I Hope You're Happy

I was listening to NPR’s story on the inside of a militia group, and I have to admit, I’ve been wrong about the militias, in particular, the extreme Libertarians of the nation. They’re even dumber than they behave. To their credit, there was an interview with a militia which didn’t seem crazy, though they had guns and the usual accessories of the militia movement, but they seemed like responsible citizens with friendly and even helpful ties to the loval law enforcement.

The clip was actually part of a recording an undercover FBI agent made with a Hutaree leader. Here’s the quote:

“In this nation, we think we are free, but you need a certificate to be born, a license to drive or permit to build, a number to get a job and even a paper after you die,” he said in February, unaware that the FBI was secretly recording him. He was in a van with other members of the Hutaree driving to a militia rally in Kentucky. This was part of a speech Stone hoped to deliver there.

Let’s break down his complaint a little one by one here. First, you need a birth certificate. Aren’t these the same people howling for President Obama’s birth certificate? What would they do if there was no birth certificates issued for anybody? They would undermine their own arguments on the constitutionality of any presidential election just to complain about a piece of paper which somehow takes away their freedom. And of course, these guys are the first to complain that Obama is trashing the constitution.

But let’s move on to a license to drive. I live in a state where a former governor is in prison because he offered licenses to unqualified drivers for bribes which wound up killing people. Government is there to govern people. Taking a basic test of moderate driving competency doesn’t seem to me to be an infringment on my civil liberties, but the contrary, putting anybody on the road who fits behind the wheel, seems like it would go a good long way on infringing my right to life. Why not just ignore traffic lights, too? They seem kind of oppressive, especially when they’re Commie red.

A permit to build, well, imagine how much lesser the disaster in Haiti would have been had they had in place building codes. I know in Michigan, it isn’t very seismically active, but there’s big snows, heavy winds and floods, and other severe weather a shelter must be able to withstand. Those permits are required for a reason. You really want to trust your life to a contractor who will cut any corner for a profit and has no oversight in the form of a governmental institution?

A number to get a job. Well, the movement which argues against and begs for a government crackdown on illegal immigrants getting jobs is now aparently against the basic preventative mechanism on this issue. Of course that same number allows you to vote, so without that number, all those illegal immigrants would be electing an illegal immigrant president. This is kind of like the Minutemen complaining the government is building a fence on the border to make their pet issue more enforceable.

And a death certificate, well, if you’re dead, do you really care about one more piece of paper in your life?

These institutions which issue papers and permits evolved over a century often in response to a tragedy or disaster to protect the public, and often the call from the public was for someone to step in to help create a code to keep the public safe. You want an example? Doors that open out on public buildings? A response to a high casualty fire in Chicago where many people died due to inward opening doors which couldn’t open because of the throngs trying to leave. Fire drills? Because of a Catholic School outside Chicago where the teachers didn’t know what to do and so they prayed and dozens of children died. This is what you’re fighting here, guys. You know that?

These are the same people fighting against healthcare. Fighting to continue this system where people go bankrupt because they get sick, where insurance companies will cut you off from life saving care for their profit margin in the guise of personal responsibility. I find it ironic they are fighting against a mandate to personal responsibility in the name of personal responsibility because Fox News called the health bill a government takeover. This is America. If you hadn’t noticed, we aren’t very good at personal responsibility. We don’t do that here. It just doesn’t fit our “thing.”

I understand it. I really do. Those papers are holding you down, man. Time to grab the full auto and pretend to kill some people. Makes perfect sense.

Watch this, the whole thing it just keeps getting worse.

Thanks for student journalism.

Congress is starting to make noises about Chinese currency manipulation, typically five years too late and without much going in the way of a plan. The problem is, nobody wants to start a trade war and possibly jeopardize the flow of cheaply made and unreliable goods into this country, nor anger the government that gives us lots of money to run up those huge deficits Republicans like to make and then deny. Ok, I’m not making friends, so let’s move on.

The issue from our side is Chinese wages are so low, tremendous amounts of our manufacturing has shifted to our communist overseas leaving us with a dearth of jobs and a lust for the cheap stuff. This works out great for China, since they have a pretty massive need for jobs for its population. Thing is, China keeps and official exchange rate, which is the same every day, rain or shine, no matter what the market does, hence the charges of currency manipulation.

Now the problem. The usual means of protesting this is to make sounds about putting in tariffs on the goods to correct the currency imbalance, and if they call us on the bluff, then we actually do it. But this will only escalate the problem, and they will push their interests and well, international tensions are not a good thing right now, given certain global economic meltdowns happening at the moment.

Of course, there are other global problems that could distract us all from these issues, and make the whole thing a muddled mess, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Hey wait a minute…

It seems to me we can work towards a solution to both problems at the same time. You see, a lot of the problems of Afghanistan and Iraq come down to having jobs. In Afghanistan, men will fight for the Taliban for a few days or longer just to feed their families. Farmers grow poppies instead of food because they make more money. In Iraq, there are similar issues, some of the soldiers of the militias we fought after the war were working for money, not ideals. What they want are jobs, American money, better lives.

This is where the issues overlap. Now, I know there are some problems with this plan. Afghanistan is not the technological capital of the world, and many of the people we’re talking about are the least skilled of people in the world. We can start with less complicated products, or find places with sufficient technological resources, like India or Brazil, nations which are our allies. We could send some of our manufacturing to Haiti and Chile, reduce the need for the massive aid being projected for future rebuilding, and at the same time cut down on the carbon emissions of shipping all of this across an ocean.

And there are other issues, the ports of these nations may not be as advanced, but demand is the mother of infrastructure, and infrastructure puts people to work, furthering our goals in these nations even more.

So here’s the idea, instead of getting involved in a trade war in Asia (almost as bad as a land war), we could provide tax breaks or subsidies to companies who will move new manufacturing or existing Chinese manufacturing away from Communist China (this will get the Republicans behind it for sure), and get our consumer greed working for us.

Imagine the fear in China when their growth is threatened, and even better, they may begin to lose jobs.

Occasionally, I’ll find an article about some paranormal event that I can use for reference here. I read a lot of paranormal weird news because it serves as inspiration for some of my scifi-fantasy-horror writing. I think it’s a good subject for comparison. We have a subject that only a handful of people really know about, and a divided knowledge base that feels passionately about their issue. This one is about bigfoot bones.

Scientists feel they have a pretty good grasp on the fauna of North America, and the ecology. They feel if a large hominid were wandering the wilderness, well, they’d have found it by now. They also feel that there’s no ecological niche open that could support a population of such large creatures, largely a matter of math in studying available food supplies. They also feel there’s a lack of evidence, no carcasses, feces or tissues, no bones.

And that’s where cryptozoologists come in. They come up with ways of studying the animals, and theories based on whatever science they think they can come up with. Sometimes its the crankiest of the cranks, and sometimes its really quite valid at least in procedure. Loren Coleman is one of the more prominent cryptozoologists which does not mean he’s the best scientifically, but he has a new theory about where the bones are. I’ll keep you in suspense until a bit later.

Now let’s imagine the issue is health care, and specifically, the cost of a version of the bill. The way it is working right now, the Democrats come up with a bill and they have an estimated price tag. The bill is sent to the General Accounting Office and while they crunch their numbers, the Republicans come up with another number, usually twice as expensive as, or three times as expensive as, or something along those lines, whatever doesn’t seem too far out of line but at the same time with a sufficiently scary number of zeroes. Then the GAO eventually comes up with a price tag that is between the two. This goes on with many bills on many issues, and the party roles can be reversed depending on the issue and who is in teh majority and which way the wind is blowing.

The dollar values are sometimes wildly off base, and we let everyone else, i.e. the media to fact check everyone else, and then the talking heads get involved, and a teaparty or two happens, and nobody knows what is true anymore.

And think about the birth certificate issue, or Obama’s religion, or any other of these iffy issues. How likely is it Obama was born in Africa? The simplest facts say his birth certificate, regardless of folds, or certification, is from Hawaii. The conspiracy theories rely on shaky evidence to make their case, and the math of the opposition should always be suspect.

What it comes down to is porcupine dens. Yes, that’s where the bones are. All of them. You can read it for yourself. He says porcupines like to hoard bones in Africa, and by extension America.  Sounds good, right? Well, until you think for a minute about how many bigfoot (bigfeet?) there must be out there, compared to porcupines, and I’ve never even seen porcupines in the wild and I’ve been to some areas where Bigfoot is known to be sighted on camping trips and the like. Those must be some busy porcupines, and they must be sitting on a veritable elephant’s graveyard of bigfoot bones. And how are they so good at collecting ALL of the bones? I thought beavers were busy, but porcupines, must be a full time job collecting all of those bones. Do they have swap meets or conventions for bones collectors? Doesn’t sound likely to me.

That’s why I try to look at all of these accusations skeptically. I don’t take either side at their word. They have reasons to skew their numbers, ad they have errors in their calculations. The GAO is theoretically impartial, and probably the best official source for the figures. But in the end, I try my best to find out what each side says and get some sense of reality from all of them. I don’t believe in porcupine dens without having a good reason to do so, and neither should you.

Further proving the Republicans would rather lie, embellish, and make congress into a circus than make a practical political argument, they are now comparing the 208 pages of the health care bill to War and Peace, a novel of 1,456 pages (they aren’t very good at math either). They haven’t read it, but they taped it together and let it unroll down the steps of the capitol, they’ve reprinted it double spaced and in large font to make it look bigger than it is, they’ve even sent the NRA in to lie about it. Apparently, reading isn’t high on their skills list.

I call this the “featherless biped” approach to politics. You may recall the story of Plato attempting to define what a human is, and this is what he came up with. A rival plucked a chicken and let it loose proclaiming it to be Plato’s man. Sadly the name of the rival is lost to history, which should tell you something about the effectiveness of the counter argument.

The lesson is, it doesn’t add anything to the argument.

Now the Republicans have a counter proposal for health care reform and it’s hardly War and Peace. In fact, its only four pages. I may not have read the Democrats plan, and I may not agree with everything in it (in fact I’m sure I don’t), but I’m pretty sure our health system needs more than two pages of overhaul.

The irony is their plan, according to the GAO, would drive up prices and not insure any more people than there are currently.

The funny thing is, a lot of what I’m reading about their plan is in the Democratic plan, too.

There is this funny thing where they call for the state insurance exchanges, because the individual market is so stacked against individuals, it is unfair, and citizens need government regulation to help them with their health care. You heard that right.