Todayâs Super Bowl marks the end of the football season, but still overshadows the political silly season, that will be with us for what will seem to be a long, long time.
Things to look for in Super Bowl 50:
“And, when we score a touchdown, make sure you know your assignments for the end-zone celebration.”
And what to look for in your living room:
But, even at the Super Bowl, the problem of football concussions isnât going away:
So far, the Democratic race is between an idealist Grandpa and a wonk Grandma:
In New Hampshire the political woods are full of free running saps:
Something not so super this week was this dickhead:
Americans worry that robots could make their jobs irrelevant. A new study shows that they may be correct. The report, Technology at Work v 2.0: The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, was conducted at University of Oxford in association with Citibank. Researchers Carl Frey and Mike Osborne, co-directors of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, found that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation in the next two decades.
They also found that the city where you live may influence the risk of your work being automated. Among metro areas, Boston faces the lowest percentage of jobs likely to be automated, while Fresno, Calif., faces the highest. The cities that fared best in the survey have a cluster of skilled jobs, typically because they have developed a strong tech sector. Boston, for instance, which is home to a number of top universities and has many well educated residents, has become a global technology hub, transitioning successfully from its roots as a shipping center and manufacturing economy to a tech/finance center.
Here are the best/worst rankings:
Even in cities with the lowest percentage of jobs at risk of automation, nearly 40% of jobs could disappear because of technological innovation, the report finds. So how many workers are we talking about? The BLS reports that in December, 2015 our working population was 149.9 million; 40% of that number would be 60 million people unemployed in the next 20 years. Perhaps it wonât be that bad, maybe 20-30 million jobs will replace the approximately 60 million we stand to lose.
No politician will be able to paint a happy face on THAT.
Skeptics will say not to worry, that the economy has always adapted over time, and created new kinds of jobs. The classic example they use is agriculture. In the 1800s, 80% of the US labor force worked on farms. Today itâs 2%. Obviously, mechanization didnât destroy the economy; it made it better. Food is now really cheap compared to what it used to cost, and as a result, people have money to spend on other things and theyâve transitioned to jobs in other areas.
But, the agricultural revolution was about specialized equipment that couldnât be transferred to other industries. You couldnât take farm machinery and have it flip hamburgers. Information technology is totally different. Itâs a broad-based general purpose technology.
There just wonât be new jobs available for all these displaced workers.
There will certainly be many new industries, (think nanotechnology and synthetic biology), and those jobs will be highly paid. But they wonât employ many people. Theyâll use lots of technology, rely on big computing centers, and be heavily automated.
Think about what Facebook and Twitter have added to the jobs economy: They are two of our very âbestâ success stories, and they only employ 8,100 workers. They have had a huge impact on society, and have created significant value for their owners, but the total jobs they have created are only a rounding error in the US economy.
Much of what we buy is produced in factories increasingly run with robots, and maintained and operated by small cadres of engineers. Also, keep in mind that globally, some 3 billion people are already looking for work and the vast majority are willing to work for less than the average American.
So, we can expect an ever-greater number of unemployed chasing an ever-shrinking number of jobs that canât be eliminated or simplified by technology. Thus, the prognosis for many of our medium and some higher-skilled workers appears grim.
Incomes will continue to stagnate, because automation does not threaten unskilled jobs. This is sometimes called âMoravecâs Paradoxâ, which says that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires relatively little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The âRoombaâ robotic vacuum cleaner remains just an expensive toy. It has had zero impact on the market for janitors and maids like a rechargeable cordless sweeper has done, yet, wages for American janitors and maids have fallen because of competition from the currently unemployed and newly arrived immigrants.
If we forecast continuing technology breakthroughs (and we should), and combine that with the 3 billion people currently looking for work globally, we have to conclude that the planet is overpopulated if the goal is a growing global middle class.
This is why the quest for better technology has become the enemy of sustaining middle class job growth in the developed world.
âEverybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.â – Mike Tyson
The primary season clown show has moved on to New Hampshire. Republicans will see more mud wrestling between Cruz and Trump, while Rubio, Kasich and Christie try to elbow their way in to be one of the top two by next Wednesday.
Iowa showed that the Democrats will have a tough time choosing between the candidates, both of whom will struggle to refine the message(s) they need to take to South Carolina and beyond in order to win the nomination. Like that great philosopher Mike Tyson says, now the top two in each party need to present a plan that connects with voters nationally.
⢠A single-payer health care system
⢠Universal pre-K and free college tuition at our state universities
⢠Guaranteed sick leave and vacation for every employee
⢠A minimum wage of $15/hour
⢠The big banks broken up, and Glass-Steagall reconstituted
⢠Our campaign finance system is reformed
⢠The super-wealthy should pay for it all
Hillary is saying we canât get all that:
⢠We must focus on what can be accomplished, not what Sanders is proposing
⢠Single-payer is a nice idea, but is too politically toxic to be viable
⢠She agrees with Sanders about sick and maternity leave
⢠College shouldnât be free for all, some should pay, mostly because their parents can afford it
⢠Breaking up the big banks isnât the best way to address financial market risk
⢠$15/hour is too high a minimum wage, $12/hour is realistic
⢠Since Republicans will control at least one house of Congress next year, theyâll never vote for what Sanders proposes
Hillary is in a difficult position. Sheâs telling people that they canât have the things they want. Every parent understands this, but Clinton is also saying: âhis policies can’t winâ, all the while she is thinking: âI can get some of this through Congress.â
That may not be a winning message, particularly if Sanders is still running in a dead heat with Clinton in April. His charm is that heâs not willing to settle for campaigning on a platform that is calibrated to work in our gridlocked politics.
So, will Hillary change if she canât shake Bernie? And what would her new message be?
She needs to start by finding a way to relate to an electorate that has limited interest in politicians like her who speak for the status quo.
Todayâs voters say that the status quo is unacceptable. In fact, thatâs the only thing everyone in America seems to agree about right now. And since 60% of the Democratic delegates actually get selected in March, Clinton needs a message better calibrated to meet todayâs political realities, or she risks losing the nomination, or winning it only after a fight that weakens her party.
It is true that if elected, either Clinton or Sanders will be in virtually the same place regarding what they can actually achieve. The big difference today is in the vision they are laying out, and whether the voters will buy it. Will they buy a president who articulates unobtainable goals and blames the .01%, or do they want a president who articulates modest, but still unobtainable goals?
Would the electorate buy that her insider status would bring about some (or all) of her goals?
Candidate Clinton is running primarily on her resume. She presents us with a CV of job titles, not accomplishments, and if there is a campaign persona that she is embracing, it is the idea of being a lifelong fighter. But will that be enough? From the 2/2 NYT:
…she still faces an authenticity problem, even among Democrats. Some 47% of likely Democratic primary voters said that they felt Mrs. Clinton said what voters wanted to hear, rather than what she believed. 62% said they believed Mr. Sanders said what he thought…
Clintonâs liabilities as a campaigner could be lessened by treating the campaign more like a struggle between opposing parties instead of one between political celebrities. Overall, she performs well enough as a candidate. She debates well, she interviews well.
Her argument should be: if you want to see the incomes of the middle class grow, if you want to retain Constitutional freedoms that are under attack by a conservative Supreme Court, if you want to keep Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs like Obamacare, if you want less foreign adventurism, then you have to vote Democratic regardless of what you think of Hillary Clinton.
While the decision makers at news organizations…scramble to appeal to younger viewers, [the] Republican and Democratic voters in Iowa and nationally have embraced a remarkably âmatureâ handful of top tier candidates.
How mature?
⢠Donald Trump will turn 70 next year
⢠Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will be 75
⢠Hillary Clinton will turn 69 a couple of weeks before the 2016 elections
There are younger Republican candidates: Ted Cruz is 45, and Marco Rubio is 44. The Democrat former Maryland Gov. Martin OâMalley is 53.
According to a January 18-24 Quinnipiac University poll of likely Democratic voters, Sanders held a 78% to 21% lead among voters age 18 to 44 over Clinton. The younger OâMalley polls at just 2%.
So, the networks are trying to attract the young voter demographic, while young voters overwhelmingly like a few of the older candidates. But, will younger voters actually vote? Their recent record isnât reliable: Young voters turned out in big numbers in 2008 and then stayed home in record numbers in 2014. Did young Dems take a short nap in 2014 or have they turned their backs on democracy?
We donât know for sure, but there is some bad news: Research by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk shows growing disillusionment with democracy â not just with politics or campaigns, but with democracy itself: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
This growth is worldwide, but it is especially strong among young Americans. Fewer than 30% of Americans born since 1980 say that living in a democracy is essential. For those born since 1970, more than one in five describe our democratic system as âbad or very bad.â Thatâs almost twice the rate for people born between 1950 and 1970.
Foa and Mounk wrote in the NYT that political scientists are well aware that poll after poll shows citizens to be more dissatisfied than in the past. Yet they resist the most straightforward conclusion: that people may be less supportive of democracy than they once were. This raises a strange question: Could the political system in our seemingly stable democracy be heading for a fall?
Think about it. People say they like democracy less than they used to. While most Americans still have a deep emotional attachment to the Constitution, respect for the rules of our democracy are also eroding. The rise of politicians who are critical of key aspects of liberal democracy, like freedom of the press, or universal voting, or the rights of minorities, is even more disconcerting.
Citizens are aware of this disconnect. When asked by the World Values Survey to rate how democratically their country is being governed on a 10-point scale, a third of Americans now say: ânot at all democratic.â
Letâs hope that this is a transient phenomenon. What explains the down-tick? Itâs probably related to:
⢠Lack of optimism caused by stagnating incomes. This disproportionately effects the young.
⢠Rising income inequality, which effects all citizens.
⢠Attempts by the rich to game the political system, often through Super PAC donations.
In fact, the rich are now more likely to be critical of democracy than the poor. According to the World Values Survey, in 1995, less than 20% of wealthy Americans (those in the top income quintile) approved of having a âstrong leader who doesnât have to bother with Congress or electionsâ. Today, more than 40% support that view.
Itâs not clear what young voters think is a better alternative to representative government, but who can blame them for not being enamored with their current political representation?
According to the US Census Bureau analysis of the voting population from 1964-2012 indicates a decrease in voting in all age groups, except for the 65 years and over group, who voted at nearly a 70% rate, while the 18-24 voted at 36% . But in 2008, 18-24 year olds did increase their numbers–the Obama factor.
Bottom line: If you want to make democracy work, you must get not only young people, but all the people who have given up on democracy involved again. But we cannot simply rely on charismatic individuals to help young voters awaken their political selves. We must restore their faith in democratic politics.
This is the very best argument for a Bernie-style political revolution.
American Experience ran a documentary called âThe Mine Warsâ on January 26th. It told the story of West Virginia coal minersâ battle against mine owners at the start of the 20th century.
Few know that the WV mine workers struggle against the mine owners led to the largest armed insurrection after the Civil War and turned parts of West Virginia into a war zone that required federal troops to pacify.
The battle started in 1920 with a shootout in Matewan, WV. It was triggered by a plan by the United Mine Workers (UMW) to organize Mingo County, where Matewan is located, and the thuggish reaction by mine owners. There is a fine movie that documents this, âMatewanâ, by John Sayles.
The town’s union-sympathizing Police Chief Sid Hatfield confronted a group of private detectives from the Baldwin-Felts company who were hired by the coal mine owners. The detectives had come to Matewan to evict the families of unionized miners. The âBattleâ of Matewan left seven Baldwin-Felts men dead, along with the mayor and two townspeople.
Some background: Workers were paid based on the weight of the coal they mined. Each car brought from the mines theoretically held a specific amount of coal (2,000 pounds). However, cars were altered by owners to hold more coal than the specified amount, so miners would be paid for 2,000 pounds when they actually had brought in 2,500. In addition, workers were docked pay if rock was mixed in with the coal. Miners mostly lived in company-owned homes, and were forced to shop at company-owned stores.
The UMW started organizing and striking in WV in 1912. When the strikes began, the mine owners used hired guns to inflict plenty of violence on miners and their families.
There is a sordid history of similar efforts throughout the US. Check out the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.
But before WWI, the UMW was unsuccessful in changing working conditions or wages for miners. The US entry into WWI in 1917 sparked a boom in demand for coal, also bringing increasing wages. After the War, demand for coal fell, and so did minersâ wages.
At that time, the largest non-unionized coal region in the eastern US were WVâs Logan and Mingo counties, and the UMW made them a top priority. Mine owners in Logan bought off the Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin to keep the union out of the county. In 1921, after increasingly violent confrontations with the owners and their hired guns, miners moved to fight back.
In August, approximately 5,000 armed union men entered Logan County. Logan city was protected by a natural barrier, Blair Mountain. Chafin’s forces took positions at the top of Blair Mountain, while the miners assembled near the bottom of the mountain. There were skirmishes and deaths. On September 1, President Harding sent in federal troops to break up the battle, and the miners soon surrendered to the feds.
By 1924, UMW membership in the state had dropped by about 50% of its total in 1921.
Mine owners also engaged in a PR campaign that portrayed the UMW as âBolsheviksâ. The Red Scare in 1919-1920 was based on fears that the labor movement would lead to radical political agitation, or would spread communism and anarchism within the country. This sense of paranoia was driven in part by the mining companies.
Does any of this sound familiar? How many red scare equivalents have we had in the last 100 years?
Corporations have always been at war with workers. Hereâs the real question: Is it possible for capitalism, by its very nature, NOT to incite a constant battle between the .01% and everyone else?
Probably not. Class is a feature of capitalism, so it follows that class conflict will always be part of capitalist economies. We may find ways to mitigate the effects of that conflict, but it will always be a struggle to do so.
At the same time, we see every day that the interests of private capital are not aligned with the needs of society as a whole. We re-learn these lessons because our public institutions periodically get co-opted by capital. Until private capitalâs stranglehold over our political process is ended, it will always try to rig the system.
The miners’ struggle in West Virginia was not just a backwoods conflict. The WV experience has direct relevance to todayâs American economy, to todayâs capitalists, and to the state of labor in America today.
What happened in West Virginia is an object lesson for what all of America might look like with unfettered corporatism.
Take a look and listen to Lee Dorseyâs 1966 hit âWorkin in Coal Mineâ written by the late, great Alan Toussaint:
For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.
Big week for news. The Bundy standoff winds down, Trump & Fox, Planned Parenthood, Iowa, and Barbieâs makeover. Most of Bundy Brigade have been arrested:
But Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, a 54-year-old Arizona rancher was killed at an FBI checkpoint. Finicum seemed deluded but decent, thinking he was doing his patriotic duty. But like the rest, he was misled by bad information, and a barrage of lies. Despite what extremists claim, there are no internment camps positioned to lock up patriots, no black helicopters waiting to attack, no government agents massing to confiscate guns, and no reason for citizens to occupy government land with arms. But because there are earnest-but-gullible citizens who take these lies to heart, Finicum may not be the last martyr for a ridiculous cause.
Fox debate is shadow of former self:
The Trump/Kelly poutrage was brilliant strategy:
Cruz still pushinâ his values in Iowa:
Cruz looks to be auditioning for attack-dog vice presidential contender. Wherever Spiro Agnew is now, he must be smiling and nodding in approval.
Iowa will be over soon. Whatâs next?
Planned Parenthood grand jury surprised everybody:
Apparently we misunderstood what it meant to come to this country to practice religious freedoms â it really is the freedom for the guy on the right to force everyone else to follow his religion.
⢠In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56% of all white voters and won in a 44-state landslide.
⢠In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59% of all white voters, yet lost decisively.
⢠In both 2008 and 2012, Republicansâ best result was with white voters without college degrees. They carried them by 14% in 2008 and 26% in 2012.
Reich offers two answers: First, that the Republicans skillfully played the race card from the 1960s through to today. Reich makes the point that in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. And later, Ronald Reagan charged Democrats with coddling black âwelfare queens,â while George HW Bush accused them of being soft on black crime (Willie Horton), and all Republicans say that Democrats use affirmative action to give jobs to less-qualified minorities over more-qualified whites.
Reichâs second point is that Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and in that time they largely abandoned the white working class, doing little to prevent the wealthy and powerful from rigging the economy for the benefit of those at the top. On the other hand, at the time Bill Clinton ran for president, the Democratic Party had lost three straight presidential elections and won only two out of the previous six. That political reality certainly had an effect on policy.
During the Obama years, Democrats did produce some weak tea for the middle class and the poor â including the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Reich goes on to indict our most recent Democratic presidents:
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class.
Reich says that partly as a result of NAFTA, union membership sunk from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economyâs gains.
Finally, Dems turned their backs on campaign finance reform. After 2010âs Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the floodgates to big money in politics were opened. Reich again indicts Democrats: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.
Can the Democrats earn back the working class voter? Well, when the dogs wonât eat the dog food, it may be time to think about changing brands. Any competent politician knows that. When 45% of the electorate claim to be independents, something is wrong with both parties. The White Working Class is being ignored by the Democrats and is courted by the Republicans, although with less and less success, unless you happen to think that Donald Trump is a Republican.
What has the wage earning class gained from the Democrats? Social and economic betrayal. From the Republicans? War and economic betrayal. They watch jobs disappear to Asia, and see increased competition from immigrants. Many feel threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees white Middle Americans as Christian bigots and 2nd Amendment fanatics.
But they are also threatened by Republicans who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their unemployment.
These are the reasons why Sanders and Trump are able to compete with the establishment elites of both parties. But nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class. They would need to:
⢠Have a vision that would create economic growth that was not based on trickle-down
⢠Build a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been or is currently being shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the investor class and the salaried class
Will Democrats stop obsessing over upper-income suburban voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy?
If we add together the polling numbers of Trump, Sanders and Cruz, it’s clear that a majority of the electorate is ready for a president from well outside the political mainstream.
Start with the Trump slogan, âMake America Great Again“. Itâs the first time in Wrongoâs memory that an explicit admission that America isn’t so great has been heard in an American presidential election. In a world where American Exceptionalism is settled dogma, how and why can a Republican say âwe ainât so greatâ, and be so successful?
Of course, that same dynamic also drives the willingness of voters to support the Democratic Socialist, Sanders. Bernie offers a different solution to the economic woes that the two parties have inflicted on us in the 35 years since we elected Ronald Reagan. Now, a substantial and very motivated part of the electorate on both the right and left, is telling pollsters that something different has to be on the table.
The old electioneering rules wonât work. We are in a time of anger and anxiety. Republicans go for the emotional jugular every day, while establishment Democrats are still trying to make points with a mix of policy, pragmatism and feel-good idealism. Democrats will have to decide whether they see the current political landscape as an opportunity to free themselves of these old terms of debate, or take full ownership of them moving forward.
Regardless of the GOP candidate, emotion will dominate their argument for the White House. John Michael Greer had an insightful piece last week about ways to look at voter motivations in America:
The notion [is] that the only divisions in American society that matter are those that have some basis in biology. Skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilityâthese are the lines of division in society that Americans like to talk about, whatever their attitudes to the people who fall on one side or another of those lines.
The axiom in politics is that voters in these âdivisionsâ tend to vote as blocs, and campaigns are designed to bring the bloc to the candidate. Thatâs less true today. Greer takes a deep dive into todayâs politics, suggesting the largest differentiator:
It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they [earn] most of their income?
He posits that itâs usually from one of four sources: returns from investments, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income in one of those four ways have political interests in common, so much so that itâs meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investor class, a salaried class, a wage class, and a welfare class.
The old divisions, women, gay people, people of color, are found in all four income classes. Finally JMG has a killer thought: The political wave that Trump and Sanders are riding has roots in the answer to another simple question: Over the last half century, how have the four classes fared? The answer is that three of the four have remained roughly where they were. The wage class in particular has been destroyed. And the beneficiaries were the investor and salaried classes. They drove down wages, offshored production, and destroyed our manufacturing base. More from JMG:
I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American political life, the point at which the wage classâthe largest class of American voters…has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing back against the ascendancy of the salary class.
That pushback could become a defining force in American politics. The problem with that viewpoint is that their desired change is anti-business and anti-middle-class. And THAT change is not acceptable to those who control our politics, most of whom are squarely in the investor and salaried classes.
And a Trump candidacy is not the worst form it could take. If Trump is sidelined by another establishment type, a future leader who takes up the cause of the wage class could very well be fond of armbands or, of roadside bombs. Like the Bundy Brigade on steroids.
Once the politics of resentment becomes a viable strategy, anything can happen.
Read Greerâs analysis. Think about how the salaried class attack on Bernie as “socialist” might actually play out for Sanders, assuming he could analyze and communicate what is really going on here.
Think about how Hillary Clinton might stumble over the problems of the wage class, given her fervid support from the investor and salaried classes.
The usual fight for independent voters using conventional wisdom will not succeed in this political cycle.
Today many are still digging out from the big blizzard, and are getting off to a slow start, but todayâs Wake Up is for those who think the answer to domestic terrorism is to get tough with American Muslims, to isolate them, to deport them, or to prevent them from getting gun permits.
Peter Bergen has an article in the current Wall Street Journal Weekend, âCan We Stop Homegrown Terrorists?â in which he reports on the threat posed by domestic Muslim terrorists: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
We found that American jihadists are overwhelmingly male (only 7% are women), and their average age is 29. More than a third are married, and more than a third have children. A little more than one in 10 has served time in prison, similar to the rate of incarceration for all American males, and around 10% had some kind of mental-health issue, which is lower than the general population. In everything but their deadly ideology, they are ordinary Americans.
Bergen reports that in 2015, the FBI investigated supporters of ISIS in all 50 states, and more than 80 Americans were charged with some kind of jihadist crime. It was the peak year since 2001 for law-enforcement activity against Americans who had chosen to join a group or accept an ideology whose goal is to kill fellow Americans. Bergen has assembled a data base of about 300 jihadists indicted or convicted in the US for some kind of terrorist crime since 9/11.
In analyzing the threat, Bergen says:
These individuals represent just a tiny fraction of an American Muslim population estimated at more than 3 million, but 300 homegrown jihadists is still 300 too many. Is the US intelligence and law-enforcement community any closer to knowing how to identify such would-be terrorists and stop them before they act? There has been definite progress, but the sobering truth is that…we are likely to be dealing with this low-level terrorist threat for years to come.
We have no way of knowing if we are at the start of a wave of domestic terror, but it sure feels ominous right now, like something could be coming. But we need to get one thing straight â domestic terrorism, whether by Muslims, Christians or others, can never be totally eradicated. As long as there are people with grievances who don’t believe they have a means to get those grievances addressed, there will be terrorists.
Bergen found that post 9/11, 45 Americans have been killed by jihadists in 15 years. Thatâs three per year.
But not all homegrown terrorists are Muslims. We had terror attacks by the Unabomber, the “Mad Bomber” and McVeigh at Oklahoma City. Ted Kaczynski, George Metesky and Timothy McVeigh weren’t Muslims, they were angry. Anger can transcend religion or even, the lack of a religion. And today, we have not only our general gun death epidemic, but more specifically, our homegrown red blooded Americans who like to shoot up schools, malls, theaters and churches.
Just last week, two Colorado teen-age girls were indicted for planning to replicate Columbine.
Can we stop homegrown terrorists? No, not even if we take all of We, the Peopleâs Rights away (well, maybe not the Second Amendment). No free society can stop free citizens from doing whatever they freely decide to do, up to and including converting to Islam and blowing themselves up. So thatâs our choice: are we going to continue to be a free society?
Our choice is between having the government acquire more power and spending money in the name of our safety. Or, keep what remains of our Bill of Rights and accept that lone wolf terrorist acts will happen on our soil.
All that can be done is to reduce the amount of terrorism to the absolute minimum. Bergenâs article talks about some of those techniques, but terrorism will always be with us.
And acknowledging that reality is not appeasement. Those who choose to be terrorists will become so, regardless of what the law requires or the people desire.
To help you wake up to the routine prejudice Muslims face in the homeland of the free, here is âTerrorism is not a Religionâ, a poem by Hersi. He is a former US Marine and veteran of Iraq, and is by birth, a Somali Muslim. In this video he recounts his experience as a Muslim in the American school system and the US military:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
For those in the Northeast who hate the snow, remember, there is no such thing as bad weather. There is only inappropriate clothing. Be careful driving, if you must drive.
The climate forecast is grim:
Doesnât matter if you call it âclimate changeâ or âglobal warmingâ. The denialism by the right in the US isnât held elsewhere. The scientific opinion is held by the rest of the world. Not based on a single opinion, or by snark, but from the overwhelming result of scientific research.
Palin endorses Trump, and the GOP takes notice:
Trump said Palin could get a cabinet job. Liberals are contemptuous of her lack of knowledge, critical thinking skills, and judgment, but none of these are crimes. A good example of Palinâs qualities occurred when she blamed Obama for her son Track beating up his (Track’s) girlfriend. Palin said that his getting drunk, beating the crap out of his girlfriend and brandishing a gun was caused by Trackâs military service, that perhaps he has PTSD. She then went on to blame Obamaâs policies for her sonâs behavior. It takes an immense level of cynicism, opportunism, and some cruelty to exploit your childâs struggle for political gain.
The Dems have a problem:
This is not the first year that Democrats doubt they are putting their best person forward. Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 come to mind. Oh, and they lost 3 of those 4 elections!
