To my dear readers, I'm slowly moving to Steemit

I know I haven't been posting much lately. I'm a father and I have one kid who likes to stay up late to read books and play chess. I have another that wakes up at the crack of dawn to find me in the basement, writing. I'm a father and being a father comes first, before this blog and before anything else. When they're awake and I'm not at my day job, I'm a dad first.

So I haven't had much time to read, to research articles and to write them. I've been looking for inspiration to write about and I can find it, but it's tempered by at least one little kid who wants to be with Daddy. Day and night. 

Now there is the realization that I'm obsolete and that everything I do everyday is so that they can have a better life than I have had. Fathers Day just passed. I spent the day working at my job with a rotating shift. No one, other than my Mom, sent me any kind of message wishing me a nice day.

While I do find time for subjects of interest, beyond my fascinating kids, writing is it. I write to live and I do what I can to make sure I find time to write ten things I'm grateful for every day. I write a morning page everyday (from The Artists Way) and often, ideas for my articles spring for there. I write more than a million characters to that morning page every year. I've been writing a morning page since 2008. That means I now have more than 9 million characters just for that alone.

I've learned a few things about promotion on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I'm still not very good at it, and for awhile there, I got 78k pageviews in one month. It was nice, but it wasn't very profitable. My wife would surely like to see me make good money at it. But I still have a day job and am looking for a way to transition from that to being a well paid freelance writer. I have a feeling my days are numbered in IT just because of institutional age discrimination. I guess you could say that I'm an old fart in the realm of IT.

I'm a stickler for details, I probably don't do as much volume as they would like me to do. I like to document everything so that I can say, "I did that" when the procedure calls for me to do it. But I'm dedicated and I do find some enjoyment in my day job. I get to work with command line *NIX. I get to run that command line logic I've come to love in *NIX. I'm perpetually fascinated with the way the command relates to the output.

And so it is that I write. I love watching the thoughts come to the fore, and the characters flow onto the screen. I love engineering a sentence just so. To make it say exactly what I want it to say. I love making a point. I love spreading the ideals of peace that are so dear to me now.

For now I have come to a place where peace to me is the understanding that we are all doing the best we can. That personal criticism is to be left for those who are more qualified. I'm learning to discern that in politics, I criticize the idea, not the person. I want ideas that work for everyone, or at least, most of us, rather than a minority interest.

I have come to a place where I know that punishment teaches no skills. I've seen it all the time in social media. People bashing each other, saying hurtful things and thinking that somehow, that is "going to teach them a lesson". All that name calling really does is belie the strength of one's position in a debate. The words that people write are a window to their mind their thoughts. When I see someone trashing another, I see how that person might talk to himself.

When I see one person call another a really nasty pejorative, I think, "Oh, is that how you talk to yourself?" I see someone lost in the world of reward and punishment. The idea is that if we want to reinforce good behavior, we reward it. If we went less bad behavior, we punish it. The problem with this is that humans are far more complex than that.

Humans will take action that they believe to right, without regard to reward or punishment. They will work towards a goal that they have in mind without reward. They will give of themselves without regard to themselves, in order to make someone else better, or give them a better life. The same line of reasoning and experience shows that people will continue behaving badly no matter how awful the punishment may be. Perhaps that is because people who are punished for challenging behavior do not have compassion for themselves, and therefore believe that they "deserve" to be punished.

Regardless of reward and punishment, behavior will not improve unless the skills required to net the reward or curb the unwanted behavior are taught. This is what matters to me, more than anything right now. I've been thinking and writing and researching this for more than a year now, and I just don't see any other way that it could be. If humans want world peace, then teaching the skills to achieve that peace should be paramount.

So let me tell you why I will be slowly moving to Steemit. Steemit is the first social media and blogging site I've seen that takes social media and blogging activity and turns it into cash. Steemit converts every like, every comment, every story, into digital currency called Steem Dollars and Steem Power. Both of these can eventually converted into real money that we use every day to buy things. Steem Dollars are similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum. They are alternative mediums of exchange that are governed by the laws of mathematics, not men.

I have never put a single cent into Steemit. But I have grown my account from nothing to about $140 depending on exchange rates, and that is not with a great deal of effort. That is far more than I have earned with Google. I have squat to show for Twitter and Facebook. There are other sites like Steemit, but for now, I'm going to be there.

Going forward, when I write a new article, I will write it on Steemit and promote it on Google+, Twitter and Facebook. My blog will still be here and I'll post from there on a periodic basis to keep it alive and prevent it from being deleted. But my most current writing will be on Steemit.

Some of you may be asking, "Wait. What about Patreon?" Patreon is nice, but it just seems too complicated for me. I rather like the idea of converting social media action into digital currency that can later be used to buy things. It seems like a natural evolution of social media.

You can find my blog on Steemit here:

https://steemit.com/@digitalfirehose

You'll find familiar articles there as I've been copying those that I like the most there when I don't have the time to write. There are some that I will always treasure and they will find a new home there. The reason for this is that all Steemit activity is recorded to a blockchain, making it pretty close to permanent. Blockchain is an encrypted, distributed database for recording and verifying transactions. That distributed part means that there is no single point of failure. That's what makes Steemit so appealing to me.

I'll still be around, debating, posting, and commenting, but over time, I will be shifting my efforts to Steemit. I hope to see you there, too.

Land is the subtext in the fight over American internet access

I just finished reading a fascinating article on the Evonomics.com website, a website dedicated to rethinking economics. Economist Josh Ryan-Collins' article, "How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory" uncovers a giant hole in economics. In his article, Collins describes how economic theory taught in classrooms for decades has been shaped to teach us to ignore land values in economic planning and public policy. What Collins shows us is that it is nearly impossible to have a coherent discussion of economic policy without talking about land ownership and rents:

"But there has always been a third ‘factor’: Land. Neglected, obfuscated but never quite completely forgotten, the story of Land’s marginalization from mainstream economic theory is little known. But it has important implications. Putting it back in to economics, we argue in a new book, ‘Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing’, could help us better understand many of today’s most pressing social and economic problems, including excessive property prices, rising wealth inequality and stagnant productivity. Land was initially a key part of classical economic theory, so why did it get pushed aside?"

Collins goes on to show in his article (a long but very worthy read), how the wealthy interests who own most of the land influenced how economics is taught to take land out of the equations, why would wealthy interests seek to do that? People who have used their wealth to amass ownership of land may well want to keep the greatest of all monopolies hidden from Economics 101. For who would want to admit that their share of all wealth is mostly unearned due to the happy circumstance of mere land ownership? From the article, but not necessarily in original sequence from article:

“In such a case …[land rent]… it would be no violation of the principles on which private property is grounded, if the state should appropriate this increase of wealth, or part of it, as it arises. This would not properly be taking anything from anybody; it would merely be applying an accession of wealth, created by circumstances, to the benefit of society, instead of allowing it to become an unearned appendage to the riches of a particular class.” 

... 

The reasons for this may well be political. Mason Gaffney, an American land economist and scholar of Henry George, has argued that Bates Clark and his followers received substantial financial support from corporate and landed interests who were determined to prevent George’s theories gaining credibility out of concerns that their wealth would be wittled away via a land tax. In contrast, theories of land rent and taxation never found an academic home. In addition, George, primarily a campaigner and journalist, never managed to forge an allegiance with American socialists who were more focused on taxing the profits of the captains of industry and the financial sector. (emphasis mine)

If most economic theories have buried land values as a factor in how an economy works, that would explain this meme:

Credit for meme: By Stephen Ewen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27391254

Take a close look at that image. The top 10% own more than half of the land value in the country. The top 40 percent own almost all of it. The bottom 60% own a tiny fraction of the United States. And then there is that little red dot, owned by 40% of the American people.

Now follow the dots. Very wealthy interests comprising of a small minority of the population, intent on preserving their wealth for generations to come, use their influence to change how economics is taught. By exerting their influence on how economics is taught, they influence economists who graduate American colleges teaching the wealthy man's version of economics, the one that hides the value of land from the rest of us. Those same economists, particularly if they follow the party line, become sources of information for people who write public policy regarding economics and journalists who write about economics. The people who write the laws regarding economic policy turn to experts who were trained to ignore land ownership as a matter of economics. All this effort is just so that the biggest land owners can avoid paying some taxes on the rents they receive from the land they own.

The tax on the land (we call them inheritance and real estate taxes) is to put the wealth generated by the land back into the economy as government spending for all to enjoy. That is the tax that the wealthy land owners wish to avoid. Such patriotism.

Now some of you may have read my earlier works on this blog and may well be aware that I'm a big fan of community broadband. I live in an area where there is only one wired internet access provider. That's what FCC Chairman Ajit Pai calls "competition". Ars Technica reports that, "Ajit Pai says broadband market too competitive for strict privacy rules". I guess that's what we can expect from a captured regulator.

I have long wondered why there is so much resistance from the top of the economy for making broadband markets work. I get it that we have telecom monopolies like Comcast, Time-Warner, ATT, Verizon and CenturyLink all working through a local franchise agreement with the cities and states they operate in. Those franchise agreements allow a de facto monopoly to take shape. That de facto monopoly receives enormous protection from state and federal governments that few are willing to acknowledge. There must be a reason why the biggest telecoms get so much protection. Do they really lack the skills to compete against municipal governments in the market for internet access?

I believe that I understand now why the fight is so difficult. It is not just the incumbent providers protecting their cash cows. It is the land owners protecting their monopolies (from the same Evonomics article):

Ricardo and Smith were mainly writing about an agrarian economy. But the law of rent applies equally in developed urban areas as the famous Land Value Tax campaigner Henry George argued in his best-selling text ‘Progress and Poverty’. Once all the un-owned land is occupied, economic rent then becomes determined by locational value. Thus the rise of communications technology and globalisation has not meant ‘the end of distance’ as some predicted. Instead, it has driven the economic pre-eminence of a few cities that are best connected to the global economy and offer the best amenities for the knowledge workers and entrepreneurs of the digital economy. The scarcity of these locations has fed a long boom in the value of land in those cities. (emphasis mine)

The fight over internet access is a fight to protect land values in large cities, to protect the land monopolies held by the wealthy elite. If internet access were made easy, cheap, fast and ubiquitous, anyone with good clerical or technical skills could live and work anywhere. For the wealthy landed class, it isn't enough to discourage and restrain social and economic mobility. Geographic mobility must be restrained as well.

Since at least 2001, there has been a very intense fight in the statehouses across the country over internet access. The major ISPs are just proxies in this fight, but effective proxies they are. One of the first community broadband networks is UTOPIA, built right here in Utah, formally known as the Utah Open Infrastructure Agency. When incumbent ISPs received word of UTOPIA around the year 2000, they worked with The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to draft model legislation to kill off UTOPIA or at least seriously hobble it. Since then, ALEC has participated in a largely successful effort to restrain or eliminate municipal efforts to build public internet access networks in more than 20 states (Utah was the first state to pass that model legislation) across the country.

The primary argument used against municipal broadband systems is that municipal governments should not be taking the risk of building internet access infrastructure, a function best left to private enterprise and savvy investors who really know what they are doing. At least, that's the narrative most of the public is fed. But a funny thing happened in Utah. A natural experiment occurred where the municipal network of Spanish Fork was spared the most onerous requirement of that model ALEC legislation: that the network must rely upon a third party to sell access. While the city of Spanish Fork could sell directly to customers, UTOPIA was required to rely upon third party sellers.

The results are plainly obvious in this article, "How Lobbyists in Utah Put Taxpayer Dollars at Risk to Protect Cable Monopolies", by Chris Mitchell, director of Community Networks, at the Institute for Local Self Reliance. UTOPIA is now buried in debt because they could not sell service directly to residents in their service area. The Spanish Fork municipal network was allowed to sell directly to residents, paid off its debts early, used their profits to add capacity, increase speeds and improve service.

I know, it sounds absurd, but there are ISPs that actually do that, but they're not private ISPs. More than 450 cities around the country have created public networks to get around private ISPs who will not build at all, or refuse to increase capacity and speed for the cities they serve. I guess the risk that opponents of community broadband refuse to talk about is the risk of legislative opposition, of which they themselves finance, to the public option for internet access.

Close observers of the struggle for internet access may also be familiar with the fight in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the Electric Power Board provides a symmetrical gigabit connection for $70 a month, mopping the floor with their competition. The Electric Power Board is a public utility that set up fiber connections to every home for meter readings and discovered that they could also provide internet access. When incumbent service providers discovered what the EPB was doing, it was too late to stop them. So incumbents moved to restrict the EPB from providing such offensive service outside of their original service area. Neighboring communities stuck with inferior service from Comcast and ATT clamored for service from EPB and took their fight to the FCC.

You might also recall how the FCC ruled that the EPB could provide service to their neighbors in adjacent areas, but the state of Tennessee sued for injunctive relief and won on behalf of the incumbent service providers to set aside the FCC ruling permitting EPB to service their neighbors. To put it differently, the fight over geographic mobility is so serious that wealthy interests are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain their monopolies, first by wire and then by land.

It's a subtle fight and it is rarely mentioned in the news if at all, and you'll never see mainstream media framing the story this way. Mainstream media teaches us that when property values go up we all prosper, what they don't tell us is just how much of a drain on the economy rent seeking is. The biggest land owners want steady and stable renters, not people who think they can move to a small town, buy a house and still make a living because they can do their work online or run an online business. The last thing they need is policy makers figuring out how to properly tax and regulate the absentee land owners, the land owners who rent their land rather than occupy it.

This silent struggle over land is only silent to the extent that the press is willing to discuss it. Some of you still read newspapers. I used to do that, too. But since then, I've learned that when I put a quarter into a newspaper vending machine, I didn't pay for the contents of the paper, the advertisers did. The content we call news, is called the "newshole" by the newspaper editors for a reason. The advertisers pay for influence on what's fit to print and what is not. Those advertisers are paying for a narrative that is flattering to their enterprise, which on the surface is anything but extracting rents. Advertisers in mainstream media are paying for a narrative that would have us all believe that rent seeking passes for capitalism. And so far, it seems to be working.

The debate over Obamacare is not a debate over economics, its really about ideology

The GOP has finally released their bill to overhaul Obamacare. Though some key elements of Obamacare will remain, it is clear that the GOP is uncertain just how to undo Obamacare without facing serious political repercussions in the 2018 mid-terms. Given the onslaught of legislative initiatives working through Congress now, it would seem to me that Republicans in Congress now have enough rope to do themselves in for the next midterm election.

The American Health Care Act, as introduced by Republicans in Congress, is the bill that the GOP has been working on for weeks behind closed doors. The key features of the bill show that allowing parents to keep their kids on the plan until age 26, banning discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, and even the Medicaid expansion will survive for now. The bill has serious changes for much later baked into it so that the current Congress has a chance to survive the midterms. That's cute.

At the Washington Post, they've noticed that opposition to the bill is fairly universal from the industry the bill purports to regulate. Organizations representing doctors, hospitals and even insurers have expressed surprise at the contents of the bill mostly because they were not invited to offer input on the bill. Afraid of offending their donors and their voters, Republicans in Congress seem to be mum about their true objectives, even in this bill.

Economist Dean Baker suggests that the GOP Congress will top 50 million uninsured once this bill becomes law. Here is one very interesting observation Baker makes about how people use Medicaid:

For example, the plan leaves in place the expansion of Medicaid through 2020. This should be long enough so that most currently serving Republican governors will not have to deal with the effect of the elimination of this provision. After 2020 people benefiting from the expansion will be allowed to remain on Medicaid, but new people will not be added. Since people tend to shift on and off Medicaid (something rarely understood by reporters who cover the ACA), after two or three years the vast majority of the people who benefited from the expansion will no longer be getting Medicaid. By 2025, the impact of the expansion on the number of the uninsured will be trivial.

This is something I did not know: people go on and off Medicaid. Once enrollment is frozen for Medicaid, the people who were on it once, will find that they cannot return after 2020. Great for Republicans in elected office who are already set with gold-plated insurance, bad for people who need the help.

Numerous critics have requested a scoring of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for the reason that no one knows the true cost of the bill. This is interesting considering that many Republicans claim to be fiscally conservative. Why wouldn't they wait to find out? Perhaps their objective is not the repeal of Obamacare. Their objective is repeal of the taxes imposed by Obamacare that would result in a nice, tidy windfall for the wealthiest of Americans who run very large businesses, but can't wait to externalize the cost of health care for their employees.

I suggest here, that the debate over Obamacare, and health care in general is not about economics. It's about ideology. Conservative rhetoric maintains that people should be responsible for their own health. In a perfect world, that might be true, but this world is far from perfect, at least with humans in it. What conservative talking points miss is that business does the majority of the polluting, while funneling most of the income generated by the business to the top 1%. 

Business creates pollution. Ordinary people minding their own affairs do not even come close to the effluvia created by business. Business sells things that pollute and people buy them. From plastic doo-dads of all manner, shapes and sizes, to electronics that need to be properly recycled, to vehicles that spew CO2 and particulate matter into the air for us to breathe, to oil spills, and coal ash spills.

All of that pollution has an effect on the health of the people who use products and services created by the very businesses that seek to escape the costs that businesses can impose on everyone else. This is the argument missing from the debate. There are a few more arguments missing, too. Like how doctors have engineered a shortage of doctors to prop up their incomes relative to everyone else. Or how drug patents now cost Americans roughly $360 billion a year. Or how lawyers game the courts with torts to increase the cost of protection for doctors.

The entire game is about shifting costs from one party to another. This is how they keep us divided. This is what the GOP plan to replace Obamacare is about. It's time to bring everyone together, into a system that keeps everyone in, everyone covered, and lets nobody out. After all, we're stronger together, right?

Enter now, the bill now in Congress that is nowhere to be seen in the news, H.R.676 - Expanded and Improved Medicare For All Act. This is a universal health care act. This requires everyone to pay in and everyone to be covered. Based on my reading so far, there is very little way that I can see, for any single group to externalize or shift the costs of health care onto another. Here is the bill summary:

This bill establishes the Medicare for All Program to provide all individuals residing in the United States and U.S. territories with free health care that includes all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care.

Only public or nonprofit institutions may participate. Nonprofit health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that deliver care in their own facilities may participate.
Patients may choose from participating physicians and institutions.

Health insurers may not sell health insurance that duplicates the benefits provided under this bill. Insurers may sell benefits that are not medically necessary, such as cosmetic surgery benefits.

The bill sets forth methods to pay institutional providers and health professionals for services. Financial incentives between HMOs and physicians based on utilization are prohibited.

The program is funded: (1) from existing sources of government revenues for health care, (2) by increasing personal income taxes on the top 5% of income earners, (3) by instituting a progressive excise tax on payroll and self-employment income, (4) by instituting a tax on unearned income, and (5) by instituting a tax on stock and bond transactions. Amounts that would have been appropriated for federal public health care programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), are transferred and appropriated to carry out this bill.

The program must give employment transition benefits and first priority in retraining and job placement to individuals whose jobs are eliminated due to reduced clerical and administrative work under this bill.

The Department of Health and Human Services must create a confidential electronic patient record system.

The bill establishes a National Board of Universal Quality and Access to provide advice on quality, access, and affordability.

The Indian Health Service must be integrated into the program after five years. Congress must evaluate the continued independence of Department of Veterans Affairs health programs. (emphasis mine, text of bill here) 

Note that private insurance is effectively cut out of the basic health insurance business. An enormous, confusing bureaucracy of multiple private insurance companies will be replaced by one federal agency, with one neck to grab in November. No one gets out from paying the taxes to support the program, which means that there can be no cost shifting for profits. Increase the burden on party at the risk of increasing the burden for all, and anyone who tries to do that will be found and made known.

Taxes are imposed at numerous sources, including securities transactions like the sale of stocks and bonds. That means those with lofty incomes who engage in high frequency trading might have to do something more productive with their time and computers. Everyone pays in for their mutual benefit.

I note with interest that Bernie Sanders is not a cosponsor of the bill. I wonder if he has an opinion of it. In 2011, Sanders introduced a similar bill, but the Physicians for a Single Payer Plan liked HR 676 better.

This is our moment. HR 676 is a far better plan and does not set one generation or even one faction against another as the Republican plan does. If everyone pays in, the costs are nominal for all. Under the current system and worse, with the GOP plan as proposed, burdens are shifted and concentrated on the people who are least able to afford it.

So let your Congressperson know that you know about HR 676. Let those who oppose HR 676 explain why the people should not be united in the pursuit of quality health care that is already enjoyed by every other industrialized country, as a right. We have an alternative to the GOP plan. Let's talk about that.

It's time to start thinking of racism as an addiction: a preventable, progressive and fatal disease of the mind

Here's an interesting story about a couple in Georgia who were sentenced to a combined 35 years in prison for participating in a parade of trucks flying the Confederate flag in front of an African American family's home where the owner was hosting a birthday party. At least, that's what we get from the headline.

During the parade, Jose "Joe" Torres stopped his truck, brought out a shotgun and pointed it at the party-goers threatening to kill them. Kayla Norton, the other defendant in the couple, also made threats while at his side. Nobody was physically hurt, but the family in the home brought charges with evidence captured on video with numerous witnesses. Consequently, the couple were arrested, prosecuted and convicted.

While several other participants were charged in the incident for lesser crimes, it is worth noting that some participants, including the couple, were charged with violations of Georgia's Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act. Finally, we're starting to see racists being charged and identified as terrorists for their acts of aggression. That is a very significant turn of events in terms of prosecution and reporting.

I watched the video at the head of the article to see how Norton, the female defendant, cried in court and turned to the victims to display an incredible degree of denial (from the CNN article referenced above):

Norton apologized for her role in the incident saying, "I want you all to know that is not me. That is not me, that is not him. I would never walk up to you and say those words to you. I'm so sorry that happened to you. I am so sorry."

This is the kind of denial someone might have expressed after discovering what they had done while blacked out from a drinking binge. It was all fun and games until they found themselves in cuffs in front of a judge (from the same article):

"Many people tried to make the case about simply flying the Confederate Battle Flag," Douglas County District Attorney Brian Fortner said in a statement. "This case was about a group of people riding around our community, drinking alcohol, harassing and intimidating our citizens because of the color of their skin."

Step back for a moment and consider the kind of ride these people were taking. I'm not just talking about the alcohol or anything else they might have been taking. I'm talking endorphins. Endorphins are the brain's response to threats and other intense stimuli. The most well known example and experience of endorphins is the "Runner's High".

Another well known endorphin is adrenaline. Have you ever been in a heated argument and felt the rise of anger? Have you ever felt fear from a threat, like a car that you didn't see behind you, but just whizzed past you? Those examples provide a very mild shot of adrenaline.

Those people in the parade were packing serious heat (at least one shotgun) and had organized a parade in front of their victim's house. The entire affair appears to be premeditated. In other words, they spent time collaborating and planning their "event", complete with giggles and anticipation. During the event, the alcohol further released their inhibitions enough for them to shout threats and throw objects at their victims, too. The acts of shouting racial slurs, throwing objects, and pointing a gun capable of deadly force, all give rise to huge shots of adrenaline.

I think we can fairly say that they really didn't think this thing through. Especially the part about getting arrested and going to prison.

The planning, the acting out and the displays of domineering behavior all arise out of obsession. Obsession is also a form of addiction and is every bit as addictive as drinking, gambling and power. From beginning to end, these people were orchestrating actions to bring about the maximum high that they could achieve. I'm not saying that was their conscious objective, I'm just saying that how it works.

Norton and Torres displayed all the hallmarks of an addict, or someone in the throes of an addiction. Here's a handy definition from Psychology Today:

Addiction is a condition that results when a person ingests a substance (e.g., alcohol, cocaine, nicotine) or engages in an activity (e.g., gambling, sex, shopping) that can be pleasurable but the continuation of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary responsibilities and concerns, such as work, relationships, or health. People who have developed an addiction may not be aware that their behavior is out of control and causing problems for themselves and others.

In this case, the couple experienced intense pleasure, the high from the endorphins they experienced while threatening the lives of others. Their actions disrupted the lives of others, when they terrorized an African American family with their parade, leaving a memory that the everyone in attendance will never forget. Their actions disrupted their own lives when they were sentenced to hard time in prison. This is the power of addiction.

To put this all in terms that most people would not ordinarily use: racism is a sign of mental illness. Now that I think about it, I've never seen or heard anyone say in the news or in civil discourse that racism is a mental illness. Symptoms in this case include obsession (the websites, the Facebook posts, fantasizing, etc); acting out as in their parade, the display of weapons, shouted threats and the slurs; and the crash, like when Torres and Norton were stone cold sober as they both cried and while she apologized in court. Wash, rinse, repeat. We don't even know how many times they've done this before as this was probably the only time someone pressed charges and made them stick.

To call them addicts suffering from an unrelenting addiction is by no means a defense of their behavior. On the contrary, they are adults and they make their own decisions, but at the least, they are very confused adults. At the time of their crime, they were high on, and addicted to power.

They are not evil. I've said before that I don't believe in evil. Evil is a supernatural explanation of challenging behavior in children and adults. There is no evil and good. To put it simply, there are two kinds of people in the world: confused (what we call evil) and less confused (what we like to call good).

The couple and their cohorts are now in jail awaiting a trip to prison. They didn't plan on going to prison and sincerely believed that what they were doing was right and just, even if the people outside of their little world disagreed. That kind of bravado doesn't come from deciding one night after a game of beer pong, that they're going to act racist for a day. No, this is a result of a long line of decisions, spanning years, maybe decades, of imitating or following behavior from some authority figure in their lives. You know, like their parents.

I think they learned that behavior from their parents, and from abuse at the hands of their parents. Hitler's Germany was authoritarian and Christian, and it should be noted that Hitler suffered tremendous abuses at the hands of his father as a child. American racism has its roots in Christianity to be sure, but I think we'd find that racism arises from abuse in authoritarian families where "might makes right". Yet, millions of other Americans can read the Bible without making conclusions of racial inferiority based upon skin color, just as Martin Luther King did.

If the parade organizers truly believed that African Americans were inferior, and had taken the time to read their "Good Book", they might find that their purpose (according to their book) is to help those "inferiors", to lift them up, not abuse them. Here's where I get confused. Were they trying to help them? If so, how did they ever come to believe that abusing someone else is even remotely helpful?

In authoritarian families, the rule is that the child lacks motivation to do well, to pay no mind to the skills the child might need to achieve the morality that is preached by the parents. Punish the child and he will do better. That's the rule.

Yet, by their actions, it would seem that Torres and Norton weren't even thinking that they would make better people out of those party-goers with their abuse. It was an entirely cathartic affair. Racism is not about superiority and most certainly has nothing to do with helping others out. I am here to say that racism is about people acting out the story of the abuse sustained at the hands of their parents. This acting out is the ritual of their addiction as all addictions have rituals in their expression.

It is right to restrain with imprisonment, such individuals as those who are willing to brandish weapons, parade in the streets and terrorize people on the basis of color. We must consider the source.

People are not born racist. They are born into this world without a care about skin color, religion, sexual orientation or nationality. Racism is a learned behavior. It is taught as a set of skills designed to marginalize, minimize and enslave, others who are deemed, "inferior" only due to the color of their skin. They're not the most productive skills, but they are skills, nonetheless.

Racism is a preventable, progressively fatal mental disease, but it can be arrested. I believe that to be true because it is up to parents to set the example of how to live with others, regardless of skin color. Parents set the example by collaborating with their children to solve the problems that children might encounter, problems that if left unsolved, give rise to challenging behavior. Solve those problems with kids and challenging behavior goes away - and kids learn new skills at the same time. A model for solving those problems can be found at www.livesinthebalance.org.

Racism is a set of skills borne of religious dogma, a perversion of morality. Morality is a skill, not dogma. Teach the skills required to achieve the morality of peace, love and compassion, and racism fades away, into grey.

This is what happens when society teaches punishment instead of skills

A few weeks ago, I read the headlines of a story about a boys reform school in Florida. I passed by it, thinking nothing more than, "ho hum, just another sensational story." But I've been thinking about that school ever since. So did my own search instead of looking for that meme from somewhere in the depths of my Google+ feed, and here is what I found.

The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, aka, "The Florida School for Boys", was opened in 1900 and was notorious for a wide range of abuses of boys that were sent there or wound up there. The first link I found was from The Smithsonian Institution, not exactly the first name in sensationalism. So I read on. I was intrigued by the picture of the crosses in the graveyard at the school at the top of the article.

I read a few more articles and the literature is fairly consistent. Over a century of operation kids were severely beaten, whipped, denied clothing and food, one may have been shot and another was put in a large clothes dryer and died later from his injuries. Scientists have found 55 graves and have matched 14 DNA samples to identify the boys buried there. They found two graveyards one for people of color and one for everyone else. This Wikipedia article has a fairly detailed history of the school with numerous sources in the bibliography. Although no one seems to have been charged with a crime at the school, it was finally closed in 2011.

From my reading so far, I think it is fair to say that it was a public school teaching morality from religion. We know this from the crosses in the picture, and the segregation of the students based on race. The roots of American racism and segregation can be found in religion, Christianity to be precise.

This article is not intended to criticize religion in general, or even the brutal discipline practices at the Florida School for Boys. That has already been done. I believe that there is a wider and deeper message we can learn from this story. Those crosses in the picture are evidence of a fact that may now be plain for all to see: you cannot teach morality without teaching the skills required to achieve it.

Those crosses in the picture tell a story of a school staff intent on beating the "evil" out of the boys who were sent there by their parents or a state agency responsible for disposition of orphans. Those crosses are evidence of the failure of reward and punishment as a method of discipline. No matter how severe the discipline, there were always some boys who would not comply, even upon risk of death.

There is another story here to consider. The addiction of abuse. The abusers who administered the punishment were addicted to the abuse. When humans engage in physical conflict, the brain sends a massive shot of adrenaline throughout the body. For the abuser, this is a huge hit, every bit as powerful as cocaine or crystal meth. This hit provides a sort of "high" much like joggers experience with endorphins from the runners high, yet far more intense in the context of violence.

I have some first hand evidence of this myself. I felt it when I was spanked by my father as a boy. I felt it when I fought the kids who used to tease me at school. I felt it the moment before I hauled off a punch to the offender in the lunch line. I was always shaken by the experience of violence and can recall those same feelings with clarity to this day.

When we engage in violence of any kind, we feel this jolt of energy from the adrenaline. Combine that jolt with authority and you have a compelling reason to do it again. And again. Regardless of the consequences.

There is a better way to teach morality. We teach the skills needed to achieve that morality. One great example is the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of America. The Scouts organizations teach skills. They both teach skills about living in and respecting the natural wilderness of America. They both teach skills about getting along, working as a team and collaborating.

For adults there are 12-step organizations, the most well known being Alcoholics Anonymous. They teach the skill of not drinking, they don't just pray for the willingness to stop drinking. They don't punish people for drinking, either. They understand, probably better than any other organization, the power and the peril of addiction. They are widely regarded as the most successful organization to help people stop drinking. And they're free. They're also anarchists. No one is forced to do anything in that program. Nothing is compulsory, there are no dues to pay, and it is an entirely voluntary organization. The 12 steps are suggested, not required.

There is even Toastmasters where people can learn to overcome fear of speaking in public. I was a member of Toastmasters for years and learned to ride that fear like a wave to turn it into an asset. They teach the skill of public speaking, and the skills required to overcome the fear of speaking in public.

I'm sure there are many more organizations out there that teach skills. The point is that when we teach the skills of morality we get better results. There is a scientific organization dedicated to this effort, Lives in the Balance, headed by Dr. Ross W. Greene, PhD. Dr. Greene has 38 years of working with kids and is applying a very simple concept to challenging behavior in kids and adults: kids would do better if they could.

According to Dr. Greene, when kids exhibit challenging behavior, that's the signal, not the problem. It is evidence of lagging skills and unsolved problems. When we work with kids to solve the problems that get in their way, we also teach them the skills they need to do well. Kids want to do well, naturally. It's up to us to engage with the kids in collaboration to solve those problems the prevent them from doing well. That means it's not entirely up to kids or the parents to solve the problems. It's a partnership.

I believe that this is true of adults, too. Crime is evidence of challenging behavior in adults. When we teach adults the skills they need to adapt to their conditions, they get better. Dr. Greene's approach is being applied to detention centers for kids with very positive results. We could do the same for adults.

By now you're wondering what this all has to do with politics. Donald Trump ran as a "law and order" candidate. He wants to crack down on crime. So do many Republicans in Congress and in statehouses. Republicans in 5 states are pushing to make peaceful protest a criminal offense.

Here's the problem: putting people in jail doesn't really address why they're in the streets. As we've learned from the Florida School for Boys, teaching morality with punishment is very difficult and perhaps a fatal exercise. Those crosses in the backyard of that school can serve as a warning that we need to change course for humanity.

Morality is a skill, not dogma

For the past few weeks, I've been watching "The Untold History of the United States", a documentary series on Netflix produced and narrated by Oliver Stone. As I saw this alternate history of the United States stream before my eyes, I found myself working hard to break it down to one simple idea. What I see is the United States caught in a war of morality. The United States is and has been for much of our history, waging a moral war against the world and many of its own citizens.

With each passing episode of Mr. Stone's version of our history, I found myself trying to put all that I have seen in context of what I know today. I have been trying to see all that history through a lens that says, "people would do better if they could". And throughout the history lessons presented by Mr. Stone, I could not help but think that these United States, acting as one, have been attempting to get the entire world to accept their notion of morality, without making any effort practice or to teach the skills required to achieve that morality.

The United States, and the people who claim to lead it, seem to think that people are bad because they want to be bad. So, when other people and other countries do not act in accordance with the moral code held by the United States, we have responded with furious, vindictive punishment. From the atom bombs we dropped on a country tired from war and ready to surrender, to a merciless war on terrorism perpetrated on countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, we have relied upon our power as justification for our morals rather than demonstrating that morality ourselves.

One cannot claim to teach morality without teaching the skills required to achieve that morality. Morality is not a question of motivation, morality is a skill. The skill of morality cannot be taught with a stick. Morality is a skill that must be demonstrated and taught with empathy and compassion through collaboration.

The United States has been trying for more than a century to convince us that capitalism has greater morality than socialism or communism. I have suggested in the past that it's not the form of government that matters so much as whether or not people treat each other with respect and compassion as a part of, and while living within the culture the government supports. The form of government we choose matters less than whether or not people are mature enough to treat each other with respect and kindness.

The leadership of the United States have been trying for more than a century to teach the world that Christianity is morally superior to any other religion, despite the fact that the United States was not even founded as a Christian nation. How have they been doing this? Mostly, through wars, military intervention and economic intervention. This hasn't been going well for America, either.

I am not saying that Christianity is a bad religion, rather, that there are a few people who claim to be Christian that are treating at least some other people very poorly. This continuum of good to bad behavior can be found in any group of people, in any religion. I've known as friends very moral atheists, Jews, Buddhists and Christians. But in its continual quest for dominance, the United States has not demonstrated the "Christian" morality that it seeks to impose upon others nor the compassion and empathy required to teach it.

This is not to say that we are a bad country, this is to say that if we want other nations to respect us, we must respect them. Just because we have the world's largest military force does not mean that others will respect us. That military force does not give us the right to topple other governments, to interfere with their economies and to foment wars in other countries. That kind of behavior breeds terrorism. 

How else can we explain the United States as the world's largest and greatest police state? How else can we explain the continual reliance upon a war time economy? To have peace, we must be peaceful. To teach peace, we must be peaceful, too. We must start that as a nation right now.

Great teachers are not worried about their security and they have no need to make war. They are entirely concerned with making sure their students learn the skills they sat in class for. Great teachers demonstrate the skills needed to live and prosper in peace, with compassion and empathy for their students. They do not punish their students for getting it wrong. Great teachers collaborate with their students. When a student goes astray, they attend to that student to determine what skills are missing and needed to learn the lesson and they teach those skills, verify that the skills have been learned and move on to the next lesson.

A great teacher is not concerned with motivation. He knows that the motivation is there. Even if the motivation appears absent, he knows it will appear when the skills are taught, learned and demonstrated by the student.

I can recall sitting in class as a child and a young man, and looking back, I now realize that the only real skills I was taught in school were reading, writing and arithmetic. They did not teach morality as a skill. They taught morality as a fact, as something to be accepted at face value without ever considering the skills required to achieve it. I now know for myself that morality comes from the chest and gut, not from a book.

The closest I think I ever came to learning life skills in school came when I took classes in home economics, auto shop, machine shop and electronics. The rest, history, social studies and even some science, were all about memorizing facts. They taught facts not skills. If they taught morality, they did not say they were teaching it. The morality they did teach was how bad socialism and communism were.

Our leaders continue to perpetuate the war on terror. They continue to allow frauds on an enormous scale to go uncorrected. With a real unemployment rate of 9.4%, they allow millions of Americans who want to work, to go wasted, with no job, no prospects, and no hope, while the wealthiest corporations in the world are allowed to park $2 trillion and more in tax shelters overseas. That's just the shortlist on my mind right now, and maybe yours, too.

This is not to say that our leaders are evil. I don't believe in evil and I'm not sure that I have ever believed in evil. The concept of evil is borne out of religion, a supernatural explanation for challenging behavior in children and adults. I do not believe in evil people. I believe that there are only the confused (who we call evil) and the less confused (the good). I think we can say with a fair amount of confidence that our leaders are really confused, both Democrats and Republicans, together.

Our leaders, intent upon teaching the morality of capitalism and Christianity, seem hopelessly lost because they are not teaching the skills required to achieve the morality they claim to possess. They seem more intent on pursuing money than morality. If our leaders do not possess the skill of morality, then it is up to us to teach those skills if we have them, and learn them if we don't. And when we teach those skills, we must be mindful to demonstrate the skill of morality ourselves, in and out of class, with empathy and compassion, through collaboration with everyone we meet.

Government isn't the problem - people are the problem - let's solve our problems together

I've been debating in Google+ again. The worry over Trump as president increases with each passing day as inauguration looms closer. I'm not worried myself, because we have a government that is built with checks and balances. I don't believe the gloom and doom about Trump. Already, I see the debaters in Google+ scoring points against each other and I see the posturing. I've also noticed some anarchists coming out in the debates I've participated in. Some are gun rights activists. I know this because I can check their profile to see what they're promoting with their Google+ accounts.

"Guns don't kill people, people do." This is the mantra of most gun rights activists, and they're right. That doesn't mean we should not regulate the sale and use of guns. That slogan simply makes the observation that guns are inanimate objects and do their damage in human hands.

I have a song playing in my head and I can't get it to go away. It's called "Heartache Tonight", by The Eagles. They are the ultimate band for the bar scene because that's what they sing about. I see the bar scene as being analogous to the playground and high school. That song "knows" that someone will get hurt tonight and assumes that no one can do anything about it. The Eagles were a big part of American pop culture for my generation and they provide some of the inspiration for this article.

I'm also reminded of this very interesting quote from a former member of the Nixon Administration:

“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

That was from John Ehrlicman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. It is a rather startling admission of the need of those in power to score points against those not in power. The attitudes expressed by the drug war clearly show the need to silence the opposition, the dissent, so that other wars may proceed without challenge. It is all about scoring points against the other side.

More recently, I'm now seeing worry about efforts by the GOP to defund Planned Parenthood. There are some who would have us believe that efforts to defund Planned Parenthood are about defunding abortions performed by the agency, but I've seen very well documented proof that no federal money is used to pay for abortion services at Planned Parenthood. Defunding Planned Parenthood means removing funding for a wide range of services that women need to check on and maintain their health. Again, I see one party with power scoring points against someone with less power.

Maybe it's just me, but lately, politics has become a sport to some and for them, it's all about scoring points. I disagree. Politics is not a sport for me. Politics about how we can all get along together. In peace.

As we close the book on the Obama Administration, I see that people are worried about Obamacare. There are serious concerns that millions will be booted from their health care plans, their insurance, and a portable system that works regardless of jobs or employers. Millions of Americans found that they are no longer tied down to one employer just for health insurance, always a dismissal away from being uninsured. Millions of Americans found that they could work part time and still have health insurance and made a choice to work part time.

With the election of Donald Trump, we see Republicans, with their majorities in Congress, ready and willing to repeal Obamacare. Yet, few if any can point to a practical and realistic replacement for Obamacare offered by Republicans. It is even a fair question to ask if Republicans did whatever they could to hobble Obamacare with amendments to the legislation that were tacked on in committee or during reconciliation proceedings as the legislation went from House to Senate and back. Their goal, it seems, is to make sure that no government healthcare program could ever work.

A fair number of conservatives that I've encountered in social media debates on the subject would have us believe that private enterprise has clean hands. Yet I can recall upon the passage of Obamacare how private insurance companies jacked up rates, leaving the marketplaces set up for Obamacare and generally, acting like sore losers in the debate, doing everything they could to make Obamacare bitter for the beneficiaries.

More than a few conservatives in debate and in the op-ed pages worried that Obamacare paved the way towards a single payer system. They worry about a government monopoly on healthcare. What they fail to acknowledge is that in many cases wherever government monopolies are compared to private monopolies, government monopolies tend to be more efficient. 

We have a natural experiment to consider with public vs private monopolies: internet access. In millions of homes across the country, most people have one or two broadband providers, and they are mostly private service providers. This is not a sign of thriving competition. These private monopolies are often unresponsive to the needs of the communities they claim to serve. They use a portion of their profits to lobby for greater protection of their business interests. Protection? From what? Municipal broadband.

In places like Colorado, Tennessee and even Utah, incumbent providers faced with real competition from "the public option" have spent millions lobbying statehouses to protect their monopolies. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, they have the very popular EPB, the Electric Power Board, now offering 1Gbps up and down service for $70 a month. Neighboring counties clamored for EPB service but are now denied service due to state legislation that prevents the EPB from servicing customers outside of their original service area. Incumbent providers like Comcast, Time-Warner and ATT all lobbied hard against the EPB, claiming unfair competition. This is what I mean when private enterprise claims the need for protection against "the public option". This is what opponents of Obamacare are afraid of - that the public option might actually work.

In Colorado, communities fed up with the private monopolies of Centurylink, Comcast and ATT decided to build their own broadband services run by the local municipalities. The incumbent providers prevailed again with a state law that says that communities may not provide public internet service without passing a series of hoops intended to hobble adoption of municipal broadband, again claiming unfair competition from a public utility. The law had an out, the referendum.

To date, 95 governments in Colorado have passed referendums seeking local control over their internet access to escape the grasp of the private monopolies running the show in their towns. Often, these referendums passed with better than 80% of the vote, sometimes breaching 90%.

Colorado is not exactly a hotbed of liberal passion, either. They are a mostly Republican state and have found the low hanging fruit of change is at the local level. Colorado passed legislation making cannabis legal for recreational use. They are flirting with the idea of a public option in healthcare, too.

Long ago, I read of an insurance executive who was paid $80 million for one year of service. He was one of the highest paid executives in the United States. His company had a PR department that worked hard to justify this outrageous CEO compensation. The wealthy, when they find the power that comes with their wealth, seem to have a hard time knowing when to stop. How do they know enough is enough? They too, are scoring points.

I'm reminded again of the soup bowl study. They tested college students in two settings. In one room, the control group, the test subject was presented with a bowl of soup and something to read, like magazines. Students were asked to eat until they were full or until the soup was gone. Most ate until the bowl was empty. They stopped when they could see the bottom of the bowl.

In another room, they were presented with the same thing, but this time, there was a hose connected to the bottom of the bowl that would create a bottomless bowl of soup. Students with the bottomless bowl would not stop even after they were full because they were looking for the bottom of the bowl. Instead listening to their bodies, they were looking for external clues and references to determine if they had enough to eat.

Wealthy people do that. After making their first billion, do they have enough? I see hedge fund managers who make more money in a day than many people do in a lifetime. Oil company executives continue to work long after they have more money than they could ever hope to spend. Long after our environment has been polluted and denatured. The wealthy can use their money to influence politics, for better or worse. I see them just scoring points, too. They seem dependent on external cues for happiness.

Life is more than just scoring points: getting an A, getting rich, making the other side feel pain. Yet there are some people who want government to work that way. Legislative jockeying and political posturing is about scoring points and making the other side feel pain. We saw that with the government shutdown a few years ago. We saw that with the DNC and their deliberate plans to make Hillary the nominee. We're seeing it again now that Republicans have majorities in Congress and the White House. They're all about scoring points and making the other side lose or feel pain.

Government is not the problem. People are. The Washington Post has an interesting article about two socialist countries. One on the brink of economic and social collapse, the other experiencing economic growth and blossoming culture. Conservatives would score a point by telling us that Venezuela is getting what they deserve while omitting how well Bolivia is doing. Both countries made different decisions about how to allocate resources. Both countries have problems, just like ours, both countries have governments that are run by people and those people determined the outcomes.

People have frailties. They have faults. They are not perfect. When governments fail, it's not because of the system, it's because of the people. When governments are run by people who treat others with respect and empathy, it doesn't matter which system they're in, the people will be better off. In every case where there is tyranny, there are abusive people in abusive cultures raised by abusive parents. Hitler's Germany was an authoritarian culture seeking world domination. The system of government didn't make Germany that way, the people did. Scandinavian countries shun confrontation with their kids, they shun judgement of their kids and they actively work with their kids to solve the problems of life with them.

It doesn't matter if the service provider in any economy is public or private. If the people providing the service are abusive, we can expect abuses. It doesn't matter if the system of government is libertarian or totalitarian, if the people are abusive, we can expect abuses. It doesn't matter if the economy is socialist, communist or capitalist, if the people are abusive, we can expect abuses.

People who are abusive believe in reward and punishment. They believe in scoring points and making the other side suffer for their weaknesses. Abusive people have a really hard time finding or creating internal motivation to succeed, to do the right thing, to have empathy for others. Abusive people rely upon external cues for happiness. This is not to say that abusive people are bad. This is to say that abusive people lack the skills they need to get along with others and play nice.

We find abusive people in a continuum, from the violent to the merely passive aggressive. We find them in a cult of personality. We find them in identity politics where we are made to focus on the person rather than the policies. Abusive people in politics exhibit little interest in teaching skills and more interest in making people pay the price for their lack of skills.

So how do we break the cycle? How do we make the world a better place? Bernie Sanders said real change starts at the bottom. Although I don't think this is what he had in mind, I believe that real change starts with our kids. How we raise our kids determines their outcomes. We've tried teaching them how to score points, but in the end, they will not find happiness in a gold star or winning at the game of life. Scoring points means that someone else loses.

Achievement cannot fill empty arms. So we could teach them collaborative and proactive solutions. When we see challenging behavior in kids, we could look at the behavior as a signal rather than the problem. Then we work with the kids to solve the problem that gives rise to challenging behavior. In so doing, we teach kids how to meet their own needs without making someone else lose. We teach them to be internally motivated to solve problems independent of how other people act.

Where could we learn about this? We could start with a book by Ross W. Greene, PhD., "Raising Human Beings". In fact, this isn't just for kids, this is for adults, too. The principles described in this book (and a few others by the same guy), are not just techniques for getting along. They are a way of life.

Dr. Greene is not the only one on this trail. There are many others on the same trail. They too, have learned that reward and punishment don't work. Happiness is not about scoring points or getting the best of someone else or making them lose. Maybe the human race is starting to learn that happiness is knowing that we have the skills to solve problems with durable, repeatable solutions.

Isn't that what government is supposed to be for?

A sort of political movie review: Star Wars: Rogue One

A few days ago, I had an opportunity to see a movie and I took it. As a busy dad of two small kids and working full time, getting out to a movie is tough unless I want to be a night owl. For Christmas, my employer bought a theater room full of tickets and sent my team to the movies. I've done this before and saw Batman vs Superman, which I enjoyed. This time it's Star Wars: Rogue One. I enjoyed that movie so much, that I thought I'd offer a sort of political review of that movie.

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading a couple of books that have changed the way I look at pop culture, perhaps irreversibly. Two books written by Ross W. Greene, PhD, have completely changed my outlook on human behavior and pop culture. The first is The Explosive Child and the second is Raising Human Beings. Both are exceptional in their presentation of the subject matter and both provide practical guidance for raising human beings and living life. Adoption of the practices described in those books entails more than learning a method for raising children, it is a lifestyle change.

I'm still on the second pass of Raising Human Beings, a book devoted to doffing the reward/punishment philosophy of child rearing to adopt a proactive, collaborative approach to raising kids. Instead of spanking, extortion, yelling, screaming, grounding and a wide assortment of "incentives", including gold stars, time with electronics and sweet treats, we can take a different approach. We can set expectations for our kids and work with them to help them meet our expectations. We make the assumption that they want to do better and that motivation is not an issue. The only issue we're concerned with is whether or not they have the skills they need to comply with our expectations as parents.

It's Christmas Eve as I publish this and I recall that even Santa Claus has been invoked to coerce kids into better behavior. The song, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town", uses Santa Claus to extort good behavior from kids. I sang that song with mixed feelings in school with other kids in our auditorium, even though that was supposed to be a "fun" song. Here are a couple of verses to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town

He's making a list
And checking it twice;
He's gonna find out
Who's naughty or nice
Santa Claus is coming to town

The song tells us that Santa knows when we're sleeping and when we're awake. He knows enough to know which houses to skip on Christmas Eve. The implication is that children should behave during the winter when they have to stay in the house, or there won't be any gifts for Christmas.

Raising Human Beings teaches us that instead of whipping out punishment for failure to comply, we talk with our kids to find out why they cannot meet our expectations and collaborate with them to solve the problems that get in their way to success. That's our job as parents and I think that's our job as humans. Like I said, that's a lifestyle change that I believe will help us treat each other with respect and dignity. Even between adults.

I know, you're wondering about the movie. After reading those books, I found myself wrestling with questions about the plot while watching Star Wars: Rogue One. I considered the characters and their motives and alternative paths to resolve the conflict between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Don't worry, there are no spoilers here.

First, I have to say that I enjoyed the entire movie. I enjoyed the characters, the robots and graphics. Everything went together well and the plot moves well, too. It is well written and I laughed out loud because the robot in this movie reminded me so much of C3PO. For me the highlight of the movie was seeing Donny Yen (Internet Movie Database). Some of you might remember him from the Ip Man movies. In this movie, he's funny, fast and smart. If you've seen him before, you may find some delight in seeing him again in this movie.

As I watched Rogue One, I was recalling all of the other Star Wars movies I've seen. It finally dawned on me that I have almost no idea what they're fighting over. What does the Rebel Alliance want? What does the Empire want? I did some research and as far as I can tell, this entire struggle is over trade. I found a Wikipedia article on the subject of Star Wars and here is an excerpt of the description of Episode I: The Phantom Menace:

About 32 years before the beginning of the Galactic Civil War, the corrupt Trade Federation sets a blockade of battleships around the planet Naboo. The Sith Lord Darth Sidious had secretly planned the blockade to give his alter ego, Senator Palpatine, a pretense to overthrow and replace the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic.

It looks like the spark of the struggle is a trade blockade setup as a pretense for a power grab. Sounds familiar, huh? And notice that The Empire has an enormous military infrastructure and it hasn't stopped building yet. So I have to wonder about Senator Palpatine. Just how much power does he want? Does he have a family? Kids? Does he even know when he has enough power to stop? Will he ever get to a point where he sits in his chair at home (if he has one), looking at the horizon as two suns set and asks, "Pfffft! What's the point?"

If this struggle is about trade, then The Empire is using force to enter into trade agreements on their own terms. That sure sounds familiar. The United States is like that. Bases all over the world, "free trade" agreements with every country that will buckle, and all of the agreements are negotiated on terms that are decidedly favorable to the United States.

Then I looked at the stormtroopers. The way they talked, they have a remarkably human nature to their voices. I have to wonder, don't those guys have families? Where do they live? Do they really believe in what they are fighting for, or are they just mercenaries? Could they be under mind control from the guys at the top? Are they even conscious?

Then there is the Force. "May the Force be with you." There is the Dark Side and there is everyone else. The Empire is on the Dark Side. It is all about rule by fear of punishment and lust for reward. There is judgment and severe punishment for failure, but no inquiry as to why someone fails. There is no assistance from the guys at the top to fix the problems that get in the way of the subordinates when they fail to meet expectations.

When I see Darth Vader closing the windpipes on one of his subordinates with the Force, as in the first movie, I now see someone who thinks that motivation is an issue. Every character in the movie wants to do well, they want to meet expectations. But when they fail, they failed in a contest of skill and luck. If the other guys have better skills and they defeat you, Vader lacks the compassion to help you. He makes no inquiry to find the problems and fix them, other than by force.

I notice also, that the good guys don't wear masks that hide their eyes. The bad guys, for the most part, are completely covered in body armor. The bad guys at the top are always scheming against each other and the Rebel Alliance. The good guys show their faces, they help each other and have each other's back. The Empire practices competition in the extreme. The Rebel Alliance practices cooperation and compassion with everyone except for the enemy.

The Dark Side never negotiates. The Dark Side operates on the threat of force at all times. The Empire has enough power that it does not need to negotiate in good faith. The Dark Side does not question failure, it only expects success and punishes failure rather than collaborating to solve the problems that get in the way of meeting expectations.

This is what I mean when I say that the book, Raising Human Beings has changed my outlook so much. Instead of accepting the plot of the movie at face value, I deconstruct the plots in movies for more favorable outcomes. As all the Star Wars movies show, just plowing through conflict with force is very expensive and very time consuming. A little tact and compassion goes a long way to smoothing things out.

The antagonist of the Star Wars story line, Darth Vader, imposes his will upon others and does so by force, open, implied and applied. Children, adolescents and young adults all enjoy the movie and get the message that it's not right to impose your will upon others and that fighting back is justified when someone tries to impose their will upon you.

In a sense, Star Wars is a cultural irony. Parents eager to raise children "the right way", the way they have been taught by their parents, have been using force in the form of extortion, open threats and/or implied threats to coerce children into complying with their expectations, however reasonable they might be, regardless of whether or not their kids have the skills to do what they ask. This is not a case of bad parenting, but rather, uninformed solutions to problems that kids experience everyday.

No one is guilty or wrong. Just a bit confused. I don't even believe in evil as a concept, for it is born out of religion. Evil is a supernatural explanation for challenging behavior in both children and adults. In my mind, there is no good and evil. There is only confused (what we call evil), and less confused (good).

The way Vader treats his subordinates implies that everyone who fails is guilty of not being motivated to succeed, even when it seems abundantly clear that they are motivated. Whether or not someone has the skills to comply with his expectations is never questioned because the entire focus of Vader is not skills, it is ulterior motives for failure to comply. He represents the ultimate alias for the authority figure in the lives of millions of children and adult children.

The message of the movie is to fight back and protest when confronted with an authority figure. The assumption is that the authority figure cannot comprehend the suffering of his adversaries, therefore, the only reasonable response is to fight. But Star Wars raises some interesting questions. If it is wrong for Darth Vader to impose his will upon others, why is it OK for parents to impose their will upon kids? In a political context, it is reasonable to ask, why is it OK for American government to ignore the needs of the middle class while catering to the wealthy?

Star Wars is not just science fiction. It is an allegory for what America has become and will continue to be until we decide to be the change we want to see. The Empire is a totalitarian regime, no doubt. America is not a totalitarian state, and I hope we can keep it from becoming one. But The Empire is analogous to the oligarchy we have here in the United States. The Rebel Alliance is analogous to the middle class struggling to sustain themselves and to restore their ability to influence the government for the benefit of everyone, not just the 1%.

To live together in harmony requires skill. Such skills include recognizing challenging behavior when it happens and to conduct a non-confrontational inquiry into why it happens. Additional skills include being proactive in addressing challenging behavior because in most cases, it's predictable. And finally, we need to develop the skill of collaborating with people who exhibit challenging behavior to find out the cause and come up with a solution for it, together. Challenging behavior is the signal not the problem. This isn't just for kids. It's also for adults.

Rogue One is a great movie. But, like much of popular culture, it pretends that injustice comes from someone else, outside of us. It perpetuates acceptance of the wartime economy that powers the United States with "free trade" and cheap foreign goods. It also perpetuates the myth that with enough force any problem can be solved with an adversary.

I believe that as a family and a nation of families, we can do better.

Write on.

BF Skinner, kids and politics

I'm looking forward to seeing my kids go to school someday. They have graduated from peanut to toddler and preschooler. It is at once a wonder and a little teary for me. I remember how cute they were as babies and how I used to walk around the house in the dark with their head on my shoulder to help them fall asleep with motion. Drool on my shoulder was a badge of honor for me. Now I see that school is on the far horizon for them and I want them to have a good experience there, too.

So I did some checking to see if corporal punishment is allowed in schools in the fair state of Utah. Happily, it is not. The literature suggests that schools did not give it up so willingly. Most states gave it up to avoid litigation that tends to empty their coffers for things that would be better spent somewhere else. Yet there are still 19 states that permit corporal punishment in our schools. Studies have shown there is a clear bias in meting out this punishment. People of color are far more likely to be paddled in school than anyone else, a trend that continues well into adulthood.

While digging around for this information, I happened upon this article from the Daily Herald in Utah. It's a guest editorial by Julian Mercer, published astonishingly enough, in February of 2015. In his article, Mr. Mercer expresses his fondness for the good ol' days when spanking was still cool and kids were under control. He likes to think that kids behave better when force is in the wings, waiting to strike should a kid cry, whine or complain in church. To wit:

I believe in spanking and I wish schools today would return to using the paddle. When I say spanking or paddle, I know many people jump to the erroneous conclusions of child abuse or battered children and want to report such activities, and so do I. I’m not advocating abuse but discipline.

I probably spanked my kids once or twice total, and that was all they needed, because it sent the message. After that, when they saw that look on my face, they settled right down. At church, they always had several choices: Being quiet was first and paramount, and to help with that process, they had quiet books, pencils, crayons and paper for drawing and snacks to eat. If nothing worked, then it was out for a spanking. For some reason they never chose the latter. They were able to amuse themselves.

I suspect he's a bit optimistic about how often he has spanked his kids, but here is where it gets really interesting:

The behavioral psychologists B.F. Skinner learned what behavioral psychology really meant, by placing some chickens in a box with a red dot on the wall. As the chickens pecked the wall and hit the red dot, food would drop down.

Guess what happened.

The chickens continued pecking the red dot and nowhere else.

Like those chickens, people always go for the reward. Children soon learn this at a very early age, so that’s when negative reinforcement comes into play.

This is from a newspaper in Utah, a Red State no doubt. But these same people will tell you that they believe in America, the land of the free. On the other hand, they believe that people behave better if they know that physical punishment just a few steps away. Training kids to behave on threat of force is not the way to teach kids about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I know this first hand.

Here we have a man advocating the same tactics used by BF Skinner to raise his kids in modern day America. Be nice and you get the reward, for the alternative is pretty grim. Get out of line and we can talk about it quietly in the car or the restroom after a few good whacks. Notice that for this man, spanking is not something to be done in public, so I guess he might have a bit of shame about that. Or maybe not.

After I read that article, I was reminded of someone else who talks about BF Skinner: Larry Lessig. I know, I know. Some of you might not be pleased that Lessig is offering pro bono legal counsel to get enough unfaithful electors in the Electoral College to vote for someone other than Trump in two days. That's not likely to happen, but if it does, maybe they'll have the good sense to elect Bernie Sanders instead.

Anyway, Lessig has been fond of pointing out how many members of our Congress are stuck in a sort of Skinner Box, a metaphor to describe the pickle that most members of Congress are in:

...members of Congress spend 30-70 percent of their time fundraising, Lessig noted, adding that they behave like animals in a “Skinner Box,” a device that doles out rewards (food) for animals that push the right buttons. 

Gosh. That sounds a lot like the description that Mr. Mercer gave earlier about using reward and punishment for raising "good kids". Now we see how that plays out in politics. Our politicians have become more interested in rewards than policy. Once a politician gets into that Skinner Box, they have no choice but to let that reward influence how they write and vote for public policy.

The results we see today are consistent with the Skinner Box metaphor described by Mr. Lessig. In this study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, we discover that we reap what we sow. From the summary:

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. 

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. 

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. (emphasis mine)

To rephrase what is said above in simple language: the average person citizen has near zero influence on the men and women who write public policy. The Skinner Box is the perfect metaphor to describe just how dependent our elected officials are on big money in politics. Larry Lessig has created the SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs which can be found at mayday.us. He has advocated for strong anti-corruption laws with teeth that send people to prison for corruption. Unfortunately, there are too many people in positions of power to let that happen nationwide. They just can't bear to get off the gravy train.

It is also worth noting here that Bernie Sanders is not in the Skinner Box. He does not dial for dollars from members of the wealthy donor class. He has advocated for publicly funded elections and himself only takes small donations from average citizens. He has won 14 elections just using small donations. His focus is on policies that work for all of us, not rewards from people who want something else in return.

The behavior of our politicians is the signal, not the problem. The problem starts in the home and works up to politics that all of us have to deal with. Generations of kids have been raised on the reward and punishment pedagogy. These same kids grow up to get into positions of power and it shows. This is the end result of using reward and punishment to raise kids. You get a government that is more interested in rewards and punishments than actually solving problems.

How do we stop this cycle and get off? We change our theories of how people behave. We make the assumption that kids would do better if they could. We assume that challenging behavior is the signal, not the problem and we investigate to find out what the real problems are.

How do we do all that? It won't be easy, but life gets easier if we make some changes. Dr. Ross W. Greene is all over it in two books: The Explosive Child and Raising Human Beings. He's got many more, but I've read these two. I believe that a change from reward and punishment to collaborative problem solving for kids will help to create a generation of kids that know how to avoid the Skinner Box.

Note that the principles taught in both of those books can be applied to adult relationships, too. This isn't just about kids for me, this is about humanity.

Bernie Sanders said that real change starts at the bottom. He's right. It starts with our kids.

Plan B for humanity

I've actually come to a place now where I don't believe in evil. I don't believe in original sin, never have, actually. I don't even see a point in getting angry at people much anymore. I've come to a place where I can look at people who commit crimes at large, or who merely do something that might offend me and immediately note that such people do not have the skills or the motivation, or both, to do better.

I have no need to offend anyone. I have no need to personally criticize anyone, either (I reserve the balance of my criticism for politics, but I'm even beginning to question that). In lieu of constructive criticism, I'm willing to help. It is refreshing to know that I no longer have to play the game anymore.

How did I get into this place? I just finished reading a fantastic book, The Explosive Child, by Dr. Ross W. Greene, PhD. The subtitle? A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children. So what is this new approach? It's called Collaborative and Proactive Solutions. Hey, wait a minute. Isn't this a political blog? It still is. Fear not dear reader, for I will get to that part later. Please, read on.

The theme of Dr. Greene's book is simple: kids do well if they can. I didn't believe that at all for much of my life. I was convinced that at some point kids needed someone to show them who is boss. I believed in "tough love". I believed in punishment and reward, you know, like Pavlov's Dogs. I believed much of that until I noticed that such beliefs go against everything that I had ever read about psychology and self improvement. And now I'm a parent of two great kids.

A couple of years ago, I found this website, www.liesaboutparenting.com, a website dedicated to compassionate parenting and being positive and fun with kids. I also found that this site is not your typical parenting site. It's not even a traditional, "kids should be seen and not heard" parenting site. No, Lies About Parenting is, in many ways, about "lazy parenting". I was so inspired by that website, that I even wrote this article about parenting (with some help from the site owner, Ashley Trexler).

My journey to that place I talked about earlier really accelerated when I found this site, Lives In The Balance. Here, I found articles and videos to learn about how kids behave when they have unsolved problems and lack the skills to solve them. I got my first introduction to the concepts taught by Dr. Greene at that site, too. I took the tour. I started watching the videos on the site (he's got a channel on YouTube - very highly recommended). Then I bought a couple of his books. The Explosive Child is one of them. Raising Human Beings is another one and I'm reading that one now.

The Explosive Child is written for parents of who we might call "difficult kids". The other book, Raising Human Beings, is about "normal" or "typical" kids. Both books have something in common: Plans A, B, and C. These are plans for dealing with the problems that kids need to solve while growing up, problems we might also know as "growing pains". Here are the plans:

Plan A - Adult imposition of adult will (unilaterally formulated "solutions") upon the child.

Plan B - Work collaboratively with kids to discover lagging skills and unsolved problems.

Plan C - Prioritize problems and/or set aside expectations, allow for kids to solve on their own.

Most of us know about Plan A. As kids, when we ran into a problem we couldn't solve (we called that, "getting into trouble"), our parents conjured up a solution and imposed it upon us without our input. Often that solution was "a lesson", a punishment or a reward for meeting our parent's expectations for our behavior. Many of us grew up to be parents that did the same thing to our children. If you want to teach your kids blind adherence to authority, Plan A is the plan for you. If you don't like it when your kids question you or defy you, just impose more of your will on them. That'll set them straight, right?

Plan B is very different from what most parents are taught to do. With plan B we are proactive, we listen to our kids, we talk to them and ask questions about problems we observe and write them down. We identify unsolved problems by noting the difficulties kids might have, like "Difficulty with getting to sleep at night" or, "Difficulty turning off the TV". We make no judgments as to character or motive. The reason for this is simple, but not so easily discerned in a culture where Plan A is so popular: when kids have difficulty, most often it is not for want of motivation. Most kids are motivated to do well. The difficulty comes from lack of or lagging skills. In Plan B, we collaborate with our kids to create durable solutions that work for both the kids and the parents. In the process we teach our kids the life skills they will need when we're not around to help them.

Plan C is setting aside expectations for our kids for some problems while focusing on more pressing concerns. Plan C may also be as simple as letting the kid solve it on his own and providing assurance that if help is needed, to come on by for help. I do a lot of plan C. Often I set up a task as a challenge and see if my daughters can solve it themselves. Many times I've seen them push my hand away when I offer help. Why? Because they want to do it themselves. When they say, "I can do it myself, Dad", that is sweet music to my ears.

To summarize, Plan A is the imposition of adult will on the child as a unilateral solution to an unsolved problem. Plan B is working collaboratively to solve problems with the child. Plan C is to set aside a problem or let the kid work it out himself.

In my view, the work of Dr. Greene is laying the foundation for a quiet, peaceful revolution. He's sharing his discoveries with schools and juvenile detention centers all over the country with very positive results. Detentions, expulsions and violent incidents have all seen declines where Collaborative and Proactive Solutions are implemented.

In fact, their results are very similar to another concept called Restorative Justice. Restorative Justice allows kids in conflict to develop empathy for each other and fosters the development of life skills. Both Collaborative and Proactive Solutions and Restorative Justice teach collaboration and life skills for problem solving. Hey, there are those "skills" again, and in both programs, the focus is on teaching skills not reward and punishment.

There is something else that I've noticed about this work by Dr. Greene. Collaborative and Proactive Solutions doesn't just apply to kids. It applies to us. All of us.

When we're teaching our kids to read, do we punish them when they pronounce a word wrong? No, we teach them how to pronounce a word that is challenging for them to read. We use phonetics or whatever method suits our fancy to help them learn to read. We observe, demonstrate and repeat again, without judgement, until the kids get it right. We need to take the same approach to adults, too.

In the streets of any big city you can find homeless people. Do you think that they want to be there? Do you think that if you punish them, they will be motivated to "do better"? Is it possible that the homeless simply lack the skills to make their lives better? I'd say knowing what I know now, that if the homeless lack the skills to find a home, no amount of motivation in the form of punishment is going to get them into a home. If they lack the skills, they lack the motivation because nothing they have tried before has worked. Teach them the skills they need to get a home and they will find one and move in.

The same is true for our institutional justice system. In America we treat people in prison more like animals than people. We lock them up hoping that the experience of prison is so incredibly awful and painful that they will never want to go back again. But without the skills needed to stay outside, they come back. Our recidivism rate is 52% (one of the highest in the world), and that means we're not teaching inmates the skills they need to stay out. Compare that to Norway, which has a 20% recidivism rate and has actually had to shut down some prisons. Norway must be giving inmates the skills they need to get along with people on the outside, ya think?

Every time I see a news story about someone doing some awful, horrible thing to someone else, I see yet another person who was trying to satisfy a need, but not having the skills to meet that need without hurting someone else. They may not even be capable of naming or articulating that need. People who commit crimes tend to lack the skills they need to meet their needs in a civilized manner. In certain situations, these same people lack the skills of diplomacy, courtesy, and humility.

If a politician must use force, deceit or coercion against the people he supposedly represents, he is using Plan A against his constituents. From a political perspective, We The People have been getting Plan A for a long time. If we live in a oligarchy as this study claims, then someone else is writing the solutions and imposing them upon us without our input or consent. We've been punished by the billionaires and millionaires for not having the skills they have, yet most of us don't have the luxury of using money as a substitute for interpersonal skills that some billionaires apparently lack. Some of us would prefer to have a life rather than to line the pockets of a billionaire or to support the local dictator.

If you're an anarchist and have an anarchist vision of a completely voluntary society, Dr. Greene's work seems to align well with your vision. Anarchy is not what most of us think it is. Most of us are led to believe that an anarchy, as analogous to democracy or oligarchy, is a state of disorder. Scientists know that order can arise from disorder. Anarchy as a human society is not disorder. It is a completely voluntary society. No laws compel anyone to do anything. As far as I can tell, in an anarchy or voluntary society, compliance with social order is really based on norms and mores, coupled with a well established reputation. If you have a good reputation and work hard to maintain it, you are rewarded. But if you fail to meet the expectations you set for yourself and advertise to others, people will not trust you.

For those anarchists and voluntaryists who happen to be reading this article, I submit that the work of Dr. Greene lays the foundation for the society that you dream of. I seriously doubt I will see something like anarchy in my lifetime, but I'm not opposed to it. I believe that Dr. Greene's work marks the logical evolution of the human species, the next step we need to take if Homo Sapiens is to survive the Anthropocene epoch.

Dr. Greene's work transcends all political parties, organizations and affiliations. Corruption in politics is an equal opportunity employer, and cares not about you, but lusts for your vote. If you want to root out corruption, you have to give people the skills to meet their needs without resorting to acts of corruption. That means we have to be willing to listen to others, to collaborate with them for solutions that work for all parties concerned. We will have to give up the need to create and assert an advantage over our fellow man for personal gain.

Bernie Sanders was right. Change really does come from the bottom. That change must start with ourselves and our kids. We must be the change we want to see and pass it on.