Mr. Moderate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) seemingly makes it hard to extract some facts about the workforce. I won’t dig deep enough to even begin to conclude that it is a deliberate attempt to hide some inconvenient truth. But I will note that the figures normally presented for women in the workforce seem to be almost deliberately misleading of the truth.

A typical statistic asserts that 76.1% of men over the age of 20 participate in the labor force while only 59.5% of women over the age of 20 participate. From these statistics you might conclude that there are still a lot of “stay-at-home moms” out there who are staying home with the kids and not participating in the workforce. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Continue reading ‘Most Moms Work!’ »

Today I watched a C-Span show where Al Gore talked about his latest book, The Assault on Reason. Gore clearly recognizes the problem: reason is getting shoved out of public dialog. But he also clearly misperceives why that is happening. The advocates of God have realized that they are in a battle against rational thought and that they have been loosing since at least the Enlightenment. What we are witnessing in the arena of public discourse is just the most obvious examples of them fighting back. And, unfortunately for those who associate rational thought with civilized behavior, God is winning, and reason is on its way out.
Continue reading ‘God vs. Reason’ »

Unable to find a decent “permanent” job, I took a one-year contract position with a major contract labor company. This at least allowed me to have access to a decent health care plan, even if I was required to pay the entire group rate premium out of my gross earnings. However, I’m approaching the end of my one-year contract term, and that means I’m approaching the end of my ability to (barely) afford health care. Now, its true that I will have the option of continuing my coverage under the COBRA law. But it is also true that my maximum monthly unemployment benefit will just about equal my health insurance premium under COBRA, so how am I supposed to afford food, shelter, and other basic needs?

Unfortunately, my family and I have chronic health care problems. As long as we are covered by health care insurance, our chronic problems are manageable. But if we ever become uncovered, we descend into medical Hell, and getting covered again becomes increasingly problematic as our chronic conditions are all “pre-existing conditions” for any new plan. This means that I do not dare allow my plan to lapse, as exclusions for “pre-existing conditions” are waived if you are simply moved from one plan to another. That being the case, though, how do I afford food, shelter, etc. while paying for health care?
Continue reading ‘Health Care Horrors’ »

I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college.

Sting, Wrapped Around Your Finger

There is some debate over exactly what St. Thomas Aquinas meant when he wrote: “hominem unius libri timeo” — “I fear the man of a single book”. On the one hand, it is felt that a man of a single book has limited knowledge and limited horizons. “Having read so little he is quite at at the mercy of his one book!” On the other hand, it might also mean “that a man who has thoroughly mastered one good book can be dangerous as an opponent.” Luckily, we need not resolve this matter as both statements are true of the Christian fundamentalist. Such a person “of one book” (The Holy Bible) is both limited in knowledge and horizons and is also a dangerous opponent as they have no way to recognize error or defeat and thus plow onward incessantly, even when all around them ought to recognize the mistake(s) they have made.
Continue reading ‘Fundamentalist: Homo unius libri’ »

There seems little doubt that the American public is being subjected to a great deal propaganda coming out of Iraq. But how do we sort fact from fiction? Take, for instance, these paragraphs out of THIS STORY:

After the arrest, the military said, nine vehicles moved into the area and positioned themselves to “block and ambush Iraqi and coalition forces.”

Iraqi and coalition forces called in an airstrike. All nine vehicles fought, and five terrorist suspects were killed, the military said.

According to an official in Iraq’s Ministry of Information, the attack planes hit a line of cars queuing next to a gas station near Sadr City. Six cars were destroyed, three civilians were killed and eight others were wounded, the official said.

Continue reading ‘Paranoia Strikes Deep’ »

The State of Israel was born on or about May 14, 1948 when the Jews declared themselves free from the British Mandate established by the League of Nations after World War I. Since that time, the State of Israel has been in a continuous war with the Palestinian people and various Arab states who have at times taken up their cause. Presently, there are definitive peace treaties only with Jordan and Egypt.

I have been watching this conflict over the past several decades, and it seems to me that Israel does not really want peace. Instead, it appears to me that Israel is attempting to gradually push as many Arabs as possible out of “Greater Israel” (which includes at least the West Bank area if not the Gaza Strip). Every time it appears that things might be settling down so that peace talks could begin, Israel seems to find an excuse to do something to set off the fighting once again.
Continue reading ‘Israel: No Peace In Sight’ »

With the passage of the Iraq War funding bill yesterday, giving President Bush another blank check through at least the end of September, there has been much time wasted on talk radio and in print media with analysis of minute shifts of opinion among the political elites. All of this misses the main point: we are fighting the wrong war.

The right wing focuses on the terrorist acts in Iraq and claims “we have to fight them there or else we will end up fighting them here,” in the United States. This ignores the one undisputed fact of the 9/11 terrorist attack: it was an operation run by Osama bin Laden, and Osama bin Laden continues to hide out in safe houses, most likely in a region of Pakistan where neither the US nor Pakistani armies dare to go after him. My rejoinder to the right wing is this: we need to find and fight Osama where he is hiding or else he will continue to lead and inspire terrorists to come after Americans.
Continue reading ‘Fighting The Wrong War’ »

If you want to win over an undecided person to your point of view, do you make up the most-outlandish accusation you can think of and then toss it out to convince your listener that your point of view is the best? If you do that often enough, you will lose respect among rational people. Propaganda has its uses when you need to control masses of unthinking people who have no access to the truth. But if you keep tossing out propaganda and getting found out, you will end up with no credibility at all, even when you are right. This is like “the boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Continue reading ‘Right-Wing Bigotry’ »

Suppose you read a story about a criminal gang that broke into a state lottery office and stole a batch of winning tickets. They get caught and punished, but the state gives them their lottery winnings anyway. Would you be outraged at such a set of circumstances?

Well, that is more-or-less what the current “compromise” immigration bill calls for. People who are in this country illegally get a mild punishment, but they still win the lottery and gain legal status within the US labor force. Normal immigrants have to win a real lottery to gain entry visas into the United States. Why should illegal immigrants get to move ahead of all of the folks who have played by the rules?

In my view, the only possible fair treatment of illegal immigrants is to require them to go to the back of the line and start over. That is what we would tell anybody who tried to cut into line, right? So, illegal immigrants, “go to the back of the line!”
Continue reading ‘No To Immigration Bill’ »

Let us begin with a quote from Bertrand Russell:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The above is from Russell’s 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy; in fact, those are the last words in the book. I think it is a pretty good ending.
Continue reading ‘The Value of Philosophy’ »