OBAMA

The name sounds foreign to many of us, and saying it in certain states, for example the red one I live in, will frequently start a tirade.  (The name itself is a bit odd.  Out of 44 presidents, his is the only Non-European surname.  We have 37 presidents with good old names off the British Isles, with most English, some Anglo-Saxon, some Welsh, some Irish, some Scottish, and some decidedly Celtic.  We have 3 Dutch names, and 1 German.  So much for the melting pot).

 Too often the tirade is about his appearance or his voice though the tirade never, ever, ever mentions race.  "This is not about race, its him."  Who are they lying to, themselves I think. "He is trying to make us communist", or "he's the next Hitler" (those people never seem to get that Hitler wasn't a communist.) "He is stupid". "He is------"something, something bad, something that is going to ruin the country.  Of course, I live in a state full of rabid born-again republicans.  For some reason, when rich powerful men start complaining about things not being good for them, my neighbors think they are part of that group. There is not a rich powerful man in the area, but they are all white--close enough.  We need racism and sexism and religionism (yes, I made it up, but what else would you call it when people line up behind religious affiliation like it is US or THEM---presidentially speaking, there have been 37 protestants, 4 unitarians, 2 quakers, 1 catholic and 1 jehovah's witness, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson had no listed religion and probably could not have even been elected these days because of it).

We need those things, because while we have those things, we don't have to worry about the real dividing line.  It is and always has been the HAVES and the HAVE-NOTS.  It isn't just money the HAVES possess, it is also power.  That was what started our own American Revolution.  Our colonies had money because the colonies were full of resources and the colonists were cleaning up, but the wealthy colonists did not have any power, and the employed (that might be slaves, bond servants, or other peasantry) had little of either.  That revolution was for Power, the power to determine your own laws, use the tax money for the good of your own people and not just send it back to the king.

In South Africa, the HAVES were all white, they were HAVES because they profited off the horrible misuse of the HAVE-NOTS and we called it apartheid and legalized racism and wrong.  It was a place in which a small percent of the population ruled the larger percent with no concern for the larger percents needs, seeing them as things not peers.  Mandela is a hero for attacking that beast.  But while that was an obvious wrong, it is far from the only place where a small group rules the vast majority to the detriment of that majority.

The French Revolution was very similar, the royals, the nobles, the landed had everything and the people cutting the wood and growing the food and sewing the clothes etc, etc, etc, were frequently hungry and could not afford medicine or shelter or other basic needs. The Russian Revolution that resulted in the rise of communism in the last century was from a similar cause.  They had seen the less than perfect results of the French and American Revolutions and like China tried Socialism.  Reality is, if you read about a republic (which we in America are) or a democracy (which we are not, but frequently claim to be) or communism or socialism, they sound wonderful.  They are all high-minded ideals in which everyone is equal, everyone is able to live to their highest potential.  Apparently, power does corrupt and absolute power really does corrupt absolutely. Add to that, what some professor from my ancient past once said, "its not hard to start a revolution, the hard part is stopping it where you want."  Wars are not led by high-minded idealists, they are led by people that aren't afraid to kill, to maim, to "get their hands"--or their followers hands "dirty".  And they never stop until the rich and powerful are back on top.  Humans are highly corruptible.  I don't understand it, but I have never had power or money.

But back to Obama.  My granddaughter was born during his first campaign.  Her mom was just starting to pay attention to politics and she followed the Obama campaign very closely.  My granddaughter has a kind of hero worship for the president.  By five she was looking at president pictures in old books and asking questions about the office.  She thinks she might want to be the first female president.  Since it hasn't happened yet I feel no need to burst that bubble.

Why has this president polarized the country so thoroughly?  What horrible thing has he done?  We made a huge deal about his birth, "he wasn't even born here" all over the internet, but he was, his mother was from Kansas, his father from Kenya.  And he was not alone, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson had mothers born in England, Andrew Jackson's parents came here from Ireland, James Buchanan and Charles Arthur both had fathers born in Ireland.  Herbert Hoover's mother was born in Ontario, Canada.  Apparently, the problem is with Africa.  But all people came out of Africa.  How is this not racism?

Okay.  Perhaps it's his agenda.  He does seem very focused on getting health care available to all people whether or not they can afford it (I have never been able to figure out the down side to this, although I do suspect the AMA and Insurance and Pharmaceutical companies are leading the lobby against--personally I wanted a full blown nationalized healthcare.
And there is immigration reform (how many immigrant ancestors are in your family tree, mine is pretty full of them).
This term's focus on gun control (we have no problem with denying violent criminals their second amendment rights, but seem to think that more guns easily available is the answer to the countries woes.  If the militias weren't so full of racists, sexists, and religionists, I might actually be more against gun registration.  Maybe it really is just that we need gun education starting in grade school and everybody has to carry by age 18.  We would either need half the police or half the number of everything else.
It might be a new kind of birth control.  It sounds a lot like anarchy.
Then there is the attempt to get more jobs.  We (editorial, since I don't know anyone making minimum wage that would be included in that "we") don't want to raise the minimum wage because the powerful rich people would not make more jobs.  So maybe we would only need half as many jobs if the jobs paid enough to live on.
Seriously, who has ever been hired to do a job that is not needed.
Rich and powerful people don't make jobs to provide poor people with jobs, they make new jobs because they have work that needs done and that work will make them a profit.  The amount of money involved in the difference between the current minimum wage and the new proposed minimum wage won't even make a blip on their radar.  They don't worry about their profits in dollar or ten dollar amounts, they worry about them in millions.
Keeping the workers underpaid just makes their profits higher, but no workers means no profit.  Not one of them is doing their own work for what they are profiting from.  I am also a fan of lowering  the amount of money salaried people can make and still get over-time.  Why should anyone not qualify for overtime.  If the job takes longer than 40 hours, maybe it is another job.  Paying one person  one salary to do two people's worth of work is a great way to raise your own profits.  But it is not right and there is another job. (amazing, isn't it)

Next is climate change.  In my state, we took a vote and their is no such thing.  We have never seen a lot of the weird weather that has occurred in the last 50 years, but it isn't new.  And it isn't caused by man, only god can change the weather---its because of all the godless, other race/other religion, sexually different people that currently don't have to hide or live in fear of being shot/lynched/tarred&feathered.  In truth, we live in a closed system (mostly closed) and setting off chemical reactions and contaminating the water and spewing gases can"t NOT alter that closed system.  Every action has consequences (physics not philosophy) and we humans has obviously altered the earth in the last 5,000 years.  The speed we are altering it has gone up tremendously in the last 100 years and we need to plan for the future of not just ourselves but our distant descendants.  (I personally would like my great-great-great-great grandkids to be able to walk in the spring air and see butterflies and recent evidence of wildlife walking on a dirt path in the country)

Last is voter access.  While we Americans don't vote as often as we could, we should not have any problems voting.  How do I feel about voter id's.  Make id's free and easily accessible and that is fine.  But use the difficulty of getting an ID like the old Jim Crow laws, and you are exactly as wrong as you sound.  We have seen crookedness in the voting world.  District Lines changed to make one group more powerful, another less powerful.  Long lines the day of, no parking, no workers, trying to close on time even when it was not physically possible for all the voters registered to vote at that place to finish within the allotted time. We have become a nation of slick, self-centered, other-haters. Was that always who we were?

I think that is not new, but Obama,  who my granddaughter unfailingly calls President Obama, has given a whole slew of people with no representation, with no toe-hold in the system, with no way to grab the opportunities this country is supposedly so free with--hope.

Keeping hope alive--Thanks, President Obama.

the bell curve

Otherwise known as the normal curve, what we like to be graded on, what we expect of a single population, favorite of researchers all over.  But what is it?
In IQ tests, its peak is 100, where 50% of the population is expected to be found.  Tests are tested and "normalized" around this.  We aren't sure if it is actually real, since we don't really know what IQ is except for that it is what IQ tests measure. We do know that the tests that similate IQ tests, those standardized tests we give to large numbers of students at a time, have to be altered as sometimes the test changes with culture and technological advances and just plain time.  (if you have never had an individually administered IQ test, don't brag about your IQ, its probably never been checked).

In other populations, you would expect in a total population that has not been skewed by other parameters, to find that 50% of that population  is on one half of the curve (say---right) and the other half on the left.  That makes the middle of the bell curve also the 50th percentile.  That means way over on the right of the curve, where it has dipped down pretty good, is about the 90th percentile. That means that if a person's number is way over there, there aren't very many people sharing that spot and they are doing "better, faster, older, smarter, richer, or whatever.   The same spot on the other side would be about the same number of people (or dogs, or tests, or whatever the "n" is) and about the 10th percentile and they would only be doing better than 10% of the participants. Its symetrical. Humans like symmetry, it's one of the things we use to judge beauty and fairness and whether we have applied our make-up correctly.

There are populations, that due to human intervention or some other force, do not fall on the Bell curve.  Examples would be chihuahuas and post-AIDS hemophiliacs.   The dogs have been impacted by genetic manipulation.  Not that we messed with their actual genes, but that we controlled their breeding.   For the traits that are desired, that the breed is bred for, the curve will be skewed to the right, and for those that are breed to remove the curve will be skewed to the left. For those poor individuals that experienced the discovery of AIDS while requiring blood products in the pre-testing timeframe, the curve is not just skewed, it is a cliff.

There are other things that can happen to a bell curve.  One of the more confusing is when it has two different hills.  That acually means you have two different populations being measured on the same curve.  An example of this, is the current wealth of the US. The best way to show this would be two show it on two bell curves--the top 2% and the bottom 98%.  The top 2% has 98% of the wealth, and by percentile, you would expect that the people at the 98th percentile would have more than 98% of the population.  But you would also expect that at the 50th percentile, 50% of the wealth would exist.  Not true here.  Everyone under the 98th percentile is sharing the same leftover 2%.  The two percent of the money is divided along a skewed bell curve, but not that severely skewed.  It skews to the left.  The top 98% of the money is its own bell curve, and it it also skewed to the left, with a much larger number of individuals making $300,000/year than the far right end, where the fortune-500 members live.

So,  in numbers, about 50% of the US population makes less than  $30,000/year, another 40% make $30,000-$100,000/year (we are now at the 90th percentile) and about 8% make over $100,000 but less than $300,000/year.  The next 1% is the makers of over $300,000 to under $500,000/year. That final 1% makes at least a half a million a year to several billion/year.  Curious?  The IRS has their own fortune 400 that is based on the top 400 income tax returns.  Stats only, the "who" is private.

So the point is? We have two population in the good ole US of A.  The ruling class and the peasantry.  Shades of Europe in the middle ages.

Since I should be doing my taxes and instead I'm writing this, I will make a suggestion.  Its a start, only, but its a new tax law suggestion.  A variation of the Flat Tax.  The biggest change would be to the individual deductions.  Where we currently get some number chosen from something that has nothing to do with life, I think we should plug in the income at poverty level.  That is what it takes to feed and clothe and shelter 1 person without assistance. In 2014, for one person, that is $11,670.  For a couple filing together, $15,730, for a family of 4, 23,550.  In Alaska, where the cost of living is higher, the same family of four would be$29,440, in Hawaii $27,090.  I personally would use Alaska for everyone since there should be some benefit to living in middle America.  Everything over that, whether salary, wage, capital gain, or any other source of income, would be 25%.  I think this would solve the problem of the person making 1 dollar over poverty and paying taxes and the person making 1 billion paying no taxes--and solve it well.
Reality is, it costs no more for a rich person to get enough calories to live, water to drink and shelter to stay warm than a poor person.  All that other stuff, the compounds and 3 vacation houses, the sixteen cars, the new wardrobe every season--designer and custom only, that is fat.  And fat should always be taxable.  Since we haven't gone with a national healthcare system yet, medical expenses should also remain until we figure that one out.  Interest?  I always liked it, but it is a sign of a sick economy and a sicker way of life, not a reason for a deduction.

If there were only 400 homeless people in the country, that would be fine, but we currently have constitution that implies equality yet the people making the laws that are supposed to support the ideal of equality are in the 2% almost to the man (was that an accident?  well there are 20  women in the senate and 79 women in the house, so perhaps I should have said person). There are 100 senators.  There are 435 representatives in the House, so that is 18% female.  All 535 members of Congress are worth an average $966,001 each, according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

A typical American household has a net worth of about $66,740 – a value that has been declining since the start of the most recent recession. Between 2007 and 2010, the median net worth of American households sank 47.1 percent. Food stamp enrollment increased by 15.5 million since 2009 and recent job creation figures show that low-paying jobs have largely replaced higher paying ones.

At a time when the majority is struggling financially, the nation’s leaders are accumulating more wealth.  The new freshmen congress members have an average net worth greater than 1,000,000.

If they represent the people shouldn't their entry-level income mirror the average American? Is our country politically becoming as corrupt as any third world country?
 Where is the hope for the majority that is supposedly ruling?
Where is the hope?