Tolerance?

Every so often you see something that makes you wonder.

It could be something good or something bad, but it just doesn't fit into your version of reality so you have to adjust.

Now, I used to think that religious people had principles that led them, such as love thy neighbor or do good works.

Now history shows that religious people have performed some of the worst abuses, and in certain countries still do.

Stoning sinners, burning heretics, wiping out entire populations of heretics, were clearly things that had ties to religion.

However, naively I guess, I felt I lived in a country, and a time where we acknowledge differences but accepted other people's rights.

Now accepting someone's right to be "wrong" can be hard, especially if you think it condemns them to hell.  However, you tolerate their beliefs and they tolerate yours.

Agree to disagree is sort of the phrase I would use to describe our current state of affairs in this country.

However, more recent events have revealed that the intolerant side of religion is alive and well.

I'm not just talking about the anti-abortion advocates who have an argument about protecting the unborn,  This extends to questioning the lifestyle choices of others.

I also find their insistence that this is a Christian country rather intolerant.  If you consider the Vikings, the first Europeans here weren't even Christian and the Native Americans weren't.

Its not very Christian, at least my version of Christianity to give out smallpox infested blankets or to enslave people or to routinely massacre Native American women and children.

Then again maybe it is, maybe it is.

Makes you wonder.

Malevolent Lies

I keep reading small articles here and there about someone in a public sort of job who displays a degree of misinformation that amazes me.

Now thinking that the earth is flat when many people have circled it or that dinosaurs aren't real don't seem to have much impact on one's day to day life except it is simply so clearly wrong that I can't understand how an adult person could still believe these things.

I'm not talking about mentally incompetent people, as far as I know, just average intelligence people who believe things that are obviously wrong.

In some cases it has to do with misguided religious teaching where the bible is interpreted to say the world is only so many thousand years old.

These things are so easily disproved, which underscores the real problem.

People believe there is some giant conspiracy that is trying to control them.

Some might call this God, but ignoring that, it is scary that people have so lost confidence in the press, the Government, the teachers and anyone who is reasonably educated that they believe truly absurd things.

Now these get reported because they are on the extreme edge of this trend.

The vast majority of people understand the world is round and that dinosaurs and fossils are real.

But this mistrust leads to other problems and is fed by shouts of fake news or conspiracy.

Take the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination.  There have been and still are people who believe that the official accounts of this are faked.  They seem to believe this because it would be possible to fake them and you can't prove a negative.

This last one is probably the one that causes the most problem, where someone says prove it didn't happen!

Well the burden of proof, and I mead real proof should be on the person making a claim.

Now sometimes there are a few tidbits of odd information that can be spun into a web of lies, but it doesn't constitute proof.

To believe that there is a group that is so powerful and so malevolent that they twist history and science for some unknown purpose is a claim that too many believe.

Its more than sad, its scary.

Chaos Trump House

Well its hard to keep up with the tweeting fool we have but it seems that all those fully vetted and highly qualified selectees weren't all that great, at least some of them, so far.

Everything that is happening was easily predictable based on his history and lack of experience and what is worse is his lack of any moral compass.

There's no way in my opinion that he won't be molesting the cookies in the white house over time, if not already.

On long Island yesterday he advised the police to go ahead and rough up those bad hombres when they loaded them into the paddy wagons.  Images of keystone kops danced in his head, I'm sure.  However the police being professional said they wouldn't do that.

There are still people who think he is doing something good for the country because I guess bigotry and racism is their thing.  Thanks to his predecessor's policies we are still doing OK and since they are pretty much ineffectual we may stumble through the whole term this way.

People who voted for him fall into a few categories.  Some are the deplorables that really hate this country and what it stands for and want to oppress minorities and other religions.  Some thought he would create jobs and the rest are opposed to abortion and gay rights.

The ones in the middle are the ones who are going to be the most disappointed.  He isn't going to revive manufacturing or coal mining jobs, automation has replaced the workers.

May see some investment with some jobs, but generally going to require some real skills to get them and nothing like the old assembly line days.

In many of our communities the people abusing the system are these ex workers, not all of them, who prefer benefits to the menial jobs they can get.  Its not the minorities or the Mexican immigrants (most of whom work very hard) who are the problem.

Making minimum wage isn't good enough for them, they used to make real money so they simply survive on what they can.

Empty promises isn't going to change anything.

House of Cards

When you think the future is going to be the same as the present you are wrong.

Now some things will be the same, but enough things will change that plans will probably be ruined.

Take Social Security as an example.  When it was created the country had experienced nothing but population growth through immigration and birth and the people at the time would have projected a similar future.  As long as that continued we would have plenty of young workers to support the relatively short lived retirees covered by the benefit.

Well while population has grown it grew as much from people living longer than young people being born and the system has become financially unstable.

The people who designed it weren't poor planners, no one can plan for the unpredictable.

Breakthroughs in medical science have prolonged our lives.  Women also have moved into the workforce and delayed having children and have fewer of them if any.

Similarly, many pension plans that depended on your workers paying in to maintain long term stability are faced with large numbers of retired workers with many fewer young workers to feed the fund.

The point is that things happen and they weren't predictable.

Moving forward requires the ability to respond to new situations, not try to undo the progress and events that are molding the present.

The Affordable Care Act was a step forward and those who wanted to undo it were envisioning a world that doesn't exist anymore.  They see it as a step towards socialism and maybe in some ways it is.  However socialism in medicine means every sick person gets treated and every healthy person gets preventive care.

What's wrong with that?

Senate Continues to Save Health Insurance For Millions

Generally the headlines talk about how the Senate is failing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act but this failure is actually a success for many Americans who would lose coverage under any of the Senate plans.

You may feel that the Government should not be providing health insurance but if you do what is your alternative approach?

In the middle ages they used to collect the bodies of plague victims but don't think that's an acceptable alternative.

Do we allow the fortunate access to things like health care and education and condemn most of the population to poverty and disease?

That's not the world I want to live in, I want everyone to have opportunity and decent medical care.

The other way has been tried in the past and has always resulted in large populations of peasants or serfs or slaves who struggled to survive.

First of course you need to strip the poor of all hope and dignity and make them entirely dependent on the wealthy.

Lets try to avoid the same mistake here.

When Even Your Allies Turn On You

It might be a bad sign when people who you claim to have fully vetted for some of the most important positions in our Government are apparently weak and unable to do their jobs less than six months later.

Of course the vetting that took place was most likely simply a loyalty test that they passed and any actual skills weren't at issue.

Further the ones that are under the most attack are being attacked because they didn't do enough to further the ego of the president more than any procedural issue.

You have a group that seems to have trouble with actual reality and has started to believe their own lies.

The Attorney General, the Secretary of State and others are apparently not living is quite the fictional world this group is.

I suspect pretty much everyone who isn't drinking the kool-aid on a regular basis is effectively in trouble. The basic issue is that if you are in fact in touch with reality, you see that the emperor has no clothes and try to get him to put some on.  Of course that not what he perceives and he refuses to listen and thinks you have a problem.

Underlying all this is the fact that the policies have no basis in the real world and are simply unexecutable.

Still, tilting at imaginary dragon that turn out to be windmills is the order of the day, so drop your visors and charge.

Is Anyone Actually There?

Nobody knows everything, some like to pretend they do, but nobody does.

Now this is normal and you need to rely on other people who actually know things you don't.

Reading the stuff that gets tweeted by our president makes you wonder?

Is anyone telling him how stupid he sounds?

I mean, yes lot of people are talking about it, but is there anyone he trusts telling him?

For example, he accuses Hillary of breaking some imaginary law about deleting e-mails.

Now first it was her legal team who decided what e-mail are indeed private and secondly her obligation to turn them over is hardly a crime, unless they are proven to be Government records.

They were after all on her private e-mail server.

Then he rants about her contacts with Russia and Iran which occurred while she was Secretary of State.

He can't even come up with the right crimes that she was investigated for which were release of secret information, of which she was never charged.

Talk about fake news!

He repeats things that his base listened to in the past figuring they bought this crap once, maybe they will again.  Although his base isn't his problem.

Its everyone else.