Things hidden underground

Police Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
-Casablanca

There has been much to-do made over the Keystone XL Pipeline project from Canada down to Texas. Even the President has opposed it. But a graphic shows this is much ado about nothing. Closing the barn door after the horse has fled. Etc.

Here's a chart of EXISTING pipelines

Bottom Line

The Canadian pipeline is nothing new. So why all the debate over it? What's the real reason for the opposition?

P.S.
I also want to mention that it is important to know what lies underground at your house. Utility companies warn, call us before you dig. It's way too easy now-a-days to cut through a buried power line or cable.

A co-worker has lost her home due to a hidden surprise. An electrician sank a new grounding rod for an upgrade to her home's electrical system. Problem was, unbeknownst to anyone, the rod cut through the pipe leading from the underground oil tank to the home's furnace. The tank was refilled a few days later and all that oil leaked into the soil under the house. After much wrangling with lawyers and insurance companies, the insurer for the electrician agreed to dig up and rebuild the kitchen over the spill. The kitchen was demolished but further environmental testing showed the oil had spread far under the foundation - the entire house would have to be demolished. At this stage the insurer is negotiating to buy the house and write it off as a complete loss instead of rebuilding.

Conservatives vs Liberals

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.
- Dennis Prager

Last night I chanced into a conversation about Conservatives. Someone had written, "Conservatives support the King and are opposed to freedom".  Huh, I replied? I was told this was part of a college paper about France just before the revolution. OK, that made more sense but I then tried to explain that Conservatives are not anti-freedom. Instead they are anti-change (usually) and particularly anti-anarchy.

Conservatives believe their world is good and things can only change for the worse.
Liberals believe the world is in bad shape and that things can only change for the better.

Both are half-right, half-wrong. Not everything is good, there is suffering and misery, but not all change is for the better. Conservatives need to do a better job of explaining why certain liberal ideas are dangerous (based upon history and experience) and do a better job addressing problems instead of living in the status quo.

This morning I came across a blog with a different comparison of Conservatives vs Liberals. It comes on the tail of the story about popular Democrat Anthony Weiner who was accused of sending a picture of his crotch (in shorts) to a girl via Tweet. At first he denied it and said he was hacked. Some left-leaning media blamed the right-leaning Andrew Breitbart for framing him or making it up. But then under mounting evidence and the account of several women, Weiner admitted it and apologized to Breitbart. So what was the Liberal media response to being wrong? Apologies? No. Instead they counter attack with "At least Weiner is not a hypocrite".

What does this mean, asks a blogger named Zombie.



How can this be? Why are conservatives hypocrites when they err but not liberals? Zombie expands his diagram to show the unspoken assumptions behind the argument.

"Remember, that’s not my characterization of liberalism — that’s liberals’ own characterization of themselves when they use this argument", says Zombie. In the extreme liberal world everything is tolerated and allowed, there is no "wrong", so there is no sin. The hypocrite defense claims that only people who believe in sin can be held accountable for sinning.

Bottom Line

Zombie comes to a close with a nice analogy:

Consider these two statements from two different potential husbands:

“I know I promised to stop drinking forever, honey, but I fell off the wagon again; please forgive me, and I’ll really really try to stay sober from now on, but no guarantees.”

vs.

“I’m a tertiary alcoholic, a stone-cold drunk; always have been, always will be. You’re not likely to ever see me sober. Take it or leave it.”

If you had to choose, which would you marry?

What don't you know?

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
-Charles Darwin

Yesterday I mentioned "Credentialed, Not Educated" to describe leaders at all levels of politics; people with little experience that have a very high opinion of their abilities and knowledge. Recently the Instapundit cited a reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect in the context of political hubris. I'd never heard of this so I looked it up.

Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper while at Cornell University entitled, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".
They found while testing students, that those who scored poorly rated themselves as much more skilled than they really were. While those who tested well had self-doubts about their knowledge and rated themselves less skilled than actual.

Some people just don't know what is missing from their knowledge. This is not to say that they cannot learn; only that there are topics they have never-ever been exposed to and are completely unaware of. To use a physical example, many people are unaware that they have a vision problem. If you've always seen the world as blurry, then you think that this is natural and normal. You have no clue that others see the world sharper and in more focus. Then when you get your first pair of glasses, it's like, wow, I never knew things could look like this.

When a doctor asks me to rate a pain on a 1-10 pain scale, I'm flustered. What does 10 feel like? If I've never experienced it, how do I know that my present pain is only a 7? Is my level-10 pain the same as his? (As it turns out, no. I have a high pain threshold so I've been under rating myself on the pain scale.)

Returning to Kruger and Dunning, they proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Many politicians get a degree in social science or politics or law, do some social work, and get elected. They have never managed a business, never really had a nine-to-five job in their life. Yet their self-confidence in their ability to fix the business world with new laws is stratospheric. They are blind to personal areas of ignorance.

Bottom Line

Poet W.B. Yeats captured the irony between those well informed & able (who do nothing) vs the uninformed & incompetent (who are militant),

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Problems with modern Government

“Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it” - Ronald Reagan

Original Gerrymander

Here's a collection of articles from just one day that show the many things wrong with the Federal Government today.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Federal pay hike? Let’s start with a freeze, then cut 10 percent.

The number of these government workers making more than $150,000 per year has more than doubled since President Obama took office, and it has increased tenfold since 2005, according to USA Today. In 2005, the Defense Department had nine civilian employees making more than $170,000. When Obama took office, the number had risen to 214. The number is now 994 -- an 11,000% increase in five years.

Obama has exacerbated the problem by creating 141,000 new federal jobs since he took office -- and that total doesn't count temporary census workers, the postal service or the uniformed military. Democrats are already talking about using the upcoming lame-duck legislation to grant the federal work force yet another pay increase, this time of 1.4 percent. Never mind that federal pay has increased 3 percent annually since 2005. Never mind that inflation has been nonexistent during that period, or that total compensation for federal bureaucrats has increased nearly four times faster than in the private sector.

Gerrymandering 101

Gerrymandering is not a new phenomenon. It’s been around since the very beginnings of our nation, so long that one could fairly say that the United States has been built on the principle of gerrymandering. The very first congressional districts were somewhat gerrymandered, and it’s been downhill ever since. The phenomenon was finally noticed and properly named in 1812 [in a Boston Gazette newspaper article with image above.]

Earmark Myths and Realities

By Sen. Tom Coburn

As Senate Republicans prepare to vote on an earmark moratorium, I would encourage my colleagues to consider four myths and four realities of the debate.
[See article for details.]

Congressmen pay wives from campaign funds

Practice is legal, but some see potential for abuse.

Bottom Line

Hopeless? Let's see what happens in the next two years with the newly elected, more conservative, government at all levels. If things do not improve, 2012 could be a very interesting year as both parties are rejected by the people.

The Conservative Viewpoint

"In physics, a conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves."

I started a new commuting lecture series today called "The Conservative Tradition" by Patrick N. Allitt of Emory University and I'm really enjoying the first lecture covering the basics of what conservatives believe. The basic premise of conservatism is this: Human nature changes very slowly (if at all) so societal change should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

This has several interesting corollaries for conservatives:

1. Human history is filled with war - it's peace that is temporary and unnatural. So when a liberal wants to disarm during a period a peace, a conservative says, "Are you nuts!", you're just making us weaker for the next inevitable war. Why believe that for the first time in history, human nature will change and that peace will last forever?

2. Human motivations from greed, love, sadness, etc., don't change. So we can still learn from the ancient Greek/Roman classics and from Dead White European Males. (I've never understood the liberal opposition to the classics. Now if makes sense if you believe that mankind has changed or can be changed through Orwellian methods of controlling what people learn.)

3. Respect your Elders. Conservatives believe that (for the most part) the laws and mores and traditions of our ancestors still apply today. Law must respond to changes in technology but people are still people. Liberals believe that everything today is different and that the old ways don't apply and must be replaced with a new way of thinking. Remember the Internet .COM boom - "this time it's different!"

4. Human nature won't permanently change through "reeducation". Look at the extreme lengths that China and Russia when through to change the people to a socialist mindset. Or consider Moses in the desert for 40 years. An entire generation had to die so that a more godly people could resettle Israel but they quickly fall from grace in the book of Joshua.

By no means can it be said that conservatives are always right; just because something has been a tradition for generations does not make it right. Interestingly differing traditions in the US and England have led to different conservative doctrines:
US: Guns are good, UK: Guns are bad
US: Separation of church and state, UK: Union of church and state.

Bottom Line

"If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain."-Winston Churchill

There is nothing wrong with wanting the world to be better. To hope that real and permanent change is possible is natural youthful optimism. But when optimists come into power they quickly learn that the real world doesn't want sudden change and they end up using force when idealism fails. Planned societies are very unstable and require isolation and a police state to prevent change back to the old ways.

Is real change possible? Yes, but it takes a long time with many conflicts along the way. Consider slavery and racism in America. Quakers opposed slavery as early as 1688. Vermont became the first state to outlaw slavery in 1772. It took a civil war in 1860 end slavery but it did not end inequality. A century later Martin Luther King Jr helped to end the Separate but Equal doctrine. In the 21st century we have a black president. We've come a long ways in 300+ years but politicians still cry racism at the drop of hat so we've not at the end of the road yet.

South Pacific has a song about racism that goes, "You must be carefully taught before it's too late. Before you are six, or seven or eight. To hate all the people your relatives hate." This raises an interesting question - which is the natural human state - to accept everyone as equal or to oppress those who are different? How do young children respond to people who are different? Do they have to be taught to hate or to tolerate? Are we overcoming an evil meme that has enthralled human culture for millennium or are we slowly teaching people to overcome an inborn instinct?

Parliaments

Anytime a large, emergency spending bill makes its way through Congress, the potential for mischief is great.-Chris Chocola (Indiana Congressman, 2003-2007)

I've just finished listening to the lecture series, The medieval world. II, Society, economy, and culture. I've enjoyed the series during my commute and today's lecture on the origins of representative democracy and parliaments struck a chord.

The professor began by pointing out that true Democracies are very rare; the common example is Athens in ancient Greece where any of the 5000 free men in the city could propose law and vote on it. The US is actually not a democracy; its a Republic where we elect those who represent us and conduct government. Republics are also uncommon in world history with Rome as the classic example. The Roman Republic lasted for several hundred years until the 1st century AD. Then over a thousand years passed before a representative government reappeared with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

The story behind the Magna Carta is revealing. King John of England was also Duke of Normandy in France which did not please the French King who fought long and hard to seize John's french lands. This constituted an "Emergency" for King John which allowed him to raise new taxes and fees on his top noblemen, the Barons, in order to pay for the long war. Apparently the Barons did not mind the taxes so much when John's brother, Richard the Lion Hearted, asked for it because Richard won his battles and could reward the Barons for their generosity. John however was terrible at war and kept losing his battles and had nothing to show or give away for the money spent. [I'm reminded of Obama and the Stimulus plan but I won't go there.]

Eventually the Barons had had enough and "forced" King John to sign the Magna Carta which required kings to "ask" the Barons for money by pleading the case before them. Barons now had the right to say no if the "emergency" was unjustified in their eyes. This led to a new dynamic of quid-pro-quo where the King with hat in hand would have to listen to the Baron's requests and make deals in order to receive the money to run his wars. There was greater fiscal responsibility because no Baron wanted to give up his money without good cause. It was their money!

The English Kings hated dealing with this new "parliament" of nobles and called it only as a last resort. But with the Hundred Year War the need for funds was great and so reluctantly Parliaments were called again and again and each time the Parliament attached more power to itself as it bargained with kings. As towns became wealthy the British king added town leaders to Parliament as additional sources of funding (and perhaps to influence the vote?). Hence Parliament became more representative.

Now interestingly, Royalty was right to fear Parliament. When in session they were a royal pain making demands. When not in session they got mad over being ignored. One cause of the English Civil War (1642–1651) was King Charles I's refusal to invoke a radically Protestant Parliament which was opposed to the king's Catholic wife. Parliament went to war against the King and won in 1651. Charles I was killed, his son, Charles II, exiled and the country ruled by Parliament as the Commonwealth of England (1649–53), and then as a Protectorate (1653–59), under Oliver Cromwell's personal rule. During this period Parliament was extremely puritanical and outlawed Christmas as well as Opera, Plays and just about any element of fun. At Cromwell's death the Parliament restored Charles II as King and there was much rejoicing.

The French Kings managed not to call a Parliament for centuries but when a funding crisis occurred in 1789, King Louis XVI invoked an Estates-General (i.e. parliament) as a last resort. The Estates-General used this rare opportunity to pass new laws, seize power, imprison and eventually kill the King, and begin the French Revolution.

The founding fathers of America established a constitution to balance Parliament (Congress) and King (President) against one another as history had shown the dangers of either side obtaining total power. However after learning about the history of Parliament I realized that we are lacking a key ingredient from parliamentary history. Our modern Congressmen and Senators have no skin in the game, it's NOT their personal money that they are managing. It's bad enough that they have an enormous slush fund from taxes, and fees, and social security to spend as they will. But they can also pass bills that are completely unfunded. When expenses exceed revenues (as they typically do), congress borrows money or raises taxes and fees.

Instead of sharing the pain of expenses, congressmen today try to grab all the Federal Pork they can for themselves and the folks back home. So let's make it personal. What if we replaced all federal tax with higher state taxes and Congressmen would have to fund the federal government out of the funds of their own states? Now each bill has a cost that is felt back home as there is less to spend on the state level. The nature of Pork might change - instead of "free money for us" from the slush fund, state residents might realize that their representative is taking their money and spending it on his supporters and friends.

Bottom Line

The federal budget is a disaster in every country today with a Representative Democracy. There is no incentive for fiscal responsibility, no reward for saving money, no recognition for running a lean government with fewer workers. Instead people re-elect leaders who bring in the most Pork for local projects and businesses. Representatives can raise more funds by offering government jobs as rewards to friends. And they raise salary and benefits sky-high for government workers to win the union vote.

We need to change the system to encourage fiscal prudence over fiscal largess.

"I Need a Freaking Job".org

"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."-Groucho Marx

The following comes from INAFJ.org and is, I think, well written and insightful.

As families suffer, our political leadership seems content with their dysfunctional posturing. Together we can set the record straight, or at least just make fun of it.

• Stupid is believing the problems we have can be solved by the same people that created them.


• Crazy is saying you're going to create jobs by spending unimaginable amounts of money that you borrow from the very same people (China) that you gave all the jobs to.


• Sick is the billions of tax payer dollars spent on bailing out the financial institutions, while their own immeasurable greed was responsible for the collapse of America's future.


• Tired is listening to career politicians saying one thing while doing another, most having never created a job or felt the burden of meeting a payroll.


• Inexcusable is the rape of the US Treasury in plain sight and in broad daylight.


• Apparent is the government's responsibility to stop digging a hole that the American people have no chance of getting out of, as they have proven time and time again that they are the worst managers of everything.


• Unbelievable are the economic policies that have forced 65% of the manufacturing jobs in America to low wage countries over the last decade.


• Betrayal is the feeling you live with while watching elected officials seek all the glory and take none of the blame.


• Insane is the unemployment rate amongst the youth in America, hovering currently at around 27%


• Unforgivable is burdening America's youth with the enormous and continuously growing national debt.


• Cynical is what you become after witnessing the destruction of American exceptionalism and realizing that you are a casualty of a handful of greedy animals feeding on the soul of a great nation.


• Obvious is the government's need to get out of the way so that inventive young entrepreneurial Americans have the opportunity to stimulate an economy that produces jobs.


• Catastrophic is being a recent college graduate with diminished opportunities and the real obligation to repay educational debt.


• Unacceptable is being a voiceless bystander to the greatest injustice in American history.


• Simple is remembering that honest American people are the ones that made this country great.


• Certain is knowing that together we can reclaim America and the promise for the opportunity to prosper.

Bottom Line

"Here's the thing. Nothing matters if people aren't working. We need to make some noise. The government is absolutely broken. If we work together maybe we can get these posers out of the way. Sign the petition. Buy a t-shirt. Upload a video. Be a friend. Start a movement." - INAFJ.org

More government? More spending?

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”- Albert Einstein

Today I’ll jump from the heat of a volcano to the heat of politics. An editorial by Radley Balko at Reason.com describes the problem I fear today – “more government is better government”.

In the private sector failure leads to obsolescence (unless you happen to work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, … the government claims it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government.

It’s a nifty trick. The right does it with national security. The fact that we haven’t had a major terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 proves that the Bush administration’s heavy-handed, high-security approach to fighting terrorism worked! But if we had suffered another attack, the same people would have been arguing that we need to surrender more of our civil liberties to the security state. Two sides. Same coin."

When the Benard Madoff ponzi scheme collapsed, congressman said we need MORE regulation to prevent this from occurring again. But in reality several complaints had been made to the FEC that something fishy was going on. They ignored some of the complaints and when they did bother to investigate, the FEC found nothing wrong and decided to trust the claims made by Madoff.

Because the American Primary education system is so dysfunctional, teacher unions and politicians say we need to spend MORE money “for the children”. In 2008, 23% of students failed to graduate rate from high school. But according to a 2005 report from the OECD, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student on its public schools, with each country spending more than $11,000 (in U.S. currency) per student. Yet despite spending the most, U.S. public schools lag behind other developed countries in the areas of reading, math, and science. The Washington D.C. public school district spends $12,979 per student per year, third highest in the nation, but results rank lower than the national average.

For decades now, the US has been spending ever more on education with nothing to show for the extra expense. The “children” need better education, not a more costly one. As one blogger quipped, When congress discovers a successful way to run the schools in DC, THEN it can tell the rest of the nation what to to. But don’t export a losing system.

During the 2006–2007 school year, a private school in Chicago founded by Marva Collins charged $5,500 for tuition, and parents said that the school did a much better job than the Chicago public school system. At the same time Chicago public school officials claimed that a budget of $11,300 per student was not enough.

Imagine a car company that said, “We spend more than our competitors on making each and every car but we rank last in quality. So our solution is to hire more managers and to spend even more money on each car for the sake of our customers.” Such a company would go out of business (or would have except for recent government bailouts.)

Bottom Line

Don’t buy the line that government or public service needs to spend more money for your benefit. In New Jersey the new governor, Christie, is battling the Teacher Unions to control costs. He asked voters to reject any school plan where the teachers did NOT agree to a one-year wage freeze. In an historic election last week, many voters agreed with him and half the school budgets failed to pass. The governor is receiving death threats from teachers and commercials warn that he is endangering “the children”. Baloney!

A study by the Cato Institute in 1996 found that private schools provided superior education at $3,116, per child per year, half of then national average of $6,857. Free enterprise trumps government planning every time. With government, more is NOT better.

No True Scotsman

“I am not an Englishman, I was never an Englishman, and I don't ever want to be one. I am a Scotsman! I was a Scotsman and I will always be one.”-Sean Connery (James Bond)

While I “almost” have a PhD in mathematical logic (all but dissertation), I lack training in rhetorical logic. Since ancient Greece, rhetoricians have studied the ways we can lie or dissemble or deceive with speech and writing. Collectively these are called logical fallacies. I’m aware of some of the techniques; for instance:

Poisoning the Well: oppose a position by discrediting the opposing advocate.
“My opponent was once wrong about X, so how can we trust him on Y?”

A Straw man Argument: exaggerating or distorting or misquoting the subject to something that is easily dismissed.
Person A: We should liberalize the laws on beer.
Person B: No, any society with unrestricted access to intoxicants loses its work ethic and goes only for immediate gratification.
(Here the argument has been extended from beer to all "intoxicants" thereby creating a straw man to attack.).

Today I came across a new one called “No true Scotsman”. According to Wikipedia is goes like this:

Teacher: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Student: But my Scottish uncle Scotty McScottscott doesn't like haggis!
Teacher: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.

When faced with a counterexample to a claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy is employed to modify the original claim to something that is “true” by definition. Think about it, what is a “true” Scotsman? It’s a tautological phrase which is self-fulling. A true Scotsman is one who eats hagis. Who eats hagis? All true Scotsmen.

Today you might see a “True Scotsman” claim in regards to Obama Healthcare. As it starts to unravel, some of the centralist Democrats are distancing themselves from it. But rather than recognize division in the party, one might counter that no “true” Democrat opposes Obama care. Or with Global Warming: no true scientist doubts global warming.

This is solidarity by dismissing the exceptions as irrelevant.

Here is a recent example of changing a label to save the argument: "Avoid the term 'global warming'," Thomas Friedman says. "I prefer the term global weirding.'”
How does one disprove Global Weirding? How can one measure and claim that the world is more weird this year than last!

Bottom Line

Here is Wikipedia’s list of Fallacies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

And a few related articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

What Causes Famine?

"Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a
Lifetime" - Lao Tzu

Starvation is a horrible way to die. It tugs at our hearts to see people suffer and frequently we are asked to donate money to help those starving in Ethiopia and other regions of the world. But sometimes you need to step back and ask – Why are these people starving?

Drought & lack of rain is an easy answer for famines. But when droughts historically reoccur, as in Ethiopia, and nothing changes, then one needs to look at the bigger picture. In the informative article, Uprooting the Root Causes of Famine in Ethiopia, by Ghelawdewos Araia (founder and president of the Institute of Development and Education for Africa), Araia points out that Egypt receives nearly no rain but exports foods by using irrigation from the Nile River. Ethiopia has “the blessings of hundreds of major rivers and thousands of streams” but fails to use them. While hundreds of thousands starve, scientists debate the irrigation side effects salinity and silt and the local government lacks the means or the will to finance an irrigation infrastructure.

Some activists blame the Ethiopian government for deliberating starving 15% of the population. The article, The Real Cause Of Famine In Ethiopia, claims that Ethiopia in 2000 had 20% more grain than required for the needs of the country but 17% of the people were locked into “famine zones” and denied access to this local grain (or are too poor to buy it). There are stories of the Ethiopian government seizing the UN supplied famine relief grain and selling it for profit rather than allowing it to go to the famine zones for free.

Interestingly Ghelawdewos Araia doesn’t blame an evil government. He sites many problems (such as government bureaucracy) but also problems with local traditions. The drought regions are dependent on a single water dependent grain. Araia says the locals need to break with tradition and plant many kinds of crops, including some that are more drought resistant. Another cultural problem is sited on Wikipedia, “Due to a number of causes, the peasants lacked incentives to either improve production or to store their excess harvest; as a result, they lived from harvest to harvest.”

Bottom Line
Famines rarely have simple answers. Giving food (i.e. sacks of grain) is simple but won’t solve the underlying problems. The BBC asked, Famine in Ethiopia: How should the world react?, and got dozens of different answers. Some blame the locals for having too many babies, some blame the world for spending money on wars instead of people, some blame the country for a failure to learn from and correct past mistakes, etc. As one respondent put it, “Why is this happening again? I thought the point of Live Aid, etc was not just to feed people but to improve infrastructure to ensure that this wouldn't happen again.” I agree! What happened to past donations to stop this from happening again?

P.S.
For a related story on famine and politics check out, Remember the Holodomor The Soviet starvation of Ukraine, 75 years later.

Insults & Logical Fallacies

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.” - Oscar Wilde quotes

This past month we’ve seen a rare event, the White House attacking the integrity and character of an American Citizen.

"It would be charitable to say he doubled down on what he said in January in ... wishing and hoping for economic failure in this country” – White House spokesman Robert Gibbs speaking about Rush Limbaugh

"This notion that I want the president to fail, folks -- this shows you a sign of the problem we've got. ... That's nothing more than common sense. And to not be able to say it? Why in the world do I want what we just described -- rampant government growth, indebtedness? ... What possibly is in this that any of us want to succeed?" – Rush Limbaugh

I bring this up not because of the politics but because of the “spin” at work here. In college I spent six years studying aspects of logic and the verbal exchanges with Rush demonstate two common logical fallicies.

The White House comments could be classifed as a straw-man argument. “One that misrepresents a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, refutes this misrepresentation of the position, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted.” In this case, Rush is saying he disagrees with the President’s policy on the economic recovery and hopes that the policy fails. The White House interprets this as equivalent to ”hoping for economic failure in this country” because in minds of the White House staff, their policy and economic recovery are one and the same. They overlook the possibility that the country might recover without (or even despite) the changes they propose.

The White House statement also distorts Rush’s statement in a second way by saying he desires “economic failure”. This overlooks the fact that we are already in a state of “economic failure”. I suspect Rush is saying that he hopes the economy does not improve under the Obama plan, because if it does, the Obama policy changes will become set in concrete for decades to come much like the changes made by FDR.

"We're not quitting. We are not giving up. The country is too important.
[Applause] There are certain realities. We don't have the votes in Capitol Hill
to stop what's going to happen. What we can do is slow it down, procedure,
parliamentary procedures, slow it down and do the best we can to inform the
American people of what's really on the horizon. I know it's going to be
tough." - Rush

If you believe that the cure is worse than the disease then you might sympathize with the opinion that,

"President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope. Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion." -Rush

To avoid an honest discussion on the long-term side effects of the economic cure, the White House and even “conservative” politicians like the Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele have resorted to a second common logical fallacy, the ad hominem attack. This works as follows:

Source A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Source A
Therefore claim X is false

When Michael Steele called Limbaugh an "entertainer" whose show is "incendiary" and "ugly" he was trying to shoot the messenger. By discrediting the speaker, one hopes to sweep what was said under the rug, to bury it as unworthy of consideration because the speaker is unworthy in some way. Attacking Rush the “entertainer” does not falsify his beliefs. Those need to be addressed directly if one wishes to refute them.

Bottom Line

I generally try to avoid speeches made by politicians today of any party. There is so much “spin”, so much deception, fact distortion, red herrings, straw-men, etc that there is rarely any real factual content left to digest. Try to get a copy of a SciFi book from 1988 call David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler. The opening chapters of the book describe an institute dedicated to training people to see past the lies in advertising, political speeches, etc. If only this were true.