2012: watershed year

Think about it. Over the last year, it seems to me, there have been fundamental-- one might almost say seismic-- shifts in public opinion in four important areas:

1. President Obama was reelected. True, it wasn't a landslide, but it wasn't a squeaker, either. He will not now take his place in history alongside Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Given the state of the economy, the Presidency should have been the Republicans' for the taking. In addition, Democrats gained two seats in a Senate they were widely expected to lose control of, and the aggregate Democratic total in House races was 500,00 more than the Republican total (voided by absurd gerrymandering of districts).

Aside from the weaknesses of their candidate (would Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann have done better?), I think this election represents a fundamental repudiation of Republican ideas. A rising tide does not lift all boats-- only the yachts, for some reason. And Republican willful ignorance of science is coming back to bite them, which leads to the next point:

2. Climate change is back on the agenda. Despite being a no-show during the presidential debates, this issue has a secret weapon going for it: reality. The long drought this summer and fall (which is continuing in some places even into winter) plus the more dramatic evidence of Hurricane Sandy have made people into believers. The evidence of one's own eyes and ears is somehow more persuasive than ignorant ideological rhetoric.

3. Gay rights have gotten over some kind of hump of popular approval. All four ballot initiatives involving this were won by pro-gay forces. We have a president who is on record in favor of gay marriage, and Wisconsin has elected the first openly gay US senator in history.

4. Gun control is now again open for discussion. I don't think it's going away this time. People are seriously starting to ask these questions about just why people should have these crazy levels of firepower at their private disposal, and why there is such an ineffective effort to regulate just who has access to any weapons at all. Mayor Bloomberg was right to say that NRA bigwig LaPierre's speech smacked of paranoia. It's a facet of this whole issue that really needs to be explored in depth.

There is one more issue that needs to be put on the front burner: The absurd disparity of income and wealth we now have in this country. Rep. Boehner's 'Plan B' fiscal-cliff proposal went down in flames because the Tea Party types in the House refused to raise taxes even on people making over $1 million a year. This kind of thing presents the Democrats with a golden opportunity to ask an uncomfortable question: Why should a small group of people be allowed to live on a plane of existence completely different from the rest of us, while people holding down full-time jobs can't make ends meet? And then, of course, there are those who can only find part-time work or none at all. Students taking on absurd levels of debt at the beginning of their adult lives, etc. This issue has got to start coming to the fore. Well, we had to leave something for 2013.

newtown and the NRA

Chez La Pierre, nothing at the 'supply' end is up for discussion

. Not the question of why high-end military weapons (and accessories) designed to kill large numbers of people as efficiently as possible should be available to private citizens. We're not talking whitetail deer here. Why on earth should private citizens to be able to buy bullets that can pierce inch-think armor at 1,000 yards (to choose but one example)?

.No mention of how the NRA colluded with the gun manufacturers to reverse declining profits. In an increasingly urban nation, hunting is simply not as popular as in the past. It's part of a demographically declining rural culture. But selling cool state-of-the-art military hardware has more than made up the deficit. Talk about male enhancement!

.Not the question of why we continue to allow this gun-show 'loophole.' Loophole? More of a gaping hole, in which 40% of gun sales require no federal background check.

No, there's nothing at the prevention end at all. It's all about the Gunfight at the OK Corral, this bunch's most fervent fantasy. And even within that context, putting an armed guard in every school hardly seems like the best allocation of resources. There might be a few school districts in Texas or Mississippi that would be willing to lay off yet another teacher to do this, but the appeal would seem to be quite limited. And certainly not on my federal tax dollar.

'different learning styles'

This is a phrase that ed-school leftists seem quite enamored of.  What exactly does it mean?  What does it mean to say that inner-city youth aren't stupid, they simply have different 'learning styles' from suburban white and Asian kids.  I've never heard any specifics as to how these people's 'learning style' differs from that of other people.  Moreover, I've never heard any indication that this different 'learning style,' whatever it is, is remotely as effective as that of other people.  If the only difference between one 'learning style' and another is that one is more effective than the other, you should simply ditch the ineffective one, n'est ce pas?

how suicidal are we?

How suicidal as a nation are we that we would subsidize the least successful among us to reproduce?  Our welfare system should be providing strong-- and successful!-- incentives for these people NOT to reproduce.  I think the taxpayer would be much more amenable to providing a reasonable 'floor' of income, housing, etc. and the social services to support it, if he could also be assured that the number of children would be limited to, say, one for a single mother or two for a married couple on welfare.  Then we could concentrate on trying to help these people and their children make their way in the world.  But if they are allowed--or even encouraged, by higher benefits-- to dig the hole they're in even deeper by having more children, the prognosis is unavoidedly grim.  We can't allow these people to reproduce us into being a third-world nation.

synthesis

My right-wing views on reproduction and my left-wing views on environmental issues meet at this point.  We probably can't have a planet on which virtually everyone enjoys a Western middle-class standard of living and still have seven billion people living on it.

marketplace money

Here's a link to the 'Marketplace Money' website.  Look for the October 5th show about poverty.

http://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-money

There are many segments, but the thing that struck me about so many of them was that these people had many more children than they could support.  One has to wonder how many of these people would still be under the poverty line if they had just stopped having children at two (or one for single mothers).  There was one Somali woman who had six out-of-wedlock children.  What the hell could she expect?

People shouldn't have children they can't support.  That means that people on welfare shouldn't have children.  The welfare system should provide serious-- and successful-- disincentives to having additional children.  Certainly there should be no increase in benefits.  In fact, among other things, maybe there should be a monthly bonus for NOT getting pregnant, and if the woman became pregnant anyway she would lose the bonus.

irresponsible reproduction

This is one issue where I've become very right-wing.  I listened to a 'Marketplace Money' show on NPR last Saturday that made my blood boil.  I'll give the link and expand on this in a couple days when I have more time.  The subject was poverty and how people deal with it.  Yet all of these people had at least two children, and one had six, all out of wedlock!  I wonder how many of these people would fall below the poverty line if they had only two children per couple or one child per single mother.  These people are reproducing us into being a third-world nations!  More later.