Antifa?

 I'm pretty sure "Antifa" is just a placeholder for right wingers to aim attacks.  There are obviously lots of people people who are anti-fascist--I certainly am--but the number who are likely to do violent or destructive things is almost certainly minuscule. 

Here are some categories:

Peaceful Demonstrator:   These can be from any issue and with only a few very narrow exceptions, their activities are protected free speech.  I have participated in many, many peaceful demonstrations, such as the Women's marches, Anti-War demonstrations in the 1960s and early 70s and 2003 and have never once seen any sort of violence.

Rioter:  There has been some rioting in a tiny number of this years demonstrations.  I haven't actually seen any in person but I've seen a little on TV.  Rioting nearly always is counterproductive to any cause being peacefully demonstrated for.

Provocateur.  Nearly always, these are people who show up to undermine a peaceful protest.  Many strategies are used, such as starting fights, throwing rocks or other things, especially at police or windows.  They fall into two classes:

Opponents of the cause:  e.g. a right wing provocateur will infiltrate a left wing crowd and stir up trouble.  There were a lot of these in the protests this summer.

Nihilists.  Incorrectly called "anarchists", these are people who find pleasure in violence and mayhem.  They generally have little or no ideology.

The Cops:  Many cops actively oppose progressive causes and in the case of Black Lives Matter, they are representatives of the problematic group.  When they commit acts of violence against previously peaceful protesters, it is not the fault of the protesters that they get angry.   I think it's very significant that the violence in the BLM protests almost completely evaporated when the cops stopped enforcing curfew.

Looter:  like provocateurs, they are at the protest for a reason which is not aligned with the protest itself.  Some of them are there because they agree, but once there is a little broken glass, their main objective is to take advantage.

Anarchist:  There is a legitimate political strategy called anarchism, most conspicuously described by Kropotkin, but it has rarely gotten very far in practice. Kropotkin's idea was to antagonize the ruling class so they would crack down and make support for their uprising nearly universal.   Unfortunately for the strategy, there's an easy way to undermine this: punish the criminal and make a point of not cracking down.   The Portland/Eugene area seems to be a hotbed of people who call themselves anarchists.  They are not.  They are nihilists, who show up at riots wearing black with their identities obscured, and just there to make trouble.

White Supremacists:  This is by far the largest source of terrorism and organized violence in America.  Before Trump was elected, they were active but understood most people were against them, although the vast majority of mass bombings and shootings were done by them.  The vast majority of people arrested for doing violence in Black Lives Matters protests this summer were White Supremacists, trying to undermine the cause.

Religious Extremists:  This is #2 to the racists and they are often the same people, shooting up abortion clinics and so forth.

Antifa:  Appears to be a fictional group made up to be a stalking horse.   Every sane person is anti-fascists, although many Racists and Religious extremists are pro-fascist.  Not all, but enough to be a problem.   Nobody has been able to identify any actual antifa group although occasional a person arrested will admit that they are antifa.  I'll be interested to learn more about the person who was killed by the cops last week who apparently fits this category.

I live less than 10 blocks from virtually all of the protests that occurred in Seattle this summer.  Without the curfew announcements, the news reporting and the occasional news helicopter overhead, I would have had no idea it was happening. 

Why Large Scale Communism is Impossible

For purposes of this discussion, communism a method of of social and economic organization such that all means of production is controlled by the public.  Socialism is quite different, in that some of the means of production is publicly controlled, but some is controlled by individuals or limited groups.  Laissez faire is a form of society where none of the means of production are controlled by the public.   Capitalism is a means of doing trade, and is at least nominally a part of all of these.

Just as there have been no successful large scale societies that have been Laissez faire, there have been none that have been communist.  The nearest are Castro's Cuba and Mao's China.  Provided that the dictator is benevolent, people can have good lives in them, and if the dictator is willing to share most of his or her power, they can even be successful at some level.  But without a strong leader, there are too many people in a large society that lust for power, that benevolence cannot last long.  All successful communist societies, such as the Kibbutzes of Israel or small communes around the world, have been small enough that the lust for power can be overcome...generally by a leader who is both strong enough and benevolent enough to keep it in check.   Just about all communist groups have a dominant leader--whether life in the commune is good or bad depends almost entirely on that person's benevolence and degree of influence.   I am far from the first to make this point. The earliest I know of is Will Durant, writing about 100 years ago about the then brand new Soviet Union, but I'd be surprised if he was the first.

Laissez-faire is even worse: an excess of Lassez-faire quickly leads to corruption and banditry.  Individual groups attempting to create something useful invariably need to put a very large share of their resources into basic security, and there's nobody building basic infrastructure.  It is fair refer to Laissez-fair as equivalent to Anarchy or a Dark Dark age.

What I'm calling socialism is the only compromise that can work for a group of more than a few hundred individuals or the political lifetime of an individual.  All successful societies, ancient and modern, have some central authority providing security, standards of trade, judiciary, etc.    How much of that is optimal varies with history and psychology.  All we really have to figure it out is trial and error.  When there are market failures, we need a little more government intervention.  But when this happens, there are losers, so we want to minimize this intervention, and where possible, realign things so that the old participants play fairly and productively without losing too much.


There are lots of cases where this was successful: the consent decree that allowed AT&T to retain a strongly regulated monopoly, the USRA that rebuilt the railroads and restored them to profitability during WWI, the breakup of Standard Oil, many, many more. 

Natural Selection and the Tillman Act

Noam Chomsky calls the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in the history of the world.  We humans now have it in our power to destroy all human life on the planet in two different ways (global warming and nuclear holocaust--bioweapons may be a third) and the Republican are actively standing in the way of doing anything to fix either--indeed they seem to be pursing policies designed to make both situations profoundly more serious.  Chomsky is right about the danger of the Republicans, and they need to be eliminated from government, but I think we need to keep in mind Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

The entities that are doing the damage are mostly corporations.  A corporation is an entity which is created to organize some project or projects (usually making money for its owners) and limit their legal liability should something go wrong.  It is like an animal that has no brain: it lives in an environment (the economy) governed by a set of rules which provide automatic response to a wide range of situations (usually to maximize profits or shareholder value) but need active intervention by the board of directors to make any consequential change to those rules.   Natural selection tends to breed corporations that do the best job of maximizing short term profit, irrespective of long term consequences.

Within the corporation are humans who do have brains, but their power is limited to their ability to sway a majority of votes on the board of directors.  Many large shareholders (e.g. endowments and large trusts) maintain an official policy of abstaining, and small shareholders usually abstain too, so garnering an actual majority to overturn a destructive policy is very, very difficult.   Over the years there have been a number of laws and policies devised to minimize the consequences of this--e.g. anti monopoly law, restraint of trade laws, the Tillman Act of 1907 (which makes it illegal for corporations to donate to political campaigns), the Glass-Steagall law (which imposed a wall between speculative banking and mainstream banking), but most of them have been overturned or emasculated by short sighted politicians in the pay of corporations in recent years, or their judicial puppets.

A brainless corporation can be very powerful, and it is not limited by human lifespans, and it may have effective employees serving its short sighted goals as strongly as they can, without necessarily recognizing their destructiveness.  The Russian word for such people is "Apparatchiks", and if they are allowed to do it, these apparatchiks may be members of congress and and executives of the government.  The reason the Republican party is so dangerous is because many of them are apparatchiks, serving the goals of the brainless corporations and nothing else.  For oil and coal companies, a way to maximize profits is to maximize the production of greenhouse gasses and minimize controls on pollution.  For banks, the way to maximize profits is to minimize limitations on the sorts of investments they can do, without regard to possible consequences.  For most companies, getting government payouts is a good thing.

We need to restore limits on corporate power.   Things like the Tillman act limited the brainless corporations power in government.  Their apparatchiks could still participate in politics, but they were personally involved, which imposed limits.  The Citizens United decision effectively eliminated this control, and without it Natural Selection effectively forces corporations to become bad actors.  We need to adjust things so corporations or at least their employees have a strong incentive to look out for the long term health of the environment and economy.  This probably means breaking up large corporations, taxing harmful behaviors like polluting, mandating that they provide clean safe transit for the communities they serve, and so forth.  I think there are a number of industries which are almost purely harmful and should either be eliminated or nationalized.  For example, high frequency trading of stocks does nothing productive at all except make money, and it distorts the stock market.  It should be banned.  Health insurance serves no purpose but to make health care more expensive and harder to obtain.  It should be nationalized and made available free for all.  Lots more.

 Ultimately, what we need to do is make corporations act like good citizens. Their limited liability is central to their ability to do serious harm.  One of the most powerful things we can do is make sure corporate officers are liable for the harmful things they do.  If an executive tells an employee to get rid of this toxic stuff, and does not offer any direction to do it a responsible way, the executive needs to be punished.  If an executive bribes a politician, whether tacit or explicit, direct or indirect, that executive should be punished severely enough that they will not be able to do it again.

Worst Attacks on America

The United States of America has been attacked by foreign powers a number of times.  Here, in decreasing order of severity, are the worst 8, in my opinion.

Fort Sumter 12-13 Apr 1861.   South Carolina militias, unhappy with the results of the 1860 election and determined to preserve their right to enslave human beings, secede from the Union and fire artillery upon the Union Fort in Charleston harbor, starting the Civil War.

Pearl Harbor 7 Dec 1941.   A Japanese surprise attack on the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, kills about 2400 US soldiers and civilians, sinks 4 battleships and damages more than a dozen other ships, and provokes US entry into WWII

Donald Trump 8 Nov 2016.  Forces loyal to Russia corrupt the US election and elect a conman who is their puppet president.  He and his allies proceed to undermine US media, foreign relations, judiciary and democratic processes, plainly intending to undermine American credibility and our place in the world.  It remains unclear how this will turn out.

1812 The British, annoyed by the loss of their prime colonies on the American continent, tried to prevent further losses farther inland and into Canada, and blockaded US ports, impressing American soldiers onto British warships during their long war against France, by this point led by Napoleon.  War was declared in June 1812 and in August 1814, the British sacked and burned the White House and Capitol.  Peace was finally signed in Dec 1814.  This is the only time a foreign power ever tried direct military action against the US mainland.

Submarine attacks during WWI.  During World War I, America had initially tried to remain neutral, but the commercial connection to the British and French were strong and shipping and travel continued across the Atlantic, albeit under attack by German U-boats.  Their leaders constantly pleaded with the Americans to come in to the war on their side.  The first crack in isolation came in May of 1915 when the ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German Sub, killing 128 Americans. The level of attacks increased in 1917.

Sept 11 2001.  19 mostly Saudi terrorists hijacked 4 airliners and crashed 3 of them into US buildings: two into the World Trade Center towers in New York, 1 into the Pentagon in Arlington Virginia, and the fourth into a field in western Pennsylvania after passengers attempt to overpower the hijackers.  Roughly 3000 are killed in the attacks.  The CIA lead attacks into Afghanistan, where the hijackers had trained in the failed state there, but then president Bush redirected the military to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the hijackings and succeeding in turning it into a failed state too, killing at least 5000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of locals.

The Maine.  1898 The US Battleship Maine mysteriously exploded while at anchor in Havana Harbor, Cuba, which was a Spanish Colony at the time. The US went to war against Spain, eventually capturing Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and more, despite no evidence whatsoever that anyone loyal to Spain was involved in causing the explosion.

Goldwater and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident Aug 1964.  Two months before the 1964 presidential election, two US ships on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin near VietNam, where US "Advisors" were at work "fighting communism", reacted to something they thought they'd seen and began firing into the night.  In fact, there was nothing there but nerves, but the presidential challenger incorporated it into his campaign and the Viet Nam war began, killing 50,000 americans and at least a million south east asians, leaving Viet Nam just as communist but a lot more miserable than it would have been had we walked away in 1964.

The first 4 were real, serious acts of war by a foreign power meaning harm to America.  For three of those, America responded with all its strength, but the one I rank the third most serious in our history, we have done very little about.  American entry into WWI shortened the war, so it probably was the right thing to do, but that was only a good thing because the existing combatants had made it so horrible.  We responded as badly as we could have to Sept 11, making the situation that caused it immeasurably worse.  What we should have done is sent teachers to Afghanistan, and only enough troop to keep the teachers safe.  The Spanish and Mexican American wars, and the "Banana Wars", were pure colonial landgrabs, as were Vietnam, Korea and Iraq, although their goals were murkier and conflated with the nonsensical "anticommunist" and "antiterrorist" policies.

About the third attack:  We need to protect our elections.  We need to to protect our media.  We need to protect our judicial system.  We need to protect the international institutions that keep us safe.  The president and his toadies are attacking all of these.

Slow Growth Policies

A lot of cities are struggling with unbalanced growth: some sections are getting intense gentrification and densification.  This unfortunately, is inevitable.  I happen to live in Seattle, so I'll use it as an example.

The symbol of Seattle densification is Amazon.com, which has built an urban campus in an area called South Lake Union--because it is south of a small lake called Lake Union.  The area used to be part of what was called "The Denny Regrade."  In the 1920s a steep hill named for city founder Arthur Denny, a little north of downtown, was sluiced down and the area leveled using hydraulic mining techniques.  It became an area of small industry and commercial buildings, cheap apartments, dive bars and other relatively low cost business. The Seattle Center, site of the 1962 Worlds Fair, was built on one part of it, and the largest freeway off and on ramps in the city passed through it, in a convoluted group of roads that came to be called "The Mercer Mess" after the biggest of the streets involved.  In the 1990s, a group led by Paul Allen began buying up properties with the goal of revitalizing one part of the Regrade and fixing the Mercer Mess.

The timing and location turned out to be perfect for Amazon, which moved its headquarters into SLU, and began to grow.  And grow.  And grow.   Tens of thousands of young professionals came to Seattle to work at Amazon.  City life suited them and they very quickly changed the dynamic of the area.  Where it had been a semi-suburban part of the city, where coming and going was all about the automobile, it suddenly became nearly impossible to find parking and very difficult to even get your car from one side to the other.  The Mercer Mess is symbolic: where it had been nominally 4 lanes in each direction with only a few traffic lights and pretty good access to the rest of the city, now it's 3 lanes in each direction with a traffic light every block and during rush hour, traffic is so dense it often takes more half an hour to get on to Mercer from a side street.  The Amazon workers resorted to moving within walking distance of work, and consequently there are dozens of new, expensive high rises within walking distance.

The people who were already here were screwed.  Thousands of people were kicked out of low rent housing, unable to find affordable housing within 20 miles or more of the area, which for most had also been where they worked.  Seattle is very much a car-focused region and city.  There are some symbolic transit systems, which do work, but their capacity is very low and the better ones cover very, very little of the region.  The bus system has better coverage, but it is terribly limited.  For example, the place I used to live in Redmond had service once an hour, from 6am to 7pm.  It was a half mile walk.  Heaven help a cripple, or someone carrying something big.  It had even shorter hours on weekends. 

The Seattle City Council wants to impose a "Head Tax" to employers over some threshold size.  I think there's the germ of a good idea in this, but the goal is mistaken.   They're trying to discourage big businesses from building downtown.   I think the right thing to do is to tax businesses to build transit.  Grade separated transit, so it can reduce congestion.  Long distance transit, so the people who want to work downtown can get to housing where it's affordable, and people who want to live downtown can get to businesses that are located where it's affordable.

Did America Stop Being Great?

We didn't stop being great,  not really, but there's a real collection of problems that are making life not so great for a lot of people.  The picture below shows a particularly important manifestation of this.  It's from this article:
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/x-marks-the-spot-where-inequality-took-root-dig-here/
article

from that article

Something significant happened in the '70s to produce that shocking and very consequential discontinuity.

several things happened all at once: ever since the reforms that followed the great depression, the people that felt they had been hurt by those reforms (they are few in number, but they're very very rich) had been trying to undermine them and the gigantic success of the economic theory that worked extremely well for almost half a century. in the mid '70s, several things happened all at once:

1. OPEC created an artificial shortage of oil¹. this created an unusual type of recession, called a supply side recession, which is accompanied by high inflation, where normal, demand side recessions have deflation or deflationary pressure. The Fed was not able to do anything to restore the oil supply, so the problem persisted and president Nixon thrashed around with ineffective policies like price controls that just made everything worse.
2. Milton Friedman won the Nobel in 1976, giving him a potent platform, despite the obvious, catastrophic failure of his ideas when implemented² in Chile³, Argentina, Brazil, Iran. Reagan embraced them wholeheartedly and began implementing them here as fast as he could: killing unions and infrastructure projects, giving away government resources (especially forests) willy nilly⁴, allowing the minimum wage to fall behind inflation, etc.  But they'd learned how important propaganda is and they used it well. Obama is the first president since then to admit some skepticism.
3. One of those ideas was that shareholder value⁵ was the only thing that mattered, and that such issues as product quality, responsible behavior in the community, how they treat employees, etc., are accurately reflected in the stock price. This is one of a collection of ideas that are collectively called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. It is wrong, catastrophically so, but the double whammy of the Nobel and the OPEC-caused recession seemed to give it credibility.  It tended to encourage self serving or sometimes even fraudulent behavior to prop up the stock price, instead of better products and better corporate behavior.  And it tended to make the sort of people who can afford to buy influence even richer, so they chose to buy influence that reinforced the idea.
4. In 1978, the supreme court ruled⁶ that banks can charge up to whatever the interest limit is, in the state in which they are chartered no matter what the rules are where the business is being done. this immediately led to several states eliminating their usury laws and made the predatory lending business possible, as well as the only slightly less predatory credit card business.
5. availability of effective air conditioning made it practical to employ industrial and office workers in the south, so many industries moved their worker base to "right to work" states, where it was legal for businesses to obstruct union organizers. This was a long trend but the '70s marks a big transition.
6. containerized shipping made it practical to outsource manufacturing to far away places, where they have even fewer worker protections and lower wages than in the American South.
7. Free Trade agreements exacerbated the ease of outsourcing.
8. the people who were old enough to remember and understand the great depression first hand started dying off.   Policies like Glass-Steagall, the Securities Act of 1933, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 were enormously effective and they were all weakened in the 70s through 90s.

during the 30s through 70s, we did such a good job with infrastructure that it took decades for the damage the EMH and the rest had caused to be obvious. The middle class had plenty of savings, the roads were built looking ahead to 30 years or so of growth and wear, and so forth. But now it's gone. if we actually do want to restore the things that were good about the 40s-90s, we need to unwind as much of this as we can.

There's probably not much we can do about shipping. But all of the rest are conscious choices we have made.  The most catastrophic was the election of Reagan, but we can repudiate the changes he made to union rights, to public infrastructure support, to management of public resources. 

We need to make regulations that force private corporations to be good citizens: minimum wage, union protections, environmental protection. Once one business in a market has begun cheating, they all need to, in order to compete.  We need to break that cycle.  Business groups might be able to do this but their track record is abysmal.  Regulation, unfortunately, is the only way.  If done right, it will hurt all by exactly the same amount, which means all will keep their present markets.

We need to reverse Marquette v First of Omaha somehow.   Probably the only way is a national usury law.  I'm thinking it should be flexible and adaptive.  For example, the Prime Lending Rate plus 6.  presently the prime is about 3.5%, so this would be a 9.5% cap on loan interest.  During more normal times, the prime is closer to 7% so this would be 13% cap.  If predatory lenders can't make a profit at that rate, that's a good thing: they won't be making ruinous loans.  Credit card companies are doing good business at 13% today.

Note that Donald Trump is a supporter of many of the things that have made us less great.  To the Donald, making America great again is about making Donald Trump rich at the expense of everybody else.



¹   The reason OPEC did is because the US gave its whole-hearted support to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.   OPEC is very dominated by Saudi Arabia.  After a second shortage in the late '70s, the US administration changed its policy to kowtow to the Saudis at every opportunity.  Reagan's point man on this policy was George HW Bush.

²   A lot of South America had been dominated by "the Chicago Boys", a group of economists who got their training under Friedman at the University of Chicago.

³   The 1973 coup in Chile was to remove (and murder) a popular and effective socialist (Allende) and replace him with a puppet that was friendly to Friedman's ideas (Pinochet) who deregulated much of Chile's business.   As usually happens when this is tried, economy quickly collapsed.   Well, they said, the only thing for it is even more freedom for business.  when the people squawked about mass unemployment and poverty wages for the few jobs there were, where before the coup they'd had good jobs and a booming economy, the leaders of the rebellion were "disappeared".  7 years later, Pinochet was soundly defeated in an election, so Pinochet rewrote the constitution to let him keep power.  Pinochet and his administration is gone now but Chile has not recovered from the damage he did.   This was the most egregious example, but Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Iran and several others were subjected to similar "experiments" in capitalism which all failed miserably.  Pretty much all of the trouble we've been having with Iran stem from our similar 1953 coup.

⁴   Lincoln had given massive tracts of land to the railroads and homesteaders.  There was a strategy behind this, about expanding infrastructure and opportunity for millions of Americans, and the country got far more in return than it gave up.  But what Reagan did was give away forests and mineral reserves to businesses who wanted despoil the land and take the profits for themselves, leaving the rest of us worse off than we were before.

⁵   Jack Welch, long time president of GE, was during his tenure a major supporter of this idea.  Since he retired, he's realized the error of his ways and has taken to calling it "the dumbest idea in the world".  http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/#152d2c682224.   I'm loath to use superlatives, especially when there are so many other incredibly dumb ideas to choose from, but it's possible he might be right. 

⁶   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Minneapolis_v._First_of_Omaha_Service_Corp.
 

Pesterware

The first pesterware was advertising on TV.   I understand the purpose of advertising and to some extent I even embrace it.  It pays for some or all of the desired programming or at least makes it less expensive--which enables production of more.  Once in a rare while, I even see something in an ad that I want to buy.

TV advertising has crossed the line in several ways.  When they run the same ad over and over and over and over and over, I initially get bored, but before long I get irritated.  A little repetition is understandable: people miss the beginning of the show, go to the toilet during ads, etc.  I skip as many as I can with a Digital Video Recorder (or its predecessor a VCR).  But at some point it becomes so annoying that I no longer watch the channel.  SciFi and FX are both in this category for me. These guys break up the show into such short slots that I am constantly cursing them--a 90 minute movie extended to 3 hours, in 5 minute spurts,  often with substantial parts of the movie cut out.  No thanks.

Another way they irritate me is by putting a bug, splash or crawl over the screen.    A typical example:  a news program will show some video with a banner over it: KWTF BREAKING NEWS!!!  and the critical thing will be hidden by the banner.  Sometimes they get the banner out of the way, but rarely.  A bug or bottom of screen crawl would have been better.  (why do they put it away from the bottom, ever?  Back in the days of rounded screens, the bottom was a moving target, so I understand why they moved it up then.  But since the '70s, screens have been relatively rectangular and technology has eliminated sync and size issues completely.  But they're still doing this.)   Recently a few channels have been putting a moving bug in the corner, occasionally with an accompanying noise, often loud enough to obscure the programming.  Sheesh.

Once upon a time, the government put a limit to advertising on the airwaves: 16 minutes per hour.  This is no longer the case but many channels still stick to it.

Computer pesterware has never had such a limitation.  Virtually all browsers have a popup blocker and virtually all users have it enabled.  So websites have implemented their own popups.  The best of them do things in a way that don't interfere and have a little X in the upper right to dismiss them.  But many of them can't be dismissed without giving the offender some of your personal data.  I boycott such sites.   I also run an ad blocker.  Many advertisers have figured out how to detect that the blocker is running and a few badger you about it.

In my view, unintrusive advertising is acceptable.   If it prevents the content I wanted from being accessed, it is intrusive.  If it keeps badgering me, even after I have attempted to dismiss it, it is intrusive.  If it makes spurious noises or flashes, it is intrusive.  If it takes more than two seconds to figure out how to dismiss it, it is intrusive.  If it consumes consequential amounts of network bandwidth, or any other resource on my computer, it is worse than intrusive.

Advertising doesn't have to be pesterware.  But when it is, we need to stop it.

Bernie Sanders Tax Rates

Several sources are talking about how much Bernie Sanders would raise your taxes.  For just about everybody, he would, but you get a lot more for them: free health care, free college, better bank regulation, lots more.  The only people who are getting hit hard are people who have been treated very gently for the last 30 years.  Here are a few hypothetical households and how they would fare:

Single, $20K income, 3 kids. (e.g. a single parent earning $10/hr)
  2016 tax: $155, 0.8% effective rate
  Bernie tax: $189.1, 0.9% effective rate.
Such a household is probably already on medicaid.  if they had college loans, this is would be a huge savings.  These are the people (and especially their children) who will be helped most: they will have an opportunity to go to college, where unless they get a "free ride" scholarship, they presently do not.

Single, $50K income, no dependents, no investment income or deductions  (i.e. a recent college grad)
  2016 tax: $5719, effective rate 11.4%
  Bernie tax: 1131.55+4880.50+1373.60=7385.65  14.8%
  2016 tax+$2K for medical insurance for a 26 year old: $7719 a 15.4% effective rate.
  +5K for college loans: $12719.

Married, 2 kids, $50K income, no investment income or deductions  (a "typical" family)
  2016 tax: $3468, effective rate 6.9%
  Bernie tax: 2263.10+1849=$4112.10, effective rate 8.2%
  2016 tax+$3600 for medical insurance for 36 year old parents and young kids $7468: 14.9% effective rate.  Bernie saves $3300 a year.
  +5K for college loans $12468

Married, 2 kids, $100K income, no investment income or deductions  (a 96th percentile family)
  2016 tax: $11368, effective rate 11.4%
  Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+1088=$13112.10, effective rate 13.1%
  2016 tax+$3600 for medical insurance for 36 year old parents and young kids $14968: 15% effective rate.  Bernie saves $1800 a year.
  +5K for college loans $19968

Married, 2 kids, $1M ordinary income, $200K investment income, $100K deductions (a typical 0.1% family, e.g. a very successful doctor or lawyer or upper manager in a big company)
  2016 tax: $333,869, effective rate 27.8%
  Bernie tax:  2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+229,584.36=384,467.76 or 32% effective rate.
  Health care and college loan costs are negligible on this income.  Bernie costs them a few percent.

Single, no ordinary income, $10M investment income, no deductions (a wealthy, stingy widow)
  2016 tax: $1,972,340.    19.2% effective rate.
  Bernie tax:  2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+678K+4,012,837.4=$4,852,250.4 or 48.5% effective rate.

Single, no ordinary income, $10M investment income, $4M deductions (a wealthy, generous widow)
  2016 tax: $1,173,600.    11.7% effective rate.
  Bernie tax:  2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+678K+2,610,400=$3,449,813 or 34.5% effective rate.

Single, $20M ordinary income, no investments or deductions (I can't imagine anyone like this; it's constructed to create the extreme case)
  2016 tax: $7,868,864,  39.3% effective rate.
  Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+678K+4016K+5,355,800.1 =$10,211,213.1 or  51.1% effective rate

I found several sources bogusly claiming Bernie would raise your taxes to over 90%.  I can't work out any version where this would be correct.  The nearest I can come is someone using the "imputed income" scam to add corporate income taxes to personal income and add percentages with different bases rather than dollars.

I found some more credible sources computing numbers in the 70s by adding payroll taxes (on which Bernie would lift the cap.  It's presently $117K) and state income taxes.  e.g., california's top marginal rate is 13.1%, and the payroll tax on my imaginary $20M ordinary income earner would be on the whole thing, where today it's only on 5% of it:  51.1+13.1+6.2 = 70.4%.  But this is at best an apples to oranges comparison.  None of the incomes above include payroll or state (or property) tax.  Even if you imagine this to be correct, this person ends up with $6M of after tax income.   They should use some of it to hire an accountant who is not as incompetent as they are...

sources:
http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_calculator.htm
http://taxfoundation.org/article/details-and-analysis-senator-bernie-sanders-s-tax-plan
https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/HBEWeb/Annon_DisplayHomePage.action

Shirt Colors

Brownshirts  --  Sturmabteilung or SA.  A paramilitary army of thugs, consisting largely of unemployed young men, who intimidated opponents of the Nazi rise to power.  The real police collaborated or looked the other way until it was too late.

Browncoat -- A fan of the short-lived Firefly TV Science Fiction series.   The browncoats in the series were soldiers in the independence army, a little like greycoats in the civil war.

Blackshirt -- The Italian Fascist version of the Brownshirts

Red Shirt -- A character in fiction who is there to be canon fodder.  It originated from Star Trek where security personnel wore red uniforms and were often killed in the first few minutes of the episode.

Red Shirt -- in college sports, a player who is attending classes but not competing, in order to extend their allowable eligibility.

Red Shirt -- in American football, a player who is exempted from full contact in full contact scrimmages and drills.

Red Shirt -- A follower of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian military leader and activist.

Red Shirts -- A white supremacist terrorist group in the south in from 1875 to the early 1900s.  

Redcoat -- a soldier in the British Army or Marines.  From the mid 17th century to the late 19th, British soldiers wore red uniform coats.  The armies of Prussia wore blue coats during this time (and German dress uniforms are still this color), the French wore grey and blue.

Yellow Jersey -- In bicycle stage racing, the current leader in general classification (accumulated time).  Some other races use a different color for this same purpose: the Giro d'Italia uses pink, and the Vuelta a Espania uses Red.

Bluecoat -- a soldier in the Union Army during the civil war.  The Prussian army also wore blue coats.

Bluejacket -- an enlisted sailor in the US navy.

Greycoat -- a soldier in the confederate army during the civil war.

Aluminum Overcast

Someone--at least as far back as Bismark's general Helmuth von Moltke--said "No plan survives contact with the enemy."   It's consistent with the ideas of Sun Tzu although nothing quite like it appears in "The Art of War".

The US prevailed in WWII not by the superiority of its technology, although there was some of that, but by superior numbers.  The US industrial base was able to produce more planes, tanks and ships than our enemies.  That included producing a lot of them for our allies.  The German Panzer tank was significantly superior to the US Sherman, but a plan was quickly devised where three or more Shermans could defeat a single Panzer, essentially by trapping it and forcing it into a crossfire.  There were a lot more Shermans than Panzers so this tactic proved effective.  Liberty ships were produced in such great numbers for such low cost that they were considered to have paid for their construction cost if they successfully made a single shipment.

Before the war, there was some design work and a little advance production by the US, but the real work didn't start until after Pearl Harbor.  There were lots of big surprises.  For example, before the war it had been thought that bombers needed to be able to defend themselves, consequently B-17s and B-24s carried a lot of guns.  5 or 6 of the 10 member crew of a B-17 were primarily there to man the guns.  But it turned out it didn't work all that well and there were appalling losses of bomber crews, and work was quickly begun on a fighter with sufficient range to travel with them to the target.  Once the P-51 came on line, the bomber losses dropped dramatically.

During the Cold War, lots of ideas about the enemy promoted lots of ideas about how we should defend ourselves, and this led to an ever escalating rise in complexity and cost.  The various skirmishes that did occur: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, showed how completely inappropriate the Cold War ideas about weapons were for the conflicts we actually did have.  B-1s, B-2s, F-117s, Nuclear Aircraft Carriers, etc., were all used in the Iraq conflicts, against enemies who were almost completely defenseless against those, and would have been almost equally defenseless against B52s and F4s, designed in the early 1950s.  (not completely: surface to air missiles took down a number of planes, including an F-117 during Bosnia.).  The most effective planes of the present generation, by far, are the drones, such as the Predator, which has performance not much more impressive than a WWI Sopwith Camel, but carries modern weapons and observation gear and can be flown remotely.

Recently, one of the more effective 1980s generation airplanes, the A-10 "WartHog", was retired in favor of the as yet undebugged F-35.  Each F-35 costs more than ten times as much and cannot do any of the missions the Warthog proved so effective at very well.  The F-35 program costs roughly the same amount each year as the SNAP "food stamp" program that feeds 5 million people every day.

We need national defense, no doubt, but we need to do it wisely.  The over-reliance on extremely complex military systems does not keep us safe; it does the opposite.  We are committing large portions of our treasure and talent to producing weapons that are not particularly useful.  At the same time, we're offshoring our once formidable industrial base.  Should we need to project force the way we did in World War II, we no longer have the industrial base that won WWII.  It doesn't appear that we have any enemies who could take us on, but should we be surprised, with our absurd military, we will almost certainly lose.

Pseudoscience Ascendant

I just returned from 8 days in my hometown, Cupertino, California.  Cell phone and cellular data reception there continues to be terrible, and if I use my phone much, the battery dies in a fraction of the time it does in more sensible places.   The home of Apple, HP and countless other high tech innovators, has very few cell towers, and these companies have been forced to implement their own private cell networks.  Here's the reason.  They have it exactly backwards.

The WHO report cited is essentially a sop, admitting that it's remotely possible that this could be a problem, just to get these nincompoops off their back.   There is no credible evidence that low level gigahertz radio causes cancer.  None.  Very high power, tuned and focused radiation can cook things though.  Microwave ovens are tuned to the frequency of water. They're shielded, but by staying a few feet away, even if there's a breakdown, you can stay safe. Powerful radars have been known to kill bugs and birds that flew too close.  Not by cancer though, by boiling the water in them.

But let's pretend that there was a problem.  Digital cell phones adjust their power output based on how far they are from the cell tower.  If they're far, they increase power, if they're near, they reduce it.  This has a bunch of advantages.  First of all, it saves a lot of battery power if they don't have to use it.  More significantly, it increases network capacity.    Each logical channel is only used up for as big an area as the power being used can reach.  The same channel can be used by another tower/phone pair if they're out of range.

But the notowerinschoools folks have this exactly backwards.  By keeping the towers far from the students, they are FORCING all cell communications to occur at high power.  The transmitter that matters is not the one in the tower.  The inverse square law makes it of little consequence to anyone more than a few dozen feet away.  The transmitter that matters is the one the kid is holding up to their ear.  If the tower 5 miles away, it's transmitting at high power.  It's unlikely to cause cancer, but it might be boiling the kids brains a little bit.  From less than an inch away.   The closer the cell tower is, the less power the mobile phone needs to use to transmit.  Unless you ban the cell phones completely, you are achieving exactly the thing you were trying to prevent.  I wonder how a cell phone ban would go down in the schools of Cupertino...not.

Idiots.

Addenda 3 Jan 2017

 There's a new cell tower in Cupertino near city hall that went on line in the spring. Cellular is now /much/ better there.

Facts, Opinions, and Theories.

A fact is something which is objectively true.  Two plus two is four.  The earth is roughly spherical.  President Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, roughly two years after it became a state, to a mother born in Kansas.  There are also false facts: things which are objectively false.  Two plus two is seven.  The earth was created roughly 6000 years ago.  Liberalism is the same thing as communism and is also the same thing as fascism.   The founders were a pack of gun toting anti-government, anti-tax, bible thumping activists.

An opinion is an attitude or belief about something which may be difficult to validate, or about which your opinion is really of no consequence to anybody but yourself.  I think there is probably life elsewhere in the universe.  Blue is a better color than Red.  Fangio was a better driver than Schumacher.  You can have opinions about facts.  It's sad that our bodies wear out as we get older.  It's annoying to pay taxes.   An opinion is sort of a middle ground, between true and false facts.  Opinions are sometimes validated or invalidated as we learn more about things. 

Since there are a lot of things that are difficult to validate, a lot of people have opinions which may actually be facts or false facts.  For example, you may think that Obama is a Kenyan terrorist.  You are entitled to think anything you like of course, but if that's your belief, you are simply wrong, and acting on that belief in some way may be harmful.  If you think that government tightening its belt during an economic downturn is an unquestioned necessity, you are simply wrong.  It may be a little too complex for a lot of people to understand.  So was the roundness of the earth before circumnavigations or satellite photos.   But lots of people did understand that and knew the truth in the face of popular belief to the contrary.

A theory is an idea about the way some particular thing works in the universe.  Theories can be true, false or opinion.  The theory of the flat earth proved to be false.  The theory of evolution proved to be true.  The theory of universal gravitation is basically true, but it turns out to be more complicated than that.  The theory that there is life elsewhere in the solar system remains possible but is as yet unproven one way or the other, so having an opinion either way is reasonable.  The word "theory" is sometimes used to cast aspersions on a fact that the speaker is unhappy about.   Not liking a theory has no bearing on whether it's true or false, nor does misunderstanding what the word means. It may have an impact on the politics around a theory, which may affect funding for research or even lead to ostracism.  Thinking that something true is false or vice versa, is likely to lead you to make strategic errors.

Death Penalty

Nebraska has voted to ban the death penalty.  This makes a lot of sense.  The death penalty is cruel and unusual, it is irreversible, it is much more expensive than life in prison, and there is no particular evidence it deters crime.

Blackstone suggested that it is better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be punished, and several of the founders expressed the same opinion.  It turns out that that's pretty close to the rate of erroneous convictions.  The Illinois Innocence Project exonerated 11% of death row inmates when DNA evidence became available.  Other similar studies have found different numbers--few lower than 6%.  Through incompetent defense, irresponsible prosecution, misuse and misinterpretation of evidence, and more, the criminal justice system is imperfect.  It's the best we've figured out, but it makes enough mistakes that we should not resort to irreversible punishments.

Justice Blackman, when he was retiring, stated that he was opposed to the death penalty as a violation of the 8th amendment.  It cannot, he said, be applied fairly in this society with various forms of discrimination.

Over the years, the method used has changed.   During my lifetime, it switched from the electric chair, then to the gas chamber, and then finally lethal injection. Before that, hanging, decapitation and firing squads were used, among others.  Each switch was made because previous methods were deemed to be cruel and painful.  Lethal injection uses a sequence of drugs--one to render the subject unconscious, and then further drugs to kill them.  The doctors of the world have decided that they are firmly against the death penalty and have banned doctors from administering lethal injections...and have pressed the pharmaceutical companies of the world to stop providing the required drugs to anyone who might use them this way.  The botched lethal injections we've seen recently have been the result of medical amateurs using drugs that were not designed for the purpose they were being used.

Many people argue that capital punishment is more economical than life in prison.  Not True!  Because of all the necessary legal processing, capital punishment is as much as ten times as expensive as life in prison.

There is no particular evidence that the death penalty deters crimes.  The deterrence effect only works if you're thinking rationally and suspect you might be caught.  Killers either aren't thinking rationally or they are being very careful and don't think they will be caught--think of a mob hit man.

The one real thing that the ultimate penalty does is give some finality and retribution to the victim and their families. That's small consolation for the thousands who have been wrongly executed.  The urge to vengeance is very destructive.  Jesus himself spoke to this subject.  Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord.  Not you or me and not the courts.  Only god.

The goals of our penal system should be: #1: to get dangerous people out of society.  #2: to deter crime.  #3: to rehabilitate those who can be.  Life in prison does this without the irreversibility of the death penalty.

I think there's one situation in which capital punishment is acceptable: When the criminal themselves want it.  This is uncommon, but not at all unheard of.  Gary Gilmore, Ted Bundy, and several others have concluded that their lives were not worth living.  I am opposed to suicide for someone who is simply depressed, but if a person is objectively in a situation where their life is irretrievably no longer worth living, euthanasia is the most humane solution.  This is appropriate for people with terminal diseases that kill slowly and painfully.  And this is appropriate where the convict agrees that they did the deed and there is no possibility of them living a life outside of prison.  Of course we should do it in the most humane way practical--unless the convict, as did Gary Gilmore, wants something more dramatic.

addenda 10 June 2015
Scalia's perfect capital punishment case-falls apart

The Problem Isn't Immigration, It's Carrying Capacity

There are immigration crises happening in North Africa with people trying to get away from the catastrophe that Libya has become, from West Asia, trying to escape the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, from South East Asia with people trying to get away from Myanmar and more.  There's an imaginary crisis of people coming from Latin America into the US and the very real one of cruel deportations back.  These all reflect real problems in the regions these people are trying to escape.  No one nation can hope to accommodate all the refugees, nor should they.  Much of the hostility toward immigrants, in both our country and in others, is racist or xenophobic.   

in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrations to the United States from nearly every part of the world.  In hindsight, nearly all of these groups have been widely accepted, although there was certainly a large amount of intolerance when they were first coming over.  Small amounts of this remains, especially towards groups who can't pass for Anglo-Saxon.   These groups enthusiastically embraced American culture and added their distinctiveness.

It all went well, because America had wide open spaces.  It had small cities wanting to become big ones.  It had seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, including water, oil, coal, aluminum, iron and lots more.  Perhaps most importantly, it had lots of places to dump the stuff you couldn't figure out what to do with.  That included setting off atomic bombs in secret when you weren't quite sure what would happen and wanted to make sure nobody was watching.

Today, this is gone.   There's basically nowhere that isn't feeling some pressure from overcrowding.  Even the great barren places of the southwestern desert and the almost uninhabitable hinterlands of Alaska are seen to be somebody's back yard.  There is really nowhere left, anywhere on the planet, if you truly want to be left alone.

I think this is all a symptom of an ecological phenomenon called Carrying Capacity.  The carrying capacity of an ecosystem for any particular species is that which is stable, consuming only the resources that the rest of the ecosystem can produce. If it exceeds it, the population will crash, and won't recover until the resources are replenished.  These crashes are very traumatic, and many ecosystems never recover.

There are ways to fool this: a small, well tended aquarium can support lots more fish than a much larger, poorly maintained one.  The same is true for people.  Sophisticated farming and transportation can provide food well beyond what a foraging culture could achieve.  Well managed countries have much higher carrying capacities than corrupt or incompetently managed ones.   If something bad is happening in your community, you will do what you can to get away from the problem.

I think the carrying capacity of the planet is somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people.  We crossed 1 billion shortly after 1800, and 2 billion in 1929.  Today we are over 7.  Several countries have recognized that their excessive population is a problem and have acted with various levels of aggressiveness to deal with it.  In many cases, this has left them open to the consequences of immigration from countries that have not done this.   Immigrant populations always struggle to fit in, but if the whole society is struggling with the limits to the carrying capacity, the stress of this seems inordinately worse.

I think America's share of world carrying capacity should be about 10%: 100-200M people.  (we arrived a little late, crossing 100M in 1915 and 200M in 1968).  The infrastructure we have, which was mostly built in the 1940s through 60s, could handle this.  Instead, we have about 320M, and we quit building and repairing infrastructure in the 1970s.  We need to understand what we are doing to ourselves.  I think we need to look at various incentives and barriers to get our population back to this sustainable level.    And other countries must do the same.  A lot of our problems--many of the civil wars, pollution, climate change, etc., can be greatly reduced if we do this.

Gehry, Gaudi, and Logic

Two of the supposed greats in modern architecture live by the dictum:

"There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.  Therefore, buildings should not have straight lines or sharp corners."  -Antoni Gaudi

Everything about this statement is wrong.   Lots of stuff in nature is straight and/or sharp.  e.g.:

More importantly Gaudi's syllogism is missing its major premise, which I believe is "Architecture must mimic forms found in nature."  Why?  That's plainly not a requirement for many of the buildings that most of us think are beautiful.  The Eiffel Tower is one of the most beautiful structures in the world.  It has lots of curves, but they are smooth curves, which are fairly rare in nature, and lots of the straight lines and sharp corners that Gaudi so detests. 

Frank Gehry seems to have been cut from the same mold--his theory is "deconstructivism", which is about breaking up the straight lines and conventional components of a building to make way for new arrangements and ideas.  A few deconstructivist buildings are not complete disasters: the Sydney Opera House and the Seattle Public Library are among them.  They are eye catching and fairly functional, even if they are not the most attractive. But Gehry has taken this to an extreme that I find appalling.  I have nothing against experimentation, even when it is jarring.  Once in a while, a good new thing comes of it.  But I don't wish to be jarred over and over again by the same failed experiment.   Gehry's buildings are ugly and stupid looking, every one.  I wish people would stop giving him money.

Gaudi designed some nice buildings in the early part of his career, but he seems to have lost his mind about 1900...and the illogic above explains it.

The Supreme Court Gets it Wrong.

In no particular order:

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia before 1800.  He was sold several times, and in 1838, he and his wife were sent from a free territory in what is now Minnesota to Louisiana, a slave state.  They traveled on their own and were on a Mississippi River boat in what was then the Free State of Iowa, when a daughter was born.  By law, the daughter was therefore free.  Scott sued to free the whole family and was denied.  They were sold again to a New York (a free state) owner and Scott sued again. The case rose to the supreme court, which nonsensically decided in 1857 that Scott was not really a citizen, that the 5th amendment banned property from being taken without due process and several other dubious rulings, and overturned the Missouri Compromise, effectively allowing slavery in all states.  President Buchanan had illegally persuaded at least one northern justice to vote with the southerners.  The ruling was eventually overturned, (not the least by the 13th amendment), but not before it had become a major provocation for the Civil War.

Bush v Gore.  The popular vote in the election of 2000 was won fairly convincingly by Gore, but the vote in the electoral college was close.  In Florida, the count was extremely close: at the completion of the first count, Bush had a 537 vote lead of almost 6 million cast.  There was an enormous amount of election fraud and corruption committed by Republicans: the Secretary of State, responsible for the count, was Bush's campaign manager for the state.  The governor was his brother, tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters had been suppressed by caging, 50,000 mostly black voters were purged on the grounds that they were felons when they were not, a republican operative had switched parties to participate in the committee to design the infamous "butterfly" ballot, leading at least 3000 people to vote for third party candidate Buchanan who meant to vote for Gore, and hundreds more voted for both, invalidating their ballot. Republican operatives screaming in the ear of pollworkers trying to do a recount.  The state supreme court tried to support a recount but the US supreme court blocked it, going back and forth several times until it was finally too late and no recount could be completed in time.  The president that the court selected proceeded to nominate two even worse justices to the court, abandon the antiterrorism work started by his predecessor and rejected warnings by the CIA of what would be the worst terrorist (or military) attack in US history, start an unprovoked war, and wrecked the economy.

Jones v Clinton  Paula Jones claimed that Bill Clinton had sexually harassed her while he was governor of Arkansas. The court ruled that Clinton, while he was serving as president, could be required to testify in a civil suit against him, even though the constitution exempts him from legal action while he is serving, claiming that it shouldn't particularly interfere with his ability to serve his duty as president.  In fact, although he was cleared of any wrongdoing in the Jones case, he spent most of the next two years dealing with the consequences of this testimony, including impeachment.

DC v Heller.  The District of Columbia had long required that all firearms be licensed and be stored unloaded.  In 2008, the court took the extraordinary position that the bit about militias in the second amendment is irrelevant to the the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, despite extensive writings by the founders that the militias are the whole point of it.  Only the requirement that guns be stored unloaded or disassembled was overturned; it didn't really affect DCs right to regulate, but now that the precedent that the comma in the second amendment should be taken as a period has been established, we can be sure another bad decision will follow.

Citizens United vs FEC.  Citizens United made an attack movie against Hilary Clinton, which they advertized on TV during the 2008 election cycle, showing many of their criticisms of the candidate in the ads.  Because CU's funding is secret (it apparently comes from the Koch brothers), FEC ruled that this was a violation of the Tillman Law of 1907 blocking corporate donations to candidates.  The court decided, against more than a century of explicit law and overwhelming precedent and evidence, that corporate political advertising is protected free speech, effectively overturning Tillman.

Buckley v Valeo.   In 1974, congress passed a law putting various specific limits on political contributions.  The court struck down a number of those limitations, for the first time equating money and free speech and opening the door to subsequent even more consequential rulings, such as Citizens United and McCutcheon v FEC, which ruled that aggregate limits to campaign contributions are illegal.

Look, the employees and owners of a corporation are actual people, and under Tillman, have a right to donate to political causes.  But corporations are not.  They have no morality or sense of fairness, they have very narrow short term goals, and they often have lots of money.  In a century or so, when the history of the American collapse into corruption is written, this group of decisions will be recognized to have been a big part of why.

Plessy v Ferguson.  By a 7-1 majority, the court of 1896 upheld states laws requiring racial segregation in such contexts as streetcars, schools, drinking fountains, etc., defining a doctrine which came to be called "Separate but equal", and cementing another half century of segregation and discrimination.  The nonwhite services were invariably not equal, until this decision was overturned by Brown v Board of Education in 1954.

Shelby Co v Holder.  One of the outgrowths of the Brown v Board of Education decision was the Voting Rights Act, which was passed by overwhelming majorities in congress in 1965 and repeatedly renewed by similar majorities.  Certain regions had a history of laws blocking minorities from voting, and in those regions, explicitly listed in the act, the justice department had to review all laws affecting voting.  Shelby County, Alabama, wanted to install new, but more subtle and not racially explicit versions of the racially discriminatory policies of old, but they were blocked by the VRA.   So Shelby sued. The court upheld most of VRA, except struck down the classification of states and regions, saying the 40 year old classifications had no logical relationship to the present day facts.  Which plainly ignored the fact that Shelby was trying to do exactly what the law had originally been intended to block.  The court pointed out that congress could make adjustments to the classifications and restore the law Within hours of the ruling, several states had passed into law voting restrictions which had been previously been blocked by VRA.

Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp.    First of Omaha wanted to sell credit cards to customers in Minnesota, and Nebraska had a higher maximum interest rate  (16%) than Minnesota (8%), which meant that FoO could profitably reach customers that banks in Minnesota could not.  The Supreme Court, in 1978, unanimously agreed with FoO; that lenders should be allowed to charge whatever interest rate pertains in their home state.  Remarkably quickly, many banks had moved their legal home state to South Carolina,  Nevada and a few others, which have NO legal maximum interest rate on loans and the local banks offering low interest largely evaporated.  Not long after, the payday loan industry was created, all chartered in the same places despite doing business all over the country.   300% interest is commonplace and rates in excess of 1000% have been observed.

McCarran-Ferguson Act.  In a case that went before the court in 1944, Southeast Underwriters Association was found  to be a monopoly, using boycotts, intimidation, and other coercive tactics to maintain its 90% market share in the region, despite gouging and other non-competitive behavior, in clear violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.  The insurance company had questioned whether the Federal Government's jurisdiction applied over a regional insurance company.  The court correctly said yes.  Congress, led by two of the most corrupt senators in history, almost immediately passed a law that specifically exempted the insurance business from most anti-trust regulation on the bizarre grounds that it's somehow not interstate commerce, but allowing states to regulate on their own.  Many did, but the monopoly power of the insurers generally exceeded the enforcement power of the states.   For example, in 1999 Washington State tried to block insurers from cancelling healthcare policies due to pre existing conditions, but was forced to back down by a boycott.   The McCarran-Ferguson act and the unregulated trusts it allowed are directly responsible for much of the high price and poor behavior of insurance in the US.

Korematsu.  Two and a half months after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, ordering Japanese Americans into internment camps, regardless of citizenship. Fred Korematsu, a 23 year old welder born in Oakland, CA, refused to obey, claiming the order was unconstitutional.  Two years later, his challenge made it to the supreme court which decided against him, though admitting that the internments were "constitutionally suspect" but justified by the war.  This decision is technically still valid although most legal scholars recognize that it was an error.

addenda: 27 Jun 2018
Trump v Hawaii  During his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly railed incoherently about Muslims and promised to ban them from entering the country, irrespective of reason, security status, etc.  A week after he was inaugurated, he signed an executive order implementing this.  It was immediately challenged in court and blocked by every real court that looked into it.  Several adjustments to the order later, the Roberts court allowed the ban to take place, arguing illogically that despite repeated insistence by Trump that it is a Muslim travel ban, that it wasn't.

Janus v AFSCME  For decades, once a shop has voted to unionize, all workers are required to pay union dues, whether they support the union or not.  The rationale is that all workers are benefiting from the work the union does, and might be called upon to do, much as you are required to have auto insurance in case you get into an accident.   The court has now ruled, explicitly contradicting an earlier ruling, that government workers don't have to pay their dues if they don't want to. Several states already have laws doing this for private industry, cynically called "Right to Work" laws.

addenda: 25 Jun 2022

Dobbs v Jackson.  The state of Mississippi made a law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, a restriction deemed too narrow under the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling, which had been repeatedly upheld despite numerous challenges.  In 2022, the court ruled, in a vast overreach of the needs of the case and in at least 4 cases, the explicit assurances in their confirmation hearings that Stare Decisis prevented it, that Roe vs Wade was, in fact, unconstitutional.

references:
http://www.newsreview.com/reno/top-10-worst-supreme-court/content?oid=5378990
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2036448,00.html

The Economic Spectrum

The traditional "left" vs "right" distinction came up during the French Revolution, when supporters of the King sat on the right in the National Assembly, and supporters of the revolution to the left.  This distinction has persisted in many parliaments and legislatures throughout the world, including our own.

Trying to put an individuals political leanings onto a simple one dimensional spectrum is doomed to fail.  How we select and replace leaders and representatives (the issue that the French National Assembly was concerned with) is completely different than how we run our economy.
  
I'll define the economic spectrum as half a circle.  I'll define "everybody is totally equal" communism to be at -90 degrees, and "no rules at all" laissez faire at +90.   There really haven't been such societies.  A few communes have come close, probably -80 or so...but every such society has had leaders.  There have been lots of societies that pass through +90, but it can't last more than a few days before someone with weapons and supporters takes over.  The dark ages hummed along at +45 or so--a new bandit or tyrant rising every few months to make everybody miserable. Somalia was probably about +75 in its darkest, most anarchistic days.    Soviet and Chinese communism in their heyday, I'll put at about -30, Korean maybe -60.  European Socialism, with democratically elected leaders, people working for wages appropriate to skill and demand, but a lot of redistribution, at about -10.  

America is the farthest right successful country in the world.  Lots of countries have been farther right, but they are disasters--as will America be if we continue on our present rightward tack.  Chile under Pinochet, Greece under the generals, and so forth.  Here are where a few famous Americans are, I think:  Obama, Clinton, Nixon, GHWB, Eisenhower are all at about +10. Reagan about +15, GWB claimed to be about +10 when he was running for office, but actually governed at +25--very much to our cost. The Kochs and other John Birchers are at about +50, and America will be over if they get more power than they already have. Bernie Sanders about -5. Noam Chomsky is at about -15, Angela Davis -30.

If you ask Americans to rate themselves on this scale, the Gaussian peak is probably about +15 with a standard deviation of about 5. However, if you ask people questions about specific issues--minimum wage, union rights, clean air, health insurance, etc., they'll come out pretty close to 0, again with a fairly narrow SD. This difference showed itself in the recent election in a number of places where they voted in higher minimum wage, marijuana legalization, gay rights and other "liberal" things, yet sent someone to congress who is dead set against all of those those.
 
Obama and Clinton are the most right wing democrats to have been president since the 19th century. Only the bubble presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan, GWB, are to their right.  Obama has done NOTHING to warrant the description "socialist".  The PPACA is very much a pro-business, pro-insurance, pro-free-market piece of legislation.  What came before had many of the bad aspects of monopoly, and in many cases, literally was a monopoly: price gouging, trapped consumers, poor service.

I'm pretty sure that no economic system that's more than about 15 away from zero on my chart can be stable without a pretty ruthless dictatorship. Friedman/Pinochet's Chile tried to be at about +30 and it didn't work.  China between 1949 and 1972 was at about -30 with the same effect.

Fred Koch

Fred's father Harry was born to a comfortable Texas family and was himself a fairly successful businessman who founded several small companies, one of them a newspaper, in which he wrote fervent editorials against trade unions, pensions, bank regulation, and FDR's New Deal.  Harry died in 1942, by which point it should have been obvious that he'd been wrong about everything.  Koch is a fairly common German name--there are several other companies named Koch, none evidently related.  (In this version, Koch rhymes with Coke--either the drink or the refined coal product)

Fred Chase Koch, born 23 Sept 1900, went to MIT where he got a degree in chemical engineering.  He managed to take control of an existing petroleum engineering firm in 1925, and this became the core of Koch Industries.  In 1927 he invented a cheaper method of separating gasoline from crude oil, which allowed small companies like his own to compete.  The big companies spent several years in the courts trying to prevent him from doing business in the US, and succeeded for several years until he managed to prevail in the courts.  The people suing him were horribly dishonest (one bribed a judge) and he learned that winning sometimes requires lying, cheating and stealing.  While he was fighting in court, he began to sell the process in the Soviet Union.  While there, he found that it was a land of "hunger, misery and terror" and came to despise Joe Stalin.

What he didn't realize is that Russia had always been a land of hunger, misery and terror, long before the communist takeover, and that was why the revolution had succeeded.  Stalin was just exploiting the preexisting conditions and chose to not change that aspect.  Communism made the life of most Russians considerably better than it had been.  Better leaders could have made it better yet, but they didn't.  Extreme policies are inherently unstable--whether they are extremely capitalistic or extremely communistic, and only through brutal force can they be kept in place.  This reinforced his ideas about winning and power: to win, you need to be able to fight as dirty as necessary, and you need to be more powerful than your opponents, be they unions or the government itself.

When Koch's legal troubles were finally settled just before WWII, Koch began expanding his company.  It soon became a conglomerate, mostly in the oil business, including pipelines, drilling equipment and refining equipment, acquiring some, and growing some.

In 1958, Koch and 11 other extremely conservative businessmen, led by Robert Welch, founded the John Birch Society to promote their extreme agenda.  This was very similar to the agenda pushed by Fred's father--opposition to trade unions, pensions, bank regulation, etc.  By 1958, it was pretty obvious that these things that they wanted to destroy had all worked, spectacularly well.  They had not harmed America's prosperity or world power at all, rather they had helped, and where they had been adopted in Europe, Japan and Australia, they were beginning to work as well.  The Birch Society added opposition to the Civil Rights Act and immigration, and were particularly outspoken about (mostly imaginary) communist infiltrators.   More reasonable conservatives, such as Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley were quite outspoken about the Birchers and warned that such fringe movements would damage the credibility of the conservative movement as a whole, and the John Birch Society subsided to the ranks of loonies and pamphleteers.

Fred died in 1967, just as his political movement was reaching its nadir.  The company he'd founded had become quite large and powerful though, and unlike most, had never felt the urge to go public--all the profits went exactly where Fred and his heirs wanted.  Consequently its doings remain largely a secret.  He left it to his sons, Fred Jr., Charles, and twins David and Bill.  Fred Jr was never interested in the business and Bill, not as right wing as Dave and Charles but still very conservative, had a falling out with the others in the 1990s, but Charles and David still run Koch Industries and are the leading exponents of their father's political movement.  They are the 4th and 5th richest people in America and 6th and 7th in the world.  Together, the Kochs are the second richest non-royal family in the world, behind only Sam Walton's descendants.  They have given more to right wing political causes than anyone else in history, including being the sponsors of the movie and advertising campaign that led to the Citizens United decision--which has allowed them to keep the vast majority of their political spending secret.

Fred and his boys may not understand this, but what they are advocating is restoring Feudalism.  They think they are advocates of Laissez-Faire, but without oppressive force, such systems are totally unstable.  There are always a few cheaters, and the moment somebody is allowed to get ahead by cheating, soon everybody else needs to cheat in order to compete.  Regulation is an attempt to keep markets fair, and public institutions like schools, pensions, and so forth allow everybody, including the disenfranchised, to participate in the market.  What the Kochs are striving for is a market where only the cheaters can prosper.

Killing Someone in Ferguson

There aren't many reasons for killing someone, I think. Basically, if you have extremely good reason to believe that the someone is so likely to commit an act of severe violence, so imminently that this is the last opportunity to stop them.  So, let's say you're a cop and a very large, strong guy reaches into your car and tries to take your weapon from you.  It's certainly plausible that the large guy will try to kill you with the gun once he's got it, so using deadly force in such a struggle might be justified--depending a lot on how the struggle arose and how it seems to be going.  Once the strong guy has given up the fight and is trying to get away, the justification for deadly force is completely gone, although shooting him in the leg or something to try to arrest him may make sense.  No matter what he's done before, shooting a guy that's 35 feet away, has several of your bullets in him already and has his hands up and is saying "don't shoot" as several witnesses have said, is murder.   Since it was in the heat of action, maybe only second degree murder, but murder it was.  If there's any evidence that the cop paused for a moment during his barrage of shots, even if it was to get out of the car to get a better angle, then it's first degree.

Essentially, this question boils down to "self defense".  Self defense is always a justification for killing someone and it extends to protection of loved ones or others under your protection--the whole community in the case of a cop.  But there's that whole thing about imminent threat:  if you think there will be a good chance to stop the bad guy in some non-lethal way before he does his violent thing, then deadly force is not appropriate.

One of the things for which deadly force is the most inappropriate is if you are trying to get someone to convert to your religion.  If you find yourself or someone else thinking it might be necessary, then you really need to question the validity of such a religion.  Such conversions under duress can never be credible.  There's a subtle but important difference between defeating an enemy in battle and them seeing the light and converting, and simply forcing.  I'm against both things, but one makes a little more sense than the other.

I'm against the death penalty.  It has never been applied equitably, and I'm pretty sure that under our present social order and legal system, it can't be--not to mention the rather alarming rate at which DNA evidence has exonerated convicted death row inmates.  It's certainly not a cost saving: housing and trying death capital cases costs the state between 4 and 20 times what life without parole cases do.  Over the last few years virtually every advanced country except ours has come out firmly against it.  Essentially all physicians refuse to take part: they regard participating as a violation of their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.  This includes those physicians involved in the manufacture of the anesthetics used to do "lethal injection".  Consequently all such drugs are unavailable and those who would continue to use lethal injection have been experimenting, without competence, with other things.   We need to cut it out and join the civilized world.

There's one case other than self defense where killing someone is appropriate, and that is if the victim has decided that it's the right thing to do.  For example, if someone has a painful, debilitating, incurable terminal disease, they may decide that there's no point in continuing to suffer.   Painless euthanasia is clearly better than months or years of insoluble misery--as long as it's up to the victim, with no coercion.  Death row inmates may take a similar position,   Gary Gilmore and Ted Bundy both did this: they decided that the best solution was ending a life which had become intolerable to them.  They went about it in different ways.  I think this ok. I would prefer to try to cure them, or at least find out what made them tick. but they have the right to make such decisions about their own lives.  Gilmore chose the drama of a firing squad, Bundy chose to trap himself where he'd be given the electric chair.

There is a group of people who think that all abortion is murder.   Legally and biologically this is not correct.  The courts have consistently ruled that if the fetus is not viable then it is not murder, although several states have used Roe v Wade's latitude to decide that non-viable second trimester fetuses are protected too.  The court also determined that severe medical risk to the mother is also cause for abortion, even if the fetus is viable.  Basically this is the same as the self defense argument.  It would be nice if there were no unwanted pregnancies, but that is not the world we live in.  There is a large societal need which will be met, whether it is legal or not.  Thousands used to die every year from illegal abortions and many still do in the places they are hard to obtain.  Legal medical abortion is a simple, fairly safe procedure.   There are very few people seeking abortions who have not weighed it very, very seriously.  Anybody who thinks otherwise does not have a credible opinion--very much like the people forcing religious conversion through violence.  Such people are terrorists, pure and simple.  The sidewalk outside an abortion clinic is not the place to provide such information, especially wrong information, as such people are wont to provide.  The doctor or social worker inside is a much better resource.