Three Silicon Valley guys took three days to create a website to sign up for Obamacare!

Three guys in their twenties. One room. Four desks. Three days. Result?  A website to sign up for new health insurance under Obamacare. Good grief!  

One of the three masterminds, George Kalogeropoulis, who created healthsherpa.com says:

"We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options," he told CNN. "Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans."

The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area.

Good grief. 

The website leads you to a plan of your choice, and then it is up to you to call or click through to the insurer, or to go to the government site to sign up. Seems pretty easy, except if you try to use the government site, of course. 

                "Creating the original Sherpa site took three days and cost "several hundred dollars," according to Kalogeropoulos. The three programmers have continued fine-tuning the site as its popularity has grown. In less than a week, the site has had almost 200,000 unique visitors and over half a million page views, he said."

Cost them several hundred dollars?  

Good grief.

So, even though I get my insurance through my employer I went to the website to see how easy it was.  It was easy.  I was presented with 29 plans to choose from.  I was given a phone number to call to sign up, and given the option to click through to the insurer's website to sign up.  I was informed that I didn't qualify for a subsidy.
The prices were kind of shocking, but that is to be expected.  Insurance is costly.  So it goes.

If you are one of the few who does not get their insurance through your employer, give this site a shot.  You will be given choices in about a minute. Signing up is up to you.

Good grief.

Moffett quits pro football to protect his body and his brain

I've been writing about how football causes brain injuries which result in depression, violent behavior, even suicide in players in their later years.  I think the data is pretty conclusive, but if I look at TV it just seems hopeless for the athletes because football is a huge multi-billion dollar industry.  How will this ever go away?  It is loved by fans, by beer makers, by auto makers, by sports games makers, by TV executives, by pretty much every boy and man in the country, by football players themselves... wait, maybe not by the players themselves, at least not for some of them now, and maybe more later.

What if the football players themselves decided that they don't want to play anymore?  What if the players start to understand that it's not just their knees and bones and organs that are being destroyed so that others can make millions off of their bodies?  

What if players start to realize that no matter how tough they are, no matter how much pain they can tolerate, no matter how much they pride themselves in being able to get off the ground and come back at full speed... there is nothing they can do to toughen their brains, that blob of jello inside their skulls that gets damaged again and again and again when they block or tackle or be blocked or be tackled, even when they don't have a full loss of consciousness concussion they can start to know that they are getting brain damage with sub-concussions many times a game, a season, a career? What if they start to think even the money and glamour and fame and lifestyle isn't  worth it?

One man decided that it's not worth it.  John Moffett is walking away from a guaranteed million dollars, and from his future in pro football. What he has to say gives me hope.  

Sports radio commentator Jim Rhome had this to say today.  He says Moffitt said:

 “I just really thought about it and decided I’m not happy. I’m not happy at all. And I think it’s really madness to risk your body, risk your well-being and risk your happiness for money. Everybody, they just don’t get it and they think it’s crazy. But I think what I was doing is crazy.”

Moffitt just left a million bucks on the table and a shot at a Super Bowl run with Denver…and it’s probably the smartest thing he’ll ever do.  A million bucks is great… Quality of life is better.

And what good is the dough if you spend every single day in a dark, quiet room with a scrambled brain.  Moffitt could retire now with his mind and body intact… Or he could get fired in a few years after hundreds of more headshots, bad knees a slightly bigger nest egg.

I don’t think he’s crazy at all. I respect him for making the call.  We’d all love to have his life, and all this dude wants, is ours.

Moffett is also quoted as saying:

“I don’t care about the Super Bowl. I don’t,” Moffitt insisted. “I used to. I mean, anytime I played this game, I gave my heart to it and I’m a person that does thing with his heart. … I don’t need the Super Bowl experience. I played in great stadiums and I played against great players. And I had that experience and it’s enough.”

Looks like at least one football player has decided to look at what matters to him, and chose a healthy body and brain over the allure of football.  

How many others will do the same?  How many parents will let their children play a sport that causes brain damage?

A synergistic solution to health care problems

September was a bad month for the Republicans (Congressional Republicans shut down the government and tried to stop paying about 30% of the government's bills).  They looked like nutjobs who couldn't be trusted to run a car wash let alone the government.

And October was a bad month for Obama and the Democrats.  The Obamacare rollout has been a disaster.  The website is apparently terrible, and millions are losing their insurance despite repeated promises by Obama that if you wanted to keep your existing insurance you could.  

At the heart of liberalism is a trust in government.  Obama's trustworthiness is justifiably dismal, and government's trustworthiness is even lower - the government looks like it just isn't up to the size and complexity of Obamacare, which has been the conservative charge against government for decades - nameless bureaucrats with little interest in the people they serve mindlessly enforcing rules impersonally and destructively on a helpless public.

Two things that stand out loud and clear from September is that Republicans really, really hate Obamacare, and Democrats really, really like it - or at least the Dems really want it to work.

I may be one of the only people in the country that never had a strong opinion about Obamacare.  I had to agree with the Dems that the old health care system was fundamentally flawed because it didn't cover everybody, had limits on insurance payouts resulting in bankruptcy for middle class people inflicted with catastrophic medical emergencies, and denied coverage to people with pre-existing conditions (which would eventually be almost everyone as they grew older).  These were very serious problems that had to be addressed and Obamacare addressed them.  But is it functional?

On the other hand, I have to agree with the Reps that trying to take one sixth of the economy under the control of the federal government just may be more than the government is capable of handling.  

The problem with the Reps is they don't really have an alternative.  Oh, I understand there are a bunch of Reps with various ideas, but there is no easy to explain workable Republican alternative that is being championed by the party to move forward - either to fix Obamacare or to replace it with a conservative alternative that addresses coverage for everybody, prevents medical bankruptcies, and cares for people with pre-existing conditions.

I have a suggestion for the Reps to present as an improvement/replacement.  It is unlikely that anyone will champion it, but I have always liked it.

The conservative economist from Harvard, Martin Feldstein, has what could be called the 15% solution.  

The government gives every family or independent person a voucher that pays for all health care costs above 15% of their annual income.  If any want to have more coverage, they pay for more.  

This takes away bankruptcy by medical catastrophe.  It takes away previous medical history exclusions. It eliminates rationing. This takes away caps on payouts. It eliminates bureaucrats deciding which health procedures to allow.  This introduces buying savvy in the purchase of care and thus reduces the overall cost of healthcare in the country.  It keeps the insurance companies in business. It creates competition in the insurance industry to compete for clients. It's a conservative solution.

If people have problems paying the first 15% they will have a government issued credit card, at a low rate, enough to cover the bureaucratic costs of handling loans, with no profits and no exorbitant salaries.  

Everyone gets the voucher and credit card which could be used only for insurance.  Bold, easy to explain, covers everyone.  Feldstein says that costs of the vouchers is in line with existing government expenditures, so there is no increase in government costs.

Plus, surprise surprise, it would be a synergy of liberal and conservative ideas - liberal Obamacare based on caring and compassion, and conservative adjustment based on the freedom and power of markets. Both parties could be proud of creating a better health care system for the country. Of course, that would mean they would have to stop hating each other and demonizing each other.  A bridge too far?

I think it could be a good solution to our health care debacle.  Dems could see it as an improvement to Obamacare (replace full coverage for everyone with catastrophic care for everyone).  Reps could see it as a replacement (replace full care for everyone with vouchers and a government issued credit card for everyone - no fines for not participating, no incentives for not participating).

  

One thing is guaranteed. At this point in time the Reps have put everything into making sure Obamacare doesn't work, and Dems have put everything into making sure Obamacare does work.  

I just want a health care system that covers everyone including those with pre-existing conditions, and prevents medical catastrophe bankruptcies. If Obamacare works, those concerns are more or less handled, if it doesn't, maybe the 15% solution could work.

Meanwhile, back at the financial industry crisis of greed...

One of my favorite financial writers is Gretchen Morgenson.  She writes a weekly column on the industry for the New York Times.  Today she writes about the $13 billion fine the Justice Department is charging JP Morgan Chase, run by Jaimie Dimon.  To me, the fine is nice, and a little bit of punishment, but I don't think it does much of anything to change the flawed incentive system that led to a crisis of greed and corruption that did so much damage to the U.S. and world economies, from which we are all still suffering (except for the super wealthy, of course).

I guess there are those bemoaning that the fines were too harsh, but as Ms. Morgenson writes:
"Nobody made them underwrite toxic loans, sell them to unwitting investors and misuse beleaguered borrowers."  

Personally, I would still like to see some jail time for the leaders of these pirate institutions.  But, oh well.

She points out the obvious, that the financial giants have gotten bigger, still have an intrinsic government guarantee of being bailed out for their sins that go awry, and have gained political influence as as result of the crisis that they created in 2008.  I would add that in many ways, our democracy has been supplanted by an oligarchy led by the financial sharks fresh from their last kills.

She reminds us that the financial institutions used to be controlled by the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking. And although it can be claimed that such a separation might not have prevented the 2008 financial meltdown, there was one very toxic effect of the repeal of that law - the institutions themselves grew exponentially in size and power and political influence.  They became impregnable.  They took over the government.  For themselves.  Not for the benefit of the economy. For their own pocketbooks. 

But isn't that the magic of capitalism?  that when each of us operates in our own self interest the economy is guided by an invisible hand that ends up benefiting the economy itself and thus, in the long run, benefits the people in the economy?  Well, yes, unless some become too powerful and disrupt the competition that is the heart of capitalism.  Witness Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting of over a hundred years ago, which was needed to allow the proper functioning of capitalism.

She cites a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago:

""When all the financial firms are the same and all large, then they are going to have the same interests and lobby in the same direction" Zingales said.  If they have competing interests because they cannot all be in the same businesses, their lobbying power shrinks."

Zingales' solution:

"First, we must force these institutions to recapitalize more" he said.  "But we must also find a more automatic trigger to force recapitalizations along the way."

The automatic trigger empowers the regulators to take over the institutions if they don't recapitalize.  That should get their attention.

Finally, Zingales recommends changing antitrust rules to include taking into account the added political influence proposed mergers would have in addition to the effect the mergers would have on competition and economies of scale.  

He concludes:

"These companies become so important politically to the state or country that it is hard to resist transforming their interests into the policy of the country."

Unfortunately, it is not much of a stretch of the imagination to see that the policies of our country have been transformed into the interests of the financial giants for quite some time.  Which would be fine, if the financial industry were focused on providing capital for capitalism, real capitalism, creating businesses and industries and jobs and economic growth.  But, the financial industry seems to have been transformed into a zero sum game where those on the inside make fortunes and those on the outside just hope our portfolios and pensions aren't destroyed by the recklessness and greed of the sharks at the top.

Brain damage evidence continues to mount for football

The great ex-quarterback, Brett Favre, says he's had scary losses of memory.  Here is his quote:

""I don't remember my daughter playing soccer, playing youth soccer, one summer. I don't remember that. ... This was pretty shocking to me. ... For the first time in 44 years, that put a little fear in me."

I just watched the documentary "Frontline: League of Denial, the NFL's Concussion Crisis".  It is very sobering.  The first NFL player to have his brain sectioned during an autopsy was the Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Webster.  He played on the great teams that won four Super Bowls.  He was nicknamed "Iron Mike."  He was beloved.  He was admired for his enormous courage.  When he retired he stopped being himself.  He could not complete sentences.  He became distracted, violent, disturbed.  He died at the age of fifty.  His body was destroyed, and his mind was damaged - CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy).  A degenerative disease of the brain.  Junior Seau also had CTE.  He killed himself at the age of 43 by shooting himself in the heart with the demand that his brain be autopsied to discover if it had been damaged by football.  It was.  He had undergone dramatic personality changes.  He ended the nightmare.  

The NFL paid $765 million to settle a concussion lawsuit brought by ex-players.  The NFL is doing its best to pretend to protect the players and research brain injuries and to stress "clean" play in the sport.  But the damage isn't a function of dirty play, it's a function of playing football, period.  You can't play football without contact, and you can't have contact without concussions and sub-concussions.  

Super agent, Lee Steinburg recounted his time with quarterback Troy Aikman after Aikman was knocked unconscious in a big game.  They were in his hospital room, lights very low because normal light was too painful for Aikman to bear.  Aikman asked Lee where he was, why, who won the game, etc.  Kind of disturbing to Steinburg to see the effects of the concussion.  But, ten minutes later, Aikman asked the same series of questions, with no memory of having just asked them.  And then again.  And then again.  For a few times.  Pretty shocking.

 And now Brett Favre admits to his fears about the state of his brain.

How many mothers and fathers will allow their sons to play this game which includes brain damage as an integral part of the game?  How many people can enjoy watching it once they see it with new eyes, the eyes of looking for brain damage?  I can't.

Sane Republicans save their party, for now...

So, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid of the Senate hashed out a deal and the government will re-open and the debt limit will be raised.  The suicide wing of the Republican Party has been overcome, good news indeed, for the country, and for the Republican Party.  

Hard to imagine how the Tea Party could have hurt itself more, other than actually to have caused a U S government default on paying its bills, which so many of them actually wanted to do.  The Tea Party seems to me to be led by the Confederate Southern states, who seem to love "heroic lost causes", for example, Pickett's charge that lost the battle of Gettysburg, and the Civil War. I guess it makes them feel brave. 

It looks to me like the Tea Party is a kind of a romanticized idealism of a lost civilization, the Confederacy, and are ever dedicated to the hope that The South Will Rise Again. Or, more to the point, they seem to be dedicated to a notion of Southern manhood. I have no idea why any of the rest of the country gets sucked into their long dead fantasies. 

George McGovern, the Tea Party, and unintended consequences

George Friedman of Stratfor.com does a good job of going back the the political roots of the current government shutdown.  He avoids taking sides as to the issues and focuses on the system that got us here.  His basic point is that our parties are more extreme today because we are now selecting presidential candidates via a primary voting system rather than having party bosses vet candidates and choose them at the conventions.  This is a very good point, to my mind.

A few years back I saw an interview with the retired CBS news anchor, Walter Cronkite.  He said that it used to be that the party bosses would get together in the proverbial smoke filled rooms and talk about who should run for president.  Someone would mention a name and the rest would say, no way, that guy is a drunk, or that guy can't keep it in his pants, or that guy has a hair trigger temper and couldn't be trusted with the nuclear button, or that guy is a nut case fanatic who would alienate most of the country.  So, they went through a process where they ended up choosing some pretty well vetted candidates. 

Then, the Viet Nam war happened, the 1968 Democratic Party convention blew up in violence in Chicago and the party bosses (Mayor Daley and retiring president LBJ) rigged the convention to take away the nomination from the liberal anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, and gave the nomination to LBJ's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey.  So, George McGovern changed all of that.  He headed a commission that would undermine the ability of the bosses to work behind closed doors to manipulate the selection process, and to have the candidates chosen by the voters.  So, the primaries became how candidates were selected.  

Sounded wonderful.  Idealism at its finest.  No more corrupt bosses imposing candidates on the public.  Hoorah!

So, what ended up happening?  

As Friedman points out, the primary system ends up automatically choosing the most ideologically pure and extreme candidates because most people are NOT ideological, they are absorbed in their lives. So, the people who select the nominees for both parties are the ideologically committed - those whose lives are centered around politics and ideology.  They choose hard core ideologues for president, senate, representative, and state offices as well.  They are the ones who vote in the primaries, which have a low turnout, and which normal people don't feel well enough informed about to cast votes.

Look at the presidential candidates that showed up for the Democrats after McGovern's institution of the primary system: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis - pretty hard core liberals all.  Not until 1988, twenty years after the McGovern change, did a more centrist candidate, Bill Clinton win the primary nomination process.  Then they went back to pretty liberal candidates in Al Gore and John Kerry.  How liberal Obama is is a question of hot dispute.

This push toward extremism is even more pronounced in the House of Representatives and even the Senate.  Today's politicians aren't worried as much about their opponents on the other side of the isle and they are from more extremist primary challengers in their own party.  The Tea Party has become the natural consequence of the primaries system.  We can certainly expect a left wing version of the Tea Party to be right around the corner, I am afraid.

So, one of the big factors driving the polarization of today's politics is the primary system of choosing candidates and electing politicians.  Gerrymandering adds considerably to the problem, where the parties assign districts so as to make safe seats for their parties, but underneath even that force for extremism is the primary system itself.  

I share George Friedman's dismay at not being able to propose a solution.  We aren't going back to the party bosses, because today's politicians don't get their campaign money from them but through grass roots fundraisers and multibillionaire donors who are fervidly dedicated to single issues or other forms of extremist groupings of issues.

My hope is that today's dysfunctional government situation will wake up enough normal people that they will pay attention, and will influence the primaries away from the take-no-prisoner-and-never-compromise-or-negotiate extremists and vote for men and women who are more interested in becoming actual politicians, i.e. people with principles and ideals who understand that the nature of governance is politics, which involves making deals to get the best that you can for your side and moving on to the next issue.

How does a political party destroy itself?

How does a political party destroy itself? One way is by causing so much pain in the country that no one will vote for them anymore (except the fanatical utopianists within the fevered ideological bubble, of course). The question now seems to me to be whether the Republican Party can save itself from the Tea Party fanatics before the fanatics create massive pain to the country.

Shut the government down unless they get their way?  Stop writing checks for about 30% of government obligations unless they get their way?  In a democracy the way you get to get your way is to win elections. The minority doesnt get to force everyone else to give in to their demands by simply sabotaging the very operation of democracy itself.

I have written for some time now that I think the Republicans are destroying themselves. I have been thinking that they would be so discredited in the eyes of the voting public that they would end up in a precipitous decline at the polls.  But, I am starting to worry that the way that this may play out is that the fanatics are actually able to get their way and it will create a world wide financial catastrophe and depression.  

That would certainly end the Republican Party, but I hope it doesn't come to that. I hope that the Republican Party can marginalize the fanatics before they cause us all that much pain.  Let the Tea Party destroy itself by having the Republican Party turn their back on them and get back to the business of doing what they are paid to do, i.e. govern, i.e. negotiate, i.e compromise.  

Tea Party on the brink of destruction

The hard core right wing Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is finally getting what it wants, to shut down the government which it hates so much.  The idea is to shut off the spigot of goodies that create a culture of dependency.  So the only thing they really want to end are those programs that help people in need.  They seem to be obsessed by the notion that a small percentage of people abuse the entitlement programs like food stamps and Medicare.  This is just silliness, in my opinion.

I don't think it is possible for any big program of any big organization to be run with absolutely no fraud or abuse.  But does that mean that the program shouldn't exist?  Are bridges built without some fraudulent cost over-runs?  Are airports built without any featherbedding of contracts?  Any huge endeavor has potential for abuse, but should we abandon building bridges or airports because of that?  I think the obvious answer is to fight the abuse but keep the programs. That is what management is all about, isn't it?

How about the financial industry, if one is looking for corruption and abuse of a massive, complicated system?  Are we to shut down the banks because the upper management has turned them into corrupt sources of multi-millions for themselves?  I would dearly love to see some of the top thieves in the financial industry ruined financially and sent to jail, but even I don't want the banks themselves to disappear.

So, the Tea Party seems to be suffering under the delusion that they can blame Obama for the government shutdown.  What nonsense.  The hard core right wing, the Confederate wing of the Republican party, is doing what it knows how to do, destroy itself while it congratulates itself for its manly courage.  I think it is no accident that the heart of the hard core is in the old confederate states, the deep south, with Texan Republican Ted Cruz proclaiming himself to be the face of the "rebellion." 

One of the things that I am seeing so clearly in all of this is how ideology works.  Those inside the ideological bubble see themselves as being at the heart of a world changing movement that is destined to sweep us all up in it so that we can all see the brilliant light of its goodness and truth.  That's what the Communists thought, that's what the Fascists thought, that's what the Libertarians think, that's what the Evangelicals think.  As a matter of fact isn't that what the Catholics thought as they were torturing their way to dominance in the Spanish Inquisition?  Isn't that what the Islamist Jihadists think while they blow themselves up in crowded places?  

They are delusional.  Too bad that their delusions are so costly and painful to all the rest of us.

Fanaticism is not an attractor.  Closing the government is the action of a three year old child - throwing a tantrum and holding their breath until they get their way.

Well, they are not going to get their way, but they will drive people out of the Republican Party.  I left in 2010 when the Tea Party took it over and I found them to be repulsively intolerant, inflexible, and childishly willful.

But, maybe that is what they really want after all, to follow in the footsteps of their ideological founders, the Confederacy - to bravely fight a hopeless battle and feel very manly while they are destroyed by those who see them as nutcases, and who just turn away.

Syria - bumbling, fumbling, stumbling, but managing to stay out of their Civil War? So far...

Bumbling, fumbling, stumbling... oh dear, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry are having real problems with Syria.  Why?  Are they incompetent fools?  Maybe.  But the real problem is the Middle East and how it compares to American values and interests.

It seems to me that there are some obvious truths.

First, the Middle East really seems to want to have a Middle East wide civil and religious war and carve up the Middle East along religious and sectarian lines - Shia, Sunni, Kurd, Allawite, and whoever else is out there wanting to live only with people just like themselves and are anxious to kill everyone else. 

I think it would be very nice if they all just got along and allowed religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity and tolerance, but the area is centuries behind the West in this respect, and the West isn't real good at it either, witness the bitter conflicts between the South and the Tea Party on one hand, and the North and the Liberals on the other.  At least we had our Civil War a century and a half ago, so the shooting is over, I hope.

Second, the nation does not, does not, does not want to go back into the sands of Middle East and spend its blood and treasure trying to pick sides between, or even to calm down, the killers in those civil and religious wars.

Third, the West finds it almost impossible to stand by and do nothing when we see brutality, slaughter, and massacre on our TVs and computer screens.  

Fourth, the interests of the U.S. and the West are best served by Syria remaining in the control of the Assad regime, but not Assad himself, rather than being taken over by radical islamist jihadists.  The Assad regime has no particular aim to kill Americans or other Westerners, whereas jihadists seem dedicated to killing infidels wherever they find them.  How to show the compassion of civilized people without empowering jihadist fanatics?

So, what can a president do?  Any president?  Of either party? Given these completely contradictory forces?  Probably either look like a bumbling, stumbling, fumbling fool, by being indecisive, kind of like Obama - or look like a bull in a china shop trashing and crashing everything he touches by being really decisive and militarily strong, kind of like W. 

Why is Syria of interest to us?  It's not, really.  But humanitarian hawks want to Do Something.  Why was Iraq of interest to us? It wasn't, really, but neocon hawks wanted to Do Something.  I was one of those, to my regret now.  

If I thought that adding American military to the Middle East would end the slaughter there, I might think it was OK.  But, as best as I can tell, American blood in Middle Eastern sands only adds more deaths, not fewer.  They are going to have to fight their way into newly drawn countries, or learn to live with each other, and the U.S. and the West aren't going to be able to have much to do with that process, as best as I can tell.

I continue to think our only option is to try to identify and train and support those factions that are more modernist and moderate.  Or at least, once some winners emerge, to add our expertise and guidance to allow them to create pluralistic democracies.  Our hopes were raised by the February 11 peaceful uprising in Egypt that deposed Mubarak, but that beautiful movement of the bulk of the Egyptians was taken over by... the Muslim Brotherhood, who proceeded to build an islamist dictatorship.  Not exactly a surprise, at least in retrospect.  

The real hope that I have is that they get tired of killing each other and decide to find a way to either separate from each other as a function of diplomacy, or to find a way to live together in relative peace.  

I concluded after the disaster of the Viet Nam war that I should only support a U.S. war if a mother and father could look at each other upon hearing of the death of a child in that war and say to each other that the pain of that loss is unbearable but at least we can comfort ourselves by knowing that our child died for a worthy cause.  I don't see how getting sucked into the Middle Eastern Civil and Religious wars satisfies that criterion.

I can't enjoy watching a sport that includes brain damage

 I lost interest in baseball and football when they became showcases for cheating by using steroids and other performance enhancing drugs to ruin the games. Football has an even deeper reason for me to not watch - brain damage. I just can't enjoy watching a sport that has brain damage as an integral part of the sport.

In the '60s I was an avid football and boxing fan.  I thought the athletes were the pinnacles of athletic excellence.  I loved the sports.  Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, Jim Brown, Dick Butkus, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice - these were thrilling heroes to me, and it filled me with many hours of joy to watch them.  

But then, the drugs ruined the games for me because of the inhuman levels of size and strength and speed of the players.  In a way, baseball was more spoiled for me than football because at least the football players were all supersizing at the same time and the competitors were still on a par with each other, whereas in baseball the game is a balance between the geometry of the ballparks and the strengths and abilities of the players, and when they became supersized they outgrew the dimensions of the parks, and the statistics became meaningless.

And now, we know the terrible price that football players are paying for the enjoyment of the sports fan - permanent brain damage.  I always knew that the players crippled their knees, shoulders, backs, feet, elbows, etc. but thought that if they were willing to pay the price, I would just ignore the whole issue and admire them all the more for their physical courage.  

But brain damage is different.  A football player cannot do anything to make his brain immune to concussion and permanent damage.  Better designed helmets will not protect his brain from concussion.  Apparently, it is not just the vicious headhunting practices where a tackler or blocker tries to knock out an opponent, but rather it is on most plays that blockers and blocked, and tacklers and tackled, jar their brains enough that even then they suffer a form of concussion that is less than a total loss of consciousness and is enough to kill off brain cells and create conditions for brain disease.

Famously, one of the greatest linebackers, Junior Seau, and Dave Duerson as well, committed suicide by shooting themselves in their hearts so that their brains could be studied postmortem.  Their brains showed that they had been suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by multiple concussions and sub-concussions, as a result of a lifetime in football.  The result?  A lifetime of dementia, confusion, depression, aggression, violence, and even suicide.  Much too big a price to pay for the enjoyment of sports' fans.

The sport has become a multibillion dollar industry.  It is the main advertising venue for beer and cars, a symbol of hyper masculinity that viewers try to identify with and imitate.  I think one of the reasons we have an obesity epidemic in America is because men have an image of masculinity where being thee hundred pounds is admired.  Weighing three hundred pounds is pretty easy to accomplish with beer and pizza and sugars.  How many couch potatoes with one hundred pound bellies think of themselves as fitting into the mold of supersteroided and growth-hormoned football freaks?  The nation is killing its athletes and its fans at the same time with a love of a game that is intrinsically damaging to its participants.

Enough of my rant.

Enough of football too, as far as I'm concerned.  How many fathers will let their sons play a game that will cripple their bodies and permanently damage their brains?  

The NFL is trying to put this all behind them by settling a lawsuit and promising to make the game safer.  They are fooling themselves.  The damaged veteran players are not going to go softly into the night, and neither are their families and lawyers. They shouldn't.

I watch golf and love it.  No steroids that help performance, no brain damage, no injuries that cripple golfers for life, a code of honor and honesty rather than of cheating and winning at any cost.  It is actually a sport rather than a sports racket that uses up athletes and throws them on the dung heap when they are washed up.

I think football is on its death bed, and I think it knows it. 

Humanitarian hawks under Obama are pretty similar to neocons under W

Susan Rice and Samantha Power are a lot like Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol in that they are each ideologues who push for military action against tyrants, just from different sides of the political spectrum.  Obama has humanitarian hawks pushing him, W had neocons pushing him.  I have hopes that Obama is less malleable that W was, and that he will manage to keep us out of a major military involvement in Syria.

As I wrote before, the U.S. has no real national interest in Syria.  David Stockman writes passionately in thedailybeast.com that the U.S. needs to get out of the business of military interventions that aren't connected to defending the homeland or connected to real, tangible issues of national security.  His main point is that after WWI and after WWII the U.S. cut its military in half because it wasn't needed to be the same size as during such huge wars.  But, after the U.S. won the Cold War the military was not slashed appropriately, but rather we have charged out into the world to make things right by either the ideologies of those on the right or those on the left.  Key quote:

"The screaming strategic truth is that America no longer has any industrial state enemies capable of delivering military harm to its shores: Russia has become a feeble kleptocracy run by a loud-mouthed thief, and the Communist Party oligarchs in China would face a devastating economic collapse within months were they to attack their American markets for sneakers and Apples. So the real question now before Congress is, how is it possible that the peace-loving citizens of America, facing no industrial-scale military threat from anywhere on the planet, find themselves in a constant state of war?"

9/11 certainly happened, but are the fanatical Islamists really all that concerned about overthrowing the U.S.?  Didn't they just want us out of the deserts?  Why do we keep meddling in their religious and civil wars?

Secrertary of State John Kerry made a lovely, impassioned speech trying to inspire Congress to do the right thing and avenge the deaths of innocents by chemical gas.  But, does anyone think that Assad is going to unleash sarin gas and wipe out half the population of the U.S.?  Stockman says that the propaganda war machine is constantly:

"...falsely transforming tin-pot dictators and tyrants like Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and now Bashar al-Assad into dangerous enemies... Only after the fact, when billions in taxpayer resources have been squandered and thousands of American servicemen have been killed and maimed, do we learn that it was all a mistake, that the collateral destruction vastly exceeded the ostensible threat, and that there remains not a trace of long-term-security benefit to the American people."

As to Syria, the U.N., NATO, the Arab League, pretty much everyone is staying out of this one.  But, the U.S. left wing humanitarian hawks are so appalled at watching bad people do bad things that they feel compelled to Do Something.  But, how do we drop missiles into a civil war without it blowing up in our faces?  How do we stick a military toe into the quicksand without eliciting a response that demands our whole foot?

The real question that the left wing humanitarian hawks and the right wing neocons never really understood the answer to was, what happens after the bad guys are dethroned? Quite frankly, Assad is bad for the Syrians, but he's not bad for the national interests of the U.S.  The guys fighting him are very bad for the U.S., as I understand it, al Nusra is associated with al Qaeda. I have hopes that modernists and moderates can gain power over time, and I hope the U.S. and the west can help them take over.  But that is not going to be helped with missiles form ships offshore now, as best as I can tell.

George Friedman of Stratfor.com observes that Obama has no appetite for nation building in Syria.  He has learned the sorrowful lessons of W's failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from his own failures in Lybia.  He suggests an interesting possibility, that the Alawite regime stay in place but get rid of Assad.  That sounds interesting to me.  It could open the door to reduced slaughter by the regime and open the door to some political negotiations.  I wonder if Russia could offer Assad asylum?  Or maybe Iran?  He seems to have friends.  Or the Alawite regime could just let him die of pneumonia or some such.

One thing for sure, whatever Obama and the U.S. does, he and we will be blamed for everything that happens in the Middle East.  Friedman sums up ironically:

"It is not easy to be president, nor is it easy to be the world's leading power. It is nice to be able to sit in moral judgment of men like Assad, but sadly not have the power to do anything. Where life gets hard is when sitting in moral judgment forces you to do something because you can. It teaches you to be careful in judging, as the world will both demand that you do something and condemn you for doing it."

I think it is too late, and Obama feels he must do a Limited Attack.  I pray that it is a one time shot, or better yet that Congress says no and Obama concedes, just as Cameron did in Britain.  Sometimes, a president needs to let the country talk him into using common sense, and Just Say No to the very well intentioned but wrong ideologues in his own administration.

Obama's foolish "red line" statement converts Syria from a regional tragedy into a U.S. interest

The most foolish mistake that President Obama has made, I believe, was his statement that if Syria were to use chemical weapons they would be crossing a red line and that we would have to respond to that "game changer." George Friedman points out that this is normally a message from a superior power to a lesser power that although they don't like what the lesser power is doing, as long as they stay on the other side of the "red line" the greater power would not intervene militarily.  
            
Well, Assad crossed the red line, a couple of times, and now we are all paying the price for Assad's stupid cruelty and Obama's foolish naivete.  Before Obama made his red line statement, Syria was a tragic situation, but had no strategically important interest for the United States. Up to now only humanitarian hawks wanted the U.S. to intervene.

After his red line statement, Syria becomes enormously important to the U.S. and the world. If we let Assad cross the line, then red lines declared by the U.S. become meaningless and future much worse actors (think North Korea with nukes) will cross them as well, and the world will suffer tremendously, and the U.S. will be drawn into terrible wars as a result.

It looks like there are three options.  

First, work like hell diplomatically to move Assad out of office and try to empower the more secular forces inside Syria.  Good luck on that one. Plus, it allows a hard red line to be crossed with no consequences.

Second, punish the Assad regime with a symbolic strike that damages some chemical weapons, or some such thing.  I guess that's supposed to show him that there is a price to pay for crossing Obama's red line. I'm sure he's quaking in his boots.  The world will note that the punishment for crossing the red line is symbolic and not real.

Third, go in with air and ground troops to remove Assad just as we removed Hussein.  We all remember how well that worked out.  Just don't expect gratitude from those we help, nor expect anything other than an Islamic anti-American nutcase government to replace Assad.  Plus, don't expect a reduction in the slaughter, it will increase dramatically, with American soldiers' body count added to the dead and maimed.

All of the options are terrible - have no effect diplomatically, have no effect symbolically, have a terrible effect militarily that makes things worse and kills Americans.  

I have no idea of how the world gets out of this terrible box.  It just looks to me like the Islamic world is bent on civil wars.  Osama bin Laden kicked it off with an attack on America, Bush took it to the Middle East with invasions, and the Islamic religious factions seem to be unleashing centuries of grievance and hatred upon each other in terrible civil wars.  

My only real hope is that the Arab Spring, better thought of as the Arab Awakening, will become a meaningful force arising from the people themselves to end the tyrannies, and also end the worse tyrannies that want to replace the old tyrannies.  I have a hope for the sprouting of new green secular, inclusive, real democracies rising from the ashes of the religious and tribal wars raging throughout the Middle East.  This has little to do with the United States military, or the United States at all except as an inspiration and a guide.

One can hope.

Banks are still dangerously overleveraged

Stanford business professor of finance and economics, Anat R. Admati, reminds us that the financial system has not really been reformed, that the banks that are too big to fail are still too big to fail, too big to regulate, and too big to manage.  They have successfully defeated banking reform in the U.S. and around the world, the world economies are still at risk, and taxpayers will pay if and when their reckless gambling with other people’s money fails catastrophically.  2008 is waiting to happen again.

The one fundamental solution she proposes is to require banks to increase the percentage of equity.   Her key sentence:

“We will never have a safe and healthy global financial system until banks are forced to rely much more on money from their owners and shareholders to finance their loans and investments.  Forget all the jargon, and just focus on this simple rule.”

Another interesting point she makes is that other corporations rarely have debt of more than 70% of assets, whereas the banks are well over 90%.  So, when they lose just a little it has the effect of shaking the viability of the bank to the core, and in  2008, only the government could rescue them with taxpayer money.  Heads they win, hundreds of millions and billions for individuals in the banks, tails we lose, multiple billions in bailout taxpayer money.

Her hope:

“If banks could absorb much more of their losses, regulators would need to worry less about risk measurements, because banks would have better incentives to manage their risks and make appropriate investment decisions.  That’s why raising equity requirements substantially is the single best step for making banking safer and healthier.”

Sounds like sound advice to me.

Fukushima's contaminated water is heading for the ocean

The terrible nuclear power plant disaster at Fukushima Japan is not over.  As I understand it, the radiation is too high for people to spend time inside the reactor to actually see what is going on and fix it.  But more to the point, it is leaking radioactive water.  That water has apparently been captured in about 1000 tanks and those tanks were expected to have a five year life.  FIVE YEAR LIFE?  I guess they thought of them as being temporary and that a permanent fix would be found before then.

But, the tanks are leaking.  According to Salon.com:

"The latest leak comes from one of the site’s 1,000 tanks, about 500 yards inland, Tepco said. Workers discovered puddles of radioactive water near the tank on Monday. Further checks revealed that the 1,000-ton capacity vessel, thought to be nearly full, only contained 700 tons, with the remainder having almost certainly leaked out.

There had been concerns raised among some experts over the durability of the tanks. Mr. Ono said that Tepco had assumed the tanks would last at least five years, but the latest leak comes less than two years after the company started installing the storage vessels at the site to deal with the growing amounts of runoff."

No matter where the radioactive waste goes, it is a disaster, but it could get to the ocean, and that is probably the worst that could happen.  It's not just that there is a bunch of radioactive water on the loose, but it's that the destroyed power plant is generating radioactive water and can't be stopped from continuing to do so, or so I think the issue is.  

It's a big ocean, but not that big.

Religious wars escalate in the Middle East

On the one hand there was Mubarak who ruled as a dictator in Egypt.  Then there was a popular uprising against him, and the Egyptian military removed him from office, putting themselves in power temporarily.  One dictator down, hurrah!

Then there was an election, and the only faction that was prepared for an election won it - the Muslim Brotherhood.  The U.S. and the West tried to assure themselves that the Muslim Brotherhood would renounce its history of radical Islamist fanaticism and rule the country democratically, i.e. inclusively, protecting the rights of religions, minorities, and women.  Good luck on that one.

Result?  A Muslim Brotherhood President Morsi ever growing dictatorship.

So, there was a popular uprising against him, and the Egyptian military once again removed a dictator from office, putting themselves in power temporarily. Two dictators down, sounds good?

Then there was another very quick popular uprising against the military, this time from the Muslim Brotherhood, and this time not very peacefully.  No surprise there.  

And Egypt is exploding.  Good grief. Which side to root for in this battle?  

I can't root for and support the Muslim Brotherhood because they have shown themselves pretty much to be the religious fanatics that people feared they would be, and re-establishing, by violence, a Muslim Brotherhood regime would turn Egypt into an Islamist state along the lines of Iran.  Remember the Green Revolution in Iran? Smashed by the religious fanatics with an Islamist regime firmly in dictatorial control.

I can't root for and support the Egyptian military because of their long history of tyranny and their brutal, dictatorial on-going slaughter of their people. 

 I can only root for the more moderate, more secular factions inside Egypt who rose up against Mubarak and then against Morsi.  But how do they get any traction while the Islamist fanatics and the military are waging war against each other?

In hindsight it looks like the U.S. and the West made a mistake in pushing for quick elections after Mubarak's overthrow.  But would it have made a difference?  Wasn't it always most likely that the Muslim Brotherhood would win a nationwide election?  And isn't it always likely that they will rule dictatorially?  Imposing their fanatical religious rules on everyone?  

The religious wars in the Middle East have been trying to erupt for some time, and what is happening in Syria and Egypt are looking like a big step in that direction.  The Arab Awakening is becoming an Arab Nightmare.  

And the U.S. and the West are mostly bystanders watching in horror.  

Had the Muslim Brotherhood governed democratically rather than ruled religiously, this wouldn't have happened.  The country rebelled and threw them out, then the religious faithful have erupted into riots.  The conflict lays at the feet of the Islamist fanatics, in my view.

The U.S. and the West needs to find ways to help the moderates and sectarians become stronger in Egypt and the Arab world.  I have no idea how they do that. All I know is that I don't want U.S. troops in the middle of fanatical Islamist religious and civil wars.

Finally, baseball strikes back at A-Rod and Performance Enhancing Drugs

I have been saying for a number of years, kind of tongue in cheek but kind of seriously too, that the reason for the financial collapse was Alex Rodriguez.  What I mean by that is that as long as a baseball player is making twenty million dollars a year, how could any self-respecting financial titan at places like Bear Stearns, Lehmann Brothers, or Goldman Sachs allow themselves to make any less? 

In other words, the world has been out of balance for some time now and the symbol of that has been ridiculous compensations for superstar athletes like A-Rod, and for top employees in the financial industry.  The results showed up in destructive ways, where baseball records were obliterated by drug inflated statistics, and the financial industry changed their focus from supporting industry and business to creating wealth in ways that had little or no benefit to the economy, and the entire country got involved in chasing unrealizable financial goals (too many people bought houses they couldn’t afford), overextending themselves, and falling into financial ruin. 

So, from just the standpoint of wanting to see the world go back into balance, I am very happy to see that major league baseball has finally banned Rodriguez from playing until 2015 because of his taking PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs).  I would like to see a real crackdown on PEDs in all sports and have sports return to the competition between outstanding athletes rather than the shows put on by robo-humanoids.

But even deeper than that is how Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, and the entire generation of PED athletes made their hundreds of millions of dollars.  They cheated.  And I don’t like it.  In fact, I don’t watch it. 

Baseball and football are both obviously being populated by drug pumped super-humans, and I don’t enjoy watching phony sports.  I watch golf instead where PEDs have no role that I know of, mainly because PEDs won’t be able to help someone chip and putt.  Tiger Woods has developed a pretty buffed up physique and strength, but I don’t think he is on PEDs.  Plus, his power advantage in the game was back in his first few years when he was a skinny whip-like kid. Today he has no particular distance advantage. It’s not his strength that has made him win so much on tour.

In my ideal world, top earners would make a couple of million dollars a year in sports, in finance, in medicine, in industry.  That would make them wealthy but not put them in an experience so far outside the realm of normal people that they become almost a different species on the planet. 

I think that the huge gap between the super-wealthy and the masses puts the country out of balance and sets up a dangerous environment where the country is run as a plutocracy on one side, and the country is susceptible to political demagoguery and radicalism on the other.  And it puts people like Alex Rodriquez and Lloyd Blankfien so out of touch with the experiences of common people that they have no way of gauging their impact on the world.

As the Beatles said long ago, "Get back Jojo..."

Republicans warn of a trainwreck while trying to derail Obamacare

I continue to watch in amazement as the Republican Party continues to destroy itself.  I think this political cartoon captures an essential truth about Obamacare.  The Reps actually seem to think that if Obamacare fails the Republicans will triumph.  I guess they think no one will notice that it failed largely because of Republican sabotage. Whether it would have failed on its own or not becomes moot because Republican fingerprints are all over the refusal to implement the law and do whatever they can to make sure it doesn't work.  

I really don't know if there will be a viable Republican Party in 10 years.

A sad day in America

It's pretty disturbing to me that a 16 year old kid can be shot to death going home from a convenience store in the early evening and no one is held responsible for that killing.

Prior to the verdict I decided that I would accept the jury's decision, and I do.  They were at the trial and I wasn't.   If we don't accept the trial system we lose a foundation of civilization.  So, I accept that it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense.  I guess the trial ended up being about the fight that ended with a gunshot. The point of a trial is that the person being accused is supposed to be looked at by the jury as innocent unless proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty. He said it was self defense and it wasn't proven otherwise, so...

But, what about the context?  Why did the older man have a gun?  Why was he following Martin?  How crazy is it to have armed vigilante neighborhood watch people walking around through neighborhoods carrying firearms?

Isn't that a recipe for disaster?  Aren't the police specially selected and trained in order to qualify handling guns when dealing with the public?  Doesn't Zimmerman prove that armed civilians who volunteer for for these kinds of roles just the opposite of the police?  Aren't they un-vetted and untrained?  

Aren't they just disasters just waiting to happen?  Shouldn't neighborhood watch people be barred from carrying weapons?  How about they watch, and report to the police, and let those who are specially trained and seasoned do the rest?

Just a terrible tragedy, and my heart goes out to every black parent in the land.  It was a fair trial, but it is a sad chapter in America.

The fence is killing the Rebublican Party

Putting up a fence tells U S Hispanics that the U S sees them as not valuable, but as leeches rather than productive people.  The words about illegal vs legal are insignificant when compared to a fence with guns. 

Talk radio is killing the Republican Party which may never recover from this nasty obsession. 

I used to be a Republican but I can no longer identify with the contempt demonstrated by the fence, the active sabotage of the safety net in the name of smaller government (shrinking the caring parts of the government), and tyrannical control over women's reproductive lives. 

Plus, of course, the disgusting display of Republicans in Congress doing anything and everything they can to make sure the government doesn't work, the filibuster of presidential nominees being the current focus.  

They have become the party that refuses to compromise, which is another way of saying they have become the party that refuses to join in the cooperative enterprise of democratic government, which is another way of saying that they are the party that refuses to govern, which is another way of saying that they are hoping that the day can come when they can simply rule by fiat.  

Talk radio extremists are leading the Republicans into a very clearly understood brand that plays only to an ever shrinking base.  Too bad. It used to be a good party. 

Absolutists ignore context

The question as to whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a villain for his massive leak of the National Security Agency’s terrorist hunting programs is interesting in itself.  But, to me, the leaks illuminate a different point – that those on the ideological edges see the world in absolute terms without reference to context. 

To 4^th Amendment absolutists, the government’s use of powerful computer programs to track communications of Americans is a de facto violation of the Constitution.  In addition, some on the far right wing see Obama as a tyrant, just as some on the far left saw Bush as a tyrant.  Both presidents authorized powerful computers to find and stop terrorists.  To the 4^th amendment absolutists, it’s a straight up violation of the Constitution.  To the right wingers it’s a straight up imposition of tyranny.

But what about the context? 

The context is that the government needs to find and stop terrorist attacks on America.  These powerful computer methods help do that.  The problem is that finding the terrorists is an exercise in finding needles in very large haystacks, and these powerful computer methods find the terrorists.  There is an attempt by the government to use big data mining to locate suspects and then go to the FISA courts to get authorization to take it to the next step and actually eavesdrop and investigate individuals.  In overarching theory, this seems legitimate to me.  Have there been abuses along the way? I suppose so, but perfection is unattainable, it seems to me.  Should the government give this approach a lot of oversight? Sure. Carry on.  But I don’t condemn the program as a violation of the 4^th amendment, nor do I see it as tyrannical oppression of political opposition.

Context helps explain a lot about the IRS scandals as well.  The Supreme Court decided, rather foolishly it seems to me, that it was possible for very political organizations to avoid taxes and avoid revealing donors as long as they met certain criteria.  Frankly, meeting these criteria is most likely just a shuck and jive.  So, the IRS decided to dig in and find out more.  This all happened during a time frame (context) where there is an explosion of Tea Party political organizations applying to get relief.  Had this happened in the ‘60s there would have been an explosion of “progressive” and “peoples’ something or others” or other identifiers of left wing political organizations applying for exemption.  To see this as the left wing Obama administration suppressing the right wing Tea Party ignores the context, or so it seems to me.  Paranoia is its own context, unfortunately, and the political extremes seem to live in contexts of paranoia – brings in lots of donations of time and money.

As to Snowden, he is clearly The Hero in his own mind, and I’m sure he expects to go down in history as a noble person.  But, I think he made the fundamental mistake that absolutists make – he ignored the context of his actions. 

By exposing terrorist hunting methods, he told the terrorists what to cease doing, and, as I understand it, the terrorists are modifying their behavior accordingly.  I don’t think I want to thank Mr. Snowden for helping the terrorists avoid detection.

By fleeing to Hong Kong and then Russia, he ended up giving up pretty much all that he knows and has access to to the Chinese and to the Russians.  Mark Theissen, conservative Washington Post editorialist, points out that he had four laptops stuffed with highly classified secrets with him, and it is obvious that both the Chinese and the Russians have captured all of that info, either having been given it by Snowden, or by taking the computers from Snowden, or by hacking into his computers against his will.  This could be amazingly damaging to the government and the people of the United States.

Absolutists can only see their own obsessions, and cannot see the contexts. 

Is killing wrong?  To the absolutist Quakers it always is, but in the context of self-defense surely it is not.  Is failure to protect an embassy wrong?  Sure, but in the context of limited military resources or human mistakes perhaps it is at least understandable.  Is going after a reporter as a co-conspirator to publish leaks wrong?  Sure, but in the context of trying to keep covert activities covert it is again somewhat understandable.  Is getting weapons into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico wrong?  Sure, but the context is an effort to track them and fight the drug wars, and that is at least understandable.  Is killing fetuses wrong?  In the context of a woman having power and control over her own reproductive life, I think it is not.  Is going to war in Iraq based on false information wrong?  Sure, but I believe the context was one of being mistaken rather than lying. Was abandoning habeus corpus by Lincoln during the Civil War wrong?  Not in the context of the U.S. Civil War where this was a necessary temporary need to protect democracy itself.

I am trying to look at the world in other than absolutist terms.  I am trying to look to the larger contexts to better understand what people are doing.  But, I am also trying very hard to disregard the paranoid contexts that the extremes on both the right and the left live in.  That is a path to a life of perpetual righteousness and dismay.

As for Snowden, is he a hero or a villain?  I think he is a fool - fooled by his own sense of grandiosity and nobility into handing over extremely vital and secret information to terrorists dedicated to killing Americans and Westerners, and to China, and to Russia.  There is nothing noble about the outcome of his self-identified heroic acts. 

I think Snowden’s heroism is the heroism of an adolescent mind which can only see the world in black or white absolutist terms.  But doesn’t that kind of explain today’s politics in general?  Glenn Beck, please meet Glenn Greenwald at the adolescent absolutist café and share drinks of paranoid accusation and righteousness.  Unfortunately, they have turned America into that adolescent absolutist café.  I’m kind of sick of it.