Why America is Confused

Here is the start of a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog that incisively identifies why the average American is completely confused about the economy, the role of big business, and who politics works:

David Brooks Is Projecting His Self Indulgence Again

Undoubtedly projecting from the fact that he can draw a nice 6-figure income for little obvious work, David Brooks complained in his column:

"Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated."

For the most part the column is a confused diatribe against the Obama administration's economic policies with a lecture on moral rectitude thrown in for good measure. He starts by condemning the efforts to stimulate the economy by telling readers:

"Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

"According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections."

One might think that the fact that the Obama administration relied on a stimulus that was only designed to lower the unemployment rate by 1.5-2.0 percentage points might have played a big role in the election defeat. (Read the number of jobs the stimulus was projected to create, not the baseline forecasts for the economy.) If the government had used bigger stimulus to get the unemployment rate down to say -- 7 percent -- it is difficult to believe that the Democrats would have suffered such a big defeat last year, in spite of people's fear of big government.

After dismissing the stimulative policies of the Great Depression, Brooks then gives us a beautifully crafted grand misunderstanding of economics comparing the economy today with the economy of the Progressive era:

"the underlying economic situations are very different. A century ago, the American economy was a vibrant jobs machine. Industrialization was volatile and cruel, but it produced millions of new jobs, sucking labor in from the countryside and from overseas.

"Today’s economy is not a jobs machine and lacks that bursting vibrancy. The rate of new business start-ups was declining even before the 2008 financial crisis. Companies are finding that they can get by with fewer workers. As President Obama has observed, factories that used to employ 1,000 workers can now be even more productive with less than 100."

The fact that factories can produce large amounts of output with 100 workers is in fact evidence of economic vibrancy, not the opposite. This is called "productivity growth." It is the main measure of the economy's ability to raise living standards through time. The fact that 100 people in a factory can produce the same output as 1000 people did 30 years ago means that we are potentially much richer than we were 30 years ago. We can have the other 900 people doing other productive work. Alternatively, we can all work many fewer hours.

Whether or not this productivity growth generates jobs depends on the structure of the economy. If the productivity growth translates into wage growth, as was the case with the very rapid productivity growth of early post-war period, then it is likely to be associated with a vibrant jobs machine. On the other hand, if the One Percent pocket most of the benefits of productivity growth, then we may have real problems of stagnation and lack of job growth, since the Bill Gateses of the world will probably not increase their spending much if they get another billion or two. The key issue here is the distribution of the gains of productivity growth, a simple fact that totally escapes Brooks.

Go read the whole article. There is much more to learn from Dean Baker.

One reason why Americans keep electing the right wing Republicans is because the media is dominated by fools with a glib and seductive writing style like David Brooks. I confess that I was seduced by his book Bobos in Paradise but I've since had the scales fall from my eyes. Brooks is a seductive writer much like William F. Buckley. It is easy to be seduced by those who dismiss the gritty reality and instead focus on grandiose generalities that blame the victim and put robber barons on pedestals.

Psychopaths Are Among Us

Here is a bit from an excellent article by William D. Cohan in Bloomberg News:

Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?: William D. Cohan

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

How do people with such obvious personality flaws make it to the top of seemingly successful corporations? Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”

Go read the whole article because the reporter includes a great deal more detail about Brody's thesis.

I found the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work to be useful in exposing this problem with modern corporations. This book has Robert D. Hare as co-author. It is Hare who developed the Psychopath Check List - Revised (PCL-R) which is the standard instrument for identifying psychopaths.

Bottom line is that these monsters create havoc and ruin many, many lives:

Then, according to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”

They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

Boddy doesn’t name names, but the type of personality he describes is recognizable to all from the financial crisis.

He says the unnamed “they” seem “to be unaffected” by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”

And if you need more scare put into you. Here is a bit from an article in The Los Angeles Times by Andrew Malcolm:

Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.

Kouri, who's a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.

These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.

But -- and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion -- these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)

Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.

Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.

"This allCapitol Hill Domeows them to do what they want, whenever they want," he wrote. "Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders."

Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we're paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways.

An Honest Man

It is rare to find somebody with integrity, somebody who values principle more than status & money. So this story in the UK's Guardian is heart-warming:

St Paul's canon Dr Giles Fraser resigned over plans to forcibly evict Occupy protesters from the outside the cathedral.

This makes very clear his unusual background and approach:

On the face of it, Giles Fraser is an unlikely looking cleric. Bald, jovial, worldly, ferociously bright but genial towards those within the fractious Church of England who disagree with him, his favourite form of garb is jeans and T-shirt.

It is a uniform in keeping with the 47-year-old's support for Chelsea football club and his determinedly demotic persona, though he had to change into a more conventional dog-collar and black suit when translated from his parish in Putney to St Paul's two years ago.

Looks are deceptive though: Fraser is the son of an RAF officer, educated at Uppingham private school and Newcastle University and latterly a lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford. He has been a regular lecturer at military staff colleges and at one stage considered becoming an army chaplain.

His family background is Jewish, and he was a teenage Trotskyite before converting to Anglicanism at university. His doctorate comes from a thesis on the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who famously declared that God – at least in the old-fashioned sense – was dead.

Fraser, served his curacy on a rundown Midlands council housing estate and for 10 years was vicar of Putney parish church in one of the most well-heeled parts of London. He equally valued the church as the scene of the post-civil war debates on the sort of society England should become.

He has never made any secret of his generally, leftwing, progressive views both politically and within the Church of England, where he has been a prominent supporter of the pro-gay Inclusive Church group, launched at a service in his church.

It is classic that a tough issue results in the honest man withdrawing while the social climbers and "yes men" cling to power and creep higher up the echelons of society strengthening their death hold on society. In a nutshell this story explains why society makes so little progress and the evils of the past keep repeating and repeating.

Here is the bureaucratic jujutsu that did him in:

Some critics will undoubtedly say that his resignation was waiting to happen, given that Fraser is not an instinctive committee man or church bureaucrat: in Putney he was in charge, at St Paul's he has had to be part of a team. He had been talking privately about possibly needing to resign when the chapter voted to take action against the protesters, but his hand may have been forced – ironically – by the revelation of that in the media. It is an interesting question who leaked it: there are church conservatives who would be delighted to see him fall.

How many times has the honest man gone down for his principles while the more "supple" social climber has climbed higher? Ever wonder how a Stalin, a Hitler, or a Mao got to the top of the heap?

I look at how the media is trying to undermine the OWS movement by questioning their motives or by trying to put them in a box by demanding that they come up with a short list of "demands". The reality is that this is a movement of social protest deeply rooted in decades of mistreatment by a system that is gamed against the 99%. Those on top my slap themselves on the back with a "job well done" by getting rid of Giles Fraser but they are simply upping the pressure cooker of social unrest and ensuring an ever more devastating explosion because the system simply won't give the bottom 99% a fair break. History is replete with popular uprisings gone amok because the "clever" people on the top manipulated things right to the point of complete breakdown.

Do-Gooders and the Evil They Bring

I was watching the new Ken Burns documentary on the American Prohibition era. It was the result of "do-gooders" who wanted to legislate morality. Their efforts led to deaths from adulterated alcohol, blindness, paralysis. It also led to the rise of organized crime and a couple of thousand gangland killings. It also helped corrupt police forces, the judicial system, and government administrations all across America.

My mind wandered onto this as I was reading stories about 20,000 Ugandan farmers chased off their land by gangs what are selling "carbon credits" for this confiscated land. From the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Land tenure in Uganda is a subject of much dispute, and last year's farming evictions have left 20,000 homeless

...

Longoli and his family of six lost everything last year when, with three months notice, the Ugandan government evicted him and thousands of others from the Mubende and Kiboga districts to make way for the UK-based New Forests Company to plant trees, to earn carbon credits and ultimately to sell the timber.

Today, the village school in Kiboga is a New Forests Company headquarters. More than 20,000 people have been made homeless and Longoli rents a small house in Lubaali village. He says he cannot go back for fear of being attacked.

And as I read the following from the UK Guardian about murders in Honduras as gangs are enforcing land seizures to earn "carbon credits":

EU carbon credits scheme tarnished by alleged murders in Honduras

...

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations has called into question the integrity of the EU's emission trading scheme (ETS), as carbon credits from the plantations remain on sale.

The "do-gooders" never bother to ponder the possibility of "unintended consequences" from their moral pushiness. All they know is that they have a vision of a "higher morality" and they are going to beat us with sticks until we agree to worship at their twisted view of "the good and moral life". They are a menace with their militant moralizing. History is littered with deaths and injuries of innocents caused by these self-important moral campaigners.

Michael J. Sandel's "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?"

I found this to be an excellent book. It posed thought provoking questions and walked me through various ethical standpoints. Unlike studying the ethics textbooks of my youth, this book was much more focused on real questions and applied principles much more clearly.

In my wasted youth studying philosophy, the texts on "ethics" were in fact more meta-ethics. They argued endlessly over what ethics could be, what ethical language could or could not convey, etc. They didn't actually dabble in the real world of action where choice is essential. This book is the kind of ethics text I would have loved to have seen back in the 1960s.

As he ends his book he broadens out the view of ethics. Here is his besst summary:

Three categories of moral responsibility

1. Natural duties: universal; don't require consent


2. Voluntary obligations: particular; require consent


3. Obligations of solidarity: particular; don't require consent

He derives the above from three traditions of moral thinking:

1. Kant's integration of morality, freedom, and reason into an ethic of "practical reason" that requires universal laws that treat individuals a ends and not means. From Kant's moral reasoning we get our natural duties but it says nothing of voluntary associations and collectives to which we belong.


2. John Rawls' refined liberalism with a kind of virtual "social contract" that requires you to judge morality by using a "veil of ignorance" to decide if you could generalize a principle to one where you were subject to its consequences. From Rawl's moral reasoning we get our principles of voluntary obligations that require us to be sensitive to others and the needs for equality.


3. Aristotle's teleological morality that requires ethical acts to be ones that "fit the true nature" of someone and which emphasizes the community in which one resides. From Aristotle's moral reasoning you get obligations of solidarity from being embedded in a community and the aspiration to be virtuous and fit the proper role in that community.

The above doesn't do justice to the book. It is rich with ideas and examples. It makes you wrestle with the author. I'm sympathetic to Sandel's desire to ground ethics in collectives, but I'm not happy with Aristotle as the theoretical foundation. I also have problems with Kant's metaphysical thrust of putting things just beyond the empirical world while to not be an idealist or rationalist.

I'm inclined to Sam Harris' project of trying to develop ethics from science. Sandel is right to reject utilitarianism as too simplistic. But the problem with most ethical thinking is that it picks principles out of thin air. Ethics needs to be grounded. Harris has a project to develop a "science of morality". From Wikipedia:

The science of morality is the controversial idea that morality can be prescribed only with the help of, and possibly priority of, the philosophy of the scientific method. This conception challenges traditionally held views both of morality and of science. This demands a philosophy of science and epistemological (theory of knowledge-based) justification that can deal with the "is–ought problem" (i.e."there are facts about what is real, but how do they ever become facts about what ought to be?"). The science of morality is a sort of ethical naturalism (moral facts are facts about nature) that challenges divine command and natural law-based moral justifications for first principles in ethics.

The wonderful thing about Sandel's book is that it makes you think. He maneuvers the reader to his point of view which left me a bit unhappy. But I was greatly impressed by the array of material he brought together and how wonderfully he weaved his story.

Social Division and Greed as the Root of "Feral Youth"

Here is a very upfront analysis of the recent rioting in the UK. This is a bit from an article in The Telegraph:

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.

I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days.

The author,.Peter Oborne, points out one of my favourite complaints: the morbid worship of the rich.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted.

Greed and corruption are rampant and all-pervasive:

David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

...

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

Here's the bottom line:

These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.

But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.

Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society.

I very much like Peter Oborne's article. It hits the right balance between condemnation and analysis, and it is willing to follow the logic right to the root and see corruption and immorality at both the bottom and top of society and raise the question of the direction of causality.

Murdoch & His Legacy

From a post by Russ Baker on the AlterNet blog:

What Rupert Murdoch Means For You Personally

Rupert Murdoch has had a profound influence on the state of journalism today. It’s a kind of tribute, in some sense, that the general coverage of his current troubles has reflected the detrimental effect of his influence over the years. Right now, the media, by and large, are focusing on tawdry “police blotter” acts of the very sort that have historically informed Murdoch’s own tabloid sensibility, while the bigger picture gets short shrift.

...

Here are twelve “take-away” points that are being obscured in the daily rush of revelations, and the related specialized coverage (his wife’s wardrobe and demeanor, the effect on his company’s stock price, etc.):

He has transformed world politics for the worse: It was George W. Bush’s first cousin(John Ellis), working as head of Murdoch’s Fox News election night “decision desk,” who, during the Florida voting uncertainties, called the election for Bush and set off a chain reaction from other media. The eight Bush years that followed, and all that came with them, can in this respect be laid at Murdoch’s feet. ...

He has ridiculed and raised doubts about global catastrophes, and about science itself, while elevating absurd theories and hyping minor matters. ...

He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat for restriction or elimination of certain fundamental rights, including those under the US Fourth Amendment, while at the same time supporting unrestrained wiretapping, the harsh treatment of suspects who may have done nothing wrong, and fueling panic justifying the build-up of the national surveillance state.

He has turned the public against the press. By the generally inferior product produced, with a few exceptions, by the majority of the news outlets he controls and the tawdry methods sponsored by many of them, he has eroded the public’s confidence in media in general, tarnishing its belief even in those outfits whose work deserves to be taken seriously. He has also used his outlets to convince the public that other, more conscientious news organizations are ideologically suspect and biased.

He has simultaneously propagandized for “the law” and compromised it. Murdoch properties are the leading hagiographers of law enforcement and the military—while at the same time routinely assailing the patriotism of those who advocate for civil and privacy rights, who question wars, and so forth. Meanwhile, as shown by the unfolding UK drama, Murdoch himself stands accused of compromising the law enforcement establishment—and not just in that country. ...

Read the whole post. It is well worth your time.

Murdoch isn't the only evil influence on journalism. The infamous yellow press of the press barons Pulitzer and Heast go back to the latter part of the 19th century. The world will survive Murdoch like it has survived Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. But Murdoch is a blight on history. He did nothing positive in his life.

Rupert Murdoch, the Moralist

It is good to see that Rupert Murdoch's heart is in the right place and that he had his flagship newspaper in the UK, The Times, carry this cartoon to remind people that there is something more important than a missing girl's family' hopes were played with by Murdoch's journalists when they hacked her phone (not to mention the other 4,000+ victims of hacking). Rupert Murdoch wants us to quit paying attention to the silly phone hacking story and instead focus on the great moral dilemma of our time: starvation in Africa:

Click to Enlarge
From BoingBoing
It is miraculous that Murdoch has suddenly "got religion" on starvation in Africa. I'm sure this new found moral concern of his has nothing to do with all the press coverage about phone hacking. He understands that in the big scheme of things that tens of thousands starving in Africa is far more important than political corruption (buying police & politicians and using phone hacking to get leverage over people).

This stance demonstrates how great a man Murdoch is to forego the scrutiny of phone hacking and political corruption and instead put his papers on the trail of the truly important story: starvation in Africa.

If you need confirmation of the ruthless and manipulative and evil nature of Rupert Murdoch, the above cartoon should suffice.

Here is Murdoch's news channel in the US, Fox "News", and how it behaves:



If you watch this clip to the end, the CNN reporter is saying that while Fox "News" is ignoring the Murdoch scandal, other Murdoch properties are covering it and he notes The Times. But the above cartoon should cause you to question how seriously the other Murdoch properties are "covering" the scandal.



And this is a prime example of Murdoch's minion's manipulating the coverage of "this hacking problem" by confusing criminal hacking by Murdoch with the fact that the Pentagon is a victim of hacking...




Go see my viewpoint on the above video.

Where are the Democratic Party Fighters?

Well... here's one. He would stand up to Republican "talking points". But he got thrown under the bus.



Sure Anthony Weiner was sleazy. But you don't force a politician to resign if he has bad fashion taste. Weiner didn't break any laws. He showed stupidity, but if that is your measuring stick, then 95% of the the legislators in the Congress should be forced to resign right now.

Weiner's own Democratic party forced him to resign. That's why there is no effective counter-weight to the Republican slime machine.

From Wikipedia, here are Republicans guilty of sex scandals much worse the Weiner and they weren't forced by their political party to walk the plank and resign:

• Chip Pickering, (R-MS) On July 16, 2009 it was announced that his wife had filed an alienation of affection lawsuit against Elizabeth Byrd, a woman with whom Chip allegedly had an affair. The lawsuit claimed the adulterous relationship ruined the Pickerings' marriage and his political career.


• John Ensign Senator (R-NV) Resigned his position as Chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee on June 16, 2009, after admitting he had an affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of a close friend, both of whom were working on his campaign. Under investigation, he then resigned his seat in Congress 20 months early. In 1998, Senator Ensign had called for President Bill Clinton (D) to resign after admitting to sexual acts with Monica Lewinsky.


• Vito Fossella, Representative (R-NY) Arrested for drunk driving. Under questioning, the married Congressman, father of three, admitted to an affair with Laura Fay that produced a daughter.


• Larry Craig, Senator (R-ID) Pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct following his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men's room in June 2007, on a charge of lewd conduct. Senator Craig had previously stated that "people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy - a naughty boy."


• David Vitter, Senator (R-LA): Took over former Congressman Robert Livingston's House seat in 1999, who resigned following revelations of an extramarital affair. At the time, Vitter stated: "I think Livingston's stepping down makes a very powerful argument that (Bill) Clinton should resign as well ..." Vitters' name was then discovered in the address book of the DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey. He admitted his adultery and withdrew from the 2003 gubernatorial race for governor.


• Jack Ryan, Senate candidate (R-IL) During sealed divorce proceedings in 2004, his wife Jeri Ryan accused him of forcing her to go to public sex clubs and described one as "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."


• Don Sherwood, Representative (R-PA) Failed to win re-election following revelations of a five-year extramarital affair with Cynthia Ore, who accused him of physically abusing her.

Etc., etc., etc.

It is sad that the Democratic party has a leader, Obama, who thinks you lead by compromise, by giving the other side what it wants, then asks "What more can I give you?". Nobody in the Democratic party is outraged by the fact that unemployment is 9% and that millions are being foreclosed and tossed out of their houses because of Wall Street scam that -- really a crime that lured unsuspecting into signing papers that set them up to lose their house -- and when the economy blew up, the Wall Street banks got $700 billion of taxpayer money while the people being forced out of their homes get nothing. Where are the politicians who will fight for the ordinary people instead of selling their soul to big money?

Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence, founding father who helped write the Constitution, forced his black slave to have sex and bear him children. But he ended up being a president. Sure. What he did was a crime. But if you make people ineligible for political office because they have lax morals or are "on the make" you will be left with a handful of prudes and prigs to run your government. And I can assure you that you will hate that far more than allowed some morally questionable people -- who have been legally elected to represent their constituents -- do do their job and stop with all the moral prudery about sex and bad manners.

The Beam in Your Own Eye

I love stories about religious figures, especially when they so obviously flaunt their ignorance of the essentials of their own religion.

Take Matthew 7:5

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

This admonition by Jesus isn't holding back a New York Catholic archbishop as Maureen Dowd points out in her NY Times op-ed column:

With his cigars, blogs, Jameson’s and Irish affability, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan prides himself on his gumption.

Certainly his effort to kill the gay marriage bill, just one vote away from passing in Albany, shows a lot of gall.

The archbishop has been ferocious in fighting against marriage between same-sex couples, painting it as a perversity against nature.

If only his church had been as ferocious in fighting against the true perversity against nature: the unending horror of pedophile priests and the children who trusted them.

In the second-generation round of the Church vs. Cuomo, Archbishop Dolan is pitted against Andrew Cuomo, the Catholic governor who is fiercely pushing for New York to become the sixth and most populous state to approve gay marriage.

I guess in the archbishop's ranking of sins 'buggering a child' is less harmful than a 'same-sex marriage'. Go figure! My problem is that in the first case, you are wrecking a kids life, a little kid who doesn't understand what is being done to him by a calculating "man of the cloth". In the latter, you have two consenting adults who want to have a public acknowledgement of their relationship.

I'm amazed that the Catholic church manages to keep its churches full while it persists in its bizarre medieval world view of male-only priests, woman-hating morally simplistic anti-abortion crusades, and their refusal to address the rampant criminal behaviour of its own priests. But what do I know? Obviously I'm not "talking to the big fella upstairs" who seems to approve of this kind of sleazy behaviour. Certainly Jimmy Swaggart was living proof that God loves a boozing, skirt-chasing, sinning hypocrite.

It is hard to believe that the Catholic church has much of a future when:

The church refuses to acknowledge the hypocrisy at its heart: that it became a haven for gay priests even though it declares homosexual sex a sin, and even though it lobbies to stop gays from marrying.

In yet another attempt at rationalization, the nation’s Catholic bishops — a group Dolan is now in charge of — put out a ridiculous five-year-study last month going with the “blame Woodstock” explanation for the sex-abuse scandal. The report suggested that the problem was caused by permissive secular society rather than cloistered church culture, because priests were trained in the turbulent free-love era. It concluded, absurdly, that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were causes.

In another resistance to reform, the bishops voted on Thursday to keep their policies on sexual abuse by the clergy largely the same, with only small revisions, ignoring victims’ advocates who were hoping for meaningful changes.

At their meeting in Bellevue, Wash., one retired archbishop from Anchorage actually proposed an amendment to get rid of the “zero tolerance” provision on abuse so some guilty priests could return to parishes. That failed, at least.

I have no problem with religious communities setting standards within their community for their own members. But I have a real problem when minorities living in a pluralistic society become politically active in order to impose their own twisted logic on the larger community. That's when I start quoting Matthew 7:5.

I love Dowd's humourous twist on things:

Worn out by the rampant sexting of Anthony Weiner and the relentless blogging of Archbishop Dolan, I’m wondering if our institutions need to rejigger: Maybe pols should be celibate and priests should be married.

Barry Schwartz & Kenneth Sharpe's "Practical Wisdom"

This is a book I'm ambivalent about. It is an entertaining enough read. It carries an important message. But I was left feeling like I had eaten "empty calories". Maybe it is me. I'm stubborn, headstrong, independent, and deeply committed to learning and ideas, so giving me a message that people's lives would be better if their work were not focused on money, status, or rewards makes me shrug my shoulders. Big deal. I've known that all my life.

The only charm for me in this book is the bit of ancient Greek philosophy. I studied philosophy and I remember that at a key moment in my life I felt kind of stupid falling back on Greek Stoicism as the "guide" to my life. I was surprised at that time, but as I look back 40+ years later, I realize I had instinctively fallen back on the one bit of philosophy that was indeed practical, the ethics of the ancients.

This book lays out Aristotle's idea of "happiness" and shows why this can only be truly achieved by "practical wisdom". Not by money, fame, glory, or power. It is written focused on modern America looking at how "rules" and "incentives", supposedly tools to allow managers and moral leaders of society to guide people to better lives is in fact undermining them. The book is very good at looking at explicit examples of teachers, lawyers, doctors, and even a janitor to show how modern America is being hollowed out. For this reason, the book deserves being read. It is in fact a message that most people need.

But for those who aren't swept up in the hoopla of greed, sex, power, and adulation, this book doesn't really carry any shocking revelation or even any really useful guidance. It is entertaining. And I hope the message is embraced by the 95% who need the message, but I sincerely doubt that this book will change more than a very modest number of minds.

Besides some "case studies", the following excerpt gives you an idea of the level of "advice" this book offers:

The work of Martin Seligman, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania ... launched a whole new discipline -- dubbed "positive" psychology -- in the 1990s, when he was president of the American Psychological Association. ... He kick-started positive psychology with his book Authentic Happiness.

The word authentic is there to distinguish what Seligman is talking about from what many of us sometimes casually take happiness to be -- feeling good. Feeling good -- experiencing positive emotion -- is certainly important. But just as important are engagement and meaning. Engagement is about throwing yourself into the activities of your life. And meaning is about connecting what you do to the livs of others -- knowing that what you do makes the lives of others better. Authentic happiness, says Seligman, is a combination of engagement, meaning, and positive emotion. ...

The twenty-four character strengths Seligman identified include things like curiosity, open-mindedness, perspective, kindness and generosity, loyalty, duty, fairness, leadership, self-control, caution, humility, bravery, perseverance, honesty, gratitude, optimism, and zest. He organized these strengths into virtues: courage, humanity and love, justice, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom and knowledge. Aristotle would have recognized many of these strengths as the kind of "excellences" or virtues he considered necessary for eudaimonia, a flourishing or happy life.

Like Aristotle, we consider wisdom to be the "master virtue." Without moral skill, many of the other character strengths and virtues that Seligman identifies as essential to happiness would not do the job. Without such know-how, these strengths would be more like unruly children, leading to well-meaning actions that leave disaster in their wake -- recklessness, not courage; indecisiveness, not patience; blind loyalty, not commitment; cruel confrontation, not helpful honesty. Practical wisdom is the maestro. It's what conducts the whole symphony.

Seligman suggests that "authentic happiness" may only be achievable indirectly, as a by-product of living an engaged and meaningful life. And the two spheres of life Seligman singles out as most likely to provide such positive emotion, engagement and meaning are the same two Ed Diener's research turned up: close social relations with others and participation in meaningful work.

And this bit is the fundamental critique which this book offers to modern managers and intellectuals who are pushing rules and incentives as the "fix" for what ails the modern world:

We need to see how the current reliance on strict rules and regulations and clever incentives to improve practices like medicine, education, and law risks undermining the very wisdom of practitioners that is needed to make these practices better. Well-meaning reformers are often engaged in a kind of unintended stealth war on wisdom.

We absolutely must understand that the corrosion of wisdom is not inevitable. It can be resisted. ...

And finally, again, relying on research in psychology, we need to appreciate that cultivating wisdom is not only good for society but is, as Aristotle thought, a key to our own happiness. Wisdom isn't just something we "ought" to have. It's something we want to have to flourish.

I fear that the 2% who read this book are the 2% who don't need the message of this book. It is the 98% who are seduced by money, power, status, and fame who won't read this book who would benefit from the message in this book. But sadly, that is the way of the world. The 2% who actively try to understand their world and build a better place will read this book looking for more helpful suggestions, but won't uncover any stunning new knowledge. But the 98% who need this book will never read it and even if they stumble on it, they will disdain it because it isn't a "how to" book with "5 quick steps" to achieve their goals of dominance, wealth, social position, and instant stardom. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Puritanism in America

The voices of "the moral majority" have been heard. Anthony Weiner has resigned.

I now expect these modern Puritans to demand that history books remove the names if other outrageous sexual perverts:

Thomas Jefferson's name needs to be removed from the Declaration of Independence and from the list of presidents. Why? Well, this "moral pervert" abused his slaves, had children with them, dragged them around the world to service his outrageous libido. This is simply unacceptable. Politics is politics and under Puritanism, only the pure may be politicians (unless they belong to the Republican party because that party has a special mandate that allows you to sin then "ask forgiveness" and then the faithful are required by God to accept the sinner back in the flock, this of course does not apply to Democracts).

Dwight Eisenhower will have to have his name blotted out as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe because of his sexual peccadilloes with Kay Summersby.

John F. Kennedy's tenure of the presidency should be blotted out and thrown into the cesspit of history because of his dalliances with many, many young women while he held the office of the presidency. From Wikipedia: Marilyn Monroe, Gunilla von Post, Judith Campbell, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Mimi Beardsley Alford

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's twelve years as President of the US needs to be blotted out. His affair with Lucy Mercer still shocks and disgusts the moral vanguard of America. Who cares that he saved the country from the Great Depression. Replace him with Hoover, a fine and disciplined man who would rather let humans starve in Hoovervilles than dally with a damsel.

... and on goes the list.

Those who are shocked, shocked by such behaviour by their politicians will simple have to seek counsel with this religious leaders, the ones who provide the religious right such sterling guidance on moral issues: Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, etc.

I don't condone bad behaviour, but to demand that political leaders be "morally pure" means that many great leaders will have to be blotted out of the past, and worse yet, will not be available to solving today's and the future's problems. Since when do you demand that your car mechanic lead a morally exemplary life, that the bus driver be chaste and pure, that the clerk at the grocery store be a morally superior person? If you start making moral character the basis for holding a job, that will solve the unemployment problem, but it will create a far worse problem as the economy grinds to a halt with so few people "qualified" to run the economy.

I thought America got over the "Puritanism thing" 250 years ago. Obviously I was wrong.

The Tragedy of War

You call on people to do insuperable things and tie them up in impossible legal niceties, then you get this...



War should only be used as a last ditch option and when you go to war, you go to war, i.e. you militarize the whole society. All civilians should be put on a war footing and "fun and games" ended until the war is over. Like Sherman said, you have to make "war is hell" a reality for your enemies, but I'm saying you have to make "was is hell" for your citizens to ensure that they only go to war as a very, very last ditch option. Sadly, the Americans have fallen in love with war and their soldiers. This has created the moral abomination of the above video. I don't blame the soldiers. I blame the civilian leadership and the military leadership for putting people into an impossible situation.

If Saddam Hussein was the big bugaboo that Bush claimed to have been, then citizens should have been willing to see their taxes go up 20%, that all entertainment (movies, parks, bars, etc.) be shut down "for the duration". They should be willing to see a "levée en masse" that makes sure that politicians kids and Wall Street tycoon kids get swept up in the war effort. I guarantee you, Iraq wouldn't have happened.

But I'm convinced that the American people would have signed up for the first 4 months of the fight in Afghanistan. That made sense. The US was attacked and they had to strike back to discourage any further adventurism by al Qaeda was stopped.

The US wouldn't have decided that Vietnam was a "strategic domino" if the above standard had been met.

OK... I have to admit that the above makes it sound like it is all cut-and-dried, simple rules, the problem is "fixable", etc. It isn't. I'm just trying to make the point that war is horrible and people who decide to go to war have to make very, very sure that it is realy and truly necessary.

Right to Life, Right to Muck Up

Some people are so morally "sure" of themselves they are willing to "go public" with their idiocy.

Here's a story about a cradle-robbing 35 year old guy who got his just-turned 18 year old "girlfriend" pregnant. When she asked him to marry her, he said "no way!". Of course when the baby died, the guy went berserk and accused the 18 year of "killing" his baby! Right... "his" baby, the one he wouldn't marry the mother of. He was happy to impregnate, but not interested in any responsible fathering, but he sure wanted to make sure she bore "his" child and that she would put in the 20 years it would take to raise "his" child.

A "morally pure" man like this wants the whole world to know just how "godly" he is. He's put up billboards to accuse the 18 year old of "killing his child". Facts be damned. He will make sure she carries a scarlet letter for life.

Here's a bit from the Reuters news report:

A New Mexico man who said he was upset that his girlfriend had an abortion bought a highway billboard and accused her of killing their child.

...

Fultz's ex-girlfriend calls the billboard harassment and invasion of privacy, and has taken him to court under the New Mexico Family Violence Protection Act. But Fultz says he's exercising his First Amendment rights, said his attorney, Todd Holmes.

"Citizens have the right to express their speech through any media and he chose a billboard," Holmes told Reuters on Tuesday. "We feel a billboard fits within the First Amendment even if it's offensive to some."

A petition filed by Fultz' ex-girlfriend said that Fultz had a pattern of stalking and harassment, including posting "intimate cyber shots of me from one of our cyber dates," she wrote. The domestic abuse petition also requested that the billboard be removed and online harassment stopped.

...

In a hearing last week, a judge ordered the billboard to come down by mid-June. Holmes said he plans to file a motion to keep the billboard up, but he said his client is ready to face prison if necessary.

"That's how passionately he feels about protecting his free speech," Holmes said.

According to Holmes, when Fultz and his girlfriend, who was then 18, found out they were going to have a baby, she wanted to get married. Fultz refused, Holmes said, and during a church camping trip there was a "discussion about an ultimatum. Either you marry me or I'm not going to have this baby type of thing."

The girlfriend later flew to Wisconsin for work and when she returned she was no longer pregnant, Holmes said. She did not explain what happened, but Fultz suspected she had an abortion, Holmes said.

"I know it's her body," Holmes said. "But his statement is more along the lines of 'Hey, you know what? Dads have a decision in the process too."

New Mexico's Right to Life Committee initially endorsed the billboard, but has withdrawn its support because it received a number of emails from people who said Fultz' ex-girlfriend had a miscarriage, not an abortion, said executive director Dauneen Dolce.

Notice how the idiotic "right to life" people did a knee-jerk support of this moral-blight-of-a-guy until friends of the girl pointed out there was no abortion, it was a miscarriage.

Moral Puritanism is Alive and Well in the US

They don't put your in the stocks and throw rotten vegetables at you like in the "good old days", but in the US they still have a strange idea of moral turpitude and they will punish you for crimes like "sitting in a park to eat a donut without an accompanying minor". Seriously.

Here's a bit from the Gothamist:

The police may not be ticketing for smoking in the parks, but they are still ticketing parker visitors for crimes like...eating a doughnut in a playground. Yup, this weekend the police gave two young women in Bed-Stuy summonses for eating doughnuts in a playground while unaccompanied by a minor.

Tickets for being an adult in or around a playground have been popping up fairly frequently lately—see the Inwood chess players—but instead of giving the offending citizens a warning and urging them to leave, the NYPD's M.O. appears to be to hand out a ticket. Here's how our reader, an anthropology graduate student, describes her experience this weekend.

Go read the whole article.

I'm waiting for the police to arrest you for have "unclean thoughts". And I'm trying to think up an appropriate punishment for such a deviant. Maybe incarcerate you like the Magdalene asylums in Ireland that imprisoned unwed mothers and abused girls forcing them into slave-like drudgery in their infamous "Magdalene launderies".

Everybody knows that clean and tidy parks are next to Godliness. And there is no better way to keep them clean and tidy than to ban people from the parks. Keep them pristine. Wall them off. Put up restrictions like "a person can only enter this park while carrying an infant in the left arm on a Tuesday while have 'pure thoughts' about God and his graciousness". That will keep the park clean and wholesome!

Dale Peterson's "The Moral Lives of Animals"

I quite enjoyed this book. The author has an excellent style and peppers his points with interesting commentary and results from scientific research.

His purpose in writing this book is to get us to recognize our in-built prejudice, what he calls Darwinian narcissism, our view that nature is out there for us to exploit. Also, he wants us to understand our deep evolutionary connection with the rest of life and, in particular, with animals that share similar brain structures. He argues for not just similar emotions and thoughts across species lines, but an incipient morality shared by us and animals. I love the bits about altruism.

He is not one of these authors with a soapbox and the accusatory rant of a preacher. He isn't beating the reader about the head with some "revelation" he has about the place of animals in the world. His style is more lyrical and seductive. He wins the reader over by laying out a feast of story, anecdote, scientific research, and personal experience. This is like sitting with a friend on the front porch and sharing insights and experience. It is very pleasant.

I love the bit where he argues that morality has two sides: rules and empathy. I enjoy his honesty in pointing out that men and women share an understanding of both sides to morality but that there is a deep divide between them. Men go off the deep end with their rules and their Bible-thumping, verse citing, hard legal case arguing. Women go off the deep end with their sympathetic relationships and understanding of the need for special pleading for each instance. I really like the fact that he points out that morality is a crazy mix of rules and empathy and he doesn't get boxed in by trying to spell out in some absolutist sense exactly which of what makes up morality. Instead he paints pictures and opens your eyes and gets you to wondering.

I do recommend this book.

A Society's Ethics

Here is a very important post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

I keep encountering discussions of health economics in which patients are referred to as “consumers”, after which the usual mantra of freedom of choice is invoked on behalf of voucherizing Medicare, or whatever.

We used to know better than this.

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

This is an excellent and very pointed commentary on what has gone wrong under the dominance of right wing "free market" thinking with the idea of "let the market decide because it is all knowing". It isn't. It is a blind beast. Worse, it is a beast without an ethics. Nature is indifferent to human values. We impose our ethical vision on the world. To let "markets decide" is to turn this relationship upside down and put people at the cruel and indifferent forces of nature. Our ancestors invented superstitions, religions, and ethics to deal with the cruel indifference of nature. To let right wingers return us to that blighted time is purely insane.

When Life is at Stake, Money Should Not be a Consideration

That is what Garrett Shakespeare is saying. He has a rare blood disease that can be treated, but the cost of the needed drugs is $500,000 each year. He is 22 years old, and if he lives a normal life, he should live another 70 years, so he is telling Canadians that they have a moral obligation to provide him with $35 million to let him live.

The problem with the argument that "you can't put a price on a life" is that in the real world, decisions have costs. Take the above story, but change $500,000 into $1 trillion. Should Canadian taxpayer spend $1 trillion per year to save one BC man? Should they spend $35 trillion over the next 70 years? That would represents 75% of the total national income. So all 34 million Canadians should literally starve to death, homeless, cold so that one man can treat his rare blood disease? That is utter nonsense.

The reality is that life and death decisions do hinge on economics and wealth. I'm a big supporter of the Canadian health plan, but if we look at it as a pot of money, I would rather spend it where you get the biggest bang for the buck. I'm not big on providing elaborate and expensive life saving operations for those in their 80s. On the other hand, I'm all for giving those very same operations to children. Why? The benefit to a kid of 12 is another 80 years of life. The benefit for an 87 year old. Maybe another 5 years.

Sadly, the New Democrat Party has stepped and argued that the medical plan should pay for this treatment adding the classic statement "you can't put a price on a life". But that just shows that the NDP has no understanding of economics and reality. Get a grip. Yes, we should help as many people as we can and our socialized medicine is a gem that should be protected and even extended, but not mindlessly ignorantly and without concern for costs. That way lies economic calamity! Socialized medicine works only if bureaucrats are diligent in helping to buy the best medicine possible for the greatest number of people and obtaining the best benefit. It shouldn't be idiotically thrown to the wind to save hopeless cases or sad cases where the cost is simply prohibitive. Realism is essential.

Here is a Province newspaper article about Garrett Shakespeare and his sad medical situation:

If Garrett Shakespeare wants to live a full life, the cost will be approximately $500,000 a year.

Shakespeare has an extremely rare and deadly disease that attacks his red blood cells. There is a potential cure, and it's approved by the Canadian government.

But Shakespeare can't afford the treatment.

Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria is a potentially fatal blood disorder usually managed with blood transfusions, but Shakespeare, 22, said his doctors advised against that treatment.

"My particular count of bad cells is so high that a transfusion wouldn't be very effective," he said before heading to his job as a lifeguard and swimming coach.

Shakespeare, who lives in North Vancouver, said he's hoping to be treated with infusions of eculizumab, more commonly known as Soliris, a treatment he said might be a miracle drug.

"I would love to get some of that," he said, his voice perking up at the mention of the drug.

The treatment was approved in Canada two years ago, but the price tag has put it out of reach for Shakespeare, who has dealt with PNH since he was a child.

For an example of this principle in the US, Oregon's public health plan has a prioritized list which captures economic reality:

The Prioritized List emphasizes prevention and patient education. In general, services that help prevent illness are nearer to the beginning of the list (also referred to as “higher
on the list”) than services that treat illness after it occurs. Treatment of advanced cancers, for instance, has a lower priority on the list than regular checkups, in the belief that early detection or lifestyle changes may reduce the frequency of cancers that become untreatable.

The Health Services Commission (HSC), in hearings over more than 18 months involving more than 25,000 volunteer hours, originally devised a list of health services ranked by clinical effectiveness and value to society. Actuaries determined how much it would cost to provide the services on the list. Combined, these pieces of information indicate the value of the health service relative to the cost of providing the service.

Fanatics who say that "health care is a right" would denounce this. But in the real world money is scarce and what we pay for has to be prioritized. It is a tragedy if somebody has paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, but it is a tragedy if you slip and fall, hit your head, have a concussion that kills you. Life is full of "unfair" facts. We make do as best we can with our lot in life.

Where I draw the line is with billionaires and millionaires telling the bottom 90% of society that schools must be shut down, police services curtailed, firehouses closed because "there isn't enough money" and "taxes are too high". For those who want to be morally outraged, I suggest they direct their anger toward the ultra-rich who during the last 30 years have severed their connection with the rest of society and demand that they be treated like royalty beyond the reach of "the common law".

If I have a choice between helping a kid get a good education and an old person live another 6 months, I go with the kid. In my morals, anything else is cruel and wasteful.

Scott Adams on Libya

I enjoy Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoons. I usually like his posts on his blogs, but on occasion I get infuriated with this libertarian nuttiness. But this one today has me thinking. I'm one of the ones in the middle who think it was good to help the Libyans, but Scott Adams pretty well takes me down and rubs my nose in my weak reasoning. Oh well...

From Scott Adams' blog:

Remind me again why we're bombing Libya? Let's run through the possibilities.

Humanitarian Reasons: No one believes this is the most effective way to save lives in other countries, unless Libyan lives are somehow more valuable than, for example, other African lives. The price for missiles alone on the first day of attacks is estimated at $100 million. For that amount of money we could buy a lot of water purifiers, food, and vaccinations. When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation starts attacking Libya, I'll believe that bombing is a good humanitarian investment.

Getting rid of a Dangerous Dictator: Isn't Libya the country that renounced nuclear weapons and apparently meant it? Gaddafi's Western-influenced son, who doesn't seem crazy, has apparently taken an increasingly active role in government. That was a good sign for sane leadership in the future. And compared to other Muslim countries in the neighborhood, Libya is relatively good on women's rights.

Supporting Democratic Movements: Sounds good in principle, but do the member states of the Arab League, who originally supported the military action, understand that they're next? That doesn't pass the sniff test.

Oil: You can never rule out oil as a motive for war. But if the military was doing the bidding of the oil companies, we'd be attacking Saudi Arabia.

Terrorism: You don't reduce terrorism by bombing a Muslim country that didn't start a fight with you.

My theory is that the military action in Libya is the first phase of war with Iran. It sends a signal to the young people in Iran that if they organize a popular uprising against their own regime, they will get military support of the same sort they are seeing in Libya. You might argue that we're sending that same message to every dictator in the region. But remember that the Arab League supported military action in Libya, and that group includes a lot of dictators. Iran is obviously not part of the Arab League, given that being Arab is sort of a requirement for the club. My conclusion is that the no-fly zone in Libya is intended as a message for the young people in Iran. The world has a far bigger strategic interest in Iran than Libya.

Here I remind you that cartoonists don't know much about world affairs. You'll see more insightful ideas in the comments below. I'm just getting the ball rolling.

I admit I hadn't thought of the Iran angle. I bought the "humanitarian" argument, but I also bought the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for Iraq. I did realize that oil probably played a role and explained why Libya but not Yemen or Bahrain.

I hate to think I get suckered by these "causes" but it looks like I have been taken again. What Scott Adams points out is that I didn't do the necessary due dilligance and examine the "costs" of the humanitarian mission. He's right. There are lots of other missions that would save more lives much cheaper.

I admit that I'm a sucker for wanting to help people in need and I'm weak on the cold-hearted calculations. I'm like the guy who sees somebody drowning and even if I don't know how to swim I jump in to "save" the drowning person. It is just my impulse. It is built into me.

Scott Adams would see the person drowning and look around and see if he can get off the hook because somebody else will jump in. Failing that, Scott would check his billfold to see if he could maybe bribe somebody else to jump in -- and risk their life -- to save the drowning person. Failing that. Scott would made the trade-off of personal risk to benefits from saving the drowning person. I'm guessing that Scott would end up walking along the water's edge shouting encouraging words. His calculation would be "if I save the guy I get patted on the back and maybe get to shake the mayor's hand. but I risk paying in infinite penalty of dying, if I stand on the shore and shout encouragement then I get points for "helping" but I don't have any personal downside in terms of risk to myself". That kind of calculation is rational, but it leaves me cold.

The interesting fact is that Scott Adams plays a better evolutionary game than I do. I blindly run risks that jeopardize my ability to keep my germ line going. He rationally plans his actions to maintain a maximum genetic viability. I'm a branch on the tree of life that will end. He is a branch that will bear many smaller branches and reach far into the future.

How to Tell When Obama is Doing the Right Thing

He gets attacked by the political right and the political left. That's what he is getting over the Libyan intervention.

Funny how Americans love to tell stories about all their wars being "of necessity" and purely "to help the local people". But they aren't. They are generally done to protect American strategic interests. Even Libya has a strategic value: oil. making sure that 3% of the world's oil supply isn't destroyed by Gaddafi or put to nefarious uses is a good reason to intervene.

I find it funny how the American media (as well as those slippery and useless "Arab League" politicians) went from calling for aid to a "noble popular youth revolt" to suddenly talking about "who are these people? why is America supporting an uprising that nobody knows who is leading and what they stand for?" Gee... with friends like that, who needs enemies?

The protesters in Libya didn't change. It was the US politicians and media and the Arabs.

I'm disheartened to hear that the U.A.E. has failed to send jets like it promised. And that Norway recalled its jets midair to return to Norway. And that Italy is now threatening to deny access to its air bases to the coalition. These remind me of the scene in the film Casablanca when the corrupt Vichy French official said he was "shocked! shocked to discover gambling in Rick's Café Américain".

All of these crocodile tears and knives in the back convince me that Obama did the right thing. This is the first thing in many, many months where I think he did the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing. Although I do believe it was due to pressure by Hillary Clinton. But I'll take it. Obama did the right thing.