Stuff I find fascinating, in no particular order of importance:
Update: The NYTimes reports that the Obama administration is ready to offer a compromise to the Catholic bishops on the birth control matter. So, some of you women will have more rights than some of you other women. Just because we are more than half of the population does not mean we are adults that can make these decisions without our churches weighing in.
You Obama apologists who can’t imagine that Hillary would have been more progressive can bite me.
1.) Why are traffic laws considered “optional” in Philadelphia?
2.) The Duggars. If they are trying to live debt free, why aren’t they off the grid? Where are their solar panels? Do they think that using them is the same as admitting that global warming exists? They’ve got 20 fricking acres with few trees and lots of light exposure. And the reason they aren’t generating their own electricity is…why, exactly?
3.) Speaking of farms, they don’t grow any of their own food. Those kids look like they’ve never seen a garden and they eat canned green beans. What’s up with that? Shouldn’t those little rugrats be outside weeding?
4.) Why is there so much packaging on a bottle of salad dressing? There’s an outside shrink wrap, a perforated paper seal, and one of those barriers between you and the vinegary goodness. You know the kind? It’s got a little tab and you’re supposed to pull it and it’s supposed to come right off? Has anyone ever gotten that thing to come off or do you just end up grabbing a sharp knife and go at it like Anthony Perkins from Psycho?
5.) Why is it that when you get your car inspected in NJ and it fails because of some stupid short circuit in an oxygen sensor that blinks on and off but just happens to blink on the minute you drive it into the inspection garage and you take your car to get the sensor replaced that the garage can’t stick an new inspection sticker on your car if you don’t have the *original* paper work? Yes, the garage can login to the state DMV database, look up your car’s inspection history, see exactly what needs to be done with your car, and fix it. But if you don’t have the original report from the state inspection station in hard copy format, they can’t stick a new inspection sticker on the car. No, you must return to one of the few inspection stations in the state and get them to print off a new copy of the old inspection report, return to the garage that replaced the sensor and present them with the hard copy before they are allowed to give you a new sticker. Why? What is the universal guiding principle behind this procedure?
4.) Why is your favorite salad dressing so expensive? There is no reason why oil, vinager and a secret selection of spices should cost $3.99. It’s not like it’s going to get you high or make you more beautiful. It’s just salad dressing. (I’ve tried to reproduce it. I can’t)
What she is saying sounds an awful lot like what Conflucians were trying to warn. If you don’t hold him accountable *before* the election, you won’t get anything from him afterwards.
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Anyway, it looks like progressives are about to make the same mistake again. Can they be taught? It’s not looking good.
Some of the things Klein said that should have triggered alarm bells is that Obama had no plan for getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was not an anti-war president. As Jane Caro said politicians should underpromise and overdeliver. And if progressives had been paying attention, they would have realized that Obama was promising nothing. The other thing she says is that as soon as Hillary bowed out, Obama put Jason Furman on his economics team. Furman was not a friend to organized labor. But note the timing. Obama waits until progressives have put out for him and when there’s no way to get back the person they just blew off. Then he brings in the guy that Wall Street liked. He did something of the same thing on the telecomm immunity bill. Hillary voted against it for principled reasons. Obama voted for it- because Hillary had bowed out.
Klein was also wrong about some things. She was wrong to hold one woman accountable for the Iraq War and let that one vote color her opinion about the character and vision of that candidate. Progressives were completely deaf to everything that Hillary said that was not in reference to the war. And no, she wasn’t held accountable by the voters for her IWR vote. She was dumped because the money coming from Obama’s camp was too good to pass up. Progressives’ deafness to everything *but* the war allowed something even more dangerous to creep in. The Wall Street boys knew the financial collapse was coming and they set up the election so they would be in charge when the shock hit. Klein came to Zuccotti park to talk at the Occupy movement’s birthplace. And she was inspiring and absolutely correct about everything including the urgency. But she undermined her own Shock Doctrine theory when she focused all of her attention on the war to the exclusion of the economy. When the economy crashed and income inequality became even more obvious and suffering and unemployment started to take a toll on the American psyche, it took all focus away from the war. Therefore, verily I say unto you anti-war activists, if you want to get out of illegal, abominable wars, you must exercise vigilance about your economy.
It wasn’t just the PUMAs who were trying to get progressives’ attention. Klein happens to be incredibly good at predicting the fallout of the political decisions we make. But “when your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes”. Progressives were infatuated with Obama and ignored all of the warning signs.
Four years later, the guy ignores them, abuses them, pushes them around and tells them they’re nothing without him. And what to progressives do? They go back to him because they think they have no other choice. They will not stand up for themselves.
We’ve seen this plot before. It will not end well.
Greed has consequences. The definition of success also has consequences. When people judge their success in life by how much money they are making instead of what they contribute to the well being of the society they live in, they can have unintended consequences for other people who they don’t even know in fields they couldn’t care less about.
Let’s follow this trail, shall we?
Matt Taibbi writes another scathing critique on the lack of character on Wall Street. This is where the worldview is developed and the flawed value system starts. In this little snippet about John Paulsen and his incredible haul of obscene gobs of cash, we are to feel sympathy for the pain he has suffered for all the gobs of cash he lost on bets that didn’t pan out last year:
Look, the financial services industry shouldbe boring. It should be quaint. Let’s take the municipal debt business. For ages, it was a simple, dull, low-margin sort of industry, in which banks arranged municipal bond issues and made small but dependable profits as cities and towns financed improvements and construction projects.
That system worked seamlessly for decades, until people like Sherman’s interview subjects suddenly decided to make the business exciting. You know what happens when you make municipal debt exciting? Jefferson County, Alabama happens. Or, on a macro level, Greece happens.
When making a few points on mere bond issues stops being enough, and you have to cook up crazy swap schemes and indices to bet against those schemes, ingenious scams allowing politicians to borrow billions of dollars that they will never in a million years be able to pay back, you might end up getting a few parks, schools, and subways in New York.
But what you get everywhere else is a giant clusterfuck that costs the rest of us years and even more billions of tax dollars to remedy.
This is what the protests are all about – it’s anger that Wall Street has been profiting from an imaginary economy that leaves bankers overpaid, but creates damage everywhere else. Sherman doesn’t get this. He seems to subscribe to the well-worn straw-man position that protesters are simply upset that bankers and financiers make a lot of money. Take for example his view on John Paulson, the hedge fund titan who was involved in Goldman’s infamous Abacus deal:
In October, a thousand protesters stood outside John Paulson’s Upper East Side townhouse and offered the hedge-fund billionaire a mock $5 billion check, the amount he earned from his 2010 investments. Later that day, Paulson released a statement attacking the protesters and their movement …. The truth was, Paulson was furious that the protesters had singled him out. Last year, he lost billions of dollars on bad bets on gold and the banking sector. One of his funds posted a 52 percent loss. “The ironic thing is John lost a lot of money this year,” a person close to Paulson told me. “The fact that John got roped into this debate highlights their misunderstanding.”
Hey, asshole: nobody misunderstands anything about John Paulson. They’re not mad that he made billions the year before, and they’re not happy that he lost money this year. They’re mad that the way he made his money in previous years – which involved putting together a born-to-lose portfolio of toxic mortgage bonds and then using Goldman Sachs to dump them on a pair of European banks, who in turn had no idea that Paulson was betting against them.
Matt Taibbi is using harsh curse words. How declasse. The fundies react with shock and horror. Is there no civility on the internet? Paulsen is rich. Surely this man deserves respect.
Moving on.
Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline wrote a rather longish post for him about the pharmaceutical companies buying back stock in what looks like a desperate attempt to push up the stock price and keep more for the executives. Lovely. And this is made easier by assuring investors that they have cracked down on research costs, by golly. We’ll have none of that wasteful spending here:
He has some figures from our own industry: From 1997 to 2009 “Amgen did
repurchases equal to 99 percent of R&D expenditures, Pfizer 67 percent, Merck 62
percent, and Johnson & Johnson 57 percent.” It could be worse – companies in the IT sector have often managed to spend even more than their R&D budgets on repurchases, partly because they increased the number of shares outstanding so hugely during the dot-com boom years.
One complication with the market-manipulation view is that stock buybacks don’t correlate very well with total stock returns. If anything, the correlation is negative: companies (and sectors) that spend the most on repurchases have lower returns. Of course, there’s a correlation/causation problem here – perhaps those returns would have been even lower without the buybacks. But there’s clearly no slam-dunk financial case to be made for repurchases.
Except one: that they’re often the easiest and least controversial use of the money. Companies get criticized if they sit on cash reserves, and they get criticized for missing earnings-per-share numbers. Why not try to address both at the same time? And without having to actually think very hard about what to invest in? I think that Pfizer’s Ian Read is being truthful when he says things like this:
Pfizer declined to make an executive available to discuss its policy. But in a statement, the company said it “remains committed to returning capital to shareholders through share buybacks and dividend payments.”
As for the cut in research spending in February, Pfizer said it has “accelerated our research strategy and made important changes to concentrate our efforts to deliver the greatest medical and commercial impact.”
In a conference call with analysts this month, Pfizer’s chief executive, Ian C. Read, said his company would “continually look” for acquisitions that would increase revenue growth. But in deciding how to use the proceeds from recent asset sales, he said “the case to beat is share repurchase.”
And that, truly, is a shame.
Oh, well, it’s not like the executives are going to stick around to see what a shame it is. As the following animation suggests, they will be sitting on a beach in the Cayman Islands ideating and leaving the company to hobble toward some finish line on its own:
{{catching breath, wiping eyes, clearing throat}} Ahem, geek humor and all that. Too funny, or it would be if so many of us “ancient ones” weren’t out of work.
Have you seen Moneyball? The movie about the Oakland A’s and its record breaking winning streak was developed from a book by former Wall Street insider Michael Lewis. Billy Beane, manager of the A’s, hired a math and statistics guy on a whim, and together, they use numbers to find hidden gems in other teams’ baseball lineups. It sounds kind of dry, doesn’t it?
Well, it’s not and part of the credit for turning math into magic is due to film editor, Christopher Tellefsen. A couple of weeks ago, he was nominated for his first Academy Award. The New York Times had an interview with Chris about what it takes to be an Oscar nominated editor, and wrote it up for today’s paper. A clip from the movie, Moneyball, demonstrates what Christopher sees, the shots he uses and why he selects them to describe an abstract concept (it looks like principal component analysis) in a film for the sports lover in the general audience.
And the reason why all of this is important is because Christopher is married to Bev who is a sister to
….
Katiebird!
We’re nearly peeing ourselves with excitement for Christopher and looking forward to catching a glimpse of him and Bev on the red carpet. And it goes without saying that we hope he wins. Moneyball is a terrific movie with one of the tensest baseball game scenes I’ve ever seen. It had me on the edge of my seat and as afraid to watch for fear of jinxing it as Billy Beane himself.
(note to Bev: Katie and I think lavender is your color and you should wear the Spanx in the dressing room when you try the dresses on)
In light of reports that Obama is starting to cave on the contraceptive issue to the red beanie boys, it would be a good idea to show him and the Democrats (forget the Republicans, they’re a lost cause) that secularism is alive and thriving in America. I am amazed at the growing number of podcasts and personalities who have taken to online media in just the last couple of years. They’re scientists like Richard Dawkins, former pastors like Dan Barker, advertising executives like Jane Caro, and lively and beautiful people like Margaret Downey and Seth, The Thinking Atheist. They are changing the face of the non-believer, the skeptic, the freethinker. They have a sense of humor and a genuine concern for people and the planet. Something is happening here. Secularists are coming out of the closet in a wave. Just like women who have finally had enough after the Komen debacle, the secular are starting to push back.
Even if you are a believer, of whatever, but are adamant about the separation of church and state, consider going. If you think it is wrong that some old, celibate dudes from Vatican Inc can make decisions about your reproductive organs to preserve their job security, if you think it’s wrong that the religious get too many breaks, too much deference and have too much influence, if you think it is alarming that our government officials have to continually swear allegiance to a bunch of people who let a Bronze Age piece of literature run their lives, this rally might be for you.
March 24, 2012, the Mall, Washington, DC. Be there.
Speaking of The Thinking Atheist, he’s got a new episode up today on Religion and Sexuality, which seems quite timely. “We interview Dr. Marty Klein http://www.martyklein.com, author of such books as “America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law,Lust & Liberty.” And we speak with Darrel Ray, Ed.D, author of the book “Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality.”
(Too funny, that podcast veers wildly from professional to profane and Seth turns out to be somewhat of a prude. Towards the end, it even made me squirm uncomfortably, which just goes to show that we’re not all the same and there are places even the ungodly won’t go.)
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Santorum picked up wins in some states in yesterday’s Republican primaries. Veddy interesting. I think this is how it’s going to work out: Romney has the party apparatus and the financing guys all lined up but he’s going to have to take on Rick Santorum as VP to appease the mighty religious contingent. Come to think of it, the red beanie boys must have seen the numbers over the weekend and that’s why they’re pushing Obama to make compromises on the contraceptive front.
Everyone knows that the VP spot is largely ceremonial (which is why I want Hillary to stay clear of it, but I’m pretty sure she already knows this). But the “Christians” will like the idea of Ricky standing by in the wings and *counseling* the Mormon on what is morally right, like Mitt is going to spend the next four years tearing his garments over abortion and birth control. Am I right, rapture-ready people?
So, where is Rick Santorum getting all of his support? Beats me, I still think the country is evolving away from religion, which is why Vatican Inc is getting so panicky and pre-emptive. But Santorum did get the Duggar endorsement. I have relatives who are in awe of the Duggars. Recently, I forced myself to sit through some of their youtube episodes to see what the attraction is. I mean, one particular relative made it sound like Michelle Duggar was Mother Teresa and General Patton all rolled up in one. Her family is held up as some kind of example of perfection.
Ehhhh, I’m not feelin’ it. But I think I see what the problem is. Here it is: the people who admire the Duggars have somehow convinced themselves that modern women have been deceived into a unfulfilling life of hard work when they would be much happier if they stopped fighting the natural and godly order of things, got back into their houses and produced a lovely family full of clean, obedient and musical children.
I don’t know *what* makes them think this is a good thing for all women and children. It is held up as an ideal of Godly perfection but it ignores everything about human nature. And it’s not like this relative hasn’t seen this kind of lifestyle played out disastrously before in a different high control group religious cult. The Duggars are no different. The boys’ profile pages are full of their favorite subjects, like math and science (they’re all homeschooled). The girls’ pages are mostly devoid of subject matter. Girls have a father figure holding authority over them for all of their lives from father to husband to older sons. They don’t have careers outside the home and they are expected to leave their family size up to God. The whole family travels as a pack together. Or they split up into other reasonably large sized chunks. The children sleep in dorms. They rarely have a minute to themselves. There is always a buddy or a sibling to be a minder.
I see heartbreak in the Duggar family future. One boy says he wants to study science and cure cancer. Can’t do that without fully accepting the concepts of natural selection and evolution. He’s going to have to make a choice. For all we know, he might be the kid who can crack this nut but we’ll never find out if he doesn’t go to a rigorous college or university and if he stays within the family’s faith and circle, he won’t ever get that opportunity.
There’s a good probability that some of the younger boys will be gay. I’ve read about this before about large families and gay sons. (need citation) It’s either related to the size of the family or the number of older brothers. Evolutionally, it kind of makes sense. If you have a large number of siblings and your parents die, it’s good to have a couple of kids around who won’t have kids of their own who can provide resources and take on parenting tasks. I think that having a gay kid in a large family is a blessing, but I’m betting the Duggars don’t. And I’m preeeetty sure I know which one of these kids it’s going to be (betcha the Duggars do too).
Then there are the girls. One of them, Jinger Duggar, has a very expressive face and is frequently caught on camera rolling her eyes or otherwise having a “And that affects me *how*?” look. There’s even a couple of websites dedicated to freeing Jinger Duggar. But she’s not the one I would expect to be the rebel.
Nope, I’m placing my money on Jessa Duggar whose natural extroversion, wit and ambition are not going to be satisfied with a batch of babies. No, not Jessa. Jessa likes the Prayer of Jabez. Jessa wants prosperity. Her focus on the success of the family business makes her an excellent family spokesdaughter. I’d like to see her father try to hand her authority over to some fresh faced Christian boy who thinks he can guide and protect her. That’s a series I’d be willing to watch on TLC.
Then there’s oldest daughter, Jana. At 22, she’s unmarried and probably close to her expiration date. What’s up with that? Can’t they find some decent courtship material for her or is she holding out for a conservatory education so she can continue to play the harp in peace for a few hours a day?
That’s not to say their childhood is bad. They’re clean, well fed, well cared for and none of them appear to be stupid. Anyway, it’s all they know, since the most contact they have with the outside world in their childhood is with the production crew that follows them around and their own circle of like minded Christian families. But they are a herd and in this herd there are mavericks. Their world is highly intolerant of mavericks. It’s going to be very hard on some of them to lose the love that Michelle and Jim-Bob have spent so much time and energy creating. They either have to deny their faith and upbringing or they have to deny themselves.
And this is a choice that the Duggars would like to impose on the rest of the country. In the world of the conservative religious, the only grace you get is from Jesus. The rest of the country should not expect unconditional love under a Christan regime.
So, does anyone believe that the red beanie boys lost their case against no-cost contraceptives in the health insurance plan because Barack Obama has a deep commitment to women’s reproductive freedom or equality?
Or does he have a problem with women and he needs to throw them *just* enough of a bone to win their votes but not enough to piss off the religious too much?
While the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as liberal has also increased since 2000, rising ten points, the Democratic Party remains much more ideologically diverse than the G.O.P. Roughly forty per cent of Democrats call themselves “liberal,” forty per cent call themselves “moderate,” and twenty per cent call themselves “conservative.”
“Such numbers explain why liberals seem destined to perpetual disappointment in Democratic presidents, who cannot lean too far left without alienating the party’s moderate-to-conservative majority,” Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute argues in a recent report.
So, if moderates are still crucial to Obama’s election, what do they look like? Over at Third Way, Michelle Diggles and Lanae Erickson take a deep dive into the data to show that the real swing vote for Obama is a group they call Obama Independents—voters who “liked and voted for [Obama] just 3 years ago… were the most ideologically moderate segment of the electorate,” and “are true swing voters, with one-quarter voting Republican in 2010 and one-quarter voting for President Bush in 2004.” This group, which we are likely to hear a lot about in the coming months, is disproportionately young, female, and secular, and it was hit hard by the recession. One quarter of its members are non-white.
If Obama goes, so does the free Lo-Ovral.
This is the problem with politicians who do not have a coherent worldview, and Obama never has had one. He has not made any effort to craft policy that will advance women’s equality in the workplace or the doctor’s office. It’s not one of his goals. Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on his. The problem with Democrats is not that their factions are all over the place. The problem is that they try to cater to these factions without providing a coherent vision for the future. There is nothing that sticks Democrats together under one united idea of how the country and world should work. So, Obama careens from one interest group to another trying to thread the needle between pissing off the religious nutcases, who do have a particular worldview, whether we like it or not, and the rest of us. Plan B is a contraceptive too far. Women should get a majority vote from their family and pastors before an abortion. But contraceptives are probably ok, according to the data mining algorithm.
He’s done the same on the banker/financial sector fiasco. Instead of developing policy and solutions based on an understanding of what is wrong with the economy and having a vision of how it should work, he has taken an ad hoc approach and tries to cut deals with each player individually. That is more of the Teddy Roosevelt model but it leaves us open to more misbehavior by the banks because there still aren’t any rules to keep them from gambling our money away and then expecting the government to bail them out. He should have started with the premise that it is wrong to compensate gamblers for their losses and then figure out how to prevent that from happening again.
Well, you know the rest. Obama is pandering here to his swing voters, who happen to be moderate, secular women of childbearing age, in order to get votes. He’s going to save them a bunch of money between now and November. But that won’t get them better jobs or jobs at all. It won’t prevent Walmart from subtle sexism that prevents women from getting ahead. It won’t make measurements of workplace parameters to prevent “he said/she said” accusations about discrimination that no one will take seriously. He’s not interested in equality. He’s interested in getting re-elected.
No, Obama’s decision to cover contraceptives is a one time only deal. There’s no systemic change to the culture. He is not an agent of change. He is an agent of Obama and women are the worse for it.
A recent Esquire interview with Bill Clinton didn’t get as much attention in the blogosphere as I might have expected, or maybe I missed it. But it’s a fascinating article in many respects. For one thing, Bill Clinton still has it, that damnable facility with language that drives his enemies and detractors to distraction. Nevertheless, for all of his political skills, which are formidable, there seems to be a blind spot where Republicans are concerned or maybe he sees the lengths that others are willing to go but he’s made up his mind not to go there. The conversation he had with one of his impeachment foes, former Representative Bob Inglis, is an example of this:
So he came to me and he said, “I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn’t do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president.” And he said, “That’s wrong.” And he said, “I’m sorry.” And he now meets with a group in South Carolina with a woman he once defeated, Liz Patterson. Very commendable thing.
In one sense, he was blindsided by this irrational hatred from the Republicans when he first came into office. Maybe that’s the problem. Bill, the politician, can handle rational behavior, the pulls of different ideologies. He gets that kind of hardball politics. It’s the meaningless, destructive, selfish kind of politics that elude him, the tearing down just because you can. Call me naive but I kinda like that in my politician.
There’s a lot to still like about Bill. Some of his ideas about work shows that he’s still learning and there is still an openness about where the future can take us in the area of workplace flexibility. I am in complete agreement that we should adopt the military’s method of teaching people new skills every couple of years. I know this helped me quite a bit when I went back into the lab for my last year of work. I relearned how to do experiments hands on, learned an entirely new but related area of study and best of all, was able to add my previous experience to my new experience. The result was greater than the sum of the parts, especially because I had the added advantage of working on the same protein in a different capacity. It was a revelation to me, renewed my interest in science, and triggered something in my brain that we think we lose when we get older. I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is not true. So, my advice to employers is not to write off people who have been in the same job for years. Change it up, if they are willing. You’ll be encouraging flexibility and building a knowledge pool of expertise. In fact, I would predict that your chances of hitting on something truly innovative will be increased. Of course, this should be encouraged and not forced.
Bill has something to say about the Occupy movement as well. He’s for it. But he also says that the occupiers should come up with 3-4 statements or demands. Now, I know that other people have made this kind of suggestion before and I agree that it’s somewhat premature to be asking this of Occupy. But let’s consider this suggestions from Bill’s point of view.
In my humble opinion, Bill and Hillary Clinton have a very well developed worldview. You may not *like* that worldview or find that it doesn’t gel with your concept of what a politician is or should be or whatever. But this worldview is internally consistent. That is, the Clinton’s have a philosophy about how the world operates and what it takes to meet your goals. Their approach to politics and policy is based on this worldview. A glimpse of this can be seen in Hillary’s book “It Takes a Village”. If you believe that the community you construct has the biggest impact on a child’s life, your policies will reflect that as well as the approach you take to dealing with members of that community. That worldview was also evident in their approach to healthcare in the early 90s. Back then, health insurance was a problem but we saw it from a personal point of view. Cost and access were the problems. I think the Clintons saw it differently. If you have a well developed worldview of how people, business and politics work, it isn’t difficult to project into the future and see that the costs of health care were unsustainable and would eventually have a severe impact on business.
It was a glimpse of this worldview at Hillary’s breakout session at YearlyKos2 in 2007 that I found so appealing. This internal consistency and study allowed Hillary to define the problem and develop policies to address this problem and stay within this worldview. This is their biggest strength. I think this is also the Clintons’ weakness because it relies on rationality and clearly defined goals and the Republicans introduced a measure of senselessness into that worldview.
I’m not sure how to derail the Republicans and make them see reason but if you have a worldview, you must find a way to put that senselessness and selfishness in its proper place and learn how to incorporate it. Capitulating to it in the hopes that you will be able to reason with it clearly didn’t work in 2008. I think the Clintons keep learning. They aren’t perfect but they’ve been working on this stuff for a long time.
Now, what does this have to do with Occupy? Occupy has a great starting point. How do you address income and social inequality and make life more rewarding for the 99%? Without a consistent worldview your demands may end up looking like a laundry list of various complaints that don’t relate to one another. They will be easy to shoot down. Your spokespeople won’t know how to defend them. I looked at Occupy Science’s facebook page a couple of weeks ago and despaired. The participants were in full react mode without bothering to find out how modern science research and business work. Without that knowledge base, you can not make sensible demands or craft good policy. It’s not enough to be angry and act like an injured party. You need to understand the nature of the problem. This does not mean all of the complexity. It simply means, how do the components relate to each other so that you know which buttons to push to get the desired endpoint. That goes for all of the other important issues as well.
What is your worldview? In your world, what are the things that relate to one another? How do you account for human nature? What are the things that make people do good? How do you encourage people to do those things? What is valuable? What is democratic? Is democracy even a desired endpoint? I hope it is but have we thought about this problem thoroughly to convince ourselves that this is true? What are our premises? What do we have to work with? What is the role of business, government, religion, ethics, nature? It’s a very philosophical problem and it takes most people a lifetime to figure this out. The problem is, we don’t have a lifetime. We have only a few months. Therefore, we may have to borrow someone else’s starting point.
Who might we call on? One possibility is Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher who had a very well developed worldview. Unlike other philosophers who tackled one weighty question at a time, Spinoza had a comprehensive worldview that melded human nature, ethics, psychology, politics and theology and he did it at a time in history when all of these things were in conflict with each other. There are some parallels between Spinoza’s Europe and our modern day that make him a pretty good starting point. In fact, the other philosophers of the enlightenment drew heavily from Spinoza’s works. Was he perfect? No. Some of his ideas are limited by the examples he had on hand. There was no American revolution and the ideas of Adams, Jefferson and Franklin. And yet, our founding fathers incorporated Spinoza’s ideas into our country’s working documents.
When I was taking philosophy courses decades ago, we read Decartes and Hume and Kant but skipped over Spinoza. There’s really no satisfactory answer for why this is except that Spinoza was a radical enlightenment thinker whose unconventional view of god might have scared conventional philosophers away. But if you’re looking for a starting place to base your demands, you could do worse than adopt Spinoza’s method of constructing an internally consistent worldview that incorporates nature, politics and man.
For more information about Spinoza, there are a couple of youtube videos that might be useful. For a lite overview of Spinoza, try this In Our Time podcast. I like this kind of thing but it might not be your cup of tea. This two hour discussion of Spinoza is particularly juicy:
Don’t be put off by the moderator. He’s the only one who talks in this hesitant style. The other panelists are more fluid.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.
(New Living Translation 2007)
This is the fundamentalist’s default answer to everything.
In the meantime, check out this video from The Thinking Atheist called “The Shell Game”. BTW, you don’t have to be an atheist to appreciate what Seth is talking about.
Have you seen 
So, does anyone believe that the red beanie boys lost their case against no-cost contraceptives in the health insurance plan because Barack Obama has a deep commitment to women’s reproductive freedom or equality?
The Confluence 