Dr. Forbush Thinks

When I grew up in the middle of the Cold War the fear of nuclear war came to mind from time to time. This was mainly because the Soviet Union and the United States had so many nuclear weapons that they could destroy each other, and the innocent bystanders many times over. The “many times over” phrase was always puzzling. Actually the motivation itself was puzzling.

I tried many times to understand why two countries would like to destroy each other and the world, civilization as we know it rather than let the other side “win.” Something was so important that civilization could not go on with the “other side” surviving.

One time I asked my dad what the Soviet Union would do that was so bad that it would be worth living. Of course my dad tried to explain the horrors of living under the rule of the Soviet Union. “For example, he said, you would not be able to have a car that you liked. Instead, everyone in the country would have exactly the same kind of car. And, it would be black!” Oh, horrors, I could never be seen in a BLACK car.

Obviously, my dad didn’t know that very few people in the Soviet Union had a black car, and they were in the Communist Party. I was young and I was trying to understand the world. Surely people wouldn’t want to destroy the Soviet Union, and risk being destroyed ourselves because they might make us all drive around in black cars.

Some time later I pointed out to my dad that there was inherent unfairness in the American economic system. Some people down the street had a boat and went water skiing every weekend in the summer, and they went snow skiing every weekend in the winter. We were lucky to get a steak on Sundays. I pointed out that some people who lived in the poor section of town would pull a knife on you if you looked like you might be carrying cash. Why would they risk being put in jail just to get a few bucks for a six pack of beer? I pointed out that there were plenty of things that needed to be repaired in their area of town, and if we just paid them to fix up their section of town they would have their money for their beer and they would be living in a nicer section of town. Of course, my dad told me I was talking like a Communist. And this made me wonder once again, what is so wrong about helping the poor that our country would risk nuclear war and the destruction of the planet?

Well, I was listening to an old time radio program from the 1950s. The show was called, “I Was a Communist for the FBI.” It was about a guy who went under cover to infiltrate the Communists in America so they couldn’t spread their evil Communism around our county. In one episode they portrayed the Communists simply as anti-American. One plan was to use a Red Cross blood drive to recruit new members to the Communist Party. But, the Communists were against the Red Cross, and therefore they could not help the Red Cross because of principle alone. So, after the blood was collected they needed to find a way to destroy the blood so the Red Cross couldn’t use it. They came up with an elaborate plan to hijack the blood truck. Of course, the guy working as an under cover agent was caught in the moral dilemma between blowing his cover and destroying the blood. But was it really worth destroying the world in order to prevent the Communists from destroying the Red Cross? And, was the Red Cross really working against the principles of Communism where the goal was merely to redistribute the wealth?

Then I was thinking about the old cry of “Godless Communist.” I actually thought of this when Ann Coulter brought up the accusation of liberals being “Godless.” Was the Cold War really a religious war? Obviously America wouldn’t wage a purely religious war, but maybe the threat of the Communists was two-fold. Maybe the wealthy didn’t like the idea of redistribution of wealth, and the religious thought that they were fighting the Godless Communists. Maybe this is why the coalition of the Right Wing Extremists has become so strong after the fall of Communism. They no longer have the evil Communists, so they redirected their hatred toward the godless liberals that offer the same fear factor. Like anything else this was just an insight into our world that doesn’t really make much sense on the surface.

But, I am not the only one thinking along these lines. The other day I was listening to a political talk show. An expert on Middle East strategy was explaining how the threat of Islamic Fascism grew during the Cold War. She said that we supported them in Afghanistan and in Saudi Arabia and around the world. I knew that we had supported the insurgents in Afghanistan, because they were fighting the Soviets. But, as the speaker told us, I didn’t know that we supported these religious sects around the world because they had religion, not like those Godless Communists. Apparently, during the 1950s and 1960s the United States had calculated that religion was better than Communism, so we sent money top these groups in any country that we feared might fall to the Godless Communists. And since we feared Communism in just about any country we might have been sending money to these groups in Italy and Germany as well.

But, now it finally makes sense. The Cold War was a religious war and it brought the extreme religious conservatives in the US into a tight union with the wealthy. It was worth risking the entire world in a nuclear battle, because it was about religion, which covers both life and death. And, the victory in the Cold War freed up the imagination of these people to attack the liberals in the United States with the same anti-Communist rhetoric. And groups of people who are willing to risk nuclear war that could destroy the world certainly are dangerous, and even worse when you are their enemy.

It is about time that this country takes the risk of the Religious Conservative Threat seriously.




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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

Politics in America is all about the marketing. This is because the entire American culture is based on marketing. If the average person would stop for a minute after they watch an ad on TV for the latest movie and say to themselves, “It will be out on DVD in three months, I can wait,” then American would be one step closer to being a thinking society. Instead, what we have in America the reacting society. Americans are influenced to buy sugar water with flavoring in the hopes of meeting the opposite sex, simply because they have been told that this will happen. In a society where the majority of Americans sit in front of the TV watching ads every 10 minutes, how could we expect anything different?

The truth is out there, but few Americans have the motivation to look for it.

Politicians from both political parties have been using the media to convey their messages for quite some time now. In the past it was always assumed the politicians would bend the truth a bit by not mentioning certain sticky issues. But, it was generally assumed that any politician that lied would certainly been exposed as a liar and become unelectable. This was one method that our Democracy could be protected from propaganda and deception.

The founding fathers worried that the masses could be incited to riot and virtually any law and order could be destroyed if the majority willed it. This was why only white, male, property owners were given the right to vote, because they had a stake in maintaining the status quo.

Since that time the rational for having a stake in maintaining the status quo had come into question quite a few times. The status quo was believed to be flawed and other members of the society had a right to express their views and make society fairer for everyone. It was believed that education would be the key to maintaining law and order and preventing a total upheaval of the current system. Therefore, by educating our children it was intended that our children would learn to love the democratic republic that they inherited and make sure they maintain it.

Unfortunately, I believe our education system has not taught the value of our current system over the last forty years and we have a population who no longer understands the system of government we have, or the purpose of many pieces of the system. This lack of education could simply be exploited by those who care to change the system for their own good. And, I believe that this has been happening over the past twenty some years as the conservatives have spread lies and deception to those young adults who never learned to understand and appreciate how government functions.

Of course we all know how Ronald Reagan came to power to shrink government, and he cut taxes and raised spending which mainly helped the wealthy class by letting the wealthy keep their money and taxing the middle class in the long turn to pay back the debt. The spending was believed to help the economy, but those who made money were mainly the wealthy while Ronald Reagan fought to lower wages by keeping unemployment high and then adding more jobs to the service economy. The intention was to create a bit of worry among the middle class, so they would work for lower pay in order to keep their jobs instead of loosing their jobs and be forced to work for minimum wage at McDonalds or other low pay service industry job. Over time we have seen the results of this policy to make the wealthy richer while the poor and middle class get poorer. In order to catch the wealth bandwagon one needs to invest in stocks and bonds and own property.

The 401K and IRA plans of the Reagan administration actually played in to this strategy as well. These plans encourage the average employee to contribute to a retirement plan that would be protected from taxes until it is withdrawn. In this way many people who never owned stock before have been able to own stock. This is good, but if you have a large number of people purchasing stock on a regular basis it is quite clear that these regular purchases create demand where it hadn’t existed before and force the stock prices higher. But, just because stock prices go higher does not mean that stock value goes up at the same rate. Those who own stock early in the scheme will be able to sell their low value stock at a higher price than they would otherwise be able to. This type of activity certainly may have lead to the stock market bubbles we have seen.
But, conservatives argue that this is great for the average American, while study after study still shows that average Americans are actually getting poorer while wealthy Americans are getting richer.

In fact, if you look at the conservative policies as a whole over the last twenty years they seem to be creating a wealthy group of Americans at the top of the economic scale, while they are creating a group of cheap labor at the bottom of the economic pool. If we add to this the corruption of the conservatives in both industry and government by looking at the examples of ENRON, Global Crossing, Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay and the others we begin to see a picture of America moving closer to the Mexico. It would certainly be ironic if America were to continue down this path while Mexico and other Latin American countries begin to shed their legacy of the elite wealthy class and government corruption.

Unless the American people begin to draw themselves away from the media that markets to them and they begin to think for themselves America won’t be much different than Mexico in a few short years. Maybe this is how the conservatives plan to solve the immigration issue, with Americans migrating to Mexico looking for freedom and employment.







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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

One tactic the anti-abortion crowd uses in their debate is the proposition that the unborn are people too. Since they are people they need protection from the government. However, as it is often pointed out they very same people that make this claim are the first to cut funding of protective services for women and children once they are born. These are the same people who believe that the mothers who use food stamps to buy food for their children are abusing the system.

Well, I also think that they aren’t all that serious about protecting the unborn either. If they really cared about that life within the potential mother and they believed that the government was the tool needed to protect these unborn children they would certainly need to approach the unborn in a different way.

First of all, the unborn child is more sensitive to toxic chemicals in our environment than at any other stage of our development. Toxic chemicals have been linked to the cause of many birth defects and disabilities. The exposure to these toxic chemicals at times may be severe enough to cause a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage early in the pregnancy. Certainly a group that cares about the well being of the unborn would want to spend money exploring the types of chemicals that cause this to happen. Certainly a group that cares about the unborn would want to clean up toxic areas were companies have dumped pollution into the air, water and ground around their plants. Certainly a group that really cared about the unborn would want these mothers to live in a safer location once they are pregnant. Perhaps they would like the government to put them up in a hotel for the first three months of their pregnancy in order to protect the unborn.

But, there is more to protecting the unborn than keeping their environment clean. The unborn child is sensitive to the diet of the mother. A poor diet will result in poor development and the child, once born, will be off on the wrong foot. Unfortunately many of the pregnant women in our society can not afford the best nutrition for themselves, let alone their unborn child. And, when they become pregnant they certainly will eat even more calories because of the demand of the unborn child. Certainly the people who care about the unborn would want that child to have the best nutrition. What better way than to have the government provide the food at the hotel that they are putting these women in for the first three months of their pregnancy.

Food and nutrition are good, but many women might choose to put other things in their bodies that will certainly effect the unborn child. Perhaps the women at the facility would need to be keep there so that they would not slip out and drink a beer or smoke a cigarette. In fact, friends might try to bring something in to them, so visitation would certainly need to be monitored. Perhaps some guards walking up and down the halls would provide the needed security for the unborn child.

And, the three months may actually be to short a time. Many things can actually happen in the last six months as well. If we keep the women in the facility until the child is born we will simply keep it safer. After all, it is for the protection of the unborn.

But, how do we get the women to go to the facility? Obviously we only have the protection of the unborn child in mind. Perhaps we could have the women report to the government when they think they might be pregnant. However, many of them might not know and not care to find out. The simple solution is that every time that they have sex they should be required to go to the facility until they have menstruated. This would be very easy to implement, a judge would be required to inspect the menstrual blood sample and a women would be free to go. But, would the women report that they had sex? Probably not, so it would also be required for the men who had sex to report their activity as well with the name and address of the women they had sex with. If the women refused to go to the facility within a few hours, then the police could easily just go and get them. This would certainly be for the best protection of the unborn.

This would obviously have some positive effects, women wouldn’t have sex very often and we would be protecting the unborn.

Are there any conservatives out there willing to tell me why this isn’t a good solution?

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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics, Abortion, Pregnancy, Sex, Government

Sometimes people lie and they can argue that they didn’t know the truth. For example, before the Iraq War Dick Cheney told the press that he knew the exact location of the Weapons of Mass Destruction. When asked the specifics he said that they were north and south and east and west of the city of Baghdad. It was quite obvious from the tape that Dick Cheney either knew exactly where the WMDs were, or his CIA intelligence was wrong. After all, with the sighting of those specific locations it was clear that Dick Cheney knew exactly where those WMDs were. Why should anyone have doubted the intelligence of the United States of America? So, it is quite plausible that Dick Cheney must have been given bogus intelligence by the CIA or his creator.

Some lies are more about what they don’t say than what they do say. For example, the truth about abortion is not as clear as either side would have you believe. The anti-abortion crowd would have you believe that seconds after conception there is a fully formed child in the uterus that is entitled to the same rights as a baby that is just born. Any thinking person knows that it isn’t the case. The person that knows this better than any other person is the mother who carries this child. Once the baby begins to kick within the womb the mother knows that she is carrying a living thing. What person could kill a living thing but a psycho that goes and kills kittens in the back yard? Does anyone really want a psycho to raise a child? A mother who wants an abortion at some late stage knows in her heart why and why should we question someone who is so certain about this crucial issue.

But, the lies are not as clear-cut from the pro-choice side either. They tend to make it sound as if every woman is able to make this serious choice at any age alone with only the help of the center who wants to perform the abortion. Obviously this is not the case either. Any young mother needs to have the support of their support group whether it is friends or family or husband. And, the specific situation for every case needs to be brought to mind.

But, the main point about abortion is, do we want the government to intervene? Republicans have been telling us forever that the government isn’t equipped to make complex decisions in complex situations. Isn’t the case of a woman’s abortion one of the most complex and complicated situations that any of us would ever face? Why would we trust this decision to the government? Isn’t the woman with the help of her support group the method we should trust in making this decision? After all, there are some people who believe that a fetus conceived one minute ago is equal to a newborn baby. If this is the case and we were to pass a law to the effect that this was the case the government would be responsible to enforce the protection of this “child.” This would mean that anyone who is potentially pregnant would need to be screened for any potentially harmful toxin. Do we want the government to check our crotches to learn whether we might have had sex? Do the Republicans really want laws prevent people from drinking and smoking? I thought that Republicans were against these types of laws, but since fetuses are the most susceptible to these toxins they would need to be protected.

But, instead of having the debate about this hot button issue people on both sides of the issue tell these subtle lies that are meant to persuade the other side to their cause. Obviously the other side can see through the lies and they hold with even more resolve to positions. Instead of being reasonable about the debate we hear about women forced to bear children from the product of rape or incest. We are told stories of women killing their children. We are told stories about women dying because they were forced to carry a child to delivery. We are told women can’t make their own decisions, because they can’t be trusted to make the right choice. We are told that only the government knows what is right for these women. Come on conservatives, you have already told us that the government doesn’t know what’s best for us when it comes to seatbelts, and safety and pollution. How is it that the government knows what is right about abortion?

There are still more lies that don’t make much sense. In fact, the very people who told us that Clinton shouldn’t have gone into Bosnia to protect the people from Slobodan Milosevic told us that we needed to go into Iraq to protect the people from Saddam Hussein. Is that stupidity or just an obvious lie? And, these were the same people that told us that we were not in the business of nation building, but they are in the middle of nation building in Iraq. In order to have such wild swings in these statements there must be more to the truth than these statements. Unfortunately the politics won’t allow the politicians to tell us the truth and come clean. Helen Thomas gave George W Bush the opportunity to come clean, but he continued to propagate the lie and Helen Thomas was made the punching bag for the supporters of the administration.

The lies go on and America continues to suffer.

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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

Pope Benedict XVI is currently preaching the power of love to bring men together. When did I first hear about this? Was it 1967, The Summer of Love? Was it the song, “All You Need Is Love?” This is quite an interesting turn for the conservative Pope who was once the “Defender of the Faith.” He also appointed a less conservative Bishop to the Washington DC diocese, that has some conservative Catholics upset with him.

But, maybe this is just a sign that the Pope actually gets it. He understands that politics has a tendency to tear people apart. It tears people apart unless these people keep in mind the point of the mission. In the Christian religion the point is the worship of God and informing people of His love for us all.

The Pope points out that politics is an organization of man and has potential for evil as well as good. He tells us that priests should not be preaching politics from the pulpit. He tells us that priests should be preaching God’s love and not politics. Does this mean that we won’t have fundraisers to raise money to fight abortion any more? I don’t know. This is because the focus of Pope Benedict is more along the lines of social justice. The teaching of “liberation theology” was something that Pope Benedict never liked.

Liberation Theology tells us that all people have dignity, and therefore the church should use its power to encourage the poor to rise up against their oppressors. This sounds just a little bit to Marxist for the conservative Pope.

However, there may be hope in this action. Maybe the Pope has realized that there are good and bad politics on both sides of the political spectrum. There is hatred and love greed and charity in all of these political efforts. Maybe the Pope has realized that man uses politics to make the world a better place. The problem is that it isn’t always clear whose world is made better and whose world is made worse. The effort to make the poor’s world better could certainly be misguided if Robin Hood were leading the charge. The Poor might be happy for a short period while they spend the money of the wealthy, but unless they invest it and make it grow the money would soon be gone. The wealthy also would have a worse time, as they become the “new poor.” Robin Hood certainly would have his work cut out for him as he goes around determining who is rich and who is poor.

Obviously the way to short circuit the inherent problem in politics is to realize that God’s Love is the guidance that the politicians need to make the right laws and make the world a better place. And that is what the Pope has been preaching over the last few weeks.

I don’t think that the Pope will be wearing love beads and tie-dye tee-shirts anytime soon. Maybe he won’t be listening to John Lennon singing “Imagine.” But if the Pope is true to his word we may not have any more sermons on the politically sensitive issues of abortion, birth control, social justice, liberation theology and instead we will be instructed to follow God’s Love and come up with unifying solutions to these issues outside the doors of the church. Of course it means that they won’t preach against the evil of war and the need to protect the environment either. Then again we may be told of some exceptions to the rules.



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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics, Religion

Insanity is doing something the same way repeatedly expecting different results. This is paraphrased from Albert Einstein. Why would Einstein say something like this? He would say this because he is a scientist. Science is the observation of nature and the description of those observations. If nature were to behave differently under the same conditions science would not be worth the study. And, human life would be subject to the whims of chance and sanity could not exist.

Scientific experiments are based on the idea that they are repeatable. Under controlled conditions experiments can be repeated and yield the same results. Based on careful observations the nature of the Universe is being unraveled and understood little by little.

God is beyond nature, by definition. Assuming that God exists He created everything that exists. He created the mechanism, principles and nature of nature. God has the option to break the laws of nature as often as he wishes in whatever means He chooses. But, as we have observed, he chooses to break the laws of nature rarely. Because if he chose to break the laws of nature often, then we would see the world as a random jumble of incoherent actions. Breaking the laws of nature means that one would observe different results whenever one would repeat an experiment or action. No one could predict the outcome of any action, because the will of God would continuously interfere with the will of man. But, by the observation of nature we know that God interferes with the Universe rarely if ever. God is happy with this and man should realize and be happy with this as well.

Prayer, intercessions, voodoo, curses, spells and magic are all attempts to circumvent nature by using the supernatural. The supernatural of course is what is beyond nature. God, Satan, the dead, the saints or the spirits are beings believed to be beyond nature and potentially able to alter nature. Attempts to use the supernatural to alter the natural world has been declared to be profane, unless it is God himself you summon. But, God himself is believed to be the one and only supernatural being, unless there are others. Some would have you believe that Satan is the evil supernatural being. Some would have you believe that Satan is “evil” nature and God is the “good” beyond nature. The truth is that no one really knows anything beyond nature, because by definition it is unknowable. The supernatural is unknowable because it is unpredictable and unrepeatable. If you know it one day it is different the next because it is beyond nature and hence unrepeatable.

What we do know about nature is what is repeatable. What we do know is what we can expect and what we can predict. We know what the world of science gives us through it record of observation of nature. Imagine for a moment that God created the world 5000 years ago. I wasn’t around 5000 years ago, so it could very well be true. But he created it in a state in which it implies a previous history. There is oil buried in the ground as a result of dead plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. God may have chosen to create the fossils and the oil and the rest of all the evidence that points backward to a previous history. But why? Time is nothing to a God that was never born and lives forever, so what difference does it make. Any act by God that disrupts that natural flow of predictable natural events is supernatural, beyond nature. To create a world 5000 years ago in a state that was flowing forward in time and assumed a pre-history is easy for a God that is beyond nature, He would just need to give every atom and particle in the Universe the same initial conditions that they would have if history had played out as scientists have observed. But, if God did this, then what difference does it make to a thinking man or a scientist? A scientist simply reports what he has observed. And, why would God do this? A religious person should ask this kind of question in order to understand the nature of God.

The scenario where God creates a Universe that is already in motion actually means that God is creating a complex lie. And, if God is “good” should an act of deception be considered a “good” thing? There are obviously people who believe that lying is a “good” thing, when an authority lies, so this is possible. But if we assume that our God lied to us once, how do we know that He won’t continue to lie. How do we know that the Bible sent down from God isn’t a book of lies? How can a God be deceptive in his actions be trusted to be truthful in his writing? So, it is clear that the Bible and the actual creation can not be reconciled in a non-interpretive way. Reconciliation between the written word of God and the actual creation can only happen if we assume that the Bible is written to be interpreted in order to understand deeper meanings. Obviously to do otherwise would require insanity, where we expect different results from the actions of God.

This brings me to Ann Coulter’s assault on the Godless Democrats as she calls them. She assumes that science is a religion that liberals pray to. Her entire argument is based on the idea that science is somehow used by liberals to live their lives. But, since science is based on the observations of how nature behaves, we should expect that everyone lives by scientific rules. We know that if you drop a rock on a china doll the doll will be broken. It is a scientific observation of nature that leads us to this conclusion. To expect that God would reach out his hand to protect the china doll would not be rational. To drop the rock and pray that the doll be saved would be a misuse of the power of the divine. Jesus warned us about this in the Bible. So, I ask you, when are we supposed to live our lives without regard to our observation of nature? When should we ignore what we expect and expect God to intervene instead? I would suggest that living your life the same way and expecting different results is insanity, like Einstein said. When a person’s life is going down the wrong path, do we pray that he change his ways, or do we use the courage and strength given to us by God to help the person change their ways. Praying alone means that the person will continue to do the same things and live the same way unless God intervenes. And, from our observation of nature God rarely intervenes. It would be insane to assume that He would intervene. Instead we are called as Religious people to change things by our works and pray that we have the strength to do it. The effort and the strength needed for our tasks on Earth has been given to us by God and we never know how much we have. If God chose to act in any supernatural way increasing the amount of strength we have surely could never be perceived by any observation or measurement. This is why some people are saints, because they pray for strength and do amazing things. These things could be seen as outliers way above the mean by any scientific observation. In a way this is the supernatural action of God in our world.

If the Godless Democrats are trying to pull people together to make a difference in our society I don’t really understand how that harms society in any way. I believe that the Democrats of the 1930s knew this and they worked to pass the laws that created a society with safety nets. They worked together to build projects that brought electric power to the dark corners of our country. They did amazing things and they understood the meaning of working together to make things better. But, I believe that this message has been lost and the people born after this time see their taxes being spent in ways they question. The Democrats who believe in these programs need to renew the message and tell us how we need to work together on new projects. And Democrats do need to pray for the strength to spread the message importance of working together to complete these huge projects and save our country. Strength is what God gives us and if we have it miracles can be done.

So, are you ready to make any miracles today?





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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics, Religion

The more people that see this data the better for the world.



This data comes from ice core samples that goes back 400 thousand years. The CO2 is trapped in the ice and preserved for us to measure. In 1959 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 ppm. And, if you look at the graph you will see that the CO2 concentration was about 200 ppm for every ice age in the past 400 thousand years. You will also notice that a concentration of 280 ppm is at about the highest level obtained in the last 400 thousand years. If you have any doubt about when the ice ages occurred you may look at the Antarctic temperatures which correlates with the CO2 measurements. These temperatures were measured in several independent means such as isotope concentrations, dust sediment, and ice volume (snowfall preserved). All of the data correlates to show that we are in a very rare warm period for the Earth and before 1950 the temperature should have begun to decline.

However we also have this interesting data measured in Hawaii. It shows a fine resolution plot of the CO2 concentration.



This is a very nice graph that shows how CO2 concentration is cyclical over the year. But it shows us how the concentration has gone up exponentially since 1959. Recall that the CO2 concentration was 200 ppm for every ice age in the last 400 thousand years. And recall that the highest CO2 concentration over the last 400 thousand years was about 280 ppm. We are currently at about 380 ppm, which isn’t shown on this graph that was made 10 years ago. A thinking person must realize that a change of 80 ppm is about 30% of the CO2 and it caused the ice age. And, a rise of about 100 ppm is a rise of about 25% which is on the scale of the ice age change. What does this mean?

Obviously it means that we are in for much a different climate than we grew up with. The Earth is a slow system and it hasn’t come to equilibrium yet, so it is hard to know what the Earth will be like. We know that millions of years ago the Earth was much warmer and the CO2 concentration was much higher. But we also know that the polar ice caps were melted and the oceans were much higher.

I hope that the thinking people will overcome this inconvenient truth and work together to plan for the inevitable. And, it certainly doesn’t help when Oil Companies are spreading lies intended to created doubt.








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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics, Global Warming, Environment

Over the last year or so I have noticed that some liberals and some conservatives have become civil again. I don’t get the regular vile remarks and comments on my blog that were once the mainstay of blogging. These hateful comments cause many people on both sides of the political aisle to turn off their comments and write their own version of what they believe to be true.

Turning off the comments in the blogosphere is the same as turning away from the political dialog. This basically means that you have decided that you are right and it just doesn’t matter what the other guy has to say. I have never turned off my comments although there have been a couple of comments that I did delete about a year ago. These comments were personal attacks that had nothing to do with the post, at least in my opinion. But, I’m sure that most of us agree that there is a line out there and each of us knows when the line has been crossed.

Turning off the dialog is actually a two way street. When people make personal attacks it forces the target into a defensive mode. The only way to make progress is to attack the idea and not the person. But, when people become desperate they resort to an “anything to win” strategy. These include personal attacks, attacking sacred cows, violence, and finally self-destruction. I am not saying that either side has resorted to suicide bombing in the American political debate, but I am pointing out that this is a path of political recourse that we are familiar with. When two sides are close together on the major issues, then compromise and discourse are part of everyday politics. In the current polarization of American politics the extremists had divided the middle and created a large gap devoid of moderates.

This polarization had lead to many attacks from both sides and had poisoned much of the political debate. But recently I had seen a number of people reaching out across the middle of the political spectrum. These are just everyday Americans, bloggers beholden to none. These bloggers had proclaimed themselves liberal or conservative over the years, but they were coming to at least discuss the other points of view. This is a good thing for America, even if the extremists would have you think differently. The political parties would like you to believe that each group is different as night and day, but the moderates don’t believe that. I began to think that perhaps some Americans were going to work together and make America better. I even wrote about the Unity ’08 group that is trying to get moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans to work together.

But in the last week it has become apparent to me that this hatred is back. I listened to an interview with Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary who has written a new book. She just seemed to be full of anger and hatred. It wasn’t exactly what she said, but her attitude and agenda in how she answered questions about the 2004 presidential election. Well, I thought that she had a right to feel that way, because the fact that she is a lesbian was brought up by John Kerry in the debates. Personally I didn’t like what John Kerry did, but if I took it against all of the unseemly things that the Republicans had done it was just a drop in the bucket. It was politics American style and it was just another attempt at mudslinging. But Mary Cheney’s hatred for Democrats just seemed to be so generalized and poisonous that I felt sad for her. I didn’t know if it was because she was a product of the poison brought to the family through Vice President Cheney, or if it was a deeper poison. Whatever it was I knew that she had a chip on her shoulder the size of the state of Texas.

I didn’t think much more about it until I saw Jay Leno last night. Ann Coulter was a guest on the show with George Carlin. I wanted to see George Carlin, and I have to admit that I wanted to see what all the fuss was about Ann Coulter. I had seen her once or twice before and I wasn’t really impressed. But, she was out trying to sell her book, so I thought that she might say something in her defense. But, I was wrong. Once again I see another female Republican conservative full of rage and hatred. Why?

Of course two data points does not mean that there is a trend, but I am puzzled as to why someone not only ascribes to the conservative ideology but espouses hatred on the Democrats and liberals. Is she some kind of symbol? What could anyone like in what she says or what she does? If this is an example of the new American hero, then we are in for some rough times. The America that I thought was beginning to heal, at least from the middle is being torn apart again by hatred. Surely the moderates can see that this hatred is not good for America and it places hope on the back burner once again.

Someone please tell me that I am wrong.



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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

By now I am sure that most everyone has read or at least heard about the Boehner memo detailing the GOP strategy to defend the War in Iraq. If you haven’t, it is posted at Think Progress here.

One of the strategies mentioned is known as the false choice. For example, the famous “you are either with us or against us,” uttered by George W Bush days after 9/11/2001. This false choice ignores the people who disagree with the proposed option. One may be against terrorism and also be against George W Bush’s method for fighting it. But, this false choice determines whether you are a patriot or traitor without the option of George W Bush being wrong.

The majority of Americans find logic difficult. Well, I don’t have the statistics on this, but I know many fellow students particularly frightened of the logic section of the LSAT examine when I was in college. These were smart people that shouldn’t have had a problem with these problems. And, these were smart students about to graduate from college with degrees in difficult subjects. I imagine that those who never attempted college would certainly be intimidated by these logic problems.

So, when the president offers the statement, “You are either with us or against us,” it is easy to imagine that a large portion of the American population didn’t realize that there was a third option that the president had purposely omitted.

The false choice is a difficult argument to fight in a debate. And, I am sure that’s why the Republicans like to fall back to this device. So, it isn’t surprising that this memo emphasizes the false choice between George W Bush’s policy and the hoping that the terrorists just disappear. Obviously the Democrats don’t believe that the terrorists will just disappear. Obviously the Democrats have other options that simply make more sense than “stay the course.” But, the Republicans are going to make the case that there are two choices, either you are with the Republicans, or you are with the Democrats and the terrorists. I don’t know about you, but this makes me sick.

It seems to me that pointing this out to the American people in easy straightforward language should be the key to the 2006 election. We need to point out how we have tried George W Bush’s policy, and look where it has gotten us. The choice is not between being for the Bush policy or being for the terrorists. Instead the choice is between Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans have lead us down a rabbit hole and we are stuck. The Democrats have a third way that makes sense. It isn’t the infamous “cut and run” stratagey, but the measured turn over of control to the Iraqi leaders. It is to garner support from Europe and NATO and the UN. It is to fix the mess that the Bush administration has made, and then put our efforts back where they belong, in Afghanistan fighting the real terrorists.

Maybe the Democrats don’t agree on the details of the new approach, but they certainly need to come together and create the option to be used in the 2006 election, before the Republicans frame this issue as a false choice in the next few days.


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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit
Politics, Iraq, Iraq War, Logic, False Choice

I was a bit surprised when I was accused of being a Socialist in a recent comment, but when I read, “I challenge you to produce a logical explanation why tax payers who make more should pay a higher rate than anyone else. It is morally wrong to have uneven tax rates.” Somehow, a person believes that it is morally wrong to have uneven tax rates, so I accept the challenge.

Through out history money has never been about fairness. People have been cheating the system and profiting from it forever. The earliest forms of cheating were the accepted forms of what we call corruption today. For example, tax collectors were hired to access what people should pay to the government, and for the privilege of doing this and putting up with the hatred of the people they took their cut off the top. But, how did this work? Was it fair?

Well, the governor of a province or local area was given the task of collecting taxes from the people of his region. If we use the example of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem during Jesus’ time Caesar asked the local rulers to collect a certain amount of money, X. The local rulers needed to spend money on maintenance and local projects, so they needed to collect X+Y from the people. Imagine that they hired 25 tax collectors to gather the money from the people. They would divide the area into 25 places and tell each collector he was responsible for collecting (X+Y)/25 and whatever else they collected would be their salary. Do you think that they collected the same percentage from every household? Chances are pretty good that people who were living on just enough money to get by would not be worth the hassle. The tax collector would obviously hit up the “big fish” in his area first to get what he could to cover his (X+Y)/25 part. Then he would spend the rest of the time going around collecting what he could for himself, until the next bill came due. It is only human nature to go to the people with the money first.

But, actually that doesn’t address the specific nature of the morality of taxes and their inherent fairness. But, it does address which people can afford to cover the cost of keeping the wheels of government and the country turning. It also does not address the inherent unfairness of wages paid to people who do different jobs, but work equally hard. It doesn’t address the inherent unfairness of wages being different for the same work throughout the world. And, it doesn’t address the inherent unfairness of the cost of living and the cost of safety and what people have to put up with to earn their wages. It also doesn’t address the fact that people who “know someone” will get a plum job being paid more and work less than a person who has no connections.

But, first let us address the tax issue. Let us assume for illustration purposes two families, each with three children and two parents. Each family has a father would works and a mother that stays home with the kids. The only difference between the families is that one father earn minimum wage and the other father earns 20 million per year. Since minimum wage is different around the country, I will use $9.00/hour for illustration. This means that this father earns $18,720.00 per year. Obviously the family can not afford to buy a house on this income, so they must rent a three-bedroom apartment at $900/month just to have a roof over their heads. And, this takes $11K from the $19K leaving about $8K for food, clothing, medical to last through the year. And, if we set a tax rate of 20% they would have to pay $3744 dollars in taxes. Do you think that this family of five can afford to eat on $4256, let alone pay for doctor visits, or buy clothing or school supplies? Is it morally right to tax these people $3744?


Let’s look at the other family. The father makes 20 million dollars per year. They have a huge tax bill of 4 million dollars, but they have 16 million dollars to live off of. They buy a house and the house becomes an asset. They can sell it at any time and they get that money back. They can invest huge sums of their money in stocks and bonds which pay dividends and interest, so they make more money off of this money. They can choose to risk their money, or they can spend it on themselves. They live in a house that they could purchase with cash, but they choose to get a low interest mortgage, because the interest can be deducted from their income taxes, so they can pay less and keep the cash in the stock market which goes up on average over time.

Would it be morally wrong to ask the wealthy father paying 20% in taxes to pay 30% in taxes while asking the low income father not pay taxes until he makes enough money to pay for his family’s basic needs? I believe that the father making 20 million per years could certainly get by on 14 million instead of 16 million. The additional tax rate is only going to effect the estate that they amass and pass down to their children. Which brings up the morality of passing wealth down to your children.

The Republicans and the conservatives have always been against welfare. They claim that it is morally wrong to give a man something for nothing, because he won’t labor for money if he gets enough money to live off of with out working. This makes perfect sense, and the government should encourage people who are capable of working to work. But, these same people would like to pass their personal fortunes down to their children so that their children may exist without working. And, the size of some fortunes are so large that many many generations of people will be able to live off of these fortunes without the need to work. So, basically what the Republicans and conservatives are saying is that if I know the people, or I am related to them then they can live the high life without the need to work. They are saying that there is a group of people that does not have to contribute to the welfare of the country through their labor. And, who these people are is determined by which family they are born into. Is this morally or ethically right?

Who makes the fortunes and who does the labor has never been fair through out history. European Aristocracy is the story of families gathering wealth over hundreds of years and paying minimal amounts for the labor that kept society operating. But, in America the American myth is that anyone can break into the upper class by hard work and creative thinking. There are examples of people who have been able to do this. Bill Gates, John D. Rockefeller, well maybe Bill Gates, because John D. Rockefeller inherited his money. Bill Gates fought the odds, and he won. But, even Bill Gates says that his fortune was more luck than hard work. The myth of the American working their way up the economic ladder has very few examples of people who made their way to fortune by hard work. People with good ideas have them stolen by those who have money and lawyers. The true story about radio, FM radio, TV, automobile, and airplane were more about who had the money and the lawyers than who had the best idea. In fact, Bill Gates didn’t even have the “best” idea when it came to operating systems. He had the luck to be in the right place at the right time. Is that morally right?

It turns out that it is not quite arbitrary who makes money. It is the people who have the money who continue to control the money for the most part. Exceptions arise from time to time. Some people make modest fortunes that don’t accumulate to the size that the inheritance tax would actually impact. The fear mongering that the Republicans have spread suggests that a family farm might be subject to inheritance taxes that would force a family to sell the farm that has no basis in reality.  Large portions of wealth are still able to pass to the next generation without being taxed, assuring that the benefactor would be able to go to the college of his/her choice, and even establish a small business without ever paying taxes on the money. In this way these benefactors are able to pursue their own American dream with a substantial boost of cash into their dream. The rest of us poor Americans with ideas for businesses need to go out and borrow money to start a business and large portions of the revenue will go back to the investor who finances the venture. Is that morally right?

I find it difficult to see that our current system is more or less morally right that the system that Rome had 2000 years ago. If mankind is to progress I would expect that the wise moral and ethical thinkers of our days would be able to establish moral and ethical monetary policy. And, the Republicans and conservatives that wave the morality flag would think about what is truly moral and ethical.

 

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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit

Politics