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.
A plastics industry propaganda campaign has flared up here. It is remaking the old lie about recycling into a new version of the lie. One can call it the Making Sustainable Change lie.
The old lie
(but the arrow still goes in the same direction!)
These fine dark free speech proponents (liars) are the American Chemistry Council, Inc. and online at plasticsmakers.org. The website shows happy White Americans in their lovely, perfectly maintained big suburban houses enthusiastically recycling plastics in the front yard as many of us now do, but maybe with somewhat less enthusiasm and in the back yard. Not surprisingly, the website fails to mentions that after decades, about 91% of all single use plastics are still not recycled all these decades later. Inconvenient recycling data estimates like this from 2020 are 100% ignored, making that a lie of omission.
MRF = material recovery facilities,
a/k/a/ recycling centers
What the propaganda website shows are happy things like this:
See how happy and enthusiastic they are!!
That is so hard to believe that it is unbelievable!
In recent years, my opinion of America’s politically active, anti-democracy Christian nationalist (CN) theocracy movement has turned extremely negative. My evidence- and reason-based ill-will (bad opinion) extends to Christians who do not explicitly support anti-democratic theocracy but nonetheless use Christianity for their own personal agendas, which seem to tend towards reliance on some form of authoritarianism and corruption. I call them fake Christians (FCs).
There is deep moral rot, shameless mendacity and shocking hypocrisy through the lens of both (1) my own moral values, and (2) the moral values that CNs and FCs self-righteously claim they believe in and live by. No one is perfect, but at least people can try in good faith to face inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. They have the moral courage to face what is inconvenient. I see moral cowardice in CN and FC elites who cynically deny what is inconvenient and rational in their quest for wealth and power. But what about the rank and file who see nothing wrong and support bad Christianity? Yeah, exactly what about them? What is the state of their moral beliefs and their behaviors?
Dim views of fake Christianity
At least some other people have a pretty dim view of how CNs and FCs practice their faith. Over at his blog, Raven’s Song, Raven posted a poem he wrote in 1984, and the man says. It includes these thoughts about some TV preachers:
but if a man tells me that it is outdated that he has more recent information that he has just come from talking with god himself personally then that man is either a god blessed saint or a god damned liar and if that man is wearing a five hundred dollar suit in front of a fifty thousand dollar TV camera and he is asking me to send him my money so that he can feed the poor or serve god then you know which one of the two possibilities I believe
I can think for myself just as anyone else can they don’t have to listen to me to tell them how to think or what to think and they sure don’t have to listen to you I know and they know
.
.
.
and the man in rags is walking down a street tonight in the cold with everything he owns in a paper bag walking past the warm TV studio in the cold walking past the warm houses in the cold and he is going to die tonight in the cold because everyone is watching the preacher on TV and getting closer to god so they don’t need to go out in the cold and bring a smelly beggar inside out of the cold and feed him or give him a place to sleep out of the cold or care enough to treat him like a human being or save his life after all their souls have already been saved by the preacher
so you can ask anyone else on this street who in america today is the holiest man and he may tell you billy graham, oral roberts, herbert armstrong or maybe you but if you ask me who in america today has done the most evil in the name of good I will tell you
Now that feels like real Christianity to me. That is how I was brought up to understand it. That is the kind of Christianity I am comfortable with and support.
Raven put his poem to an artificial intelligence program called Suno that turns words into songs. The AI-generated song can be played at this link. Like with most other things that humans do, opinions about what is real Christianity and what is fake vary widely. And so does the empirical and moral basis for that variance.
There are intractable moral differences in the matter real vs fake religion. Democracies resolve the disagreement by reasonable compromise. Theocrats resolve it by force, e.g., forced birth laws, and bigoted, oppressive laws that discriminate against hated out-groups like the LGBQT community. That is a core moral difference between a pro-civil liberties democratic Christian and a pro-bigotry authoritarian Christian.
Two hundred years from now, when we are all dead and gone,
and assuming that we haven’t annihilated ourselves by then, future generations
will be reading about the first ever criminal trial of a one-time President of
the United States.
Here in 2024, when social media runs unchecked and rampant, regular
“We the People” are not allowed/forbidden to see the proceedings live, on TV.We must get the info second-hand, from
observers, or from transcripts after the fact.Better than nothing, I guess. 😕
Here’s the question:
Should “We the People” be allowed to see the proceedings live
on TV if we want to?Hell, we even got
to see O.J.'s trial, for crying out loud.
Make your case, pro or con, for letting the public witness
this historic event, as it unfolds live.
From what I could tell, the murderous 10/7 attack by Hamas on Israel probably turned a lot of Israeli public opinion against the Palestinian people and their cause. But is that really true? Apparently. A search of Israeli public opinion gave this answer:
Q: What is Israeli public opinion about the actions the Israeli military are taking in Gaza?
A: The vast majority of Israelis, across the political spectrum, are convinced of the justice of the war against Hamas in Gaza.
57.5% of Israeli Jews believe the Israeli military (IDF) is using too little firepower in Gaza, while only 1.8% think the IDF is using too much.
Despite some dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Netanyahu's handling of the war, trust in the IDF remains high, with 49.5% of Israelis expressing confidence in the military's actions.
Israelis have rallied to crush Hamas after the October 7th attack that killed over 1,400 people and took over 240 hostages. They have little tolerance for criticism of the steep toll the conflict has taken on Palestinians.
Even Israelis who oppose the occupation largely reject any contextualization of the Hamas attack, viewing it as an unjustified breach of Israel's borders.
In summary, the Israeli public overwhelmingly supports the military's actions in Gaza, with a majority believing the IDF is not using enough force, despite growing international criticism of the high Palestinian casualties and destruction. Israelis see the war as a justified response to the Hamas attack.
If that data is basically correct, it along with past history, strongly suggest that the Palestinians and their cause are screwed permanently. There will probably never be a two-state solution. The only solution that looks plausible to me for the foreseeable future is the forced removal of all Palestinians to miserable, poverty-stricken enclaves that are strictly controlled by the Israeli military. The time for diplomacy is probably gone and not coming back any time soon, if ever. This is looks like it is getting close to end of the ~76 year-old game called Middle East peace.
Of course, that's just my current opinion. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe something will change.
Qs:
1. This is not a perfect analogy, but if terrorists in Canada lobbed missiles into the US and crossed the border killing ~25,000 people and taking ~1,500 hostages back across the border, would you support proportionally about the same level of retaliation against Canada with ~575,000 Canadian deaths (mostly non-combatant civilians), based on a kill ratio of ~23:1 as estimated for the current Gaza conflict (probably too low because many Palestinians are simply unaccounted for and may be dead).
2. It is unreasonably sanctimonious or unfair for Americans and other foreigners to criticize the level of bloodshed among Palestinian civilians?
3. Does past history matter, e.g., the Q&A quoted below?
A: Based on the search results, it appears that Israel has taken actions that have made the two-state solution increasingly difficult to achieve since 1948:
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Israel captured more territory than was originally allocated to it under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, while Jordan took control of the West Bank and Egypt took control of Gaza. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of Palestinians becoming stateless refugees. 35
In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and other Arab territories. This led to the idea that Israel would exchange land it had captured for peace with its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians. 5
However, over time, Israel has continued to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank, making the prospect of an independent and contiguous Palestinian state more difficult. 134
Some scholars argue that the two-state solution was "stillborn" and "never a solution" due to the competing nationalist claims over the land and the difficulty of partitioning it equitably. 4
So in summary, while the two-state solution was initially proposed as a framework for resolving the conflict, Israel's actions since 1948 - including capturing and occupying Palestinian territories and expanding settlements - have made the realization of this solution increasingly remote over time, according to the sources provided. The search results suggest Israel has been a major obstacle to achieving a viable two-state solution.
The Register reports that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has successfully completed tests with a modified, artificial intelligence-driven F-16 fighter jet going against a human pilot in a standard F-16 jet:
US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 fighter jet
has been dogfighting with humans
Robo-plane was made to restrain itself so as not to harm pilot or airframe
The claims rest on the USAF and DARPA implementing machine learning in an X-62A VISTA, a plane built as a testbed as it can mimic the performance of other aircraft, and recognition of their work as one of four finalists for the National Aeronautic Association's 2023 Robert J. Collier Trophy, an annual award for exceptional feats of aeronautics or astronautics in America.
"The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now," said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. "In 2023, the X-62A broke one of the most significant barriers in combat aviation. This is a transformational moment, all made possible by breakthrough accomplishments."
The AI software won that competition but had an edge – it was allowed to fly at speeds that would have overstressed a real aircraft and generated g-forces that would harm a human pilot.
The integration of AI into modern
warfare is scary but apparently inevitable
AI is taught not to break the airplane because it can do so. But, if AI completely replaces humans, aircraft design would no longer have to take into account human limits. Aircraft design would be unleashed from human considerations.
The federal government owns and administers a huge swath of land in the “West” sometimes defined to be some lands west of the 100th meridian to the east side of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges in California, Oregon and Washington. These public lands consist of (i) the heavily touristed National Parks, which cover less than 50 million acres (78,125 sq mi), and (ii) roughly 450 million acres (7,031,250 sq mi) of grassland, steppe, desert and forest managed in trust for the American people by the Unites States Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Unites States Forest Service.
100th meridian running
through ND, DS, NE, KS, OK and TX
As discussed in Nov. 2023 posts here, and here, the federal lands of the West mostly were, as author Chris Ketcham in his 2019 book quoting historian Bernard DeVoto described it:
“a plundered province,” a resource colony for corporations and absentee landlords who practiced an “economy of liquidation.” He was broad in his attacks on the liquidators. He went after the timbermen, the mining companies, the stockmen, the cattle barons, the oilmen and gasmen, the overgrazers, the deforesters, the denuders, the profiteers of gold rushes and grass rushes. He named the bankers and congressmen who abetted the plundering. The Western hogs, he called them.
In short, federal lands were not managed in trust for the American people. They were exploited by brutal special interests for special interest profit. That has been the law. Until now. The WaPo reports (not paywalled) about a major proposed federal land management policy shift that puts conservation and recreation on equal footing with resource extraction by Western Hogs and sanctimonious government hating ideologue zealots:
For decades, the federal government has prioritized oil and gas drilling, hardrock mining and livestock grazing on public lands across the country. That could soon change under a far-reaching Interior Department rule that puts conservation, recreation and renewable energy development on equal footing with resource extraction.
The final rule released Thursday represents a seismic shift in the management of roughly 245 million acres of public property — about one-tenth of the nation’s land mass. It is expected to draw praise from conservationists and legal challenges from fossil fuel industry groups and Republican officials, some of whom have lambasted the move as a “land grab.”
Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, known as the nation’s largest landlord, has long offered leases to oil and gas companies, mining firms and ranchers. Now, for the first time, the nearly 80-year-old agency will auction off “restoration leases” and “mitigation leases” to entities with plans to restore or conserve public lands.
“Today’s final rule helps restore balance to our public lands as we continue using the best-available science to restore habitats, guide strategic and responsible development, and sustain our public lands for generations to come,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
If Trump is re-elected in 2024 I guarantee it or your money back, that if this this new policy is in place, it will be soon reversed to hand power back to special interest Western Hogs, while taking it away from the public interest. We all know where the sympathies of the morally rotted Republican Party lie, i.e., with Western Hogs, and against the public interest.
This machine is called a Bull Hog
Bull Hogs shred bushes and trees
to clear land for resource extraction
This is how Ketcham described the operation of Bull Hogs in his 2019 book:
Here’s what’s happening to our land: it is May 2018, in the Egan Range of Nevada, south of Ely, and a machine called a Bull Hog is approaching. .... It runs on treads like a bulldozer, and affixed at it’s front is a spinning bladed cylinder. It has one use and one use only -- the destruction of the forest in which I stand, a forest of pinyon and juniper that the BLM manages on our behalf. .... The pinyon-juniper forest is the great survivor in the aridlands, drought resistant, adapted to heat, and is deliciously sweet-smelling -- these two species, after the sagebrush, are the perfuming flora of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. But they have no value for logging or wood products, no value that can be measured in money. Therefore, they must be wiped out for other enterprises -- for cattlemen I later learn, so that the land in the Egan Range will be “productive” for cows and not wasted.
The Bull Hog, operated and funded by the Department of the Interior -- at our expense, with our tax dollars -- charges through the forest as I stand in a kind of fugue, incredulous at the pace of its destruction. The beautiful old gnarled trees are devoured in the mouth of the mobile muncher, knocked down and chewed up, defecated out its ass-end in fragments. .... The howl and whine of the engine and the spinning blades, the tortuous toppling of the trees, the crackling and crushing of trunks and limbs, the shattered spitting of being alive seconds before -- it is almost too much to bear.
.... May is prime nesting season for birds in the pinyon-juniper biome. Kestrels and hawks, mountain chickadees and house wrens, black throated gray warblers, flickers, gray flycatchers, scrub jays and pinyon jays live here, and in the soil between the trees nest the poorwills -- all that are caught and ground to red mist by the servo-mechanism, for no reason other than to expedite commerce.
This point bears repeating: If Trump is re-elected in 2024 and if this new policy is in place, it will be soon reversed to hand power back to special interest Western Hogs.
An AP article describes the messes that occasionally happen when a pregnancy goes off the rails in red states with strict forced birth laws:
One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
Pregnant patients have “become radioactive to emergency departments” in states with extreme abortion restrictions, said Sara Rosenbaum, a George Washington University health law and policy professor.
“They are so scared of a pregnant patient, that the emergency medicine staff won’t even look. They just want these people gone,” Rosenbaum said.
Consider what happened to a woman who was nine months pregnant and having contractions when she arrived at the Falls Community Hospital in Marlin, Texas, in July 2022, a week after the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion. The doctor on duty refused to see her.
“The physician came to the triage desk and told the patient that we did not have obstetric services or capabilities,” hospital staff told federal investigators during interviews, according to documents. “The nursing staff informed the physician that we could test her for the presence of amniotic fluid. However, the physician adamantly recommended the patient drive to a Waco hospital.”
At Sacred Heart Emergency Center in Houston, front desk staff refused to check in one woman after her husband asked for help delivering her baby that September. She miscarried in a restroom toilet in the emergency room lobby while her husband called 911 for help.
“She is bleeding a lot and had a miscarriage,” the husband told first responders in his call, which was transcribed from Spanish in federal documents. “I’m here at the hospital but they told us they can’t help us because we are not their client.”
Emergency crews, who arrived 20 minutes later and transferred the woman to a hospital, appeared confused over the staff’s refusal to help the woman, according to 911 call transcripts.
One first responder told federal investigators that when a Sacred Heart Emergency Center staffer was asked about the gestational age of the fetus, the staffer replied: “No, we can’t tell you, she is not our patient. That’s why you are here.” [un-fracking believable]
Meanwhile, the staff at Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro, North Carolina, told a pregnant woman, who was complaining of stomach pain, that they would not be able to provide her with an ultrasound. The staff failed to tell her how risky it could be for her to depart without being stabilized, according to federal investigators. While en route to another hospital 45 minutes away, the woman gave birth in a car to a baby who did not survive.
Every avoidable human death (homicide) that radical right forced birth laws cause is the fault of cruel authoritarian legislators and cruel authoritarian religious fanatics who support and made the laws in the first place. Those people are literally and morally killers.
Manslaughter or murder? We can leave that to the moral and legal experts.
