Well, I have quite a bit of time between now and my flight at 11 AM tomorrow. Expect some posting here. I’m in Billings, Montana.

When I went to grade school here, as I learned many years later, the reason we were let out at 2:45 and not at 3:00, like Garfield School down the street, was that the nuns wanted to minimize our contact with public school kids. We did not know this, of course, but I did have the attitude that something bad was going on in that school one block away.
Continue reading “Montana lets out at 2:45 PM” →

Let’s take two examples of government, one where it was responsive to the needs of the majority, and one where it was not. Let’s set aside minor differences. I know that right wingers do not like Franklin Roosevelt for a host of reasons. But I also know they do not like Joe Stalin as well. I’m having a problem now because I just read some comments at 4&20, and as I see it, both Roosevelt and Stalin represent the same thing … government. There is no gradation. Government is, or isn’t, and has no quality other than oppression. It cannot be controlled, and even if we like what it does in minor doses, those small amounts always lead to larger abuse.

That’s fairly typical thinking on the right wing, the missing middle, the inability to think in grays. But I thought it would be interesting to do a thought experiment. Let’s say that, for instance, government hiring people to take away our garbage is good government, and government hiring people to break into our houses and steal our possessions is a bad thing. Is it possible to have one without the other? Of course! One is a public service, one is a criminal enterprise. If, by chance, government comes under control of a criminal enterprise, then indeed we have a problem. We have a problem too if ExxonMobil comes under control of criminals, or Bank of America or the local YMCA. Or the Supreme Court, congress, or the presidency.

So then, the problem is not ExxonMobil or the YMCA or government. it is criminals. Bad people. They are a problem in private society, a problem in government.

FDR was effective. Let’s call what he did “representative government.” Another word for that is rule by “us.” We did good things for ourselves. Stalin was a bad dude. Let’s call what he did “tyranny.” That’s another word for rule by criminals. Does it follow that representative government naturally leads to rule by criminals? Quite the opposite, it appears. The criminals were upset by representative government, and have been working ever since FDR held office to destroy his legacy. They hate unions, minimum wage, child labor laws, import tariffs, high marginal taxes, Social Security. They have countered all of this by corrupting politics with money, stealing elections, launching illegal wars, spending us into a ditch … it seems that the criminals are very much opposed to representative government.

So does good government naturally lead to criminal government? No. Not at all. There are merely reactionaries around us, always waiting to pounce, take advantage, seize the public treasury for their own use. These are criminals, and they are being protected by police right now against people who want representative government.

So I wish to take the phrase “representative government” and set it aside, so that it not be thrown into the same pool with “government,” so that we cannot be told that all “government” is alike. The following words are from Dave Budge at 4&20, my substitution of words used for his in brackets. It’s startling what he is really saying!

But one must remember that no matter how egregious the behavior of cops is it is you, dear voter, who indirectly gave them that power. Many of you, I believe, support federal funding of local and state police. Many of you have called for more enforcement by the legal system for protections against civil rights violations.

It would seem that many only want to have enforced those rules with which they agree. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. The solution, then, is to work to change the rules….I’m not making a red herring. I’m saying that there is a high correlation between wanting more [representative]government and getting more [representative] government abuse. … If you ask for more [representative] government you’ll get more abuse of power. If you want to level the playing field for the poor you have to reduce the ability for the state to discriminate against them. That means expanding freedom and ridding the law of moralistic nonsense in the name of public health.

You blame spooky big corporate interests? Think of [representative] government as the Federal Bank of Abuse and the (well, some) Corporations as Willie Sutton. Why do they rob the banks, cause that’s where the money is. …But the solution will never be to get business to stop rent-seeking (unless you subscribe to a full [representative] state.) One cannot expect a dog to be anything but a dog. The only limits that are effective are those on the grant of favoritism. If you can show me another way (short of complete [representative government] ) I’m all ears.

I can be accused of putting words in his mouth. I surely am, and yet, am I derailing his words or merely amplifying his message, maybe decoding, or removing the dog whistle aspect? He is the one who cannot distinguish between representative government and rule by criminals. But I think he is saying something much more basic – that we have to learn to live with criminals. We cannot keep them caged up. That harms freedom.

It’s quite a muddled thought process he’s got going there, so there is never going to be a unified theory of government coming from him. What will come from him is more of the same, the notion that we must never interfere with the power of the strong to control the weak (euphemistically referred to as “rent seeking.”) That robs us of our freedom. He’s deep in contradiction. Rand would suggest he examine his underlying assumptions.

This bugs me no end. I don’t care about the outcome of the Obamacare bill. Without it we’re screwed, but he made sure that with it we’re screwed as well. It’s a wash.

Justices Scalia and Thomas dined with the people litigating before them as they prepared to discuss the case. Not only is it improper, it’s flaunting. They are telling the world they don’t care about ethical conduct.

That demonstrates complete lack of integrity.

I think my mojo, my edge, my annoying self is returning. Don’t worry, fellow bloggers! I’m not going to go where not welcomed.

I set out this morning to write about this constant dialogue I am having with people about the importance and effect of voting. It’s a broad subject, but to sum it up, there is an old saying that if voting mattered, it would be illegal. Indeed, in Chile in the early 1970’s, voting was effective, so the US murdered the president and installed in power a man who then outlawed voting. The other example I used over at Intelligent Discontent* this morning was Father Jean Jacques Aristide, who came to power in Haiti in the early 1990’s by means of a popular movement that was then crushed by the Bush and Clinton regimes. Voting can indeed be effective, and in those two cases it forced power to come out in the open and use its only real sustaining device, violence.

What on earth makes people think that the leaders of the US, who so despise voting in other countries, respect it here? Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro also sustain(ed) their regimes using the façade of electoral referendum. Somewhere between the a real referendum in Chile in 1970 and the fake one in North Korea in 2009 lies the US voter. We do have a system in which voting can be effective, but we are trained to use it in the most ineffective manner possible, choosing among candidates offered to us by the oligarchy.

For that reason, in the United States in 2011, voting does not matter. Voting for munchkins in a world run by Wicked Witches is not much of a choice.

In retrospect it appears that the Obama campaign was constructed with the knowledge that there would be a backlash against Bush. He was groomed, and did not appear out of the streets of Chicago by accident. He’s highly intelligent, but I am wondering now if he even wrote those books that made him famous, his profiles in courage. Now elected, he has assiduously worked to make sure that every major advance made under Bush is either maintained or intensified.

In other words, in terms of regime Change in 2008, our votes were as important as a vote for Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Hope on that.
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*I just realized as I wrote these words that Polish Wolf, who wrote the post over at ID, committed the fallacy of the missing middle, which I just wrote about below. Blew right by me!

Here’s a nice turn of phrase I ran across: crippled epistemology. I like it because it so nicely encapsulates Randianism. People become embedded in tightly controlled feedback loops, and suffer from information starvation.

Randianism/libertarianism (they echo one another) yield negative results when implemented. That’s abundantly clear. The fallback response is that the implementation was imperfect, in other words, not enough. So some years back when electrical deregulation produced a catastrophe in California, we were told that deregulation was not done properly. That’s all. Also note that even though tax cuts* are said to produce jobs by putting money in the hands of “job creators” (a PR term if ever one was dreamed up), current unemployment is reaching depression era proportions.

These people firmly believe that once implemented, their proscribed philosophy will yield positive outcomes. Evidence does not sway them. That’s not only defined insanity, but also religious faith.
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*I suspect one reason why the wealthy (and their intellectual stooges) so vigorously oppose even a modest tax increase from 35% to 39.6% is the Clinton lesson, when a tax hike preceded a robust expansion. That is evidence that taxes have far less impact on economic growth than we’re led to believe. Ergo, no tax hike of any sort is allowed, as it might again defeat their flimsy philosophy.