Science Friday

My conservative friends don't think there's anything to be concerned about.  My liberal friends are pretty green on such issues.  Disagreements aren't over the science, perhaps, so much as opinions on the degree of impact and risk.  It would all be entertaining discussion, I suppose, if the questions weren't about the fate of the world and life on it.  :)

If we find ourselves agreeing with politicians on environmental subjects, there's little likelihood of scientific objectivity.  If we have time to have an opinion, perhaps we might take the time to review the issues for ourselves.

(There's only 3 paragraphs in the graphic above.  Without looking, remember what's there?)

Inspired by NPR's 'Science Friday' show, obviously.

Today's crookedest bank? Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees for unethical sales practices that they had been pressed into using by management.

Before the truth became public, many whistleblowers were bullied, threatened, or quickly fired, an illegal action by the corporation, of course.

Corporate practice was to press sales personnel to add billable services to customer accounts either by pressuring the customer to agree or by adding the services without the customer's request or consent.

About two million such fraudulent accounts were created without the customer's consent.  Wells Fargo has paid $185 million in fines and penalties for their actions.  The CEO testified before Congress on the integrity of their corporation and the validity of the whistleblower program.  He didn't have any memory of the several whistleblower reports that were sent to him by personnel who were quickly fired for spurious reasons.  Many in senior management were informed, but perhaps having directed the unethical practices themselves, they took no action other than to squelch the complaints.  No senior management were removed.

As has been said, Wells Fargo has a history
of illegal activities.  

So where is the problem?  Is it unrestrained capitalism?  Is it lack of regulatory oversight?  Is it greed and immoral pursuit of wealth?  Wells Fargo and similarly corrupt corporations should perhaps be broken down and de-globalized.  They should have their executives removed, penalized, and decertified.  Is anything less severe likely to clean up the crooked practices in the financial industry of which this is just one?

____________________________________________

Senator Bernie Sanders, “Let’s be clear, the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” 

“There is no better example than the recently-exposed illegal behavior at Wells Fargo.”

During his testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee, CEO John Stumpf admitted that he and other senior executives were made aware of the account-opening scheme in 2013.

Sanders says the Wells Fargo scandal is "not an aberration," laying out the bank's history of abusing its customers and getting slapped with multiple fines.

Bernie Sanders 

@SenSanders

How many people at Wells Fargo are going to jail? Zero. But if you smoke marijuana in this country, you get a criminal record.

9:56 AM - 20 Sep 2016

Update March 1, 2017 -- Wells had estimated that up to 2 million customers may have had accounts opened in their names without authorization. As part of an expanded review of affected customers, Wells said in its annual 10-K filing that there could be "an increase in the identified number of potentially impacted customers."
,
416 Retweets

Update April 3, 2017 -- Wells Fargo Whistle-Blower Wins $5.4 Million Lawsuit and Gets His Job Back17,825 likes

Great insight

You stumble across this profound article; it crosses your mind that it would be worth studying.  As you're stewing on the usefulness of what's there, ding ... there's an event on FB that needs your attention, and another ... and in a moment, it's all lost.

We're exposed to more information in a day than our grandparents saw in a month or more.  It's not just information.  It's drivel, propaganda, opinion, rhetoric, and advertising ... and perhaps some small quantity of useful information.  In a world of intense assault by media, how do we retain our identity, our focus, and a way forward?  

We can be defined by the issues that swirl around us, distracted over and over by the stimulus that pops up on social and news media.  A few weeks of that, and our awareness and priorities shift; true?  Yes.  And important things can drift into the background.

A deliberate intellect, a deliberate direction and focus can be pursued, but the battle is fierce these days.  Just having time for a little self-awareness and objectivity is difficult.  

Today more than ever, we need time outside the box; way outside.  :)  
(as in 'outside the computer, outside the television, outside the mobile device, and perhaps outside the house')

"If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver."

A new start!  You and your family are relocating; pack and go!

A new neighborhood, new schools, new people and culture ... okay, not new, just different, but it's all new to you and your family.  

It's a whirlwind for the first months as the job becomes routine, as the kids settle in, and as the details of life fall into place; house, bills, food, transportation, school work, friends, and language. There's a bit of tension, perhaps because you're not a perfect fit yet.

Food is expensive; that and housing consume most of your income.  You've got a job, but it doesn't pay well yet.  It's a struggle to keep the growing kids clothed and equipped for school and life.

Two jobs now, plus mom has to work too.  The only opportunity she's found so far is doing maid services in the households of the wealthier folks several blocks away.  She walks to and from. There's a railroad track and some woods she has to cross on the way.  Her jobs don't pay well, but they let her take home leftovers and old clothing they don't want.

The school environment is difficult for the kids.  They don't fit in, and that's an impediment to learning, it turns out.  There's little help from mom and dad that makes a difference, and anyway, they're not available much because of working all the time and odd hours.

The neighborhood is kind of harsh.  There are drug dealers, and there are gangs of bullies.  It's not really safe. You know people that have died here.  There are a lot of single moms; fathers have a hard time because no matter how hard they try, they can't really provide well for their families or find a way ahead.

Fifty years later, your children and grandchildren are grown.  Some have risen out of their simple beginnings, but not all.  The doors of opportunity aren't really open yet.  As for you, you're old now.  Your little house is mostly paid for, and you've got a social security check. You can still work; you've got a little job at minimum wage for a few hours a week.  Technically, you're below the poverty line, but you think you can make it okay for awhile.

Your great-grandson recounts his own story...
We live in the city; it's an okay neighborhood.  Dad died here before I was born.  Mom takes care of us, but she works a lot so my big sister pretty much runs the household.  School is hard, and I've missed a lot of days because I've been sick, not sure what kind.  I get breakfast if I go to school, so I'd really rather go.  I think my sister is doing some kind of drugs her boyfriend gave her.  She doesn't help me with my homework like she used to.  I want to be a pilot, but I don't know if my grades will be good enough.
______________________________________________________________________

Much has changed since 1970, but too much remains the same.  Persistent poverty is a particular concern.  Our social intent is not a patriarchal government that takes care of everybody.  Our intent is to make a place for everyone and lend a hand where it's needed.  Justice, fairness, freedom from oppression and abuse, wide-open opportunity ...  how are we doing?

In a multi-year inquiry into inner-city demographics of school children, we find that:

• most of the children have seen street violence and are familiar with gang and drug cultures, 
• most know of someone who has died violently in their neighborhood, 
• many or most have no father in their lives, 
• many have mothers who are occasional prostitutes for lack of other income, and 
• many will not finish secondary school or go on to higher education.

Why might that be true?

____________________________________________________________________

Making a place for everyone is taking longer than anyone expected.  Racial segregation and difficulties with inequality and discrimination remain a problem in America.

"Despite increased racial and ethnic diversity, American neighborhoods continue to be segregated and some of the progress made toward integration since 1980 has come to a halt this decade, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data released Tuesday."  "This is a surprising result," said Brown University sociology professor John Logan, who analyzed the Census numbers. "At worst, it was expected that there would be continued slow progress."

Among our most segregated cities, Chicago's black-white dissimilarity score is 75.9, according to the 2010 Census data. A score above 60 on the dissimilarity index is considered very high segregation.  
See 21 Maps of Highly Segregated Cities in America. The list includes Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, Columbus, Pittsburg, Memphis, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami, New York, ....

________________________________

Chicago west side, race riots 1968

When 10-year-old Lafayette Rivers described his hopes in Alex Kotlowitz’ award-winning book, There Are No Children Here, he began, “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver.” 

"If I grow up ...."

Chicago west side, narcotics arrests 2013-14

He lived in a public housing complex on Chicago's west side.

Chicago west side, protests and lawsuits 2015.
One complainant, a mother whose son was killed
shielding a friend on a city bus when a
gang member boarded and opened
fire on a rival group.

Children in more privileged neighborhoods often ponder what they will do when they grow up, but not if they will grow up. The fact that place and race exert such a profound impact on one’s future, or whether there even will be a future, violates every national ethic of equality and justice.  It is brutal.  

__________________________________________________________

Like most Americans, I'm a descendent of immigrants.  My great-grandfather David was born in Ely, England, in 1868.  He and his wife came to settle in Nebraska as farmers.  They had little and lived simply.  Their descendents are artists and writers, college professors and production workers, teachers, farmers, and church builders, and me.  It worked out well enough for us, but we may have had an advantage.  We were white.  Does that make a difference?  Anything odd or out of balance about us?

"I could see that the Wasichus [whites] did not care for each other the way our people did .... They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. ... This could not be better than the old ways of my people."  Nicholas Black Elk, 1863-1950, fought at Wounded Knee, was well integrated into the emerging American lifestyle, traveled to England and Europe, converted to Catholicism and raised his children in the church. He offers an interesting perspective on white culture.

You have to wonder how much there is that we don't yet understand.  For better or worse, we're still changing.  Got a plan?

Thieves, small and big

Long ago a philosopher observed, "it is in the nature of man to hang the small thieves and to elect the big ones to public office."

If we go with the content offered by candidates, asking a citizen to vote thoughtfully this fall is like asking a physicist to do herpetology.  One, it's mostly irrelevant, and two, the choices are lizards.

The Issues:  Important issues are complex and changing.  For example:

• Persistent poverty, economic inequality and immobility, explosive growth for the top 10% and stagnation for the bottom 90% for the last forty years.  Today, 20%+ of our children live in poverty, and it's been that way for a long time, but it doesn't have to be.
• Both liberals and conservatives know that terminating a pregnancy ends a child's life.  Improvements in in-utero observation and fetal monitoring have shown the well-developed child at mid-term and forced the recognition of deliberately ending that life.  Now we're stuck with having made it legal to end a child's life for the convenience of the mother among other perhaps more supportable and less selfish reasons.
• The supreme court is on the cusp of being redefined or permanently ensconced.  Conservative or liberal, it's on the ballot for us to decide.
• The economy is changing faster than economists can monitor and manage.  We crashed the world economy with the Great Recession, and we haven't quite done anything to ensure it doesn't happen again.  Banks bigger than countries got bailed out, fines were charged and paid to governments, and the citizenry bore the losses.  It came out of your pocket and mine and went into the pocket of the wealthiest 1%, and we didn't get so much as an apology or any reason to believe it's over.
• Social and political unrest are spreading around the world, in part at least because of the political and economic actions of western nations.  Violent extremism continues on the rise, but the root causes are unaddressed.  We see the top level response of shooting back at the bad guys as though they came up with their position for no reason.  We see little support for understanding and negotiation.
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is a major concern as part of our international relations with other economies.  The agreement is over 5,000 pages long and tediously complex.  Specific criticisms include detrimental impact on Japanese agriculture to the point of ending the national industry.  Unable to compete with foreign suppliers, farmers worry that they'll be put out of business.  It happened to Mexico as more than a million farms were closed by competition with North American corn producers. The list of specific concerns is long.
• ... and many more.

Trickle-down didn't.  Welfare wasn't.  Fanny and Freddie failed.  More than One Child got Left Behind; in fact, except for the children of the wealthy, most suffered loss.  The cheerleader who said, "WE CAN," couldn't, and now, neither can the rest of us.  Government sanctioned fiscal policy and partisan squabbling over the national debt crisis have tanked the economy twice in recent years while the financial sector (now the nation's largest industry) extracts hundreds of billions out of the economy.

Occupy Wall Street is just another round of citizens asking hard questions a bit more emphatically.  

There are no credible answers coming from either party, there are no reasonable responses to the fragile state of the global economy which their best efforts have given us, and there are no particularly believable leaders moving toward reasonable change.

Sound familiar?  Almost biblical?  I suspect that some (not all) of our current leaders are doing their best amidst the failures to serve the American people, yet their efforts seem to be more of the same.  The Republican alternative offers no more credible solution to our functional failures than does this administration.

The gap between rich and poor continues to widen, and the trend is now visible in the global marketplace.  Countries are in many cases prospering, but their increases are going exclusively to the wealthy few.  The trend includes the capitalist democracies.

The choices:  the candidates from among whom we must choose our leadership leave a lot to be desired.  They both suck, at least according to each other.  Each accuses the other of various disqualifying attributes, and they're perhaps mostly right.  As Douglas Adams pointed out, we must choose from among the lizards.  We all hate the lizards (as we should because they're despicable of course), but that's the choice we're given, and if we don't vote, the wrong lizard will get elected.

We're flawed not so much in intent, perhaps, as in structure.

To be fair, both sides have attempted good initiatives they hoped would serve well.  For example, social aid programs have in fact addressed some immediate problems and many folks in need were given a hand up out of poverty. The same programs (since more is better) have gone on to do more harm than anyone imagined was possible.

Personally, grass-roots-driven change appeals to me.  Not that it's likely to make the problems go away, of course, but if we choose, then we'll own the problems and perhaps be a bit more thoughtful about the process.

So, is it time to think about re-engaging our political process personally?  Kinda looks that way, doesn't it.  Heard anything meaningful from your representatives in Congress lately?  It's been strangely quiet there since the debt crisis screw up, if you ask me.

"Suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress ...  but I repeat myself."

~ from a letter fragment, 1891, Mark Twain 

They're not idiots, of course.  Arrogant, perhaps, 
hubristic, out of touch, and inappropriately 
influenced by money.
And polarized!

It's a little frightening, considering the government's attitude toward such, to discover that I am perhaps more of a dissident than a party acquiescent.  Not interested in being tasered or maced, but definitely had enough of disinformation (lies), market mismanagement (theft),  and patchwork solutions (rule by doodoohead fiat).

Lizards politicians play for position,

coming out on top is the intent.

Patriots understand the goal

is the well-being of those

whom they serve.
Any overlap between the two
is purely coincidental.

If you're a Republican because you think they're the conservative bunch, it's not really that simple anymore.  You'll perhaps want a better reason.

If you're a Democrat because you think they're the liberal, human rights oriented, environmentally sensitive bunch, they're not so easily defined now. You'll perhaps want to reexamine that position.

Simple debates on issues are perhaps informative, but promises are often shelved after the race.  What the parties actually do when they're in power is more revealing.  Both groups are more complex than their simple campaign slogans suggest.  Perhaps there's a different reality behind that façade.  

One candidate inadvertently admitted to having “both a public and a private position” on Wall Street reform ...

The historic differentiations in the two-party system have less effect on their performance in office than we might expect.  Many, perhaps most issues have succumbed to power plays and influence purchase.

What makes me think I'm a conservative? Or a liberal?

How would I know?

My thoughtful friends provide an energetic discourse, and the surprise that frequently emerges -- they agree. Not on the candidates, perhaps, but on the issues. The common ground for both:

• Concern about incautious change  
• Concern about injustice (discrimination, abuse, oppression) 
• Support for national values -- life, liberty, equality, ... 
• Sanctity of life and the defense of the weak, or so we all say 
• Concern for children, their safety and health, and their future 
• Responsible and accountable government and politicians 

Right and left even agree on money. I've heard it expressed dozens of ways by both sides, and it's usually as a fear of losing something I don't yet have. On the right, "my increasing possessions might not continue increasing so quickly if we make things more equal." On the left, "you can help those poor people if you take from those rich people."  The perhaps common ground, don't take from me ....

The Great Divide emerges when we get to the details.

• Both right and left understand that poverty is not a choice. 
• While the left supports assisting those in need, they're unwilling to wait for them to catch up. 
• The right are content to leave them behind with nothing, expecting things to sort themselves out. 
• On both sides, many are left behind more or less permanently.
• Both right and left know that terminating a pregnancy ends the life of a child. 
• While the right opposes termination, they decline to assist the survivors. 
• The left supports the termination as a choice mommies should get to make for any reason. 
• On both sides, the baby suffers for the rest of its life.
• Both sides share a worldview that's only true for perhaps the wealthiest of the world's people, and neither understands who is responsible or why it works that way.   The great divide is perhaps in front of us with the rest of the world on the other side.

Liberal, conservative, both, neither, ...?

What are the troubling issues humanity faces today?

• Government, purchased regulation, and rule by an elite?
• Marketplace abuse and extractive economics?
• Corporations, especially banks, now larger than countries? 
• Rule by economic success rather than ethical success or human benefit ...
• Us vs. them? 

Although it is somewhat natural to do, separating ourselves from others, cutting them off, angrily polarized ... that's below the bottom rung of morality, wishing another ill, ethically equal to bullying, abuse, and killing.

“You have heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment. But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.  ... Go and be reconciled .... Then come and offer your gift to God."

So why?  Is there something like that going on in our culture?

Note:  Foundational issues of conservatism and liberalism vary among us without precise definition.  Politicians and the media are having a ball with the emotionally charged but ill-defined verbiage.  This is perhaps the most confused run-up to a presidential election I've seen in my lifetime.

The left and right are more extreme than ever, moderates are missing from the political venue, and progress is extraordinarily difficult.  We're a polarized nation, and the price is high.

Did we each choose to become so polarized, so divided?  Or is it being done to us, and we've fallen for it.


And, there's little left of the original meaning of the words conservative and liberal.
😏

The refugee crisis is worldwide.  A UN report concludes that countries 
hosting refugees received “almost no meaningful international support.” 

The UN’s humanitarian appeal to cover the costs of caring for refugees

received less than a quarter of the necessary funds.

A Syrian child is lifted over border fences near the Turkish border crossing
at Akcakale in Sanliurfa province. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Update: 06/2018 -- The nation is further divided.  Truth has become ideological, and citizens are inured to lies and false accusations.  We've been given a fabricated threat of an outgroup described as murderers, terrorists, and rapists. They used to be just refugees.  We've become accustomed to ethnic defamation, and now cruel abuse of children.  ... not what I would consider progress.