Let’s try a simple exercise in very Basic Logic.
1. “There are just as many women as men.”
2 “The female vote is equal to the male vote.”
In a society with universal suffrage for all eligible citizens, the second statement is a conclusion based on the first statement, a premise.
The premise is taken for granted, as is the conclusion about the strength of each gender’s vote. The conclusion (assumption) is that, if each gender is equal in size, then their voting has equal weight. “One person, one vote.”
A premise is the foundation, the base, of everything that follows, everything that is built on top of it. Our society is full of really huge constructs existing on top of such fundamental premises. Almost never does anyone question such premises anymore. They are simply accepted as “taken for granted”.
For example, we begin with the statement, “The ground at this site is solid.” (Premise.) “We can construct a building here.” (First conclusion based on the premise.) “We can build a skyscraper on this site.” (Second conclusion based on the premise plus the first conclusion.) And the structure grows — ever larger, ever more complex, ever more detailed, with ever more conclusions.
In the physical world, no one would lay the first brick before verifying, proving, the original premise, such as through exhaustive geological study of the site. And periodically scientists would return to that premise to ensure that nothing has changed to alter the premise, such as a rising or lowering underground water table or construction of a subway tunnel or slightly shifting sub-surface geology. Such sensible – responsible – periodic acts are intended to re-confirm the original premise, and ensure that all above it is still solid.
But in the social world, we have a tendency very often to place our original premise floating somewhere in space, or to continue using a once-valid premise to support our construct without verifying that it is still valid. No one questions such premises. People go to work building their construct on this premise, or continue building without ever re-examining the foundation. All the focus is solely on the construct above. People argue over tiny details in that construct, but no one notices that the original premise is as solid as a table with a leg missing, or has no legs at all.
Very often such focus is carefully orchestrated by self-interests, especially through lobbies, to purposefully ensure that focus never does shift to the original premise, to the early conclusions based on that premise long ago. Everyone gets lost in the details so no one will notice that the whole is a house of cards.
Returning to our original analogy,
The statement that male and female voters in America are equal is a completely false conclusion.
Further, it is a false conclusion based on a false premise.
Numbers. In the first place, there are about 5,000,000 more females in America than there are males, mainly because women live, on average, about six years longer than men born at the same time. Thus, women greatly outnumber men at ages over 65, a group with a very high voting rate, by a ratio over 4 to 3. Males are also much more prone to deadly accidents in dangerous (or stupid) pursuits or professions, much more prone to suicide, to death in war, suicide, etc. – all of which terminate life earlier than would natural causes. Almost two million more males (93% / 2,140,000) than females (7% / 161,900) are also convicted felons in prison who have lost the right to vote. So there are in America a lot more (over 10,000,000) eligible women voters than eligible men voters (over age 18).
Percentages. In the second place, men and women do not vote with the same strengths; a much larger percentage of eligible women vote than do eligible men. No one is exactly sure why this is (See Footnote #1.), but the statistics are clear: since 1980 more and more men do not vote in each succeeding election, while more and more women do. So not only do men start out with fewer numbers, they vote in smaller percentages than women. In a nation of over 310,000,000 citizens, this results in really huge numerical differences. These differences assume even greater import when one considers that a simple majority of just one vote is sufficient to decide any election in America. In the last election (2008), Mr. Obama won over his opponent by a really huge majority (by American standards) of 9,500,000 votes – in an election that saw over 9,148,000 more women than men cast votes. And this was an election that saw an unusually large number, by recent standards, of male votes. (Election averages show that about 55% of voters are women, and 45% are men – a spread of 10% (12,500,000).)
Voting Tendencies. But what difference does it make to the outcome if everyone is free to vote any way they wish? This question is based on the premise that men and women vote in the same way, have the same voting patterns. But is this premise valid? Studies for the past century have consistently shown that men vote evenly across the entire political spectrum, from extreme left to extreme right, resulting in a voting pattern that can be represented in a normal “bell-shaped” curve, rising at center and with little variation from the norm. Just as many men vote left of center as vote right of center, never having split their votes by more than 54-46 (8 points, right-left). Studies for the last half century have shown that women, however, vote in a pattern that is represented by a steep peak a little left of center, a peak that drops off dramatically on the right and left of the peak, and stops far short of the extremes for men. Women vote much more as a like-minded “bloc” than do men, and splits of as much as 43-57 (14 points, right-left) are not uncommon. (See below at end for an Example of the dangers of percentages in voting, opinion polls, etc..)
Location. These voting pattern gender differences are even more pronounced in urban areas, where in presidential elections that majority of electoral votes are concentrated. In national presidential elections, urban areas rule, and in those urban areas, women rule.
For the past three decades, political power in America has been solidly in the hands of the distaff side of our society.
They are assured of this power through (1) their sheer numerical superiority, (2) the greater degree of their voting participation and (3) their established voting patterns.
In order to get elected and stay in office, politicians must speak to the most influential voters, and these voters are women. Their concerns, their wants, their whines literally suck life from everything else. For the past three decades, no candidate could win an election in America without winning the votes of women, and the most certain way to commit political suicide in America has been to publicly state anything that might raise the ire of women. The strength of the women’s vote is now so great that, given the established voting patterns of each gender group, male voters are actually no longer relevant to the outcome. Where women vote on the political spectrum has also resulted in a slow but inexorable movement of the “center” to the left, for both political parties.
Politicians know these things. They know that the original premise and first conclusion above are no longer valid, as are most of the subsequent conclusions based on that premise. They know that the old premises exist mostly in the unquestioning mind of the public. If you’re old enough and politically aware enough to have observed the scene over a long period, you’d be amazed at how much the political discussion in America has become ever more “feminine”, how so much of any male bravado that occasionally does creep in is usually just so much impotent macho nonsense (usually intended for “someone else” to execute). Decorated World War II veteran Jack Kennedy, a Democrat, challenged the people of the Greatest Generation to rise to one more great challenge on behalf of the nation; political candidates today speak only of getting government to meet the wants of certain groups of people. It’s all about buying votes by promising to meet the petty wants of huge herds of incessantly needy and pathetic citizens now apparently even incapable of standing up on their own two feet – by confiscating money from “someone else” and giving it to “me”. The things that apparently concern all Americans today were once things that only concerned whining women. Apparently there is nothing of concern to men as a gender. This is because for the past three decades politicians have been speaking almost exclusively to women. It has become so very pervasive that very few today are even aware of anything “unusual” in the political discussion. This political shift in emphasis is one of the important factors contributing the the relentless “feminization” of the American male. (It also helps women greatly that men, and boys, have no lobbies to balance out the very loud women’s lobby bullshit.)
The popular view of the American voter is just one of many constructs in our society that are no longer based on valid premises, or on solid conclusions based on those premises. For one of the asinine false premises in the western world, see Footnote #5: The Big Bad Russian Bogeyman.
Most of the chattering class in this country devotes almost all of its energy to debating minor details of the construct without bothering to examine the premise. This approach is mostly wasted energy signifying little. The very first step taken by a sound thinker would be to critically analyze the premise at the foundation of the construct, and then follow the truth and logic up through each succeeding conclusion in the construct. Very often it’s easily possible to quickly invalidate long-standing constructs by revealing their premises to be mush, and their early conclusions to now be false, and everything subsequently built on them to be nothing more than utter nonsense. Such is almost always the case with fluid societies that never remain constant.
Public Schools
But few take this approach. There is a theory that holds that this is because we no longer teach our young how to think clearly, how to apply rigid logic, to conduct sound analysis, to subject our constructs to disciplined critical examination, bottom to top, to disassemble constructs piece by piece and try to reconstruct them step by step. That theory also holds that we now live in a society based on emotion rather than on logic. (There are also a number of other possible explanations, such as the power today of very sophisticated “marketing” to very large herds, a power that can even trump simple logic among huge numbers of people. Women in the “news” and “opinion” media, for example, incessantly conceal gross gender differences in opinion polls to imply that “everyone” thinks this way; it’s a deliberately conscious effort to influence men to join the majority women‘s view. (See “Marketing And Propaganda – Techniques”.)
For example, how is it possible to continually heap praise on those who consistently labor valiantly to achieve dismal results? We do it all the time with our “education” industry. The school discussion is all about process (the construct); results are irrelevant (the premise).
Premise: Publicly funded schools exist to teach all of our young effectively and equitably. (The premise is that schools funded by all taxpayers will achieve this result.)
First Conclusion: Those employed in public schools work hard to teach all of our young effectively and equitably.
Second Conclusion: Our kids are being taught and are learning effectively and equitably.
No one focuses on the results of those efforts. If they did, they would quickly see that our kids have been steadily falling against those of other advanced societies for decades, and that our public schools are far more effective at teaching to girls than they are to boys. So our schools have been failing for decades in both effectiveness and in equity. What good does it do to “work hard” (process) if the results belie the effort? The First Conclusion is false. So is the Second Conclusion. But on top of both conclusions has been built a skyscraper of constructs that consumes a huge portion of our national wealth, a portion so great that it has also led to the creation of the most powerful labor unions in the country to champion, not “education”, not “schools”, not even the “kids”, but rather those employed in a shamefully failing effort, as clearly shown by the results. Throughout our history, K-12 education has been a “woman’s world”. (Those in public “education” should not feel unfairly selected here; the same mindless process has been going on for decades in other enormously expensive efforts, such as in the forty-year “war on drugs”.)
“Leadership”
Among elected officials, the perpetuation of such absurdities is possible only if candidates and elected officials consistently deliver rhetoric and action, continually pay homage, to their most important constituency. They will always deliver whatever that constituency wants, regardless of the larger consequences to the society as a whole, or to future generations of that society. Such has long been the case with our Congress.
“Leadership”, too, becomes solely a matter of process; our “leaders” actually are now consummate followers of their constituencies, bound together in various social-political “networks”. The premise was that leaders get out in the risky front and convince diverse others, usually by their own example, to follow along with their greater objectives. But now “leaders” are those simply chosen to faithfully represent the will of the herd. So our society now wanders in circles electing superficial popular icons who are simply reflections of self-interested voter groups. No one is leading; all are simply following the applicable “group think”. These are very safe “leaders” indeed, who “lead” somehow from the rear, who do exactly what their largest and/or most influential constituency wants them to do. Most elected representatives are little more than powerful lobbyists for their most influential constituencies. They are celebrity winners of superficial popularity contests, mirrors of “group think”, who then become puppets. The last thing in which they are interested is taking the constituency somewhere it is not already prepared and eager to go. The very last thing these “leaders” do is actually lead.
“Leadership” becomes just another of our countless unexamined premises, which probably goes far in explaining why the country continues to run on mindless auto-pilot decade after decade, concerned only with self-involvement, going nowhere, mainly the result of two competing left-right groups canceling each other out. Social-political lobbies have become the most powerful force in our society, delivering not only great quantities of money and very sophisticated propaganda, but also many millions of votes. Pity the poor group with no matching lobby, such as America’s boys, easily bulldozed by the supremely arrogant “tyranny of the majority”. The only thing that unrepresented minority group has in its arsenal is civil rights law – provided someone will use it on their behalf.
Does It Make Any Difference?
Do the gender numerical and percentage and tendency differences in voting make any difference in the overall scheme of things? If one assumes that men and women think exactly the same way about politics, about responsibility, about society, about groups other than their own, about the future, then it probably doesn’t. But is this premise valid?
Try this: American social “science” has known for a quarter of a century that our boys are in big trouble. But in all that time no elected female representative at any level has ever tried to champion the cause of boys and most have even conspired with the schools since the 1990s to keep the gender differences secret from the public. But then, in all that time, no elected male representative has ever championed the cause of boys, either, perhaps thankful that they don’t have to address embarrassing truths of which the public is largely unaware. We thus have the same result from both elected genders (but for VERY different reasons). Even stranger, no attention has been focused on this topic by taxpaying citizens, by either mothers or fathers of boys, by our humongous chattering class, by “think tank” elitists, or, most shameful of all, by American social “science”. As long as the 98% of “education journalists” who are women are content to regurgitate the school and women’s propaganda, then civil rights only apply to “special” people, and no one has to address a problem they “don’t know” exists. (Cowards are quite happy in their ignorance.) So, in this particular case, huge gender disparities among voters makes no difference at all. (See Footnote #2.)
The power of women’s lobbies reigns supreme. Everyone prefers instead to pretend all is well. And if the truth does manage to break through the conspiracy, everyone is content to dismiss it by blaming the boys – who don’t have a lobby – for being such stupid, bored, disruptive, un-girly, disabled, etc., losers. The United States is the only English-speaking country in the world that has not been adult enough to embrace the cause of its boys as of sufficiently grave concern to warrant major national level programs to try to correct very troubling trends, trends which obviously portend really great problems down the road for both genders, and, in turn, for our whole society.
Just what IS the definition of American “leadership” anymore, anyway? (It’s a safe bet that the most important factor in there is “Me”.)
A good mind can list dozens of such illogical incongruities in our society. A whole society running on mindless auto-pilot, on premises that haven’t been valid for decades, because self-interest dominates everything. Thanks to powerful lobbies, it’s all about “me”.
The 2012 presidential election campaign kicked off almost a year ago as the Republican Party has sought to find a front-runner candidate who can challenge the incumbent President, Mr. Obama, in November. The Republicans so far have had as many as nine different people trying to win their party’s nomination. I’m a pretty smart guy, and quite knowledgeable of American politics both domestic and international, but I have been able to really understand only about one-fourth of what these people have been saying to the public over all those months. The rest of it sounds to me like so much nonsense rising from a foundation of ever-shifting sand. This is probably because I learned about American politics from the Greatest Generation, and I consider things about the nation as a whole that apparently are no longer of much interest to most American voters. I also think with disciplined logic, and few do this anymore, either. When it comes to national-level elections, I am not interested in what is best for me, but rather what is best for the nation, today and, more importantly, for decades to come. Today, the political discussion is 90% emotion, and politicians have to speak to the immediate wants of their most important constituents. (See Footnote #3.) Obviously I am not one of those important constituents; the only one of the potential candidates I can understand is the one whom everyone labels a “whacko” – the Silent Generation’s Ron Paul. So maybe I have become a “whacko”, too.
“Special”
Conclusion: Women are “special”; they deserve extra consideration, a plethora of different social deferences and standards, and all sorts of protections and subsidies and entitlements and separate rules of conduct, etc..
Premise: Unlike men, women can give birth; they get married and have and raise and educate the healthy children society needs to survive and move forward.
The conclusion is based on a premise that has existed in western culture for a millennium. Based on the premise, the conclusion seems valid.
But the premise is not valid. It hasn’t been valid for a majority of native-born American women for a half century. But this hasn’t stopped American women from demanding everything that arises solely from that invalid premise. In fact, the less valid the premise becomes, the more arrogant women get with their conclusion demands. If women are not going to have and raise the healthy and well-educated children our society needs to survive, then there is absolutely nothing “special” about them at all, and thus zero basis for any double standards.
In the 1960s, over a half century ago, women became ever more vocal in demanding “equality”, and they used the social structure in place during the 1950s as their hated status quo enemy, a social structure to which they were vehemently opposed. That social structure was based far more on convention than on law, and that convention had been established and maintained just as much, if not more, by women than by men. It essentially revolved around a lasting marriage between a man and a women, with the woman responsible for raising the children and maintaining the home, and the man responsible for competing in the marketplace to provide for his family and home. Nevertheless, a portion of very militant and vocal American women, under a belief structure they called “feminism”, demanded change – despite the fact that women in American society have never been required to do anything. And our society, with men as always at the forefront, responded, steadily granting whatever women wanted, primarily through government and its laws, as soon as enough women decided just what it was that they wanted.
American society has changed dramatically since 1960, and over 90% of that change has been accomplished in response to the demands of women. Women have been the voting majority in America since 1980, and they have a strong tendency to vote for whichever entity promises the most for women. So, naturally, all politicians are eager to respond to that focus on “me” to buy the votes they need to win elections. Today, almost 60% of American women have never been married and never had children. Today over 60% of marriages end in divorce, often more than once, usually initiated by women. Today, over half the children born in America are born to single women exercising their free choices. Today native-born American women have less than half the number of children needed just to maintain our society’s status quo, and only a third of the number of children needed to pay for their lucrative birthright entitlements later – entitlements that were based on a social structure that began to vanish a half century ago. This has required our society to constantly import many millions of Third World immigrants just to keep our society barely viable. Only about one in four American boys can count on a constant father through age 18, so naturally loser boys now simply “create themselves”, because no one wants to hold women responsible for anything, not even their own choices, their won elective behavior, the example their behavior sets for their sons. Women now “raise”, “educate”, “treat”, “medicate” and brainwash, with almost no real input from adult males, all those “men” about which their daughters are constantly complaining and ridiculing. Women now single-handedly create the “men” their daughters love to hate. Today, thanks to our women-dominated “education” industry, young adults with a college degree are about on the same knowledge level as the public at large with a high school diploma in 1960, and this shame follows all the way back to the fifth grade.
Today American women are a much greater net burden on society than they are a net contributor. But they still base all their demands on a premise that holds the ‘procreation within marriage‘ ideal as the justification for their “special” status – the very premise to which their “feminist” mothers and grandmothers were so strenuously opposed in demanding their version of (privileged) “equality”. In essence, the vast majority of American women today are riding free on the backs of a quite small minority of women who still actually earn their “special” status.
American women are far and away the most protected, the most pampered, the most promoted, the most privileged, and the most powerful group on the planet. But American women are still complaining about the same things they were complaining about a century ago. Why? Because the complaints and whines of American women and their many powerful lobbies serve to keep the myth of “eternal victimhood” alive. This, in turn, enables women to garner ever more rights in society while systematically shedding ever more responsibilities to that society. American women have rights; they do NOT have responsibilities. It is everyone else’s responsibility to ensure whatever rights women demand for themselves at any moment in time.
Women perceive the past as a time when their choices were limited, and they are in some respects correct in that assessment. But women never seem to notice that the choices of men were also quite restricted. Women never seem to notice, for example, those endless fields of military grave markers, those countless millions of early deaths on the job of men trying to provide for their families. Nevertheless, today the choices of women are limitless. No one and no thing is forcing, or ever has forced, American women to do anything. They can choose to engage in any behavior (that is not criminal) they wish. So now the demands are for “someone else”, mainly government through laws, to pick up the costs of their own free choices. So we now have a cacophony of demands for government to pay for their elective behavior – their free choices to engage in sex, to get pregnant, to bring a child to term, to do so without a husband, to nurse that child, to raise, educate and provide for themselves and their children, etc., etc.. They even expect government to pay for the costs of their eating behavior resulting in obesity, their borrowing behavior resulting in their inability to meet loan agreements, their own employment behavior resulting in lower wages, slower promotions, etc.. Today American women greatly prefer to marry Big Daddy Government than a mere man for their guaranteed dependence.
And no one dares to call out these incredibly arrogant and self-involved creatures. Why? Because no one ever goes back to examine the premise. Hint: It’s ALL a scam. American women are rapidly becoming the ugliest group on the planet. There is NO “special” in equal. If women are not married and raising two or more children, they are just more schmucks in the competitive arena, fully responsible for themselves and their own behavior – just like men. Men are NOT responsible for the free choices, the elective behavior, of women. Women can damned well pick up their own tab.
The purpose of women’s lobbies, of course, is no longer to improve the lot of women; the purpose of women’s lobbies today is to perpetuate the myth of “woman as eternal victim”, and thus to keep the money flowing in and the power in hand. Question: If the group with all the power has all the rights, and the group without the power has all the responsibility … how does anything for the whole ever get done? (Hint: It doesn’t.)
Check the premise!
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Boys: Be sure, when you fulfill your responsibility to register for the draft, that you also register to vote. Exercising your right to vote at least buys your ticket to the complaint counter, even if those like you have no chance of winning. Then after college you may become an actual leader who understands both rights and responsibilities and be able to get others to follow your example in the arena.
Addendum Prediction, 2 April 2012. Despite the fact that Republicans are still trying to decide on their representative to run against President Obama, it looks like Mitt Romney will end up being their nominee. However, it really doesn’t make much difference who the Republicans put up. Polls are showing that a truly whopping 18% more women support Obama over Romney. If Obama has more than just a 5% majority of women, his election is a 100% guarantee. Game over. An 18% plurality means the women’s vote will go 59%-41% in favor of Obama, a really huge difference that simply cannot be overcome. There are now well over 12,000,000 more women voters than men voters, a number that itself is sufficient to decide any election. (In national elections, it’s actually three times larger than the usual margin of difference.) Romney would need a huge plurality of 30% of men in order to overcome the 18% women’s plurality for Obama. A 30% plurality means the men’s vote would be 65%-35% in favor of Romney. But, in the history of America, men have never placed anywhere near such a large plurality for any candidate. Men always split their vote rather evenly left-right, usually well in the range of 53-47 or less, distributed “normally” (bell-shaped curve) across the entire political spectrum. Since elections for US President are now decided by considerably less than about 10,000,000 votes, the votes of minority men are essentially irrelevant. If a whopping 18% more majority women favor Obama, Obama is in for a landslide win. By concentrating on urban women, he simply cannot lose – regardless of how men vote – with a really huge majority of electoral votes. While dumb men still make all the noise, women do all the deciding. Romney doesn’t stand a chance of beating Obama if Obama has the women’s vote – by ANY majority. Politics in America is now all about Whatever Women Want. That’s probably why almost none of it makes sense to me anymore, why our politicians never solve anything, move forward, make progress, make tomorrow better for those who have to follow us. It’s all about “me”, and “now”.
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(See “Marketing And Propaganda” and “Who Decided The 2012 Election?“, posted separately.)
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P.S. Here are some terms always brandied about by politicians and the idle chattering class (including “diplomats” and “academics”): “allies”, “our interests”, “responsibility”, “world leadership”, “we”, “super-power”, “alliance”, “freedom”, “self-determination”, “equality”. Do not ever let such terms slide. Always demand a clear concise definition. And then demand to know precisely why. These are premises that underpin really huge amounts of American “thinking”. But in almost every case, such premises ceased being valid decades ago, or never were valid, and yet “we” continue to operate on “thinking” that has “foundations” existing on nothing more substantial than very thin air. This is the easiest way to pull the rug out from under 90% of the nonsense that now clogs the air in America. It’s mostly noise pollution, delusion, unquestioned self-serving dogma. Because, of course, it’s just brainless bullshit, for mental midgets.
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Footnote #1. What Do Men Think? It is now very difficult to find valid studies of the thinking behind male decision-making. In the first place, most money in social “science” for decades has been devoted exclusively to championing women and race (with the overwhelming emphasis on women), a fact that naturally results in a single-minded group think. In the second place, all social “science” in this country is now very heavily dominated by women “experts”, with their own preconceived views, beliefs and prejudices. In the third place, males have been conditioned over generations to to go great lengths to avoid the knee-jerk “sexist” label and to provide the “expected” response to questions, or to provide the response that best complies with the prevailing dogma and also best conforms to the prevailing popular view of males. The Thought Police have succeeded in actually changing the thoughts. American males have been thoroughly conditioned to “Always tell ’em only what they want to hear” (or at least what they think they want to hear).
So male “truth” is mostly an illusion. But it gets even more confusing. It used to be that male decision-making was most strongly influenced by logic, but increasingly, even with males, emotion is the deciding factor. But what, exactly, are the emotions involved? Who knows? Who cares? Further, most women’s lobbies now fiercely object to social “science” studies that show gender differences – unless their group can benefit from the study’s gender findings. Since the 1990s, for example, it’s been nearly impossible to obtain gender data from America’s public school systems, where enormously more girls than boys are in advanced placement programs, graduate from school, are admitted to colleges and granted scholarships – so almost no Americans know just how much in violation of federal civil rights law are their own schools. Apparently our schools only teach to some unisex entity. On the other hand, hardly a month goes by without women’s lobbies generating some “story” about women at a disadvantage in a college sports program – by comparison an incredibly puny “issue”. And the 98% of “education journalists” who are women happily jump on the bandwagon, whining about their own group not playing college badminton, while blaming boys for not making it to college at all.
Footnote #2. “Children”. A sure way to win support among voters of both genders is to champion “children”. Who could NOT be in favor of assisting children? But if you look more closely and objectively at what is actually being done, you’ll discover that almost all such efforts are intended to assist adults in executing their parenting responsibilities with children. The same applies to commercial entities and government agencies charged with caring for children. (Apparently women-dominated state and federal departments of education have no responsibility for children in school who happen to be boys.) So “children” is mostly a “marketing” cover used to garner more money for those employed doing the tasks of other women. Children, of course, don’t have a vote. If they did, you can bet the farm that they’d be a lot better off than they are. We ought to just give all that money straight to the kids to use only for their own health care and the best education they can find, anywhere they can find it. That sure would end a lot of cheap scams benefitting a sea of adults.
Footnote #3. Emotion And Logic. Below is an example of emotion trumping logic across a broad spectrum of American society, as a direct consequence of how our schools now “teach” our children. (I am not the author; it was sent to me by a friend.)
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Canada‘s Top Ten List of American Stupidity
Only in America …
10) … could politicians talk about the “greed of the rich” at a $35,000-a-plate political campaign fund-raising event.
9) … could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black, 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans – 3X the rate that goes to whites and 5X the rate that goes to Hispanics! (With some minor tweaking, this could apply also to our “eternal victim” women versus those evil men.)
8) … could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the US House Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats – who are in favor of higher taxes (apparently only for “someone else”).
7) … can they have Muslim terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.
6) … would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they seriously discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just ‘magically’ become American citizens.
5) … could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country’s Constitution be thought of as “extremists.”
4) … could you need to present a driver’s license to cash a check or buy alcohol, get a loan or board a plane, receive welfare or an insured postal package, but not to vote.*
3) … could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up – when the return on equity invested in a major US oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half that of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).
2) … could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year – for total spending of $7 Million PER MINUTE – and still complain that it doesn’t have nearly enough money.
1) … could the rich people – who pay 86% of all income taxes – be accused of not paying their “fair share” – by people who don’t pay any income taxes at all.
”Americans get the government they deserve.”
* In American democracy, only about half of eligible voters even bother to vote in national elections – which is probably a good thing. The average American spends more time deciding on which new cellphone to buy than choosing a candidate for elected office. Only 42% can name the three branches of the federal government. Only 30% of Americans can name their two senators. (It goes down-hill from there.) Liberals are strongly opposed to people being required to show some basic form of identification in order to vote, but it obviously would be better for the nation if everyone, liberals included, was required to answer a brief elementary quiz about American citizenship before being allowed to do something as important as cast a vote. Thanks to our deplorable schools, most recent immigrants know ten times more about American government than most native Americans know.
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Example: Beware Voter Percentages
Voting reports and opinion polls always use only percentages to show results, partly because percentages, as a fraction of 100, are relatively easy to understand. But, since the underlying premises may be totally false, the percentages are more often than not just misleading, which is often the main purpose. Using percentages is a favorite tactic, for example, of special-interest lobbies, such as to entice herds of dumb men to join the majority women’s crowd (without knowing that there are huge differences in the views of men and women). It is rarely possible to find the raw numbers behind the percentages. Because there are stark differences between the way men and women think and vote, no one should ever accept percentages without asking for the underlying numbers, the foundation, the premise. (It’s amazing how people are always seeking the right combination of complimentary differences in romance and marriage, but readily accept that both genders think alike in opinion polls and politics. There is very little that makes logical sense in American society these days.)
The main premise behind voting percentages is that there are just as many women as men voting. But is that premise valid?
According to the 2008 census and the 2008 general election results:
A total of 131,257,328 votes were cast in the election, with 1,865,610 (1.4%) of those votes going to four minor candidates. (Although the four minor candidates received distinct majorities of male votes, the relatively small numbers did not affect the outcome.) Because of our entrenched two party system, general elections for national office almost always boil down to a choice between only two candidates each for President, Senator and Representative. Here we’ll use the choice for President to illustrate the problem.
A total of 129,391,710 votes (98.6%) were cast for either Obama or McCain. Obama received 69,456,897 (52.9%) of those votes, and McCain got 59,934,814 (45.7%) votes – a difference of 9,522,083 (7.6%), which by American standards is an unusually large difference, enough to qualify as a “landslide”. There were 8,450,000 more women citizens (108,260,000) than men citizens (99,810,000) over age 18. So already women had a huge numerical advantage. But then many more men than women were not eligible to vote, raising the voter pool difference in favor of women to over 10,000,000.
(Slight numerical variances below are due to percentage rounding.)
About 66% of eligible women citizens voted, while a quite high 61% of eligible men citizens voted. (Usually, about 60% of women vote, while 54% of men vote, so voter interest in this particular election for both genders was unusually high. Women have steadily increased their voting majority since they passed 50% of the vote in 1980.)
About 9,148,000 more women citizens (70,415,000) than men citizens (61,267,000). actually voted.
56% of women voters voted for Obama (56% of 70,415,000 = 39,432,400) 43% of women voters voted for McCain (43% of 70,415,000 = 30,278,450)
Obama won the lopsided women vote by a huge 9,154,000 votes.
49% of men voters voted for Obama (49% of 61,267,000 = 30,020,083) 48% of men voters voted for McCain (48% of 61,267,000 = 29,408,160)
Obama won the customarily evenly divided men vote by only 612,000 votes.
If the same percentage of men had voted for McCain as the percentage of women voted for Obama (56%), men would have cast 34,009,520 votes for McCain – still a really huge 5,423,000 votes short of overcoming the women’s vote.
It would require men to vote 65% in favor of McCain to overcome the women’s vote for Obama, but men have never split their vote by more than 54-46%. So it is virtually impossible for the men vote to overcome the women vote. The votes of men, given the numerical differences, historical voter participation and historical voting patterns, are simply irrelevant to the outcome. For the past quarter of a century, it has been impossible for all national level elected officials, and most state level elected officials, to get elected and stay in office without catering heavily to, and winning, the almighty women’s vote. (Just about the only areas in the country where the men’s vote actually counts is in very sparsely populated farming areas, where males have significant numerical majorities.)
In this arena, politics, men do all the talking, while women do all the deciding. And if women do all the deciding, what difference does it make which gender they put in office? After all, regardless of gender, all office holders are completely beholden to women voters (and, of course, to women’s many powerful lobbies.) So women whining about their gender not having its “fair” quota of elected representatives in Congress is, as usual, just so much meaningless bullshit.
Footnote #4. The Big Bad Russian Bogeyman.
Premise: “Russia is a credible military threat to both Europe and the US that must be countered with a very strong, united and determined political and military will.”
This premise is used to justify the continued existence of the western “NATO” military alliance and the humongous American and European industries that produce military machinery. It is also used to keep the Americans carrying the overwhelming burden of “defending Europe” well into a second century.
The premise is patently false. And, naturally, the conclusions based on it are just ridiculous.
But it capitalizes on vague notions gained by most Americans from old school books about a world and its long “Cold” war that ceased to exist well over a quarter of a century ago and used ever since by politicians in both the US and Europe to gain ignorant votes and easy taxpayer money to buy stuff they don’t need. There was a time when the premise was true of the Soviet Russian Communist Bloc, but both Soviet communism and its bloc are long gone. The man who has led Russia for most of the past 18 years has been an anti-communist political conservative who has been trying to rebuild Russia as a democratic capitalist society based on the American model – an extremely difficult task considering Mother Russia’s long history and contemporary political and economic realities. Ignorant nitwits in the West who think someone can just wave a wand and turn a country like Russia into France in anything less than three generations have no real understanding of Russia at all. No one understands Russia better than its current president; he knows what’s possible and what isn’t. And he also knows what’s necessary to eventually get Mother Russia to where she must go to survive.
That “Russian threat” premise is today so false that it borders on the incredibly stupid.
Anyone who cannot view the board from the other side’s vantage is doomed to fail – whether the game is chess, diplomacy or war. Only obnoxious bullies think they can “win” with brute force alone. Let’s view the board from the Russian side.
The Warsaw Pact was created as a “balance of power”, or “counterweight”, to NATO, in direct reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955. Germany, of course, was the country that had just a few years earlier attacked Russia along a thousand mile front, laid waste vast expanses of Russia and many Russian cities, and cost the lives of 20,000,000 Russian citizens and soldiers. With its headquarters located in Warsaw, its communist members were Russia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Albania. For the next 36 years the two huge military alliances – the western NATO and the eastern Warsaw Pact – stood against each other on the European continent as relatively counter-balanced equals. From Russia’s perspective, the other members of the Warsaw Pact also stood as a “buffer” between Russia and the west – which had repeatedly launched devastating attacks against Russia for centuries. Such a buffer could slow down another such attack and give Russia time to martial its internal defenses against another onslaught from a French Napoleon, a German Hitler, or an American Patton under a NATO flag.
So both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were seen by their creators as purely defensive alliances and were continuously sold as such by their respective politicians. Even today, NATO is still described as a defensive alliance, even though no one ever mentions just who or what it is defending against.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the greatly over-extended Russian economy collapsed in 1990. Russia could now hardly maintain its own military forces, much less support all the other member states of the Warsaw Pact. Finally, on 25 February 1991, the Warsaw Pact was declared disbanded. With that event, NATO’s mission had been completed. It had successfully held back the advance of Soviet communist domination into western Europe, and all of the European continent states were now free of external ideological domination, free to choose their own destinies.
But rather than honorably disband NATO, its member states elected to maintain and grow the alliance, but without a sensibly articulated mission beyond “European integration”. But the only way Russia could possibly view NATO now was as an ever-growing threat to a greatly weakened Russia.
Russia then watched with alarm as its former Warsaw Pact partners “defected” en masse to the other side, steadily pushing the huge western military alliance, behind the goliath American super-power, ever closer to Russia’s border. East Germany became a member of NATO when it was re-integrated into a united Germany in 1991. In 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary formally joined NATO; Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia joined in 2004. The near-Russia Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had not been formal members of the Warsaw Pact, also joined NATO in 2004. Completing the entire Warsaw Pact “defection”, Albania joined in 2009. Even though Soviet Russia no longer existed, the Russian Federation was now isolated and alone.
While all this was going on, NATO continued to claim that it was still a purely defensive alliance – an absurd assertion that vanished as soon as anyone considered NATO’s two elective attacks against the former Yugoslavia, its attack against Afghanistan, and its undeniably clear “regime change” war against Libya – none of which were in response to threats to NATO member states. If NATO could do that to a friendly Libya and its leader under a phony “humanitarian” cover, it certainly could do the same to Russia and its leader under any excuse it wished to dream up. The US also insisted on providing Europe with a short- and medium-range “missile defense system” that could only possibly be directed against Russia, which does not need long-range ICBMs to reach Europe, and vice versa. Russia’s alarm naturally then went into overdrive when plans were drawn up to have the huge former Russian republic of Ukraine, whose borders are only 260 miles from Moscow, also become a NATO member state. From Russia’s perspective, this would be akin to California seceding from the United States and joining a military alliance led by China.
The military “balance of power” in Europe was already 20-1 against Russia, but the members of NATO seemed oblivious of the implications of their own patently aggressive actions, steadily and inexorably advanced for twenty long years. They also seemed oblivious to the condition of 25,000,000 ethnic Russians who suddenly found themselves unwelcome immigrants in all those former communist republics. (That “self-determination” thing, of course, only works when NATO, still deeply immersed in “Cold” War “thinking”, wants it to work.) And they steadfastly refused to view the board from the Russian vantage. “We are now so big and powerful, we can do whatever we want to do, and no one can stop us.” If the Americans, later whining about someone “interfering in their election”, can brazenly engineer a coup d’état in Kiev right in front of the closely watching Russians, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to try the same in Moscow. If the US was in Russia’s position, the Americans long ago would already have teed up their nukes.
NATO now has 28 member states, one of which is the world’s single superpower. Russia stands alone, not party to any alliance. Just three of those original NATO states – Britain, France and Germany – today have a combined military strength that is more than twice the size of Russia’s. Today, Russia’s economic and military strength is best compared to that of Britain, and both are dwarfed into near insignificance by that of the US. For example, Russia is able to build and deploy one average-sized aircraft carrier; the US has ten super-carrier battle groups at sea and three more super-carrier battle groups under construction. Russia is as much a threat to the US as is Canada.
The US GDP is around $18.2 trillion. Russia’s GDP is about $1.4 trillion – 13 times smaller. (California alone has a GDP that is almost twice as large as Russia’s.) Due to its still-struggling economy, Russia must keep its defense spending under 3% of its relatively small GDP, while the US routinely spends 5% of its humongous GDP on defense. For the past 25 years, Russia has never spent more than 10% of what the US spends on defense, or more than 5% of what NATO spends. Just how does one single country represent a credible threat to a military alliance that is already 20 times stronger? Sure, Russia has conventional machines like ships and planes and tanks that can be countered with other conventional ships and planes and tanks. But, really, just how stupid do you have to be to take on a military alliance that is 20 times your size?
And, really, just how brilliant are your Baby Boomer “leaders” when the best they can come up with is to continue with thinking devised by their Greatest Generation parents for a “Cold” War world that no longer exists? Obviously Russian leaders are a LOT smarter than our own.
It would also be useful to ask how it is possible for the most powerful conventional military machine in the history of humanity to be held to a standstill for 16 years by a prehistoric unconventional enemy that does not possess one single ship, plane, tank, missile or drone. Yet no one wants to even LOOK at this question. Obviously, military power has its definite limitations.
Also quite obviously, Russia’s main problem is how to defend itself against such a gigantic juggernaut that obviously knows almost nothing about military realities. In its own national interests, in its own self-defense, Russia must make maximum use of smart thinking, limited resources and strategic planning, while using unconventional capabilities wherever possible to at least keep the marginal twits on the other side off balance.
The premise is a complete myth, based on nothing more than girly historical emotionalism. Russia is now just a lame excuse for western ulterior political objectives. But based on that false premise, a huge gaggle of nations, including our own, playing their own people for morons, have built whole universes of pure bullshit conclusions accomplishing nothing.
P.S. The smart thing to do would have been to retire NATO with honors when its mission was concluded in 1990 and to forge a new alliance actually designed for the next century, with Russia as a respected and equal core member. But no one ever accused the airhead Boomers of being smart.
(For a more detailed look at this subject see, “Russia and “NATO”.)
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Invincible Probity 