The Importance of Critical Thinking

A lot of us have been curious about the Tea Party which most of us first saw as a part of organized protests with inflammatory posters depicting President Obama as Hitler or as a socialist or fascist.

So the recent New York Times/CBS News poll and its accompanying NYT article Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated provided some interesting insights on the group.

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public… The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

Their responses are like the general public’s in many ways. Most describe the amount they paid in taxes this year as “fair.” Most send their children to public schools. A plurality do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, and, despite their push for smaller government, they think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

But even more revealing was an Interactive Feature accompanying the article, Voices of the Tea Party which featured 20 videos submitted by Tea Party supporters on why they support the movement.

Listening to all of them, it's easy to get a general consensus of their feelings. They want a limited government with less spending and taxation along with a balanced budget. And they felt that any government actions to intercede into the economy with a stimulus or bailouts along with more regulation is tantamount to socialism.

While others may criticize these Tea Party supporters as being unintelligent or uneducated, I don’t agree with that. But I do see a general lack of critical thinking on their part.

Of course, it’s easy to say that I feel that way because their views are different from mine. But what strikes me most are their extremely simplistic solutions to complex problems without any underlying thinking to support their (for me) tenuous positions.

This is how Wikipedia begins its article on Critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determining whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true.

They also write later in the article about important obstacles to critical thinking including:

[T]endency towards group think; the amount your belief system is formed by what those around you say instead of what you have personally witnessed.

I believe this video link neatly sums up the concept of critical thinking.

When Tea Partiers say they are in favor of lower taxes and spending along with a balanced budget, they never say specifically how this is to be accomplished. If they are in favor of maintaining Social Security, Medicare and military spending, what else can be cut that would balance the budget especially if tax increases are not an option? This and other questions like the ones below deserve an answer!

If tax cuts are a panacea as claimed, why did the tax cuts of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations result in historically large deficits? Where were the deficit hawks when George W. Bush (whom most of the Tea Party view favorably) turned a budget surplus into a huge deficit?

If health care reform is so bad, what would be their solution to providing affordable health insurance to the working poor whose employers can’t or won’t provide coverage?

If providing universal health care in other countries is so bad, where is the outcry in these countries to change their system to what we had in the US before the recent reform bill passed?

While they express their fear of big government controlling our lives, why are they so silent about big corporations controlling our lives? While speaking out against so-called government “death panels”, why were they so silent about health insurance companies enriching their profits by denying life saving treatment to some of their policyholders which is in effect a real death panel?

They say that government doesn’t listen to us. But why do they fail to mention that the biggest cause of this is the millions of dollars of corporate money put into elections and lobbying to make sure that as many of our legislators as possible are bought and paid for?

If indeed President Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Kenya, why didn’t his presidential opponent, John McCain use this against him in the election? If McCain believes neither of these are true, why is that not good enough to satisfy the rest of the Republicans including many in the Tea Party?

I feel that too many of those in the Tea Party are into group think, which as mentioned previously is a tendency to have a belief system based on those around them rather than on personal observations and experience. And while these people most likely get their information and opinions solely from Fox News, it is clear that Fox has also benefited in the ratings from being a driving force behind the Tea Party movement.

If liberals are viewed with such obvious contempt by these people, what is the chance that they would ever want to listen to an opposing viewpoint from any of them? From personal experience, when listening to those who oppose health care reform, I have often urged them to at least watch the first 30 minutes of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko to at least try to understand the other side of the health care debate. But if it's Michael Moore who is saying it, it must be wrong in the minds of these people and thus I have never gotten any of these people to agree to seeing any part of Sicko. The same attitude is reserved for other liberals such as Al Gore. Because it’s Al Gore warning us about global warming or climate change, it must be wrong. Case closed!

But it’s not necessarily about where we get our information. It’s about whether we question those who give us their information or viewpoints. Admittedly, I mostly watch MSNBC because their liberal viewpoints are usually compatible with my own. But I still insist in my own mind that MSNBC or anybody else has the obligation to provide some factual back up to support their opinions. For example, if an MSNBC host says that Rush Limbaugh made some racist remarks that day, I expect them to show the video clip so I can make up my own mind. And as for Michael Moore and Sicko, he provides factual backup for this and other movies he has made.

The world is (and will continue to be) full of complex problems for our leaders to try and solve. Many issues simply cannot be broken down into simple black and white viewpoints. Relying on simplistic solutions may not do much to solve these problems, but it sure makes for heated conflict between the different sides which makes for good TV sound bites. And there are all too many politicians who exploit this lack of critical thinking to their own benefit getting by with little more than repeating ideological talking points instead of using substance and reasoning to make a point. But alas, listening to substance and reasoning means that we have to rely on more than just sound bites that the media is all too often content to feed us.

The Tea Party supporters say that we are going in the wrong direction. Whether we are or not will greatly depend on whom we elect as our future leaders. To elect the right leaders, it requires making the effort to actually acquire an understanding of the issues that we passionate believe in. It requires empathy to understand the plight of those who are less fortunate than us. And most importantly, it requires us to be open minded enough to seek the truth no matter where it leads us. So do we have what it takes?

A Preventable Tragedy at Upper Big Branch Mine

Last Monday turned tragic when 29 miners lost their lives in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. But this time mixed with the grief over the tragedy was anger at the owner of the mine, Massey Energy which had been cited with a history of violations.

The Upper Big Branch coal mine, where an explosion Monday killed 25 miners (now 29), has a history of serious violations that at points were five times more extensive than the national average, according to federal records.

The mine in Raleigh County, near Beckley, W.Va., was cited for 458 safety violations last year, with 50 of them listed as unwarrantable failures to comply -- citations reserved under federal mining regulations for instances of willful or gross negligence.

Nationwide, an average of 2 percent of safety violations are unwarrantable failures. Slightly more than 10 percent of Upper Big Branch mine's violations last year were unwarrantable failures.

At the time of Monday's explosion, Upper Big Branch mine was facing more than $150,000 in fines for pending safety violations, after routine scheduled inspections resulted in more than 100 citations three times in a 12-month period.

When a mine gets this many citations as a result of inspections that are actually announced ahead of time, it’s safe to say that its management is thumbing their noses at the inspectors and the agencies they work for. But this time, its management is being represented by the outspoken and controversial chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship.

Whether it is because he is the head of Central Appalachia's largest coal producer, a financier of Republican campaigns whose spending has rewritten constitutional law, the lead organizer of a Friends of America Labor Day rally on the site of a mountaintop mine, or a blunt spoken businessman who has taken on environmentalists -- "greeniacs" and "enviros" as he refers to them -- Mr. Blankenship's statements and actions elicit strong emotions.

Those emotions intensified in the wake of the nation's largest mining disaster since 1984. Critics of Mr. Blankenship cite what they say is Massey's long history of violating safety and environmental rules.

But Blankenship has been controversial not just for his strong anti-regulatory views but also his political influence over West Virginia’s Supreme Court which went as far as Blankenship vacationing with its Chief Justice while the court was hearing Massey's appeal of a $50 million dollar jury verdict against him.

So again we have an ideological battle between those on the political left who feel that stronger and better enforced regulations are necessary to help prevent future tragedies and those on the right who argue that regulations are an evil of big government.

Union miners can at least refuse to work in areas that are unsafe until they are repaired. But most miners today do not have union representation and thus have little leverage against an unscrupulous owner. Especially for those workers who live in remote rural locations in Appalachia, they are forced to make a choice between working in substandard conditions and not working at all.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has been reacting to violations by issuing what are called “withdrawal orders” which means shutting down only the affected parts of the mine until the violations are corrected. This seems reasonable but how effective is this when a mine has shown a continual pattern of violations?

Officials from the department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration issued 54 withdrawal orders to the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009 and seven so far in 2010, according to the documents. Fifty-four of those withdrawal orders “were issued when inspectors found Massey subsidiary Performance Coal exhibited an ‘unwarrantable failure’ to comply with federal health and safety standards,” Ward writes.

There’s a distinction to be made here. Issuing withdrawal orders is different than closing the mine altogether, which would require MSHA to get court approval first. In cases of closure, officials would have to prove that mine operators showed “a pattern of violations” — a step that’s been complicated by the skyrocketing number of appeals being filed by mining companies to protest citations. (After all, how do you prove a pattern based on violations that are in dispute?)

Indeed, MSHA never even tried to cite the Upper Big Branch for such a pattern, despite the fact that more than 1,300 citations were filed against the mine in the last five years.

But here is the worst part.

The company was tied to eight fatal accidents at West Virginia mines in 2001 and was blasted by investigators for failing to prevent a 2006 fire that killed two miners. It was cited by federal regulators for 1,342 safety violations over the past five years, including two the day of the explosion. Davitt McAteer, former head of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration and chief investigator of the earlier Massey accidents, called that "a huge number" and said that Monday's explosion "should not have happened. It was preventable."

So what we have here is the worst of both worlds. Weak regulations that only require wrist slaps for violations in the form of fines (a civil penalty of no more than $220,000) to go with a regulatory agency that is lax in doing its job. For companies such as Massey Energy who had 2009 earnings of over $104 million, these fines (which are often reduced through appeals anyway) along with political contributions to try and influence politicians and judges are no more than the price of doing business.

There are two obvious changes that need to be made — one to address past violations and another one to address future violations and thus save needless loss of lives.

As for the past, we obviously can’t bring the lost miners back. But in the case of Don Massey (and others like him) who may well have committed repeated criminal negligence pursuing profits at the expense of safety, criminal charges (including manslaughter) must be considered when the preventable loss of life has occurred.

As for the future, we need to start enforcing the existing regulations that totally shut down the mines where a repeated pattern of serious violations is found until all of the violations are corrected to the satisfaction of the inspectors. Fines are just a pinprick. Totally shutting down a mine stops the flow of revenue and profits which would really get a company's attention since it would hurt their all-important bottom line.

Everybody agrees that coal mining is inherently a dangerous occupation and that some accidents and deaths are unavoidable. But it stands to reason that if the offending mines were forced to close until the serious safety violations are fixed, the great majority of accidents and fatalities could be avoided. We rightly safeguard passengers from flying in a plane that was found to have serious mechanical issues until it is satisfactorily repaired. Why can’t we do the same to protect our coal miners?

So in the end, it comes down to what we value more — profits or human lives. The only moral decision is to resolutely come down on the side of human life! Regrettably, it has been shown that some, e.g. the mining and health insurance industries, that profits are often indeed more important than human lives. We must do what we can to correct those on the other side whether it is by coercion, legislation, or where appropriate, punishment by jail time.

If we are to truly call ourselves a moral society, we can do no less!

Will the Pope Resign?

It does seem a bit strange on Easter Sunday to speculate on whether the Pope is going to resign. But it is clearly on the minds of the Catholic faithful along with those in the Vatican as evidenced in Pope's Abuse Record Defended Before Easter Mass.

In an extraordinary departure to the ritual of Easter Mass at St. Peter's Square, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a senior Vatican official and Dean of the College of Cardinals, staunchly defended Pope Benedict from what he called ''petty gossip'' and hailed his ''unfailing'' leadership and courage in leading the church's response to the crisis.

Petty gossip? Cases of sexual abuse around the world have become so widespread that there is no longer any doubt that many cases of sexual abuse by priests against children have occurred with the Catholic Church being part of a cover up to protect many of the guilty from prosecution. Perhaps the most well known case here in the US is that of the former archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law.

Cardinal Law came to personify the clergy abuse crisis. He was the first member of the Catholic hierarchy shown to have actively covered up clergy abuse. Immediately after the Boston Globe broke the abuse story in 2002, Law refused to step down. But 11 months later, when priests’ records were released by court order showing that Law took elaborate steps to cover for abusers, he stepped down.

So whatever became of Cardinal Law? Dismissal from the Catholic Church? Hardly.

After leaving Boston, Law was named [by Pope John Paul II] to the prominent position of archpriest of the St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome. He also serves on several Vatican boards and committees and he participated in the 2005 conclave that elected Pope Benedict.

But now there are serious allegations that the Pope himself was part of a cover up as summed up by blogger Andrew Sullivan in his March 16th posting How Is the Pope Different from Cardinal Law?

A priest is discovered to have been actively molesting children. His superior is notified in 1980. One of the things he is told of is the priest's forcing an 11 year old boy to perform oral sex on him. The superior does not contact the police. He approves a transfer of the priest to a different city, where the priest is required to undergo therapy but is also subsequently able to resume his work with access to children. Six years later, the priest is again found guilty of abusing children. This time, he serves a sentence, but he is subsequently allowed to resume work as a priest, with the church authorities hiding his past from future parishes, and is only removed from his position
three days ago.

Joseph Ratzinger was the superior, he reviewed the man's files in 1980, and he was subsequently in charge of reviewing all sex abuse cases as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine Of The Faith in Rome. He was integral to the policy of hushing up as much of this as possible.

Of course, Joseph Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Further damning evidence on Pope Benedict was presented in the 39 minute, 2006 BBC Panorama documentary Sex Crimes and the Vatican which is available for viewing online in this link.

So far, to nobody’s surprise, the Vatican has resorted to a policy of denial and stonewalling with the Pope refusing to directly address the allegations. What complicates things tremendously is that the Pope as a head of state is given diplomatic immunity from prosecution. (Panama’s former dictator Manuel Noriega is an exception but that was justified on the grounds that he was accused of drug trafficking and racketeering.)

Without a practical way to prosecute high ranking Vatican officials, it is easier for them to dismiss these serious charges as “petty gossip” without having to respond to direct questioning. And while previous popes in the history of the church have resigned, the rules of the church clearly state that a pope cannot be forced to resign.

So the question by many including myself is not whether the pope should resign but whether he eventually will resign for the good of his church. While Pope Benedict can probably stay for as along as he wishes, the rapidly eroding support by many of its members will continue to exact its toll. How many churchgoers are going to financially support their church when they see the millions of dollars being paid out to settle lawsuits? How many young people will dedicate their lives to serving in the clergy if they see their church hierarchy as being corrupt? And a church that has its so-called moral leader accused of serious crimes will surely become more and more irrelevant to its members while possibly making some of them go as far as to even question their faith.

Surely, a major housecleaning needs to be done to try and repair the damage to the church. But without replacing the man at the top who controls everything, any efforts at reform will justifiably be looked at as no more than window dressing to preserve the power of its existing bureaucracy. Or in other words, preserving the status quo.

But as the recent sexual scandal around Tiger Woods proved, continued denial and stonewalling will only make matters worse for the church. Without answers from the Vatican, people will assume the worst and come up with their own answers which will further damage the church’s credibility and reputation.

I’m not a betting man. But if I were, I’d bet on the pope eventually resigning for the good of his church. Apparently others are too. Legal online bookmakers like paddypower.com are posting odds on not only the pope’s resignation but also on who will replace him. So far, most of the money is on him resigning causing the odds to be shortened from 12/1 to 3/1. And the current odds as of this posting have fallen to an astounding 6/4!

But lest we forget, this is ultimately not about the pope or even the church. It is about the victims who need our support to get some closure and to move on with their lives as best they can. It is about treating these acts of abuse (and their cover up) not just as a sin, but as a crime that requires prosecution and punishment.

And equally important, the Catholic Church has to put its top priority into protecting its children instead of just protecting its bureaucracy. Hard questions have to be asked about why the priesthood seems to attract so many pedophiles. Again, Andrew Sullivan who is both gay and Catholic offers his interesting perspective on the subject in this posting.

I don't believe…that you can tackle this problem without seeing it as a symptom of a much deeper failure of the church to come to terms with sexuality, sexual orientation and the warping, psychologically distorting impact of compulsory celibacy in the priesthood. If women and married men were allowed to be priests, if homosexuality were regarded in Catholic theology as a healthy and rare difference rather than as a shameful disorder, this atmosphere would end, and these crimes would for the most part disappear and the cloying, closeted power-structure which enabled them to go unpunished for so long would finally crumble. And the church could grow again.

Amen!

Health Care Reform at Last!

For so many of us in the US hoping for health care reform, the last year has been an emotional roller coaster. At times, it looked encouraging. Some of our legislators were promising that not only would a reform bill pass, but it would also have a strong public insurance option to compete with the private insurers who had been relentlessly raising their rates.

But especially when President Obama seemed so ambivalent about the public option, liberals who felt they were already sold out by the president for taking single-payer (Medicare for All) off the table were left to wonder whether what was left in the bill was even worth passing.

And when Republican Scott Brown (a.k.a. "Mr. 41") won the late Senator Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, things looked really grim since the Republicans now had enough senators to block any and all Democratic legislation by use of the filibuster. Sure there was an obscure technical way to bypass the filibuster called reconciliation, but President Obama seemed to many of us to be more of a professorial lecturer than somebody who would be willing to fight for a noble cause.

But his State of the Union speech signaled a change in strategy. Instead of staying in the background and letting Congress fight it out, the president finally took ownership of health care reform. When he finally figured out that the health insurance industry was not part of the solution but indeed the problem, he finally started calling them out on their abusive practices.

Most important of all, when he traveled around the country to rally people around health reform, he finally stressed the human cost our present policies were causing by including real-life stories of individuals who needlessly suffered through illness and financial catastrophe. Better late than never, but I think he should have stressed the moral imperative of health care reform from the beginning!

While the Democrats were stressing the human needs that had to be addressed, the Republicans persisted in talking about little more than the dollars and cents to pay for it, ignoring the human side of the problem.

Now that the bill has been signed, instead of helping to make the bill they disagreed with work as well as possible now that it is a law, the Republicans are now talking about doing what they can to repeal it — which is especially ludicrous with the Democrats now in control of Congress and the White House.

The Republican rhetoric about health care reform being socialized medicine doesn’t look like it’s going to go away any time soon. After all, it’s in their DNA going back to Ronald Reagan Speaking Out Against Socialized Medicine back in 1961 to try and head off a proposed plan to provide seniors with health insurance that we now know as Medicare.

In fairness, nobody knows for sure exactly how well this newly signed law is going to work. Unlike simpler plans such as expanding Medicare to all US citizens, this is a hodgepodge of different plans pieced together as a result of the legislative process requiring many compromises to get enough legislators to vote for it. The part I most worry about is that the ban against rejecting adults for coverage due to pre-existing conditions doesn’t go into effect until 2014. In the meantime, these people will have to resort to joining high-risk pools to get insurance which may or may not be affordable for those who most need it.

But if reform does work, the non-stop hysteria by those opposing health care reform over the last year is going to deeply affect their credibility. Medicare was controversial when it was first enacted. Today, only those on the fringe right would ever advocate taking it away from our seniors.

Conservative commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, had this to say on the day the health care bill was passed in his controversial blog posting Waterloo.

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

I can’t think of anybody more deserving!

The Emergence of the Amateur Professional

Every time the Olympics come around, there is the inevitable call by some to bring the amateurs back to the Olympics. One of the most memorable Olympic events ever was the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" in Lake Placid when the amateur US hockey team beat the Soviet Union team that consisted of full time “amateur” players.

While there are a number of reasons for finally allowing professional players in the Olympics, the one the stands out is that at the top levels it has become almost impossible to truly distinguish between the amateur and professional athlete.

At one time, the definition between an amateur and professional was pretty straightforward. The amateur is not paid for what he or she does, the professional is.

But when so-called “amateur” Olympic athletes from the Eastern Bloc were not paid a salary but had all of their expenses paid for by their governments, true amateurs who had to train in their spare time while holding a job were at a severe competitive disadvantage. So other countries had to resort to subsidizing their athletes through their governments or private donations which made the idea of pure amateurism little more than a joke.

But in many endeavors, the dividing line between professional and amateur is becoming more and more blurred. Let’s take the definition of a professional.

pro·fes·sion·al [prō féshən’l, prō féshnəl, prə féshən’l]

1. member of profession: somebody whose occupation requires extensive education or specialized training

2. somebody doing something as paid job: somebody who is engaged in an occupation as a paid job rather than as a hobby

3. somebody very competent: somebody who shows a high degree of skill or competence

As 3. suggests, while a high degree of skill and competence can be attained through formal education, there is a growing group of people who have also attained these skills and competencies — the amateur professional. (sometimes referred to as a professional amateur)

The concept and terms have been used, since 2004, as a descriptor for an emerging sociological and economic trend of "people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards."

Amateur professionalism occurs in populations that have more leisure time and live longer, allowing the pursuit of hobbies and other non-essential interests at a professional or near-professional knowledge and skill-level.

Am-pro fields today increasingly include astronomy, activism, sports equipment (e.g. in surfing and mountain biking), software engineering, education, and music production and distribution.

An example of professional amateurism on a large, and socially and economically notable, scale is the international open source and free software operating system project GNU/Linux which along with its many spinoffs has been developed by paid professionals at companies such as Red Hat, HP and IBM working generally indistinguishably together with am pro coders, and has become a major competitor to Microsoft Windows.

Charles Leadbeater, a London think tank researcher in this video talk “weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't.”

In Leadbeater’s initial example, he cites how the mountain bike was actually invented by enthusiastic amateurs before the mainstream manufacturers discovered its worth and eventually mass-produced it.

Many of the more recent discoveries in the field of astronomy have been a collaboration of amateurs and professionals. And not long ago, it was difficult for writers to share their thoughts with the world except for established authors and journalists. Now there are self-published authors and bloggers, many of whom have produced quality writing that rivals that of the full-time professionals.

Not surprisingly, there are professionals who take the prejudicial attitude that the term “amateur” necessarily means second rate as I wrote in Writing Is My Labor of Love in response to a local newspaper columnist who wrote:

Writing is a tough gig, and the fact that millions of people choose to do it for free is a mystery to us paid writers.

Leadbeater has also published a paper, The Pro-Am Revolution which explores this subject in more depth and can be accessed in this link.

I feel there are two things we need to take away from all of this.

One is that innovation is the lifeblood of among others, the manufacturing and educational processes. Instead of amateur professionals being cast aside as second-rate, we need to acknowledge and encourage their contributions.

Secondly, although many have lost their professional jobs due to a terrible economy, many of these same people have a great deal to offer through experience and knowledge acquired in other fields that they are passionate about. For those who want to or need to make a career transition, they should be judged on their own merits instead of simply formal education.

I conclude with this from Leadbeater.

Some professionals will seek to defend their endangered monopoly. The more enlightened will understand that knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will combine the know-how of professionals and amateurs to solve complex problems. That is true in astronomy, software development and online games. It should be the path that our health, education and welfare systems follow as well.

We Need To Pass Health Care Reform Now!

OK, I admit it. I don’t have a life. How else can I explain my watching almost all of the 7 hour Health Care Summit last Thursday led by President Obama and attended by Democratic and Republican legislators?

It’s not that I expected all that much. But it was at least worthwhile to see what would happen if the sides engage each other across the table. All too often, we see legislators on both sides share their viewpoints on media outlets that are friendly to their viewpoints. For example, the Democrats appear on liberal friendly MSNBC while the Republicans appear on conservative friendly Fox News.

But to nobody’s surprise, the two sides had irreconcilable differences. The Democrats were worried about insuring as many of the 45 million uninsured as possible. The Republicans were worried about how much covering these additional people would cost.

The Democrats asked whether there was any compromise that would enable President Obama’s proposed reforms to pass with some bipartisan support. The Republicans wanted the process started over from scratch. It is widely accepted in Congress that the more a bill can be delayed, the more likely it is to die. So isn't starting all over just another way to kill health care reform?

Even conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat had this to say about the Republicans in his op-ed piece Six Hours of Hot Air!

(President Obama’s) Republican opponents, meanwhile, were out to disprove the notion that they have no ideas on health care reform. Not so, America, not so! They have two ideas, malpractice reform and interstate purchasing, which they clung to all day like Al Gore with his lockbox. Also, they had several piled-high copies of the lengthy Senate health care bill, and a slogan to go with them: “Let’s start over from a clean sheet of paper.” What would end up on that paper? Why, malpractice reform and interstate purchasing, of course!

But one thing more than anything else signaled that there was no way to bridge the partisan gap. While the Democratic proposal would insure about 30 million of the 45 million uninsured, the Republican version would insure only about 3 million of them! Many bills have been passed by legislators reaching across the aisle and working for a common goal. For example, if both the Democrats and Republicans really wanted to find a way to insure 30 million Americans, there would be hope of getting something accomplished. But when one side wants to insure 30 million and the other side only wants to insure 3 million, there is no common goal to work for which makes compromise just about impossible.

So the only possible way forward for the Democrats is to go it alone and pass legislation through the Senate by using reconciliation which only requires a simple majority instead of 60 to bypass a Republican filibuster. While the Republicans see this issue mainly in terms of dollars and cents, pro-reform people see this as a moral imperative to alleviate the needless suffering and dying by those who do not have health insurance. For each day we delay, more people suffer and die needlessly. We need to think about this when deciding whether to pass health care reform now or just delay it endlessly!

The Greatest Animal Welfare Scandal of our Time

One of the highlights of the year for US dog lovers is the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show held each February at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It is considered by many to be the most prestigious dog show in the world next to Crufts in the UK. I like dogs very much but admittedly not enough to own one. I’m lucky if I can take care of myself let alone a dog!

But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying other people’s dogs on the annual telecast that concluded last Tuesday. I root for my favorite breeds on TV along with the spectators at the show.

But the inquisitive part of me wondered about a number of things surrounding these dog shows. One of those was how the winners were picked. I know that it’s not about whether one breed is better than another. That would be like deciding whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is objectively better. Instead it’s about judging how closely a vanilla ice cream meets its own standard of excellence compared to how closely the chocolate ice cream meets its own standard of excellence. And so it is with dog breeds at these shows.

So at least in theory, every breed has an equal chance of winning. But the history of the show has examples of breeds that have been frequent winners along with many breeds than have never won despite being part of the show for over a century. What’s with that?

So a judge of a group of different breeds literally has to remember every detail of the extensively detailed breed standards of each of a couple dozen dogs he or she has to judge to be able to pick a winner. Can they really do that?

Even more incredible is the best of breed judging which is not normally shown on the telecasts but you can check out the Golden Retriever judging in this video link. Here the judge has to pick a winner from a group of forty dogs who practically look like clones of one another. If the dogs were separated from their handlers and put into a group, one can’t help but wonder how many of the handlers would be able to pick out their own dog?

But most important is the issue of why so many of those dogs within a breed look like clones of one another. The answer is that the dogs are bred to all have the same physical attributes as those in the published standard for that breed. Whichever dog comes closest to that standard is normally declared the winner. But the big problem with this is that inbreeding is often used to set the physical characteristics of the dogs to be able to compete in these shows. And especially when overdone, the health of many of these breeds has been severely compromised.

A 2008 BBC investigative documentary, Pedigree Dogs Exposed is an emotionally gripping story of what they call “the greatest animal welfare scandal of our time”.

The one hour video can be viewed online by opening this link.

The dogs are falling apart. And the number of genetic problems are increasing at a frightening pace.

We are in effect, breeding them to death.

People are carrying out breeding which would be first of all entirely illegal in humans and secondly is absolutely insane from the point of view of the health of the animals. In some breeds they are paying a terrible price in genetic disease.

One of the breeds examined is the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel which was estimated to have as much as one third of the breed affected by syringomyelia, which occurs as a result of the skull being too small for the brain which can result in agonizing pain for the dog.

In addtion, they have an incidence of heart disease about 20-25 times as much as other breeds.

By the time they are 5, half of all Cavaliers will have a heart murmur…By the time they are 10 or 11, almost all Cavailiers will have a heart murmur of some description.

The excellent Animal Planet series, Dogs 101 describes the mitral heart disease of this breed in some detail but doesn’t mention anything about syringomyelia.

And the documentary goes into how many other breeds are suffering similar fates.

Much of the blame for all of this is given to the existence of dog shows. In addtion to breeding more for appearance (which wins dog shows) than health concerns, a number of dog show winners with genetic health problems have been known to produce many offspring because of the lucrative amount of money that champions can bring in breeding fees.

There is nothing wrong per se with breeding purebred dogs for physical traits. This preserves the identity of each of the breeds. The problem is when the health and vitality of the breeds are neglected in favor of physical standards that win dog shows.

But in fairness, the blame must also go to those who mass produce puppies not for the love of the breed but instead to satisfy the demand for some of the most popular breeds.

Most likely, breed standards used in dog shows will have to be relaxed somewhat to allow more healthy dogs to enhance the genetic pool. And health standards at dog shows have to be enforced to not allow dogs who clearly have health problems to compete.

All it takes is enough people who truly care about the welfare of these animals to speak out and do something!