Big Brother may be spying on your bus ride

Photo via Wired.

Is Wired promoting a conspiracy theory mindset, or should there be a legitimate concern? Related to that, is it being too alarmist (as in stereotypical media) about how it raises such concern?

Given that at least some of the money is from DHS, first, that's one reason to be legitimately concerned. Second, having the surveillance hyper-visible is often something deliberate, whether just to get people more mannerly, or to deliberately remind them of Big Brother, or to even encourage snooping.

Third, remember the school district that was remotely viewing students via laptop cams? True, that was not the "public square" and this is; nonetheless, it does raise some parallels.

As for the ideas raised under my "second" point, I raised the issue of the Overton window when a friend posted this on Facebook, before I shared it. And I was accused of pop-sociology bullshit.

Sorry, but I disagree. In matters of propaganda and similar, the government has, in WWI, WWII, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror shows a repeated desire to shift the window on what it wants the public to consider as legitimate surveillance, whether the legitimacy factor is one of legality or one of ethics. In the War on Terror, let's not forget waterboarding, warrantless wiretaps, drone warfare with kill lists and more. And, again, let's not forget that on all but the first, Obama has pushed that window further than Bush.

And, per "public square" arguments that say the government has a right to do this, whether Big Brother is the government (in this case) or Big Business, "legal" does not equal "ethical."  Per Wired, the fact that in one case, a local government had constitutional worries show that this isn't being overhyped.

Gay? It’s in the epigenetics as well as the genes — no #gaygene, no #popevpsych

This new research and meta-research, summarized here, indicating that tendencies toward being gay or lesbian are a matter of epigenetics more than genetics in general, and ruling out the idea of a “gay gene,” makes a lot of sense to me.

The idea that it has at least a fair amount to do with epigenetic issues in the womb makes HUGE sense to me, as statistical studies show consecutive male births (no intervening females) increase the likelihood of each successive male being gay:

Here’s the key info:

Writing in The Quarterly Review of Biology, researchers William Rice, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Urban Friberg, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, believe that homosexuality can be explained by the presence of epi-marks — temporary switches that control how our genes are expressed during gestation and after we're born.

Specifically, the researchers discovered sex-specific epi-marks which, unlike most genetic switches, get passed down from father to daughter or mother to son. Most epi-marks don't normally pass between generations and are essentially "erased." Rice and Friberg say this explains why homosexuality appears to run in families, yet has no real genetic underpinning.

Epigenetic mechanisms can be seen as an added layer of information that clings to our DNA. Epi-marks regulate the expression of genes according to the strength of external cues. Genes are basically the instruction book, while epi-marks direct how those instructions get carried out. For example, they can determine when, where, and how much of a gene gets expressed.

Moreover, epi-marks are usually produced from scratch with each generation — but new evidence is showing that they can sometimes carryover from parent to child. It's this phenomenon that gives the impression of having shared genes with relatives.

That said, at the same time, the io9 story looks like a bit of oversell, past the headline. I wouldn't go so far as to say homosexuality is not genetic; I would certainly say it's not solely genetic, and might say it's not primarily genetic.

And, just because you rule in epigenetic influences, you can’t rule out genetic ones by fiat.

At the same time, this theory is hugely explanatory for why a trait that reduces evolutionary fitness continues to perpetuate, too.

And, it also relates to other issues, such as gender identity problems.

Epigenetics in general also undercuts the ideas of Pop Evolutionary Psychology, especially its vaunted Enivironment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.

That’s because epigenetic influences are themselves subject to outside environmental influences. And, as the io9 story notes, and as we’ve seen in other issues like obesity, epigenetic influences can be passed on from generation to generation.

So between heredity of nongenetic factors that are environmentally determined, and such factors rapidly shifting, the EEA is all wet, again.

AA CEO living in dream world

American Airlines CEO Thomas Horton must be smoking the good stuff. He says he and his management team deserve to continue running the show after a likely merger with US Airways. (I will give him reality check credit for admitting a takeover is likely, even if he wants to call it a "merger.")

Reality? American's on-time performance, customer service and safety wee all sinking to new lows even before it entered Chapter 11.

The other reality is that, even if American is improving, it's still the lesser player in any deal.

And, Horton was CFO since 2006, until last year. If he's making all these alleged major changes to American now, was he asleep at the wheel for five years before that? The high labor costs (or "high," if you will) maybe couldn't be fully addressed until recently, but other issues?

A #reality-community second-term plea for #Obamiacs (updated)

Updated, Dec. 10: Given that the Washington rumor mill, as reported here by Joan Walsh, says Obama's willing to raise the Medicare eligibility age as part of avoiding the fiscal cliff, how much will diehard Obamiacs continue to defend him? 

There are so many things wrong with raising the eligibility age that I still can’t believe it’s under consideration. That’s not doubting Klein; it’s just a failure on my part to imagine that data-driven leaders — Republican or Democrat — would propose it. It doesn’t save money; it’s a shell game that just pushes costs around. While it’s possible that lower-income 65 and 66 year olds would be eligible for Obamacare, that means we’d be subsidizing them anyway. Besides there’s no guarantee such subsidies will exist: Republican governors are refusing to expand Medicaid or create the insurance exchanges to make it possible. Even Obama’s new GOP BFF, Chris Christie, says he won’t do it in the blue state of New Jersey. Remember, too, that Obamacare works through the private insurance industry, which has at least five times the administrative costs of Medicare. 

That's the problem in a nutshell. Lower-income seniors at the mercy of insurers (while they/we can't be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, age as a general factor is a different story). 

Frankly, I think Walsh is spot on ... on a hint she has near the end of the column — this could be the opening move to a discussion of privatizing Medicare entirely, even though she thinks this is just a trial balloon.

That said, Joan, what if the GOP says, "OK, we love it!" Then, will the public think it's now his fault, not the GOP's, if we go over an alleged fiscal cliff? There's other signs, such as his talk about how much Latinos will lose, and making such presentations to Latino groups, that Obama may be, if not quite blinking yet, getting kind of twitchy.

Also, "shock me" that Jon Chait thinks this is a good idea. He's got a track record as a neoliberal fellator of Obama. Further "shock me" that he describes it as "a bone to throw the right," rather than "throwing poorer senior citizens under the bus."

The reality? The Washington Post, of all "insiders," actually has a good answer to Lindsay Graham (and Chait, and Obama). While Medicare is in worse shape than Social Security, it's not going bankrupt now, or even 20 years from now. And, even then, only the hospital bills portion of Medicare faces any near-term problems.

Indeed, the Medicare Part A fund from its inception has been on the brink of going “bankrupt.” The Congressional Research Service, in a report titled “Medicare: History of Insolvency Projections,” shows that in 1970 it was due to go “bankrupt” in 1972.

So, these worries have been around for decades. Or, these "worries."

And now, with Obama looking to a second term, and with an ongoing Democratic majority in the Senate, but less than 60 votes, and a GOP majority remaining in the House, talk is turning to what Dear Leader plans for a second-term agenda, and how likely it is to succeed, beyond, but including, "fiscal cliff" negotations.

In light of his first-term agenda, and how much he did or did not get past Congress, of course, he struggled with GOP obstructionism.

However, while that’s the greater part of the tale, it’s not all of it.

He also struggled with himself, including an unrealistic, arguably even self-delusional, belief in himself and the magical, mystical, messianic (doorknob, I love alliteration) healing powers of himself, his persona, and his voice.

Well, not only was the GOP not going to listen, it made that clear early on.

But, again, that’s not all the tale, just the majority of it.

The fact is, that in general, and specifically on the magical, mystical, messianic healing powers of himself, his persona, and his voice, Barack Obama simply is not all that he or true-blue Obamiac disciples crack him(self) up to be. Period. End of story.

So, I’d like at least a few Obamiac Democrats to admit that at least part of his problems with the GOP in the last four years have been self-inflicted due to the combination of A: Lacking testicles and/or backbone and B: Believing too much in the power of his own allegedly magical voice. Bonus points for admitting nothing major is likely to change on his side as well as on the GOP side in the next four years. C'mon, you science-based/reality-community Obamiacs, time for you, too, to put your money or your Facebook postings where your beliefs are.

Dear Leader isn’t likely to change his second-term stripes. What about you?

Oh, and while you’re at it, would you please have a small bit of admission that he benefited, ironically considering who coined the phrase, from the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in following George W. Bush?

And another Rick Perry budget cut backfires

Cut $73 million from Texas state family planning , to freeze out Planned Parenthood? Sure, no problem.

Watch poor women giving birth to more than 20,000 more babies than they planned, likely to cost the state as much as $200 million more than that over the next budget cycle? Austin, we have a problem.

Once again, wingnut lies about caring about budgets are exposed for the cold reality that they are. Ideology, at the state as well as federal level, wins out. Rick Perry's fine busting the budget either to leave poor women out in the cold or give rich business friends crony capitalism handouts.

The complicated Mr. Lincoln and black colonization

I’ve seen the new Lincoln movie twice, recommended it as a must-see, and stand by that. At the same time, after hearing Tony Kushner on NPR, I came to think that perhaps he (and Steven Spielberg) had put Abraham Lincoln on too much of a pedestal, and went on in a second blog post to further develop that idea. Per Eric Foner, I thought further that, while the movie might not be inaccurate, it is incomplete.

I want to background this somewhat.

First, I think Lincoln was the first modern president in a way that Jackson was not, namely, in the complexity, at least relatively speaking, of problems with which he had to deal. By this reckoning, the next modern president was Teddy Roosevelt.

So, it might be possible to see a president as great in some areas but still “iffy” in others. A good parallel to Lincoln might be FDR, and specifically on the issue of race relations. Did Roosevelt feel he had to go slow on how much he extended the New Deal to blacks because he felt the country as a whole, and not just Southern senators, weren’t ready to move faster, or did he have some racial “issues”?

That, then, ties back to Lincoln.

On some book reviews and other things, I’ve used the word “racialist” to note a person who is not a full-blown racialist, but who has more than just a touch of bigotry, and is willing to engage in pseudo-realistic explanatory devices to try to justify it.

Was Lincoln, by today’s standards, a racialist even in the 1850s? I’d argue yes. Was he still that way by his death? No. He had evolved that much.

Yet, and contra Foner’s comments in my second blog link, Lincoln may well have evolved little on the issue of wanting to colonize black Americans. He financially supported (he as president, not he as individual) a small colonization site in Haiti until 1864, and publicly, appears even after that to never have permanently repudiated the idea before an all-white audience.

Why?

A charitable but non-hagiographic argument is that he believed what he said in 1858, that the black and white races would simply find it too painful to live side by side.

But, if that’s true, how could he square that with his acceptance of Frederick Douglass’ statement that his ancestors had been in the US longer than Lincoln’s?

It is probably the biggest puzzler for me of just where we should rank Lincoln’s nobility and ideals.

Per one link in the second blog post of mine, Lincoln allegedly still discussed colonization with Ben Butler in April 1865, even after he had started talking about black voting rights.

I believe he would have continued to evolve, in a second term. However, I believe he may well have tried again to float colonization schemes, and that he might have been paternalistic about some aspects of Reconstruction.

In any case, perhaps Churchill’s famous quote about Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” ultimately applies to where Lincoln was at, both personally and professionally, on race relations as of April 14, 1865.

At the same time, it's worth noting, that largely for the same reasons Lincoln favored it, many American blacks, whether free blacks of the North or just-freed slaves, also favored colonization. In fact, pre-Emancipation Proclamation, they included Douglass.