GOP 2016 : 'don't trust voters under 75 !' (they're all Boomers and their kids) (and relatively few 75+ vote)

In November 2016, all of "THE GREATEST GENERATION" (all those in the Allied nations born before 1941 and who can thus personally feel part of the WWII 'victory for modernity' {sic}) will be over 75.

Now journalists of all stripes never tire of telling us that the elderly vote more than the young.

But what very few journalists admit (the charitable view) or actually know (the uncharitable view) is the truly awkward fact that voting turnout actually drops off sharply after 75, as physical and cognitive infirmities keep the very old from voting.

Bad bad bad news for the GOP.

Un-Super Heroes : a biography of NEW DEAL penicillin ...

The post-modern NEW DEAL extrusion onto the landscape of the Modern Age

British Conservative wartime penicillin or American Republican wartime penicillin , if they had succeeded, would have totally altered the generally favourable image we have today of penicillin.

It would have been regarded as needlessly expensive and originally available - by design -  to only the richest and whitest classes.

By contrast the wartime penicillin we actually got in the end  - NEW DEAL penicillin - is probably the world's best known medicine almost entirely because it is also the most beloved of lifesaver.

It remains non-patented ( in the public domain) and naturally made and hence both cheap and available to all nations to make.

During the war this non-patented natural penicillin was made available to all those in the world dying from lack of it only because the New Deal oriented super agency known as the WPB (War Production Board) willed it to be so.

In many accounts, the New Deal was definitely on its way out in Washington and America by 1945 and the gift of cheap natural penicillin for all was merely its final, departing, gift.

But in my view, the informally postmodern New Deal morphed seamlessly into formal post-Modernity in late 1945 and the gift of  cheap natural penicillin for all became merely postmodernity's opening gambit...

Social costs of too-expensive anti-bacterials

When the cost of live-saving anti-bacterial medicines (or anti-viral vaccines) are too expensive for a poor person and their family to buy, they die.

The family's grief goes far beyond mere "social cost".

But let us consider how "social cost" of too-expensive medicine against contagious diseases can translate into grief for another family.

Say the family of a Tea Party Republican whose mean-spirited ideology of demanding that "the user pay all" ensured that this life saver remained too costly for the weak and the small.

When people with virulent strains of bacterial or viral diseases aren't promptly and thoroughly treated, they and their families remain reserve pools of that virulent strain that ensures it remains endemic or epidemic.

That means it can be transmitted at some point to the granddaughter of the selfish Tea Party zealot.

If she isn't treated right and treated right promptly (because that disease has been rarely seen by younger doctors in America while remaining endemic in parts of Asia and Africa) , she could die.

When society no longer wants to pay for lighthouses and the crews of container ships die on the rocks, society still have to pay for their loss and the loss of the ship itself and its containers.

Beyond the grief of the dead crews' families, the lack of a social willingness to make a one time payment for a simple automated lighthouse adds up to the permanent higher cost of subsequently imported goods for all.

And permanently higher insurance premiums for all.

Martin "Henry" Dawson's wartime call of "penicillin for ALL humanity" might have seemed fiscally extravagant to Allied conservatives at the time, but it actually wasn't.

The fact that the self-fixated Tea Party is here alive and mouthy and not rotting in a grave from Rheumatic Fever is proof of that.

It would be totally, totally un-Christian of me to add "unfortunately" ...

The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense

Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.

They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.


The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.

It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.

Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.

But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.

Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.

In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.

Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.

Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.

The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.

But who can save that this project's impact  - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves.... 

Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

DRUGS and Romney's 47% : AZT, Penicillin and Sulfa once didn't pay federal income tax either

AZT once part of the 47%

In a dynamic - Democratic - world, one minute you're down, not paying any federal tax, the next minute you're paying millions. But in a static - Republican - world : when you are down, you're out - for all time.

Roughly 47% of all of our most famous, best-loved, life-saving drugs were written off as "useless" when first discovered.

In the lexicon of Ryan, Romney and Republicans everywhere : they were part of the "unfit" 47% - well past caring about.

So Sulfa, penicillin and AZT were labelled as "useless" for 30 , 15 and 20 years respectively.

But then some kindly souls picked them up out of the medical gutter and gave them second chance, a second chance to do good and save lives.

AZT, Penicillin, Sulfa later saved the lives of those who earlier wrote them off as "useless" : poetic justice

But revealing once again that God has an infinite sense of irony, He - in his spirit of forgiveness - later permitted those "unfit" miracle-inducing medications to be used to save the lives of Romney, Ryan and all the rest of those church-going Republicans.

 All the people who had earlier failed so demonstratively to obey God's command to show mercy to the "unfit" : there is a lesson here - maybe even a sermon (!) : something about how the weak and the useless are sent to humble the mighty and the wise, maybe ...

Supreme Court rules: you have to be stupid to vote Republican, as 400,000 plan move to Canada to 'avoid socialized medicine'

Buzzfeed tracks the stuff going viral on the Net and it reports hundreds of thousands of Facebook "likes" and Twitter tweets on the idea that Republican Americans should head to Canada to "avoid the Democrats ' socialized medicine".

And if Republicans want to get away from Democratic Socialist governments as well, why don't they come to Manitoba and Nova Scotia, Canada in particular. They'd be safe here ---- at least in Nova Scotia.

I take all this as a tenor of the Republican thought processes as they ponder, over a dry martini what to do - if anything - about the world outside their gated compounds going to hell in a very hot hand basket thanks to too much CO2 pollution in our skies.

What ever happened to the Grand Old party .....

the ANTI-BIBLICAL republicans most popular among bible-"loving" evangelicals

     The BIBLE ,remember it ? , said that that would be easier for a Republican elephant to go through the eye of a needle than it would be for a One Percenter to get to Heaven.
    The Republican elephants have responded, in Florida and elsewhere, by saying "that was then, this is now: we're going to make harder for a Ninety Nine Percenter to get through our new voter registration process, than it would be for Mother Theresa to get to Heaven."

    One then has to ask why are rich Republicans Chicken Hawks so eager to send other families' children off to die oversea, to ensure poor dark youth overseas can vote, when they are working so hard to deny the same voting opportunities to similar poor dark youths back in America?
   Why indeed are they simultaneously chickens and hawks?
   Any effort to find consistency in the Republican Deniers on a political science scale, as resting somewhere between libertarians concerned above all with freedom and the hierarchy-oriented concerned about restraint are going to flounder - chicken cum hawks simply aren't found exclusively at either pole.
   Rather the scale we want to look at is a moral scale, one that has
at one pole those who are selfish and self centred.
   Then, all Republicans' self-centred behavior does display its own powerful internal logic and consistency : its all about me, all the time, everywhere.
    Spoil a child of the One percent Class, teach them the world is their's on a silver spoon and then just stand back.
     Spoil a child ...... and ruin a world.
    Senators who deny the idea of free publicly funded medicare for all, on the Canadian model, will then have no moral problem going into publicly funded Navy hospitals, free, when they are ill ---- because they are self-centred .
    To the extent that they really believe in the rule of law at all, they believe there is one law for the 1% and another totally different law for the 99%.
    All the denier-watching bloggers are not ever going to get a handle on the denier libertarian/authoritarians' behavior if they restrict themselves to the insights from economists, political scientists and psychologists and the like --- useful as they all are.
    They are going to need help on this one, from those who have long studied ethics  : because being greedy is truly humanity's oldest profession.....
 

Contra Chris Mooney , SCIENCE & REPUBLICANS once exchanged bodily fluids quite happily ...

Michael Marshall

In the 1930s, when FDR and the Democrats were racking up their impressive majorities ,about the only place the twosome couldn't catch flies was in college towns ---- they voted Republican.

Yep.

Science - conservative Modernist/Progressive Science - was very popular with the not-yet-angry-wealthy-white-guys back then.

For it had demonstrated, from the example of Nature, that it was natural and inevitable for the big and the powerful to vanquish the small and the weak - and those red letter passages in the New Testament be damned.

(I mean had this Jesus guy ever even so much as run a single lab experiment ??)

Conservatism is the business of relishing certitudes in an uncertain world and Science, Modernist Science, sure delivered some beauts.

But after 1945, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, scientists - the younger ones particularly - started having their doubts and by the late 1970s they were coming on to replace the dying and retiring modernists in science's positions of power.

The certitudes of modernist science had actually been proven wrong almost as soon as they were publicly uttered but these failings were downplayed and buried--- until the post war post modern generation found the courage to speak up.

As scientists showed the world to be even more uncertain than any lay person imagined possible, the conservative personality left the ship of science in droves.

What college town today votes Republican? - the idea seems absurd.

In which case, Chris Mooney is right and I am wrong.

But look it up - they did once.

In spades....

TOP DRAWER people have not changed their mind about Science, scientists have changed their minds about TOP DRAWER people ...

Michael Marshall

Scientists haven't changed their minds on GOD - they still don't believe in GOD, by and large.

But they are no longer certain HE is on the side of the Big Battalions.

They no longer believe Charles Darwin's claim that civilized man will inevitably kill off the weak and the small.

Instead they fear Humanity's stay on earth will be relatively short and it will end up being inherited, once again, by the meekest of the meek - the microbes.

Naturally, this does not leave the people in the Big Battalions and in the skyscrapers of Ever-Upward-Human-Progress very happy.

 That is what I  take away from Gordon Gauchat's study on why the Republicans hate 'Science' ....

When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

The MAN bit I mean.

Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.

If you plug in  'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.

In his mind.

And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.

But their minds, their minds !!!

Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.

They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .

Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.

This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.

The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.

Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.

If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)

However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago,  "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."

When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...

Michael Marshall

The MAN bit I mean.

Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.

If you plug in  'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.

In his mind.

And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.

But their minds, their minds !!!

Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.

They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .

Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.

This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.

The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.

Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.

If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)

However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago,  "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."