The Least of These

    One thing I've learned since I started to do this, tongue-in-cheek seriously,  is you can actually learn something new by blowing your pie hole.  Somehow, in defending our government's role in providing for the general welfare I managed to inform myself of what that role should be and how we arrive at that balance. I'm real big on having our actions meet our original concepts.  I don't know that those concepts should be referred to as values but I'm big on semantics too.
    I don't believe in the idea of government largess.  I don't think it's a legitimate function of the government.  I also don't think there's much largess extended by the government no matter what we may have heard; at least not to the poor.  We have managed to elevate big parts of this country from literal third world status in the last 50 years or so.  Some people disapprove.  I'm kinda proud of that. Glad I could help in my small way.  It is as it should be for a very good reason.  Grinding poverty drags down all of us from the working class to the famous 1%.  We owe it to ourselves, through government  to reduce things that are a drag on all of our prosperity.  That's how you provide for the general welfare.
    The truth is, through government, read taxes,  no one should be forced to pay for anything that doesn't contribute to the common weal.  That contribution to the common weal is the logic behind taxes.
    Here's another truth.  If we cut every dime of so called welfare spending from the federal budget we wouldn't gain so much as 5 % for other things. That percentage hasn't changed in 50 years.  We would, however, lose a quantum percentage of the overall progress those expenditures have given all of us. That would be the definition of "counter-productive".  I think that would be more readily obvious if the issue been cast in the realistic light I have shown above.  It has occurred to me that is very important to know.  I'm glad I now know it.
    As devout congregants of any philosophy we have an obligation to charity for the sake of charity. As citizens of any government we have an obligation only to the general welfare.  At least, in our system if we try to do otherwise our efforts all fall well short.
    There is a big difference between the rich and malefactors of great wealth.  I've known several people we would consider rich.  They have been as honest as any other class of folks I've met.  They seem nice enough.  Some of their perceptions seem a little skewed to me but that's understandable. The primary fault seems to be an isolated kind of elitism.  It's hard to understand things outside your experience no matter who you are.  Honesty is a shared value no matter the amounts involved.
    Because of the actions of a few malefactors the rich have been thoroughly demonized.  People resent the increased access of the wealthy to members of our government, the increased input to the decision making process. As things stand that famous 1% pay about 24% of the overall taxes.  If they don't have increased access;  in the real world they should.  Not disproportionate access but a reasonable say in how their contribution is spent.  That's called  "fair play".  Yeah, that's a value and a basic concept.  However, like all of our values and basic concepts it has to be limited by common sense.  Daily we are reminded common sense isn't as common as we would like.
    We tend to think of the 1% as this very small, very exclusive club.  There are 313 million Americans. One percent is 3.13 million people.  If you expand that to the upper 5% ya got more rich people than, say, firefighters, policemen, veterans or illegal aliens.  It's a good thing most of them behave,  just as it's a good thing most firefighters, policemen, veterans and even illegal aliens behave.
    You also have more well to do people than we do in poverty. It's important we keep it that way.
    So, what did I learn?  Charity for the sake of charity is very important.  Assistance from the government is not the same as charity because it must be limited to that which benefits all.  That means assistance to the poor and the well- to- do should be limited to what benefits us all.  There should be no undo resentment in either instance.
 
 

I Bet This Comes Up.

    Given recent events the subject of the biennial or mid-term elections will be much discussed.  Gee, ya think?  So, let's add to the noise.
    We do not have a parliamentary system.  If we did, the health care vote failure would have resulted in a no-confidence vote and we would face another general election soon.  In that system, the executive is also the head of the majority party or coalition.  The heads of the various executive departments are also members of the legislature.  Boy, I hope you know that.  It would make it a much longer essay if you don't.
    We manage government power differently. We limit government power differently. Oh Geez, now I'm gonna bore myself.
    Our government was formed by men who were in rejection of unlimited executive and governmental power. They didn't like kings much so they set up a system that sequestered the executive power. They fiddled around with the weak-executive model of the Articles of Confederation for a bit and decided that just didn't work. They didn't pull a Conny writing flash mob one day. They'd been thinking about it for a bit.
    Our system limits executive power on a slower time table with mid term elections whether we like it or not.  I think it works pretty good.  Thinking most of what government does doesn't work pretty good is something of a cottage industry.  That industry will be on full display in the coming months.
    Now, wait for it, wait for it. This is where I always say it's really kinda interesting.  But it is. We tend to want to change a system when we don't like the result.  We're not gonna change the Electoral College or the way we elect Congress or the rules of Scrabble, (Though I do have some thoughts on that.)  no matter the amount of hot air expended.
    Our time would be better spent in understanding why a thing works the way it does and manipulating that "why" if we think it necessary.  Why we don't get that is interesting to me.
    Every four years we elect a President.  Stop me if you've heard this.  He (so far "he") usually has coattails that bring members of his party in larger numbers into the Congress. Those elections usually have fairly large turn outs. People are motivated by a national appeal and pageant. There is no small measure of a cult of personality involved.  I dunno, it just is.
    Then we have the mid-terms two years later. The voter turnout is about half for these elections.  It is the usual, all members of  the House and a third of the Senate. There really isn't the national pageant aspect and no personality cult except the sitting executive is usually demonized to some degree.  A kind of personality cult in reverse.
    Since these national polls involve a very large sample you would think reduction of that sample wouldn't affect the outcome much but that's not what happens. Obviously, people are motivated to act by dissatisfaction more than they are by satisfaction. Talk radio and the Alt-Right movement are built on exploiting those feelings of exclusion and dissatisfaction.  The party that's in power is satisfied and often smug. The  "outs"  are very dissatisfied and can't wait to vote their displeasure. They show up in disproportionate numbers. Congress can end up peopled with members with no real agenda except rejection and dissatisfaction. To oppose is the duty of the opposition.  You can oppose very effectively from that position but it's very difficult to govern.
    So, what's gonna happen next year?  I dunno but look at the dynamic of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. A lot of people across the culture are very dissatisfied with the current executive. Are they right?  That answer isn't part of this assignment but you would have to think the midterms will be a bloody affair.  I think it's probable the "no confidence" vote will be held then. Since the '90s it's been the grassroots republicans that have made splashy backlashes in the mid-terms.  There are a few things that haven't really been discussed.  In the '98 mid-terms the republicans lost seats while pursuing either sex or impeachment. It was never clear which. That just doesn't happen.  In 2006, G W was left with most of the curtains in the White House and little else. Frankly,  had there been a possibility he could serve more than the two remaining years on his 2nd term he would have been impeached without a kiss. That was understandable.  In 2016, I guess we have to say the republican presidential candidate was successful but that really depends on what your definition of success is. However, the republicans actually lost seats in both houses of Congress.  That just doesn't happen.  You have to think the dynamic of dissatisfaction is going to work against the republican members of Congress.  Nineteen months is an eternity in politics so, I guess we'll see.
    I think republicans are going to make an even harder right in response to their base and against their better judgment. The events in Washington are pushing the country to the left or at least more to the center.  I can't imagine discussing taxes is going to help the republicans stem that tide at least not the way they intend to go about it.  Right or wrong the rich have been thoroughly demonized. It has been pointed out the rich are even excluded from mention on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.  The republicans show no signs of proposing anything that mildly acknowledges that demonization.
    Those are the dynamics which is all I set out to discuss.  I'll leave the predictions to you.

The Old West Musta Got Pretty Old

   The more I think about it, it seems to me the old west just couldn'ta smelled very good.  Horses smell bad.  If you get a bunch of them together they smell really bad.  Cows are pretty much the same. That doesn't even mention they're dumber than a bag of hammers. Then you add the ubiquitous privy to that and a July day couldn't have been all that pleasant.  You gotta think any town would have been obvious from a distance, at least downwind.  I wonder if they had unique aromas?  Could a guy riding along on a bad smelling  horse say to himself, "Oh, that must be Abilene." Would the horse know it was Topeka?

    Not to mention the irregular bathing habits they had other problems.  There was the presence of high octane liquor, high caliber, low muzzle velocity weapons and gambling. That seems to be what made the plots of most '50s TV shows although, not "Leave It To Beaver" which actually was a sophomoric joke. I was forty until I knew that but I had bathed regularly.  I had discovered high octane liquor much earlier. But, I digress.
    Some guys worked in tandem to address these problems. It's reasonable to assume Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday worked as partners.  Earp controlled the violence and Holiday oversaw the gambling.  It's amusing to note how mid-twentieth century TV writers skirted the fact Miss Kitty controlled the prostitution and had a hand in the liquor distribution. They never really explain what the rooms upstairs were for. Ya gotta figure Doc Adams did his share of abortions and gave out his share of mercury.  An evening with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury. Look that reference up. You'll be either appalled or amused.  I have wondered why prostitution hasn't been dealt with more realistically but then again a moralistic climate that spawned the strip tease as an industry probably can't stand up to "realistic" examination.  Prudery is as odd as licentiousness. Actually, to my mind, licentiousness makes more sense.
    One of the things I liked about  "Gunsmoke" was a lot of people seemed to need a bath, a haircut and a better suit of clothes.  It just seemed more realistic. Imagine what Hoss, a character in a different beloved show,  had to smell like to get that nickname but he always seemed to dress nice.  It's also one of the things I liked about "Unforgiven". The one guy actually got shot in a privy.
    So, what's the point?  Well, there's a couple.  I guess, foremost, I'm interested in how we try to dress the past to make us look better so we might actually be better. I think it's misguided but kinda noble.  I guess it informs me that in order to advance the future we have to be realistic about the past.
I, also, don't think it's realistic to assume people are immoral because we ascribe some sort of morality to them. I also don't think people are moral because they tell us they are.  I especially don't think people are moral because they tell us they are.
    Lastly: A good, smelly saloon is one of the few places I'm truly happy, to quote "Silverado".

Wassamatta U.

    This is turning into a theater of the absurd. Mulvaney told us the other day, with a straight face, how compassionate it was to literally urinate on the less fortunate among us and tell them it was raining.  Of course, we have to do this for their own good and so we could spend more on the military.  His goal is to go from spending 611 billion to spending 668 billion dollars to make us "great" again.  That's absurd on its face.  There are some who it fills with pride we can easily provide for the least fortunate and even the most despicable among us. Then there are those it just fills with resentment. Not hard to see where this guy comes down.
    Mulvaney is the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.  It's hard to imagine why a guy like that doesn't know if we cut every dime of "welfare" spending from the Federal Budget we couldn't produce 3% of the military budget.  That would make his pronouncements, literally, insane.  He'd probably be less dangerous if he were merely dishonest.  Either way, dangerous, is the only way to describe his behavior.
    You would think a guy like this would discuss our largest outlays on an annual basis and how we might address them.  He didn't. He discussed "entitlements" as though they were some kind of welfare program.  Nah. We pay for that.  As a fact, the average person withdraws less from Social Security or Medicare than they pay in. You'd think the director of the OMB would know that.  He must not.
    Here's something else he doesn't seem to know.  Our second largest annual expenditure is debt service on what's already been borrowed.  It's about 300 billion a year.  That's mostly the penalty and interest on the 13 trillion in hot checks GW wrote and the bills due for crashing the economy through malfeasance.  Put 13 trillion on a credit card and tell me what your balance is 10 years later.  The answer is 19 trillion for those of you slow on the uptake. Don't believe me?  Read a damned newspaper. Not only that; the cost is going to approach 1 trillion annually within the next few years no matter what we do about marginal tax rates and then it really takes off exponentially.  Compound interest is relentless.  In a few years, we are looking at becoming Greece.
    That brings us to someone else who,  at least,  is slow on the uptake. The cost of maintaining the national debt is tied to the Fed Funds Rate.  The Fed Board have apparently decided it'll be good for the economy if the debt service we all pay is increased a couple percent.  Good for who?  In what way?  Just asking that question should illustrate the absurdity of the decision.  The Federal Funds rate is not paid by imaginary people to imaginary people with imaginary money.  It's real money paid by real people to real people.  There can be no decision that says it's good for all of us to increase the cost of using this money that can have the slightest toehold in reality, particularly if you propose to sweeten the pot even further by cutting upper tax rates.
    Some days it looks like the whole thing is being run by Rocky and Bullwinkle and now it looks like Boris and Natasha wanna buy into the game.  Yeah, stop that.
    I would readily believe most conspiracy theories except for one hard fact of life that proves itself over and over again.  Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

Hey! Can You See?

    It has always struck me that English is filled with little jokes. The employment of certain words and turns of phrase as a joke that have passed into the everyday language.  Since I don't speak other languages I can have no idea if other speakers do this as well. I imagine they do but I've seen no literature.  The French have a phrase ,"escalier", which refers to what you wish you had said earlier while you were on the stairs, leaving.  I know of no other examples.  People seem to have a playful nature.  That's a good thing.
    In English we refer to someone who is angry as being mad.  That's a joke comparing the actions of a mad dog to a person who has lost his temper.  It's so apt it has become a synonym.
    Americans are sometimes fond of referring to an unfortunate circumstance as just so much tough shit.  The British are more eloquent.  They employ the phrase" hard cheese".  If you are fond of sharp cheeses you know, first hand, exactly what they mean.  I recommend coffee.  The British also employ a really obscene image.  Their use of the term "bloody" this or "bloody" that is a reference to menstruation.  Did you think they had nicked themselves shaving?
     I wonder if pew, as in church, has some association with  pew, as in close proximity?
    When we sleep, little crusties accumulate in the corners of our eyes.  The proper word for those things is "smut".  That has come to be synonymous with various forms of published obscenity.
    Trying to define obscenity caused one Supreme Court Justice to remark he couldn't define it but he knew it when he saw it.  In a way that almost echos the sentiment that  "I don't know about art but I know what I like."  Funny how things like that work out. The idea that there is some ober-class that can be unaffected by these things and are therefore qualified to decide what the "average" person can see is a laughable, mindless insult.
    The internet and the fact everyone has a camera on their cell phone  has rendered most debate about the distribution of "smut" moot. You show me yours, I'll show you mine.  The cloak has been removed from even The House of Representative's cloak room.  Wanna see what Donald sees in Melania?  It's just a click away.  You could see it as the democratization of....prudery?  In the end there can be no pornography without prudery.  It's all just a part of that tension that has to exist in human affairs in order to render meaning.  It just is.  Kurt Vonnegut submitted a thesis topic on the opposition of good and evil in simple tales that was rejected.  He then made a career of just that kind of thing.  It just is.
    However, we still have to understand, quantify and explain these things, if not to our children at least to ourselves.
    In the end it boils down to this: It's not what you hear, it's what you think of it.  It's not what you see, it's what you think of it.  It's not what you read, it's what you think of it.  As we seem to always find, it's a matter of teaching people to think clearly.  Some days that seems like a joke in and of itself.
 
 

A Single Decision

    There sure has been a lot of Nazi talk in our recent debate.  It seems to get that way when we start to not like each other much.  Nazi this;  Nazi that. Yeah, how bout ya Nazi this.
    Anyway, it got me thinking about Nazis in literature and popular entertainment.  One recurring theme you see is: What if the Nazis had won?  There's movies and books and episodes of popular TV series with just that theme.  The real answer is that in 70 years we'd corrupt anyone and things would be pretty much the same.  That's what happened to the Soviet Union.  We co-opted them.  We did it to the Japanese,  we are doing it to the Chinese and we will do it to the "Mooslems"  if we can get the dumb-asses out of the way.  Our culture is so seductive it just plows forward. That's the demonstrated power of good ideas.  But sometimes a single decision can change so much.
    It got me to thinking about how things were and how they might have been. Until the beginning of the 20th century the big dog in American foreign policy was the British Empire.  We had two factions: Anglophobes and Anglophiles. For the better part of a century war was confidently predicted to be imminent between we and the Brits. There were armed incidents on the Great Lakes from time to time; general friction. In ways it was kinda like our relations with the Soviets.
    Wilson was an Anglophile. It seems reasonable to say his conduct led to the decision to engage in the European War.  What would have happened if we had followed Washington's dictum and just sat it out?
    Well, the indications are the two sides would have fought to an uneasy standstill. It's easier to see what would not have happened.
    There probably would not have been a Great Depression. That would mean there wouldn't have been the great dislocation that led to Hitlerism. Thus, no WWII. Probably no FDR. Maybe no nuclear weapons.  The Russian Revolution either would not have occurred or the Russian Succession wouldn't have been so disruptive.  Probably no Cold War.  The end of the Colonial System would not have been so sudden and violent.  The Vietnam War wasn't just part of the Cold War it was a feature of the end of the Colonial System.  Modern Africa would look a lot different.  Who can say what China would look like without the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.  Those are large things. A couple small things here are Daylight Savings Time or War Time which became permanent. We still talk about that.  Prohibition which was followed by more Constitutional methods in peacetime was an Executive Fiat in war.  Wilson never thought it would work.
    All of these things flowed from a single decision which went against the guiding principles of George Washington.
    What does this mean?  Well, there was no threat to the peace and security of the United States in the European War which became known as World War One. The results would indicate that is the only casus belli that makes sense.  That's what Washington thought. Actually, he thought it was a mistake to have an alliance of one country over another because it might lead us into a war without us having an interest or a war against our interests.  I think it sounds like Iraq. That was certainly a single decision. I do like the concept of certain singular decisions. Certain moments in time.
    I guess I can say these are the kinds of thoughts that inform me when I think about more specific things.
    What have we learned?  Looked at that way, Wilson sure doesn't seem as smart as he's been given credit for.  It might be a better idea to let the force of our ideas progress than make war with a half-baked aim.

Now, That's Interesting.

    Let's chew over some old defeats and some old victories.  I was in Florida in 2000, for the whole hanging chad debacle. " Floriduh!"  was probably my favorite headline.  Boy!  Was that true. The place is a Banana Republic. The legislature, when in session, is practically a Klan meeting.  It's almost a surprise the gubernatorial inaugurations don't include a cross burning.  Jeb Bush was governor then. His political career, like his more infamous brother's, was largely funded by Kenny-Boy Lay. He signed off, on his signature alone as a trustee on the Florida State Teacher's Retirement Fund, in riding Enron stock to the bottom while it collapsed. That represented the theft of over 115 million dollars in public funds. It was Enron executives cashing their options when no one in their right mind would buy them. How do I know that?  It was in the newspapers while it was going on.  No one batted an eye. The other two signatories complained.  No one batted an eye. Floriduh!  The current governor was involved in the largest Medicare fraud in history!  What a place.
    Why do I bring this up? Mainly because there was nothing wrong with the voting machines in Palm Beach County. The "butterfly" ballot was confusing but no where near as obtuse as the confusion the republicans then created.
    The truth is we have been holding elections for over 200 years. Everything that can go wrong has been the object of endless litigation.  In that particular case, in Florida, the settled case law said Palm Beach should have been a do over.  Al Gore would have clearly won Florida and the Bush debacle would have been avoided. You can thank the majority republicans on the U S Supreme Court for that bit of chicanery. Yeah. Explain that to the innocent dead.  But, I digress.
    There was nothing wrong with the machines but the whole mess set off a scramble to replace and update voting machines across the country. Why? What better way to deflect from having stolen an election?
     It's important to note the real power resides with those who count the votes. That was figured out in Chicago in the '20s.
     The new generation of electronic machines were thoroughly investigated by all the experts for accuracy and vulnerability to tampering.  It was found that certain of these machines could be manipulated in such a way as to alter their totals for one candidate or the others within a range of about 10%.
     In 2004 there were certain precincts in Ohio that recorded more votes for G W Bush than there were registered voters. Those supposed "Diebold" incidents were largely ignored.  At the same time there were predominantly black precincts in Philly that didn't record a single vote for G W.  I think the latter is more believable than the former.  Certainly more understandable all things considered.
    In 2008,  I don't think Jesus Himself could have helped John McCain.  That was almost painful to watch. Whether you liked the guy or not,  you really couldn't help feeling sorry for him. But that brings us to 2012.  Karl Rove came dangerously close to revealing what he knew to be going on with these machines when he melted down over the results in Ohio.  He knew the fix was in.  Since he had no respect for or understanding of Barack Obama he couldn't believe the legitimate vote totals would overcome that "fix". He didn't count on that and he didn't understand the "Diebold incidents" had caused the malware to be adjusted.
    Where's my tin foil hat?  That all sounds a little strange without some kind of confirmation. That brings us to 2016.
    Hillary Clinton, although a very bad candidate, wins the popular vote by nearly 3 million but Trump ekes out victories in notably, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and that gives him the Electoral College.  In reality, something like 50,000 votes made him President.  The Electoral College was conceived as a means of thwarting the "tyranny of the majority".  It was meant to check the power of the more populous urban areas over the rural areas. That idea was turned on its head in 2016 and it ended up imposing a kind of tyranny of the minority. That's a result worthy of more thought but not today.
    I think my opinion of Donald Trump is fairly obvious but that's not the point here.
    Hillary Clinton could not be seen as a sore loser for a number of very good reasons.  However, the same computer experts who had demonstrated the vulnerabilities of the various machines early on, pointed out the results in Wisconsin particularly and the other states showed the same results they had predicted for malicious employment.  So, Jill Stein is tapped to demand recounts. The recounts were never meant to overturn the outcome of the election.  They were meant to audit the machines and stop the abuse.  Stories have begun to surface that officials nationwide are scrambling to get funding to replace the machines. I'll remove my tin foil hat now.
    Do I think Trump was involved in this?  No. I doubt seriously if the republican establishment would trust him with so much as the combination to a gym locker.  Do I think these local, rural, republican officials were complicit in some national scheme?  No. I don't think they're guilty of more than overzealous partisanship.  Do I think the people responsible on a national level should be prosecuted?
    In a perfect world, there just isn't a jail deep enough but we can't afford that spectacle.  We could not afford that assault on our faith in our elections.  President Obama got that and threw the republicans the Russian fig leaf which they have fallen all over themselves to grasp. Everyone was surprised Trump actually had extensively colluded with the Russians. Everyone, that is but the intelligence agencies that had been watching all along.
    So, blame the Russians and replace the machines. This time, pay attention to the experts about their security. Boneheads!