The Glade 4.0

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I saw a metaphor I liked attached to the household income analogy on Facebook.


Of course, I'd add a third stipulation -- not only should you remove the ****, but you should get the backup fixed in the first place.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Where does $1.65 trillion come from? 2011 was $1.3 trillion and 2012 is $1.08 trillion.

We seem to be netting an addition 3+ trillion in debt each year.

No matter what tax hikes happen, we need to be doing some serious spending reduction in this country.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

But nobody wants to cut their spending because their constituents will kill them. An across the board cut might be the only thing that would work then it would give congress sitters some cover.

Brown, Portman and even Jordan won't cut JSMC regardless of wether or not we need more A1 tanks or not because they know it means they will find it hard to carry this county.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

What might help is to eliminate party organizations within Congress. I don't see anywhere in the Constitution that it mentions a majority/minority leader, a caucus, or any of those structures; they're just part of the business rules Congress uses, and while not unConstitutional, they are not mandated either and therefore could be eliminated. While we're at it, we could get rid of organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus that have similar problems.

The thing is, when a Congressman doesn't want a program cut in his district or state, he's actually doing his job- representing his constituents. When he's worrying about what the Republican or Democrat parties or their constituents nationally want, that's not doing his job. The same is true for the Black Caucus and any other organization that reflects an interest group rather than a constituency; it's a distraction from their job and distorts the function of the individual members of the legislature. It isn't the job of a black Congressman to represent blacks; it's to represent his district.

To illustrate the point, remember that white Congressman with a majority black district that wanted to join the CBC? Had they let him, that would make it far more acceptable because at least then it would be an organization based on constituencies, rather than on this idea that black Congressmen are there to represent blacks in general.

When Barney Frank whines that he wants the F-35 cancelled, but if it isn't he wants half the engines built in his district, the problem is the former, not the latter, and not simply because he wants the air force flying fighters that are older than I am. The problem is that he's trying to have it both ways; represent his voters but also represent liberals nationally. Ignoring the fact that Congress should not be mandating how and where the individual components of a complex system like a fighter be produced and fit together anyhow, the simple fact is that if Frank's home voters want the jet, he should want the jet without trying to split the difference, or else he should be explaining in his next campaign why the jet is really not good for his district.

This isn't to say that Congress should behave as if its members don't have party affiliations, but we have forgotten that their job is to represent their district or state, not their party. The press doesn't help. Every time there's some kind of story about people nationally being dissatisfied with Harry Reid or John Bohenor, the fact that only people voting in Nevada and part of Ohio are actually represented by either of those two is never mentioned.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

While that sounds great on paper DE, we all know it's never going to happen. It's human nature to be communal and pull together into like minded groups. You might as well rail against the fact that we have strong drives to eat and ****.

And that means we should allow it to happen in Congress, why?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

You'll notice I didn't suggest we get rid of all references to party affiliation in Congress, just that we demand the structure be dismantled. I also didn't suggest dismantling the seniority system; that's because by getting rid of the party structure seniority becomes more important. That's the incentive of Congresscritters to go for it. Make the folks at home happy, you get re-elected and get more seniority, allowing you more leeway to make folks at home happy. Meanwhile, without the party structure, you have to be willing to compromise more with everyone else because you can't just hide in your party and point fingers at the other side of the aisle.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

To my mind, I think it needs to swing the other way, we need more groups, not less. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party are monolithic, homogeneous entities. I say take a long, hard look at the individuals, and group them according to their trended views. I think you'll find enough fracture points to end up with at least half a dozen viable groupings, and some actual subset of independents.

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Who's going to bell that cat?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

As an activity, it's probably more feasible today than it's ever been, what with the era of kickstarting and crowdsourcing upon us. However, binding the targets to the results of the effort is certainly no mean task. Of course, neither is binding the targets to the dismantling of their current structure.

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What I was saying was, I don't know that we can trust the people evaluating the "trended views" not to impose their own views upon things.

More groups would be better, especially if they actually represented localities with common interests rather than the current idiocy of trying to tie union industrial labor to San Franciso gay pride, or for that matter, of trying to tie small government and reduced spending to pro-life abortion stances, but I'm not sure anyone should be in a position to be passing judgement on who fits into what group.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Crowdsourcing would act to alleviate that problem to a large extent. Like Wikipedia, you wouldn't be able to use it for sourcing academic papers, but it's good enough for government work.

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That's not really the other way. Remove party affilliations and groupings altogether, and what you have are 435 parties of one person each. What Diamondeye is suggesting is just a far extreme of the same thing you're suggesting.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Again, I wasn't suggesting removing parties at all. What I was suggesting was removing official structure for Congressional business that is party or group oriented. If all the black Congressmen still want to consider themselves a group they could do that, but they wouldn't be allowed to represent themselves as an official congressional group. Similarly, Republican or Democrat congressmen could still organize informally, but they wouldn't be entitled to a majority/minority leader or whip as an official position.

There's nothing wrong with Congressmen having party affiliations that they work within; the problem is making those affiliations part of the overall structure. It distorts the job of the Congressman from representing his district to representing his party. PResumably, the majority or close to it in his district is of his party, but the national aggregate of Republican interests is not necessarily the same as the interests of rural dwellers in Wyoming. The sole representative of that state should concern himself with Wyoming's needs more than the national Republican goals. Then, other Congressmen will know what they need to do to get his vote.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."