Last week I issued a three-parter that proposed several dozen fresh tactics for the Enlightenment side of our current culture war. And as a unifying umbrella, I made them part of a "Democratic Newer Deal"... both satirizing and learning-from the most agile polemical maneuver of the last 40 years - the so-called 'GOP Contract With America.'
Others are wholly my own.
Some of the proposals take the form of internal reforms that Congress could enact on their very first day - of a session whose majority consists of sane and decent people.
For example, pause and envision this reform and procedural rule. One which no future GOP-led Congress would be able to retract!
Distributed subpoena power: We shall establish a permanent rule and tradition that each member of Congress will get one peremptory subpoena per year, plus adequate funding to compel a witness to appear and testify for up to five hours before a subcommittee in which she or he is a member. In this way, each member will be encouraged to investigate as a sovereign representative and not just as a party member, ensuring that Congress will never again betray its Constitutional duty of investigation and oversight, even when the same party holds both Congress and the Executive.
Think about that for a sec. very soon each Representative or Senator would view that personal, peremptory subpoena -- whether one per year or per session -- as a treasured and jealously-guarded prerogative of office. Possibly useful to their party or to confront major issues, or else to grandstand for the folks back home. Either way, they will balk at any attempt by future party leaders to terminate the privilege. And thus it could become permanent. And the minority will never again be barred from calling witnesses to interrogate the majority.
Or look at another internal reform that I'll talk about next time... to reconstitute the advisory bodies for science and fact that used to serve Congress, but were banished by Gingrich and Hastert and company, because... well... this Republican Party despises facts.
Other proposals would be legislated LAWS that seem desperately -- even existentially -- needed for the U.S. republic! Like this one I have offered annually for the last fifteen years:
We shall create the office of Inspector General of the United States, or IGUS, who will head the U.S. Inspectorate, a uniformed agency akin to the Public Health Service, charged with protecting the ethical and law-abiding health of government. Henceforth, the inspectors-general in all government agencies, including military judge-advocates general (JAGs) will be appointed by and report to IGUS, instead of serving beholden to the whim of the whim of the cabinet or other officers that they are supposed to inspect. IGUS will advise the President and Congress concerning potential breaches of the law. IGUS will provide protection for whistle-blowers and safety for officials or officers refusing to obey unlawful orders.
Wouldn't everything be better if we had IGUS right now? Go back and read the full text.
And then there's this one - a way to bypass the corrupt Citizens United ruling by the suborned Supreme Court - using a clever and totally legal means, that is supported factually by Robert Reich. Though I think my approach is more likely to get passed... and to work.
THE POLITICAL REFORM ACT will ensure that the nation’s elections take place in a manner that citizens can trust and verify. Political interference in elections will be a federal crime. Strong auditing procedures and transparency will be augmented by whistleblower protections. All voting machines will be paper auditable. New measures will distance government officials from lobbyists.
Campaign finance reform will reduce the influence of Big Money over politicians. The definition of a ‘corporation’ shall be clarified: so that corporations are neither ‘persons’ nor entitled to use money or other means to meddle in politics, nor to coerce their employees to act politically.
There are others, like how to affordably get every child in America insured under Medicare, while we argue over going the rest of the way. We'll get to that amazingly simple method next time.
But here's another one that is super timely because - as reported by the Strategic News Service - "Huge new botnets with 40M+ nodes are available to criminals on the dark web..." That's Forty MILLION computers around the world - including possibly the one you are now using to view this - have been suborned and turned into cryptic nodes for major cyber crime.
Indeed, we are far more open to cyber attacks than ever, now that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been downsized by a third! And the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) dissolved, and the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC) terminated. And many counter-terror agents have been (suspiciously) re-assigned. Hence, here's a reform that might address that... and it might - if pushed urgently - even pass this good-for nothing Congress.
THE CYBER HYGIENE ACT: Adjusting liability laws for a new and perilous era, citizens and small companies whose computers are infested and used by ‘botnets’ to commit crimes shall be deemed immune from liability for resulting damages, providing that they download and operate a security program from one of a dozen companies that have been vetted and approved for effectiveness by the US Department of Commerce. Likewise, companies that release artificial intelligence programs shall face lessened liability if those programs persistently declare their provenance and artificiality and potential dangers.
Again... these and maybe 30 more are to be found in my big series on a proposed "Newer Deal." I'll try to repost and appraise each of them over the next few weeks.
Almost any of them would be winning issues for the Democrats, especially if they were parsed right! Say, in a truly workable 'deal' for the American people...
...and for our children's future.
== Political notes ==
Kimmel’s latest has been to satirically take on Trump's crowing about his 'aced' cognitive test. That test (which is not for IQ, but to eval senility or dementia) was accompanied by yowling that two female Democrat Reps were 'low-IQ.' Kimmel's offer of a televised IQ vs dementia test is brilliant. It'll never happen. But brilliant. In fact, Kimmel's offer of a televised mental test is a version of my Wager Challenge.
The key feature is REPETITION! The KGB-supported foxite jibberers have a tactic to evade accountability to facts. point at something else and change the subject. Yet, no dem - not even brilliant ones like Pete B and AOC - ever understands the power of tenacious repetition. Ensuring that a single lie - or at most a dozen - gets hammered over and over again.
All right, they ARE doing that with "Release the Epstein files!" Will they learn from that example to focus? To actually focus? And yes, demanding $$$ escrowed wager stakes can make it a matter of macho honor... honor that they always, always lose, as the weenie liars that they are.
29 comments:
Dr Brin in the previous comments:
And Galt refusing to share his inventions, even via existing imprefect markets where 'looters' would steal some value , was tantamount to murdering a billion people..
Ayn Rand's heroes had some notions about economics which seem wise when you're wrapped up in the moment of the book, but don't make a lot of sense in reality. They smugly treat fiat money and Taggart Transcontinental stock as having zero value because they can be arbitrarily manipulated. I could see valuing such things below their ostensible face value for that reason, but treating them as if they are Monopoly money is just another fallacy. As long as they can be traded for goods and services, they self-evidently do have a non-zero value.
I think what those characters were trying to say is that you can't bury fiat money or TT stock in your back yard and expect it to maintain its value indefinitely over time. If so, I say "So what?" You can't do that with pizza or petroleum either, thanks to entropy. You can't even really do it with gold. Gold may be tradable for more goods and services in 50 years, or it might be tradable for less, but contrary to Rand, it does not maintain a constant intrinsic value for all eternity.
I think what those characters were trying to say is that you can't bury fiat money or TT stock in your back yard and expect it to maintain its value indefinitely over time. What a weird position for an author to take. Used books are also worth far less than the price printed on the back cover. You can buy a hardcover Ayn Rand book (printed price $28) for about $5 at online used booksellers.
Rand's novel was written in a time when train travel and radio were the preeminent forms of transportation and communication. Though both air travel and television existed, they were treated in the book more as novelties.
Point being, I don't think online bookstores were on her BINGO card.
No Randian has ever even tried to answer my 2 dozen 'j'accuse!' denunciations at https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/aynrand.html
- like her 'life-oriented philosophy' following characters never having children or even discussing it! (For reasons I speculate.)
- like the fact that she denounced the Interstate Commerce Commission's regulation of railroad charges... and DEMOCRATS DISSOLVED THE ICC and ended the practice. And no Randian ever gave them credit or ceased to the looter-anticompetitive GOP as their preferred "hold my nose and vote" alternative.
...and many others.
I will admit that THE FOUNTAINHEAD was a bearably readable and even diverting novel, if sadomasochistically kinky, unlike ALL of her other, turgidly awful writings. Irt worked because it focused on art and architecture which truly ARE often rife with deceit and villainy.
So? The US patent system, while hugely imperfect, is NOT. And Galt could have patented his inventions and saved a billion lives while becoming richer than Croesus.
- like the fact that she denounced the Interstate Commerce Commission's regulation of railroad charges... and DEMOCRATS DISSOLVED THE ICC and ended the practice.
Much of the plot of Atlas Shrugged depended on the fact that, at the time of writing, private ownership of gold was forbidden in the United States. The fact that that practice was ended in the 1970s doesn't at all affect her followers' dissatisfaction with the status quo.
I will admit that THE FOUNTAINHEAD was a bearably readable and even diverting novel, if sadomasochistically kinky,
The Fountainhead is a different kind of polemic, and even makes a good case for some of her philosophy without making a tract out of it. It's a story about individual people, even if they mostly act like cartoon characters whose fates are preordained. I've read it twice and may do so again some day.
The problem with Atlas Shrugged is similar to the problem with The Bible. It's supposed to be a story and a how-to-live-your-life manual, and there's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle that says it can't be both at the same time. At least "Atlas" isn't also trying to be a history book as well, which the Bible is.
And Galt could have patented his inventions and saved a billion lives while becoming richer than Croesus.
He'd have only accepted payment if it was in gold.
Galt Patenting his inventions
Patents are like a thin veneer on all of the underlying structure and knowledge that is required to make them worth anything!
What good would the knowledge of how to make Galt's miracle metal have done to a caveman?
Without all of the underlying technology to make the stuff, measure it and use it .......
Underlying techs that ingrate Galt never acknowledges or pays for.
Heck, what "intrinsic value" would GOLD have had for a caveman?
Again I ask, what makes you think that the people who actually run this country will ever allow you to pass any of these laws?
I've had that reaction to many of our hosts recommendations. His common sense approach to districting, for example. But the reason state and federal districts are so gerrymandered is not because no one has thought of a way to make them fairer. It's because lawmakers don't want to make them fairer.
What good would it do to explain to Judge Doom how to make the Red Car more efficient and profitable? He bought the Red Car to dismantle it.
Rand's novel was written in a time when train travel and radio were the preeminent forms of transportation and communication. Though both air travel and television existed, they were treated in the book more as novelties.
Point being, I don't think online bookstores were on her BINGO card.
Before there were online bookstores, there were ACTUAL bookstores, some for new books, and some for used books. (There's still a few of them around, and many of those that survived are very special places)
OGH would know more about the economics than I would (if he still remembers ;-) e.g. I don't know what prices were at used bookstores in the 50s. But in the 90s, used to be about a buck for paperbacks in the bins, and I think you got a quarter or 50 cents back for books you sold them. The printed price on my copy of a Tom Clancy novel from that era was $9 CAN.
Even new bookstores had tables set up near the front for books that had sat on the shelves past their sell-by date (there would be one display at 20% or 30% off, others that were $5 or less for hardcovers for dogs that just weren't moving).
So the market value of Ayn Rand's book as soon as you walk out of the store with out would have been about 1/8th of what you paid.
So the market value of Ayn Rand's book as soon as you walk out of the store with out would have been about 1/8th of what you paid.
I would guess she considered that you realized the value of buying her book when you read it. Just as I realize the value of a slice of pizza when I eat it. Trade-in value has little to do with consumables. No one, not even the Romans, claims that it's a bad idea to eat food because it's only worth what you can trade it for.
Now if we were talking about poly-bagged, mint condition copies of "The Death of Superman", then sure, the only reason for buying them would be as a store of value. Most paperback books don't roll that way.
The amazing thing to me is how conservatives see all taxation as slavery, but will fall over backwards to yield enthusiastically to much worse exploitation by big business.
John Galt works as an inventor at a motor plant in a company town in rural Wisconsin. Just as he "invents a way" to make an innovative new motor that runs on atmospheric electricity, the owner dies and his heirs decide to run the plant as a communist collective. John Galt’s reaction is the calmest but hugest temper tantrum in literature; he decides not only to quit his job in rural Wisconsin, but to destroy the entire nation’s economy to teach them something something garbanzo.
And yet, if the original owner had lived, the motor Galt had invented would have been appropriated as the property of the company, because that’s where it was built, according to the adhesion contracts that all engineers and product developers signed as a condition of employment under 20th century capitalism. It would have been called the Starnes Motor, CEO Starnes would have been credited as its inventor, and it would have depended on the kindness of Starnes’ heart whether Galt even got a bonus for the use of his mind. And THAT would have been just fine by him, but taxes and labor cooperatives are a bridge too far? Blank out.
Celt asks the wrong questions about rules.
The Rule Obedient (aka 'those who are inclined to follow the rule-of-law') are often subject to a peculiar psychosis, insomuch as they assume that any rule (once written) has the magical power to compel obedience in those who are most disinclined to follow external direction, leading to the near exponential proliferation of civilization-smothering regulation.
I therefore argue that Celt & our fine host would be better served by examining the actual basis for the the rule-of-law among men, instead of producing more meaningless legal boilerplate due to their acceptance of the biblical Divine Logos myth.
Best
_____
The compendium of US Federal Laws, Regulations & Statutes has increased by more than 7000% since 1938, while rule obedience (as a population percentage) has gone into steep decline, as the rule obedient continue to insist that MOAR rules will usher in a golden age of law & order when the opposite is provably true.
Celt: (1) You make a very good point, since I have been raving several of these notions for nigh on TWENTY years. It's not corruption that prevents Dems from acting on them. In 2021-22 the Pelosi miracle bills did many fine things, including reversing the decay of US infrastructure... and sure, ALL construction bills contain some kickbacks. This one maybe 0.01% as much as is routine under Trump. But it was still great stuff...
...and none of it prepared us for Trump v 2, as my IGUS bill or the war powers act or others would have done. Because they simply could not imagine... or consult anyone with imagination.
And - since almost none of my proposals would have undermined the interests of dem lawmakers, there's just one explanation... insipid lack of imagination and derision of anything Not Invented Here. Kamala's people illustrated that sickness to an especially spectacular degree.
2. But that's how it might actually happen! Very little in my list of 35+ reforms would not garner 60%+ support from sane Americans, if offered well and very little of it would gore any Dem sacred cows. What is needed is a major election result... plus another miracle... the still residually sane wing of conservatism finally getting fed up.
3. In any event, I aim to GET THE IDEAS OUT THERE. And you guys can help.
---
Locum must be cribbing this stuff. It's too smarmy-smoothly written and it is stark, jibbering insanity. Hey goombah, YOURS is the most disciplined-obedient political movement in US history, lockstep Nuremberg-style rallies. ANY cant or jibber issued at midnight by the Kremlin basement is repeated by Fox in the morning and must be repeated, verbatim, by all GOP officials by evening or they are in trouble.
feh.
I think Loc is too moral. Won’t go into his rule-compliance screed; but to go on a tangent will write that there is that which is thoroughly immoral yet entirely necessary.
Such as torture.
We can all agree that torture is extremely wicked albeit torturing spies has to be done. Unless someone believes that nationalism is passe’, and we should be more Kumbayah.
People know what they’re trained to know: Loc was trained as a physician. What does he know about the nuances discussed here?
Nope we do NOT all agree! - torture is counterproductive - it produces convenient lies and is NOT useful
The combination of "extremely wicked" and "counterproductive" means that it should never be used
Counterproductive? yours is an Opinion, not fact.
Much info has been obtained by torturing spies.
... sure, morally you’re correct; but this is a practical matter. It concerns national defense—-not ethics in a Philosophy class.
@Alan Brooks,
You invoke national security as if torture is always a net gain in that realm, and that the only reason to refrain is for bleeding heart reasons. We most certainly don't "all agree" on that point.
Torture often produces any fantasy that the victim believes will make the pain stop. During the Iraq occupation, there were all sorts of news items about plots bomb plots using model airplanes and something about cows that I don't quite recall. No doubt, the "intelligence" gained from torturing prisoners.
That aside, torture provokes vengefulness from the other side. George Washington famously forbid torture of captured Redcoats, which made them more willing to surrender rather than fight to the death.
Torture also disgusts potential allies.
There may be very limited situations where torture is appropriate. A captured member of a terrorist cell who knows when a terror plot is planned for, perhaps. Even so, I find your categorization of "spies" as the necessary victims to be questionable. What can they be coerced to tell us other than what they already reported back to our adversary on? Not quite the ticking time bomb excuse.
What's counterproductive was to over-use a method of interrogation that formerly had been reserved for the very most urgent and heinous moments and men... and so overuse it that we were forced to outright ban it and send people to prison. And cripple the very few specially chosen utilizers NOT to use it under those special circumstances. It's less about 'morals' than about jibbering stoopid dunce-headed idiots. And THAT was just the Bushites! Who were absolute geniuses compared to these microcephalic, pervs and Kremlin sig Heilers.
Much info has been obtained by torturing spies
True!!
But 90+% of that "info" has been total bollocks!
The experience during WW2 was that the British method of giving a nice cup of tea, talking to them nicely (and bugging their quarters) worked MASSIVELY better than torture or ill treatment
Pragmatically "Torture" has zero actual advantages and massive disadvantages
So even if it was not "evil" then it should NOT be used
LH,
there MAY be very limited situations where torture is appropriate?
There ARE— not may be—such situations.
Duncan,
If the number is 90+ percent useless intelligence, it still leaves 10- percent useful info.
This is one time you are not convincing and won’t be—
unless you provide more evidence re torture being out of the question.
@Alan Brooks,
You're scaring me, dude.
Do you also advocate torturing and killing their family members to make them talk? Because that would be more effective, right?
If the number is 90+ percent useless intelligence, it still leaves 10- percent useful info.
If you can immediately discern the wheat from the chaff. Otherwise, no, a method that gives you misleading info most of the time is not useful, let alone worth becoming evil for.
You're masking your thirst to identify an "other" that it is ok to torture with concern for national security. I'm not buying.
Banned outright?
How do you know torture isn’t being conducted anyway, in absolute secrecy?
So presumably Alan Brooks would have been OK with the Ukrainians, provided they could reach him, applying whatever level of torture required to get the Starlink re-enabling codes out of Elon Musk after he crippled one of their offensive actions by switching coverage off.
It strikes me that would have fitted any definition of 'urgent and heinous moment'.
I do not know that it isn't done in extreme secrecy. But the task of doing that is far harder now that very explicit laws would reward your colleague next to you for handing you over. Not under the current admin, of course. Which encourages the same insane attitudes as the Bushes, tho on steroids.
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