Life in the Third Layer

This world we live in

Posted on April 26, 2010 | 1 comment

The newspaper reported that a third to half of parents at one middle school kept children home on Friday because they were afraid the children would be ritualistically sacrificed by other children who had joined a vampire cult and had to kill to gain immortality. I’m not making that up.

It appears that a girl was suspended recently for stating that she had to kill someone to gain immortality, a startling aspect of a religion that she got from a comic book. The aunt of another student heard about this cult (?), composed the details into a message titled ““Something to PRAY ABOUT!,” and sent it to ten or fifteen of her close friends on Facebook.

Well, the friends passed it on to their friends. They kept their kids home the next morning. Parents who got the message after their children had already gone to school started picking up their kids. The newspaper is unclear about how the school superintendent found out about the panic, but he went to the school personally and sent out a calming e-mail.

You can chuckle over this, but there is a serious issue embedded in this story. It says to me that religion has gotten out of hand. A school is disrupted by rumors of a vampire religion because a child reads a comic book. A relative hears about the cult and leaps to the rescue by requesting prayer on Facebook. What world do these folks live in? They are able to believe that middle school children are joining a vampire cult and planning to kill each other, and they pass around a prayer request on Facebook? In my world, if you think there is a vampire cult that is going to kill your children at school, you really should call the school principal.

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Posted in Reality, Religion

Economists and politicians and greedy people

Posted on April 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

From the Tea Party to the other extreme, which so far as I know has not been adequately named, the U.S. population seems to agree that finance reform is needed to stop greedy people in powerful financial institutions from creating fraudulent products to line their pockets and designing consumer credit to empty ours. Economists agree, people agree, and on most points even banks agree. Big banks made big money and got bailed out, while some smaller banks closed their doors; so they know there is a problem.

The debate will be an interesting because there is so much agreement. Politicians cannot be seen to have agreed with the wrong people, so we have the stand-off reported in The New York Times today in an article by Wyatt and Herszenhorn titled “Bill on Finance Wins Approval of Senate Panel:”

Republicans said that they had forced Democrats back to the bargaining table to negotiate a bipartisan accord, while Democrats said that Republicans were hastily abandoning their opposition in fear of a public outcry.

Another dimension in this debate is that the people who are actually interested — it is economics, remember — are more educated, better informed, and more critical. In the health care debate, Republicans tagged end-of-life counseling as “death panels,” and they got a lot of street action from what was actually just a lie. In the financial reform debate, Democrats talked about having banks pay into a fund so that if they failed in the future this fund could be used to finance their liquidation. Republicans immediately tagged this fund a “bail-out fund,” and Fox News announced that Democrats were not preventing future bailouts, but were in fact guaranteeing future bailouts. The story worked on the street for an hour or two, then someone noticed that it was a lie. Soon after the lie died, Democrats and Republicans and the public — in what order we are not sure — found out that President Obama didn’t like the fund idea, so that left Republicans agreeing with President Obama. So everyone had to take a look at the likely effects of such a fund, and now practically nobody thinks it is a good idea, including me. I was with the Democrats at first, and I knew the Republicans were lying. But when I looked at the issue more closely, I now find that I agree with President Obama, the Republicans, and the Democrats on this particular aspect of financial reform.

What nobody can really tell is whether the Democrats proposed something and the Republicans drove them back to the bargaining table to start over, or the Democrats thought of something and reconsidered it with input from President Obama, or the Republicans abandoned their opposition because of fear of public outcry. We will never know. But among us there are some who will continue — absent any knowledge, mind you — to care deeply. That is probably because they got into a habit of calling the other side evil, sneaky, mean, lying Nazi-Fascist-Socialist idiots. So by habit they must think of something to put on a sign in no more than six words to show to each other to tell each other how bad everyone else is. But the topic is economics, and practically everyone agrees on just about all of the points. So the sign-carrying population has a lot of tried-and-true insulting adjectives and nouns, but they can’t figure out which ones go with which. So we are likely to have a substantive discussion resulting in a strong piece of legislation, which will be, well, interesting.

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Posted in Taxing and spending

Open letter to Virginia legislators

Posted on April 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

This letter has been sent on e-mail to my Senator, William Wampler, and my Delegate, Joseph P. Johnson:

Dear (Virginia legislators)

I am writing to encourage you to vote against amendments to the budget bill that cut services in health, support of families and children, and education. I know that these are rough financial times. Rough financial times require us to hold our breath and trust one another, to share our resources so that everyone can come out okay in recovery. This is not the Democrat way or the Republican way. It is not the Christian way. It is not the way of the right or the left. It is in fact the only way to recovery. Nothing else works for hard times.

As a student of history, which I know you are as well, I know that governments are instituted to serve people, to make a good life a possible goal, and to even out the good times and the bad times. Virginia has done well with that, and has maintained a good environment for business and workers. If we cut health, family support, and education now because of hard times, we won’t all come out okay in the recovery. We will in fact all come out worse, because we will downgrade the educational level of our workforce, lower the standard of health for the Commonwealth, and leave families — upon whom society rests — to fend for themselves.

I don’t think people are as mean and greedy as they have been represented in the press, and I don’t think they would be as angry if our leaders, like yourself, would stand up and give them the truth instead of letting them receive their news and views from FOX. Most of us wouldn’t mind a small tax increase if it meant that we could go to bed each night knowing that Virginia’s mothers and children were not hungry or cold or ill and unable to afford medicine. Every Virginian is either a mother or a child of a mother, so every Virginian knows what I am talking about on a very personal level.

I know that you can’t spend money you don’t have, but I also know that people of a democracy or a commonwealth count on government to create and run programs and projects for the benefit of citizens. When a government loses or gives up the ability to raise revenues for essential programs, it can no longer serve its purpose. It changes from being a servant and conservator of the Commonwealth to being an expensive parasite, absorbing resources for its own existence when it can do us no good.

Please vote “no” on additional cuts, and give us a budget that will let us sleep better in the Commonwealth. There will be a great health benefit to that good night’s sleep we get after making sure we have done all we can for the people we serve.

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Posted in Politics, Taxing and spending, The Economy

Springtime 2010

Posted on April 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

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Originally uploaded by Thirdlayer

Everything is blooming in my yard now, including this unknown flower that actually blooms all of the time here, even in January. This photo is part of a set on Flickr where you can see my Spring 2010 photos.

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Posted in photographs

Glancing over the archives

Posted on March 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Glancing back over the archives at Life in the Third Layer, I can see that I have been blogging — more or less — since 2003! That long ago I was already thinking about the possibility of retirement and having more time for reading, writing, and pursuing my own interests. A full-time job, let’s face it, takes a chunk of time out of your day.

I have been retired now for almost six weeks, and the schedule has changed but not quite settled. Most of my time so far has been dedicated to changing over the blog hosting and sorting out the tangle I find here on my computer. In the coming weeks I hope to get that task completed so that I am comfortable with the new environment and everything is working. I am considering ways of getting back those old web pages that you expect to see linked here — my puzzle page, the children and YA literature page, the papers, and the small schools project page. I still have the content, so those won’t disappear for long. Then it will be time to focus on new content and get something interesting up here for my friends to read on a regular basis!

I expect to be writing about education and politics, and why one of these activities generally has a negative impact on the other one. And between these two topics, you can’t stay away from writing about religion, at least about the effect of religion in education and politics. These topics will, I am sure, be foremost in what you might expect to find here. However, I won’t rule out the occasional photo of an interesting bug that is eating my vegetable garden. Life is after all complex and curious.

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Posted in Blogging

How American democracy isn’t working

Posted on March 4, 2010 | 1 comment

American democracy has historically been an effective two-party system. Each party was pushed by fringe groups and activists to the left and right, but each remained strong enough to actually get work done and sustain the system. Then came the radical right, whom reason cannot sway because reason is trumped by ideology. So now there is a great divide between the “tax-and-spend” liberals who are driving the country into debt and “small government” conservatives who want to reign in costs. The talk shows and news desks still use these definitions without critical comment from the reality sector. If there were critical fact-based comment, people would notice that under the “small government” conservatives, government grew by leaps and bounds. Also, they would see that the surplus that “tax-and-spend” liberals handed to cost-conscious conservatives was rendered — by conservatives — into a staggering deficit.

I am, for the record, a tax-and-spend liberal. I am liberal because I believe people are as they are, diverse to the point of individuality. And life is hard. So we need to accept, help, and support each other as much as we practically can. If we do that, we will feel good about ourselves and others. I was brought up in a Christian family, and I think that Christians are compelled to be liberal by many New Testament teachings. I could make a long list, but one example should serve: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”Gal. 6:2. So I am not offended to be called a liberal. As for the “tax-and-spend” part, I want to point out that “tax” and “spend” are really the only two functions available to government. Without taxes, the unit of government — federal, state, local — would go bankrupt, and therefore could not serve citizens. The means of service to citizens is government spending. A government could possibly tax without spending, but that would be abusive. A government cannot, as we have seen over the past several years, spend without collecting taxes.

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Posted in Politics, Reality

How to fit on an airplane

Posted on February 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

Back before airlines gave up service and started playing at security, flying was more fun. Now they want to tell you how much you can weigh and whether or not you fit in the seat. My thought is that if you are sitting in the seat, you fit. If someone says you do not when you obviously do, they just want to find a reason to charge you more money.
Some people are fat and some are thin, some tip their seat in your lap, and some are holding a crying baby all the way home. Once I was on a flight to Berlin with a 6-year-old and an infant (both mine), and the flight was full of German tourists going home after a fun time in the U.S. The flight was the final fling, and they kept the stewardesses busy bringing them drinks. I understand a last fling. Who doesn’t? We need to have a little tolerance for other people.
What we do not need to tolerate is crowding and overbooking. On that same flight I was told to bring the car seat because regulations required the baby to be in the car seat with the car seat belted into its own seat on the airplane. I did bring the car seat. At the airport they put a luggage tag on it and sent it on with my suitcases and told me that they had no extra seats so I would have to hold the baby. I protested, and they were willing to let me file a complaint and take a later flight, or they said I could file a complaint when I got to Berlin.
So the airline charged for two seats, and then put me, the baby, and all of the stuff I had to carry for the two children in one seat. Believe me, we spilled over the armrests big time. And the tourist who fell in my lap fortunately chose a time when the baby was on my shoulder, and he did in fact apologize. It left me a little light-headed from the side-stream alcohol.

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Posted in Reality

Letter to MoveOn

Posted on February 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

I have consistently written to and called Senator Warner. He is a venture capitalist, and he approves of corporate control of Washington. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can control Washington. Our entire senate has placed the interests of corporations that sell health insurance above the American people against poll numbers and in response to ignorant and frightened fringe groups manipulated and funded by corporations.
In Virginia, our wise citizenry, fearful of themselves and afraid they would lose “business,” mobilized people in churches and other Republican strongholds — God, guns, and TEA Party — to re-file as Independents and vote in the Democratic primary. I know this from phone-banking after the primary for local candidates using the list of people who voted in the primary and listening to people tell me they were Republicans. I know it also from being at the polls for the primary handing out sample ballots to people I know are strong Republicans.
Our primary resulted in an overwhelming vote for Creigh Deeds, who agrees with the Republicans more than with the Democrats, and who actually lost a race to Bob McDonnell in the previous election. Creigh is a fine man, but a weak candidate. We might have won the day if Republicans had not stolen the primary and we had been able to run Terry McAulliffe.
We elected Bob McDonnell with a lot of Democrats staying home. The youth vote would have come out for Terry as it did not for Creigh.
One of the first things that Bob McDonnell did was send a letter to President Obama asking him to reconsider changing over the management of student loans to government. Direct government management is the best thing that could happen to people who owe student loans. But banks do not want to give up lending government money — our tax money — and collecting the interest for themselves. Who co-signed his letter? Our two Virginia Democratic senators, Warner and Webb.
When banks control legislators, interest is taxation without representation. Can we say this?
The second largest shareholder in Fox News is a Saudi prince. Can’t we point this out? Frequently and loudly?
MoveOn needs a new strategy. I can send you every dime of my Social Security and every other person can do likewise, and we can’t match the money flowing from our own corporations, much less from China and Saudi Arabia. And they give a lot of it directly to the legislators, while we try to pretend that the process still works and pay for a van to take a few activists who are out of work to Washington to talk to Rick Boucher who won’t listen and does not care. Legislators are exempt from insider trading prohibitions, so corporations can give “wink wink” tips to our legislators in exchange for votes, and we won’t even know that a corporation gave them anything. How else does the stock market go up when everyone we know is going down? And the corporations will hire Rick Boucher, Mark Warner, and possibly even Jim Webb when they leave Washington.
Forget convincing our legislators. Those who see it see it, and those who don’t have looked away and will not turn again. They have shown that they are not on our side. They have bought the “free market” lie and actually believe money will trickle down. They haven’t read anything Adam Smith said about free markets, they have just signed on to the current ideology that claims to come from Adam Smith. It doesn’t. I invite them to read Adam Smith. We live in a world very different from his, and you can’t “light out for the territories” any more, or get on a boat for the new world. You can’t get ahead by your own hard work any more. Corporate control of wealth is the modern equivalent of primogeniture, and people will all be poor if we accept it.
Our legislators who have bought the lie will not turn back to us. They cannot. They are owned, and we will not be able to buy them back.
If we win in 2010 or in 2012 we will have to win over the ignorance vote — the God, Guns, and TEA Party crowd. We have to show people that they are being sold down the river to corporate interests, that corporate control of government is bad, and that corporations — including banks — tax them more today than the federal government ever has.
We have to go to the people, the young and the old.
The young can’t find jobs because the old can’t retire. Reduce the Medicare age to 55 and watch the jobs open up. Can we poll that and predict a number and put the information out there?
The manipulators drive a wedge between the young and the old by citing the load that the baby boomers will have on Social Security. Can we point out that the baby boomers are the two-income generation? Most of the working women that I know pay in to Social Security for many years and still use the spouse’s benefit because it is greater than their own benefit from work would be. I have paid into Social Security from full-time employment since the 1980’s. When I retired, I took my own benefit, which was just a few dollars above the spouse’s benefit. We are the two-income generation. We pay in twice, draw out once. The money went away when George W. Bush took the funds out of the Clinton lock box and let our legislators fund wars with it. Can we say that?
We have to tell women that where governments control a woman’s reproductive choice they can say “no abortions” today and “only one child” tomorrow. Didn’t China do this?
What we have in the United States today is not a democracy because we have only a few statesmen in government. Al Franken is a statesman. A year ago I would have said Jim Webb is a statesman. We have a few, but most of our legislators serve corporations and do not know history at all. The middle class is the source of wealth, and it has thrived under liberal economic policy. Our elected representatives are sitting there in their seats with President Obama and a mandate, and they won’t vote against their large funding sources, which will always be corporations. I imagine that if one of them actually read the Constitution either they skipped the Preamble or they don’t know what “the general welfare” means.