And yet, the coast has managed to maintain a certain charm. Visiting some areas is like living in a Jimmy Buffett song. Taking a tour of historical sites—those that have survived the onslaught of hurricanes—brings one into a bygone era of simplicity, a certain kind of elegance (even for the more rustic historical sites), and closeness to nature. Visiting one of the many wildlife sanctuaries on this coast and observing the unique plants and animals that live there can make an environmentalist out of anyone but the most hardened plutocrats, even though (or especially since?) such jaunts are darkened by the inevitable signs indicating that some creature is critically endangered. And anyone who has ever taken a walk on the white beaches of Alabama or far western Florida at night can attest to the subtropical marine beauty of the Gulf. The coast is its own travel advertisement.

Were it not for the hurricanes, and the fact that they have a much higher tendency to make landfall at devastating intensities on the Gulf Coast (and southeast Florida) than the subtropical Atlantic coast, I would consider living as close to the shore as I could manage.

But once again, the Gulf Coast has been sucker punched.

I’m not going to go into depth about the science of this oil spill or the technological requirements of damage control. Mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering are not my specialties, nor have I read much of anything about them in my life, and unlike many bloggers, I’m not inclined to make an ignorant-sounding fool out of myself by pretending that I know something about a topic when all I’ve done is to read about it on the news and maybe check a Wiki article or two. Not to mention that I, quite frankly, no longer believe one word coming out of the mouths of anyone protecting BP, the various supporting industries such as Halliburton (though I haven’t believed them in eight years), or the White House. You simply cannot believe any source except scientists if it has an agenda to protect that relates to the topic at hand, and sometimes even certain scientists lose sight of the fact that they are supposed to accept the truth even if it is not what they wanted. This is going to be an absolute disaster; bits of information are trickling out now to indicate just how thoroughly these entities tried to lie to the American public about the scope of this, and like the spill itself, the trickles are only going to get worse.

It is incredibly hubristic to imagine that one could prevent the truth from getting out about something as large-scale and catastrophic as this, but power knows no boundaries in its arrogance. Though history is littered with the figurative corpses of former power-brokers who thought they could get away with massive lies, each new set thinks it is invincible until put to the test. BP’s reputation is shot. And the White House may well try to do damage control by implementing a temporary ban on offshore drilling, but that does not erase the fact that the president broke a major campaign promise by getting out there and supporting this type of thing in the first place and then sent a spokesman to say that the spill didn’t change his mind. (The time to act like George W. Bush is when you are trying to get a piece of legislation passed in a non-watered-down form, not when you have just witnessed the American Gulf Coast experience a disaster on your watch that could have been either mitigated or entirely prevented. Heck of a job.) People will pay a price for dishonesty.

As for the pathetic, deranged “progressive” South-haters who will say in so many words that the people of the Southern coast (we’ll ignore the innocent wildlife for now) got what they deserved for voting for politicians that support offshore drilling, well, to dignify this bigoted bile with a response is beneath me.

The only remotely positive outcome I can think of is that of disaster-as-catalyst. It is far past time for the world’s economy to get away from fossil fuels. If I believed that God destroyed innocents on Earth in order to teach the survivors a lesson, I would say that the oil spill and the recent tragic coal mining disaster are one heck of a message. As it is, I think it’s just a terrible coincidence. Still, we can always choose to take a lesson from it even if the events themselves have no greater meaning. We are in the 21st century. We should not have our civilization so utterly dependent on the compressed or liquefied remains of prehistoric life forms. Do I think that this will serve as a catalyst to finally get away from the intravenous drip of oil and the crack pipe of coal? Not really. But then, I’m a cynic and a pessimist. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, both about the impact of the spill and about our future.

I do love the Gulf Coast, after all.

Before I get to the topic about a future event, I feel compelled to talk about one closer to the present. Severe weather season is upon us, though it is off to a slow start. The Southeastern states are arguably past the springtime peak and seem to have gotten off quite light, but we must not forget that it is the months of May and June when so many major tornado disasters have occurred. Jarrell, TX… Moore, OK… the May 2003 outbreak sequence… Greensburg, KS… Parkersburg, IA… those are all F5 or EF5 events except for 2003 (and even it had a tornado that was considered by some to have been underrated as F4). The list goes on, and it does not require an EF5 tornado to do massive, tragic damage. But it is very difficult to forecast severe weather more than a few days in advance, let alone a month or more.

Hurricane season is a different matter, and it is quite possible to make long-range forecasts about the overall activity level of a particular season, especially now that we are merely a month and a half away from the beginning of the Atlantic season. 2010′s hurricane season is not, I believe, going to be anything at all like 2009′s.

The strong El Nino event that gave the Eastern U.S. such a cold and snowy winter (and killed off much Atlantic hurricane activity) is fading fast. The majority of ENSO models predict a return to ENSO-neutral conditions by the June-July-August period (link: PDF).

However, El Nino has left its mark. As is typical following a significant El Nino event, sea surface temperatures in the eastern Atlantic are well above average, and in fact, the anomalies for this year are greater than the anomalies in April of 2005, a year that had record heat across the ocean. In the far eastern part of the ocean, there are areas that are already at 30°C.

Apr. 12, 2010:

Apr. 12, 2005:

Note: All graphics in this post are created by NOAA and are therefore public domain. I have downloaded the graphics current for 04/12/2010 to my server to avoid taking U.S. Government bandwidth. Links to the pages where these graphics were found will not point to the same images at dates in the future.

If this continues and shear decreases as expected, this year may be quite good for long-tracked Cape Verde systems. Indeed, these temperatures are apparently a record in terms of warmth.

The Gulf of Mexico is below average, but this is because of the cold winter. With surface temperatures reaching into the upper 70s and low 80s in the Gulf states for the foreseeable future, and little cloudiness to moderate the effect, it’s likely that this body of water will warm up. Indeed, observing the sea surface temperature anomaly maps for the past few weeks indicates that this warmup is occurring already.

A limiting factor at present may be wind shear, which is above the climatological average:

(Link takes you to the current shear map on NOAA.)

This will continue to be a limiting factor for cyclone development if it persists into the early season. However, as the El Nino fades, shear should decrease. Indeed, the current above-average level of wind shear may only be a temporary event, as overall it has been below average for much of the past several months:

(Link takes you to the current shear graph on NOAA.)

The Bermuda High, an area of high pressure that extends to the western Atlantic, is not yet established. The location of this feature will be important to watch, as it determines whether long-tracked Cape Verde hurricanes tend to strike land—and what landmasses that they strike—or recurve to sea. The farther west it goes, the more likely that such hurricanes will hit a coastline, but too far west and storms tend to be steered south of the United States, as was the case in 2007.

In short: Sea surface temperatures are likely not going to be a problem in 2010. I think the features to watch, here in the pre-season, will be the evolution of ENSO, the location of the Bermuda High, the warmup of the Gulf and far western Atlantic near the Bahamas, and the levels of wind shear as compared to climatology. If the ENSO level decreases to neutral by the peak of the season and shear decreases to the climatological average (and these two factors are very intimately connected, I should note), but sea surface temperatures continue to remain high, I fully expect to see some beasts brewed up and for “Category 5″ to make a reappearance in this basin for the first time since 2007.

Unless the ENSO prediction models are mostly wrong, the Atlantic coasts are not going to get off light this year. It’s impossible yet to determine what areas are likely to be targeted, since we do not know how far west that the Bermuda High will set up, but at present I would go out on a limb and say that somebody is in for a bad year. It’s time to start getting ready.

And the fact that most of those same erstwhile allies consider this such an atrocious thing says a great deal about their true priorities. In my not-so-humble opinion, these people are liars to pretend they care about some 30 million without insurance, or people with existing medical conditions (of whom I am one), or a hypothetical 45,000 people who may die a few years earlier than they otherwise would have (yes, it sounds inhuman, but life can be cruel. Many of that figure will die because of cancer. Insured or not, the 10-year survival rates for internal cancers generally are not good). For starters, the bill is an insurance coverage bill and outside of some provisions for community clinic funding, it has nothing to do with health care administered by medical professionals. The typical deductible and co-pays of affordable individual coverage policies—to paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara—might as well be a million dollars if you don’t have that kind of money saved up, and most Americans, unfortunately, do not have that kind of money saved up. The bill doesn’t bring the individual market up to the standards of the group policy market in deductibles and co-pays, not even close.

Some of those lives could indeed be saved, but precious few of these activists are truly interested in saving lives. I can’t entirely fault them; it’s a known quirk of human nature that it is easier not to let death bother one if the numbers are high enough and the incident is remote or distributed enough. I see that 45,000 figure and I don’t even blink. Still, that’s not what I mean here. There are, undoubtedly, some long-term health care activists who see the world from an optimistic viewpoint and want to believe that this bill will help. I will not disdain them, though I think they are tragically mistaken, and nothing I say refers to them. However, most of the people yapping sanctimoniously about this on blogs, Facebook, and political mass e-mails are Johnny-come-latelys to the health care issue, and they are only on it right now because that is what their party and the president are on right now. These activists’ real agenda is only to maintain their partisan majority in Congress this year. They may use the 45,000 or 30 million as a loaded gun against their opponents, but if they get what they want, the devil take those human statistics. I have seen this disgusting little game played before; in 2006 many Democratic candidates invoked the Katrina response and the body count following it, but as I have complained about many a time and documented on this blog, most of them didn’t lift a finger to help those people after assuming office. I see no reason to believe it’ll be any different for the politicians or partisan activists when the true effects, or lack thereof, of their health insurance bill start to come out. Once this thing is over, they’ll move on to something else.

Incidentally, these partisan activists have revealed with their very own words just what they really think of the right of people with chronic medical conditions (like me) to have affordable health care, and it is not encouraging. Some proposals have been floated to initiate the pre-existing condition exclusions immediately but wait to implement any mandate. Such proposals would actually benefit the chronically ill (if they had all the loopholes plugged—keep reading!), you know. But whenever such an idea has been brought up, the partisan activist goons are on it like a pack of hyenas: “We can’t do that! We can’t have the pre-existing condition exclusions without an individual mandate! People might wait till they got sick to buy a policy and it would raise my premiums! Besides, there’s a high risk pool proposed for the interim!” (There are high risk pools already in place in many states. This does not make them affordable or useful for obtaining treatment for costly illnesses. If it did, we wouldn’t be discussing this.)

The proposals I refer to would affect a period of not quite four years, and even if people actually did drop their insurance en masse just because they could (which I do not believe would happen), the sky will not fall in four years, and health insurers could easily take the comparatively small losses out of their own profits rather than hiking everyone’s rates, if they were ordered to do so. Besides, even after the mandate would take place, people could still go naked as long as they paid the fine, which is much less costly than a policy, and these same people could still wait to get a policy… when they got sick. So much for that bogeyman. So no, this is not about fairness to the public at all. In the minds of partisan progressive activists, it’s more important to be “fair” to a parasitic industry that has killed its own customers by proxy than it is to provide health insurance to people who are sick. To them, I have no right to affordable health care; it is a privilege that depends on the behavior of other people. Concern for the chronically ill, my rear. I have so much contempt for the deceitful sanctimony of these people that I can barely express it, and though I do have chronic medical conditions and therefore would be among the people they pretend to care about, I will not be a pom-pom for their partisan cheerleading.

I have had the opinion for quite some time that the worst thing anyone could do, in the view of Democratic Party brass, is to display disloyalty to the party brand. There is no such thing to these people as ideological disloyalty. As I’ve lamented before, they discussed stripping Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship not because he thwarted an investigation into FEMA’s role in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but because he campaigned for John McCain. Now, we have numerous reports that the White House threatened to make sure that any Democrat who voted against the health insurance package would not receive any party money for re-election. There were no repercussions or threats made when the stimulus act passed last year, nor have there been any such threats for any other piece of legislation that the president wanted. Absolutely none. But it was never implied that the failure of these bills might result in a party changeover in the fall. Now that some people in the pundit and political classes have formed this opinion about this particular bill, opposing it is tantamount to switching party allegiance in their minds.

But to return to topic, my opposition to the bill. It is not just unmitigated contempt for many of the proponents (and pity for the rest, who I think are in for a big disappointment) that is why my opinion is what it is. I also have good reason to believe that the bill can make things much harder for people like me. Right now, if I were to receive a denial letter that said “pre-existing conditions,” I can produce paperwork demonstrating in an open-and-shut case that I am entitled to the insurance claim. I’ve done it before. I can handle my own appeals at minimal cost and time as long as the insurers can still say “pre-existing conditions.” If the bill passed and the regulations took effect in 2014, they wouldn’t be able to say that any longer. But don’t worry; they have a backup plan: They still can send out letters to customers rescinding coverage altogether if they claim it is on the basis of fraud, and to fight a fraud claim, you’ll have to engage legal services. For many, you’ll have to hire a lawyer and fight these vermin in court while you are sick and getting medical treatment. The insurers do this already to customers whom they cannot get on pre-existing conditions but who develop a costly illness that they don’t want to pay for, and insurance company executives have even told members of Congress point-blank that they would continue to do this to customers if the bill passed. Great, just great. Though I’m sure the trial lawyers’ lobby is quite happy.

Incidentally, when this detail is pointed out to these progressive activists that I have been impugning, they get quite upset and insist that such things won’t really happen because it will depend on how regulations are written up and interpreted. (The memories of the Bush Administration deliberately ignoring and defying all manner of business regulations, let alone “legitimately” interpreting them in the most corporate-friendly way possible, seem to have slipped their minds.) The naivete would be truly amazing if I believed it really were naivete; as I have said, though, I think the simple answer is that they do not really care about the chronically ill. They are liars.

I will not be the pawn of a group of people who are interested in my life only as a tool to achieve partisan triumphs. I’ve watched it happen once before, and all I got in return was disappointment and betrayal. Say what you will about the Republican activists; at least they make it plain that they don’t care three straws about people like me. If they decide that they would use us left-wing opponents for their own goals and then discard us, it’s no different from what the progressive activists and politicians would do—except that we can also use them.

It comes as no real surprise to me that existing conspiracy theories such as birtherism and trutherism are commonly held by Tea Partiers. Clearly, birtherism—the idea that President Obama was born a citizen of the British Empire—is more common in a right-wing movement than trutherism, but both make plenty of appearances. Trutherism, I should note, is the idea that the attacks of 9/11/2001 were a controlled demolition or were perpetrated by some entity other than Al-Qaeda. (This is not the same thing as questioning whether the United States government did everything it could legally do to prevent the attacks from occurring.) Some flavors of trutherism are extremely anti-Semitic and invoke the New World Order conspiracy theory. However, when I speak of a “conspiracist mindset” within the Tea Party, I do not merely mean an unofficial embrace of pre-existing conspiracy theories. I mean that the movement itself is increasingly losing any semblance of what one could call a political ideology, and instead focusing on a version of reality that can only be called a conspiracy theory.

One of the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory is the idea that all sources of information except a select few are part of the conspiracy. Now, I have some experience with the media. Even for some completely innocuous feel-good stories about the local “whiz kid” in the National Spelling Bee, the media managed to grossly misquote me more than once. For one front-page article, they misspelled my name, ironically enough. If the media can mess up harmless, inoffensive stories like that, then of course anything they say should be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion as to detail. However, this is not the way the Tea Party sees it. It is not about incompetence or laziness to them. The media, to them, are not just avoiding the conspiracy point of view because they cannot substantiate it, nor are they doing it for a mercenary reason; they are actively involved in furthering the conspiracy because they support it. The Tea Party movement has adopted this notion, and among most of the Tea Partiers, there exist only a few “trustworthy” sources of information: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, certain right-wing blogs and websites, Sarah Palin’s palm… but I digress. The point is that any source of information other than the accepted ones is automatically suspect to the Tea Party.

Needless to say, this is deeply ironic for a movement that got started because of a staged on-screen rant made by a CNBC reporter. However, there actually is a method to the madness. The Tea Party accepts this view of the media because it purports to be a dissident revolutionary movement within an authoritarian country. They differ as to whether it is a fascist or communist dictatorship (or perhaps they don’t know the difference), but they are united in the view that we are under some form of authoritarianism. In dictatorships, “official” sources really can’t be trusted to report the truth, and real information has to come from the underground or outside the country. I am unsure how many Tea Partiers know that Rupert Murdoch is Australian, but even if a majority do, this probably does not bother them. In the 1990s, conservatives called Fox News “Radio Free America,” an homage to Radio Free Europe, which was funded by the American government and countered the Communist Party line in the days of the Soviet bloc. For those Tea Partiers who know that the owner of their favorite TV station is not American, they probably see it as a plus because it fits with their worldview in which American media are controlled by the government as part of the conspiracy. Presumably, the fact that Australia has a government censor on Internet Service Providers located there escapes them entirely.

But it’s not just a distrust of the media that powers the Tea Party conspiracy theory. One must keep in mind that, in their view, America has become a dictatorship. Once you understand that this view underlies everything they believe about the country we live in, it makes perfect sense within that framework.

Dictatorships always have players officially outside the government to keep order. To the Tea Party, a key player is ACORN, an organization that I had never even heard of until 2008. Many of the Tea Party adherents believe, or at least entertain the idea, that this nonprofit group “stole the election” for Barack Obama. They compare it to the idea that many on the left side of the spectrum had that voter suppression, ballot-box stuffing, and possible electronic machine fraud flipped the state of Ohio to George W. Bush in 2004. This ignores several pertinent facts about the 2004 election. This is a diversion, I’ll admit, but since I’ve seen this “defense” made by a lot of people, I’m going to head it off at the pass:

1. In 2004, a credible means was proposed for the alleged fraud, as well as a credible scale on which it could possibly have taken place. Voter suppression has a long and sordid history in the U.S. and every election has it reported. Additionally, as a software engineer, I can assert that election security has been a professional concern for this community, not just a political one. The machines in question were deemed insecure and shockingly easy to tamper with, so much in fact that many states (including Florida of electoral infamy) ditched theirs after only a few elections.
2. In 2004, eyewitness reports of young and minority voters being illegally turned away from the polls surfaced. In addition, the Secretary of State was known to have ordered thousands of new voter registrations to be rejected because the wrong weight of card stock was used for the registration forms.
3. In 2004, a populous county in Ohio closed its doors to all observers when it counted its votes, citing a terrorist threat to the area. When the FBI was later questioned about it, agents said that there was no such threat issued by any agency.
4. In 2004, seriously suspicious anomalies turned up. Some precincts reported more votes cast than there were registered voters. In some highly Republican counties in southern Ohio, a Democratic candidate for Chief Justice who had not advertised in the area received more votes than the Democratic presidential ticket. Even more suspiciously, in these same counties, there were many more votes against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage than there were for the Democratic ticket. Nowhere else in the state did these bizarre patterns occur. The same county that lied about a “terrorist threat” is located in this region.
5. The U.S. Senate, when presented with all the information, saw it as suspicious enough to warrant an objection to the Ohio slate of presidential electors and a hearing into the voter suppression aspects of the story.

It’s been a while since I looked at this information, and there is probably more that I’ve forgotten. A Congressman, John Conyers, compiled everything into a concise book that hit the shelves of mainstream bookstores. However, the point is that the two situations—2004 and 2008—are not comparable. In 2004, the only allegation raised was that voter suppression and possible ballot stuffing or vote-switching may have illegitimately flipped the vote of one very closely contested state. No credible allegations were made about the national popular vote or multiple states, and those making the allegations about the state of Ohio came bearing evidence. On the flip side, the Tea Party embraces the idea (because so many of its members hold it) that the organization ACORN “stole the election” without, apparently, recognizing what it would actually imply if that were true. For ACORN to have stolen the election, they somehow had to have created 10 million fake voter names across the country that made it past the Secretaries of State or Departments of Elections, and they sent out 10 million people to vote fraudulently under those names on Election Day. Alternatively, they had the polls stacked with people who stuffed 10 million fake votes into ballot boxes.

This is not a rational idea. This is a conspiracy theory of the first order. However, it seems that in dictatorships such as Afghanistan and Iran, massive ballot-box stuffing does occur, as well as outright lying by the vote-tallying sources about who won. If one believes that the United States of America is a dictatorship, then of course such a notion is plausible. The idea of ACORN as the tyrannical government’s private ballot-box stuffer is so prevalent in Tea Party circles that Doug Hoffman, the candidate in the New York special election last year supported by Tea Partiers, blamed it for his loss, despite that the district he ran in is extremely rural and ACORN is pretty much exclusively an urban group. It didn’t even have an office close by.

Another common behavior of dictatorships, real and fictional, is to turn children against their parents and convince them that their family members are enemies of the state. George Orwell noted this and made it an important detail of his masterpiece 1984. Naturally, the Tea Party movement has taken this to a ridiculous extreme in their dictatorship conspiracy theory. Glenn Beck recently said on his program that Obama was “turning kids against their parents to get elected.” This is not just a dog-whistle to the conspiracy-minded who think we are living under a dictatorship. In a shout-out to the new 2010 vintage Tea Party, which is less Libertarian and more Religious Right, Beck goes on to say that this is against the Mosaic commandment to honor one’s parents. Seriously? These people worry about a dictatorship and yet think that young adults have no inherent right to vote differently from their parents or get their parents interested in casting a vote at all? Let alone the idea that voting a certain way is at all comparable to turning in family members for crimes against the state. In a deep, massive irony, during the Bush era, there was an official statement from the Department of Homeland Security that we should all keep an eye on our neighbors for signs of terrorist sympathies or suspicious behavior.

A year ago, the Tea Party movement was planning protests on Tax Day. These protests were purportedly about the bank bailouts and the failed “cramdown” mortgage restructuring attempt. I had issues with the concept of protesting the government’s attempts to help people avoid homelessness, but at least there was a coherent message to the Tea Party. The movement could say that it was about small government and keeping the government out of any form of bailout, and it would have some validity. It was a Libertarian populist movement, and you could take that or leave it. However, something happened to the group over the course of the year. They embraced the Religious Right, for one, and the New World Order conspiracy theory is a dusty old skeleton in this group’s closet that many do not want to acknowledge. Even those who do not accept the NWO theory often believe that there is a nebulous “secularist” conspiracy to ban the Bible (and presumably also to repeal the First Amendment, which is what it would take). It makes some sense that these people would bring their version of reality into the ranks and allow it to distort Tea Party views. But they also embraced groups that had heretofore been deemed fringe: the birthers and the militia movement, for starters. By taking these people into their ranks who did not all necessarily share the Libertarian economic viewpoint, or have it as their chief issue, the Tea Party had to find something to unify its adherents. The “secret dictatorship” conspiracy theory seems to have been what was used for this. It has come at a price, though. In times of economic distress, there is often great appeal in a populist movement, but the appeal becomes limited when that movement loses its touch with reality.

We were active in the process. We took our grievances first to the administrators, then to the school board. We helped manage a campaign to unseat the superintendent of education, which failed. We wrote letters to the local newspaper, including one that I wrote as a freshman about ridiculous “security” policies instituted in the wake of the Columbine school shooting. By all measures, we did the activism part right.

However, we were up against a strongly apathetic populace and a small group of people who were very committed to their agenda, and that agenda was not just ill-conceived educational policy. Over the course of my high school education, I was informed in a history class that, in the teacher’s opinion, “Nixon was innocent in Watergate and the Democrats just set it all up because that’s the kind of thing they would do.” This was after the Nixon tapes had begun to trickle out. In a social studies class, I was told that a single president could undermine years of legal precedent by changing the Supreme Court makeup “like the current president (Clinton) has done.” Never mind that Roe v. Wade, the case that was almost certainly on this teacher’s mind, had been settled law for 25 years. I was “taught” evolution in one of my science classes by being told to outline the chapter as a single night’s homework assignment. I don’t recall learning anything in school about the Big Bang, though in private reading I had long moved on to articles about the theorized heat death of the universe.

Our efforts to fix that particular school district ended in complete, total failure, and my three sisters and I all withdrew from school long before graduation. I went to college after 10th grade courtesy of my ACT score. (I should add that the school also had “discretion” in whether to let me go, which they wanted very much to abuse once again, and during that final meeting, I am convinced I was only signed off to leave after I made it clear that I’d just take the GED route if they didn’t let me go of their own accord.) My three younger sisters were home-schooled for the rest of their pre-college days.

We were burned on the public school system, but going cold turkey on a social activist cause is extremely difficult if it’s one that you have worked on for years. For several years after getting out of the system, we peripherally followed events, but with a sense of hopelessness and despair for those who did not have the choice of leaving as we did. We took care of our own and that’s all anyone can do anymore—that was how I thought, at least. In the information age, those kids would eventually be exposed to the true version of science and history rather than a version consisting of anti-science, blatant partisanship, and feel-good revisionism. Whether they chose to accept it would be up to them. With any luck, some of them would discover these ideas and logic would have a chance of winning out.

It turned out that it wasn’t as simple as that. Upon entering college, I learned that the anti-science and revisionist sides had extremely well-funded institutions backing them, and their views were not merely confined to the cliched village idiots. They were, and are, so successful at pushing propaganda that they have succeeded in muddying the waters in the United States and deceiving perfectly intelligent people. They have done this in part by taking over school boards of public school districts and pushing rote memorization—whether of standardized test material, Biblically-based “theories,” or a smiley face version of U.S. history that is not to be questioned unless the questioner wants to be accused of hating America—over critical thinking skills.

This is especially evident in science. Something like half of the U.S. population rejects evolution, and the media will often present evolution as a controversial topic. But at the same time, there was NO controversy about the fact that the H1N1 virus could mutate and that the hypothetical mutated version could outperform its predecessor—in other words, that the virus could have evolved. There is no question whatsoever that human beings have artificially selected for specific traits in domestic and agricultural animals. Yet there is a substantial group who will absolutely refuse to believe that selection can happen in nature at a multicellular level and that it can change species, especially the human species. On another scientific topic, I distinctly recall getting into arguments in secondary school about the Big Bang. My peers thought it was a choice; either I believed in God or I “believed in” the Big Bang. My natural response, “I don’t understand… why couldn’t that have been the method that God used to create the universe?”, was met with total lack of comprehension. It was as if that had absolutely never occurred to them. And since I now have a basic understanding of abstractions such as superstring theory, it makes me wonder how much of a heretic they would now consider me to be. In fact, reading about Theories of Everything has just given me a greater appreciation for the beauty of the universe and reinforced my belief that this beauty isn’t accidental. I’m not suggesting that everyone who accepts science must be theistic. However, those people who truly think that it is a choice between science and faith have lost, shelved, or never developed their capacity for critical thinking.

With history, the problem is not so much an inability to think critically as it is an inability to think objectively. The right-wing revisionists proclaim that “liberal historians” want students to grow up hating America and feeling ashamed of their heritage. However, if there are stains in the fabric of a country’s history, those shouldn’t inspire pride. Such stains are a part of our past, and it is inappropriate and arguably dangerous to pretend that they didn’t happen. History isn’t meant to be a pep talk. And incidentally, there is little evidence to suggest that people who learn an objective version of American history come to hate America as a result. We’re Homo sapiens. We’re members of a species for which group/tribal identity is, and always has been, very important. Every nationality in the world takes pride in itself, and I see no reason to believe that America would be any different. Knowing about the bad parts might just inspire people to want to prevent such things from happening again.

For the right-wing scientific and historical revisionists, the driving force behind their actions seems to be fear—fear that people might come to different conclusions than they themselves have. To avoid this, these people have stepped up their assault on education. They are not just taking over school boards at a local level; that has been a whopping success. Now the particularly empowered school boards have bullied textbook publishers into forcing their version of history, science, and English upon all American children in public schools.

How, might you ask, have a few political ideologues on school boards managed to persuade private companies to change their product? (And doesn’t the idea of government entities pressuring business to change their product sound like the diametric opposite of “conservatism”? These folks’ hypocrisy truly knows no bounds.) Well, it has to do with the market reach of specific states. Texas and California have been the two biggest markets for schoolbooks, and so the requirements of each state’s Board of Education have had a disproportionate impact on the material that goes into textbooks. A state reserves the right to reject books that do not meet its criteria. California, with its catastrophic budgetary problems and massive education cuts, is not going to be purchasing new textbooks for several years. This gives Texas’s Board of Education virtually unilateral power to determine what material is put into school textbooks.

The Texas Board of Education has been taken over by people with an agenda, and it is not even a subtle one. An excellent article in the Washington Monthly describes in great detail what these people have in store for American schoolkids. Here are some of the priorities of Don McLeroy, a right-wing creationist on the Texas Board of Education:

• Propose the likes of Concerned Women for America (Phyllis Schlafly), Contract With America (Newt Gingrich ’94), and the Moral Majority as conservative counterweights to the New Deal and the Great Society.
• Defend Joseph McCarthy and the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
• Teach in science classes that there are substantial flaws to evolution and that the scientific community does not agree that the theory of natural selection occurs in nature (this is completely false, incidentally).
• Teach deniers’ arguments about man-made climate disruption (my chosen term for global warming).
• Remove references to a planet that is four billion-plus years old and a universe that is fourteen billion years old. This entails denying biology, paleontology, geology, astrophysics, cosmology, and probably more disciplines, and embracing a thoroughly discredited creationist view that minor flaws in carbon dating open the possibility of a planet that is 0.00015 percent of the age that it is believed to be.

Something tells me that Big Bang theory is high heresy to this guy and he probably doesn’t even know that superstring theory and loop quantum gravity theory exist.

Some of McLeroy’s colleagues and associates are even worse. Another board member, David Barton, is a former executive of the Texas Republican Party. His “qualifications” for office include a degree from Oral Roberts University. These two pieces of his background should give you a good guess about what his educational priority is, and it would be correct. Barton ignores the Native American democracies and ancient Greece, the actual models for our government, and the Enlightenment, the period in which the first official United States documents were actually written. He ignores the fact that the period in which religion was unconstitutionally intersected with government was the Great Revival (or Great Awakening) of the early 1800s and the Victorian era rather than the time of the Founders. Instead he plays up the much uglier Puritan heritage of early America and the theocracies of most of the colonies in the 1600s, proclaiming them to be the real sources of inspiration for our form of government.

I’ve mentioned that these people prefer brainwashing and rote memorization over critical thinking. Apparently there is a very good reason for it. There is not a lot that I can add to a quote like this (emphasis mine):

In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer.

If a comment like that does not send chills down the spine of any parent or teacher, I would question that person’s commitment to education.

It is a legitimate concern that many people lack a basic understanding of English grammar. I’ve seen far too many essays that are virtually unreadable. However, leaving aside the fact that there is no reason for it to be an either/or choice between grammar and reading, grammar is part and parcel of reading comprehension, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true. One can write perfectly grammatical sentences that say nothing when taken together. On the flip side, learning how to determine meaning from well-structured paragraphs tends to structure one’s own thinking, and having examples of good writing is invaluable toward improving one’s own. Anyone who ever studied a foreign language can attest to the value of learning by experience. It says a lot that critical thinking and reading comprehension are alien to this person—who has been in the position of determining curricula for schoolchildren.

At the moment, it looks very much as if these people in the Ministry of Truth in Texas are going to get most of what they want, because right-wing ideologues are notoriously impervious to the appeals from “liberals.” My old attitude from 2000 seems to apply quite aptly to this situation: “We took care of our own and that’s all anyone can do anymore.” However, it isn’t strictly correct. In my preceding blog post, I said that sometimes there are situations that we can do nothing about. In this one, I can do a little something. I can inform. There must be plenty of objective-minded parents and teachers out there who are unaware of what is happening in Texas and would learn about it only upon first opening the teacher’s edition or looking at what a child brought home.

For me, having open-minded parents who accumulated a lot of reading material was the difference between knowledge and ignorance. There is no doubt in my mind that without this material available for me to read, I would have been at a disadvantage when I went to college. This is a situation where those who are concerned with education and concerned with the truth need to know about what’s going to happen so that they can decide how to respond. I would advise home-schooling if the parents’ finances permit it, early admission to college or junior college, or as a last resort, lots of supplemental reading for the kids. If there is any hope in a particular district, I’d also advise interested persons to run for the school board against ideologues who are there on behalf of an American cultural jihad (oh yes, I went there). The school system cannot be allowed to remain in their hands indefinitely. Whether people like these individuals in Texas want to acknowledge it or not, their version of history and science is not the correct one, it is not the one accepted by the developed world, and if they are allowed to deprive American children of real information, America will continue to fall behind.

But every once in a while, a news story will appear that is so awful that I don’t even want to know about it. The earthquake in Haiti is a perfect example. And before you immediately think, “This person is a sociopath just like Rush Limbaugh,” let me explain. I have been avoiding this story. The imagery that I have seen (it’s almost impossible to completely avoid the news in the information age) reminds me all too well of the images of human misery that came out of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. However, for all that this was part of my reason for not staying up-to-date with this one, that is not the primary reason I have been avoiding the story.

For all my life, I have been a “can-do” type of person. I am a Type A personality, an INTP (sometimes INTJ) on the Myers-Briggs, and an Enneagram personality type of “Achiever.” My ambition has taken different directions, and unfortunately it has sometimes had to struggle against stress or illness, but it has always had an object. It’s very difficult for a person like me to say, “I can do nothing about this.” Middle-class life in a first world country, high intelligence (it’s not boasting if it’s the truth), decent health, and they ultimately mean nothing for some situations. But that is the conclusion I have been forced to draw about the situation in Haiti. I had to draw the same conclusion about the devastating cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China a few years ago. I had to turn the TV off and walk away because there was nothing I could do, and because staring at such images with no intention of doing anything about it seemed to be little more than disaster voyeurism. I don’t have a high opinion of deliberately stoking that primal fear instinct for the adrenaline thrill.

Many people are going to Haiti for cleanup efforts. The U.S. military is sending troops into the Caribbean to assist with relief, and from what I have heard, those soldiers are pretty much universally proud and happy to be part of the effort. They should be; what they are doing is making a difference. They do have the power to help, as do the churches and charitable groups that are sending people. Unfortunately, though, most people just can’t go. I would not suppose this to be the case for myself, but some people undoubtedly have very precarious employment situations, and it would quite literally be a choice of keeping their job or helping an earthquake victim in another country. For my part, I would just have to take unpaid leave, lacking that much vacation time, but money is still a strong consideration in a harsh economy. We live in a society that places an extremely high value on work. A consequence of this is that most people are tied to work and cannot do other things if it is a choice between work and these other activities.

I suppose I could donate some paltry amount of money to the relief efforts. The Red Cross has raised millions, certainly, and that undoubtedly helps. But the simple fact is that even if I emptied out my savings account and donated 100% of it to this, that is pocket change compared to what needs to be done. Again, I’ve witnessed this firsthand as a resident of a state struck by Hurricane Katrina. Even in the year that will be the fifth anniversary of the strike, there is still work that needs to be done and work that needs to be done but won’t. There was that much damage.

This is no doubt going to come across as a heartless, soulless thing to say, but unless an individual is independently wealthy and donates a very large sum of money to charitable relief, no individual donation is going to amount to much, and moreover, having an impact was not even the primary purpose of the donation. Unless we have a personal stake in a cause (such as a widow giving to the American Cancer Society after the early death of her husband from cancer), the act of giving is something we do to make ourselves feel better. It’s a placebo effect. It gives us the feeling that we do have power to change the situation. Certainly if enough individuals make donations, that amounts to something, and I would not dare try to dissuade anyone from making a charitable contribution if that is what they want to do. But for me, I would look at the amount of money I would be able to give, and it would just reinforce my sense of powerlessness.

It’s not at all about wanting acclaim or recognition for anything. I am simply unable to feel that my efforts even matter for the cause at hand if they only have value after being combined with 100,000 other people’s efforts. 10 dollars more or less—what’s the difference when we are talking about tens of millions? It’s why I left political activism. It did not empower me; it made me feel like a single molecule in one grain of sand on the beach. “Hardcore” activist types (a term I’ve made up to describe those activists who are extremely eager to judge those not like themselves) condemn those with personalities like this, believing that we only are in anything for ourselves. It’s not true; we are simply people who want to see concrete evidence that we have made a difference. I’m not a hypocrite about it either. I have complained over the years about various aspects of the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort, but they were always directed at those who had the ability to act but chose not to, such as FEMA, members of Congress, the media, and members of the Bush administration. I do not harbor one iota of resentment toward any “regular person” who did not do anything for Katrina victims.

In comparison with what happened in my (relative) backyard four and a half years ago, the current governmental American efforts seem to be doing extremely well. It really should tell us something that it is easier for us to do disaster relief in other countries than in our own, but I blame the Homeland Security bureaucratic rules (and Bush-era incompetence) for that. I’m glad that there are people in existence who do have the ability and means to do something about this, and I’m glad that this time, there are people in place who will act and act effectively. However, for myself, I have to turn off the TV.

A scientific study group led by British scientists has run the climate models again, and the group has found that we are on target for a global rise in temperature of 6°C by the year 2100. This is the worst-case scenario of the 2007 United Nations report on climate change, which even then was widely seen as being far too conservative. The odds are very strong that I wouldn’t live to see it, since I’d be 117 if I did, but the children and definitely grandchildren of my generation would see it.

This is not quite a repeat of the carbon- and methane-caused temperature spike that caused the massive Permian extinction and resulted in the loss of 95% of all species on Earth. It’s not quite the catastrophic mass extinction scenario of the Pixar movie WALL-E. (Yes, the real environmental damage portrayed in that film was caused by global warming, not just garbage.) But it’s close, and it isn’t an isolated result. For several years now, scientific studies of climate have been finding that the observed conditions are on the upper end of the range of predicted results for that period of time, or even exceed all estimates outright. Those people who have paid attention to global warming news probably saw this British result coming.

Life on Earth at +6°C would not be a pleasant affair, even if the description of it in The Independent is a bit sensationalized. The Gulf Stream Current of the Atlantic would have shut down, plunging Europe into coldness (and probably also much of the Atlantic coast) and cutting off the outward flow of hot water from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Without a source of outflow for this tropical heat, hurricanes like Katrina could be brewed up in the Gulf every month in every hurricane season, theoretically. Tropical diseases and invasive species would have an easier time of spreading past their appropriate ranges. The Arctic ice would long ago have melted—indeed, the summer ice is very close to disappearing now, and mainstream scientific consensus is that it is too late to prevent this particular loss—and the resulting changes in air masses would have a profound impact on Northern Hemisphere climates. At 6°C, the Antarctic Ice Shelf likely would have melted as well, along with Greenland, resulting in the submerging of areas like the Florida peninsula and the marshes of Louisiana.

But even so, what the West will face in this brave new nightmare world is mild in comparison with what is coming Africa and Asia’s way. Africa, already suffering from critical food and disease problems, would see both exacerbated. The melting of glaciers and the sea-level-driven flooding would be climatic bombs dropped on east Asia. Imagine a scenario in which the ice of the Himalaya mountains—a source of fresh water for India, China, and Pakistan—melted away. Then add to that the seawater flooding of the Ganges, Yangtze, and other river basins in Asia that have port cities housing millions of people. Those people have to go somewhere, but resources would already be strained because of the decrease in usable fresh water. China, India, and Pakistan are all nuclear powers. (It suddenly makes “Global Zero,” a full nuclear disarmament movement, sound not at all hippie-idealistic, but critical.) Even the Bush-era Pentagon produced a report about the geopolitical effects of catastrophic global climate change, and its conclusions were chilling. It predicted a global resource war.

What scientist in his or her right mind would want to fabricate data to support such a horrific situation? The only people who enjoy dreaming of things like this are people like the scriptwriters for 2012. People who actually do deal in fantasy. Of course the stupid hackers did not find anything real. It is indicative of the level of media discourse in America that, to the extent that either news story is being discussed at all, their failed stunt garnered more attention than the scientific study of the Global Carbon Project. But the Global Carbon Project’s results are far more important.

I’ve said it before and I will reiterate it in the face of this ugly report. I do not believe that energy efficiency and conservation will be enough to forestall this. I am absolutely in favor of moving in that direction, if for no other reason than because it is cheaper in the long run and it is not advisable to power a world economy on fuels that will someday run out. However, I am utterly convinced that we will need to develop geoengineering techniques that can remove the greenhouse gases that we have already put into the atmosphere. Technology created this problem, yes, but it is a fallacy to extrapolate from this that technology must be avoided in finding a solution. In fact, I think that the judicious use of technology to clean up the atmosphere is the real solution.

It is a truly horrible idea, though, and it just goes to show that bad ideas do not only come from Blue Dog Democrats or Tea Party Republicans.  Self-described “progressives” can have them too.

“Progressive” Activists Betray the Legacy of the Civil War:  A United U. S. A.

This is far from the first time that “progressives” have advocated Balkanization of the United States and the breakdown of the federal government in favor of a loose alliance such as that proposed by the Articles of Confederation.  In the lead-up to the American Civil War, many Northern progressives said “Let the South go” rather than fighting militarily to bring seceded states back into the U.S.  These 1860s-era progressives did not really care about the human rights issue of slavery.  Many of them believed that slavery would collapse under its own weight and the South might voluntarily choose to return.  Obviously, history did not take this path, so we do not know how it would have turned out if President Lincoln had followed this advice and war had not broken out.  However, we do know one thing:  African Americans would have remained enslaved for far longer than they were.  Not just living under the iron heel of Jim Crow laws, but actually enslaved.  We also know that, though some aspects of Reconstruction were extremely broken, when that process ended by the “corrupt bargain” of the 1876 election, Jim Crow laws were immediately forced into effect.  That’s what happened when they “let the South go.”  Human and civil rights in the South were eroded.

The legacy of the Civil War was not just the abolition of slavery and the enshrining in the Constitution of voting rights to people (men, at the time) of any race.  Another part of the legacy was the principle that there are certain things individual states cannot do.  The War settled the question of secession and nullification.  If states are part of the U.S., they abide by the laws of the U.S. and cannot deny their residents the protections of the Constitution, the United States Code, and federal programs.

Of course, if a health care reform bill is signed and it allows states to opt out of a robust national public option, this would blow a hole right through that ideal.  Legally, of course; there is nothing in the Constitution that says Washington cannot enact laws with an opt-out clause for states.  But the very existence of this hypothetical opt-out would go against one of the legacies of the Civil War, just as surely as it would go against the legacy of abolition if the U.S. somehow overturned the Thirteenth Amendment through legal means.  For progressives to be advocating this idea is a monumental betrayal.

Death by Popular Vote

It’s not just a betrayal of E Pluribus Unum, either.  This idea is a betrayal of every person in a Republican-dominated state who is in favor of a public option.  It is saying to us that we don’t count.  Here is a direct quote from a popular Daily Kos diary in support of this idea:

(…) I really love the idea of an opt-out public option.

Not because it’s the best idea by any means. A robust single-payer plan would be the best idea. Not because tens of thousands of real Americans won’t die and go bankrupt in states with morally bankrupt legislators. They will.

Our lives are meaningless, then, to the “progressive netroots community” except as political pawns.  The message absolutely could not be clearer.

I know what the residents of my state would probably vote for.  I certainly know what my governor and Legislature would do.  And while I would indeed apportion blame to them if Mississippi denied its residents access to a national public option, I would apportion a great deal more to the ivory tower blue coast “progressives,” and any members of Congress who voted for such a thing, for making it possible and legal for them to do it.

People in the South and other Red areas will die because of this, if it passes, whereas they would not die in Blue states.  This means that a state’s populace would be allowed to sentence people to death, permanent indigence, or bankruptcy by a popular fiat.  Have we sunk so far?  There was massive outrage—MASSIVE, I say—about the idea behind California’s Proposition 8 and the fact that 50% + 1 could deny court-established civil rights to people.  Where did the outrage go?  Or was it only ever present because LGBT people are generally a liberal-oriented group and California was a blue state?

I am a former Democratic Senate staffer, actually, but I would NOT forget that it was the progressive community and Democrats in Congress who allowed townhallers, teabaggers, and insura-cons in my state to sentence people like me to death or bankruptcy.  Want my vote in the future?  Want the votes of any left-of-center Southerners in the future?  Too bad, suckers.  If this idea ends up passing, we will remember exactly who it was that sold us down the river.  We would expect no less from our troglodyte state governments, whom we do not vote for anyway, but we depend on Washington to keep their harmful ideologies somewhat in check.  This idea won’t turn the South blue.  All it will do is royally tick off Southern Democrats and liberal-inclined people.  (Yes, I am a civil libertarian oriented liberal, not that cowardly weasel-word “progressive.”)  It will send the message loud and clear that our lives, health, and finances do not matter because of where we live, that we are not worth fighting for, that we have no inherent value, but are only useful as a body count to make a political point.

I’ve suspected this for some time about the “progressive” community’s real opinion of Hurricane Katrina’s victims, and this idea does not do one thing to dispel this suspicion.  It only reinforces it, in fact.  Apparently, if you live outside of a Blue area, your only value to this part of the “netroots community” is as a part of a body count that they can use to advance a political agenda.  Even if it’s an agenda that you otherwise would agree with, nobody wants their entire worth to be dependent upon their being dead.

In truth, this whole scheme gives the impression of being revenge politics. If you are at all familiar with the left-wing blogosphere, you’ll know that there is a huge amount of resentment over the fact that the South gets more money from the federal government than it pays in. The people who hold this resentment ignore that the entire purpose of social programs and such is to assist the poor, and the South is the poorest region in the country. To them, no one in the South deserves anything because a majority of Southern voters would vote against their having it. They are no different from anti-tax Republicans in that they only want to see “their” tax money go to projects and places that they personally like, and they have a massive grudge against the Southeast. This opt-out idea looks very much to me like they simply love the idea of “getting back at the South” for the tax money that it “stole” from them.

Passing a law with this in it would also send the message that health care is not a fundamental human or civil right in the United States.  If it were either, it would be the responsibility of the federal government to require every state to offer the same health care exchange across the borders.  With the exception of the death penalty, the federal government does not defer to states in the arena of human or civil rights (and it is truly a major problem with the DP that the same crime can get a different sentence not based on the judge and jury, but based on where it was committed).  By letting states opt out, this continues to send the message that health care is a privilege rather than a right.  This is not the message that we want to send!  That is the opposition’s message.

It will not turn the teabag crew in favor of the Democratic Party.  Their people are dying at the hands of insurance gangsters, too; it doesn’t seem to penetrate their skulls.  If anything, all it will do is cement their ideology.  “We don’t have socialism in this state!”

Denying—or letting governors and legislatures deny—people the right to use a social program is not going to turn anyone in favor of that program.  The only thing that will is to deploy it and let people see through experience, either their own or that of people they know, that it is not such a bad thing.  Every parent knows that sometimes they must force a stubborn child to do something, even if the child stamps his foot and DOESN’T WANT TO, because it is good for the child and the child will be grateful for it in the end.

Let’s take the hypothetical that Congress passes, and the President signs, a bill that requires American adults to purchase a private insurance policy but does not provide a public plan. Let us suppose that noncompliance is punished with a fine that is automatically taken out of one’s taxes, as is done in MA. In that state, you must provide proof of insurance for the entire tax year or, barring extreme poverty, you will get fined for it.

Generations Y and Millennial, which contain the largest number of uninsured, will get hit the hardest by such a law. The bill that proposes this, the “Baucus bill,” would cap the out-of-pocket cost of premiums at 13% of a person’s yearly income. A year’s full-time work at the minimum wage (probably the most common wage for this age group) comes to $14,790 before taxes; you can skim off about 20 percent of that in various taxes, of which perhaps half will be recovered by the following year. (The rest is Social Security and Medicare. Yes, Virginia, there is socialized medicine in America already, but only if you’re older than 65.) I am not sure whether the 13% figure applies to gross income or income after taxes. If it is gross income, that’s $1922.70 a year for insurance premiums, or $160 a month. For net income, it is $1538.16 a year, or $128.18 a month.

This may not sound so bad until you realize that this leaves a single person making minimum wage with either $9909 a year or $10294 a year, and this must cover housing, food, transportation (including auto insurance in most cases), utilities, and perhaps other necessities such as child care. It also must cover all medical bills that this “insurance” is not covering because of deductibles and co-pays.

The only plans that run for less than $128 a month are plans that are not intended to be long-term. They are meant for people who are between jobs and need creditable coverage to avoid getting blasted with a pre-existing conditions clause when they get a job again. They often have expiration dates of a year after issuance. The kind of a plan a minimum-wage worker would afford gets them a ridiculously high deductible (up to $5000) and a horrible co-pay. This sort of policy is worthless. It’s extortion, quite frankly—forcing money out of a person to avoid a punishment, but not offering anything tangible to show for it. People with these policies pay twice; they pay for their premiums and then they pay for the cost of medical care, because the insurance doesn’t cover a bit of it unless they get catastrophically ill.

I defy anyone, anyone in the world other than Ebenezer Scrooge, to suggest that this is a reasonable thing to do to someone making minimum wage. In many cities, it is tantamount to condemning a person to living in a shelter. It encourages people to make very poor decisions in order to have enough household cash to stay out of cardboard boxes: Find a roommate, any roommate, cohabit and therefore risk an unplanned pregnancy, get married when they have no business doing so, etc. Some people will find ways of committing suicide (and decrease the surplus population?) rather than continue with what they believe is a never-ending downward spiral. Forcing vulnerable people into making bad decisions is not good policy.

However, even the most diehard Scrooges of the world surely will not have a word to say about the other horrible aspect of this hypothetical mandates-only insurance law. I am talking about deficit explosions. This is the 800-pound gorilla, the aspect of bad reform bills that I did not touch on in the previous blog. Deficits are popular to talk about these days, and it says something about the insurance industry’s stranglehold on our political system that deficits suddenly don’t get discussed when bills come up that could reap them a mountain of profit.

That 13 percent in the Baucus bill is not a cap on the market cost of a policy. It is a cap on the buyer’s out-of-pocket costs toward buying that policy. You cannot force people to pay money that they don’t have; debtor’s prisons are against the law and I think there might well be blood in the streets if we actually started sending people to jail for nonpayment of “fines” for not being insured. The government, you see, helps out. It makes up the difference by offering subsidies to poor people. There is no proposal to cap the absolute cost of policies, and there is no proposal to cap executive payrolls. Basically, there’s no means to control runaway health insurance costs. This bill, a national version of the failed Massachusetts system, would simply shift the bulk of the expense to the government.

You think the deficit is bad now? Wait till the government has locked itself into paying whatever insurance companies demand. This is what has happened in Massachusetts. I used to live there; the system that they have there has only exploded premium costs, with the state government paying the price for it. Much of the money is paying for garbage—the lousy junk (or more accurately, bunk) insurance policies that are all that’s affordable to private individuals without group coverage. The purpose of business is to make money. That’s neither evil nor good in itself, but it should be taken into account. Government policy telling a particular industry “Charge what you like and we’ll foot the bill” is blatantly stupid.

Sure enough, the most expensive Congressional bills, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, are those that attempt such a thing. The least expensive are those that have a sturdy cost control mechanism, namely a government-administered insurance option.

The main benefit of a public plan would be that NO money going to it would be funneled into the 8-figure salaries and bonuses that have actually driven the cost of health insurance premiums sky-high. It could pay for people’s health care rather than the yacht of some corporate bureaucrat. It is a complete myth that malpractice lawsuits, overuse of medical services, and/or a reckless iPhone-loving generation voluntarily going uninsured are what have caused costs to go up. All of these things undoubtedly happen on case-by-case bases, but the real culprit, pure and simple, is executive greed, just as it was for Wall Street.

A private-only reform plan could work, theoretically. Other countries have done it. However, the countries that have pulled it off have regulated their private sectors to the hilt. There are strong cost control mechanisms and in many cases, take-home pay is capped. I don’t think such a system would be the best fit for the United States of America. We are about choices in the marketplace. A government plan is just another choice. If it provides a better product than the private sector, well, that’s the marketplace at work. They would either improve themselves or take the consequences.

I do believe in economic freedom, provided that basic safety of labor, consumers, and the environment has been accounted for. Earlier in the year when people were screaming for Congress to cap executive pay, I was against the idea; I favored a punitive tax on firms that had abused the bailout money. I am against the government placing a cap on the pay of any private sector individual, including those most hated. All legitimate businesses get government assistance, whether in the form of tax benefits or in the much loathed bailouts. In many situations, government contracts jobs out to private businesses, paying them with taxpayer money. Saying “X business should have its salaries capped because it gets money from the government” is a slippery slope, and what the people calling for it actually wanted was a cap on “bad” businesses encoded into U.S. law. This is a bad idea. I am all for highly progressive taxes on the wealthy, but I am unequivocally against dictating a maximum limit for a person’s gross income.

So, a mandates-only bill will drive people who are barely treading water further into financial disintegration, most of whom are the young generation and are already saddled with mountains of debt and a truly atrocious economic situation. It will force them to create more credit card debt as they pile basic living expenses onto their cards out of sheer necessity. (Do you hear the voice of personal experience in this?) It will drive governments into a sea of red ink as they foot the bill for the remainder of whatever outrageously priced bunk insurance policy that the private sector, when guaranteed a captive customer base, will force on people. This is not theoretical, though the theoretical financial estimates of such a proposal back it up too. This has actually happened in the state, Massachusetts, where it has been tried.

There’s a call these days that “some reform is better than none at all.” I most vociferously disagree. There are ways of making the status quo worse, and the Congressional bill out there that does not have a public option definitely does that. It may be bad for the Democratic Party to fail to pass a bill, but the long-term fiscal health of the United States of America takes precedent over the health of a political party.

If you pass a health care reform bill that mandates all adult Americans to purchase insurance policies without providing a Medicare-like public option, beware.  Beware the sleeping giant.

I speak of Generation Y, the group of people born in the 1980s.  This is my generation.  It is the generation that, arguably, delivered Barack Obama the White House.  It is also the generation with the most people who are “voluntarily uninsured.”  (The “young invincibles,” as the sneering corporate media dubs us, a phrase that is extremely offensive to those of us in our 20s who do have serious pre-existing conditions, such as yours truly, and already have accepted that our bodies are on a time limit because we get proof of it at every doctor’s visit.)

Yes, of the voluntarily uninsured, a majority of them are young people who (for whatever reason) don’t think they need health insurance yet.  This is true.  This means that my generation has become a convenient scapegoat for those forces who think that the problem is that things cost too much for the insurance industry.  We (I say “we” to refer to Generation Y as a whole, since I am obviously not part of the “we” who can voluntarily forgo health insurance) are blamed for the rise in premiums, since we aren’t there to share the costs with everyone else.  The fact that the health insurance industry has raked in record profits lately seems to have escaped the minds of these people, but there you have it.  A mandate from the government to buy insurance would hit my generation the hardest.

And let me tell you, the Democratic Party will not like the result.  In all the calculations by the White House and the Blue Dog members (not least of which appear to be calculations about how much money they will lose from the industry in donations if they support real reform), the effect of waking up the sleeping giant of Generation Y and its successor, the Millennials, seems to have been lost.

My generation put these Democrats and this President into power.  I have to admit that I was never on board with hope and change; I was always skeptical and cynical about that rhetoric.  But many of my generation actually did believe it.  More importantly, they believed in it. They saw candidate Obama as a person who was in touch with them and could actually represent them. I can say with near certainty that forcing this generation to send their money to the bloodsucking private insurance industry, in exchange for junk policies (which is all that will be offered at the rates that Generation Y can actually afford—keep reading), will drive these new voters into cynical apathy or possibly even into the arms of the Republican Party.

The AFL-CIO recently completed a report on the economic state of young workers.  Their findings were that my generation (and to an extent, Generation X) can barely afford their bills, if at all; that a third of us still live with parents because of necessity; that if we lost our sources of income, a huge majority of us would have no more than a month’s worth of living expenses saved up; and that we have the worst health benefits, sick/vacation packages, and retirement benefits of any age group.

THIS is the generation that the Democrats in Congress and apparently, the President, would force to enrich the health insurance industry.  Generation Y cannot afford it. However much CNN and its ilk may want to pretend that my age cohort has a large number of uninsured because we would rather pay out for iPods, the truth is that we don’t have it because a great many of us have crappy jobs (if any) with crappy wages and worse, no benefits.  I am exceedingly grateful to be in the portion of my generation that does have at least mediocre health insurance that covers my pre-existing conditions and a deductible that wouldn’t require me to tap into the cash line of my credit card to pay.

If we get a mandates-only health insurance bill out of Washington, where is the money going to come from to pay for the premiums, I ask?  Government subsidies?  Try getting government subsidies as a young person unless you are a single parent or living in a box.  I’ve tried.  The proposed subsidy program in one of the many health care bills, the one that does not have a public option, is about at this level.

Will it be like in Massachusetts, where you must provide proof of insurance to the state tax commission come tax day, and if you cannot provide it for all 12 months, you get a fine automatically taken out of your rebate?  That’ll go over well.  What if such a law would mean that a tax rebate became a tax liability, a liability that one could not pay?  Are we going to put people in jail for failure to send money to a private industry?  The Republican town hall disruptors scream about “fascism,” but if that’s not actual fascism, I don’t know what is.  If this is what we end up getting, you can toss me a tea bag and count me as one of them.  I strongly suspect I will not be the only liberal-turned-”teabagger” if this is what passes.

Incidentally, the cost of insurance premiums in Massachusetts has shot through the roof since “Romneycare” was enacted.  So much for mandates alone being an effective way to lower costs.

If the Democrats pass Romneycare-turned-national, they will lose Generation Y and the Millennials.

Obama’s going to make a statement on Wednesday about his vision for health care reform.  About time.  I hope he’s taken to heart the lesson that there are few real leaders in Washington, DC, and that Congress is used to 8 years of being threatened and intimidated by a consummate bully of a President to the extent that they have apparently forgotten how to lead.

A mandates-only bill is what I am against.  What I am for is a little harder to articulate.

I am in favor of a public health care option that is administered like Medicare—something that every American would be eligible for but that was not mandated and did not have automatic enrollment.

Call be a libertarian, but I am not in favor of “universal coverage” in the sense that 100% of the population would have “insurance” (whether public or private).  I think that if you are an adult, you have comprehensive and affordable options available to you, and you don’t want coverage, that should be your right—as should paying your own medical bills.  I am in favor of making good insurance affordable to everyone who wants it, and to all children regardless of what their parents want.

I am against caps on malpractice settlements.  What’s your eyesight worth to you?  What about your limbs?  What about the life of a loved one?  You see the problem with this.

I am in favor of passing a law allowing people to sue their health insurance providers.

I am in favor of having a strong federal committee to regulate the private insurance industry, but I am concerned about it becoming corrupted whenever a President or a Congress came in that didn’t want the insurance industry regulated.  Any means of making this committee robust rather than subject to the partisan whims of the time, I would be in favor of.

I am in favor of decoupling health insurance from employment.  If employers want to offer a group policy, that’s fine, but I do not support automatic enrollment of employees.

And with the exception of my tort reform opinion, I don’t see what’s so controversial about any of this.  But then, I’m not taking in thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.