Broadband internet and rural economic development

The juxtaposition of a story about New York state's failure to deliver broadband internet to the North Country and the story about the closure of Dannemora and Watertown prisons is insightful.

State prisons were added in the north country in the 1980s by the current governor's father and Republican Senator Ron Stafford as a rural economic development program.

Now with the prisons being closed as the inmate population plummets, the state and localities have to come up with a sensible and sustainable rural economic development plan(s). Broadband internet is essential to any such plan.

With the pandemic (and terrorism concerns before that), many people have been looking to get out of densely populated urban areas. The Adirondacks' stunning natural beauty is a great draw. But they're not going to move somewhere without access to high speed internet... even less so when they are working and their kids going to school from home.

The electoral college has always been controversial

Everything old is new again.

One minor but interesting point from this podcast I listened to about the 1796 presidential election.

 

A contemporary conceit is that hostility toward the electoral college's purposefully anti-democratic structure is based on the ignorance of a modern society that is clueless about the wisdom of our sacred and omniscient Founding Fathers (capitalized, of course).

But this podcast points out that so-called "faithless electors" - who tried actually implementing the electoral college's precise purpose - were controversial even back in 1796... among the generation that actually wrote and adopted the Constitution.

A better idea than Court packing

There's chatter among Democrats of changing the size of the Supreme Court if they win the Congress and the presidency. Just like Republicans talked about changing the size of the Court in 2016 if Hillary Clinton won.

Obviously, this is naked power politics, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some kind of reform.

I'm intrigued by what New York state does for appellate level courts: terms last 14 years and judges have to retire when they are 70 (I think this age limit applies to elected trial court judges too). I believe a term can be renewed but it is not automatic and has to be approved by the state senate.

I think this lessens the power of the presidency and the SCOTUS-stakes of a presidential election - which distort the race - because in this system, every presidential term is going to get a couple of picks.

And you don't have justices clinging on to a lifetime seat when they should be able to retire (especially if they're ill) because they want to see if a better president/replacement selector is chosen.

Obviously, both ruling parties like the current system because their policies and actions are terrible and indefensible and controlled by corporate money; SCOTUS fear-mongering is a great motivator  that prevents them from having to engage in representative governing.

Removing this excuse for corruption and facilitating some real accountability is perhaps the best reason for such a change to be made.

White supremacy has always served the rich

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

I am working my way through the brilliant PBS documentary on Reconstruction Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

It is not news that white supremacy was and remains America's original terrorism. But it's interesting how social issues and economic issues, often treated as separate, are usually inter-connected.

What I did not know is that after the Civil War, poor whites and poor blacks worked together to wrest some degree of political and economic control from the plantation class. Hundreds of black men were elected to various offices throughout the south, until disenfranchisement in the 1890s. Aggressive promotion of white supremacy and racial caricaturing was a way to drive a wedge into that alliance and thus for the rich to preserve economic and political power.

Lynchings, which were inevitably triggered by fabricated accusations of the rape of white women, were not random. They specifically targeted black men who ran businesses or who were otherwise economically successful.

White supremacy was way to divide and conquer poorer people. It still is.

 

Stop living in fear!

I hear a lot of people saying that if you take reasonable, minimal precautions during a global pandemic which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, you are living in fear. 

So don't live in fear. 

Drive without a seat belt. 

Ride without a helmet.

Disable the brakes in your car/bike/motorcycle.

Jump off a cliff.

Science says these are bad ideas but can you really trust science? It's just controlled by Big Seat Belt (the richest lobby in DC). I mean isn't gravity just a "theory"?

 Don't live in fear by letting the tyrannical laws of physics suppress your freedom.

Without accountability, we have a police state

We've all seen countless stories of police abuse - many more disturbing than this one - in recent days.

I think most people accept that the police deserve the benefit of the doubt.. But what we're seeing is too many agencies wasting that benefit of the doubt by essentially proving the claims of the protesters. This is not new, it is just being more widely filmed.

Police often have a difficult job, but so do soldiers and firefighters and social workers and nurses. Those workers have accountability when they screw up. The benefit of the doubt CANNOT be a blank check. Especially not here. Police without accountability is a police state.

Most would agree that most cops are good cops. There's a saying that nobody hates bad cops more than good cops. But until bad cops are consistently held accountable - ie: systematically and not just when protests erupt - all cops will be tainted.

Police reform - in whatever guise it takes - is the human rights issue of our generation. We have been avoiding dealing with systemic racism for 400 years. Enough's enough.

American history lesson

In the 1770s, American colonialists were dissatisfied with British rule.

They took to the streets to protest. The result: several of them were killed by the forces of order. (Boston Massacre)

The killings fueling their anger, the Americans escalated their resistance to vandalism. (Boston Tea Party)

When the British refused to budge, the Americans resorted to armed violence. (Revolutionary War)

The Americans did issue a strongly worded press release (Declaration of Independence) but did not halt the violence.

Americans only resumed peaceful dialogue AFTER they seized autonomy following the British military surrender. (Treaty of Paris)

Rioting, as seen by Dr. King

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.


Dr Martin Luther King said this over 50 years ago. Still relevant today.

"I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”

Distance learning is not real education

there's an assumption by adults that kids are so enraptured by technology that distance learning would be a snap. It's easy to see kids glued to their phones and think that.

But although I've heard from countless who hate it, I've yet to hear from one kid who actually prefers this set up, though I'm sure a small minority do. Even the kids who normally whine they hate school are complaining about it.

Nor a teacher, for that matter. The clueless idiots claim teachers are lazy or glorified babysitters but every teacher out there wants to be doing more than they are permitted to do now.

And that's not even factoring in the digital divide and unequal access that implies.

This is something to consider as our governor and others hand over education design to big tech. I'm a bit skeptical that the plight of homeless students is going to be high on the radar of tech CEOs.

Tech can enhance traditional teaching methods and already have. But it should be done thoughtfully and with serious input from educators, something that 'education reform' attempts rarely include.

Any attempt to replace school learning with distance learning should be resisted with the fervor of armed white men demanding their right to poison wait staff.

Why Germany succeeded where the US failed

The German soccer leagues are the first in the world to re-open, albeit without fans. I was listening to an interview with a German soccer announcer. He said that part of what helped is that Germany "got lucky." 

He explained that they watched on TV what was happening in Italy and were quick to take action to mitigate the spread of the virus. 

Rather than choosing a national leader who rejects science and surrounds himself with the same, they chose as their national leader a trained scientist. Even in a decentralized federal republic, this was critical in setting the tone.

Little about this is "lucky."

It is the result of conscious choices made by Germans and their leaders to act decisively and proactively to prevent a crisis from becoming much worse. They saw what happening elsewhere and didn't sit on their hands and/or scream MSM sheeple Nazi Hitler hoax plandemic. They took action.

Over the decades, they've also consciously chose to develop a decent social safety net to reduce inequality and to establish a rational health care system designed to serve citizens.

The results of serious leadership: they had one of the lowest per capita death rates in the western world. And now the country is slowly re-opening.  

The fundamental divide in America is not between left and right

I'm coming to believe that the fundamental divide in this country is not between left and right. It's between those who accept the need for credible public institutions and those who don't. 

"Accepting the need for" does not mean "automatically and mindlessly trust." Those who accept this need try to repair failing (or sabotaged) institutions. Those who don't accept this need add to the breakdown in social cohesion.

It has nothing to do with education or intelligence. I see many smart, educated people parroting the nihilistic rage. They know what public institutions are saying very well. They just knee-jerk disbelieve the institutions unthinkingly. My recent essay on the difference between skepticism vs cynicism is instructive here. Because many of them are smart, they are good at making their disbelief sound just pseudo-intellectual enough.

It's not just the fascists and Trump cultists. Many on the harder left are no different and it's causing a real breach between those who want to re-fortify sabotaged institutions and those who want to burn everything down and replace it with who knows what and who knows how..

I'm not sure how to resolve this breach. Once you reject the notion of anything public or common, even a set of facts (upon which opinions and strategies can be based), I'm not sure where you can go from there. 

The Death of the Liberal Class foreshadowed our current collapse in social cohesion

Some years ago, I started reading but did not finish Chris Hedges' book The Death of the Liberal Class. (liberal of course meaning classical liberalism, not left-of-center politics)

Published in 2010, it described the collapse in credibility of the public institutions that long served as the foundation of western liberal democracy. This collapse has led to the comprehensive pan-ideological breakdown in social cohesion that we've experienced the last several years, which has been laid even more bare by the pandemic. 

This breakdown was accelerated by the Trump presidency, who exploited it mercilessly to get (s)elected in the first place. But the unraveling did not start with Trump's inauguration and will not end with his long overdue eviction from the White House. I think it's time I picked the book back up.

Cuomo's scheme to "re-imagine" education

One of the dumbest catchphrases you often hear is, "Those who can't, teach." It'd be more accurate to say that, "Those who can't teach develop education policy."
The last two press conferences, Governor Cuomo has mentioned about working with Bill Gates to "re-imagine" education. Today, he introduced a Google executive who would aid the effort.
He was very vague and nebulous. No hint as to what direction it might take, other than the inclusion of Microsoft and Google honchos. This is something people needs to watch carefully. 
With everyone distracted by the pandemic and dazzled by his coherent complete sentences and his ability to sound like a vaguely functioning adult (in contrast to you know who), this is a very opportune time to pull one over the public.
Major education "reforms" are almost always developed without meaningful consultation of the folks who actually have to implement those changes on the ground. The typical result of such "reforms" is the state buying more stuff from for-profit companies. 
As much as the education system does need to re-imagined, the idea of oligarchs heading the effort in a time whether those who might ring the alarm bells are distracted does not really inspire confidence that it will be done in a way that will benefit children.

The risks of not voting your conscience

Remember the countless Democrats who said they were going to vote for Joe Biden in the primary without much enthusiasm, even though they liked another Democratic contender better, because Biden "clearly" had the best chance of beating Trump and "no one" with a clue could dispute that self-evident fact.

Although it's not surprising that the fascist party would nominate an admitted sexual predator, it would've a lot easier if the party that patted itself on the back for supporting #MeToo and who went after both Brett Kavanagh and Al Franken had chosen to avoid nominating someone credibly accused of sexual assault. Cue predictable double standard rationalizations.

People often talk about the risk of voting your conscience. Well, not doing so can have consequences too.  This one's not on the DNC. It's on rank and file Democrats. They made this bed.

Only millenials can save us

In the middle of the #MeToo era, our two major party choices for president are an old man credibly accused of sexual assault and possessing a history of bad conduct toward women and another old man credibly accused of sexual assault and possessing a history of bad conduct toward women.

I really can't imagine why young people have so little faith in the current lesser of two evils political system that their elders - which includes my Generation X - continue to prop up.

Young people are the only generation that seems to have a clue about the transformations that need to happen and the backbone to see it through. To my eyes, this is pretty much beyond debate.

They know that needed changes have been obstructed for so long that sclerotic incrementalism - itself deemed too radical and intemperate for most of the last quarter century - is no longer a credible option for the major challenges we face. They actually realize what has been clear to me for decades: the longer we kick the can down the road, the more disruptive and less effective the changes will be. If the country and the world are going to be saved, it's going to be by them. Just hope it's not too late.

Even Republican governors are targeted by Trump

It's bad enough the Trump regime has been failing miserably to help governors desperately trying to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. 

As many governors have rightly pointed out, given the knowledge of how the pandemic was spreading in Asia and Europe, FEMA should've prepared a national stockpile before the outbreak started him rather than having states bid on the open market against each other and FEMA and other countries.

 But even when responsible governors do manage to obtain supplies that the federal government should be doing, there's the fear that the Trump regime will steal them. 

The Republican governor of Massachusetts complained that the feds seized a plane load of masks that his state had bought and paid for. No word on if the Trump regime reimbursed the taxpayers of the Bay State they swindled. 

The Republican governor of Maryland has ordered the National Guard and state police to protect his state's supply of COVID19 tests. His assertion of states rights in the face of an intentionally sabotaged federal government will no doubt enrage the PO(TU)S.

Trivializing COVID19

I see a lot of people relentlessly trying to trivialize the danger of COVID-19. They're clearly doing so for ideological reasons, which is fine, except that they spout pseudo-scientific b.s. to obscure their ideological reasons.
 

What's noteworthy is that you don't really hear doctors and nurses in hospitals or nursing home staff trivializing the virus.

What you do hear is medical professionals and care staff talking about how bad it is in the hospitals and nursing homes, not only in metro NYC but also here in upstate. They use words like overwhelming, exhausting and unprecedented, even those who've worked during previous pandemics. They're not saying "it's just like regular flu season." They're saying it's worse than during AIDS. 

Maybe this is a terribly mainstream belief, MSM sheeple that I must be. But the people who are on the front lines of this and have actual scientific training from real schools might, just might, actually know what the fuck they're talking about better than someone whose "expertise" changes (impeachment last month, epidemiology this month, chem trails next month) based on whatever is trending on Youtube at the moment. Or maybe not. Maybe those LPNs risking their lives for $16/hr are just part of the Grand Conspiracy too.

Historically, Americans have always lurched through extremes where we go back and forth between fetishizing science uncritically to rejecting it entirely. We're obviously in the latter period right now. Take a swig of Clorox if you disagree.

When I lived in West Africa, a Guinean friend of mine who was a chemistry teacher told me something I never forgot: "Science without conscience will be the ruin of Mankind." This is not about rejecting science. It means assessing it with a critical eye based on the intersection of ethics and actual scientific principles. But we Americans never seem to be mature enough as a people to master this nuance.

Skepticism vs cynicism

Skepticism is the principle that you should not automatically believe every opinion, theory or informnation that you come across. It's the principle that you should try to verify data as best you can and independently assess opinion and theory. Skepticism means you don't assume something is true or sensible until you can conclude it to be so via critical thinking.

Cynicism is the principle that you should automatically assume as false or dishonest every (or most) theory, opinion or data that you come across. It's the principle that anything that doesn't correspond to your existing beliefs cannot possibly be demonstrated as true or sensible no matter what. Cynicism is as much an antithesis to critical thinking as naivete.

Skepticism is necessary to have a functioning society and be a functioning adult. Cynicism is corrosive to both.

Why I wear a mask

I've seen several local businesses posting something like "No mask, no entry, no exceptions." And it always provokes howls of outrage from cable "news" addicts denouncing the business owners and those who follow their rules as submissive slaves and sheeple. 

They're a private business. They can make you wear a mask any time they want, pandemic or not, governor's orders or not. You step on their property, respect their rules. Get over it or leave.

 Listen, wear a mask in public. Don't wear a mask and deal with the consequences. That's your choice.

I choose to wear one. Not so much because I'm that worried about catching it, even though I'm in a higher risk category. I do so out of respect for my neighbors.

Out of respect for the underpaid cashiers and stock clerks who deal with hundreds or thousands of people coming in, some of whom are no doubt sick and many of whom do not respect social distancing. I'm sure most of workers have their stress heightened just a little bit every time they see a customer without a mask. This is not the job they signed up for.

Out of respect. for senior citizen shoppers who no doubt share that fear.

Out of respect for the doctors and nurses and other medical personnel who having working straight out with no break for a month. Out of respect for their family members that they barely see anymore.

Out of respect for everyone who wants this pandemic to subside sooner, rather than later.

If you think your governor is Hitler for issuing restrictions and that he's trampling on your God-given right to get a haircut that our Founding Fathers fought for, fine. That's your right.

If you think the business owners doing this are idiots because they don't realize this is all a hoax like you learned from Fox News or YouTube Medical School, that's your right.

If orotesting that makes you feel like Rosa Parks, congratulations. That's your right.

Go ahead, break your arm patting yourself on the back. The first responders will treat your broken arm anyway. But bear in mind, they will be wearing masks too.

But don't crap on people who think they're part of society and choose to respect their fellow community members. That's our right.

Progressivism used to dominate rural America

A friend of mine asked me to read a piece entitled What Liberals Don't Realize from the website Quora. There were definitely chunks of it that made me roll my eyes. Slog through it because there is also some good stuff in there.

The general lack of interest of left-of-center folks in the realities of rural and small town America strikes me as not just ignorance, but willful ignorance. This comes across to folks who live in places lke my hometown as outright contempt. This is an issue I've been calling attention to for a long time.

Progressive discussion is so urban-centric that it makes itself seem irrelevant at best or alien and hostile at worst in much of the country, even though many of those policies would help people in places like where I live.

People in rural and small town America aren't stupid. But if only one side is engaging them, no wonder the other side gains no traction there.

Progressives need to stop treating this part of the country like an afterthought and speak directly (and listen to) rural and small town Americans if they ever want their policies to gain traction.

***

 The prairies - now solidly red - used to be a hotbed of rural activism. Witness Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? 

In the Midwest, the fusion of the urban labor movement with the interests of rural farmers was a key coalition that made the progressive movement so powerful in the early 20th century. In fact, the blue outfit in Minnesota is still known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

I was looking at the 1912 presidential election, at the height of the progressive movement. There was a Progressive candidate (Theodore Roosevelt) AND a Socialist candidate (Eugene Debs). The pair did very well in more rural states: South Dakota (55% combined), Washington (48%), Nevada (44%), Montana (41%). 

Because of progressives' self-defeating tunnel vision, such numbers seem inconceivable today.

How bad governance botched needed bail reform in New York

The shambolic implementation of needed bail reform in New York is a great example of the state government's dysfunction and how its abysmal processes lead to embarrassments like the governor admitting a law needs revamping only a few days after it takes effect.

Far from being a new development with the Democrats taking control of the state senate, this has been the depressing status quo for decades.

Some of the good things are being misrepresented by political hacks or flat out misunderstood by well intentioned folks, no doubt. Some of the reforms were needed. Some were bad ideas. Some were good ideas badly implemented. 

But why was this reform implemented so chaotically that the governor is conceding the need for changes only a week into the law's existence?

The process.

The reforms weren't passed via the normal legislative process that first world governments use to pass important legislation. Which is by holding hearings seeking feedback from all of the stakeholders, using that feedback to make tweaks to the initial bill and get rid of previously unforeseen consequences and then holding a public debate and vote on the stand alone bill.

Instead, the reforms were shoved into the unrelated budget with no separate debate while constituents were focused on the countless other things that might or might not end up into the budget.

No democracy. Whatever the legislative "leaders" and governor agreed on. The other 221 legislators are useless. This is nothing remotely close to the good governance that candidate Andrew Cuomo promised us in 2010.

The tactic of shoving policy into the budget, used on many issues, is designed to shield the other legislators from constituents opposing or questioning whatever is being passed. It's designed to protect rank and file legislators from having to do their job.

 

Process matters. And the state's processes have always been horrible. It takes good ideas in principle and ruins them in implementation. Even the good laws that come out of Albany seem to arrive despite the process not because of it.

Why climate activists have been failing and how they can succeed?

I'm a big believer in the premise that people who want to effect real change can't just tell people to say no. You have to offer them something to say yes to. In politics, something, no matter how awful, nearly always beats nothing: witness Trump vs Hillary. The nihilistic Republicans vs the corporate Democrats.

I've been thinking about this is relation to denial of the reality that climate change has been massively accelerated by human activity.

 I think that most climate change denialism is not really based in actual belief that there is no human component. Most don't reject the science because they actually disbelieve it. They do so because accepting the science would imply action... action that might well be, in the short term, nothing less than self-harm. Climate change activists given little thought to addressing this narrative.

Such denialism is largely based on the belief that getting rid of - or at least shrinking the fossil fuel industry -  will cause major economic damage, given the absence of other jobs to take their place. This is not, in fact, an irrational fear. 

I feel that one of the areas that climate change activists have failed is in developing alternative economic opportunities for people who work in fossil fuel industries or who live in regions whose economies are dominated by said industry. Or rather, in pushing politicians to do the above. This is indispensable to softening opposition to needed environmental actions. Instead, climate change activists have largely opted for the tactic of shame and that's clearly not enough.

People aren't going to voluntarily abandon their way of life and their often already meager wages for the vague promise that maybe some unknown alternative economic sector might be realized at some indeterminate point in the future. 

They see how the deindustrialized northeast and midwest have largely been left to rot.  And it's wholly irrational to expect them to do so. And wholly counterproductive to shame them for not doing so.

Climate change activists need to recognize that those affected by their desired shrinking of the fossil fuel economy are real people with real bills to pay and that if they want those people to go along with serious action to repair the climate crisis, activists have to ensure they have some other way to feed their families.