The 10th Justice

The recent book How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt tells a story about how human nature often works against our best interests. Even when there are no barriers to racial heterogeneity people tend to congregate with other people similar to themselves. For instance, new immigrants often choose a place to live where there are other immigrants. They do this for financial reasons and also because they like neighbors who speak the same language, eat the same style of food, share the same cultural myths and ideas. It is just easier to be around people who are like you in terms of heritage and sometimes color. We are all to some extent tribal. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt no democracy has been formed and persists that is multicultural. To quote the book: As our colleague Danielle Allen writes: The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social e...

Donald’s Chronicles Numero 1 It's 3am and I'm awake wondering if the president is awake also. I wonder if he is thinking what I’m thinking. Now that he has no Chief of Staff and no Secretary of Defense, no Attorney General, and since he is Commander in Chief, if he orders the military to do something, will they do it? This is a huge question for America the Democracy. No fascist regime can function without a strong right arm and Trump is no Hellboy. “What is it that makes a man, a man?” This question was asked by Hellboy’s “father” played by John Hurt in the first move. The answer is that ‘it is the decisions that he makes.’ Hellboy, and his strong right arm, decided to not use force to rule the universe because the lives of so many normal people would be ruined, so much pain and suffering would be caused, so much joy of freedom lost. But just as Trump is no Obama, he is no Hellboy either. If cartoon characters are used for comparison, only Scrooge McDuck fits the...

“Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers,” said the donald yesterday after the Fed raised the interest rate by a quarter point. I wonder if he said something similar when he demanded gold plated faucets in the Taj Mahal casino after being told by his accountants that the level of debt he was incurring for the project was unsustainable and would go bankrupt. Maybe he said, "Forget the meaningless numbers and don't worry about the debt. I love debt. If we go bankrupt the only ones who will suffer will be the subcontractors and they can't afford to sue me." The Federal Reserve is being managed by people you do understand numbers and their implications. They operate on facts and not feelings. But having facts requires reading and studying the situation. It requires focus and a background body of knowledge. We don't pick children to manage the Fed because they don't have enough education to do the job correctly. It is difficult to understand how a c...

Let's follow the news for signs the Republican party is abandoning democracy and the rule of law for authoritarian rule. Scott Walker, always against the best interests of the people of Wisconsin, just signed a bill stripping the incoming Democratic Governor of most of his power. The people of Wisconsin just elected the new governor to govern their state, as Walker had before him. They elected him to change the policies of the past governor. So, against the wishes of the people of the state, the outgoing Governor and the Republican legislature changed the rules of what a governor can and can't do. The Republican are losing so they are changing the rules in their favor. When you can't give a rational, convincing argument to support your position you can either resort to cheating or be a good loser and try to defend you opinion in the next round of elections. Because the Republicans have chosen to cheat means they are have to arguments to support their position and therefo...

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, was asked by Rep. King of Iowa to provide the names of the 1000 employees who work on the search engine algorithm so they could be evaluated for political bias. There is no need because the answer is clear: yes, there is bias. Thousands of pages of research have been done on this issue. The more educated you are the more likely you are to identify yourself as Democrat or to feel aligned with the principles of the Democratic party. This is not because colleges indoctrinate students as part of vast conspiracy, it is because educated people understand that the world works better when both physics and tolerance are understood and used to make the world work better. There is an argument for not educating people. There is an argument that technology has harmed us all by allowing the human population to increase and by creating machines of war and industry that kill, pollute, and confuse. Since the industrial revolution began skeptics have wondered if technolog...

The Trump debacle has taught us that the fourth branch of government is the most important: a free press. Journalism will rise from this mess as the beacon of truth amid the jumble of lies, spin, insinuation, rumor and malicious tweeting. It probably already has. More and more Trump is almost impossible to listen to; rambling, uninformed speech that sounds like the rumbling of a garbage truck in the morning, with just enough information that we know it for what it is, garbage, so that we can go back to sleep. Then we open the newspaper and read coherent English about the events of the day. What a startling contrast! A free press is ensured in the the first amendment to the Constitution. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. In the wake of Trump'...

Life is complicated. For me, not so complicated. My gender and sexual preferences have never taken up much time in my head. But listening to my friends and family and reading the newspapers I know that many people are troubled by what their real gender is or, even more confusing, if they even have a gender. Then, to amplify the normal choices of man-and-woman, we have discovered that sexual preference isn't tied to gender, necessarily. For most people, however, chromosomal men are attracted sexually to biologic women. If it were otherwise, the species might perish. But it is not that way for many people and other animals. Things are always part of a spectrum. Thinking about these issues, I have wondered if there aren't a lot of other folks in the closet about other issues. For instance - race. Part of me really feels Asian. I am attracted to the simplicity of style of classic Japanese architecture and construction as well as the manicured beauty of their gardens. I like their...

Jesus understood people pretty well. When the devil, probably a scientist, asked Jesus to 'throw himself down' from a roof to prove he was a god, Jesus refused to leap off the roof because he knew this secret: if I can get them to believe in me with no evidence - take the Leap of Faith - I can get them to believe anything. Belief unsupported by evidence leads to all kinds of mayhem and will continue to do so until humans figure out themselves. For the best written and informative book about human gullibility, read Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan . In the emergency room in the 80s and 90s I must have seen a dozen people who thought they were victims of satanic ritual abuse. Maybe a few folks in our community decided to start a church that worshipped satan rather than christ. I don't know for sure, but I never saw any evidence of harm to any of them, other than the psychological confusion, fear and anxiety. In Wright's book he examines the Thurston County, Washi...