Class War in America

Obnoxious Humans are Still Human

Some people are very difficult to accept. They are hateful and obnoxious, loud, stupid. We’ve seen quite a few of these types now that the Nazis have bubbled to the surface to spout their hate and ignorance once again.

But we should consider what happens to such people to make them so nasty, and if we do, my guess is that we will find that a great many of them grew up in less than ideal, or even…

All Our National Problems Solved

The tax regs book is about the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. TR Reid’s excellent book, A Fine Mess, explains why and how this disaster came about. Expanding on what he says, I here complete the task of fixing this mess and a number of others while I’m at it. Please thank me before I die.

The first thing we must do is to discard the OED-sized tax regs. All of them. We should be able to…

Health Care In the Meantime

The people who bring medical and dental care to the rural poor are saints. Recent articles have described big tents set up twice a year, and the caravans of poor people with problems arriving by hundreds, hurting, desperate. For the most part, these folks are proudly independent. But a toothache will bring them in.

These are people who have no medical care at all. Usually they go it alone, but…

The Long Road Back

As I write this, political discourse has sunk to the lowest it has ever been. Donald Trump’s newest appointee, Anthony Scaramucci, sounds like a half-literate high school troublemaker mouthing off in the boy’s locker room. This is only a continuation of Trump’s ranting and bad language. Trump himself honors no decorum, and violates our sense of decency day after day. Worse, angry Trumpsters stomp…

Certain folk are complaining that the Democratic Party has gone off the rails, and is incapable of doing anything right. Nonsense. Dems believe in what they have always believed, that the strength of our democracy depends on how well our citizens are treated.

It’s the Republicans who have gone off the rails, and are now devoting all their time to serving the very rich and living in a fantasy…

A Few Republican Opinions

Idaho Rep Raul Labrador: Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.

Health Sec Tom Price: It’s reasonable that the elderly pay five times what the young pay.

Mo Brooks, AL: people who “lead good lives” should pay less for health insurance.

John Shimkus, IL: Men shouldn’t have to pay for prenatal care because they don’t deliver children.

Tila Hubrecht: Pregnancy by rape is God’s…

Measuring Quality of Life

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is convenient for economists and politicians, but it misleads us into thinking an increase in GDP makes us better off. More guns, worse natural disasters, and private prisons add to GDP, but show us that not every contribution to GDP improves our lives.

Measures of the improvement in the quality of our lives is vastly more important. Unfortunately, GDP is easier to…

Death in the Sea, Life in the Fishtank

Most of the great fisheries of the world face disaster these days. Huge Asian trawlers drag the bottom, destroying everything. The fish they can’t use they throw back, dead, along with sea mammals such as dolphins. Sea creatures large and small frequently die when they are caught up in lost nets and lines. The harvest of fish all over the globe is declining from overfishing and environmental…

Repubs Must Now Decide Who Is To Die

In the modern countries that have national health care—which means every one of them except ours—the unfortunate souls who are diagnosed with a serious condition such as cancer are more likely than anyone in the rest of the world to survive. That is because they will receive the very best, most up to date treatment there is.

Whether you or I survive just depends. Mostly it depends on our income.…

The Self-Destructive Folly of Trump’s Hatreds

Trump campaigned on a policy of hate, and nearly every picture we see of him shows a contorted face of hatred. He hates virtually every human group that is not white, male, and rich.

He said that all Mexicans are rapists and criminals. All Muslims are terrorists. All blacks are lazy. Women should stay home and raise children. And so on. All the standard prejudices of our times, none of which is…

What Facebook Kitties are Really About

In my college years, the 1960s, scientists were telling us that animals have no emotions. This struck me as patently ridiculous, but they insisted. As someone much later said, “Don’t any of these guys have dogs?”

Somehow these brilliant scientists seem to have missed out on fundamental brain anatomy. We differ from other animals in that we have a greater cerebral cortex. But the cortex is not the…

What to Call a Hater

The short answer is, Don’t call them anything. Don’t label them. Forget what they look like to you. Drop all your preconceived notions. Even the worst haters are sentient beings, after all. Maybe the dumbest and ugliest of them mostly wants you to pay attention.

This is what liberals should do, rather than the vile name-calling we often see under Comments on political statements online, from…

I have heard that the Women’s March of “45” + 1 (the day after Trump’s inauguration) was the largest demonstration in history. I don’t know about that, because there have been many marches and demonstrations around the world that made the streets look like a bee swarm. But what I do know is that women, particularly in the West, have enormous power, and that power must not be lost.

Almost all of…

Anyone who has observed Donald Trump at work, or even read his daily hateful and disturbing tweets, must be painfully aware that these things point to a pathological obsession with narcissistic perfection, and are not what we should be learning about a man who is representative of the most powerful nation in the world. While enormous global problems fester, Trump tweets about celebrities who…

Low Tax is Not What We Need

Low tax never made anyone’s life good.

Consider India. Millions of Indians pay no tax at all, and they are so miserable that suicide is at a record high. In the US, low tax means nothing to you if you can’t pay for your cancer treatment until you go bankrupt. We already have taxes that are too low.

Taxes too low!? How is that possible?

It’s very simple. The cost of a good life is not measured by…

The Lingering Death of the Carbon Age

Donald Trump’s presidency, custom built for the benefit of the very rich, is not a new fashion. Every few years the power shifts in an unsteady balance between those motivated by the welfare of the people, as Lincoln’s memorable Gettysburg address states, and those who think money itself is the highest order because they have a lot of it.

What is new is the failure of the latter to understand…

It becomes more apparent with every passing day that our president is mentally unbalanced, and incapable of fulfilling the duties of leader of the most powerful nation in the world.

He is incapable of accepting reality, and daily insists that his fabrications are the truth. Although he says he has independent evidence that no one else has, he never presents it because it does not exist.

He is…