The Daily Consternation - a blog - KennebecTom.com

Would You Like A Side Of Healthcare With That?

1/7/2014

In tonight's news, Vermont embarks on the great single-payer health insurance experiment.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/07/vermont-backs-controversial-single-payer-system-for-health-care-overhaul-but/

"A single-payer plan would largely sideline the insurance industry..." Exactamundo. Single-payer was on the table during the first 6 months or so of the ONE AND A HALF YEAR Congressional logjam that gave us what people insist on calling Obamacare, but I feel is more appropriately termed CongressCare. But single-payer was so excoriated and portrayed as a product of the mind of Satan that it was sidelined early on, leaving Congress to assemble the Frankenstein plan they did. Wonder who influenced that? Oh...perhaps...health insurance companies? Well, anyway, when I talk to my dad, who due to his age has Medicare, even he, who has fondness for neither Obama nor government generally, admits "It works pretty good." Like decriminalizing drugs, I feel that we'll inevitably do this. Economics will force it. The question is just whether we go painfully, kicking and screaming and gnashing our teeth, or with an open mind, giving it a try, perfecting it, and, sure, if it doesn't work, then trying something else. Most of the problems I solve are not solved with the first tool or method I try. But I am not easily dissuaded and I keep my mind open to all possible solutions.

P.S. I've heard theories that the liberals gave up on single-payer and went along with passing FrankenbamaCare because they new it would be such a train wreck, and that it would make health insurance companies look so much more evil, that single-payer would look like the Promised Land in comparison. Based on the Facebook chatter I see, that plan, if true, seems to be working perfectly.

Defending American Schools

10/12/2013

I’ve been thinking on this post and writing it for a long time. The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School completely held up my blogging until I cleared my reactions from my mental buffer. On our way driving to Ohio for Christmas 2012, we passed through Newtown by chance, and from the turnpike one of my daughters saw one of the huge funeral processions. The sensationalized media event was suddenly a grim, matter-of-fact reality.

Over the months, I sat and watched reactions play out in the professional media and social media. I kept my lips (and fingertips) shut. I wasn’t sure how to react. I wasn’t sure what to say. I watched the parade of reactions, assertions, accusations, defenses, speculations, and speeches. None of them seemed right. Most seemed oversimplified, illogical, and belligerent. And the media threw itself on the conflagration like gasoline, building its coverage of the event upon a foundation of juxtaposition and using the word “versus” a lot. Finding the most tactless and extreme spokespersons on every side of the multi-faceted topic attracted viewers I suppose. But it did nothing to foster a workable response to these rare but extreme acts of ultraviolence.

Since that time, several more tragic incidents have occurred and many more near-incidents have been deterred, though certainly not as widely reported as those that come to fruition. After hearing of a couple of close calls, I've finally decided now is the time to share these thoughts, during a time of relative calm – not during the shock and grief of a new tragedy.

People and organizations have made wild remarks about putting armed guards, military or police, in all schools; or fortifying schools against attackers like some institutionalized version of I Am Legend. No thought is given to the economic burden of maintaining such measures, nor to the psychological impact on our children (and teachers) of having to attend a daily reverse prison with armed guards, asking mommy and daddy “should I be scared to go to school?”

I propose something less than the police-state schools proposed by the NRA and something more than an unregulated self-choice method of arming teachers. I think placing police in every school is economically impractical and, we hope, a waste of a highly trained crime-interdiction professional to mostly act as a scarecrow and security guard.*

A quick Google search turns up some suggestion that there are as many as 99,000 public education institutions in America (kindergarten through college graduate schools). If, in a given year, you had "school shootings" in just one percent of schools, that would be 990 events. Roughly three per day. Although the media scours the country to present us with plenty of horror, the toll is far short of three per day. We are dealing with a very, very small number of incidents, calling into question the necessity, wisdom, and cost of altering society to try to reduce the number of incidents to absolute zero (which I believe is impossible). This is the classic "zero-to-infinity" problem. On any given day, in any given school, the chances of a school shooting are almost zero. But if it occurs, the consequences are infinite - so horrible it shakes the nation and motivates scrambling knee-jerk legislation at the highest levels and a willingness to relinquish personal liberties for an illusion of heightened safety.

Despite what may be a copycat wave we are experiencing right now, school shootings are pretty rare. So the cost and resource drain of placing at least 99,000 police officers into our schools (obviously big schools and campuses need more than one) seems to be overkill. It would be similar to maintaining our peak nuclear arsenal after the demise of the USSR. Remember the widespread demand for undercover sky marshals on every plane after September 11? After a while we wondered how many flights really had armed sky marshals on board. It was admitted not all – rather a random sampling such that terrorists would be deterred by the possibility. Now, in 2013, I wonder how many flights have sky marshals. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was none. I don’t hear anyone still actively asking the question.

Even Newtown, Connecticut residents, on April 23, 2013, balked at increasing the municipal budget to hire additional police and unarmed security guards for the town’s seven schools. [article here] That vote took place on the very same day that Newtown officers visited Maine to speak at the Augusta Civic Center for the 5th Annual Maine Partners in Emergency Preparedness Conference. Ironically, their top recommendation for protecting schools was a fully trained school resource officer in every school. [article here]

Increasing this burden, I argue that any place with uniformed guards would need at least two, stationed in different locations, to overcome the element of surprise. Because on the one day in a guard’s ten-year tenure when the shooter walks up, it is likely that the first guard will be complacent from years of boring days and will be the first victim. A second guard elsewhere in the school will perhaps hear the shot and have time to switch to fight mode.

At the other end of the spectrum is the near-vigilante, Wild West kind of approach, saying to teachers and/or administrators, “Okay, whoever wants to carry a gun at school, go ahead.” Whoa! Gun owners, like drivers, come in all levels of ability and all levels of vanity about their own skills. Many teachers and professors (and members of any cross-section of the populace) have no business wielding a gun in a public setting. Even the concealed weapon licensing programs in some states require only a paltry level of weapons proficiency, law, and safety knowledge.

So, who does society accept standing around a school with a gun? Who are we comfortable with? Who are we not shocked to see standing in the hallway with an openly displayed deadly weapon, fully loaded and ready to deploy within a second? Well, the aforementioned police. Why are we comfortable with that?**

We accept police carrying firearms in all environments because we at least believe that they have had a criminal background check, analysis of their character and fitness, psychological evaluation, education and training, and have physical fitness level necessary to deploy their weapon and keep it from being taken from them by force and used against them. This training, at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy takes about 720 hours over 18 weeks. The full curriculum is here: http://www.maine.gov/dps/mcja/training/basiclaw/curriculum.htm

Well, what if you took just those aspects of this training related specifically to firearms training, tactics, and emergency management, and offered an optional certification program to teachers, administrators, education majors, and college professors to become trained as “School Security Specialists”? The curriculum and training would NOT include how to write effective police reports, how to apprehend suspects, how to arrest, how to conduct a safe traffic stop, how to frisk people, how to search for drugs, how to recognize intoxication and drug use, or what constitutes a crime and when to intervene. Perhaps, in the place of the criminal justice and patrol aspects of the curriculum, you would add training specifically focusing on prior school shootings, mistakes made, and develop tactics and plans for such scenarios. And there would be ongoing training and practice to maintain the certification - continuing education like that in many professions - including a lot of firearms and tactical practice under conditions mimicking the stress of a real-life attack on a school. The curriculum and ongoing training ought to be a uniform national standard.

In their eventual jobs these graduates would primarily be teachers, not cops. They would not intervene with firepower to stop a car burglary, or a theft of a computer, or embezzlement. They would not search for drugs or bust kids for alcohol violations. All that would be handled with a phone call to the full-time police. The school security officers’ only purpose would be to return fire in the event of a school shooting situation, with a goal to stop, delay, suppress, and obfuscate the attacker until the attacker was disabled or dead, or until a full police force could arrive. The local police would know which teachers in the school were the security officers so as to reduce the risk of arriving on the scene and mistaking the security officers for the assailants.*** Perhaps they’d have some kind of badge to display to the police to identify their role when the cops arrived. The school security officers and the police would develop plans for coordinated response to school violence incidents.

The graduates could expect, with this certification, to command a higher salary and to be more marketable as employees. It will take some years, of course, before there is a pool of individuals large enough to provide trained personnel to all 99,000 schools. Any sustainable rational solution will take longer than knee-jerk panaceas. Additionally, may institutions will choose not to hire any such security specialists.

Once such a body of such educators exists, each individual school, school district, university, or college can make their own decision about whether to hire such people, pay them more, how many to hire, etc. based upon the infinite variables of each location, including school size, demographics, attitude of the parents and community, and more. Essentially, each community can then balance the risks of the zero-to-infinity problem for themselves, but have on the table a reasonably affordable, reasonably safe method of employing armed protection for our educational institutions, which are salient targets essentially because they are places where large groups of vulnerable people congregate regularly on a predictable schedule. And during the 99.9% of school hours that are peaceful and unremarkable, you'd still have a productive educator giving your children your money's worth.

None of this will reduce the number of school shootings to zero. But perhaps it is a balanced, practical, and sustainable approach to guarding against the infinite consequences of the terrible acts of the insane, the impassioned, and the wicked directed at our educational institutions. This proposal is not meant to be exclusive. By all means, effort needs to be made to keep weapons out of the hands of nuts and mental health care (like health care generally) needs a lot of work. And more needs to be done to rehabilitate troubled and broken American families. And I do believe that the extreme violence of a lot modern movies and video games (even though I enjoy some of them) is more than necessary to convey creative expression and, if watched repeatedly by a marginalized, unbalanced person, might give them the kernel of a very bad idea.

This proposal is only for a system of last resort, when all the other measures (should we responsibly implement them) have still failed. This also does not address the problem of other public places of gathering - restaurants, movie theaters, malls, etc., which are beyond the scope of this article.

After hours of driving around thinking on this in idle moments, and watching the scene in the mornings after dropping my daughters off at their junior high and high schools, and after considering my wife’s role as a high school teacher and what could be done that might offer me any increased sense of security - well, that’s the best I’ve got.

*There are those who are completely dismissive of the idea of armed security in schools. They employ an illogical argument, stating, “Well, there was an armed guard (or police) at Columbine. And at Virginia Tech.” Well, that led me to Google up those incidents. True. And the armed guards either fired and missed the killer, or were perhaps not persistent enough when their target passed from their view. But if that argument were applied on a larger scope it would lead to the conclusion that because there was one successful murder yesterday, armed police are useless, and therefore we should disband all of our armed police departments because they obviously can’t stop killings. My retort is that perhaps those police/guards should have spent more time practicing - or that sometimes you’re just stuck taking a shot with a pistol from 50 yards away, and that’s a tough shot. But that's not a rational reason not to try.

**This goes to the NRA’s swaggering cowboy statement, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” I can just hear that in John Wayne’s voice. There was, of course, a reflexive outcry over that remark - just because of who it came from, and because the timing and tone of it was tactless. Again, the Columbine and Virginia Tech failures of “good guys” were pointed to as proving this statement untrue. And yet, if you or I saw a “bad guy with a gun” lurking around the school, or our yard, or your neighbors’ yard, or the supermarket, who ya gonna call? Not Ghostbusters (good guys, but no guns). You'd call the police (good guys with guns). And in fact, in a recent presentation in Maine, Newtown police officers essentially echoed this, making their top recommendation for protecting American schools a fully trained school resource [police] officer in every one. (cited above) Further, our nation’s self-defense laws are generally structured in this way, permitting law-abiding citizens (good guys) to employ deadly force only in the face of threatened deadly force (or other life-threatening actions) by criminals (bad guys). I therefore find the basic premise sound, and it is the underlying assumption behind any proposals to install police or even soldiers in school settings. I feel my proposal is a more reasonable and affordable approach.

***Whether students, parents, and the general public would be privy to the identity of the school security specialists, and whether the security officers’ weapons would be carried openly or concealed, is a matter about which I have not yet formed a conclusion. As a friend of mine expressed it, “Why does Mr. Smith always wear a sport-coat?”

Government Cheese - My Solution To "Food Stamp" abuse

10/12/2013

Most of the griping about welfare I see in social media and hear on the street is about the selections people see the recipients making in the checkout aisle. My middle or upper class friends are waiting in line and in front of them is some scruffy tattooed dirty guy, or some harried single-mom with numerous children who don't resemble each other wearing the regulation dingy pajama bottoms and slippers or flip-flops (depending on the season). She and the children are probably overweight in this scenario (the guys, for some reason, tend to swing the other direction, being wiry, leather-skinned, tanned, and jittery as red squirrels).

Anyway, on the conveyer belt is a bunch of soda pop, sugary cereals, potato chips, maybe gum and candy, and God forbid, alcohol. Maybe ice cream, chocolate milk – you can imagine a heap of unhealthy and/or “fun” food products.

Then the shopper whips out their Maine EBT card (the way by which Maine distributes welfare money – which includes several different public assistance programs actually) and maybe some cash to cover whatever is excluded from payment with the card, and my observant friends go crazy with Facebook protests and other online rants. Some form entire political campaign themes around the topic.

Well, look, I've got a simple idea I call the Government Cheese Program (GCP). First, check out the Wikipedia Government Cheese article. So, I put forth this premise. If the government (taxpayers) are paying for your food, then the government (taxpayers) get to tell you what you're going to eat. If you want freedom of choice, and fun, colorful, yummy treats that are mostly about pleasing the palate and not focused on sustaining a healthy mammal throughout a day, then that's a goal to strive for by getting off of public assistance and earning your own money that you can use for anything you like – like vodka and Twinkies.

The way it would work is this – eligible persons or families would get a GCP card. At all supermarkets, certain food in the store would be FREE to those with the card. You'd just put it in your cart, swipe your card, and walk out. Instead of getting money and then having a choice what to buy, you only have the choice of specific foods. The supermarkets would all be reimbursed by the government directly for the consumed merchandise. They would also have to agree to carry the core GCP foods list at all times, but would be allowed to adjust quantities to match demand.

What would be on the Government Cheese free food (and other essentials) list? Well, it would intentionally not be exciting, but it would be nutritious. There would be little variety. One reason for boring but healthy selections would be to motivate people to strive to get off of welfare. Another would be for the products to be unexciting enough such that one could not find buyers to resell them too, acquiring cash, and then spending it on Keystone Lite and Ding Dongs.

I sense there is already some categorization of foodstuffs that are eligible and aren't eligible for using the Maine food supplement program, but I don't think it's specific enough to prevent the problem of the junkfood extravaganza. It's probably based on broad categories. Too broad.

So here's some examples of what I'd put on the GCP free food list:
85% lean ground beef
Kosher reduced fat all-beef hot dogs
Boneless chicken breasts
Pork chops
Mac and cheese (store brand – not Kraft)
Franks and beans
Thin spaghetti pasta (no other shapes)
Green leaf lettuce (only 1 variety of lettuce)
Granny Smith apples (only one apple choice – whatever is most generic)
Broccoli
Green beans
Beans (one kind of basic, canned, baked beans – store brand)
One kind of multigrain bread – store brand
Milk (only the cheapest brand of the basics – skim, 2%, ½ & ½)
Coffee (yes, coffee to enhance productivity – but only one kind of basic freeze-dried grounds – store brand if possible)
Feminine hygiene products – one choice
Toilet paper – one kind of plain white store brand
Shampoo – one kind, one scent, non-gender specific, of the cheapest brand
Soap – just a bar
Potatoes – plain brown ones
Carrots
Bananas
No sugar added jam (I'll be generous and allow two flavors, strawberry and grape)
Plain, store-brand, low-sugar, high-fiber cereals
Brown rice
Eggs
Flour
White sugar
And of course, the proverbial Government Cheese – I think a nice longhorn cheddar. Block form.

I think you see where I'm going with this. Point is, no multiple flavors, no fancy colors, nothing fun. No ice cream, no popsicles, no soda, no flavored water, no potato chips, no Cheetos, no muffins, no cookies, no cake, no Ding Dongs, or Little Debbie cakes, or Entemann's breakfast treats. No pizza. The choices are centered around concepts like Protein and Fiber and what-not. No tiny snack packs or convenient take-along packages. No microwave entrees. You have to cook for yourself until you have a job that has you pressed for time – then you can spend your own money to by quick-prep stuff.

It won't be fun or exciting, but it will keep you from dying until you get a job. Your family and kids and friends will whine about the choices at your house...until the rumbling of their belly gets strong enough to want another can of franks & beans. Or a banana.

This way there is no room for abuse. Public sentiment towards public assistance will shift from bitterness and envy to pity and sympathy. And folks on the program will probably look healthier and lose weight, as well as striving to get off it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, writing this has worked up an appetite for some franks and beans and cheese and crackers.

The Bell You Can't Unring

9/6/2013

Today's headline online on FOX News Politics*:

"NSA can reportedly break into most encrypted Internet communications"

No duh. Do you think, if there's a computer geek smart enough to create encryption NSA can't crack, that they're going to stay both alive and not an employee of NSA for more than a week? And further, there's no reversing this revelation. What're they gonna do? Say, "We promise we won't peek anymore"? You believe them? Why?

It's like a scene I imagine:

NSA Dude: "Mr. President, the Secret Spying Program has been discovered. Our citizens and other countries are outraged."

President: "Sigh. Well, what now? What's your recommendation?"

NSA Dude: "There's only one solution Mr. President. The ultimate option. We have to make the Secret Spying Program....EVEN MORE SECRET."

So what's that mean for you? Well, if you want to plan a revolution or a terrorist attack or a school shooting, kidnapping, murder, affair, or any other unsanctioned behavior, you'd better do it in a paper spiral notebook kept under your bed and not "in the cloud", nor even on a computer that is connected to the internet.

The chilling thought is that "unsanctioned behavior" is a shifting definition. So while today's government may only be looking for Arabs bent on blowing things up, tomorrow's government might decide it has a problem with Native Americans, African Americans, Japanese, Germans, Jews or Christians, Muslims or gay people, cat people or dog people, gun owners or pro-lifers. (I assume you noticed that some of these historically have already been the case, but they didn't have Facebook, Google drive, and iPhones) And if you put your thoughts in digital format (whether typed, audio, or video), then they can already read your mind. And by the way, there's plenty of science news that they are working on that even as I type.

*Disclaimer: I am not a FOX News junkie, it just turned up in my Google News Feed.

Post Election Musings

11/7/2012

This particular Facebook post garnered a lot of positive reaction, from people on all points of the political spectrum, so I add it here for posterity's sake:

No one's Facebook posts changed my mind on any issues or candidates. Some came close to alienating me, but none changed my mind. I did make it through the season without actually clicking unfriend because I actually know most of my Facebook friends in person, and in daily life, they're all decent people I'd expect to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with piling sandbags, or searching for the missing, or distributing rations, or raising funds, etc. We shouldn't let politicians divide us for their electoral benefit. They don't care about us as much as would should care about each other. Which all sounds sappy, except I really mean it.

We Fear The Freedom Of Others

10/28/2012

Postulate: We fear the freedom of others. Apply to topic of your choice, and I think it explains a lot of human behavior. It sounds like a great quote to me. I Googled it and find no first page hit. So I'm claiming it and adding to my favorite quotes, ascribed to...yours truly. Feel free to quote me. As in, "Well, Tom McCowan once said, 'We fear the freedom of others.' And that explains that." Or, "Well, Tom McCowan believes we fear the freedom of others." Paraphrase as, "Freedom is all good and wonderful, until someone is doing something you don't like, something that threatens you, or something you don't understand. Then, of course, you fear it, and seek to gather like-minded people to make it stop."

This thought came to me reading the morning news. While I was writing, a friend reported on Facebook an incident which evidenced this very instinct. Google revealed a quote that, “Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom,” by someone named Marilyn Ferguson, and a few paraphrased expressions of the same.

There are the free, and those who fear them. The fearful will seek to ban or restrict the free. The free will seek to persist in the exercise of their freedoms. Sometimes abuse of a freedom increases the ranks of the fearful until the free are constrained due to their flagrancy in use of their freedom.

Americans are by now very familiar with the expression, "Freedom Isn't Free." I also suggest that, "Freedom Isn't Fear." Corollary: "Fear Isn't Freedom." (adding those to my quote page, too; and wouldn't they make great T-shirts?) And I note that most political campaigning seems to focus on telling us to fear, what to fear, and how much to fear. Most political spin control involves tortured explanations of why not to fear, or more often, "Yes, yes, but you should fear the alternative MORE."

I, for one, am tired of being told to fear. In fact, I'm a bit pissed. It start with September 11. With the President, the government as a whole, and the media, explicitly telling us to fear. They even established a color coded system for fear. Maybe DHS called it a threat level. But if the nature of the threat is unclear, and you can't take any action to avoid it, then what good is the warning - it's basically just a fear level indicator. "Experience Fear Level Orange, Now!" Fear was used as a justification for invading countries and infringing our liberties with the Patriot Act. And now fear has become such common parlance, that political expression really seems to have forgotten how to inspire us with positive statements, or articulate comprehensible plans to establish defined objectives.

Fear is powerful because it overwhelms our capacity for logic and critical thinking, and our curiosity. It appeals to the panic centers of our old mammal brains and inspires us to fight or flee, or to herd-like unquestioning behavior. It moves us to tribal formation - teams and political parties - and de-personification of others.

Whenever you're confronted with a message, I implore you to analyze it and ask, "Is this trying to appeal to my sense of fear." And if the answer is yes, I suggest the thing to be feared most may be the proponent of the message.

Where To Now?

10/23/2012

Well, political discourse has sure gotten to be an absolutist, scorched-Earth, take no prisoners affair. I can't get too terribly excited about the Presidential race due to the conclusions I reached in my post, The Puppet Presidency. I have my choice about who I'm going to vote for, but it doesn't matter much, and I don't expect a lot to change regardless of who wins.

First, to pretend you even know who you're voting for is a philosophical fiction. Politicians (at least at the federal level) are such idea whores and chameleons that they have no true beliefs. They'll say anything and be anything to get elected. They get in trouble for this, as Romney did, when their remarks to one group they're speaking to get leaked to another group they're pandering to that happens to hold diametrically opposed values. Embarrassing, but it usually passes into the past faster than a Facebook post.

Nevertheless, a lot of people have been making remarks and Facebook comments and memes that leave no room to really accept the fact that you're living on a planet, and in the same community, and even the same neighborhood, church, and workplace, with people who are going to vote for the other guy. When you equate the other candidate with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Satan, etc., if you really believe that, then you should be very uneasy walking around town with people who are voting for them. I know you're thinking, "I am very uneasy." But no, I'm dead serious. VERY uneasy. Like psycho stocked up on water and food and guns and ammunition, and garlic and wooden stakes, and barricaded doors and armor-plating in a kind of I Am Legend/Mad Max sort of way. So, since I don't see much of that behavior going on, I have to believe that those who speak such rhetoric, or Share it, or Like it, don't really believe it so much as say it for the relief and release of it. Sometimes things get so confusing and frustrating it feels nice to make simplified radical remarks and damn the consequences or counterarguments. I get that. But, most likely, everybody whose candidate does not win will just get up the next day and go back to work, or maybe buy one of those "Don't Blame Me..." bumper stickers or something expressing a percentage.

I know some people, dear to my heart, who actually espouse the belief the Obama is in fact a Muslim terrorist with secret police who are going to take over after the election. What I can't figure out is why this wasn't accomplished during his first term. Is he just inept at that? When he asks for four more years to "finish the job" are you telling me he's actually referring to his secret Muslim plot to take over America? If so, well, he's a pretty lousy Muslim despot. That should've been accomplished in the infamous "First Hundred Days." It's said that that Presidents reserve their more radical initiatives for their second term. They play it safe the first four years so they don't alienate too many folks. They want to get re-elected. But does that strategy really matter if you're a dictator? If you can't set yourself up as a totalitarian overlord in your first term, I say you're a wuss. You're probably a wuss if you had to be elected in the first place. I'll bet down at the Dictator's Club they laugh at the dude who got into office by election. Military coup - that's the way the big boys play. The only reason I can think of to wait till the second term - to keep the sheep's clothing on until you're sworn in and THEN reveal your true wolfy self - would be if you're toying with all of America in some kind of sadistic James Bond villain style, where you just want to draw out the misery, explain your plan at great length, and maybe rub in the fact that you convinced everyone to vote for Satan not just once, but TWICE. Now that's really something. And then you end the world.

I would also love to see a debate between different conspiracy theorists about whose theory is right. I mean, we've got the secret Muslim terrorist theory vs. the judge in Texas who recently espoused the belief that Obama will let U.N. troops into America to take over. So it's like secret police vs. U.N. troops. Sounds like some kind of Marvel head-to-head issue. And then there are those who think the IRS will fulfill that role just by enforcing healthcare "taxes."

For me, while I may disagree with other people's choices, I can understand and imagine lines of reasoning that justify, for them, their decision. Sometimes I think their facts are faulty, or that they are reacting emotionally instead of logically - but believe me, I've made plenty of emotional decisions (and mistakes). It's the frailty of human nature.

In the good old days, when the whole country seemed to have gone to pot, and everyone seemed crazy and seemed to disagree with you, you loaded up a ship with like-minded folks, had a little sail, found a new chunk of land, conquered the poor natives, and set things up just the way you liked it. Unfortunately, everywhere you go these days, the natives have at least AK-47s, and at least some immunity to whatever diseases your crew is harboring, and they just fight and fight and fight and fight and....taking over new turf just ain't as easy as it used to be.

So I read with interest all the science articles about extra-solar planetary systems, and about recent physics theories postulating that faster-than-light travel and warp drive engines might actually be possible. For that is about the only way out of our current predicament I can see. Then, woe unto extraterrestrials, because here we come with about a hundred different religions and government styles, a bad track record, and not much tolerance.

All I know is, the day after the election, and every future election, I've gotta get up and work and live with ALL the winners and ALL the losers - my friends, neighbors, and countrymen - to continue trying to solve the actual problems of my community - all without any discernible help from the guy who divided us and won.

Who are these people?

8/17/2012

Today, I was reading an article in The Morning Sentinel when I came upon this:

"Romney, who made millions of dollars heading the private equity firm Bain Capital, is skilled at extracting money from supporters.

His Wednesday midday event in Charlotte drew more than 100 people who paid between $2,500 and $50,000 each, netting his campaign about $1.5 million. That night, a somewhat larger crowd at a swank club overlooking Birmingham, Ala., generated more than $2 million, campaign aides said." (emphasis added)

I ask you, who cares THAT MUCH about who is President? Even at my most passionate, I have never yet cared enough about a political cause or candidate to fork out $2,500, much less $50,000 to support it or them. What kind of person does that? Well, first you'd have to be filthy rich. The only things I can afford to spend that much money on are food, healthcare, and my mortgage. Even then, no single grocery store bill is $2,500. Nor can I afford to pay that much to a hospital in one lump. $2,500 means a two-year payment plan, brother. So these have got to be incomprehensibly wealthy people.

Secondly, as stated in my prior post, The Puppet Presidency, the President doesn't really have any power at all to implement his own ideas. He is controlled by someone or something beyond his will. Well, to be willing to pay $50,000 to support a candidate, you've got to be expecting some direct and tangible return on investment to occur within the next four years. You're bidding to be one of the puppeteers who are going to make the marionette President dance. And I'm very sure that I, and most of my peers, can't afford to buy so much as a single string of that control bar.

And I love this: upon looking up the word "marionette", I have just learned that the term for a marionette's puppeteer is "MANIPULATOR".

Healthcare and Socialism

7/31/2012

I was slowly sinking in health insurance hell ($674 a month for a $10,000 deductible, while simultaneously paying about $350/month to hospitals on payment plans for debts accrued from everything under that deductible, which we never hit). Self-employed middle-class with a family of four is a sinking ship. My salvation came when my wife reentered the work-force as a teacher, and teachers still have the best health insurance around, thanks to their powerful union. Thus, the approximately $16,000/year premium for our outstanding coverage - the cushy kind with measly $20 co-pays and such - is paid for 75% by the employer, which is the school, which means the taxpayers, including myself - and you. That's pretty much socialism I reckon. What people don't realize is that wealth transfer is already commonplace. It is conducted by the hospitals and health insurance companies instead of government. Insurance companies charge the healthy higher premiums to pay for the sicker policyholders. Hospitals charge payors more to offset services to non-payors. So what's that? Free-enterprise socialism? Private socialism? The difference between that and government-run socialism is that we have to accomodate a profit-margin in there also. In the same world where our fellow citizens will put money in a coffee can, or hold spaghetti dinners to help a kid fly to another state for an exotic medical treatment to give him a last ditch chance at survival that his insurer won't pay for, those same citizens recoil at the "horror" of all Americans paying some taxes to build a system where we can have a uniformly healthier, and therefore more productive, country. And yet we're obediently paying taxes for wars in godforsaken foreign lands and the wasteful and hopeless pursuit of drug-prohibition. I don't object to paying taxes, if there is a tangible return on investment. As for the wealthy, none of whom I know (well, maybe one) they need to realize the difference between self-interest and selfishness. Self-interest involves intelligence and foresight. It is in the self-interest of the wealthy to have an America full of healthier citizens working to keep the cow producing milk, so to speak. Warren Buffett realizes this, and has spoken on the point. It is in the self-interest of the rich to keep the middle-class and lower-class at least placated enough not to do something...very...uncomfortable for the rich. It's happened many times in history, but the lesson is never learned. Selfishness is just taking more and more and more, in blind greed, until you hear the villagers storming the gates with torches and pitchforks.

Why I Write About Decriminalizing Drugs

5/11/2012

Having formed this opinion over 24 years ago and growing more convinced ever since, why do I care so much about the topic of drug prohibition in our society? First, let’s cover a couple of things.

1) I do NOT want to legalize drugs so that I can use them. I can actually say I have never used any of the drugs currently categorized as illegal. (My parents will be relieved to hear that) I am not a closet pothead who is chomping at the bit (or joint) to toke it up the day marijuana is legalized. You won’t see me chanting “Free The Weed”. I have no emotional attachment to the drug. I don't even want to wear hemp clothes. Like a lot of Americans, I do occasionally consume alcohol.

2) I do NOT believe that legalizing drugs will solve our nation’s, nor our species’, problems with drugs. It may actually increase drug use and possibly addiction, at least for a time. However, I do believe that it will improve or even solve many of our society’s problems with crime, violence, national security, foreign affairs, immigration, governmental overspending, invasion of privacy, and erosion of our civil liberties. And I powerfully believe that those problems have reached levels of severity wherein it is better to choose the problems of drug abuse and addiction and deal with them outside the context of the criminal justice system.

3) I do NOT believe that abusing any substance, including drugs, is “good.” But by the same token, I don’t believe that doing so is necessarily “bad” or “evil.” The badness comes from the effects of the behaviors of drug abuser on their family, their neighbors, and their community. Human history demonstrates that humans enjoy altering their minds with substances, for medicinal, spiritual, recreational, and social purposes, even discounting chemical addiction behaviors. Rather than call it evil, we should accept this aspect of ourselves and responsibly and openly learn how to manage it.

So, why am I outspoken on this topic? Well...

1) Maybe, and I emphasize maybe, I might actually change the opinion of a person or two. But that is unlikely. Changing a person’s opinion about anything is almost impossible through mere rhetoric. Usually, it takes a significant, direct life event to move a person to a change in their beliefs. But hey, it could happen. It’s more likely that I may influence a few people who have just never previously thought about the topic at length. People are going to start having to confront this issue as the mainstream media has finally taken up the topic, and as it starts to affect each of us personally through rising burglary and robbery rates all across the nation. And of course, initiatives to legalize at least marijuana are springing up on ballots everywhere.

2) Mostly, I simply hope to publicize that this is one of the most significant issues confronting and hampering our nation, and the world, at this time. By introducing the topic into daily dialogues and showing how it is connected to so many current issues, I hope to help bring the subject of drug legalization into mainstream discourse, and to make others feel comfortable talking about it without feeling like they’ll be labeled a druggie. There are many, many reasons for people of all political persuasions and all walks of life to support the decriminalization of drugs.

3) I hope to provide an example of a responsible citizen, a lawyer, a father, a community-oriented person, and a non-user, who neverthless believes that decriminalization is the best thing to do for the preservation and improvement of our society. To some degree, I feel I also have a special responsibility to speak out as a lawyer. Lawyers should take the lead in advocating for changes in the law they believe necessary to preserve our nation’s governance by law, our judicial system, our prison system, our Constitutional rights, and the respectability and safety of our law enforcement officers.

By providing such an example, I hope to create an atmosphere where other lawyers, judges, police officers, and especially politicians can feel confident expressing their true beliefs - because in my informal conversations with such people, I believe many have come to the same conclusion as I have. They just don’t think it’s “safe” to speak out yet.

4) I hope to increase awareness that this topic is not one to merely shrug your shoulders about. It affects everyone. Its tendrils creep out into every area of our lives as Americans, even if you have never had an issue with drugs, nor even any family member or friend with addiction issues. You may not realize how embedded in our society this hopeless effort has become and how many people’s careers and how many industries, political decisions, and even wars are based upon it.

For me, therefore, increasing awareness, establishing importance, and creating an atmosphere of “safety” about the topic is enough. From there, I have every confidence that the facts and the crushing economic burden of the situation will inexorably lead to decriminalization. The question is only how much longer we hold on to the failed policies and how much further damage is inflicted upon our society before we muster the courage for change.