A. Solve for 1/2(x + y) = (10 + 40)
B. Quantities of different candy types have no mutual dependency. Just have Jane give Dick 7 Junior Mints, have Dick give Jane 9 Red Hots, and move on to the next question.
C. Jane gives Dick 1/2 of her Junior Mints and Dick gives Jane 1/2 of his Red Hots.
D. Teach to the test.

Last night I watched the PBS Frontline special “The Education of Michelle Rhee.” Rhee is an educator who rose to national prominence as Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system – a new office created especially for her, which transferred direct power from the board of supervisors to Rhee.

The DC school system was – and probably still is – one of the most challenged in the nation. It shares problems common to many large inner-city school districts: kids from broken and low-income homes, horrible discipline problems, perfunctory attempts to prepare the kids for the next grade level, failing marks in the three R’s, and a demoralized cadre of tenured teachers who aren’t empowered to make meaningful changes within a seemingly hopeless teaching environment.

Rhee’s solution was simple: raise your kids’ test scores, or I’ll fire you. She also got tough on discipline. Essentially, she became the “Tiger Mom,” the dragon lady of the Washington D.C. school system.

Lo and behold, test scores started rising, slowly at first, then dramatically. Scores of tenured teachers found themselves unemployed. A victory for “tough love” teaching methods? Not so fast!

I heard no one actually SAY “teach to the test,” but teachers running scared for their jobs found that to be the only way to produce immediate results. Investigators later found an unusually high incidence of erasures on multiple-choice IBM computer card scoring sheets, though it was never proved who performed the erasures.

Kids were able to raise their test scores, on an average. Teachers were graded not on inspirational or innovative teaching techniques, but on class test scores. There was ideological method in the Rhee madness.

I wasn’t surprised that Rhee also became active in far-right Republican politics. She launched an initiative to fight the recall effort against anti-union Michigan governor Scott Walker. The philosophical dividing line between the Walker mentality and the rest of the world is that of “human capital” versus “human being” rhetoric. We are NOT just commodities, somebody else’s “resource.”

Be that as it may, what I didn’t hear last night were glowing testimonies from the students themselves. I didn’t hear from kids who’d suddenly acquired the learning tools and self-confidence to announce their goal was to continue on to college. I didn’t hear one expression of delight from a kid who finally “got” a difficult principle. I didn’t hear a single kid ask, “how can I find out more about this?”

It seems manifestly true that big changes need to be made in the philosophy and profession of teaching. Scapegoating teachers makes no more sense than scapegoating kids. It accomplishes no more than scapegoating parents: we blame parents, which in education is like embracing the chicken-vs-egg riddle as a viable solution. Since education is so heavily institutionalized, changes in methodology have to come largely from the top, which Rhee understood, but they have to enable students AND teachers to achieve their potential, which Rhee didn’t understand.

To my mind, teaching kids how to pick answers that best satisfy the educator score card is a monstrous perversion of the point and rewards of a rounded education. For demonstrating that we don’t have to accept dysfunctional school systems as inevitable, I’d give Rhee an “A.” For inspiring kids to acquire the one skill that makes all the others possible, that is to say a love of learning, I’d give Rhee an “F.”

And I’d fire her.

There’s a hidden danger in San Francisco Bay: mercury. A potent neurotoxin that can cause serious illness, mercury has been flowing into the bay since the mining days of the Gold Rush Era. It has settled in the bay’s mud and made its way up the food chain, endangering wildlife and making many fish unsafe to eat. Now a multi-billion-dollar plan aims to clean it up. But will it work?

So, our San Francisco Bay annually flushes some 3,100 pounds of mercury out through the Golden Gate. Its principal source dates to the early days of the Mother Lode. Several rivers carry those compounds down into the Sacramento River. Mercury is not water soluble, but Methylmercury is. It’s a bacteria-generated trace compound of mercury found in all those waters. Although not normally considered present in hazardous concentrations, methylmercury is accumulated in the tissues of small aquatic animals and fish. Like other heavy metals, it is not metabolized. Smaller fish in turn are eaten by larger fish, and so on and so on, all the way up the predator chain. Sharks and largemouth bass are often too toxic to eat.

So what did I ever find in the EMBUD water quality report about mercury? Nothing! I checked more carefully. The report even cites trace levels of uranium (not mined in our area): the EPA target concentration is 20 pico-curies per liter, or less. All our water sources are less than 1 PCi/L. If EBMUD even lists uranium, why, then, no mercury statistics?

So, I went to EMBUD’s website. Plenty about water quality; a little bit about mercury in fish; nothing about mercury in drinking water.

Yet it’s plainly there. Now, we don’t get our drinking water from the Sacramento. Depending on the city we live in, we get it from the Hetch Hetchy, the Mokelumne, or regional reservoirs. In my area, we get it from the Upper San Leandro and Chabot Reservoirs. I haven’t fished Lake Chabot in years, but many people do.

I found a PDF from the California EPA listing CHEMICALS IN FISH FROM TEN RESERVOIRS IN ALAMEDA, CONTRA COSTA, SANTA CLARA, AND MARIN COUNTIES – INTERIM COUNTY HEALTH ADVISORIES.The report is on “elevated levels of mercury and PCBs” in those reservoirs.

“If you eat the recommended maximum amount of fish from one reservoir, do not eat any other fish during the same month.” For women of childbearing age, and children:

Lake Chabot: Carp (0) OR Largemouth bass (1) OR Channel catfish (4) OR Redear sunfish (4)

How does mercury get in the reservoirs, and what does it mean to we who drink it? The Upper San Leandro reservoir was not listed. Since we get drinking water from the Upper San Leandro and Chabot Reservoirs, I conclude there is a problem in both reservoirs since I have fished and hiked in both recreation areas. They are part of the same drainage.

Humans may not be in the fish foodchain, but we’re at the top of the predator food chain, AND we ingest and cook in a lot of drinking water. I caution the reader again, drinking a glass of water is NOT the same as eating a fish. The fish act as pollutant concentrators (think: toxin storage containers), from small snails to mosquito larvae to minnows and all the way up the chain.

Question of the day: Why is a water-drinking human not like a fish in water, even if we’re vegetarians? And why would EBMUD report on minuscule uranium concentrations, but not on the locally much more serious mercury pollution?

===========
RESOURCES
===========

• PBS Quest video (embedded, 11:33)
• EBMUD Annual Report (PDF)
• CHEMICALS IN FISH FROM TEN RESERVOIRS IN ALAMEDA (CA EPA, PDF)
• Methylmercury (Wikipedia)

“Students deserve the opportunity to discuss what they care about,” an organizer said. “Once you leave high school, life hits you like a ton of bricks and these students need to know about the troubles with the banking system and why cuts are made to education.”

There was some isolated violence. The real violence was in Oakland, Seattle and elsewhere in the nation. Banks were vandalized, windows were smashed, police cars were burned, police were assaulted, and police and the crowd were at one point bombarded by a roof-top crazy hurling down long sections of heavy steel piping. There was no follow-up story on the high school girls, but I bet most were disappointed.

Occupy Wall Street, what the hell do you think you’re doing?

Democracy NOW! is a new PBS news hour which gives a different viewpoint from PBS’ traditional BBC international broadcasts, and from the reasonably balanced PBS coverage of conservative, moderate and liberal perspectives. Democracy NOW! provides news from the standpoint of the liberal “Progressive,” the militantly and uncompromisingly left end of the liberal political spectrum.

Dave Barry once wrote, “The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.” But violence, and particularly planned, organized violence, goes beyond the pale. Violence is not “protest.” In my personal opinion, Democracy NOW! soft-pedals the violence in order to get out the word on the protests.

I’ve long felt that a balanced appraisal of the news of the day requires getting a balanced sampling of the whole gamut of opinion, from BBC to PBS to network news and CNN, and, yes, when I can stomach it, even the Faux News Channel.

AMY GOODMAN: Not all of yesterday’s demonstrations were peaceful. In Seattle, black-clad protesters allegedly used sticks to break down downtown windows and ran through the streets disrupting traffic. In San Francisco, the Occupy movement was blamed for a night of violence in which cars and small businesses were vandalized. In Oakland, police fired tear gas, sending hundreds of demonstrators scrambling.

Occupy demonstrators in the Bay Area canceled plans to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, instead joined picket lines organized by labor groups.

Now, many if not most Americans do recognize the 2008 global financial meltdown proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that something has gone seriously awry with the US banking and financial systems. “Wall Street” is out of control. Liberals and conservatives may differ profoundly on the solution, but almost everybody agrees that Wall Street and international banking speculation in unsecured sub-prime mortgage derivatives (toxic assets) brought the world monetary system to its knees. The road to recovery may be long. Reforms are needed.

Thus, a surprising spectrum of American opinion expressed cautious optimism at the early “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Getting Congress to move is even harder than changing the banking system. The turn-off is this strong OWS directional shift to violence.

OWS violence reminds America of nothing less than our terrible era of the so-called “Free Speech Movement” of the 1960′s and 1970′s. In that movement, a few valid ideas were hijacked by power-hungry leaders intent on manipulating our youth into bringing the country into a partisan civil war. It was a dangerous time in US history that brought us massive civil rioting, and tragic government intervention like the Kent State massacre.

Violence “in a good cause” is even more dangerous than simple plug-ugly violence, for it doesn’t just destroy people and property. It drags down the cause as well.

The United States already has more crippling partisan divisiveness than is healthy. Occupy Wall Street needs to denounce the violence NOW! and, if it does not, we need to make it clear to the media and our leaders in both political parties that violence is unacceptably risky, dangerous and WRONG.

My mother used to enjoy public opinion research for part-time income and stimulation in her senior years. We spent many an enjoyable evening together over dinner, analyzing how surveys were conducted, how the survey scripts sometimes channeled responses into canned categories, and how much she enjoyed talking with other people who care passionately about our country and its issues.

So I always viewed opinion surveys as a valuable civic feedback mechanism, almost a birthright, and I tried to participate enthusiastically. But no more. This ain’t our mothers’ polite question-and-response era no more.

For one thing, the survey concept has been hijacked by the fundraising crowd. When you get a mail survey, for example, flip to the back page and see the donation checkboxes for $50, $100, $250, $500, $1000 or “more.” They don’t want our opinion; they want our money.

For another, the audience is rigged. Once, participants were selected by elaborate statistical methods designed to guarantee a truly random polling base. Now, they don’t even want to talk with you unless you meet selection criteria that practically guarantee you’ll tell them what their sponsors want to hear.

So, guess what: 99.5% of (Senator Snort’s) supporters say they’re voting for Snort this year.

When the phone rings, “What is this about?” and “How long will this take?” are fair questions. Telephone surveys are scripted to be evasive and misleading on both queries. Their first job, of course, is to ascertain whether they even want to talk with you.

Last fall I took a call soliciting my opinion on the economy. It should “only” take 20 minutes. I hesitantly agreed. Their first question was whether my age group was 18-25, 26-45, 46-55 or “above.” When I answered “above,” they thanked me for my time, said they had no more questions, and hung up.

Earlier this week I took a call on a phone that does not display caller id. They were sounding out respondents on the November elections. I hesitantly agreed. Their first question was whether I felt I’d “definitely not” vote in November, was “uncertain” whether I’d vote, or “definitely” would vote in November. When I answered “definitely,” they thanked me for my time, said they had no more questions, and hung up.

Now, I’m unlikely to even answer the phone if caller id indicates it’s a survey, but if I do, it’ll be to tell them “Sorry, you don’t meet our eligibility criteria,” and hang up.

We are still fighting wars with tactics better suited to World War II than Afghanistan. We use tanks even though we are not in the desert fighting Rommel. We use gunships even though this may take out a whole village to take down one insurgent, and we call that “collateral damage.” We send our boys overseas for three, four, even five tours, asking them to go into those villages and figure out which handful of Afghans are combatant Taliban. In Afghanistan, our enemy are in the villages because they live there.

In Bill Cosby’s 1963 “Toss of the Coin” take on the Minutemen vs. the Redcoats, the British lose the coin toss. They’re told “you guys have to wear red coats and march in a straight line” while “we get to hide behind trees and shoot at you.” We lost the coin toss in the Mideast.

In Bill Moyers’ recent in-depth interview “Moving Beyond War”, he has a series of interesting conversations with Andrew Bacevich, “a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran-turned-scholar who’s become one of the most perceptive observers of America’s changing role in the world.”

The following excerpt tracks that portion of their discussion in which they covered our increasing and controversial use of the Predator unmanned drone. Many Americans are asking if this tactic is moral. Does it divorce accountability from the military-political process? Perhaps, but does it save American lives? Here is the excerpt from the transcript:

ANDREW BACEVICH: I don’t think anybody today thinks that counterinsurgency is going to pacify Afghanistan.

BILL MOYERS: Why didn’t it work?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Again, one would refer to Afghan history here, that this is simply not a place that accommodates foreign invaders who think they know how to run the place better than the local population. But what I would want to emphasize, I think, is that by last year, I think Obama himself had given up on the notion that counterinsurgency provided a basis for U.S. strategy and had, indeed, begun to implement Plan C. And Plan C is targeted assassination.

Plan C is relying on drones, unmanned aerial vehicles with missiles, and also commandos, special operation forces, in order to conduct military operations, in essence on a global basis, identifying those who could pose a threat to us. And without regard to congressional authority, without regard to considerations of national sovereignty, to go kill the people we think need to be killed. Plan C is already being implemented.

BILL MOYERS: Most people seem to accept it as an alternative to failure in Afghanistan, and as a way of keeping American soldiers out of harm’s way.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, and also they accept it because of course, it doesn’t cost us anything. We are not, the people are not engaged in any serious way. The people are not asked to sacrifice. The people are asked only to applaud when we are told after the fact that an attack has succeeded.

I don’t have any easy answers to the Predator problem. I favor keeping our boys out of harm’s way. That’s why I’m also for an accelerated withdrawal from a hopeless quagmire. I do not see Afghanistan as a unified country in need of defense or capable of benefiting from it, even if they asked us to stay, which doubtless they now will not.

But we all recognize that targeted robot assassinations are a slippery slope. Yet we never resolved our differences on CIA assassinations several decades ago. At what point do assassinations become immoral?

My take on Predator’s slippery slope is that “assassination” launches should be accountable to, and only authorized by, our country’s highest elected civilian leaders, never by military field commanders – however reputable and trustworthy. This kind of target must be a high-ranking military or paramilitary individual or unit, actively engaged in military hostilities against the United States or its armed forces, or poised to do so when it is too late to stop them by conventional means. The high-profile target must be non-containable by means of timely kill-or-capture. And the target may not be a civilian head of state unless the President determines an extraordinary and imminent threat to national or global security, such as a Hitler.

I draw a sharp line between targeted assassinations and calling in a drone strike in a combat situation. If no noncombatants are killed, and American lives are saved, I’m for tactical strikes. But I still resist the idea of uncontrolled field-level deployment. I believe Congress and the Defense Department should get involved in creating light-speed control and monitoring mechanisms, and high-level field commanders should have the responsibility for approving tactical strikes and reviewing results.

Remember, the United States will not long be the only nation deploying smart unmanned aircraft systems. It would be in our own self-interest for the United States to take the lead in defining clear-cut boundaries.

Bin Laden obviously would have been an eligible Predator target (though we took him out with our miraculous Navy Seal team). But Assad most probably would not be. For that, we need the United Nations. It is perhaps too soon to tell if Russia and China have committed to cooperative global efforts to reduce global atrocities, but their new-found willingness to go along with the UN’s Mr. Annan in pressuring Syria is encouraging. And, China has greatly facilitated efforts to pressure North Korea on its nuclear weapons program.

Concerted world cooperation and containment is the anti-terrorist weapon of the future.

2. FOX channel: Previously, I’ve seen enough unwarranted ad hominem attacks on this network that I don’t watch Fox. A friend recently told me he thought their news coverage had become “fairly balanced,” so I said I’d check it out again anyway. The news segments themselves seemed fairly enough presented, though with a higher ratio of sensational content than I usually care for. Last week, Fox had a half hour hosting Mike Huckabee. Huckabee much as labeled Barack Obama, our President of the United States, “stupid.” I’ll check Fox out again in another decade or so.

3. Belva Davis has hosted KQED (PBS) show This Week in Northern California for more than 19 years. I remember when Belva came to Bay Area channel KPIX in the 1960′s. At that time, there was still some national controversy about black women bringing news into white living rooms. I remember feeling that we should wait and see what kind of reporter Belva was. Over the years, Belva’s been a bedrock of calm Bay Area reporting of a hotbed of news and issues. Her mission was always to “bear witness” to events and let the viewer evaluate the content. Belva will be retiring in November. I for one will always miss her soothing and salient presence in a turbulent news world. Carolyn Jones of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an excellent article Belva Davis, grande dame of Bay Area journalism, and I recommend it.

1. The President ordered a change to the HHS ruling so that health insurers automatically provide the coverage at no additional charge to any insuring employer.
2. Brooks and Shields agree that the Administration pulled us back from the brink of “religious war.”
3. The Catholic Church, ACLU, women’s groups and Planned Parenthood all seem mollified.
4. GOP candidate Romney finally announces “that attacks religious liberty and freedom of speech.”
5. Brooks shows how the Administration’s original ham-fisted proposal for universal access to birth control, and the recent California court overturn of the ban on gay marriage, have emboldened the religious right.
6. The religious right will step up its long-standing assault on personal choice it opposes.

Well, Catholics having been somewhat mollified, we should have been able to predict this would only prompt the religious right “social conservatives” to step in where Bishops care not to tread. Brooks explained the religious right would be opposed to any aspect of the HHS bill anyway, since the original proposal concretized their claim that the whole “Obamacare” program is an unwarranted government intrusion upon their religious freedom, not to mention the untouchable private sector.

As we’d expect from any religion-driven political movement, this is partly political and partly because in the view of the religious right, reproductive preventative services of any kind are a violation of the word of the Creator who blessed only their interpretation of our founding state papers. We only need a Supreme Court to rubber-stamp doctrinaire edicts from the great pulpit on high. The constitutional separation of church and state is being broken down, piece by piece.

In other words, in the “social conservative” view, religious freedom must trump personal freedom of choice every time. In that view, religious freedom requires an imperative to impose upon others sharia, i.e. religious law, by force of political legislation. Never mind that this is unconstitutional in the United States.

Do you want fries with that? Did you know that the very organization which aggressively defames gays and lesbians has its own anti-defamation league? The irony is that we find freedom of speech and religion being used here as a tool to silence personal liberty. See:

1. DefendChristians.org
2. Right Wing Watch
3. Christian Anti-Defamation Commission

Sometimes it may seem hard to defend organizations which in many cases push intrusive meddling upon the rights and private lives of American citizens. Here we have a case where the exact same wrong is being perpetrated upon some of those religious groups. The danger in each case is that the wrongs are perpetrated through the offices of the United States government.

What was HHS thinking? Who would be beneficiaries of this new ruling? PBS reports that while churches themselves are exempt from the new rules, Catholic hospitals and universities must comply.

Employees of the affected groups would be covered under the ruling. So students and presumably patients – anyone covered under “most private health plans” – would be included too.

PBS reported that women’s groups generally favor the White House action. Cited as one reason was the fact that millions of women depend on contraceptive services. The ACLU is fine with it because [employee] “individual liberties are not affected.”

It was hard to deconstruct exactly how the United States government rationalized compelling conscientiously objecting religious organizations to provide contraceptive services. If the government can do this to Catholic schools and charities, they can do it to anyone. Are religious organizations just getting a taste of their own medicine?

It’s obviously also not about taking away a benefit church organizations had provided before.

As has been widely publicized in the last few days, many Catholic workers and students already avail themselves of contraceptive services (elsewhere) despite their church’s ban on birth control. There are already excellent alternative sources of family planning, including the recently spotlighted Planned Parenthood, which, according to Wikipedia, “is the largest provider of reproductive health services in the United States.”

So the HHS action is not truly remediative: it does not provide or restore services that were not readily available before. So it is not about women’s rights, and probably not about affordability. If this were about a threat to the unquestionable right of women to access and control and their own reproductive rights, we would have to side with reproductive rights. But it is not.

No matter whether we agree or not with the motivation, is it immoral for a government to compel its citizens to act in direct contradiction to their most fervently held convictions if no one else is harmed by those convictions? We have to ask why the ACLU dropped the ball on the individual right to religious freedom.

Would we really be on the moral high ground compelling vicars, priests or their administrators to dispense condoms and morning-after pills?

Under a generalized “religious exemption,” Federal law does not prevent religious organizations from engaging in discriminatory behavior against gays, for example, but the law seeks to ban religious organizations from excluding contraceptive services from its health care insurance programs.

Part of the problem is the hit-and-miss approach our own democracy takes in applying constitutional standards of equality. I think access to reproductive health care is as basic a part of health care as prostate screening. In this light the Administrative dilemma is actually predictable: if reproductive care should be a basic element of a health care package, should religious organizations be exempted from providing complete basic health care plans?

The common ground here, I submit, is freedom. Religious organizations, however much they may be opposed to same-sex civic marriage, premarital sexual relations and other commitments of individual conscience, do not actually have any right or power to legally bar them in the United States. In the other corner, our government has access to almost unlimited power to impose a patchwork of arbitrary mandates upon all of us, no matter how carefully worded our Constitution.

Catholic and other religious institutions are not in any way preventing their employees from obtaining contraceptives. They are simply saying “please don’t expect us to provide them.” I fail to understand why reasonable people would not see the true significance of this.

If I chose to pursue a curriculum of Gay Studies, and decided to pursue it at Holy Names University, wouldn’t it be fair to ask what I could possibly have been thinking?

I’m fully aware that the Catholic Church and many other religious groups are still engaged in an unrelenting effort to deprive millions of Americans of civil rights by lobbying our legislators and influencing our laws.

But violating their religious and political freedoms, whether we like how they exercise them or not, is not the way to go about it.

I support federal oversight of health care plans, because of the deplorable track record of private US employers, insurers and HMO’s in providing access to affordable comprehensive health care. But I remain aware that kerfuffles like this one are a really good argument against federal oversight. The government needs to back off.

That our government should persist in this high-handed tactic would be utterly bizarre. The Administration’s contrived legal gimmickry is dangerous, and the President should personally rescind it. If it gets that far, I doubt the Supreme Court will smile benignly upon this.

The cities of Oakland and Washington, D.C. are current newsworthy Occupy targets (among many others), further straining the resources of already financially beleaguered cities and their residents. And why Oakland, indeed? We don’t just have cities to house large law enforcement repositories. Believe it or not, ordinary citizens also try to live in cities, raise kids, and, if possible, earn a living.

Besides discovering that some police departments have learned nothing at all about police brutality vs. effective and humane crowd control in half a century, we don’t hear as much about Occupy these days because the question “how’s your poison oak” is only interesting to most of us for about the first week of the infection.

But they’re still here. What the hell do they really want?

To inspect the horse’s mouth – that part of the equine anatomy presented to those inspecting its teeth – I checked out an actual Occupy web site, OccupyWallStreet.

That site issues a disclaimer on the posted list of demands, “This content is user submitted and not an official statement,” but alas, I could not locate an “official” list. Here’s a smattering of the wackier zany demands I did find:

• Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Unionize ALL workers immediately. [Return of the 1923 "Wobblies?"]
• Open the borders to all immigrants, legal or illegal. Offer immediate, unconditional amnesty, to all undocumented residents of the US. [Oh, sure]
• Lower the retirement age to 55. Increase Social Security benefits. [Pie in the sky, a chicken in every pot]
• Ban the private ownership of land [Nyet, komrade]
• Make homeschooling illegal. Religious fanatics use it to feed their children propaganda. [Regular parents use it to give their kids real educations, too. Even Hippie parents couldn't have sanctioned this proposal.]

So much for the notion “Occupy” is for increased freedom.

Looking up “Wobblie” in Wikipedia, I find the following wording in their preamble to the “current IWW Constitution:”

Sound familiar? Occupy needs to re-focus or disband. I believe union and popular social movements that address social problems by hurling walls of human bodies into the maw are short-selling the potential of the 99% to conceptualize and debate real issues. “Let’s protest police brutality by seeing if we can provoke it” is not a solution. It’s a shopworn, coldly calculated gambit to manufacture martyrs for a cause that often doesn’t bear up well under closer scrutiny. Rather than performing public-service educational functions, why do these movements invariably send their supporters into the failed strategic equivalent of World War I trench warfare?

Occupy can jolly well get out of the cities and try a 21st-century communications solution, like the Internet.

Occupying Oakland makes about as much sense as picketing “Elmo & Oscar’s Kiddie Daycare Center” to force Assad to democratize Syria, or to induce North Korea to enthusiastically embrace free speech and elected government.

How long will our existing two-party system last? What do the parties really stand for? When will elected officials stop governing on the one-way, top-down model? Everybody wants to know, and no one has the answers. All we can do here is look at the one party that continues to change and surprise, even if those come as unpleasant surprises to so many of us. What’s going on?

Republicans are scrambling to find someone articulate enough to stand up to Barack Obama in debate, yet look good wearing the party’s ultraconservative new clothes. Gingrich has a tarnished past and is viewed as somewhat volatile and unpredictable, but he can certainly handle debate. Ron Paul by all accounts would have been viewed as a crackpot only a few short years ago, and the more you look at his platform and ask the question “so how would this work?” the more dubious it looks.

But Ron Paul has an unaccountably strong following. Why? Ron Paul is articulate; he can explain things all of the other candidates fumble, even though they are generally all sipping from the same slipper. Why is only Ron Paul giving answers that seem to make sense to the Republican base, even if they only make sense when we don’t ask what would happen next?

Ron Paul has been called the “godfather of libertarianism.” How did we get from a fringe backwater political philosophy to a serious national candidacy?

This isn’t the forum to discuss libertarianism, a generalized political philosophy with 18th century roots which anchors the individual (not governments) as the unit of all social transactions, advocates minimization of government, prohibits the use of force in settling disputes, and usually has a strong platform on individual rights. A “free market” is viewed not just as an adjunct to those principles, but as indispensably rooted in them. In the U.S., libertarianism is more apt to affiliate with “right wing” policy, where in Europe one may still see variants such as “libertarian socialism.”

The old-time U.S. Libertarian Party never expected to win popular acceptance, so they didn’t have any identifiable next-step plan in the event that should ever happen. What seems odd is that, under the present success of the Paul candidacy, which may properly be regarded as a huge and unexpected popularity boost for the libertarian philosophy, they still don’t.

Over the years I’ve come to see how nations succeed by creating a culture and environment that brings all their citizenry into the participatory fold. Nations that leave their children under-educated, create exclusionary castes, shelter their elite classes, and cut loose their middle classes are, historically, nations on their way out. As corporations use to spout, “people are our most important asset.” What conservatives have forgotten in the past 50 years is that squandering people is not like squandering money. You cannot simply go out and get more. The just society is also the most efficient when everybody is a player. And efficiency is exactly what capitalism was supposed to be all about, was it not?

2012 is the first election year in memory when we the electorate could actually really use a primer to better understand some of the libertarian political tenets. First, we’ll survey some snippets of libertarian ideology. Afterwards, we’ll sample some of what Paul would like to do to implement them.

1. The Theoreticians

In 2012 we’ll face another contest between the two main US political parties. The Democratic Party seems to be the last safe haven for the moderate, leaving the old-school liberal in a kerfuffle. The Republican Party is the new, mean, aggressive soldier force for corporate America and the wealthy. Many people who are neither corporate not wealthy still believe this is a good cause that will trickle down for the rest of us.

Ron Paul breaks the mold.

This means, uh-oh doodie, talking about the last vestiges of capitalism’s theoretical underpinnings, as preserved through the dark ages of participatory democracy by the high priests of old Ayn Rand style libertarianism. That would be Ron Paul if it were anyone. Paul is the one candidate who most closely explains most platform positions of all the others, because he appears to be the only one who understands the theory, and he’s the only one advocating it.

Ron Paul is one of only two currently favored GOP contestants for the 2012 presidential elections who have any idea what they’re talking about. Is Paul another GOP flash in the pan, or does he have staying power? Is Paul any different than the rest of them? Just look at the initial lineup: Paul, Gingrich, Romney, Perry, Santorum, Bachman, Huntsman, Cain, Palin. What do they have in common?

Cain dropped off off the radar, Palin again avoided the commitment. Huntsman always seemed too decent and too moderate to last. Santorum and Bachman wear their hate agendas on their sleeve. Perry probably had his one senior moment too many on national TV. Romney is the chameleon who wants to be all things to all people, people know this, and he seems safe because we can’t count on him to carry out threats to do anything specific. Gingrich may be damaged goods but he’s very smart, he can take any position on an issue that suits him, and he’s a talented and persuasive speaker.

The GOP contest may yet devolve down to two the ideologues, Paul and Gingrich. Democratic and Republican voters alike need to understand the ideology behind the ideologues. Ron Paul knows what he’s talking about, and he practices what he preaches. Unfortunately he would actually try to do it, and that platform essentially consists of dismantling federal government and then doing nothing. Gingrich is too facile to be held to any plan of action, but he has plenty of practice ramrodding whatever legislation seems trendy at the moment.

Gingrich could tell you what he’d do in any given situation. But you could put Paul in an isolation booth, blindfold him, and tell him what Gingrich had said. Paul wouldn’t be able to tell you what situation Gingrich was trying to deal with, but he could unfailingly tell you what principle was being invoked.

Indeed, with the emergence of the “tail wags the dog” Tea Party movement in the GOP, it’s more important than ever to understand where the players are really coming from.

Libertarianism is another “big tent,” just like the GOP used to try to be. There’s general agreement on general principles, but you don’t get exiled to a North Korean POW camp and have your right to habeus corpus suspended just because you disagree on Iraq or gay rights or printing money to finance undeclared wars.

Libertarians have been running for everything from President to dog-catcher for decades. Only recently have their ideas taken hold in some circles. Some Libertarians managed to put up a decent showing for their principles, like US Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, by teaming up with the (formerly) mainstream Republican Party.

But what would Ron Paul do if he actually got elected President? Ignore the fact that he says he doesn’t want the highest job in the land in order to “run the world.”

To understand why he says that, consider his response to a question about whether he favored seat belt laws. “When asked if he was in favor of seat belt laws, Paul quickly shot back ‘I’m in favor of seat belts, not seat belt laws.’” — ABC News

In short, what if the right thing to do about unemployment, corruption and the whole current economic mess is to condemn it, deplore it, and then just sit back and wait for private enterprise to figure out all the messy practical stuff? Libertarians have a theory that rational behavior is the most just and efficient behavior, but when transgressors take advantage of the system, or violate the rights of others, Libertarians draw a fundamental distinction between burglars and banks. If the contents of your home are robbed by a burglar, that’s a police matter. But if your home itself is taken by the bank, “our hands are tied.” That’s a matter for SuperCoolCapitalistMan. You can always cash in your 401K and sue the bank. Get in line.

“That may work in practice, but it won’t hold up in theory!” — unknown author

Ron Paul is by far the most ideologically consistent 2012 candidate of either major party. He was the 1988 candidate for the Libertarian Party. He was a 2008 candidate for the Republican Party. He has by far the best record of supporting a principle even when personally somewhat opposed to its implementation. Unfortunately, like most free market advocates in general, and the Libertarian Party in particular, he can pronounce on any number of principles we might sympathize with in theory, yet fall inexplicably mute on the question of how to get us from here to there.

The free market or Libertarian solution, you see, is “that’s none of our concern.” It’s not for the federal government to remediate systematic injustices, it’s thought, even when caused or abetted by government itself. It’s not for the federal government to address societal wrongs, persons displaced by economic chaos, the homeless, persecuted minorities, discrimination, poverty, hunger, our our third-world education system. Who else then, indeed?

Let them eat cake

In the Libertarian view, then, it should be up to the states to legislate in areas forbidden to the federal level. No one ever explained what the Founding Fathers expected to happen when you let the states dole out legislation already deemed inappropriate at the federal level, or why we would want to do this. But they clearly didn’t expect the Civil War.

To take just one example, Paul remains opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguing that such powers should have been relegated to the states instead. This of course included Jim Crow states like Alabama and Mississippi (among others) that the 1964 Act was designed to rein in. This “reserved to the states” clause is exactly the same line Alabama and Mississippi were arguing in 1964, yet Paul does not seem to be a racist nor in any way sympathetic to racism. It’s just that his hands are ideologically tied. If you are denied your right to vote, you can still appeal to the offending state that enacted the obstacles.

So then: does Paul have what Robert M. Pirzig called “the tendency to do what is ‘reasonable’ even when it isn’t any good?“

In the Libertarian view, we see how it should be up to the “marketplace” (the entire private enterprise system) to find appropriate solutions to economic disruptions and downturns. More often than not, this will involve turning a social need into a cash cow. Paul, like almost all Libertarians, believes the free market is eminently capable of doing just that. We know of few examples where the free market has actually ever done it.

We live in a “mixed economy.” Should America ever actually adopt a consistent free enterprise model, private enterprise today is neither inclined nor prepared to begin regulating itself effectively.

Remember this: Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand does NOT meddle in private affairs, even though this does not preclude discriminatory legislation. If you are hurt by economic disruption or corruption, you are free to figure out what the hell to do next when the boom is lowered on your industry or region. If you were hurt by Enron, or by Bank of America, Lehman or Citibank, those who can afford to do so can always file civil suit for damages.

Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage is everyone’s perfect hot-button litmus test across all political parties! No matter where you stand on gay equality, once you determine a candidate’s stand on our least popular minorities, you have a far better idea how consistently you’ll expect your own rights to remain secure.

Here we find another great illustration of the Libertarian “not our problem” approach. The Libertarian Party Platform would “repeal existing laws and policies intended to condemn, affirm, encourage or deny sexual lifestyles.” From this may we infer the LP would not oppose gay marriage, even if individuals were opposed to it? Not so fast. There is nothing at all in this view to say that just because we may be opposed to a certain form of discrimination, we have any moral, personal or collective responsibility to correct the wrong by “allowing” people the same rights we ourselves enjoy. The “right thing” has nothing to do with it. If it remained illegal for gay couples to get married in a state, well then, according to this theory, those states can’t stop them from emigrating to the UK, so gay Americans already have a remedy.

That’s how we can have these bizarre interview scenarios on international TV where one GOP candidate for the highest office in this land, the most powerful nation the a world in turmoil has ever known, is accusing another of being soft on gay marriage. The issue at that moment wasn’t exactly whether or not you’re soft on gay marriage, because it’s presumed you’re unalterably opposed to it. It’s whether or not you can fight against a law to give equal rights to the gay community on the one hand, yet still say you’re “tolerant,” on the other. On network TV, and as documented by towlerroad.com:

SANTORUM: “[He] ordered people to issue gay marriage licenses. And went beyond that. He personally, as governor, issued gay marriage licenses. I don’t think that is an accurate representation of his position saying tolerance versus substantively changing the laws.”

ROMNEY: “I fought leading an effort to put in place a constitutional amendment in Massachusetts to overturn the court’s decision to make marriage between a man and a woman.”

Dirty little secret:The libertarian political philosophy severely limits federal authority to the most basic functions of government. As this principle was revised by the GOP, legislation that controls or restricts what corporations and the wealthy can do remains an unspeakable sacrilege to our founding principles. However, legislation that gores somebody else’s ox is OK when we don’t like them, and if we can’t pass that bill, we can always try to amend the US Constitution to get our way.

You see, Libertarians didn’t invent bigotry, prejudice or discriminatory behavior, but they provided a theoretical justification for practicing it. Not original, but disowning personal accountability is a neat trick if you can get away with it. This is just “Market Forces,” applied to individual rights. If you ever found yourself scratching your head, wondering how we can vote or legislate away constitutionally protected rights (gay equality or gun rights, makes no difference), there’s your theoretical justification.

‘Entitlements’ and War

Paul is so famously known for his opposition to welfare, medicare and social security I provided no external references in part 2. As an intelligent and well-educated intellectual he is smart enough to know elimination of those long-standing programs would require a huge transition period for the United States, its budget, and its citizens. The Federal government could not just say “so sorry, we’ve changed our minds.” People already on the programs would have to be grandfathered beyond some point in their working careers, or transitioned to new programs, the nation would have to be educated on how these programs would work and get behind them, and our dysfunctional Congress would have to devise and approve those changes.

But what would these new programs be, and how would we transition to them? Blank-out. Leave that to – sniff – practical people.

“Life first, Miss Lemon, filing second.” — Hercule Poirot

Ron Paul was an opponent of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I was too. Paul has always been unequivocally opposed to any US military overseas presence anywhere at all except in periods of declared war. This sounds very straightforward. He was morally opposed to Obama’s taking down Bin Laden at a cost of zero American lives. Just how then shall we prepare for the coming nuclear crisis in Iran? What if North Korea goes ballistic (literally)? There’s no proposal to increase the effectiveness of diplomatic solutions, nor to strengthen our ties with the United Nations, an organization already hated by many conservatives. We’re left to assume that if Paul were elected, somebody else would have to figure out how to deal with those problems.

This is the same thing we did to Iraq: we liberated them, destroyed their infrastructures, and left them – with no roadmap for the day after tomorrow.

Paul is the most theoretically consistent of the conservative candidates. The others pay lip service to Libertarian principles when it’s politically expedient. What they all have in common is belief in the myth that the American free enterprise system is anywhere near ready to step up to the plate with workable solutions to hold this nation together.

Bizarrely, Paul is also a science denier, at least when it comes to Darwin. He does not accept the theory of evolution, saying it’s just a theory. Paul earned his medical degree at Duke, and served as a USAF flight surgeon from 1963 to 1968.

I have to conclude that the only reason Paul is doing so well is that many Americans (who may not actually vote for him) admire Paul’s general consistency on most issues. I personally believe we need much more than a leader who can only scold miscreants and wait for the states and “the suits” to come up with equitable answers across all 50 states. Nevertheless we are all starved for straight answers. We need answers that represent puzzle pieces that actually fit together – for a change.

I read on the previously-cited ABC article that Paul was on The Jay Leno Show recently:

There remain a few unseemly little glitches in Libertarian theory, such as the reality of people, with all our distastefully messy little practical human problems. Let’s see if the younger generation has the education and patience to think and plan ahead of the curve. Let’s hope they can come up with something that’s both reasonable and any good.

2. The Practice

• On Israel: “Israel can take care of itself.” — CBS
• On Gay Marriage: “Personally opposed to same-sex ‘marriage,’ but….” Paul has earlier said the law could allow gays to marry, on a state-by-state-basis, and he doesn’t care what it’s called. Paul is the only candidate who has NOT signed the National Organization for Marriage pledge to amend the US Constitution to prohibit gay marriage. — lifesite news
• On OWS: “If they were demonstrating peacefully … and making a point, and arguing our case, and drawing attention to the Fed–I would say, good!” — Reason
• On Abortion: personally opposed, but “Ron Paul believes that the ninth and tenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution do not grant the federal government any authority to legalize or ban abortion. Instead, it is up to the individual states to prohibit abortion.” — RonPaul.com
• On Illegal Immigration: “Paul believes illegal aliens take a toll on welfare and Social Security and would end such benefits, concerned that uncontrolled immigration makes the U.S. a magnet for illegal aliens, increases welfare payments, and exacerbates the strain on an already highly unbalanced federal budget.” — Wikipedia
  Note: Paul would do away with both welfare and social security anyway, if he were empowered to do so.
• On Evolution: “Congressman Ron Paul, who is campaigning for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, says that the theory of human evolution is just a theory – and one that he does not accept.” — CBS News with YouTube link
• On Government in the classroom: “If you care about your children, you’ll get the federal government out of the business of educating our kids. In 1980, when the Republican Party ran, part of the platform was to get rid of the Department of Education. By the year 2000, it was eliminated, and we fed on to it. Then Republicans added No Child Left Behind. The goal should be set to get the government out completely, but don’t enforce this law of No Child Left Behind. It’s not going to do any good, and nobody likes it. And there’s no value to it. The teachers don’t like it, and the students don’t like it. But there are other things that the federal government can do, and that is give tax credits for the people who will opt out. We ought to have a right to opt out of the public system if you want.” — Issues2000.com
• On Social Security: “Now, what I would like to do is to allow all the young people to get out of Social Security and go on their own. Now, the big question is, is how would the funding occur?” – Issues2000.com
  A rare questioning of how the nation could deal with the consequences of implementing a libertarian policy. But where are the all-important answers?
• On Iraq: “Paul was the only 2008 Republican presidential candidate who voted against the Iraq War Resolution, and he continues to oppose U.S. presence in Iraq, charging the government with using the War on Terror to curtail civil liberties. He believes a just declaration of war after the September 11, 2001, attacks should have been directed against the actual terrorists, Al-Qaeda, rather than against Iraq, which has not been linked to the attacks. In 2003, Paul said that when America seeks war, it must be sought only to protect citizens, it must be declared by the U.S. Congress, and it must be concluded when the victory is complete …” — Wikipedia
• On Corporate Greed vs. Political Greed: Paul backs himself into the position of being an apologist for corporate corruption and fraud. His default answer would deflect blame back on the government for the actions of Bernie Madoff, Bank of America, Citibank, Lehman, Goldman Sachs, and Enron: “Why don’t we ever mention the real American killer: political greed?” — RonPaul.com

Further Reading

Political positions of Ron Paul (Wikipedia)