The difference between Liberals and Conservatives

I believe I have complained before, in a blog about gun control, that its opponents were so fixated on what gun control might lead to, that they were unable to see what the lack of gun control has already led to.

I think we can generalize from that point and say that the Liberal sees his task as acting to solve existing problems, while the Conservative urges us not to act, so as to prevent problems he thinks might result.

Inside the heads of the Republican base

Apparently, one of the biggest worries among the Republican base is that Democratic programs are designed to foster dependence on government which will guarantee a Democratic majority in the future.

I find this interesting coming from the party that has been bragging about their strategy to create a permanent majority for the Republicans.

And when I die...

I do not plan to die soon, but one never knows.  I have mentioned a funeral I have been to of a skeptic, whose wife had not one, but two religious groups participating.  That, of course, was between the husband and the wife, and I think, had he been conscious of his own funeral, he might have shrugged and rolled his eyes, but understood.  He loved his wife, after all.

I know of another funeral of an atheist, that I did not attend, at which a friend, a writer of some popularity these days on matters Christian and spiritual, made a rather showy speech, which was more about herself and her beliefs than it was about the departed.  The grieving family were not comforted.

When I die, if I get a funeral, in keeping with my view that the Bible is merely one book among many, I would like texts from other books read instead.

At the risk of quoting a passage longer than constitutes "fair use," I give you Lucretius, from On the Nature of the Universe:

"Now it is all over.  Now the happy home and the best of wives will welcome you no more, nor delightful children rush to snatch the first kiss at your coming and touch your heart with speechless joy.  No chance now to further your fortune or safeguard your family.  Unhappy man," they cry, "unhappily cheated by one treacherous day out of all the blessings of life!"  But they do not go on to say: "And now no repining for these lost joys will oppress you any more."  If they perceived this clearly with their minds and acted according to the words, they would free their breasts from a great load of grief and dread.

"Ah yes!  You are at peace now in the sleep of death, and so you will stay till the end of time.  Pain and sorrow will never touch you again.  But to us, who stood weeping inconsolably while you were consumed to ashes on the dreadful pyre--to us no day will come that will lift the undying sorrow from our hearts."  Ask the speaker, then, what is so heart-rending about this.  If something returns to sleep and peace, what reason is that for pining in inconsolable grief?

Here again, is the way men often talk from the bottom of their hearts when they recline at a banquet, goblet in hand and brows decked with garlands: "How all too short are these good times that come to us poor creatures!  Soon they will be past and gone, and there will be no recalling them."  You would think the crowning calamity in store for them after death was to be parched and shriveled by a tormenting thirst or oppressed by some other vain desire.  But even in sleep, when mind and body alike are at rest, no one misses himself or sighs for life.  If such sleep were prolonged to eternity, no longing for ourselves would trouble us.  And yet the vital atoms in our limbs cannot be far removed from their sensory motions at a time when a mere jolt out of sleep enables a man to pull himself together.  Death, therefore, must be regarded, so far as we are concerned, as having much less existence than sleep, if anything can have less existence than what we perceive to be nothing.  For death is followed by a far greater dispersal of the seething mass of matter: once that icy break in life has intervened, there is no more waking.

Suppose that Nature herself were suddenly to find a voice and round upon one of us in these terms:  "What is your grievance, mortal, that you give yourself up to this whining and repining?  Why do you weep and wail over death?  If the life you have lived till now has been a pleasant thing--if all its blessings have not leaked away like water poured into a cracked pot and run to waste unrelished--why then, you stupid man, do you not retire like a dinner guest who has eaten his fill of life, and take your carefree rest with a quiet mind?  Or, if all your gains have been poured profitless away and life has grown distasteful, why do you seek to swell the total?  The new can but turn out as badly as the old and perish as unprofitably.  Why not rather make an end of life and trouble?  Do you expect me to invent some new contrivance for your pleasure?  I tell you, there is none.  All things are always the same.  If your body is not yet withered with age, nor your limbs decrepit and flagging, even so there is nothing new to look forward to--not though you should outlive all living creatures, or even though you should never die at all."  What are we to answer, except that Nature's rebuttal is justified and the plea she puts forward is a true one?

But suppose it is some man of riper years who complains--some dismal greybeard who laments over his approaching end far more than he ought.  Would she not have every right to protest more vehemently and repulse him in stern tones:  "Away with your tears, old reprobate!  Have done with your grumbling!  You are withering now after tasting all the joys of life.  But because you are always pining for what is not and unappreciative of the things at hand, your life has slipped away unfulfilled and unprized.  Death has stolen upon you unawares, before you are ready to retire from life's banquet filled and satisfied.  Come now, put away all that is unbecoming to your years and compose your mind to make way for others.  You have no choice."  I cannot question but that she would have right on her side; her censure and rebuke would be well merited.  The old is always thrust aside to make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the wreck of others.  There is no murky pit of Tartarus awaiting anyone.  There is need of matter, so that later generations may arise; when they have lived out their span, they will all follow you.  Bygone generations have taken your road, and those to come will take it no less.  So one thing will never cease to spring from another.  To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.  Look back at the eternity that passed before you were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing.  This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.  Is there anything terrifying in the sight--anything depressing--anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep?

(Translated by R.E. Latham.  Penguin Classics.)

 

 

The Shutdown: Plain as the nose on your face.

Plain as the nose on your face; that's how my mother used to put it.

And yet, I feel I need to reiterate what the shutdown is all about.

1.  The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) passed both houses of Congress, and was signed by the President; it is therefore the law.

2.  The law has already been tested by the Supreme Court, and found to be Constitutional.

3.  The Republicans in the House of Representatives, led by their Tea Party wing, do not want Obamacare to be implemented.

4.  Instead of using democratic methods to try to repeal a law, the Republicans in the House of Representatives have shut down the government by sending the Senate a budget tied to a delay of implementation of Obamacare.

Now, in my opinion, what the House Republicans are doing ought to be illegal, but I guess it isn't.  It really amounts to extortion.

As for people who are claiming that there is "plenty of blame to go around" and that "both sides are refusing to negotiate," they seem to be ignoring the obviously outrageous behavior of the House Republicans.

Cultural deprivation

I'm constantly surprised that, the farther back in history my reading goes, the more I realize that humans have been fighting pretty much the same battles since we learned to talk.

My picture of history has been a gradual awakening of humanity from the darkness of superstition over centuries.  But one finds writers farther and farther back who championed reason over belief in the supernatural.

I have long known, in a vague way, of the Great Greek philosophers and ancient Greek science, but my picture of the world held on stubbornly.

Now I'm reading Lucretius, a poet who was born about 100 B.C., and he espoused some very advanced scientific and philosophical ideas, based on observation of nature.  He didn't get things exactly right, of course, but he did well for someone without even a telescope or a microscope.  He said, for example, that matter was made up of atoms, which were constantly in motion, and that "all objects are compounds of different kinds of atom."  He dismissed the notion of punishment after death.  He said nature was self-regulated and was not interfered with by the divine.

It dawned on me as I read On the Nature of the Universe, that my idea of the past as uniformly dark and superstitious was formed by the Bible.  My early life was steeped in religious teaching that substituted the Old Testament for a broader view of ancient history.  I missed the scientific and rational currents that existed in the ancient world--that must surely have existed in some minds since the beginning of humanity.

A note on the Second Amendment...

The text of the Second Amendment to the Constitution reads thus:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

What else does the Constitution say about this militia?

Article I, Section 8:  The Congress shall have the power (15.) to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; (16.) to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such a part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

And,

Article II, Section 2:  The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.

This militia, to which the Second Amendment is attached, is explicitly under the control of the Congress (while the states do select the officers and train the troops), and also under the command of the President in times when it is called to serve the nation.

Our Second Amendment absolutists, those dreamers, see the amendment as a protection against the tyranny of the Federal Government, but, aside from language that gives the states certain powers (and duties), the Congress and the President are in charge of this militia.

Again, can we please use common sense with regard to the Second Amendment?  My meaning is this:  The Second Amendment doesn't mean what you think it means; and your fears about what you think will happen if guns are controlled in any way are purely hypothetical.  What is happening right now with guns in the United States is anything but hypothetical.

 

Sweating the small stuff...

I don't know how to begin to explain the benefits of a single line to people who don't get the concept.  What I'm talking about is the situation where you've got more than one cashier, but they're all fed from one line of customers.  The beauty is, of course, that, unlike when there are multiple lines, you're never in the wrong line.  If one cashier turns out to be slow, you're not stuck with him or her.

Now, as long as McDonald's has been in business, they've never made a serious attempt to manage their customer flow.  There's a mosh pit in front of the counter, and the system is a fluid, uncertain one. The customers decide, on the fly, how many lines there are.  The single line system often breaks down when a manager calls out, "Come on, folks, there are two lines!"  Other times, there's a customer who doesn't understand why the people in front of the line don't pick a cashier, thereby making two lines.  That customer, like the woman behind me in line this morning, will say, "If nobody wants to go to that register that's almost empty, I will.  Then the people in front of the idiot have to pick a line quickly, or she'll just do it.

Anyhow, I've gone on too long about a small matter, but I'm a pedantic nerd about these things.

Join me next time when I explain why you should never send a companion to save a seat in a crowded restaurant while you're ordering.

NOAA CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS!!!!!!!! Nah, not really.

One of my co-workers read me a headline from a news source he reads, to the effect that NOAA should be given a "climate change denier's award" for pointing out that, although 2012 was one of the hottest years in a long time, it was also the coldest since 2008.

In any case, the argument went that NOAA (along with myriad contributing climate scientists) was still trying to scare the public, although it's clear that we are in a cooling trend.

So, I Googled "NOAA climate report cooling trend," and I found the internet abuzz with the news.  Most of the stories used similar wording to the story my friend read.  And many of the stories cited one "climate blogger," Pierre Gosselin as a source.  So I checked him out.

Funny that the first sentence in his story is this:

"The political beauty about climate data is that it can be easily manipulated in order to fool the public."

Mr. Gosselin meant that remark to be applied to NOAA, but it is an inadvertent confession.  Gosselin's trick is one that is very well known to those who seek to use data to fool people, and, luckily, also to those who are truly interested in using data to find out what is really going on.

The trick is to take, from a large collection of data, a small slice that seems to contradict the data taken as a whole.  In this case, Mr. Gosselin has selected a graph of temperatures between the years 1998 and 2012 which shows the temperature going down.  The larger graph, beginning in the 1890s, shows a definite, accelerating warming trend.  It would be one thing for the wishful thinkers to imagine that the temperatures are leveling off, but some of these blogs are contending that we've turned the corner, that climate scientists have been alarmists all along, and that we might be heading for an ice age.

Meanwhile, of course, we see that ice sheets in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic are melting faster than expected.  It's all too visible.

The point is that, even as the atmosphere heats up in the long run, there will always be short periods when the temperature goes down.  But the long term trend is still up.

Here's a thought experiment for you.  On June 1, 2013, the high temperature in Washington DC was 91.  Over the next week, the high temperatures were 86, 83, 78, 80, 76, and 73.  Did that mean summer was not coming?

Rand Paul pushing "Personhood at conception" bill

Here I see two things.  First, it's another piece of evidence that Libertarianism is a white male phenomenon.  Second, it's another instance of trying to legislate science.  You can't make something true by passing a law that says it's true.

Hunter on David Brooks on the Muslim Brotherhood

My goodness, I seem to be too lazy lately to write my own stuff.  But sometimes other people's stuff is just so good, it needs to be rebroadcast.

Hunter, over at Daily Kos, puts out superb, scathing diaries day after day.

In David Brooks wonders if Egypt has the 'mental ingredients' for democracy, it is not lost on Hunter that every single thing Brooks says about the Muslim Brotherhood applies exactly to America's own Tea Party.

"Waaaaah!" say the babies.

“Our ability to freely engage in civic life and to organize in defense of our beliefs is still under coordinated assault from groups on the left that don’t like the idea of anyone criticizing their aims, and from a White House that appears determined to shut up anybody who challenges it,” McConnell said at the American Enterprise Institute, according to a transcript.

I don't know what McConnell is talking about, unless it's the strange idea that criticism of one's beliefs is an attack on free speech.  As I've said many times, free speech means that you're allowed to say any dumbass thing you want, and I have a right to call it dumbass.

In related news, right-wing Christians are feeling bullied.  In this country, you could never elect an atheist president, but Christians feel bullied.  Now, if they equate bullying with ridicule, maybe they have a point.

Thank you, President Obama

A while back, I wondered whether our long-term defense policy would amount to intervening in any situation anywhere in the world that looked like it might be trouble.  President Obama, in the quote below from his speech on terrorism, gives me hope that that won't be the case.

I believe, however, that the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion about a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. Because for all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.

Thank you, Mister President.

Purity of essence

If you are the government, Thou shalt not put beneficial chemicals in the water.

If you are the government, Thou shalt not prevent private industry from putting deadly poisons in the water.

Fantasy vs. reality

The gun people are worried that any regulations on guns will cause any or all of a number of disasters.  They worry so much about what might be, that they cannot see the sorry situation that exists in the here and now.

As of this moment, at least 4,044 men, women, and children have been killed by guns since Newtown.

Once again, it's fear vs. facts.

Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US

Bush has also told friends and political associates that his success keeping the homeland safe after the 9/11 attacks will be awarded greater weight by history. That’s why it’s no coincidence the centerpiece of the library’s exhibit hall is a 17-foot, 2-ton piece of steel from the Twin Towers.

Clearly, George W. Bush and his admirers don't appreciate irony.  The centerpiece of the Bush Library's exhibit hall is the greatest symbol of his failure as president.

George W.Bush, a class act

"Fuck Saddam.  We're taking him out." --George W. Bush, March 2002

"Do you want to know what the foreign policy of Iraq is to the United States? (Gives the finger.)  Fuck the United States!  That's what it is--and that's why we're going to get him." --George W. Bush, September 2002

"Kick ass!  If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!  Our will is being tested, but we are resolute.   We have a better way.  Stay strong!  Stay the course!  Kill them!  Be confident!  We are going to wipe them out!  We are not blinking!" --George W. Bush, April 2004

I've gone on before about how George W. Bush used our pain and grief over the 9/11 attacks to maneuver the United States into a war with a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, a country  which he fully intended to invade before 9/11.

Even after it was known that Iraq was not behind the attacks, and even after it was known by anyone who cared to look at the evidence that Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction," George W. Bush exploited the natural desire of a people to follow their president in a time of war.

And now that the war is over, we can reflect on the fact that more Americans died in that war than died in the attack that George W. Bush was pretending to avenge.  George W. Bush was willing to have others make that sacrifice on his own selfish behalf.  He is a bad man.

We also know that George W. Bush was a worse than mediocre president, a fact that anyone should have been able to predict from his career up until that time.

George W. Bush is not a man who cares about the consequences of his actions.  He is not an intelligent man.  He cannot speak a coherent sentence.  If such a drab little person can move a country into a war it should never have fought, what might he have done were he articulate and if he had even a thimbleful of charisma?

Because we can?

I'm no expert on foreign policy, to be sure.  I may have mentioned here before that I was startled to find out that there are American troops in somewhere around 150 countries.  That little fact has been percolating in my brain, mostly unconsciously, and it has prompted me to dimly wonder just what we mean when we talk about national defense.

There is a range of defense stances the most powerful country in the world can take.  The most limited would be to maintain our military at some minimal, but safe level, and be vigilant for signs that our people or our country might be attacked.  The other extreme would be to try to keep the rest of the world so locked down that nobody anywhere could even begin to get the wherewithal to attack us.

So it occurred to me to wonder just what our defense posture really is.

In the March 2013 issue of Harper's, Andrew Bacevich has written a letter to Paul Wolfowitz "Occasioned by the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war," which speaks to this question.

According to Bacevich, Wolfowitz is a disciple of one Albert Wohlstetter, described as a "nuclear strategist," and "the quintessential 'defense intellectual.'"

Bacevich presents Wohlstetter's "precepts" as follows:

First, liberal internationalism, with its optimistic expectation that the world will embrace a set of common norms to achieve peace, is an illusion.

Second, the system that replaces liberal internationalism must address the ever-present (and growing) danger posed by catastrophic surprise.

Third, the key to averting or at least minimizing surprise is to act preventively.

Fourth, the ultimate in preventive action is dominion.  The best insurance against unpleasant surprises is to achieve unquestioned supremacy.

Lastly,  by transforming the very nature of war, information technology--an arena in which the United States has historically enjoyed a clear edge--brings outright supremacy within reach.

Wolfowitz's ambition, says Bacevich, was and is to put Wohlstetter's ideas into practice, thereby preventing "the reemergence of a new rival" (after the crumbling of the Soviet Union.)

The actions taken by the Bush administration in waging war on Iraq are a direct result of Wolfowitz's influence.  The results of the Iraq war, as Bacevich rightly points out, are nothing like the tidy outcome Wolfowitz's ideas predicted.

Indeed, says Bacevich, the question is this:  How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?  (Italics his.)

Aside from the question of whether preventive war works, my concern is with its morality.  How much is the United States entitled to tyrannize the rest of the world in order to protect itself?  Our actions remind me of the days of colonialism and the convulsions the world is still going through as a result.  With power comes responsibility, but in ways I don't think the right wingers understand.  The practice of preventive war will give us a lot to answer for.

 

 

 

Supporting the troops

People are falling over themselves and each other in an effort to be the most supportive of the troops.  For those of you too young to remember Vietnam, this may or may not seem remarkable.  Here's a little history of how the modern attitude came about.

You may have learned in History class that the Vietnam war was an unpopular one, and indeed it was.  It didn't start out that way, at least for most people.  There was a sharp, very acrimonious division between the pro- and anti-war camps.  As the war dragged on, more and more Americans moved to the anti-war side.

There was a widespread attitude at the time that the key to ending any war was for enough people to refuse to participate as soldiers.  I had a button that read, "Wars will cease when men refuse to fight."  Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote a song called The Universal Soldier, that put the blame on each individual who willingly went to war.

By the time it was over, the Vietnam war was at its most unpopular, and when the soldiers came home, the customary public thank-yous and patriotic parades did not happen.  As time went on, many people became ashamed of their treatment of the Vietnam veterans, and today's soldiers are the beneficiaries of a more extravagant appreciation.

I thought we were done with Whom and Whomever.

I remember reading, a few years back, that the word "whom" was fading from use, and that "who" was beginning to "sound" correct, even in the objective case.

Something odd has started to happen.  I've noticed that a lot of people, perhaps because they think it makes them sound more educated, are using "whomever" a lot.  The problem is, they seem to be guessing when to use it, and guessing wrong.

One error that people often make is the following:

"I will give a piece of pie to whomever deserves it."

They realize that the words that follow "to" in the sentence constitute the object of the verb "give."  They also, perhaps, know that "whomever" is in the objective case.  What they don't realize is that what the clause "whomever deserves it" needs is a subject.  "Whoever," the nominative form, belongs there.

"I will give a piece of pie to whoever deserves it."

So, in this case, using "whomever" actually makes the speaker sound less educated.

I'm all for the disappearance of "whomever."  Even when it's correct, it sounds stilted and archaic.  So if you're using "whomever," and you're not sure why, my advice is to say "whoever" every time.

NRA enemies list

One of the publications I read reported that the NRA has an "enemies list," and listed a small selection of organizations on that list, and I suspected that, perhaps, the NRA was revealing an anti-Semitic streak.  But when I studied the whole list, I found that wasn't the case.

The list, to clarify, is of organizations and prominent individuals who have pro-gun control policies, and/or who have given money to promote such policies.

Looking at the list, I see that the overwhelming majority of its members come from the medical and helping professions.  Doctors, nurses, and psychologists are the ones who deal every day with death, wounds, and trauma inflicted by firearms.  These are the folks who would be expected to know just how big the problem is.

Next, numerically, are educational and child advocacy groups.  And we certainly don't need an explanation as to why that is.

The third largest category is religious groups.  This fact makes me happy because it reassures me that most religious groups are still peaceful and loving by nature.  It is interesting to note, also, that despite the worries of the Second Amendment absolutists that citizens will be defenseless against some future fascist or socialist dictator unless everyone can own a gun, several Jewish organizations are on record as wanting more gun control.

The gun lobby has told us that the Jews might have been able to save themselves had they been armed. Jews have, indeed, been persecuted and murdered in huge numbers by the governments of Nazi Germany and the USSR.  It is also true, however, that before World War II, Jews were killed in large numbers by mobs of their non-Jewish neighbors.  So, as I stress time and again, the government is not the only entity we have to fear.  While my last observation might strike you as a reason for increased gun ownership, many Jewish and African American organizations don't agree.

Republicans, please just get out of the way.

People like to feel useful, I believe.

There are people out of work.

There is real work that needs to be done.

Who cares whether the money for that work comes from the private sector or from the government?

Not me.

Certainly not the people who are out of work.

It is immoral to let one's ideology get in the way.