Reagan (and Bush) on Energy and Consumer Protection

News has it that President Obama is installing solar energy-producing panels on the roof of the White House.

This item, and earlier ones, reminded us that President Jimmy Carter had also installed solar panels on the White House roof—and then Ronald Reagan removed them. Why would he do this, when it must have cost taxpayers money to remove them? My guess is, simply to thumb his nose at environmentalists.

Also, as is not very well known, on the day of his inauguration, Reagan froze all funding of alternative energy research by the Department of Energy. I can tell you that a lot of alternative energy research that is being called for today or has recently been started up, was going on in 1981 when Reagan halted it. On the smaller scale, Reagan's move cost many jobs (including, ultimately, mine—so yes, I have a personal axe to grind here) but it also set back the efforts to find new energy sources by 30 years.

Many of the bad things that Reagan did (okay, bad at least from my perspective, or any liberal perspective) were not publicized at the time. Reagan was very popular—remember, he was called "the Teflon President," and the Press was afraid to criticize him because of that popularity.

For example, he gutted federal regulatory agencies such as the EPA and FDA that were intended by Congress to safeguard our food, water, air, and so forth. He appointed as heads of these agencies industry-sympathetic people or even industry insiders who had no intention of allowing these agencies to function effectively.

Similarly, Congress passed laws to beef up (no pun) government inspections of food-processing plants. Had these measures taken effect, they might have prevented some of the recent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses such as Salmonella and E. coli from eggs, peanut butter, and so forth (there have been many in the last few years). But the stiffer inspection schedules were never implemented, because of eight years of foot-dragging by the Bush administration.

Update, August 26, 2011
I recently learned that Rodger Mudd, of CBS TV news, did at the time report on Reagan removing the solar panels from the White House. It was a very brief news item and didn't mention any possible explanation.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

How to Live to Age 107

Today we interview George Crumbum, who, at 107, claims to be the oldest man in the developed world.

Old Leftist Curmudgeon: Mr. Crumbum, to what do you attribute your long life?

George Crumbum: Eating pepper.

OLC: Eating pepper?

GC: Yeah. I swallow two tablespoons of ground pepper every day. Sometimes I just chew on whole peppercorns. They're crunchy, and it's a bit of variety.

OLC: And you just swallow the pepper? Isn't that a bit difficult?

GC: Nah. I wash it down with beer.

OLC: Beer?

GC: Yeah, but not just any beer. It's gotta be lite beer. None of that yuppie microbrew crap, or dark beer, or anything like that.

OLC: So you like lite beer.

GC: Yeah. If your beer don't taste like piss, it don't do you no good. Trust me. My age is proof of that.

OLC: Any other tips for readers who'd like to live as long as you, Mr. Crumbum?

GC: Yeah, get plenty of sex. And cuss out your children or your neighbors or anyone else who's handy. Ya gotta do some cussin' every day.

OLC: Well, I'm sure that letting it out is good advice. But do you really have a lot of sex at your age, Mr. Crumbum?

GC: Well, I think I do. I admit, it's been getting hard to tell what I been dreamin' from what's actually happened.

OLC: Mr. Crumbum, thank you for a most interesting interview. And may you live for another 107 years.

GC: [Evil chuckle]

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Reaganomics and Republicanomics

Remember Ronald Reagan and his "Reaganomics"? Reagan espoused the "trickle-down" theory, supposedly scribbled on a napkin by the young (and previously relatively obscure) economist Arthur Laffer, with his "Laffer curve."

The idea was that tax cuts and other economic policies that would help large businesses and rich individuals get richer would ultimately benefit everybody, because the benefits to them would "trickle down" the ladder to lower income levels. The rising waters would float everybody's boat--or so the theory went.

What happened is that under Reagan, the U.S. national deficit rose to unprecedented levels--a fact that those on the Right who are lambasting Obama for a rising deficit are conveniently ignoring.

Now, since the numbers are in, we can see similarly that the Bush economic policies, such as the famous "Bush tax cuts" that are now up for renewal, and that had the most benefit for the rich, hurt the total U.S. national income.

Here is an article by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Reich on that subject:

www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-super-rich-get-richer_b_737792.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=092410&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry

If you want to go into the economics of it more deeply (and you have patience), here is an article replete with tables (in .pdf format).

www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/CHAS-89LPZ9?OpenDocument

Here is an article that shows the lasting, systemic harm to America's economic structure that was done by Reagonomics:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-white/rethinking-reaganomics-wh_b_749839.html

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Mormons and Marriage

With a big news story about federal raids on the compound of a fundamentalist Mormon sect a while ago, and a more recent TV program about a polygamist family, the practice of polygamy associated with some Mormons has been in the news.

As you may know, mainstream Mormonism at one time not only tolerated polygamy but actively encouraged and preached it. For example, Joseph Smith, with difficulty, persuaded Brighman Young to have multiple wives.

Then, at one point--to end federal pressure on Mormons and further the incorporation of Utah into the Union--Mormon leaders suddenly and miraculously had a new "revelation" that told them that they should renounce polygamy.

I'd like to tell you what I think. Aside from questions of what it does to the birth rate, I am fine with polygamy. I think people, Mormon or otherwise, should be permitted to do what they want, and it's no skin off my nose.

But there's a huge irony here. Mormons would like others to keep their hands off marriage--yet they won't do the same in return. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) was a very big financial supporter of Proposition 8 in California, which was a ballot initiative to end same-sex marriage.

To any Mormons out there: Hey, let's make a deal. I'll advocate letting you guys do whatever you want, marriage-wise--you can have multiple wives, multiple husbands, I couldn't care less. And in return, how about you keeping hands off same-sex marriage?

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Yet Another Homophobe Outed As Gay

If you follow the news, you've heard or read about Bishop Long, of a huge (25,000 member) African-American church in Georgia. This is a man who is a very vocal homophobe, and now he is accused of having had sex with (at latest count) four men from his congregation when they were adolescents.

This is just the latest of a long list. Remember these: Foley, Craig, Haggard? I think there have been several more that I can't recall at the moment.

I have to wonder, when will people stop listening to these people with credence and simply question whether the volume of their rhetoric is in proportion to their desire to cloak their own homosexuality?

Here is an article that is excellent and, in my opinion, gives a very good slant on the issue of homosexuality and the Bible.

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-bishop-long-and-whats-long-overduer-for-christians/19645378

Update, August 26, 2011
Yet another instance to add to the list along with Sen. Craig, etc.--just the latest among many: An Indiana state senator, Phil Hinkle, arranged, via Craigslist, a liaison in a hotel room with a very young guy (either 20 or 18). He claims, "I am not gay."

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Does Education Make Us Liberal?

It's widely known that better-educated people tend to be more liberal—or "progressive," as we might prefer to say since certain segments have done their best to make liberal a dirty word.

And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.

(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)

But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.

Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.

Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.

Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.

Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.

It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

What's Changed in the World. Part 5 - Computing

If computers have brought great changes in our lives, computing itself has changed. Fifty years ago, computers were owned only by the government, the military, universities, and large businesses. Computers were very large and required dedicated rooms that in turn had dedicated air-conditioning, because the heat that the computers generated was bad for the computers themselves and had to be removed. A modern computer—a laptop or desktop computer--that almost everyone in America can have, is many, many times more powerful than one of those old computers that filled a room.

I dealt with computers back before the day when it occurred to someone to hook up a TV screen to the computer. The computer's output (and sometimes input, as well) was to a TeleTypewriter, a big machine that—well, never mind, suffice it to say that this was a device that had been around for the purpose of receiving and printing out telegrams.

You'd write your program out, with a pen or pencil, on "IBM coding sheets." Then you'd have to sit down at a machine called a keypunch. You'd type in your program at this machine's keyboard. Every line of your program would result in the production of a punched card (called Hollerith cards or IBM cards).

A program of any complexity could be hundreds of punched cards. People writing and running programs would carry their stack of cards in a shoebox. (Don't even imagine what would happen if you dropped the box or spilled the cards!)

Then the stack of cards was fed into a "card reader." That finally got the program into the computer, and then the computer needed to be commanded to run it. For students such as I was, you had to wait your turn for your program to be run, and you'd get the printout of the program's output in a day or two!

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein