Gleeful cruelty, part deux

Since my last post, I've been reading Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir of living with the fatwa. He cites H.L. Mencken's delicious definition:

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

That says it all.

The gleeful cruelty of Republicans

The gleeful cruelty of today's Republicans goes nicely with their frantic rapaciousness. By rapaciousness, I mean the fact that some of them seem to have a compulsion to lay waste to our rare resources as quickly as they can, and to sell off our protected lands so that they can despoil them for a couple more bucks. It just irks some people that they can't own everything they set their eyes on.

By cruelty, I mean their determination to make life harder than it has to be. They want to dismantle all of the government work that has made life a little easier for Americans: Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare. And, for God's sake, they want women who miscarry to have to bury or cremate their fetuses.

Birth control has been a life saver for women, but the Republicans even want to get rid of contraception if they can, even though the lack of contraception would make the number of abortions go up.

And, make no mistake, these wealthy paragons of virtue would take their own wives, daughters, and mistresses for abortions in a New York minute, if they had to. The women who suffer most from abortion bans and contraception bans are the poor, who are, by the way, suffering already. Just not enough for the Republicans' liking.

Sixty million Trump voters are fools.

On November 8, a large portion of the United States electorate failed the IQ test. There are approximately sixty million of you. Some of those 60,000,000 votes are fraudulent, but the number of fools is not far off.

Whether your vote was for the establishment of a fascist state; to roll back the gains made by liberals in the "culture wars"; because you thought the gaudy, amoral candidate from New York City understands your dim sense of being an oppressed minority; or because you still believe in the idiotic Republican economic policies that bring disaster every time they are implemented, you have been bamboozled. Here is what we will all be getting: misery.

Abject misery.

Don't think that the ignorant brutes you have put into power will only punish your perceived enemies. It will be bad for everyone.

Perhaps you thought that Barack Obama did not understand the Constitution. Donald Trump and his thugs may talk about the Constitution, but they, if they even know what is in the Constitution, are not really interested in finding out.

Liberty is out the window. Maybe even your liberty. Probably your liberty.

Republicans like Paul Ryan see the Trump administration, with its accompanying Republican majorities in the House and Senate, as an opportunity to push through their economic policies. If they are successful, you will lose your Medicare; if you have Obamacare, you will lose it; you will lose the overtime pay that Barack Obama promised you; your Social Security may be in jeopardy; we will all probably experience another Great Recession or Great Depression.

But the loss of liberty is the worst thing. You may have thought you were voting for liberty for your own race or your own religion, but you will probably be surprised at the outcome. The creation of an official Christian state would mean the end of freedom of religion. You don't believe that, but it is true.

I hold some hope for an Electoral College Christmas Miracle, but if that doesn't happen, misery is coming. For everybody.

Properly directed praise

A co-worker of mine spent a long time in the hospital and under care of doctors for a very dangerous spinal infection. When she finally came back to work, in a wheelchair, but in good spirits, we were all happy to see her, and I told her so.

She smiled at me and said, "All the glory goes to God!" I am used to these declarations, and I usually don't let on that I think they are preposterous, but I'm sure I let my jaw drop for an unguarded split second before I regained my equanimity.

All the glory to the being who, if it existed, was responsible for the disease in the first place. No thanks to the tireless efforts of the medical professionals who saved her life.

I am going to quote, probably at too great length, the reaction of Daniel Dennett to a similar life or death situation.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and X-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to X-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India--and the United States, of course--and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan--you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

("Thank Goodness", Copyright 2006 by Edge Foundation, Inc.)

Let's give credit where credit is due.

Office organization for the new president

p.g. montgomery

Anytown, USA

November 17, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump

Trump Tower

New York, NY

Dear Mr. President-elect,

I can see that you have been struggling a bit under the weight of your new duties, since President Obama gave you the bad news that you have to hire your own office staff. I think I can help you with your office organization.

I am a recent retiree with computer skills and also a background in property management. I can offer you my services as an office manager for $1,000.00 a month (I could use the money to supplement my Social Security payments, for sure!). However, if I do a bad job, you don't have to pay me. You can see that I have researched your business style!

Now, I recently heard that you are having trouble scheduling a meeting with the leader of Japan, not having been aware that meetings with foreign leaders are easily arranged through the Department of State. I admit that I, like you, have no experience in the Federal Government, but I am very skilled at the Google! These things can be looked up, and if you're too busy, I'm your guy!

Please consider my application, Mr. Trump. I don't think you'll get a better deal anywhere.

Yours sincerely,

p.g. montgomery

P.S., I do have a couple of requests for benefits should you hire me: I voted for Hillary, and I was very much looking forward to taco trucks at every corner. If you could arrange for one to be parked at the end of my street, that'd be great! Also, I don't think I could work with that douchebag Steve Bannon. If you really need to keep him around, please see that he is kept on a leash while in the office. Thank you!

p.g.m.

Thoughts on yesterday's electoral calamity

Donald Trump has won the latest battle in Pat Buchanan's Culture Wars. Those of us who have been around awhile can perhaps console ourselves that, while this battle was a big one and its result will be catastrophic, the war is never over.

A conservative acquaintance of mine makes the claim that the only group of people that it is not politically incorrect to ridicule is the poor white. We call them trash, rubes. Well, whatever we call them, they have had their revenge on the intellectual elites.

This revenge they have exacted is a curious one. They have chosen as their champion a man who is in no way like them. The rural districts of America have elected a city slicker from New York City, no less. A business cheat whose own open behavior and statements make his vileness obvious to all. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States leaves the rational person with a lot of questions. Those questions must have answers. Here are some of mine.

A good number of people in the United States (the people who have spoken) do not tolerate neighbors who are different, but paradoxically, seem to admire those same differences in their celebrities. If a person wants to be different, he has to go big. If you are gay, be Liberace. If you want to be a sinful woman, be Miley Cyrus or Madonna. If you want to grab your own crotch in public, be Michael Jackson. Being an amoral bully and an alleged raper of underage girls might just get you elected president if you just go big enough.

Another habit of many, many people is to refuse to see things that are in plain view, and to believe in things that they can't see. The Killary mythology (she is a murderer, someone said to me) proves stronger in these people's eyes than Donald Trump's open amorality. Donald says, "I'm rich. I can grab women's pussies." Hillary is hounded by years of investigations that find nothing, and yet people are more afraid of her than they would be if she were actually a convicted criminal. The imagination is stronger than reality.

Finally, what are we to make of so many evangelical Christians voting for somebody who so obviously does not share their values? He cheats on his wives; he gropes and makes advances on married women; he peeps at his beauty contestants when they are undressed. And it should be plain to anyone that he is not a religious man. Why vote for him?

I have recently read a couple of essays that shed some light on the evangelical mindset and give us clues as to their strange, unexpected behavior.

Let's compare two different attitudes about people's behavior.

First, let's look at John Stuart Mill's Moral Influences in Early Youth: My Father's Character and Opinions. John Stuart Mill was not brought up with any religious belief or training. He recalls his father's attitude toward the behavior of others: James Mill judged a person by his outward actions, and those actions by their effect on others. James Mill was not interested in the motivations for these actions. Bad motives might bring about good actions, and vice versa; all that counted, in the end, was the action itself.

Contrast that point of view with the one criticized by George Eliot in her essay Evangelical Teaching. Her criticism of evangelical teaching centers on the opinions of the Reverend Doctor John Cumming (referred to in the essay only as Dr. Cumming). Dr. Cumming's view on a person's actions is that a good deed is worth nothing if done for its own sake, just because the doer has a benevolent heart. Good deeds are only good if they are done with the glory of God in mind. The doer must intend to advance the glory of God in order for a good deed to have any moral merit.

Now, this attitude suggests to me that any action, good or bad, may be acceptable if done to advance the glory of God. This brings us back to the Culture Wars, and to Sean Hannity's strange (to me) comparison of Donald Trump to King David. After all, said Hannity, King David had 500 concubines, and yet, the fallible king managed to do the will of God. Why shouldn't Donald Trump advance the glory of God? I firmly believe that evangelical Christians could cast their votes for the manifestly bad man Donald Trump because they think that he will be God's instrument in winning the war against secular humanism. We shall see how that works out.

Funny world. Not "funny ha ha."

The religious contribution to the modern world is negative.

When I was in ninth grade, we had a course called General Science, which was ably taught by a Mr. Doyle. One day he gave the class a little survey in which we were to rank the importance of various historical figures in their influence on the modern world.

There were modern figures like Einstein and Lincoln, intermixed with Biblical names: Moses, King David, et. al. You may recall that, outside of school, I did not enjoy an intellectual background. All I knew of ancient history was the Bible. The Greek philosophers, for example, did not yet exist for me. So, in my mind, the Biblical figures loomed large, especially since they were from so long ago, yet still were so present in our lives. I reasoned that the reputations of more modern figures had not stood the test of time.

Well, apparently a lot of the other kids reasoned the same way, because Mr. Doyle let us know of his distress at our choices.

As I look, also with distress, at the modern disdain for science and logic, it occurs to me that, beyond religion's promotion of things that are not true, it has artificially preserved a world view that existed among ignorant religious fundamentalists thousands of years ago. It's a view of life that, without religion, would presumably have died a quiet, peaceful death when its time was up.

Moses and King David are too much with us today. Judges and lawmakers want the Ten Commandments displayed in courthouses, although our modern legal system owes more to things that happened in England a few hundred years ago. Some people believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.

The scientific point of view encourages us to observe nature carefully, then come to conclusions about the world. These days, there are far too many people who deny what is obviously in front of them, and instead believe only those things for which there is no evidence.

One way such thinking takes root is via our religious training. From the time many of us were small children, we have been conditioned to believe things that are false, and trained to twist logic so that it fits preconceived notions--notions that are false.

For me, these old ways of thinking are like the invasive vines that are choking the bushes in my back yard. It takes a long time to get rid of them. It is unwise to plant them, for sure.

Trump has finally made enough noise to wake some of the sleepers up.

The latest lame excuse from leaders of the Christian Right for still supporting Donald Trump, following the revelation of his serial molestations, is that the Lord has long used flawed individuals to do his work. The Biblical example cited was King David and his 5,000 concubines. Mysterious ways.

But there are signs that there are evangelical Christians who have reached the lower limits of how far they'll go to get a Republican into the White House. For example, a student group at Liberty University has announced it wants nothing to do with Donald Trump.

It is nice to see that there is a limit to how far Republicans can plummet. The party has been in moral and intellectual decline since Newt Gingrich came on the scene, at least, despite his pretense of scholarliness.

I have really been amazed that Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Michele Bachmann, and Ted Cruz, and so many others were not the end of it. Every day seems to have found the hole getting deeper for several years now.

I am not expecting everybody to smarten up over night, but I would like to think that the candidacy of Donald Trump is enough of a jolt to cause a "What have we done?" response.

If you're still voting for Donald Trump, maybe you don't know who it is you're supporting.

One of the most emotionally satisfying moments in a movie, for me, is when a bully gets his comeuppance. George McFly punches Biff Tannen, and his life--and his family's--is transformed. Is there any more wonderful moment in film than Ralphie beating up Scut Farkus? In last night's debate, Hillary was Ralphie and Donald was Scut. I want to make sure, Donald Trump fans, that you know just who he is.

Some of you, I suppose, know very well who and what Donald Trump is, and support him anyway. Perhaps when you went to the movies, you rooted for Biff Tannen and Scut Farkus. The polls show that the race between Hillary and Donald is very close. I would hate to find out that America has that many people who know a bully when they see one, and support him anyway. If there are that many such people in America, our country is an ugly place indeed.

I'll try to be charitable here. Maybe you don't see Donald Trump as Biff Tannen. Maybe you cast him in the role of "the tough cop who doesn't play by the rules." But really, that cop is a bad cop and an asshole to boot. He's no hero.

OK, maybe you love tough guys on principle. Maybe toughness is everything to you. Have you noticed how wimpy and whiny Donald Trump is when he's not busy bullying? The people who have "treated him unfairly" or might treat him unfairly in the future include Megan Kelly, Anderson Cooper, and Lester Holt. Not to mention entire newspapers and TV networks.

And now Donald is blaming his loss in last night's debate to a faulty microphone. I can see him in gym class, missing a routine fly ball and blaming his crappy glove. Or pretending to trip over a rock in the field.

Donald the bully is afraid. He knows that Hillary knows more than he does about government. So he blames everybody involved for rigging the process against him. The bully is a not-so-secret wimp.

Just want you to know who this guy is that you're supporting.

They just hate her because she didn't stay at home and make cookies.

Everyone has a theory as to the origins of Hillary Clinton's reputation as a suspect character. People have been investigating her dealings--and coming up with nothing--for so long that many people assume she must be a crook. Mainly, though, the investigations have been politically motivated--Republican skullduggery.

What's the origin of Hillary Hate? I trace it back to Bill Clinton's first election campaign and his first term in office. Hillary made it known from the start that she had a lot more to offer a Clinton administration than your average First Lady. Why should she waste a JD from Yale Law School, after all? Why shouldn't that come in useful?

The day after Bill Clinton's first election, I saw one of those "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for Bill OR Hillary" bumper stickers. Clearly, Bill Clinton's enemies on the right felt that Hillary had already, before Clinton was even inaugurated, stepped out of the First Lady role and into a job she hadn't been elected to. When she started the hearings on health care, they clearly thought she was out of line.

What rankled, of course, is that Hillary was invading the boys' territory, and being better at it than a lot of the boys. It still rankles, apparently.

A matter of faith

The United States has been a field experiment in economics for longer than I have been alive. One observation from this study is that we are usually better off economically speaking when the Democrats are running things. Time and again conservative policies send the economy into a tailspin.

Just as when the religious praise God in the wake of natural disasters, conservatives never stop believing in the face of evidence that their theories are wrong.

Conservatism in economics is a faith.

No honor among Republicans

The Republican Party is tearing itself apart. The coalition of rich guys, poor whites, and evangelicals is being torn asunder by its own membership.

Is it really any wonder? A mix of pathological lying and conspiracy thinking that already trusts no one is the perfect combination... for disintegration.

Imagine being a paranoid in an organization in which everybody else probably is lying to you and stabbing you in the back.

Il Donald acts out...

I'm sure that Donald Trump always saw his run for the presidency as his opportunity for the ultimate in self-aggrandizement. Of course, when he acts out on an international stage, everything about him is magnified, including his assholery. And I'm sure the spotlight that is now shining on his crooked business practices has attracted more law enforcement attention than it might have otherwise.

Donald Trump is an odious little man, and now the whole world knows it. Way to go, Donnie.

A worried mind

Nate Silver says it's not really time to sweat every little movement in the polls, but the current trend has me very worried indeed.

The question I have for a nation that has seemingly gone insane: Why are so many of you so willing to follow a candidate so obviously vile, even when every new news item about him makes him appear more corrupt, more ignorant, more unfit? Why are Republicans made of Teflon?

And why, given a Democratic candidate who is the most competent, best qualified in recent history, should unfounded allegations have such a dramatic effect in the polls? For some reason, Hillary has to be blemish-free or you won't vote for her, while Il Donald can be covered in slime and you don't notice.

I know the Conservatives will roll their eyes at my explanation, because of their own conviction that the white male point of view is the only one without bias: Hillary Clinton is a woman. A woman must be faultless, must not behave like a man, to gain their approval.

Even so, I wonder that so many Americans are so stupid.

Donald Trump voters: You are the victims of the Art of the Bamboozle.

First, I should provide a link to Ezra Klein's excellent article containing every reason not to vote for Donald Trump.

I have just this to add. There is a large pool of disaffected voters who feel voiceless, and who think that Donald Trump will hear their voices at last. Donald Trump hears those voices, all right, and he has promised them everything they long for.

But Donald Trump is a man who has made a long list of promises he hasn't kept.

He has promised millions to charities and not honored those promises.

He has hired people to do work for him and not paid them.

If you are one of the disaffected voters I mentioned above, I wish you luck with your complaints. Donald Trump will not keep his promises to you. He is not your savior. Donald Trump is a con artist.

Disappointment and delusion

Robert Reich is getting on my last nerve.

I'll get back to that statement in a minute.

First, I'll digress to the ultimate story of the persistence of false beliefs. The story is the subject of the book When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter.

In 1954, a woman named Dorothy Martin (aka Marian Keech) led a cult that believed that the world would end on December 21, and that the faithful would be rescued by a flying saucer from the planet Clarion. When the prophecy failed to come true, instead of dashing the cult's faith, it actually made it stronger. Marian Keech, you see, soon received another message from Clarion: God had been so impressed with the steadfastness of the believers that He had intervened to save the Earth at the last moment.

I relate this story because it reminded me of the reaction to today's news that the FBI had concluded their investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices and found nothing worth prosecuting. Far from calming Hillary's detractors, it only strengthened their conviction that she is evil incarnate.

Now, we know that the right wing has been after the Clintons for years, and that, when the House Committee on Benghazi had to finally give up on the idea that Hillary was responsible for the deaths of embassy personnel, they grasped at the straw of there being criminal activity in her handling of her emails. When the Committee finally gave up even on that, the right had only one hope left: that the FBI investigation would turn up something that they could use to prosecute Hillary.

Now, to anyone who paid attention, the facts never supported the indictment scenario, but hope springs eternal.

This brings me to Bernie Sanders's truest believers. Beginning with the assumption of Hillary's evil nature, their belief system included the following:

Hillary stole the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders, and

Hillary would surely be indicted (they shamelessly bought this from their own political enemies) and Bernie would miraculously get the nomination she had stolen from him.

But I suppose it was predictable that, when the miracle was not forthcoming, there would be a way to claim that that only made the case against Hillary stronger. Sure enough, the attacks against her intensified today, because the lack of an indictment merely reinforced the faithfuls' belief in Hillary's great powers: she is a criminal, her email server committed treason, and yet SHE GOT AWAY WITH IT! Yes, Hillary is so powerful, that even the FBI is afraid of her! In the cesspool that is politics, Hillary Clinton is no common criminal! She is MORIARTY!

So, finally, back to Robert Reich. He is perhaps the most public progressive proponent of the myth that Bernie Sanders still has a path to the Democratic presidential nomination. He has redoubled his attacks on Hillary Clinton in the wake of the FBI's failure to find any criminality in her email practices. I think Mr. Reich needs to take a deep breath, and perhaps count to ten, and ask himself what good can possibly come of continued attacks on Hillary Clinton.

Frankly, I think we should all thank the FBI for saving the Republic. It's a choice between putting the presidency in capable hands, and abandoning the country to the disaster that is Donald Trump.

But the true believers would rather look that gift horse in the mouth.

 

Trying to unpack the Orlando shootings

The shooting in Orlando is a complicated matter, and getting more complicated as we find out more.

People trying to make sense of the shooting (and to assign blame) are pointing fingers in many directions.

All of those pointed fingers are justified to some degree.

Omar Mateen, the shooter, was a Muslim.

Islam preaches against homosexuality.

Omar Mateen, it now appears, was also gay.

Omar Mateen has been married twice, both times to women.

Omar Mateen's family are very strict, and he led a double life.

Omar Mateen was abusive to his first wife, and she left him.

Omar Mateen was on the FBI's radar in connection with possible terrorist plans, but was released for lack of solid evidence.

Yet he had no trouble obtaining guns legally.

People are saying that we need to take off our blinkers and recognize that we have a problem with Islam. Perhaps that is so.

Some right wing Christian leaders have celebrated the massacre.

Religious life affects different people in different ways; some become murderous, others saintly.

We know that human beings are very complex, and that part of our makeup is extreme violence.

Terrorists and other violent people form clusters around some religious organizations.

Our modern Western religious doctrines contain very high levels of error.

People who base their actions on the assumption that the holy books are God's Word are making a mistake.

All of the contributing factors to the Orlando massacre, aside from Omar Mateen's easy access to guns, are nearly intractable problems that will likely not be solved soon.

The Bill of Rights spells out our rights, but the law recognizes NO right that is unlimited.

The freedom of speech guaranteed by First Amendment does not allow you to commit libel, incite a riot, or yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

The Second Amendment should not be interpreted as giving every Tom, Dick, or Harry the right to any kind of firearm he chooses.

Lawmakers should be smart enough to decide who should and shouldn't have guns, as well as what kind of guns are legal, and not be hogtied by absolutist allegiance to the Second Amendment.

Decisions on gun control are really much easier to sort out than flaws in human nature.

Gun control should be implemented while we try to work out those other problems.

No matter what the root causes of acts of violence are, the use of firearms multiplies the damage manyfold.

I wish the President would take their guns away.

It's a complicated world, of course, and everybody seems to have their favorite villains in the Orlando massacre. It's a twisted confluence of many problems we have in America.

The shooter had been on the FBI radar for a few years. They had to let him go for lack of evidence, but I really believe that dangerous people need to be denied gun permits, even without having been convicted of anything. I'm not asking for their freedoms to be taken away, saving the freedom to murder someone.

The right wing will blame Islam; the left wing will defend its peaceful adherents and point to our own right wing Christian leaders for whipping up anti-gay hatred. I will say, as an atheist, that people basing their behavior on beliefs that are false can be a danger to all. And all religions are based on false beliefs.

The thing that really enrages me is that, for whatever reason, there are people in this world who assume for themselves judge, jury, and executioner rights over their fellow humans. For that reason alone, we need stronger gun restrictions.

At this point, I would be happy to see some governmental overreach.

They got nothin'!

Some Republican Party notable, I can't remember who, recently complained that the Trump version of the party is "morally and intellectually bankrupt." You may find that very phrase in one or another of my blog posts from several years ago, since anybody who has paid attention has noticed that there has been no there there for a long, long time.

Markos Moulitsas over at Daily Kos was marveling today that, apparently, not a single high-ranking Republican has responded to Hillary Clinton's devastating speech on Donald Trump's deficiencies as a candidate and possible president. Nobody came to Trump's defense.

It has finally happened: the Republicans have reached such levels of nothingness that there is no argument they can make in their own candidate's defense.

It became apparent during Hillary Clinton's Benghazi Committee appearance that her Republican tormentors had also achieved tremendously high levels of incompetence and unpreparedness. Even had there been a Benghazi, or even an email, smoking gun, I don't think that bunch could have smelled it.

Intellectual bankruptcy.

Moral bankruptcy.

Incompetence.

Lack of preparedness.

That's today's Republican Party.

Abstinence-only sex "education": just another authoritarian idea

What are the goals of sex education? First, we want our children to understand themselves and their bodies more accurately. Second, as a result of that education, we seek to prevent our children from suffering. That is, we hope that the things they learn will prevent sexually transmitted disease, and will keep them from being parents before they are ready.

The goals of the abstinence-only approach are ostensibly the same, but are they really? Too often, the teaching of abstinence is done without actually imparting any information whatsoever. Keep the child ignorant in the hope that ignorance of sexual matters will keep him/her from indulging in sex. The child might just as well not be in class at all.

We know for a fact that, since the beginning of humanity, teenage hormones have made it nearly impossible for the young person to resist sex, no matter how strongly they or their families believe they ought to. Over and over again, the sex drive wins over good sense.

A good sex education course, aimed at the minimization of unhappy accidents, takes this reality into account. Abstinence-only sex education merely attempts to overcome the urges that are natural, and the outcome is very often not the desired one. We know, because we can count, that in areas with abstinence-only programs, out-of-wedlock pregnancies happen more often than when children have good information; the same is true with STDs.

Faced with these facts, proponents of abstinence-only education persist in their practices. This makes me wonder about their real motives. Do they really, out of love for their children, want to give them a better life? Because what they're doing fails miserably.

I wonder whether their real motive is a desire for strict obedience to their parental authority. Well, even so, they fail to achieve that, too.

Protecting our bathrooms from Republican legislators

State governments with Republican majorities are passing laws designed to keep transgender people from using the bathrooms they belong in. They want to prevent girls from the predations of... of whom? Ex-boys?

Aside from missing the obvious truth that, once a male undergoes sexual reassignment, he's no longer a male, some of our Republican legislators are once again displaying behavior that fascinates me.

Many of our ardent Christians are horrified at the idea of a world without God. Wide-eyed, they say that, without the threat of God's punishment, anything goes. To such people, the only reason to be good is to avoid punishment. Never mind that, every day, people go about doing good and avoid doing wrong without any thought of punishment avoidance. Asked if, were there no God, would they transgress, many Christians say they would.

Now, this always puzzles me, since my assumption would be that a Christian, by definition, would voluntarily be in favor of doing good and opposed to doing evil. Yet, some of these people admit that, if they thought nobody was watching, they would run wild.

I was reminded of this when Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), said this in defense of bathroom laws:

When it comes to this current legislation where — in most of the world, in most of the religions, the major religions, you have men and you have women, and there are some abnormalities but for heaven’s sake, I was as good a kid as you can have growing up, I never drank alcohol till I was legal, never to, still, use an illegal drug, but in the seventh grade if the law had been that all I had to do was say, "I’m a girl," and I got to go into the girls’ restroom, I don’t know if I could’ve withstood the temptation just to get educated back in those days.

And Tennessee State Representative Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin) is an interesting case as well. Rep. Durham is a cosponsor of an anti-transgender bathroom bill. It turns out that Rep. Durham is more dangerous to women than the people he claims to be defending women from.

Last week, Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell exiled state Rep. Jeremy Durham from his offices at the War Memorial Building and limited his access to other areas after Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued a warning that the lawmaker’s behavior posed “a continuing risk to unsuspecting women who are employed by or interact with the legislature.”

I'm going to indulge in some amateur psychoanalysis here. Durham is being investigated for multiple sexual harassment incidents, according to interviews with 34 women by the Tennessee Attorney General's office. I would say that Durham is lacking in self-control and is perhaps terrified of his own inability to control his urges--and he projects that fear onto transgender people.

Today's far-right Republican is (has always been, I suppose) an authoritarian, and a product of authoritarians. A dictatorial father decides what behavior is acceptable or, perhaps more to the point, unacceptable, and he lays down the law. Under those conditions, always controlled by an angry father or an angry God, how does a child develop self-control? Often, he or she doesn't.

Then the authoritarian goes out into the world and dedicates himself or herself to making other human beings miserable.

Adding a layer of usefulness to the roof

It's heartening to see so many roofs in my neighborhood with new solar power installations. I mentioned a while back that some vested interests are actively trying to prevent the growth of the solar industry. Part of the satisfaction is seeing these people lose. The rest is optimism for a better world.

Principle and the 2016 Presidential election

We Democrats can learn from the Republicans' mistakes this year. The Republican Party is at war with itself, and it's not just the Establishment vs. Trump. The Evangelical wing is also battling Trump. His conservatism is not pure enough, and his lifestyle is not approved. All but the dimmest among them recognize his "New York values."

I have noted previously that, in the race for purity, the Republicans who rational people would assume could not be farther to the right are displaced and distrusted by ever purer politicians. For example, Grover Norquist, architect of the slashing-of-spending pledge that once marked the true conservative is now distrusted by people to his right. Solidly right-wing congressmen, such as Paul Ryan and John Boehner are unable to control their party members.

Purity is poisonous.

There are Democrats who, citing principle, cannot vote for Hillary Clinton. Principle is a fine thing, but sometimes fidelity to one principle can blind the faithful to another, higher principle. The higher principle of which I speak will surprise nobody: We must defeat the Republicans in 2016, and beat them decisively. I want to run up the score to LBJ-Goldwater proportions.

If this election amounted to a contest between Hillary and one of the reasonable Republicans (who, unfortunately, seem only to have existed in the past), the "Hillary is a corporate shill" principle would hold up under scrutiny.

But 2016 is no ordinary election.

"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde

Humans are blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the need to know the how and why of everything. Hence, science. But when you think about it, wasn't religion an early attempt at science? How did the world begin? Well, let's see, it could have happened like this... Why are humans so crazy? Well, let's think up a possible story to explain that.

The trouble starts when a better narrative comes along, but people won't let go of the old one(s). So many people have clung to pre-scientific beliefs, some of which are thousands of years out of date. This has potentially disastrous consequences in the real world. Physicist Sean Carroll, in his "Preposterous Universe" blog, points out that the preponderance of outmoded beliefs severely inhibits our ability to work out our problems.

Over the last four hundred or so years, human beings have achieved something truly amazing: we understand the basic rules governing the operation of the world around us. Everything we see in our everyday lives is simply a combination of three particles — protons, neutrons, and electrons — interacting through three forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. That is it; there are no other forms of matter needed to describe what we see, and no other forces that affect how they interact in any noticeable way.

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As far as our immediate world is concerned, we know what the rules are. A staggeringly impressive accomplishment, that somehow remains uncommunicated to the overwhelming majority of educated human beings.

Knowing these rules should prompt us to throw out a lot of silliness:

[T]here’s no question that this knowledge has crucial implications for how we think about our lives. Astrology does not work; there is no such thing as telekinesis; quantum mechanics does not tell you that you can change reality just by thinking about it. There is no life after death; there’s no spiritual essence that can preserve a human consciousness outside its physical body. Life is a chemical reaction; there is no moment at conception or otherwise when a soul is implanted in a body. We evolved as a result of natural processes over the history of the Earth; there is no supernatural intelligence that created us and maintains an interest in our behavior. There is no Natural Law that specifies how human beings should live, including who they should marry. There is no strong conception of free will, in the sense that we are laws unto ourselves over and above the laws of nature. The world follows rules, and we are part of the world.

At the risk of quoting more from Carroll's blog entry than is ethical, he goes on to imagine what sorts of discussions we could have about living in the world if people could let go of the religious outlook. He lists many of our pressing moral questions and concludes:

I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.

Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.

Sean Carroll has a book coming out in May, called The Big Picture, in which he makes an attempt to answer the big questions in light of our current knowledge. I look forward to reading it.

Trump would be the nation's Misery-Dealer-in-Chief.

Donald Trump has attracted to him a gang of ready-made thugs who would like nothing better than to bust some non-white heads and not suffer any consequences.

Now, I tell myself that not enough Americans are stupid enough to make this fascist President, but this is as close as we've come in a long time to doing serious damage to our republic, and I worry about the actions of two kinds of voter: the low information voter, and the high misinformation voter.

The high misinformation voter is Trump's bread and butter, because this voter is willfully misinformed, and is really not interested in real, observable facts. The high misinformation voter is nearly impossible to reach, but I am confident that such voters do not exist in sufficient numbers to win an election.

But so many people in this country are not sufficiently engaged in the process of Democracy or the study of history to know a good candidate from a bad one. Donald Trump is attractive to many of these voters because of his very candor. They think, "He's not a politician. I know where he's coming from. How refreshing!" (To the detriment of career politicians, they certainly have mastered the technique of not answering any question they don't want to, and therefore have narrowed acceptable discourse way too much, and they don't display much backbone during the election season, but...)

The low information voter likes the candor, but does not seem to understand the ugliness and danger of this particular candidate's plans. White supremacist goons are made bold by the way Donald Trump encourages them to rough up brown people at his rallies. It is not as long a distance from a Trump candidacy to a fascist state as the ignorant voter thinks, if he thinks about it at all. And I've been wondering lately, now that World War II is seventy years in the past, whether younger voters are connected with its memory enough to know just what miseries Hitler and Mussolini inflicted on the people of Europe. The Jews, of course, were the main target of Fascism. That said, almost no Europeans avoided suffering in the ensuing war.

Donald Trump is a bully and a liar, and his supporters don't care. They have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, what it means to be an American--what it means to be America.

A Donald Trump presidency would make more people suffer than an ignorant voter might think. It is not long before a government that persecutes "them" gets around to persecuting "us," too.

Republicans: making up the Constitution as they go along

There seems to be no end to the Republican imagination when it comes to history and the Constitution. They invent one thing after another and hope the faithful believe it, which they always seem to do.

This time, they're fabricating reasons why Barack Obama should not be allowed to nominate a replacement for the late, unlamented Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Their very quickness at inventing pure hogwash is a wonder.

I look forward to Obama's nominee. Whoever it is is bound to be an adult, which is what our country needs more of in positions of responsibility.

Religion is not the root cause of our problems.

Religion is not inherently evil, just wrong.

Religion gets a lot of attention for causing murderous strife in our world, and it is, to be sure, probably the one difference between groups that we get most riled up about. But, at root, our problem is that we are so easily riled.

People talk a lot about the immense distance between humans and the other animals; I think we don't look enough at our similarities. Our brains seem to have evolved incredibly quickly, but other aspects of our animal nature have not changed so much. Our survival has depended on recognizing the "other" and defending our territory for ourselves an those we recognize as most like ourselves.

Our rational brains tell us (well, some of us) that it is possible to live and prosper without the constant need to murder each other, but our instincts and emotions have more influence on us, often, than our brains. Our ability to create technology that is many times more powerful than our own bodies has complicated matters by enabling us to multiply the rate at which we can kill each other. Instead of using our thinking capacity to devise ways to live with each other, we use it in service of our animal drives.

Religion is, indeed, one of the things that most divides us, but it's really the present nature of humanity that is at fault.

I don't argue that we ought to become less human; only that we should rely on our brains a little more than we do to work out our problems.

Benghazi bumpersticker bullshit

I saw a bumpersticker in my neighborhood grocery store parking lot today. It read

Four Died, Hillary Lied.

I'm quite sick of people's obsession with a "scandal" that has been found to have no basis in fact. The ankle biters at the House Select Committee on Benghazi toiled (and part of that toil was making things up) for seventeen months and found nothing. After their failure to find anything Hillary did wrong in handling Benghazi, the Committee devolved into what could be called the Select Committee on Hillary's Email Practices. Nothing there, either.

You could argue that Issa, Gowdy, and company were incompetent, but, hey, they're your guys.

I would like to contrast the Benghazi affair with what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney perpetrated on America during their two terms in office: the Iraq War. After the comparison, I'll ask a couple of questions.

The death toll in the Twin Tower attacks was 2,996. Possible responses to the attack were several. One of the Bush Administration's responses, the war in Afghanistan, was foolish in some ways, but at least it was related to 9/11. The other (stated) response was the war in Iraq, which, as subsequently proven, had no connection whatsoever to the Al Qaeda terrorist attack. Indeed, Bush cynically used the nation's grief and anger over 9/11 to launch the war in Iraq under the cover of a supposed "international war on terror."

Bush lied.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2014 was 4,491. Had the Iraq War had anything to do with 9/11, it still would have been a bad bargain. As it is, Bush and Cheney have 4,491 wrongful deaths on their heads.

I am not suggesting that, because one administration carries out a larger calamity than another, that the smaller calamity can be excused. But a long investigation of Hillary Clinton found nothing, and even ended up making the Committee look like unprepared school children.

Now, why is it that people can obsess over some error that Hillary Clinton was alleged to have made, yet not be outraged at what George W. Bush did to this country?

Is it, perhaps, that you just hate Hillary in the first place and just embrace any little scrap of scandal (true or not) that you can find?

A missed opportunity

I just finished watching President Obama's final State of the Union message. This great man was viciously fought every step of the way, and yet he has managed to be a very good president. When I think of what he could have accomplished with just a little cooperation from what we once called the loyal opposition, I mourn what might have been a great presidency.

In the end, America was not worthy of him.