The Psychological Attraction of Religion

One of the reasons religion has the power over people that it does is that it not only gives people clear moral instructions, relieving them of the burden of making moral decisions on their own, it forges their emotions into compliance with those instructions through their pretty fairy tales. This is the biggest advantage religion has over secular systems of morality. Although you may be able to convince yourself of the moral rightness of a particular action through your own reasoning, you may not be able to motivate yourself to perform that action through the same kind of rational deliberations.

Here's a nun talking about this very phenomenon. Especially after about 3:30.

John Maynard Keynes FTW!

Buying $600 Billion worth of debt is probably the right move. Put more money into the economy, people will buy more stuff, and businesses will make more stuff, and have to hire more people in order to do so. This works. The standard right wing response is that pouring money into the economy will lead to massive inflation and we'll end up like Weimar Germany. The important difference, of course, is that one of the problems with this economic downturn is deflation, not inflation. The problem is not that prices are too high, it's that nobody has any money so there is little demand in the economy resulting in prices being too low. Inflation is not what people should be afraid of. We need more inflation.

Sure, the US Dollar has sunk a little in comparison to other currencies, but the fact remains that jobs aren't growing because people aren't spending, and people aren't spending because they are broke.

Compromise on What?

Now that the Democrats no longer have the House, Obama says he's willing to compromise. "Compromise" to Republicans, of course, means doing everything they tell you to. To Obama it means "to yield to Republican demands on tax cuts," which is bad enough considering it means that in order to get tax cuts for the middle class, he has to give tax cuts to everyone richer than the middle class, thus cutting off the the vast majority of money that could have been used to pay down the deficit.

Well, at Least They Gained a Democratic Governor

Amazingly, prop19 didn't win. The contributions from the alcohol industry and other interested parties successfully scared people into believing that nurses and school bus drivers would be showing up to work high and their employers would, for some reason, not be able to fire them for it.

But on the bright side, while I actually liked Arnie, I'm glad that the governor of California is now a Democrat.

Creepy NephilimFree

Nobody's surprised, except maybe at how long it took for this kind of thing to come out.

Taking the Credit

Well, the election is tomorrow, and with the economy beginning to look up, the Republicans seem poised to get into power just in time to take credit for the recovery. Here's a good New York Times Article about it.

Of course if the Democrats hang onto power, the Republicans will still try to take credit, but fewer people will fall for it. This seems to be standard Republican sophistry. They still like to tell you that the economic boom of the Clinton administration was all because of Reagan's policies, even though he was two presidents prior.

Frustrating

Obama's justice department is trying to get a stay on the injubction against DADT. Why? Because, "changing the policy immediately as ordered by a federal court in California 'risks causing significant immediate harm to the military and its efforts to be prepared to implement an orderly repeal of the statute.'" How is an injunction less orderly than a repeal? If the military can handle a repeal, they can handle an injunction overturning the policy.