Archives

Does the acronym PIPA mean anything to you? Well, it should. It represents the PROTECT IP Act, otherwise known as the Internet Blacklist Bill. This act, currently being considered by Congress, would give the government the power to block access to sites accused of copyright infringement, through control of “information location tools” such as Google. This is a clear case of censorship, and it must be stopped. Demand Progress has already helped 24,000 letters of opposition be sent to Congress, but the more support we have, the more impact we’ll have.

Will you email Congress to urge them to oppose the Protect IP Act?

We are facing significant opposition from corporations such as the Motion Picture Association of America, who are doing everything in their power to discredit our campaign and end our efforts. They have gone so far as to claim that we’ve used fake names on our petition. They’re clearly feeling threatened by the support we’ve gained, which means what we’re doing is working. But we can’t relax now—the most important fight is yet to come, as Congress decides whether or not to pass the bill.

You can help by signing our petition and by contacting your senators through the links provided on our website. By emailing them directly, you’ll be proving the MPAA wrong and making a stand for a free and uncensored Internet. Please help us by telling Congress that this bill is unacceptable.

You can learn more about Demand Progress, our campaigns, and PIPA on our website, demandprogress.org.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

One of the most critical political issues confronting the U.S. Congress right now is something that has never been a political issue before, is universally recognized by every economically literate member of our society to be something that should never be made into a political issue, and yet has become one due the willingness of one ideologically fanatical faction that is gaining increasing political control in this country to blackmail the non-fanatical majority with complete self-destruction unless the latter gives in to the former’s demands. That is the current state of our country.

The issue to which I’m referring is whether to raise the debt ceiling. In fact, the United States is alone among developed nations to have such a provision, the existence of a debt ceiling and the necessity to vote to raise it, because it would be inconceivable not to, and as a result default on the nation’s financial obligations and destroy the nation’s credit ranking. One frequent poster on Colorado Pols offered some historical insight into this “archaic and useless” bit of legislative baggage: http://coloradopols.com/diary/15729/the-debt-ceiling-is-archaic-and-useless.

It is worthwhile to read and listen to some summaries of what the actual effects of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be. Here is Tresury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s response to Senator Michael Bennet’s query on that subject: http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_18066294. And here is a particularly cogent round table discussion, in which all experts from all ideological camps agree with Giethner’s assessment: http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/roundtable-economic-outlook-13607093. Notice, despire the universal agreement among all economic experts, from all ideological camps, concerning how devasting this would be to the U.S., that Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado Springs, CO), quoted in the first article linked to above, said, defending the fact that he has never voted to raise the debt ceiling and never will, “These proclamations and threats mean nothing to me.”

It is a tragic irony that the worst of our catastrophes, the greater part of humanity’s suffering, is inflicted on humanity by humanity itself. The genocides are what underscore this point most emphatically, but the political blackmail that the far-right is now engaged in, while a subtler example, is perhaps a more salient one, for it underscores how ordinary our self-inflicted suffering really is, how easy to avoid, and how easy not to. We have just seen in America the sudden effervensence of a political movement that is based on reducing everything to a few populist platitudes, and the introduction to Congress of some phenomenally unprepared and incompetent representatives who have promised to remain completely faithful to this increasingly institutionalized ignorance.

Now, despite absolute certainty that it would destroy us fiscally and economically, propelling us and the rest of the world into an economic crisis possibly as deep and sustained as The Great Depression itself, these agents of self-destructive stupidity are blackmailing everyone who has an ounce of sense or responsibility that unless they cave in to the economically and socially illiterate demands of this new movement, their newly elected agents will destroy the nation’s economy completely.

Okay, folks. You’ve had your fun. Enough’s enough. Give us our moderately rational, somewhat pragmatic, not entirely insane nation back again. Okay?

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Buy Steve Harvey’s e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

As we all know: The Clean Air Act has been under heavy assault as of late. With a recent legislation proposing to abolish The Clean Air Act, our health and the environment are at stake. With the abolishment of The Clean Air Act, EPA is facing a potential budget cut of nearly one third of its total funds. To make matters worse, the proposed bill is pushing to cut other important environmental initiatives, including:

  • Protecting the public from destruction caused by mountaintop mining.
  • Allowing the public to review offshore drilling permits.
  • Prohibiting oil companies from being exempt to the Clean Air Act while drilling in the Arctic.
  • The restoration and protection of Chesapeake Bay

If the proposed legislation becomes law, the EPA, as we know it, will be completely decimated.  Our air quality, water, and public land quality will be jeopardized. The impact of this bill will ripple through time, negatively affecting generations to come. Without The Clean Air Act, polluters can freely spew mercury into the air we breathe, arsenic into the water we drink, and asbestos and other waste into the reserves that feed our land. Environmental toxins will permeate through the environment, silently ravaging our ecosystem.

The potential health threat this legislation present s is staggering. With an increase in pollution and environmental toxins comes an increase in the number of annual children diagnosed with asthma, brain cancer, mesothelioma, and other serious health problems.  Asthma, even for adults, is one of the largest contributors to work and school absenteeism. The illness results in almost 15 million lost workdays each year. Furthermore, mesothelioma symptoms (a rare cancer that forms on the lining of the lungs) are often mistaken for symptoms of asthma. When this affliction is left undiagnosed, the mesothelioma life expectancy does not generally exceed 14 months.

The fate of the Clean Air Act will be at stake this week as the discussion over government spending ramps up at Capitol Hill. There was a “climate science” meeting this Tuesday, where some of the top climate scientists were able to testify on behalf of the importance of the Clean Air Act.  This meeting, held by The House Energy and Commerce Committee, was the stage for a battle between representatives of the EPA and proponents of the legislation

Representative Ed Whitfield spoke on behalf of the proposed bill at the hearing. He contends that The Clean Air Act will continue to have an adverse effect on the U.S. economy. He furthermore believes that The Clean Air Act is counterproductive because it just forces U.S. manufacturers to relocate to China where they will use environmentally destructive practices anyway.

According to the climate scientists, there is a general consensus that climate change is in fact occurring, with human’s being the main cause. Full committee Chairman, Henry Waxman, drove this point home during Tuesday’s climate science meeting, stating:

The Hill Reports:

“Human-induced climate change is happening, we are already seeing its effects, and harm from climate change is growing,” full committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said in his opening remarks.

And Waxman slammed climate skeptics, arguing they are putting public health at risk by seeking to block EPA’s climate regulations.

“If my doctor told me I had cancer, I wouldn’t scour the country to find someone to tell me that I don’t need to worry about it,” Waxman said. “Just because I didn’t feel gravely ill yet, I wouldn’t assume that my doctor was falsifying the data.”

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

The benefit of striving for the ideal of “the rule of law” is that doing so imperfectly seals out human caprice and the unrestrained exercises of power that such caprice enables. But it does so at a cost, for striving for the ideal of “the rule of law” also imperfectly seals out the ability of unrestrained minds to make nuanced, context-sensitive decisions on a case-by-case basis. The lathe of history, spun with an eye to maximizing the benefit while minimizing the cost (though also with the bias of power resisting its own marginalization), has carved out a balance between relative objectivity (“blind justice”) and nuanced human judgment by allowing decisions in the interstices of established law to continually create new and finer filaments reaching into the endless inner-space of novel fact patterns.

Combined with this is the political game of testing how much ambiguity can be read into words and phrases given from above in the procedural flow-chart of legislating, executing, and adjudicating the law, and to what extent that real or imagined ambiguity can be exploited to stretch and fold the law to desired ends.

While I am about to describe the dynamical, evolving legal structure generated by these forces in static, structural terms, it’s important to remember that it is really an on-going process, one consisting of the movement and manipulation of human cognitions (see The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change for a more comprehensive description of this more general phenomenon). The specific sphere of human cognition most centrally implicated in the generation and evolution of the legal structure is that which is encompassed by policy analysis and legal reasoning, the latter representing finer filaments of the former. As I wrote in a law school final exam essay: 

Legal reasoning is artificially constrained policy analysis. If ethical and political discourse is a ship adrift at sea, then legal reasoning is a ship that has dropped an anchor too light to keep it from drifting, but heavy enough to drag on the seabed and restrict it’s meanderings. Even when the anchor momentarily snags on the kelp of a particular law or legal theory, the ship of legal reasoning still swings in broad arcs defined by the length of the anchor line and the currents of the sea. Of course, the anchor itself, its weight and the length of the line, and the kelp upon which it snags, are shifting functions of the drifting ship rather than exogenous parameters, byproducts of generations of ethical and political reasoning which themselves drift with the judicial-political zeitgeist. And not one but many ships are adrift at once, exploring many areas of law, proliferating and occasionally pruning the thickening forest of kelp while becoming entangled in the growing vines. Legal reasoning, therefore, is a subset of policy analysis, with tentacles branching like veins throughout the universe of ethical and political discourse, according to a fractal geometry generated by an algorithm of “distinctive . . . argumentative techniques” and limiting rules.

The U.S. Constitution and the English common law, together, provide the broad framework within which this cognitive process takes place. The English common law (the accumulated law created by court decisions over the centuries) was adopted and continued by the new United States, the Constitution being the first codification of our own will carved into it. Gradually, Congress and state legislatures continued this process of codification within the universe defined by common law, enacting statutes which superceded the common law, sometimes merely codifying it and sometimes overriding and replacing it. These two levels (state and federal legislation) articulated in their own way, with states building on federal law, and federal law sometimes nationalizing widespread state laws.

Eventually, the complexity of the economy and our demands on government generated the need for finer filaments of codified law, a finer elaboration within the framework of statutory law. Congress (and, to a lesser extent, state legislatures) increasingly delegated essentially legislative responsibilities to executive branch administrative agencies, which promulgated regulations designed to specify more precisely how to define the broad statutes passed by Congress.

As can be seen from the above discussion, the legal structure in America is recursive, with the broad, general outlines of common law and the Constitution filled in by more massive and specific statutes, which in turn are filled in by yet more massive and specific regulations, all carving out codified law from the space historically occupied by common law. But this recursiveness occurs not just in enacted and codified law, but also in the evolution of common law itself, with court decisions occasionally encountering novel fact patterns not perfectly anticipated by existing common law, and, like occasional mutation creating new species, coming to decisions in response to these anomalies which generate new inner-spaces of common law.

This does not exist independently of the courts’ role in interpreting Constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law. Not even the fine filaments of regulatory law can anticipate all contingencies. Courts are left to decide cases in which, occasionally, the specific facts fall within the inevitable remaining gaps in Constitutional, statutory, regulatory, and common law. (In regulatory law, this occurs first in administrative courts with quasi-judicial functions, and only sometimes then end up in Article III judicial courts). This is the mechanism by which the finest filaments of our legal structure are forged.

One can discern in all of this the complementary fractal geometry of government, which exists to create (legislative branch), implement (executive branch), and interpret (judicial branch) the law. Our founding legal and governmental blueprint (the Constitution) provides the simple formula that, when iterated and reiterated over time, generates the branches and twigs and tiny veins of both government and law.  The three branches of government exist at the federal, state, and local levels (the executive and legislative often being combined at the local level, particularly in county commissioners).

Congress is mirrored at the state level by state assemblies and at the local level by city councils, county commissioners, school boards, and transportation (and other special district) boards. The federal executive branch, headed by the president and including the Cabinet and the major executive branch agencies under the control of these secretaries (e.g., departments of state, interior, defense, etc.), as well as the proliferation of regulatory agencies created by Congress, is mirrored at the state level by the Governor’s office and state level administrative agencies, and at the local level by city mayors, county commissioners, school superintendents, and special district board chairmen. Similarly, federal courts (comprised of appellate circuits which in turn are comprised of federal districts) are mirrored, recursively, by state courts (comprised of state districts), county courts, and municipal courts, with specialized courts tucked into this structure. Quasi-governmental entities such as HOAs fill in some of the remaining gaps.

Inevitably, some of this is excessive, redundant, and wasteful. The underlying algorithm generating, continuously, this complex fractal of law and government doesn’t have an “off” switch, and is over-productive in part because of political pressures both to try to cover all bases and to appease all interests. And some of it is oppressive, imposing an excess of controls on individual freedoms, particularly at the micro-quasi-governmental levels (e.g., HOAs).

But the wastefulness and oppressiveness of this throbbing, organic entity tend to be exaggerated, and its utility underappreciated. Some of the redundancy is functional, providing checks and balances, and allowing for efficiencies of less cumbersome and expensive recourses as a first response, in order to siphon off the simpler issues and filter out all but those that need to continue up the hierarchy into more elaborate and involved processes, leaving each issue addressed at the level most appropriate for it. And rules, in reality, can liberate as well as oppress, protecting rights and coordinating our coexstence without requiring us to spend all of our time and energy ordering our coexistence from scratch in an endless trap of institutional amnesia.

The massive size of bills drafted by Congress is as much a function of the complexity of the world in which it is legislating as of the political processes that cause accretions of “pork” to glob on to every piece of legislation. Some of that bulk is due to Congress’ healthy desire to cede as little power as possible to the executive branch, for once enacted legislation leaves Congress and enters the administrative infrastructure, Congress loses control of it. The more gaps Congress leaves to be filled in, the more those administrative agencies end up writing the law, and rewriting it in accord with successive presidents’ ideologies. In other words, even while our laws are a messy product of an imperfect world, they are amazingly adapted to the complex challenges of that complex world even so.

What’s left over after Congress, state legislatures, and local governments carve their enacted law into the space of haphazardly evolved common law is the inner-universe of the unforeseeable, to which the organs of legal production must constantly respond and adapt. This is the function, first, of the judicial branch, at all levels, addressing, on the margins, unique circumstances unanticipated by both existing common law, and existing federal (constitutional, statutory and regulatory), state (constitutional, statutory and regulatory), or local law.

When existing law cannot be interpreted in service to reason, the courts generally must submit to the unreasonable, while, in their written opinions, sending a message to legislators that there is a defect requiring their attention. Depending on the egregiousness of the defect and the political obstacles involved, the defect may or may not be remedied. This process can certainly be improved upon, lubricated and rationalized. While the lathe of time places a constant pressure in favor of doing so, the institutionalized resistance to that pressure can be quite obstinate.

All of this articulates with the processes described in Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, and The Politics of Consciousness. The waxing and waning technologies, social institutions, and ideological beliefs reverberating through the social field create the environment within which the above described processes occur and to which they respond, and the above described processes, in turn, further modify that environment and, by doing so, affect the complementary processes of technological, ideological, and social institutional evolution. The ebbs and flows, expansions and contractions, of all aspects of the social institutional landscape, including technologies, ideologies, religions, norms, rituals, beliefs, and laws, are intertwined and mutually formative.

There are many portals of human intentionality into this system. In fact, it is comprised predominantly of human intentionality. Every act by every person either reproduces or slightly modifies some aspect of this dynamo. Human will and ingenuity insinuates itself in particularly salient ways in several fields, such as academe, writing (both fiction and non-fiction), and engineering. But, of all of these, there is something particularly important about politics, about how we exercise our will in the on-going refinement of the formal rules by which we intentionally provide a context for this all-encompassing human enterprise, a context which determines how robustly our imaginations are activated and their products realized. For it is through the political process that we consciously determine how well or poorly we manage to liberate The Genius of the Many, which is the most valuable of all human and natural resources.

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Due to immediate obligations, I will have to take a break from writing new posts until the end of February. As always, others are welcome and encouraged to post. Please try to do so in the spirit of the blog (which is committed to exploring how best to address social problems as a polity -i.e., through public policy, which inevitably implicates the agency of government, though in what ways and to what degree is certainly open to legitimate debate- rather than whether to address social problems as a polity). Please be assured that, as long as that is your intention, that your contribution, whatever it is, is greatly appreciated.

In the four and a half months since I started this blog, I have published over 200 posts and pages exploring various aspects of our social institutional landscape, almost all of which are of more enduring relevance than posts on typically news-oriented political blogs. Please peruse them through the topics box, or the search engine, or by visiting my Catalogue of Selected Posts. You will find posts on a variety of topics. If you haven’t yet, please read A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill or The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, which describe an integration of analytical thought, social identification messaging, and non-partisan community action, all in service not only to cultivating broader and deeper popular support for policies based on reason and goodwill, but also to improving the quality of such policies, and promoting direct non-partisan mutual assistance in our communities.

For those interested in a complex dynamical systems approach to social theory, I recommend my series of posts on that topic: The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Politics of Consciousness,  Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix.

For those interested in my thoughts about how to make the progressive movement a more powerful and constant force for long-term social and political change in America, see the long list of posts under the heading “The Progressive Policy Program” (the first box on the Catalogue of Selected Posts page).

Please consider referring others to this blog, and posting links to posts that you liked on your own social media accounts. My project is to contribute to (even if  just marginally) and help activate and mobilize “the genius of the many,” in service to humanity’s realization of ever more enlightened states of individual and collective thought and being. History is a braided narrative of both modest and dramatic successes and failures by this measure; clearly, the choices we make determine the balance we achieve between the two. As I frequently repeat: We’re all in this story together; let’s write it well.

See you at the end of February! Cheers!

I will be posting more sporadically until March 2011 (perhaps an average of 2 or 3 new posts per week). As always, others are welcome and encouraged to post. Please try to do so in the spirit of the blog (which is committed to exploring how best to address social problems as a polity -i.e., through public policy, which inevitably implicates the agency of government, though in what ways and to what degree is certainly open to legitimate debate- rather than whether to address social problems as a polity). Please be assured that, as long as that is your intention, that your contribution, whatever it is, is greatly appreciated.

In the three and a half months since I started this blog, however, I have published over 200 posts and pages exploring various aspects of our social institutional landscape, almost all of which are of more enduring relevance than posts on typically news-oriented political blogs. Please peruse them through the topics box, or the search engine, or by visiting my recently updated Catalogue of Selected Posts (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?page_id=698). You will find posts on a variety of topics. If you haven’t yet, please read A Proposal: The Politics of Kindness, which describes an integration of analytical thought, cognitively targeted communication, and non-partisan community action in service not only to cultivating broader and deeper popular support for policies based on reason and goodwill, but also improving the quality of such policies, and promoting direct non-partisan mutual assistance in our communities.

In the meantime, look for a few up-coming posts in the next couple of weeks, including Politics & Social Change, The Alternative to Idolatries, and A Political Christmas Carol.

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Ward Churchill loses appeal to win back CU job: I’m a fan neither of Churchill’s “Little Eichmans” remark, nor of his apparent academic misconduct, but there is an inescapable issue involved when the arguably “good” result of removing him from his position at the University of Colorado is accomplished by the “bad” means of launching an investigation because he said something offensive to public sensibilities. In criminal proceedings, the courts have developed the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine, which throws out any evidence, including derivative evidence, acquired by unconstitutional means. This sometimes leads to “obviously” guilty people going free, when overzealous investigators violate a suspect’s Constitutional rights to acquire evidence against someone who really was guilty, and tank their own case by doing so.  But if we allow such evidence to be admissible, we essentially erase the Constitution in practice, by declaring that as long as we like where its violation leads, we don’t have to adhere to it. Churchill’s case is similar: If we don’t want academic and political speech to be stifled, we can’t allow universities to engage in politically motivated investigations of professors who say things that offend public sensibilities. This particular case of effectively punished speech is a good example: While I find the “little Eichmans” reference offensive to the loved ones of the thousands of innocent people who died on 9/11, I also find it to be a poor articulation of a legitimate argument (that America is not the unambiguously benevolent force on the world stage that it’s citizens like to imagine it to be, and that global resentments of our non-democratic impositions of our power on their lives are not completely unjustified). In the insularity of our own national mythologies and ideologies, we need to protect rather than persecute the voices that bring that perspective to light, even if they sometimes do so in poorly conceived ways.   “Ranked Voting” is an example of room for experimentation and improvement of our democratic system (http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16719992). Illustrating the need to keep using our minds to continue to refine and perfect our political and economic institutions, the tinkering involved in “ranked voting” (in which people rank candidates, and lowest top-rank earners are dropped until one candidate receives an outright majority of the vote) is a good example of useful creative experimentation. Whether this innovation proves to be successful or not, it is the kind of thing we should be considering, testing out, and, when it proves to be an improvement on previous institutional procedures, implementing. There are many improvements, sometimes quite dramatic in their effects, that can be made on the margins, and since the margins are where the greater malleability of reality resides (see http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=1241), they are a good place for political activists to focus a great deal of attention.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Extreme dogmatic ideology, of all varieties, is like the Hydra of Greek mythology: You can keep chopping off its heads with swift strokes of reason and evidence, but two more equally irrational ones grow in the place of each one dispatched. Most often, in fact, the heads that grow back are simply the same as the ones that had been demolished, somehow oblivious to their own demise. It is an endless struggle, with seemingly no torch-bearing Iolaus in sight to cauterize the severed stumps. And the typical answer to often virtually irrefutable presentations of sound analysis applied to reliable evidence, completely debunking positions that consist of arbitrary assertions wrapped in emphatic platitudes, is simply to insist that the platitudes prevailed under the rules of reason. The Hydra’s heads grow back so fast because they do not bother with the burden of including a brain in the bargain.

Here’s a list of a few of those heads, just off the top of my own:

1) The concept of liberty that denies interdependence. (See Liberty Idolatry).

2) The belief that the world is best understood in terms of good guys v. bad guys, with the speaker generally believing that he or she belongs to the former group, and that he or she can tell in one word who belongs to the latter (e.g., “corporations”,”socialists”, “Muslims”, etc.).

3) The belief that any call for the utilization of expert knowledge in the design and implementation of public policy is an anti-democratic insult to everyone who doesn’t possess it, and impossible to balance with the democratic need to hold government officials responsible to the people they represent.

4) The belief that programs to increase opportunities for others (particularly the poor) rob from the rich (or any disgruntled tax payer).

5) The belief that public goods production and meeting the social responsibility to address poverty and other injustices can and should be left to independent individual choices and private charities.

6) The belief that people who participate in the system as it is are necessarily doing so in order to preserve its defects.

7) The belief that politicians are greedier, more corrupt, less moral, and/or less honest than other people.

8) The belief that pettiness, viciousness, and malice are ever anything other than reprehensible behaviors.

9) The belief that all opinions deserve equal respect, and that the popularity of a belief is as sound a foundation as the degree to which it is supported by reason and evidence.

10) The belief that whatever you believe must be reasonable, and whatever arguments contradict it must be irrational, independently of actually having applied reason to the process of arriving at those beliefs.

11) Anti-intellectualism, particularly combined with assertions that the anti-intellectual alternative is more rational than the systematic application of reason to evidence.

12) The habit of engaging in obsessive virtual stalking, expression of a grudge, relentless hatred, name-calling, ridicule, and/or other similar behaviors, while simultaneously both complaining that the person who is the object of your obsession or resentment is the one engaging in it, and insisting on your own moral superiority to them while demonstrating the exact opposite.

13) Making claims that belong to a particular discipline (e.g., law, economics, etc.) without any actual knowledge of that discipline, usually with inordinate certainty, generally far removed from the actual prevailing conclusions of that discipline, often in a rancorous debate with someone actually knowledgable in that discipline.

14) Believing that personal insults, critiques of writing style, observations about alleged personality flaws, or similar forms of engagement, are clever arguments that refute the substantive content that prompted them.

The list goes on, of course. These are just a few of my favorite Hydra Heads, easy to chop off, but impossible to keep from growing rght back again, bigger, dumber, and more belligerent than before.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

A Study by Colorado’s Corrections Department Finds that Solitary Confinement is Good for Mental Health (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16545619). The Department’s chief researcher said of legitimate criticisms of the study, “In any study, there’s always plausible alternative explanations.” The problem is when the plausibility of the alternatives is greater than or equal to the plausibility of the study’s results. That seems to be the case in this study, in which a variety of other identified artificial factors may have caused the results, any one of which is at least as likely as that the results themselves are valid. Rule number one of empirical research: Either isolate the variable, or control for intervening variables. Failure to do that means the study is garbage.

Jews resent Mormon practice of post-humously baptizing Holocaust victims into the Mormon Church (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16545156). What strikes me about this story is that, if you don’t believe in the Mormon religion or in the sanctity of their baptisms, then their fiction doesn’t have to be your reality. I get how insulting this practice appears to be on the surface, and how insulting it is at some level, given the perceptions of those engaging in it (they believe that they are making a relevant decision on behalf of those who died, without any right to do so). But, for my part, if it makes a Mormon happy to baptize me in absentia, or anyone I care about, knock yourselves out. On the other hand, if, for some reason, others involved are unable to dismiss the practice as someone else’s fiction, then their sensibilities are relevant, and do indeed merit consideration.

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Amercan Perceptions of Christianity: What struck me most in the Denver Post article reporting that 1 in four Americans can’t think of any recent positive contribution by Christians was the intergenerational difference among Christians themselves (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16433284). “[R]esearchers noted that Evangelical Christians over age 25 and those who said they are ‘mostly conservative’ on socio- political matters were least likely to list serving the poor as an important contribution.” This confirms what has long been obvious: That the configuration of political beliefs that include Evangelical Christianity, “Constitutional Idolatry”, and a general anti-government/pro-social-injustice-and-inequality-of-opportunity stance includes indifference to the plight of others. Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff, in his book The Political Mind, identified this orientation as a lack of empathy. Whatever policies we design and implement as a nation, whatever balances we strike between efficiency and equity, a lack of empathy should never inform them. More than anything else, this lack of empathy, frequently waxing into outright antipathy toward the poor, combined with a disdain for reason and knowledge, are the principal causes of my vehement opposition to the Tea Party and its fellow travelers. We must never, ever govern ourselves with indifference to human suffering, much less belligerence towards those who are suffering.

Crowdfunding: An example of Wikinomics (Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed), crowdfunding is the use of an internet platform to present “grant proposals” to the public at large, and receive donated support from members of that public who find the idea worthy of their support (http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2010/10/crowd-funding_art). Again, this is triumph of decentralization through reduced transaction costs, allowing an increasing number of publicly funded projects to be funded directly by the public, rather than indirectly through the governmental and non-profit apparatus that has traditionally played the role of gatekeeper.

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Topics