Can Democracy Survive the Voters?

I read about this initiative in the February HARPER'S.

The initiative will be on the ballot in the City and County of Denver in August. It was signed by 4,211 voters. (I've left out several paragraphs to make it shorter.)

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The People of the City and County of Denver hereby declare that:

--The presence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings and vehicles on Earth, and within Earth's atmosphere, has been confirmed by credible evidence, official government documents, and whistleblowers formerly working for the U.S. government;

--Evidence of extraterrestrial beings has been known by U.S. presidents (sic) since President Franklin Roosevelt, including President Ronald Reagan as disclosed in his presentation to the United Nations regarding extraterrestrial matters;

--The United States Government has suppressed, and withheld from the public, evidence of advanced clean energy, transportation, and other technologies of extraterrestrial origin. These technologies could potentially offer substantial economic relief for our most pressing social and economic concerns, including a reduction of pollution and at least partial replacement of fossil fuels with affordable non-polluting energy sources, and other advanced technologies. . . .

Etc.

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The above is an example of the opposite of paranoia. I doubt if it is listed in the DSM, a compendium of our approved mental illnesses, but I did see someone refer to it, many years ago, as "proanoia." It's the belief that everyone is out to help you, or at least that imaginary aliens want to save us from ourselves.

Gary Goss

Anger

When I was a child the news was 15 minutes of facts. Today the news lasts all day, and whether it is Amy Goodman (soul of integrity) or Fox News (soulless idiocy), the news is bad. It enrages people. Good news is not news. As Bob Boardman points out, if you are part of a group that has accomplished something positive, you will seldom be covered.

Politics is a place where people can freely vent their anger, whatever its origin. Then they can stay mad all day.

If you need to vent anger, in the political news each day there will be a series of terrible crimes to enrage and justify you. For starters, there is, on this planet, always a genocide in progress, beginning with the sack of Troy.

Look at the anger in the Massachusetts election. Fundamentalist Christians were so mad that they endorsed a candidate who had paraded his photographed privates in a national magazine. Teabaggers were so enraged at deficits that they supported the party that had created the deficits. Some liberals were so committed to the public option in health care that they voted for the candidate who had promised to block health care, leaving thousands of poor people to die each year.

Consider the rage at Obama, coming from the Angry Right and Angry Left, blaming one mild-mannered man for the mess we're in.

In the worst of times, the mild (and ignorant) center of the country usually puts aside its distaste for the angry political classes just long enough to prevent catastrophe. During the last Bush regime, which was close to totalitarian, when it seemed Bush could do anything he (or Dick Cheney?) decided, including start unjust wars, the center blocked an attempt to turn social security over to Wall Street. Bush never recovered. But in Massachusetts the center did not hold.

The Left can not hope to win an election without unity or without the Center. We had better learn to work together. It might help if we turn off the TV Bad News, stop using politics as an arena for the expression of personal rage, and instead focus on the good that we can do. (But that lacks the appeal of the cleansing denunciation of the dude across the street whose politics are an inch different from yours in exactly the wrong way.)

El Supremo

Last night the Peace Project was talking about the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision to strengthen the ludicrous fiction that corporations are people. The Peace Project expects problems. For one thing, now that corporations are people, they can marry (unless they are gay). For another, the American Constitution makes it illegal to own a person; as of today our corporations have no owners. And what if Republicans start several more pointless wars and corporations get drafted?

"Obama Has Done Nothing."

Well, perhaps not quite nothing. In one year Obama did overturn a prohibition on federal funding for stem-cell research and let people with HIV travel to the United States. Let's see--he also started closing the prison at Gitmo, banned torture, eased a few restrictions on Cuba, pulled out of combat in Iraq, added troops in Afghanistan, pushed the idea that the government is responsible for health care, pledged to cut American emissions, promoted the first Latina to the Supreme Court, stalled a worldwide Great Depression (we hope), opened dialogues with Russia and the Moslem world, set aside large tracts of wilderness, etc.

Why People Are Nuts (1)

In a poll, Michael Shermer asked people two questions: Why do you believe in God? & Why do other people believe in God? Those polled explained that they believed in God for logical reasons. There had to be a First Cause--something had created the universe. Then they explained that other people believed in God because it was comforting and customary. In other words, my beliefs are based on reason and yours are based on emotion. This is a persistent bias--I am a Progressive for logical reasons, and you are a Teabagger because you are an animal. (Hume pointed out that logic provides no motivation; what motivates us in every case is emotion.)