Taking Place

The Gingrinch

2011-12-09T16:41:00.003-06:00

I 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.

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.

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
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
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
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
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

I'm sure many more will come. Please, suggest your own.

Jesus was not a Free Marketer

2011-12-08T09:04:00.003-06:00

I'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.

Anyway, I want you to take a moment and go read this. 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.

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.

Let's go through this step-by-step.

Here's the parable he's discussing:

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.’

14 “But his subjects hated him and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’

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.

16 “The first one came and said, ‘Sir, your mina has earned ten more.’

17 “‘Well done, my good servant!’ his master replied. ‘Because you have been trustworthy in a very small matter, take charge of ten cities.’

18 “The second came and said, ‘Sir, your mina has earned five more.’

19 “His master answered, ‘You take charge of five cities.’

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.’

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?’

24 “Then he said to those standing by, ‘Take his mina away from him and give it to the one who has ten minas.’

25 “‘Sir,’ they said, ‘he already has ten!’

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.’”

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 all conservatives, but I think it is representative of the most vocal block of people calling themselves that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 are intrinsic to the system and are 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.

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!"

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.

Also, hilarious Mr. Perkins, you're so funny. You're going to trash collectivism, but corporatism, one of the most prominent examples of collectivism, he's just fine with. Hah!

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.

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.

Oh, how about this one, from Matthew 5:

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.

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.

While we're on the subject of tossing things out, how about this, from John 2:

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."

Or this, from Matthew 21:

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."

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."

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?

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.

Mr. Perkins, I think you may want to see this as well, from Matthew 25:

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.'

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."

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.

You mean there's another? From Luke 10? Oh, that Jesus, always going on about seemingly collectivist stuff:

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."

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."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

With all that in mind...I'm going to go ahead and call it. You lose, Mr. Perkins. Good day, sir, you lose.

The Militarization of Police

2011-12-05T13:42:00.004-06:00

Radley Balko over at the HuffPo has an excellent breakdown on the militarization of police. I'd highly suggest going to read to it.

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?

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.

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.

In slightly more humorous news, Fred Upton (R-MI), a member of the GOP Supercommittee, has no idea why job growth was better with higher taxes on the upper income brackets than under the Bush tax cuts, but still thinks that tax cuts will create jobs.

A Run-Down of the Ridiculous

2011-12-02T10:13:00.006-06:00

Here's a brief run-down of some of my top ridiculous recent stories.

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 just don't vote Republican, 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 unfounded, with even law schools writing policy briefs about it.

Second, we have Steve King (R-Iowa), totally forgetting 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 discuss those issues. Perhaps even more importantly, the Supreme Court in 1898 ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark, 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.

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 isn't really raising taxes at all. Again, this is really just giving away the game.
"Should we raise taxes just a little, tiny bit on those making the most money in the entire country?"

-"NO! Of course not, that's ridiculous and will kill the economy!"

"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?"

-"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."

Finally, for a bit of good news, and definitely not ridiculous, Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who helped start Amazon, has written an excellent op-ed, 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.

The Myth of Trickle-Down Economics

2011-11-29T13:43:00.009-06:00

Here'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.

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.

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.

To me, however, this is all a scam, and built on bullshit. We'll explore that after the jump.

Let's examine some basic evidence.

The Great Depression and the Golden Age of the 1950's

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."

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.

The Crash: Or, How the 2000's Mirrored the 1920's

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.

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.

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.

Let's look at some other similarities: for one, income inequality has now hit its highest point 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 here to see what I mean. You can read the full story here. I'll wait.

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 here. 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.

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.

How We Recovered

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.

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.

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.

Arguments for Supply-Side

The Government is Incompetent

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.

Tax Cuts Spur Growth

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.

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, they just don't create them here. For more evidence that tax cuts do not lead to job creation, you can check out here and here.

What this has led to is a massive income disparity, and positive income growth for pretty much only those at the top.

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 average tax cut 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?

Creeping Influence and Starving the Beast

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 Citizen's United 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?

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!

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."

It's entirely manufactured, and it's paying off well for the conservatives right now.

The Relation to Supply-Side Economics

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.

But this doesn't make sense.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conclusions

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.

But that's just my two-cents.

Make No Law Respecting The Establishment of Religion and Free Exercise Thereof

2010-11-30T12:43:00.003-06:00

This is posted without comment, because both Cenk and Craig Scarberry are pretty eloquent in their views:

Airport Body Scanners and Privacy

2010-11-17T20:35:00.003-06:00

To 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 this article on CNN. This is more invasive, more onerous, and more...well...disturbing than any other country puts up with.

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.

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.

The Day After

2010-11-03T10:39:00.003-05:00

The 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.

This piece from the Chicagoist sums up a lot of my feelings on the matter.

Confidence Breeds Error

2010-11-02T12:54:00.002-05:00

Click through to here 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.

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.

Election Day 2010

2010-11-02T10:35:00.003-05:00

Today 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.

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.

Let's consider a little bit of the atmosphere today, and what it could mean for the future, after the jump.

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?

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

Finishing up the Bartending Posts on Bases

2010-11-01T14:25:00.002-05:00

I've finished my review of alcoholic bases in a three-parter.

Find Part II (rum and gin) here, and Part III (tequila and whiskey) here.

Expect an update on mixers and what not soon, as well as crepes recipes and others.

Also expect a more politically-influenced post in the near future.

Recipe: Osso Bucco Inspired Chicken

2010-10-29T12:45:00.001-05:00

Here'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.

Enjoy!

New Blog. Food Blog.

2010-10-28T13:46:00.002-05:00

So Steph and I have started a new food blog, 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.

Thus, post one in what I imagine will be a long series on bartending, to be found here.

Recipe: Oat Bread

2010-10-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

Suppose 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.

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.

Recipe: Oat Bread

Ingredients:
12 ounces cook rolled oats
2 Tablespoons agave nectar
1 Tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for bowl and pan
1/4 cup warm water
11 ounces bread flour, plus extra for dusting
1 teaspoon salt
1 envelope dry active yeast
1/4 cup uncooked rolled oats, plus 1 tablespoon rolled oats, divided
1 egg yolk
1 Tablespoon water

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).

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:

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:

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.

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!

So, our cooked oats:

And our leftovers:

So, measure out 12 ounces of the cooked oats, and add the wet team:

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:

Mix together with each addition, and you'll end up with a very, very sticky dough about like this:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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!

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.

Recipe: The "Marie" Sandwich

2010-10-26T11:42:00.002-05:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

Recipe: "Marie Sandwich"

Ingredients:

1 half of a large, ripe avocado
1 medium, ripe tomato
2 slices Muenster cheese
1 sub bun

Directions:
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.

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.

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.

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:

1) Soft ingredients (such as egg salad) go best with soft breads.
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)
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,
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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Next up on the recipe list...I'm thinking oat bread.

House of the Rising Sun

2010-10-22T16:23:00.002-05:00

Here'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.

Wild Horses

2010-10-22T16:22:00.002-05:00

This 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.

Moonshiner

2010-10-22T16:20:00.001-05:00

Here's Joe and I practicing Moonshiner, by Uncle Tupelo:

Wagon Wheel practice

2010-10-22T16:15:00.007-05:00

Here'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?

Conversations with the Parents

2010-06-08T15:38:00.003-05:00

My 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.

Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 16:36:54 -0700
From: --------------------
Subject: Fw: THIS IS POWERFUL , A MUST READ !
To: ----------------------------------------------------------

What if he is right?

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?"

Take the three minutes to read this. Maybe he is wrong, but what if he's right?

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.

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.

History Unfolding

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.

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.

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?

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.

We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy.

Why?

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.

Why?

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?

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.

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.)

Mr. Obama's winning platform can be boiled down to one word:

Change.

Why?

I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now.

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.

And that is only the beginning..

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.

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,

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.

If you think I am exaggerating, look it up. It's all there in the history books.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I pray I am wrong. I do not think I am. Perhaps the only hope is our vote in the next elections.

David Kaiser
Jamestown, Rhode Island
United States

Pass this along. Perhaps it will help to begin the awakening of America as to where we are headed...

So, that was the email my mom sent me. Here was my response:

Hey Mom,

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

"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."

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.

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.

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 -
"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."

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.

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.

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:

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-Matt

Holy Diver

2010-05-20T15:24:00.002-05:00

This 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.

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 ex nihilo. 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.

After leaving Sabbath, he embarked on a successful solo career. Two records from that era stand out: Holy Diver and The Last in Line.

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 this article can attest. I've included some select songs from his career below. \m/

With Rainbow:

With Sabbath:

With Dio:

And here's a tongue-in-cheek tribute from Tenacious D:

Connecting Great Minds and Big Problems

2010-04-20T23:57:00.002-05:00

Bill 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s my educated two cents.

Extremism and the Politics of Legitimacy

2010-03-20T16:32:00.001-05:00

I 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 "10 Orders We Will Not Obey to demonstrate the moral quandary within the discussion and ultimately why I do believe these people are dangerous.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and its Hatewatch blog 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.

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.

Take the Vdare blog 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 homage to Virginia Dare 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.

Let's use easy examples.

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).

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.

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.

Rory McVeigh 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.

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.

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.

Plate Tectonics Redux

2010-02-19T21:36:00.002-06:00

A while ago I wrote a rather sarcastic post on plate tectonic denialists. I got a reply from Harry Dale Huffman, who claimed that plate tectonics was easily disproved and directed me to one of his blog posts. Go take a minute and read it. I'll be waiting after the jump.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

Tea Parties, Oath Keepers, and the Radicalization of the Right

2010-02-16T08:33:00.003-06:00

The Tea Party movement's radicalization is continuing to organize itself evermore around Oath Keepers, Glen Beck, and the memory of Waco and Ruby Ridge. That's the story from this morning's The New York Times. 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 wrote a post 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The Abstinence-Only Study That Didn't Promote Abstinence-Only

2010-02-03T11:49:00.004-06:00

Once again we see the utter FAIL of the media in reporting science. We have a new study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, that nominally has to do with abstinence-only and how it could be a very effective form of sexual education.

Except...not really. The study looked at several different forms of sex education, going from abstinence-only, safer-sex only, and a combination of both (otherwise referred to as comprehensive sex education). They found that the percentage of kids receiving the "abstinence-only" program that had sex after two years was lower than the other groups, with the "safer-sex only" group being the highest. This sounds pretty conclusive! Perhaps!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of specifics to this study that are important to tease out. First, the group of kids that they looked at were 12-14 years old (basically, received education at 12, followed up with a survey at 14). The average age, in the U.S., when people have sex the first time is roughly 16-17. Granted, I don't have the statistics on standard deviation here, but I'm fairly confident that you're looking at a group where the percentage of people who are having sex is going to be...well, I'd be willing to bet outside the first standard deviation. If I'm wrong about this, and if anyone actually does have the full statistics on hand, please, send them my way. So, my first criticism - the age group they're looking at isn't exactly the best for determining long-term effectiveness (also note, 33% of this group had sex anyway. Granted, that's lower than the other two groups, but...we're still talking about a large percentage of the group. Another criticism is that no matter what the sex education, a lot of kids are still going to have sex at a young age. A more important question than whether or not you can prevent them from having sex until they're a few years older may be whether they have the knowledge to do it safely. I wish I could add "smartly" to that, but...well...as much as I know kids are going to have sex, pretty much no matter what, I don't think it's usually the smart thing to do).

My second, and more important criticism, is that this isn't an abstinence-only program! At least, it's not the sort of A-O program we're used to seeing and that have been funded by the government in previous years. That is to say, this program is abstinence-focused - it suggests that kids hold off on sex until they're "ready," (not necessarily until marriage), it doesn't present the information with any moral overtones, sex is not described as dirty or bad or evil, and while they don't specifically promote contraceptives, they clear up some of the myths associated with them (largely fueled by other A-O programs) and don't disparage them. In short, you have a program that says, "Hey, you know, it's a good idea to wait until you're ready to have sex because it's a big emotional commitment, and there are huge possible consequences. But if you're going to do it, at least be informed about the facts of contraceptives and be safe about it." Hmm...that sounds like a program I could support, and it sure has hell doesn't sound like any A-O program I've ever heard of before.

See, I would actually support this program, but not under the title of "Abstinence-Only." I would totally grant "Abstinence-Focused," but that's a completely different matter. The real problem here is how the study has been reported. Conservatives have been crowing over it since its release (well, to be honest, it's the only study to show any effectiveness for "abstinence-only" education, even if it's just nominally, so I suppose they've been waiting a long time), and, of course, the media is all a buzz, twitterpated, as it were. See, for example, CNN's discussion. Here it's all breathless excitement about a "game-changer," and how abstinence education really works! But as I've already said, no, not really. They mention about halfway through the article that the program doesn't have moral overtones and focuses on abstinence till you're "ready" instead of until marriage, but fails to mention that this kind of program could already receive funding under the current administration's plans and is not disqualified as the disproven A-O claims of other programs.

This isn't difficult, media, really. It takes a little extra effort, a few extra strokes at the keyboard, but...seriously. You're just adding fuel to fire to allow people to call this abstinence only and how it just goes to show that we were right to fund those programs all along (even when they didn't work!). I'm disappointed, but not surprised. Wait, maybe that means I'm not really disappointed, just a bit more jaded. Thanks, Media!

Post-Script Note - My criticisms are primarily directed towards the media reporting of this study, but I will level one major criticism at the study title itself - "Efficacy of a Theory-Based Abstinence-Only Intervention of 24 Months." I don't know if these guys are trying to rebrand abstinence only, which would be okay with me; don't see a problem with playing with the commonly-known conception of the word, which happens a lot in science and is largely forgivable; or are trying to promote other abstinence-only education programs, which don't work, and which I would definitely have a big problem with. I'm going to give them the benefit of a doubt and say that it's potentially one of the first two, but...I guess we'll see. In an extremely positive note, and a bit of good on CNN for including it (though at the very end, of course), the study authors do go on to say that it is not an effective long-term strategy, because the expectation is that eventually, one way or another, people will have sex. Their primary goal seems to be reducing adolescent sexually-transmitted diseases, so, I'm actually rather in favor of these authors...I just really wish they had chosen a different name for the paper. And that the media wouldn't hype it as if all those other A-O programs really worked all along. That's the primary FAIL here.

Reactions After the State of the Union - Ragoth

2010-01-28T11:02:00.004-06:00

In thinking of the state of politics after the State of the Union Address, I believe I have settled on one of the pillars of my discontent with Obama's strategy - the eventual ramifications of his tact and attempts at bi-partisanship. By following the course that he has set so far, there is absolutely no way in which the Republicans cannot frame everything that happens as a win for them. Imagine - through constant compromise with basically everything the conservatives want, Obama and Congress have set up a situation in which they cannot appear to be the good guys - whatever policies end up working can be framed as working only because the conservatives compromised the proposal down to its essential and workable parts. Any proposal that fails they will still claim victory from because, to be honest, it's not like they voted for it anyway.

Even more sickening is the rush that Democrats seem to be in to push Bernanke through confirmation again. This is a political time bomb waiting to go off. There are a few Senators on both sides who are opposed to it, but this is definitely a case where the majority of the Democrats are for his confirmation and the majority of the Republicans are against it. Meanwhile, Republican Senators have requested and obtained several documents that purport to show that Bernanke was aware of the consequences of the bailout and ignored the advice of his staff to give 100 cents on the dollar in the CDS bailout. If the Democrats push Bernanke through quickly, the Republicans can merely hold out and release their documents after the confirmation and point the finger at the Democrats and say "See, these guys are in league with the bankers!"...and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. The Republicans would begin to seize the mantle of populism, even when they have all been hand-in-hand with the banks and other corporate interests. Bernanke should be pulled from the nomination, and hopefully someone will get Geithner out as well. Hell, I'd love to have Spitzer back. Honestly, I could give a damn who he had sex with - what matters to me is whether or not he was doing his job, and, to a large extent, indeed he was doing a great job of policing Wall Street. When you have champagne parties on Wall Street to celebrate the resignation of Spitzer...well, maybe he was doing something right.

A bit more after the fold...

It seems telling, also, that all of a sudden the Dems don't actually need 60 senators to get something passed. They can confirm Bernanke with 50 senators, just fine. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, and I don't think this requires some real conspiracy...but it's interesting at the least that whenever a proposal comes up that favors corporate or financial interests, we only need 50 votes. Whenever it's a progressive measure, all of a sudden we can't do a damn thing without 60 votes (and probably not even then). Conspiracy? No. Politicians being politicians and voting for those who really support and pay for them...yes, exactly. It's even more disheartening looking into the face of a ruling on unlimited corporate spending...

So, I continue to question Obama's continued insistence on bi-partisanship. The Republicans have made it overly clear that they will never be satisfied with any compromise and will never vote for any of his policies. Likewise, in the past eight years, we saw how the Republicans got bi-partisan support. I'm not saying that I approve of this approach, but at least it was effective. Through threats and rhetoric, they demanded bipartisanship and largely got it. At the very least, the Republicans won the rhetoric battle - "Those who oppose this legislation are against the American people," or are "supporting terrorists," etc.

On a slightly more positive note - Obama has proposed to repeal "Don't Ask - Don't Tell." This is a good step, I feel. I have yet to hear a good argument for discriminating against sexual orientation in the military, and more than discriminating against race or gender. If someone feels like they have one, I'm all ears, but so far I've been rather unimpressed.

Anyway, I'm sure Jason has a much more in-depth analysis and reaction to the whole thing, and I'd certainly love to hear it.

Was I Wrong to Defend Obama - After Massachusetts

2010-01-24T11:51:00.003-06:00

After the polls closed in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the fate of the health care bill never seemed more bleak. It calls into question my previous post celebrating Obama's tack in pursuing the Health Care bill. My interpretation is that the results exploited what I take to be Obama's core weakness and in fact do represent a strong rebuff to Obama's tact. Indeed, I have been over-optimistic in evaluating Obama's strategy. However, given that I think the weakness is apparent it offers a sense of how to move forward. The health care bill should be passed and electioneering should be fully embraced. Let the 2010 election begin!

Brown's victory does fully indicate both the anti-establishment energy symbolized, though not encapsulated, by the Teabaggers. It also revealed democrats misunderstanding of their mandate after the 2008 season. Voters had finally recognized that the Republican party was running our country off the rails and wanted a new course. However, our primary demand as voters was to fix the decayed government structure (both regulatory and budgetary). Health Care was, initially, a great vehicle for doing this and demonstrating how Democrats are in fact different governors than Republicans. The ultimate failure is that there was no broad discursive framing and leadership by Democrats tying the Health Care bill to setting the right course.

Conservatives began pulling ahead of Democrats in late Spring 2009 as "Death Panels" and such caught fire. Conservatives successfully tied the apprehension and disappointment with government management to health care and effectively began turning swing voters. We shouldn't look at this as a wide-spread rational decision that health care is communism or an irrational manipulation of voters through sensationalism. Rather, I believe, in general, voters began to distrust the bill and the process because they can't evaluate the bill itself (few in this country can really) and they are genuinely upset about the economy and mistrust government's ability to keep its house in order.

The Democrats' and Obama's failure was their inability to reframe the bill as a jobs and economy bill. It's a given that liberal America in general does not have the kind of media army that Republicans have. However, there has not been a significant media campaign for the Democratic Plan that has been able to grasp the mainstream media's attention. This, I believe, is Obama's mistake. If Obama had taken more authorship of the bill in the field of media, a genuine Democratic framing could have emerged in mainstream discourse to counteract voters' apprehension. All of this is water under the bridge now that the whole approach to the bill itself is under review.

I would love to see a push to count the votes. Put together a great bill, challenge Republicans and centrist democrats to put their votes on the books, and fight it out in the elections. I don't think anyone with power to do this also has the gall and confidence that the votes are there to push this strategy. So, in terms of a compromise, I believe a pared down bill sold simply on government responsibility, job creation, and budget reduction would be the best strategy. These values are easy to tie into the spirit of the vote in Massachusetts and can still accomplish the most of what is left in Health Care. I think Republicans would be confident enough to put their votes on the books to get the votes in November. What this does though is put Democrats on the offensive in setting the agenda given that it's their bill. Supposing such a bill might pass in March or April perhaps, it leaves a full seven or eight months to get a jobs and budget bill and fight it out in the voting booths.

The Health Care bill is not the death of the Democratic Party. We can't forget that the Republican Party has a distinct and recent track record of irresponsibility. There is a strong, internal fight in the party between "true" conservatives and moderates that will polarize the party and alienate them from the middle. There is no Republican vision for the country. There are tag lines of less government and fiscal responsibility, but no actual plans; particularly given that, any conservative-favored budget cuts on the social safety-net would be roundly rejected in a recession and Democrats are actually winning on foreign policy. The 2010 elections are still Democrats' to lose.

That being said, Democrats recent electoral track-record shows the party's own inability to effectively frame its policies in terms of basic, common American values. Obama was incredibly effective at making these connections and his re-engagement in the electoral process indicates Democrats will fair better than their recent elections indicate. The real question is whether or not the candidates they field will actually be able to do their job. That, for me, is the million dollar question. As well as the now unlimited corporate donations to the election process.

God Help us All

2010-01-09T22:26:00.002-06:00

That's right, an estimated 70 million new Americans decided this year that there's no solid evidence for global warming and over 35 million (roughly 100 million in total) do not believe there is any evidence for global warming. So, what is the cost of self-serving lies I dare ask my conservative politicos? That's right, it doesn't matter as long as it gets you and your party into power.

In Defense of Obama

2010-01-03T12:38:00.007-06:00

In response to my colleague's disapproval of Obama's handling of Health Care below, I would like to offer a counter argument. I think Obama, despite one glaring fault, has handled Health Care extremely well. Future presidents should learn from his approach. The problems that have hampered the bill-making process which Ragoth cites are not marks on Obama's record, but rather the results of the broader American political culture and structural facts about how our legislative institutions operate.

Obama's single greatest achievement in the Health Care debate is letting the legislature do its job on its terms. The Health Care bill is the single largest legislative undertaking since Medicare with so many constituencies, laws, regulations, and potential strategies that it is simply impossible for a single person to be completely satisfied with the bill. The political capital being spent, burned, and built is incomprehensible. Had Obama come out with his own piece of legislation, it would have crashed as miserably and dishearteningly as the Clinton bill. Not only do we have the Clinton example to look to as a comparative, but also the string of failed Bush legislative projects like immigration and social security reform. The Bush administration's series of legislative failures is a great example of what happens when the executive takes too much initiative in the legislative process.

So, rather than write the bill himself (excuse my artistic reification), he outlined specific, largely inflexible, and sound goals for the bill. The shortcomings of how the bills have come out were not his choices. They are the results of the legislative process driven by the relationship between the party machines, polity, and interest groups. Republicans will not vote for the bill period, despite the fact that much of their bill (most prominenty, the exchanges) will end up in the final bill. There are too many new Democrats in vulnerable districts and moderate Democrats to take full advantage of the Democratic supermajority. So, a big public option or single-payer system is simply politically infeasable. We will have to wait for health care to implode before the American political conscious is ready for such a radical market restructuring.

What Obama has done wrong is not spend his own political capital to better shape the legislative process. To be sure, he has pushed his weight around in the many private meetings he's held throughout this process. That may be why the bill will be deficit neutral, cost-cutting, and ultimately politically feasible. However, he has not publicly pushed specifics in the initiative to the point of having any piece of the bill put in his name (though Glen Beck would have you believe otherwise). For example, he could very well have personally owned the public option, stumped for it in a national campaign, and gave up other items (such as the abortion payment rules) to persuade the remaining moderate Democrats and secure the filibuster-proof majority. In this view, Obama is guilty by omission. However, this is hardly the ownership that detractors and critics attribute to the President (still love saying that).

To extend this out to the rest of Obama's presidency and wrap up my defense, I believe this is a great sign of exactly the kind of success Obama will have throughout the rest of his terms. While Republicans will never vote "yes" on any liberal issue (i.e. immigrant citizenship, carbon emissions regulation, recession spending), their party infrastructure, ideological puritanism, and general detachment from the majority of Americans will insulate Obama's legislative goals from strong Republican interference. Yes, some Democrats will probably lose their seats in the next elections, but Republicans will not be able to legitimately claim a mandate within the next four years. Think the "Anyone but Bush" sloganeering.

This will enable Obama to continue to work his guiding, but hands-off approach to the upcoming, major initiatives that he put forward in his campaign. Unless Obama changes tactics; environmental, government spending, immigration, and other monumental legislative undertakings will follow the same trajectory. No one will be fully satisfied, but we will witness major advances in government policy. If Obama learns from Health Care and Democrats maintain their majority or miraculously expand their electoral success, we could see the most effective and long-lasting solutions to modern social problems in our life times. They won't be silver bullets as Health Care has well-demonstrated, but they will be leaps talked about in terms of "light years." Obama's greatest contribution then will be the exemplary leadership that guides without doing everything himself.

Why I Probably Won't Be Voting for Obama Again

2009-12-15T11:36:00.003-06:00

It would seem that meaningful health care reform has been killed in the Senate. Really and utterly destroyed. Joe Lieberman, Bill Nelson, and a few other conservative "Democrats" have said that they will not vote for the bill as it stands. Let us take a brief detour through the history of this process.

Medicare was created in the U.S. in 1965 under Lyndon B. Johnson. It is offered to those who are U.S. citizens or have been living as legal permanent residents for 5 years or more, who are 65 and older, and have been paying taxes for Medicare for at least 10 years. Medicare is a single-payer system, and in fact is the largest single-payer system in the world, covering 43 million Americans in 2007. The program has been under constant scrutiny since its inception, and indeed has a lot of problems - one of the largest being huge fraud issues. Medicare has been updated several times since its creation, and largely has gotten better by most measures of such things. Conservative opposition has always been the strongest, and typically fall along two pillars - 1) It's too expensive; and 2) It leads to socialism.

As to expense...yes, I'll give them that. The Medicare system needs significant overhaul to cut costs and perform audits on treatments. Clean up the program, and you will probably see significant savings. Al Franken has made this a huge talking point - the guy is very much in favor of Medicare, but recognizes it needs significant work.

As for the second pillar, that of fear-of-socialism...well, I offer this to the conservatives. If you really and strongly are opposed to all "socialized medicine," and are so concerned about principles and values as you claim, then propose an amendment to eliminate Medicare. Get rid of it. Tell all your constituents that Medicare is "evil" and "socialized" and is ruining American freedom and that you're going to eliminate it and allow the elderly to exercise their freedom of choice and buy their own health insurance out of their own savings (because subsidizing them would be exactly the same problem). You'll be saving money and protecting American values. I don't understand why you haven't already done this when you controlled Congress and the Presidency.

More below the fold...

Let's jump ahead to the Clinton administration. A bit arbitrary and skipping over some things, definitely, but this is a blog post, not a history of health care in America. Clinton made it an important part of his presidency (in some parts spearheaded by the First Lady) to introduce health care reform. Part of the problem was that it wasn't sold very well, and conservatives and the health care industry made their case loudly and well (whether or not it was a valid case is an entirely different point, but here is the problem inherent in humans - we don't often, if ever, make choices based purely on logic). Clinton tried and got little done - it was all basically shot down by Congress. We had no meaningful reform, despite the fact that so many conservative members of Congress claimed that they were quite happy to legislate reform, so long as it was the right reform.

Let's skip to the Obama administration. This is not as arbitrary. For more than a decade very little was done with health care, despite conservative control of government. That silence may, in fact, be the most damning evidence against them of all.

Obama campaigned primarily on promises of health care reform, on significant reform in foreign policy, on constitutional adherence and on transparency in government. In foreign policy...well, he's done a pretty good job. He has restored a large part of foreign nation's relations with the U.S., and has taken a tough but measured stance on specific groups. While I don't fully agree with the idea of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan if your only purpose is hunting down the reported 100 or so people left, I'll give it to him, it's a strong political message, and at least he's showing he is attentive to the situation there.

However, Obama has made little moves to eliminate or reduce Bush's foreign or economic policies. I see this as a significant failure. The Patriot Act, tax cuts, even the TARP bailout. Let me be the first to state that I do agree that some sort of bailout was necessary to prevent a deeper depression - whether or not we should have had a bailout may not be the right question. How the bailout was carried out...that is entirely a different question. The bailout should not have been, I think, at a $1:$1 ratio, nor do I think that it should have come without any oversight or regulations. Basically, nothing has been done to fix the basic system. Obama's speech in the past few days about the bankers' responsibility? Please. A glorified publicity stunt - a public slap on the wrist, nothing more. He's asking them to self-regulate. The media complains that the White House doesn't have much leverage in this situation. Please. My ass the White House doesn't have leverage. Let's look at it this way - the only reason most of these banks are still afloat is because the American tax-payers bailed them out. Obama, as the representative of the American taxpayers, should be able to tell the banks a few things, as that we own a rather large stake in them now. And what should he tell them? Well, first of all, that they're going to open up lending again. And if they need a little assistance in that, well, we could just eliminate the whole credit default swap mess that got us into trouble to begin with. Executive decision - regulatory power, hell, use whatever agency you want to decide that they're fraudulent and just effing ban them. That's a big stick right there.

But Obama consistently makes deals with the bankers and continues to open loophole after loophole for them. I believe that he is smart enough to realize that he does have the ability to push for regulation, (certainly Britain and France have recognized it). I believe that if he had the will to do it, he could accomplish it relatively easily. Which leads me to believe that he simply doesn't want to do it.

So now let's look into health care. If we go with the most progressive/liberal option, Obama could have pushed for a single-payer system. This would essentially be like expanding Medicare to everyone. The basic pros would be everyone would be covered with health insurance, and assured coverage. The basic cons would be costs and likely tax levies. But, instead of pushing for this, they compromised to a strong public option - a government run insurance plan that most anyone could buy into. This would also have come with significant regulation reforms to bring down costs in other areas such as Medicare. I was in support of this plan to begin with, but again and again the Democrats compromised, and the White House stood basically silent or encouraged such compromising. Now the public option, if it happens at all, seems likely to be a completely toothless measure that would cover very few people, be vastly more expensive than it would have been to begin with, and chock-full of loopholes. I am not in support of this type of public option.

Now, granted, the House passed a proposal with a public option. It's not everything that we would want, but...maybe it's a bit of a step forward. But let's look at the Senate. Here we have the utter breakdown. The Obama administration has again and again called for "bipartisan support" for this bill, and has signaled his willingness to compromise again and again to get even one Republican vote. But that's exactly the problem - they have given you the laundry list for what it will cost to get even a single vote from their side of the aisle. We'll have to eliminate the possibility of a public option, we'll have to eliminate the expansion of Medicare, we'll have to mandate that everyone gets private insurance coverage, we'll have to reduce regulation. Essentially, if we take out all meaningful reform and fill the coffers of the private insurance companies, then we might get a Republican vote or two...but probably not.

So here are the basics - the Senate's bill does not include a public option. That got eliminated due to "conservative Democrats" like Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson. Then someone proposed that we could expand Medicare to people 55 and older in special cases. But Joe Lieberman didn't like that, so, of course, we have to bow our heads to him. The Obama administration has made a deal with him and has basically told Harry Reid to accept whatever Lieberman says. Lieberman says that not only will he not vote for any bill that has a public option or Medicare expansion, but that he will join a Republican filibuster.

Let's look at the situation. If the Democrats had any spine at all, this would be a very easy fix. There is a special option for budget resolutions in Congress called reconciliation - it's a fairly drastic measure, but let's be honest...the Republicans used it all the time when they were in power, including to get the Bush tax cuts passed. Back when they were in control, reconciliation was just another means of doing business, while filibustering (the Democrat's option at that time) was a horrible and obstructionist policy. Now that the Democratic Party controls Congress, reconciliation is a means of railroading policies and destroying American freedoms, while filibustering is a noble venture to protect the people. Hmm...politics as normal.

Anyway, the point is, you could have a Senator, one of the ones already locked in to vote for a reform bill, go on any of the programs that Lieberman and Nelson are touring and say something like the following:

"Oh, hi Mr. Lieberman, Mr. Nelson. I'm sorry to see that you've been wasting your time on these talk shows. You see, we've decided to split the bill. Yeah, it's going to be a headache, but, here's the thing. We're going to put in a public option, or an expansion of Medicare, or whatever the American people want, and make it a budget matter. Then we're going to push it through in reconciliation. I'm sorry, but you are effectively irrelevant now. Oh, what's that you say? It's going to cost too much? Well, it's up-front costs, maybe; but the Budget Office has already returned estimates that show that these measures would save us a helluva lot of money over the next decade. So, at the very least, it's budget-neutral. What about that war that's going on? I notice the conservative senators across the aisle never had any budget problems when Bush was in office. How odd it is that they and you are complaining about the budget now. Oh, and we're going to push private insurance out of business? Look, I really don't think that's going to happen - FedEx, UPS, and the USPS all coexist quite happily. And if they have to trim their belts a bit and offer better services, well, that's capitalism for you. Socialism? To begin with, that's ridiculous, and on the other side of it, a majority of Americans want significant health care reform and are in favor of a public option. So, you tell me, if the American people want it, why are you standing in their way? Even if it does smack of socialism to you?

"You see, (interviewer's name), the problem is that most of us in America believe that when you have two opposing views, the truth must be somewhere in the middle. Our issue is that here we have one side, the conservatives and people like Mr. Lieberman, who are so far off into non-reality, that even when you take the middle ground between them and the facts, you're still wrong. It's like when you split the differences between American progressives and the "pure" Republican party, you're still pretty conservative. We need a fact-based approach to this, and here are some basic facts - private insurance premiums have continued to rise unchecked in the past years; health insurance is covering fewer and fewer people for fewer and fewer conditions, and thus excluding more people for more conditions; the majority of American tax-payers, who people like myself and Mr. Lieberman are ultimately accountable to, want strong health care reform like a public option; the people elected Obama, who ran on a platform of strong health care reform; and no significant reform has happened in quite a long time. Beyond these basic facts, there are the numbers of comparing different health care systems around the world. On any standard measures, ours ranks fairly low. Conservative congressmen are wont to say "Our health care system is the best in the world." I can only assume that they include the V.A. and Medicare in that, as they often tout our treatment of veterans and the elderly. If that is so, why are they so opposed to a government-run plan for the rest of us?

Could it be that these senators and representatives are not truly representing the will of the people? Could it be that they have been bought off by private insurance companies? We know they receive significant amounts of money through that lobby, and it seems that opposition to health care reform is directly correlated with the amount of money being received from them. Which brings us back to Mr. Lieberman, senator from Connecticut. You stand to gain a lot from revenue increases for private insurance companies, Mr. Lieberman, and have proven time and time again that you have no real interest in actual reform. Thus, we have decided to cut you out of this process. We are going to reconciliation, and we will spend every nickel we can to run an actual progressive against you in Connecticut in the next election. Don't pretend to be surprised or angry. You can pack your things and move to the other side of the aisle if you want, but for now, you've effectively been cut out of the debate."

You want to tell me that the Democrats don't have leverage to spare right now? Fuck, it's like everyone's taken a stupid pill. I think the issue here is that, with a few notable exceptions, no one, including Obama, is really interested in creating real reform in this area. Maybe the lobby is too big and there's too much money in it for them; maybe they were never interested in reform to begin with but just wanted to garner some of the progressive vote - I don't know. What I do know is that Obama has completely given up on a lot of his campaign promises. While I think that's normal for politicians, it's also disappointing to have allowed the process to go this far and then have the guy who proposed it in the first place stomp it down.

I know that Rahm Emmanuel has his strategy - gather whatever support you can from conservatives by compromising, because progressives will never vote for the other guy. They're expendable. Well, maybe that's true. We're not so crazy as to vote for ass-hats who have been coming to the forefront of the conservative movement recently. But, maybe we're not so stupid as to keep voting for people who are going to turn out to be conservative-lite in the end.

So, for now, I'm probably not going to be voting for Obama again. Don't caution me about voting against whatever crazy-person the Republicans offer up...at this point, I'd almost relish knowing again that the person in power has no intent to do anything but selfishly promoting their own power and control. I'm not sure that it's less dangerous than having someone who promises so much and not only fails to delivers, but purposefully does the opposite. Obama can win me back, but it's going to be a hard, hard fight.

Who Wins in the Health Care Overhaul: Patients, Hospitals, or Insurers

2009-10-25T11:27:00.011-05:00

Evaluating Republican and Democrat health care proposals can be boiled down to how the plans impact the Three Interests of Hospitals, Insurers, and Patients. It doesn't seem like you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to our health care market. I argue that the Republican plan most supports Insurers and Patients but does little to stem health care costs and puts the majority of bargaining power in the hands of Insurers. The Democrats' plan, broken down into those with a strong or weak/no public option, supports Patients. Ultimately, Patients win in the Democratic proposal, with mild benefit to Hospitals and mild or adverse outcomes for Insurers. These proposals however miss the fundamental problem with the health care economy - the existence of an adversely incentivized arbiter between patient and doctor known as the insurer.

Right now, Insurers and wealthy-treating, research-oriented Hospitals are the winners. In our liberal system, market regulations allow, and industry practices take advantage of, the relative health and wealth of middle and upper class populations to offer high quality plans and care because the wealthy can afford them. Those who can't afford the newest treatments or drugs or become too costly (i.e. sick or disabled) are the uninsurable and underfunded in research. By excluding the poor and unhealthy, our current system is allowed to operate on largess for the wealthy and parasitic accumulation of debt and disease on the poor.

The under-publicized Republican plan provides a range of incentives to patients, businesses, and hospitals to participate in the current insurance industry. Basically, the plan allows more people to have the kind of insurance we have now without any strings attached to Insurers. The cornerstones of the Republican plan are tax credits to the uninsured to pay for health insurance, limitations on medical liability, and insurance pools for individuals, small businesses and other groups (www.gop.gov, Rep Roy Blunt's summary) . There are other, more ambiguous and less ambitions proposals in the Republican Plan. I focus on these three and mention some of the other highlights in saying that Insurers are the winners here.

Insurers win because the Republican plan is built on making it easier for people to get private insurance without changing the insurance industry. Ironically enough, what is asserted as lowering the cost of health care are the insurance pools and tax credits that make insurance more affordable. Affordable health insurance is not cheaper health care. To put a price on these subsidies, the Congressional Budget Office puts the additional cost for just a quarter of the uninsured at $1 trillion over the 10 years. In addition, there is language in the Republican House Bill to incentivize Medicare and SCHIP (children's insurance) patients to move to private insurance. While these proposals would add to the health care roles, they in fact do not reduce the cost of health care.

The real cost-cutting measures for Republicans are in medical liability claims (House Bill), "increased competition," and efficiency savings. First, by capping how much and who you can sue for, say, dying from getting the wrong heart in a transplant, doctors and hospitals can reduce their costs by having to pay less in their own insurance, reduce their defensive mechanisms (like quality assurance procedures), and paying less in the case of a lawsuit. Now, while I'm not sure what the difference between a $20 million and $200 million legal suit means for the plaintiffs, the logic of price reduction is sound. Such savings however are not a panacea. The beneficiaries here are Hospitals and Insurers and (indirectly directly, around the elbow to the knees) Patients (maybe).

Second, GOP.gov asserts that their plan would increase competition by allow patients to get insurance from any state and comparing coverage and rates through an online portal. The actual Patients' Choice bill does not mention inter-state plans but Insurance Exchanges at the state level. This is the only market restructuring proposal in the Republican Plan. While such an exchange would make insurance shopping easier, it is unclear whether or not it would actually increase market competition. As we all know from buying cars, televisions, appliances, and other products from mature industries; competition often produces fewer, bigger firms and less product diversity (not to mention an ambiguous relationship with the quality of the product).

By subsidizing and incentivizing private insurance with minimal changes in the insurance industry itself, the Republican plan looks to expand private insurance's customer base without interfering with business as usual. More people would be insured (though how many poor folks the Republicans would be willing to hand money out to is historically laughable), but through the same kinds of insurance that we have now and which have not proven to reduce medical costs or properly incentivize treatment and research. The biggest winners would be Insurers and maybe the poorer hospitals and those receiving the tax deductions depending on how much is actually spent subsidizing private insurance. When it comes to market bargaining power, who gets to enforce cuts on whom, private Insurers win out hands down. Hospitals and the current cost structures inflating our Health bills would be relatively untouched.

The loose ends of the Republican plan are where both parties' plans come together to benefit hosptials. They include a number of government oversight mechanisms for improving hospital efficiency, rewards for evidence-based medicine, and a focus on lower-cost prevention and treatment approaches. These proposals are not game-changers or world-makers in terms of policy. These oversight proposals cannot change our overall health care economy because they do not internalize the motive to cut costs, reduce the economic drag of the uninsured (by insuring them, covering their procedures, or otherwise eliminating the burden of their health debt), or guarantee adequate health care to meet our standard of living.

The Democratic Plan, depending on whether or not and to what extent there is a government run insurance company, benefits Patients most. (I use "Patients" instead of "people" because insurance agents, doctors, nurses, and officials are people too.) Patients benefit through subsidies and the elimination of rejections based on pre-existing conditions (a guarantee made in the Republican plan, but remains highly ambigious in that it's supposed to be implimented through increasing or creating new (unspecified) programs for those with pre-existing conditions). On the subsidy front, both Republicans and Democrats are on the same general page.

The game changer, as it always is, is the extent to which government will be involved in paying for health care. The bigger the public plan, the more dangerous it is to Insurers. The weaker the plan, the less effective the bill will be in changing the underlying economics of health care. As I said above, without a change in the market structure, there will be no stopping health care inflation, better incentivizing research and development, or adequatly supporting the health of poor and rural populations.

This gets to the heart of why you cannot make all three Poles of health care happy and actually improve the American health care system. Health insurance is an arbiter between patient and care. The current free market nature of that barrier means that the bureaucrat mediating my relationship with my doctor is in it to make money from both of us. In a government run program, the bureaucrat between my doctor and me is in to provide a service within his budget. Neither are, at bottom, in it to make sure I get the best care or that the doctor and hospital offer the best care at a sustainable pay structure. The public option replaces the doctor-greed-patient relationship with the doctor-administrator-patient relationship.

There's an economic wall disconnecting producer and buyer and, in both cases, the middle man has the most leverage to make patients pay more and receive less and hospitals provide more for less without quality of care entering into the patient-hospital relationship. Hospitals don't compete with one another on price and it is extremely difficult to know what a patients' care would have been like at another hospital. To improve the hospital-insurer relationships (paying hospitals more and getting better care for the dollar), you have to increase prices on patients to fund the added expense. To reduce costs for the patient, the insurer must force hospitals to cut costs and shed unprofitable practices like prevention programs. There is another option for health care economics.

Let's imagine that insurers had no market bargaining power, meaning consumers can choose any hospital and insurance plan they want at any moment and hospitals can treat anyone regardless of whether and what form of payment. (This would be much like the world of a single payer which works on a administrator-hospital-patient traid). The connection between patient and hospital is effectively immediate and the health care economy is driven by hospital competition and the balance between quality of care and cost of care. Insurance then is an administrative task of making sure the hospital can cover its costs while patients get maximized quality. In this case, insurers make no profit and have no bargaining power, but hospitals and patients find a free market balance between demand for and availability of services.

Where bargaining power is concentrated in the hands of the insurer, only a maximum of two of the three players can win. In the Democratic plan, patients win because the government can negotiate lower prices with hospitals, drug companies, and other health care providers; out-compete private insurers; and subsidize below market-value plans. Think of the U.S. Postal Service. In the Republican plan, Insurers win through more consumers, government funded hospital cost-cutting, and government-absorbed high-risk/high cost patients. Imagine the Cash for Clunkers program without rules about mileage. In both plans, the middle man's leverage ensures that patient and hospital are detached from one another.

In neither plan are we really addressing this fundamental problem with the economics of health care.

Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?

2009-10-11T11:26:00.004-05:00

Obama does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama is a relatively decent, left-of-center President who has restored America's standing in the world and taken steps to ensure peace. Fine. But he still presides over a country that practices "extraordinary rendition," where people are nabbed and sent to countries where they can be legally tortured (in ways that make Gitmo look like Disney World). That is simply a defeating condition of his eligibility to receive a peace prize. And I am not even claiming he is a horrible president; I realize his actions are circumscribed by political realities he can't control. But so far he has done exceedingly little to transcend those realities, opting instead to prove how adept he is at working within them. Again, fine: he is a good politician. But so far he has not shown the moral courage that would make him truly deserving of the prize.

The Supreme Court on Corporations: Citizens United vs. the FEC

2009-09-22T12:03:00.012-05:00

The current case of Citizens United vs. the FEC, the Supreme Court is confronting one of the most foundational constitutional issues since Brown vs. Board. Despite all of the angles taken by the plaintiffs and justices about fair elections, the role of money in politics, and the purient interests of government to make rules in regards to free speech; the one that matters most is the most taken for granted: does the bill of rights apply to corporations sui generis? My answer, as I will elaborate below, must be no; but I will consider the implications if the court decides it does.

The core rule driving the debate is that it is currently illegal for corporations to spend money on "electioneering communications" (meaning "an appeal for a vote for or against a specific candidate"). The rationale for the challenge is whether or not Hilary: the Movie is such a communication and advertisement, and whether or not the rules of enforcement are overly burdensome. (See Cornel Law for a full but short overview.) At face value, these claims are very different from the arguments being made to the Supreme Court and, frankly, this case could technically be solved without any major change in statute. However, the Appelant and thus the court and Appelee (Citizens United) have focused the issue on whether or not the law against electioneering communications is constitutional by way of arguing that free speech protections apply to corporations. Listen to the arguments at NPR , read the Citizens United brief (pdf), read the FEC's brief (pdf).

The question of whether electioneering communications are unconstitutional stems directly from the interpretation of who (and now what) the first amendment applies to. Scalia makes the argument that 95% of corporations are small business “indistinguishable from the individual who owns them.” Ginsberg's take is that corporations are not "endowed by their creator with inalienable rights" and raises the additional issue of corporations partly owned by non-citizens (see re-examination available on NPR or secondary news source).

While these touch the core issue of the application of the first amendment, they do not touch on the legal basis of corporations - which are not mentioned in the constitution and are pure legislative constructs from a legal point of view. Corporations are, in a legal sense, only what legislatures say they are and are not, and only a constitutional amendment can override that.

While I will ignore convenient arguments about judicial activism and rewriting the Constitution, the basic question is whether or not the Bill of Rights applies to corporations and the answer is a potential watershed moment in our history. Let's go into some of the potential implications. First, to extend the right of free speech to corporations subverts any rules on what can be seen on television or expressed in any other media except for what is already proscribed for individuals (including language, sexual content, violence, drug-makers' claims about a new drug, etc.).

Second, the peaceably assemble clause of the first amendment could also be used to severly limit laws on how corporations can be organized and run. For example, if a corporation's plant is shut down for sweatshop practices, the government can be taken to court for preventing peaceful assembly. Other such practices may include certain types of price fixing, cartel formation, and any scale of merger. Free market supporters who may not have a problem with the first and second implications should not forget that they would imply that we lose the ability to control monopolies and whatever their impact on government and politics more generally.

Lastly, the notion of voting rights also comes to the table if corporations are treated as people. While the idea that corporations would themselves have a vote is a constitutional stretch of cosmological proportion, to rule that corporations must be treated as people under the constitution raises these issues directly.

I don't mean to come off as a sensationalist about this ruling, but these issues become new fundamental questions with potentially history-changing impacts if the Supreme Court so rules. Of course, if the majority opinion does not base its finding on the notion that corporations are people, none of this matters nearly as much.

My guess is that the ruling will be overturned (Citizens United wins) because the law itself is too broad to defend the purient interest, the argumentation supporting the purient interest has been poorly defended over the course of the case (in large part because it is strapped by overbroad wording), and the right-leaning court is just not gonna hear it. However, such a blatant endorsement of the corporate personhood position will likely be found in an assenting opinion, but not the majority opinion (thus giving it credence without necessarily the force of Supreme Court interpretation); while the dissenting opinion will opine the view as it really supports the majority opinion and offer suggestions on how to regulate corporate money in campaigns given the majority interpretation.

Can We Sue for Being Offended?

2009-09-21T11:37:00.002-05:00

A quick one for today. A Christian hotel-owning couple is being sued for offending a Muslim patron. Now, the actual elements of the conversation are not reportable due to the court proceedings, so I don't know exactly what happened. What appears to have happened, however, is that a Muslim patron became involved in a conversation about religion. The Muslim patron became offended at the conversation, and went to the police, and complained that she had been offended by the conversation, and felt there were "threatening or oppressive" elements to it.

Where do I stand on this? At this stage, I stand completely behind the Christian couple. If the same thing had happened at a Muslim hotel, believe me, I would stand completely behind the Muslim couple. This has nothing to do with the religious beliefs of either party. It's a basic element of free speech. You do not, or at least should not, have the right to not be offended. If a conversation is offending you, walk away, don't sue the people. I don't care if it offends your deeply held religious beliefs any more than I would care if it offends your deeply held political leanings. Trust me, if this is all it takes, I'm sueing the pants off of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, to name just a few. I am almost daily offended by the things they say. But does that make any sense? No. They have a right to their freedom of expression, just as I do, and I freely exercise that right and call them idiots and then list my reasons for doing so. That's the point.

Now, granted, this all took place in England, where the laws and the courts are a bit different, but even a commentator on the article brings up that the police are also charged with protecting freedom of expression, and that the Public Order Act has been used and is being used probably too aggressively, especially in cases where people's feelings are hurt.

Man, maybe I should change career paths and sue people for a living for a while. Then I can retire and drink away all my conscience concerns. On a remote island, or on top of some mountain.

Hm...it's not sounding so bad after all...

ACORN, Tea Parties, and Militias: the New Conservative Grassroots

2009-09-19T12:11:00.012-05:00

These three headline-makers signify the emergence of the newest wave of conservative grassroots organizing that will set the tone for the next brand of conservative politics. Within a long view of history, they are really not that unique. Looking to the near future, there are some very troubling dimensions, some healthy directions, and a nascent map for conservatives' political future. To sum it up briefly, the conservative grassroots is emerging as with all inter-election periods for the party out of power in the U.S.; however, it brings with it a dangerous fringe tied to the mainstream raising the question of how the grassroots will address its violent impulse.

The grassroots are the muscle and skeleton of political activity, from elections to petitions to agenda setting. This is particularly true for the grassroots of the party out of power. Remember all of the liberal anti-war, anti-WTO, and '06 and '08 election organizing during the Bush years? With the arrival of current Democratic power, the conservative grassroots have plenty of grievances to air with (seemingly) no hope of immediate success and a highly visible enemy to fight. At the center of the rebirth of the conservative grassroots are the Tea Party groups and emerging militias (including the hybrid militia-interest group Minutemen organizations) advocating for smaller, less intrusive government. While the social conservatives still penetrate the Tea Party groups, social conservativism of the anti-evolution, anti-homosexual, and other bible-thumping varieties are being comparatively deemphasized.

First, the ACORN catastrophe. You've been living in an internet news hole if you haven't heard about the everyday investigators posing as a pimp and prostitute getting advice from ACORN staff on escaping the law and taxes. Here's a list of primer reports: Original Source (Biggovernment.com), NY Times Blog Round-up , "Congress stops funds to ACORN". Just search "ACORN" on your favorite news aggregator for more than you will ever want to know.

So, what does this have to do with the grassroots conservative movement, since the specific motivations and political ideologies of the investigators are open to interpretation? First, it is an immense blow to progressive grassroots organizing on the marketing and funding front. While community organizing, like taxes, will never go away; the pure toxicity of being associated with this scandal is sure to further inspire the conservative grassroots and weaken liberal organizing. This is one of the many-yet-to-come successful attacks on liberal groups (though ACORN considers itself nonpartisan) that will continue to drive the conservative grassroots' sense of efficacy and purpose and weaken public trust in liberal causes. It is a major victory.

Compare this to the Tea Party protests in D.C. and across the country this week. The massive, well coordinated protests demonstrate the energy of the conservative grassroots and foreshadow the ideology that will be put forward in the next two election cycles - small government through reduced taxes, less market regulation, and less (non-socially conservative) law enforcement. The conservative grassroots are pissed at the bailout, the ballooned government deficit, and enlarged health care programs. Essentially, we have a libertarian wave tinged with some conservative Christian dogmatics. That is exactly what we will continue to hear in the next election cycle and what will drive the conservative grassroots to the poll. The big question for politicians who will be up for election is the extent to which these groups' ideology and counter-Democrat mobilizations will be taken up by independents and other conservative blocs (like the hawks, mainstream conservative Christians, and moderate conservatives). The big question for society at large is the extent to which these groups will become linked with the radical, violent fringe of militias and anti-immigration bigots.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's report on the resurgence of the malitia movement (that spawned Timohy McVeigh and includes other highlights such as Ruby Ridge and Waco) has helped spark an undercurrent of news reports on the issue of violent American malitias. The center's report links the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, the murder of a Latino Family in Arizona, and the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas with many others throughout the country to this growing militia movement. The storm of brutality is built on the injection of anti-immigration racism, a radical libertarian anti-Nationalism, and new fangled rebirth of white/Christian supremacy according to the report. The groups that have thus far been named in this movement include various wings of the minutemen movement, the Oath Keepers, the nativists, Birthers (who claim Obama is not American-born) and the NRA (due to their "Prepare for the Storm 2008" membership drive with gun manufacturers).

What may be more frightening now than in the 1990's version is the connections these groups and their ideology have with mainstream institutions. These groups' ideologues include Bill O'Reilly, lambasted for his "subtle encouragement" and *wink wink* commentary on the murder of Dr. Tiller, Lou Dobbs, for his racist special reports on illegal immigration and conspiracy theory episodes about Mexicans' invasion plans, and Fox commentator Dick Morris who said, "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over' — well, they're beginning to have a case." Incredibly, high level politicians have echoed the rhetoric including Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Texas Governor Rick Perry's talk of succession at an Austin Tea Party, and Representative Michelle Bachman's (Minn.) claim that Obama was creating "reeducation camps."

The conservative grassroots movement has its feet on the ground and the big question is how far and in what direction it will go. The violent bigotry of the militia movement has found rhetorical resonance with some mainstream conservatives, but it is seriously questionable as to what, if any of it, would actually translate into a policy platform or mainstream ideology. In fact, I would hope that some conservatives find it offensive that I mention the two in the same breath. The fact of the matter remains that, unlike the Muslim population, American conservatives have (and probably will continue to) largely failed to publically take a stand against or even acknowledge their own. The surprising exception is Glen Beck, though he continues to foment hatred and conspiracy theories. They have yet to prove that they are not like their fringe.

I anticipate a further escalation of conservative grassroots activism and the development of a more contemporary conservative ideology and platform over the next two years reaching an apex in a strong party platform in 2012. Along with this however, I too anticipate the largely uncheced growth of the violent fringe, more conspiracy theories and extremist policy quackery, and, unfortunately, more bloodshed in the name of the conservative agenda. I predict that either a large republican swing over the next two election cycles or a more intense attack like Oklahoma City will deflate the movement and turn it away from violence.

On a more optimistic note, should conservatives emerge as a reasonable force with the ability to know when they are being lied to by their leaders, then we might actually get a better, more responsible government in the support for reduced government spending and deficits. Though I doubt that any serious bipartisanship will happen within the next decade, the swing towards smaller government should at least put deficit reduction on the table before Obama's term is up and maybe some pork barrel regulations will finally be put in place (though I doubt it).

All in all, the Tea Parties are the map to the conservative future, there are conservatives who might kill you with an IED and some in the mainstream will condone it, and at the end of it all, some sad progress might be made.

The Sorcerer in California with Marriage Infedility...

2009-09-14T19:12:00.003-05:00

A few quickies for today, just for the chuckles of it all.

First, a completely straight article about magic in Islam. Now, the more secular or not-believing-in-magic among you, or those of you who just happen to think that religions other than your own are a little kooky, will probably find this somewhat humorous. I'll admit, I do too. I can't help myself. But there is an interesting point to take away from it. Note the descriptions of 1) the rituals performed by the magic-sellers and 2) the rituals performed by the religion-sellers, or, in this case, sheiks. Not so different, eh? Well, actually, that's to be expected. Traditionally there has been a very thin line between "magic" rituals and "religious" rituals. The difference, in some views, is only the kind of person performing the ceremony. You see, to both these people, the magic is real. The sheiks are just on the "good" side and will break a curse for a nominal fee. The "sorcerers" are on the "bad" side and may make or break a curse, for the right price. The rituals are nearly identical, it's just one guy gets to wear a funny robe or hat and claim ultimate divine authority, and the other guy wears a funny robe or hat and claims (usually) some lesser or personal authority. Now, for those of you who want to claim that we are too civilized for that kind of thing, need I remind you there are groups in this country who still practice and believe in faith healing, in praying for more rain or less rain, spiritual anointing, that prayers protect people, and that God may give you what you want if you ask and believe hard enough. A very, very thin line.

Secondly, this article about a recent study. It would seem that, on average, one out of every thirty-three women who regularly attend worship services have had sexual advances made by religious leaders. So, on average, for everyone 100 women in a congregation, 3 have been advanced upon by a religious leader. And two of those three were probably married at the time. Ahh...see, this is what I've tried to tell you before - watch the people who protest the loudest that they are the most moral. They're the ones typically hiding something. See, once you have it so ingrained in your head that you are the morally superior one, you can start writing off discrepancies, because you ARE moral, or God forgives those few discrepancies, and anyway, you're still much better than the rest of THOSE sinners, they must be ten times as worse. It's called cognitive dissonance, and it's one of the oldest tricks in the book. So, to be clear, I'm not saying "moral people aren't moral," I'm saying "people who CLAIM THE HARDEST to moral often are not." It just so happens that religions and religious people like to hold high that particular banner, and so there is a biased population there. Lest we forget Ted Haggard, who only recently has discovered (after years of fire-and-brimstone preaching against gays and divorcees, etc) that his sexuality is "complex" and will take time to resolve, after snorting meth with a gay prostitute...right. Lest we forget California Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who loves having affairs with "really hot" women, enjoys a bit of spanking, and...oh, is so totally against allowing gays the right to marriage in California and is a strong promoter of "traditional family values." Lest we forget all those Catholic priests who...well, you get the idea. This isn't commentary on religion directly, although anyone who knows me knows I have my beef with organized religion, especially when it tries to wiggle its way into policy, but it is something to be noted. Keep a careful eye on those moral vanguard, lest you be disappointed when you find out just how much of con men they are.

Lastly, a straight-faced sarcastic proposal to make divorce illegal in California. I think he's very good. A little obvious with the sarcasm of it all, but very good overall. I've always wondered exactly what people meant by "traditional marriage." It's sort of a moving target. People throw up other words like "Biblical marriage" or "faith-based marriage," but that's really just another place-holder, like "Intelligent Designer" or "God" is for "we don't yet know how this happened." I mean, it would seem to me that polygamy was allowed for quite a few people in the Bible, so long as you were wealthy enough...and there were all sorts of bride-prices, dowries, sacrifices, and feasts that had to go on. I don't see too many people selling slaves along with their daughters, but...maybe that's just me. I also don't see too many Christians basing their marriages off of the Talmudic traditions, but, I guess as much as they like to claim we are a Judeo-Christian nation, there aren't too many Judeo-Christians out there.

The problem is even worse if we try to take an archeological perspective of what a "traditional marriage" would be. It'd be like gathering together a human, sheep, pig, cat, dog, rabbit, horse, ox, bear, dolphin, and mouse and asking "which one is the mammal?" Oh, you can pick one and say it's your favorite, but, as you can maybe guess, the answer's not quite right. So, really, all we have again is a group of people who want everyone else to follow their favorite system, to make everyone adhere to their laws. Now, in a federal sense, an certain bit of this is understood - you obey the traffic laws, giving up some bit of your own freedom, to enjoy the benefit of a mass transportation system. When you get married, there are certain legalities you have to get through, and you pay a tax to enjoy some benefits of the state. Okay, that's fine. But when a particular group, religious or otherwise, wants to legalize its own way of living, and only its own way, there's a bit of a problem. Imagine, if you are Christian, that a Jewish group wants to mandate that only Kosher food can be eaten from now on. Goodbye cheeseburgers, shrimp, and a helluva lot more. They're just protecting the sanctity of food preparation, and doing it in a very tradition-minded way. Do you have a problem with it? God decreed it, lest you forget as you munch on those shrimp cocktails. Now, Paul did indeed say it was okay to break Kosher, but also note that he said you shouldn't do it if it would offend those with whom you were dining. Well, well, if it's going to offend some of the more tradition-minded Jews, you'd probably better stop.

Or imagine if a Muslim group wanted to U.S. to adhere to Sharia law. Would you have a problem with it? What if, just imagine, they were the majority in this country? Would you have a problem with it then? Would you feel that your rights as a group of people are being trampled on? That some religious group is forcing their view of things onto the public through legislation?

There is a solution, though. It's not a perfect one - few are. It's cobbled together and frail, sometimes barely hanging on. It offends a great deal of people, but it allows society to work, however hobbling it may go. The solution is brilliantly simple - no religion, no philosophy, no particular group, even the majority, gets special treatment or free reign in legislation. You are free to practice your own religion, or lack thereof. However, just the same, I am free to practice my own, however different they may be. So long as they do not interfere with each others private rights, there is no problem (I can't kill you because my god told me to. I can refuse to eat cheeseburgers though). So, why don't we take a hint from the Constitution, you police your own religious community, I'll eat some shrimp scampi, and we extend the right of marriage to everyone, regardless of what particular bits of flesh they possess where (legislate only the minimum necessary - need for consent, proof of stability and support if needed, minimum age requirement, and maximum relatedness if-you-so-desire), and we all go home happy.

That's just my two-cents anyway.

A Little Lighter

2009-08-25T00:02:00.002-05:00

Alright, so the last post was pretty angry. That's been building for a while. I want to add a little something to maybe lighten the mood, brighten your day, or maybe just give you an example of someone who understands what it means to be human. I give you, Tom Waits:

and

Republican "Bipartisanship" is Letting Republicans Get Their Way

2009-08-24T23:21:00.004-05:00

*sigh*

It really never ends in this country. Probably nowhere else, either, but as that I live here, it's my current primary concern. I'm talking about this. A delightful little argument about how Democrats can achieve bipartisan cooperation. The undertone, of course, is taken straight from the Rush Limbaugh play book, which can be seen in this four-part series from his 2009 RNC CPAC address. Now, Limbaugh is, in my opinion, the very definition of repugnant. His entire show focuses on thinly veiled racism, sexism, and outright bigotry and hatred. Yes, he does indeed want Obama to fail, and I can't honestly bring myself to believe that he means just Obama's policies. Now, the one good thing about Rush that I can say is that he's often honest about his viewpoints. I say often, because like everyone else, there's always an element of obfuscation somewhere.

Anyway, Rush's idea of "compromise" and "bipartisanship" is really "we get what we want all the time." The Republicans are clearly in his pocket in this, which is why those of us on the more progressive front have a hard time understanding why the liberals in Congress and the White House are paying them any attention at all. They've made it clear that they're not going to go for anything supported by a liberal, ever, and after all this effort of reaching across the aisle, the Democrats will get, oh, about zero Republican votes. They've drawn their wagons, done their poll research, created their talking points, and they're doing what they do best - turtling and jamming their fingers in their ears, crying because it's THEIR birthday, dammit, and it'll be their way or the highway.

No, I'm sorry Rush, I don't have any respect left for you and your kind. You yell and scream that this is not the America that you grew up in like that's a bad thing. I'm sorry, but I think we've improved a lot since your toddler days - we've made some inroads into ending segregation and discrimination (I'm sorry that it offends you that there is anyone other than older white males in America); we have passed legislation that improves the quality of health care received by seniors (ah, yes, Medicare...that burr in your side!); we, despite our previous president's best efforts, have made major progress in the sciences (I know, reality really encroaches on your worldviews, but...there it is); and, I suppose most importantly for you, a majority of the American people decided they didn't like doing things your way anymore and voted a bunch of your guys out of Congress, and perhaps more importantly, voted for a president who promised to bring radical change. You want to talk about a mandate? There is was. Maybe you missed it.

Now, my vitriol isn't entirely directed against Mr. Limbaugh. No, he has plenty of cronies and plenty of others who think just like him anyway. You see, they have a sense of entitlement - they're conservative, they represent the "true America," so even when the majority of us vote against them, they're still entitled to have only their policies passed. See, when they were in power, they could do whatever they wanted, and now that they're out of power, they're still supposed to be able to do whatever they want, didn't you know?!

And, no, I'm no bleeding heart begging "can't we all just get along?" I'm ready to go for a more progressive agenda. We've got the power now, let's use it people.

I'm tired of all the talking points and rhetoric. I'm tired of the cliches in this. I'm tired of seeing people on or about to go on Medicare yell that the government should have nothing to do with health care. I'm tired people arguing that the government should have no right to interfere with a person's health decisions, and then try to legislate anti-abortion laws. I'm tired of having Republicans propose Advanced Care Planning and then other Republicans calling it death panels and having it removed. I'm tired of Republicans saying that they'd be happy to compromise, and then for every compromise they say "it's not enough. It's not our policy yet." I'm tired of the ignorance, of the outright stupidity, of the hypocrisy. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of old rich white men say that they're being put-upon and how hard it is to afford their multi-million dollar mansions with all these taxes while people starve to death or die because they can't afford health care. And sorry, yes, I am a white man myself, though nowhere near as wealthy as these guys.

But let me tell you something honestly, if I were making enough to be able to afford to cover myself and my family with health insurance, I would consider it an honor and a civic duty to thank the country that gave me the opportunity to do so, and to thank those who support the base of our country, and give back a little in taxes towards covering them. Because, let's be honest. You're already giving tax dollars to cover people who don't have health insurance - they use emergency rooms, which are quite expensive, and the funding for emergency rooms comes from...ah, that's right...tax dollars. So, your choice is - pay for very expensive treatments with your tax dollars, or maybe contribute to a more efficient and cheaper health insurance for other people. But that's the ultimate problem with the upper echelon conservatives. They honestly believe that they have reached where they are with absolutely no help. They don't drive on roads that are paid with by tax dollars. They didn't attend public schools. They never had an emergency operation. They have always grown and cooked their own food. They didn't have family members or friends who know people or had contacts. They were never on food stamps or welfare. They will never go on Medicare. They were never protected by police. They never had to use any medications that were created by research generated from public funds. No, they have never needed anybody, and they're not willing to part with their hard earned cash. Now, the truth of the matter is that a lot of them have very good lawyers who can get them out of paying a lot of their taxes anyway, so they don't have to fear that they might be contributing to someone else's benefit...no, because that would be just awful.

Part of me hopes that the health care bill does eventually get a real vote. Let the Republicans vote against it. It won't matter. They'd never have voted for it anyway. Let the blue dogs vote it down too. That's fine. More people will die or go bankrupt. They really don't care. But maybe, just maybe, in a few people's minds, a small inkling will start to appear that these guys are all crazy hypocrites, that they have only their own self-interest and pay-checks in mind, and that they really don't represent the people. Maybe, after that, or, failing that, years from now when the present generation of conservatives die off, maybe there will be actual reform. Progress always comes in small incremental steps, usually long overdue. We'll get health care reform eventually, probably long after many of those who could have used it most have passed away, but it will come. That's the problem with conservatives, why they always have to fear - the world is always changing, and slowly...painfully slowly, we're beginning to wake up from their nightmare and realize that maybe, just maybe we should treat people equitably. Maybe someday we'll have a little compassion and realize that it's the nice thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing, hell, the Christian thing to do to help those who are less fortunate. My advice for those conservatives out there who are so for their own wealth and so for "morality" but are so against health care or any sort of social services...read your damn Bible. It's not my damn Bible, and I don't consider myself bound by it. It's your damn book. Either follow it, or quit spouting it and pretending to believe a word of it.

How I wish I had those squidly tentacles of doom...

2009-08-21T15:44:00.004-05:00

So I'm just going to link to PZ at Pharyngula for this post on the age of the earth. It's too well done and too good of a take-down for me to really try to add anything to it other than "Snaps!" and, perhaps, "Boo-yah!"

Ah, science. Helping people more closely approximate reality for over 300 years.

Converting Poe

2009-08-17T11:35:00.002-05:00

I have every reason to believe that this is a clear example of Poe's Law. But that's part of the reason it cuts so close - I've had these kinds of arguments, online and in person. In each of them, you take a second, turn your head, and say "Wait...really? You...REALLY...believe that?" I've always wondered if some of the people I've had discussions with were actually trolling/Poeing...but most of them seemed sincere enough afterward.

Anyway, watch, cringe, facepalm, laugh.

The Inherent Contradictions of Conservative Opposition to the Public Option

2009-08-10T12:01:00.004-05:00

Political hypocrisy is nothing new. We've all seen it, heard it, and lived it from pretty much every politician...ever. At this point it's really the degree that matters. Do you go with the politician who is always going to be lying, or the one who is only going to disappoint sometimes. Jaded? Perhaps.

But let's consider this issue in regards to say, the public option that the Obama administration has proposed for health care reform. We already know that the public option is a compromise from a single-payer system, as in, in committee, the public option was hammered out as an acceptable compromise. Now, of course, the conservative voices in Congress are saying that the public option should be compromised, revealing a few things - first, that of course they never intended to actually work with the idea of a public option, but were waiting for the public option to be revealed as "the plan" instead of as "already a compromise," and secondly, that these guys are in the pockets of the health care industry. The Young Turks have a good commentary on a Keith Olbermann special comment that nicely sums that up:

In fact, I'm just going to go ahead and link you to The Young Turks in general. They're fairly excellent.

Anyway, the point of this post was really to look at the conservative position and see if it stands up to itself.

To me, it seems to break down to three points of contention:

1) Government control
2) Free market economics
3) Government ineffectiveness.

Let's think about these things. These are all talking points of the conservatives, in one way or another, and you hear them all the time from these "town-hall meetings." We'll get to those in a second.

First, we have the issue of "Government Control." Conservatives, naturally, want government to keep its hands off of their health care and medical issues. This has led to the rather ironic statement being yelled "You tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare." Pause for blinks and awkward laughs. OF COURSE Medicare is government-run health care. OF COURSE it has been since the 60's...um, right. But, anyway, we'll go back to medicare later. If you main point is that you want to keep government out of your health care and medicine, then OF COURSE you must support the right for a woman to choose to have an abortion, and OF COURSE you must support the right for a person to remove a family member from life-support, and OF COURSE you must support the right for researchers to work with stem-cells....Oh...right. We're only against government interference in health care in some issues.

Our second issue to consider is the whole issue of the free market. A frequent conservative talking point is that the public option is actually a nationalization of health care, or that it would out-compete any private insurance and drive them out of business. On the first point, no, the public option is not a nationalization of health care insurance. It is a public INSURANCE OPTION. Which, basically means, you have the OPTION to get your health INSURANCE from a government source. The government is not taking over hospitals or doctors. It is merely an insurance option. Yes, this does mean that someone will have to determine exactly what the public option will cover and which health care suppliers are preferred. But is that any different from a private insurance company? No. Another thing that people say is that they're happy with their employer insurance and don't want to be forced to go with a public option. Well, first off, you're not forced to go to the public option. Secondly, the only reason that most people really like their employer insurance (i.e., cannot discriminate for pre-existing conditions like private insurance can) is because of a government mandate. Already, the hand of government has intruded into your health care. Now, the other problem is the whole "driving private insurance out of business" or "dominating the market." As this is a public OPTION, you would assume, perhaps, that one would be in favor of having yet another competitor in the market, especially when private insurance companies tend to dominate entire states. In most projections, the public option would drive down costs across the board, because, yes, the government can do it for cheaper overall and would be a competitor in the market. Would they drive out other companies? Well, even if they did, would this not be the utter definition of a market economy? The better option prevails unless the private insurance companies can compete? Also, since so many claim that a government program would fail miserably, it's surprising to hear so many say that it would out compete private options. But that dovetails into our last point.

Third, the common refrain is that government cannot run health care. You hear this on Fox News talking points - the government can't run Cash for Clunkers (which it can and is an example of a program that is almost TOO successful), so how can it run health care? Well, part of the problem, already mentioned, is that the government does run health care - Medicare and Veterans' programs. That's right. Medicare, considered one of the best programs by the people insured under it, is government run. Likewise, conservatives always talk about the top quality care that our armed forces receive (partially in compensation for lower wages), and that too is government run. An excellent take down of this point can be seen here, in a interview between Jon Stewart and Bill Kristol:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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So, if you're going to claim that Medicare and Veterans' care work, which conservatives tend to do (and just try to maintain any political capitol when you say you are going to take away Medicare), then it's very hard to say that government cannot run a health care program with a straight face. Also, again, the general contradiction of saying that government programs would out-compete private companies and would also be horribly run and an utter failure.

Lastly, the trope of of "nameless, faceless bureaucrats between you and your doctor." How this is different from the nameless faceless people in my insurance companies, I don't know, but regardless. Most of the rhetoric is outright lies, such as the "nationalization of health care" and "death panels," but let's also go back to Medicare. People on Medicare tend to like it. They like it a lot. So, if we already have a well-running program to cover people over 65, why not extend it back to 55? Why not 45? 25? Why not everyone? Granted, a legitimate question is "how are we going to pay for this," and that is an issue we should talk about, but it is also clear that nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured, and preventative care can do a great deal to lower costs overall, in the long run.

This issue has been made a clearly political one - conservatives want to stop Obama, and want to pocket the money that insurance companies are providing for them. We know that public options can work - we have examples from around the world. Unfortunately, the conversations we should be having are not the ones that are going on. There are jokes of town-hall meetings going on around the country because conservative groups are funding, educating, and shipping people around to these town halls to protest, fill up the front rows and disrupt the meeting so that the senator or representative cannot talk or offer counterpoints. Now, if they wanted to ship people in to go up to the mic and voice their concerns and allow a rational debate, then that's fine. That's democracy. However, as it stands, they are not allowing anyone else to talk but themselves. They're trying to drown out every voice but their own and ignore any rational points, as well as the more-than-majority number of Americans who want major reforms (a la Gallup polls). That's not democracy. Sorry.

I promise this will be the last point - you often hear conservatives state that we have "the best health care system in the world." What they don't tell you is that this is based on an opinion poll. The World Health Organization has a different idea. We spend more money than almost any country, and yet have lower quality of care, ranked 37 in a WHO assessment. Are there problems with this measurement? Of course it's arguable. But at least it's more objective than a simple opinion poll.

Anyway, that's my two-cents. I'm not saying the public option is perfect, but I can't stand anymore to hear the utter hypocrisy from the conservative side and listen to the constant contradictions. They don't even have a leg to stand on, if this is the way they're going to be arguing. I'm sure Jason could offer more, and tell me where I'm bullshitting, and I fully welcome that. Any thoughts?

Standing Up for Simon Singh

2009-07-30T09:53:00.002-05:00

(This is simply a repost of an article by Simon Singh, which got him sued by the British Chiropractic Association. A lot of skeptics are reposting this article today in support of Mr. Singh.)

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results - and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that "99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae". In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer's first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying - even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world's first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: "Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck."

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

Thunderf00t Debates Ray Comfort

2009-07-28T11:11:00.004-05:00

An interesting series, unedited, of a video debate YouTube personality Thunderf00t had with Ray "Bananas are the Atheist's Nightmare" Comfort. It goes about how you'd probably imagine. I'm not saying Thunderf00t had a great performance here. I'd say it was very good, but not great. But, on the other hand, he was clearly more interested in having the discussion than winning the debate, so, points to him. The part that's the hardest to watch is all the variations of "I know this is true" "Why?" "Because the Bible says so and the Bible is true" from Ray. His absolute statement near the beginning of "I know what happened in the beginning, you don't know, but I do, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is...well...painful, to say the least. You also get the sense that there is one proposition that Ray will never, ever, EVER consider - maybe, just maybe, the Bible is not absolutely true. Comfort brushes aside any other scripture as drivel or evil lies, but never applies the same logic he uses to bat those aside to his own scripture. He begins with the unquestioned assumptions that God exists, it is the Christian God, that God created everything, and that the Bible is absolutely true and as long as someone is born again, they can never be wrong when reading the Bible. The other extremely painful part is in Part 7 of this playlist, when Thunderf00t describes in detail an observed instance of speciation, a ring species of salamander, well, perhaps more accurately a forked speciation event, but, regardless. Ray agrees with every part until Thunderf00t gets to the conclusion - "That's speciation." Ray then goes on to basically say "Okay, sure, there is this species of salamander, that after sufficient geological distance cannot interbreed with the two ends of the range. Sure, you can interbreed salamanders from each fork all the way back to a common salamander at the top of the fork, and the two at the end of the forks cannot interbreed. But this is not speciation. This is not evolution. It's just infertility problems. Even though they can still breed with themselves or other salamanders close to their part of the river." I wanted to scream just a bit after watching that fail of logic. I know that this kind of response happens on both ends. You feel that you are using logic and reason to its height, and whomever you're talking to is just not getting it, or accepts every step until the logical inference to the conclusion. I do feel, however, that Ray got himself into more trouble in this kind of situation, however, because Thunderf00t makes it clear that he doesn't accept at face value Ray's basic premises. That's important - if you accept Ray's premises, such as God existing and having created everything and the Bible being absolutely true, then yes...it all makes sense. But that's exactly where the atheist draws the line - show me that your premises have merits, and then we can argue about the finer points of deduction or induction. Ray utterly fails to provide any evidence to back up his basic premises.

Anywhere, here's the video. Watch it if you can stomach it:

Commemorating Apollo 11

2009-07-20T11:10:00.003-05:00

I wanted to make a short post to commemorate today as the 40th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing. A few days ago was the anniversary of the launch, and I meant to put up something then but didn't get around to it due to being sick for a while. Anyways, recovering now, and I would ask you to take some time and browse around The Big Picture's post on the Apollo 11 mission, or go check out Phil Plait's blog for a bit of a more personal reflection. I wasn't alive at the time of the landing, unfortunately, but it's had its impact on me in other, less direct ways.

The Moon landing was an important and historic achievement, perhaps largely political in its time, but in the long view it has come to symbolize something about humanity in general - our curiosity, our outward and upward reach, our scientific and technological advances, and the general hope that pervades our species for a better world. There is something impressive about the speed with which we went from the first flight to stepping forth onto another world. Likewise, it is hard to believe that is has been close to 40 years since humans have really left Earth orbit. I hope we return soon, with forethought and a well-laid plan, and continue to press out into not just our solar system, but eventually the cosmos as a whole. In a way, we are returning to the primordial oceans that birthed us, we are going home.

Marx’s Theory of Finance

2009-07-19T12:36:00.002-05:00

To develop a basic, classical Marxist theory of finance; we must understand the basic profit principle of Marx: M'=M+ΔM or Money-Capital-Money'. In Marx’s mature thought, everything is built on this principle and all human economic activity is reducible to achieving M'. But, because Marx discussed his theory in terms of labor-produced goods and set labor as the only way to create profit, applying Marx to finance and especially trading becomes oblique in some ways. The reason why we must consider Marx’s perspective (and why you should continue reading this article) is that it helps us understand the difference between good finance and bad finance. But first, a short word for the anti-communists out there about the difference between Marxist thought and communism and their policy implications.

Marxist thought, at its core, is a theory of economics that described how we make profit by combining capital investments and labor. Communism is a political ideology based on the ethical and political implications of the labor abuses that this drive for profit can create. While Marx himself was certainly anti-capitalism because of these abuses, I do not believe that there is any metaphysical reason why we cannot produce profit humanely. In fact, I believe that a fully humane capitalism is possible. I will not discuss why here. I only mention this to assuage conservative readers that this is not another hate-mongering polemic on capitalism and private property.

Now, the key problem with applying Marx’s thought to finance is that finance does not produce goods in the traditional sense. They do not buy low and sell high to their investors. On top of this, the tertiary finance sector which trades in derivatives, is two steps removed from the traditional economy. Thus, Marx’s M-C- M' profit formula and fundamental motivation becomes, at best, only indirectly applicable. In the most traditional finance sector – savings and loan – the leap is relatively easy for Marx. Financiers invest (add M) for a slice of the final profits M'. This formula for motivation and economic causation however does not apply to speculative derivatives trading, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and other tertiary financial economic activity that has become a mainstay in our system.

Why is this such an issue and why should we care what Marx might have to say about it? First, since these tertiary activities are mainstays and they do not fall into a smooth image of how profit motives translate into real, goods and services-based profit; it is crucial that we understand how they interact with the main economy to better predict and regulate these activities. Second, Marx’s theory is very clear about the relationship between what people think, what they do, and what happens because of it. While his thought itself is very general and now analytically outdated, it is still in line with the basics of micro and macro economic theory. Thus, it offers a comparatively clear way of interpreting tertiary financial activity while not seriously violating basic economic principles.

So, what makes tertiary finance so special and un-amenable to a basic understanding of capitalist economics that we have to create a whole new interpretation of it? Capitalism, at its core, works because it adds real value to real things and earns a fair return from it. As Marx throws away talk about prices as a proxy for understanding the real value added, we too must throw away the notion that capitalism makes money simply because it gets more money than it puts in. Tertiary finance latches on to this process in a very distant way, putting money into money that is somewhere backed by real value-adding processes. These financiers make money when the money they invest produces more money. The problem is that, because the link to real value-added process is so convoluted and, adding to that, the gambling economy of short-term trading practices, the M' that traders achieve is not easily traceable to any actual value created. Hence we can have toxic assets with no way to measure their actual value.

To better understand a bit of the range of tertiary finance practices and address one of its central self-defenses, we can look at speculative derivatives trading. To keep it simple, speculative derivatives trading operates by allowing investors to put money in actual goods and the returns that investors make come from the change in value brought about by other investors and market demand for that good. For example, I invest in the derivatives equivalent of a barrel of oil at $100. Five other people invest at increments of $105, $110, and so on. I then sell my derivative at the final $130 to the sixth person. I’ve made $30 because people were willing to pay $130 for a barrel of oil. (For those of you who know the technical dimensions of derivatives, I know I’ve cut out 99% of what actually happens for the sake of simplicity). While no more value was added to the barrel I bought and then sold, I still made money. The central rationale for this among economists and free market defenders is that this process helps the process of putting an accurate value on the good being traded. In essence, the actual value of the barrel I bought was $130, but the market did not know that until I sold it and, it was only because others bought it at higher prices (the proof that the barrel was worth more than the $100 I bought it for) that I could sell it for the more accurate value.

This accurate valuation hypothesis of the role of tertiary finance can hold water theoretically under the assumption that investors will not pay more than something is worth and will buy something when it is valued less than it is worth. Here we have the disjunction with the basic logic of capitalism. Tertiary profit is made when the estimated value increases. Primary profit increases when the actual value increases (primarily through productivity increases). (Note: increased market share, or selling to more people, does not constitute an increase in profit or value, only a redistribution of existing profit in Marx’s analysis). While there are many cases when tertiary profit increase occurs because primary profit increases, there is no reason to believe that this is actually what happens without a thorough business analysis. What this means is that the tertiary sector has an incredible leeway to make money without actually producing anything of value or contributing to the overall efficiency of the market.

The current recession is not the only time in which some have claimed that the profit businesses report were not based on any value created. Compare former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s analysis of the 1980’s merger and acquisition bonanza with Gowan’s diagnosis of the present financial crisis. To save you some time, both argue that the large amount of profits generated were based on non-capitalist gains like artificially inflating and deflating market bubbles and taking government write-offs for merging and writing down sick companies. The lesson is that when we disconnect the capitalist motive for M' from the actual process of adding value to objects, we open ourselves up to diverting money to paper profits and a pure gambler’s game which are tangential to contributing to the production of real value.

What does this have to do with discerning good and bad finance? What I’ve implicitly argued and now explicitly state is that good finance is attached to real value, meaning that financial profit is generated by the creation of actual value. This does not necessarily mean that tertiary practices are bad, but they require much more conscientious review than primary or secondary finance (such as mutual funds, 401Ks, and the like). What is bad finance is the intentional attempt to make money by manipulating market values and disconnecting the value of a tradeable from the actual value which backs it. The CDOs that accumulated so many types of financial vehicles from so many sources that no one could trace them and that have melted our financial sector are criminally negligent at best. The second insidious form finance is that which makes profit from the loss of value. A good example of this would be predatory lending such as some forms of sub-prime mortgaging and many credit card policies. No, you cannot legislate consumers’ financial intelligence, but you cannot legitimate a business that financially generates and then profits from financial destruction. It usurps the creation of value and acts as a parasite on the capitalist system and our society as a whole.

There are two lessons that I believe can be taken away from a classical Marxist theory of finance. First, solid capitalist finance is linked to actual value. Second, finance disconnected from actual value contributes to the destructive and free-riding dimension inherent in capitalism. Though Marx’s vision of our ultimate evolution away from capitalism seems irrational now, I believe his underlying image of the economy is still useful in interpreting modern markets and capitalist enterprise and can contribute to a more ethically sound way of creating real value for our lives.

The Importance of Blogs

2009-07-03T17:58:00.006-05:00

This is a post about how and why blogs will become an important foundation of genuine, participatory public discussion and how you, reader, can help lead the way. Basically, traffic-building strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), blog carnivals, trackback, and RSS/syndication align profit, informational value, and readership with low overhead and search costs. This means that anyone can blog, but only those who provide the most valuable information in the most easily accessible way will dominate in the long run. The "long" in long run dominance will be shortened by people like you reader as we develop more sophisticated interests in linking to blogs and, for you fellow bloggers, in learning how to build traffic.

A lot of server space is taken up by online articles, wiki-entries, and of course, blogs about the future of blogging and its role in society. One general consensus as I find it is that blogs are an unprecedented way for everyday people (not newscasters, public officials, or media stars) to have a public voice. For example, here is Technorati's stance and Scott Rosenburg's defense of bloggers against the apparently not-so-everyday journalist. Whether blogs are good for democracy is its own niche in the blogosphere and academia. There is the Habermasian Angle of free, open, and rational discussion ultimately reaching consensus and the information filtering argument in the spirit of John Stuart Mill. You should also read the blogs prompted by Arianna Huffington's debate on the issue for more complex positions. The jury will be out on this question and many others for a long time and will probably come back with mixed results like every other complex issue. However, when it comes to efficiently finding and consuming information, the blogosphere and internet as a whole has unmatched and probably unavoidable potential.

The first reason and lesson for readers, particularly you bloggers, is the fact that blogs run on traffic and traffic is created by content value. If you make valuable content, visitors will like you. If visitors like you they will come back. They will bring their friends by linking to you on their own blog, linking your blog on Facebook and MySpace, or the old fashioned word-of-mouth. This is the sage advice of bloggers' bloggers like Copyblogger and Steve Pavlina. As you may notice from the links, these are veterans' advice for turning a blog into a traffic and money-making hub. While not everyone cares about the money in blogging, those who dominate the field and their content niches do. If this is any indication of the future of blogging (and when has history not followed the money?), blogging will only create more high quality information, scale up on traffic, and become more commodified.

As an aside, the commodification of blogging opens up a whole other bag of worms that I will not get into now and that does pose some serious downsides, particularly over the medium run, and are likely to raise new questions and issues as it reshapes content on the internet.

The second dimension which both drives growth, quality content, and accessibility is the slew of traffic-building marketing tools currently used which link the traffic-quality base to integrating, content-driven marketing. Take Search Engine Optimizaiton (SEO), syndication, and blog carnivals for example.

SEO is the process of tailoring a website so that it is most easily found and visited from search engines. It can be such a technically intensive and profitable mode of traffic building that Google's own discussion revolves around hiring an SEO consultant. They do however provide a Starter's Guide (pdf). In total, SEO is a creater-side strategy which should aid search engines and reader heuristics (i.e. bookmarks, links on networking sites, feed following, etc.) to increase the overall information search efficiency among blogs. While it is not for everyone, it is but one efficiency tool.

Syndication increases visitors' ability to follow a blog's activity and return to the site and the same kind of starter information is also available. This may be one of the best ways to generate the medium term readership (those between one-time browsers and regular readers) which more fully tests a blog's content value. Additionally, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, which offer other forms of tracking, also offer another means for ranking and ordering blogs.

Lastly, blog carnivals are when a group of bloggers write posts on a certain topic and post them to a single site hosting the carnival. Not only does this provide a (rare) source of editing, they deepen personal, professional, and hyper-reference relationships between bloggers, expand readers' blog networks, and condense topical discussion to a much more localized venue.

These three tools exemplify the intrinsic link in blogging between growth, content quality, and accessibility in the realm of marketing a blog. First, these tools are cheap and accessible for those just beginning (unless you hire an SEO consultant and what self-respecting internet cowboy or cowgirl would?). Not only is it relatively easy to start a blog, but to market it. Second, these tools operate on the same logic of information organization as one of the most basic internet features: the hyperlink (I'll return to the awesomeness of this feature in another post (maybe)). Third, building hyper-reference networks through embedded images, hyperlinks, etc. transfers the status of linkers providing more cognitive and emotional meaning than any other dimension of a link. Lastly, each of these also makes the organization of information more efficient by matching content with entry point content like the text in hyperlinks or Google search results.

With the basic framework tied to traffic, content, and search efficiency; the last cornerstone is the basic economics of blogging - little overhead, low barriers to entry, and an unknown upper-limit on profits. There is little pre-startup selection meaning that everyone who wants a shot can get one. There is little natural selection, meaning that even if you're not successful, you can still do it without going broke. If you actually get the ball rolling on your blog, almost all of it is profit. Remember though that time is money and putting up a respectable blog takes a lot of it.

Lastly, how much money could be made in blogs is utterly unknown and new ways of turning readership into income are being invented everyday. (The ethics of monetizing blogs is also another major niche debate which I hope to address in another post. Lets just say for now that most strategies are at least annoying, but there are some methods that might benefit you, reader).

Blogging is an economic wild west and there's plenty of room for everyone right now to make some money and for some to potentially make an unimaginable figure based on high quality content and readership. In my opinion, the economic incentives are aligned to make blogging a crucial source for the public imagination, education, and discussion. We're not there yet and will not be there for probably another decade (in which time we'll figure out better ways to organize information on the internet, develop better-quality information, scale up blog production, and see more centralization of blog readership at the same time that readership grows exponentially).

The question and challenge for you reader is one, whether you care (and, if you've gotten this far, probably do); two, how can you do your part to help us all bring rule to this wild west; and three, to create the next generation of blogs. For those of us who are not full time bloggers or have hopes of being one, start tagging and linking to blogs you know and like. Put them in your RSS reader or Twitter them. Make it easier for others and yourself to find them. Also, as we all know you're good at, rain the criticism down. Make sure no bad content goes unpunished and no good content goes unmentioned. For those who are thinking of trying to live on blogging, I dare you to go beyond the achievements of the many great bloggers today, start finding the upper limit of readership and profit, and push. Since money, readership, and content are so intertwined in blogging, pushing the limits will open the doors to a bigger, better blogosphere; not immune to corruption, but subject to a much sharper "bend towards Justice."

Tee hee hee 2

2009-07-03T15:38:00.001-05:00

Sabotage!!!!

Tee hee hee

2009-07-03T15:36:00.000-05:00

You stupids!

Vacation

2009-06-18T09:46:00.002-05:00

Hey folks.

I'm in Canada at the moment, and this is the first time I've had internet access while I've been here. I'll be back in ole Chicago on Monday, so I might crank out a post or two next week, but then I'll be back in my home state (North Carolina) the following week. I'll have internet access there, so I'll probably be able to post from there. Anyway, just wanted to give an update on why posts are so rare these days.

If anyone else wants to write some stuff, I'd be quite glad to see it.

The Historical-Critical Method and the New Testament

2009-06-09T10:43:00.002-05:00

I want to discuss, briefly, the historical-critical method. This is the scholarly model of research that has been dominant both in seminaries and in universities for the past several decades, and it has a long history reaching back to probably Desiderius Erasmus, though certainly to the German "higher criticism" of the Tubingen School.

What differentiates higher criticism from lower criticism? At its heart, higher criticism approaches a text (any text) with the viewpoint that it makes sense, or at least made sense originally. The higher criticism method seeks to examine the historical context of the text, to attempt to determine who actually wrote it, when, where, and how, and to compare it to other texts from the same time period. It assumes (and this is what draws the ire of many religious adherents) that each text has a human author with a particular agenda. One thing that you have to get used to is the usage of the word "agenda" in academia. It's a fairly neutral term most of the time - everyone has an agenda when writing a text, otherwise they wouldn't bother writing it in the first place. This is somewhat synonymous with "intent," but there are subtle shades of differences. The method of higher criticism wants to view each text as a separate authorial piece and examine its sources (i.e., where it gets its information from); the text's redaction (how it was edited and why); and form history (what type of literature are you examining? A war hymn? A prayer? An incantation? What are these forms histories within a community?). Essentially, the best way to examine a text is to examine its context and how it influenced the text.

Lower criticism, on the other hand, views the text itself as the best method to interpret the text. Thus, if a passage is unclear, one should search (almost) only the text itself for clearer passages which may illuminate the difficulty. Lower criticism is concerned with discovering what a text originally said before any scribal or redaction errors crept in. Thus, for example, from lower criticism we may come to understand that Matthew's quotation that the Messiah would be born of a "virgin" is an authorial error of translation - the original word in Isaiah was "young woman." From a higher criticism standpoint we would understand that the author of Matthew was working with a Greek copy of the Hebrew book of Isaiah, where the word for young woman is mistranslated as virgin (Hebrew has a word for virgin, and we have to assume that if Isaiah meant "virgin," that's what would be in the text). Likewise, we would understand that Isaiah's prophecy of a man born of a young woman to be named Immanuel who would save the kingdom was a prophecy about his own time, spoken directly to his king to give him a sign for victory - a "prophecy" that was supposed to be fulfilled in the same book. Now, this isn't to say that Christians can't reappropriate a prophecy and interpret it as meaning something other than the author of Isaiah meant it to mean, but, it gives one pause sometimes when you begin to closely examine scriptures.

Now, as for the historical-critical method, it's an outgrowth of the higher criticism school, but it certainly includes the textual criticism of "lower criticism." Here, a scholar is concerned in part with the historical information presented in a text - that is, are these stories factually accurate. There are several criteria that help us determine whether or not a story is likely to be historically/factually accurate, but for right now I want to concern myself with a brief analysis of some of the stories in the New Testament.

First off, there is a huge difference between the devotional reading of scriptures and the critical reading of scriptures. The devotional reading tends to view the text as at least divinely inspired and offering significant meaning and instruction in one's life. Devotional reading tends to be "vertical," that is to say, when you read a text for devotion, you read one book at a time, all the way through. Or, alternatively, you pick and choose passages from books about the same event to create a syncretic story. The problem with this approach is that when you read straight through one book and then move on the text, you are likely to skip over inconsistencies or contradictions and mentally adjust to make them all fit together. Most religious adherents would be familiar with this by example - if I ask you to relate to me the story of the birth of Jesus, many people will relate a story along the lines of - "An angel came to Mary, told her she would conceive God's son. Mary and Joseph went down to Bethlehem from Nazareth to participate in a census declared by Caesar Augustus. He was born in a manger, shepherds and wise men came to witness his birth. Then the family returned to Nazareth." It's an interesting story, and there are probably some divergence there - some people may remember the story of Jesus being circumcised on the eighth day. Others may recall the flight to Egypt. But here's the primary problem - the story is a confabulation of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. The tale, as told, is not present in either of them, but is a mixture of them both and, because of this, loses a lot of the meaning of each independent story.

This is an important lesson from historical criticism - you approach a text with the idea that the author was writing what they considered a definitive work. The author of any of the Gospels did not know that their books would be compiled into a single edition. The author of Matthew did not know that his story would be put alongside the story of the author of Luke. Each had their own ideas about what these stories meant and how to best convey them. Each emphasized or changed, or even made up, certain details to push their own agenda, quite independently of thinking they were writing books for a "Bible" that would only come centuries later. This is a point I will take up a bit later, but it's very important to realize - you have to take each book as its own text, with its own interests. This method reads "horizontally" - that is, you take each text that relates a similar tale, or talks about the same topic, and then line them up. Make a list of the important events and the order in which they go, or the important ideas, and then compare them.

So, two items I want to examine after the jump are from the New Testament - first, the birth of Jesus, and last, the death of Jesus.

So what are the circumstances of Jesus' birth? Well, first off, we have to recognize that only two Gospels even mention it - Matthew and Luke. In Mark and John, Jesus appears on the scene as a full-grown adult. Now, this actually may give us some insight into what exactly each author is trying to tell us.

First, a brief history lesson. As far as the Gospels go, Mark was likely the first written, somewhere between C.E. 50-70, depending on who you're talking to. Mark is a very fast-paced gospel and primarily is concerned with the last week of Jesus' life. Jesus teaches almost entirely in parables in this Gospel, as in the Synoptic Gospels as a whole, and has a very interesting take on the Passion narrative. Matthew and Luke came later, perhaps up to C.E. 110. We fix these dates on a couple of things - when the Gospel begins to be mentioned by churches and church leaders, and from a form of textual criticism - Matthew and Luke relate almost every story in Mark, but contain some of their own separate ones. Likewise, they both quote Mark exactly in several places, suggesting that Mark already existed for the authors of Matthew and Luke. John was the last Gospel written, probably towards C.E. 100, but maybe afterward, and is certainly the most divergent of all the Gospels. We'll get to that in a moment.

Back to the birth narratives. In Matthew and Luke, we have genealogies of Jesus through Joseph (though Luke makes explicit that this was merely "so it was thought). This bit never made terribly much sense to be, that in order to fulfill the prophecies that the Messiah would come from the House of David, Jesus had to be born to the wife of a man from the House of David, but not actually be his son, but be thought to be his son...regardless.

What is interesting is that these genealogies are different. Not only do they not line up in terms of names until King David, they differ in number as well. Matthew wants to make an important numerological point - every 14 generations something important happens (7 is the divine number in Judaism, so 14 is doubly divine). Abraham -> David -> Jesus. Well, okay, maybe. But, if you count Matthew's generations the same way, Jesus is actually the 13th generation after David. Beyond that point, however, Matthew and Luke have different end points for their genealogies, and this is the first hint that they are driving at two different goals. Matthew ends with Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. Luke ends with Adam, the father of all humans. You can begin to see a divergence of emphasis and intent merely through these genealogies. Now, the question for the historian is, can both of these genealogies be correct, as well as the authors statements about them? Well, probably not. They clearly don't agree in name or number, and Matthew is insistent on the "14 Generations" idea.

Okay, so maybe the genealogies don't mix that well, but what about the birth narrative itself? Let's take a look.

Matthew states that Mary and Joseph were pledged to be married, but she was found to be with child before they had come together. Joseph, apparently being a nice dude, wanted to quietly divorce her, but an angel appeared to him and told him she had conceived of the Holy Spirit, and to name the child Jesus (a later form of Joshua, which, in Hebrew, meant "Leader"). This, as Matthew is fond of reminding us, was in accordance with prophecy (Isaiah) so that the "virgin" would give birth to a child and he would be called Immanuel (here is another little bit that interests me - you see, in Hebrew, the idiom for giving someone a name was "call his name," or "to call." So, really, as in Isaiah, to call him Immanuel probably was to name the child Immanuel...just a bit of trivia). So, he took Mary home with him and did not have union with her until she had given birth. Where did this take place? Well, it says that Joseph took her home with him, and the next chapter tells us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Later it says that the Magi came to the house where the child was. Clearly, for Matthew's purposes, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents lived there in a house.

What does Luke say? Well, Luke begins by informing us that a census was declared by Caesar Augustus for all the Roman world, while Quirinius was governor of Syria. Well, historically, that indeed does match up. It happened in about C.E. 6. Okay. But wait...the census occurred after the banishment of Herod Archelaus and the imposition of Roman rule in Judea. This may not sound like a big deal, but remember that story from Matthew about Herod the Great ordering the murder of all male children aged two and younger, and how it forced Mary and Joseph to flee with Jesus to Egypt? Yeah, Herod the Great died between B.C.E. 5 and 4, about a decade before the census took place. Matthew is explicit that Jesus was born during Herod the Great's rule, but Luke is likewise explicit that he was born nearly a decade later. Another interesting problem. They can't both be right. At least one has to be historically incorrect.

Anyway, Luke goes on to say that the census required every man to register in the town of his ancestor's birth. Now, this is just silly on its face - imagine, Joseph, who according to Luke is living in Nazareth at the time, must return to the city of an ancestor many centuries back to be counted. Now, first of all, imagine someone told you that you had to return to the city of your ancestors for a census, someone say, even just four hundred years back. How many would know it? Granted, Judaism has a strong patriarchy, and it may be that many people know their ancestry that well, but also consider this: if you're taking a census to count population distribution and income, why would you leave the area in which you actually live and work?

Alright, so, Joseph and a pregnant Mary go from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea and can't find an open inn, so they have to stay in a manger, where Mary gives birth to Jesus.

Here we come to another discrepancy - who came to witness the birth of Jesus? According to Matthew, it was the Magi, or wise men, from the east, who were following a "star". They tipped Herod the Great off to the whole "Messiah" thing, who tried to get them to report back to him on the location of this child. The wise men go to see Jesus and offer him gifts fit for a king, and then leave by another route to escape Herod, who then becomes enraged and orders the murder of all the boys in Bethlehem and the vicinity around the age of two or younger. Joseph has another dream and the family escapes to Egypt to wait out Herod's reign. This, of course, is in fulfillment of prophecy, so that "my Son" can be "called out of Egypt," as a parallel to the Exodus account. Now, originally Joseph was planning on returning to Bethlehem, where he lived, but when they found out that Archelaus was in power, they instead fled to Galilee and settled in Nazareth, again, to fulfill prophecy.

Luke has an entirely different story. It wasn't wise men who came to see Jesus, proclaiming him to be a king. Instead, it was shepherds, who praised him. There is no mention of Magi in this book. Likewise, there are additional narratives not found in Matthew. For one, it tells the story of Jesus being taken to the Temple in Jerusalem to be circumcised, where he is met by Simeon, a wise man who had prayed to see the Messiah before he died. Jesus is blessed by Simeon, and is likewise praised by a prophetess, Anna, who was also at the Temple (an important note - Luke puts much more emphasis on women than the other gospel writers - it is Mary who has dreams and visions of angels, not Joseph). After performing the "duties before the Lord," the family returns to Nazareth. There is no death order for babies, there is no flight to Egypt, there is no attempt to return to Bethlehem only to turn around and go to Nazareth instead. Luke also narrates that the family returned to Jerusalem every year for the Passover Feast, and thus records a story of the twelve year old Jesus teaching the elders in the Temple.

Both of these authors had a historical problem. Jesus was obviously from Nazareth, and yet, the Messiah was supposed to be born in Bethlehem. Both tried to solve it in very different ways. For Matthew, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his family lived there, and only later settled in Nazareth. For Luke, Jesus was from Nazareth because his family lived there but was born in Bethlehem because Mary and Joseph traveled there for a census. Likewise, the birth of Jesus is attended by two very different sets of people in the two books, and for very different reasons. Matthew is very concerned about the fulfillment of prophecy and making Jesus the Jewish Messiah - he has to be worshiped and honored as a king. Luke wants Jesus as the savior of all of mankind, and thus he traces his lineage back to Adam and has lowly shepherds witness his birth. These are very different agendas and they led to different stories which, on the historical front, are impossible to reconcile with one another without doing a lot of violence to the books themselves and creating a new gospel which says something different from both Matthew and Luke.

Alright, so, on to the opposite end - the death of Jesus.

All of the gospels record something about the death by crucifixion of Jesus. But each has a different perspective about it. Let's begin with Mark. In Mark, Jesus clears the Temple after entering Jerusalem, which begins the plot to kill him. He then goes on to teach several parables and other mysteries. After the Last Supper, Jesus goes to Gethsemane to pray and is arrested. He is taken before the Sanhedrin where many people are brought in to testify against him, but he remains silent until admitting that he is the Son of Man. The Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate early in the morning. Jesus admits that he is the King of the Jews, but otherwise answers nothing. Pilate releases Barabbas, who was a member of the insurrectionists. He hands Jesus over to the soldiers, who flog him and mock him. Simon of Cyrene is forced to carry the cross. Jesus is crucified on the third hour of the day of Passover with two robbers, who hurl insults on him, and is mocked by passerbys and the Jewish people. At the sixth hour a great darkness comes over the land. At the ninth hour, Jesus calls out in a loud voice "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" and dies. At this moment, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two and the centurion at the cross says "Surely this man was the Son of God!" Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Younger and of Joses, and Salome, and many other women are present.

In Mark, we get a picture of Jesus almost in shock - he is silent before his accusers until the end, and likewise, Jesus the deserted - Peter denies knowing him, no one stands up for him, and in the end, you have the moving cry of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" before he dies. There is no triumphant end on the cross, merely a sentiment of desertion and death. The curtain of the Temple is ripped at the moment of Jesus' death, probably signifying the breaking of the old covenant and the establishment of a new - there is no separation between God and his people now. Likewise, the centurion, reversing the previous two episodes of mocking, recognizes Jesus as the Son of God (note, this is a formal title and can be applied to many people, as could Messiah).

In Matthew and Luke we have a bit of a different story. Let's look first at Matthew, then Luke.

In Matthew, Jesus clears out the temple, teaches several parables, has the Last Supper on Passover (as in Mark), goes to Gethsemane to pray, is arrested, and brought before the Sanhedrin. He is mocked and accused, and he only admits to being the Son of Man. Then he is beaten for blasphemy. Jesus is taken before Pilate, again refuses to answer, and Pilate releases Barabbas, after the Jews call for the blood of Jesus to be on their hands. Pilate hands Jesus over to the soldiers, who flog him and mock him and take him to be crucified. Simon of Cyrene is made to carry the cross. The robbers, the elders, and the passerbys all mock him. From the sixth hour to the ninth hour a darkness comes over the land. At the ninth hour, Jesus cries out "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me," and dies. At the moment of his death, the Temple curtain splits in two and many graves broke open. Holy people who had died rose out of the graves and appeared to many people in the city. The centurion remarks "Surely he is the Son of God," and many women were watching in the distance, including Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee's sons.

This account is mostly similar, save for the earthquake and the saintly zombies bit. But, again, this is the synoptic account, we expect it to be mostly similar. Let's check out Luke as well.

In Luke, Jesus cleans out the temple, takes on some challenges to his authority, teaches parables, including telling them that "this generation will not pass away before all these things have happened," (and I don't see how you could get much more explicit than that), and has the Last Supper on Passover. Jesus goes out to the Mount of Olives "as usual," and prays. He is arrested and taken to the house of the high priest. The guards mock him and beat him. He is taken before the elders and the teachers of the law. He states that they would not believe him if he told them, and then admits to being the Son of Man. They formally indict him for blasphemy. They take Jesus before Pilate and accuse him of speaking against taxes and of being King. Pilate asks, and Jesus affirms that he is the King of the Jews. Pilate learns that Jesus is from Galilee and so sends him before Herod, who has jurisdiction over that district. Herod is pleased to see him and asks for some miracles to be performed. Jesus is silent. Then the soldiers and Herod begin to mock him and send him back to Pilate. Pilate says he sees no basis to kill Jesus, so he will punish him and release him. The elders demand that Pilate kill Jesus and release Barabbas. They take Jesus away to be crucified. Simon of Cyrene is made to carry the cross. Jesus asks that people not mourn for him, and instead mourn for themselves. They crucify Jesus on the placed called the Skull, and he asks God to forgive them, for they know not what they do. Two criminals are crucified with him, one who hurls insults on him, the other argues that Jesus has done nothing wrong. Jesus tells that one that he will be with him in paradise on the same day. From the sixth hour to the ninth hour a darkness came over the land. Then the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Then he dies. The centurion at the cross says "Surely this was a righteous man." The women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance.

Clearly there are differences here. Jesus responds to some of his accusers, and he is taken first to the high priest, then before the elders, then to Pilate, then to Herod, and then back to Pilate. Both Pilate and Herod find him innocent. Jesus on the way to the crucifixion is calm and collected, telling others to mourn for themselves. There is no feeling of being forsaken on the cross, instead, he commends his spirit into God's hands. The temple curtain is not torn after the death, but before, giving further emphasis to the entire point behind Luke's narrative - Jesus was innocent. The Temple curtain here probably represents a rejection by God of the decision, or perhaps the people. The centurion does not recognize Jesus as the Son of Man, but, more importantly for Luke, as a truly innocent man.

Lastly, we come to John, where the most significant differences lie. To begin with, Jesus clears out the Temple at the beginning of his ministry, not at the end. There are several trips to Jerusalem. The last one being the triumphal entry. Jesus predicts his death and before the Passover Feast washes his disciples' feet. Jesus gives several long discourses (typically of John, Jesus does not teach in short parables or aphorisms, but instead extended speeches. Also, unlike the synoptic Gospels, in John, Jesus does not speak primarily about the Kingdom of God, but instead about himself - the origin of all the "I am" statements). Jesus then prays for himself, his disciples, and all believers, before being arrested. He is taken before Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year. The high priest questions Jesus, who responds very openly. He is struck and bound and then sent to Caiaphas the high priest and then to Pilate in the morning. This is all before the Passover Feast, which would occur the coming night. Pilate argues that Jesus should be judged according to the Jew's own laws, they respond that they have no right to execute him. Pilate questions Jesus, who gives several theological replies, including, importantly, that "My Kingdom is not of this world....But now my kingdom is from another place." Pilate releases Barabbas. Jesus is flogged and mocked. Pilate again brings Jesus out and says that he has no basis to kill him, but the Jews demand it. Pilate tries to release him, but the Jews increasingly demand his death. John is very clear - it was the day of Preparation of Passover Week. Carrying his own cross, Jesus is led to Golgotha, and is crucified with two others. Near the cross stood Jesus' mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When he saw them there, he said to his mother "Dear woman, here is your son," and to the disciple, "here is your mother." Later, knowing that all was completed, and to fulfill Scripture, Jesus said "I am thirsty" and was given a sponge soaked in wine vinegar. Jesus then said "It is finished," bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.

This account is incredibly different from the others. But, of course, this also reflects John's theological views. You see, for Mark, there is some evidence to say that Jesus was the "adopted" Son of God. There is no birth narrative to tell us this, and the first mention of that term is when Jesus is Baptized, when God recognizes him as his son. For Mark, and for the other synoptic Gospels, Jesus was indeed a very special person, come to proclaim the Kingdom of God, which would occur after a great cataclysmic change. This cataclysm, however, would merely divide earthly kingdoms. Paradise, the Kingdom of God, would occur on earth. It was not a heavenly kingdom to which we would ascend, but a paradise on earth. Likewise, Jesus may be God's son, but it is equally clear that he is a man, separate from God, perhaps adopted by God, perhaps born of some supernatural conception by a virgin. However, Jesus' mission was to be the early indicator of the first appearance of the Kingdom of God on earth - he performs miracles to show its early manifestations, but is killed, perhaps as the sacrifice for the sins of many. Matthew and Luke hold fairly similar views, and Luke at least makes explicit that the Kingdom is coming soon, or has already begun to appear.

The situation is a bit different for the author of John. John begins his narrative by describing the Logos and God. The Word. The Word was with God, the Word was God (this does not necessarily imply identity...perhaps more on that later), and the Word became flesh. In John's narrative, Jesus was pre-existent. The story is of an incarnation, not of an immaculate conception of a human. Jesus, for John, is clearly divine. Perhaps not God himself, but at least co-existent with God since the beginning. Likewise, in John, Jesus continues to proclaim his divinity and special status. Also, a major problem for the author of John is the amount of time that passed between the death of Jesus and the writing of his book. Most, if not all, of the people who had followed Jesus originally were dead. How to deal with that troubling promise that "this generation will not pass away" then? Well, John rotates the divide between this world and the Kingdom of God. Instead of being a new earthly paradise, John proclaims a heavenly paradise - an eternal life not on this world, but in heaven. Likewise, John is quite explicit on the fact that Jesus was crucified on the day of Preparation for the Passover Feast, when the lambs were slaughtered, not on Passover day. This is probably because of John's identification of Jesus with the sacrificial lamb. So, which is it? Did Jesus die on the Preparation day or the Feast day? They can't both be right.

This is but a brief entry into the kind of modern methodology that scholars of ancient texts and scriptures use, but even for so small a topic list, it provides some very interesting discrepancies between some of our supposedly best known stories and reinforces the idea that we have to let each author speak for themselves. To attempt to just mash these stories together and say they reconcile with one another really ruins the power of each one and makes one lose sight of what the author wanted to emphasize or bring to the attention of the reader. We lose the original intent and intended audience of the text when we argue that they all have to agree with one another.

So, what does this mean for believers? Not being one myself, I can say that personally I am not troubled by this kind of analysis and find it interesting to explore the meanings that ancient authors wanted to convey. For the believer who insists that their scripture is the inerrant, literal word of their god...well, this methodology, and history in general, is probably quite troublesome. For the believer who doesn't require his scriptures to be inerrant or literal, it may not pose that much of a problem. Many people ask why they were never told about these kinds of things before, but, I dunno...I suppose you could still find a lot of meaning and value in a text, regardless of its historical veracity.

If you've got a minute, tell me what you think.

The Livelihood and Some Thoughts

2009-06-04T22:34:00.002-05:00

I handed in my final paper today. I'm officially done with the requirements for my Masters degree. So, I figured I'd update you a little on my life.

I realize that it's a bit arrogant to think that any of you would actually care about what's going on in my life. When I started this blog, I think I seriously thought people would, or would be interested in some of the topics talked about on the blog. First time blogging naivete, perhaps. Anyway, I've reconciled myself to the reality that this blog is really more of a mouthpiece for some of the things that I, personally, find to be more interesting, or a place to scribble down a few musings as I go, and I'm okay with that. In that vein then, indulge me.

Some of you know me well enough to know what I've been doing with my life for the past little while. For those of you who don't: I finished my BA in psychology and philosophy & religion at Appalachian State University in 2007. I was accepted into the MA in Divinity (note, this is distinct from a Masters in Divinity) at the University of Chicago. I count this as a rather prestigious honor for several reasons - it's a selective school that offers a very excellent education; I've met a lot of really great people here and had the ability to expand my cognitive horizons; and, lastly, I had a lot of extra time during my coursework to take classes in another field of interest - cognitive neuroscience. Now, those of you who know me slightly less well may be saying at this point: "What the heck? YOU? In a Divinity School? But you love science and most of what you talk about is science!"

Yes, that's certainly true. I've always maintained, however, that I am not an expert. I consider myself an educated lay person, and when I don't know something, I look it up or, even better, consult with an actual expert in the field. They're nice people, and are generally willing to answer questions related to their study. A lot of scientists are like that - some are genuinely surprised that other people are even interested in their work. Now, as I said, I've also been taking classes in cognitive neuroscience/psychology, and when I'm in the lab or doing coursework there, I consider myself to be a scientist-in-training. I'm trying to pursue a Ph.D. in the cognitive sciences, but with the current economic situation and universities tightening their belts...well...it's tough. So, no, you should not consider me an expert or a "scientist" just quite yet, but I am certainly working towards that. I will never be an expert in evolutionary theory, or biology in general, that's true. However, I do consider my opinion on these matters to be among the educated lay people, and will try to direct any questions I cannot answer to someone who actually has had that sort of training.

More below...

So why did I pursue a Masters in, essentially, religious studies? Well, that's a bit of a tough one. I deeply appreciate the historical-critical method of investigating scripture, for one. This is the method that is taught in most divinity schools and even seminaries in the country. It is not devotional - that is, it does not attempt to exam the text for life lessons or absolute truths. Instead, you learn about the text - who wrote it, when, why, and how. You learn that scriptures were written by particular people at particular times for particular reasons. Thus, you also come to understand that some doctrines cherished by you or others may not have originally been in the text you're so committed to. For instance, the doctrine of the divinity of Christ or the Trinity are not present in the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament. Tom Sheepandgoats, a guy that I've had fairly frequent contact with, is fond of pointing out some of this information in support of Jehovah's Witnesses having a more probable and better translation of Scripture in these cases, at least. This point, I will certainly grant to him - the Jehovah's Witnesses are right - these doctrines are later insertions. However, we would still disagree as to the actual existence of God and all the rest. Tom, if you're reading this, I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, but an apt analogy would be for when I come into contact with people who believe in Scientology or Spiritualist writings - indeed, your translation may be closer to the original or what was originally intended by the author, but, we're still arguing about things that are unlikely to be true anyway.

Yes, indeed, I am an atheist. Or at the very least, a very strong agnostic (not in the sense of thinking that no one could ever have knowledge about God, but more in the sense that I think it's incredibly unlikely, but I simply do not absolutely know). So why am I studying in a divinity program? Well, for one, I was once a very committed believer. I have that as a personal part of my history, and indeed it has influenced my later life. I likewise find religious belief and behavior utterly fascinating. True or not, religions have been some of the most important motivators for human behavior in all of history. A very, very, very minor point was that I was tired of hearing people complain about people like Dawkins and Dennett by saying "Oh, they don't consider the advanced theological opinions," mostly from theologians. Personally, I have studied these opinions, and the reasons behind them, and I find them utterly unsatisfactory. Part of me wants to understand the psychology behind belief, but I've also come to realize in pursuing this degree that I really want to focus on the scientific fields more and pursue cognitive neuroscience as a career.

I'm also getting married. I'm engaged to someone who makes me happier than I have ever felt, and I feel wonderfully blessed (in a non-deity way) to have met her and to be with her. To think that out of all the billions of years of the universe, out of all the possible people who could be here in my or her place, out of all the trillions of things that could have been different so that we would never have met...to have our particular molecules come together here, at the same place and the same time, is truly wonderful and astounding. Some would call this a religious experience - in the sense that it is awe-inspiring and wonderful, then indeed, yes, I would agree. But I need no God behind it to make it so wonderful. Some would complain that this is the monk mistaking the finger pointing for the moon. I would say that these people are more ones who want to argue that the elephant's wings are its most noble and glorious quality.

I want to say, briefly, that I actually don't have that much against religious belief or behavior, so long as it does not interfere with other peoples' freedoms. I understand the motivation, the drive, behind witnessing to others, and to an extent, the desire to make into law your own position. I have been there, but I also came out of it and realized how terrible it really was. Here's the essential problem for a democracy though - how can you have a successful democracy, and democratically represent and respect those who refuse to recognize the organizing principles behind democracy? That's a post in and of itself, and I'm not going to get into here. All I'm going to say is that I am strictly opposed to people trying to legalize their own opinions and make illegal any other opinion on the basis of a faith statement. I would make that statement stronger, and simply leave it at "make illegal any other opinion," but the actually issue is a bit more complicated, and again, I don't have the time or the desire at the moment to go into it at the moment. If a person has religious beliefs, that's absolutely fine. If they want to voice them, likewise, that's fine. But, I stress, what is also fine is if I want to argue with them over those beliefs. I am deeply appreciative for Tom Sheepandgoats. I don't agree with him on several issues, but I am very glad to have that conversation with him and come to better understand what I actually think about these issues through those conversations. Would I like to have him come to agree with me? Well, in some ways yes. In other ways, I more appreciate the dynamic of disagreement.

So, I want to leave with a few thoughts right now. I'll be posting more on interpretations of books of the bible or classical theories of religion over the summer, and whatever else tickles my fancy, but for right now, I want to ask a simple question. Why is it that we spend so much effort, time, money, and volume against foreign terrorists who want to kill American citizens, ostensibly for the freedoms that we enjoy, when we have domestic terrorists who have bombed American facilities and assassinated American citizens? Yes, I am talking about anti-abortion extremists. These guys have had a long history of violent protests, intimidation, assassinations, and bombings, culminating most recently in the death of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas. This was a tragic occurrence, and what makes it even more so is that there is no sanctioning of these extremists. When was the last time that you heard of anti-abortion advocates being killed for their viewpoints? I hope that it doesn't come to that, but it is disturbing to see entire media networks, such as Fox News, pushing the type of behavior that led to Dr. Tiller's death. Why have we not come to the conclusion that we can differ in opinions without the need for violence, and if violence occurs and seems endemic to a position, perhaps it should be watched more carefully. Now, I personally am disquieted by late-term abortions. I would personally prefer that they not happen except in life-threatening cases. However, I also believe that it is a matter between a woman and her doctor (and her god if you happen to believe in that sort of thing). My personal opinions should not take away the freedom of someone else whose situation I do not and cannot know.

In a (perhaps) related note, a question occurred to me recently while I was taking a class on Ancient Near Eastern Mythology and Magic. We have been covering magical rites in ancient Mesopotamia for the second half of the course, and the majority of these rites deal with eliminating witchcraft and the influence of witches. The majority of these rites involve creating figurines of a witch and warlock, setting up an alter and a crucible, burning incense, invoking a deity, listing the afflictions the supplicant has, accusing some unidentified person as the one causing the afflictions, imploring the deity to find and destroy these persons, burning or otherwise destroying the figurines, and then offering praise to the deity and washing oneself clean.

What interests me, beyond the rituals themselves (the incantations and other literature is quite fascinating in and of itself), is the relationship between ancient Mesopotamian witchcraft proceedings and the types of things that happened in Europe. Specifically, in ancient Mesopotamia, witchcraft is handled primarily through ritual acts. These acts are often legalistic in nature and tone, but they are directed towards an "unknown" witch, warlock, ghost, or demon. The ritual is performed, the supplicant feels better, social order is maintained, and no one is hurt. It's a relatively bloodless system. Occasionally, and I stress that, occasionally a real person would be accused of witchcraft and be brought to trial, but it was incredibly rare, as far as we know. In medieval Europe, on the other hand, witchcraft accusations were primarily directed against someone within the community and were dealt with, often, by execution. An interesting side note is the folk vampire literature in Europe - a recently deceased person's spirit would return to cause mischief and kill livestock, etc. The body would be exhumed, mutilated, and "dealt with" in an appropriate way. While perhaps disturbing, still, no one was actually hurt.

Why the difference, then? This may be an impossible question to answer. There are many factors that could be in play here. Maybe we simply don't have the relevant texts - that's certainly possible, our excavations are limited and incomplete. Maybe there are socio-economic factors underlying these differences, but what are they? Maybe there are socio-cultural factors to consider - certainly Mesopotamian cultures were very concerned with the idea of a single universal law that bound both gods and men, and they had a god, Shamash, the sun god, who saw everything and would judge every case fairly. Shamash would deal with witches righteously, destroying them through his associate Girra, basically deified fire. However, this still doesn't answer the question of why in Mesopotamia witches went unidentified, or why they didn't accuse other people in the community directly, as happened in Europe. There could be religious factors in play between the Mesopotamian religions and Christianity - Mesopotamian religions are more explicit in saying that witchcraft is not always evil and they can serve a useful purpose (at least until the later periods). And I would like to note that I am not blaming this difference on Christianity. I'm simply pointing out an observed difference and trying to offer possible suggestions which may interact with one another.

If there are any historians or other professionals in the field who happen to read this blog and can or want to comment on this issue, please feel free, I'd love to hear your opinions.

Alright kids, it's getting late and this has gone on for far, far too long. I'm going to bed. Expect more posts in the near future as I'm finally done with coursework.

The Human Dilemma

2009-05-27T23:30:00.005-05:00

Another short post that speaks, rather eloquently, for itself:

Do You Believe In...

2009-05-15T15:41:00.001-05:00

This one simply speaks for itself:

That is all.

Plate Tectonics - A Theory in Crisis?

2009-05-08T11:01:00.002-05:00

Let's talk a moment about the theory of Plate Tectonics.

Scientists have this new-fangled theory about the continents sitting on huge "plates" that slosh around all over the place and collide with one another. They even say that at one point, all the continents were all joined up together in one big piece! They say they have a lot of evidence, and let's be honest, we're not arguing that there are certain facts we can agree upon, it's simply the interpreation of these facts that we disagree with. I mean, we've all experienced earthquakes or tremors, and this kind of micromovement we can agree upon, but macromovement? The movement of entire continents? I think not! Were you there to see them move? Also, isn't the whole thing rather circular? Earthquakes occur along fault lines and we know where fault lines are because earthquakes happen there? I'm not saying we shouldn't teach plate tectonics in geography and geology classes, merely that we should teach the strengths and weaknesses of the theory, teach the controversy, and let the kids decide. After all, it is only a theory.

More below the fold...

Of course the above paragraph is mostly bullshit. Plate tectonics is indeed an accepted science, and there is a lot of evidence for it (some quite recent). The point is, the exact same argument made by creationists against evolution can in fact be used against every area of science, and this is what some of them are actually driving at. Part of the problem, for some of these people, is that science doesn't deal in proof. It deals in evidence and the most likely explanations for a series of facts.

So, to begin with, let's get a few things straight.

A fact, in science, is roughly equivalent with the idea of data (though humanity studies love to point out that data is what is "given" while a fact is "made"...thanks guys). It is an observation that can be objectively verified. For example, it is a fact that when I release an object, it falls down. It is a fact that the sun appears to rise in the east. It is a fact that earthquakes occur. It is a fact that the magnetic orientation of rocks on various continents align to a point in space as they are now, but if the continents were closer together, they would converge on the north pole. It is a fact that we have a large, though certainly incomplete, fossil record of species that seems to show transformations from one to another while preserving significant morphological, geographical, biomolecular (in some special cases), and chronological similarities. It is a fact that we have witnessed events of speciation the lab and in the wild within the past few decades. It is a fact that we have witnessed novel mutations bringing about a net increase in fitness. Several of my previous posts deal with these issues and more.

A law, in science, is a description of how certain principles operate, typically expressed in mathematics. For example, there are Newton's Laws of motion. These describe the ways that objects behave and finally pin down those really hard observations like "the harder you shove something the faster it moves." I'm not trivializing here - F=ma is a very important law, and it took us centuries to nail it down. Good going, Newton. Likewise, there is Newton's Law of Gravity - it describes to a fair degree of accuracy how two bodies of mass interact with one another in the absence of other forces. There are also laws in population genetics, a field with some notable influence in evolutionary biology. A law is not the "highest" class of scientific ideas - they are merely a subset of them. Getting a law named after you is a pretty cool thing, though.

A theory, in science, is a well-tested explanation that attempts to tie together a large set of facts and laws and explain why they are the way they are. For example, we had Newton's Law of Gravity for a long time (as well as his theory), but it failed in some important aspects, specifically with the orbit of Mercury. Also, his theory had low plausibility. It wasn't until Einstein that we understood why the planets orbit the way they do (i.e., due to the curvature of space-time), and also picked up some pretty cool new predictions, such as gravitational lensing. These predictions, a necessary component of any theory, allow for evidence supporting its veracity, but they don't "prove" a theory true. A theory never graduates into a "law" or any such thing, it either stands the test of time, or is falsified and rejected in the harsh reality of the scientific world. What works stays and gets refined over the years, what doesn't work is rejected and scorned. Sorry, them's the breaks. So, for example, we still don't say that Einstein's Theory of Relativity has been proven true - people are constantly trying to disprove it. However, so far, no one has been able to offer verifiable evidence against it. It stands thus far, but may be replaced in the future. That's one of the wonderful things about science, we go where the evidence leads us, and we're willing to change our minds. Hell, we may even win a Nobel Prize in the process. Sweet! This is also why the "just a theory" claim is so laughable. A theory is a battle-tested and hardened contentor in science. We want to teach our theories, they're the best explanations we have in the world.

Anyways, back to what this has to do with plate tectonics and evolution.

I've heard the arguments I started out with said about evolution all the time. It's really pretty trite, I must say, and five minutes with a google search or a good librarian should be able to clear up these misconcepts. Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, and within a few decades, the scientific debate over the matter was settled - Darwin was right. Now, the funny thing is, I hear people say all the time, "We have evidence for microevolution, but not macro. That's just fantasy." What makes this laughable, beyond its merely being invented by creationists, is that it comes from our rather peculiar time in history. Had we lived when Darwin first published his book, the argument would have been exactly the opposite. Darwin based his theory on evidence from palentology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, physiology, and embryology and drew a very large picture. He had no workable theory of inheritance, the "micro" of this particular scale. It wasn't until the 1950s, actually, until we had a solid model of that, which allowed for the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Since that point, Creationists have been making a huge effort to ignore or create elaborate explanations for all the evidence that had existed and continues to mount against them.

One of the more laughable comments from creationists is the "Where you there?!" question, intended to cast doubt on any scientific theory, because, as they say, it is supposed to be based entirely on "observable evidence," which for them means only which can be seen under a microscope in a lab. I'm sorry, creationists, but science is bigger and more imaginative than that. When you have a theory that allows for predictions, and can go out and test those predictions, and follow the evidence, well, that's science. For example, Neil Shubin knew that there had to have existed an intermediary between fish and amphibians. He predicted, based on the theory of evolution, when this type of creature had to have lived. He went out and found rock of that age (I may go into how geological layers are laid down, and why there is no single geological column that contains all the layers, in another post), and bam...there Tiktaalik was. More confirmation of the predictions of evolutionary theory, which goes to offer more support for evolutionary theory. Listen, if you want to say evolutionary theory is false, well, okay, you've still got to explain the facts of evolution that we've seen, as well as come up with evidence that the theory doesn't work, and supply a theory that has at least as much evidence and plausibility as evolution has going for it now.

Now, the plausibility bit is important. The old saw is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and that's true. The more prior plausibility you have, the less extraordinary the evidence you must have to make a claim believable. For example, if I am known to love cookies and tell you that I had a cookie this afternoon, you'd probably believe me. If, however, I am deathly allergic to cookies, have shown you how terrible my reactions are in the past, and then saunter in and tell you that I just got done eating twenty-three pounds of cookies, you'd probably ask for some proof or just assume I'm bullshitting you. It's the same in science - the work is still based on evidence, but the more out-there your claims, or the more it directly contradicts all the evidence we have so far, or proposes new mechanisms, the more evidence you have to have to convince people. Likewise, this is why supernatural explanations don't work - they have low prior plausibility and they are utterly untestable. Science is a field in which testing is supreme. When you say you want to insert an untestable, unnatural explanation in there, you've got a contradiction of terms.

Some people say that evolution is a circular argument - the survival of the fittest really means that whatever survives is the fittest. Well, not really. Evolution predicts the differential survival of individuals dependent on the interaction of their differential genetic and behavioral characteristics and the dynamic environment. "Fit" is not a static thing, it changes from environment to environment and from species to species. Sometimes, otherwise fit organisms die in catacylsmic events. Too bad. What you end up with the differential survival of alleles in populations. That's the important thing - evolution is about populations.

Evolutionary theory takes evidence from biology, palentology, geography, geology, chemistry, and many other fields to create a comprehensive explanation for the diversity of life forms and generate new predictions. There are significant controversies in evolutionary theory, but they're not the ones that creationists tell you about. They're about things like gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium and the overall influence of genetic drift versus natural or sexual selection. If you doubt evolution, with all the evidence for it, I would argue either you haven't done your homework well enough, have been indoctrinated against it, or should also doubt that gravity exists, that the earth is roughly spherical, that modern medicine has anything going for (as so much of it is based on evolutionary theory anyway), or that atoms exist. We're talking about the same levels of evidence here.

Anyways, look up plate tectonics sometime. It's a fascinating field, and some of the lines of evidence for it are just great. Science, people!

Lastly, a guy I've had some frequent debates with, Tom Sheepandgoats, is fond of a phrase: "Why should I listen to scientists telling me that my car doesn't work when I'm driving along in it?" It's pithy, I admit. I can understand the feeling behind it - some of science is quite counterintuitive and some of it is incredibily difficult to grasp. However, my response would be that it was in fact science and technology that built the car and explain how it works in the first place - how chemical reactions release energy stored in hydrogen bonds in the hydrocarbon fuel and powers a drive train to produce rotation in the wheels, which interacts through friction with the road to propel the car foward. In fact, it seems more the creationists who want to argue that the car can't work, even though it clearly does. They continually deny evidence put before them, or argue things along the lines that because the drive train can't steer the car or because the steering wheel can't propel the car, cars are impossible, or because they haven't personally seen any tractor trailers, they deny the possibility that tractor trailers exist, even though other people have seen them.

For one example of this, I'm going to go for radioisotope dating. You get a lot of claims about radiocarbon dating being wildly inaccurate or incorrect. For example, Kent Hovind loves to talk about living mollusks being dated to millions of years old, or shrimp, or marine seals....hmm...there's something going on here. His statements are actually true - these creatures have been dated with obviously wrong dates, but they are also incredibly misleading. In one video, Hovind even cites one of the studies he's quoting from, but he doesn't give the title - which clearly states that the paper is about fraudulent dates for mollusks and marine animals and why it happens. Listen, these creatures are filter feeders that tend to live in and feed on carbon-14 depleted environments. This becomes incorporated in their shells and bodies, and then when other marine predators eat them, they likewise absorb depleted carbon. It's true, radiocarbon dating is very inaccurate for marine organisms, and this is one of the reasons that scientists don't use it for those types of creatures! See, that's the other thing. Scientists aren't stupid. They know the limits of their tools and they're careful to describe exactly what they're doing with what and why. You use radiocarbon dating for a narrow range of materials and it has a limited time period in which it is generally accurate. Luckily, we have many other kinds of radioactive dating, all of which can be independently verified by other means. Likewise, creationists often play up the "random chance" element of evolution - the mutations. They always forget the selective elements, or the evidence that mutations can increase fitness. If you need a real-world, real-time example...let's use viruses, Influenza A H1N1, for example. There you go. Thank you, done.

That's about it for now. If you want to comment or debate any of these issues, feel free to reply. Likewise, if you see any mistakes, go for it.

Short Post on Torture

2009-04-27T14:07:00.003-05:00

This is a very short memo, a broadside, as it were, on a position I care deeply about: torture.

I have to say, I am completely unsurprised by the recent release of information about the US's torture techniques at Guantanamo Bay, how they were approved of by high level officials, and then spread to Afghanistan and Iraq. I am completely unsurprised becase we knew about this as least as far back as the beginning of the Presidential Race, when Hilary Clinton was a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination.

I am still absolutely enraged by it, however.

Now, the classic question about the ethics of torture is basically this: What if a person has sensitive information which they are unwilling to reveal. Should you torture then? Because, let's be honest - if they have no information, then torture is obviously wrong. If they have sensitive information that you can get otherwise, then torture is wrong. The gray area is where they have sensitive information (say, of an impending attack that will kill many innocent people) and they are unwilling to give up this information.

I will take a rather unpopular stance on this, as a moral issue. As terrible as the consequences may be, as a member of a free society, I am absolutely opposed to torture, no matter the situation. I am not willing to give up liberties for a sense of security. In brief, torture has never been shown to be an effective means of getting true, and only true, information out of a subject. Second, it is possible that other means could gain such useful information. There is certainly historical precedent for this. Granted, our treatment of prisoners of war during WW II was not reciprocated by other countries. However, this only goes to show an important point. We should not be so willing to give up on human liberties and rights in return for some measure of security.

What was the purposed goal of modern terrorists? The utterly change the American way of life, to make us cower and stop doing things as we always have. To make us give up our liberties and watch our nation crumble from within. Well, on some of these points, they have completely accomplished their goals, through the actions of our administration. Though we suspected such abuses of power, we allowed our administration to defame our nation and our liberties. We gave up our basic freedoms, so that now we are observed by CC cameras, wiretaps, and other means, and in return for what? We have secret memos that are supposed to show we gained some valuable information, while we know for certain that we got a lot of lies as well. The balance is not even.

What is even more despicable is to watch some of the talking heads on the networks, especially Fox, pander to all of this - "Oh, he was put in a box with some catepillars, big deal!" No, sir, that is not the point. Regardless of whether they were actually stinging insects or harmless, regardless of whether anyone has died from these tactics, and people have, the point is that we have become a nation that tortures, or, excuse me, uses advanced interrogation tactics. I, for one, argue it is not worth it.

And what, in my view, would have been the appropriate response? After 9/11, if the owners of the land had rebuilt the twin towers exactly as they were before, that would have been an effective message. In essence, a strong "Fuck You" to terrorists who want to destroy the freedoms that America was built on and are supposed to be gaurenteed by our Constitution. This is not a libertarian rant, although I admit it may sound a bit like it. I am not arguing that our government should have no involvement in any of these matters. What I am arguing is that the government has far overstepped its bounds because we believed ourselves to be in a time of crisis. I do appreciate safety, but honestly, living in Chicago, I'm more worried about my day-to-day trips walking around and possibly being mugged or shot than being killed by a relatively small number of extremists. To me, the overstepping of the government's control and use of torture is far out of bounds.

Here's an interesting video take on it from YouTube. Likewise, Olbermann's response to Sean Hannity.

Again, this is an incredibly short post on this, and I have to get back to work. Please excuse any of the typos and horrible sentance structures...get back to it later.

2009-03-31T21:41:00.003-05:00

Lol Saints. That's right, irreligulous.

Oh, and the LOL cat bible: that's Right!
"1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem..."

Semi-Vacation

2009-03-26T23:16:00.002-05:00

Hey kids.

I'm entertaining the girlfriend and her mom and aunt for the weekend, so I may not be able to post anything for over the weekend as I had planned. I may still get something up in the Classical Theories series, we'll see.

If anyone else has some free time, feel free to post guys.

I'll be back soon.

Classical Theories of Religion: Karl Marx

2009-03-14T00:47:00.003-05:00

As promised, I'm updating on my several-part series on some classical theories of religion. This edition will cover Karl Marx, an important thinker in many areas, and will concentrate primarily on his "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" and "Theses on Feuerbach." Both are interesting works from his fairly early years, and reference both Hegel and Feuerbach, about whom I already wrote a previous post.

In the way of a brief background, Marx was born in 1818 in the German Rhineland, and died in 1883. The Rhineland itself had in interesting history which was formative for many people in the area. In 1794, during the French Revolution, the Rhineland was taken and many reforms were incorporated. The French ruled the area for 20 years, longer than any other part of Germany, until the Prussians took it back and annexed it to Prussia in 1814. Two years later, in 1816, a year after the Congress of Vienna, which restored the monarchical status quo of Europe, Prussia published laws against Jews - reinstating the confinement to ghettos and the denial of civil service. Marx's father, inspired by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, converted from Judaism to Lutheranism. In 1824, Marx and his brothers were baptized and attended Sunday School. In 1835, Marx went to the University of Bonn to study law and basically lives a wastrel existence. A year later, he moved to Berlin and began to study the philosophy of law. he gave up on Romanticism and became interested in Hegel, eventually also reconciling with his father. In 1837, he joined a number of clubs and associations identified with the Hegelian left when people were beginning to struggle for power among the Hegelian movements.

More below the fold...

In 1841, Marx submitted his dissertation on philosophy, taking up an incredibly obscure and seemingly meaningless dispute in ancient philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus, interested int he philosophy of nature. Marx favors Epicurus for several reasons -
1) Epicurus admits to sensuous knowledge, he does not limit his philosophy to rational deduction.
2) Epicurus is less mechanistic and entertains a more complicated sense of causality, giving a detailed picture to the resistance of force.
3) Epicurus steadfastly refuses to turn philosophy into religion.

So, overall, Marx saw in Epicurus a greater materialism, more attention to dynamic relationships, and a refusal to entertain super-human "mumbo-jumbo." This may seem absolutely pedantic or unimportant, and in some ways, it may be. But this dissertation also shows the beginnings of Marx's thought. In fact, the dissertation is a detailed and impressive commentary on contemporary German philosophy, recoded through a minor debate in ancient philosophy. By entertaining this debate, Marx is able to talk fairly freely about his views on the contemporary philosophy, and a lot of it is rightly regarded as brilliant. Likewise, we see an interesting thread here in Marx's later thought - religion was important for him in his early, formative years (many philosophers begin by cutting their teeth on religion in this period), when he was more interested in law than a radical critique of society.

1841 also saw new censorship laws in Prussia. A journal that Marx published was driven out of Prussia, successively, through the Rhineland, and finally settled in Paris. A year later, in 1842, Bruno Bauer, a controversial figure in his own right, was dismissed from the University of Bonn. Bauer held a high status in Young Hegelian circles, and his dismissal was a strong factor in Marx deciding on a career in journalism instead of attempting a career in the university. Marx wanted a philosophical correction to religiosity, and began railing against private interests in general. In 1842-1843, Marx became editor in chief of a Young Hegelian journal which came under government suppression in March 1843. At this point, Marx left for Paris (in October of the same year) and proclaimed that Hegel's theories of State of Geist nonwithstanding, the state is no longer the embodiment of Spirit (He writes his "Contribution..." in 1844). Marx founded a new journal, which lasted until 1844, when the French, under Prussian pressure, shut that journal down as well. He moved to Belgium in 1845, but, of course, trouble followed him.

Marx wrote his "Theses on Feuerbach" in 1845. It's quite short, and I suggest that you read it (a link is at the top), but I will get into a discussion of it in a bit. Likewise, around this time, he began work on The German Ideology, which never found a publisher in Marx's lifetime. Marx moved to London and joined the League of the Just, renaming it to the "Communist League." In 1848, revolutions broke out across all of Europe, but they are short lived - the re-establishment of the old powers is solidified by 1849.

Alright, now to the meat of this post. First, I'll consider his "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right."

Marx begins with a direct homage to Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, in that he need not pursue a criticism of religion. Marx felt that it had already been accomplished, and done well. Likewise, he states that a criticism of religion is necessary for any other criticism. Why is this? Why does the criticism of religion allow for other criticisms? Basically, Marx recognizes the utility of a critique and long look at the material world - reality. If humans make unreality (i.e. religion), then they can unmake it, allowing them to remake reality in other forms. Marx believed the problems of suffering and distress were real, and that religion is a false promise to cure us. It is both a protest and a salve for real human misery. It misdirects human attention. Furthermore, this discourse is constituted as more than human - as sacred, and protected against challenges of certain sorts. If these (religions) are merely human propositions, then they should be open to debate and questioning. The recoding of religious propositions as sacred (instead of human-made) is a misrepresentation or mis-recognition of these propositions as coming from outside the human condition, which saves them from human criticism. When religions are returned to the human sphere, and seen as merely human inventions, all criticism become possible, nothing is sacred, and nothing is protected from debate and critique.

That's the main importance of the "Contribution to the Critique" for theories of religion, so now I will turn to Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach."

Feuerbach attempted the anthropological reduction of the theological. Marx takes on Feuerbach on the notion of the "human," arguing that there were real errors in his understanding of human, consciousness, and matter. Marx argued that Feuerbach understood men as a species-consciousness. Marx saw man as social actors with sensuous knowledge (note the ties to his dissertation). Feuerbach assumed that all humans are alike and ideal; they just needed to clear up some misconceptions and it would return all that was best to humanity. Marx argued that this was merely another form of idealism - there is nothing material or historical about this belief, and the end result of Feuerbach's argument was merely a human illusion. Marx argued that we have to look at real human beings, and when we do, we would see something rather different - all human beings are tied into societal interactions.

Marx argued that all human beings are the products of society - they resemble one another, but there is also a plurality. What is the nature of the social that it creates different positions for different humans? In this work, Marx spoke of a division of labor, which is his first step towards economics, analysis of class, and understanding the class struggle. Marx imagined pre-history, before the division of labor, when everyone did the same thing. He argued that the first division of labor was between the manual and the spiritual. The first specialists were therefore priests who depended on the rest of the community.

Why would manual labors turn over their surplus to supply for priests? Marx argues that this exchange is construed as one of good of equal value but different types. A set of religious propositions are created that marks some as a successful priestly class, which figures out how to elegantly expand their control. This movement gains success because it addresses real problem and needs, in ways that are at some level satisfying, but which never resolves the real cause of the pain (hence the famous "opiate of the masses").

Marx renamed Feuerbach's deuteroscopy to "false consciousness," feeling it better reflected the exact nature of religious propositions. Feuerbach described religious ideation as an alienation - stealing the best virtues of humanity for the religious imaginary. Marx argued that alienation of the religious sort was the product of alienation at the level of the human and the material; suffering is behind religious need, and if you removed religion, the alienation would still remain. Alienation, for Marx, was a product of actual matter - the stuff necessary for sustenance. He focuses on ownership, production activity, profit, management of goods, and economic relations. Marx begins to work out a complicated system...

He firstly wants to redirect our attention the material human, e.g., how does this person eat? He always focuses on the Mode of Production - what are the activities in which humans engage to produce the stuff of life? What is their technology and techniques? What is necessary for surplus, etc.? Marx also wants us to consider the Relations of Production - a matter of ownership and control. Is the soul recognized as a transmittable property to be bought, owned, and sold?
Marx notes the height of this thinking in medieval feudalism. He notes that asymmetries are possible in any age, however. Often, these asymmetries are necessary for initial future developments. It is also possible, however, that the relation between the Relations of Production and the Modes of Production gets far too out of sync - one class lives in luxury while doing no work while another clash is crushed under the burden of work. This is the moment of alienation for Marx - the worker loses ownership of his product of labor in exchange for a paycheck. Creativity and skill is handed over to someone whose investment in a product is small, but whose return is much larger. Alienation exists at this real, material, end of the spectrum.

So, what would it take to live a less alienated life? Marx here reflects on life, and his theory reshapes consciousness, creating practice, and opens up the possibility of real change in the world. Relationships of Production can be divided into owners and laborers - owners of Modes of Production, and those who use them. This relationship is always asymmetrical. The further out of balance this gets, the more suffering there is. As Modes- and Relationships of Production get more asymmetrical, the more chance there is for a radical change or revolution in society.

As other means than agriculture become important to a society, the noble class is challenged by a rising middle class - the city becomes concentrated and bourgeois. This became very important for the Modes of Production, but it doesn't really change the Relations of Production, which favor the landed nobility. When the bourgeois begin to sense that they are more powerful, Marx predicted there would be a revolutionary overthrow of an outmoded system where modest Relations of Production are so out of sync.

Is there an easier way to accomplish this? The division of labor into the Manual and Mental ensures that there is a class whose job it is to supply discourse, ideas, and philosophies. To ask Marx's question, how do these people eat? The "mental" group can sell their products to the owners (as they have a surplus anyway) because they produce legitimizing discourses for the owners, ensuring legitimacy, stability, ennoblement, flattery, etc). Marx argued that most thought, speech, religion, and philosophy arose from this nexus of selling a mental product to owners. Marx argued that philosophers in this system tried to persuade manual laborers that this is either the best of all possible worlds; or that there are real problems, but you have to man up to them; or there are huge problems, but nothing you can do about them. The crucial role of ideology is to misrepresent social realities as something that ought not to be changed - religion is merely one style.

Marx hoped that philosophies could be turned to the benefit of the "little guy," and saw religion as merely another discourse that legitimized those already in power. He hoped for a revolution in which humans would recognize the chains that bind them and the false hope that religions and philosophies give them and stand up for themselves and attempt to take control to improve their situation and cure the actual causes of their alienation and suffering.

That's about all I can do for tonight. I'm exhausted and have spent far too much time on this as it is. I hope that it's informative, and I'm sure The Rooster could give some additional good information for those of you who are interested. The next post in this series will probably focus on general movements in theorizing religion after Marx and will probably cover a lot of history in a fairly brief way. The next theorist I may consider in any depth could be Taylor. Or maybe Marcel Mauss. We'll see. I'm going to skip Nietzsche, as well as Freud and Jung, because they're relatively well known. If you want me to do a series on them, let me know, and I'll maybe work something up.

Epistemology Classrooms

2009-03-12T01:32:00.003-05:00

Based on my experience with analytic philosophers (hereafter 'philosophers'), I would say the great majority (>75%) of them are non-theists. So prevalent are atheists and agnostics among philosophers that, upon meeting each other or congregating in a group for the first time, it is often the case that one or more of them will take it for granted that everyone else among them is an atheist or agnostic. Philosophers will sometimes put down a position by comparing that position to religion (to wit, Nietzsche used to refer to Kant as "the clever Christian"; it wasn't a compliment). I once enraged one of my colleagues by jokingly saying that if anyone in the department were to convert to or adopt a religion, he would be that person. And when a quasi-relativistic epistemological theory (like semantic or inferential contextualism) is proposed, the test of whether that theory is too relativistic is whether that theory permits religion to count as knowledge or justified belief. Needless to say, I fit right in. Religious claims strike me as so obviously absurd that I am probably a worse philosopher because of it. (Imagine trying to give a charitable interpretation of Descartes' Third Meditation - the one where he presents the cosmological argument for the existence of God - when you think the concept 'God' is not only fictional, but very close to vacuous. That's right: I think that many sentences containing the word 'God' are neither true nor false, but positively meaningless.)

Given the contemporary landscape of academic philosophy, you'd expect that there would be pervasive discrimination against religious philosophers. However, I do not think that is the case. In my experience, once it is revealed that someone in their ranks is, for example, a believing Christian, most philosophers I know will act with respect toward that person, and not be openly dismissive of or hostile toward that person's beliefs. That's not to say that they use kid gloves when talking about religion - far from it - but when they do debate religion they will do so on the basis of reasons and evidence and refrain from leveling ad hominem attacks against their interlocutors - and the theistic philosophers will respond in kind. Some of the very sharpest analytical minds I know are believing Christians. (I have to admit, I am not quite able to make sense of it. I think of it as a kind of cognitive dissonance.) It's when I talk to religious philosophers that I feel the least threatened (by which I mean, existentially threatened) by religion. To put it bluntly: religious philosophers tend to be quite rational in their religious belief; the religious doctrines they affirm are usually sanitized of the more despotic and unreasonable aspects of religion.

Religious philosophers are mostly harmless and reasonable. I still think their religious views are crazy, but when I talk to them, I get more hopeful about the prospects of people getting along despite their deep ideological differences.

In Which I'm an Idiot

2009-03-05T11:00:00.003-06:00

So, sometimes I feel like an idiot. This is one of those times.

See, last year I went to this amazing Mexican restaurant and tequila bar with my friend Mary, one of her friends, and her ex-husband. It was...interesting, but the food and tequila was absolutely amazing (thanks again for driving and taking us, Mary!). Since that time last year (it's been almost a year), I have been trying to remember the name of this place, because I got a little tipsy that night and wasn't driving (I tend to not memorize directions or names if I'm not driving...)

So, for an entire year, I have been struggling with this and asking people about it, trying to describe it and hoping to get someone who knew what I was talking about. I'd narrowed it down to Blue Agave, Salpicon, and Salud and had simply reconciled myself to the fact that I'd have to go to each and check them out. Then, last week, I was making bananas foster at Steph's house (yeah, that's right, I cook a lot). I asked her for some matches, because I didn't want to use my lighter and get that close to the alcohol (yeah, that's right, I've also burned myself a few times). She's like "Yeah, I've got some matches that you left here at the beginning of the year."

Not remember this at all, I say, "Wait...whaaaat?"

So, she brings out this matchbook emblazened with "!Salpicon!" on the front.

I immediately feel like an idiot, and then it all comes rushing back. I had grabbed the matchbook on my way out of the restaurant so I'd remember the name and put it into the coat pocket of my leather coat. Since it warmed up soon afterward, I hung up the coat and didn't use it for a long time. Then I wore it only briefly this winter before I got a long wool peacoat and had totally forgotten about the matchbook by that point, when I gave it to Steph to use at her house...

Ugh.

At least I know what the place is now.

Brief Update on ID in Florida

2009-02-27T13:00:00.004-06:00

A Tampa radio station has taken up a line on State Senator Stephen Wise's bill on Intelligent Design, which he hopes to raise when the Florida Senate meets in March. Scientists have stood up against them, and good on them! Wise is highly influenced by Ben Stein's Expelled. Listen to the last half of the radio segment on the bill. Senator Wise has exposed himself as having literally no understanding of evolution whatsoever. "I've always liked the story the, the person says 'we came from monkeys...we came from apes.' Well, why do we still have apes if we came from them?"

FAIL, Senator Wise. FAIL.

I hate Oprah

2009-02-23T17:31:00.002-06:00

Here's why.

P.S. Sorry I've been MIA lately. I am figuring out where I am going to live next year. I am also working on a couple of papers/projects. One is on the notion of the "burdens of judgment" in Rawls's political theory. (Actually, that might generate some fruitful content for this blog.) The other is my M.A. thesis on Kant's ethics.

P.P.S. God still does not exist.