gop Ideas Are Bad, Not gop Communications

http://utahpolicy.com/pages/full_story/push?&id=21868018

The gop communications problem isn't its own stand-alone problem.  The communications problem exists because it is no longer possible to convince poor people ( 80% of Americans ) that gop plans which hurt them in so many blatantly obvious ways are "magically" good for them.Republicans aren't correct on ANY of the issues, and too many people have paid for it with too much misery in their lives for too long.  Nobody is voting for barrack obama because he talks of people.  They are voting against the gop.  They aren't going to forgive the gop for the harm they have caused the nation for the rest of their lives.

Republicans can think inside their own heads that they care.  But Americans are starving.  The gop tells them they don't even deserve minimum wage no matter how many productive hours they spend producing high quality work, or how much blood they leave on the factory floor.  This shows everyone that the gop doesn't actually care about them, the gop cares about hanging onto incorrect GOOFBALL fantasies about how the economy works, how it should work, and who is DESERVING of wealth in our society, and who is not.  The gop fundamentally gets the morality of proper wealth & power distribution WRONG.  Constantly.  The gop has screwed us up for so long that even the most unaware, uninformed, irresponsible voters have a general sense that this is so.

You don't have a communication problem about policies.

You have a "Our policies hurt people" problem, combined with a "We're too stupid to understand how our broken policies hurt people".  You have to gerrymander & steal elections to hold office now, because your thoughts upon what GOOD IS are wrong in ways that are obvious to everyone but yourselves.  The ultra-progressive liberal (not democratic) critiques of the gop are always completely correct.The two examples you give:

                limited government

                low taxes on the lives of everyday citizens

Limited government means that multinational banks rob us blind, and not one single prosecution takes place because there aren’t enough honest finance cops in our employment to prosecute them.  Not even an indictment.

When you speak of "low taxes", you mean NO TAXES.  And when you say "everyday citizens" you mean ONLY for the wealthy supercitizens who receive the benefits of everyone else’s taxes.

You can’t convince people that taking away:

             benefits  --> Anything that is a benefit has been EARNED by the recipient.  If you take it away, you are STEALING from them.  You're arguing that people should vote for thieves.  Good luck.

more help --> You're arguing that help is bad?  You're a fool.  "Help" is inherently good.

programs  --> The economy of scale we benefit from when the American government acts for us on our behalf is the BEST deal an American could ever possibly get in their life.  We should insist that everything the government could do for us together, it should, because we get so much more out of it than if we try to supply goods & services individually, or privately.

subsidies --> ONLY wealthy corporations who don't need them get subsidies.  If an American is very lucky, he can get some survival.  Some more existence.  Hardly an undeserved luxury.

is somehow, counter-intuitively, good for them.  Because this harm is demonstratably not good for them, and the painful demonstrations have already occurred.  Austerity has RIGHT NOW failed completely in Europe, once again proving John Maynard Keynes completely correct.  If there are magic benefits of hurting people this way, why can’t we detect them?

Your thinking is broken at its core when you say:

                ". . . .conservative policies will bless the lives of real people, making them strong financially and morally."

This means your plans depend upon MIRACLE MAGIC being real.  It means your plans are fundamentally bad, because magic is not a feature of our physical universe.  It means your mind fails to recognize the problems because it holds conservative thoughts for religious reasons, not good reasons.  It means that when presented with irrefutable proof that a conservative plan will hurt everyone, you will not alter your plan, or your warm feelings toward it.  Your self-identity is wrapped up in your bad plans.  Rather than separate your identity from your bad plan and change the plan, you preserve your self-identity by preserving the bad plan. 

You say:

                "We need to make the moral argument for free enterprise and individual effort."

These are two different things, and one doesn't exist.  "Free enterprise" is not "Free" as in "Freedom".  It is free as in "devoid of any laws".  There is no such thing as a valid moral argument for an enterprise that isn't bound by the same laws living, breathing, human citizen are bound by.  It's like making a moral argument for the squareness of circles.

As for individual effort, conservatives have a goofball notion of what this is.  They think a capitalist who steals labor instead of insisting on a minimum fair profit distribution has performed more "individual effort".  Everyone knows that almost all wealthy perform no useful work whatsoever.  Almost all wealthy, with exceedingly FEW exceptions, inherit and/or steal their wealth.  Everyone knows it now, thanks to the internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

You say:

                "We need also to make the case that some programs, particularly when too generous, actually hurt real people instead of helping them, especially over the long term."

The only example I can think of that meets this description is defense contracting.  We overpay and get more wars, when we could hire actual warriors instead and create more peace.  

You say:

                ". . . . we need to make the case that we can make the transition from an entitlement society to an achievement society without undergoing a terrible wrenching of society. . . . . . making the case that people will be far better off in the long term."

If this was EVER going to be true, the bush tax cuts would have produced a TIDAL WAVE of demand for labor.  This never occurred.  Your beliefs were disproven upon the pain of our lifetimes, yet your beliefs about it failed to change in spite of concrete proof that hurt us so very badly.

You say:

                "It’s a difficult communications challenge. Conservatives need to do much better."

This is wrong.  You have a difficult HUMILITY challenge.  Your plans have deep inherent flaws, and even after you hurt us with them, you insist that we should get hurt some more.  You ran your experiment upon us, but you didn't alter your experiment when it failed.  You insist the experiment should have worked, that we should do it again, exactly the same way.

Conservatives need to admit that they have been bad.  They must apologize for the harm they caused.  Then they must alter their brains to create plans that acknowledge that no one is independent.  Every last one of us depends upon all the others. 

Your thoughts and plans are bad & wrong, NOT THE WAY YOU TALK ABOUT THEM.

Rolling R's

I accidentally figured out how to roll my R's yesterday while singing parts of ranchero music to myself.  I've been listening to 102.3 "La Grande" to help pick up some words.  Sometimes I can follow the general theme of a song.  Most include some sentence about returning to your lover.  I don't know any whole song in español, really, I just have earworms for the interesting parts.

To roll an R, you first start off with an normal R sound, but while doing that you switch to an almost complete D sound, and then back to an R.  This hapens quite fast in practice, but you can go slow to learn it.  You'll know you've got it when you feel the vibration in your head during the middle part of the rolling R sound.  The R sound allows lots of air out of your mouth.  A pure D sound requires briefly holding your tongue against your top palate, just behind your top front teeth.  The D sound restricts the airflow, and you release it to make a plosive "Duh" noise.  But when rolling an R, the tongue doesn't completely restrict the airflow, because you leave a tiny sliver of space between the tongue and the top palate in the D-like position.  This tiny space with air rushing past causes your tongue to vibrate like the reed of a woodwind instrument.  Your tongue is extended to the top front of the mouth, making it stick out just enough like a lever fixed on one end.  The lower-jaw area is like the fixed end of the lever.  Your tongue muscles give the tongue just enough springiness to bounce back as the air rushing past between the small sliver of space tries to push the tongue away.  This sets up an oscillation.  The top palate is fixed, it can't move anywhere, so the air under pressure ( you are exhaling to make a rolling R sound after all ) tries to expand, but if all of the air can't slip through the thin space left by the tongue, the tongue gets pushed down.  The space is ever-so-slightly wider now, and so more air can escape past your top teeth.  This relieves the air pressure, so the tongue moves back into position.  This cycle will repeat and repeat for as long as you have a breath to exhale.  You can make the rolling R sound in an extended fashion until you must inhale once more.  This makes the rolling R a lot more like an extended L sound which can be held as long as you have breath.  But in the L, the air escapes around the sides of your tongue, not the tip.

APM Marketplace's Bad "Promised Land" Fracking Journalism:Fire Scott Tong

In response to: APM Marketplace "Promised Land" Fracking Movie Report

Marketplace needs to fire Scott Tong for cause. This article violates basic standards of journalism.

Scott Tong says:

A plot twist at the end confirms the corporate villain. Ok -- bye bye reality. 

This was not presented as sarcasm.
For this statement to make any sense, Scott Tong must believe that our reality has NO corporate villains, or he is selfishly willing to benefit himself somehow even if it harms everyone else.

As a news organization dedicated to business news, APM Marketplace above all should know that our capitalism is littered with ample examples of such corporate villains. To have an attitude that is in such obvious conflict with we know is true suggests Scott Tong is happy to ignore evidence that conflicts with his preconceptions about what he thinks is true, or he knows the truth but wants to actively disinform the audience anyway.

Scott Tong also makes an extraordinary whopper of claim:

industry has fracked without incident for decades.

 

He lets this fish-tale of a proposition go completely unsupported in an entirely non-journalistic fashion.

If I knew nothing else about this situation, I could not help but notice this story seems to follow the common patterns of corrupted journalist seen today:

1. Lobbyist front group makes false claims to press.
2. "Journalist" asks no questions, challenges nothing, writes down claims as though he is just a stenographer.
3. "Journalist" presents industry's false claims as "fact" to large audience by repeating them without doing any research that could have disproven false claims.

or

1. Ideologue holds mental model of reality that has huge discrepancies with actual reality. These discrepancies are easily discernible to the common man.
2. Ideologue gains access to a broadcast medium. Pretends to be a journalist or an analyst with a normally respectable opinion.
3. Ideologue presents goofball claims as facts to large audience, abuses access to a broadcast vector to create false impression of credibility.
4. Ideologue unjustly earns lots of attention for his verifiably incorrect ideas.
5. Station does not notice or care the Ideologue is clearly wrong. Station may benefit from the false drama the Ideologue creates, willfully allows the corrupt situation it is fully aware of to continue.

If basic journalism had occurred here, there are some basic questions about the statement "industry has fracked without incident for decades." that Scott Tong would have provided answers to:

• WHO:Name all the companies who have supposedly fracked safely. WHO:Are they same companies that want to frack now?
• WHAT:Are these frackers using the same people, materials, equipment & methods now that have supposedly been used safely in the past?
• WHAT:Were the very same mystery chemical that they want to use now used during the supposedly safe fracking?
• WHEN:On what dates decades ago did this claimed safe fracking occur?
• WHERE:Scott Tong should have provided the geographic coordinates for the locations of this supposed safe fracking of decades ago.
• WHY:If fracking as it is understood today has truly been around "for decades", why are we only finding out about it now?
• WHY:If past fracking similar to modern fracking has occurred, does it appear safe due to a lack of oversight at that time? Was there a comprehensive monitoring program put in place in advance to detect water contamination?
• HOW:Do frackers use company specific chemical markers in their fluids so they can be held accountable when their chemicals show up in our drinking water?
• HOW:Are frackers prohibited from conducting an operation unless EPA inspectors are present for the duration of the activity?
• MONEY:Are there corrupt incentives? Do some landholders of towns that permit fracking take the money & run, so they never have to suffer the consequences of contaminated drinking water they leave behind for their neighbors?

This report was so bad, American Public Media needs to ascertain whether or not Scott Tong has any kind of financial interest in fracking or "good old boy" corruption network interest in pushing disinformation upon the audience.

Good Helmet Bill

Mr. Gehrke,

I like your proposed helmet law article.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55401921-78/helmet-killed-percent-utah.html.csp


Photo © by Jeff Dean

I would like to say so in the comments, but the tribune is blocking my comments simply because I prefer to write them on my own blog, acefrahm.blogspot.com/2012/12/good-helmet-bill.html, where I can spell check them, and post a link in the comments section of the tribune's articles.  Can you get them to stop blocking me?  It looks like the tribune is corruptly trying to force readers to never follow any links that take them off the tribune's website, or it doesn't like the possibility of criticism it can't control.  It's one thing to block a spammer, but quite another to block locals with valid viewpoints. 

I find it odd that people who want to ride recklessly claim a "freedom" argument, never acknowledging that their freedoms are limited by what can harm others.  This is basic civics, so obvious that it is stunning that anyone ever needs to point this out to anyone.  It is weird that no one makes the case for crashes completely avoided (thus not counted in statistics) because of the protection of a full face visor.  We don't allow car drivers to drive without windshields.

As a former taxi driver, tow truck driver, and officer responsible for the safety of a mobile communications squadron, I say kudos to Senator Todd Weiler for this one sensible thing.  Most folks are terrible at assessing risk in daily life, and even those who actively manage risk can have a hard time doing it well.

I hope Senator Weiler's colleagues are sensible enough to proceed, as it is clearly a positive, good change for our state.  Though I have no statistics to prove it, but logic would suggest that those against safety aren't the kind of people responsible enough to vote in elections, so the senators should have no fear of ballot box reprisals.

I urge Senator Weiler to make sure the bill requires full face helmets, and forbids the less safe open face helmets.  Reckless riders claim they get in the way of hearing, and thus supposedly reduce safety.  But hearing is not a reliable way to maintain safety, only vision is, and only full face helmets provide vision protection.  This is why deaf drivers who can see just fine are allowed to drive. 

Gov. & Lt. Gov. Fail To Think Critically About Higher Ed

In response to:http://utahpolicy.com/view/full_story/20856815/article-66--by-2020?instance=newsletter_featured_articles_policy

Lt. Gov. Greg Bell writes:"Gov. Herbert has set a state goal for 66% of our workforce to hold a post-secondary degree or certificate by 2020".  But Herbert won't be governor in 2020, and our population is suffering under low pay wage slavery right now.  There is no indication that 2 of every 3 jobs requires a degree, nor is it likely that this will ever be true. 

Bell reports:"Gov. Herbert then asked our colleges, universities, and technical colleges to prepare the numbers of students with the degrees and skills necessary to align with these workforce projections."  This is a dumb thing for anyone to do.  OF COURSE when you ask higher ed if more graduates are needed they will tell you we need more, more, MORE, MORE!  The governor should have looked at what is actually happening in the job market instead to determine for himself what is needed in reality.  The last thing Utah needs is a populace saddled with student debt & no corresponding excellent career opportunities, only lousy jobs that pay badly with no benefits.

If the governor wanted to help, he would demand that public school teachers be paid well enough that professors who can teach advanced calculus want to teach in our middle & high schools instead of in private universities.  He would decrease public school class sizes until those professors move to public schools. 

If the governor want to help, he would write a law that says no college can charge more for a degree than that school's last graduating class actually earns in their 1st year after graduation, counted only by grads who are using the knowledge from the degree program.  He would write a law that inserts into every student loan a clause that says repayment is limited to a fraction (no more than 10%) of the actual pay received by the graduate.  Herbert would insert a clause that says this income-based charge is only paid when earned by employment that actually uses the degree.  He would insert another clause that says the full debt is discharged after 4 years, so that if the student doesn't earn enough money with the degree after 4 years to repay the loan, then the degree and the loan weren't actually worth the price the school charged, and the student doesn't have to pay for value not delivered.

Education does not magically create careers.  It doesn't even create jobs.  The very best thing the Lt. Gov. could do to solve the problems of education is to demand a huge increase in the minimum wage.  This is the only thing that gives demand the ability to pay, thus generating work and enabling students to have money to solve their own problems.

There Is Only One Kind Of Fair Tax

In response to this news report: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/55278783-90/bill-credit-everyone-families.html.csp

The one and only kind of tax that is justifiable is an extremely progressive income tax.  All other taxes disproportionately harm the poor, and anyone who can't work|increase their income at will.  All other taxes fail to correct the outsize power that huge sums of money grant to the wealthy.  Their money based control over society grows exponentially, not linearly, as their wealth increases.  This reinforces the unjust distribution of wealth in our society from the hard working & least able to pay into the hands of the idle, uncreative & dynastic wealthy.

The food tax is hideously unfair, a corruption-generating feature of Utah.  Increasing the food tax will only reinforce the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy who don't deserve it.  Instead of a food tax increase to 4.75%, this tax should be dropped to 0%.

Utah should eliminate all taxes that are not extremely progressive income taxes.  This is the one and ONLY fair tax system.

The Spellcatcher

I just finished creating The Spellcatcher.

It is for Windows PC desktop-laptops.
It reads both ATOM & RSS feeds.  It comes with a default list of podcasts built-in, so the first-time user can immediately see that it works, and try out the podcasts I like.

Most podcatchers will download the entire back catalog of episode enclosures when you add a feed.
This causes your computer to work for days, clogging your internet connection the whole time.
The Spellcatcher has a "no-podcasts-older-than-date" field, so that it can suppress the downloading of old shows.
This one feature alone completely justified the time and effort I spent in creating it.

And I made some features that help podcasters measure downloads, place promos in other podcasts, and make it possible for the small podcaster to sell podcast ads for the first time.  But the user base needs to grow, as The Spellcatcher is brand spanking new. . . . .

Please give it try!