Blind Hypocrisy

Republican primary presidential candidate Ben Carson recently started a minor firestorm of public opinion when he suggested that he would not “advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” Naturally, such a biased statement seeming to denigrate a whole religion put some people on edge. Carson, in a later interview, went on to further clarify his views with the following statement: “I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson said, referencing that Islamic law is derived from the Koran and traditions of Islam. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”

I happen to agree with most of this statement. The President, and many other elected officials take an oath upon entering office to support and follow the US Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Any religious beliefs that would tend to force someone in such an office to ignore and violate the provisions of the US Constitution must be set aside in favor of following the US Constitution.

Carson later stated, “Anyone who is running for president should embrace the Constitution and should place it above their personal beliefs,” he remarked. “Anyone who can’t do that should not be running for the presidency.” I completely agree with this statement. Hooray for his ability to understand this as a basic qualification for running for the office. Unfortunately, Carson and several other Republican candidates have a form of severe myopia when it comes to understanding the import of this statement.

Just a few short weeks ago we in this country were faced with the spectacle of a county court clerk in Kentucky who refused to follow the ruling of the Supreme Court of the land that said that she must issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. The clerk, Kim Davis, was eventually jailed for a week for contempt of court in refusing to follow this ruling because she felt it went against her personal religious beliefs. In other words, we have experienced a clear cut case where a duly elected official refused to follow a ruling based upon the same US Constitution that Carson insists must be placed above a public servant's personal beliefs.

Instead of a hypothetical case where a Muslim might be tempted to violate the Constitution in favor of their religious belief we have a real life situation where a Christian did violate the Constitution in favor of her religious belief. Carson could not have spelled this out any clearer. It is exactly that situation he described above only it is a Christian refusing to follow the Constitution instead of a Muslim putting their personal belief system above the law of the land.

As it turns out Carson has commented on the case in Kentucky in very concise terms. Unfortunately, his comments directly oppose his statements about Muslims and their belief system. When asked about the Kim Davis case and her right to refuse to follow the Constitution he responded with the following: “But this is a very basic right. This is a Judeo-Christian nation in the sense that a lot of our values and principles are based on our Judeo-Christian faith. There are substantial numbers of people who actually believe in the traditional definition of marriage,” he said. “I’m one of them. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think that other people can do whatever they want to do.”

He continued, “And Congress now has a responsibility to step up to the plate and enact legislation that will protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans. That’s the reason that we have divided government. When one branch does something that tilts the balance, the other branches need to pitch in and correct the situation. This is a serious problem.”

In the first place, no one’s First Amendment rights endow them with the right to deny rights to other people; no matter if they believe their faith demands they do so or not. As Carson rightly stated before, the Constitution of the supreme law of the land and it has to come before someone’s personal beliefs if they are to hold public office in this country. Unfortunately, Carson doesn’t seem to recognize this includes his and Mrs. Davis’ Christian beliefs. Make no mistake about it, the Supreme Court ruling was based directly on the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, the supreme law of the land. Neither Carson, Davis, nor any of the multitude of Republican candidates who have since come out in favor of Mrs. Davis’ decision to flout that Constitution in favor of her own personal belief system seem to understand the hypocrisy inherent in believing Christian beliefs should trump the US Constitution.

In the second place, a basic understanding of 7th grade civics should also be a requirement for someone to run the US government as President and Mr. Carson seems sadly deficient in his understanding of how our government actually functions. Congress does not the authority or responsibility to enact legislation to overrule the Supreme Court’s rulings on the US Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land and the Supreme Court is the body which rules on interpretations of the US Constitution. While most 7th graders understand this principle and therefore understand that the only way to change the US Constitution is by the amendment rules within the Constitution, Carson thinks Congress should “pitch in to correct the situation.”

Of course none of this should come as too much of a surprise when it comes to Ben Carson. Carson severely castigated Planned Parenthood for selling fetal tissue when that particular scandal was in vogue amongst Conservatives. He didn’t seem to understand that hypocrisy of such a statement coming from someone who had personally used such fetal tissue in his own research projects earlier in his career. Carson seems to commonly be unable to see where his stated positions contradict his personal activities or where his high flying rhetoric about Muslims contradicts his own statements about Judeo-Christian values.

If one is to believe Carson is right that people who cannot place the US Constitution above their own personal belief system should not be running for the presidency we seem to have several other Republican candidates who have recently failed this test as well. When the events surrounding Kim Davis’ incarceration for refusing to follow the Constitution in carrying out her duties came to light there was no shortage of indignant Republican Candidates supporting her right to put her religious beliefs above the Constitution.

Rick Santorum postulated the following: “Martin Luther King wrote a letter from Birmingham jail and said in that letter that there are just laws and unjust laws and we have no obligation to condone and accept unjust laws. And then he followed that up and said what is an unjust law. An unjust law is a law that goes against the moral code or God’s law or the natural law. I would argue that what the Supreme Court did is against natural law, God’s law and we have ever obligation to stand in opposition to it.”

It would be hard to find someone more clearly expressing their belief that their religious beliefs should supersede the US Constitution than this but other Republicans seem to be trying to do so.

Mike Huckabee, another Republican candidate, went even further: “If someone needs to go to jail, I am willing to go in her place, and I mean that.” Imagine the spectacle of a US president refusing to follow a ruling of the US Supreme court and instead demanding to go to jail because their religious beliefs so far outweigh their conviction that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land.

Ted Cruz had the following to say on the subject: “I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to choose between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.” Senator Cruz, a highly educated lawyer, is surely spouting rhetoric. Again, 7th graders understand the difference between “a lawless court opinion” on the US Constitution and a duly considered opinion rendered by the final arbiter of Constitutional law in our system of governance. Cruz surely knows the difference in what “the Obama administration” wants and what the US Supreme court has duly decided. Never one to let the truth interfere with what he wants to project to voters, Cruz has once again proved himself to be wholly devoid of integrity with this statement.

Marco Rubio also weighed in on Mrs. Davis’ right to somehow refuse to do her sworn duty and uphold the Constitution. “We should seek a balance between government’s responsibility to abide by the laws of our republic and allowing people to stand by their religious convictions,” Mr. Rubio said. “While the clerk’s office has a governmental duty to carry out the law,” he added, “there should be a way to protect the religious freedom and conscience rights of individuals working in the office.”

It is unusual to find someone so easily fluid in speaking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time as Mr. Rubio. His ability to support both sides while ignoring the reality that Mrs. Davis is required to follow the law as the arm of the government charged with issuing these licenses. Either she issues the licenses or the law is ignored in favor of her own personal religious beliefs. There is no other solution no matter how skillfully Mr. Rubio avoids the question.

All US Presidents are required by the US Constitution to take the following oath before taking office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Carson is right about one thing. There is no exception to this oath such as “unless my religious convictions conflict with the Constitution.” Unfortunately, neither he nor any of the Republican candidates seem to understand the import of this oath. I would suggest that the statements above concerning Kim Davis effectively disqualifies all of them from eligibility for the office according to Carson’s own logic.

Confusion about Liberty

I have been watching with a kind of fascinated incredulousness the situation in Rowan County Kentucky wherein the Court Clerk refuses to issue marriage licenses in protest of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage. The same thing is happening in several counties in Alabama where they had simply decided not to issue any marriage licenses in the hope that this will forestall the eventuality of issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

Unfortunately for Kim Davis, the Court Clerk in Rowan County Kentucky, there have been lawsuits filed to force her to issue such licenses. Mrs. Davis, who has been married four times herself, has taken it upon herself to fight this issue in court rather than follow the ruling. Mrs. Davis issued the following statement through her lawyers:

I have worked in the Rowan County Clerk’s office for 27 years as a Deputy Clerk and was honored to be elected as the Clerk in November 2014, and took office in January 2015. I love my job and the people of Rowan County. I have never lived any place other than Rowan County. Some people have said I should resign, but I have done my job well. This year we are on track to generate a surplus for the county of 1.5 million dollars.

In addition to my desire to serve the people of Rowan County, I owe my life to Jesus Christ who loves me and gave His life for me. Following the death of my godly mother-in-law over four years ago, I went to church to fulfill her dying wish. There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God.

I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision. For me it is a decision of obedience. I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God’s Word. It is a matter of religious liberty, which is protected under the First Amendment, the Kentucky Constitution, and in the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Our history is filled with accommodations for people’s religious freedom and conscience. I want to continue to perform my duties, but I also am requesting what our Founders envisioned – that conscience and religious freedom would be protected. That is all I am asking. I never sought to be in this position, and I would much rather not have been placed in this position. I have received death threats from people who do not know me. I harbor nothing against them. I was elected by the people to serve as the County Clerk. I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience.

Mrs. Davis obviously has deep convictions on the subject of gay marriage and strongly believes that her religion requires her not to participate in sanctioning such a marriage. Personally, I have no problem with her conviction and feel that she has every right not to participate in something that she feels would signify her disobedience to her chosen god. However, if she no longer feels that she can carry out the duties of her position as a servant of the county she should simply resign from her office. She is perfectly free to do so. What she has no right to do is project her own personal religious beliefs into her position as a servant of the people of Rowan County in contravention of established law. Make no mistake about it, it is now established law that she must issue such licenses if the people of Rowan County ask her to do so in spite of her personal religious beliefs. An appeals court has so ruled and the Supreme Court of the United States has also so ruled.

Mrs. Davis seems terribly confused about one thing though, the idea of religious liberty. Religious is defined as relating to or believing in a religion. Religion is defined as the service of or worship of God or the supernatural. It is further defined as a personal or institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs, or practices. In this particular instance this last definition seems to most accurately describe Mrs. Davis’ idea about her religious duty when she describes her belief that the First Amendment, the Kentucky Constitution, and/or the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act allows her to choose to follow God’s word instead of the laws of the government she is currently in the employ of. She further goes on to state that our founders wanted conscience and religious freedom to be protected.

Perhaps there is good reason for her confusion as the term Religious Liberty is something of an oxymoron to begin with. Liberty is defined as the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views. Organized religion is an institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs or practices. Therefore, Religious Liberty is by definition a combination of two words that are antithetical to each other in meaning. It is quite literally impossible to be free from restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life or behavior while following an institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs, or practices.

Mrs. Davis ironically misses the truth that she is in fact by definition denying other people’s liberty by her misunderstanding of the terms she used in her statement. Her actions are themselves the very definition of oppressive restrictions imposed on one’s way of life. Her decision to violate law and refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay people because her narrow ideas of what serving her god demand is logical proof that she neither understands the definition of liberty nor deserves the cover of hiding behind it.

Liberty is also defined as the power or scope to act as one pleases. Obviously, the liberty to act as one pleases extends only so far as the point where these actions interfere with someone else’s liberty. Neither the First Amendment nor any of the rights called out in the Bill of Rights are correctly construed so as to restrict the rights of other people. In other words, they are personal rights aimed at allowing and expanding personal freedom. They were never intended to be used as weapons or shields behind which one could hide in order to restrict or inhibit the rights of other people.

While Mrs. Davis position is untenable in the extreme, we seem to suddenly be besieged by religious based groups demanding that it is a religious liberty for them to be able to deny rights to people whose lifestyle they find offensive. Any suggestion that liberty contains within it such a right is a blatantly obvious proof that someone doesn’t understand the term to begin with.

In April of 1864 Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to the Maryland Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, Maryland. The following passage of that speech accurately describes this same confusion on a subject around which a similar argument about liberty sprang up; the liberty to enslave others:

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in the same word we do not mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name…. liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names…. Liberty and Tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.

Lincoln was dead on in 1864 with his philosophical thoughts on liberty. They are no less true today. At some time in the future we will look back with horror and revulsion on the idea that one group of people with religious convictions should, in the name of liberty, have the temerity to restrict the basic rights of another group because they have a different sexual orientation. This will be the same kind of revulsion we currently feel looking back at a society in Lincoln's day determined to go to war to protect the liberty to own other human beings.

The Demise of the Welfare Queen

Ronald Reagan created a mythical character during his run for the Presidency in 1980. The welfare queen was a lazy, shiftless character who lived on public assistance and drove a cadillac. They laughed at you as you drove to work in the morning, content to live high on the hog on your tax dollars and a little too lazy to get a job. Even though this character never really existed she became a force in American politics, one that never failed to ratchet up the frustration with the working class. Many people still believe that one of the main problems we have in this country is that we have a whole class of people who no longer want to work, but are being provided for by the government. I believe this is a problem but it is on such a small scale at to be much smaller than some of our other problems (more on this in a minute).

As an example I looked up the current figures on TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). There is no such thing as Welfare in the US anymore. The welfare program was replaced by TANF in 1996. There were some very important changes to the system put in place at that time which I will discuss in more detail in a moment but for now I want to concentrate on numbers.

TANF is funded by a combination of State and Federal taxes. The Federal Portion of the funding for TANF totaled 17.1 billion dollars in 2013 according to US government numbers. While 17.1 billion dollars is not an insignificant number it is massively outweighed by several other programs in the budget. Let’s start with Corporate Welfare in the form of subsidies and tax breaks to the largest corporations in the US.
According to US government numbers in 2013 Fortune 500 companies alone received 63 billion in federal subsidies. If we look at the top 965 companies in the US this number swells to 110 billion. Boeing, a company with many well paid employees in our area, received almost 13 billion in that year. In other words, we handed 6.4 times more money to corporate interest in 2013 than we spent on the whole TANF program.

Let’s take a look at where the TANF money actually goes, how it is distributed. The actual cash distribution to needy families is 28% of the TANF budget. In other words, we actually handed out in EBT transfers 4.78 billion dollars to needy families. This means we handed Boeing 2.7 times the amount of money we gave to needy families all over the country in 2013. While no one thinks 4.7 billion dollars is insignificant, I have a hard time understanding why are were simply not outraged that we are handing 2.7 times that amount in one year to one of the largest, wealthiest corporations in the US. Public assistance is a problem and a drain on our budget. Understanding that it is 6.4 times less of a problem financially than the corporate welfare that lobbyist pull out of Congress every year tends to make me think we have other problems that need our attention worse.

Let’s look at who is eligible to received TANF money. This information is all on the TANF website for the state of Alabama. The second requirement specifies that no adult can receive Family Assistance benefits for more than 5 years in their lifetime. There are no exceptions to this rule. In other words, as soon as they have received 5 years of benefits they are through. They will receive no more benefits for the rest of their life on penalty of imprisonment. This is a cumulative total and does not reset if they go off of benefits. The old welfare queen stereotype Reagan rode into office simply doesn’t exist at all. No one simply chooses not to work and draw benefits for the rest of their life on the TANF system.

Children are eligible for benefits as long as they are under 18 and in school. If they drop out of school they are no longer eligible. All persons who receive TANF benefits must be US citizens. No one, adult or child is eligible for TANF benefits if they can’t prove US citizenship. It seems like the myth of illegals coming here to live on welfare doesn’t have any basis in reality either. No child who is receiving foster care is eligible. All Child support payments the child is receiving through the court system must be turned over to the state. No child may receive benefits if their parent or guardian is on a strike.

For a child to receive TANF benefits their parent or guardian must be employed or participating in the state JOBS program to receive training for employment. Such relatives must accept any job offered to them unless the County department tells him or her otherwise. All relatives must apply for any other benefits they are eligible for such as Veteran’s benefits, Social Security, Unemployment Compensation etc. These benefits will be counted as income along with any income from jobs of any family members living in the same household and TANF benefits reduced accordingly.

Any child or relative convicted of a felony is not eligible from that point forward. Any child or relative convicted of a controlled substance violation is no longer eligible for benefits from that point forward. There are restrictions on where benefits (EBT) cards can be used and what they cannot be used to purchase. The following are places where EBT cards cannot be used on punishment of fines and/or imprisonment. Liquor, wine, or beer stores, gambling establishments, strip clubs, tattoo or piercing store, or a place providing psychic services. Benefits cannot be used to buy liquor, wine, beer, tobacco products, or lottery tickets.

Let’s look at what money people on TANF can receive for assistance. The numbers are based on family size in Alabama. The following table specifies the amount for families of varying sizes.

1- $165
2- $190
3- $215
4- $245
5- $275
6- $305
7- $335
8- $365
9- $395
10- $425
11- $455
12- $485
13- $515
14- $545
15- $575
16- $605

Since most families receiving TANF benefits are also receiving some other forms of assistance this is not the amount they will receive. Any income from jobs (51% on TANF have jobs) or other assistance is first subtracted from this benefit. In other words, for a family of four this means $245 dollars a month is the maximum TANF benefit they can receive. I am sure you are aware that this hardly leads to a life of luxury. There aren’t a lot of people standing in line to try to buy groceries for four people a month on $245.

Perhaps the real problem is that we are in some way encouraging people not to work by making it possible for them to just go on public assistance. In other words, what can we do to reduce the number of people on assistance, to get more people off of assistance and into the work place? As it turns out we know the answer to that because we are already doing it. Since 1996 when the TANF program went into place to replace the welfare system we had at that time, the government and independent concerns have been tracking the numbers of people on public assistance to see if the TANF program is an improvement. When TANF went into operation there were a little over 14 million individuals on the existing welfare system. As of 2013 there are a little less than 4 million people on the TANF system. While this is far too many, it is a 350% reduction in people on public assistance. All of this has taken place while the number of people in the US has grown by 48 million people.

In other words, we are looking at a problem has been reduced 350% in the last 18 years. One would never know that to listen to conservative pundits but numbers don’t lie, it is a problem that is getting smaller instead of one that is getting larger. Just in case you are wondering the Alabama TANF program has shrank 38.5% since its implementation in 1996. We never had as big a problem here as in some of the larger urban areas but the truth is that it is shrinking everywhere across the nation and usually by much larger numbers than ours as is evidenced by the overall 350% reduction.

Let’s look a little deeper at statistics about who is collecting TANF benefits. The average TANF family has 2.4 persons, including an average of 1.8 children. In other words, 75% of the people receiving TANF benefits are actually children. Over half of the TANF families receiving benefits have no adults in the household receiving TANF benefits. 51% of the families receiving TANF benefits are single parent families where the head of the household also has a job.

Let’s look at the average adult on the TANF program and the length of time they have been on it. After all, the narrative says that there are whole generations of families out there living on public assistance because they are simply too lazy to get a job. 41% of adults on TANF have been on it less than a year. Another 23% have been on TANF for less than two years. Only 12% have accrued a lifetime total of over 4 years. This same data shows that only 2% of adult TANF beneficiaries actually ever reach the 60 month limit.

I think everyone agrees that public assistance is a necessary evil, one that has to be carefully implemented and controlled both for the benefit of the people receiving it and those paying for it through their hard earned tax dollars. The old “welfare queen” narrative of people living high on the hog because they are simply too lazy to work and getting fat and happy on the government dole just doesn’t exist anymore. We have made a lot of good progress since 1996 towards eradicating the problem and we are still making progress in the direction. Unfortunately, that is not the message getting out to the American public.

Perhaps here in the modern land of OZ we should pay more attention to what is actually going on behind the curtain. Maybe if we weren’t so distracted by the booming voice of a corporate conglomeration intent upon distracting us with infuriating scenarios of a society too lazy to work while they pick our pockets and raid our treasury to finance the candidates they choose, we might actually be able to take control of our government again.

The Donald Runs for President

There is a rather well-worn maxim that says politics makes strange bedfellows. The gist of this statement is that often what seems like competing interests find themselves on the same side of individual issues and thus become temporary partners in pushing an agenda they mutually desire even if their core values are diametrically opposing. We are seeing this played out on the national presidential stage today with Donald Trump. Trump is a rather bombastic entrepreneur that is the epitome of what my dad used to call a snake oil salesman. He has made and lost several fortunes in some rather shady business dealings. Buying, building, and selling casinos is as akin to what most Americans consider business as loan sharking is to banking. It is a rough and tumble business historically prone to investment by organized crime and fantastically unsavory characters of every stripe.

Trump leveraged a middle end residential real estate business that his father started into a commercial real estate business aligned toward aggrandizement of his own name. The one thing Donald Trump has always been excellent at is self-promotion. He started out with some very large no money down projects that he leveraged into successful buildups with the help of 40 year tax abatements he was able to finagle from politicians in New York. He then leveraged a right-to-buy payout from the city government into a tidy fee for himself when the city built the Javits Convention Center. By the late 1980’s in a boom economy Trump acquired the Taj Mahal Casino by going heavily into unsecured debt. Massively expensive upgrades by Trump left him even deeper in debt. In 1989 he financed the building of another Taj Mahal casino with high interest junk bonds to the tune of another 1 billion dollars in debt that he couldn’t repay. On the verge or corporate and personal bankruptcy Trump filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on his corporate debts. Investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars but Trump was able to convince them that it was better than losing everything by fiscal blackmail. At the same time he was able to restructure and extend his personal debt. This was Trump’s first experience with corporate bankruptcy but it was not to be his last. He never again involved his own personal fortune directly in financing his business ventures. It was much safer to use other people’s money to finance his schemes.

By 1991, the restructured Taj Mahal emerged from corporate bankruptcy when Trump ceded 50% ownership in the casino to the original bondholders in exchange for a lowered interest rate and more time to pay. The contracts that Trump had made with vendors were restructured during this time. In order to understand what this means it is necessary to understand that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy gives a debtor shelter from creditors. Trump used this shelter to renegotiate contracts with vendors so that they received pennies on the dollar for services they had already rendered. With the shelter of the court Trump pointed out that they could either accept reduced payment or nothing at all because they had no leverage to force him to pay and the only other option would be that no one would get paid anything. This is how Chapter 11 bankruptcy works. The small creditors get the shaft and the large creditors extend their terms out until they can get paid. Trump is a master at this game. Besides personal aggrandizement and pompous arrogance it is probably his strongest skill.

Chapter 11 has worked so well for Trump that he has done it four times altogether. Trump’s casino property and real estate boondoggles filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1991, 1992, 2004, and 2009. Each time Trump received a huge personal salary while he negotiated the bankruptcy payments down by refusing to pay contractual debts his companies compiled. He has successively used less and less of his own personal money to finance his deals so his personal wealth has increased with each succeeding bankruptcy. Trump, true to his nature, sees nothing wrong with this business model.

“I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on “The Apprentice”. It’s not personal. It’s just business.” To be fair, Trump is not the only so called entrepreneur to utilize Chapter 11 laws to build a huge personal fortune while refusing to pay back other people’s money. The last Republican presidential candidate did the same thing for his personal fortune although he wasn’t so brazen about it.

You might notice that Trump doesn’t like to use the “B” (bankruptcy) word in his explanations. It has a negative connotation. Borrowing other people’s money and then not paying it back as a business model is frowned upon by most honest Americans who believe they are obligated to pay the debts they sign their name to. It’s a basic tenet of something called integrity.

What is most amazing about Trump’s run for the highest office in the land is who is supporting him. Conservatives and grass roots Tea Partiers love Trump’s brash posturing. The same people who lecture everyone on fiscal responsibility are supporting someone who has made an extravagant living borrowing and spending obscene amounts of money that he can’t pay back. I have a standard response now when I hear someone saying how Trump is a great business man. He bankrupted a casino. Casinos are business designed to skillfully separate people who don’t understand the concrete science of odds from their money in a foolproof manner and Trump has managed to bankrupt four of them.

The Gun Ownership Argument

Once again our nation has been shocked by someone wielding a gun to slaughter innocent people. It’s hard to say if this is a new trend or something that sells newspapers and 24 hour news airtime so well that we hear about it more than we used to. The one thing I am certain of is that it is a horrible crime whenever and wherever it is committed. It’s hard for me to imagine how someone could be so twisted as to kill people just to make a point or for personal enjoyment but obviously there are those who do. As usual in such situations our gun laws immediately come up for review and discussion. The fact that we are a rarity for an industrialized civil society in that guns are so widely owned never escapes anyone’s attention when incidents like this occur.

I was raised by a gun owner and NRA lifetime member. My dad was a hunter and a competition target shooter. I was shooting a rifle before I was seven and a handgun not long after. Many happy hours of target shooting and hunting with my dad followed. He reloaded for himself and for other target shooters, down to the details of having different loads for different guns of the same caliber. Guns were serious business to my dad. He supplemented the money necessary for these activities with his reloading and teaching gun safety as a certified instructor for civilians as well as police officers. For a time, he had a gun shop on the side as well, so I was raised in an environment where guns were quite commonplace and part of your daily lives. The one overarching message from observing my dad giving shooting lessons and safety courses is that handguns were designed for one purpose and one purpose only, they kill people. They are not to be pointed at someone to control their actions or to protect yourself. If you point a gun at someone it is to kill them. Any other proposed use for handguns is simply avoiding the point that they are made to kill other people.

We have become desensitized to this reality by the way that handguns are regularly utilized. Police use them as a means of controlling the actions of suspects. Movies and TV shows are full of people using handguns for this and other reasons but the reality is that they really only have one function and any attempted usage for something else often leads to that purpose whether we mean to or not. People whose express purpose is to kill other people realize this. Unfortunately, most other people do not. They are concealable, they are relatively lightweight and they are extremely deadly when used by someone with reasonable skill.

Every time some sort of mass killing spree occurs there is an instant backlash against the proliferation of gun ownership in this country. This is usually followed by an opposite and equal reaction in which a lot of gun owners point out that if someone else would have had a gun, maybe there wouldn’t have been so many innocent people killed. There is an element of truth in both arguments. However, the likelihood that an untrained gun owner will be able to stop someone intent on mass murder while under fire is a long shot to say the least. I am sure it has happened and will happen again in the future but the odds of having such a person in the same place as some random nut job killer intent on taking a lot of innocent people out are rather long. Add to that the better than average chance that such a gunfight will result in even more innocent people being shot and the whole concept of safety by more gun wielding falls apart.

There is however, one other factor that needs to be taken into account when we weigh the good that comes from gun ownership vs. the bad. There are probably a lot of reasons for this but the fact remains that gun accidents account for a lot of accidental deaths in this country. I am struck by this often when reading the news. It is not as dramatic as someone walking into a church in order to kill a lot of people he doesn’t know but it happens a lot more often so it has to be accounted for if we are to truly do an analysis of the relative merits of massive gun ownership. The truth is no one likes to hear about this. No one gets any sort of pleasure from a news story of a dad accidentally shooting his four year old son while getting his gun out of the car. It won’t be on the 24 hour news cycle because there isn’t a lot of good ratings in horrifying people with the death of innocents accidentally killed by their loved ones. I can’t imagine the heartbreak and constant pain that would follow such an incident but it happens and it happens a lot more often than the mass shootings we seem to be so fascinated with.

If you add up all the mass shootings since 2010, in 19 separate cases some 154 people have died in these sensational incidents while 97 have been shot and survived. During this same time period we have averaged over 600 children per year being killed in gun accidents. In case you haven’t already done the math it come out to over 3200 children who have died from accidental gunshot wounds in the US since 2010. Any way you slice this information the fact remains that it is a direct result of our fascination with owning guns in this country. It simply doesn’t occur in other civilized nations because they don’t have the same kind of fascination. Breaking this down a little further, we average somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 accidental shootings of children in the US annually. In 2010 alone had 15,576 accidental shootings of children in the US.

Another argument that usually comes up is that such killers will find another way to kill people if they don’t have guns. While this is possibly true it has no effect at all on the fact that without gun ownership we wouldn’t have so many gun accidents. You simply can’t make that argument at all unless you ignore reason. Every gun that is not sold in the US is a gun that will never accidently shoot a child. The corollary to this is that every gun that is sold increases the likelihood and therefore the number of children that will accidentally be shot. More gun ownership equals more accidental shootings of children. They are directly and indisputably linked.

Let’s go back to the original discussion. Suppose every mass killing in the US since 2010 had been headed off by the presence of a gun toting citizen capable and skilled enough to kill each of the cold blooded murdering shooters before they could get the first shot off. We would now have 154 more innocent people walking around unharmed in the US. We can leave off the sheer improbability of this occurring but these are the numbers. This is the very best scenario we could possibly have had happen by having an armed, trained, and somewhat prescient citizen who could see what was happening beforehand and kill the gunman before he has a chance to kill anyone else.

Unfortunately, we would still have over 3200 dead children who have been accidentally killed during that same time period because we have a fascination with gun ownership. I don’t know how we stop people intent on killing innocent people with guns. I suspect it is a price we pay for living in a free society. What I do know is that there is a direct correlation between innocent children dying from gunshot wounds and the number of guns that we own.

Update Rates

Modern data acquisition systems that are used for gathering data during testing are now digital instead of analog. In layman's terms, snapshots of data are recorded at a specified rate and then lines are drawn between the snapshots. In the case of a pressure reading, an acquisition system records a pressure of say 100 psig and then records the pressure again some specified time later. A representative graph is then produced by connecting these readings with straight lines. In modern systems this rate can be very high, up to 50,000 times per second (50,000 hz). Naturally, matching sampling rate with signal rate becomes pretty important as you can get graphs that have no resemblance to reality if you don't correlate them correctly. Old movies wherein the wagon wheels appear to be spinning backwards are a good example of this error. The camera took a snapshot at a time rate that wasn't correlated and when these snapshots are spliced together the wheel appears to be spinning backwards. It turns out our mind does the same thing with optical data that we take in with our sense of sight.

I was reading a short article about update rates and the how that correlates to our understanding of time passing. According to the article humans have the ability to do optical updates in the 60 hz range. In other words, we can't do it much faster than that no matter what we do. Dogs and cats are in the 80-90 hz range. The author was putting forth the suggestion that this has to do with life expectancy AND suggesting that updating at a faster rate in effect makes the total time passage between life and death similar in both instances. Carrying this comparison a little further he went on to explain that the common fly has the ability to update in the 225-250 hz range. (This kind of explains why it is so hard to kill a fly with a fly swatter as we must move in extreme slow motion from their perspective). They also live a very short life... but .... is it true that it seems just as long to them?

Of course my mind instantly went off in several other directions on that same subject. I read some time ago that we seldom actually update at full speed. It simply takes up too much concentration and energy and for efficiency we usually observe something for long enough to establish a pattern and then slow down our update rates in favor of predictive snapshots taken occasionally only to confirm the pattern is correct. Presumably.... this means that the more comfortable we get with the idea that we don't need to fully utilize full update rates the slower this actually gets until it is at a rate that is only a very small energy drain. We can recalibrate and update faster when something is amiss and we sense that our prediction is wrong. This was all written in explanation of optical illusions and the fact that eyewitness accounts are often so wrong when it comes to the actual physics of what happened.

I found this interesting enough at the time but somehow the correlation between update rates and our understanding of the passage of time also triggered some completely new thoughts. I have been researching how aging affects the brain as I have noticed that I sometimes now struggle to recall words or terminology for a short period while discussing things with other people. What I discovered is that the brain is a lot like a processor in that it is very parallel but not necessarily extremely fast. As we age we start to form more connections but are not as parallel. In other words, we can pull up more detail and in depth understanding but not necessarily at the same speed. It is the difference between passing information at top speed and passing information at a slower speed but with more contingent connections. Upon reading this, I felt a little better as I noticed in my own case that the terminology came to me; it just sometimes was not instantaneous. It more or less matches what I have read about how this works.

All of this goes to explain my next connection from the update rate. One of the things I discovered in researching how the brain works is the oft quoted idea that exercising the brain is a necessary part of staying mentally sharp. I think that is pretty well known and accepted but the update thing suddenly added another dimension to the equation. Currently, there is a sort of cottage industry of sites such as luminosity pushing mental exercise word games and such as a means of keeping the brain agile and healthy. I think this will only work to a point. If we do crossword puzzles or any other similar activity we find that they get easier the more of them you do. We are so good at pattern recognition type thinking that we begin to see who people who design such things go about the process. I found this out years ago when I started doing crossword puzzles in our local morning paper. I struggled at first but soon could do them in a very short time period. However.... I found that when I tried to expand and do those in the evening paper or other publications I was not nearly as efficient at getting them done. I didn't put a whole lot of thought into why but I think it was simply pattern recognition of that particular author.

It seemed an arcane and ridiculous thing to spend a lot of time on at the time and I soon lost interest. Keeping in mind the update rate thing it suddenly dawned on me today that it isn't doing anything in particular that keeps our brain agile it is doing something we don't know how to do. In other words, it is the very process of learning something new that requires our concentration.... our focus... to the point that we are in effect straining the bounds of that update rate and making our brain work at full speed or full effort. That is the key I think. A new subject...... one that we have to constantly go back and forth to different sources and really rack our concentration out on is tiring but absolutely necessary for high brain function. In effect, it is the difference between jogging around the block and doing interval training. It is the heavy lifting of wading through something complicated enough to require our full attention that strengthens the thought process; not the comfortable recollection and repetition of something we know well.

If this is true.... and I think it demonstrably is; maybe it also explains why people are often more comfortable in shared belief systems. Having faith in why things occur is obviously much less taxing on the brain than searching for reasons why things occur. It also explains why most people prefer affirmation to information. Maybe I should start a research project correlating intellectual curiousity with early onset dementia and Alzheimer's.

What does all this mean? Maybe it means I have too much time on my hands... but more likely it is just another manifestation of somehow needing to understand how everything ties together.

Work Ethic

Occasionally, something happens in the periphery of my life that really makes me angry. Usually it has something to do with a personal acquaintance but it can be more random. I was raised in a manner that probably doesn't occur that much anymore in that my parents instilled in me a work ethic that is very prevalent in my world view. In other words, any task that is worth doing is worth doing to the ultimate of your ability. I seldom do anything at less than a full effort as I not only feel it is the right thing to do; I get a sense of satisfaction from the effort as well.

The other side of this ethic is the idea that life is often unfair. Reality teaches us that the concept of fair seldom is the overriding concern in nature so to expect that life will be fair is to put yourself in for a lot of disappointment. Better to understand that fair is a human concept and one that seldom actually applies across the wide spectrum of our lives except as a goal. Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for the concept of being fair and feel that it is a fundamental goal in our relationship with other people. However, to expect that everything in life will be fair is not very realistic.

I have always felt that employment is simply an extension of myself. In other words, I don't separate my working life from my personal aspirations of how to treat other people. If I work for someone, I do my level best to give them the best return on the investment they are making in me. Again, it is not simply an ethical concern, it is part of the self satisfaction I derive from my work and the catalyst for going to work in the first place. I have been lucky enough to have worked in industries where I enjoy my work. Either that or I have never stayed in a job that I didn't enjoy, but I honestly don't remember a job that I had where I hated going to work every day. I have had some rough jobs, working in sweat shop manufacturing, farm work, construction work on many different levels, and even worked for a while in retail sales when I was in high school. I always derived a sense of satisfaction from doing the job and doing it well. I can't say I would have done the jobs without getting pay, but I also would not say that I ever did a job that I didn't derive a sense of satisfaction from.

Recently, I have become aware of a shift in how jobs are perceived. The last few years have been very hard on those seeking employment as unemployment has hit and lingered at levels that were simply unheard of for much of my working life. I won't bother to go into the realities of how such numbers are computed but it seems rather obvious that jobs are much harder to come by today than at any point in memory. Beyond that, most jobs that are available are low paying jobs with little or no opportunity for real advancement. This has led to a situation where there is excess of labor and very little demand of anything but the barest minimum of skilled labor in most jobs that are available. It has also created an ideology amongst business owners that I find to be dangerous and destructive.

Many businesses now operate on a business model that considers the excess of labor as their own private disposable pool of labor. We are seeing that play out in ways that simply didn't exist for much of this half of the last century. Wal-Mart is just one example of an entity that subsists largely off of that pool of labor but there are many, many more very successful and wealth corporate entities that use this same model. The long and the short of this model is that most employees wind up working less than full time so that they get no benefits. This would not be possible if unemployment was not rampant and a lot of these corporations fully realize this and lobby accordingly.

Free market adherents point out that this is perfectly acceptable under our system without admitting that this is not a free market in reality. Many of these industries take full advantage of government subsidies and tax breaks to build their business and in effect utilize government assistance programs to subsidize the ability of their employees to subsist on the wages they pay them. In other words, the government subsidizes their profits by making up the slack in what their employees make while at the same time giving massive tax breaks to the corporation up front. This system actually has no resemblance at all to a free market but you won't hear that view espoused very often.

I see this scenario playing out over and over again with my daughter's friends. The same people that rail against the work ethic of our youth and insist on cutting government assistance programs make huge profits off of the system through tax breaks and stock investments. I see the same germination of a work ethic in my daughter's friends that I am so familiar with but it is being strangled by a system that treats them like so many cogs in a machine. They struggle to subsist on wages little above minimum wage while their hours are cut and they are increasingly treated with less respect and more disdain from the people who profit from their labor. Small business owners short their hours, demand faster and more efficient use of their time while at the same time complaining that their employees have no loyalty.

Ethics is a two way street. You cannot treat people with no respect and expect to get respect in return. That has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with reality. There has been a lot of publicity lately about how skewed our economic distribution system has become. Corporate leaders now make 700 times what their employees make as a national average. Small business owners seem to have taken this ratio to heart as well. While I have not seen real numbers on this difference, I can see by direct observation that the ratio at this level is well out of balance. Employees who work 32 hours a week at less than $10 an hour support business owners who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and call themselves job creators in a self-congratulatory way.

These same business owners rail against paying taxes while at the same time offering jobs that make it impossible for their employees to make a wage high enough to support themselves. Most are presently realigning their work scheduling to make sure that they are not liable for providing health care coverage for their employees under the new law. While this saves them money on the front end, it inevitably costs them more money on the long end when these employees are later forced to seek the most expensive care in the free world at hospital emergency rooms. These costs are then passed on to everyone else in the form of higher insurance premiums to cover these exorbitant costs to the system. In other words, those who have insurance subsidize those who don't while business owners reap the difference in profit margins.

The point of my most recent anger came in a conversation with my daughter the other night. The small business owner she has worked for the last few years is expanding his business. He has a fairly loyal group of steady employees who have worked for him for the last few years; so much so that he rarely makes an appearance at his business except to pick up money and distribute paychecks. As a part of his expansion he is asking this core group of employees to help train new employees and establish his new business in another community. This means a further trip to work, more responsibility, and more headaches for everyone.

In order to deal with these problems he has established a new policy requiring all employees to come to a weekly organizational meeting at the new place of business. In fairness to him, all these employees have received a modest increase in pay for their new responsibilities. However, these new required meetings are to be attended on their own time. His employees are all hourly employees but are expected to increase their attendance of off work meetings for which they will not get paid.

This is a point of contention to the point of outright anger with me. Every employer can choose to employ their people as hourly wage earners or as salaried employees. As there are advantages and disadvantages to each system, it is a matter of choosing which is best for the employer as employees seldom get the chance to choose. Having chosen to pay people on an hourly basis because it is most beneficial to the owner, it is both ethically reprehensible and illegal to then demand these employees attend meetings for which they will not be paid. These meetings are not so that the employees can advance their prospects or increase their earning power they are called so that the owner can advance his personal prospects and increase his profits.

I would venture to say that most small businesses still realize that it is their employees who make or break their business. Somehow, many can't seem to make the connection between treating their employees with respect and having their employees' respect in return. After all, loyalty and respect are simply outgrowths of this basic concept of human ethics. Give and you shall receive is accepted as a concrete truth without understanding that it is impossible to continuously receive without giving. Unfortunately, many of these concepts of honesty, integrity, and basic human consideration have been replaced with simple greed and profit maximization at the expense of all else.

I have made every effort to teach my daughter the value of work and ethical honesty. If you work for someone you owe them your best effort and your absolute honesty. The current economic situation of disposable labor makes a mockery of all of these ideals. I am tired of seeing the same people who rail about work ethics utilize business practices devoid of ethics of any kind. People learn by example and we are teaching a whole generation of workers that ethics and work are mutually exclusive. I cannot say what the results of this type of business model will be with any certainty. Whatever the result will be, they are multiplied in effect by the duration that we allow this to continue and I see no end in sight.