Is Christianity threatened? Yes, and it’s people like these who are destroying it:
Common Core isn’t a mistake — it just misses the point
When the Founders wrote the Constitution, they included protections for every basic right they felt belonged to the people of the new United States. But in countries with Constitutions newer than ours, particularly those written after WWII, there is a more comprehensive view of citizens’ rights.
Chief among them is the right to a public education, which was unknown in the formative days of our union, and because this right isn’t protected by our Constitution, most conservatives and even many liberals believe education is not the federal government’s business. How wrong they are.
We are first and foremost a nation of 50 united states, not a loose confederation of 50 little countries. Our people have common interests and common needs — and more than ever our people move about. It is absurd to argue that the educational needs of children in Mississippi or Kansas differ from those of children in California or New York. The children of Mississippi or Kansas have the same aspirations as children everywhere, and they should be as prepared for the opportunities they will be presented as adults as children everywhere.
This means only one thing: a basic curriculum common to every state, as is the case in other industrialized democracies — countries whose children regularly outperform American children academically. But this won’t happen as long as education is left up to the individual states, which only results in an achievement gap amount American children. This won’t happen until Americans realize a fair and equal public education system is in our national interest and get behind a constitutional amendment to guarantee a fair and equal public education for every child.
Note: I’ve often cited the Netherlands for having an education model worth studying.
Surprise — I’m okay with GMOs.
GMOs are at the heart of a raging controversy today, with the public largely fearful of foods made with GMO ingredients. This is despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that GMO foods are safe.
My own view is pretty simple: until I have reason to believe otherwise, I’ll believe GMOs are indeed safe. Why? Because I don’t know enough about the science of plant genetics to doubt such a consensus of scientists.
Which is unlike my faith that global warming is real and caused by man. Yes the consensus of science accepts this as fact, but I do know enough about the related sciences to know it’s true. In the case of GMOs, I seriously doubt if 89 percent of the world’s scientists have conspired to put one over on an unsuspecting public and throw their support behind companies that produce GMOs — Monsanto, for instance.
Where I part company with Monsanto and other companies is on their agressive opposition to farmers saving seeds for use in coming seasons. Farmers have been doing this since the advent of agriculture many thousands of years ago, and this violates a time-honored tradition.
Meanwhile, farmers have been genetically modifying foods for just about as long, as they select seeds from the best of their crops to plant in coming seasons. This is genetic modification at its most basic because it saves the genetic characteristics of the preferred crop and lets the others disappear. GMOs are not a new thing.
A lot of smart people are fighting GMOs in foods, and I think they should concentrate on two things: preventing Monsanto from monopolizing seeds, and pushing for labeling foods that contain GMOs. If there’s nothing wrong with GMOs, food producers shouldn’t be afraid to tell the public their foods contain them.
Terrorism by legislation
Today cable media is preoccupied with news of the horrific attack in Paris, where ten journalists and two police officers were killed by cowardly terrorists. Tragic yes, but another tragedy may be unfolding as, also today, Think Progress released a story about another cowardly act of terrorism — this one perpetrated by our own Congress, against America’s SSDI recipients.
It was cowardly because the language to prevent the two funds that comprise the Social Security system to borrow from one another when necessary to ensure that benefits can be paid in full each year, as has been done a number of time since the 1950s, was buried in an unrelated bill. It was an act of terrorism because it threatens to reduce benefits of some of our most vulnerable citizens — disability recipients — and for most each monthly Social Security stipend isn’t nearly enough to survive as it is. Furthermore it would pit disability recipients against those who receive regular benefits.
And why did the cowardly Republicans hide this language in an unrelated bill? Why to avoid a shitstorm of public opinion, of course. And thanks to a media that can’t chew gum and pat its head at the same time, no one has five minutes to spare to report this critical story. As a result, Republicans pray very few Americans will hear about it.
But word will get around, and I suspect social media will light up with outrage. How Congress reacts to the criticism is impossible to predict, however. If Republicans think they are immune from a backlash, as indeed they might be, this might be the beginning of the end for Social Security, and for every other safety net program. And we’ll be back where we were in 1930.
Welcome to Republican rule.
Boehner is the stupid one
About some things I can get windy. This for instance as I gagged when I heard Speaker John Boehner say in a clip that Americans want the Keystone Pipeline because they aren’t stupid. I was compelled to send him this in a tweet (thank you, TwitLonger) that I know he will never see.
If the American people are stupid, it’s because they believe you and the science deniers in your party. Climate change is real, a consequence of Global warming, for which humans are responsible. Yes climate change ordinarily occurs naturally, but not this time. Nature doesn’t burn fossil fuels on its own. Oh it might ignite the occasional tree or forest, but living trees aren’t fossils. It took millions of years for fossil fuels to form beneath the surface of the earth–fuels that are the fossilized remains of organic carbon-based plant and animal life. I know this because I went to high school. I trust you did too.
So where did we come in? Well, the carbon in the fossilized remains of plants was absorbed from the atmosphere from a time when there was excessive carbon in the atmosphere and the world was very warm. Animals meanwhile consumed this plant life and the carbon became part of their systems. By burning so much of these fossilized remains–the coal, the oil, the natural gas–since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution we have returned much of this carbon to the atmosphere–and as any school-age child knows (or should) CO2 is the key greenhouse gas. It not only retains the heat that makes our planet habitable, it regulates that heat. Get it? REGULATES that heat. More carbon, more heat. Not hard for a simple mind to grasp.
So here we are at a time when we should be reducing the amount of CO2 we re-release into the atmosphere–nay, eliminating it altogether. And what do you and your colleagues want to do? You want to exploit even MORE of these fossil fuels instead of focus on what is critical to the survival of the human race–alternative fuels with NO carbon footprint. You essentially want to hasten the arrival of Armageddon. So forgive me if I call you stupid, but you are.
United, but not always
Today I’m going to rant about the Tenth Amendment — another amendment that is hopelessly misunderstood and abused. No amendment dis-unites the United States like the Tenth.
For the record, here it is: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” I put it in italics so it can be easily distinguished from more well-reasoned text.
Don’t get me wrong — the Founders had good intentions when they chose the Tenth from among the many amendments they’d dashed off. First, they wanted the Bill of Rights to be a nice round number, and nine just didn’t seem like the right one, despite the fact that it was whole. Maybe they didn’t want to be outdone by the Ten Commandments.
Second, they were pandering to the states, which felt they had to have something to do after all was said and done. They might have wanted to be part of a country, but deep down the states each wanted to be a little country on its own, and the Tenth Amendment let them have that.
For some reason, conservatives love the Tenth Amendment as much as they love the Second. Maybe it’s because they secretly don’t like the idea of a United States to begin with. They argue the Tenth to make a case against a national health-care system in general, for example, and Obamacare in particular, that health care should be left up to the states — as if health care needs differ from state to state. Well, convince me how cancer in Iowa differs from cancer in Virginia, or how doctors treat pneumonia 50 different ways. I can see Montana’s high speed limits, too, because nobody lives there and there’s not much reason to linger. I can see California tailoring its environmental laws to address the special needs of a below sea-level desert. Do not steal sand to take home for your child’s sandbox, for example, because Death Valley is already far enough below sea level. That doesn’t happen often. But clean air and water know no state boundaries, and like Americans themselves since before the Bill of Rights was even adopted, they migrate from state to state.
And what about rights? Why should an American have the right to do something in one state but be denied that right in another? I’m talking about basics, like the right to marry the consenting adult of your choice. Many of us can recall a time when some states had laws that denied rights to black people — and they got away with it until Congress stepped in. I know some conservatives wouldn’t mind going back to that time, but most people agree that the end to Jim Crow was just.
Like the Second Amendment, the Tenth will never be amended, or even tinkered with. But like the second, it could sure use a little modifying. My own suggestion? “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people — just don’t do anything stupid.”
The folly of privatization
An appearance by Jesse Ventura on today’s Ronan Farrow show on MSNBC prompted this post. First, I have newfound respect for Jesse. I don’t remember if I was aware that he was a former Navy Seal, but I know now, and that deserves respect. But it was what he said about mercenaries and the DOD’s over-dependence on privatizing that got my attention.
He’s dead right. When I served, private contractors were rare. They were the occasional mechanics, technicians, and engineers whose skills were required at so few installations that it was impractical to devote an entire military specialty to them. Otherwise, each branch was self-contained.
Today, however, so many specialties are farmed out, to no one’s benefit but the contractors and the personnel who cash in on the higher pay scales. I’m not just talking about the Blackwater-type mercenaries either, who make ordinary troops think twice about a career at comparatively paltry pay. I’m talking about food service and so many of the other services traditionally performed by military personnel. I can’t say if the food is better than it used to be, and I’m not saying that the food used to be lousy. It was fine, and I don’t know if there are many who served who got to know it both ways, so they can offer a critique.
What I think is, the practice of private contracting costs taxpayers more than it has to and removes the responsibility from the proper chain of command. What I also think is that the military is better off when it depends on no one but itself. It’s more than tradition — it’s common sense.
Mourning in America
Wednesday, November 05, 2014 — Election Day plus one. Some pundits predicted we might not know who owned the Senate until after the New Year, until after the runoff election results were in. They were wrong. To our dismay, we found out last night. The only good thing to come out of the evening was, I got to go to bed at a reasonable hour.
My head is flooded with thoughts, and bubbling to the top is climate change, because if there’s anything we can’t postpone any longer, it’s action on climate change. But a short while ago Mitch McConnell addressed the American people and said something that for all practical purposes sealed our doom when he said “energy policy” and “pipeline” in the same sequence of sentences. At a time when we absolutely MUST get off fossil fuels rather than exploit remaining sources, we should not be giving any attention to fracking and oil pipelines.
I’ve written about global warming countless times, and I’ve mentioned the tipping point in at least six previous posts. For the record, the tipping point is the level at which the increase of atmospheric CO2 can no longer be reversed. Of course we all know what the role of CO2 in the atmosphere is, don’t we? If not, it’s the principal greenhouse gas, or the gas that holds heat in the atmosphere. Too little — it gets colder. Too much — it gets hotter. And why is the level of CO2 rising? Well, unlike eras in the past, when levels varied over hundreds of thousands of years, the level in modern history has soared over a short period of time — about 200-odd years, or since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when we started burning the coal that took millions of years to bury. And what is coal but CO2 in the form of a combustible material, the remains of vegetation that thrived back when there were huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
With this kind of Armageddon on the horizon, everything else is probably moot, but life will go on in our remaining few centuries. And what that life will be like depends to a great extent on what else Congress does or doesn’t do. Will Congress start whittling away at Obamacare, until we’re back where we were before, or will they grow it so everyone is covered fairly no matter how much they earn. My feeling? McConnell already gave us a hint: they will start getting rid of parts they think don’t work (read parts insurance companies hate). The end result will be that tens of thousands will still die, as before, and the US will once again be unique among industrialized nations as a country that doesn’t give a shit about its people.
Fair immigration reform? There is too much opposition on the right for any meaningful reform, so we’ll continue to see “illegals” streaming across the border, and we’ll continue to hear the clamor for more border security. There will be no dreams come true for Latinos who came here as children, no guest worker programs that help to control the flow, no pathway to citizenship. Citizenship? Forget it. The last thing Republicans want are more non-Caucasian voters.
There will be no real increase in the minimum wage, so adults will still have to support families on poverty wages. Coupled with cuts in safety-net programs, we will start seeing epidemics of malnutrition and homelessness. And Republicans will not be stirred by human tragedy.
While I see no fall-off in defense spending, I see continued disinterest in veterans, both those who recently sacrificed their youth and health, and those who served a generation or two ago. We will be forgotten, benefits will be cut, and fewer and fewer vets will be eligible for care.
On the economy forefront, look for more deregulation and less oversight as Republicans lay their trademark groundwork for another economic collapse of the kind that occurred in 1929 and 2008, also in the midst of or on the heels of a Republican-dominated government. Of course it takes time for depression conditions to develop, but the way it looks right now Republicans will have the time.
And then there’s education — and if there’s anything Republicans fear more than non-white voters it’s well-educated voters. And if your child’s school bus traverses an overpass, pray it isn’t among the thousands at risk and in need of repairs or replacement.
What else? A lot, but this post is already overly long and I’m getting overly depressed. I guess what’s most depressing of all is that voters have no idea what they did. They wanted to clean house? If so, they got rid of the wrong crowd. They castrated the party that stood up for them, not those who would suck their wealth, their blood, and their freedom.
Times have changed
In 1932, voters punished Republicans for the Depression by electing Democrats. Today voters rewarded Republicans for trashing the economy and impeding the recovery by giving them the entire Congress. Amazing how well-informed people were in the 1930s, when there were comparatively few sources of information–nothing more than newspapers that reported the goddamn news. People must have had a knack for assimilating facts back then in a way they no longer do. And some doubt evolution!
By the way, tonight I tweeted this in Twitter — Republicans destroy the economy, then get in the way of full recovery, and voters about to reward them by giving them the Senate? Go figure — and after just a few hours there were almost 90 retweets. Never had that many on a single tweet before.
History’s a bitch
During his two terms in office, President Teddy Roosevelt launched the progressive era, angering Republican conservatives by pressing hard for a variety of important reforms — railroad regulation, food and drug protection, labor, conservation, trust-busting, banking. During the 1920s, Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover reversed the trend toward regulation, instead giving corporations free rein, raising protective tariffs, and cutting taxes on the rich. The more conservative Supreme Court, meanwhile, overturned the progressive measures designed to regulate big business, and declared labor boycotts unconstitutional. (In my view, the economic collapse that followed was inevitable, as was the collapse in 2007-08, which followed a similar progression of business-friendly deregulation.)
Thanks to u-s-history.com.
Liberal Buzz 