A friend who’s active-duty military and who was in Afghanistan remarked that he didn’t think the Afghans could get by “without our help.”

Hmm. I held my tongue, but hmm.

My friend is a decent enough sort, but he’s in the Army and sees the world from that viewpoint. As a matter of psychological self-preservation, he must see the world from that viewpoint.

Nobody likes to see himself or herself as a villain. We always try to believe that we do what is right. If not right, then necessary. If not necessary, then what we had no other choice but to do.

When my friend thinks about the American occupation of Afghanistan, he thinks about building clinics and dispensing antibiotics to kids. As much as he can, he avoids thinking about the more common instances of bombing wedding parties, shooting kids, and urinating on the corpses. He doesn’t do that, so he tries to ignore it and focuses on any positive images he can find.

But “helping the Afghans”? Forget about making a sarcastic retort. It was all I could do not to laugh.

The Afghans did not request American “help” any more than they requested it from the Russians or the British, who previously attacked and occupied their country. They did not request that the United States install a puppet government. They did not request that their country be bombed and that their people be slaughtered.

One thing I’ve learned is that war is constant. Three reasons are most important.

First, human nature contains an aggressive and destructive impulse that war satisfies. That impulse often drowns out the voices of conscience and reason — in some of us more often than others.

Second, war is financially profitable for some people. Not for the soldiers who fight in it, and certainly not for the victims of its carnage. But bankers and weapons merchants make a killing,  figuratively and literally. Smedley Butler, a Marine Corps Major General, discussed this in his book War is a Racket.

Third, war is politically profitable for government officials. It allows them to pose as courageous heroes who defend the nation. It enables them to crack down on dissent and enact oppressive laws. It distracts the population from the country’s real problems: As Shakespeare put it in King Henry’s advice to Prince Hal, “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” And it keeps the military busy overseas, instead of giving them free time to think about staging a coup at home.

I don’t have anything particularly wise to say to my friend about Afghanistan or America’s other imperial aggressions. As long as he wears the uniform, he has to believe in what he’s doing, and there’s no point in trying to talk him out of it. You or I would probably feel the same in his circumstances.

What I can do is talk more generally about how every person’s life is sacred; how war, killing, and destruction should be avoided whenever possible; and how America was founded to be a republic, not an empire.

War and oppression will always be around because they’re a consequence of human nature. However, from time to time, we can moderate and reduce them a bit.

It’s not as inspiring a goal as universal peace and brotherhood, but it’s what we can achieve on earth.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Graphic: United Federation of Teachers.

Like most informed people, I’ve watched in disgust as over a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted laws to prevent Democrats from voting.

They don’t come right out and say that’s what they’re doing, of course. To hear them talk, it’s about preventing “vote fraud.” That follows a script from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that works for America’s super-rich against the 99.9 percent.

Those same people were curiously incurious about vote fraud in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The 2000 election was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, voter suppression, and “spoiled” ballots in Florida — where the election machinery was controlled by George W. Bush’s brother Jeb. The Bushes’ dirty tricks made the vote count so close that a recount was needed. Then, Bush’s friends on the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount and they awarded the presidency to Bush. Rather than cast doubt on the legitimacy of the U.S. government, Democratic candidate Al Gore conceded without a fight. Later, a consortium of six major newspapers (including The New York Times) and the University of Chicago did a comprehensive recount and analyzed the data under various assumptions. In every scenario, Gore won.

The 2004 presidential election was stolen by the Bush-Cheney machine in much the same way, but this time in Ohio rather than Florida. A University of Pennsylvania statistician found that based on the data, it was virtually impossible for Bush to have won the 2004 election. But the ever-subservient news media ignored the evidence of massive vote fraud when it benefitted the Bush-Cheney regime.

At the retail level, however — that of individuals or small groups of people conspiring to vote fraudulently — very few cases have been documented. Republican cries of “vote fraud” are simply a pretext to prevent voting by groups likely to vote Democratic: minorities, young people, the poor, and the elderly.

In the eyes of Republicans and their super-rich corporate paymasters, such people have no business voting in the first place. They’re not “the right kind of people.” If they were good enough to vote, they’d be rich. And corrupt. And white.

The Republican agenda is simple: Government should be of, by, and for the rich and the politically connected. Voting by the common people is a nuisance that should be minimized as much as possible.

Democrats want more people to vote for the same reason that Republicans want fewer people to vote: The majority favors ideas, programs, and policies that Democrats say they support, even if their actions often contradict their promises.

Progressives believe that for democracy to be legitimate, voting should be extended as widely as possible. No group should be deprived of the vote, either directly or through subterfuge.

But It’s Not That Simple

But the issue isn’t quite as simple as either side pretends. Democracy as an institution was not handed down to us on tablets from Mount Sinai. It has taken many forms in many different times and places.

In the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, literacy tests were used to prevent black citizens from voting. That’s an unsavory purpose. The law was also used to harass and humiliate black citizens. That’s despicable.

On the other hand, consider the official justification for the law: In order to be properly informed about the issues, voters had to be able to read. If they couldn’t read, then they couldn’t be properly informed. If they weren’t informed, then they couldn’t vote intelligently. Society has a legitimate interest in limiting the vote to people who can vote intelligently. You can say that the argument was abused, and it was, but it’s not a crazy argument. It makes sense.

In the early days of the American republic, voting was limited to white male property owners. Women couldn’t vote. Even if they were free and not slaves, blacks couldn’t vote. That limitation of voting rights led to a particular kind of government and political system. It was worse in some respects than our system, and better in other respects.

Even in the birthplace of democracy, ancient Athens, only white male Athenians could vote. Women couldn’t vote, and were considered about equal in status to horses. Foreigners couldn’t vote, and were considered fit for enslavement. That limitation of voting rights led to a government and society that was pretty good for white male Athenians. Its results were pretty good for all of Western civilization that came afterward, giving us foundations in science, philosophy, art, and politics. The cost was what we’d call injustice. Athenian males disagreed.

The Real Issues in Voting Rights

The real issues in voting rights are:

• What values do we consider most important?
• What kind of society and government do we want?
• And who counts as part of “we”?

From a political-science standpoint, democracy only works in small political units up to populations of about 500,000. When a political unit is bigger than that, democracy breaks down because (1) it’s impossible for the majority to know what’s going on, and (2) each individual’s vote is so diluted that it has almost no chance of making a difference. Ancient Athens had a population of about 250,000 — of whom only about 30,000 could vote.

With larger populations, democracy degenerates into oligarchy, just as it has in the United States. Democracy is no longer about rule by the majority, because that’s practically impossible. Instead, it becomes a device by which the ruling oligarchy deceives the majority into consenting to whatever the oligarchy does for its own benefit. It’s a way to give the majority of people the illusion that they have some control without actually giving them control. In essence, voting is transformed from an exercise in governance into an act of consent to be ruled and exploited by the oligarchy.

That said, there is some wider benefit in having people feel that they are part of the society. That applies even if the political system is corrupt. Voting rights are a way to recognize people as full citizens, giving them status and respect. People who feel that they are part of the society are more inclined to cooperate with others, help the needy, and contribute in other ways that the ruling oligarchy neglects because it’s too busy stuffing its bank accounts and starting wars.

For those reasons, I think that voting rights should be extended as widely as possible, even though the people voting are unlikely to have any power. It’s not a political but a social exercise: People who can vote are part of our society. We, as their peers, show them respect and acceptance.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Technorati Tags: voting, elections, Republicans, vote fraud, democracy, Jim Crow

By N.S. Palmer

It’s inscribed on a sign above the entrance to the Pentagon:

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

I recalled that principle of American government when I read about the “National Defense Authorization Act.” Enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama, it states:

Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Congress passed the Authorization for Military Force in 2001 after the 9/11 false-flag attacks that were blamed on “al Qaeda.”

All right-thinking people believe it means the president and the U.S. government may kill, torture, oppress, or launch wars of aggression against anyone they choose.

They will retain that authority for the duration of the “war on terror” — or, as commentator Jon Stewart remarked,

until the war on terror ends, and terror surrenders and is no longer available as a human emotion.

In other words, if it’s up to them, forever.

In that respect, the “war on terror” is exactly like the “war on drugs.” It can never be won and is never intended to be won. It’s merely an open-ended justification for profiteering and a police state.

Notice how the wording of the new law:

Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

almost precisely inverts the meaning of the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

All “evil empires” collapse sooner or later, often in unpredictable ways. We’re waiting to see how it will happen this time.

It will probably involve a good deal of suffering. We can only hope that some of the suffering hits the right people.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

I recently saw the movie “The Help,” which chronicled the insults and indignities suffered by black people in the early 1960s.

Its basic theme, of black people humiliated and oppressed by whites who were either racist or oblivious, rang true. It was consistent with my experience in life, though it took me many years to understand that experience.

As a child, I knew almost nothing about racism. It never occurred to me that racial differences were significant.

I don’t say that to establish how virtuous and enlightened I was, because I wasn’t. Virtue requires conscious choice. And children, no matter how clever, are almost never enlightened. I didn’t choose not to be a racist. I simply wasn’t one.

Even as a child, I was a nerd. I lived in a world of books and ideas, not of people. I still do. I might not remember your face (or your race), but I’ll remember numbers and facts about you. We nerds don’t dislike people, but people don’t register with us as vividly as do ideas, facts, and principles. As a character on the delightful and quickly-cancelled TV sitcom “Wonderfalls” said of himself, “It’s a borderline autistic thing.”

By the way, that’s not just a funny line from a TV show. Some neuroscience researchers think that autism is an extreme form of male cognitive organization. But I digress.

In my primary school class, Greg was the only African-American kid. There were no Hispanics or Asians, so except for Greg, we were all white. As far as I could tell, no one treated Greg any differently from the rest of us. I never noticed anyone make hostile remarks about him or pick fights with him. Of course, as a nerd, I wasn’t attuned to that kind of thing. However, I would have noticed it if it had been intense or repeated.

Much of the time when I was a child, one or the other of two black ladies took care of me.

Margie, my parents’ housekeeper, was from Alabama. She’d previously worked in an ice cream shop, which to a seven-year-old boy seemed like a glamorous and exciting job. She taught me how to scoop ice cream “the professional way” and how to make chocolate sodas. She praised the childish comic strips that I drew and she encouraged my artwork. She nagged me to practice for my piano lessons.

Bea, my grandparents’ housekeeper, was a plump, good-natured lady a little over four feet tall. Whenever my father saw her, he jokingly asked Bea if she was standing up or sitting down. She was devoted to my grandparents and to me. She taught me a lot, including personal hygiene.

And yet, there was something odd about Bea’s relationship to my grandparents. I didn’t understand it at the time. My maternal grandfather loved Bea but hated black people. That wasn’t what he called them, but you can guess the word he used.

After a while, I realized the inconsistency of my grandfather’s attitude: he hated black people in general, but every black person who he  knew personally was “different.” The ones he knew were all right. It was only the ones he didn’t know who were — well, whatever he thought they were. He never elaborated on the subject, at least not to me.

In high school, one of my best friends was John, an African-American who again was one of a very small number of black students at the school. Everyone, including John, made jokes about race, but as far as I could tell it was all good-natured. Just as with Greg in primary school, I was never aware of anyone being unfriendly to John or saying hateful things on account of his race. He was a very likeable guy, and as far as I could tell, everyone liked him.

In college, one of my friends was Charlie, a pre-med student. That was when I first became aware of race as an issue, though I was still fairly obtuse and insensitive about it. Charlie was one of a fairly small number of black students at our college.

My perception might have been unfair, but it seemed to me that most of our black students confirmed the worst racist stereotypes. I thought that they weren’t serious about their studies, and that they complained constantly about real and imagined insults. Looking back, I’d guess that my perception was biased by those very same racist stereotypes, but that’s what I thought I saw.

Charlie was different. (That sounds just like something my grandfather would have said.) Unlike the other black students, he wasn’t on scholarship. Whenever you saw Charlie, he was doing one of three things: studying, participating in class, or working at one of the part-time jobs he held to pay his way through college. The other black students thought he was “acting white” and viewed him with disdain. He graduated with straight ‘A’s. I’m sure that he’s now an eminent doctor somewhere.

How much hurt and anger lurked beneath the smiles and easy-going demeanor of all those black people? Were they really as happy as they seemed?

I hope so. But I suspect it was partly because they knew what happened to black people who expressed dissatisfaction or stepped out of line.

What have I learned from all that? I suppose it amounts to this:

• A just society doesn’t treat any group of people as second-class citizens.
• Even if people smile when they’re mistreated, it doesn’t mean they’re happy about it or that they think it’s okay.
• An injustice done to any person is an injustice done to all of us, and we should treat it as such.

As well as what I always knew:

• All people have infinite worth and importance. To the extent that we can, we should treat them that way.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Old wine in new bottles” is a common phrase in English. It refers to the practice of taking something old, dressing it up a little, and then pretending that it’s new.

Like so many phrases and proverbs in Western civilization, this one comes from the Bible. In this case, however, it reverses Jesus’ statement from Matthew 9:17:

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

In our time, we get a lot of old wine in new bottles. At the grocery store, we get “New! Improved!” laundry detergents whose only change is a “new! improved!” price. In politics, we get the “unitary executive” theory, which recycles the medieval doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and “privatization,” an updated version of the 18th-century enclosure movement. In literature, we get dumbed-down re-workings of Shakespeare, made suitable for our thuggish and illiterate popular culture.

And then there’s science. We’ve been conditioned to believe that science is always new and shiny. But contemporary scientific research often just re-states, in modern terms, truths that have been known for centuries or millennia.

The latest case of old science in new bottles is reported in the June 18, 2011 issue of Science News:

Villagers from an Amazonian group called the Mundurucu intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal maths education, say psychologist Veronique Izard of the Universite Paris Descartes and her colleagues …

Study co-author and Harvard University psychologist Elizabeth Spelke argues that evolution has endowed people with “core knowledge” about several domains, including physical space.”

(“Geometry Comes Naturally to the Unschooled Mind”)

None of that would be a shock to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (424 – 348 BCE). Over 2,000 years ago, he told in his dialogue “Meno” about an encounter between his teacher Socrates and an uneducated slave boy:

SOCRATES: He is Greek, and speaks Greek, does he not?

MENO: Yes, indeed; he was born in the house.

SOCRATES: Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers.

MENO: I will.

SOCRATES: Tell me, boy, do you know that a figure like this is a square?

BOY: I do.

SOCRATES: And you know that a square figure has these four lines equal?

BOY: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And these lines which I have drawn through the middle of the square are also equal?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: A square may be of any size?

BOY: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And if one side of the figure be of two feet, and the other side be of two feet, how much will the whole be? Let me explain: if in one direction the space was of two feet, and in the other direction of one foot, the whole would be of two feet taken once?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: But since this side is also of two feet, there are twice two feet?

BOY: There are.

SOCRATES: Then the square is of twice two feet?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: And how many are twice two feet? count and tell me.

BOY: Four, Socrates.

SOCRATES: And might there not be another square twice as large as this, and having like this the lines equal?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: And of how many feet will that be?

BOY: Of eight feet.

SOCRATES: And now try and tell me the length of the line which forms the side of that double square: this is two feet—what will that be?

BOY: Clearly, Socrates, it will be double.

SOCRATES: Do you observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions; and now he fancies that he knows how long a line is necessary in order to produce a figure of eight square feet; does he not?

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Hypocrisy is the tax that vice pays to virtue.”

That quote has been attributed to various people: to the Irish satirist Oscar Wilde, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, and the French social reformer Francois La Rochefoucauld, among others. Perhaps they all said it.

But it spotlights a truth: However much we dislike hypocrisy, it serves an important social function.

President Obama, like President Bush before him, now claims the right to order anyone killed, anywhere in the world, without a trial or conviction for any crime.

Here’s a non-surprise: The U.S. government has been doing that for a long time.

Someone gets in the way, whether of the U.S. government, the oil companies, or the multi-national corporations, and he gets killed. Saddam Hussein, who was the first President Bush’s favorite Middle Eastern dictator until he got too independent. Ngo Dinh Diem. Patrice Lumumba. News reporter Danny Casolaro. Now, it’s Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi‘s turn. He has a target on his back because he annoyed the oil companies.

But in the past, there was a difference. Even if the president knew what was going on, he avoided any personal involvement. He had “deniability.” The president pretended that he knew nothing about it. And the rest of us went along with the charade.

Yes, it was hypocritical. But that’s the point. The hypocrisy was a good thing. When a hypocrite sins covertly, he breaks moral and statutory law but he acknowledges their validity.

President Obama and President G.W. Bush are not hypocrites, at least not on the issue of government-sponsored murder. They embrace their evil acts. They even boast about them. By so doing, they deny the validity of the moral and statutory laws that forbid such evil acts.

Not only do they do evil, but they compound their sin by weakening the moral foundations of civilization. They avow that we are nothing more than lawless, bloodthirsty barbarians. And they have the power to prove it with their actions.

So let’s hear it for hypocrisy. If people are going to sin, they should at least have the decency to lie about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Earlier this evening, I was reading Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell.

It’s one of my favorite popular books about the history of mathematics. It discusses both the lives of great mathematicians* and their major discoveries. Some of the discoveries are pretty abstract, but the book does a good job of explaining them in simple terms. And Bell isn’t shy about saying when he thinks that someone acted like an ass or an idiot. With a little effort, almost anyone can understand and enjoy the book.

However, in his chapter about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), Bell wrote:

Instead of the easy Latin which sufficed for Euler and Gauss, and which any student can master in a few weeks, scientific workers must now acquire a reading knowledge of two or three languages in addition to their own.

As a boy, I had two years of Latin study. I enjoyed them immensely, both because Latin is fun and because I had a wonderful teacher. The teacher was Mr. Shaugnessy. He tricked us into thinking that we were goofing around when we were actually learning Latin. Sneaky devil. Because it was a boys’ school, he could (and did) spice up exams with dirty jokes in Latin that we were supposed to translate. Sadly, he was also a chain smoker. Lung cancer. All his students remember him and benefited from having him as a teacher.

I never really understood English until I took Latin. It showed me how all European languages work, since all European languages are either derived from or influenced by Latin. It even gave me a conceptual framework to understand non-European languages such as Russian, Hebrew, and Hindi.

Hindi, by the way, is one of the official languages of India and has surprising similarities to English. Both English and Hindi are Indo-European languages derived from the same ancient language group. In spite of the geographic distance between New York and Mumbai, their official languages are related.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Latin. But Latin that “any student can master in a few weeks?” That strikes me as one of the most optimistic characterizations of Latin that I’ve ever heard.

Yes, Latin is logical. Yes, almost any student can learn the noun declensions, verb conjugations, and a working vocabulary in a few weeks. But that’s just to read a little Latin, not to write in it. And it’s hardly “mastering” Latin. Euler, Gauss, Newton, and their contemporaries wrote in Latin, which is much more difficult than simply reading it.

Either Bell has a very liberal concept of what constitutes mastery, or he’s referring to a subset of Latin that people of Gauss’s time used for their scientific writing. I suspect that it’s the latter.

I also suspect that Bell was a trifle optimistic about how many languages the average scientific worker can read. Most U.S. doctoral programs require their students to pass a reading proficiency exam in one foreign language relevant to their field. A few years later, very few American graduates can still read the foreign language in which they took the exam, let alone any other foreign language. The percentages are higher in Europe, of course, where many people at all educational levels are multi-lingual. And around the world, English has replaced Latin and French as the lingua franca of science and commerce: lots of people know English as their second language.

Nevertheless, Latin remains a wonderful foundation for understanding all other languages. It’s also a gateway to reading a lot of classical literature. One of the best texts, for study on your own or in a class, is Wheelock’s Latin, now in its sixth edition. Other resources for learning about Latin are:

• Why Study Latin? An About.com page with links about the benefits of Latin study.
• Getting Started on Classical Latin: The Open University’s online course in basic Latin, with 10 hours of instruction.

Have fun, and don’t expect to master Latin in a few weeks. You can get a good working knowledge of Latin in that short a time, however.

_________________________
* Women mathematicians, too, in spite of the book’s title. I received an indignant email about the sexist title from my niece, who graduates from college next month and is quite good at mathematics.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

I’ll miss newspapers when they disappear. There will still be a few of them online, but it just won’t be the same.

This morning, I’m sitting at McDonalds and perusing The New York Times while I quaff my coffee.

I should put this in context, both politically and metaphysically.

Politically, I’ve concluded that the U.S. government and political system are irredeemably corrupt. A sufficient number of politicians and government officials are “on the take” from giant corporations and the super-rich that almost nothing positive can be accomplished.

Wall Streeters, banksters, and giant corporations will continue to loot the United States until there’s nothing left to loot. Then they will pick the carcass clean, leaving honest Americans to fend for themselves in a wrecked country. There’s nothing non-violent that we can do about it, and since violence is a very unpredictable instrument of social change, I don’t advocate it. All I can do is get a big tub of popcorn, watch the show, and laugh.

There’s a reason why mature people don’t start revolutions, which are almost always started by the young. When you reach a certain age, you’ve learned not to act without thinking about the results of your actions. You tend to act only if you are reasonably sure that your actions will improve the situation.

Violent action lacks that kind of predictability. Revolutions are launched by young people who are so outraged by injustice that they don’t care about the result. That might happen in the U.S., though corporate control of the army, the secret police, and almost all of the communications and news media would make it difficult. My guess is that our decline will continue until the corporations and super-rich start fighting each other for control of the country, with each side enlisting working-class cannon fodder to “fight for their freedom.” Then the country will break apart, with unforeseeable results.

In any event, that’s my political assessment: We’re done. Stick a fork in us. And the reason for the political situation — indeed, the reason why justice and freedom are such rare commodities in human history — lies in our metaphysical situation.

Metaphysically, in this world at least, the evil have a systematic advantage over the good. And the very evil, such as the Bushes and Hitlers and Stalins, have an advantage over the moderately evil. The pickpocket beats the liar. The robber beats the pickpocket. The murderer beats the robber. The psychopathic mass murderer beats the ordinary “amateur” murderer.

Consider what it means to be a good person. Among other things, it means that:

• You will not do certain things even if they are in your material self-interest.
• You will do certain things even if they are against your material self-interest.

The evil, on the other hand, have fewer such limitations. And the more evil they are, the fewer limitations they have.

Imagine a tennis match between two players of equal ability. One of them not only obeys the rules of tennis, but in the middle of volleys, he runs over to the side of the court to help children and little old ladies. The other player pays no attention to the rules and cheats constantly. He “wastes” no time on anything except winning the game.

Which player wins, the good one or the evil one? The answer is obvious. Unless the good player gets very lucky — which does happen on occasion — the evil player wins.

The same applies to life on earth. Good people have a long list of things they won’t do. Evil people say, “Sod all that, I’m going to win.” And they do.

All that provides a context in which the morning newspaper becomes an exercise in dark humour.

On the front page, we learn that the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi has been using cluster bombs against the rebels who want to overthrow him. The lead paragraph observes that such bombs “have been banned in much of the world.” Only later does the article mention that the U.S. uses cluster bombs. It never mentions that the U.S. and Israel both use cluster bombs against civilians, or that those two countries have not agreed to the treaty banning cluster bombs.

The New York Times is a real newspaper and often does a good job, but when it’s under pressure (or under orders) to publish war propaganda, it does so. The first paragraph demonizes Qaddafi, who is undeniably as bad as Bush or Cheney, but “buries” the inconvenient facts further down in the article. What distinguishes the Times is that to retain a little credibility, it did at least mention some of the inconvenient facts. Dedicated propaganda outlets such as Fox News and The Weekly Standard probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Elsewhere on the front page, we learn that Republican governors and state legislatures want to gut environmental protection laws so that corporations can pollute ad libitum and impose the costs on others.

On the editorial page, we learn that House Republicans want to throw open the Gulf of Mexico once again to the tender mercies of the oil companies, given that they did such a good job almost destroying it last year.

On the op-ed page, Columnist Gail Collins catches Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney falsifying the history of the 1990s, much the same as almost all Republicans routinely falsify the history of tax cuts for their wealthy sponsors.* Romney would probably take refuge in Republican Sen. John Kyl’s excuse that his lie about Planned Parenthood spending 90 percent of its funds on abortion “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

In fairness to Mitt, Collins found the lie (births to teenaged mothers peaked during the Clinton years) in a book of which Romney was the listed author. As a former Capitol Hill ghost writer, I can tell you that Romney almost certainly didn’t write the book.

Elsewhere on the op-ed page, columnist Charles Blow reiterates what’s widely known to everyone but Fox News viewers and Tea Partiers: corporations and the super-rich get a steadily increasing share of the national income but pay steadily decreasing tax rates. The top income tax rate was 91 percent under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would now be considered a radical socialist. Since then, it’s been repeatedly reduced to reach its current level of 35 percent. House Republicans want to cut it even more to 25 percent.

U.S. economic growth was higher when the top tax rate was higher, but that’s one of those inconvenient facts that politicians can forget in the interest of getting money from Wall Street. Republicans are determined to give more tax breaks to “job creators:” but they fail to mention that the jobs are created in China and Indonesia, not in America.

I made my mind up, back in Chelsea,
When I go, I’m goin’ like Elsie.
Start by admitting, from cradle to tomb
Isn’t that long a day.
Life is a cabaret, old chum,
Only a cabaret, old chum.
And I love a cabaret.

– Cabaret

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* I don’t mean to beat up exclusively on Republicans. It seems to me that Wall Street pays Republicans to commit the crimes, and pays Democrats to stand around whining that they can’t do anything about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are include

… was sent to me by someone in Madison, Wisconsin, who found it in the Capitol building last week. It was obviously written in a hurry, and it carries the label “first draft.”

Wisconsin is the latest battleground in the on-going war by corporations and the super-rich to strip working Americans of all their rights and reduce them to abject destitution. Similar battles are being waged against working people in Indiana and other states. But the exploited majority is finally waking up and fighting back.

Manifesto of the People’s Party

It’s emerging from the heartland – from Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa — and it is spreading across the nation. It doesn’t have a formal organization or Washington lobbyists behind it, but it’s gaining strength nonetheless. Like the Tea Party did with Republicans in 2010, the People’s Party will pressure Democrats in primaries and general elections leading up to 2012 and beyond to have the courage of the party’s core convictions. But unlike the Tea Party, which has been coopted by the super-rich, the People’s Party represents the needs and aspirations of America’s vast working middle class, along with the less fortunate.

The People’s Party is dedicated to the truth that America is a rich nation – richer by far than any other, richer than it’s ever been. The People’s Party rejects the claims of plutocrats who want us to believe we can no longer afford to live decently – who are cutting the wages and benefits of most people, attacking unions, and squeezing public budgets. The People’s Party will not allow them to turn us against one another – unionized against non-unionized, public employee against private employee, immigrant against native born. Nor will the People’s Party allow the privileged and powerful to distract us from the explosive concentration of income and wealth at the top, the decline in taxes paid by the top, and their increasing and untrammeled political power.

We have joined together to reverse these trends and to promote a working people’s bill of rights. We are committed to:

1. Increasing the pay and bargaining power of average working people.

We’ll stop efforts to destroy unions and collective bargaining rights. Protect workers who try to form unions from being fired. Make it easier for workers to form unions through simple up-or-down votes at the workplace.

2. Requiring America’s super-rich to pay their fair share.

Increase top marginal tax rates and the number of tax brackets at the top. Treat income from capital gains the same as ordinary income. Restore the estate tax. Revoke the citizenship of anyone found to be sheltering income abroad.

3. Protecting and expanding government programs vital to the working middle class and the poor.

These include Social Security, K-12 education, Pell Grants for disadvantaged students, public transportation, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

4. Ending corporate welfare and cutting military outlays.

Trim defense spending. End special tax subsidies for specific corporations or industries – at both state and federal levels. Cut agricultural subsidies.

5. Saving Social Security while making it more progressive.

Exempt the first $20,000 of income from Social Security taxes. Make up the difference – and any need for additional Social Security revenues – by raising the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax.

6. Ending Wall Street’s dominance of the economy and preventing any future taxpayer-funded bailout.

Break up Wall Street’s largest banks and put a cap their size. Link pay on the Street to long-term profits rather than short-term speculation. Subject all financial transactions to a one-tenth of one percent transactions tax.

7. Fully enforcing regulations that protect workers, consumers, small investors, and the environment.

Raise penalties on corporations that violate them. Expand enforcement staffs. Provide more private rights of action.

8. Providing affordable health care to all Americans.

The new health law isn’t enough. We’ll fight for a single payer – making Medicare available to all. End fee-for-service and create “accountable-care” organizations that focus on healthy outcomes.

9. Slowing and eventually reversing climate change.

We’ll fight to limit carbon emissions. Impose a ceiling on emissions or a carbon tax on polluters. Return the revenues from these to the American people, in the form of tax cuts for the working middle class.

10. Getting big money out of politics.

We’ll fight to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overrule Citizens United v. FEC. Require full disclosure of all contributions for or against any candidate. Provide full public financing for all presidential, gubernatorial, and legislative candidates in all general elections.

A few of the places it’s happening:

• Madison (ongoing).
• Des Moines (ongoing).
• March 10: Indianapolis. Gather at 10am and rally at 11:30am at Statehouse, 200 W. Washington St., Indianapolis. Rallies will continue at the capitol until the impasse is over.
• March 11: St. Louis. Downtown at 3:30 pm at Kiener Plaza. SB 1 is expected to be voted on in the Senate the week of 3/7 or 3/14.
• April 4: In cities across America. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – Demonstrations to show that “We Are One.”

Corporations and the super-rich control the government, all the levers of power, and almost all of the news media. Their agents are experts at discrediting, disrupting, and co-opting popular movements. We don’t have much of a chance. But as Americans, let’s at least make sure that they know they were in a fight.

Two basic forces shape the universe: Law and Love, or if you prefer, Rules and Results.

Those forces also generate the two basic viewpoints about human and Constitutional rights. Both are currently on display in a dispute over gun control laws.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the “Bill of Rights,” states:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Opponents of gun control laws latch onto the part that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Supporters of gun control laws argue that “the people” refers to Americans collectively rather than as individuals, so the right to keep and bear arms applies only to people in government-organized military organizations.

Frankly, I think that opponents of gun control laws have the better Constitutional argument. The text says what it says. And via the Fourteenth Amendment and later court decisions, the Constitution applies to states as well as to the federal government. Therefore, one can make a good case for an individual right to own guns.

But that’s not the only question involved. The larger question is whether rights are an end in themselves, or are justified because they produce good results.

Consider Timothy Egan’s recent column about the January 2011 shootings in Tucson. After avowing that he grew up around gun owners and supports private gun ownership, he starts talking about results. He cites statistics showing that more gun ownership leads to more gun deaths, more often of the innocent than the guilty.

Conservatives and libertarians argue that gun ownership makes everyone safer, but they really see that point as irrelevant. Their main response to Egan’s argument is to say that results don’t matter. Only rules matter. And according to what they say are the rules of the U.S. Constitution and “Natural Law,” the government has no business restricting or discouraging gun ownership of any kind. You can probably even find a conservative or two who thinks it’s in the Ten Commandments.

As usual, the dispute between rules and results leads to further questions:

• If rights are an end in themselves, how do we know that? How do we know what rights we have? And if respecting rights in a particular case would lead to terrible consequences, should we still respect them in that case?

• If rights are justified because they produce good results, then results for whom? “The greatest good for the greatest number?” Or just for the Wall Street sharks and corporate billionaires who bankroll libertarian think tanks and publications? How much good does a right have to produce, and with what degree of reliability, in order to qualify as a right?

Because the choice between emphasizing rules and results is so fundamental, there’s no way to prove that one choice is right and the other is wrong. Different people make the choice based on their personal history, psychology, and the dominant viewpoint of their society. And the choice itself is a false dilemma: you need both law and love, rules and results. Having only one of them would be like trying to do mathematics with only odd numbers.

It’s peculiar that many evangelical Christians, as conservatives, think that rules are more important than results, because Jesus taught that rules should be guided by love.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.