M&A Madness. Comcast cable company was permitted by the FCC to take over the NBC television network and its Universal Studios/theme parks subsidiary. The merger went into effect this week. I left this comment at an AOL News story about that acquisition.

Here again we have major corporations wasting money on mergers and acquisitions that accomplish NOTHING of value to society. BILLIONS of dollars change hands among the millionaires, and not one benefit of any kind accrues to the working people or taxpayers or society at large. Can we expect, as happens so often in mergers, that layoffs of "redundant" employees will ensue, so that working people are actually injured by this pointless merger?
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There ought to be a total ban on mergers and acquisitions by major corporations except for the very rare case where a substantial economic entity would go out of existence without being bought. Mergers are wasteful and anticompetitive; many acquisitions are done to destroy competitors, despite our scarcely-ever-enforced antitrust laws. Over time, merged corporations become "too big to fail", setting taxpayers up for a costly bailout if they would otherwise fail. Better to prevent them from becoming too big to fail in the first place.
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99% of mergers and acquisitions are of absolutely no value to society; perhaps 50% of them are anticompetitive and produce the shedding of jobs to pay for the costs of a pointless merger. The fewer corporations, the more powerful each, and the less powerful the public as regards reining in abuses. Business-school grads in management are keen on proving how smart they are by building enormous, but often shaky, empires that provide absolutely no value to shareholders or society. Money that should be used to develop technologies, extend and improve services, provide jobs, etc., is instead wasted on insane transactions that render increasingly larger swaths of the economy into a house of cards. We need to destroy the cult of mergers and acquisitions before it destroys us.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:00 PM

 
Morality and Practicality in Capital Punishment. I was intrigued by an odd story ("End of Lethal Injection Drug in US Leaves Death Penalty in Flux") on AOL News on Tuesday about capital punishment being hampered by the artificial shortage of one drug used in lethal injections because the Government of Italy dares to forbid the export of that chemical if it would be used in lethal injections. It is not for Italy to tell U.S. governments how to use chemicals they buy in international trade, and the U.S. Government should tell Italy that if it insists on that extraterritorial arrogance, then we will end trade of all kinds with Italy, and put Italy on a State Department list of countries U.S. tourists should not go to because we will close all U.S. consulates in Italy, leaving only one embassy building, in one city, Rome.
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I read some of the 500 comments (at the time; the total ballooned to 1,517 since then) and was struck by some of the arguments — and by the awful rudeness of people to put up comments that made the same point as dozens of other comments. Some of the Radical Right nonsense that usually taints discussions on AOL was on display, blaming President Obama and American Liberals when the shortage in question was caused by a transnational company exporting jobs to Italy, and thereby feeling itself subjected to Italy's extraterritorial pretensions.
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Capital punishment is a subject that a lot of Americans don't understand very well, legally, due to confusion produced when the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago mandated a moratorium on executions until laws could be drawn to meet the Court's version of what the Framers of the Constitution meant by "cruel and unusual punishment". Never mind that the Framers expressly mention "a capital, or otherwise infamous crime" in the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which plainly indicates that they did not mean that capital punishment per se is banned by the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment".
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Some people feel that capital punishment is barbarous, but some of the same people have disingenuously argued that life imprisonment with no chance of parole is, if anything, even worse a punishment than death! The anti-capital-punishment crowd has tried to make their cause compulsory upon everyone who would consider himself a Liberal (or the noxious euphemism "Progressive"), but there is nothing at all illiberal about protecting the innocent by killing the savage guilty.
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I present below my comments scattered thru the early discussion of that article, addressing various issues in that particular capital-punishment debate in 46 comments comprising a bit less than 2,200 words.

The barbaric practice is awarding "life" (imprisonment) to murderers.
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How does a criminal's next-of-kin share in the criminal's guilt? That concept was abolished (specifically for treason) by the Framers of the Constitution, when they outlawed "corruption of blood".
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It's generally the other way around: all but one member of the firing squad shoots a real bullet; the last gets a blank, so multiple bullets ensure a quick death but each member can choose to believe he did NOT kill -- tho everyone can choose to believe they did fire the fatal bullet if that better suits their conscience in executing someone whose crime they detest.
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Public hangings brutalize the witnesses. They also give the criminal too much stature.
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You'd have to remove the skin so the [zoo] animals [to whom criminals might be fed] do not develop a taste for people they detect by smell.
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If this "...kid..." is older than 15, he needs professional help. Acts bear consequences. Life is temporary. If we don't kill a criminal, s/he will still die eventually. We are just punishing the gravest crimes, in a way that makes a huge impression upon infantile people who think that life is a right no matter what you do to forfeit that right.
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Punishing crime is not a game, and turning soldiers into vicious killers hunting down people would render them unfit ever to return to society.
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No, people convicted of capital crimes should have the same right of appeal -- one appeal -- as those convicted of every other crime. And why should a noose cost $100 each time. Rope is almost infinitely reusable.
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The bullets would have to be collected and recycled. Rope is infinitely reusable, and biodegradable when it fails.
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Where does the article say the President wants to release people from death row? You're just making that up. As for lawyers, if it weren't for lawyers, there wouldn't be any justice for anybody, in civil or criminal matters.
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It's only one bullet in China. I don't think anyone wants COMMUNIST China's legal system -- or much of anything else. We can go thru a reasonable appeal process, once, before executing the worst criminals. And protecting criminals is NOT a Liberal issue. Liberals want justice, and that sometimes means that people who commit gruesome crimes pay the ultimate penalty.
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No, that would destroy organs that might be transplanted to decent people. Such a punishment -- premature cremation -- would be fitting only for criminals so old, damaged, or toxic that their organs could not be used in other people even after a period of detoxification. Chopping heinous criminals up for parts would actually help some such criminals to feel that they will make up, in some measure, for their crime, by contributing vital organs to decent people after death. Win-win.
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People who committed really brutal murders or committed many crimes against many people should be killed not by a gallows hanging but by a rope tossed over a sturdy tree limb or lite stanchion, then hauled up a few inches to dance their way to hell. Ideally, tho, the punishment should fit the crime, and that means that if someone beat someone to death, he should be beaten to death; stabbed someone to death, stabbed to death; etc. That way they get to appreciate the absolute propriety of the punishment, and get a chance to identify with their victim -- what would be a growth experience if it weren't fatal.
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In my state, New Jersey, the people were something like 65% in favor of the death penalty when the Legislature and Governor abolished it. So much for democracy. I'd favor killing all those legislators and ex-Governor, one by one, each time a New Jerseyan was murdered.
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Different states should have the right to different laws, but if the will of the great majorty of the people of each state is that there be capital punishment, then there should be capital punishment in each state.
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That [the appropriateness of a proposed cruel punishment] depends on the crime. One size does NOT fit all.
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Not all people convicted of capital crimes committed GRUESOME crimes. The punishment should fit the crime, and that punishment [which I will not repeat here] would fit NO crime I've ever heard of.
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Too much transportation cost [in reply to proposal that convicts be dropped into the middle of the ocean].
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Stop blaming Liberals. Liberals believe in justice and merely want to be certain that someone really committed the crime. When that is certain, we have no problem with saving money wasted on evil people, to be redirected to helping good people.
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Stop repeating posts, and stop blaming lawyers, without whom there would be no monetary awards for people who have been wronged by corporations, drunk drivers, etc., and innocent people would automatically be convicted. You may need a lawyer someday yourself. You'd better hope s/he never connects your comments with your person.
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Oh? How many murders have there been in OK? How many executions? [In reply to assertion that "The death penalty is working just fine in OK." (Oklahoma)]
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Wrongful convictions in capital cases are rare, and usually happen to bad people who have been guilty of many crimes before, or not arrested for bad things they do. This "if one person" crap makes absolutely no sense. By that reasoning, we could never punish ANYONE for ANYTHING, because it might all be a mistake. Should we just abolish trials and prisons and even trying to do justice? The chances of a decent person being railroaded to the death chamber are about one MILLIONTH the chance of being killed by a criminal. Those are good odds. Perfect, no. But you could slip on ice on the sidewalk, crack your skull open, and die in the cold before an ambulance can get to you. Nothing is perfect.
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Cut the crap. If it weren't for Liberals, there wouldn't be a United States, a Bill of Rights, child labor laws, worker protections from hazardous waste and 80-hour workweeks, and on, and on.
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What is this madness about killing a child molester? Molestation and rape don't kill, so the punishment does not fit the crime. This country has got to grow up about sex. Murder and habitual criminality are appropriately punished by death. Not many other things, unless a crime is repeated many times.
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What kind of craziness is that, to unload criminals on other countries' innocent populations? Fidel Castro did that in the Mariel Boatlift, and we didn't like it one bit.
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There are a lot of people who care deeply about the murdered unborn. That's something we could fix with a death penalty for the "mothers" and "doctors" and "nurses" responsible.
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You are plainly insane to defend Tookie Williams. Too bad his gang didn't pay you a visit when you offended them.
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Better: send them to replace decent people in such anti-IED activities. Let them live as long as they continue to destroy IEDs, and if they get blown up -- so sad.
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If you make a punishment standard and impose it regularly, it is no longer "cruel AND unusual".
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One rope could hoist all 3,279 [people on death rows; one at a time per length used].
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And the ax, sword, or guillotine is infinitely reusable. Just sharpen it every now and then.
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Only fools equate things that are nothing alike. And doing justice has nothing to do with your perverted "quiver in the loins" slander [that people who favor the death penalty are asserted to enjoy when someone is executed]. YOU may not know the difference between murder and execution, but all sane and sensible people DO.
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Italy has no authority to interfere with U.S. executions. That's pretty high hypocrisy for Mussolini-land.
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But we don't want a splash [of blood] onto the executioner doing society's work. Is it Jack Kevorkian who suggested putting the convict on an operating table and removing all reusable organs while the bastard is under anesthesia? Organs removed, problem solved. Win-win.
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Murder and rape, of anyone, are not the same. Grow up.
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We can build all the guillotines we want. We don't need to worsen our trade deficit for guillotines.
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[In answer to the suggestion that 'the lawyers on both sides' of capital-punishment cases are 'laughing all the way to the bank:] The lawyers on the people's side are public employees and do not make extraordinary amounts of money.
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Justice requires that punishment fit the crime. How else to punish murder than death?
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Only a lunatic would think death a fitting punishment for child molestation. Besides, the insane emotions around child molestation have produced MANY wrongful convictions.
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Silliness. There are no habitable planets anywhere near, and the cost to taxpayers would be insanely high. Let's kill the criminals here, use transplantable tissues for decent people, burn the rest, and use the ashes as fertilizer in national or state forests.
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Viewing death traumatizes people, and can push some people to gruesome crimes of their own. Keep executions secret except perhaps to selective audiences of actual criminals [not high-school kids, as was suggested].
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You apparently missed the reference to INJECTING cyanide, a different matter entirely from a gas chamber.
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You made that up. China does no such thing [as "drain their blood while they are awake"].
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The Supreme Court's (illegal) moratorium on executions expired a long time ago. It is California's own government that refuses to kill murderers.
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Stop your slanderous crap. A CAPITALIST company decided to move its operations to Italy, and Italy's government, not American Liberals, dared to impose restrictions on the use of products made in Italy but exported. Why would we accept Italian jurisdiction over the United States? Tell Italy to mind its own business. As for what the majority of the country is, I would remind you that President Obama, when thought a Liberal (which, alas, he is not), won election as President by nearly 10 MILLION VOTES.
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[Answering an irrelevancy intruded into the discussion:] Try reading the Wikipedia article on NAFTA and you will discover that it was negotiated by President George H.W. Bush. Then apologize for your misrepesentations. Besides, Mexico is not the enemy; Communist China is.
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[And, finally,] I wish people would read comments before repeating something that scores of other people have already said.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:16 AM

 
Punishing Reckless Driving — Onscreen. Hollywood has been teaching people to drive irresponsibly from the very beginning of film and TV production on the West Coast. Hollywood teaches drivers to take their eyes off the road for extended periods, while driving, to talk to their passengers — even to the point of turning around to look at people in the backseat! Rarely, or never, is there any adverse consequence, in film or television, to taking your eyes off the road while driving. In the real world, looking elsewhere than straight ahead, be it rightward at the front-seat passenger or in the rearview mirror to talk to people in the backseat, often causes accidents, including multiply FATAL accidents.
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Hollywood teaches people to speed; to drag race on public streets; to spin-out; to drive recklessly, as by passing in no-passing zones and "playing chicken"; to disregard alcohol intake; to smoke; to change CDs, tapes, or radio stations; to eat; to kiss; to put on makeup; to read; to text; and to do other things I can't think of right now, while driving. Hollywood productions normalize inexcusable, criminal recklessless. Only criminal punishments seem likely to stop such outrageous propaganda, that you can drive as carelessly and recklessly as you choose, without anything bad happening.
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If such recklessness is not shown, in the filmic work at issue, to be dangerous — as by making it the cause of an accident, of any severity, in the movie or TV show — then Government must step in to punish such irresponsibility as actual incitement to recklessness. The very least that should happen is that every actor, director, writer, and producer responsible for such incitements should have their driver's license suspended. The length of that suspension should depend on the seriousness, and frequency, of the offense.
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Every time a driver in film or TV is shown looking away from the road while the vehicle is in motion, simply to talk to someone s/he could and should perfectly well talk to while keeping eyes on the road, that actor's driver's license should be suspended for a month. If the driver looks away five times in the course of driving scenes, suspend his or her license for five months. And so on.
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Reckless driving itself is punished. So, therefore, should encouragement to drive recklessly be punished, because it constitutes criminal activity, at least verging on depraved indifference to human life in that cars are very heavy and very dangerous when in uncontrolled motion. For that depraved indifference to human life in propagandizing irresponsibility behind the wheel, suspension of one's driving privilege is the very least society should impose, in an attempt to teach people that reckless driving is not harmless but can KILL.
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Never dismiss the power of filmic media to affect behavior by saying, "It's fiction! Chill." The human brain does not instinctually know the difference between fiction and reality. If it looks real, it is real, to the core brain. We would not have survived as a species if we had to stop and think whether the lion charging us is real or imaginary.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:40 PM

 
Extending Life, Ending Life. An email acquaintance from Thailand, who used to live in my part of New Jersey and contacted me in relation to my Newark USA fotoblog, sent me link to an interesting, and dismaying, story on BBC News about research into slowing and even reversing the aging process. That story addresses some of the concerns that success in that field could produce, but not some of my concerns. I started to write my Thailand friend about my concerns, then decided that such a discussion was better for this blog. So I moved this chunk out of that email and just told him in the email I actually sent that I am inclined to view anti-aging research mostly negatively.
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Here's the longer reply I initially thought to send.

Without wanting to seem an intellectual snob, I have seen too many old people who live absolutely useless existences. They never had serious interests of any kind, not during high school, not during work. They'd come home from the job, for forty and more years, plop down in front of the television set, and vegetate. When they retire, they feel useless, and are useless. They don't even develop interests now that they have all the time in the world, but continue to vegetate, just, in the words of the title of a Britcom, "Waiting for God", or, less poetically, waiting to die.
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And what indeed about the planet, and the economies of the world [concerns raised in the BBC article]? Attrition, starvation, disease, and war are the only major means by which the Earth's ever-increasing population — which may hit 7B this year, and which is overwhelmingly in poor, even starving countries — is even remotely braked. Keeping most people alive for decades — centuries? — longer would be insane.
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And until societies make retirement truly adequate, longer life even for people in good health who do have interests is not necessarily a one-sided benefit, because financial stresses cut deeply into joie de vivre. I look around at the economic and political worsening of life all over this planet and wonder how long I am going to want to stay around. There was a time when it seemed each year got a little better, but now, at each New Year's midnite, the crowd in Times Square roars not so much to welcome the New Year as to shout good riddance to the old .
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Every technological advance seems to bring technological backfire or blowback. Every political or social advance somewhere is countered by worsening elsewhere. We get a black President, but then the racists are empowered to take over the Republican Party and try to turn back the clock to The Bad Old Days. The progressive income tax has been almost completely undone, and now the regressives want a "flat tax" that will accelerate the takeover of everything by the rich, which is almost complete even as the tax laws stand now, with a profoundly enfeebled progressive income tax.
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Looking out at the world, we see distress and injustice everywhere. The anticolonialism we were so joyous to see at the end of the Fifties and beginning of the Sixties has turned out to be a catastrophe, as kleptocrats seized the wealth of Africa and refused to provide for burgeoning populations that are destroying habitat for thousands of species, desertifying fringe areas around the Sahara, and deforesting parts of the rainforest. Post-colonial Africa is the world's basket case, not breadbasket.
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Destruction of rainforest is even worse in Indonesia and South America. Do we really want to live another 50 years to see how this all turns out? Is there any realistic chance that things, now becoming ever worse year to year, will somehow turn around and become ever better year to year?
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There used to be brite spots. The U.S. was pursuing social and economic equity; Europe was getting its act together, and working cooperatively toward peaceful coexistence instead of working its way toward the next fratricidal war. Now the U.S. is headed toward total plutocracy, in the economy and politics, in a system utterly corrupted by money and ossified into immovability. The only revolution that has made even a ripple in the past decade is the Tea Party movement, which wants Radical Libertarianism's scarcely disguised selfishness to control public policy. Europe is wracked by debt and recession so bad that some analysts think the Euro may go the way of the dodo. Is widespread disorder in the streets Europe's future? Look what's happening in North Africa.
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Even once-Liberal places like NJ are reverting to The Bad Old Days of control by suburban selfishness, under a callous FAT Republican Governor who is as selfish as his shape suggests. He is starving the schools, the libraries, the cities to benefit the fatcats. And the national and regional economies are in terrible shape, made worse by snowstorm after snowstorm in the Nation's economic centers, all the while the rich keep exporting as many jobs as they can get away with, so recovery becomes ever less possible. President Obama hires an economic consultant on competitiveness who as head of GM exported uncounted numbers of jobs and closed down 29 U.S. factories! What the hell is going on? We elected a Liberal Democrat but got a Conservative Republican — another turncoat like the pseudo-Democrat Bill Clinton.
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Where is the hope to come from, when the United States is at war with itself, with the movies' angel on one shoulder and devil on the other whispering into different ears of the Nation? Brazil? India? It's certainly not Communist China, which has devastated its own environment, poisoned importers of its unsafe products, and suppressed human rights; and is building up its military for ultimate war against the United States, while lulling the West as to its intentions by pouring back SOME of the hundreds of billions of its trade surplus into investment in U.S. treasuries.
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Within what used to be the engine of world development, the United States, people are not as furious or panicked as they need to be to create the kinds of revolt necessary to turn things around. There are too many distractions. The Romans' "bread and circuses" is now "snacks and TV, movies, social networking sites, YouTube, Twitter, and 24-hour-a-day spectator sports" to keep able-bodied men noshing in fecklessness.
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And now we are to add decades more to the lives of the useless elderly, to all the other problems? We already spend more in the last year of life of the terminally ill elderly than in something like any 20-year period of their lives before that. Doctors have no sense, no discretion. If a treatment is available, they will use it, no matter how pointless or expensive, to keep alive someone who has absolutely no reason to BE alive, and isn't even all that interested in continuing to live.
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I just can't greet news of reversing the aging process as a blessing for the planet. Would George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, or much of anyone else from the past have wanted to live into our wretched era? Even at our age [the guy in Thailand is 67; I'm 66], when we are glad for electric toasters instead of having to make toast in the oven or on a stovetop, and for microwaves and other labor-saving devices like the bagless vacuum cleaner, there are some things we adapt to easily and others that puzzle us. What on Earth is the point of Twitter? Someone in recent days (I forget who) said that some people (mostly young) have developed a type of madness in which they endlessly check social-networking sites, and send emails and text messages in lieu of actual interpersonal contact face to face, almost as tho they prefer to sit alone in a room communicating with what could be only imaginary people — robots or text-writing programs — as against seeking physical companionship with real, flesh-and-blood human beings.
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I spend a lot of time alone, of necessity, because my (unremunerated) work requires it. But at least I do get out to art opening receptions and the like. What of empty-nesters living in isolation in new suburbs they moved to for warmer weather, but in which they never met much of anybody? Then their spouse dies. Or people in nursing homes whose big activities are meals and mahjongg?
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I'm not saying we should shut down research into slowing or reversing the aging process, just that we need to think about the practical and ethical problems that success would raise.

The issue of the immovability of the current U.S. political process is something I expressed to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont by feedback form at his website on December 14th. That was my second message to him, and was a followup to his form reply to my earlier message. (I don't have that message to see if it contains points I should address here, because for some reason America Online emptied my mailbox of all mail a couple of weeks ago, as it has apparently done to an unknown but large number of accounts within the past two days. And AOL has not yet fixed the problem, so his email is not available to check.)
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In any case this is my message of December 14th. Note that I spoke about the danger to this republic of assassination when nothing else works. 25 days later, a Member of Congress was indeed shot, in an attempted assassination.
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Also note the changes, such as members of different parties crossing the aisle to sit with the other party during the President's State of the Union address, that even one attempted assassination produced. But tone and substance are very different, and members of the Nation's leadership have disowned any political meaning to the act of a madman — even tho the news today indicates that the shooter planned his attack and had researched political assassins. Will this be the only attempt to assassinate someone in the Nation's top leadership? And will all the people who attempt to change things by selective assassination be insane?

(Followup to your form reply to earlier message.)

You and other Democrats must not surrender to the Radical Right. Tell Obama that he may have a deep, sick need to win over his enemies by giving in to them, but you do not, and the American people do not. There comes a point when things have moved so far to one side that there is no returning without violence. When the Supreme Court unleashes anonymous donations from the rich to drown the political system in money; and the tax system gives ever more money to the already obscenely rich with which to flood and fundamentally corrupt the electoral system; and the distribution of income is nearly that of the worst Latin American country of old, that we have to expect that people who see no way to get justice thru the ballot will resort to the bullet. The history of Latin America is prolog to what may well happen here if the Radical Right will not relent in its effort to render everyone into slaves to the rich.
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Will a few assassinations suffice to scare the Radical Right out of its despicable behavior? Or will we have to have another Civil War, against much the same enemy, to restore this Republic? The Radical Right does not have any idea how angry people are that they are losing their only house while the rich are buying their 14th house. I fear for this Republic. I am nearly 66 years old, and have NEVER seen this country in such peril. Democracy itself is at stake, for there is no foreseeing what will happen if the mental habit of democratic fairness and compromise breaks down and we erupt into Revolution. The American Revolution ripped apart an empire. The Civil War nearly destroyed the Union, and killed over 600,000 Americans when we had only about 32 million people. How many will die in a New Civil War, when we have 308 million people? And will our democracy be restored by that war, or destroyed by it?

It seems that nobody is talking about any of this but me.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:06 PM

 
Evict Congressional Squatters. The CBS Evening News tonite discussed a bunch of Tea Party Republicans stating their intention to live in their Congressional office. It is a Congressional OFFICE Building, not dormitory. There is no right to turn it into substandard housing. The offices don't have showers, and shouldn't; and the U.S. Government must not be a slumlord. The space these squatters want to live in are not residential units but offices. The symbolism of these Members' cheapskate behavior is idiocy. Nobody begrudges members of Congress an apartment — at their own expense — in Washington, where they have to work. They are paid very well. They can rent an apartment or stay in an inexpensive hotel like every other working person. How is becoming homeless a sign of anything but what most homelessness is, a mental disorder?
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The Congressional Office Buildings are not hotels, motels, nor apartment houses. No one is entitled to live in them. President Obama should evict the assh*les. Live in your car, if you wish, but not in a Federal office building. And if you do choose to live in your car, the D.C. Police should arrest you for vagrancy. Tea Party loons must not be allowed to drag Congress into disrepute. They pretend to respect the institution, but their Kongressional Kampground of America stunt dishonors the Nation. Oust them from Congressional Office Buildings, and if they try another stunt that drags Congress's name into the mud, oust them from Congress altogether. If they won't behave like responsible adults off the floor of the legislative chambers, they shouldn't be allowed on the floor of either the Senate or House. You don't want to be part of Washington? Then go home! Washington is the Nation's capital, and that is where members of Congress belong. If you didn't want to live there, you shouldn't have run for Congress. Congress is for adults. There is no place for childish stunts in the Congress of the United States.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:10 PM

 
Record Cold Is "Global Warming"! There is no end of madness and doublespeak in media today. ABC's World News actually said today that the reason our winter is so severely cold is "global warming". That's right: they actually said that it is COLDER because of global WARMING. There are words for assertions like that: "madness", "insanity", "lies", and "garbage" are among them.
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No matter how cold it gets, it's "global warming". Do we need to tie these "scientists" to a pole and flog them to end this craziness?
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The premise we were supposed to buy is that this planet is burning to a crisp, and will be desertified by ever-rising global temperatures. Today, ABC showed one climate scientist saying what should have been obvious all along, that when temperatures rise, more water is turned into water vapor that goes up into the atmosphere, and what goes up must come down. Vapor turns to rain, sleet, and snow.
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So "the new normal" will be severe temperatures — down as well as up — year-round. That is not global WARMING. The mechanism asserted, evaporation, does not explain severely, subnormally LOW temperatures. And the role, if any, of human activity in this wild fluctuation in temperatures, both hotter and colder, cannot be explained. In short, "man-made global warming" is a massive fraud upon the stupid and credulous. But it is embraced so titely by media that we could have 6 feet of snow in New York City on August 15th, and ABC News, headquartered in that city, would STILL be talking about "global warming"!
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That's not science. That is superstition, even religious dogma, not susceptible to reason or dispassionate evaluation. To refuse to believe is heresy, a crime that must be punished. In the Soviet Union, people who refused to accept Communism were incarcerated in mental institutions. Can incarceration of global-warming "deniers" be far off? When severe COLD is blamed on WARMING, society has gone mad, and the sane must be sent to mental institutions.
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Will record cold temperatures and record high snowfalls budge the true believers? Maybe not, since they long ago gave up any independent thought to line up behind the "experts", abdicating their personal responsibility to think, and form their own judgments. They cannot now accept that they were too fast to jump on the bandwagon, and admit that they were fools. Oh, we can say "You don't have to be a fool to be fooled by so-called 'experts'". But you really do, when all around you are proofs that the "experts" are either mistaken or lying.
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Where lies the greater shame? In being fooled once, or being fooled forever? In admitting a mistake, or refusing to admit it, while everyone around you knows that you were too trusting then, and too stubborn now, to admit you were wrong?
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I hope there are enuf people who never invested themselves in the "man-made global warming" theory that they can now step back and say, "All bullsh*t", then move on to impel societies worldwide to take sensible measures without regard to whether those measures will increase or decrease nonexistent "man-made global warming". Cut pollution. Stop deforestation and promote reforestation. And, above all, first end the growth of human population, then, and quickly, reverse it. Bring the planet's population down from 7 billion to 6, then 5, then 4 billion, and everything will be better for everybody, including the natural order of plants and animals. Will such measures have any effect whatsoever on planetary climate? Maybe, but maybe not. We didn't cause the Ice Ages nor end them. But the planet will be greener, calmer, healthier, and more beautiful for everyone.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:17 PM

 
Catfish Treason. A report on NBC Nitely News this evening about American catfish farmers being put out of business indicates that the United States Government is at least passively conniving with Communist China and Vietnam to destroy the American catfish farming industry. Why? When did the U.S. Government come to regard the people of Communist China and Communist Vietnam as its first priority, above the interests of Americans? And HOW did this happen?
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Republicans have long sided with impoverished Communist countries against Americans, in favoring absolutely unrestricted free trade in order to destroy unions, drive down wages, and strip away fringe benefits for American working people, all in the service of the rich, who are the only people the Republican Party truly cares a rat's ass about.
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But why would Democrats side with Communist governments against Americans, and be more concerned about helping people in China or Vietnam than in Alabama or other places in the United States?
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The United States is still, at least for the moment, sovereign. We have an absolute right to control our borders, and to exclude people, products, services, and economic competition from any other part of this planet as we may choose— any time we choose. What is the point of having such a right but leaving Americans open to endless, merciless economic attacks from foreigners? What is a border for? What is sovereignty for? What is a military for, if not to protect Americans? If our Government refuses to protect us economically, there is no point to having an enormous military that costs us a fortune and raises the costs of everything by taking money from productive activities to the worthless activity of a sham defense. If the Government will not protect us economically, it might as well abolish the military, because if we are destroyed economically, there will be nothing left to defend.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,436 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:47 PM

 
Palin's Giveaway Grimaces. In a video decrying the blame rightly directed at the extremist rhetoric of the Radical Right for inciting unstable people to kill politicians they disagree with, Sarah Palin says, in part:

No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent. And we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good.

What exactly is THAT supposed to mean? If a Liberal had said it, we would know exactly what it means: the Radical Right. But when a Radical Rightist says it, what can it possibly mean? She goes on.

And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of different opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.

And that is where the giveaway grimace occurs:

That's no happy, playful wink. That is a confession of guilt, that what she just read (someone else plainly wrote it, because it is much too refined and elevated a text for her to have written) is pure, unadulterated bullsh*t that has no meaning unless it is directed against HER and her ilk. That is the kind of face you expect to see when you catch a child in a lie, as is this next grimace.
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This second grimace of guilt occurs after she completes the absurd suggestion that someone (presumably on the Left), blames people who "proudly voted in the last election" for this shooting, a completely off-the-wall nuts implication that she plainly understood to be a preposterous straw man of absolutely no validity.

These visual confessions of rhetorical fraud appear in the same video in which she grotesquely and insanely misuses the term "blood libel" to suggest that Rightwingers are being cruelly abused by everyone who suggests that their violent rhetoric has played any part in the Tucson shooting and in the dangerously elevated antagonisms in today's political discourse. She has a somewhat less obviously guilty expression at the end of that ridiculous assertion.

I don't know how many other "tells" were in that video, since I watched only what appeared on MSNBC's Countdown of January 12th. The video should, however, be equally notorious for its giveaway grimaces of guilt.
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Incidentally, Keith Olbermann, a generally good speaker, mispronounced "thesaurus" as thés.a.ris, and used the sports pronunciation áu.fens for the ordinary term "offense" (a.féns). I'll add those to íe.yer.nee in a list of words that Olbermann needs to work on. Broadcasters are speech exemplars, and not everyone who hears an odd (mis)pronunciation on television will think to look it up, but may simply emulate it. "If Keith Olbermann says it, it must be right." Not necessarily.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,432 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:32 PM

 
Live with the Consequences. One of the reasons this country has such a huge problem with health care for all is that we have tens of millions of willful morons doing things they know can kill them, but expecting the rest of us to pick up the tab for their healthcare when, for instance, 20 years of smoking tobacco gives them lung cancer, or when a motorcyclist without a helmet has an accident that produces brain injuries, or when morbidly obese people who are gluttonous pigs develop fully predictable adverse health consequences. Make these bastards live with the consequences of their own self-destructive behavior — or, better, die from them.
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Why should anyone at all but smokers, helmetless motorcyclists, or porkers pay for the hugely expensive healthcare that fools want to push off onto the rest of us? If we cannot create separate insurance pools for such enormously high-risk groups, then we should force out of all healthcare pools people who take inexcusable risks with their lives. You want to do crazy things? Fine. Just pay all the consequences yourself.
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Indeed, we should pass legislation to authorize healthcare providers to refuse service to specified classes of irresponsible people, absent proof that they can pay all their medical costs themselves. So if some idiot motorcyclist without a helmet is lying on the side of the road, and no proof of insurance coverage is found on the body, ambulances should be authorized to take him or her to their own home, not to a hospital, and bill them for the ride. If a 450- or 600-pound slob without special-pool healthcare coverage has a heart attack at home, EMS workers should be authorized to refuse both in-home treatment and transportation to a hospital. And if a two-pack-a-day smoker without special-pool health coverage develops life-threatening emphysema, cancer, heart problems, etc., hospitals should be entitled to refuse admission or even outpatient treatment and just say "We can't save you from yourself, and we're not even going to try. You brought this on yourself. Now, heal yourself."
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We are not talking trivial numbers here. 440,000 Americans die from smoking each year. Essentially all of them spend significant periods in the hospital and sop up hugely disproportionate amounts of medical care, amounting to billions of excess dollars wasted on the worthless. Gross obesity produces similarly excessive costs. Who picks up those costs? Everyone, generally, because we allow smokers and slobs to steal from people who are careful about their health. That is unfair, and unwise. If smokers and fatties are told in no uncertain terms that they are uninsurable and untreatable except at their own expense, and every cost of every kind that their stupidity and gluttony produce will be their own responsibility, because NO ONE else will help, some may actually change their ways. And that would be all to the good. If they don't change their ways, and die from their stupidity, that might be even better, in powerfully discouraging other people from such stupid irresponsibility.
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This planet is grotesquely overcrowded. If the stupid and gluttonous (on a starving planet) should die from their stupidity and gluttony, that would be a great way to reduce the excess population.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,432 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:01 PM

 
Original Constitution Not Read. On the second day of the new Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, including at least one Democrat from my state, New Jersey, read the entire text of the present, legally functioning Constitution (that is, all parts that had not subsequently been voided by amendment).

The decision in part will allow members to avoid reading less pleasant sections, like the clause in Article 1, Section 2, which counted black slaves as three-fifths of a person.

This is one of the most commonly misunderstood provisions of the Constitution. Civil-rights advocates have taken umbrage at that provision, but it was actually inserted to WEAKEN the influence of the slave states by reducing the representation of the South by discounting 40% of slaves, who were not allowed to vote, from the tally used to apportion votes in the House of Representatives. Northerners wanted NO slave to be counted for apportionment of Congress, since none was allowed to vote. Southerners wanted ALL slaves to be counted to boost their numbers in Congress. The two sides compromised at 3/5, rather than ½, 1/3, or some other ratio, perhaps on the theory that the economic power of the South had to be considered, no matter that part of it derived from slavery. I don't know the exact justification, but reducing Southern states' representation by 2/5 of the people held in bondage was better than giving the South full credit in the House for people who couldn't vote. That compromise STRENGTHENED the Northern, anti-slavery states, and eased, for instance, the abolition of importation of new slaves on January 1st, 1808, the very first day that that could be done under the original Constitution (before even the Bill of Rights — comprising the first ten amendments — was passed).
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In any case, the Tea Party sorts who talk about the "original Constitution" pick and choose which parts of the Constitution are authentic and which are perversions of "original intent". They reject even parts of the Constitution that have been explicitly inserted by amendment, such as the income tax and direct election of Senators. Do they also want to go back to the extremely stupid provision in the original Constitution that whoever gets the most votes for President becomes President, and whoever gets the second largest number of votes for President becomes Vice President? That would have given us a President Obama and a Vice President McCain. Who would want that? It's an invitation to assassination of the President, and even if we did not have a history of assassinations, it would divide the Executive Branch against itself. Would any Tea Partier argue to restore this original way of selecting the Vice President, on the basis that the Constitution is all about divided government, so the more divisions, the better, to secure us from dictatorship? I haven't heard anyone even on the extreme Radical Right talk of restoring the original plan for selection of President and Vice President. The Tea Party and Radical Right who are hostile to the income tax and direct election of Senators (done by amendments they reject) rabidly support (their version of) the Second Amendment, which means that they recognize the validity of SOME amendments.
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Why wasn't the whole document read, with introductory and followup language to mark out the portions of the Constitution that have subsequently been voided by amendment? That would have been very instructive, but the Republicans who insisted on this public reading refused to show the people that the Constitution is not the tidy, unified document they might want you to think it is, but a messy mix of original provisions and rethought provisions and added provisions and subtracted provisions, as different generations of the Nation's polity took the document as their own and made it fit the circumstances of the time.
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I pass over the slip-up whereby two pages got stuck together, as caused some provisions to be skipped, and thus be read out of sequence once the mistake had been detected. There is enuf confusion in trying to follow what the Constitution actually has said over time. Perhaps the best way to approach this public education would have been to read the Constitution as it now stands, with all invalidated text removed, but then, afterward, read all the provisions that have been changed, along with what replaced them, and a timeline of when the original language was written and when the new language was substituted. That might give people who troubled to listen to the entire presentation a fuller understanding of how the document has evolved over time.
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I long ago downloaded an electronic version of the Constitution's entire text, with revisions shown plainly, and refer to it fairly often. It annoys me when people ignore parts they don't like, such as the anti-immigrant loons who say that we should not grant "birthright citizenship", even tho it is plainly granted in the Fourteenth Amendment. It ignores the fundamental question "How else COULD citizenship be granted, other than naturalization?" If no one gets citizenship from birth, how do they get it? From their parents? How did their parents get it? By birth to citizens, in the U.S. or outside. But how did THOSE parents get citizenship? BIRTH. If birthright citizenship is invalid today, then it was ALWAYS invalid, so NOBODY is a citizen except naturalized citizens. The anti-birthright-citizenship campaign is unspeakably, intolerably (and intolerantly) STUPID.
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The argument that children born to illegal immigrants are entitled to all the rights of citizens, and that that is somehow wrong, is preposterous in the extremes to which the anti-birthright-citizenship crowd take it. Birth of a child in the U.S. does NOT entitle the parents to remain in the U.S. on that basis alone, and their tie to a U.S.-citizen child grants them no special rights to immigration or a Green Card until the child affirmatively takes U.S. citizenship at adulthood. As a recent Christian Science Monitor story points out:

It takes 21 years before a child can file for a US visa for its parents, and there's no guarantee that the parents will get one, says Ms. [Rosalyn] Gold, [senior analyst for] NALEO [National Association of Latino Elected Officials].

The silly attempt to hang some huge meaning on the qualifying phrase in the Fourteenth Amendment "and subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States is futile. What that clause means is that a person born in the U.S. who moves to another country as a child is not entitled to certain rights, such as the right to vote, unless s/he returns to the United States and takes residency. That is a protection for parents, who may NOT want their child to take a citizenship other than their own and produce legal problems for the family. British or French tourists who have a child a month earlier than they anticipated, on U.S. soil, might not WANT their child to consider himself/herself an American and assert U.S. citizenship even while resident in their parents' house in Britain or France — even challenge the legal right of their parents to discipline them! There's also the whole issue of who is entitled to vote in U.S. elections while resident overseas. If a person has no residence in the U.S., why should they be allowed to vote here? That is a sample of the kinds of problems the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause was intended to head off.
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The bulk of the Constitution is written in very simple, layman's language, not legalese. Nonetheless, some people willfully misinterpret it. The same people who assert that "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is hugely important and voids birthright citizenship completely ignore the phrases "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," that introduce the remainder of the Second Amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The Second Amendment's qualifying language occurs at the very start of that Amendment, but means nothing. The "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause is in the middle of the Fourteenth Amendment, but means everything! I think not.
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Interpreting the Constitution correctly requires the honesty to admit when the text does not support the point of view you WISH it entrenched. That, the Radical Right does not have. Indeed, the Radical Right is fundamentally incapable of honesty, on anything, because nothing on Earth supports their dopy politics.
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P.S. The Democrat who was interrupted by a crazy "birther" woman is Frank Pallone, who represents the grotesquely gerrymandered Sixth District of New Jersey, which includes most of Middletown Township, where I went to school from fifth grade thru high school. Curiously, I do not find a list of all the members of Congress who read parts of the Constitution. I wonder why that is.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,432 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:20 PM

 
Conspiracy Theories on Wildlife Die-Offs. AOL News had a story today about unexplained die-offs of wild birds and fish, perhaps from severe winter weather, that irritated me in using Celsius — only — for a mention of temperature. I read some comments to see if anyone else mentioned that, then added my objection too.

Never should foreign measures be used for unfamiliar items (3 liter bottle, fine) in U.S. media without U.S. measures being given as well. The CIA World Factbook, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, uses nothing but foreign measures. It should be defunded or FORCED to give all measures in U.S. terms -- FIRST, and only then, if at all, in foreign measures. Not 1 American in 100,000 knows how big 353,000 square kilometers is.

I then read farther into comments and added my own responses to some, especially those that posited bizarre conspiracies.

There is no purpose to these things. They just happen(ed). No "Divine Plan" lies behind them. There is no God, no purpose to life, or death, but what WE assign to it.
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There is no indication that the particular mass wildlife deaths that are the subject of this story had anything to do with human activity.
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Off-topic, as well as illegal. Advocating the overthrow of the Government is not protected free speech. I for one won't feel the slitest sorry if the FBI shows up at your door with a warrant for your arrest.
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We should all jump on reporters and media that try to force us to use the metric system. If people WANT to use metric measures on their own, fine, but Americans who don't want to should not be insulted by writers and editors who think they know better.
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Keep your vile, racist hate to yourself. [Re comment that we should sell rotting fish to Mexicans.]
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Liberals do not delite in other people's misery, unless they are guilty of serious misdeeds. Being stupid is not properly punishable. What would really happen in any environmental catastrophe is what always happens: Liberals help, Conservatives say "It's not my problem."
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The Bible, withcraft, voodoo -- always the same nonsense when people don't understand what's happening. They rush to assign some superstitious "explanation" that explains nothing. Grow up. This is 2011, not 1692 (the year of the Salem witch trials).
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Very cute: blame Iraq. What is wrong with you people?
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Seek professional help. There IS no God.
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The article certainly didn't blame anybody. Why do you insist on dragging in the concept of blame?
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Yes, you have definitely watched too much science fiction. Try sitcoms or documentaries for a while.
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If space aliens wanted us to know something, they would simply park on the White House lawn and tell us whatever it is they want us to know.
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The incidents in Arkansas were hundreds of miles inland. The incident in Maryland was something like 1,500 miles from the BP leak. The news coverage has said nothing about toxic chemicals being found.
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Which government are you accusing, the Arkansas State Government, the Louisiana State Government, the Maryland State Government, the local governments of the municipalities involved, the Federal Government? How about the United Nations? Your cynicism is irrational. Why would local, state, and Federal Government officials all suppress information about these events?
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The expression "Mother Nature" is, as these events show, insane -- unless the mother you have in mind is Medea.
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Pls cut the crap. If the people wanted Ron Paul to become President, they would elect him. Hasn't happened, and is not bloody likely ever TO happen. Remember that we had a black man elected President, and now former President Jimmy Carter says he thinks we're ready to elect a gay president. But we are not ready to elect a Radical Lbertarian President who advocates that everyone operate on the narrowest selfishness in all matters of public policy.
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The birds showed sign of blunt force, as from severe hail. No sign of disease or toxins, at least in initial investigations..
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Perhaps you believe in a Volcano-God version of God, but very few other people do. There is NO God. Try to understand the REAL world.
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You subvert what sense you make with lunatice assertions like Communist Chinese taking billions of gallons of water from the Great Lakes. Drivel.
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mortonrchrd, what conceivable reason could there be for local, state, and Federal authorities all refusing to tell us the truth? And how would such a secret be kept in the era of the Internet? Stop talking paranoid nonsense.
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The Mayan calendar merely reaches the end of a cycle, not the end of the world. But who cares what Mayans said about anything? They destroyed their civilization long before Columbus set foot in the New World.
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We cannot get back to "normal", whatever that is, until the planet's human population is REDUCED starkly to sustainable levels. There would be no deforestation or massive pollution if the planet had TWO billion or even 4 billion rather than 6.8 billion people, and rising.
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Tho fish are indeed cold-blooded, in the sense that they do not provide internal heat to keep them going, some fish are indeed temperature-sensitive. Tropical fish will die if the temperatures fall very far from tropical levels.
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Andy, political corruption is AT LEAST as commonly found among Republicans.
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None of that would explain local die-offs of selective species in a very small and limited area.
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No toxins were found. Get real. If "terrorists" wanted to make "trial runs", they would do so in ways that would kill AMERICANS, people not birds or fish.
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Please keep your insane religious fantasies to yourself. Rational people seek rational explanations. The Biblical conditions for "end of days" have not remotely been met. There has been no Antichrist, for instance. So just stop talking nonsense.
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No toxicology report thus far released supports that premise.
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No toxicology report supports any such premise, so far. And what conceivable reason would any government, at any level, have for suppressing such information? You conspiracy-theory types need to attempt to connect with reality.
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What climate change? This all occurred during periods of unusual COLD, and the "climate change" (new name) we are supposed to be worried about is global WARMING. You can't have "climate change" that makes things colder as well as hotter. That's all nonsense. Climate change, when it ac tually happens, affects extremely large areas, not one square mile in Arkansas or a few hundred square miles elsewhere.
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These fish kills are NOT happening all over the place but are isolated events.
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If you have nothing to contribute, contribute nothing. Why do you waste our time with nonsense?
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No theory of global warming explains COLDER temperatures. How credulous, calderasf, are you that you believe that colder temperatures are the result of global warming?
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Only draconian punishments will stop the litterers. Fine them $100 for a first offense, even if it's just a cigaret butt. For a second offense, arrest them, put them into orange jumpsuits, and make them clean up (without pay, of course) for 10 hours, with a sign imprinted on the jumpsuits ("Offender", so the jumpsuits could be used for various crimes). Any subsequent offense, multiply the hours by 10 for each offense. I suspect that if we did that, all of a sudden our streets, parks, etc., would become very clean indeed.
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A Congressman is elected by a district of 700,000. Scientists aren't elected by anybody. The typical scientist is no better at his or her job than is the typical file clerk or typist, and you don't get a degree in science unless you feed back what you were told. "Science" is a collective of fallible human beings in which dissent gets you punished. No grants, no media, no promotion. Toe the line or find your career shunted into a dead-end.
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Stop wasting our time on partisan anti-Obama attacks that have NO connection with this story but what you invent. No matter how distant the story from politics, some loon insists on dragging Obama into it. Kindly SHUT UP about Obama in stories about unexplained wildlife deaths.
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False. The Mayan calendar reaches the end of one cycle; then restarts.
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Fine, but not, apparently, relevant to these wildlife deaths. Warming trends are more localized than you may appreciate, the result of, for instance, deforestation.
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That is so exaggerated as to be untrue. Our forests are actually VERY healthy, in the U.S. Deforestation is a Third World catastrophe, not First World. Most states and the Federal Government require environmental-impact statements to clear a proposed development. Many landfills now have liners that prevent seepage of toxins into groundwater. What you say was more like true 30 years ago, but is now largely false. And, last I knew, nobody knows why the bees have vanished, and bees do survive, albeit in reduced numbers. It is not, in any case, the U.S. or First World that is producing the worst environmental devastation. That is all being done in the Third World, and mostly because of OVERPOPULATION. Nobody is talking about reducing the world's population. If we do NOT reduce planetary population, all talk of correcting environmental damage is pointless nonsense.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,432 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:54 PM