A Word about Bias

We all have bias. We all love bias. We all hate bias. We all love to hate bias. We all hate to love bias. But we do not all have the same amount of it. This is because, while we all begin with the same germ of bias, this germ proliferates in some people and some situations more than in others. This blog has a bias, in case you haven’t noticed.

We all want to believe that the ideas to which we have devoted our lives are true. I will use myself as an example. I am a scientist, and I want to believe that the scientific method reveals truth. But suppose that I am wrong. Suppose that it is not, in fact, possible to figure out the truth by observing and measuring the physical world. Suppose that everything we see in the universe really is a delusion created by an evil god who enjoys watching us suffer. There is no evidence for this idea, so I reject it. But suppose there was evidence for it. Suppose that unexpectedly, as unexpectedly as that asteroid came by a few weeks ago, this evil god appeared in the sky and told us that everything in our lives and that we thought we knew about the universe was a trick he was playing on us. I would reject this observation, assuming myself to be deluded for having seen this god in the sky. It would take a lot of evidence to make me change my mind.

We also want to believe that the sources of our money are good. I work in higher education. I want to believe that a college education improves the lives of graduates in almost every way, not the least of which is employability. But suppose that it turns out that college education is worthless—that we Americans would be just as well off working in unskilled jobs for companies owned by China or Singapore or Germany as we would be in creating our own innovations. Of course, there is no evidence for this. But suppose there was. It would take a long time before I would admit it.

Bias, therefore, proliferates where there is money. A professor with a doctoral degree at a small university, earning just a little more than the national median, is less likely to be biased than a petroleum engineer with less education but earning twice as much, when it comes to issues such as global warming. Certainly such a professor is less likely to be biased on this subject than oil company executives or the conservative politicians to whom they give uncounted millions of dollars. The money-stoked intensity of bias in conservative politicians blinds them to even the most obvious truths.

So, if you want to know whom to believe on any particular issue, ask not only what the evidence is, but also follow the money.

Republican Climate of Economic Oppression, Part One. Going Back to Slavery?

Despite Joe Biden’s outlandish statements last summer, it is almost impossible to return to the old days of black slavery. To do this, white masters would have to truly believe their black slaves are subhuman. Even most white conservatives know that black people are fully human, and many have black friends. So if slavery comes back, it will not be racially based.

But slavery could come back. Here’s how.

Right now, banks have almost unlimited freedom to treat debtors as they like. Recent Democratic legislation has limited this ability, but a future Republican administration might very well sweep these limitations and regulations away.  If you owe money to one or more banks, and if regulations were swept away, they could raise your interest rates or lower your credit limit singlehandedly for any reason or no reason. Bank of America lowered my credit limit even though I always paid more than the minimum, without exception. Okay, I got a payment in two days late back in 2003. But otherwise, my record is perfect. They lowered my credit limit (which I wasn’t going to actually use anyway) for no reason connected with me. But this did cause my credit score to go down—for no reason connected with me. Without regulation, banks can also invent new fees. For example, some banks suggested a minimum-balance fee for those of us who have paid down our debts; if you have less than $1500 balance, you may have to pay a fee. Only federal regulation now prevents this.

Banks could therefore, in the absence of regulation, manipulate people into a permanent state of debt. How can you ever pay them back? Before about 200 years ago, one way to do this was for the debtor to be sold into indentured servitude. That is, they would work for the creditor until the debt was paid off. However, the creditors manipulated the fees such that the debt could never actually be repaid. The indentured servant thus became a lifelong slave. The first black slaves were actually indentured servants, and by a process similar to what I have described, they turned into slaves. It could happen again, unless federal regulation prevents it. This time, the slaves would be a multiracial group of poor people, virtually (not legally) owned by a multiracial group of rich people. Black people would be disproportionately but not exclusively in the slave category.

There are even more recent historical precedents. You remember the song Sixteen Tons? It is about coal miners who work all day but can never repay their debts to the coal mining company. “You load sixteen tons, whaddaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don’t ya call me ‘cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.” Just substitute bank for mining company and you have a situation that could virtually (not legally) enslave millions of Americans.

And don’t think debtors would be offended by this. Many debtors really, really want a job; and if the creditor required them to work off their debts, this would be the equivalent of being given a job. Many of them would jump at the chance. When the alternative is economic ruin, indentured servitude might look pretty good. Right now, Mexicans risk death to cross the border into the USA mainly for economic reasons. Compared to the travail of the undocumented Mexicans, indentured servitude—even if it turns into a lifelong commitment—looks pretty easy. Requiring indentured servitude might also be a way of reducing or even eliminating welfare, something that conservative Republicans will stop at nothing to do.

Lincoln said that a nation cannot survive half slave and half free. He was wrong, I suspect. I suspect the USA may survive as a nation 90 percent indentured and 10 percent free.

Yes, Wayne, Absolutes Do Exist, But This is Not One of Them

According to a January 23 news release, National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told a Weatherby Foundation awards ceremony that the Second Amendment gives Americans the unfettered right to own firearms. “Absolutes do exist, words do have specific meaning in language and in law,” he said. “No government gave them to us and no government can take them away.”

It is not clear from the news release what LaPierre was referring to when he said no government gave “them” to us. Did he mean that government did not give us the right to own firearms? If so, LaPierre is utterly and frighteningly wrong.

Absolutes do exist. The speed of light. The charge of the electron. In fact, a whole list of physical constants. But the right to own firearms is not an absolute. The federal government has, in fact, given us this right in the Second Amendment. But the Constitution provided a mechanism for amending the Constitution. Therefore the Constitution, and the Second Amendment thereto, are not absolutes.

Furthermore, there is no absolutely clear definition in the Second Amendment of what these “arms” are supposed to be. It is illegal to own nuclear weapons or missiles. Are these arms? It is illegal to use, and in most cases to own, machine guns. Even the NRA has not dared to call for the legalization of private ownership of machine guns and nuclear weapons. The right to bear arms is therefore limited, not absolute, even if you were to interpret the Second Amendment as an absolute commandment from God.

One could interpret arms, within the Second Amendment context, as whatever is necessary to maintain a militia. But we don’t have militias anymore. There are groups of people who think that the government is restricting their rights, for example, to polygamy. Does the Second Amendment give them the right to have arms to resist the federal government from enforcing laws against polygamy? Could not Warren Jeffs claim that the Second Amendment gives his followers the right to armed resistance? Would this be an example of a militia? And, if so, his followers could most certainly use machine guns and cannons and nuclear weapons to defend their compounds, since the Second Amendment does not prohibit them from doing so. I am sure this is not LaPierre’s interpretation. But he has told us that it is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of absolute truth.

LaPierre, and many NRA extremists (a term LaPierre rejects), are using absolutist terminology that is usually associated with religion. Conservative religious leaders consider all of their beliefs to be absolute, and that God has given them the right to enforce their religious beliefs on others. This is why religion has been such a successful component of human evolution (this blog is about evolution, remember): it is an adaptation (genetic and memetic) that allows some people to subdue others and to gain evolutionary fitness at their expense. The NRA is promoting a new religion: the absolute right to bear arms, as absolute as God Himself. The absolute right to bear arms is not found in the Bible, by the way. Jesus said, “Put away your sword, Peter; for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” But the NRA is promoting a new religion in place of Christianity. And, like many other religions, the NRA religion sways people to adhere to its claims with visceral emotion rather than with facts. I am not saying that gun-rights advocates have no facts; I am just saying that whatever facts they may have are irrelevant when LaPierre talks about “absolutes.”

The talk of “absolutes” has made reasonable dialogue impossible. From the NRA viewpoint, there are only two choices: unrestricted ownership of weapons vs. total helplessness. The NRA has not permitted any discussion of intermediate possibilities. For example, what about stun guns? Could those be used as an intermediate form of school protection? I know that stun guns have a very limited range. But at least they provide some protection without actually killing people. At close range, a teacher’s stun gun could incapacitate a school shooter and allow his gun to be confiscated and for him to be subdued. What would be the strengths and weaknesses of a school stun gun policy? I would be interested in hearing this. But there can be no such discussion so long as the NRA divides the issue into helplessness vs. a full armor of assault weapons. I might want to hear a discussion of some intermediate possibilities regarding gun ownership and restriction; but I do not believe I shall ever hear such a discussion.

This is exactly the same approach used by creationists. They claim that if you do not accept a young Earth then you are an atheist. The NRA says you either accept unrestricted availability of weapons or else total defenselessness. Nothing in between. They have insisted on absolutes: an absolute dividing line between darkness and light, as between sun and shadow on the Moon. But this is Earth, with twilights and dawns.

How Not to be an Alpha Male (or Female)

 As several recent books have shown, humans have behavior patterns similar to those of other apes, although we dress it up and use the power and complexity of language to perpetuate them. These patterns can be good (as described in de Waal’s Age of Empathy) or bad (see parts of Conniff’s Ape in the Corner Office). There are two ways in which alpha males get to the top of their societies, and in nearly all cases the alpha males use a combination of the two. The first is sheer bluster and violence. The second is altruism (in this case, acquiring the friendship of supporters). Gorillas use more of the former, chimps more of the latter. Different human societies throughout history have used more of one or more of the other. The spread of freedom and democracy supposedly entails the growth of the latter and diminishment of the former.

Democracy is the formalized requirement that leaders attain power by the consent of the governed. This would make it appear that our leaders would want to do things that would make us support, or at least approve of, them. Why is it, then, that our leaders do things that make themselves objects of ridicule? In sociobiological terms, the behavior of America’s leaders is dysfunctional.

So it is not surprising that Congress has, as of this past week, an approval rating of 9 percent. This is the first time that Congress has had a single-digit rating since approval ratings began to be monitored decades ago. UPI listed ten things that have been more popular than Congress now is:

·         President Obama has a 46% approval rating.

·         The Internal Revenue Service has a 40% approval rating.

·         Lawyers have a 29% approval rating.

·         The airline industry has a 29% approval rating.

·         At the nadir of his scandals, Richard Nixon still had a 24% approval rating.

·         Banks, even at the worst of the financial scandals, had a 23% approval rating.

·         The oil and gas industry has a 20% approval rating.

·         Even during the Deepwater Horizon blowout, BP had a 16% approval rating.

·         Paris Hilton has a 15% approval rating.

·         Even the idea that America should become a communist nation has an 11% approval rating.

Other sources report that colonoscopies have a higher approval rating than Congress, although gonorrhea is still less popular. That is, the antics of Congress (which columnist Jack Anderson used to call the Washington Merry-Go-Round) are obliterating the one and only thing from which they can obtain their social power: the goodwill of the citizens.

As a progressive, I attribute most of this to the Repuglicans. They could defend a truly conservative viewpoint, but instead they are just the Party of No. They will oppose anything Democrats want. The worst example of this was when Senator McConnell filibustered his own bill. It was the Repuglicans who took us not just up to but over the fiscal cliff. And now they promise to do so again, with the debt ceiling argument scheduled for a few weeks hence. They took the federal government to the brink of default before, in the summer of 2011, by refusing to allow payment for projects they had already approved. This is the exact equivalent of refusing to pay bills for items you have already purchased and used. To do this would cause the credit rating of the federal government to decline, perhaps causing the government to have to pay millions of dollars more on debt interest. It is principally because of the Repuglicans that America sneers its own Congress.

But the solution is not to give our allegiance to the Dismal-crats. For it is from their Treasury Department that a breathtakingly stupid idea has come. Or, it would be stupid if they actually intended to do it. But if they think it is a funny joke, they might want to reconsider. I refer to the idea of the trillion-dollar platinum coin. Apparently it is entirely legal for the Treasury Department to mint a commemorative coin of whatever denomination they choose. They would then deposit such a coin (or two of them) and use that “money” to pay bills, even if Congress votes to authorize no payment on programs they have already approved.

Inside the Beltway is a world that is total fantasy, as far as most Americans are concerned. They do not have the power to force us to be their friends, as an alpha male gorilla might, nor have they any inclination to earn our approval, as an alpha chimp might. Even Genghis Khan tried to gain some measure of approval among his victims. He allowed a measure of autonomous rule and religious and cultural freedom to conquered territories, so long as they paid their ransom. If our romper-room Congrass (oops) is the flower of democracy, then what faith can we have in the future? There is no species of animal that has this kind of social leadership. And if there ever was such a species, it is now extinct.

This essay is also posted on my evolution blog.

Resurrecting the Republican Climate blog

Hi. Now that the election is over, I plan to gradually resurrect this blog. It will deal with long-term issues in which the Republican Party, despite its loss in the recent elections, continues to obstruct.

Quietly, the Republicans are giving in on some ground. For example, last September, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Office issued a report that found no correlation between the state of the national economy and taxes on the rich. Because this conclusion, based on data, contradicted a key Republican talking point, the Republican leadership of the House squelched the report. Last week, House Democrats posted the report, which Republicans have now stopped trying to suppress.

At this writing, the Republicans continue to head us toward the "fiscal cliff" by insisting that rich people pay almost no additional taxes, and they continue to insist on ideologically-based budget cuts rather than cuts that will actually solve any problems.

And probably most of you heard about how Senator McConnell filibustered his own bill in the Senate, during the fiscal cliff discussions. Apparently, the fiscal cliff does not matter to the leadership of the Republican Party. They are just playing games.

New video on Republican Climate channel

There is a new video on the Republican Climate youtube channel that dramatizes the topic of the previous essay.

The Republican Party Is Going To Stop Loving Us

For many years, we have all known that the Republican Party is the party of love. They say only nice things about people so that everyone will love them. They gladly accept the label “bleeding hearts” for themselves because their hearts flow out with love toward not just the middle class and poor, such as the victims of bank robo-signing, but even toward the world of nature, you know, birds and stuff. They embrace the Bleeding Heart ideal because this term refers to the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ.

Nowhere has Republican love been more obvious than in the pronouncements of commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. For years, liberal writers such as myself have referred to them as “bloviators,” but we have been so wrong. Every word that has come from Rush Limbaugh’s mouth has been loving and nourishing, each an attempt to help his listeners by giving them truly constructive advice. Even Jesus himself would have a hard time matching the love that Republicans have showered upon their listeners. Where have you ever seen a more loving person than Donald Trump? When the Religious Right Republican commentators make it abundantly clear that everyone who disagrees with them in even the most minor detail is a Satan-possessed terrorist God-hater, this is only because they care about us and wish for us to be saved from hell by worshiping them. Pat Robertson, who pours his words of love from Trinity Broadcasting Network, is the ultimate Christian superman, and he consistently proclaims the Gospel of Republicanism.

So great has been their love that the Republican Religious Right fully deserves every last penny of their wealth. Paul and Jan Crouch, owners of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, have used millions of dollars of money sent by their worshipers to purchase numerous lavish mansions, a luxury jet, and then even have a $100,000 motor home for their dogs. Surely their mansions and the comfort of their dogs is more important than a few thousand children in Bangladesh—isn’t this what Jesus would have said?

But all of that is about to change. At the Republican convention, Governor Chris Christie said (as quoted by Fox News), “‘I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved.’ Christie said leaders chronically opt to do what is popular, ‘but tonight I say enough. Tonight, we’re gonna choose respect over love.’”

So the Republican Party is now going to command the kind of respect that one receives in the absence of love. What kind of respect could this be? It cannot be the respect that comes from doing a good job for your customers, since that is a form of love. Certainly it is not the kind of respect that comes from neighbors helping one another after a hurricane, such as the one that almost hit the Republican Convention. Both of those are forms of altruism, which Mitt Romney specifically rejected a couple of weeks before Christie’s Sermon on the Mound. It must be the kind of respect that comes from force and intimidation. The kind of respect that a schoolyard bully receives from the other kids whose faces have been beaten into the dirt. Limbaugh called student Sandra Fluke a slut. (Maybe I should call one of my unwed female mother students a slut, and see how long my tenure would protect me.) That, my friends, is love-speech. I wonder what respect-speech would look like.

And before you know it, the whole country will be dominated by the vast canopy of Republican respect. I am looking forward eagerly to all of us non-Republicans, and even moderate Republicans, being called a slut or a terrorist or a communist or a servant of Satan. I can hardly wait to live in this Republican utopia.

If this essay has been a blessing to your hearts, dear brethren, please send the link to others who will be similarly uplifted.