so closely resembles one of said villains - namely, The Grinch (the jury is still out as to whether or not Mr. Gingrich's heart will eventually grow three sizes). Hence, the Gingrinch.<br /><br />I have taken it upon myself to do as others in my generation, and condense several children's stories down to their Twitter-type essence. Consider the following as a moment in revisionist history.<br /><br /><ul><li>Newt Gingrich finds no evidence of discrimination in the case of Rudolph v. Other Reindeer, tells Mr. Red-Nosed to "get a job after you take a bath." #thegingrinch</li><li>Newt Gingrich issues press release condemning Ebenezer Scrooge for gifting a turkey to the Cratchit family. Claims this will only promote a welfare state and that Tiny Tim should have gotten a job as a janitor to support his family. #thegingrinch</li><li>Newt Gingrich, following the Singapore model, will seek the execution of a young girl named "Alice," accused, among other things, of taking a drugged "potion," eating a drugged "cake," and on at least two separate occasions, consuming drugged "mushrooms." In a related story, Newt "The Professor Moriarty" Gingrich will lead a manhunt for one Sherlock Holmes, ordered for execution for known opium usage. #thegingrinch</li><li>Breaking: Newt Gingrich plans investigation of citizens of Whoville for alleged communist and un-American behavior. Gingrich sites disregard for capitalist gains and products as primary reason. Working closely with special agent based out of Mt. Crumpit. #thegingrinch</li><li>Newt Gingrich responds to request from a young Mr. Twist reading "Please sir, may I have some more" with the following: "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." Rick Santorum also issued a press release, claiming that Mr. Twist was likely obese anyway and deserved no more social welfare. #thegingrinch</li></ul><br />I'm sure many more will come. Please, suggest your own.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-50861714717207325202011-12-08T09:04:00.003-06:002011-12-08T09:09:35.764-06:00Jesus was not a Free MarketerI'm going to take a brief break from politics and return to my old stomping ground of religion. Now, I know, in today's day and age, there's not a whole lot of light between those two topics, but, let's just assume some sort of divide...a wall, maybe...that kind of, you know, separates the two.<br /><br />Anyway, I want you to take a moment and go read <a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/06/my-take-jesus-was-a-free-marketer-not-an-occupier/?iref=allsearch">this</a>. It's an article by Tony Perkins over at the Family Research Council, about how Jesus is a free-marketer. I know, just go read it. We'll discuss after the jump.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I know that you can feel it in your head - your IQ has dropped. Yes, this article is weaponized stupidity, and you are literally dumber for having read it. I'm so, so sorry. Now, most of the time, I'd read something like that, mutter "Idiot..." and move on. But I feel like this is different. This is special some how. Some strange confluence of religion, economics, and politics has swirled into a primal vortex, from which screams an eldritch beast out from the depths of Tony Perkins' black soul, crying, nay, begging for an answer. A hero. Dovahkiin, if you will. So, here I stand. I may not be the one you wanted to reply to this, but perhaps I am the one you needed.<br /><br />Let's go through this step-by-step.<br /><br />Here's the parable he's discussing:<br /><br /><b>11 While they were listening to this, he went on to tell them a parable, because he was near Jerusalem and the people thought that the kingdom of God was going to appear at once. 12 He said: “A man of noble birth went to a distant country to have himself appointed king and then to return. 13 So he called ten of his servants and gave them ten minas.[a] ‘Put this money to work,’ he said, ‘until I come back.’<br /><br /> 14 “But his subjects hated him and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’<br /><br /> 15 “He was made king, however, and returned home. Then he sent for the servants to whom he had given the money, in order to find out what they had gained with it.<br /><br /> 16 “The first one came and said, ‘Sir, your mina has earned ten more.’<br /><br /> 17 “‘Well done, my good servant!’ his master replied. ‘Because you have been trustworthy in a very small matter, take charge of ten cities.’<br /><br /> 18 “The second came and said, ‘Sir, your mina has earned five more.’<br /><br /> 19 “His master answered, ‘You take charge of five cities.’<br /><br /> 20 “Then another servant came and said, ‘Sir, here is your mina; I have kept it laid away in a piece of cloth. 21 I was afraid of you, because you are a hard man. You take out what you did not put in and reap what you did not sow.’<br /><br /> 22 “His master replied, ‘I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant! You knew, did you, that I am a hard man, taking out what I did not put in, and reaping what I did not sow? 23 Why then didn’t you put my money on deposit, so that when I came back, I could have collected it with interest?’<br /><br /> 24 “Then he said to those standing by, ‘Take his mina away from him and give it to the one who has ten minas.’<br /><br /> 25 “‘Sir,’ they said, ‘he already has ten!’<br /><br /> 26 “He replied, ‘I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 27 But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me.’” </b> <br /><br />The context of this parable is that Jesus and his disciples are going into Jerusalem. It's near the end of the book of Luke (chapter 19), and if anything, this parable is pretty clearly about Jesus going to die soon, and how the disciples should live after that. Namely, it's often interpreted in terms of "spiritual gifts," that is, go out and convert, or share your skills and talents. Don't hide them. It also explains that though the Kingdom is coming, it won't be immediately, and it's not going to happen in the way the the contemporary Israelites believed. That's fine. I don't have much of an issue with Perkins' interpretation of that bit. Now, he does choose to use the King James version, because it contains the translation of "Occupy," as opposed to "Engage in business" or "Put this money to work." Fine, "Occupy," it's a relevant topic at the moment, and it helps his case...so, okay. After that, however, this article really goes off the rails. Now, a note. I'll be using the word "conservative" a lot in this post. What I mean by that is essentially the current, radical conservative that could be exemplified by the Tea Party, the majority of the Republican party, the majority of the Republican presidential candidates, and quite a few of the really far-right religious blocks in the United States. This gives me a little wiggle-room, so I want to be clear, this isn't <i>all</i> conservatives, but I think it is representative of the most vocal block of people calling themselves that.<br /><br />First, he claims that the Occupy movement has taken over and "trashed" public property. While there are some examples of this, it is also clear that the Occupiers are willing to clean up after themselves, and often times, they don't have much of an option if local businesses refuse to allow them entry or use. Likewise, I'm sure there were a lot of conservatives who made similar claims about Hoovervilles...I mean, hell, they set up tent cities and protested their government. Sorry, guys, but this whole Occupy movement has deep precedents. <br /><br />Now, Perkins will admit that the minas probably represent opportunities in life and abilities. Fine, great. But he misses an important point, one that conservatives love to gloss over. He says that Jesus gave each of his 10 servants equal responsibility and opportunity. Number one, a minor point, if he's talking about Jesus and not the guy in the parable, then he had 12 disciples, not 10. If he's talking about the guy in the parable, then that guy had 3 servants, not 10. I don't know where the 10 comes from, but whatever.<br /><br />The more important point is that we do not have equal opportunities. Now, i know, the usual conservative screed is that liberals want equal outcomes for unequal participation. No, not really. What we would love to have is equal opportunity. Conservatives will claim that we all have equal opportunity, because the Constitution and Declaration of Independence say that we're all created equal and endowed with equal rights. Now, granted, they do a lot to bar those "equal rights," but whatever. The real issue is that, while that is a great sentiment, it is simply not true. Due to the circumstances of your birth, your location, the connections that your family has, the color of your skin, your gender, and a host of other factors, there is not, in practice, equal opportunity for all. Statistically speaking, the lower the socioeconomic class of your family, the lower your likely socioeconomic class as you age. We have a lot of speeches about the American Dream and rags-to-riches stories, but those are relatively rare, and class mobility has all but stopped (except in the downward direction) in the past couple of decades. So, you can say "Well, we're all created equal, and hey, I started out poor and worked my way to the top. Anyone can do it." Well, potentially, but that's a little misleading. It's true, anyone could, in the sense that the next rags-to-riches story could be about anyone, but in terms of likelihood for any individual, it's very low. Wages for the middle class and poor have been stagnant for the past 30 years, while those for the upper income bracket have skyrocketed for more than 200%. So, we're literally in a situation of riches-to-riches, and the chance of you working your way out of a poor neighborhood and becoming fabulously wealthy is actually quite low.<br /><br />Perkins claims that Jesus chose for the basis of this parable the free-market system. That's funny to me. For one, free-market capitalism was not a concept that existed in that era of Palestine. The general consensus among economic historians is that free-market capitalism did not really begin to emerge until the Medieval period in Europe, which is notably later than the time period of Jesus. So, sorry, no, Jesus did not chose the free market as a basis for his parable.<br /><br />Perkins continues to argue that the first servant, the one that got a return of 10 minas, had invested his money and got a nice return. Well, maybe...but I think the terms of investment in this sense is very different from the one that Perkins wants to argue. Moreover, he goes on to claim that it probably took a lot of diligent effort and attention. Well, at that time, probably it did. Now, however, you can play the stock markets - essentially legalized, large-scale gambling. Chance is the ruler of the day, as well as deep-seated fraud and corruption. So, granted, you can poor over stock reports and the news every day and you might get by in the market...or you can join league with speculators, short-sell stocks that you know to be worthless, and make a ton of money on the back end. I'm sure Perkins will argue that Jesus would be very proud of the bankers who short-sold worthless mortgages and crashed the economy. They made a huge profit, and that's what counts, right?<br /><br />The second servant has much the same story, but the third servant...well, here's a special case. See, that third servant, he knew that his master was a bit of a shady operator, and didn't want to piss him off (which amuses me, as Perkins claims that the master is a stand-in for Jesus), so he basically hides the money and gives it back to his master after he returns. The master is really angry, both because the servant calls him out on his bad behavior, but also because he didn't do anything with the money. Instead, he takes the money from this "wicked servant" and gives it to the richest one. Now, that's exactly the kind of stuff that has been going on in this country over the past few decades, and I know Perkins has gotten quite wealthy from his position, so I can totally understand why he wants to defend taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich (I mean, it's basically the business model of his organization, so, there you go), but I don't think most people consider that to be very, you know, moral.<br /><br />Mr. Perkins also goes on to praise how the parable shows some of the great qualities of the free market system - for example, there are winners and losers. And, according to Mr. Perkins, parroting one of the biggest conservative lines ever, the "winners are determined by the diligence and determination of the individual." Now, for all the reasons that we've discussed above, and more, that is simply not always the case. He wants to save himself from that criticism by saying that "some egregious abuses have" occurred, they aren't inevitable or intrinsic to free enterprise, and that the parable endorses the principles of the free market properly employed. Well, no it doesn't (again, free market economies didn't exist at the time in the same way that they do now), and actually, the abuses that we've seen <i>are</i> intrinsic to the system and <i>are</i> inevitable given the way it's currently set up and running. They aren't that "occasional" either, Mr. Perkins. Oh, if we just practiced it being bridled by "transcendent moral principles," we'd all be fine. Well, that's great, but it's not going to happen. In fact, you're really arguing against yourself at that point. If you truly believe that the free market, bridled by morality, is the best system, you should be all for regulation to ensure that the market actually is accountable to that morality. I mean, the master does return and audits his servants, no? The market, and corporations, are not immoral or moral. They are amoral, by their very definitions. They have a legal and contractual obligation to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders and hence are profit making machines. A machine does not care if you get hurt using it. A machine does not care at all.<br /><br />Oh, yeah, sidenote about the end of the parable, the master (who is now king) also commands that everyone who didn't like him be brought before him and executed. I can see why conservatives love this parable. "Take money from the guy who knows that you've done bad stuff and give it to those who are rich? Sweet! And kill people?! Awesome!! Yeah! Jesus is so hardcore!"<br /><br />Perkins then goes on to say that "Jesus rejected collectivism." Now, that really interested me. I seemed to remember that Jesus wasn't particularly wealthy, he spent a lot of time with twelve other not particularly wealthy guys, and I seemed to recall a bunch of stories and events (i.e., most of the rest of the New Testament...hell, most of the rest of the Old Testament), which really seemed like Jesus was kind of a collectivist.<br /><br />Also, hilarious Mr. Perkins, you're so funny. You're going to trash collectivism, but <i>corporatism</i>, one of the most prominent examples of collectivism, he's just fine with. Hah!<br /><br />So, was Jesus a collectivist? I'm not sure I'd use that term exactly, but he sure as hell was not a free-marketer.<br /><br />For one, we have the feedings of the multitudes. On two occasions (one reported in all four Gospels, one reported in only Mark and Matthew), we see Jesus take a small amount of food and miraculously feed everyone. Note, not feed those who were wealthy, and not feed those according to how much work they had done...no, he took the total amount of food that they had and distributed it evenly to everyone, regardless of their status, job, or anything else (Mark 6:31-44, Luke 9:10-17, Matthew 14:13-21, John 6:5-15; Mark 8:1-9, and Matthew 15:32-39). Huh...that's weird. Rewarding people with the same outcome by distributing everything evenly after having pooled all their resources together...that sure doesn't sound like a free marketer. Maybe you should have chosen this story, Mr. Perkins.<br /><br />Oh, how about this one, from Matthew 5:<br /><br /><b><br />38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.<br /></b><br /><br />If a man wants your shirt, give him your coat as well? Don't turn away from one who wants to borrow from you? Give to those who ask? What? None of that sounds like the free market, does it Mr. Perkins? Aren't you arguing that the Occupiers just want to trash things and want hand-outs, and that Jesus would have tossed them out? Even though you'd be wrong about your characterization of the Occupy movement, it also looks like your whole argument is just...wrong.<br /><br />While we're on the subject of tossing things out, how about this, from John 2:<br /><br /><b><br />13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16And he told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade." 17His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me."<br /></b><br /><br />Or this, from Matthew 21:<br /><b><br />12 And Jesus entered the temple[b] and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 13He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers."<br /></b><br /><br />Huh...sure doesn't sound like he was too happy at those making a profit around the Temple. Now, you might say that it's really their location that bothers him, but he also seems to be pretty pissed at the general greed as well. He sure as hell did not stand around saying "You see, here it is, free market economics just humming along. Sure, there are occasional abuses, but these guys are just great. We should work on our portfolio...you know, stocks...well, you don't know, but people 2,000 years from now will know...it'll make sense to them."<br /><br />Oh, and how about Matthew 19:23-24, or Mark 10:24-25, or Luke 18:24-25? A young, rich guy (I'm sure he got that way through diligence and determined effort in a free market economy) approaches Jesus and asks how he can get into heaven. Jesus tells him to follow the commandments, which he has been doing, and moreover, that if he wants to be "perfect," go and sell all of his possessions and give them to the poor, and follow him. Young rich guy isn't willing to do that (I mean, hey, he earned it in the free market, right?), and Jesus says that's hard for a rich man to enter heaven. Hey, Mr. Perkins, if Jesus was a free marketer, and rewards are really only given based on merit, shouldn't it be the other way around? Like, the wealthy are the ones who have "earned" it through "diligence" and "effort," right? So...why does this seem to contradict your whole argument?<br /><br />Oh, wait...you mean the meek inherit the earth, and blessed are the hungry and thirsty, for they will be filled (Matthew 5:5-6)? Wait, that doesn't sound very free market at all.<br /><br />Mr. Perkins, I think you may want to see this as well, from Matthew 25:<br /><b><br />31 "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' 37Then the righteous will answer him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' 40And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[f] you did it to me.'<br /><br /> 41"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' 44Then they also will answer, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?' 45Then he will answer them, saying, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."<br /> </b><br /> <br /> The righteous are the ones who have fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned? Oh man, Mr. Perkins, you might want to really rethink that whole free market thing, because that certainly sounds pretty...well..."socialist" (in today's American terms), at least. But, that's probably an isolated example, right? Or Jesus was just kidding around? You know, he liked to have a few jokes about socialism before going and preaching about free market economics.<br /> <br /> You mean there's another? From Luke 10? Oh, that Jesus, always going on about seemingly collectivist stuff:<br /> <b><br /> 25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" 26He said to him, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" 27And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." 28And he said to him, "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live."<br /><br /> 29But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 34He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35And the next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.' 36Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" 37He said, "The one who showed him mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go, and do likewise."<br /></b><br /><br />Oh man...paying for another guy's health care, that certainly doesn't seem free market. But, the one who shows mercy, that's the righteous guy. Mr. Perkins, that doesn't sound a lot like your vision.<br /><br />One last thing, from the book of Acts, chapter 2. Now, you may say that hey, that's just the apostles, that's not Jesus, and you're right. But, I think most people who agree that the people who are mostly to have gotten the whole "living a Christian life" thing right were probably the apostles...because, you know, they lived with him and had all his teachings. So, they're living it up in a free market environment, just wheeling and dealing left and right, correct, Mr. Perkins?<br /><br /><b><br />42And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43And awe[d] came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.<br /></b><br /><br />Oh...they were living as a collective in a commune...selling all their stuff and distributing the money to all, according to need...well...that seems pretty bad for you, Mr. Perkins.<br /><br />Okay, so all of that was a long way of saying that Mr. Perkins is dead wrong...actually, it's so bad it's not even wrong. The above is giving Mr. Perkins a lot of credit in assuming that all he states is actually true, and assuming that the Bible can be used to justify any sort of economic or social policy. There are numerous other criticisms (beyond the easy one, "Bible's a series of supernatural myths punctuated by some sometimes alright moral philosophy [often not that great, though], and thus we can reject it as a foundation of an argument". I've tried to avoid the easy path on this). <br /><br />We could go on to say that parables, by their very definition, are not really about the things that are spoken about within the parable, e.g., the parable of the sower is not about good agricultural practice, and Mr. Perkins wants to have it both ways with this one.<br /><br />We could also go on to say that since free market economics did not exist at that time and location, obviously the parable is not about that, and it would be impossible for the Bible to be praising an economic system like that, and Mr. Perkins is just reading into it.<br /><br />We could also say that this proves that point that if you're really diligent and willing to bend some wording a little bit, you can find a quote from the Bible to justify nearly any position, and thus, maybe it's not the best source to be using in broad arguments.<br /><br />We could also say that the Bible should not be the basis of us determining economic and political policies because, you know, it was written in a time vastly different from our own and does not speak directly to our times without a little massaging of the content.<br /><br />With all that in mind...I'm going to go ahead and call it. You lose, Mr. Perkins. Good day, sir, you lose.<br /></span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-44297352858504672412011-12-05T13:42:00.004-06:002011-12-05T14:12:06.218-06:00The Militarization of PoliceRadley Balko over at the HuffPo has an excellent <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/police-militarization-use-of-force-swat-raids_b_1123848.html?page=1">breakdown on the militarization of police</a>. I'd highly suggest going to read to it.<br /><br />It's chilling, and quite relevant to today's circumstances. We live in a world where everything is being declared a war, the "War on Drugs" being the most obvious. Of course, with the "War on Terror," it only makes sense that the police need to be militarized, or that the military needs to operate as police within the country, right?<br /><br />When you couch things in the language of warfare, you're not really looking at "suspects," or "witnesses," or "citizens;" you're considering "enemy combatants," or "potential targets." We sent SWAT teams in to avoid search warrants and arrest low-risk offenders. Anyone who gets killed, even when it's cases of incorrect information, is "collateral damage" in the overall war. It's meant to teach us all a lesson - if we don't completely police ourselves and follow every government edict exactly, we may end up as collateral damage. Actually, scratch that, even if we do all the right things, we may still up getting gunned down because of falsified or incorrect information. <br /><br />Again, I want to make it clear - I don't hate the military or the police. I think both groups provide a very useful and necessary function. However, I think their functions should remain quite distinct, and I don't think they should have the same tactics or theaters of operation. Use of force is sometimes necessary while on the job as a cop - this doesn't mean that it should be the first option for all situations.<br /><br />In slightly more humorous news, Fred Upton (R-MI), a member of the GOP Supercommittee, has <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/04/381510/upton-cant-explain-tax-cuts-jobs/">no idea why job growth was better with higher taxes on the upper income brackets</a> than under the Bush tax cuts, but still thinks that tax cuts will create jobs.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-47914333018752737132011-12-02T10:13:00.006-06:002011-12-02T15:49:16.781-06:00A Run-Down of the RidiculousHere's a brief run-down of some of my top ridiculous recent stories.<br /><br />First, we see that Republicans are continuing their war on the right-to-vote. But this time, they've actually just given away the game. You see, the problem is, those people who they want to be disenfranchised <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/69465.html">just don't vote Republican,</a> at least according to New Hampshire House Speaker William O'Brien. Now, beyond the fact that his statements are either a) untrue, or b) at the very least short-sighted, conservatives for years have been trumping up this fear of voter fraud as a means to an end to disenfranchise demographics that don't typically vote strongly for Republicans. This, despite the fact that fear for widespread fraud is patently <a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3703">unfounded</a>, with even law schools writing <a href="http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/documents/policy_brief_voter_fraud.html">policy briefs</a> about it.<br /><br />Second, we have Steve King (R-Iowa), <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/democrats-secure-communites_n_1121971.html?ref=politics">totally forgetting</a> about the 14th Amendment, you know, the one that talks about citizenship. Now, I know, Republicans would love to do away with the 14th Amendment, and probably declare all sorts of new policies about how you have to prove ancestry back to 4 generations or some such nonsense (unless you're a white male, of course), but sorry, the Amendment still currently stands. Is that characterization unfair? Only partially. Supporters of eliminating or changing the Amendment are specifically against birthright citizenship, which essentially states that any person born in the country, no matter the circumstances, is a citizen of the country. They want to enforce proof of legality for both parents (at least in Steve King's mind, having one U.S. citizen parent doesn't cut it). They say that the 14th Amendment was never meant to grant citizenship to the children of people who were not legal citizens. Problem is, the framers of the Amendment did <a href="http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/special-reports/constitutional-citizenship-legislative-history">discuss those issues.</a> Perhaps even more importantly, the Supreme Court in 1898 ruled in favor of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark">Wong Kim Ark</a>, arguing that this man, who was born to non-citizens in the United States (in fact, Chinese immigrants who were outlawed from becoming naturalized citizens), was a citizen under the 14th Amendment. So, sorry guys.<br /><br />Third in our ridiculous round-up is Grover Norquist. What mash-up of ridiculous stories would be complete without Grover "Anti-Tax" Norquist? Well, now he's changed his stance a bit. You see, raising taxes on middle-income families <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/01/380129/norquist-gop-middle-class-ta/">isn't really raising taxes at all</a>. Again, this is really just giving away the game. <br />"Should we raise taxes just a little, tiny bit on those making the most money in the entire country?" <br /><br />-"NO! Of course not, that's ridiculous and will kill the economy!" <br /><br />"Well, since you're against taxes, obviously we shouldn't raise taxes by not extending the payroll tax cuts, right? I mean, even though they'd just go back to previous levels, when we wanted to let the Bush tax cuts expire (and let them return to their previous levels), you said that would be raising taxes...right?" <br /><br />-"That's ridiculous. Of course we should let the payroll tax cuts expire, that's not raising taxes at all. At lot of people don't pay taxes at at! [ed. note: this separates into two categories - people who don't make enough money to be taxed at all, or people who make such low wages that they get a refund on their federal/state tax. Everyone still pays sales tax, food tax, etc. Those are also the taxes that disproportionately affect the poor.] The only sector of the economy that matters is the extremely wealthy. They're job creators! [ed. note: no, they're not.] And they give good donations, after all."<br /><br />Finally, for a bit of good news, and definitely not ridiculous, Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who helped start Amazon, has written <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-01/raise-taxes-on-rich-to-reward-true-job-creators-nick-hanauer.html">an excellent op-ed</a>, describing how backwards our tax policy has been for the past 30 years. This is the fundamental problem with supply-side economics, which I also described earlier. There is no way that the additional expenditure of a very small group of people, who are already having their needs and wants fully satisfied, will make up for the wasted potential economic activity of the majority of people who are just getting by.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-42493548521897683432011-11-29T13:43:00.009-06:002011-11-29T16:56:54.196-06:00The Myth of Trickle-Down EconomicsHere's a post I've been working on/thinking about for a while, and I think it's more relevant now than it was when I first wrote any of it. It's about trickle-down economics, or supply-side economics, if you want the hype.<br /><br />What is supply-side economics? Well, it's a nice coating for the more pejorative "trickle-down" theory. Both of them essentially state that economic prosperity flows downward from the top to the bottom, and if you give tax breaks, subsidies, or whatever else, to those at the top of the income brackets, it will raise the general economy indirectly, which will benefit the poor and middle-class. You hear all sorts of rhetoric in relation to this idea, such as "a rising tide raises all boats." While that quote was originally spoken by John F. Kennedy, responding to criticisms that a dam project was just pork barrel spending, it has been taken over by supply-siders to defend their theory.<br /><br />So, the basics are, if you cut tax rates or give fiscal benefits to top earners, this will improve the economy (through several means we'll explore in a bit), and when the general economy improves, everyone gets a lift, so the poor and middle class benefit eventually.<br /><br />To me, however, this is all a scam, and built on bullshit. We'll explore that after the jump. <br /><br /><span id="fullpost">Let's examine some basic evidence.<br /><br /><b>The Great Depression and the Golden Age of the 1950's</b><br /><br />Conservatives today seem to revere the post-war 1950's in America as a time when you could walk down the street, and if you dressed sharply and were persistent, you could get a job just about anywhere. They also believe that social mores were stronger, that the nuclear family was held as an ideal, and that everything was just plain "good."<br /><br />Well, that's not entirely true...if you were a straight, white male from a Protestant background, the 50's were probably very good for you. If you weren't...things weren't that great. But let's examine the situation. The economy was indeed better than it is now, and there was significant growth throughout that period. That's great, and Republicans say that they want to get back to that growth (later also seen in the 80's and 90's for very different reasons), but let's review what was really going on, and if we're actually replicating any of that.<br /><br /><i>The Crash: Or, How the 2000's Mirrored the 1920's</i><br /><br />A few decades prior to the Golden 50's, the stock market crashed, causing (or perhaps was merely a symptom of) a trickle down (more of a deluge, or flood) through the rest of the economy, wiping out people's savings, creating massive runs on the banks, destroying businesses, and sending us into the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a massive shock to the system, and is still not fully understood. There is likely no single cause that led to the Depression, but there are a lot of factors which we share with that period today, and understanding those are really key. The response to the crash and the change of those factors eventually pulled us out of the Depression, but we seem to have forgotten its lessons.<br /><br />For one, debt had massively increased before the Great Depression, both individually, commercially, and federally. In one eerie similarity, the banks and brokerage firms at the time were massively overleveraged, with margin requirements at only 10%. This meant that for every dollar they took in, they could loan out nine. When the economy started to slow, brokers demanded payment on the loans, which created a massive problem - the capital was not present to pay them. A lot of people and institutions defaulted, creating a massive shock through the system. We saw the same thing in the mid-to-late 2000s, where banks had massively overleveraged bets, creating a huge housing bubble that eventually burst when those bets were recognized as being shoddy and called in. Today, overleveraging is even worse, and financial industries want the margin requirements to be even lower. In addition, many theorists from the monetarist side and the Australian school (similar in many ways to the supply-side today) blame policies of the Federal Reserve for causing the crash, and today we have many people who blame the Fed for fueling the Recession. I blame the Fed for the back-door bailouts and continued idiotic policies today, so I feel some sympathy for them. The period before the Great Depression had also seen massive surges in productivity, and may have caused a sort of "productivity shock," where there was excess output and not enough demand or purchasing ability to consume it. This should obviously produce some caution for supply-side theory, but it's a lesson that has been lost.<br /><br />In response to the crash, and the resulting Depression, we tried a lot of policies to get the economy going again, and to prevent something similar from ever happening. Legislation such as Glass-Steagall Act, enacted after the crash, separated investment banks from commercial banks. This meant that the bank that you go and deposit your money in would not then use that money to make bets in the stock market - investment banks would have to use the money of their investors, specifically designed to be gambled with in the markets. Glass-Steagall likely had a huge influence on stabilizing the economy and preventing another crash for the next 70 years, until the last bit of it was finally repealed by the Republican-controlled Congress under Clinton in 1999. Following that, investment banks and commercial banks merged and gobbled up as much as they could, using depositors money to make gambles, and investing in mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, which eventually led to our more recent crash. Added to that, banks also bought up credit-rating agencies, so they could package shoddy loans and have their in-house raters rate them as triple-A. Corruption at its finest. While Glass-Steagall, given the context of the times, may not have prevented a crash entirely, it likely would have lessened the blow. But, the repeal was essentially the final straw in a period of poorly informed Keynesian spending and deregulation.<br /><br />Let's look at some other similarities: for one, income inequality has now hit its <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/22/income-inequality-america_n_772687.html">highest point</a> since just before the Great Depression. And I don't mean, "oh, it's been close the whole time and is just now starting to get back into that narrow range," I mean more that it has been skyrocketing recently. Take a look <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/income-inequality/">here</a> to see what I mean. You can read the full story <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-executive-pay-rich-pull-away-from-rest-of-america/2011/06/13/AGKG9jaH_story.html">here</a>. I'll wait.<br /><br />Tax rates for the top bracket are also massively lower than they have been for much of U.S. history. Coincidentally, tax rates for the top bracket also fell to very low levels in the years leading up to the Great Depression, as you can see <a href="http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html">here</a>. It's also interesting to note that the top marginal tax rate in the 50's, that period of massive economic recovery/expansion, was 91%. 91%! And here we are at 35%, excluding capital gains taxes, estate taxes, etc, which are much lower. So today, if you're already massively wealthy, or the majority of your income comes from capital gains (e.g., dividends from investments), you may end up paying less, as a proportion of your income, than say your secretary. Great news if you're wealthy already.<br /><br />Given all of that, and given the massive deregulation campaign that has been waged since the 80's, we should be in a supply-side paradise, right? Well...obviously not.<br /><br /><b>How We Recovered</b><br /><br />Here is part of the important thing about the economic recovery following the Great Depression, which led to a period of economic expansion through the 50's and 60's: the period after the crash saw a massive hike in taxes and massive amounts of spending on domestic issues. We also had the War spending starting in the 40's, which provided a huge boost to the US economy. During the 30's-50's we invested in the country - in infrastructure such as the Tennessee Valley Association, the interstate system, bridges, public parks, and basically anything to put people back to work. We invested in education, perhaps most importantly with the G.I. Bill to send soldiers back to school. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, we poured massive amounts of money into science and mathematical education and funded the Space Race. We invested in our people with the New Deal and later programs by creating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You pay into those programs so that there will be a safety net to fall back into if something traumatic happens in your life, and to support yourself as you age and retire. To be honest, we've kind of been living and resting on the laurels of those investments, and our politicians have steadily been working to undercut many of them since they were created. <br /><br />Republicans today want to have the war spending and the social morality of the 50's, but they don't want to raise taxes or invest in domestic issues. They're happy to do deficit spending if it's to fund a war or tax cuts (a really terrible misinterpretation of Keynesian theory), but programs which are deficit-neutral, which you pay into and are entitled to the money back (that's why they're called entitlement programs), well, we just can't afford those any more. This is the fundamental misapplication - if you want to live in that Golden Age, you have to have similar economic policies and investments. You can't completely invert the economic and investment policies and expect to see identical growth. What you end up with, instead, is the bubbles of the 80's and 90's. Yes, I will say it here, supply-side economics ultimately leads to a continuing boom and bust cycle. It works, occasionally, but only very briefly before it crashes again.<br /><br />Now, why would they want to do that, and what does all of this have to do with supply-side economics? Well, that's a rather complicated topic. Follow me, if you will.<br /><br /><b>Arguments for Supply-Side</b><br /><br /><i>The Government is Incompetent</i><br /><br />First of all, let's take a look at the standard arguments. We've all heard a lot that the government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers, and that the government isn't smart enough or agile enough to spend effectively to induce economic growth. While in specific cases that argument is basically impossible to refute, I'm not sure that it's correct in the general picture. Certainly, our past investment in infrastructure and education spurred a great deal of growth, and a government-created job is just as much a job as a privately-created one, despite what Republicans will say. Many will argue that the government creates do-nothing jobs, but, again, while that may be true in specific cases, it doesn't hold in all cases. For that argument, I'll give them a half point for having some truth, but being in general misleading.<br /><br /><i>Tax Cuts Spur Growth</i><br /><br />Now we go to the argument we hear the most today - that we have to put more money into the hands of the "job creators," i.e., the richest in the country. The argument basically follows from the above, saying that since the government is incompetent, we need to empower those who have proven themselves to be successful - basically, give them more money and opportunity to do what they've been doing, only more so. That's the stated reason for all the tax cuts to the top bracket - these people are successful and run businesses, so if we give them more money, obviously they'll grow their business and hire more people. Right? Well...not so much.<br /><br />See, we actually know from past experience that cutting the top tax rate does not automatically mean more investment in business at home. It actually leads to several different things - for one, people will simply pocket the money or put it into savings. They will also invest it in the stock market, which doesn't so much create jobs as institutionalize and legalize gambling - it's a great way for a CEO to pad his bank account, but it creates nothing aside from more money for people who get lucky. It also leads to massive investment overseas. Tax cuts will create jobs alright, <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/tax-cuts-rich-create-jobs-outside-us">they just don't create them here</a>. For more evidence that tax cuts do not lead to job creation, you can check out <a href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/susan-milligan/2011/06/20/corporate-tax-cuts-dont-stimulate-job-growth">here</a> and <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/06/14/Tax-Cuts-and-Job-Creation-Fact-or-Fantasy.aspx#page1">here</a>.<br /><br />What this has led to is a massive income disparity, and positive income growth for pretty much only <a href="http://www.jobwatch.org/">those at the top</a>. <br /><br />To add insult to injury, the Bush tax cuts, which were billed and promoted as an across-the-board cut that would benefit all, really were weighted toward the top, to the end result that the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/23/375654/bush-tax-cut-one-percent/">average tax cut</a> for the top 1% this year will be greater than the average income of the rest of the 99%. Now, before you statisticians begin clamoring that it's reporting the average (i.e., the sum of all household incomes divided by the number of households) and not the median (i.e., the income at which 50% of incomes are below, and 50% are above), yes, the median income is even more depressing (in 2004, the median US income was $44,389). In this year, the average income for the 99% is $58,506. Hey! I'm above the median but below the mean...awesome?<br /><br /><b>Creeping Influence and Starving the Beast</b><br /><br />Why would this happen? Well, you have to understand that there has been a progression of decisions since around the 70's that allow for massive corporate donations and lobbying of Congressional members, culminating in 2010's <i>Citizen's United</i> decision, which basically removed the last restrictions on donation amounts. Our representatives don't really represent us, they represent the people who pay them the most, which is not their constituents. It makes good fiscal sense, but it's playing havoc with our system. Beyond that, conservatives since the 80's (at least) have been promoting a strong stance against government spending for all the above reasons - they want to throw the reins to the private sector, who pays them very well for their work. They also really can't stand entitlements and have wanted to do away with them basically since they were enacted. Now, you can't make a campaign (typically) out of saying that you want to eliminate Social Security and Medicare directly, so what do you do?<br /><br />Well, if you're smart, you start modifying them and using them as piggy banks that you can spend from whenever you want. Social Security, on its ledger, is running a huge surplus, but that money isn't actually there anymore. Where did it go? Well, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush Tax Cuts. And now they don't want to pay it back. You create a crisis by stealing the money from the account and then complaining that its bankrupt. You also cut taxes to reduce revenue, and without that money coming in, the crisis deepens. All of a sudden you have a budget and deficit crisis because you've been engaging in massive deficit spending while cutting revenues. At that point, no one wants to cut Defense, right? So, what's left? Entitlement programs!<br /><br />Starve the beast, indeed. The majority of this is a calculated and long-running scam to eliminate entitlement programs and get rich quick while doing it: Promote your economic vision as "helping the job creators," by which you mean reducing taxes. This decreases revenue. Then you take money from those programs that you want to cut and refuse to pay it back, instead using it for your own ends. You engage in budget-busting policy decisions that creates a fiscal crisis when your reduced revenues can't match your current spending, and then you turn around and say "Hey, we can't raise taxes in a crisis like this! We've got to cut spending. And if you cut Defense spending, you're threatening the well-being of the nation. So, sorry, but we're really forced into this, we've got to cut Social Security and Medicare."<br /><br />It's entirely manufactured, and it's paying off well for the conservatives right now.<br /><br /><b>The Relation to Supply-Side Economics</b><br /><br />So how does this all relate to supply-side economics? Well, that's the fancied-up language they use to defend this move. You make the argument that you're spurring jobs growth by giving more money to the private sector, the people who produce things, instead of wasting government money on other programs. The people who get the tax cuts will produce more, and that will help everyone.<br /><br />But this doesn't make sense.<br /><br />Let's consider a few brief examples. Let's say that we have a group of 100 people. One of them is fabulously wealthy and can afford anything they want or need. The other 99 are getting by, some better than others, but can't satisfy their every desire. Now, if you're a Republican, you say that we need to put more money into the hands of that one person, and they'll spur some economic growth by investing more in their business, or by buying more and stimulating the economy directly. If they want another yacht, well, someone has to build the thing, right? It creates jobs.<br /><br />If you dont' think about it too much, that makes a sort of sense. But when you really think about it, it all falls apart. See, they already have everything they want, and the economy is already supplying that for them. Given more money, their demand is not going to increase that much, and you're likely to see the tax-cut money disappear into their pocket or into investment banking, which, again, doesn't really create any jobs. The additional economic demand of one individual isn't going to be that great. Now, let's say instead you inact a policy which forgives the other 99 people's debt, or puts more money into their hands. Now, they have a lot of things they want and need - their demand is high, and given the ability to make additional purchases, they are likely to do so. The additional economic demand of ninety-nine people is much more likely to have an impact in our hypothetical scenario.<br /><br />Now, you may say that's a little unfair. It's not just about direct purchases - these people will invest in the economy in general, and it will improve. Well, not really, again. Just because you increase productivity or increase supply, does not mean that demand will rise to meet it, or that consumers will have the purchasing power to satisfy their demand. Say I own a pizza company, and the government decides to cut the tax rate for pizza companies who make a certain number of pizzas per day. Or, alternatively, they decide to just subsidize pizza companies and give them money to make pizzas. "Great!" I think, as I hurry to make a lot more pizzas than I ever have before. Unfortunately, even though I have much more supply, the demand just isn't there. It's okay, though, because even though I waste money on the surplus pizzas, I get a huge tax break which more than makes up for it (or, alternatively, I'm being paid to waste money). <br /><br />See, if you're already making a profit, there's little reason to hire additional workers - there's not much reason for job creation. Beyond that, we know that a lot of times, it's much more profitable for a company to lay off people. Shareholders see their stock prices jump massively after layoffs, because the company is supposedly becoming "more efficient." Just giving the heads of companies more money does not produce any real incentive for them to invest that money in hiring additional workers. And why would they? Demand is pretty low - companies aren't hiring because people aren't buying. It's ideal to match your supply to the demand so that you aren't wasting any production, and companies aren't going to artificially boost productivity if there's no demand.<br /><br />This is the ultimate flaw of supply-side thinking - boosting supply does not automatically boost demand. Typically, it creates waste, and when you subsidize waste, you're just putting money into the pockets of people who have no intention of ever creating a job. <br /><br />If you really want to spur economic growth, you have to increase demand, and that usually means increasing the purchasing power of consumers. For people who are massively in debt, or working very low paying jobs, it doesn't matter how much supply is out there - they can't afford it. So could tax cuts work for the middle-class and the poor? Well, potentially, but you'd have to wait a long time. People in that situation typically spend additional money paying down debt, which does not directly boost economic growth.<br /><br />Henry Ford had a crazy idea when he hired people to work on his assembly line. He paid them $5 a day. That doesn't sound like much, but it was vastly higher than any other similar job would pay. Ford took a hit on his profits by paying his workers so much, but he also turned them into consumers. With that kind of money, they not only built Model T's, but they could afford to buy them too. This is part of the idea behind a minimum wage, and it's why "welfare" programs like Food Stamps have the largest economic multiplier of any government policy - these are people who have massive demand for food, shelter, basic necessities, and every so often, some luxury. When they receive food stamps or other such money, they spend it directly, and that demand fuels the economy. When you give more money to people whose demand is already low, i.e., those who already have everything they desire, you don't see it going back into the economy. <br /><br /><b>Conclusions</b><br /><br />So don't believe the hype. When people say that they're for cutting taxes to the top brackets to spur economic growth, you know they're lying or are deluded. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. We've tried supply-side economics for basically the past 30 years, and look at where we are. We had some good growth times, but those turned out to be bubbles, and now we're basically on the edge of falling even further. The road to economic recovery is not through tax cuts and slashing spending on the programs that people need the most (and which also have the best economic multipiers). We need to boost demand, and we need to have a safer system in the markets and banking industries. I think the government can sometimes spend wisely, and it needs to invest in the country to stimulate job growth and consumer demand when the private sector refuses to step up.<br /><br />But that's just my two-cents.</span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-2092823382276058282010-11-30T12:43:00.003-06:002010-11-30T12:46:43.723-06:00Make No Law Respecting The Establishment of Religion and Free Exercise ThereofThis is posted without comment, because both Cenk and Craig Scarberry are pretty eloquent in their views:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0SiQVac---M?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0SiQVac---M?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-32067482267411621042010-11-17T20:35:00.003-06:002010-11-17T20:51:06.361-06:00Airport Body Scanners and PrivacyTo add to the hassles of airline travel, now we've got to deal with X-Ray body scanners, or, if you are opposed to that, rather invasive pat-downs. This is yet another in the long line of reasons that I really dislike flying these days. I'm going to rather agree with <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/11/17/rotenberg.scanners.privacy/index.html?hpt=T2">this</a> article on CNN. This is more invasive, more onerous, and more...well...disturbing than any other country puts up with.<br /><br />Now, TSA wants to argue that they are merely trying to keep us safe and working "with" the American people, and like to point out that in 2009 a majority of Americans agreed with the idea of having body scanners in airports. I'd like to cite a bit of buyer's remorse in this case, but moreover, I'd like to add that this a strange case of invasion of privacy. Now, for security purposes, the courts have largely argued that these agencies are able to circumvent certain laws that bind the rest of us. Certainly we've all heard of warrantless wiretaps, and how the courts are sort of okay with this, despite the fact that it violates a lot of civil liberties. But now we have a case where, if these people were not TSA agents, are undertaking actions which could easily be taken to court, or grounds for immediate termination. I mean, if I demanded to perform an "extended" pat-down on anyone, I'd be fired. If I used a backscatter X-Ray to gain images of people's bodies...well, I'd likely be charged with a lot of things, including sexual assault.<br /><br />While I am all for a certain measure of security in flying, I find this excessive. I find it sad that we've had to give up on a lot of our liberties and privacy for the sake of "safety." I don't think this is ever a good trade-off, and I hope that sometime in the near future we can have sensible security measures at airports that are not this invasive and...well...absurd.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-1069860654205957842010-11-03T10:39:00.003-05:002010-11-03T10:55:00.424-05:00The Day AfterThe day after the election, and the Republicans have taken the House, a lot of them promising to repeal basically everything that's been done in the last two years. The Democrats kept control of the Senate by a narrow, narrow majority. Lessons to be learned? People still aren't huge fans of the Republicans, but they'll vote disappointing Dems out. The other major lesson? The Dems are not unified, and did not have a strong message this go-round.<br /><br />This <a href="http://chicagoist.com/2010/11/03/the_day_after_the_midterms.php">piece</a> from the <span style="font-style:italic;">Chicagoist</span> sums up a lot of my feelings on the matter.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-83831537102751512582010-11-02T12:54:00.002-05:002010-11-02T12:59:03.611-05:00Confidence Breeds ErrorClick through to <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/dont-watch-cable-news/">here</a> to see an interesting article, showcasing the effects of confirmation bias. You really have to put in some hard work to be worse than random chance, but confirmation bias is a strong predictor for it.<br /><br />This is why the majority of my posts on politics are opinion-based, and, likewise why I would strongly urge you to vote. It's probably about the best thing you could do to screw with the pollster's predictions.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-76551807430259261422010-11-02T10:35:00.003-05:002010-11-02T11:07:07.510-05:00Election Day 2010Today is election day. I strongly urge to go out and vote. I say that no matter your politics - one of the most important things you can do as a citizen is to actually voice your opinion at the ballot box. Unfortunately, most of us, as private citizens, don't have the kind of money to really influence our politicians. We don't have the social pressure either. What we do have, however, is a large group effect - that is to say, the one power that we do have is to vote into office people we like, and do not vote for those we don't want. Now, the sad thing is, in most races you're going to be choosing between the lesser of two evils, and for the foreseeable future, that's the nature of the game.<br /><br />So why vote? Well, it's your one true option for putting action to your opinions. It is the rare one of us that is invited to speak in a public forum, and much less than that are invited to appear on TV (in fact, most of us are far too moderate and reasonably-minded to get on TV...we don't make for good ratings). So, aside from standing on a street corner or attending your local poetry jams, you've got the option of voting your conscience, and thus, in some small way, holding your politicians accountable. The real trouble comes when your only other option for an office is so, so much worse...to my mind, that recalls Harry Reid and Sharron Angle. I've been highly disappointed with Reid most of the time...but Angle...Best of luck, Nevada.<br /><br />Let's consider a little bit of the atmosphere today, and what it could mean for the future, after the jump.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><br />By almost all the polls out there, today is supposed to be a bloodbath for the Democrats. They're expected to lose the House and potentially the Senate (though probably not). A lot of the governor races are close, and the news is slightly better there, but in many cases, slightly better means, "You might not lose!" How has it come to this? Two years ago, Obama rode on a groundswell of voting and actually captured a lot of young voters. The Democrats rode into power as well in 2006 and have stayed in power for four years. For Democrats, in this day and age, that's pretty good. There's a reason why there's a mantra about the Democrats always finding a way to screw up their own election, clutching defeat from the jaws of victory, and all that. But how did it happen?<br /><br />Well, first an interesting point. According to most polls, people actually prefer Democrats to Republicans, in pure opinion. When you start asking people which way they're going to vote, though, most lean Republican. What does that mean? Well, on the face of it, it means that even though most people don't prefer the Republicans, they're tired of the Democrats, and in this country, that almost always means you have to vote Republican. People are angry - they see the economy as stagnant, unemployment too high, and a lot of people feel that Obama focused too much on the grand ideas (health care and the like) without first fixing the economy.<br /><br />That's an interesting point, and one that I go back and forth on. One the one hand, I'm incredibly disappointed in the financial reform bill - it's got too many loopholes and does nothing to actually fix the underlying system. On the other hand, now that we're living in a country that requires a super-majority to get anything passed (wait until the Republicans take control again...that word will more than likely disappear for the simple reason that Democrats don't have the sort of party-line unity Republicans can muster, and a lot of them are actually pretty willing to compromise. I mean, seriously, check out the Rep's "YouCut" website. They maintain records of the voting on their issues, just check out the numbers), it's unlikely that Obama could ever have gotten anything near good enough through Congress. That's disappointing, but it's the world we live in. So, Republicans get to crash the economy and then blame Obama for not fixing it fast enough and use the crash itself as a platform to get re-elected. It's a bit sickening, really. They also get to use the TARP funds, which were the previous administration's idea originally, to hammer at Obama and the Democrats in general. Now, I'm not a huge fan of TARP. I realize that some bailout was probably necessary, but I don't like how the money was handed out, with not strings attached.<br /><br />So we have an angry populace upset with the way the administration is handling the situation, who are likely to vote the Republicans back into power, regardless of their previous record. This seems like a dangerous situation, and if they do gain power again, I'll guarantee that their first order of business is eliminating everything the Democrats have tried to get passed since they took office. Farewell, any thoughts of a regulated health insurance industry, farewell financial regulation, farewell any sort of fiscal responsibility (not that the Democrats have really got a hold on that either, but letting some of the tax cuts expire would be a pretty smart move. The other, smartest move, that no one is willing to make - cut the Defense budget. It's way...way...over-bloated, and for what?)<br /><br />Unfortunately, we can expect the House to go Republican, and maybe the Senate as well, and then watch whatever small baby steps in a more liberal direction we've taken in the past few years get immediately cut off. And then we have to ask, what will the Democrats have learned? If they decide that their problem was that they were too liberal, and they should be more like the Republicans...well, that's just a sad, sad state of things. Especially considering that many of the seats in the House that are up for grabs are more "moderate" Democrats, this would have been maybe their first chance to actually present a good, liberal, face. The other thing that they may learn is that when they say they're going to change the system, to fix some of the most basic problems, maybe they should actually make that case, forcefully, and often, until the myths and lies from the opposition party are actually exposed. Offer the hand of compromise, yes, but at this point it's rather clear the Republicans want nothing to do with you. John Boehner is gloating right now that this is not the time for compromise, and if they win, you can expect none of it from the Republicans. After the first few times they smacked your hand down (and let's be honest...they did it on basically everything you ever brought to the floor), well, maybe it was time to move on without them. I know which one is more likely, and sadly, I think it's the worse choice.<br /><br />This doesn't have to be the case, however. Only around a third of the eligible voting populace is actually expected to go to the polls today. It's only a little past noon on the East Coast right now, and you have time to go and make your voice heard. Massive effects can be made by small individuals, each taking part in a collective action, so, I implore you, exercise your hard-earned rights, and vote.<br /></span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-70907348351326164722010-11-01T14:25:00.002-05:002010-11-01T15:38:01.767-05:00Finishing up the Bartending Posts on BasesI've finished my review of alcoholic bases in a three-parter.<br /><br />Find Part II (rum and gin) <a href="http://eat-drink-bemarried.blogspot.com/2010/10/bartending-well-stocked-bar-part-ii.html">here</a>, and Part III (tequila and whiskey) <a href="http://eat-drink-bemarried.blogspot.com/2010/10/bartending-well-stocked-bar-part-iii.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Expect an update on mixers and what not soon, as well as crepes recipes and others.<br /><br />Also expect a more politically-influenced post in the near future.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-55789795565539449812010-10-29T12:45:00.001-05:002010-10-29T12:46:53.365-05:00Recipe: Osso Bucco Inspired ChickenHere's my take on a very traditional, very delicious dish, Osso Bucco. I typically have a hard time finding veal shanks around here, so, I've adapted it to chicken.<br /><br /><a href="http://eat-drink-bemarried.blogspot.com/2010/10/osso-bucco-without-osso-bucco.html">Enjoy</a>!Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-84465515771788961482010-10-28T13:46:00.002-05:002010-10-28T13:48:56.934-05:00New Blog. Food Blog.So Steph and I have started a new <a href="http://eat-drink-bemarried.blogspot.com/">food blog</a>, primarily revolving around our own culinary adventures, but which will also include reviews of restaurants and kitchen gadgetry. Instead of totally reposting things from there, I'll merely post links here.<br /><br />Thus, post one in what I imagine will be a long series on bartending, to be found <a href="http://eat-drink-bemarried.blogspot.com/2010/10/bartending-well-stocked-bar-part-i.html">here</a>.Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-53040928022318223672010-10-26T20:28:00.000-05:002010-10-26T20:29:33.564-05:00Recipe: Oat BreadSuppose one morning you wake up and decide to make oatmeal. Let's also assume that you use good old-fashioned, rolled oats. None of those instant or quick oats, please (we'll explain in a bit). Suppose, also, that you a lot left over...like say, 12 ounces of cooked oats. Now, what are you going to do with that? Save it for several more portions of oatmeal? That's a possibility. But let me suggest something different: oat bread.<br /><br />Now, I will fully admit that Steph and I are true fans of Alton Brown - I would label myself in the "Briner" category...look that up, in case you're wondering. The recipe that follows is our first attempt at a recipe of AB's that recently aired, Oat Cuisine II. How was it? Read, and follow along on this particular culinary journey.<br /><br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Recipe</span>: Oat Bread<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Ingredients</span>:<br />12 ounces cook rolled oats<br />2 Tablespoons agave nectar<br />1 Tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for bowl and pan<br />1/4 cup warm water<br />11 ounces bread flour, plus extra for dusting<br />1 teaspoon salt<br />1 envelope dry active yeast<br />1/4 cup uncooked rolled oats, plus 1 tablespoon rolled oats, divided<br />1 egg yolk<br />1 Tablespoon water<br /><br />Let's prep this dish as though we had every intention of cooking it from the start, as opposed to making due with leftover oatmeal (which, I will note, is equally viable...depending on what exactly you put into your oatmeal).<br /><br />So, in a large bowl, you'll want to combine 11 ounces of bread flour (by weight, of course), a packet of dry active yeast, 1/4 cup of rolled oats, and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt, such as the following mixture:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdxgwyah3I/AAAAAAAAAHQ/3_NkoxNUZuA/s1600/oatbread_dry_team_prep.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdxgwyah3I/AAAAAAAAAHQ/3_NkoxNUZuA/s320/oatbread_dry_team_prep.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532515474914051954" /></a><br /><br />This will be our dry team. Now, let's also prep our wet team. That'll be 2 tablespoons of agave nectar (this is a rather delectable, honey-like sweetener made from the agave plant [yes, the same plant true tequila is made from]. Where can you find it? Well, certainly any health food store, and almost every market in Chicago that I've seen has it somewhere, usually close to where they keep things like honey. It's as cheap as honey, so, if you're really penny pinching, why not buy a bottle of agave nectar instead of honey? Try it out. Or, you could substitute honey for the agave nectar in this recipe), 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and 1/4 cup of warm water:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdyVqFgYRI/AAAAAAAAAHY/tJokGMpSqww/s1600/oatbread_wet_team.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdyVqFgYRI/AAAAAAAAAHY/tJokGMpSqww/s320/oatbread_wet_team.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532516383648145682" /></a><br /><br />Once you have that assembled, you're going to want to cook 12 ounces of rolled oats on the stove top, according to package directions. Why rolled oats? Well, they stand up a lot better to cooking and manipulation. See, instant and quick oats are chopped before they're rolled, creating thinner and thinner strips that really just fall apart when they're cooked...the texture is not great.<br /><br />Anyway, you might want to try to have somewhere between 7 and 9 ounces of rolled oats, before you add water, to create 12 ounces of cooked oats (season with a pinch of kosher salt, of course!). It's likely you'll have leftovers, but hey...now you've got a bowl of oatmeal! Awesome!<br /><br />So, our cooked oats:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdzJ9JQu6I/AAAAAAAAAHg/Bk4-9xvWC0w/s1600/oatbread_cooked_oats.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdzJ9JQu6I/AAAAAAAAAHg/Bk4-9xvWC0w/s320/oatbread_cooked_oats.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532517282117368738" /></a><br /><br />And our leftovers:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdzV2HRD7I/AAAAAAAAAHo/zD_c1AbBvqs/s1600/oatbread_leftovers.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdzV2HRD7I/AAAAAAAAAHo/zD_c1AbBvqs/s320/oatbread_leftovers.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532517486388383666" /></a><br /><br />So, measure out 12 ounces of the cooked oats, and add the wet team:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdzlkz3oiI/AAAAAAAAAHw/WJIEWWrwh2A/s1600/oatbread_dry_mixed.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdzlkz3oiI/AAAAAAAAAHw/WJIEWWrwh2A/s320/oatbread_dry_mixed.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532517756621529634" /></a><br /><br />Stir together a bit, just to get everything coated, and then start slowly adding the dry team, in about three batches. Here's batch one:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdz11mO1VI/AAAAAAAAAH4/N_quTJBIhmk/s1600/oatbread_add_flour.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMdz11mO1VI/AAAAAAAAAH4/N_quTJBIhmk/s320/oatbread_add_flour.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532518036005639506" /></a><br /><br />Mix together with each addition, and you'll end up with a very, very sticky dough about like this:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd0CksKYWI/AAAAAAAAAIA/ry7-ROLNX1M/s1600/oatbread_first_dough.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd0CksKYWI/AAAAAAAAAIA/ry7-ROLNX1M/s320/oatbread_first_dough.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532518254805410146" /></a><br /><br />When you've got that, take some bread flour and lightly flour a work surface. Turn the dough out onto the surface and knead for a full 10 minutes. A quick aside: one of the first times I ever made pasta by hand, I kind of skipped this step. It's not that I didn't knead it at all, I just kneaded it for a few minutes. I didn't understand all the stuff going on with the formation of gluten and other structural changes: I just thought this step was about incorporation of ingredients when they got too stiff to mix with a whisk or spoon. I thought it looked pretty well incorporated, so I went about the rest of the recipe and ended up with pasta that was just awful...it had no structure, and you couldn't do anything with it. So...the kneading is quite essential:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd4KgKIOyI/AAAAAAAAAII/a9pKqdQUxO4/s1600/oatbread_kneading.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd4KgKIOyI/AAAAAAAAAII/a9pKqdQUxO4/s320/oatbread_kneading.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532522789074385698" /></a><br /><br />Once you've kneaded the dough, lightly oil a large canister or bowl and toss the dough in. Roll it around a bit to get a bit of a coating around the dough and then cover with a tea towel and let it sit in a dark, warm place for a full hour, or until it has doubled in volume. This will incorporate some good structure and development, which is always nice...as well as boosting a lot of flavor. You'll be able to smell a bit of the yeasty/bread smell if you get close to it. That's how you know it's working.<br /><br />When the dough has risen, turn it out of the bowl/container and punch it down and then form it into a loaf and drop it into a lightly-oiled 9 inch by 5 inch loaf pan. Cover it with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight, or full a full eight hours.<br /><br />A note on this: a lot of bread recipes call for a short second rise at a regular temperature. This recipe, and one of the many reasons I love AB's recipes, calls for a long, slow rise in the fridge. I personally find that it creates a better overall texture and taste in the end.<br /><br />After that eight hours/overnight period is over, you can take it out of the fridge, and you should be rewarded with something that looks roughly like this:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd5pO2x2kI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/MjHtXQIRcuI/s1600/oatbread_final_rise.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd5pO2x2kI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/MjHtXQIRcuI/s320/oatbread_final_rise.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532524416517397058" /></a><br /><br />At this point, you'll want to prepare an egg wash. Take one egg yolk and one tablespoon of water. Mix that together well, and brush it along the top of the loaf. Take one more tablespoon of uncooked oats and sprinkle it along the top of the loaf, finally producing something like this:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd6G7-KNgI/AAAAAAAAAIY/2FO4iGzpUK4/s1600/oatbread_eggwash.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd6G7-KNgI/AAAAAAAAAIY/2FO4iGzpUK4/s320/oatbread_eggwash.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532524926844155394" /></a><br /><br />Put that into a 350 degree oven for 55 minutes to an hour, or until the internal temperature of the loaf reaches 210 degrees. An instant read thermometer is hugely helpful for this. You should be rewarded with a loaf of bread looking basically like this:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd6nKz7JMI/AAAAAAAAAIg/KbaAN5AlH7k/s1600/oatbread_oven.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd6nKz7JMI/AAAAAAAAAIg/KbaAN5AlH7k/s320/oatbread_oven.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532525480583570626" /></a><br /><br />You'll want to turn the loaf out onto a cooling rack and let it cool for at least 30 minutes before you slice into it. This will allow it to stabilize and cool enough to eat, which is always good. Why turn it out onto a wire rack? Well, it gets it away from the residual heat of the pan, and the bonus of a wire rack is that it allows even flow of air even under the loaf, instead of just across the top and sides. Anyway, after 30 minutes feel free to slice to your pleasure:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd7Ors4cGI/AAAAAAAAAIw/ZQhA3CLXYuw/s1600/oatbread_finish.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMd7Ors4cGI/AAAAAAAAAIw/ZQhA3CLXYuw/s320/oatbread_finish.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532526159427301474" /></a><br /><br />How does it taste? One word: Delectable. In another word: Scrumtrilescant. It's soft, with just a bit of a crunch. The oats on top provide a nice contrast of flavor, while the oatmeal in the dough itself very nicely dissolves and is imperceptible except for the wonderful taste.<br /><br />The only real note I would make about this recipe is that you're going to want to make sure the oatmeal still has some moisture in it before you start mixing the flour in. I'm not saying you should make soupy oatmeal, or that it should be soaking, but I know I made the oatmeal a little dry and had to add a bit of warm water to the dough to get it to come together. Not too much, but a little bit. Otherwise, this one worked out perfectly. I highly recommend it!<br /><br />Next up? Maybe some bar philosophy, and then perhaps getting into the quest for the perfect Long Island Iced Tea - definitely not my favorite drink, and rather bloated, I feel, but it's handy for a lot of other tips in bar-tending general.<br /></span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-40445379878502746232010-10-26T11:42:00.002-05:002010-10-26T11:43:09.603-05:00Recipe: The "Marie" SandwichI figured I'd start adding some recipes and music to this blog, and to that end, I'd start with a rather simple sandwich, named for and inspired by a very close friend of ours who has left for the foggy British Isles. We call it the "Marie" Sandwich. It's a rather simple mix of avocado, tomatoes, and cheese, but it makes for an absolutely delicious sandwich, and can be greatly modified to suit the individual palate.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMb31FH5KuI/AAAAAAAAAHI/ep-igV7tZrI/s1600/marie_sandwich.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z7OvrFuLUvc/TMb31FH5KuI/AAAAAAAAAHI/ep-igV7tZrI/s320/marie_sandwich.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532381683551644386" /></a><br /><br /><span id="fullpost"><br />All of last year, Marie was a constant fixture at our house, and she was great for cleaning out the last of the leftovers we had in the fridge. We met Marie while she was directing the Dean's Men (a local theater group) production of Romeo and Juliet - Steph played the part of Tybalt and I mostly cooked for people and gave rides when they needed it. Steph and Marie became fast friends and started designing, and redesigning, all the costumes and props in the play. For a while, our apartment was overflowing with plaster and newspaper while we made face masks for the masquerade scene of the play. Through all of this, even though she was incredibly busy with classes and directly, Marie was always there for us and always willing to hang out.<br /><br />So, during one of those marathon work sessions, Steph was working with Marie and her apartment, and Marie decided to make lunch - just simple sandwiches. Apparently, it was so good that Steph immediately called me to run to the store and pick up everything we'd need to make it ourselves.<br /><br />By now, this has become a staple lunch-time or tide-me-over-till-dinner sandwich at our house. It's simple and quick to make, requires very few ingredients (unless you want to start modifying it...then you're only bound by the stability of the sandwich itself), and tastes great.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Recipe: "Marie Sandwich"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Ingredients:</span><br /><br />1 half of a large, ripe avocado<br />1 medium, ripe tomato<br />2 slices Muenster cheese<br />1 sub bun<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Directions:</span><br />Use a serrated bread knife to open the sub bun, splitting it into two pieces. Using a sharp knife, such as a chef's knife, carefully slice the avocado length-wise, cutting around the pit. Gently twist the halves apart and set aside the half without the pit. Cover your hand in a kitchen glove or with a towel and get a good grip on the avocado half with the pit. Using a sharp knife with a heavy blade, strike the blade down into the center of the pit, trying to use the part of the knife close to the handle. If the avocado is ripe enough, a gentle clockwise or counter-clockwise twist should free it.<br /><br />Stretch your thumb and first finger around the spine of the blade and pinch/push the pit off of the edge. It should pop off easily. Then, you can carefully cut a small grid through the flesh of one half of the avocado and use a spoon to scoop it out and onto the bread. Try to evenly spread the avocado half onto each half of the loaf. If you can't mash the avocado easily, you may want to first put it into a bowl and mash it with a fork or potato masher. You can then cut the cheese slices in half and layer those on top of each half, and finally thinly slice the tomato and layer slices of tomato along one half.<br /><br />Put the sandwich on a cookie sheet or other baking tray and put it under the broiler until the cheese has melted and the bread is lightly toasted. Remove from the oven, press the two halves together, and then let cool slightly before consuming.<br /><br />Now, a quick note about sandwich making. There is much talk about "sandwich-physics," and it's important to figure out a few of the more important pointers there. Alton Brown, on the show Good Eats, goes into this in his season 8 episode "Sandwich Craft." In fact, I hear tell there are entire blogs and syndicated columns on the art of constructing the proper sandwich! I leave you to find those on your own, but I will reiterate Alton's rules from Sandwich Craft, because they are good reference, and they do have some bearing on this recipe:<br /><br /><blockquote>1) Soft ingredients (such as egg salad) go best with soft breads.<br />2) When using wet ingredients (e.g., tomatoes), always use a moisture barrier, such as mayonnaise, oil, butter, or cream cheese to prevent soaking. (note, this is also why when making a PB&J sandwich, it's best to coat both pieces of bread with peanut butter, instead of leaving the jelly exposed to naked bread on one side)<br />3) Do not place layers of slippery ingredients next to one another - this will cause everything to call apart as you're eating it - you have to think about the proper amount of friction to hold the sandwich together. And finally,<br />4) Never use a bread you wouldn't eat on its own. If it's not good enough for consumption plain, it's not good enough for sandwich-making.</blockquote><br /><br />Now, that being said, we should look back at our recipe and realize we might have a few potential issues. Most of them aren't serious and can be overcome with a little careful thought, but let's review and suggest a few possible modifications.<br /><br />First of all - the sub bun or Hoagie roll. This works fine for us most of the time, but you may want to consider exactly how you're going to want the finished sandwich.<br /><br />Consider, for instance, if you want an untoasted/unheated sandwich, you may want to get a roll with a rather crusty exterior, like say, a baguette, cut it in half, and dig out a bit of a trench in the bread (use the leftovers for breadcrumbs, or fondue, or dipping in soup!). You can fill that trench with the avocado and layer the tomato and cheese on top. If you wanted, you could create a simple vinaigrette by putting:<br /><br />1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard into a mixing bowl and whisking with 1 Tablespoon of red wine vinegar and 1/2 tsp. kosher salt and several grinds of black pepper. Slowly drizzle in 3 Tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil while whisking constantly to create an emulsion. <br /><br />You could slowly drizzle this mixture over the sandwich, place the two halves together, and then compress it in plastic wrap for a little while to let the flavors mingle.<br /><br />But let's say you wanted a hot sandwich, maybe a pressed sandwich. In that case, you could almost completely slice the bread in two, add some mustard or olive oil, layer down the avocado, then the cheese, and the tomatoes in the middle, fold and crimp the cheese into the interior, and press the sandwich. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need a sandwich press. You could probably do it between two heated baking sheets, maybe with a hot cast iron pan on top. Leave it pressed for about ten minutes, and you'll have a pretty delicious sandwich.<br /><br />As for additional toppings - spinach is a possibility, different cheeses can work, a little olive oil and vinegar, or a touch of salt and pepper...all of these can be added to personal taste - just keep in mind that you don't want to overpower the sandwich with two many competing flavors, and if you go too crazy with ingredients, it may not hold together.<br /><br />Next up on the recipe list...I'm thinking oat bread.<br /></span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-39733095126574562862010-10-22T16:23:00.002-05:002010-10-22T16:26:23.765-05:00House of the Rising SunHere's Joe and I doing a bit of House of the Rising Sun by the Animals. Obviously, my voice is going like crazy on this one. Forgive me.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="400" height="255" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7du7Z3OVMUs" frameborder="0"></iframe>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-54290164324267479402010-10-22T16:22:00.002-05:002010-10-22T16:23:24.068-05:00Wild HorsesThis is Joe and I practicing Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones. Obviously, I forgot some of the lyrics and some of the structure of the verses...it was late, we'd had a bit to drink, and I was a little distracted. I do appreciate Butter's laughter though.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="400" height="255" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TFFSyseH9RA" frameborder="0"></iframe>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-66174393361301692242010-10-22T16:20:00.001-05:002010-10-22T16:21:36.798-05:00MoonshinerHere's Joe and I practicing Moonshiner, by Uncle Tupelo:<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="400" height="255" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GaBu2rrTjVE" frameborder="0"></iframe>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-69968988037000564822010-10-22T16:15:00.007-05:002010-10-22T16:20:26.971-05:00Wagon Wheel practiceHere's Joe and I practicing a bit of Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show, the night before the wedding. My voice was going all night, but, hey, gotta take the first step out there and take some criticism, no?<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="400" height="250" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/p80pcROXLi8" frameborder="0"></iframe>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-83055792799150937992010-06-08T15:38:00.003-05:002010-06-10T04:25:38.508-05:00Conversations with the ParentsMy parents, mother especially, occasionally forward me things. I read these, all of them, but rarely reply. This one forced it out of me, and again proves that I could never really go into politics (I would have a heart attack within a few years). This was a quick reply (hah...quick...), so it wasn't researched anywhere near well-enough, but it got most of the basic points into it. I'll post the email I received first and my reply after the fold.<br /><br />Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 16:36:54 -0700<br />From: --------------------<br />Subject: Fw: THIS IS POWERFUL , A MUST READ !<br />To: ----------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">What if he is right?</span><br /><br /><blockquote>I hope you find the time to read this with an open mind. It's interesting. Please read it with the open mind rather than immediately breaking it down into left or right, but rather look at it from the neutral viewpoint of right or wrong. It's like the line below says, "what if he is right?" <br /><br />Take the three minutes to read this. Maybe he is wrong, but what if he's right?<br /><br />David Kaiser is a respected historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics, from European Warfare to American League Baseball. Born in 1947, the son of a diplomat, Kaiser spent his childhood in three capital cities: Washington D.C. , Albany , New York , and Dakar , Senegal . He attended Harvard University , graduating there in 1969 with a B.A. in history. He then spent several years more at Harvard, gaining a PhD in history, which he obtained in 1976. He served in the Army Reserve from 1970 to 1976.<br /><br />He is a professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the United States Naval War College . He has previously taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams College and Harvard University . Kaiser's latest book, The Road to Dallas, about the Kennedy assassination, was just published by Harvard University Press.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">History Unfolding</span><br /><br />I am a student of history. Professionally, I have written 15 books on history that have been published in six languages, and I have studied history all my life. I have come to think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is simply a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes these exist, but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus.<br /><br />Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within our country that has been evolving for about ten to fifteen years. The pace has dramatically quickened in the past two.<br /><br />We demand and then codify into law the requirement that our banks make massive loans to people we know they can never pay back? Why?<br /> <br />We learned just days ago that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no real oversight by anyone, has "loaned" two trillion dollars (that is $2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom or why or disclose the terms. That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is three times the $700 billion we all argued about so strenuously just this past September. Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a government of "we the people," who loaned our powers to our elected leaders. Apparently not.<br /><br />We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy.<br /><br />Why?<br /><br />We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no longer teach our founding documents, why we are exceptional, and why we are worth preserving. Students by and large cannot write, think critically, read, or articulate. Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing, school boards continue to back mediocrity.<br /><br />Why?<br /><br />We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election (violently in California over a proposition that is so controversial that it simply wants marriage to remain defined as between one man and one woman. Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade ago?) We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system into a banana republic. To what purpose?<br /><br />Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall, major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of collapse, social security is nearly bankrupt, as is Medicare and our entire government. Our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and I know precisely what I am talking about) - the list is staggering in its length, breadth, and depth. It is potentially 1929 x ten...and we are at war with an enemy we cannot even name for fear of offending people of the same religion, who, in turn, cannot wait to slit the throats of your children if they have the opportunity to do so.<br /><br />And finally, we have elected a man that no one really knows anything about, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as Wasilla, Alaska...All of his associations and alliances are with real radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary. (Surely you have heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders? No? Oh, of course. The media would never play that for you over and over and then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter and $150,000 wardrobe are more important.)<br /><br />Mr. Obama's winning platform can be boiled down to one word:<br /><br />Change.<br /><br />Why?<br /><br />I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now.<br /><br />This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never, ever done in his professional life. In my assessment, Obama will divide us along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces into a new and different power structure. Change is indeed coming. And when it comes, you will never see the same nation again.<br /><br />And that is only the beginning..<br /><br />As a serious student of history, I thought I would never come to experience what the ordinary, moral German must have felt in the mid-1930s. In those times, the "savior" was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing. What they should have known was that he was associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage through great oratory. Conservative "losers" read it right now.<br /><br />And there were the promises. Economic times were tough, people were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and frowned and waved a lot. And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his "brown shirts" would bully and beat them into submission. Which they did - regularly. And then, he was duly elected to office, while a full-throttled economic crisis bloomed at hand - the Great Depression. Slowly, but surely he seized the controls of government power, person by person, department by department, bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The children of German citizens were at first, encouraged to join a Youth Movement in his name where they were taught exactly what to think. Later, they were required to do so. No Jews of course,<br /><br />How did he get people on his side? He did it by promising jobs to the jobless, money to the money-less, and rewards for the military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across Europe , and across the world. He did it with a compliant media - did you know that? And he did this all in the name of justice and ... change. And the people surely got what they voted for.<br /><br />If you think I am exaggerating, look it up. It's all there in the history books.<br /><br />So read your history books. Many people of conscience objected in 1933 and were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and ridiculed. When Winston Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into his seat and called a crazy troublemaker. He was right, though. And the world came to regret that he was not listened to.<br /><br />Do not forget that Germany was the most educated, the most cultured country in Europe . It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and universities. And yet, in less than six years (a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. presidency) it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors.. All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them.<br /><br />As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me (even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am wrong by closing my eyes, having another latte, and ignoring what is transpiring around me.<br /><br />I choose to believe the evidence. No doubt some people will scoff at me, others laugh, or think I am foolish, naive, or both. To some degree, perhaps I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what I believe-and why I believe it.<br /><br />I pray I am wrong. I do not think I am. Perhaps the only hope is our vote in the next elections.<br /><br />David Kaiser<br />Jamestown, Rhode Island<br />United States<br /><br />Pass this along. Perhaps it will help to begin the awakening of America as to where we are headed...</blockquote><br /><span id="fullpost"><br />So, that was the email my mom sent me. Here was my response:<br /><br />Hey Mom,<br /><br />I'm going to dedicate a little time to replying to this one because, well, I feel it's important. I think I should note from the beginning that I am actually very disappointed in Obama, but I'll explain that later. That being said:<br /><br />First, this article is not by David Kaiser. I thought that was odd to begin with, because I've heard some of Kaiser's talks about history, and this didn't seem to agree with anything he's ever said before. So, via snopes, http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp , the article actually comes from a reader's comment on a conservative blog.<br /><br />To his first proposition, that we demand and then codify into law that banks make loans that we know people cannot pay back, this is largely an effect of the deregulation that began in earnest under Reagan, continued in a strong way under Bush senior, coasted through under Clinton, and then picked up again under Bush junior. The heads of the banks figured out how to make a bet that would make money no matter what - essentially loan out mortgages that would be tied to the national interest rate instead of fixed, and then bet against them so that if they ever went bad, they would get a huge pay-out. Alan Greenspan had artificially deflated the interest rate around this time to about 1% and the Fed urged everyone to buy adjustable rate mortgages because they would be so much cheaper in the long run. Now, it doesn't take much to see that when you have an artificially deflated interest rate, especially so low of one, there's not much lower that it can go. Thus, statistically, it's likely that it will rise, and rise close to the "true" interest rate, given the prevailing market. So, at the urging of the Fed and bankers, many people bought these AR mortgages, I suppose believing that the interest rate would always remain low. Of course, it didn't, and when the interest rate skyrocketed back to the level that it should have been at, many people could not pay their new rates, and thus the housing crisis. The problem here was multi-faceted - there was a historically low interest rate, which makes people interested in buying homes and property anyway, the banks' creation of a new type of (for the time) cheaper mortgages and loans, and the urging of government and religious bodies (this was also the beginning of the Christian Prosperity movement, which was very emphatic about everyone being blessed to own a home) to buy housing. Add the rising interest rate, and thus the increase in foreclosures, to the fact that the entire housing scheme was little more than a massive Ponzi scam, then it's not surprising that when the housing bubble burst and entrance funds ran out, the whole system collapsed under it's own weight, except for those massive pay-outs on all the back-door bets that the system would collapse anyway.<br /><br />Why did this happen? A large part of it is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. From the creation of this Act until its repeal, we did not have another financial collapse on the order of the Great Depression or the economic collapse of today. Essentially, the Act separated the banks into two parts - those that loaned money to citizens, with a certain amount of capital dedicated to that, and another part that invested money, using the bank's credit. It's a pretty clear conflict of interest when the banks use the same pool to lend money and to invest. The Act also did not allow banks to own other financial institutions, like say, institutions used to rate the quality of a bank's investment package. That last part was repealed in 1980 under Reagan, and the second part was repealed by the Republican-majority Congress under Clinton in 1999. Democrats and Republicans share the blame for this, but as it was the Republicans who proposed it and pushed so hard for it from the beginning, I'm going to lay a slight share more of the blame on them. It's long been a conservative rallying cry to de-regulate, so, this is the eventual consequence of a true free-market with a pure-profit motive.<br /><br />As to the bailouts, I am likewise very upset and disappointed, but again, there is a rather short-list of people whom we can reasonably lay some part of the blame on. First, the Senate. It is not a stretch to say that all of the Republican senators and the majority of the Democratic senators have taken huge payouts from the banking industry and are willing to do anything and blame anyone but the banks themselves. If this means shoving more citizens' money into the banks, they're fine with it. Most recently, we can see this by the Republican opposition to a measure to force the banks to create their own "bailout fund", with their own money, so if they fail they have a bit of a safety net and the taxpayer will not be required to bail them out again. Apparently this was a terrible idea in the minds of the Senate Republicans, who would prefer that taxpayers do the bailing out however many times is necessary to keep the banks in the black. The same holds largely true, but to a lesser extent, in the House of Representatives. The problem is not so much Republican vs. Democrat (although, if we're being fair and looking at from whom these guys are getting paid, the Republicans are definitely much more in their pockets), but a problem that the majority of both houses of the Senate could be called "corporatist." They don't represent the people because they get too much money from the banking industry, the industrial-military complex, and other corporate entities who have their own self-interest at heart. I can't blame for that - it's capitalism, and as long as it's regulated to a degree, it can do wonders, but for the past three decades at least we've been trying harder and harder to deregulate everything.<br /><br />The banking institutions can obviously be blamed - they set up the bad loans in the first place. The regulatory agencies can be blamed, but only a little. Our government, following conservative free-market principles, has done all it can to limit the power and oversight of regulatory agencies, or have them bought out by the institutions they are supposed to regulate (this was particularly a problem under Bush junior, who stacked almost all the major regulatory boards with people who were former employees, or were still technically employees, of major companies in the industry they were supposed to watch over, including, in the case of the MMS, a representative who had a long history of safety violations and trying to cover them up). Obama can be blamed to an extent - it's clear that he doesn't particularly understand the financial industry and is willing to let Timothy Geithner and Ben Burnanke run the show, both of whom have a long history of being cozy with the banking industry. Geithner was the one who orchestrated the bail-out in its present terms, which essentially means that we, the taxpayers, payed one hundred cents on the dollar for the banks' bad loans and had no plan to get any of that paid back. Now, if Obama had nominated say, Joseph Stiglitz, or Paul Krugman, or Paul Volcker to the same position, things may have been very different. Or, as seems likely now, they still would not have been confirmed because all of them are much less conservative that Geithner, and as there are still over one hundred nominations that have not been allowed to be tested yet, we can see that the Republicans are very much a party of opposition right now.<br /><br />I'm a little confused by his assertion that we have de-industrialized the economy. In some ways, this is obviously true. We do indeed have proposals that are trying to shift people into newer, technologically driven fields because all signs point to the fact that these fields will dominate the foreseeable future. In other cases, it's clear that some of the larger industries refused to change their business model at all, and so collapsed under their own weight. In other cases, we've given strong incentives for companies to move oversees, but, as is beginning to happen, places like China are becoming more expensive as their own industry expands, and companies are returning here because we're now among the cheap labor.<br /><br />The paragraph about dumbing down our schools is largely true, especially in certain areas of the U.S. If we look at the Texas Board of Education in the past few months, controlled entirely by conservatives, they have made it clear that Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Mark Twain are persona non grata, because they do not adequately reflect the idea of a strongly Christian, white, free-market, conservative nation. It's also become increasingly clear that these people do not see men like Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, or John Adams as our "Founding Fathers," but instead the Puritans and other strongly religious groups who first settled here and continued a history of sectarian warfare leading up until very close to the American Revolution. I do strongly wish that we would teach our founding documents, but this is entirely against the conservative agenda. For example, all the rights presented in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are granted to every person in this country - citizen or not. How can I defend that? In the Bill of Rights, every amendment makes use of the word "person." By itself, this would not mean much, but if we turn to the 14th amendment, we come to actual definition of a citizen - any person born or naturalized in the United States. This means that all the conservatives in states like Arizona who want to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born here are strongly, and I mean strongly, anti-Constitutional. Also, most importantly, as soon as the word "citizen" is defined, the writers immediately revert back to word "person." Of particular interest is this line:<br /><br /><blockquote>"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."</blockquote><br /><br />Notice, they define citizen, explain the rights of citizens, and then explicitly say that these same basic rights are granted to any person within the jurisdiction of the United States.<br /><br />Now, also to reach ahead a bit, this bears directly on the recent Arizona laws about illegal immigrants - number one, by the numbers of arrests and the demographics of people questioned, this law is obvious a codification of racial profiling and thus is anti-Constitutional in that it denies due process to the people in the jurisdiction of the United States. Secondly, as the latter half of this article is so fond of drawing ties to Nazi Germany, I can think of a particular regime where the words "Show me your papers" was a bit of a catchphrase. In fact, there's hardly a movie made about these people that does not include that phrase somewhere. Brown shirts, indeed.<br /><br />I can understand the desire to protest close elections, and I think people have a stronger sense of it now than they did say, before 2000, when a president who lost the popular vote was elected anyway. As for Proposition 8 in California, there are numerous reasons why that vote was so controversial. First off, it was primarily funded and advanced by certain religious groups like the Mormons, in an official, church-sponsored way. Why is this controversial? Well, this also ties into the bit about history and why actually studying history so goes against the conservative line, but we have a long history of a process called separation of church and state. While conservatives love to harp that this line is nowhere found in the Constitution, I would point out two things - 1) God is likewise never mentioned in the Constitution, and in fact the opening line is the most important -<br />"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."<br /><br />Notice, it is We the People, not, We Under God, or any other such statement. To add to this, you have the signing of the Treaty of Tripoli by John Adams, one of the founding fathers, who makes it explicit that the United States is not a Christian country and in fact endorses no official religion at all. James Madison and Jefferson were the real source of the idea of separation of church and state, and why this is important I'll get to later, but created the Jefferson Bible, which removed every supernatural element of the text and essentially left a history with some proverbs and teachings.<br /><br />Also, 2) we do have the establishment cause and the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees that the government will make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This is a pretty broad-ranging statement and also explains why, at least in its current form, the National Day of Prayer is not really Constitutional either.<br /><br />Why does the United States have a history of separation of church and state? There are several reasons, but among the most important are these - 1) The founding fathers were all strong proponents of reason and believed that if religion, any religion, had any element of truth to it, then people, being reasoning creatures, would be able to find this out for themselves. Moreover, imposing upon these people an established religion would only impede the effort of their own free reason, and thus would more than likely lead people into falsehood than promote a truth. Moreover, the founding fathers had seen the long history of sectarian warfare in Europe and in the early Americas, largely brought on by established religions, and had no desire to repeat this. It's little wonder that, until recently, when the myth of the United States always being a conservative Christian country has become so entrenched, America has never had to worry about a religious war or strong religious persecution. The entire idea of the 1st Amendment, and the idea of separation of church and state, is that everyone is free to practice their own religion or lack thereof, and neither the government, nor any other person, can impinge upon that, so long as the practicing of religion is not harmful to others or does not impinge upon the rights of others. In reflection on Jefferson's words, the Supreme Court had this to say:<br /><br /><blockquote>"The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organization or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and state."</blockquote><br /><br />This means (and this is the way things are, as much as conservative voices like to claim otherwise) that in a public school, children can pray as much as they like, but a teacher or principal cannot lead them in prayer. Why? Because to have children pray, or to have a group of students organize around a particular religious belief (say, the Christian athlete organizations which are very popular) do not, in and of themselves, impinge upon others' rights. To have an official lead people in a prayer of a particular faith, however, does impinge upon others' rights to potentially of another religion, or to lack a religion entirely. Also, it is not fair to make people declare their religious beliefs, because we are granted a right to our own conscience.<br /><br />So, against all the conservatives (and liberals too, let's be honest, everyone falls prey to this one in a political battle), I would say that no, we are not a Christian nation built on Judeo-Christan values. We are the descendants of a government established as the world's first secular government that recognized that the only way everyone could actually be free was to never endorse or prohibit the exercise or non-exercise of religion by any free individual. In fact, until the rise of the evangelical movement, the various religions in the United States have been the ~strongest~ proponents of the separation of church and state, with the possible exception of Catholicism.<br /><br />The reason that Proposition 8 was so controversial in that it was a religious organization advocating for it is because it is a violation of the separation of church and state. If individuals of a particular religion want to get together to propose something like that and fund it, that is fine. When a religion itself funds it, it is strictly against the rules - why? Because it violates the idea of one religion imposing its beliefs on other people, and violates the idea of the government making a law respecting the establishment of a religion. It's fine that these people believe marriage can be only between one man and one woman, what's not fine is them using their official positions as religious leaders to get the government to agree. If religions want a voice in the government, from an official position, then at the very least they should pay taxes and pay the membership fees to the government. The other major problem is that marriage is often seen as a right for citizens. On this particular issue, people of other racial groups have had to fight incredibly hard - first blacks for the right to marry at all, and later for the right of inter-racial marriage. What this comes down to in the end is that the government should not oppose the marriage of two consenting adults. However, conservatives see it somewhat differently, in that, largely based on religious ideas, they do not think that gays or lesbians should be considered as full citizens, guaranteed the full rights of citizens, or allowed access to the same services of other citizens.<br /><br />I am even more strongly upset about this line about our "sacred political process being corrupted by unelected judges". By the rules of the Constitution, the Supreme Court is appointed, not elected. Apparently, the writer of this article does not believe in our political system at all, and instead believes that we should throw it all out and start over. In fact, the idea of a "sacred political process" is itself extremely anti-American. The whole idea, as pointed out above, is that this is a secular government and that it can and should be changed from time to time, according to the needs of the people.<br /><br />As to the point about Acorn, number one, the organization is not Marxist, unless by Marxist it is meant that all those people who can vote should be allowed to vote and educated about the process and issues. In fact, I can't think of a more American sentiment than that. Acorn's primary intent was to educate people about their government and its processes. Now, I'm sure we're all familiar with the video that's circulated (and eventually led to Acorn being defunded and closed) of a teenager dressed as a pimp asking for information about how to set up a prostitution business. What's not shown, and mentioned only a few times by anyone, is that the kid never went into an office dressed as a pimp, but instead had a highly edited video. Almost all of the offices he visited, when they came to understand what he was asking, refused him service. Only a few places provided him any information at all, and from the extent of the unedited video, it's rather unclear whether they really understood what he was getting at. It's also rarely mentioned that the guy was later arrested after impersonating a telephone repair man and attempting to wire tap a Democratic office. I seem to recall that we in this country had a similar event a few decades ago that led to a lot of anger and then an impeachment. I believe it was called Watergate. But, of course, the media instead reports this kid as a hero or a martyr. So now we have defunded an organization who likely had a few bad people working for them, but overall had been rated extremely high for getting people to go and vote and educating people on politicians' stances on various issues. Of course, this is likely a large part of the Republican opposition to Acorn, because especially recently, figuring out what the Republicans actually stand for has driven a lot of people away from them.<br /><br />The next paragraph is likewise highly offensive, and largely wrong. To begin with, it was a stupid idea at the beginning to name this war the "War on Terror." Terrorism is a tactic, and thus it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a war on a tactic. We don't have a "War on Guerilla Fighting," or a "War on Snipers" or a "War on Mutually Assured Destruction." As to the last, I rather wish that we would, not an actual war, but a recognition that while it was temporarily useful, it's actually a horrible idea. This leaves us with...what? I know the conservatives would like to say that this is a war on Islam, or Islamic fundamentalists, but to me, that seems wrong. The majority of Muslims are not terrorists, just as the majority of Christians are not. However, for every "underwear bomber" or "Time Square bomber," there is likewise a Scott Roeder, Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh, and others. There are anti-government terrorists who fly planes into IRS buildings, or break windows and threaten government officials, but rarely do we hear a call for a War on Domestic Terrorism, but then again, the majority of these people are white conservative Christians, so I imagine that would not play well in our politics.<br /><br />As to Obama's experience, it's partially true. He's never run a country before. In fact, besides the former presidents, I don't think anyone in this country has run a country before. I'm not sure that there's much former experience that's useful to that task. Bush junior ran several companies into the ground before taking the reins. He had experience, sure, but I don't think it counted for much. Reagan was a movie star. As much as the conservatives love him, I'm not sure why they would ever bring up the "experience" or "celebrity" card about anyone else. And the opposition to Sarah Palin is much more deep-rooted than her lack of experience, her pregnant daughter (whom she constantly referenced by the way, and is now getting tens of thousands of dollars to talk about the value of abstinence-only education...the education policy shown to work the least by any measure), and her wardrobe. Though, I will say, it is becoming abundantly clear that Palin is ready to cut and run as long as more money is involved. Besides that, though, it's clear that she would utterly destroy everything that this country was founded on and convince a large percentage of people that it's exactly what the founding fathers had envisioned. This references some of the points about the educational system, above.<br /><br />As far as never bringing people together in his professional career...well, that's a bit of a wonder. First, Obama was a community organizer, and by all accounts brought a large number of people together for a common cause. Beyond that, in his run for president, he created an extremely strong grass-roots effort that got him elected. I think watching his acceptance speech at Grant Park, it's hard to say that the man never brought people together. The thing that is really disappointing about Obama is that he has become increasingly conservative and increasing desperate to achieve "bi-partisanship," which the Republicans have never been interested in. I would like to see him strike out and say "Fine, if you don't want to play, we'll do it on our own," after all the press conferences where Republican representatives have said again and again that they will never vote for any measure proposed by this administration. It's clear that they're playing a political game and have no actual interest for the American people in mind, and yet they still win the rhetoric game because they know how to play to peoples' emotions and fears. If you want to look at a person dividing this country philosophically, look back the Bush years with all the "Anti-American" rhetoric.<br /><br />Now, as to the whole history lesson on Hitler: This is almost laughable, if not for the fact that it has become a consistent meme among conservatives today. I would say that almost every negative attribute he attributes to the Nazis and Hitler is actually a case of projection - conservatives have done, and continue to do, all of those things. When you hear about violent, threatening rabble-rousers, 9 times out of 10, it's a conservative group. Look at the Tea Party protesters that bring assault rifles to meetings and carry signs saying "Next time they'll be loaded," or the constant death threats that Democratic congresspeople received, and continue to receive, over any new proposal. Look at the town hall meetings where you have people shouting down senators to say things like "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Think about that one for a while if you don't sense the irony.<br /><br />In fact, conservatives should love Obama. He's only pandered to them since the beginning and compromised on every good proposal he had to give them everything they wanted, even when they ultimately vote against the bill in the end anyway. I have to say, this must be an extremely new breed of conservatives, and the Republicans under Clinton must have all been socialists. Otherwise, it makes no sense that conservatives today would call the Public Option a socialist plan when it was precisely what Republicans under Clinton proposed in opposition to his health care bill.<br /><br />This actually makes an important point about the larger picture of why a reference to Hitler doesn't make sense. Fascism is inherently conservative - it seeks to control people's thoughts and education and organize everyone into a military complex, but it believes inherently in a completely free market and pure-profit capitalism. Now, it's pretty clear that these days, it's the conservatives who have come to dominate many of the school boards and are attempting to rewrite history. Texas went so far as to try to rename the "slave trade" the "Atlantic Triangular Trade" and remove most references to slavery. Thankfully, that change was rejected. Conservatives are also the first to propose expansions to the Defense Department's budget and never cutting any military projects, even when the military itself doesn't want them. No other nation on Earth spends so much on its military as we do, and it's really not clear exactly why. There is no other super-power with an advanced military left to fight right now. We have military dominance, yet, we continue to expand the budget, taking money away from science, educational, and health care programs because conservatives have made it very clear that those things are extremely low priorities for them. Also, as is evident, conservatives are the strongest advocates for completely free markets with no regulations whatsoever. They tried for years to achieve that, and now want to blame the collapse on other people. Likewise, as noted above about Arizona, but this also applies to United States citizens throughout the country, it is conservatives who have rounded people up for questioning. Under Bush, a large number of U.S. citizens were detailed indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism or terrorist-ties. To that, I would have to go back to the words of a Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin : "The society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."<br /><br />As for Obama having a compliant media? Where? I suppose he has never heard of Fox News, which daily broadcasts total opposition to the Obama administration and touts itself as the largest and most-listened-to news organization in America. You can't have it both ways.<br /><br />As for the laundry list of things that Hitler advocated for, this is a ridiculous argument. Not all of those things are bad, and not every policy under the Nazis or personal decision that some Nazis made were evil. For example, the Nazis were the first to institute a public anti-smoking campaign. I suppose if you want to carry this list further, we should all strike up a few cigarettes in opposition to Nazi policy. Likewise, universal health care is not an inherently bad idea. Certainly, every other major 1st-world nation has found a way to do it, and it's very popular among the people that do have it. In this country, granted, the Veteran's Administration and Medicare both got off to rocky starts, but they are recognized by outside observers and by the people in these programs as today being among the top Health Care programs in the world. And they're both government-run. The public option was not even universal health care, instead, it was an additional optional plan that people could buy into (i.e., pay premiums just like we do with any other insurance company). It would not "get in between you and your doctor" any more than an insurance company already does, and you could not be denied coverage. I don't see this is a bad idea, in large part because the insurance companies have a responsibility to their shareholders. This is not necessarily bad, but it means that on average, they have to cut coverage and raise premiums on people in their plans to be able to pay higher dividends to their shareholders. They're for-profit companies, so you can't blame them for this, really, but I think it should be recognized that having for-profit companies in charge of mediating health care, which is really a life-and-death matter sometimes, is not a great idea.<br /><br />For example, we provide other services for these kinds of things. If you're being robbed or assaulted, you can call the police. If your house catches on fire, you can call the fire department. Neither the police or the fire department ask to see your Civil Service Insurance and have to call to make sure you're covered before they try to assist you. The closest thing we have for health care, though, is the emergency room, but even then we have to deal with insurance and whether they will cover something or not. It's not, in my opinion, a very smart system.<br /><br />On the same matter, there are some programs that I believe should be government run and should be mandatory - vaccines, for example. This is a matter of statistics - the vaccines we currently have have a reaction rate that is an order of magnitude, at least, lower than the base rate of catching the disease they vaccinate against and dying. Because the anti-vax movement has become so popular, measles and a host of other preventable diseases are making a resurgence and killing tens or hundreds of children and elderly people. If a parent chooses not to vaccinate their child, their child may never catch the disease, or may have a mild case, but they can then pass it on to a child too young to be vaccinated, or to an immuno-compromised individual. I strongly hope that we don't have to watch thousands of children dying every year before we recognize the need again for vaccines.<br /><br />To get back on topic, however, the most damning evidence against the writer of this article is that there is no similar piece from him during the Bush years. He apparently did not care about the direct violations of the Constitution, the rounding up of American citizens, the increased de-regulation that led to economic instability, or any other such matter until a Republican was no longer in charge. When Obama begins taking away peoples' guns, invading Canada and Mexico, and rounding up American citizens, then he may have a case about analogy to Hitler, until then, this is nothing more than an extremely strong case of projection, and it only fuels the fires of fear-mongering that has happened so often in the past few years.<br /><br />-Matt<br /></span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-7285398612643936462010-05-20T15:24:00.002-05:002010-05-20T15:55:04.755-05:00Holy DiverThis week the heavy metal music community lost one of its giants: Mr. Ronnie James Dio. For the uninitiated, Dio came to prominence in the late seventies in the Ritchie Blackmore (ex-Deep Purple) outfit Rainbow, with such songs as "The Man on the Silver Mountain." He attained true Jedi Council-status when in the early eighties he replaced a singer named Ozzy Osbourne in a band named Black Sabbath.<br /><br />Now, whenever Dio's tenure in Sabbath is discussed, it is usually qualified with a remark such as, "Black Sabbath's best work was with Ozzy..." or "Only the original line-up is the *true* Black Sabbath." And these qualifications are all true: None of Dio's three albums with Sabbath (Heaven and Hell, Mob Rules, and Dehumanizer) reach the depth and artistry of those early Sabbath records -- you know, the ones that pretty much invented heavy metal <span style="font-style:italic;">ex nihilo</span>. Nonetheless, by the late seventies, Sabbath was a band in decline, and as far as I am concerned Dio resuscitated that band. There are some truly great songs on those first two records he did with Sabbath, and some people think their song "Heaven and Hell" is the best song Sabbath ever recorded. (It's definitely in their top ten.) I had the great pleasure of seeing this line-up of Sabbath at Radio City Music Hall back in 2007.<br /><br />After leaving Sabbath, he embarked on a successful solo career. Two records from that era stand out: Holy Diver and The Last in Line.<br /><br />I have been following Dio's career for a long time, and I am sad to see him go. He was famous for being a nice guy, as <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/robsheffield/;kw=[blogs,Sheffield_April2010,153680,53897]">this</a> article can attest. I've included some select songs from his career below. \m/<br /><br />With Rainbow:<br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/p9nfVrusSMg&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/p9nfVrusSMg&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />With Sabbath:<br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/riwxbh_n_WM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/riwxbh_n_WM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ts6YTeSEv0Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ts6YTeSEv0Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />With Dio:<br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/OgpDDDIo_XE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OgpDDDIo_XE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />And here's a tongue-in-cheek tribute from Tenacious D:<br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rD6d8vAL9EY&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rD6d8vAL9EY&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>The Roosterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05252962439559026998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-57630146783539704952010-04-20T23:57:00.002-05:002010-04-21T00:01:47.533-05:00Connecting Great Minds and Big ProblemsBill Gates gave a talk at the University of Chicago tonight in which he outlined the call to mobilize the brightest minds for the biggest problems. He also spent a significant amount of time fielding input from the audience and challenged us to offer our own ideas. These are mine. <br /><span id="fullpost"><br />First, social movement research has given us three principles of mobilization that may help us solve the big question. Give the brightest minds the frames by which to identify and solve the biggest problems and the culture to pursue them with vigor. Give them the resources to fully pursue their cause. Lastly, enable them to identify and pursue the opportunities for change that arise. The society of philanthropy is a renewable, self-reinforcing activity that can create its own resources and culture and seek out its opportunity. Anything you contribute to building the social good is returned in-kind. <br /><br />So, of the biggest problems, he left them, in general, open. My theory is that, rather than framing them as problems, we should see them as the biggest solutions. I think, the biggest solutions are those that provide the capacity to have capacities. As the saying goes, teach someone to fish and they can eat for a week. The biggest solutions are those which give people the capacity to solve their own problems. For that, I applaud the Foundation's focus on childhood mortality. Life is the fundamental capacity that allows us all to have the chance to solve any problem. Health and education are the building blocks for a good society. <br /><br />And, who are the brightest minds who you should invest your resources? He left this relatively open, but pointed to us (UChicago, and I’m sure Stanford and Berkeley and surely will MIT and Harvard). I respectfully and partially disagree. Much can be said for intelligence and strenuous intellectual engagement, but they can only work with information, knowledge, and appropriate values. The brightest minds are those who know how things work and value the work of social beneficence. Hence, it is crucial, as he mentioned, to work with local women on economic development projects because they tend to know how and want to maintain their own house. The brightest minds are not just astute, but also appropriately informed and directed. You can find them at Harvard and a tiny village outside Mogadishu. <br /><br />On a final, more self-referential note, I have my own practicable ideas for such a better connection between great minds and solutions. First, entrepreneurship and incubation centers for nonprofits to support the great innovations in philanthropy of the future. The infrastructure and know-how are there. We just need the resources. Second, technology has been championed for “flattening the world,” but I believe that it can also enhance the local. I expect the Internet to include more localized content and augment our day-to-day interactions in our community. That’s why I am starting a website focused on cultivating and streamlining individual donorship in Chicago. I believe that technological localization, like I'm attempting, may offer a new way of enhancing local capacity in a new, self-reinforcing way. <br /><br />That’s my educated two cents.<br /></span>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02622538888041375502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-53590638422442659062010-03-20T16:32:00.001-05:002010-03-20T16:41:02.264-05:00Extremism and the Politics of LegitimacyI have been tromping through the online world of the Tea Party, Oath Keepers, and Southern Poverty Law Center looking through the discussions of conspiracy theories, radicalism, and the contemporary conservative grassroots mobilization. The movement, media, and analysts are caught in the conundrum of what to do about conspiracy theories and theorists who argue that the U.S. is about to be invaded, that citizens are going to be sent to reeducation camps or interned in FEMA concentration camps, and/or that a New World Order is about to be created in the form of a united, international government. On their face, the groups built on these beliefs organize themselves around traditional frames of democratic governance and the Lockean right to rebellion in order to legitimize their political position. I will go through the Oath Keepers "<a href="http://oath-keepers.blogspot.com/2009/03/oath-keepers-declaration-of-orders-we.html">10 Orders We Will Not Obey</a> to demonstrate the moral quandary within the discussion and ultimately why I do believe these people are dangerous.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />The Southern Poverty Law Center and its <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/blog/">Hatewatch blog</a> with its attendant comments have become a good case study in the justification and defense of the conspiracy mindset. The SPLC has labeled such groups, particularly the Oath Keepers, various militias, Patriot organizations, and the John Birch Society as radical extremest groups because of their anti-government platform and threats of radical action. Their blog has attracted a wide-range of apologists for the groups which make for educational (if inflammatory from both sides) reading. The most common defenses are "we're not hate groups" and "we are defending the constitution - there's nothing wrong with saying we will not obey unlawful orders." While the former is an instance of miscommunication (the SPLC distinguishes Hate groups from Anti-government extremism), the latter is the perfect example of the moral ambiguity of these groups.<br /><br />At face, no one would have a problem taking the oath of the Oath Keepers to not intern American citizens as Unlawful Enemy Combatants. In fact, I might suggest it for many police forces when it comes to profiling and stop and search routines. The problem is that the ideology and beliefs about the world which justify the oath, also justify violence against the government and collateral citizenry. The oath is not bad and does not define the Oath Keepers as extreme. In the same way, patrolling the border and preventing illegal entry by the Minutemen is neither illegal nor, by definition, dangerous. It's the understanding that immigrants are criminally violent, a fear of the "browning" of the population, and sense of personal, cultural superiority.<br /><br />Take the <a href="http://www.vdare.com/">Vdare blog </a>for example. It's a policy and research-oriented forum on immigration issues written by the authors of "The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America" and "Alien Nation." The name is an <a href="http://www.vdare.com/why_vdare.htm">homage to Virginia Dare </a>and a celebration of "the mettle of those settlers." This pride in national history is at once virtuously patriotic and immorally ignorant in its unacknowledged celebration of colonization and "whitening"/brown eradication. The same dangerous double speak is found in the Oath Keepers whose Orders We Will Not Follow demonstrate their danger.<br /><br />Let's use easy examples.<br /><br />Order #7: "We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext." The insinuation is obvious. The group is motivated by the belief that Americans are under threat of being placed in detention camps (maybe they mean prison).<br /><br />Order #8: "We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to 'keep the peace' or to 'maintain control' during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war." Again, the insinuation is obvious.<br /><br />While it is a bit comforting to know that if the government decided to put me in a detention camp, there would be military and police officers who've got my back; I'm not comfortable with members of the police and military believing that the country is about to be besieged by foreign invaders and citizens rounded up in concentration camps. The reason is that it means that armed representatives of the law believe themselves to be under imminent threat. Not only does it justify these oaths, but it also motivates and legitimizes proactive violence to prevent such from occurring. The ideology behind these overtly legitimate stances and commitments is one based on a dangerous conspiracy of imminent threat and justified revolution. Such a dual legitimacy is a constant in the politics of hate and extremism as well as other forms of unacceptable platforms.<br /><br /><a href="http://sociology.nd.edu/faculty/all/mcveigh-rory/index.shtml">Rory McVeigh </a>has finally come out with his book on the KKK in the early twentieth century. The biggest takeaway for this post can be garnered from the earlier article with his colleagues on the same topic "Corn, Klansmen, and Coolidge." During the 1920s and 30s, the Klan was actually much more of a political party than a civic group, paramilitary, or fly-by-night band of marauders. They developed an entire platform similar to the libertarian platform today with an additional emphasis on support for farmers, anti-immigration, and racial segregation. Racial superiority as an ideology was actually less prominent than their broader political agenda.<br /><br />The lesson I want to draw out is that extremism and hate are always wrapped up in an account of how they tie into common, fundamental values of the American constitution and way of life (obviously in the American case). This is necessary for political power, but we must not confuse these claims for the fundamental raison d'etre ("reason for being") of the organization. For the Klan, it was white supremacy. For the Oath Keepers, it is defense against an impending totalitarianism. For intelligent design groups, it is the replacement of scientific knowledge and secularism with a Bible-centered education and society.<br /><br />P.S. As for the spillover effects of suffering these conspiracy theories in the name of free speech, I must also acknowledge a correction I need to make to a previous post. I predicted that the movement would spawn violence next year. Joe Stack proved me wrong. (Despite the debate over his political leanings, his anti-government diatribe, principled Birch-style tax evasion, and the support he has received in right wing circles firmly sets him within the current anti-government extremist culture.) Secondly, as the SPLC has consistently shown, there have been many acts of violence and foiled plots well before I wrote the post. The real change I expect over the course of this year and next is an increase in the coverage of these plots, scale of violence, and increasingly formal ties to existing extremist groups. They do not have to foster their own violence. Simply fanning a conspiracy-driven climate of the fear of government tyranny is good enough to push sympathizers to violence.<br /></span>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02622538888041375502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-75987301535286926642010-02-19T21:36:00.002-06:002010-02-19T23:29:47.163-06:00Plate Tectonics ReduxA while ago I wrote a rather sarcastic post on <a href="http://takingplace.blogspot.com/2009/05/plate-tectonics-theory-in-crisis.html">plate tectonic denialists</a>. I got a reply from <a href="http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/">Harry Dale Huffman</a>, who claimed that plate tectonics was easily disproved and directed me to one of his <a href="http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2009/04/challenge-to-earth-scientists.html">blog posts</a>. Go take a minute and read it. I'll be waiting after the jump.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Okay. Done with that? Let's talk about it. First I want to discuss warning signs, then logistical problems, and finally the actual content of the post. Maybe I should do this in reverse order, but at the moment I don't want to do it that way. I'll say at the beginning this is not an ad hominem, because I will discuss the actual content of his claims, but, if you want to claim poisoning the well...I'll partially accept it. However, I do believe that Mr. Huffman falls into the larger category of, to put it bluntly, quacks. If you read through that post, you get a lot of references to paradigm changes, that this is obvious if only people open their eyes, that these has been denied or dismissed by scientists, etc, etc. This should be a red flag for most people, it's the kind of language that you hear most often among the quack or pseudo-scientific community, be it evolution deniers, climate change deniers, HIV-AIDS deniers, etc. This is not to say that Mr. Huffman is not an intelligent man and cannot do actual research. I am sure he is quite competent, but it is to say that in this particular area, he is a bit of a quack.<br /><br />It is interesting, if not particularly surprising, that many intelligent design supporters tend to be engineers. People who actually work in the field of biology see through ID rather quickly and don't accept arguments about design because, very simplistically, biological units don't follow the same rules and processes of man-made objects. There are some superficial similarities, of course, but deeper study reveals that this is a false analogy. Call it a special case of functional fixedness - after working for so long on design and being trained to look for elements of design, it isn't hard to see that these people often try to import their views on design into natural systems. So, yes, we tend to be rather wary when people start talking about design in natural systems - it hasn't really panned out yet.<br /><br />As to logistical problems - there are a few problems. First, he claims that "seeing is believing." The short response to this is easy: "Wrong." The more detailed response is, as should be expected, more complex. Indeed, in some ways, seeing is believing. However, it is very easy to be wrong about what you believe, or what you believe you are seeing. Optical illusions are the easiest example of this - I would presume that Mr. Huffman would not argue that these illusions represent the reality of the situation. Likewise, perhaps Mr. Huffman would like to look at the Face on Mars (from the 1970's observation) and explain why that is or is not evidence of advanced civilizations and design on Mars. Perhaps Mr. Huffman also believes that the fractal patterns of ice crystals is also evidence of intelligent design of ice, or perhaps not. I would also question him about just how far he wants to take this statement - should we deny the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum outside of visible light because it is not readily apparent to the naked eye? Also, if this were really so evident as Mr. Huffman wants to claim, why is it that only he has noticed it, and that this "evidence" has completely escaped the best minds of the planet for centuries? This is a rather common issue among quacks - they always claim some secret knowledge that is "readily apparent," "completely obvious," "denied by modern science," and "discovered by hard work under the oppression of the establishment."<br /><br />On another point, Mr. Huffman isn't really clear about how the whole movement of continents worked in the past and why it won't continue now. He doesn't deny that the continents have moved, he merely wants to argue that they have been purposefully moved and now, apparently they have stopped moving. As that I've gotten a lot of hits on this blog from the last plate tectonics post, and as that most of those hits are from queries that are looking for evidence specifically to disprove plate tectonics, I think it is important review some of that evidence here. This does not necessarily bear directly on Mr. Huffman's arguments, as he does not seem to deny previous continental movement, but we'll get to that.<br /><br />First, we have the overall shapes of the continents. It isn't hard to see that they seem to be pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle and that they could be all fitted together. This was the original impetus for the theory of continental drift, but originally there was no mechanism identified for why the continents should move. Secondly, we have fossil distribution. The distribution of fossils of the same type and same edge along the edges of continents (and sometimes across continents like Antarctica) only makes sense with the assumption that at some point in the distance class the continents were either connected or vastly closer together. Third we have paleomagnetism. When a rock is formed, its magnetic alignment is frozen. We can see that looking at rocks of a certain age, if we draw the lines of their alignment now, they align somewhere in space above the earth, or are misaligned. If we assume the same continental placement/distribution that makes fossil dispersion make sense, then the magnetic alignments converge on the poles. This is a nice finding. We also have the evidence of the distribution and types of earthquakes and volcanoes - the majority occur along the proposed plate lines and actually serve to define these lines rather well. Likewise, at the proposed sites of new upheaval, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, we see the expected gradient of age in rocks as you move further from the Ridge. That is to say, the youngest rocks are along the ridge and they get progressively older the farther away you move from the ridge. Likewise, we have the continued growth of mountain ridges where plates are grinding against one another. There are also symmetrical magnetic bands on either sides of these ridges, showing evidence of the previous polarity reversals and weakenings in earth's history. These are all converging lines of evidence that point towards the movements of the continents, and point toward plate tectonics, but as that Mr. Huffman does not directly disagree with previous movement of continents, they do not particularly bear on his points.<br /><br />However, Mr. Huffman does want to deny current or future movement. He argues that the mechanisms of plate tectonics are physically impossible. Currently, the mechanism is described as convection zones of heat underneath the crust. This heat originates from (in a very small way) residual heat from the formation of the earth, and, more importantly, from the continued radioactive decay within the earth. A large problem with Mr. Huffman's ideas is that he would have to account for how this heat is going to be released if not through the movement of the plates. A bigger problem is whether or not he have a mechanism at all for previous movement, if not from the release of this built up heat. I would be very interested to know his ideas on how previous movement occurred and why it should stop now without catastrophic results, or perhaps he intends this.<br /><br />Mr. Huffman's main argument seems to be a recapitulation of Pythagorean and Platonic ideas about geometric shapes and how they are reflected in the world or universe. Johannes Kepler struggled with this idea for a long time before eventually rejecting it - realizing that no matter how much the mathematics, design, and beauty of it all looked, the evidence just didn't back it up. I think this is largely the same case. Mr. Huffman wants the design to work out so badly that he's willing to flub some of his "data." Look again at his drawing of the prime lines that bisect the globe. Notice how there's not really much consistency in how far away some of these lines stray from the actual coast lines. Some are very close or even cross land, while others are pretty far into the ocean. His "Asian" line is drawn out to the coast of Japan, while his "African" line avoids Madagascar. Why are islands considered part of the coast line only some of the time? Why are his South American and North American lines allowed to cross land at certain points? Why is the Gulf of Mexico's coast line ignored while cowing the importance of the line's proximity to the Yucatan peninsula? Why, after discussing how important it is that these lines align along the east coasts of landmasses, does he note the importance of how close the fifth line comes to the ~west~ coast of New Zealand, which is not even a continent? What does Mr. Huffman have to say about the continued movement of the continents, continued subduction, continued growth of mountain ranges along the plate lines, and continued expansion along places like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge? Why is this moment in time, when these lines are possible to draw, so important?<br /><br />It seems after all of this that Mr. Huffman is perpetuating two errors - 1) Confirmation bias, and 2) anomaly hunting. First, Mr. Huffman is dismissive of any evidence that would invalidate his claims, or even where his own method doesn't particularly work (e.g., his fifth line), but is quick to jump on anything that helps his bias towards ancient geometric traditions. Secondly, Mr. Huffman's argument doesn't go much beyond "isn't this interesting?" and taking what would appear to be a coincidence (if it is even that) to something very meaningful. These sorts of anomalies are to be expected in any system that is large enough or complex enough. In fact, it would be much more interesting if they ~weren't~ present. Mr. Huffman also falls into the same sort of argument that many evolution denialists fall into - the use of odds. These are almost always red flags and are typically quite misleading. Let us look at any crystal formation - the odds of each atom being in exactly the place it occupies is extremely low. The odds of being able to place, at random, each atom into its correct position are so low as to be past the point of being fathomable. However, these crystals exist - they have to take some state. This sort of argument is contained within the field of statistical dynamics, as stated in a previous post. What other system is Mr. Huffman considering when he calculates the odds of the continents being in their present location?<br /><br />So, in conclusion, I would like to hear Mr. Huffman's explanation of why the continents are still moving, why mountain ranges like the Himalayas are still rising, and why new material is still appearing at mid ocean ridges, as well as to explain the inconsistencies within his own presentation. I do not agree with him, clearly, and I do not think that his case is anywhere near as self evidence as he would like to claim. <br /></span>Ragothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02032216046972764021noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6115375869553591839.post-91841886704681779822010-02-16T08:33:00.003-06:002010-02-16T09:57:52.282-06:00Tea Parties, Oath Keepers, and the Radicalization of the RightThe Tea Party movement's radicalization is continuing to organize itself evermore around Oath Keepers, Glen Beck, and the memory of Waco and Ruby Ridge. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html?th&emc=th">That's the story from this morning's The New York Times</a>. The Times writer weaves in the narratives of everyday, middle class people awakening to the conspiracy theories of Beck and Adam Jones (of infowars) through their participation in their local Tea Parties. More editorially, the writer focuses on these newly radicalized groups in Western Washington/Idaho where Ruby Ridge took place and Waco, Texas; among other locales. In September, I <a href="http://takingplace.blogspot.com/2009/09/acorn-tea.html">wrote a post </a> about this reemergence arguing that, while the election this Fall will be about the energy of the Tea Party, the power and actions of the militant right will largely continue until a Republican victory or another Oklahoma City. While I don't mean to rehash that line of thought, I wanted to revise it in lieu of the movement's current state and add to it a sociological approach to why people radicalize.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />First of all, the article nicely exemplifies why some of the common misunderstandings of radicalism are untrue. Radical right-wingers are not all Nazi skinheads or poor rural folks who cling to their guns. While some are, the majority of radicals (this goes for Islamic Terrorists and almost all early movement activists) are from the mainstream middle class. Second, they are not ignorant. While I would argue that many are not long-time political aficionados, they are not the uneducated masses. Third, though they are almost always white in America, this does not automatically imply a racist ideology. Again, in this case, there is a distinction between the ever-present white supremacist groups and the currently ascendant radical right. Yes, there is overlap and, even in this version, a militant anti-immigrant ideology. However, particularly as the movement grows, it will mainstream itself more on anti-government rhetoric than an anti-immigrant platform. That said, why are so many decently educated, relatively economically stable people radicalized by Beck, Jones, and stories of Ruby Ridge?<br /><br />The only difference between a cult or extremist ideology in their early stages and mainstream liberalism is in ideological degrees. As the Times writer well points out, these people are "awakening" to the radical discourse. It's not that they wake up one day and say, "the government is out to get us." They attend Tea Party meetings, start listening to Glen Beck, and reading infowars. People don't watch one show and say, "death to the fascists." Individuals pick up little pieces here and there from the repertoire of pre-made ideologies and start to build a new world-view. As they start to lend credence to this world-view, they continue to attend meetings and protests and get networked into the more mainstream Tea Party world and find like-minded radicals. Both continue to be a source of both ideological hardening and emotional elaboration which entrench the world-view and shape members into radical activists. Radicals find radicals and then seek converts both directly and indirectly. This emergence then causes the ideology to evolve both for participants and the collective. It is this evolution into hostile separatism that distinguishes the ideology. <br /><br />This is the process that has been going on since I last wrote in September and the result is a more developed infrastructure of radical organizations linking Tea Party groups, Oath Keepers, Beck's 9/12 groups, the John Birch Society, and Friends of Liberty. It is this organizational embeddedness which is changing the nature of the game. Organizations do much better at surviving in a movement than any individual and can continue to recruit and mobilize supporters even when the political tide ebbs. The Oath Keepers could very well survive a member blowing up a federal building. On the other hand, movement maturation, organizational institutionalization, and political success all tend lead to ideological moderation. Except in the few cases when they don't. In those cases, the movement changes the definition of "mainstream," usurps political control, or gains a dedicated political following which defines a new niche. <br /><br />These then are my adjusted predictions for the movement. If the movement splinters republicans and democrats maintain control or republicans they don't like win, the movement could become tactically hostile. If there is going to be another Oklahoma City, it would probably be in 2011. Nothing mobilizes radicalism like political inefficacy. If the movement wins in 2010, it will become a more hardened political force. While there's a chance it could fizzle out as grassroots often do after a victory, the extent of grassroots organizations lends me to believe it will not. Also, if their victory does not lead to progress they like, that would further the movement's mobilization and re-energize radicalism. In either instance, the movement does not presage a fortuitous future for this country.<br /><br />Given what I feel is a need to unwind this movement for our safety, it seems necessary to offer the "policy implications" that good sociologists ought to draw. First, mainstream political voices (particularly Fox News) must denounce any act of violence and any legitimation of violence as they occur. Even mainstream politicians and media outlets have the ability to "wake members up" from their extremism and research has shown that public disavowal reduces support for violence. <br /><br />Second, any act of state repression, as exemplified by Ruby Ridge and Waco, will surely exacerbate the movement's radical wing. Given that Homeland Security is already monitoring the movement, the best policing strategy is to target the most egregious violations, be immediately open with charges and disconnect them from movement ideologies ("she was a bad apple"), and pursue any arrest in public places (where a protracted arrest process like a hostage situation or Ruby Ridge self-containment is least likely).<br /><br />Third, the greatest counterbalance to this movement would be a counter-movement. Unfortunately, the left's biggest grassroots organizations are either mainstream or professionally linked in to the mainstream. The radical right's mistrust of ACORN is Exhibit A. However, to unwind the dangerous grassroots organizations requires alternative organizations with more civil ideologies that can absorb the radicals. The ideal counter-movement is indeed the Tea Party itself. If the Tea Party were to take responsibility for it's connections to and role in fomenting radical extremists and make an explicit attempt to bring them into the fold, the radicalism would be quickly exchanged for broader political power. <br /></span>Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02622538888041375502noreply@blogger.com3