There was an article in the New York Times this weekend, What Would the Democrats Do?, about the Democrats struggle to find a position on the war in Iraq.  What really bothers me about this article is that the Democrats are still depending on polls to find a position.  They’re having trouble finding a good position because they can’t find one that won’t alienate too many people.  Here is an actual quote from the article:

“It’s a dog’s breakfast,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which has done extensive polling on public attitudes toward the war. “The reason that Democrats aren’t talking about specific plans to end the war is because it’s hard to figure out what to say without alienating a broad swath of the electorate.”

This is so frustrating.  The democrats are so afraid of stepping on anyone’s toes or possibly bothering anyone.  Why can’t the democrats learn that its more important to have YOUR OWN view rather than try to find the least alienating one?  You can’t find a position that everyone will agree with, and even if you could that doesn’t make it the right one.  You’ll get more votes from people on both sides of the issue for actually believing in something and standing up for it than just following the “least alienating” policy.  Don’t any of the democrats believe in anything?  Is there a single one who will make a stand on his own rather than follow some poll to find what the least alienating policy is?  They’re supposed to be “leaders”…

A lot of the serious problems in our society today can be attributed to the difference in goals between the citizens of the country and monetary goals of the corporations that run most of the country. For example, oil companies want to make money at the expense of people’s pocketbooks and the environment. Health care companies want to make money from multiple doctor visits and procedures instead of trying to keep citizens healthy (which would mean fewer doctor visits). In order to make capitalism work in society’s favor, we need to somehow change the rules so that monetary benefits for companies are aligned with the needs and goals of the citizens and country as a whole. If there were monetary incentives to fixing health care, education, etc in this country then it would happen much faster than anything the government might do. So how do we change the rules to align companies and citizen’s goals? Is it even possible?

I’m not sure if this is possible. Obviously any changes in the rules to shift how the money is distributed in these industries would require law changes from Congress. And since Congress is run by the lobbyists of these industries, there is absolutely no incentive to do such a thing. The Veteran’s Health Administration is a great example of how this might work.  Since most people stay in they system for their entire life, the VA actually receives the benefits of doing preventive medicine.  Preventive medicine keeps the veterans healthy and prevents costly procedures being done later in their lives.  Since many people switch between HMO’s frequently (with each job change at least), one HMO does not see any benefit for good preventive care, since the later cost savings may be reaped by a different HMO.  So if we keep patients under one health care company for their entire lives, the company monetary goals end up in the best interest of the patients.  It seems that we should keep everyone under one health system to improve preventive care for everyone.  I think the most logical basis for this would be a national health care system based on the current VA system.

They’re both trying to keep people from freely accessing information. Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times earlier this week about China’s attempts to censor the internet so their citizens won’t be able to read about Falun Gong or the Tiennaman Square massacre. Meanwhile, I was just reading an article on the edge about one scientists fight to against the intelligent design movement. But he says:

“What really upset me and really offends me about these people is that they would rather children be ignorant than be exposed to knowledge that might - quote unquote might - weaken their faith. And that attitude of course is the same with the Taliban.

I do believe the greatest threat to our freedom, in a democracy or not in a democracy, is sort of the censorship that controls information. And knowledge, one way or another, breeds freedom. And so for me, to actively promote ignorance is the worst thing you can do.

Information is extremely important to our society and our ability to deal with things in a reasonable way.  Knowledge and  ideas have the power to captivate millions and accomplish incredible things.  It’s scary how much control people are trying to exert over information. With the internet however, it is almost impossible to block information.  Even in China, the best they can do is block a few sites out of millions, they just can’t keep up with all of them.  Free information empowers the people.

I’ve been thinking about the Iraq war with congress now arguing over settting a timetable for withdrawal of the troops.  But I think the thing that would make the most sense would actually be to send more troops to Iraq.  One of the problems since the start of the war has been the fact that Rumsfeld sent far fewer troops than his generals thought was necessary.  We have barely enough troops to keep even with the insurgency and we’re forced to try to whittle down their forces slowly in a long drawn-out war.  Meanwhile they are able to fight back and kill many of our troops.  We’re just spread too thin.  We should send more troops so we can end the insurgency much quicker and with fewer deaths.  Then we can bring ALL the troops back home much sooner.

I just saw Stephen Colbert interview David Sirota on the replay of last night’s “Colbert Report”. It was interesting because he basically said exactly what I wrote the second point of my post on government corruption last week: that the politicians are currently being bought by corporations through campaign contributions and other monies and that the only solution is to publicly finance all elections. Without the politicians need for the corporate money, the corporations will be powerless. Colbert asked him about the cost of “welfare” for politicians and Sirota replied that you would save money quickly since they politicians would no longer be paying back corporations in no-bid contracts and absurd laws and such. I still wonder how plausible it would be to eliminate all outside money from elections though, it seems like it would be fairly easy to find a way around it.

A few random things:

I’m trying to figure out what the “focus” of my blog should be.  There’s lots of interesting articles that I read, but I don’t want to just be posting links to articles.  And then there’s the fact that I’m talking about science, politics, AI, etc.  Thankfully no one reads this blog so it doesn’t matter too much.

There was an interesting article by Jaron Lanier on the Edge a few weeks ago about wikipedia and the “hive mind.”  Basically, in the hive no is held responsible or accountable (good in these times of lawsuits) but no one has the responsibility either.  Lanier suggests the danger of this but I think in the form of wikipedia its ok.  What I found interesting was how a bunch of random people can add small bits of information and you get a huge wealth of knowledge.  I wondered how that compares to the brain with tons of “dumb” neurons that together form an intelligent brain.  Is wikipedia intelligent or conscious?  Surely not.

There was a good article in the Washington Post about college students taking Ritalin and other drugs to help them be smarter and perform better on tests.  The people they interview for the article said that something like 50 to 70% of their friends did the drugs.  I never saw anything like that at Northeastern, I suppose its more of an Ivy League thing were people are obsessed with improving their 3.8 GPA’s to a 4.0.  It is concerning that we are giving so many kids these drugs without any serious testing.  But its only first rain before the flood.  As we learn more about the brain there will be all kinds of drugs, surgeries, implants, etc to improve our intelligence, and our bodies in general for that matter (steroids).  There will certainly be a debate over the consequences of things like these and whether its really good for our society to be so dependent on these things.

Finally, the Edge posted a talk by quantum physicist (and mechanical engineering professor) Seth Lloyd about the complexity of the universe.  He basically says that the universe is a giant computer and that the random quantum fluctuations that were input to the computer after the big bang (and today to a lesser extent) are what resulted in the complexity and structure of the universe and life that we know today.  His analogy is that if you had monkeys typing at computers (instead of typewriters, as in the classis story), eventually something structured would come out since a small random program can produce structured and complex results. So similarly random quantum fluctuations that were input to the computer developed the structure that produced life here.  This also reinforces my thought that the big bang was almost certainly just a quantum fluctation somewhere.  Perhaps some quantum fluctuations in our universe are exploding into new universes all the time as well.

Finally, just a quick link to an article from the LA Times about the Electoral College.  Since passing a Constitutional Amendment would be very difficult, a number of states are passing laws that would give their electoral votes to the candidate who won the national popular vote so as to make the election decided by popular vote.  It’s a good idea and I hope enough states pass it to make it the way elections are decided.  It would be so much different if elections were decided on a popular vote.  Normally there are probably 20 states that are definitely voting Republican and 20 that are voting Democrat and the candidates spend all their time in the remaining 10 states, discussing obscure issues that most of the country may not care about.  With an election based on a popular vote, getting a few more percent out of states that are very much for or against the candidate would matter.  It would be an entirely different election, involving the nation as a whole instead of just a few states.

According to Paul Krugman’s column on Friday, the Senate voted against spending $648 million to inspect containers coming into U.S. ports while Republican leaders came close to repealing the estate tax (a tax on large inheritances) , which should provide over $300 billion over the next 10 years.  Here is a quote from Krugman:

But today’s Congressional leaders have a very different view about wartime priorities. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” declared Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, in 2003.

…

So a more precise statement of the DeLay Principle would be that nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes for very, very wealthy people, like the tiny minority of Americans who are heirs to really big estates.

Americans from an earlier era might have been puzzled by the DeLay Principle. They still believed in the principle enunciated by Theodore Roosevelt, who called for an inheritance tax in 1906: “The man of great wealth,” said T.R., “owes a peculiar obligation to the state.”

I think the biggest problem our government has right now is that the people running it are more considered about power and money and cronyism than trying to do what is best for our country. They give money and positions to their friends (Bush’s assignment of a former horse judge to be FEMA director), they give money out to backers (like all the money the current administration gives to the oil/healthcare companies), they do anything they can to stay in power (re-districting states to protect their seats), they want to take away some citizens’ rights (ban gay marriage or gay rights, secretly spy on any Americans who make a phone call), and disobey the Constitution (deciding to disobey laws Congress passes using ’signing statements’). In general, the current administration and Congress don’t really care what is best for the country at all, but only what is best for them and increasing their personal wealth and power. If we could elect people who did care about the country more than themselves, whether they be Republican or Democrat, I think that would be a HUGE step towards improving our country. But how can we do this?

The first problem is that the people who are in power will do ANYTHING to remain in power. They need tons of money to campaign, meaning they will give tons of money out. They have their states re-district so there will be less of a challenge to them keeping their seats (like Tom DeLay did). They will even try to block voters from registering and voting to remain in power (2004 Election in Ohio). Assuming we can overcome this, and say, elect the Democrats to power this fall, it is possible that they would eventually get addicted to the power and corruption if they were able to stay in power for a few terms as well. So we need to both remove the current corrupt/self-serving politicians and find some way to prevent so much of that from re-appearing.

How could we prevent the corruption from re-occurring? What is it that causes them to become so addicted to their power? Is it that this is their only way of life? Is it the extra money and kickbacks that they get? Is the problem that they want the money? Or that they need the money because of the insane costs of running a re-election campaign?

I think there are a few things that need to be changed that would help:

1. Elections need to be verifiable and reliable. Everyone should be allowed and encouraged to vote and it should not be possible to block them from registering or voting. It should be possible to go back and count whom they voted for. The election process, from making the districts to voter registration to voting to vote-counting, should be overseen be either a “neutral” person or by a committee of members from both parties. They should have no association with the candidates running (as in Ohio Sec. of State being on Bush’s re-election committee in 2004 and running for Gov’r in 2006).
2. The only way to remove corporations’ power over the government is to cut off their ability to “buy” politicians.  We need to find some way to reduce the need of candidates to raise so much money for their campaigns. Campaigns should be based on issues and ideas rather than who can get more money from special-interest groups and corporations. We need to either provide for equal public funding of political contests, set some cap on the amount of money a politician can spend on a campaign, or absolutely eliminate any possible contributions from special interests and corporations. But then there are PAC (Political Action Committee)’s that campaign as well so we would need to regulate them as well. Hopefully with information and communication dropping in price, candidates can advertise over the internet for pennies instead of paying for TV time.
3. Even with politicians not needing money for their campaigns, they will still like any money or trips offered to them by lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. I’m not sure that paying politicians more would reduce their greed at all, since baseball and football players who make millions always still want more. Plus more money would probably only push them to farther extremes to remain in office. I guess we need to keep a tight watch on the lobbyists, perhaps eliminate them all together if that is at all possible.
4. To stop cronyism, candidates for jobs should actually have “qualifications”. But how do we find some non-partisan way to judge these qualifications? Perhaps they should just have to prove they have no close personal relationship with the person appointing them to their post.
5. How do we ensure that the administration itself obeys the Constitution? I read something the other day that said there were four ways you could enforce the law. You could enforce it strictly on everyone, lax on everyone, strict on the government and lax on the citizens or lax on the government and strict on the citizens. The first three are fine but the last one makes no sense. Sadly that is the one we follow. I’m not sure how you can ensure they are following the law if the department that should be checking on them is in cahoots with them. The only solution is a more open government so that the citizens themselves can see what is going on.
6. How do we prevent politicians from providing funding for oil companies or writing a health care bill that provides benefits to the health care companies instead of the consumers? This isn’t so much a matter of corruption as it is a matter of getting politicians who care more about people than corporations. Protecting our civil rights is another case like this. Really you just need government that you think actually has your best interests at heart.

In summary:

To remove corruption, we need to have open verifiable elections, reduced campaign costs or public campaign financing, and to eliminate lobbyists.

For things like protecting our civil rights and writing laws that provide money for citizens instead of corporations, we simply need politicians that care more about the citizens than themselves.

moveon.org just announced their new agenda based on nationwide meetings and online voting. This agenda was created and voted on by over 100,000 people and I think it really covers what we need to do to get this country back on track. The agenda is:

• Health care for all
• Energy independence through clean, renewable sources
• Democracy restored

I think these are all great ideas that we should be pushing for. No matter what your political views are I don’t see how you could argue that energy independence and restoring democracy would not be best for this country. Some on the right might not like the idea of health care for all but I think it is important that we do provide health care for everyone and not let some suffer because we just don’t care.

Energy independence will allow us to no longer let the oil-rich nations have so much power over us, it will decrease the power of the big oil companies in our government, it will help the environment, and we will hopefully no longer go to war for oil.

Restoring democracy involves a number of things. Giving people back their civil rights. Instituting accurate verifiable voting for everyone in the country. Replacing corrupt politicians with ones that care about this country more than their personal wealth. And putting a President in office who will actually obey the laws of the land and the Constitution (as opposed to just writing statements explaining why he doesn’t want to obey the laws).

If we could eventually accomplish these three things, it would make our country a MUCH better place.

Al Gore’s new movie “An Inconvienent Truth” about global warming is currently being released across the country.   This is creating lots of discussion about global warming, but also lots of discussion about Al Gore possibly running for President again in 2008.  It’s incredible the comments I’ve read about Gore lately.  Where the media was lukewarm to him at best in 2000, they are currently looking at him as an ideal politician, who listens to reason and fact and stands up for what he believes in.  Here are a few samples:

From Paul Krugman’s NYT Op-ed:

Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.

And so the 2000 campaign ended up being about the candidates’ clothing, their mannerisms, anything but the issues, on which Mr. Gore had a clear advantage (and about which his opponent was clearly both ill informed and dishonest).

I won’t join the sudden surge of speculation about whether “An Inconvenient Truth” will make Mr. Gore a presidential contender. But the film does make a powerful case that Mr. Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country.

From Arianna Huffington’s blog:

Whether Al Gore ends up running in 2008 or not, he is modeling the way our public figures, and especially our would-be presidents, should be operating — from the heart and true to themselves. Standing for something more important than just winning, and more powerful than the fear of losing.

I was planning to write about how this is probably because the current democratic front runner for 2008 is Hillary Clinton and everyone is looking for anybody to take her place.  She’s very timid and tries to create an image that she thinks people will like rather than of actual ideals and stands on issues.  And people are looking for someone else who could beat her in the primary (Obama?) so suddenly Gore is incredible.  Anyway, I was about to write this, but Frank Rich beat me to it Sunday. He says:

If Senator Clinton is the Antichrist, might not it be time for a resurrected messiah to inherit (and save) the earth? Enter Mr. Gore, celebrated by New York on its cover as “The Un-Hillary.”

But he goes on to praise Gore like all the rest:

An anti-Hussein hawk who was among the rare Senate Democrats to vote for the first gulf war, Mr. Gore forecast the disasters lying in wait for the second when he spoke out at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Sept. 23, 2002. He saw that the administration was jumping “from one unfinished task to another” and risked letting Afghanistan destabilize and Osama bin Laden flee. He saw that the White House was recklessly putting politics over policy by hurrying a Congressional war resolution before the midterm elections (and before securing international support). Most important, he noticed then that the administration had “not said much of anything” about “what would follow regime change.” He imagined how “chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.”

At the time, the White House professed to ignore Mr. Gore’s speech, but on cue in the next five days Condoleezza Rice, Ari Fleischer, Donald Rumsfeld and the president all stepped up the hype of what Mr. Rumsfeld falsely called “bulletproof” evidence of links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Democratic leaders in Congress, meanwhile, blew off Mr. Gore for fear that talk of Iraq might distract the electorate from all those compelling domestic issues that would guarantee victory in the midterms. (That brilliant strategy cost Democrats the Senate.) On CNN, a representative from The New Republic, a frequent Gore cheerleader, reported that “the vast majority of the staff” condemned his speech as “the bitter rantings of a guy who is being politically motivated and disingenuous in his arguments.”

Anyway, so although I think a lot of this praise for Al Gore is based on a fear of Hilary taking the democratic nomination in 2008, I do think he would be a good candidate.  He does look at facts, he does care about the environment, and at least now, while he’s out of politics, he stands for what he believes in instead of what he thinks people want to hear.  And he has made some very insightful speeches about Iraq, our government, and the current political system that are right on the mark.  If he could run with confidence in his views instead of fear of pissing some people off (the problem of all the democratic candidates lately), then he would be a great candidate.

Here’s a really good speech Al Gore gave last year:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1006-28.htm