Opportunities

There is nothing wrong with taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves, but sometimes it goes too far. The Family Research Council was the target of a failed attack the other day, and now they are using this to claim the Southern Poverty Law Center, a relatively neutral group, of inciting terrorism. They are claiming this is evidence for their persecution complex, the so called war on christianity by some nebulous liberal conspiracy in a country that is mostly Christian and conservative. Most liberals, too are Christians.

And all this is right after the supposed assault on Chick Fil'As free speech by the grave crime of criticism. These people openly call for violence and armed insurrection, then cry the second anything happens to them. Their ideological allies in the violent extremist groups, like the KKK and various Neo Nazi groups, constantly attack abortion clinics and non white people of various religions, but somehow calling Dan Cathy is destroying free speech. Somehow one lone and mentally unhealthy individual is an all out war on the majority they claim to represent. The same people who talk about the death of the president as a good thing claim the incredibly rare violence from left associated people is representative of a liberal violence.

These persecution complex they foster, the fear they foster, the violence they encourage is beyond reasonable discourse and it is becoming clearer every day the only things they can say other than violent rhetoric are parroted from criticisms of them. Read the wording, they seem to copy exactly what people said about the Sikh temple attack, about Gabby Gifford's attack, about any given argument with these people. "I am rubber you are glue" seems to be their best argument these days. Accuse them of fostering a violent culture, they repeat it word for word the first chance they get. Critique them for bigotry, they claim calling them bigots is bigotry. Try to show them their logical fallacies, they accuse you of illogic, though they never back up their rebounded accusations. They claim to be a majority and a persecuted minority. The strange compartmentalized minds are beginning to confuse the hell out of me.

Logic Priest

Academics

PZ Meyers has a post and link up that is frankly upsetting. Yet another way the US is falling behind due to privatization: higher education. We all hear the crap about public education failing, and that now includes public universities. Republicans have pushed for school vouchers to gut the primary and secondary education of our country, now they funnel funds to over priced and under qualified for-profit schools like Devry and Pheonix, where graduation rates are terrible, hiring rates are worse, and they cost as much as an ivy-league school.

The over political nature of faculty jobs, the remaining funds universities have going to coach salaries and non academic president's salaries have led to good scientists and educators leaving the system to make money elsewhere. Even as the states and the fed cut primary and secondary education funds, even as states and the fed funnel money out of them to tax breaks and for-profit schools, we have science funding under attack. There seems to be an all out war on education, on science, on intelligence in general. The US lead the world in science and technology for years but now we have an entire political party who cuts funds from and even demonizes education and research, the basis of such leadership. They think that private corporations will advance the world? Even while the private corporations suppress inventions that threaten their monopolies and sue each other over vague patents to keep innovation out? It seems like every card is stacked against an intelligent generation. From kindergarden to a PHD it costs more and more for less, with no prospect of a good job or even the ability to start a new company, since it will be sued out of business the second a tech giant sees it as a threat, the US is headed for a new stone age. The oligarchical nature of the Republican party isn't just about making as much money from bribes and insider trading and outsourcing as possible, it seems to be actively working towards making a new peasant class, blindly following the conservative march towards destruction.

Logic Priest

Depressing Statistics

Ok, so not exactly new but new to me, according to Gallop twice as many people self identify as conservative than liberal. That is depressing as hell. Some 40% of Americans openly claim they like the world how it once was, in some murky and ill defined past. They preferred more blatant discrimination,  less equality, more racial violence. They liked the world when we live in constant fear of global annihilation and we spent trillions of dollars building monuments to phallic pride designed to murder the population of earth. They openly admit, are even proud of the fact that they don't like change. I know most people are conservative, in the sense that they fear change, but I thought most would at least try to think ahead. I really didn't know that so many were so proud of being regressive assholes bent on making shit worse.

Fox news and its affiliate hyper conservative media love to equate liberalism with fascism and other blatant fear mongering,  so I didn't expect these people to call themselves liberals, but at least moderate or unsure or something less blatantly anti progress. Various psychological holes make people think the past was better, even to the point of thinking the past they didn't live in was, but fuck man, do they really think it was awesome for non white males in the 50s?

I guess I really shouldn't be so shocked. The average human fears change, and is easily manipulated by it. Without strong leaders, intelligent alpha personalities, they won't move or revolt in even the worst conditions. How else are there so many brutal dictatorships? It isn't even about that stupid poem everyone quotes against each other, with "they came for the jews" etc. People don't take action because they prefer to stay still, to hide, over doing things, over making decisions.

On the other hand, at least they take some position. Moderates are in some ways worse, being unwilling to even label themselves as having anything. They are almost universally conservative, but they build their identity over the golden mean fallacy. Both sides of an argument, if there only two, are not always or even likely to be equal.

Logic Priest

Broken Patents, Google Saves the Day?

While Google is getting more and more involved in the patent wars that muddy up innovation in the tech industry these days, especially in defending Android and Android partners, they have helped by creating a patent search. For a few years now the Google patent search engine has given potential innovators and curious bystanders a way to effectively search the highly obfuscated patent system of the US, and now they offer a new feature: Prior Art search.

Assuming they don't start to muddy the results themselves, which they have avoided in ordinary searches for a decade now, this could be a way to navigate an over expansive patent system, at least until (if) it gets fixed. To make any technology or software these days seems likely to infringe on someone's broad and poorly defined patent, so this could be a way to work around it, as well as is possible with such a fucked up system. Hell, the US patent system let Apple patent a search bar and rounded edged rectangular phones. Patents are supposed to protect, for limited times innovative and non obvious inventions, not styles and features.

Logic Priest

Crybaby Romney

We as a voting public in the US have grown used to the majority of ads being negative, or attack ads against the other candidate. With the Citizens United decision allowing unchecked corporate money to pay for ads, it has only gotten worse. But at this point anyone involved in the campaign should expect such negativity, yet somehow Romney seems blind to his hypocritical moaning and crying over attack ads. Now he claims Obama is "running on hate," something I find more than a bit hilarious. Both Obama and Romney ads are mostly attack ads, and both stretch and bend the truth to some degree to shine a negative light on their opponent, but Romney has by far outspent on negative ads and his ads are less stretches of the truth and more pulled out of his ass lies. For example, the CBO (congressional budget office, a bipartisan committee) said that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (obamacare) would raise the cost of medicare some $700,000,000. Seven hundred billion dollars. Somehow, Romney claimed that this meant Obama had removed that much from medicare, using something I like to call conservative math, also known as bullshit. See below:

Knowing it would face attacks on Ryan's Medicare proposal, the Romney campaign counterpunched Tuesday with a new ad accusing Obama of cutting more than $700 billion from the popular entitlement program.

Romney continued that tone Wednesday, saying in a morning interview with CBS that the Obama campaign is "about division and attack and hatred," adding it is "designed to bring a sense of enmity and jealously and anger."

"The president seems to be running to hang on to power," the former Massachusetts governor said. "I think he'll do anything in his power to try and get re-elected."

A spokesman for the Obama campaign responded to similar comments by Romney on Tuesday by saying the Republican candidate also had gone negative in the campaign.

"Gov. Romney's comments tonight seemed unhinged, and particularly strange coming at a time when he's pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false," said Obama campaign Press Secretary Ben LaBolt.

After a blatant lie, Romney has the balls to say Obama is a big meanie. After implying Obama is un-American, after deliberately misquoting him and the CBO, after pulling lies from thin air, Romney dares say the Obama campaign is mean. LaBolt's quote, above, seems to sum it up perfectly. Romney has become unhinged. He is so absorbed by his own little GOP/Fox media machine that he cannot handle critique in an election season. And this is common to the whole Republican party, apparently. On CNN, of all places, a reporter did her job for once. She actually called out a GOP talking head for blatantly lying, and he freaked and called her an Obama drone.

It seems the conservatives in the US have gotten to cozy with owning an arm of the media and with no one being willing to call their bullshit. Finally we have a Democratic politician fighting mud with mud, not necessarily the best thing but better than lying back on the defensive. Besides, at least a good portion of the Obama ads are true, compared to the Romney ads I have seen which seem universally false. Obama has disappointed me on 4th amendment issues and copyright/patent laws, but when the choice is between an oligarch who sells out to corporate interests and a blatant corporate puppet, I suppose the one who is pro gay rights and pro regulation (somewhat) is better?

Logic Priest

Red States

It is becoming increasingly clear that the more someone rails against the "others" who take their money in some sort of welfare queen imaginary land, the more likely they were to receive such welfare. Paul Ryan received Social Security survivor benefits, using those to go to college. Ayn Rand, his hero, took her Social Security pension after decades of railing against it. Red states overwhelmingly receive the most federal aid per taxes paid.

There seems to be some innate hypocrisy in bitching about "others" getting off easy. The same voters Ryan and Romney are sucking up to imagine those others to be black welfare queens, lazy immigrants, so on and so forth, while it is they who need the most government help. The working class is obsessed with the idea they are paying for the rest of the working class, despite the inherent insanity in that belief. An imaginary lazy poor peasant class has been invented in their minds, and goddammit they want to keep it out of those lazy (insert racial slur here) hands. They never notice the bloated military budget or low upper class effective tax rates, they bitch about welfare and science taking all the funds.

Logic Priest

Pushing the Blame

Mitt Romney and the Republican party have recently taken to demonizing the half that "don't pay taxes" in the US. Besides ignoring payroll, Social Security, sales and property taxes, this doesn't mean much since that half doesn't make much. Income inequality is so bad right now that the top ten percent own nearly all the wealth earned, even more so when counting disposable (as in not debt based) income. Now we can see that they, in turn, pay far less. In an article on the New York Times website, the wealthiest Americans pay far lower than the rest of us. Partly due to capital gains maxing out at 15%, partly from tax shelters and deductions, even in bad years the wealthy make money. In 2009, for example, the richest 400 paid little to even zero in taxes, using quirks of the system obviously designed for them to exploit:

The data show that the ultrarich typically pay low tax rates every year, but 2009 was a special case. In 2008, people with large stock portfolios and other less liquid assets were disproportionately hit with large losses on paper. One of the oddities of the tax code is that capital gains taxes are discretionary, since they must be paid only when gains are realized. And they can be offset by losses. The silver lining in a bad year like 2008 for wealthy people is that they can “harvest” losses by selling assets, then use those losses to offset any gains. They can also carry forward the losses to offset gains in future years.

Apparently the ones who actually have money are the ones avoiding the taxes. Romney himself reportedly only paid 13.6% or so, under the rate that people considered in poverty by the US government pay, which is 15% or so. The ones who pay the highest percent are the middle class, and while true the wealthy pay the most in taxes by amount, they disproportionately make the most money to begin with. Demonizing these imaginary welfare queens and lazy poor people is beyond dishonest. The so called half who don't pay taxes work over 40 hours a week to afford housing and food, yet the Republicans dare to claim they don't pay their fare share? The exact people demonizing the poor pay less in taxes by amount earned than they do, and they will never even use that much money. When you live paycheck to paycheck, any amount paid is a big deal, but when you hold millions in secret accounts how much does it hurt you to pay some out for social programs?

The best, most ironic part is that a good portion of these bottom 50% people will go to the polls and vote for the people who rob them and blame them for it. They will show up and yell about Obama ruining the country with welfare and go collect their food stamps and Social Security checks. They will complain about the lazy poor (Read: black people/immigrants "others") while being poor. Tragic irony.

Logic Priest