Monthly Archives: May 2015

Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator from VT, has thrown his hat into the Presidential Ring for the Democrats.  He is serving his second term as US Senator after having served 16 years in the House of Representatives, so he knows the system; he was also Mayor of Burlington, VT – he is a political creature.

In his On the Issues Quiz, I was surprised to see his expected response to Stimulus better than market-led recovery is that he would disagree.  His response to Maintain US sovereignty from UN is to Oppose it; I would probably slightly support it.  Otherwise, his positions are either agreeable or not of interest.  And his map shows him well away from the GOP:

Whether he’s suited for running a nation is, of course, not answerable here.  I’d be interested to hear his ideas, though.

His website is here:

The American people must demand that Congress and the White House start protecting the interests of working families, not just wealthy campaign contributors.

I’m always wary of inflammatory populism.  If you’re in it to win, you need to be able to talk to everyone, not just those who voted for you.

David Dayen at Salon believes Sanders need not win to be successful:

That’s how activism works. You make a stand on principle, build a coalition, and force politicians to get out in front of the parade. You create a constituency where one didn’t previously exist. And that’s precisely the promise of a Sanders presidential campaign. If his issues are popular – and every indication in the polling is that things like a higher minimum wage and more equality of income are – and he can build the same kind of grass-roots movement that ignited the fight for $15, then it challenges not just Hillary Clinton but everyone who wants to lead within the party to recalibrate and come closer to his ideals.

Ashley Smith at SocialistWorker.org has no enthusiasm for the self-proclaimed socialist:

But in running for the Democratic presidential nomination as the liberal outsider with almost no chance of winning, Sanders isn’t very “bold”–no more so than the fizzled campaigns of Dennis Kucinich in past presidential election years. And by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders–no matter how critical he might be of Hillary Clinton–is acting as the opposite of an “alternative.” …

If Sanders had his heart set on national politics, he could have run for president like Ralph Nader as an independent, opposing both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. He would have been appealing for a protest vote, rather than any real chance to win, but Sanders rejected this possibility out of hand for a different reason. “No matter what I do,” Sanders said in January, “I will not be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States.”

Ashley sees little difference between any GOP contender and Hillary, the presumed Democratic nominee.  She would prefer to see Sanders as Governor of Vermont as an open Socialist.

Yoli Ramazzina on Elephant Journal is excited by Bernie’s funding sources:

Clinton receives financial support from entities such as cable companies and banks, while Sanders’ receives support from worker’s unions and teacher’s federations. (Clinton’s sources of support cause some worry that she is being set up to be a political puppet, in the pocket of big corporations.)

The difference in the amounts being donated is also notable—the large corporations will of course have more to contribute than labor unions will.

This is one of the very issues that is exceedingly important to Bernie Sanders—should big businesses and corporations simply be allowed to buy campaigns or buy politicians?

Is that what Democracy is about?

Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw doubts Bernie’s staying power:

Is it just me, or are there a number of people in the media who seem to be bending over backward trying to make Sanders’ bid seem more legitimate? There are two different schools of thought to explain this, depending on who it is doing the advertising at any given moment. Hillary’s many supporters in the media like the Sanders story because, first, they know that Sanders isn’t a real threat. But second, they absolutely hate the media narrative that Clinton is receiving yet another coronation in the primary – as she did in her New York Senate run – and that it damages her to not have an opponent to sharpen her skills on.

Markos Moulitsas, who founded the Daily Kos and Vox Media, responds to House Speaker Boehner’s remark that the ACA makes it harder to hire new employees:

So ask me, “Has Obamacare has made it harder for you to hire employees?” And the answer is “what the fuck are you talking about? Of course not!” I mean, the whole concept is patently ridiculous. Why would the law make it harder? Note that Boehner doesn’t even bother trying to explain why.”

What would be even better?

Universal health care. Take away my healthcare costs at Daily Kos, and I save over $400,000 per year. That’s what, four-six employees? I could use those extra employees, too. (With nearly 10 times the employees at Vox Media, I can’t imagine how many millions that company would save with universal health care!)

Here’s the interesting part:

So what is hurting my ability to hire more people? Not Obamacare, which if anything is actually helping because it has lowered the annual increase in insurance premiums. Perhaps that’s why not a single business group filed an amicus brief in support of the King v. Burwell Supreme Court case challenging the law.

I recall, many years ago (close to 25), reading that the major car manufacturers also supported universal health care (I regret I cannot provide a source on that) for the same reasons.  It’s a bit of a reminder that the entities that benefit from the free market rarely actually support it completely, especially if they are the entrenched incumbents.

All that said, one must keep in mind that businesses often speak from the narrowest of interests.  I remain neutral on the subject of universal health care; I wish I had the time to sit down and read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or some other authority on free markets and see if medicine really should be considered to qualify as a good candidate for a free market, or if the arbitrariness of disease, and the extreme importance of good health, qualifies it for government interference….

And not everybody agrees.  The Tea Party Patriots site certainly sees doom & gloom:

Emergency room visits up, despite Obamacare

“Too many Americans get care in emergency rooms instead of doctors offices — and expanded health coverage is making the problem worse rather than fixing it. Three in four emergency room doctors said patient visits have increased since the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to have health insurance went into effect, in an email survey released Monday by the American College of Emergency Physicians. That’s not the news some healthcare advocates had hoped for. The thought was that by expanding health coverage to more people, they would get their ailments treated earlier by primary care doctors and could avoid visiting emergency rooms, which already struggle with an overload of patients.

… which is a quote from the Washington Examiner.  They seem to act as a aggregator on anti-ACA news.  But this does serve to reinforce the idea that businessmen, even lefties like Kos, can put on blinders and see only what they wish to see.  As ever, a well-done survey will leave an entertaining story such as Kos’ in the dust for those of us who value facts over emotion.

David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy notes the Internet may be changing governance soon – disastrously:

The US government is contemplating relinquishing the last remaining vestige of its control over a vital piece of the Internet’s core technical infrastructure – the domain name system (DNS) — and, with it, the last vestige of its ability to exercise oversight over how that system evolves and is used in the future.

It is, for any number of reasons (which Danielle and I try to summarize) a very good idea; the US government’s special position in the management of key Internet resources – oops, I almost said “Internet governance”! – no longer makes any sense, and there are many reasons to support a transition placing the control over these resources into the hands of the global Internet community.

But this transition could also go very badly.  How?  The power that comes from control over the DNS is substantial, and, like all power, it is subject to abuse.  In the case of the DNS, abuse means leveraging control over the DNS into control over the content of Internet communications. What does that look like?  Well, it looks like something I warned might be coming a few months ago (see here):  using control over the DNS databases to hear, and to enforce via the DNS entries, claims about the distribution of unlawful content – content that infringes (or is alleged to infringe) copyright, say, or that violates consumer protection laws, or gambling laws, or anti-pornography laws . . .

So, yes, ICANN does have its thumbs over the carotid of the Internet.  And?

It is starting to look, to me, like a deal is being cooked up: one condition of handing over control of the DNS to ICANN will be its promise to set up a process to deal with copyright infringement claims through the DNS.  Far from providing safeguards against this kind of mission creep, the US government may be conjuring it into existence.  We will all regret that if it comes to pass.

The article is worth reading in full.  I am not enough of a network expert to know if an alternative master DNS setup is possible; but the real question is how to responsibly structure such an organization such that it is blind to the content it’s transporting.  It’s not clear that this is a technological question, but rather the dreaded human/political question.

I haven’t heard her speak, so I’m not aware of her positions outside of the On The Issues quiz.  Finding her in the polls is difficult.  And whether she would be a competent public leader is an open question; I have little faith that her corporate executive experience truly transfers over, which is one of my pet peeves:

Let’s consider something else that can get my knickers in a knot – the businessman who decides to run for office and repeatedly offers up his businessman experience, his acumen, as his credentials that makes him qualified for office – H. Ross Perot being the best known example in my lifetime (“I just want to get under the hood and fix things.”).  So what’s wrong with this picture?

What we’re forgetting is that the goal of business – commerce – is NOT the goal of the government. I’m finding it a little hard to articulate the goals of government that are not objectionable to someone out there, so I’ll suggest that, if only currently, the goals of government are to protect society from outside intervention; and regulate the internal interactions of society, individually and collectively, such that, well, colloquially, everyone is equally unhappy; or that everyone is justly, according to their actions, treated.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine agrees:

I’m no more enthusiastic about Fiornia’s candidacy than I was about Cain’s. The Republicans should nominate a candidate who has successfully governed a state or who has mastered public policy issues, including foreign policy, while serving with distinction in the U.S. Senate (note: co-sponsoring amnesty legislation with Chuck Schumer doesn’t count as serving with distinction).

My sense is that Fiorina is actually running for vice president. She’s more than intelligent enough to know that (1) she can’t win the presidential nomination but (2) the nominee will be tempted to name a female running mate.

Ex-colleagues and other industry observers are dubious:

“She put herself ahead of the interests of the company and I fear she would do the same as president,” Jason Burnett, a grandson of the late HP co-founder David Packard and a member of the Packard Foundation board of trustees, told the Guardian. “I don’t want her to do harm to this country.”

HP’s longtime director of corporate communications, Roy Verley, said his ex-boss alienated colleagues with a “cult of Carly” that put self-promotion first.

“She didn’t know what she was doing and couldn’t deliver on her promises,” said Verley, who left HP in 2000.

The notion of a successful Fiorina reign at HP, he said, was “fantasy”.

Her website is here.

A Facebook correspondent responds to this post:

Interesting that you tie this to religion as being an agricultural-based phenomena.

Well, I wouldn’t tie religion per se to the transition from foraging to farming; I’m not sure archaeologists would grant that religion starts with farming.  Wikipedia claims the first signs of religion may, in fact, predate homo sapiens, as some of our predecessor species appear to have practiced funerary rituals indicative of a religious concept.

However, I’d be willing to believe, if told from a reliable source, that the use of religion as a force for shaping society through the use of psychological warfare, as it were, began with the creation of the farming society.  After all, if you are the source of the energy used to make the farm work, there had better be some reason you’re staying in that position, and I don’t think prospects for advancement would be likely.  I suspect either carrot or stick – God will punish you, or you get to enter Heaven – would be the thorns used to keep you in place, at least in homogenous societies.

In heterogenous societies – such a flavorless word, heterogenous – pure and simple force would be more likely as the myths and customs shared in homogenous societies would not have the same currency, the same binding power in those societies where slaves are brought in from the outside (sure wish I knew the anthropological term for that practice).

The Yemen war may be coming to an end, according to Maysaa Shuja al-Deen of AL Monitor‘s Gulf Pulse:

As soon as Saudi Arabia declared the end of Operation Decisive Storm on April 21, all parties to the Saudi war, the Houthis and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, jointly declared victory on the same day, in a war where no one achieved gains, and joint losses were the name of the game.

A fight to a draw?  Despite the destruction of the Houthi’s and Saleh’s air power,

the Houthis and Saleh’s forces were able to further expand, given their internal organization; Saleh’s forces were once part of the regular army forces while Houthi forces are composed of soldiers who receive fixed salaries.

Did Saudi Arabia’s proxy opponent, Iran, profit from this war?

Iran did not earn anything in the war in Yemen. It has lost all of its alliances in the non-sectarian Yemen. The network of alliances it has built in Taiz and the south has completely collapsed. Chief among these is the alliance in the south with prominent southern leader Ali Salim al-Beidh, who announced his support for Operation Decisive Storm in line with the position of the southerners, albeit at the expense of his ally Iran. Iran now has to settle for one party, the Houthis, who will remain its ally, despite all of its expansion attempts.

But Saudi Arabia still scrapes up a few pennies:

… Saudi Arabia succeeded with the passing of UN Resolution 2216, which was issued in favor of its military intervention. Saudi Arabia was able to neutralize Russia and bring down its project, which aimed at seeking equality between the Houthis and Saleh on the one hand, and the Saudi-supported military forces on the other. …

Saudi Arabia enjoyed wide international political support, as seen when a US warship stopped an Iranian ship loaded with weapons near the coast of Yemen on April 20. Russia also stopped opposing the Saudi strikes. This means that the world recognizes Yemen as a region under Saudi Arabia’s influence and believes that Iran is not entitled to manipulate it, especially since it supports a militia, not the authorities of a country, as is the case in Syria.

A microcosm of war: even if you can identify the winners, they’ve lost nearly as much as the losers.  Asharq Al-Awsat‘s Tariq Alhomayed has a more definite opinion:

So, who were the Houthis and Saleh seeking to target with all these arms and missiles? What would have happened if Riyadh did not take action at this time? It is clear that these arms were being amassed in order to attack Saudi Arabia, which has always had only the best intentions for Yemen—otherwise why else would Saudi Arabia and its allies have waited for so long before militarily intervening to deal with this threat? Therefore, the biggest achievement of Operation Decisive Storm is that it neutralized a great threat not just to Saudi Arabia but also one the rest of the Gulf region, destroying Iran’s stranglehold on Yemen. This also sent a decisive message to Tehran and its followers that Saudi Arabia is more than prepared to respond to any provocation and preserve its security and defend itself.

The paper’s editor-in-chief, Salman Aldosary, has much the same opinion:

Operation Decisive Storm has achieved one success after another, whether militarily, politically or diplomatically, and is now approaching the end of its military operation once it achieves all of its projected objectives—and without the need for adopting a boisterous or disrespectful attitude. This marks the difference between Saudi policies, which are based on facts, and those of Iran, which rely on conspiracies, devious machinations and ostentatious displays of power.

Neither mentions the Pakistani refusal to join the ground war at the behest of the Saudis, though.

The editor-in-chief of Al Arabiya English lauds the efforts of the Saudis:

Having been a victim of several atrocious terrorist attacks itself, Saudi Arabia has always been a key ally in the war against terror and has been relentlessly pursuing al-Qaeda and ISIS militants in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. However, while Yemen’s proximity as well as the despicable crimes committed by Houthis against innocent Sunni men, women and children were all factors that led to the Saudi decision to use force, one needs to remember that Saudi Arabia and its allies are waging this war in the name of humanity, civilization and on behalf of the whole world.

After all this blame on Iran’s ambitions, Stephen Lendman at Real Independent News & Film places the blame directly on the USA:

Yemen is in the eye of the storm. Washington planned and  orchestrated ongoing war on an entire population.

Its using Saudi Arabia, other regional rogue states, and extremist takfiri mercenaries to do its killing and dying.

It’s systematically destroying an entire nation to tighten its regional chokehold.

Will millions of Yemenis die, sustain disabling injuries and/or lose all future hope before things end?

No nation in world history caused more harm to more people over a longer duration than America.

None operate more ruthlessly. None more callously ignore human lives and welfare.

And how did the Saudi public feel about this war?  Back on April 21, AL Monitor, after registering caveats, attempted to assess Saudi public opinion via statements from various prominent figures.  Typical was this:

Meanwhile, Abdallah al-Maliki, a researcher and writer close to the Islamic Enlightenment current, expressed his support for Operation Decisive Storm March 26 on Twitter. He stated: “The war led by the kingdom is fair and attempts to deter Iranian expansion in the region.” He wondered, “What are Arabs doing as another Arab capital falls into the hands of Iran — after Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut?”

OpenDemocracy reports that Sudanese factions appear to support the war:

Sudan’s decision to join Operation Decisive Storm with Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Gulf countries to fight Yemeni Houthi rebels comes as no surprise. …

Considering Sudan’s history, the government is neither concerned with human rights nor the protection of civilians in Yemen or elsewhere. However, what is surprising is the opposition parties’ overt support for Sudan’s participation in Operation Decisive Storm. …

Major opposition parties in Sudan boycotted the elections that took place earlier this month, because they are refusing to give the regime legitimacy. However, representatives of National Umma Party (NUP), Sudanese Communist Party and Sudanese Baath Party support the government’s decision to join Operation Decisive Storm.

What does it all mean?  Perhaps simply that truth never wins out in war’s time; only in the assessment of historians who have no stake in the game.

Ian Morris, in NewScientist (18 Apr 2015) “Morality is rooted in the way societies get their energy” (paywall) (print: “The unexpected origin of human values”) and in his new book Foragers, farmers and fossil fuels: How human values evolve (Princeton University Press), suggests that energy requirements of culture dictate the human values that prevail:

I call the first of the three systems foraging values, because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily by hunting and gathering wild plants. For tens of thousand of years, everyone on Earth lived this way, but now barely one person in a million does so. …

No two modern foraging bands are identical, but virtually all agree that a fair world is one where everyone is treated more or less the same. No one should be much richer than anyone else or much more politically powerful; and men and women should have roughly equal freedom to do what they think best. Upstarts who subvert these values will be cut down to size with mockery, ostracism and even violence. …

The second moral system, which I call farming values because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily with domesticated plants and animals, could not be more different. … Virtually all these groups operated on the principle that a fair society was not one where all were treated more or less the same; rather, it was one where different individuals were treated differently. Some were wiser and more virtuous than others, and deserved to be rich and powerful. It was right to own slaves, for women to defer to men and everyone to defer to rulers who had been chosen by the gods – or actually were gods – because people who were male, free and royal were better than people who were not. Hierarchy was fair.

The third moral system is once again wildly different. I call this fossil-fuel values, because it is associated with societies that augment the energy they can extract from living plants and animals with that from fossilised plants, by burning coal and oil to power machines.

Fossil-fuel society began in Britain around AD 1800 and spread rapidly around the world. As it did so, farming values simply collapsed. Opinion pollsters tell us that by the 2010s, huge majorities – varying only slightly with age, sex, religion and nationality – were insisting that political, economic and gender inequalities are bad. Steep hierarchies, say fossil fuellers, are not fair, and people who disagree seem as immoral as democrats, socialists and feminists would have done 1000 years ago.

Interesting, but what does this have to do with energy?

Foragers captured very little energy from the world – typically, no more than 5000 kilocalories per person per day, to use as food or fuel – and they had to live in tiny bands, usually less than 10 people strong. This made it impossible to create steep political, wealth or gender hierarchies; which, in turn, meant that those who interpreted fairness as treating everyone roughly the same tended to do well, while those whose idea of fairness was treating people differently did not. …

The upside of farming, though, was that it unleashed a flood of energy: by my calculations, the amount of energy used per person roughly doubled between 10,000 BC and 4000 BC, to reach 10,000 kilocalories a day (see “Energy-hungry humanity” graph below). By 1 BC it had risen to 30,000 kilocalories a day. As this happened, farmers turned much of the extra energy into more of their own kind. In 10,000 BC, there were no farmers on Earth, but there were about 5 million foragers; by 1 BC, there were 250 million peasants, who had driven the few surviving foragers on to lands the farmers did not want. …

The industrial revolution increased energy capture even more dramatically. Around AD 1700, the average north-west European used about 32,000 kilocalories a day, but by 1900 this had nearly tripled, to 92,000. Today, the average American burns through 230,000 kilocalories a day. Once again, we turned a flood of energy into more of ourselves. In 1800, there were 1 billion humans. Today, there are 7 billion of us.

The remarkable thing about this energy surge, however, was that rather than pushing the farming world toward even steeper hierarchies, it did just the opposite. Today, 60 per cent of the world’s population live in democracies, and in almost all of these places women can vote and economic inequality has tumbled.

So he suggests that values are shaped by energy requirements; that energy availability enables better reproduction; but that there is not any kind of correlation between energy requirements and, to put it baldly, slavery.  He uses the Gini coefficient, which measures (roughly) inequality in a group, to measure our misuse of each other.  Since this is a pay article, I shan’t copy his chart, but the average values for the three society types are .25 for foragers, .48 for farming societies, and for today’s fossil-fuel society, as he calls us?

By the 1970s, the average Gini coefficient for income equality (after tax) in the nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was just 0.26.

While I’m wary of apples and oranges, it is a fascinating analysis.  Finding good data over time doesn’t appear to be easy.  The OECD, mentioned above, provides this 2013 data:

indicating Gini moving up for the OECD as a group over the years.

Reluctantly leaving the fascinating question of whether the Gini coefficient implies slavery, unrestrained greed, or something else, we can return to the primary question of how energy availability (vs requirements) changes the human value system.  In the beginning, we must acknowledge that a value system cannot be disconnected from group, or even species survival; indeed, value systems have evolved as a survival mechanism.  Foragers, while being fairly egalitarian, are also fragile, with low reproductive potential.  The farming value system requires – coerces – nearly everyone to give up their autonomy in order to lower the fragility value.  But a nuance missing from the paper – but perhaps not the book, which I’ve neither purchased nor read – is whether the energy consumed by the farming group, for some given individual in the hierarchy, includes the energy, at least in some part, of those below him in the hierarchy, or if it’s only a personal consumption.  I think it’s clear that fossil fuel, and the power systems it enables, replaces the slave labor that used to be employed on the farms; the value system of the farm evolves in order to justify the farm because the farm’s output enables the survival of the group.  Thus, from Morris:

Here the anthropology of modern peasant societies partly comes to the rescue. What the downtrodden disagree with, ethnographers find, is not hierarchy as such, but their own place in it, or the suspicion that their so-called “betters” are not living up to their moral obligations. Resisting specific husbands, masters or lords who are abusing their authority is right and proper; resisting authority itself is not. And we find similar attitudes even in texts from now-vanished farming societies. “The Tsar is good, but the boyars [local elites] are bad,” a typical Russian peasant saying went; rebellion was justified if its goal was to let the tsar know that his agents were failing him, but not if it intended to challenge the divinely appointed tsar himself.

So this illuminates, to some degree, the fascinating anachronism that is much of modern religion: it evolved to support the farming era, when nearly everyone was involved with farming and energy came from the human back; now that it is unneeded, it continues on but carries a burden of irrationalism which leaves us with such amazement that many still believe it just because it’s so unbelievable.

And, finally, the fossil fuel value system can safely move back toward autonomy and equality without sacrificing group survival, or so would go the theory – although how nuclear war impacts the theory may be a discussion for another day.

SCOTUS recently ruled for the defendants in this case.  The issue?  From SCOTUSBlog:

Whether a rule of judicial conduct that prohibits
candidates for judicial office from personally solicit-
ing campaign funds violates the First Amendment.

WSJ:

The ruling marks a turning point in the contentious national debate over how state judges should be chosen, a disagreement that goes back to the founding of the nation.

Writing for the court’s majority in a 5-4 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said judges aren’t politicians even if they have to win votes to join or stay on the bench. The case produced a rare alignment, with Justice Roberts splitting with his four fellow conservatives and joining the court’s four liberal justices in supporting fundraising restrictions.

The American Constitution Society’s President Caroline Fredrickson had a somewhat insipid statement:

“This ruling recognizes the corrosive effect money has had in judicial elections and helps to restore the image of state courts as fair and impartial.  The Court’s decision will help stem the trend of politicization that has been occurring in the state courts.”

At Philadelphia’s Citified, an anonymous writer (sponsored by Adam Bonin), prior to the decision, declares for what he hopes is a more professional approach:

Alternatively, just end the partisan judicial election process altogether. For years, Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts has led the fight to bring merit selection to our state’s judiciary, so that our judges could be considered, nominated, and confirmed, rather than elected. Merit selection promises to bring a more professional, qualified bench, and potentially solves more problems beyond the fundraising issues.

Merit selection would restore some dignity to this process while, admittedly, giving me a lot less to do this time of year. It’s worth pursuing.

The important link is broken, so here’s Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts.  Merit selection:

Merit Selection is the judicial selection system that best ensures that qualified individuals will reach the bench without the problematic influence of money on the selection process. Merit selection uses an independent bipartisan citizens nominating commission composed of men and women from across the Commonwealth, non-lawyers and lawyers, from diverse occupational, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Anyone meeting the required criteria may apply to the commission to be considered for a judicial vacancy.

I must admit to being less than enthused, partially on compositional grounds.

First, the first sentence really requires at least a few paragraphs to back up an assertion which is not obviously true, and therefore should not be mixed into the rest of the paragraph under examination, which is devoted to the “how” of Merit Selection.  In fact, I suggest the methodology of Merit Selection be first explained, and then exposition concerning its superiority over other methods follows it so that readers can follow the logic for the assertion.  The above paragraph is not persuasive.

Second, the last sentence should be stricken.  I had to read it several times before i understood they were switching the focus of the paragraph from the makeup of the committee to who would be eligible to be a judge.  2a, which “required criteria,” a phrase I find questionable in itself, apply?

Third, “independent bipartisan” sounds great until you take a moment to think about what you just read.  First, “independent” can (and usually will) be taken to mean “not part of any political party,” which is jarring once you realize that “bipartisan” definitely implies that the members of the commission are either members of, or are, at the very least, strongly inclined towards, one political party or another.  I search for an alternative meaning of “independent”, but the best I can do is suggest members who are not tied to the power structure of the party, but are merely members in good standing, and I think that is dubious.

Fourth, if they REALLY mean bipartisan, then why bother?  They’ve returned to voting for judges using ideological criteria.  They can HOPE their committee members are really looking for the best, but the process is highly vulnerable to members with an ideological bent, and I do believe the committee will become packed with ideologues – because those will be the people who will take the time to serve on the committee.  (Standard rant: Most politically interested people just do NOT understand that the average Joe & Jane want to work their jobs, take care of the kids, and drink their beer or (for the younger set) play their video games.  Politics is an unpleasant occupation if you’re not temperamentally suited for it.)  Think of who runs the parties: ideologues.  These are the folks who have developed an interest in politics, and definitely have a strong point of view that rarely brooks compromise, and often values ideological commitment over reality.  They’re the ones willing to devote the time to run the parties, developing extreme positions, etc; the same will happen with the committee.

As an engineer, I would prefer some objective criteria for rating the candidates.  However, as a citizen, I would have to agree with the methodology used to rate the candidates, and in the absence of any such system, and given the fact that I may fall under the jurisdiction of these judges, I may have to fall back to the question of whether voting for judges is better than gubernatorial appointment.

Naturally, I must disclose at this point that I’ve never researched judicial candidates here in Minnesota, where we do vote on them.  I doubt the overwhelming majority of voters do.

So what are the options?

We could imitate the Federal approach and have state judges nominated by the governor and then face legislative inquisition.  This is, again, a political process prone to corruption, but can be mitigated by making their positions permanent, as Alexander Hamilton points out in Federalist Paper 78:

According to the plan of the convention, all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices during good behavior; which is conformable to the most approved of the State constitutions and among the rest, to that of this State. Its propriety having been drawn into question by the adversaries of that plan, is no light symptom of the rage for objection, which disorders their imaginations and judgments. The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. In a monarchy it is an excellent barrier to the despotism of the prince; in a republic it is a no less excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body. And it is the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.

However, this does not address the possibilities of legislative deadlock, such as we experience at the national level at the present time.  While I think this method works well when both parties believe in governance, rather than winning a game, it’s an unstable system – it takes only one party behaving childishly to cause the system to choke up..

There is direct gubernatorial appointment, legislative appointments, elections, etc.  Truthfully, none are really appetizing.

(h/t vis a vis the SCOTUS decision: Adam B @ The Daily Kos)

Sometimes you just have to goggle at what’s out there.  Here’s Fundraising Success Mag, which annually looks at the best fund-raising campaigns.  From the 2014 judging:

Campaign of the Year
(Also Gold Award — Multichannel, $10 million and over)
Heal Children, Heal Detroit 2013 Year-End Multichannel Appeal
The Children’s Center
(Submitted by The Children’s Center)

The Numbers
Recipients: 4,157
Response rate: 4.2 percent
Total cost: $9,932
Income generated: $90,287
Average gift: $520
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.11

I can usually predict the ultimate Campaign of the Year winners by the number of gasps and “wows” I hear as the judges mull over particular entries — as well as the amount of furious note-scribbling going on. When I heard one of our judges say, “This gives me chills,” followed by a round of hearty agreement, I suspected we had a winner. And the final judging bore out my suspicions.

The campaign at hand was The Children’s Center’s Heal Children, Heal Detroit multichannel appeal. Powerful imagery of children that balances their beauty and potential with the seriousness of their situation is just the start of the long line of winning elements in this campaign.

Beyond the numbers is the wonderfully consistent messaging that seamlessly carries through the many touchpoints involved.

Makes me wonder about their audience.  Organizations considering doing fund-raising and looking for pointers, partners, and processes?

Ever wonder how a family as big as the House of Saud (15,000 members) works out problems?  Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institute covers some recent maneuverings for AL Monitor:

Without warning, [King] Salman removed the sitting crown prince, Muqrin, his half brother, and promoted the third in line, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, his nephew, to number two. Salman made his own son, Mohammed bin Salman, the new number three despite a lack of experience as a senior policymaker. Muqrin has since publicly proclaimed his allegiance to the new team, but without providing any explanation for his removal. …

What happened with Prince Muqrin is a key question. As the son of a Yemeni slave girl, he was always a bit of a black sheep in the family, but his competence was never in question. According to the royal palace, Muqrin had asked to be replaced, but no reason was given. No crown prince has ever relinquished the position in the history of the modern kingdom, which was founded in 1902. When Salman took the throne, the press trumpeted Muqrin as his heir, and there were no signs that he was less than eager to be the next in line. Posters showed Salman, Muqrin and Nayef smiling, a happy triumvirate poised to rule the kingdom for decades to come.

Earlier discussion of Iran’s problems in the area bordering Afghanistan here.  Now it appears Iran’s decision to be self-sufficient in agriculture may result in self-inflicted harm, according to Bijan Khajehpour in AL Monitor:

[Issa] Kalantari addressed a group of experts and reporters April 25 to highlight the various aspects of the ongoing disaster. He charged the country’s politicians with being in denial of the true dimensions of the water crisis and outlined some of the key issues:

• Iran’s self-inflicted water shortage stems from its exploiting 97% of its surface waters. The international benchmark for surface water use is 40%, which by comparison points to the magnitude of water mismanagement in Iran.

• The push for agricultural self-sufficiency in the past led to over-consumption of water reserves, which in turn undermined development. According to Kalantari, a number of political stakeholders dismissed sustainable development as a Western concept lacking utility in Iran.

The suggestion that self-sufficiency is threatened does not couple well with the current sanctions regime, not so much because food is currently targeted – but because it becomes another exposure for Iran.  This may be another motivation for Iran to consummate the previously announced deal framework, as even the most efficient government can manage only so many emergencies simultaneously.

… is at least partially fulfilled by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  CommonBlog reports:

 ALEC boasts that a third of all state legislators in the US are members, introducing around 1,000 ALEC bills every year.

Which leads to an interesting question: what is appropriate and inappropriate for such an organization to do?  They craft bills and deliver them to legislators nation-wide, naturally (or is it?) with their own interests at heart.

Yet here is one of those conundrums of democracy – the legislators cannot be experts at everything.  No doubt, these bills help legislators accomplish legitimate tasks, but it’s certainly worrisome when this happens:

When Florida Rep. Rachel Burgin (R- 56) introduced a bill in November calling on the federal government to reduce taxes for corporations (HM 685), she made an embarrassing mistake. Rep. Burgin was introducing a bill she had received from the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.  A bill written by the Tax Foundation, corporate members of ALEC’s ‘Tax and Fiscal Policy task force” and a group founded and funded by major corporate interests, including the billionaire Koch brothers.

All ALEC model resolutions contain a boilerplate paragraph, describing ALEC’s adherence to free market principles and limited government.  When legislators introduce one of ALEC’s bills, they normally remove this paragraph. Sometimes (but only sometimes) legislators will make some slight alterations to anALEC model bill,perhaps to include something specific to them or to their state. Rep. Burgin didn’t do that.  Instead she introduced a bill that was the same as the model word-for-word, forgetting even to remove the paragraph naming ALEC and describing its principles.

So it’s disturbing to think these are introduced with, at best, cosmetic alterations; one hopes they are modified during the usual rough and tumble of the legislative sessions.

Back in 2013, Molly Jackman reported on ALEC successes, failures, and causes for Brookings:

My findings are threefold.  First, ALEC model bills are, word-for-word, introduced in our state legislatures at a non-trivial rate.  Second, they have a good chance – better than most legislation – of being enacted into law.  Finally, the bills that pass are most often linked to controversial social and economic issues.  In the end, I argue that this is not good for ALEC, its corporate partners, or for the democratic process.

A lot of good information here, although this is somewhat suspect:

Of the 132 ALEC model bills introduced, 12 were enacted.  One additional bill passed the New Hampshire legislature only to be vetoed by the governor.  Now, a success rate of 9% may not seem high upon first glance.  However, consider the fact that, in the 112^th session of the U.S. Congress, less than 2% of introduced bills passed.  That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.

Not really, as many bills are introduced in Congress as symbolic measures, or in an attempt to stir up the base of one party or the other.  For example, the House GOP attempted to abolish the ACA several times (while other votes related to the ACA have to do with defunding, modifications, etc, and perhaps not all these fail).  Attempting precise math on imprecise mathematical entities, yada yada yada.

But to return to the question in hand, how do we craft good law that is conducive to the common good?  I think this is a harder question than is generally recognized.  Should a liberal counterpart be created?  No?  Should the liberal legislators then have to craft each of their bills by hand?

Perhaps we just try to make too much law.  But human society is complex and has many impacts, both inside and outside – and these often need to be moderated simply because humans are too self-interested.

A 2012 article on NJ.com accusing Governor Christie’s of using ALEC bills is here, where it notes:

There is nothing illegal in what ALEC does or in using its bills, but critics say New Jersey officials are handing off a cardinal duty — do your own work — to a national group with unique ties to the business world. If they’re relying on templates, critics add, state officials should publicly acknowledge any work that they do not do themselves and the source of any proposals that aren’t their own, especially when that source has an agenda.

Christie’s spokesman denies the allegations.

Legislators should listen to advocates for both sides of an issue in most cases, although personally I feel an advocate for, say, homeopathy should just be tossed out on his ear.

So…. a bunch of amateur lawmakers, often full to the brim with ideology, making laws – either with their own clumsy hands, or those whose self-interest may not align with society’s.  An example from a 2002 Mother Jones article:

Not surprisingly, many of the bills benefit the companies that helped write them. Consider ALEC’s “Environmental Audit Privilege,” a measure that relieves companies of legal responsibility for their own pollution. The bill got its start in 1992, when Colorado regulators fined the Coors Brewing Company for smog-inducing air emissions at several plants. ALEC was quick to respond, drafting a measure to prevent firms from being fined if they report environmental violations at their facilities, and to keep such disclosures secret. Coors is a corporate member of ALEC, and company executive Allan Auger is a past chairman of the group, to which the Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation is also a donor. Last year, Kentucky and Oregon passed audit-privilege laws like the one drawn up by ALEC.

A site devoted to unmasking ALEC’s fell intentions is ALEC Exposed.

UPDATE: Here’s an interactive map so you can see which member of your legislator is also an ALEC member.

(h/t WePartyPatriots @ The Daily Kos)

With regard to this post, a Facebook correspondent remarks,

I don’t understand how that law’s directive that a person cannot even talk to their lawyer can be constitutional.

Nor do I.  As an engineer I like stable systems with predictable behaviors.  In the area of campaign finances I’ve seen proposals for public financing come and go; restrictions on financing gradually eroded, until predictions on the size of your war-chest just to play in the next Presidential election have reached $2 billion.  People are upset on both sides of the aisle (i.e., system instability), but there doesn’t seem to be a way to modify the system acceptable to courts and candidates.  Perhaps this is a continuous rupture in the side of American-style democracy…

Alternate conclusion: when you’re the pre-eminent nation in the world, the scramble to the very top of the pyramid results in surreal landscapes.

Keith Laumer wrote a series of short stories centered around the development and consequences of artificially intelligent tanks, named Bolos; Cordwainer Smith also briefly addressed the issue in “War No. 81-Q”, in which countries settled differences of opinion by fighting wars using autonomous weapons where no one gets hurt.  We’re now beginning to creep up on this science fiction concept, and some folks at the United Nations are trying to prevent it, namely the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.  They held a meeting a few weeks ago, where Matthew Bolton delivered a few remarks:

A preemptive ban would honor the Marten’s Clause, following the guidance of the principle of humanity and the dictates of public conscience in developing new law.  The delegation of violence to a machine – whether lethal or less lethal – is a violation of human dignity. Last month, a Model UN conference of 2,500 undergraduate students from around the world – meeting in the UN General Assembly Room in New York – were commended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for passing resolutions calling for a ban on autonomous weapons systems. ICRAC urges states to follow this ethical leadership shown by the world’s youth, as well as Nobel Laureates, clergy and faith-based organizations, concerned scientists, ethicists and the civil society Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

I notice their Mission Statement has been updated to remove “tele-operated” weapons, since drones fit into that category and it’s poor politics to annoy the leading country that just happens to use them.  Here’s their latest:

Declared July 2014, updating the Original Mission Statement in light of ICRAC’s 2009 call to commence a discussion about robot arms control having been heard.

Given the rapid pace of development of military robotics and the pressing dangers that these pose to peace and international security and to civilians in conflict, we call upon the international community for a legally binding treaty to prohibit the development, testing, production and use of autonomous weapon systems in all circumstances.

Machines should not be delegated with the decision to kill or use violent force.

Further we call upon the international community to urgently commence deliberations and discussions on:

• Limitations, regulation and transparency for remotely controlled unmanned systems.
• A ban on new kinds of unmanned nuclear weapons delivery systems.
• A prohibition on robotic space weapons.

 

I confess I haven’t gone through their resources section, so perhaps they’ve solved the problem of rogue states – wish I had the time to do so.  Unlike nuclear weapons and their testing, there are no tell-tale signals that can be monitored from orbit or on the ground, only inadvertent leaks by workers who realize their project may be unethical.  Further, the development of AI for peaceful missions necessarily will contribute to the development of autonomous weapon systems.  Hardware requirements should be met, I would imagine, in large part by systems developed for the harsh environment of outer space – hardening against radiation and that sort of thing.  And safeguarding computers against the mechanical problems of warfare has been going on for a very long time.  Frankly, it seems like a lot of technology is coming right together.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is here.

(h/t NewScientist 18 April 2015 “Rein in the bots“, p. 7)