Just wondering….

I got to love this site that advertises on places like NewsMax which is for denial-of-reality people. Using the what goes-down-must-go-up inverted law of gravity, the website says:

Let’s say you decide to err on the side of Iraqi prosperity. You take advantage of the 100 year low value and buy 2 million Iraqi dinars. You look them over, admire them, and show them to some friends as a curiosity. The security features alone will have them enthralled. Then you stick them in a closet and go about your life.

A few years from now, you see a program on A&E portraying the lives of average Iraqis. You see people drinking locally bottled, genuine Pepsi Cola; not the ersatz they’d been consuming for years. They are buying their cars from Baghdad Mitsubishi.

Their highly educated engineers, no longer waiting tables or driving cabs, are engineering. The world’s 2nd largest oil reserve is producing more efficiently. Higher quality crops are being harvested, in larger numbers.

You discover that things are going well enough in Iraq to have raised the value of the the dinar to one US cent.

Your $2100 purchase would now be valued at $20,000.

If the dinar were to climb to a dime, you’ve got two hundred thousand dollars in your closet. What if it were to reach a dollar? Or rebound to it’s peak of over $3.00? Do you dare continue to keep your dinars in the closet?

Of course this is assuming that the Iraqi government doesn’t devalue their currency and no longer honor it. How much are those Confederate dollars worth, those Third Reich marks, or Wiemar Republic marks?

But to all of you still believing in the Iraqi (mis) adventure I would like to encourage you to go to that site and experience in person the fraud that is Operation Iraq Liberation Freedom.

Did “freedom” lose its meaning? That is the question George asks and answered Friday, June 9 at the YearlyKos convention. He was wondering this because the way George Bush uses freedom is completely out of sync with the way Lakoff uses the word freedom.

Since the 1500, freedom by the progressive definition have increased freedom enormously. Voter rights, worker rights, access to capital, health have expanded and expanded freedom enormously.

This expansion is what the left thinks about when we talk about freedom. This is not George Bush’s version of freedom. But his version (from the left’s perspective) results in less freedom - less reproductive, more government interference in marriage.

“Freedom” is a contested concept. There are a core set of principles that no one disagrees on. The contest is over values. Most people do not know that freedom is not a contested concept. Freedom is being able to do what you want to do.

Freedom as a concept is centered on physical movement.

“Free will” is a related concept. “Reason” and “Passion” are in contest with “Will”. Will is the arbitrator and a strong will in conservative thought process is demonstrated in how much wealth a person has.

“Government” is about the promotion of freedom. There is a logic that you are not allowed to impose on the liberty of others. What counts on imposing on the liberty or freedom of others.

Physical harm is imposing on the freedom of others.

Justice is about keeping others from harming others. Freedom dependences on justice.

The surprise is that nature and competition is tied to freedom in a negative way. A competition does not impose on the freedom of others. (Oakland A’s beating the Texas Rangers doesn’t impose on the Rangers freedom.)

Does an earthquake impose on the freedom of others? No, this is not contested.

(FYI: Conservatives spend a $250million/year on child rearing “education”.)

For conservatives, the market has to do with competition. The market is a force of nature. Competition has nothing to do with freedom. If the market is manipulated to someone’s betterment, it just means that they compete better than the others in the same game, not that they are imposing on the freedom of others by engaging in stock market manipulation.

If you are a force of “good” then you are allowed to use the devil’s own tools against the evil in the world. NSA spying is using the devil’s own tools against them.

Elliot Spitzer (NY-Attorney General) is a free-market progressive. Freemarket is o.k. but there are rules. Laizze-faire says that government regulation, taxation, courts, and unions get in the way of proper (conservative) market.

The conservatives agree that it was bad that Enron executives lost their 401k’s, but they saw no problem in the way Enron manipulated the energy prices in California.

Conservatives have different view of causation. Conservatives believe in direct causation - crime is caused by bad people, and it has to cause direct harm. Liberals use complex causation, society contributed to the conditions which created the need/opportunity for the criminal to act. For conservatives, when something goes wrong it is the individual not the system.

Progressives have lost the ability to connect Americans’ individual identity with societies identity.

“Liberty” vs “freedom”: liberty is freedom from oppression. Conservatives are convinced that liberals are oppressing the conservatives.

Oppression comes liberals imposing their complex causation interpretation on the conservatives instead of using the direct causation way of looking at the world. So conservatives fail to recognize the power of large numbers of people do a small harm adding up to a large harm. For example, the harm of one person driving a snowmobile in Yellowstone is small, therefore no one should stop 15,000 from doing so.

For conservatives, “Property = freedom”. Property rights and loss of property is tied to freedom (or lack of freedom).

There are two views of religion. In conservative thinking, “essence” is the the fundamental quality that makes a person or thing what it is. For women it is the ability to give birth. So abortion violates the “essence” of women. God is a strict father - church interprets and understands God - and God’s created nature. Therefore you are most free when you follow the church’s dogma.

Fundamentalists are required to spread the truth. Freedom of speech allows you to spread the truth. Therefore, government should allow preaching in schools.

Free market freedom - democracy is inevitable - a bunch of rich people, will not want a dictator so they want elections that they can influence with their money. They are not going to want a leader who is too strong thus balance of powers. Civil control of military to stop dictators from taking control of property. Free press so the wealthy can run their business and make sure no one is taking their property.

Notice that this view rewards wealth, not work.

Biconceptuals can bridge the gap. Need to convince them that they are being oppressed by conservatives.

A related discussion is here

My letter to the Merc -

Dear Editor –

In 2000, Santa Clara voters were promised BART-to-San-Jose, Caltrain electrification, and increased bus service with no new taxes. Santa Claus was going to pay for any funding shortfalls.

Since then over $100 million in borrowed money has been spent planning the BART-to-San-Jose project. Yet for all that credit card spending, the BART-to-San-Jose project hasn’t even been able to complete the federal
documents needed to get federal funding. The proponents say that they plan on getting money from all these other agencies. Yet at $4.7 billion dollars and rising, BART is a project that no other agency believes should be
built and they certainly are not eager to fund it.

On June 6, the Santa Clara County voters realized that Santa Claus wasn’t coming to town and said “no more”.

It is time now to look at real solutions that don’t require Santa Clara to mortgage its future to build a single 21-mile rail line that will barely serve any county residents.

And my letter to the Mountain View Voice:

Dear Editor –

On June 6, the Santa Clara County voters spoke loud and clear. They want VTA to stop planning to build a project that no one will ride and no one else will help pay for. It is time to close up shop on the BART-to-San-Jose project and look to other solutions to our transportation problems.

Will the politicians and political establishment listen? The backers of BART-to-San-Jose seemed to consist mostly of companies that stood to make billions off the construction and the politicians who wanted to be there for the ribboncutting ceremonies and photo-ops.

Maybe it is time to elect new leaders who will spend money on practical transportation projects that actually help people get to their jobs and their doctor; leaders who don’t have a bust-the-bank-attitude and a BART-and-only-BART myopic vision.

It is time now to look at real solutions that don’t require Santa Clara to mortgage its future to build a single 21-mile rail line that will barely serve any county residents.

Victory … the night started of well for the pro-good transportation people and stayed excellent.

In spite of being outspent 100-1, the No On Measure A folks had a HUGE 30,000-vote margin of victory. The pro-measure A folks got spanked.

The Mercury News had this to say about the one and only one mailer we had the money to send:

This is the time to be especially wary of political mailers or telephone calls. Campaigns prone to misleading innuendo or outright lies often wait until the last minute.

Notice the implication, that our mailer is spreading an outright lie, when in fact it was 100% accurate.

Anti-BART activists have mailed a last-minute hit on Measure A, the half-cent sales tax for transportation and health care. It implies the measure would make the tax higher than anywhere else in the state, when Alameda County and other locations are already at that level.

Actually, what the flyer said was this “would make our taxes the highest in the state”, which is 100% true ( or rather would have been).

And it implies businesses supporting Measure A are trying to get out of paying sales tax, based on a proposal now stalled in the Legislature that would exempt only the purchase of manufacturing equipment — a break most of California’s economic competitors offer. It’s usually negative pieces that mislead.

Whether or not other states, offer or don’t offer the same tax break has no bearing on whether or not the Measure A proponents (Silicon Valley Leadership Group) are trying to cut themselves a sales tax break at the same time they were trying to raise everyone elses’ sales tax.

Today the Mercury said this:

Santa Clara County voters soundly rejecting a proposed half-cent increase designed to rescue the financially imperiled BART extension to Silicon Valley and restore health services for the poor.

It was a stunning result for much of the county’s political, business and labor establishment, which joined forces to promote a tax increase to address a variety of transportation and social service needs.

The $4.7 billion BART extension, the centerpiece of county transportation planning, is now in serious jeopardy, as politicians from Gilroy to Palo Alto will have to confront how to pay for a list of scheduled transportation projects far larger than they can afford. VTA lacks the money to operate the 16.1-mile extension, and federal officials won’t approve a $750 million contribution to the project unless VTA comes up with a stable financial plan.

Tax opponents said VTA now has to consider scrapping BART, which would serve Milpitas, San Jose and Santa Clara, in order to spread existing funds more equitably around the county.

“We have to rethink BART, which is good because there are other things we can do which are great transit projects,” said Mountain View Councilman Greg Perry, a VTA board member and leading BART critic.

Like improving ACE and Capitol Corridors service incrementally.

Supervisor Don Gage said, “We’re going to have to layoff a significant number of people and cut a lot of services. We may have to close the county airports, cut off alcohol and drug services.”

Well maybe if the county hadn’t so foolish tied their sales tax request to that of the golden BART rescue plan, they wouldn’t be facing this problem.

And the Mercury finally admits to the pro-Measure A’s self-dealing:

The forces supporting Measure A outspent opponents by more than 100-to-1 after raising more than $1.7 million. Labor unions and members of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the county’s major business lobby, each contributed about $650,000 to the campaign.

An additional $160,000 came from development interests, many of whom have property in San Jose’s Coyote Valley and want it opened for development. An additional $130,000 came from contractors who work on Valley Transportation Authority projects, including companies working on the design of the planned BART extension.

Leadership group members have made BART their leading political cause since 2000, while most of the labor money came from the unions representing county employees.