Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 10

The Conundrum of the Pendulum

George Will, on ABC’s “This Week,” correctly refuted the Romney campaign claim that the Middle East riots would not have happened if Romney were president. But one wonders why Will still has a national voice. He used to be the kind of conservative I loved to read; he is smart, articulate, presents a well-crafted argument, and has a good sense of history. But he lost credibility years ago when he called the American war for independence a “conservative revolution.” He presented this oxymoron (in his defense, he is not alone) to promote the idea that conservatism can lead to positive change in the course of history. But in contorting himself into this impossible position he sacrificed his credibility, which like virginity, once lost is lost forever.

To boil down the essential differences between liberals and conservatives, we can take the conclusion from John Locke (1632-1704) and Edmund Burke (1729-1797). Liberals believe in and support human rational potential, a compact between the people and their government, and the right of revolution if that pact is broken. Conservatives place a high value on existing institutions, customs and traditions, put faith in a supernatural force guiding human affairs, and accept human inequality and the consequences of social hierarchy. However laudable those latter ideas may or may not be, they do not lead to revolution.

Thinking conservatives face the dilemma that most of history’s advances derive from liberalism. Conservatism resists change and promotes either the status quo or a return to earlier times. If conservatives had won the day, we would still have segregation, women could not vote, child labor would be the norm, mixed-race marriages would be illegal, evolution could not be taught in science class, abortions would be criminal, Christian prayer would be embedded in public schools, the air in Los Angeles would still be brown and deadly, our water would be contaminated with lead and arsenic… and we would all still be British subjects. We are American and not British thanks to enlightened liberals. In each of these cases, conservatives fought in their day to preserve what we view in retrospect as failed social and political constructs.

Take any one of those issues — women’s suffrage or child labor for example, and read the stories of the day. Conservatives predicted catastrophic consequences if women were allowed to vote. Industrialists fought tooth and nail to prevent the passage of laws to protect children from the vilest forms of exploitation. And conservatives fought hard to remain loyal to the British. What could be more anti-American — literally — than that? Conservatives have historically fought to preserve what we now consider some of the worst abuses in society. They are doing the same today, and we’ll have that perspective 50 years hence. Citizens United will be our Dredd Scott. You cannot have a conservative revolution; a revolution is a fight for radical change to create a new and better future. A revolution is not a quest for some reversion to an old past; change is the antithesis of conservative thought. Revisionism and linguistic contortions will not save conservatives from the harsh reality that their movement is based on a fight for causes that decades hence will seem archaic and barbaric.

Historically, conservatives have served a single useful purpose: to rein in the excesses of liberalism. Liberal thought is the engine for change, but without the pull of conservative resistance that train can quickly accelerate beyond safe speed. In the absence of opposing views, liberalism fast becomes too much of a good thing. A sense of entitlement, too much reliance on government, excessive regulations that stifle innovation, exploitive taxation, legal constructs that interfere with desirable market forces, and social policies that threaten individual rights are all consequences of liberalism unconstrained.

Liberalism properly reined in by conservatism is like the water falling through a turbine to generate electricity. The force of the water when resisted by the internal gears of the turbine creates something useful to society. That same force, though, becomes destructive when flowing uncontrolled over the top of the dam. Liberalism creates change necessary to advance our society; conservative resistance prevents the rate of change from exceeding redline.

The real danger of right wing extremism today is not necessarily the medieval views advanced by party advocates. I believe the majority of Americans will reject the far rights’ antiquated views on women’s rights, science, unregulated capitalism of robber-baron days, and jingoistic nationalism. No, the real danger is that extremism is going to damage the legitimate conservative movement beyond repair for a generation or more. In the absence of a sound conservative movement, liberalism will be prone to excess. Then in response to that excess the pendulum will swing back too far to the right, and we will enter into ever-widening and unstable swings left and right. Our future is in the middle, and the further we swing away on either side the greater the danger.

My great hope is that a decisive Obama win in November will largely discredit the extreme right, giving voice and power again to moderates in the Republican Party. Liberals have no exclusive insights to what is best; nor do conservatives. We need both in dialogue to create a better future. We need the falling water, but we need to guide that water to useful purpose. We need both liberals and conservatives, absent the extremes we see today on the far right. And no, I did not include extremes on the far left. At least for the moment the left has no equivalent of the Tea Party, or the extreme voices of Rush Limbaugh with 20 million listeners or extreme candidates like Michele Bachmann or Todd Akin. Where we stand today the right must swing to the middle across a greater distance than the left.

But Officer, You’ve Got the Wrong Guy

As I watch from the sidelines I keep waiting for the big news about Lance Armstrong to be discussed somewhere in the primary news story about his capitulation. An important component of the story is deeply troubling, but unexplored, no matter his guilt or innocence. The press, and people I talk to, largely believe that by giving up the fight Armstrong is admitting guilt. The idea is that, surely, if he was innocent, he would continue to battle the charges against him. Yet this is wrong, deeply wrong. Forget for the moment the naive idea of being innocent before being proved guilty; I am not concerned here with legalisms. Instead, something much more nefarious is happening: in believing Armstrong is guilty because he won’t fight, we are giving tremendous power to the accuser. And beyond the trivial realm of sports, that idea is extraordinarily dangerous.

Throwing an accusation is essentially cost free, but the price of defense is astronomical. That disproportionate balance is by itself reason to be cautious in yielding an advantage to the accuser, but there is yet another concern. If we shift mentally, collectively, to believing that any unanswered accusation is admission of guilt, we open the floodgates for personal destruction and chaos. We can maintain in our legal system the idea that we are innocent until proven guilty, but that that will provide no security against random charges if we the people believe the opposite. Any utterance absent any proof can become by itself evidence of guilt, and we should strive to avoid that idea at all costs. While I do not really care if Armstrong is innocent or guilty, I do care that we seem to have slipped as a society passed the threshold of putting the burden on the accused rather than the accuser. And that is truly frightening: history’s worst totalitarian regimes have been founded on the idea that accusation equals guilt, against which there is, by definition, no defense. So while the sports example here is of little import, our response to the situation reveals an ugly trend that we should stop right now.

The Show Me State Shows Me Some Intolerance

Yesterday voters in Missouri passed by an overwhelming margin a bill to protect a threatened minority from an oppressive majority. Without this protection the minority might cease to exist. Yes, Missouri is taking the bold step of protecting that rarely seen and fragile species, the American Christian. Christians will, finally, no longer have to fear extinction with passage of Amendment 2 , better known as the “Right to Pray” bill. Proponents will sigh in relief now that it is once again safe to “pray briefly before a City Council meeting.” Prayers from one faith? Invoking Jesus?

According to a 2008 survey from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. But sponsor of the bill feel compelled to “level of the playing field.” It would seem that having a majority of nearly 80% is just not enough of an advantage. Even with a supermajority, the field needs to be leveled. This is not about religious freedom, it is about establishing absolute dominance, and repressing all religions other than Christianity. Only 4% are self-proclaimed non-believers (broken into the survey categories of atheists at 1.6% and agnostics at 2.4%). Yet in spite of these vast, massive, overwhelming, deeply embedded majorities, Christians often speak in the dialect of victimhood. The idea of Christians as modern victims while enjoying an overwhelming supermajority is difficult to swallow. From the perspective of a tiny 4% minority, any claim by a group representing 78% of the population that the views of a few are a threat to the many is simply surreal. A Christian complaining that Christianity or prayer are under attack when we submerged in Christianity’s ubiquitous presence is like a fish in the Pacific Ocean complaining that there is not enough water.

The bill states that “no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs.” So no physics (Big Bang), no biology (evolution), no geology (climate change),and no philosophy (secularists); we will be pumping out students from public schools who know nothing about anything other than the bible. My religious belief is that secular education is a sin; therefore according to this new law I can opt out of school completely.

As an aside, let us mention that Missouri right now is suffering a severe drought that threatens the state’s entire agricultural sector. All but a few counties are disaster areas. Climate change is a liberal hoax, though, so good thing the legislature is focusing on the important issues.

Let’s cut to the chase and through the nonsense. We all know that the Right to Pray bill is really an attempt to impose one religion on a secular society composed of diverse faiths, and to tear down the wall separating church and state. What our Christian friends so readily forget is that they pursue a course our founders fought hard to prevent. They could not have been more explicit about this point. John Adams, who said when signing the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Since he helped found the country, he would certainly know on what principles the nation was founded. Should we not take his word over some preacher’s interpretation almost 300 years later? Missouri apparently thinks otherwise.

We do not need a Church of America: what the founding fathers knew in 1776 holds true in 2011. In spite of right wing Christian rhetoric to the contrary, that we are a secular nation cannot be denied. The facts supporting that conclusion are unambiguous, overwhelming, and indisputable. The Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1777, the U.S. Constitution (1787), and the Federalist Papers (1787-1788) are purely secular documents. Searching for references to god in any of these documents is akin to looking for Rick Perry at a gun control rally. Nowhere to be seen.

Our national obsession with God in politics is a recent phenomenon, and would seem completely alien to any of our founders. “In God We Trust” was first placed on United States coins in 1861 during the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt tried to remove the words from our money in 1907 but was shouted down. Only in 1956 was that phrase adopted as the national motto by the 84th Congress. The clause “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance was inserted only in 1954 when President Eisenhower signed legislation to recognize “the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty.”

For the first 180 years of existence, the United States never included God in its motto, on its currency, or in any document creating the republic. We were born a secular nation and remained one for nearly two centuries. Missouri wants to negate that history in order impose one religion on all others, our founders’ greatest fear. The religious right claims, incredibly, to know more about the intent of our founders than the founders themselves.

We really need to stop this ridiculous argument about being a Christian nation. We are not; we have never been.

Nuns of America Unite

American nuns dare challenge the Vatican. Sure, but that is not the story. What intrigues is the Vatican hierarchy’s rationale for the fight.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) has attempted to create a dialogue with the Holy See to explore issues such as ordaining women as priests, birth control and acceptance of same-sex marriage, to name a few. The LCWR represents about 80 percent of Catholic nuns in the United States. The Vatican has responded by appointing three bishops to implement a hostile takeover, essentially taking the reigns of the LCWR agenda to repress any discussions of forbidden topics and, with a papal mandate, filter and approve any communications from the group.

The rift has highlighted a deep division in how the church approaches a fundamental question: can church doctrine change in response to a changing world. The nuns clearly believe yes. Sister Pat Farrell, president of the LCWR, said that, “Our understanding is that we need to continue to respond to the signs of the times, and the new questions and issues that arise in the complexities of modern life are not something we see as a threat.”

The Vatican does not agree. Cardinal William J. Levada, formerly head of the Vatican’s Doctrinal Office and now retired, said of the nuns, “they’re misrepresenting who they are and who they ought to be.” Prior to his retirement Levada met with the LCWR and informed the nuns that his harsh assessment of the group should be seen as “an invitation to obedience.” The bishops also concluded that the LCWR was promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” after reprimanding the nuns for hosting speakers who “often contradict or ignore” church teachings and who “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

Initially I had intended to ignore this story, which at face value is no more interesting than a debate between the two Grimm brothers arguing whether Gretel should walk one pace or one-and one-half paces behind Hansel. Editing a fairy tale unbound by an objective truth is not terribly interesting.

But then I heard an interview with Sister Farrell on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, followed later by an interview with Bishop Leonard Blair, one of the bishops who evaluated the LCWR. What struck me finally was the indefensible rationale for the status quo as articulated by Blair, who said about ordaining priests: “…If you’re a Catholic, this is part of our sacraments and practice for two millennia, and it’s not just an arbitrary decision of male oppression over women.”

He argues, therefore, that because the church has taught something as correct for 2,000 years those teachings cannot be questioned now; they are an inviolate and integral part of the sacrament. And here is where Terry Gross failed to follow up, because Blair’s argument is fatally flawed. Let’s go back to 1612.

The church taught as an absolute inviolate truth for 1600 years that the earth was the center of the universe. The bible makes this abundantly clear in multiple passages. The earth was said to be immobile at the center, while the sun and all planets orbit the one planet made special by god. People were burned at the stake for heresy for questioning this absolute truth. But there was a problem, no matter how hard the church now tries to sweep it under the rug.

Galileo claimed in 1612 that the earth revolved around the sun, a conclusion that was in direct contradiction to teachings of the Church. Galileo’s observations were a significant threat to the world order because he verified by direct observation the heretical ideas put forth by Copernicus 70 years earlier in The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium), published shortly after Copernicus died in 1543. The Church was not at all amused by Galileo’s advances in astronomy, or by his support of Copernicus. Pope Urban VIII denounced Galileo with the following language:

We say, pronounce, sentence and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of these things which have been detailed in the trial and which you have confessed already, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: namely that Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.

There is nothing ambiguous about that statement: the Vatican declares that the Holy Scripture is clear that the Earth is the center of the universe. No amount of spin can alter the meaning of the Pope’s words.

The Pope said that what was correct for 1,600 years could not be wrong. So under threats of torture and death, an unpleasant fate to consider, the Inquisition forced Galileo to renounce his views and to make a public statement that the earth stands still and the sun revolves around the earth. He complied, in order to avoid burning at the stake, and wrote the requisite abjuration.

If you think that this argument is a relic only relevant to the 15th century, you would be wrong. Even today in the 21st century, the Church claims that Galileo shares blame because he made “unproven assertions.” Unproven assertions! The best that Pope John Paul II could muster was that he regretted the “tragic mutual incomprehension” that had caused Galileo to suffer. As the new millennium settles in, the Church still claims that Galileo was wrong. The dissonance between Scripture and fact is not a problem relegated to earlier centuries, but remains relevant today.

With each new discovery proving a Biblical assertion wrong, the Church retreats to the safety of errors in interpretation or dismissing the discrepancy as unimportant. Catholic scholars go even further, and claim that the more science advances the “closer we come to the ontological mysteries of Christian faith.” Really? The Bible’s age of the earth is off by more than 4 billion years. This error, of course, has implications for creation. Speaking of which, we know that not all life was created in six days, and that once created it evolves. This too is a problem for the church: The Pope in 1996 was able to admit reluctantly only that evolution is “more than just a theory.” Any fairy tale can be modified to tell a good story in new circumstances because the story is constrained only by imagination and not by any hard objective truth; but even with extraordinary contortions trying to fit reality to the old myth, science only takes us ever farther from the “ontological mysteries of Christian faith.”

These accumulating factual mistakes call into question the certainty with which the Church claims the Bible is infallible, since their previous insistence has proven unsubstantiated. These doubts about infallibility apply to all the Church’s teachings.

You might try to seek safe harbor in the notion that these discrepancies, and therefore church fallibility, arise when measured against an objective truth but not church tradition. Alas, no, that is not the case. Believers can no longer overtly bribe their way to heaven with indulgences, that unseemly practice initiated in the 13th century by which a sinner can be absolved by donating money to the church. The church was literally selling tickets to heaven. This was one of Martin Luther’s big complaints in his 95 Theses, objecting to “professional pardoners” selling absolution on a grand scale.

If you are still not convinced that the church is fallible, or that practices in place for millennia can change, consider the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II made significant modifications in doctrine and practice in the face of a rapidly modernizing world. How often does one hear mass in Latin now? After nearly 2000 years, communicants no longer kneel down at a rail to take the host, but continue to stand. After two millennia, the priest now faces the congregation instead of away.

The church is fallible; and practices that have been in place for a thousand years have been either proven wrong or changed culturally; this has been demonstrated beyond any doubt. Nobody today believes that the sun orbits the earth, yet nobody is burning at the stake for heresy for pointing this out.

So now let us revisit Bishop Blair’s rationale for opposing a dialogue with the LCWR: “”…If you’re a Catholic, this is part of our sacraments and practice for two millennia…” So because it has been thus for 2000 years it cannot be wrong. But we’ve just shown otherwise. Blair’s argument is vacuous, unsustainable and desperate. The church was adamant, sure, unwavering in its belief that the earth was the center of the universe, that mass had to be celebrated in Latin, and that…woman can’t be ordained as priests, that same-sex marriage is a sin, that birth control is an affront to god. The church’s credibility on the latter issues is no greater than on the former, that is they have no credibility or moral standing at all to oppose their own most pious followers who seek only to question doctrine that has remained unquestioned for far too long. The church’s moral bankruptcy was demonstrated clearly enough with the global scandal of child abuse; now the church further undermines its moral foundation by muting nuns who dare question Vatican authorities, the progeny of those who insisted with such certainty for 1600 years that the earth was the center of the universe. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

The GOP’s Entire Economic Strategy:

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Life on Mars and the Garden of Eden

The latest Mars rover, Curiosity, will land on the Red Planet in a few days, if all goes well. Should Curiosity find evidence of past life on Mars, allow me to preempt what will certainly be a rewrite of history on the part of the world’s major religions. All will come out and say such a discovery is completely consistent with religious teachings. Nonsense. Let us be clear that the Bible is unambiguous about creation; the Earth is the center of the universe, only humans were made in the image of God, and all life was created in six days. All life in all the heavens. In six days. So when we discover that life exists or existed elsewhere in our solar system or on a planet orbiting another star in the Milky Way, or in a planetary system in another galaxy, we will see a huge effort to square that circle with amazing twists of logic and contorted justifications. But do not buy the historical edits: Life on another planet is completely incompatible with religious tradition. Any other conclusion is nothing but ex post facto rationalization to preserve the myth. Let us see why more specifically.

From Genesis 1:1, we get:

God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of god he created him; male and female he created them.

Nothing in that mentions alien worlds, which the ancients knew nothing about, of course. Man was told to rule over the fish on the Earth, not on other planets. But God would have known of these alien worlds, so it is curious that he did not instruct the authors to include the language.

There is also a problem with Genesis 1:3: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Well, the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, yet the universe, and all the light generating stars in ancient galaxies, are more than 14 billion years old. So when God said, “Let there be light,” there already had been light shining bright for at least 10 billion years. He was flipping a switch that had been turned on eons before by the thermonuclear reactions in stars. And that light bathed other suns and other planets long before the Earth was a loose accumulation of rocks orbiting our sun. Given that this is the story of all creation, these tidbits seem an important omission that will undermine the entire story when we find life elsewhere. We were late to the game of “let there be light.”

We are also told in unambiguous terms that all life was created in six days. All life in all the heavens. Genesis 2:1 says, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” So here we learn that all life, in all the heavens, was complete, and all found on Earth. The complete totality of that creation in all the heavens, all of which was here on Earth, is made clear in the preceding sections of Genesis 1:1-31, with “every herb bearing seed” and “every beast” and “every fowl of the air.” There is no modifier like “every fowl of the air — that is, on Earth, but excluding life on the planet Xenflugan.” We know all of this took place in six days, because Genesis 2:2 says, “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made.” Now, some say that these are not real days but allegorical “God days,” which could be millions of years each. But no, when God said, “Let there be light,” and created life in six days, he tied these events to seasons on Earth, which are governed by real days. So the Bible tells us that all life, in all the heavens, was all put on Earth in six days — that is, six Earth days. That leaves no room for alien life in this creation story. The discovery of alien life would therefore undermine the entire saga.

We can also have no doubt that the Earth is the center of the universe, because this is where God placed man. In the trial of Galileo, Pope Urban VIII made perfectly clear the church’s understanding of God’s word that the Earth is unambiguously the center of the universe:

We say, pronounce, sentence and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of these things which have been detailed in the trial and which you have confessed already, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: namely that Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.

Yet it would be difficult to claim the unique position of universe center if other planets held life that was zipping around in anti-gravity cars travelling at the speed of light. Clearly, if the ancients knew there was alien life, any form of life at all, the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe would be more difficult to sustain. Again, though, there is no mention of alien worlds or life beyond this little blue dot.

None of the 66 books of the Bible makes any reference to life other than that created by God here on Earth in that six-day period. If we discover life elsewhere, one must admit that that is a an oversight, so much so, in fact, that such a discovery must, to all but the most closed minds, call into question the entire story of creation and anything that follows from that story. How could a convincing story of life’s creation leave out life?

As I stated at the beginning, none of this will matter upon life’s discovery elsewhere. Religious leaders will simply declare that such life is fully compatible with, in fact predicted by, the Bible. Just like they eventually swept under the rug their being wrong about Earth’s position in the heavens. They will create contorted justifications to support this view, cite a few passages of the Bible that could mean anything, and declare victory. Don’t say I did not warn you.

Learning All the Wrong Lessons From Aurora

Shortly after the shooting stopped, Romney and Obama both issued statements on the killings in Aurora that largely struck the right tone, even if the message was perfectly predictable in the wake of yet another massacre. Along with those expected words of condolence, we all fell immediately into a depressing pattern of exaggerated grief and feigned shock.

The Appeal to God

Statements from both candidates make an appeal to God, which in fact trivializes the event and our response to it. Romney said, for example, “We pray that the wounded will recover and that those who are grieving will know the nearness of God.” And what about those who are not grieving; can they then not know the nearness of God? Does a son or daughter have to die to know the nearness of God? And concerning the wounded: If God wants them to recover, why have the victims wounded in the first place? To teach them a lesson? To get to know him better? If Romney wants to pray, how about praying that people going to see a movie do not get shot and killed? If prayer is effective, I suggest prayer to prevent tragedy rather than to comfort victims afterward. Or let’s be realistic and concede that prayer cannot alter the course of events and stop appealing to prayer just because it makes us feel good about ourselves so we can move on and put the tragedy easily behind us. “Offering our prayers” is a coward’s way out: We do not have to think any further, and we’ve done our bit, even though we’ve done nothing at all.

Dissing the Dead

When a survivor of a violent and deadly attack, like that in Aurora, says, “I am thankful God spared me,” I wonder if he or she has an inkling of how extraordinarily offensive that is to the families of those who died. Did those who died not get spared by the same god for some reason of sin? Were they less worthy individuals, less pious, less deserving of life? Were the survivors chosen by God because they are special and the dead were not? By assigning the outcome of the tragedy to the workings of God rather than to the random nature of existence, those so thankful imply that they were spared for a reason, that the hand of God came down to protect them but very specifically did not protect others; so where does that leave the families of the dead? Did God abandon them? If you answer, “God works in mysterious ways,” then you explain nothing; that statement is no different from saying, “I have no idea why some died and others lived other than bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” So why invoke God at all, implying so rudely that the dead were somehow less deserving? We honor the dead by acknowledging that they were not chosen for their ill fate but died because life is dangerous; we diminish their lives if we claim God chose them for death, speculating on why God would do so and ending with the meaningless “we can’t know the mind of God” or other such pabulum.

Blaming Humanism

In a perfect counter to the scientific method, many politicians pick and choose facts to fit a theory or political agenda, rather than developing a theory or principle based on a set of facts. So we can expect that after every major attack politicians of every stripe will come out to draw lessons that always coincide with their preconceived ideas. A few mature representatives use the tragedy to call for unity, appealing to our common interests, but there are always the fire breathers like Louie Gohmert, a Republican representative from Texas. He claims the Aurora deaths can be attributed to “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs.” Here is Gohmert’s well-thought-out, carefully crafted, perfectly logical justification for this bizarre conclusion: “People say … where was God in all of this? We’ve threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God’s name, they’re going to be jailed … I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present.” (Yep our prisons are filled to the rafters with high-school kids who used God’s name — and that kind of stuff). Well, then, where was his protective hand? Did he ignore Aurora because we do not allow public schools to impose a Christian god on a diverse student body? Did he punish 12 innocent souls to make a point about separation of Church and State? Did he allow the death of 12 bystanders to promote gun control? The great thing about God and the Bible is that you can appeal to either to justify any point of view or to promote any political agenda. Gohmert goes for broke and uses the terrible death of 12 people callously to advance a narrow agenda. But hey, he is a Republican from Texas. We could expect little else.

Democrats Whine

Faithful Democrats are criticizing Obama because he has not used the latest massacre fueled by yet another arsenal of weapons as a vehicle to push for gun control. You have got to be kidding me. Even after more than three years of proving the success of running the long game (see DADT, gay marriage, Iraq), Democrats insist on being both impatient and impractical. Here is the realpolitik choice, whether you like it or not: Tackle the issue of gun control now and lose the election, or be smart. There is no middle road here. The polls are running even nationally; twice as many voters think Romney can handle the economy better than Obama (proving the amazing power of propaganda). If Democrats have any hope of winning reelection in November, idealism is going to have to be tempered by the reality of our divided nation. I have no idea if Obama will address gun control if he is reelected, but I know we have no hope of doing so if he takes on the issue now. If there is one characteristic that makes Obama unique, it is his ability to ignore calls for immediate action that feel good now while he keeps his eye on the ball to achieve lasting change. I have close gay friends who infuriated me when they soured on Obama because he did not deliver on DADT and gay marriage in a time frame they thought suitable. I kept telling them to take a deep breath and give the man some room. He has enough trouble fending off Republicans; he does not need to fight another front with his own. And sure enough, in a way that will stick, and be widely accepted, he eliminated DADT and, when the time was right, came out strongly for gay marriage. So Democrats, chill out. Obama will not deliver on every issue and will not fulfill your every fantasy. But he will do more for you than his opponent ever will. So back off a little and be realistic about what is possible, or experience the hardships of what is not when Romney takes office.

Unhealthy Obsession

As a society we manage to turn real tragedy into parody. The deaths in Aurora are terrible and represent, to those who lost loved ones, a dark day from which they will never recover fully. The hole will always be present, and that is truly sad. The unexpected and senseless nature of the deaths in a place of innocence catches our attention, and rightfully so. But we go overboard. The news coverage is excessive, blanket, non-stop, 24-hour; we lose all perspective. In 2010 an estimated 32,788 Americans died in auto accidents. That means 90 people die on our highways each day, every day, seven days per week, every week of the year. That is, about four people die every hour of every day of every week. We suffer the tragedy of Aurora every three hours in a perpetual, never-ending loop of death. The families of those killed in cars feel no differently, have lost no less, than the families of the victims in Colorado. Do not misunderstand; what happened in Aurora is newsworthy and is important enough to suggest that society has some important questions to consider (although we probably will not). But what we are witnessing in covering the story is obsession, and it is unhealthy. We have lost our sense of proportion. News organizations are nearly giddy with opportunity even as they put on a grim face before the camera. Instead of taking this tragedy as an opportunity to have an adult conversation about gun control, or about broader issues of societal risk, we instead have converted a true tragedy into the triviality of a reality TV show. In doing so we degrade ourselves and soil the memories of those who did not survive.

Fetal Personhood: Why Stop There?

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), that scion of small government, wants the government to decide when a woman can choose her own reproductive fate. Paul has offered an amendment (to an unrelated flood insurance bill) that would give full legal protection to a fetus from the moment of fertilization. This has obvious implications for the legality of any abortions as well as stem cell research and many forms of fertility treatments. The measure would challenge the use of mifepristone (RU-486), the so called “morning after” pill. Even the use of an IUD could be considered illegal since it prevents a fertilized egg (now a person) from implanting in the uterine wall. IUDs are the world’s most widely used contraceptive so this is not a trivial concern.

But if Senator Rand wants to travel down this road, he must go much farther. His idea is not nearly radical enough. He has only arbitrarily selected fertilization as the magic moment when life begins, and he has chosen badly. Using Rand’s own logic, we actually need to reach further back into the cycle of life to define personhood. We should declare, and have the government enforce the idea, that life begins when the testes produce a sperm and ovaries produce an egg. Masturbation and ovulation should be declared acts of murder because every sperm and every egg is a person. We will need to build more jails.

Perhaps unwittingly, Woody Allen was an early proponent of the idea gametes deserve personhood. In his 1972 movie, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask, Allen dressed up like that ubiquitous male issuance, a good visualization of my theory that a sperm is a person.

Paul’s idea about fertilization and mine about eggs and sperm come down to the concept of potential. Even Paul would say that an egg just fertilized is not a fully formed human being able to function independent of the mother. No, he is saying that the fertilized egg has the potential to be human, and therefore given that potential should be treated with all the rights of a person. Well, a sperm has the potential to be a human being too; it just needs to fertilize an egg; just one step earlier in the process of development. Since I am moving closer to origin, my claim should take precedent. A fertilized egg has no special status compared to an egg not fertilized. A fertilized egg has a long and uncertain journey to the uterus, and once there has only long odds on a successful attachment. Fertilization is no guarantee of success, far from it.

What Rand ignores is the fact that the majority of fertilized eggs are naturally aborted. Understand this: as many of 75 percent of all fertilized eggs fail to implant in the uterus. Fatal genetic abnormalities, hormonal imbalances, a uterus incapable of receiving the embryo, and a multitude of other factors prevent the majority of fertilized eggs from implanting and growing in a nurturing uterus. So what does Rand say about these fertilized eggs that in fact never had even the potential to become human?

So both an egg alone and one fertilized have the potential to become human given the right set of circumstances; since both have the potential to be human, both should be granted personhood. The moment of fertilization is nothing but one action (and usually an unsuccessful one) in a series of millions that take us from a single cell to an independently living being. Granting that moment special status is completely arbitrary and meaningless biologically.

One could just as easily, and less arbitrarily, declare that life begins at the moment when a fetus could live independently outside the womb. In fact this threshold is supported by solid biological reasoning. Without lungs, for example, life outside the womb is impossible. Incredible advances in medical technology have not extended fetal survival much before 24 weeks for good reason; a human fetus is simply not viable outside the womb much before that time and certainly not before 20 weeks. A fetus without lungs has potential to become human, sure, but so does a fertilized egg or an egg about to be fertilized, or an egg with the potential to be fertilized. So does a sperm with any potential to meet up with an egg. All really could be become human, all have the true potential to become human, given the right set of circumstances. Why choose fertilization as the magic moment?

So let’s go back one more step in the biological chain of events and boldly declare sperm and eggs as persons. Ridiculous? Not one bit more than declaring a fertilized egg as a person. Both declarations are made arbitrarily in the absence of any basis in biology. So gird your loins — you have much to protect.

Sunday New York Times: Making Taxation Fairer

Income tax in modern form came into being only in 1913 through the 16th Amendment. For most of the first 137 years of our Republic, we had no income tax at all. We need to return to our roots.

The concept of an income tax is flawed both in practice and theory. Taxing consumption rather than income allows the unfettered accumulation of wealth, encouraging production; you pay taxes only when you spend. The economy and the environment both benefit by taxing that which really has societal costs.

This is both progressive and regressive: progressive because our tax burden is proportional to ability and willingness to pay. Regressive because the poor will pay a greater percentage of their total income on consumption tax.

The regressivity can be partly offset with savings from dismantling the Internal Revenue Service (about $13 billion) and through measures like exempting food and social necessities.

Taxing income makes little sense. Time to call this a failed experiment.

JEFF SCHWEITZER

Spicewood, Tex., May 9, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-making-taxation-fairer.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1336914952-CgMCMxbczvRsnxU7t3gmZg

 

 

McCarthyism Survives: Fox News Carries the Torch

Joe McCarthy lives. Those of us “of a certain age” but still too young to have witnessed Communist purges now have the pleasure of reliving those exciting times that we had earlier missed by only a few years. We are witnessing a resurgence of the Red Scare with a new face but an eerie parallel to the witch hunts of the early 1950s. Instead of Communism and Fascism, our great nation is now threatened with a “radical socialist agenda” imposed on a vulnerable population by a Marxist foreign-born Muslim president who follows a violent Christian cleric.

McCarthyism is not precisely defined, but is commonly understood to mean evidence-free accusations of treason or insufficient patriotism, supported by character assassination through innuendo, outright falsehood or demagoguery. While having origins dating back to the first Red Scare in 1917 the classic period bearing McCarthy’s name lasted about from 1950 to 1954. We should have learned from this dark half-decade in our history, but every day Fox stubbornly proves we have not. Wild claims, oddball conspiracy theories, hateful rhetoric, racism cloaked in thinly veiled code, and pure fabrication are daily fare on Fox. If the truth is inconvenient, Fox simply manufactures a new reality: faith-based reporting in which facts are optional. Let’s look at this new face of McCarthyism, which blossomed forth during the Bush years and simply exploded like an inflationary universe after the Big Bang with the election of Obama.

A number of websites are devoted to tracking the outright lies and more insidious half-truths broadcast daily by Fox News; and of course Fox’s tenuous relationship with reality is routinely mocked by Jon Stewart and SNL. But a few egregious cases are still worthy of scrutiny — as compelling parallels to the havoc caused by Joe McCarthy’s assault on truth under the guise of patriotism.

Fox repeatedly cries that Obama has raised or will raise taxes. This is the fiscal equivalent of the Red Scare; create hysteria about a fabricated threat. This claim is central to the Fox myth that Obama is a socialist bent on redistributing wealth. But the claim is blatantly false. The opposite is true: Obama cut taxes on 94.3 percent of working families. He cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion. Those are facts, easily verified. The Wall Street Journal acknowledges the numbers but objects to the claim that these are “tax cuts” because some come in the form of tax credits. The WSJ has a valid technical point but not a politically important one. If prior to the tax cut or credit I paid $1,000 in taxes and after I paid $900, it matters little to me, or most people, if the $100 savings is in the form of a lower tax rate or a credit on taxes I would have otherwise paid. My bottom line is that I paid $100 less than before. The WSJ calls that “sleight of hand.” Most call it a tax cut. (An aside: Republicans want to kill this tax cut; that is a tax hike. That is the exact argument made in their support of continuing Bush’s tax cuts, which nearly bankrupted the country; any repeal is the same as raising taxes. Republicans want to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans).

Yet in spite of these tax cuts only 12 percent of Americans know that Obama cut their taxes. Worse, 24 percent of those surveyed believed their taxes had gone up. Remember, they went down by $116 billion. Fox has managed to not only obscure the truth, but actually invert it. This is the impact of the Big Lie; repeat something enough and it becomes truth, no matter how ridiculous or removed from fact. Fox has altered the political landscape by creating a daily assault of fabricated stories. McCarthy fabricated the threat of Communism by exaggerating its true reach; but there were of course Communists, even if small in number and influence. Fox takes the process one step further by creating a threat from whole cloth, then doubles down on their deceit by converting an actual good into something undesirable. Fox is now what McCarthy would have been if he had access to the Internet and 24-hour cable TV.

Odd stories like the birther movement only exist because Fox irresponsibly fans the flames, continuing to report on the discredited issue of Obama’s citizenship long after that corpse was buried. The birther story is important not because a few nut bags have a conspiracy theory, but because a news channel viewed by millions of people chose to perpetuate a claim they knew and know not to be true. Well after Obama released his birth certificate, Sean Hannity said (on March 23, 2011) of the Obama administration, “why can’t they just produce it, and we move on.” After they had produced it. In January of this year, Mike Huckabee as a Fox analyst said Romney should only release his tax returns if Obama released his transcripts to “show whether he got loans as a foreign student.” Huckabee knows that Obama has provided incontrovertible proof of his Hawaiian birth. That would include a copy of his long-form birth certificate and testimony from Hawaii’s Department of Health that the certificate is valid, original and real. There are also birth announcements in local Hawaiian newspapers. Huckabee and Fox nevertheless persist. Like McCarthy, Fox is questioning a politician’s legitimacy and patriotism, an accusation against which there is no defense because the charge is bogus, based on a falsehood. Fox makes the outrageous claim there is an invisible pink elephant in the room; then touts proof of its existence because opponents cannot prove it does not exist.

By equating something real (Romney’s tax returns) to a discredited myth (Obama is foreign born) Fox implies a false equivalency. Fox is like “Weekend at Bernie’s” in which two losers pretend that their murdered employer is still alive: the facts are clear but the lie gets perpetuated before an audience willing to be deceived. Fox has created a mythical Obama like those losers created a live Bernie; the reality has nothing to do with who Obama really is or what he represents. Fox’s Obama is just as much fiction as Bernie’s animation; they have Romney running against a myth they created because they cannot run against the real thing.

Fox News reported and then repeated on numerous shows that Obama was spending $200,000 million per day on his 10-day trip to Asia in November 2010. (That is close to the daily cost of executing the war in Afghanistan to put the absurd figure in perspective). Glenn Beck reported the $200 million number with great confidence on his show with no reservation and no limit to his outrage, then went on to say in later interviews when challenged that he did not know if it were true, but that gee, it certainly could be. When confronted with the misinformation campaign on Bill Maher’s Real Time show, Bill O’Reilly reverted back to the tired claim that there is a difference between hard news, commentators and soft news, implying that the latter two have no obligation to report facts; and have no prohibition on reporting known falsehoods. Nobody on Fox thought to compare the actual cost of the trip to similar trips made by Bush, during which the cost was never raised as an issue. Just as Fox never mentioned the debt or deficit when Bush was president — but now is fairly obsessed with it. Fox implies Obama is doing something wrong (innuendo) by citing a fabricated figure (lies, falsehoods) with no effort to put in context the actual cost of the trip or what is the typical operational costs of moving any president between two points (demagoguery). This was a non-story based on fiction about an issue that did not exist — but was used to paint a bad picture of the president. That is the definition of McCarthyism.

I think more insidious, even worse than creating false news to damage the president, is what Fox omits from their “fair and balanced” programming. Here is what I’ve never heard on Fox News about Obama:

• Cut taxes for 3.5 million small businesses to help pay for employee health care coverage

• Created tax credits for 29 million people to help pay for health insurance

• Obama cut prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients by 50 percent

• Promoted and signed the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, providing health care to 11 million kids; of those four million were previously uninsured

• Was the force behind the Health Care Reform Bill, which allows children to remain covered by their parents’ insurance until the age of 26

• Created more private sector jobs in 2010 than during the entire 8 years under Bush

• Signed the new START treaty with Russia

• Provided travel expenses to families of fallen soldiers to meet the bodies of their loved ones when they arrive at Dover AFB (but Republicans support the troops)

The inverse is true as well; here is what I never heard from Fox News programming while Bush was president:

• Supported torture

• Suspended habeas corpus

• Arrested and held American citizens with no charge and no access to counsel

• Illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens

• Politicized the Justice Department in a way that would make Nixon shudder

• Fired 9 federal prosecutors who refused to investigate bogus election fraud scams

• Exposed the name of an active CIA agent, a treasonous act

• Crumbled the wall separating church and state

• Created at the time the biggest debts and deficits in our nation’s history

• Oversaw a record number of foreclosures and personal bankruptcies

• Praised Kenneth Lay as a business genius as Enron collapsed (remember Enron?)

• Lied about and then incompetently executed two wars

• Sent soldiers to war with inadequate equipment

• Neglected soldiers returning from war, exemplified by the filth of Walter Reed

• Invited attacks on our soldiers with bravado like “bring it on.”

• Allowed al Qaeda into Iraq

• Allowed the Taliban to regroup and re-strengthen in Afghanistan

• Failed to capture Osama bin Laden. Remember “Dead or alive?”

• Created a new breeding ground for extremists and terrorists in the Middle East

• Ignored genocide in Darfur

• Create kangaroo courts that make a mockery of justice

• Dismantled the federal government’s scientific advisory structure

• Politicized the FDA, using religion to trump epidemiology and hard science

• Stifled biomedical research with a ban on stem cell research

• Failed to respond to Katrina

• Gutted the Endangered Species Act

• Opened national forests to mining, drilling and intense logging

• Reduced air and water pollution standards

• Failed to support renewable energy, extending our dependence of foreign oil

• Tried to classify oral contraception as a form of abortion.

• Narrowed the scope of services that can be provided to poor people under Medicaid’s outpatient hospital benefit.

• Changed how the government calculates occupational risks with the goal of downplaying their severity; the rule also hampers the government’s ability to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job.

• Tried to accelerate oil shale development by weakening environmental standards across more than 2 million acres of public land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

• Tried desperately to auction drilling rights for lands contiguous to national parks, allow mining wastes to be dumped into rivers and streams, and exempt factory farms from critical environmental regulations.

• Weakened air pollution standards for mercury and lead, abandoned the Endangered Species Act, and let loose gun-toting weekend warriors in our national forests.

None of those items was ever reported on Fox News. Fox has an obvious strategy of omission, failing to report news damaging to the far right or favorable to the left, and fabricating stories that undermine anything they perceive to be liberal when the truth fails to support the right’s agenda. So we live in a new age of McCarthyism, one now better coordinated in the era of modern communications. The Fox hydra has many talking heads but only one brain, which feeds the mouthpieces on every show, with all anchors reading from the same daily script.

On the anniversary of bin Laden’s death, Fox was enraged that Obama dare politicize the war on terror, forgetting 8 years of braggadocio and claims that only Bush could keep us safe. Here are the anchors and commentators who used the phrase “spiked the football” in describing Obama’s commemoration of the event: Sean Hannity (on Hannity); Rich Johnson (Fox News Radio), Charles Krauthammer (Fox Nation), John McCain (Fox News), Jonah Goldberg (on CNN Piers Morgan Tonight), Michael Mukasey (Hannity), and Ed Gillespie (Fox News, Meet the Press). While not using the exact phrase, George Pataki (Fox News), Greta Van Susteren (On the Record) and Brit Hume (Fox News) also gave the same spiel.

To carry forward the story’s momentum the emphasis was shifted to the blatantly false accusation that Obama took all the credit for bin Laden’s death and gave no recognition to those most deserving, again with an impressive display of synchronized dancing: Eric Bolling (Fox News), Karl Rove (Fox News), Charles Krauthammer (Fox News), and Kimberly Guilfoyle (Fox News) all robotically spoke the corporate line. What Fox News failed to air was all the footage of Obama in multiple venues heaping praise on the intelligence officers, Navy Seals, and just about everyone else remotely involved in the operation that killed bin Laden. What Fox News failed to air was footage of George Bush taking personal credit for keeping us safe, and George Pataki at the Republican national convention telling America that Bush alone was responsible for keeping al Qaeda at bay. This is the new face of McCarthyism: evidence-free accusations of treason or insufficient patriotism, supported by character assassination through innuendo, outright falsehood or demagoguery.

Fox is tearing apart the fabric of our society with vitriol and venom, lies and half-truths, much like we witnessed in the hunt for subversives in the 1950s. I hope that I live long enough to see Fox’s demise just as McCarthy was eventually discredited, ultimately brought down by the terrible weight of a truth different from the fantasy he created.