Category: Politics

Springfield

Governor DeWine had an editorial in the NY Times this morning — https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/springfield-haitian-migrants-ohio.html — he starts out OK. Essentially I’ve got a history in that area, I know the area, and I know this nonsense to be untrue. But then he says he still supports Trump because of the horrible problems with immigration elsewhere.

Without mentioning that a bipartisan attempt to do something got scuttled by the very guy I am telling you will fix it.

Worse – without thinking maybe some of those reports are made up or embellished like this situation has been? If I know first-hand what is going on in Springfield, and I know that Trump’s portrayal of it is wildly inaccurate? Why wouldn’t I question how accurate his depiction of Colorado or even the Mexican border is?!?

They just let you steal!

This is another case of simplifying a complex situation to make someone look bad: Cali lets you walk right out if you are stealing $950 or less. And ignoring the real problem (if you want to have all of these crimes investigated and prosecuted, your local/state taxes need to go up so departments can staff accordingly and enough jails can be built to house all of these criminals).

Every state has a law that differentiates between misdemeanor theft and felony theft. e.g. https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/title-5/subtitle-4/chapter-36/subchapter-1/section-5-36-103/ for Arkansas at $1000. I think most people would agree that someone who steals ten dollars worth of merchandise and someone who steals three grand worth of merchandise should get different punishments. Punishments are generally defined along with the classification of the crime. And each state’s law reflects this. Different states have different dollar amounts — and $950 sounds like a lot of money. But compared to the other states? California’s demarcation is pretty middle of the pack.

Unfortunately the entire criminal justice system is overloaded. Police may be too busy to deal with your theft complaint. The prosecutor may not get around to filing charges. And what happens if they do get a conviction? Now we need to find somewhere to detain the thief. And, again, if there’s a person stealing cars, a person kidnapping minors, and a person stealing the latest video game … ideally, we’d have resources to punish all of them. But we don’t. And I’d be way more upset if the kidnapper skated because they had a task force down at the GameStop gathering video from all the surrounding stores to track down this thief.

Prop 47 absolutely has some flaws. There’s a Prop 36 this year that seems like an attempt to fix some of the unintended consequences — two or more theft charges under $950 would be a felony. Stealing from multiple places that add up to over $950 would be a felony. Won’t know if that passes until November, but it’s not like all the liberals are dancing around saying this was 100% perfect and everyone else should do it too.

 

Alabama: $500
Alaska: $750
Arizona: $1,000
Arkansas: $1,000
California: $950
Colorado: $2,000
Connecticut: $2,000
Delaware: $1,500
Florida: $750
Georgia: $1,500
Hawaii: $750
Idaho: $1,000
Illinois: $500
Indiana: $750
Iowa: $300
Kansas: $1,500
Kentucky: $1,000
Louisiana: $1,000
Maine: $1,000
Maryland: $1,500
Massachusetts: $1,200
Michigan: $1,000
Minnesota: $1,000
Mississippi: $1,000
Missouri: $750
Montana: $1,500
Nebraska: $1,500
Nevada: $1,200
New Hampshire: $1,000
New Jersey: $200
New Mexico: $500
New York: $1,000
North Carolina: $1,000
North Dakota: $1,000
Ohio: $1,000
Oklahoma: $1,000
Oregon: $1,000
Pennsylvania: $2,000
Rhode Island: $1,500
South Carolina: $2,000
South Dakota: $1,000
Tennessee: $1,000
Texas: $2,500
Utah: $1,500
Vermont: $900
Virginia: $1,000
Washington: $750
West Virginia: $1,000
Wisconsin: $2,500
Wyoming: $1,000

Why so militant

Someone asked why some feminists are so anti-anything-feminine. I think a silly analogy makes it easier to understand:

If there were a law that required everyone to eat pizza for dinner every day, and a whole freedom movement evolved to ensure we could all pick our own dinner? I expect some people would be so adverse to pizza as to never eat it again. Electing to eat pizza (because I love pizza, just not every day) could be seen as an insult to the Dinner Liberation movement.

Viewing the movement as action so you never had to eat pizza again rather than action so to could chose from the entire world of options including the one that had formerly been forced upon you.

Trusting Science

Kinda hard question for me, as a scientist, if I trust science or trust experts. Few who ask are honestly curious – they’ve got an agenda. I generally trust Science and Experts. *But* I also know that Science and Experts aren’t always right. They are generally right with the information they had available at the time, the measuring tools they had available at the time, etc. It’s surprisingly easy to do nothing wrong and still manage to arrive at the wrong conclusion. There are some things that have remained consistent over enough time and testing that they’re generally accepted as true (scientific theories). But even that name … scientists aren’t out there claiming it’s the complete, never changing truth. It’s the current theory.

What I don’t trust second-hand accounts of science or experts. There is generally a peer-reviewed publication that makes a cumbersome read. With a lot of details you don’t really need. But! It’s also exactly what was studied, how it was studied, what conclusions the researchers drew, how statistically significant the findings were, and other factors that should be included in future studies. A newspaper article claiming researchers say XYZ? I’ll use my internet search engine of choice to find the actual article if I’m interested in the claim. It’s a newspaper’s summary of a PR guy’s summary of the abstract written by an expert to explain something that requires domain knowledge to understand well.

Outnumbered

Any political system requires “buy in” from a very large percentage of those being governed. If the 600,000 people who live in Wyoming thought they had absolutely no say in how the country ran because there are like 8 million people in NYC, 3.5 million in LA. Or even the just about 600,000 people who live in Harrisburg, PA … they don’t have much incentive to peaceful participation in the federal government.

I hear folks in rural parts of Ohio saying the same thing — cannabis will be legalized because of the three C’s (Cinci, Columbus, Cleveland) and they get no say in it. Which made me curious — just how “outnumbered” are these “rural” folks. So I grabbed a list of cities in Ohio with population numbers. Columbus is huge, almost a million people! But there are almost 12 million people in Ohio. So Columbus is just under 8% of the population. Add in Cleveland, and you are up to almost 11% of the population. Keep going — add Cinci to get 13.5%. So the “three C’s” are only 13.5% of the entire population. Toledo gets us over 15%. But these are hardly “bossing everyone else around” percentages. I was down to the 143rd largest city in Ohio — Fostoria with just over 13,000 people — before “cities” account for 50% of the state’s population.

And that assumes 100% of people in urban areas are voting against whatever 100% of these rural people want to see happen. Which is absurd. If 80% of the people in these cities were voting against “the rural way”, we’re adding cities with just under 4,000 residents before we reach 50%.

If 75% are voting against “the rural way”, we’re down to cities with just under 2,000 residents.

While I think Wyoming is probably right — there are enough liberal voters nationally that conservatives would be “outnumbered” without creative districting, over-representation in the senate, and over-representation in the electoral college … the same doesn’t seem to hold true in Ohio.

Figs

Came across someone referencing the “God Hates Figs” bumper sticker as presumed “religious nuts” online today.

Those are generally folks against religious nuts – Westboro Baptist Church had a domain for god hates fags. There was a coordinated effort online to overrun their message board (they shut it down eventually) and god hates figs came up as a joke. You can find all sorts of biblical citations showing that god hates figs. Far more than those showing that god hates people of a specific sexual orientation. Someone bought a domain, and there you have it. God hates figs.

Not saying there aren’t people who took it seriously – but it’s meant like the “dangers of dihydro-monoxide” thing. A bit of a riff on people who use the Bible to justify hatred.

The Best Medal?

I’m not sure if this is tripling down, quadrupling down, or what … but Trump’s made more statements about how he’d prefer a Medal of Freedom because Medal of Honor recipients are gravely injured or even killed.

Beyond the incredibly absurd notion that he’d qualify for a Medal of Honor — his assertion boils down to this: a Medal of Honor winner gave something significant of themselves. They put themselves into an incredibly dangerous situation to allow the rest of us to enjoy our Constitutionally protected freedoms. They earned that medal, often with their own body or even their own life.

Medal of Freedom winners also did something — but the person to whom Trump was referring? Was a doctor, who did what many other doctors do without being awarded medals. The ‘extra’ that got the medal? They gave money. Some of which went to Republican campaigns and conservative causes. Now, I presume even DonOld realized you couldn’t actually award a Medal of Freedom to someone for donations to his campaign. She (and her husband) also gave money to research centers fighting substance abuse, medical research, and Holocaust remembrance — not a bad thing, but there’s a huge difference between giving your life for something and giving your time and money for something.

Of course DonOld would rather be lauded for handing over some money (or, in his case, creating a charity to allow him to get praise for handing over other people’s money to beneficial causes) than actually have to give something of himself.

 

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/medaloffreedom/

The following individuals received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump on November 16, 2018:

MIRIAM ADELSON. Miriam Adelson is a committed doctor, philanthropist, and humanitarian. She has practiced internal and emergency medicine, studied and specialized in the disease of narcotic addiction, and founded two research centers committed to fighting substance abuse. With her husband, Sheldon, she also established the Adelson Medical Research Foundation, which supports research to prevent, reduce, or eliminate disabling and life-threatening illness. As a committed member of the American Jewish community, she has supported Jewish schools, Holocaust memorial organizations, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and Birthright Israel, among other causes.

Who Deserves Benefits?

I blame Reagan for the public “knowing” who actually deserves benefits. Instead of showing the “welfare queen” as an extreme outlier who got caught and prosecuted because that’s an important part of government function along with “success stories” of people who survived on welfare for a few years whilst they got job training and reentered the workforce?

They wanted people to think that was a norm – your hard earned money is being stolen by the government and handed over to these frauds. Since there are so many lazy people out there stealing your money, odds are decent that anyone person getting benefits is a fraud. Obviously the people you like aren’t frauds – you are a good, loving, considerate person who wouldn’t like frauds. So it is conveniently all those people you don’t like stealing from us all.

And people manage to find something to create an ‘other’. If everyone has the same skin color, those folks are the wrong religion, descend from Irish/Italian/whatever immigrants, or are a bunch of McCoys/Hatfield’s/whatever’s.

For some reason, the ten thousand dollar toilet seats in the military budget didn’t get people thinking that military contracts are a scam misappropriating your hard earned money.

And the military one is kind of a straw man too – they eventually started 3d printing the thing and cut the cost to a couple hundred bucks (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-air-forces-10000-toilet-cover/2018/07/14/c33d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html).

On Suddenly

I had a dual major in Uni: history and theoretical physics. My “history mentor” was someone who studied under Howard Zinn, so my knowledge tends towards a somewhat alternative version of history. And his thesis was on slavery — so many of the Project 1619 ideas were hardly new to me. Listening to Trump say VP Harris turned Black — beyond sounding racist weird — shows a remarkable lack of historical perspective and a stunning US-centric view of the world.

Harris’s father is Jamaican. To say she isn’t Black is to say Jamaicans aren’t Black. The University of the West Indies has some 76% of the Jamaican population being of African descent.

Does he think the entirety of the slave trade was built around the USA?!? Over 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to South American and the Caribbean. Jamaica, specifically, was a British colony — and somewhere between half a million and a million enslaved people were sent there. Why? Sugar production! There were about 400,000 enslaved Africans sent to the USA. So, based on historic records? More Africans were kidnapped and forced into slavery in Jamaica than the USA.

https://www.slavevoyages.org/

Separation of Church and State

As I see states enacting laws to require religious education in public schools, I think of the history of trying to incorporate Christian philosophy in law. I’ve always wondered *which* Christian. The real answer, I expect, is everyone assumes it is their own. Good for garnering votes, but that’s going to make implementation dicey.

Obviously some sort of Reformationist Christianity (sorry Catholics!). But there’s a big difference between Lutheran, Southern Baptist, Mormon, Presebeterian, Mennonite, etc. And, yeah, they locked up the courts so what the Constitution says and what the authors meant probably don’t matter … But I like to throw Deist in there as a knod to the founding fathers.

My gut is it ends up being “left up to the states” generally. So Arkansas can be Southern Baptist, Maybe Catholics get Rhode Island (only like 40% of the population, but the next highest is Pentecostal at like 6%). In states like Ohio, religions are going to have to band together to get a majority — it’ll be like a coalition government in the UK. If we’re lucky, “I don’t want to live in a theocracy” will win a state or three.

We are either stuck with whatever religious edicts align with our region or we move. And the feds are just in charge of saying it’s not a violation of the Constitution when women wearing slacks gets banned in some state. For reasons. Really good, substantiated by history and text, reasons.

 

https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-ten-commandments-displayed-classrooms-571a2447906f7bbd5a166d53db005a62