Did we deep six bin Laden or put him on ice?

I want to be clear that I am not questioning whether bin Laden is dead. Even Al Quaeda admits that. However, I do wonder about the burial at sea. Supposedly it was a big deal to bury him the same day. Yeah, right. Even many Muslim scholars question these obscure requirements.

However, even if true, who is really ever going to be able to confirm that we put him in a weighted bag and tossed him into Davy Jones' locker. Even people watching on the ship would only know that a bag got tossed over, but would likely not know what was in that bag. It would seem like a more reasonable scenario to *claim* that we disposed of the body, but keep it on ice, just in case it later becomes useful. True, we could keep pictures, but conspiracy people will simply claim they are doctored. Obama says that we shouldn't treat bin Laden like a trophy, perhaps to contrast with the blood-thirsty George W. Bush's desire to have Osama's head cut off, frozen in dry ice, and sent back to him in a box. However, the reality is that bin Laden is a trophy of sorts. In particular, it might be instructive to keep his corpse around to show to the Saudi royals and some of the other Emirs, warlords, and potentates in the Middle East, so that they know we mean business.

Republican equals Gadaffi Loyalist

You might be wondering what kind of people could possibly support Moammar Gadaffi. They certainly have to be extremely ignorant and/or willfully misinformed about reality. They have to have a sociopathic antipathy toward their fellow countrymen who disagree with them on matters of politics or religion. They have to see violence and the use of firearms as the primary means to settle arguments. Also they must be willing to sell their souls to a very rich madman in the hope that their service to his whims will line their pockets and win his fickle favor. In short, they have to be exactly like the average tea party republican in the United States, who slavishly defend the agendas of the ultra-rich even when it ends up costing themselves dearly in the pocketbook.

Lest you protest overmuch about the comparison consider the following. Many tea partiers including Bachmann and Palin constantly use gun-based metaphors in reference to their opponents in the right-wing culture war. A number of even more extreme individuals, such as failed candidate Sharon Angle, and state and federal republican representatives have spoken favorably about the virtues of an armed uprising against our government. However, make no mistake, republicans are not revolutionaries. They want to revert things to how they used to be several hundred years ago, with slavery, theocracy, and aristocracy all restored to its former glory. They are obsessed with guns, not for defense, but to stage a takeover of democracy and to replace it with rule by the rich and in the interests of the corporations they own.

Gadaffi feels the same way about his country. He is in it for the money and the power, just like republicans such as Sarah Palin, who is forever trying to cash in on her waning celebrity status.

Like Gadaffi, republicans don't care what they have to do in order to obtain money and power. They are now gleefully sabotaging the economy, slashing medicare, and subsidies to help poor people buy heating oil. This is not done by people with a social conscience, much like pro-Gadaffi factions who cluster bomb cities and bombard their countrymen with heavy artillery.

I know that, in the right-wing echo chamber everything comes out reversed, but they can hardly claim that peacenik leftists would be shelling their neighbors with cluster munitions. They can hardly claim that those commie, pinko, socialists would be servants of the ultrawealthy. They certainly can't claim that liberals would be opposed to big government programs to assist the poor and elderly. By the increasingly binary logic that is American politics today, that leaves only the republican as the servants of the wealthy, the weapons merchants, and the slashers of social programs to assist the poor.

Endgame in Libya? It's move two in the chess game

It's truly amazing that Republicans have finally, FINALLY found a war they oppose, which is 2 two week long, minor little air attack. I'm sure they're shy of the "entanglement" that this could created. They don't mind being in Iraq or Afghanistan for 8 years with no end in sight. They didn't mind when Bush 41 committed US ground forces to Somalia. These missions didn't have clearly defined objectives, especially 2 weeks into them. They were all hugely costly in terms of money and American lives. How many American lives have been lost in the current Libyan intervention? Sarah Palin is beside herself complaining about the $600 million dollar cost of the operation when Iraq and Afghanistan combined cost thousands of times as much and still are not over. And how dumb do you have to be to be confused about what is going on in Libya? We're bombing Gadaffi's forces and (not so) secretly arming the rebels. Rightwing dunderheads want to know what the "endgame" looks like. Big clue here. This isn't even close to the "end game". We're not even at the middle game. They want to know how the last move of the game will look when we are at move two on the chessboard. Hint to armchair generals like Sarah: don't use chess metaphors when you don't even understand how shoots and ladders works. You want Obama to predict how things will turn out 37 moves in the future when you can't even figure out how the horsie moves. I will note that Saint Ronald bombed Libya in 1986, and it is part of right-wing orthodoxy that Reagan can do no wrong. Nobody asked what his "end game" was there. He just wanted to bomb Gadaffi, and that was good enough. Of course Obama would never be allowed the same license.

Hypocritical war-hawks against Libyan operation

It's amazing how right-wingers have supported pretty much every war that Bush 43 ever started, but now have discovered their opposition to these same kinds of operations, the moment Obama became president. They had no problem with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on for many years after their optimistically promised deadlines, but now, by golly, they don't want foreign entanglements.

Operations in Libya have been going on for about a week and right-wingers have already insisted that we are in a quagmire, that there is no plan for an exit strategy, and despite the fact that nothing could be more clear or obvious to anyone with an an IQ greater than 50 as to what we are doing (no fly plus destroying pro-gadaffi heavy weaponry), they insist that they have absolutely no clue what the mission there is.

Granted, when right-wingers plead ignorance and stupidity, it's hard not to believe them. However, even they aren't dumb enough to truly be confused about the situation. Gas prices have skyrocketed since Libya became destabilized, and it is certainly in the US national interests (and indeed in NATO's interest) to restore stability.

However, the US did even better, going to the UN and the Arab League, and allies like NATO and securing promises from all of them that they would specifically confront genocide and war-crimes that Gadaffi and his supporters were committing and are still committing. These types of justifications have been used for many interventions, including George Bush 41's intervention in Somalia, which put American ground forces there for months, saddling the next president with a military morass that ultimately resulted in events like those described in Blackhawk Down.

The only thing more clear than the mission in Libya is the glaring hypocrisy of war-hawks who now pretend to oppose current operations with the flimsiest of excuses. They think the mission is too vague. Welcome to the fog or war. Most missions are vague. They think it's too costly. Please, it costs nothing compared to any of the other military conflicts we have engaged in recently, and the potential benefits outweight any conceivable costs by at least an order of magnitude (i.e. ten times).

I know that right-wingers are ignorant of a lot of things, but surely even they have heard the part of the Marine Hymn (you know, line one) that says, "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli...." Even several hundred years ago it was in our national interest to insure that matters in Tripoli (that's Libya for folks for still haven't figured that out) remain stable.

Nuclear's Teenage Invincibility Syndrome

I see it everyday with teenagers. They all think that they are indestructible and therefore that nothing bad can ever happen to them. It is egotism, and wishful thinking too be sure, but at least teenagers have the excuse of youth. The nuclear industry constantly evinces a similar level of false confidence in the invincibility of their technology. Yet, they are far from invincible, as the events in Fukushima, Japan show all too clearly. The designs of these reactors were downright negligent and slipshod in terms of disaster preparedness. Even a smaller tsunami likely could have flooded the basement levels where their electric pumps and batteries were kept to circulate coolant. This design is about like giving a beer helmet to a teenage driver and expecting that he (or she) will use it solely for head protection.

Similarly, the cooling facilities for spent rods clearly are inadequate to prevent the release of radioactive materials in the case of emergency. The "invincible" plan was that water would always cool the rods. But what happens, as in the case in Japan, when these pools crack and spring leaks? What happens when the facility around it catches on fire?

Perhaps teenagers would believe that such systems were failsafe and foolproof, but the people of Tokyo, one of the most populous in the world, must now pay for the foolhardy and all too fallible presumptions of a nuclear industry that needs to finally grow up.

Radio Activism

There is a place for legitimate criticisms of the fat-cat, irresponsible, faked-safety-report culture in the Japanese nuclear industry. However, many concerns by opponents are completely overblown and their ignorance of the science makes all activists look uninformed. Take fears of radioactive iodine crossing the Pacific Ocean and possibly affecting people in California. Those trace amounts which do reach us will most commonly be I-131 which has a half life of 8 days. If it gets absorbed into plants and the plants grow for a month or two before harvest, and then are sent to the green grocer then, by the time it reaches your shopping basket, it would have been degraded by about 4 or 5 half lives, which effectively means there is none of it left.

Nuclear Industry Blames Everyone But Themselves

There was this attempt to rehabilitate nuclear energy a couple years back. A nuclear renaissance was announced. The problem, as always with nuclear, is that the industry is its own worst enemy. They had changed nothing about how they operate or how they plan to operate in the future. Sure they tell you about a million nifty new reactor designs they have, but they don't actually intend to build. Yes, those designs are safer and more convenient, but they would also be too expensive, or in some cases, not expensive enough, and they don't want either one of those scenarios. They want the multi-billion behemoth that has massive cost overruns. They claim that those darned protesters and alarmists are causing the cost overruns, but they secretly don't really mind spending more money, especially when Uncle Sam is guaranteeing the loan and kicking in huge subsidies to boot.

Unfortunately, the nuclear renaissance ground to a halt because nuclear power, in short order, did what it did best, which was tripping over its own feet and taking itself out of the game. Of course the Japanese reactor in Fukushima is 40 years old, built toward the end of the first nuclear golden age. However, it will likely spell the end of the second golden age before it even had much of a chance to get started.

That's the thing about nuclear power that must be so maddening for the fans. The harder it tries, the more spectacularly it fails. And right now the Japanese nuclear industry is flirting with epic failure.

The almost complete inability to respond in a real emergency situation underscores one of the real issues with nuclear power and not the phony ones about protesters or CO2 emissions. The real problem with nuclear is that it cannot insure itself against the risks it creates, because the risks are too large. No insurance company on the planet wants to insure nuclear reactors. The governments themselves have to provide this kind of insurance. Therefore, in the middle of real emergencies like Tsunamis, the government also has to scramble to clean up the mess left by a nuclear industry who always wants to cut corners and which has few incentives to act otherwise.

Indeed, why should they break their backs to insure safety when the government will always jump in and save their bacon in the end. It's not like these types of explosions and releases of radioactive materials hadn't happened in the past in Japan. Faked safety reports and slapdash concern for safety have been hallmarks of the industry for decades, since nuclear energy is a national priority, due to low fossil fuel reserves. However, the second unfortunate geographical fact about Japan is that they live in one of the most quake-prone areas of the world. There is a reason that we all use the Japanese word tsunami to describe what happened there.

Gosh, given the huge amount of geological activty, why does Japan produce so little power from geothermal anyway? Estimates are that they could produce dozens of gigawatts, with current technology. That might mean a dozen or so less nuclear plants, which would be a baker's dozen less headaches.

Obama finally mans up...sort of

It might be French jets in the skies over Libya, but they are only part of a coalition lead by the US and NATO who are finally acting to blunt Gadafi's murderous warfare against his own people. Naturally, Obama didn't want to hand another PR victory to Al Quaeda by having American planes strike the first blow, though they could have long ago. By spreading the risk around and forcing the Europeans and even the Arab League countries to be part of this operation it leaves the US far less exposed and less on the hook for potential problems down the line. Critics of Obama will criticize absolutely any action he takes no matter what as they always have. If he had intervened they would have preached the virtue of doing exactly what he is doing now, which is coalition building and working with allies. So naturally, now Obama's opponents insist that he should have been more of a cowboy and acted weeks sooner before there were any UN resolutions or public commitments from other countries to help out.

The reality is that if the US had decided to act alone, before others were ready, then this would have removed all the pressure from other countries and their participation would have evaporated. The US should not have to fix all world problems, and we need the rest of the world to get used to that. Europeans will have to act, especially in their own backyard, if they regard the threat as grave enough.

BTW, this conflict is far from over. There are still all kinds of problems, including the potential destruction of huge amounts of oil production infrastructure, which could make the price of gas go through the roof again. I hope that Obama prosecutes price-fixers this time. Bush certainly wouldn't/didn't because he was in bed with them as an oil tycoon himself.

Mexicans didn't steal my job and education didn't bankrupt the state

I have a friend who is an English teacher, who is convinced that illegal Mexican immigrants are out to "steal his job". I told him, Jim (not his real name), you're an ENGLISH teacher. How is a mexican worker, who doesn't even speak ENGLISH, going to steal YOUR job as an ENGLISH teacher? Of course, the delusional often have answers. Jim thinks that they will do it through "bilingual education", which he insists is not BI-lingual at all, but just an attempt to replace English with Spanish as our official language. I must not have noticed how, according to him, we are being prohibited from speaking English in this country and instead being forced to speak Spanish for all official transactions.

Perhaps he should be more worried about the right-wing assault on teacher pay and attempts to do away with all job security for teachers, where they can be fired instantly, without due process, and seniority will count for nothing. These are the people trying to steal jobs from teachers and trying to take money out of their paychecks, and their pensions to boot.

Some argue that the state has the right to cut teacher pay and take money away from their pensions because those jobs are paid for by taxpayers. Well teachers are taxpayers too, so they have as much interest as any other taxpayer in whether the government uses the money wisely. However, the law says that students have to attend school and the wages they pay to teachers in public schools are less than the wages that most private schools pay. Therefore, if anything, the taxpayers are getting a bargain.

Furthermore, the fact that taxpayers are paying for something doesn't mean that the government is entitled to cheat the person doing the work. If the government contracts with a person to build a bridge and then politicians get together an vote that they only want to pay the contractor half of already agreed upon price, then they can't justify this on the grounds that "the taxpayers are paying for it", or even that "taxes are too high already". It may be that taxpayers are cash strapped, but the bridge still needs to be built and the materials still cost what they cost. You can't vote to repeal either one of these facts.

The same applies to education. It still costs a certain amount to train a person who is willing to endure day-long abuse by teachers, administrators, parents, etc while delivering all the most up-to-date educational material and following all the rules required of them (by the government/taxpayers). You passed laws which demanded that we teach the way we teach. You passed laws that said we had to have certain amounts of training. You spelled out in minute detail every single area you wanted us to cover in the educational standards. You asked for it and we gave it to you at a price we already agreed upon. You can't now turn around and say that you didn't really want all those things and you don't want to pay us for the work we did because you think taxes are too high.

It's not the fault of teachers that taxes are too high, and this wouldn't be an excuse to cheat us out of our salaries and pensions anyway. Sure, the government spent money on our salaries and pensions, just like they spent money on lots of other things. However, that doesn't prove that teachers are the ones to blame for the governments financial woes.

Some people say, but education is a huge part of the state budget, and this is true. But that doesn't prove that we created the mess. If you lower taxes and have other economic mismanagement, reducing revenues, education will still be a large chunk of the budget. However, the reason for the reduction in revenues is not because of education spending. It's because of those other things, like cutting taxes in the middle of a recession, and investing state funds poorly. I understand that other taxpayers are also hurting in a recession. But that doesn't entitle them to get together and vote to raid my bank account so that they can all have a nice vacation. That's money that I saved out of my paycheck, which I already noted is a smaller paycheck than many private schools pay out.

Likewise, the money that I put into pension funds is largely my money, even if my employer made some contributions too. I dare say that I have put far more of my money into my teacher pension, as both a teacher and taxpayer, than the average taxpayer is. These same people who begrudge me my pension, despite the fact that I serve the public and educate their children, get pensions of their own. If the government had no pension then it is unlikely that they would be able to attract teachers in the first place. We would instead work for private companies who offered these pensions. So the government has to offer comparable benefits to get us to work for them.

This all part of the social contract which so-called conservatives want to abruptly rip to shreds after decades and even centuries of agreement about what constituted a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. That doesn't sound very "conservative" to me. It sounds like an untested scheme that is likely to fail along with many other gimmicks and quick fixes that often get proposed as shortcuts to dealing with difficult problems.

Jim's brother hates government too, even though Jim's brother Bruce worked as a police officer for 20 years before retiring on a state pension. He too thinks that the government is trying to pick his pocket and that immigrants are here to take the part time job that he still has to work as an emergency dispatcher to make ends meet.

I asked Bruce, if you want to prevent immigrants from taking your jobs, how do you propose to shut down all the internet and telephone communications in the country. Bruce wasn't sure what I meant, but I pointed out to him that he works in the telecommunications industry and there are plenty of people in India and elsewhere in the world who are also being hired by US firms to handle call center traffic. We call this outsourcing.

If Bruce is worried about all the immigrants trying to take his job, what about the "digital immigrants" who can work from half a world away for less than half of what they pay Bruce? Furthermore, how will the US government collect tax revenues on the digital immigrants living in India. They won't of course, because they are Indian citizens, not American citizens. But these jobs used to be done by American workers whom they could tax. Even illegal immigrants who were here physically, often ended up paying taxes, albeit into a social security account that was not actually their own. These illegal immigrants in the flesh often had tax deductions taken out of their paychecks, but they know that they cannot attempt to collect them, because then the government might discover that they are undocumented workers and send them back. So the government gets money from them, but never has to give them refunds or social security benefits.

This isn't true of digital workers. In fact, I have also heard people make the modest proposal that we could save a lot of money if we just hired people from India to teach in our public schools, via the internet. The only question I have for these people, aside from the one's raised above, is how they expect Mister Depak to maintain order in the classroom and keep the kids on task and not killing each other from half a world away? When Johnny isn't learning and says he doesn't understand what Mr. Deepak from Bangalore is trying to teach him, what are we going to do then? Call in Mr. Chang from Bejing perhaps?

Maybe a better idea would be to try to ditch the silly schemes to nickel and dime teachers in this country, stop all the constant interference, and let us do our jobs. I know that virtually every person who is not a teacher thinks that he or she can teach better than the people who actually are the teachers, but I don't come to McDonalds and tell you you're flipping burgers wrong, so why don't you stop coming to school and giving me bad advice on how to teach.

And stop worrying about Mexicans trying to take your job. They prefer tacos, not burgers, and fast food isn't much of a job to steal in the first place. Neither is making beds in a hotel or picking cotton. Even hundreds of years ago Americans didn't want to do that, which is why they imported slaves to do it for them. Now the (wage) slaves are coming here voluntarily, and we say the (wage) slaves are stealing our job. Sorry, I don't want a slave job. If that's the kind of job they are stealing then I feel sorry for the (wage) slave, but I certainly don't lament the fact that an American no longer has to work it. I wish the (wage) slave didn't have to work it either.

It's RadioACTIVITY not Radiation, people!

I hate to have to do this, and it seems almost as pointless as trying to get George W. Bush to stop saying, "nukUler", but almost every major newspaper and TV report keeps talking about "radiation leaks" and detecting "radiation traces" in California, and generally worrying about "radiation". The correct term is radioACTIVITY. Radiation is electrons and neutrons. Light is a form of electromagnetic "radiation", because it *RADIATES* in all directions from a source. Radio waves are another form of radiation. We do not say that "radiation" leaks out of a light bulb or the antenna of a radio. Furthermore, the "radiation" from a light bulb, in the form of light, will not set off a geiger counter, nor do we say that the light is "radioactive".

On the other hand, there are RADIOACTIVE materials. These include plutonium and uranium (some types more than others), for example. These materials, when they decay, DO emit "radiation", the most harmful of which can be *ionizing* radiation. If these material get inside your body then they will continue to emit harmful radiation, because they are are radioactive. People take supplements like potassium iodide (KI) to block the uptake of a radioactive form of iodine into the thyroid.

Other materials may be only slightly radioactive. For example, radioACTIVE steam was released from the reactors in Japan early on, in an attempt to help cool them. This radioACTIVE material quickly dissipated in the air. The mildly radioactive material is still there, but it spreads out so that it is less concentrated and therefore less harmful in smaller doses.

Here is a summary: Radiation does not equal radioactive. Radioactive does equal radiation.

Radiation itself is not necessarily harmful. Many things radiate (and therefore constitute "radiation"), such as light and radio waves. The "radiation" produced by nuclear (no not nucUler) reactors in Japan, like the light from a light bulb in Japan, cannot travel very far without becoming very faint. Airborne radioACTIVE materials, on the other hand, from the Japanese reactor may indeed travel a much greater distance. A few particles can make it all the way across the Pacific Ocean, though, it is very very very (very very ...) improbable that large number of particles will make it all the way to California. It is far far far (far far...) more likely that the radioactive material which may be released will stay in Japan. For example, when the US bombed Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) we didn't worry about the (don't say radiation) radioACTIVE material from the bomb crossing back over the Pacific Ocean and "getting us". Most all of the radioactive material stayed in a close region around the site of the bomb. We used to conduct above ground nuclear tests in the desert southwestern US. In fact, the first such one was at Trinity, New Mexico. We also exploded nuclear devices on or near islands in the Pacific. All of these threw radioACTIVE materials into the air which circulated all over the place. If we have so much time on our hands that we want to worry about utter nonsense, then it would be better to worry about those, because they produced far more radioactive materials. Chernobyl likewise released a great amount of radioactive material, but not much of it made it to the US mainland.

I know it won't stop the constant, almost intentional misuse of these terms for me to point all this out, but it feels good to do it anyway. In fact, as with "nucUler", people will probably decide to make the mistake more than ever before and push for a redefinition of the terms so that they can finally be correct about something.

In japanese "it is difficult" means "no effin way"

Just in case people haven't picked up on this, in Japanese culture and etiquette, they avoid saying that no or declaring that something is impossible. Instead they often use the euphemism "it is difficult". Therefore, when the prime minister says the situation there is "extreme difficult", what he is really saying is that it is effed up beyond belief and that they have no clue how to fix it. Take the two nuclear reactors that are melting down. They keep making these excuses that say things like , "gosh we can't be sure that the core has really melted, because we haven't been able to look inside and see". Well no kidding. But would we really accept this kind of idiotically evasive answer from anyone in our own country if a reactor near us had its cooling equipment explode and emergency efforts looked partially effective at best. There is absolutely no chance that some melting of the rods has not occurred. Cesium monitoring stations are reporting high levels of radioactivity. Let's not try to sugar coat this or hide behind the smokescreen of uncertainty that always exists in any emergency. Minimizing the situation will not change it or prevent the facts from coming to light in the not-at-all distant future anway..

Nuclear Power's Cheating Heart

I know that many people, especially of the completely uninformed right-wing variety, are in love with nuclear power. In their one-size-fits-all world, it should produce 100% of all power. It must really be a b*tch to see absolute and unequivocal proof that their lover has strayed again, in this case, in Japan at the the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Facility, where the cooling system failed, following a massive earthquake. This caused the cooling water to rise above the boiling point and released about 1000 times the normal level of radioactivity.

That was before the cooling system exploded, crumbling the walls of the reactor containment facility and leaking even more radioactive material. These are the same containment facilities that we are constantly assured could take a direct hit from a 747 or withstand the strongest earthquakes. In fact the building did withstand the earthquake, it that turns out not to matter, because it set off a chain of events where the potential for much more serious problems, including a partial meltdown, are possible.

Of course, it is possible that things will be brought back under control. The plan is now to flood the reactor with seawater before temperatures can get high enough for the rods to melt. Perhaps a Japanese Chernobyl will be avoided. Perhaps it will remain only be a Japanese Three Mile Island. However, like the TMI incident, it is questionable whether this multi-billion dollar facility will ever operate again. Three other reactors in Japan also shut down, BTW, though presumably they shut down safely. Hopefully there will not be 4 Japanese Three Mile Island incidents. The quake was devastating enough without additional man-made disasters compounding the situation.

Imagine if a wind or solar generation facility that cost billions of dollars just suddenly and unpredictably became unusable. Imagine if a 20 kilometer radius around it had to be evacuated indefinitely. Imagine if three other billion dollar alternative energy plants also shut down indefinitely.

Nuclear power boosters, after licking their wounds for a while and declaring everyone else to have over-reacted, often sit around nursing their broken hearts. Nuclear power lets them down again and again, but like battered housewives, they dutifully return to it, and in relatively short order. They always talk about the good that they see in it. They talk about the latest, greatest, fancy, high-tech reactors that cannot possibly let them down the way the current ones seem to. They talk about all the times that things didn't go wrong, and how this is just a minor blip.

Of course, if we were getting 100% of our power from this type of nuclear facility then it would be a blip multiplied at least 10 fold. Instead of only having a near disaster every couple decades, we might have only every couple years. And the odds of a near disaster turning into a total disaster also increase.

I believe that the newest, safest forms of nuclear fission should continue to be investigated, but it should only be part of the power mix, not anywhere near 100%. The main reason is cost, and the next major reason is that fact that these facilities are never as safe in practice as they are claimed to be in theory. The latest generation reactors, such as Pebble Bed Moderated Reactors (PBMB) or even Liquid Fluoride Thorium Moderated Reactors (LFTMR) supposedly cannot melt down the same way. PBMRs, are not even cooled with water, and supposedly the encased "pebble" fuel would stop producing heat efficiently without the circulation of a coolant. LFTMRs also avoid the buildup of Xenon, and have no fuel rods at all. Yet these are never the reactors that seem to get built, perhaps because they would be way more expensive than the older, mass-producible generations of reactors we have today.

It is, simple put, 100% false that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear. The same amount of money and time spent drilling super-deep geothermal wells would likewise produce huge amounts of power that was always available, for example. However, the main issue is avoiding one-size-fits-all thinking. Having multiple, diversified power sources makes things more robust, not less. The wind doesn't blow all the time, but it's always blowing somewhere and the sun is pretty predictable too, especially in the desert.

Demand for power itself is variable, so it is acceptable to have variable sources of generation. The problem with nuclear is that it does not vary easily with demand and therefore a lot of power generated at low peak times must be stored. Without certain renewables, like hydro power, nuclear would be even more wasteful than it is already, because there would be no practical way to store this excess production.

The point is that we not put all our eggs in one nuclear basket. All but the most blinded by love should be able to see that now, one would hope.

If Wisconsin dirty trick was legal.....

If it was possible for Republicans to pass a bill with no democrats present .... then that proves that people criticizing democrats for obstruction don't know what they're talking about. After all, right wingers, who wanted democrats to return so that they could be steam rollered kept screaming about how the legislators weren't doing their jobs, but now these same republicans say that it wasn't even necessary for democrats to be there in the first place to pass legislation. If it was legal for Republicans to act as they did, which is highly doubtful, given strict open-meeting laws in Wisconsin, then clearly these Republicans were incompetent at their own job, because they didn't act for three weeks when they had the power to do so.

They need to get their story straight. Besides, these missing democrats are doing a better job of representing the interests of their constituents than they would if they were just going to be automatically voted down anyway. The republicans who want the democrats to return are not the constituents of these representatives anyway.

It is also worth noting that Walker has tried to manufacture this kind of phony crisis before, when he tried to bust courthouse unions in Milwaukee in favor of a fat-cat crony deal with Wackenhut. He failed to follow the law then as well, however, and now Milwaukee has to pay back pay to all their courthouse security, as well as pay for the private contract.

This phony $137 million budget "crisis" is as transparently fraudulent as they get. Even in New Mexico we have a budget shortfall of larger than that and our total operating budget is far less. Every year legislators deal with gaps bigger than this and routinely plug them without abolisihing the rights of public employee unions.

On top of that, Walker offered about as much in tax breaks to businesses as the total amount of the alleged "shortfall". If there was really a budget crisis then all he would have to do to plug it would be to rescind the tax breaks, rather than demand that public workers take what amounts to an 8% pay cut.

Against senority? Tell the rest of the world.

When it comes to teachers and other public employees, it seems that today's crop of "reformers" wants to take away every right in sight including the job security which comes with senority. Strangely, they don't seem to think that giving deference to senority is a problem in just about any other profession. In fact, I suspect that most people, in most jobs, would be appalled if they saw companies discarding 20 and 30-year veterans like yesterday's garbage and replacing them with people who have five minutes of job experience. It is not just teachers and public employees who have systems based upon senority. It is embedded in the entire fabric of the labor market throughout this nation and, in fact, throughout most of the world. Abolishing these practices amounts to a voiding of the social contract that society has with those who work to build it and keep it going.

I guess unions do work after all

Soon-to-be-recalled Republican Governor Scotty Walker is waging a Moammar Gadafi style civil war against the labor rights of the citizens of his own state who have the misfortune of being public employees under his "leadership". It is clear to us all now that his attack on unions has absolutely nothing to do with balancing budgets and everything to do with attempting to destroy union rights. It's not about balancing budgets, but about payback to political cronies who coincidentally are getting just as much in tax cuts as he proposes "saving" by imposing what amounts to a tax on public workers in the state.

This is interesting, because it requires Republicans to admit that unions are actually effective at securing higher wages for their employees. Contrary to a half century of right-wing propaganda against unions, Walker is admitting that union workers make more money and have more benefits, compared to their non-union counterparts, and he wants to put a stop to that right away, by God. It's unfair for them to make more than the rest of us....except it's fair for rich people to make more...especially the Koch brothers who underwrote his campaign. Taxing the rich is unfair, by Republican logic, but taxing a group of working class public employees by charging them higher fees for medicine and retirement is A-OK.

What's so wrong with working people bargaining for more money, anyway? Isn't this the American way? Republicans have even fought against minimum wage, refused to raise it for a decade, and have created sub-minimum wage "training wages" which are used as loopholes to short change workers even today.

Talk about a race to the bottom. If you get rid of a system that has and proven to help people earn higher wages, as even Republicans now admit, replace it with their proposed systems which pay less than current minimum wage, how is this supposed to help the "average Joe" that McCain/Palin so epically failed court in their disastrous presidential campaign?

I know, I know, by the magic of voodoo it with mysteriously "trickle down", but "how's that been working out for ya", to paraphrase Sarah, over the last 30 years that Republicans have been hocking it as the patented cure-all elixer for our economy? Wages are flat for the average worker while the rich are richer than before. Mighty geysers of tax dollars have blasted (not trickled) upward and into the bank accounts of the rich, but the middle class worker has less net worth than before under the leadership of primarily Republican presidents and a Republican congress.

Trickle-down economics has itself been an epic failure, so much so that now, as I alluded to earlier, Republicans are playing "divide and conquer" games with American citizens, pitting union workers against non-union ones, much like Moammar Gadafi is known to pit one tribe of Libyans against another in a desperate bid to hold on to privilege and power. However, history has shown us that you can't build up the rights and pay of non-union workers by tearing down the rights of union employees. If employers will not make concessions to an organized group of professional negotiators, what makes people think that they will offer anything better to unorganized amateurs and individuals?

Walker has inadvertently spilled the beans here, about the Republican double standard on labor. He wants to abolish unions so that he can pay people less, but this means that unions do succeed in getting people paid more. This means that those who haven't been brainwashed by decades of anti-union misinformation, should be wanting to go out and join one, rather than demanding that the ones that exist be abolished.

It is also noteworthy that Walker's egotistical comparisons of himself to Ronald Reagan when dealing with striking air-traffic controllers is completely off the mark. There were no strikes in Wisconsin. Reagan was dealing with people who were on strike even though public workers are forbidden from striking. I have already addressed the silliness of calling a one day "sick out" a strike as well. A real strike is not a minority of workers calling in sick for one day. A real strike is occupying the factory floor and bringing work 100% to a stop for weeks or months. Nothing like that was happening in Wisconsin.

Air-traffic controllers acted first and force Reagan to respond after-the-fact, but Walker threw the first punch in this brawl trying to cut wages and benefits that had already been negotiated under contract. He doesn't like the contract so he wants to change the law to say that he doesn't have to follow it. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could all just change any law that we didn't feel like following. That's how Gadafi operates. Then Walker threatens to layoff thousands of workers unless his demands are met. No negotiation. Hummm, this sounds more and more like Libyan dictatorship everyday.

So maybe when Walker is removed as Governor, by a popular uprising at the polls, then he can move to Libya, where there are no pesky union labor laws. He would probably get along fine with people like Gadafi, if he is still in power.

Oh and lest you protest too much about how Walker never threatened violence like Gadafi, Walker actually was already on record before he started this fight as threatening to call up the national guard to deal with union protesters. So far he hasn't had the courage to attempt to follow through with that, perhaps because he has already generated enough negative publicity for himself.

It must also be said, on the subject of protesting too much, that right-wingers have been apoplectic about a few people on the left who started twittering about wishing Walker would die. Of course, they know quite well, if for no other reason than because many of those complaining have participated in it themselves, that not a single day goes by without fringe right-wingers wishing death upon Obama and in many cases calling for more direct assassination of him and other Democrats such as Reid and Pelosi. Therefore, when a few people on the left talk about something far less direct, though still distasteful, their hypocrisy on the subject gives them no room to manuever.

Denial is not a river in Wisconson

Most of the rest of the world, expect for a few far-right wingers like Glenn Beck, are happy for the people of Egypt, Tunisia, and perhaps soon elsewhere, who are getting their first opportunity to have a democratic government in decades. Of course, the right-wing frets that there may be more "terrorism" there, now that the firm hands of the dictators have been loosed from the throats of their people. However, much the same was said about the American Revolution when we overthrew our king. British solidiers thought of American colonists as no better than "terrorists" or "enemy combatants" and many of the regimes in Europe predicted that our liberated nation would quickly plunge into anarchy. People who know anything about history should, at long last, be able to see that the alleged anarchy is often overblown, although revolutions will have their ugly moments. This is one reason why I would caution the far-right to be careful what they wish for, given that, more often than not, they are the ones using inflammatory rhetoric about needing an armed uprising every time they don't get their way on some minor point.

Speaking of uprisings, let's hear it for Cheesehead power. I'm not just taking about the Greenbay Packers finally taking back the Lombardi trophy. They also made a good show in the capital of what it looks like when unionized Cheeseheads get cheesed off.

Of course, much was made of the match up of Steeler versus Packer, with both teams being representative of blue collar, working class people. However, if one wants to get down to it, working in a "packing" plant is way more blue collar than steel work. It certainly pays a lot less, even with unionization. Anyway, our steel industry, or what is left of it, is only a dim shadow of what it was before free traders freely traded much of it away to other nations in exchange for cheap, shiny trinkets.

Anyway, back to sports for a second, I have long been a fan of Greenbay for another reason, which is that it is the only fan owned team, while the others are often owned by a wealthy individual. Every time Greenbay would win a game this season, I would tell my friends that I hoped they finally made it to the Superbowl, because I think it would make a powerful statement, reminding the nation that you do not need economic royalty to have sports teams. The city of Greenbay decided that they wanted a team that one wealthy owner could not move around willy-nilly, so they sold shares to help finance the Packers. We could do the same thing with other teams, but many people have already drunk the Koolaid of conventional thinking that tells us that we need some rich guy, modeled after the pharaohs or dictators of Egypt in order to world-class professional organizations, like football teams.

The topic of dictators gets us back to the current situation in Wisconsin. In a place where unions started, Republicans have finally seized back control of the governorship and state senate, and are determined to decimate public employee unions. You can hate on unions all you want, but when you see a group of political hitmen doing everything they can to strip rights and benefits from public employees, what will stop them from doing the same to other groups next.

As a teacher in another state, I can attest to the fact that EVERY single year, without exception, we are always told that there is ANOTHER crisis and that we will have to expect massive layoffs, paycuts, benefit cuts, etc. In the end, we always discover that there never was a crisis to begin with. It is just the standard method that the state uses to do business with is. The state always seems to want to balance the budget from the bank accounts of teachers.

Right now the governor in Wisconsin claims that there is a fiscal emergency. This is the same governor who turned down over $1 billion dollars in Federal Stimulus money to build rail systems in his state. In the middle of a recession, when they have a budget shortfall in the state approaching $3.5 billion, this guy is turning down a billion dollars of assistance from the federal government, and then telling people there is an emergency.

I can tell you this. The so-called fiscal emergency, which I predict is another manufactured disaster, was not created by teachers, who tend to earn very modest wages. On the federal level we have seem republicans cut trillions of dollar of taxes over the last decade, with the promise that it would "stimulate the economy". Instead we have the worst recession in living memory and now the states are hurting, because (1) the Federal government has much less money to give them and (2) certain republican politicians are turning down the money that is available, when it is being given to them.

They always want us, out of the goodness of our hearts, to voluntarily cut our own throats, and if we have the temerity to ask them to show us the evidence of this latest emergency, they tell us about how our lavish union contracts have bankrupted them. However, when we look at our wages compared to other people with graduate degrees, we already see ourselves paid 20-30% less than comparably skilled workers in other areas. Our pensions are far from lavish. They talk about teachers making 70k or 80k. I know of nobody in New Mexico who makes even close to that. Our top tier in in the low to mid 50k range, after going through a decade of hoops and national board certifications. Teachers here, even under union contract start at $30,0001 per year and cannot earn more than that for three years. That is the lavish salary of the state. My medical contributions run 13% of my gross salary. My state retirement takes another 10% and is an involuntary contribution.

When I finally retire, politicians will call my pension an "entitlement" and sneer at it like I'm collecting welfare. I paid into it every year, and this doesn't count social security, workman's comp, etc which are also taken out before I even get my check. I should be "entitled" to collect something, down the line, for putting money into all those programs.

As I started to suggest in the title of the article, denial is not a river that runs through Wisconsin, but many anti-union republicans there are in a state of severe denial. They believe that the same group of people who systematically strip away pay and benefits from teachers can be trusted not to do that to police and firefighters, and the average working man. They scream about "no new taxes", but this is a tax on the people they are attacking. They are effectively forcing these people to pay thousands more to the state. It is a very unfair and selective form of taxation on working class people, so that wealthy, non-working people don't have to pay higher taxes.

To the working people of Wisconsin, many of whom were brainwashed enough to think that public employee unions are the source of all their problems. You will not see a penny more in your pocket by attacking teachers. In fact, you will see less money than before, because the people who attack teachers today, will attack you tomorrow. They won't call it a "tax", they will charge higher "fees" and cut back the services that you use. This will effectively be the same as a tax hike, because you will have to pay more for your driver's license.

Here is another dirty little secret about public employee's unions too, for all you union haters. Teachers unions are not even real unions. They are forbidden by law to strike, since they are regarded as "essential" service providers, in many cases. This is like a tiger that has been declawed and had all its teeth pulled. You might say, "look at that scary tiger", but the fact is that it's not a real tiger anymore when it has no claws or teeth to do what tigers do. It's a cuddly pet. So people who tell you about those scary public employee unions are either ignorant of the facts, or want you to be ignorant of the facts. Don't believe the hype.

Alarmists might also point to the fact that public employees can do a "sick-out", but we all know that these are just symbolic and can only last a day or two at best. Only a minority of teachers even called in sick in a few districts for a day in Wisconsin. Real strikes last longer than a single day.

In some ways, it is funny that we have such a love/hate relationship with education. Many people love to hate it and are forever complaining about how kids don't learn enough, while simultaneously cutting funding for education and cutting pay to teachers. I'm sure that test scores are just going to shoot through the roof if you start pay teachers less and cutting their benefits. Why, the best and brightest will just be lined up around the block to go through the elaborate state licensing process, just so that they can make substantially less than they could in the private sector.

Propaganda pieces like _Waiting For Superman_ (WFS) make the unions out to be the source of all evil in education because they limit "flexibility", meaning the ability of principals to fire teachers without any kind of due process, and the "flexibility" of the state to constantly lower pay, while raising requirements. I can tell you that the mythical "tenure" given to school teachers is not the same as real tenure, and it certainly is not granted after two years with only trivial requirements, as the film alleges.

The mantra of the anti-union people is that unions protect bad employees. However, myths aside, most teachers have none of the imagined protections. Waiting for Superman claims that only about 1 in 2500 teachers ever lose their licenses, but the fact is that around half of all teachers do not even renew their licenses after they expire (which is in three years in NM). Besides, you don't have to lose your license to be fired as a teacher. They don't even have to say, "you're fired". You just don't get a contract for the next year. It is standard practice in many places to not rehire any first year teachers, for example, and that is even when these teachers are under union contract.

Far from being a cushy arrangement, most union contracts for teachers are extremely stingy about pay raises, which often only come after several years on the job, and don't even give good education benefits for teachers to upgrade their skills. Typically, even in union contracts, it entirely stacked against the newcomers, and this would not change if there were no contracts at all. It would make things even more precarious. The first time a single parent complains about anything, many principals would rather get rid of the teacher than have to deal with unpleasantness. So students end up with three or four different teachers in a single year, including long-term subs who are not under union contract and are paid even less. That is under the current system. I know because I was brought it, in exactly this situation, when several previous teachers had been fired, and the alleged infractions were not even that serious. So the myth that it cannot happen and that schools are stuck with low performing "lemons" or "turkeys" according to WFS can officially be considered busted just based upon personal observation.

I know that people want official studies to "prove" this or that, but you find that, especially in education, the "studies" tend to "prove" whatever the people putting the study together want to prove. They decide what particular agenda they want to prove and then proceed to collect data to "support it". Every year there is some new "scientifically proven" new gimmick system that "can't fail" that promptly fails and we move on to the next one.

For example, a recent justification for denying graduate tuition benefits to teachers is an alleged study that claims that teachers with graduate degrees are not necessarily any more effective than ones with bachelor's degrees. Well I'm sure you can prove that people with PhDs don't necessarily do a better job teaching either, and there are grad students who do a better job at teaching university classes. If universities operated like public schools this would require us to immediately fire everyone with a PhD and replace them all with grad students. But as we just saw, they don't necessarily do a better job either, so many we should replace them with undergraduates, and so on, ad infinitum.

In the end, it may be true that a person with an MBA is not necessarily a better manager than someone without one. It's doubtful that a manager at Burger King is going to sell way more burgers with an MBA under his belt, but I'm sure people can do all kinds of "studies" and prove whatever they want about it.

Generally, however, we have a social contract that says that we value people getting higher levels of education, even if we can't prove that this will instantly make things measurably better in ten different ways. When we stop valuing the process of continually improving levels of education then we start to stagnate and decline as a civilization. We might think that everything you need to know is in a book somewhere, but there are a lot of things that people know about how to do things that must still be passed on to other people and is not something that gets written down. When we stop telling people to go out and get this education because we cannot prove that it instantly makes them more productive, then we will start to lose all this procedural knowledge.

This takes up back to unions. Before there were unions there were skilled craft guilds, and almost every profession had them. Learning to teach is more than one can get from a book. It takes an organization of professions, or a community of practiced individuals with common experiences and common purposes. When we start breaking this apart and saying that every teacher should be out of himself or herself, we will likewise lose a great deal of knowledge and commitment that teachers hold as a group.

It used to be that the word "conservative" meant someone who was cautious and valued time-tested approaches to things. Now we have radicals, calling themselves "conservatives", who want to gut a century of labor practices with a result that is, at best, extremely uncertain. Everyone hopes that the changes he or she puts through will turn out for the best, but the history of education suggests that the vast majority of quick fixes, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), never accomplish even a fraction of their much-lauded ambitions. More than a decade after NCLB, there are more children being left behind than ever, and the same right-wingers who told us that NCLB would fix all these problems are now putting their faith in union busting. Perhaps this time, at long last, we can tell them that "No, this won't work any better than all the other quick fixes you have proposed".

Just like their trillions of dollars of tax cuts did not stimulate the economy, and instead produced the worst recession since 1929, their union busting efforts will neither improve the economy, nor fix education. Cutting spending in the middle of a recession, many have pointed out, is like deciding to start saving water when your house is burning down. Actually FDR used the metaphor of people wanting to save water only when their neighbor's house is on fire. This ambition to start saving money seems to have been forgotten when Bush was president and Republicans were in charge of congress most of the time. It only seems to have been discovered when Obama is now in office and they believe that continuing to wreck the economy can help them in the next presidential election.

We are back to the issue spoken about at the beginning of inventing crises so that certain political opportunists can ram through their agendas with less opposition. People are tired of government by crisis. We are tired of people who constantly provoke fights that weren't there before they stirred the pot and tried to turn the working class against itself in Wisconsin and elsewhere. People who continually provoke fights are likely to get more than bargained for eventually. In many other countries there are national strikes to show solidarity. Wisconsin is, after all, not the only state considering similar maneuvers. What if educators called their own "day of outrage" in this country? What if we all went to our state capitals. I've heard of accidents where boxes of roofing nails got accidentally knocked off the back of trucks and get scattered across all the streets in these capitals. I've also heard of strange accidents where people get very confused and end up squirting glue into the locks of the doors of important buildings, tragically making it impossible to open them without calling locksmiths. A pair of old shoes with bailing wire for laces sometimes might get accidentally tossed into the air like a bolo and end up wrapped around power lines, which could inadvertantly cause them to short out. I don't know how that could happen or why or who want to do such a thing, but if it did occur, God forbid, I suppose it could give people a little more time to reflect on things, and contemplate if this is a confrontation that needs to take place.

You can't do rage every day and not be consumed

Rage, conspiracy fear-mongering, demonization, and extreme aggression, for hours on end, are staples of right-wing talk radio. You find nothing even remotely this severe on the left-wing of the political spectrum, especially now that Obama is in office and democrats remain in control of the Senate. The closest that liberals might get to this would be people like Keith Olbermann or Mike Malloy. But Keith and Mike have nothing on the ranting, raving lunacy of Michael Savage, or the maudlin fear mongering of Glenn Beck, or the in-your-face bullying of Bill O'Reilly.

I am suggesting that constant anger, fear, and aggression cannot be healthy, either physically and mentally, for people to consume (or to produce for that matter) for hours on end. It has to do something to your mind to constantly be in an agitated state. It is no surprise that most people turning to violence for political reasons in recent years also come, almost exclusively from the right-wing, where they are whipped into a frenzy nearly every day. Rage is all the rage today, with these folks. It is hard to think of an agenda item where they disagree with their opponents calmly. Instead, everything is about death panels, and gays, and immigrants coming here to kill and rob and take our jobs. If vote *for* health care for all you are not simply disagreeing with them. You are called a baby killer, and dark murmurings are made about how the government is planning to round people up and put them in concentration camps.

It may seem that I'm overly attacking the rightwing here, but that's because politics has shifted so far to the right of center in the last several decades that many people have noted that people like Nixon and Reagan would be derided, these days, as liberals by the modern neo-conservative and TEA party movement.

Therefore, a key to returning to centrism is reigning in ultra-extremism on the right. Extremists on the left have long been marginalized, ridiculed, and hold very little power. People like Kucinich or Wellstone or Bernie Sanders are never given the media attention of someone like Sarah Palin, for example. People like Pelosi or Reed, hyperbolic rhetoric to one side, cannot possibly be said to represent anything approaching the extreme fringe of the democratic party. They are firmly in the center.

Liberals do need to work on not allowing some of their vocal extremists, such as gay activists, from dominating the dialog, as they often end up doing on things like Don't Ask Don't Tell, which will probably still remain a liability in 2012 elections. Liberals have paid very little attention to the cost versus the benefits of various positions, like gay marriage, and have instead ended up martyring themselves over so-called principles at the ballot box. I would humbly suggest that, if you are going to choose a hill to die upon, that you choose causes where the payoff is worth the risks electorially, because otherwise, you will be voted out of office and your principles will be defeated anyway. I know that people love to jump all over this sort of thing, but I will share a little tidbit with you. As a real estate agent, you know the deal is over when one side starts arguing "over the principle of the thing". Some people will throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars over $40 curtains. One wonders if people can afford principles like that for long.

Palin Sure Is Full Of Herself

To say that Sarah Palin is self-absorbed is about like saying that water is wet or that Mama Grizzly's are furry. For Palin, it's always "all about me". Therefore, it is unsurprising that, in the aftermath of the massacre in Arizona, Palin would assume that all of this happened just to make her look bad and thus the need for her lame jeremiads and swipes at the "lame stream media".

Her asinine "blood libel" comment is just an example of her planet-sized ego. To anyone with a brain, a clue, or a conscience, it would not even occur to compare some minor kerfuffle to the suffering of millions over centuries, mainly at the hands of her christian brethren. However, in Palin's mind, her ridiculously mild brush with criticism is an earth-shattering affront to her unbridled ambitions. Her speech writers probably also saw it as an opportunity to inappropriately begin the rhetoric of violence anew, just by making reference to such events. One will note, if one listens at all to her comments, that she claimed that holding her responsible for putting crosshairs on Giffords picture could potentially lead to more violence.

I'm afraid that cosmic justice usually ain't that condign, sweetums, though you would certainly deserve to be paid back in kind for the beast that you helped to release.

Palin is certainly behaving like someone who has a guilty mind. Who else would go into full panic mode and hide out for four days, while sending out damage control teams to fight her battles by proxy.

I'm afraid that she takes Diva to a whole new level, at least politically speaking. That may be the only thing she has to contribute to American politics.

Why the violent rhetoric? DUH! Let's see....

This is an example of how far some people are from common sense. Particularly on the liberal side, some of the peace activists I talk to are asking questions like, "What purpose does all this violent rhetoric from people on the right serve?" Yeah, really, they are so far removed from reality that they don't understand the basic purpose of violence and threats of violence, which is POWER. Right-wingers derive power by threatening and attempting to intimidate their opponents. Instead playing the game by the rules, they win by cheating. Duh. It's pretty simple. I know that some people think there must be some more complicated reasoning than this, but THERE'S NOT!

By acting as bullies they put the lie to the fundamental premises of pacifism. You cannot shame a bully who has no shame. Gandhi and MLK Jr. succeeded because some of their opponents had a modicum of shame. But you will notice that both of them were murdered, and the kinds of people who would do that will not be deterred by pacifism. It is a dogma, bordering on religious superstition that there is always a non-violent answer to every problem. The fact is that when someone comes at you with a gun to take your life that you will have to defend yourself or die. Most liberals are in serious denial about this. When your opponents constantly announce their desire to kill you, you cannot afford to just dismiss this all as idle talk. Yes, it's true that most bullies are chicken s**t little cowards who threaten because they are too impotent to act. However, threats do give the threatener power, especially if you never properly answer them or prepare for the worst case scenario. The proper answer to a threat is not to passive-aggressively ignore it, or use some namby-pamby platitude like, "I won't dignify that comment with a response". Remember, you are trying to shame people who may well have no sense of shame. The only intelligent, appropriate response to a threat is to counter the threat with your own promise of all legitimate responses against it immediately. When someone says, "liberals deserve to die" you need to immediately have that person prosecuted for hate speech, while at the same time, taking maximum effort to insure that you are prepared to meet this person's threat with lethal deterrence.

Most liberals don't own guns because they are that deep in denial. They will usually justify it by citing some vague "study" that says having a gun in the house is dangerous and could be used against you. Yeah, if you don't secure the gun. IOWs, if you act like an idiot about owning a gun then it certainly will be dangerous to you. If you're a colossal wussie and know that you will wimp out on pulling the trigger instead of seeing that assailant as a tree stump to be used for target practice, then you will become a victim of your own firearm, and I can't say I feel too sorry for you. You had your chance right in your hand and you refused to take it.

This is the same thing that left-wingers do politically all the time. For a long time these guys refused to fight back against an onslaught of negative attack ads. They said "they wouldn't lower themselves" to campaign that way and they lost and they are footnotes in history that are lower than whale poo. So much for not lowering yourselves.

Now, it's true that people are sometimes turned off by negative ads. But there is a formula that is virtually guaranteed to defuse this. You first attack your opponent, and then at the end of the ad you deny that you attacked the person and say you just want to get along and have a civil debate. Perhaps even accuse your opponent of attacking you first, and THEN announce that you "won't stoop to that level", even when you already have. People will tend to remember the last thing you told them intellectually. But they will remember the first thing they saw emotionally. Republicans use variants of this technique again and again. Fox News claims to be "fair and balanced" at the end of mercilessly displaying their bias. Many people continue to buy it.

Now I know some people might say, "but that's being dishonest". Those kind of people are really not equipped to function in an actual democracy. They are functioning in a perfect fantasy world which has never and will never exist.

So, to recap, the purpose of violent rhetoric is POWER. Whether you are defending yourself personally or your campaign politically, by refusing to meet your opponents threat with adequate stopping power, you become the victim. The key is to disguise your own responses, claiming that you are not attacking your opponent and that you have been wronged, and that you just want to be civil. However, don't drink your own Koolaid. They will come at you with everything, and you have to come at them with everything. The time for being civil is when things are over. Civility is for your friends, not your mortal enemies.

Gun Liberals, Gun Conservatives and Crazy People

I know that current pro-gun fanatics, who are almost exclusively right-wingers, will hate to be called "gun liberals", but that is what they are advocating when they argue that there should be less restrictions on owning or carrying firearms. I know that, to them, liberal just means something derogatory, but to those who know the meaning of words, the term "liberalize" means to be make less restrictive, and this is what they are advocating. On the other hand, "gun conservatives" (gunservatives), who happen to be primarily left-wingers in the US, are those who want to tighten regulations on gun ownership and carrying. I'm sure that this kind of "semantic" argument would drive a person like Jared Loughner even crazier than he already must have been.

That brings me to the common sense, centrist issue of the day. Any person with common sense would agree that a crazy person should not be carrying around a gun with a high capacity magazine. Yet, according to gun fanatics, no regulations can be placed on gun ownership. Their argument that gun regulation is unconstitutional relies upon reading only the second half of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and purposely omitting the part that says, "a well REGULATED militia being necessary to the security of a free State,". Instead they only cite, "... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Therefore, it is an inescapable consequence of their pro-gun position that crazy people should be allowed to carry guns. One wonders how "pro-life" the "pro-gun" position is, in this case, since crazy people, by definition, are not going to make sane choices about the use of lethal force.

That is, even if everyone else is armed and is able to kill the crazy person after he or she starts shooting, then at least one person, but probably more than one, will be dead. Granted, it will be self-defense to shoot the crazy person, but allowing that crazy person to have the gun in the first place, knowing that they are mentally incapable of acting responsible, is the reason that multiple lives end up endangered or destroyed. Even if these people just use the gun to kill themselves, making this easy option available to them makes it easier than it has to be to carry out their reckless plans.

Now, I know that a favorite "argument" is that "criminals will break the law". However, in the case of people with diminished mental capacity, we should still be trying to make it as hard as possible for them to carry out their plans. If they are forced to turn to improvised weapons like knives, then the body count will likely be far diminished. Allowing them the convenience of purchasing an "off-the-shelf" professionally-designed "massacre machine" from Walmart should not be an option open to them.

Gun fanatics also like to play the "personal responsibility" card, but the fact is that crazy people are not capable of personal responsibility, by their nature. More importantly, craziness sometimes develops slowly, and can be hard to detect. Often times crazy people don't even know it, or are in denial about it. So I highly doubt that people who are beginning to experience episodes of mental instability are going to say, "Golly gee, I guess I should trot down to the police station and turn in my firearms so that I don't accidentally hurt someone with them".

Now the fact is that there are gun fanatics out there, but the real people who benefit from all this divisive rhetoric are the gun manufacturers. They want to sell as many guns as possible, and requiring a person to undergo a psychological evaluation before being able to buy a gun would reduce sales. Even having to put safety devices on guns makes them more expensive, which again can cut into sales. Gun manufacturers don't want to have any regulations, because it could hurt the bottom line, so they strongly sponsor the pro-gun activism and the abolition of regulations.

So what can common sense centrists do. For one thing, we have to break out of the traditional roles. Liberals have not fared well on the gun-control debate. All the money comes from the gun manufacturers and goes straight to the coffers of groups that advocate gun fanaticism. Money is life-blood in politics. Therefore, for a policy to be successful, it must not cut into sales. I believe that liberals could appeal to gun manufacturers with a policy that says, "we will encourage more liberals to purchase guns and safety locks and concealed permits". This represents a new revenue stream for gun makers, if political leaders on the left can convince their constituents that responsible gun ownership can help make themselves and their community safer.

On the right-wing, perhaps one can appeal to a need for security. We don't want terrorists, for example, many of whom are not always mentally stable either, to have easy access to firearms. Therefore, requiring customers to complete a mandatory psychological evaluation, and periodic evaluations, would probably weed out a few people who shouldn't have a firearm. I know that right-wingers are paranoid about people "trying to take my gun", but if police did come around occasionally confiscating guns from people with lapsed permits this would only create more sales, or at least encourage people to more diligent about keeping the permit current, and paying their fees.

It would also potentially win a new revenue stream from mental health practitioners. They would likely be glad for the extra business, and would throw contributions to whatever politician pushed this kind of agenda. The trick is to balance this with not pissing off the gun makers, by promising to help them get customers who from new demographics, like liberals, and middle-of-the-road people who aren't as paranoid as the average person to which they currently market.