http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-mean-if-i-lose-to-mitt-romney-ill-probably-kill,30092/
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Law Enforcement in the Suburbs
I’m driving on a one-lane road near a construction zone, and a police car is parked at the side of the road. There is a line of cars in front of me waiting for the light to change. The other cars start moving, but the car in front of me doesn’t. The driver is talking to the policeman in the police car. I see that the light has gone back to red again, while this conversation continues. So I honk my horn a little bit to remind the person in front of me that I’m behind her and would like to make the next light. The driver drives off to the side, apparently in order to continue her talk with the officer.
As I drive by, heading for the red light, the cop yells at me “Take it easy!”. I ignore him and keep going.
This reminded me of the last time I was addressed by a local police officer. He was parked in a lane that is used to drop off and pick up passengers at the train station. He was blocking traffic. When we eventually got around him, by driving over a low divider, I gave him a look. He noticed and said something like “You got a problem?”. I can’t remember what I said — our car was moving and there wasn’t a lot of time for discussion — but it might have been something like “We’re trying to get around you”.
As we drove around the nearby traffic circle, the cop put on his flashing lights and pulled us over. He was upset that I questioned his authority in public. We had a fairly long talk. I was kind of hoping he’d arrest me for something so I could sue the city. Perhaps he thought I was obstructing justice by interfering with the performance of his official duties, i.e., sitting in his parked car in a special lane that is designed for dropping off and picking up passengers.
I wonder if police officers in the suburbs are so pressed for real confrontations that they look for excuses to exercise their authority. To prove that they are in charge. They don’t have lots of bad guys to deal with, so they try to insure that we citizens treat them with total respect, even if they’re blocking traffic for no good reason.
It’s not an earth-shaking situation for sure, but this is my blog and there don’t seem to be any cops around.
Sophistry
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “sophistry” as “the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving”.
Consider, for example, the statement on Mitt Romney’s official website that says he wants to “make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal (income tax) rates”.
So if you make a lot of money and the last dollar you earn is now taxed at a rate of 35%, your new, lower rate will be 28%. That will lower your taxes by quite a large amount, especially if you earn a million dollars or more.
If you don’t make so much money, and your last dollar is taxed at a rate of 25%, your new rate will be 20%. Your marginal rate will go down by 5%. Not bad, but the high earner’s rate will go down by 7%. That’s how percentages work.
It certainly sounds like Romney is advocating a big tax cut for the highest earners, bigger as both a percentage of income and as a dollar amount.
At the last debate, however, Governor Romney said: “The top 5 percent will continue to pay 60 percent, as they do today. I’m not looking to cut taxes for wealthy people. I am looking to cut taxes for middle-income people.”
Well, if he’s not looking to cut taxes for wealthy people, he’s made a grievous error.
But wait — the top 5% will continue to pay 60% of all income taxes! Doesn’t that mean that the high earners aren’t getting a tax cut at all?
Of course not. Since the total amount of taxes being paid will go down, the top 5% will still pay 60% of that smaller total. At the same time, they will receive a big tax cut on their “earned” income, much bigger in fact than low earners.
As Bill Clinton said today, someone running for President thinks we’re dumb. No surprise, it’s Mitt Romney, sophist.
Ending the War on Drugs
Back in April, the Summit of the Americas was held in Cartagena, Colombia. President Obama attended the conference, which received quite a lot of news coverage. Unfortunately, the story that dominated the news in the US was that Secret Service agents were caught hiring prostitutes.
A much bigger story was that, for the first time, some Central and South American governments called for an end to the American-led “War on Drugs”. The presidents of Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia vigorously argued that the “War on Drugs” has failed and that a different approach is needed.
Writing in The New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto describes a discussion at the conference “that for the first time in forty years challenged the United States’ dominance on drug issues (and) focused urgently instead on the ways that the financial health, political stability, and national security of virtually every country in the Americas has been undermined by the drug trade”.
The president of Costa Rica made these remarks:
“For Costa Rica, the road — our road, at least — is not the war on drugs, because we have no army and we are not willing to be hooked onto that convoy of destruction, of militarism, of exorbitant expenditure, that distracts states from their efforts toward social investment….Costa Rica has already made progress in decriminalizing drug consumption, (because) we believe it’s a question of public health, and not of criminal law”.
It might take decades to change our government’s policy, but it seems more likely every year that the use of drugs like marijuana and heroin will eventually be decriminalized, regulated and taxed. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol and it isn’t working for these drugs either.
“Drugs: The Rebellion in Cartagena” is a long article in The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/drugs-rebellion-cartagena/
A much shorter article about the conference appeared in The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/18/cartagena-war-on-drugs
A Universe Unto Ourselves
Professor David Barash published an article in the NY Times recently discussing how parasites make use of and even manipulate their host’s behavior, often in remarkable and creepy ways. He asks whether we humans are likewise fulfilling the needs of the tiny creatures within us (and the needs of our genes, which aren’t tiny creatures but lists of instructions).
Professor Barash concludes with what he says is a heretical possibility: “Maybe there is no one in charge — no independent, self-serving, order-issuing homunculus”. But this isn’t such a heretical idea, at least not a new one. Philosophers, most famously David Hume, have long questioned whether there is a self, a single self-conscious mental entity that is “me”. Hume claimed that all he was conscious of was “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section VI).
What everyone should agree on is that we are biological organisms, living things composed of trillions of much smaller living things. The human body is composed of roughly 10 trillion living cells. In addition, we provide living space to roughly 100 trillion other life forms, mostly bacteria, mostly in our intestines. Each one of us is a community. Somehow the operation of this community results in the almost overwhelming conviction that we have a single seat of consciousness, observing the world and controlling our actions.
How this happens is still a mystery. But it might change our perspective on who we are if we keep in mind that every action we perform, every thought we have, reflects the actions of a small universe of other living things.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/whos-in-charge-inside-your-head.html?ref=opinion
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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