A political countdown

== Boundaries, borders and political miscellany ==

One of the hottest issues in the U.S. presidential campaign was Donald Trump’s pledge to build a wall with Mexico. Writing from Mexico City, Homero Aridjis and James Ramey offer a highly innovative proposal: Instead of Trump’s wall, they want to build a border of solar panels. “It would have a civilizing effect in a dangerous area,” they contend. “Since solar plants use security measures to keep intruders out, the solar border would serve as a de facto virtual fence, reducing porousness of the border while producing major economic, environmental and security benefits on both sides.”

The latest Wisconsin legislative map has been ruled illegally partisan. Please, get this to the Court before Donald can appoint Phil Robertson to the bench?  

One of the netizens of my blog community recently made a petition on Change.Org that I think some of you may find interesting: Statehood for Native American tribal lands administered by the Federal Government.

Petition Text:  “Native American peoples have historically been disenfranchised with the states where their reservations have been located. Even today, the more than 5 million Native Americans lack even modest representation in DC, often due to the machinations of the Red State governments surrounding them. I propose that all reservations lands that are administered by the Federal Government be designated as an American State, with 2 seats in the US Senate and an proportionate congressional delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. This American State would not be contiguous, but neither is Michigan, Virginia nor Alaska. Designation of a state capital and congressional districts will be entirely up to them. Issues arising between residence in this State and the racial qualifications for tribal membership must be resolved in full accordance with the US Constitution.”

Huh!  I like the idea of giving all Native American reservations a collective statehood!  Kinda hard on New Mexico. Turns it into a smaller state that’s kind of lily white, so no gain for the dems!

How about this alternative idea. Let reservations across the U.S. declare themselves to be part of New Mexico or Dakota? You’d accomplish the same thing. In fact, W.E.B. DuBois once suggested a reverse Great Migration of African Americans to either Mississippi or South Carolina.  It would only take a few hundred thousand to turn either of them into a black republic. What a delicious thought... worth reviving?

Oh, in Existence you see much the same thing.  The Senators from both North & South Dakota are Native Americans… because so many whites moved out after the Yellowstone volcano burped.

== Twin pillars of a cult ==

Republicans are in a tight spot, since Obamacare was originally their own damned plan. 

Why am I the only one mentioning this? All of their alternatives are variations on it.  Not surprisingly since Obama's Affordable Care Act was based upon the outline developed for Republicans by the Heritage Foundation, that was the GOP platform plank on health for a decade and then became “RomneyCare” in Massachusetts. 

Watch this clip of Rep. Brendan Boyle explaining the origins of Obamacare in the GOP's marketplace plan for healthcare.

So why did Obama present their own plan to them, in 2009. He did it in the sappy and forlorn hope that Republicans would actually negotiate, just that once, if offered their own… damn… plan.  

Instead, since Obama touched it, the plan suddenly had cooties. And was deemed satanic by all loyal dittohead Fox watchers! 

Only now, what to do? What, after 6 years screeching that Obamacare - which insured 20 million Americans and steeply lowered the rate of increase of health costs in America - was devil spawn, you still don't have a replacement ready?

 Expect extensive tweaking and cosmetic changes, especially in nomenclature! Lots of symbolic re-namings. And "health savings plans" that no one will buy. Oh, and a new law requiring drug companies to negotiate with Medicare on costs... something democrats have long advocated and that Republicans, by law, specifically forbade.

Later news seems to confirm all that. Paul Ryan’s plan and Trump’s are both looking like Obamacare with Obama’s name and wording scratched out and a couple of tweaks that could have been negotiated 6 years ago, if any Republicans once showed up at the negotiating table. See where I predicted this. 

To reiterate a core point about American political life: Democratic Congresses always negotiate with and compromise with Republican presidents, in order to get some business done. They yell and fight, but always pass budgets, usually based on the budget presented by the administration. 

In contrast, GOP Congresses (with the sole exception of 1995) never, ever negotiate with a democratic president, even over vital national needs. And only seldom do they even pass budgets.

See this pattern playing out again. As it will, especially, if the dems retake Congress in 2018, the Year of the Colonels.

== Cheaters redux ==

North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project. Of course the same thing applies to all but two red states. (In fairness, two blue states also do this wretched cheating.) They do this because if gerrymandering and other cheats fail, the entire neo-feudal design collapses. 

More on cheating: The U.S. is the only democracy in the world that allows its voting machines to be made – mostly unsupervised – by private, for-profit, partisan companies. "Companies that make political contributions as did Dominion, the remnants of Diebold that went out of business for worldwide fraud following the 2004 election, and Hart Intercivic. So we allow these private, for-profit partisan companies to count our vote, to set our databases with secret proprietary software that nobody can look at. It violates every principle of transparency. And the only person on a high level willing to talk about this is Jimmy Carter, who says to Der Spiegel that America has a dysfunctional democracy and that we don't meet minimum standards of transparency."

Apropos of voting machines: this article mentions ‪Black Box Voting the outfit that has probably done the most work to explore and educate about the shift to electronic voting. With a donation, you can download a PDF of the book: Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st century.

== And irksome cavils ==

Someone I know pointed out an interesting hypocrisy: those who would proclaim that human life begins at conception rage against morning-after pills - the simplest form of abortion... yet say nothing about fertilization clinics that create scores of fertilized embryos for every successful birth. Many are flushed.  Some are "stored" without any chance of ever being implanted... and are eventually flushed. Why no outrage?

Perhaps because it's often poor women who need abortions, and those who can afford to could always go to New York or California. But it's mostly rich women who use in vitro fertility clinics. 

Alas, it's likely even simpler than that. The abortion frenzy serves a political purpose, as a way to take the uber moral high-ground, based on a single, grand declaration that proclaims your enemies to be baby-killers. It allows fundies to get around the quandary they faced, called the Jesus Effect. (See my earlier posting: Abortion and the Jesus Effect.) For despite all of his other, beaded, bearded, socialist hippie and broadly democratic values, Jesus would have to be a Republican based on the one, simple issue of saving murdered babies. With that one declaration, they can then safely ignore everything else that Jesus stood for, and help elect a man who is his diametric opposite.

 This is not a stance that can bear much scrutiny.  So never scrutinize.

Oh, final rant-item: Even the CATO Institute, after decades whoring for the Kochs, seems to be gathering some guts, publishing articles like this one -- The Right has its own version of Political Correctness. It's just as stifling -- calling out conservatism for being just as wording and symbolism obsessed as their left-wing “PC bully” adversaries. 

“Just as?” Oh, much, much more so. Vastly more so. See here.  

                                                                       

Abortion and the "Jesus Effect"

Okay then, after riling up some of you by trashing some favorite movies, or else positively reviewing some films you hate, let's settle down to a topic that will win friends and soothe ruffled feathers...

God Does Not Regard the Fetus as a Soul: This article in Slate is an interesting attempt to grasp - historically - why the American right swung so avidly and passionately toward a zero-tolerance policy against abortion: "Ask most (white) evangelicals about the morality of abortion these days, and you’re certain to hear about its absolute immorality in most, if not all, circumstances. But this is a recent innovation in the history of evangelical belief, a product of political forces as well as new theological insight," writes Jamelle Bouie.

As recently as the late seventies, even the Southern Baptist Convention declared it to be morally acceptable in all borderline cases (e.g. rape, incest or threatened health of the mother and the first couple of months. Even theologians in the "biblical inerrancy" movement (the Bible is 100% accurate) cited “[A]ccording to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”

By 1982, however, all had changed and the passionate declarations of "baby-killing in all cases, even contraception" became standard as the most perfect litmus test of an increasingly rigid American right wing…. even as the decline and later fall of communism sapped most similar dogmatic purity out of the far-left. 

So whence came this purist passion, that has absolutely no bearing on the hoary and simplistic so-called "left-right axis"? Randall Balmer, in his book about Jimmy Carter "Redeemer," roots this evolution in the 1970s push to change federal tax laws, removing tax-exemption from segregationist schools that barred pupils because of race. This change -- which even most republicans would today call justified -- was first proposed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, but was blamed on Carter by furious southern whites.  Knowing they could not actually make an issue over such an immoral stance, they needed another purist issue, says Balmer.

Very clearly, one aspect to all of this is the effectiveness of the abortion issue at delivering the biggest (and most destructive) "drug high" in American life, repeated, heavy doses of pleasurable self-righteous indignation, poisoning our national genius at pragmatic problem-solving and negotiation with our neighbors.  I explain this in a TedX talk: Indignation, Addiction and Hope: Does it help to be "Mad as Hell?" that shows how it is not only the American right, wallowing in this filthy habit of self-doped dudgeon. Many on the left... and even you moderate liberals... indulge in this addiction, shamelessly. 

But no. Sometimes -- and especially regarding abortion -- it goes much, much deeper than that.

== The deepest underlying reason ==

Envision you are a woman who has discovered she is carrying an anencephalic fetus… without cranium or brain, that will not survive outside the womb — absolutely zero chance — and that cannot experience any sort of life. (It has nothing to experience life with!) Will purists actually insist she must continue to carry it for five more months?

Then there is the problem of purism vs incrementalism. States like Colorado, that offer teens free contraceptives, would appear to be encouraging promiscuity. Yet, Colorado (and other blues) have LOWER teen sex, teen pregnancy, STD and — yes — abortion rates than states like Mississippi, in which “sex education” consists only of berating kids toward total abstinence -- a goal that they achieve less well than blue states do.

Faced with facts like these, the Confederate Philosophy must be purist. Just reducing the number and percentage of abortions is a non-issue; indeed, pushing for pragmatic, incremental reduction is seen as a sign of moral fault! 

As in Ursula LeGuin’s famous story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” no pragmatic weighing of numbers can stand up to the pure villainy of the state sanctioning even one innocent death. (Never mind that state laws against abortion never succeed and always increase the number of botched procedures and deaths.)

But none of that explains the purity of the right’s current obsession. So what gives?

All right, as you'd expect... I have a theory: the "Jesus Effect."

It's quite simple. Just look at any image of Jesus -- beard, long-hair, sandals, beads, wandering around the desert with a bunch of guys, preaching folks to give up their possessions, "the meek shall inherit" and all that… while also proclaiming you should pay your taxes without complaint. Now squint and imagine him returning and walking amongst us today, teaching the same things.

Um, to whatever extent he endorses a U.S. political party, which can you envision the hippie socialist choosing?  

No no.  This won't do.  This will not do at all!

What conservatives needed was a single issue that would make the crucial difference, like an on-off switch. Something so pure and absolute that Jesus would have to switch sides, holding his nose and saying: "I disagree with you right-wingers on every social and economic and general moral point, and yet... I must still side with you against the goll-durn lib’ruls. Bcause I can't abide baby-killers."

If you had to come up with such an all-or-nothing test, "baby-killing" would pretty much be it. Just by defining humanity at conception, you eliminate any need to consider Jesus's wishes on other matters, like economic fairness, or pacifism, or inheritance by the meek, or… You get it; nothing else need be considered! 

Truly, can you think of any better reason, to explain the volcanic fury of this movement? Why no compromise is permissible, even steadily-incrementally reducing the rate and numbers of abortions? 

Otherwise, we'd long ago have found common ground, uniting on a shared goal ---

-- that strenuous efforts should be undertaken to ensure that abortion will be safe, legal, and very rare.

Santorum Part II: More Choice Samplings of Culture War

Well, he survived the debate and we're all breathlessly awaiting the results from Michigan and Arizona, to see if this marvelous theater will go on.  My own fascination with Rick Santorum is partly rooted in the fell prediction that Papa Robert Heinlein made, in his future history, way back in the 1950s... that a fundamentalist preacher would win the presidency on a court decision, without a plurality (sound like 2000?) and thereupon clamp down a theocracy as "Prophet of the Lord." That character was named Nehemia Scudder and it all happens in 2012.

But in fact, I do not expect Rick to win the nomination, this time around. That is because Republicans always follow a very precise pattern in their nominations.

(1) if there is a recent or sitting Vice President available and running, they always choose him. (In fairness, the dems do that too, almost as consistently.)

(2) If there is no available veep, they then nominate the guy whose "turn it is." The fellow who came in second for the nomination last time.  Reagan in 1980, Dole in '96, McCain in 2008, etc.  Hence, following that rule, it will be Romney in 2012…

...only dig it... that means Santorum in 2016.  Was Heinlein off by only a little bit? I'll conclude this series with a comment on that. Including a prediction for how the GOP base will deal with it when -- the very second after he is nominated -- Mitt Romney instantly charges for the Center as fast as he can.

But first, let's get back to Rick Santorum, the gift that keeps on giving.

 == Rick's Roll Goes On and On... ==

What's he been saying lately?
 
State and federal governments should not have a role in operating schools. 

No abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Women should "make the best out of a bad situation."

Birth control is "harmful to women."

The government should ban or refuse to pay even for pre-natal testing.

When Santorum's press secretary, Alice Stewart, called Obama a "radical islamist" to an open mike, was that just an innocent slip of the tongue?  Or an inadvertent, but Freudian-honest rolling-out of what she - and many Santorum supporters - commonly say and believe in private?

And it goes on. Did Rick call Obama Hitler? See how he denies it... then weaves a draw-your-own-conclusions tapestry that inescapably says exactly that.

== "Fairness" is When YOU Want More... ==

"Just like we have certifying organizations that accredit a college, we'll have certifying organizations that will accredit conservative professors. If you are to be eligible for federal funds, you'll have to provide an equal number of conservative professors as liberal professors." See this interview with Santorum.

So, governments should not operate public schools, and big federal interference is bad... but it should hammer down on colleges to force them to hire 50% conservatives?  Wow.  What's the principle here, Rick?  Fairness and equal time?

Hm... then why do the GOP and Fox scream bloody murder over any mention of restoring the old equal time rule in broadcast news?  The notion that the viewers deserve to see and hear rebuttals to outrageously partisan declamations on partisan cable "news" channels?

Why no opposing opinions or rebuttals... at all?  That's the policy on Beck, Limbaugh, Fox&Friends, Hannity and so on.  Only the resident "adult" at Fox, Bill O'Reilly, has the guts to bring on some guests with challenging viewpoints. Rarely. You say it's the same on the Left?  Not.  Jon Stewart has more opposition guests on his one show than the entire Fox network. He treats them courteously and hawks their books. They come back often and eagerly! There's a word for what Stewart does. It is Courage.

And thus, those who do the opposite are cowards.

Heck, I'd settle for a 10% rule, because having tough, smart opposition voices just that often on Fox would demolish their hypnotic trance.  Rupert and Roger desperately fear the day their captive audience might hear alternative viewpoints. Or even -- (shudder) -- facts.

It seems that "equal time" is right and proper, depending entirely on who is getting "equalized."

Oh but I saved the best for last. It is by far the most important aspect to all of this, even though it will strike many of you as troglodytic and obscure.  Because it shows where millions of our neighbors have been wandering, in their minds and in their increasingly fury-drenched attitude towards the rest of us.

== The role of religion: Rallying the faithful... vs the majority ==

Here's the part that Rick Santorum considers paramount. And so we should take his word on that and spare the time to  pay close attention, because the moral and logical essence is astonishing.

Santorum proclaimed that mainstream Protestantism is "gone from the world of Christianity" -- thereby dismissing all of the communions who are members of the National Council of Churches  as heretical, and thus classifying - by inclusion - all Americans who abide by mainstream Protestant sects such as Lutherans, Episcopalians and Methodists. By all means. link to hear his speech laying out how Satan personally seeks to destroy America, and has so far succeeded in corrupting our colleges and our mainstream Protestant churches:

"And so what we saw was this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it."

What a guy!  I'd be delighted... at one purely political level... if I weren't also terrified.  This, after all, being the year that Papa Heinlein forecast the election of a radical fundamentalist "prophet of the lord" named Nehemiah Scudder.

Woof.  How do you answer stuff like that? Is the intention of all this to make half of Americans view the other half as purely satanic enemies?  For it is no less than that.  Can the United States of America govern itself when we're no longer arguing over negotiated policy solutions, but over pure and essential damnation?

Before you shrug, consider what this means. These folks try not to say it before an open mike, but their pastors (e.g. of Sarah Palin's church in Wassila) make plain that they both pray for and expect all of the events described in the Book of Revelation (BoR) to befall us in the very near future, and that those who do not hold to their exact doctrines are inherently in for grotesque torment and eternal damnation. (Do, by all means, read Revelation and see what they pray for, including "fire from the sky," lavish agony for the vast majority of us, and an end to all democracy and to the United States of America.)

Many of us were already used to being consigned to that category by the BoR-fetishists. Only now Rick makes it clear -- it includes a majority of his fellow citizens.

But let's return to that bit about Satan personally having it in for the good old USA.  Consider it logically.

Let's suppose that someone, say Satan -- (or else an immensely rich foreign royal family with its eye on ending and replacing Pax Americana) -- did conspire and plot to see the U.S. ruined.  Would the devil -- or those princes -- not want exactly this volcanic fury vented by Rick Santorum and his allies?

Raging, hate-propelled civil war? Demonizing our neighbors over any disagreement? An end to all chance for Americans to negotiate with one another as free minds, willing to learn and adapt in the face of evidence? To make us incapable of negotiating with our neighbors as calm adults.

Wasn't that our strength, the eager optimism of our song?

And who'll be laughing with delight the day that music dies?

==Return to Part 1
or continue to Part 3

Snips of Science, Tech and Politics

Occupy the skies!

Think I'm kidding about "sousveillance" and people-power vision? Now citizen protesters have drones!

This video shows the view from a Polish RoboKopter with video camera. Getting an aerial view is the next step in compelling DIY citizen video.



== Antimatter and FTL Neutrinos? ==
 
The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.  This could alter our understanding of matter and anti-matter...or provide a clue to why our cosmos is only made (largely) of one kind.

And yes, there’s been a lot of interest in the recent neutrino experiments in Italy. Does a recent result that replicates the “faster-than-light finding” actually prove it??

Well, I remain skeptical.

1- this new result comes from the same pair of facilities in the alps and Italy; it's not a confirmation.

2- it's very hard to synch the clocks.  Show me you’ve done that and measured the distance properly.

3-  if neutrinos traveled FTL with any consistency they would have arrived months before the light from supernova 1987a, instead of right on time. A hundred thousand light-year journey. Any systematic exceeding of the speed of light would be noticed!

One suggestion that would explain the 1987a results, yet allow something anomalous over the very short, initial distance from Switzerland to Italy? It’s been suggested that perhaps some neutrinos bump out of our "brane" just after being made, then settle back in and travel normally. Very sci fi-ish idea.


== Tax Evasion and the IRS ==

The IRS has opened new enforcement offices overseas, beefed up staffing and expanded cooperation with foreign governments. A similar disclosure program in 2009 has so far netted $2.2 billion in back taxes, penalties and fines, from people with accounts in 140 countries.

Between the two disclosure programs, a total of 30,000 tax cheats have come clean. "The world has clearly changed," IRS Commissioner Shulman said. "We have pierced international bank secrecy laws, and we're making a serious dent in offshore tax evasion... Unlike a few years ago, it's very clear now that there's a real price to be paid for people who think they can hide offshore and not pay their taxes."

You’ll be hearing the “class war” refrain for years. Gather some capsule, one-sentence answers:

* Across 6000 years, 99% of human cultures were pyramid-shaped, and the owner-lords were the ones who oppressed both freedom and competitive markets. Try reading Adam Smith!  So why this effort to demonize every elite EXCEPT the lords?

* Only one generation of human beings did not know “class warfare” - the Post-World War II generation that lived in the miracle that FDR built - a vigorous capitalist-entrepreneurial market and booming middle class... amid the flattest non-pyramidal social order ever seen. The first time ever that self-made millionaires outnumbered the inheritance brats.

Sure, some FDR regulations were excessive. But just try to argue with those results.  The crux: as the anti-FDR cult grew ever-more vituperative and bitter toward America's most popular president ever, it tore down everything he built... all three of those vital metrics of US national health have diametrically reversed.  And this is good for America... how?

Why are people who make grand pronouncements so unwilling to let their opinions change, when shown the failure of their predictions?

* Ask your "ostrich" friends: "Tell us how to avoid “class war” now that 400 families own a greater share of our wealth than 50% of Americans. Is there some disparity that would finally make you worry? When they own more than 75%...Perhaps more than 90%? WHEN will you admit that we’ve returned to the normal condition that reigned in 99% of human cultures? Then will you admit that Franklin Delano Roosevelt wasn’t Satan, or that our parents in the "greatest generation" weren't complete idiots, after all?"

All right, some of that sounds “liberal.” I guess I’ll be accused of that leaning even more, after my next posting about Ayn Rand.  But I promise, I’ll skewer some on the other side, soon!

Also remember this. Libertarians - especially Ayn Rand followers - are not "right-wingers." They have their own perspective and I'll show that it is a very close cousin of ... Marxism.


== The Abortion fight ... and the Bible ==

Mississippi voters recently defeated a ballot initiative proclaiming that life begins at conception. Here's an eye-opening letter in the LA Times by Sandy Smith... and one wonders why this wasn't brought up till now!

"I don't know what Bible the folks in Mississippi are reading, but it's not one I'm familiar with. The New Testament has no references at all to a fetus, but the Old Testament is very specific. If a man kills another man, he must pay with his life; if he kills an animal, he must offer restitution. But, according to Exodus 21:22: "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows." A fetus was considered potential property."

I say again, the whole and entire purpose of the anti-abortion crusade was to give the right a "moral high ground" against foes who seem much more giving and Jesus-like. It lets them say "saving babies trumps all other things that would've made that hippie Jesus side with the left! That one issue makes Jesus side with us!"  An extremely effective polemical trick.

See more in my posting: Abortion and the "Jesus Effect."

== A Bit of History ==

An interesting word introduced to our comments section blogmunity by a new member: Seisachtheia was a set of laws instituted by the Athenian lawmaker Solon (c. 638 BC–558 BC) in order to rectify the widespread serfdom and slaves that had run rampant in Athens by the 6th century BC, by debit relief.

Under the pre-existing legal status, according to the account of the Constitution of the Athenians attributed to Aristotle, debtors unable to repay their creditors would surrender their land to them, then becoming hektemoroi, i.e. serfs who cultivated what used to be their own land and gave one sixth of produce to their creditors. Should the debt exceed the perceived value of debtor's total assets, then the debtor and his family would become the creditor's slaves as well. The same would result if a man defaulted on a debt whose collateral was the debtor's personal freedom.

Solon's law changed all that.  Forbidding slavery due to debt and freeing those who had been so enslaved.  Athenian slavery still existed, but under terms more gentle than Sparta, by far.