Category Archives: Web Article Review

Bernie Sanders makes the case to (UK?) voters

A guy named Bernie Sanders has an article in The Guardian. Who is Bernie Sanders, asks the UK audience. According to the article, “Bernie Sanders is a US senator. He represents the state of Vermont”. According to this Bernie Sanders,

If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.

And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.

If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.

The Guardian

It’s ironic that as the excitement of the election begins to fade, and the feeling sets in that we have dodged the bullet of a second Trump term, we now feel comfortable with beginning to feel disappointed with the Biden administration before it even takes power!

Prove us wrong Joe! I think Bernie has it right. The Democratic party’s message is overly focused on putting everything in race and gender terms, and not focused enough on an economic message that appeals to the working people of this country, which is the vast majority of people. Getting the basic benefits in place that people in other functioning modern societies take for granted – child care, education, health care, infrastructure in good repair – would disproportionately help people who need the most help, without the race and gender-based messages that are a turnoff to many voters and are ultimately ineffective at bringing about change.

“Fighting the special interests” means campaign finance reform. It probably means legislation or even a constitutional amendment clarifying that the right to free speech applies to humans and not dollars.

I have friends and family that voted for Trump. None of these people is openly racist, although only the hypocritical or naive among us think we are completely free of bias. Most of them honestly believe that Trump lowered their taxes and that Biden will raise them. Some are small business owners who honestly believe Trump, or any Republican at all, is pro-business and that Democrats are hostile to business. Some believe 1990s-era free trade agreements took away their jobs, the issue that I still believe edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The solutions are pretty clear. The U.S. probably needs to take in more taxes and reinvest the money in smart ways that benefit working people, and that set the stage for long-term sustainable growth and innovation. This means the social programs I mentioned earlier, plus investments in infrastructure, capital goods, skills and training, research and development. These are also pro-business policies!

But how can you get people to support paying taxes when they have been subjected to decades of extreme anti-tax propaganda? This is really tough. That propaganda was created by decades of the rich and powerful buying off politicians to implant their extremist ideology in all our heads. I think Bernie is right that attacking those forces of propaganda is absolutely necessary. This is politically very tough and a very long game, and it is fighting the anti-tax message which is so simple to understand and so brutally effective.

Another idea, also politically very, very difficult, is to make taxes psychologically easier to pay. A value added tax would do this. This is how the rest of the developed world does it. It is the equivalent of a saved credit card in your iTunes app being so much psychologically less painful than writing a check each month to pay the electric bill. You just don’t “feel” that payment as much, and you see and enjoy the benefits that you getting in return every day. When I worked in Singapore, I submitted a tax return not unlike the one I submit here. But then someone reviewed that tax return and sent me a clear bill for the exact amount I had to pay. I was then able to set up an auto-pay from my bank account in twelve equal installments. Anything that gets tax payments into the background of people’s minds, kind of like the stored credit card on your Netflix account, might help.

People need to see and understand the value of the goods and services they are getting from the government in exchange for their taxes. We get enormous value from the government but we tend to take it for granted. Part of the propaganda has been for working people to believe that the taxes they pay provide benefits to other people, people not like them in one way or another, or people far away. I don’t have all the answers here, we could look at how companies create a sense of value for services. Advertising, branding, and marketing are part of the answer, whether we find that unsavory or not. Monthly statements, or the digital equivalent, might help.

There is also the flip side of helping people understand how much they pay for war and weapons, payments that do not bring any direct, measurable benefits to the people paying them. Federal tax revenue also gets sucked out of population centers where most economic value is created and redistributed to rural areas where it is not (out of proportion to the populations served, I am not suggesting rural people deserve nothing.) The brilliant, successful propaganda then convinces those rural voters that the exact opposite is true, that they are subsidizing the lazy people in the cities who do not create value! So we have to fight this too, and it brings us back to campaign finance reform, constitutional reform, and maybe democratic (small-d) reforms that get us closer to one-person, one-vote and lower the barriers to entry of candidates outside the two large parties. All politically very, very difficult! So who in the next generation will take up the Bernie Sanders mantle and make this case to the UK voter?!?

energy directed weapons

An energy directed weapon is basically a microwave beam directed at people. They have been developed for both military and riot control purpose. The U.S. says it has them but has never used them. The Daily Mail (a UK semi-respectable paper, known to sensationalize but not outright fabricate) says China may have used one against Indian troops.

military robot dogs

The Air Force now has robot dogs patrolling at least one base in Florida. Fun pictures here.

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubberpadded paws…

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began…

It was half across the lawn, coming from the shadows, moving with such drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence. It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red colour like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (I am not guaranteeing this download is legal. If you ever see a book lying around and you are not sure if the copyright intellectual property rights of The Man have been followed, BURN IT!!!)

Jack Goldstone

Here’s a long interview with Jack Goldstone in Salon, who wrote the 1991 book Revolution and Rebellion in the Modern World. His basic idea was that when “selfish elites” starve the government of resources, things get hard for ordinary people (from the poor to the upper middle class, I would say), and that is when revolutions can happen. He says when a society mostly consists of older, less educated people in a stagnant income situation (like former Soviet socialist republics), revolutions are more likely to be peaceful and focus on reform. When a society has more young, educated people in an economic freefall, that is when violent revolutions are more likely to happen. His vision of a stable society is one where elites agree to share the wealth somewhat to promote stability, then they educate and develop cohorts of future elite leaders. Too many educated people chasing too few elite roles is dangerously unstable, in his view. A thought that occurs to me (not in the artcle) is you can see a basis for the emphasis on STEM – educated people in a narrow way that allows them to earn a living and contribute to the larger economy, without the likelihood of them becoming politically active.

The solutions he offers are non-partisan problem solving in Congress, blue ribbon panels, and “citizen assemblies”. It’s a long article and my thoughts above barely scratch the surface.

By the way, here is what a “citizens’ assembly” is according to Wikipedia:

A citizens’ assembly (also known as citizens’ jury or citizens’ panel or people’s jury or policy jury) is a body formed from citizens or generally people to deliberate on an issue or issues of local or national or international importance. The membership of a citizens’ assembly is randomly selected, as in other forms of sortition. It is a mechanism of participatory action research (PAR) that draws on the symbolism, and some of the practices, of a legal trial by jury. The purpose is to employ a cross-section of the public to study the options available to the state on certain questions and to propose answers to these questions through rational and reasoned discussion and the use of various methods of inquiry such as directly questioning experts. In many cases, the state will require these proposals to be accepted by the general public through a referendum before becoming law.

why we’re numb to mass death

I’ve always found close up pictures of Hiroshima victims to be some of the most affecting images I’ve ever seen, and yet knowing that 100,000* people were vaporized in a fraction of a second has less emotional effect. We also get numb to hearing about steady numbers of deaths that add up to a lot over time, like car accidents. I’m not a monster – this is a bug in human psychology. This article in Axios gives other examples of the phenomenon, from the Holocaust to the Rwanda genocide to the U.S. coronavirus meltdown. The article links to an academic paper by Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon, who studies this “psychic numbing” effect.

A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately. However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies – such as genocide – or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. We believe this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action. We shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.

The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide

I’ve often thought about a class that would teach the history of a war or tragedy by the numbers, by focusing on the number of deaths, who the people were, where they occurred and when they occurred. I think that would be educational (if depressing). But to put it in perspective you might need some visuals. One idea would be a stadium with people vanishing from seats. (This would work for, say, up to 100,000 deaths.) For even larger numbers, maybe you could start with a point in the center of the town where the class is being held or where students live, and then expand the dot outward as though all the people who live inside it were to vanish. You could even make this an app based on census data, and let the user pick the center of the bubble. Then finally, you probably should tie some of the deaths to individual stories, or interviews with survivors, friends and family. For me personally though, the numbers are important to put the emotional stories in context, and I am wary of news stories that don’t have numbers. Morbid stuff!

* Okay, I admit the “100,000 people in a fraction of a second” is just a number I picked somewhat for shock value. According to Wikipedia, 70,000-80,000 people were either vaporized instantly or burned to death shortly after the blast. Then a bunch more died of radiation poisoning of course. Does this make it any better? No, when it’s my turn please just vaporize me.

QAnon: a game or not a game? and, some thoughts on raising kids, or why a goat is actually not a son of a bitch

This article about how QAnon is a game but not a game is clearly written by QAnon him or herself. He or she purports to believe QAnon is just a propaganda technique to indoctrinate people into various racist/right wing ideas, not by explicitly stating those ideas, but by leading people to follow a trail of “breadcrumbs” that result in them thinking they arrived at these ideas through their own cleverness. Breadcrumbs that consist of random events people will naturally try to build patterns out of. Then they are connected to other people who have arrived at similar ideas, entering an echo chamber where they can all just sit around sucking each others’…er, reinforcing each others’ beliefs. The fact that it resembles centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Gargamel from the Smurfs (come on, you know Hillary Clinton would love to drink sweet blue Smurf blood and melt those suckers down to gold in the basement of a pizza parlor if she ever got the chance) is just a coincidence. The coincidence that all those coincidental events appear to be a coincidence is just a coincidence. Next they’ll be telling us that Cuban mobsters with CIA connections didn’t murder JFK, or that Exxon and the Koch brothers didn’t pay people to act as fake “grass roots protestors” to cast doubt on obvious global warming science, or that the insurance industry didn’t pay off our elected officials to make sure Americans don’t have access to a health care system that could deal with a deadly global pandemic (which wasn’t created by the bat people in unholy fornication with the lizard people.)

The author tries to convince you that when most people make the A-OK hand symbol, they actually do not have any satanic intent. For example, astronauts >> aliens >> Satan!!! Do your own research.

The thing with the goat horn symbol is kind of weird though. I used to think it just meant two outs in baseball. I just feel bad for goats.

The horns of a goat mainly perform two purposes. The first purpose, and the one that is perhaps not as well known, is to act as an air conditioning system during hot weather. The horns help regulate body temperature.

The second function of a horn, which is maybe more familiar, is for a goat to protect itself. Goats often communicate by “butting” things. They play by butting or can even show affection. Two of our girls ask for pets by “gently” ramming us in the thigh (it’s bittersweet love). When a goat is threatened, the horn communication becomes more aggressive. They will lower their head and flatten their ears toward their attacker. The thick plate at the base of the skull and the sharp horns act as a great defense system; in some ways it’s like two swords and a shield ready to fight off predators—or a competing buck.

Raising Kids

So contrary to popular opinion, one thing we should be able to agree on is that baby goats are not evil. They are not even sons of bitches. They’re just kids.

Hillary Clinton speaks

In Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton has a laundry list of ideas for U.S. war policy. (I like to say war instead of defense or security. Because that’s what we’re talking about. She talks a little bit about pandemics and climate change early on, but she gets down to war and weapons pretty quickly. This gives us a pretty good idea about what she would have been doing for the last four years.

  • Retire aging weapons systems and close unnecessary bases (as she explains, easier to say than do because each factory and each base supports the economy of some place, and the elected officials representing that place will fight tooth and nail against the cuts. She says one way around this is for Congress to agree on an up or down vote on a comprehensive package of reforms, rather than argue over individual bases or factories.)
  • “Invest in accelerated maintenance and next-generation submarines” rather than new aircraft carriers, which are vulnerable to clouds of cheap missiles and drones.
  • Long range bombers
  • “mechanisms that allow for consultation with China and Russia to reduce the chances that a long-range conventional attack is mistaken for a nuclear strike, which could lead to disastrous escalation.” (Joe here, yeah, we’re coming to bomb you, but it’s just the strongest normal bombs we have, nothing to worry about…)
  • fewer active-duty soldiers and tanks
  • “upgraded intelligence and communications systems” (shuttered tank factories take note, this is the stuff you need to learn about…)
  • “a renewed commitment to diplomacy” (Joe here…yeah, we just want to talk…just talk and maybe we won’t have to blow shit up)
  • “it will make sense for other NATO members to concentrate on strengthening their conventional ground forces so that they can deter incursions in eastern Europe or lead counterterrorism missions in Africa.” (Joe here…no, those aren’t our guns by your border…we just sold them to the guy who lives there…nothing to worry about, just stay away from your border and everything will be okay…)
  • “rebuilding of the country’s industrial and technological strength” (especially things that are useful for war and weapons…) “It’s not enough anymore to prioritize materials and technologies used for weapons systems and semiconductors; the United States’ security also depends on the control of pharmaceuticals, clean energy, 5G networks, and artificial intelligence.” 

Towards the bottom, she gets to nuclear weapons:

Perhaps most important, the United States needs a new approach to nuclear weapons. For starters, it should not be deploying low-yield nuclear warheads on submarines or nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which expand the range of scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons and increase the risk of a misunderstanding escalating quickly into a full-blown nuclear exchange. Nor should the United States spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years on its nuclear arsenal, as is currently planned. Instead, it should significantly reduce its reliance on old intercontinental ballistic missiles, pursue a “newer and fewer” approach to modernization, and revive the arms control diplomacy that the Trump administration scrapped. A top priority should be to extend the New START treaty with Russia, which Ellen Tauscher, the State Department’s top arms control official, and I helped negotiate at the beginning of the Obama administration. It will also be important to persuade China to join nuclear negotiations.

Foreign Affairs

(Joe here…yeah…no, not the small ones, just the really big ones…no, nothing to worry about, they’re so big we would never even think about using them…no…right, we want you to throw yours away…yeah, we’ll throw some of ours away too…right, nothing to worry about, the old ones, not the new, really really big shiny ones, which are so big and pretty we would never even think about blowing them up…yeah, we know we have a lot more of them, just throw some of your new ones away and then maybe we’ll throw some of our old ones away while we’re building the shiny new ones…)

mass incarceration

Maybe I’ve finally put my finger on what bothered me about Black Lives Matter. Of course I’m not in favor of police brutality and nobody should be. Police brutality is a huge problem for the people on the receiving end of it, and it needs to be addressed. Addressing it would only remove drop from the bucket of violence and injustice in this country. We need to identify and address root causes of violence and injustice, but maybe that is too vague a concept for people to be marching in the streets about. Mass incarceration is concrete – we hear the numbers frequently, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. For every 100 or so people you see walking on the street, there is one American in a federal, state, or local jail. And some of those people on the street are on probation and parole. Add in friends and family of all those people, and a huge proportion of the population is affected, certainly enough to get a march together.

So what can we do about it? Just trying to reason it out, I would first identify things that don’t need to be crimes, and don’t make them crimes any more. Drug use and possession come to mind – unless you are selling drugs to children, you are really only hurting yourself and/or other consenting adults, and this should be dealt with through the health care system (we need a health care system!). Go ahead and legalize prostitution. Gambling is pretty much legal already. There might be other things in this category I haven’t thought of. Next, find non-violent ways to treat non-violent crimes. For example, address property crimes by taking away property.

Finally, you come down to just violent crimes, and violent criminals do need to be taken off the streets. But you can try to find ways to reduce and prevent crime rather than just treat the symptoms. Ultimately, as suggested in this Brennan Center for Justice report, the answer is to look at all those approaches and programs that have been tried on a small scale, follow the evidence, and then try to scale up the ones that have been proven to work. Things that have been tried include “deferred-sentencing diversion programs, pre-booking diversion programs, and alternative court models, including mental health and drug courts.”

This is hard, but unlike say, education, mass incarceration is pretty easy to measure and determine if we are making progress or not.

mRNA vaccines

According to Der Spiegel, the mRNA vaccine development technology accelerated to deal with coronavirus could be adapted to protect against some forms of cancer and other diseases. In fact, some scientists working on these other diseases switched temporarily to coronavirus vaccine development, and will eventually go back to their regularly scheduled programming.

The trick is that each patient receives an mDNA that is precisely tailored to the genetic profile of the cancer they are suffering from. These personalized cancer immunotherapies are still considered experimental, but the results of the initial study were so promising that Türeci, Şahin and their team were able to publish their results in July 2017 in Nature, the prominent scientific magazine. Almost two years later, a 52-year-old skin cancer patient in the U.S. received the experimental BioNTech treatment, after which he told Nature: “I was actually witnessing the cancer cells shrinking before my eyes.”

Der Spiegel

If a massive investment can break a log jam that has stymied research progress into a particular problem for decades, why don’t we do it more often? It would seem to support one of our most competitive industries, create jobs and stimulate the economy in the short term, and I would imagine it has a long term economic payoff. It would be nice to have an HIV vaccine and a male contraceptive shot or pill, just to name a couple.

Since this is publicly funded, will the “recipe” be made available to the WHO or other countries’ health agencies for free. That would seem like the moral thing to do. I also wonder though if the technology could be put to nefarious purposes like biological warfare or terrorism.

How could the U.S. end pro-war policies?

The other day I called Biden pro-war, which might seem a little harsh. How would the U.S. actually go about reducing its military commitments, if it wanted to? I think the starting point is to realize that other countries are actually afraid of us. We have the world’s most powerful (most expensive anyway) military, and we use it frequently. The confrontations we are involved in with Russia and China tend to happen very close to those countries’ borders, and yet our rhetoric treats them as the aggressors.

Here is one set of ideas from the Defense Priorities think tank. Now, this think tank is funded by libertarian ideologues like Rand Paul, who just want to starve the government until it goes away, and corporate plutocrats like the Kochs, who just want to starve the government so they can keep all the money in their own pockets. Any money they save would not be reinvested in, say, Social Security if they were in charge. It would just be diverted to the rich and powerful. Nonetheless, the actual ideas for shrinking military commitments seem to be serious, and various factions who normally don’t agree might be able to come to a consensus in the short term, then argue about how to reinvest the proceeds later.

First step is to bring troops home from the Greater Middle East, from Afghanistan to Africa. Obama won a Nobel Prize just for saying he was going to do it. he didn’t do it. Trump said he was going to do it, and he also was not able to do it. Not only that, we blundered into conflicts in Libya and Syria under their administrations that seem intractable and have no obvious benefits, to us or to the people actually in those countries. It’s time to just announce dates for withdrawal and then withdraw.

Second step is to say NATO is done expanding. In retrospect, trying to expand NATO (starting under Bill Clinton) was very threatening to Russia, and we quickly lost their trust and cooperation. The nations of Europe are much more powerful technologically and economically than Russia. We can pull troops back while still supporting them with training and equipment (either giving or selling these things to them, the latter keeping the military-industrial complex here at home happier and less nervous.)

Similarly, in Asia we can pull troops back while supporting with training and equipment. South Korea and Japan are incredibly powerful countries that can fend for themselves day-to-day with some assurance that we would ride to their aid if actual armed conflict breaks out.

Terrorist threats can still be dealt with through intelligence and law enforcement operations. Arguably, our foreign military adventures have probably inspired more potential terrorists than if we had never gone on those adventures. We can make it clear that we are not a threat to other sovereign nations, and then we can spend a decade or two practicing what we preach so that they might actually start to believe what we say.

I might add to this negotiating hard for nuclear arms reductions and nonproliferation, and leading by example on these. Also reengaging and trying to reinvigorate the United Nations. Not being a military threat to other sovereign nations doesn’t mean we ignore human rights abuses within their borders. It means we work in concert with the world community to apply pressure to solve these problems.