Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
Former PresidentDonald Trumpsaid Wednesday he had made up his mind about whether he would seek to regain the White House in 2024, but declined to actually say whether he would launch yet anotherpresidential campaign.
“You’re not going to answer, but I have to ask,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told Trump at a town hall event in Edinburg, Texas.
“Where are you in the process, or — let me ask you this, without giving the answer … have you made up your mind?”
“Yes,” Trump responded, generating applause from the friendly audience.
On Wednesday, Trump railed against McConnell again, saying the Kentuckian “can no longer do the job.” He also lashed out against “RINOs” (“Republicans in name only”) and “weak Republicans” in Washington.
A new C-Span poll of presidential historians has ranked US presidents. As usual for expert rankings so far, the ex-president is ranked in the bottom four. He is tied with Franklin Pierce for third worst. The results are shown in comparison to rankings from 2017, 2009 and 2000.
This survey was informal, with respondents selected by C-SPAN, not by scientific polling. This year, more historians were invited to complete the survey compared to the past. C-SPAN said this was to better reflect diversity in race, gender, age and philosophy. That makes it harder to directly compare it to previous surveys. All of the respondents are distinguished presidential historians covering a broad range of perspectives.
The experts rated presidents from 1 to 10 on ten different leadership categories. The averages of all of ratings were then ranked. The ten categories are public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursuit of equal justice for all and performance within the context of the times. The ex-president's best average rating was for public persuasion, where he came in 32nd. On moral authority and administrative skills, however, he came in dead last, i.e., he was first in being last on morals and competence. That assessment seems quite reasonable.
Obviously, this ranking by experts is way out of synch with how most rank and file republicans view the ex-president. Some of them believe he was sent by God and was a great president. Some Republicans believe he is far and away the best US president ever.
One can reasonably expect silence from radical fascist Republican media sources and leaders. Most of the rank and file will probably remain ignorant of how history is starting to assess the fascist president's God-awful time in office, his incompetence and his lack of morality.
“A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be ‘compromise.’” -- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971
The fascist Republican Party continues to show clearly how anti-democratic and opposed to the rule of law that organization and its elite leadership still is in the wake of the fascist 1/6 coup attempt. The latest show of its contempt for and opposition to democracy is in almost total Republican opposition to investigating the coup attempt. All Senate Republicans oppose a commission to investigate. And yesterday, all but two Republicans in the House voted against a House measure to establish a select committee to investigate the 1/6 attack on the federal government. The New York Times writes:
The House voted mostly along party lines on Wednesday to create a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, pushing ahead over near-unanimous Republican opposition with a broad inquiry controlled by Democrats into the deadliest attack on Congress in centuries.
The panel, established at the behest of Speaker Nancy Pelosi after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan independent commission to scrutinize the assault, will investigate what its organizing resolution calls “the facts, circumstances and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack.”
The 13-member panel, which has subpoena power, will have eight members named by the majority party and five with input from Republicans, and is meant to examine President Donald J. Trump’s role in inspiring the riot. While the measure creating it does not mention him, it charges the committee with looking at the law enforcement and government response to the storming of the Capitol and “the influencing factors that fomented such an attack on American representative democracy while engaged in a constitutional process.”
By opposing an investigation, the Republican Party defends fascism and the opposes the rule of law and democracy.
A galling aspect of this is the obviousness of Republican contempt for democracy and the rule of law. The GOP is blatant about it. The only thing that matters now is power and wealth. Other than corrupting and destroying government, here is no Republican Party governing vision or concern with the public interest. Attaining and exercising raw power for party and donor advantage is the only morality and vision. In this regard, the Republican Party is uncompromisingly fascist and very much like any other purely self-centered special interest seeking wealth and power without much or any regard for the public interest, public opinion or democracy. The GOP doesn't do real compromise, it only does window dressing when needed.
A deeply troubling aspect of this is how some Republicans rationalize the 1/6 coup attempt into something it was not. One bemused congressional Republican characterized the attack on the capitol as just a bunch of innocent tourists being polite and taking selfies as they toured the capital building. Either that Republican was unaware of what happened on 1/6 or more likely, he is a cynical liar feeding a ridiculous excuse for consumption by rank and file populist Republicans to use to justify their continuing support of fascism and the ex-president, who is the epitome of modern American fascism.
Most rank and file conservatives seem to be comfortable with the coup attempt by rationalizing it into either insignificance or literal non-existence, e.g., ‘it could not have been a coup attempt because those people on 1/6 were disorganized fools who failed to overthrow the government and/or just harmless demonstrators expressing their unhappiness (about whatever they were unhappy about)’. The definition of a coup attempt does not take into account how inept it was. A coup attempt is a coup attempt. Period.
Even more troubling is that some independents and democrats also downplay or even deny the seriousness of the 1/6 attack and the now blatant and undeniable fascism of the Republican Party. This reflects the human condition from evolution. The human mind did not evolved such that different people observing the same thing see the same thing. This is particularly true of modern politics and American Christianity, both of which are awash in dark free speech that distorts reality and manipulated minds into false beliefs and irrational behaviors. This is what can take democracy down and give rise to the historical normal human condition, namely tyranny, plutocracy and kleptocracy. Put another way, the modern Republican Party has become the face of the historical normal human condition striving to free itself from the unspeakable horrors of democracy and civil liberties.
I am having endless troubles in trying to migrate to a new laptop. Not sure how this is going to work out or if it will work out. I thought I lost my Disqus account yesterday, but it came back, none of which I understand. If I disappear, I'm not sure how to come back. I may have to remove Disqus from this blog and revert back to the original Blogger comment system. I'm still trying to work through this nightmare.
The New York Times reports on worker attitudes toward the low paying jobs that dominate some sectors of the economy. Most conservatives blame worker reluctance to take low pay jobs on extended unemployment benefits. However, most economists do not believe that is the main issue for most workers. Instead, workers have reassessed their lives and are tired of being treated rather badly for low pay and long commutes. The NYT writes:
Work-force development officials [in St. Louis, MO] said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the governor’s announcement, which ended a $300 weekly supplement to other benefits. And the online job site Indeed found that in states that have abandoned the federal benefits, clicks on job postings were below the national average.
Of course, it’s early. But conversations with employers who are hunting for workers and people who are hunting for jobs in the St. Louis area revealed stark differences in expectations and assumptions about what a day’s work is worth.
“Clearly part of the problem now,” she said [Katharine G. Abraham, University of Maryland economist, former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics], “is that what employers and what workers think is out of whack.”
[Accordong to employers,] there were good jobs available but not enough good workers to fill them, those who were reliable and were willing to work hard.
That’s not the way Elodie Nohone saw it. “They’re offering $10, $12, $13,” said Ms. Nohone, who already earns $15 an hour as a visiting caregiver and was hoping to find a higher-paying opportunity. “There’s no point in being here [at the job fair in St. Louis].”
The labor market’s deeper problem, said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell University, is the proliferation of low-paid jobs with few prospects for advancement and too little income to cover essential expenses like housing, food and health care.
The pandemic focused attention on many of these low-wage workers, who showed up to deliver food, clean hospital rooms and operate cash registers. “The pandemic put their lives at risk,” Ms. Blau said, “and we began to wonder if we are adequately remunerating a lot of the core labor we need to function as an economy and society.”
Hundreds of jobs were being offered at the fair. A home health care agency wanted to hire aides for $10.30 an hour, the state’s minimum, to care for disabled children or mentally impaired adults. There were no benefits, and you would need a car to get from job to job. An ice rink, concert and entertainment center was looking for 80 people, paying $10.30 to $11.50 for customer service representatives and $13 for supervisors. But the jobs last just through the busy season, a few months at time, and the schedules, which often begin at 5 a.m., change from week to week.
In St. Louis, a single person needs to earn $14 an hour to cover basic expenses at a minimum standard, according to M.I.T.’s living-wage calculator. Add a child, and the needed wage rises just above $30. Two adults working with two children would each have to earn roughly $21 an hour. [$50,000 a year, or about $25 an hour is roughly the median earnings of wage and salaried employees in the United States]
In recent decades, a declining share of the country’s income and its productivity gains has gone to workers. And for adults without a four-year college degree, the options are especially bleak. From 1974 to 2018, for example, real wages for men with only a high school diploma declined by 7 percent. For those without that diploma, wages fell by 18 percent.
Among job seekers interviewed at job fairs and employment agencies in the St. Louis area the week after the benefit cutoff, higher pay and better conditions were cited as their primary motivations. Of 40 people interviewed, only one — a longtime manager who had recently been laid off — had been receiving unemployment benefits. (The maximum weekly benefit in Missouri is $320.)
Justin Johnson already had a job when he showed up at an Express Employment Professionals office. He was working at a pet feed company, earning $14 an hour to shovel piles of mud or oats. But that week temperatures topped 90 degrees every day and were heading past 100.
“The supervisor pushed people too hard,” Mr. Johnson said. He had to bring his own water, and if it was a slow day, he got sent home early, without pay for the lost hours. He accepted an offer to begin work the next day at a bottle packaging plant, earning $16.50.
Whether workers will be forced into the pre-pandemic situation as time passes is unclear. Interviews with job applicants indicate that wages, hours and commute times matter most to most job seekers. In the St. Louis area, few are willing to work for less than $14 an hour. That is the minimum to cover basic expenses for a single person. Time will tell how this will play out.
The idea was cooked up by a now-dead astrophysicist (Steven Hawking) and a Russian billionaire (Yuri Milner). What go wrong?
The idea was to build a lightweight spaceship attached to a lightweight light sail. The ship and sail would weigh maybe ~5 grams (~ 0.17637 oz), maybe less. The light sail attached to the tiny ship would be about one square meter in size and weigh almost nothing, being a couple hundred atoms in thickness. One or a flock of these pipsqueak ships would be launched into space by a regular rocket and released once in space. After they are released in space, each pipsqueak would by powered by blasting it with a 100 gigawatt laser light beam from hundreds or thousands of lasers on the ground that can all be precisely aimed at a single point in Earth orbit. The point they will aim at is the little sail.
100 Gigawatts is enough juice to power about 70,000,000 homes or a pile of small countries. That's a lot of power.
The force of the laser light hitting the sail would power the light sail on its way to the nearest star Alpha Centauri, about 4.37 light years away from Earth. The ship would be looking for alien civilizations in that neighborhood. The video below shows the array of lasers doing their blasting thing. The idea is to accelerate the tiny sail ship to about 100 million miles/hour. At that speed, it would take only about 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
The little spaceship would carry about 150 mg (0.00529109 oz) of Plutonium or Americium as its electrical power source to run the tiny ship's guidance system, communications gear, cameras, cafeteria and other needed items. OK, no cafeteria.
There are still a couple of technical hurdles to work through. One is how to hit the sail with 100 gigawatts and not instantly vaporize the ship and its sail. Actually, that's a really big hurdle.
Another is the light sail material itself. It will be made of an ultra-thin "metamaterial." A metamaterial is stuff, mainly experimental stuff, designed to "pick up" photons from a light source. That picking up thingie acts as a pressure force on the sail, which gently pushes it away from the light source. Stuff sounds a bit vague so some more work on that detail is probably needed. The push on the sail has to be gentle because it will be just a couple of hundred atoms thick. For context, a human hair is about 100,000 atoms thick. The sail will be reeeeeally thin.
Other ongoing projects include design of a coating that will resist space dust particle damage, means to aim the onboard cameras at things of interest at Alpha Centauri and figuring a way to get the contraption to survive the forces on it during launch from Earth into space. Just launching the little bugger from Earth could tear the sail to pieces. Heck, the puff of air from someone just sneezing toward the sail would rip it apart.
For anyone with ideas of how to solve some of the development problems, you can go to this link and pick a problem you want to fix. Once you have figured out how to fix the problem, just let them know and they will be grateful and happy to implement your clever solution. I'm working on the diode laser photon thruster problem right now and am close to a solution.
