Science of gun policy

Comment at Truthout article about teachers fighting for gun control in schools:

The NRA is a good example of [gun] policy by ideology as opposed to policy based on science. Science is a system of knowledge that accurately predicts the future under defined conditions (example, researchers accurately predict vaccinations can prevent most cases of target infectious disease). NRA is all about profiting from guns so they don't want accurate scientific predictions of the effect of gun proximity to violence. As a result, they are a major player in banning epidemiological research on gun violence. This allows the NRA to use ideological '2nd Amendment' arguments to advance 'gun right'. The opposition doesn't have the resources to conduct scientific studies so they are forced to use anecdotal evidence to make their case to policy makers; even when their arguments are more intuitively sound, the stridency of the gun rights lobby is overwhelming. 

The resistance needs to fight individual issue battles under the umbrella of increasing overall universal rights. Policy should be based on science, not ideology.

Money & economy

Comment drawn from Richard Wolff video at Truthout:

For workers who 'exchange/sell' their labor to employers for wages, money is stored labor. With money, people exchange their stored labor for objects containing stored labor or services (direct labor). Value of land must then reflect how much labor must be invested to return profit. 

Prof. Wolff said something with even more prolonged implications than his comments about money - workers work to support themselves (and their families). This means the purpose of economies - production, consumption and exchange of capital - is to support the wellbeing of people. The wellbeing of people is not restricted to the current generation, so this includes the long term sustained wellbeing of people. This means profits are not necessary to economies and even more interesting, industrial sectors which do not support human wellbeing are anti-economic; think arms and military industrial complex.

Update: mistake in the original "...profits are necessary to economies..." It has been corrected above.

This article at Buzzflash clearly demonstrates the short economic consequence of our current global economic trajectory I predicted - ever increasing concentration of wealth in the upper income tier by their constant extraction from the producing tiers. When workers are starved to the point they are not productive, the system will degrade into a very low productivity economy. I called it economic desertification. It's preventable. But the best solution is not to replace one set of elites (or apex predator) with another. It's much better to evolve a system with many small enterprises with complex interrelationships in an information transparent society, a modified anarchy because it 'evolves' with the community and is not pre-structure like a charter based society.

More than consumer information

Comment at Truthout post proposing graphic warning labels:

Yes, fully informing consumers is the only way to democratize markets. Without complete information, it is not possible to consume your values; instead, you are forced to consume the values of those controlling information. Consuming values in both literal sense of eating and figurative sense of supporting human/animal/environmental rights. 

But why stop with direct consumer information? Information is used to control and manipulate the behavior of everyone. DJT incites fear by calling immigrants criminals and terrorists in order to gain support for his 'Mexican-paid' wall and Muslim ban. Department of Defense uses national security fears to avoid and get away with not conducting legally mandated audits to (a) force politicians to increase their funding and (b) terrify voters into paying their bills. DuPont hid the health impacts of PFOA so consumers would continue to buy/use teflon. Pharma uses patent protection to obscenely profit from life saving drugs. All sorts of technology companies repress competition by buying and quashing innovative inventions and patents... 

Information transparency would initiate the most transformative and revolutionary political and cultural reform. It won't come from the top. The only possibility is a grassroots revolution.

Triumph or Tragedy

NPR posted a story on it website yesterday announcing the First Clouded Leopard Cub Born Using Cryopreserved Semen. I am often of two minds with such announcements. As a supporter and advocate of science and information, I cheer at the advancement of knowledge and understanding. IMO, the best justification for scientific inquiry is curiosity interesting; answer an interesting question. In instances when extraordinary efforts are needed to preserve a species, I detest the need to ask the question, often because human destruction of habitat is the root of population decline. When I read the post yesterday, I was angry. Economic greed drives habitat loss and decimates wildlife. Now appeals to the compassion of workers funds this type of research and 'preserves' these lost species in zoos as living exhibits. It's morally wrong.

Unifying Resistance

A comment I posted at Truthout. It pulls together several themes I've written about here:

"Trump is upping his game, and we, as resisters, aren't ready." 

Yes. It's also time to be proactive as opposed to reactive. But we need to understand the reflex to react and how to step back and see the forest to respond proactively. It's important to understand how politics divides people in both obvious and subtle ways. DJT is a practitioner of confrontational divisiveness; he outright declares his rejection of immigrants, Mexicans, unattractive women, prisoners of war, disabled people, etc. Divide and conquer can also be achieved by more subtle tactics, such as when Republicans and Democrats specifically void the needs of the poor by leaving them out of the debate (or DJT spotlighting the educated with his 'I love the poorly educated').  

The modus operandi of the body politic is to act on the interests of the elite at the expense of the larger population by dividing the larger group. Successful opposition would require some degree of unified resistance which is not the case with single issue movements. I would suggest single issue movements make their case under the umbrella of a larger 'meta' theme for the benefit of the larger overall. For instance, demanding that all policy be based on objective evidence would mean the numbers of gun injuries and deaths factors into gun policy and definitions of corporate personhood would correct for the differential influence such policy would confer on owners. Another useful theme would be to define economies as 'production, consumption and exchange of capital for the sustained wellbeing of humanity'. 'Sustained' would entail policy makers incorporate a long view of policy outcomes - think climate change; 'wellbeing' would require some degree of universal healthcare; and the 'economics' of warfare would be completely invalidated. A final theme would be maximize information transparency. The only way a small group (elites) can concentrate power to any extent is through the control of information. They use propaganda (selective/deceptive use of information) to create divides in the larger population and amplify infighting. Information transparency inoculates against propaganda.  

The resistance movement needs to recognize that although Trump is personally repugnant and vulgar, he is only a figurehead. The real adversaries in the long fight are the power elites.

Redress of disproportionate scale

The primary problem with the economy right now is enormous inequality expressed in many ways. On the meta level, the power of corporations to effect ecosystem scale damage threatens the survival of humanity through its impact on the environment - climate change, air and water pollution, fracking triggered earthquakes, water shortages, etc. My favorite example is the power to literally remove mountains by mountaintop coal mining. Bill Nye describes another example where tar sands oil extraction has denuded one quarter of the visible ecosystem in the Canadian province of Alberta.

As regular readers would know, my preferred solution is to make information fully transparent. Controlling information is how corporations concentrate power. There are two other options which would diffuse the ability of corporations to concentrate power. Neither would be as effective as information transparency but its always good to attack large problems from multiple fronts. One would be to force all corporations to have a fixed expiration dates. Corporations are legal entities. The Supreme Court has given them some personhood rights without the limits that natural persons experience with biologically imposed death. Corporate expiration dates would fix that problem. BTW, because corporations are owned by people, the extension of personhood rights to corporations means owners of corporations have more rights than non-owners. Its surprising this isn't seen as a challenge to one-person-one-vote.

The other option is to limit the size of financial institutions. Banks are tools by which corporations collect/borrow the money/capital to become powerful. No one individual has the money to buy the resources to blow up mountains. By pooling the money of many people, banks can collect the needed funds. Smaller banks can't collect as much money. This would not prevent the concentration of power but it would put up additional barriers because it forces the participation of more players who each would/could add their own conditions.

So not as simple as my preferred open information proposal but perhaps good options to add to the tool chest in opposition to concentrated economic power.