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Political Books
Religious Books -- Not Fundamentalist!
The Fundamentalist Xtians should not be allowed to hijack the language of Christianity. They are at least as much heretics to Christianity as the Arians and Gnostics of early Christian days.
Biblical inerrancy is not possible.
The books both above and below show the limitations of language and the impossibility of Biblical Inerrancy.
How can language be misused? Using General Semantics, this book was Written to explain Nazi propaganda and still used as a textbook
Books - Popular Math, Post Enlightenment & Science
This book explains why the above books on Christian Fundamentalism are politically important in America today.
Modern Society measures risk & predicts possible futures. The book below is a higly readable history of insurance, statistics and modern financial instruments.
Compare this to religion, in which it is presumed that the perfect society was known in the past and all that is necessary to do is to return to that perfect society.
Fascinating, highly readable and fun book on modern mathematics and its limitations. If you are interested in ideas, this is your book!
This is a collection of Hofstader's Scientific American articles. Again, a very fascinationg and highly readable book, requiring no mathematical background. (Buy it used - it is one of the books that will keep disappearing.)
Older, very fascinating book on mathematical ideas. Did you know there are three kinds of infinity?
When someone reacts to something conservatives say by asking what universe they exist in, the question may make sense beyond just being snark. Science is beginning to determine that liberals and conservatives really do live in different universes. This is a quick report from Wired.
Research has already shown that, compared to liberals, conservatives display heightened responses to threatening images. Michael Dodd of the University of Nebraska wanted to explore this in finer detail: He showed 46 left- or right-leaning Nebraskans a series of images alternately disgusting (spiders on faces, open wounds) and appealing (smiling children, cute rabbits.) Dodd's team found that conservatives reacted most strongly to negative images, and liberals most strongly to positive photographs.
Then he showed them pictures of well-known politicians. The same patterns held: Conservatives displayed more distaste than liberals for politicians they disliked, while liberals felt more positive than conservatives about politicians they liked. Given these and other findings, wrote Dodd's team, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."
That sounds pessimistic, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a healthy reminder that people with whom we disagree aren't stupid or irrational; they just have different perspectives.
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Image: Each graph depicts the arousal response of conservatives (triangle dots) and liberals (square dots) to images that are disgusting or appealing (left set) and pictures of opposing politicians (right set). (Dodd et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)
Citation: "The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences." By Michael D. Dodd, Amanda Balzer, Carly M. Jacobs, Michael W. Gruszczynski, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Hibbing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1589, March 5, 2012.
I still think that Romney will be the Republican candidate for President, Adelson's $10 million (so far - in about a month) to Gingrich notwithstanding.
Some years are pivotal and serve to mark off eras of history. 2011 saw the end of American hyperpower, and it announced the end of a decade of US-Muslim conflict that began with 2001. It saw the killing of Usama Bin Laden, the virtual rolling up of al-Qaeda, the repudiation of al-Qaeda’s methods by the masses of the Arab world, and the US military withdrawal from Iraq. The upheavals of the Arab Spring and subsequent elections have led to Muslim fundamentalist parties being drawn into parliamentary politics on a Westminster model, rather than remaining sect-like corporate groups outside the body politic.
[...]
The end of the Cold War, which had stretched from 1946 to 1991, had left the political elites of the United States and Western Europe without a bogeyman or security threat on which they could run for office and through which they could funnel resources to the military-industrial complex that largely pays for their political campaigns. With Russia in steep decline in the 1990s and China still run as a small, cautious power, the US emerged as what the French called a Hyperpower, the sole superpower. US hawks were impatient that Bill Clinton seemed not to realize that he had complete freedom of movement for a brief window of time. It was the new US status of hyperpower that allowed the G. W. Bush administration to respond to the September 11 terrorist attacks by launching two major wars and a host of smaller struggles, all against targets in the Muslim world.
As of 2011, the age of the US hyperpower is passing, along with the possibilities for American wars of choice, i.e., wars of aggression.
Was 2011 the year that signals the end of America as the only World Hyperpower. Al Jazeera showed an hour long program called Empire that suggests it was. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of that program (transcript here.)
Marwan Bishara
This is Empire.
Hello and welcome to Empire. I am Marwan Bishara. The United States has the world’s biggest economy, strongest military and the most influential culture. It’s the only power with a global project defended and supported by more aircraft carriers, Fortune 500 companies and most successful media-tainment conglomerates than any other. But America’s post-cold war optimism, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has given way to pessimism, forecasting a declining power and more crucially, the end of an American era. The rise of new divisional and global powers, coupled with Washington’s recent war fiascos and financial crisis have worsened the outlook for America’s future.
Countless books have gone beyond recent developments to illustrate a persistent decline with titles like Suicide of a Superpower, The Empire Has No Clothes, Taming American Power, Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, Colossus, The Rise and Fall of The American Empire and Selling Out a Superpower. But how serious are the Doomsday scenarios? Is this decline temporary or reversible and what does it mean to America and the rest of the world? Well joining me to answer these questions and more are Tom Engelhardt, editor of the American Empire Project and a popular website Tomdispatch, the author of the United States of Fear. Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, former editor at the Washington Post and co-author of Kremlin Rising Vladimir Putin’s Russia And The End of Revolution. And Cynthia Enloe, professor of woman’s studies and international development at Clark University, the author of The Real State of America Atlas, Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States and Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Last, but not least, Stephen Walt, professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, the author of Taming American Power and co-author of the Israel Lobby. Our starting point is US strategic overstretch.
The show itself is here:
America's relative economic decline internationally has been quite obvious for several decades. In some ways I suspect that America has been trading the existence of its middle class for the military that has substituted for the economic dominance that existed after the end of WW II. The election of Ronald Reagan as President signaled both the end of increases in real wages for workers and the sharp increase in the absolute size of the American military. That increase in the military has been the largest single reason for the deficit that the Conservatives have decried since Obama was elected President, but the deficit has occurred primarily under Republican Presidents.
Now the Wall Street banks have given the world the Great Recession and America can no longer afford to spend a third of the federal budget on a military force that is more expensive that the total military forces of every other nation in the world.
All of these trends came together in 2011. Something is going to have to change radically in 2012. In fact, it may have already changed and we are only just beginning to see what broke. As this election year plays out a lot of it will be exposed - and the fear of the changes will bring forth a lot of lies to conceal the facts. 2012 is going to be a rough year.
Right now the four possible Republican candidates for President are Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and trailing the pack, Rick Perry. But the recent announcement that Gingrich and Perry failed to qualify for the very significant Virginia primary to be held March 6, 2012 pretty much establishes that Romney is going to be the nominee. Let's look at Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick perry individually.
Ron Paul
Ron Paul has a good chance to win the Iowa caucuses according to Nate Silver. But he isn't likely to be able to build on that relatively strong showing in Iowa. His support is quite strong, but very narrow. Nate estimates that at the very best Ron Paul might be able to get about one-third of the Republican votes.
Nate bases his opinion on a series of polls. But his analysis comes from before the Republican establishment really started going after Ron Paul because he was beginning to appear to be a real threat to Romney. The growing chorus quoting Ron Paul's racist writings in his 1980's and 1990's news letters will lower these numbers. So will wider distribution of his views regarding pulling American troops back to the American shores and entering a new period of American isolationism.
Ron Paul's fervant supporters will keep him in the Republican nomination process until it ends, but I think Nate Silver's estimate as high as one-third of Republican voters is highly optomistic.
Newt Gingrich
The next candidate to look at is Newt Gingrich. Newt's disorganization has jumped up to bite him big time. He has failed to qualify for the Virginia Primary which is to be held on Super Tuesday March 6, 2012. His campaign needed signatures from 10,000 registered voters, including 400 from each of the states 11 Congressional Districts. The Newt campaign could not organize itself well enough to achieve a relatively small admininstrative requirement by the deadline. This failure demonstrates what most observers already recognize - Newt is horribly disorganized.
It will be interesting to see if Newt's secretive backers and their Super Pacs who have funded Newt's recent rise from obscurity to being considered a viable candidate forthe Republican nomination as an alternate to Romney will continue throught the Spring.
Rick Perry
Rick Perry, the only other non-Romney candidate likely to be able to compete into the Spring, also failed to qualify for the Virginia primary. Like Newt, Rick Perry has had the appearance of being a well-funded alternative to Mitt Romney. His series of gaffes in the debates have clearly demonstrated that he is not Presidential quality, but his deep-pocketed funders in Texas have been willing to shell out the money for the primary season anyway. I'm not sure what his funders thought they were going to buy, but it's pretty sure Rick Perry will never deliver to them. America as a whole is the winner here.
Mitt Romney
Given the weaknesses of Romney's three major opponents and the fact that the Republican establishment is circling the wagons in support of Mitt it looks like Mitt Romney will, as previously expected, be the Republican nominee for President.
Is there a chance this line up will change this spring? There's always a chance, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller. Without the Virginia votes on Super Tuesday Gingrich and Perry are very unlikely to be able to effectively challenge Romney. Ron Paul will never get over 35% of the Republicans and I'll be surprised if he gets 20%. The more Paul moves to become a real challenger the more the fact that he is utterly insane will become clear even to the Republican voters. The field of candidates really has winnowed down that tightly.
Both the tea partiers and the evangelical Republicans are going to make a lot of noise objecting to Romney, but as spring moves forward their hatred of Obama and the hope that Romney can defeat him will damp down that noise. As much as the evangelicals dislike Romney's Mormon religion, they hate Obama and the Democrats worse. They will hold their collective noses and prepare to vote for Romney in November.
The media is going to hate this. Where is the conflict that drives ratings and advertising? No drama Obama isn't going to give it to them, and while Romney will try to lure the media in he doesn't have much to offer them until after the Republican convention in August. That leaves the media in about a six months long silly season from Super Tuesday until the conventions. Then it will be Obama vs Romney - just as has been clear since last summer.
Newt Gingrich told Bob Schieffer today on CBS' Face the Nation that America does not need to obey orders of the Supreme Court if America disagrees with those court orders. In fact, he goes on to state that Congress can send the Capital Police to arrest 'Radical' Judges.
I have to give Gingrich credit for choosing a detested target which has weakened itself politically during the 21st Century.
The US Supreme Court (SC) has really worked very hard to destroy its' own political legitimacy, especially with their unjustified and clearly illegitimate appointment of Bush as President in 2000 as well as their judicial overreach going far beyond the issues in the case they had decided to accept in the declaration that corporations are people in Citizens United.
Beyond their unjudicial and biased decisions there is also the refusal of the Justices to Clarence Thomas' and Scalia's unethical behavior. Their refusal to act within judicial ethics rules also has weakened the Supreme Court's legitimacy. Most of America - progressive and conservative both - no longer consider the declarations of the nine justices anything more than just the pronouncements of another bunch of cheap politicians. Gingrich
Gingrich, as one of America's most notorious cheap politicians, has recognized all this self-inflicted weakness in the Supreme Court and has stepped in to take advantage of that fact. He is attacking the Supreme Court, and through it the entire American judicial system. Trust a nasty cheap politician like Gingrich to use the self-inflicted weakness of others to try to advance himself.
Unfortunately for Gingrich it won't help him. He simply displays his own lack of character as he attacks the Supreme Court. He offers no analysis or correction to the court. All he is doing is showing off his own (imagined) intelligence as well has his own inability to function effectively in government.
Here's a lesson in Ron Paul's Austrian economics. Paul Krugman points out that Ron Paul has been consistently wrong in his economics, but that for some strange reason the GOP has decided to abandon its earlier good sense and join him in his pit of ignorance.
Mr. Paul identifies himself as a believer in “Austrian” economics — a doctrine that it goes without saying rejects John Maynard Keynes but is almost equally vehement in rejecting the ideas of Milton Friedman. For Austrians see “fiat money,” money that is just printed without being backed by gold, as the root of all economic evil, which means that they fiercely oppose the kind of monetary expansion Friedman claimed could have prevented the Great Depression — and which was actually carried out by Ben Bernanke this time around.
O.K., a brief digression: the Federal Reserve doesn’t actually print money (the Treasury does that). But the Fed does control the “monetary base,” the sum of bank reserves and currency in circulation. So when people talk about Mr. Bernanke printing money, what they really mean is that the Fed expanded the monetary base.
And there has, indeed, been a huge expansion of the monetary base. After Lehman Brothers fell, the Fed began lending large sums to banks as well as buying a wide range of other assets, in a (successful) attempt to stabilize financial markets, in the process adding large amounts to bank reserves. In the fall of 2010, the Fed began another round of purchases, in a less successful attempt to boost economic growth. The combined effect of these actions was that the monetary base more than tripled in size.
Austrians, and for that matter many right-leaning economists, were sure about what would happen as a result: There would be devastating inflation. One popular Austrian commentator who has advised Mr. Paul, Peter Schiff, even warned (on Glenn Beck’s TV show) of the possibility of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation in the near future.
So here we are, three years later. How’s it going? Inflation has fluctuated, but, at the end of the day, consumer prices have risen just 4.5 percent, meaning an average annual inflation rate of only 1.5 percent. Who could have predicted that printing so much money would cause so little inflation? Well, I could. And did. And so did others who understood the Keynesian economics Mr. Paul reviles. But Mr. Paul’s supporters continue to claim, somehow, that he has been right about everything.
So the inflation that Austrian Economics predicts has not happened. Why not?
Because the world is in a massive recession. By definition that means there are unused capital goods and workers who cannot find jobs. Inflation occurs when too much money chases too few jobs in the market.
In that case the excess money has to compete with others who have money to buy capital goods. The competition drives the prices up - meaning competition for capital goods by people who need them and have money causes the price to rise. But prices are not rising. Why?
Because no one has any use for the unused capital goods. The problem is not excess money. The problem is insufficient demand. That means there is not enough consumption to drive businesses to obtain capital goods in the market. Generally they simply use what they have already. They also do not hire more workers, and since workers create 70% of all consumption, demand is not increasing. Without anticipated consumption to drive it, businesses will not invest in more capital goods and will not hire more workers.
Austrian Economics fails again. Ron Paul is, like most of the GOP leaders today, living in a fantasy world of his own making. The Austrian Economics/Libertarian fantasy is being pushed by wealthy individuals like to Koch Brothers through the CATO Institute primarily to weaken the power of the government over corporations, banks, and yes, wealthy families who would prefer to live in a plutocracy where they call all the shots.
Gov. Nikki Haley dictated the conclusions of a committee charged with deciding how the state should implement federal health care reform before the group ever held its first meeting, public documents show.
Now, some of those involved in the dozens of meetings are calling the entire planning process a sham that wasted their time and part of a $1 million federal grant.
In a March 31 email thread that included Haley, her top advisers and the committee member who eventually wrote the report, Haley wrote, "The whole point of this commission should be to figure out how to opt out and how to avoid a federal takeover, NOT create a state exchange," which is eventually what happened.
A central part of the federal health care overhaul, an exchange is a marketplace where various insurance plans eventually will be sold.
[...]
The most recent progress reports filed with the federal government show the administration used about $109,000 of the $1 million grant through the end of November.
Crangle said the exercise was "not in good faith" and called it "an abuse of federal funds." State money also is at issue because state employees were on state time when they attended dozens of exchange planning meetings, he said.
Sue Berkowitz, an advocate for the uninsured who participated in planning discussions as executive director of S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, said time was wasted.
"We came together and sat down for a lot of meetings in good faith that we'd explore every option and discuss what is in the best interests of the state," she said. "I'm frustrated that we were being used for something that wasn't an open, transparent discussion."
[...]
Insurance exchanges are the state- or federally-run marketplaces where health coverage will be sold to individuals and small business employees beginning in 2014. They are a key part of the federal health law.
Envisioned as the "Expedia" for health insurance, exchanges are intended to make purchasing health care easier and more affordable by allowing customers to compare options side-by-side.
They also are intended to be the place where residents who make between 133 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level will apply for and collect federal tax credits to buy coverage.
A state panel established by Gov. Nikki Haley recommended last month the state should not manage its own exchange. If Haley accepts the recommendations, South Carolina will join a handful of other states that already have declined to set up exchanges.
States that do not set up exchanges by 2014 will be subject to federally run exchanges.
In short, Nikki Haley does not want a competitive market in health insurance. She is governor of Virginia in part to ensure that Virginians have to buy health insurance from an oligopoly that already exists and wants no competition.
There are two very different tax-policy conversations playing out in the Republican Party right now. In Washington, House Republicans are arguing with each other over how small of a temporary tax cut to give the middle class. Out on the primary trail, the Republican presidential candidates are arguing over how huge of a permanent tax cut to give the wealthy.
All of which leaves the Republican Party in an odd place: skeptical of a temporary tax cut for the middle class that carries a price tag in the low hundreds of billions of dollars and is fully paid for but apparently enthused over permanent tax cuts for the rich that cost trillions of dollars and aren’t paid for at all.
But it’s not odd at all, once you realize that the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit. All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.
The entire debate has been fake. If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.
There is a real good set of reasons why the tea partiers and the Occupy Wall Street groups both think that the Wall Street banks consist largely of immoral criminals. Their behavior has clearly shown that they are. Here is Robert Reich describing the behavior of the banks:
Wall Street’s shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged.
Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they might as well begin cheating in small ways. And when they think the game is rigged, they’re easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.
Tally up these costs and it’s a whopper.
Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism. Most Americans assume the reason the Street got its taxpayer-funded bailout without strings in the first place was because of its political clout. That must be why the banks didn’t have to renegotiate the mortgages of Americans – many of whom, because of the economic collapse brought on by the Street’s excesses, are still under water. Some are drowning.
That must be why taxpayers didn’t get equity stakes in the banks we bailed out – as Warren Buffet got when he bailed out Goldman Sachs. That means when the banks became profitable gain we didn’t get any of the upside gains; we just padded the Street’s downside risks.
The Street’s political clout must be why most top Wall Street executives who were bailed out by taxpayers still have their jobs, have still avoided prosecution, are still making vast fortunes – while tens of millions of average Americans continue to lose their jobs, their wages, their medical coverage, or their homes.
And why the Dodd-Frank bill was filled with loopholes big enough for Wall Street executives and traders to drive their ferrari’s through.
The cost of such cynicism has leeched deep into America, causing so much suspicion and anger that our politics has become a cauldron of rage. It’s found expression in Tea Partiers and Occupiers, and millions of others who think the people at the top have sold us out.
Wall Street has shown clearly that they cannot be trusted, but when someone tries to enforce regulations on them what do they do? They whine about how misunderstood they are. They are not misunderstood. They are the organized center of financial greed and immorality in the world.
Wall Street Bankers are responsible for the current economic problems because they created and sold “financial weapons of mass destruction.” They bought off the regulators with their K-Street lobbyists, and they have supported the libertarian conservative Republicans who have thwarted and stopped government regulation of bank trading and mergers.
Since the (bank-created) collapse of the Savings and Loan institutions in the 1980's commercial banks have been merging until there are now only about five really massive banks. These banks do not do much business with small businesses because such loans do not provide large profits. They instead compete with the financial trading banks like Goldman Sachs for trading profits, using the savings from commercial customers as the basis for their trades. Why not? It's a lot cheaper than borrowing money in the market, isn't it?
But along the way the banks have forgotten that people have to trust them to do business with them. If we express our lack of trust in the massive banks who don't give a shit what happens to us, then we become their enemy. Their enemies are people that the government they buy (see K-Street Lobbyists) is supposed to suppress. The bankers prefer to wield power rather than work to develop trust.
Bob Reich has the banker's number. The bankers have forgotten that they are not in the power business, they are in the trust business. And a lot of us have been burned and no longer trust them.
Smart bankers will push for stronger and more visible regulation. I doubt that there are very many smart bankers on Wall Street in positions of power within the banking structures.
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