Doom and Gloom?

== You cynics aren't helpful! ==

Finally, someone (else) is making a key point — that liberals and progressives sabotage themselves with gloom, by proclaiming that no past reforms or interventions have done the slightest good.  Nothing has improved, everything is worse and none of the past measures that we strove so hard to achieve has ever worked! 

This reflex is not only counterfactual and kind of sick-minded... it is also spectacularly counterproductive, playing into the hands of those who proclaim: “Yep! Progressive ‘solutions’ never work, and progressives are the first to say so!”

In Progressives Lost the Election, but Their Ideas are Winning, Richard V. Reeves offers statistical evidence that the poor and middle class aren’t doing quite as badly in the U.S. as many have been railing. Does that make him an enemy of progress? Not when he shows relentlessly that:

(1) it was successive liberal interventions that prevented a plummet into poverty for tens of millions and 

(2) we still have a long way to go. Indeed, bragging about their product’s past successes would be the first thing done by any sane salesperson! Suggesting that many of our left-wing friends are not especially, well, sane.

“For progressives, doom and gloom will be a self-defeating political strategy, since it adds steadily to the sense that government doesn’t work. This will be especially true in 2016 after occupying the White House for two terms. The subtext of downbeat progressive rhetoric is, by implication: "Yes, we have already done all these things (the Great Society, tax credits, welfare reform, food stamps), but honestly, nothing has really worked, look how terrible things are becoming," writes Reeves, continuing:

“What they should be saying instead is: "Look at all these government initiatives that have really worked to reduce poverty, improve workplaces, lessen inequality, weaken racism, boost women’s chances, and improve wellbeing. So let’s do more of it! What’s the next problem that we can help to solve?"

Lest you right wingers crow, at this point, fie upon you!  If you had had your way for 70 years, this society would be a festering feudal cesspit of poverty, simmering on the edge of revolution. And you HAVE had your way in the US for 2 decades, and things ARE getting worse for the middle classes! Your oligarchs, in contrast, are doing great. Still, the aversion of our news media - of all kinds - to ever mention good news, is stunningly consistent, almost to the point of evil.

Just one example.  Since the Department of Health & Human Services began a campaign, three years ago, to eradicate fatal  hospital errors, there has been a plummet in Hospital Acquired Illness. Had you heard of this?  Of course not.

All of this riffs along with Steven Pinker’s important book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, wherein he shows absolutely that average per capita rates of both violence and poverty have plummeted, worldwide, every decade since humanity hit its nadir in 1943. 

I take head-on the fury that these facts arouse in people of the left, and the blindness of the right, in my TedX talk, Indignation, Addiction and Hope: Does it help to be mad as hell? (Follow the slides on Slideshare!)

Caught in the middle are the few remaining liberal-pragmatist problem solvers remaining in a country that once specialized in pragmatism and negotiation and simply getting the job done.

All of this shows that - although the Neo-Confederacy is our worst problem today — a froth of insanity and treason, incited by foreign petro-sheiks who mean us nothing but harm — there certainly is a fair amount of crazy, also, on the other side.

== Satire and Bullshit == 

The New Age Bullshit Generator randomly generates hilariously plausible, touchy-feely psychotech-quantum babble!  Farm-out man! Right-arm!

For a more compact version of this much-deserved satire, see: The Enigmatic Wisdom of Chopra.

But I recommend delving into the intellectual grand-daddy of New Age/postmodernist satirical debunkery, the "Sokal Hoax." 

Okay, I am having some fun skewering the ditzy far-far-left, this time. But let us never forget, cesspits thrive near all fanaticisms. And although the biggest threat right now to our rational enlightenment is the "bullshit mountain" of the Fox'd right, there is definitely a far wing of the other side that wallows in insipid fantasy. 

If you cannot turn your head and acknowledge this, then you have Fused Political Spine Disease and you are part of the problem, not the solution.

Get an ideological chiropractor.  Re-learn how to turn your head and see that dangers lie in all directions. Only then will you earn the credibility (as I have done) to say: "I am very aware of my own side's crazies... and that qualifies me to say, unequivocally, that the other side is worse!"

== Health Care ==

“For all the irrational disgust the right has for the ACA (Obamacare), the law itself is actually a boon to entrepreneurs," writes Steve Benen, It allows brash startups like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb to do their capitalist thing, attracting lots of independent drivers, etc, who can have the courage to take on that lifestyle instead of working for The Man, since health insurance can now be bought affordably outside working for a big company or corporation.  

Just to be plain, this was actually predicted, back when Newt Gingrich presented the ACA as his party’s alternative to “HillaryCare...” 

...before the GOP went completely bonkers and disowned its own… damn… plan. Simply because Barack Obama had the utter gall – the nerve – to … agree to it!  That gave their own damn plan cooties, it appears.

 == On Ebola ==

Pater Tenebrarum observed: “A friend recently asked us whether the massive Ebola outbreak in West Africa could be regarded as a “black swan” in the sense of Nassim Taleb’s definition of the term. After thinking it over, we concluded that yes, it can definitely be characterized as one. Evidently, something is very different about this year’s outbreak compared to previous ones, and a number of unexpected developments have occurred. Chief among them is that a hitherto firmly held belief had to be abandoned. It was thought that the very thing that that makes the illness rather terrifying, namely its high mortality rate, helped in containing outbreaks…  We can definitely state that the current outbreak is anything but “well contained”."

== ISIS CRISIS == 

George Monbiot sarcastically asks (in The Guardian) “Why stop at Isis when we could bomb the whole Muslim world? Humanitarian arguments, ifconsistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East.”

Midway into his attempt at satire, he offers this paragraph: “Is there not an urgent duty to blow up Saudi Arabia? It has beheaded 59 people so far this year, for offences that include adultery, sorcery and witchcraft. It has long presented a far greater threat to the west than Isis now poses. In 2009 Hillary Clinton warned in a secret memo that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban … and other terrorist groups”. In July, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, revealed that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, until recently the head of Saudi intelligence, told him: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.” Saudi support for extreme Sunni militias in Syria during Bandar’s tenure is widely blamed for the rapid rise of Isis. Why take out the subsidiary and spare the headquarters?”

Monbiot leaves out the biggest allegation against that desert kingdom — that it meddles in U.S. governance.  Not just with bribery and blackmail and the usual tools, but above all by supporting and maintaining Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda empire which has deliberately destroyed politics in America, pitting one half of the country (a re-ignited Confederacy) against the other half.  

The Bush family, virtually a branch office of that R’oil House, (holding hands with them and calling Prince Bandar “Uncle Bandie"), plunged us into so many calamities that every single metric of U.S. national health plummeted under the watches of George Senior and George Junior, plus Dick Cheney — losses that measure many trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.  Should we not consider all of that an “act of war”?

In any event, remember this in 2016.  That McCain and Romney distanced themselves from the accursed Bush clan... but surrounded themselves with factotums from the entire Bush-GOP 'brain trust' that delivered the worst governance seen in at least 80 years. Do not believe that anything has changed, till the whole house has been disinfected and cleaned. And finally hope for sane conservatism when that whirring sound goes away... the spinning of Goldwater and Buckley, in their graves.

  

== Bush and more Bush ==

Oh please, please please run, Jeb. By appearances, you seem the least loathsome of your wretched clan, whose terms in office featured exactly ZERO improvements in even one unambiguously attributable metric of US national health.  The first and second time that happened, ever in U.S. history. Indeed, nearly all such metrics plummeted across the spans of both Bush Administrations... a correlation so perfect that it tempts one to imagine it had to be deliberate.

And why not?  As we've seen, the Bushes are so intimately tied to one of the Middle Eastern royal families that W said "Uncle (Prince) Bandaar just about raised me."  A family also co-owns Fox.

So yes, by all means Jeb, run! If the Confederacy succeeds in imposing another Bush rule over the United States, then we in the loyal, Blue half will deserve what we get. And our nation's 200 year Civil War will be over, for good.

P.S. and BTW....  I am still looking for a guerrilla performance art coop who might do a piece of political humor that would far out-do Jib-Jab's famous 2004 "This Land" sketch. 

It might even put the kibosh on this "dynasty" thing, once and for all.