Review: The Force Awakens

It should come as no surprise that I would watch the new Star Wars movie, or that I would want to get a few thoughts about it out of my system by way of my blog.

It should also come as no surprise that there are SPOILERS here.

So don't read any further unless you've seen the movie or don't mind spoilers...

All in all, The Force Awakens was a decent movie.  If it stood alone from the rest of the Star Wars universe, it would be even a good movie, with great effects, good acting, epic characterization, and a cohesive plot.  Taken within the fabric of the whole universe, though, it is lacking on several fronts.  As someone said, it's the best Star Wars movie in 32 years - not better than the original trilogy, but certainly better than the prequels.

Although, perhaps, only slightly better than Episode 3.

So why do I think it misfired?  To answer that, I need to go into detail about the film...

Problem #1: There is nothing new under the sun...

The movie starts out as A New Hope:
The bad guy, Darth Vader Kylo Ren, who is cloaked all in black and wearing a mask, invades a rebel ship resistance camp.  Plans to the Death Star a map to find Luke Skywalker is uploaded into a droid for safe keeping.  The droid is then set loose on the desert planet of Tatooine Jakku, where he accidentally meets a force-sensitive teenage orphan named Luke Skywalker Rey, who is a hotshot pilot and capable fighter already.  The teenager meets up with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and the Millennium Falcon, and together they fly away on a mission to deliver the droid to Princess Leia and the rebellion resistance.  On the way, the Empire's First Order's gigantic planet-destroyer is put in use, its destructive power witnessed by our heroes, who have to flee. Once they arrive at the base, they find that the planet-destroyer is being turned on their base, because the Empire First Order was secretly tracking them.

It then briefly becomes Empire Strikes Back:
We discover Darth Vader Han Solo is Luke Skywalker's Kylo Ren's father.  Darth Vader Kylo Ren reports in to his master, who we see only in hologram.

And then solidifies into Return of the Jedi:
The heroes form a plan to destroy the Empire's First Order's weapon: land on the planet and take out the shield generator, so hotshot pilot Wedge Antilles Poe Dameron can fly in and take out some critical target that will cause a chain reaction and destroy the entire base.  Luke Skywalker Han Solo confronts Darth Vader Kylo Ren, believing there is still good in him, and trying to turn him back to the good side.  This sets up an epic lightsaber battle between Vader Ren and Luke Rey, and in the end, our hero manages to win, and flies to safety as the planet-destroying weapon is destroyed.

So my biggest problem with the movie is that it's not a new movie - it's the same bloody movie they've done before.  The only thing new about it is that the dark-clad masked bad guy strikes down his relative, instead of being saved... but the story is clearly set up to let Ren turn back to the side of good, perhaps as he strikes down his master in a later movie.


Problem #2: It's too predictable
Part of its predictability has to do with the fact that it's the same movie as before, but every time they do a tiny bit of foreshadowing, it's obvious what's going to happen: the monsters Han is smuggling will get out, Leia and Han will make up, Ren will kill Han, the rebels will destroy the Death Star or whatever everyone wants to call these things now, and everyone else will survive, and R2-D2 will conveniently come back online at the end to give Rey the location of Luke so she can receive her training.  There was not one single moment during the movie that I was surprised by anything relevant to the plot, except for the moment when Rey and Finn are running towards a fancy ship and it's destroyed, so they turn and run for the Falcon.

As a result, nothing is ever tense.  The scene that's supposed to make us question who can live and who can die - the scene where Han is killed - doesn't actually serve to do that, because the foreshadowing of the scene made it clear he would.


Problem #3: The little idiosyncrasies
There are little things wrong with the movie.  For instance, in the beginning, we see an old guy who looks vaguely like the War Doctor, who we're told is someone we know and trust who might know the location of Luke.  Problem is, he's entirely new to the universe - no one has a clue who he is.  If you do some research online, you'll discover that his name is Lor San Tekka, and he runs some kind of Church of the Force or some such nonsense, and that's why he might know that location.  But, without digging into his story, you won't know any of that, and so he's just a random old dude whose death is entirely meaningless and who we have a hard time believing would have any such information.  We're left scratching our heads about who he was in the other movies, only to draw blanks.

In the same scene, we see something that is impossible in the original 6 movies: Kylo Ren stops a blaster bolt in mid-air.  Darth was able to absorb or deflect a bolt with his hand, but never did he stop the bolt in mid-air.  If such a thing is even possible in the universe (I guess it is now, but it wasn't before), then Ren should be capable of doing such a thing in even more crazy scenarios.  He could stop the bolts coming out of the x-wings that were attacking his troopers, for instance.  Instead of pushing Rey's blaster away, he could stop the bolt in mid-air with her, too.  Heck, he could stop the bolt, knock her out (we saw him knock her out with the Force), place her in front of the bolt, and let it go, so that her own shot kills her.  Yet, when he actually fights either Finn or Rey, he doesn't rely on The Force at all, and we're given no explanation or insight why, despite the fact that he's clearly capable of it.

We're also told Poe Dameron is a hotshot pilot, but what kind of hotshot pilot jumps into a tie fighter not looking to see if it's still tied down.  Any decent pilot is going to make sure he can actually take off before gunning it.

And we're told that Finn is a stormtrooper, but for some reason, he's the only stormtrooper who can hit anything.  Just like in A New Hope, where we're told that "only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise" and then see them missing every single shot they ever make, we should expect him to do the same, only to see him be this godlike badass who hits everything and can even fight a trained Dark Lord with a lightsaber...

And then there's Rey, who lacks even the training Finn has.  Her fighting prowess is great, certainly, but she uses a staff on Jakku, not a sword, let alone a lightsaber.  Ren, on the other hand, was trained by Luke himself.  And yet, Rey defeats him...

And the entire time she's beating him down, there's no moment where it seems like maybe she's giving in to the dark side.  When we saw Luke and Vader fighting in both Empire and Return, there was always the risk that Luke would give in to his hatred (an early script for Return actually had him turning to the dark side), but we see no such fear or temptation between Rey and Ren.  Ren mentions once that he can train her, and that's the extent of it.



Problem #4: The science.
Star Wars is not a science fiction - it is, rather, a fantasy set in space.  When Star Wars has tried to explain its science, such as in the midi-chlorian debacle, it has always fowled up marvelously.  It is at its best when it simply shows futuristic-looking things without explanation.

That's why the new Death Star-like thing is even more ridiculous than the last.  It's the size of a planet, and in fact appears to be built into a planet, carving out the entire thing like hollowing out a pumpkin.  It has the ability to siphon energy off of a star, taking solar power to a whole new level, but it does so by sucking in all the matter of the star.

First of all, that's bad enough.  If you want to destroy a planet, sucking in its sun is a great way to do so.  Without the gravity of the sun (which is now entirely inside the destroyer), the planet orbiting it would shoot out into deep space at whatever direction it was traveling when the gravity went away.  Since the new destroyer has come into the system, and has sucked in the solar gravity, the planet will now be gravitationally bound to it, and will have a massive course change.  If they wanted to, the First Order could simply move their destroyer near to the planet and let the two collide, or use the gravity of the destroyer to fling it into another planet or a moon.

But when you suck in the matter of a star, you're not sucking in its energy.  You'll get a bit of energy, thanks to the fact that a lot of the star is super-heated plasma that will continue to be ridiculously hot, but it won't be engaging in fusion.  The matter itself isn't destroyed, it's instead compressed inside your planet.

That's actually a key component of the film - the thing that the resistance has to destroy is the compression coil, which is keeping the matter of the star compressed inside the destroyer.

But hydrogen, under intense pressure and heat, as it would be inside the destroyer, would fuse - that is, it would go back to being a star inside the destroyer, now under much more intense pressure and heat than it had before.

but it would not cease to exist

They say they have to suck in a star each time they want to make a shot, but the star they sucked in already isn't dead, the hydrogen is converting slowly to helium.  Our own star will last for another 4 billion years.  Even under intense pressure and heat, it should last for a few million.  The shortest-lived stars still live for tens of thousands of years.  If they could somehow compress and hold onto a star like that, they would have the power to destroy planets for thousands of years.

Not to mention the gravitational issues...

Our sun has a mass of about 2×10³⁰ kg, and a volume of 1.41×10¹⁸ km³, leading to a density of 1410 kg/m³.  If it was compressed down into the volume of our Earth, its density would be 1300000 times higher, or roughly 1,800,000,000 kg/m³.  That's still 8 zeroes away from Neutron Star, but the gravitational forces would be extreme nonetheless.  The gravity on its surface will increase by about a thousand-fold.

That's going to put tremendous gravitational forces on the destroyer.  Nothing on the surface could survive, no matter if they are our intrepid heroes.  And, under that kind of gravity, we can't even imagine technology that can survive, meaning the entire planet-destroyer-thingy would collapse.  We can't even land a probe on Venus without it instantly dying.


All of that said, it's still an enjoyable film.  Finn and Rey are believable heroes, and the film plays just the right balance between fan-service and advancing the story.  There are several moments during the film where even I cheered and laughed.  It could be better, and if Disney is to survive ownership of the franchise, it must be better.  Fortunately, this film is really just set up to the Disney expanded universe of films, books, shows, etc., and as the setup for that universe, it did a remarkable job.  Disney didn't forget that the point of the Empire is to mimic Nazi Germany, and it really nailed that point home, which is really critical at a time when so many politicians seem to be trying to lead America to becoming the ideological successor of Hitler. 

Echoes

How is it that Trump is in the lead of the latest Republican poll, with a total equal to the sum of his next *6* competitors?  41% of Republican voters back him, which says something decidedly disturbing about today's Republican party. 

Any time someone says he "says what's on his mind," it's really a way of saying that the prejudices the person experiences are things he or she wishes were accepted by society, that he or she wouldn't be ostracized for saying them.  And, since so many people back Trump, it's clear that a considerable portion of society wouldn't ostracize the person for saying them, either.  It's an echo chamber around Trump, creating a closed society of Trump supporters whose shared beliefs can bounce around within the group and become reinforced and amplified.

There has been a sudden spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Trump said he would block Muslims from entering the country entirely, which is a reflection of this echo chamber.  When demagoguery is echoed and amplified, it leads to people being emboldened to take action against other people, partly under the belief that they will get away with it since everyone else feels the same way, and partly because the anger and hate that are bouncing around that echo chamber also amplify until that anger reaches the tipping point. 

I wonder if all of this isn't a result of social media.  I know that in my own Facebook and Twitter feeds, I see mostly those people who agree with my points of view.  As a result, Bernie Sanders groups, progressive groups, groups espousing a progressive interpretation of scripture, and so on, are echo chambers for me, making me believe falsely that more people agree with my ideals than actually do.  While Social Media could perhaps enable people to interact more with others who disagree with them, because of the vitriol spewed from people online who wouldn't act the same way face-to-face, we tend to push people of differing viewpoints aside.

Case in point: a man who goes to my very liberal church, who espouses mostly liberal beliefs, and who at one time was on my friends list.  He went to the Veterans' Day Parade in Tulsa, and protested Muslims marching in the parade by flipping them off.  When I found out, I looked for him on my friends list to remove him - but, it turns out, he had already removed me, perhaps because I had posted so angrily about the people who were protesting.

I feel like it's right to push him and others who agree out of my life, because I don't need that kind of hate, but in so doing, I do wonder if I'm not propagating the problem.  Being friends with someone offers unique opportunities to change minds, to show that good people disagree with their viewpoints, that it's not just their political "enemies." 

That said, I'm not sure I'm strong enough to be that guy...

Swords

I find it terribly interesting that the Christian Right is associated so strongly with the NRA, especially in light of Christ's own teachings regarding weaponry.

Jesus said He was bringing strife rather than peace (Matthew 10:34), but this is in the context of how people would be so adamant for Him that they would forsake everything else, much like someone who has found a new passion for music or art or anything else might forget their friends and family and focus on it.

That said, He was not bringing the kind of strife that the Jews of the New Testament thought - that is, He was not bringing about a new Earthly kingdom, leading the Jews to a glorious revolution over the Roman Empire.  They expected a Messiah that would lead them to war.  There was a moment when He could've taken up that banner, where He could've fought back - His arrest.

While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people.

Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.”

Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him.

Jesus replied, “Do what you came for, friend.”

Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. (Matthew 26:47-51)

An uprising is exactly what Jesus' disciples still thought he was there to lead, and this kind of violent confrontation is exactly the sort that could have escalated quickly.

Instead, though, Jesus defused the situation,

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

In that hour Jesus said to the crowd, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not arrest me. But this has all taken place that the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled.” Then all the disciples deserted him and fled. (Matthew 26:52-56)

All who draw the sword will die by the sword; or, you may have heard it as "all who live by the sword will die by the sword."  The literal weapon is unimportant - the weapon is merely a symbol for a person's willingness to maim and possibly kill an opponent, armed or unarmed. 

There may be some who say, "but it's okay to defend yourself!"  Well, to a certain extent, yes.  But note what Jesus says about self defense:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." (Matthew 5:38-42)

Or, as quoted in Luke:

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.  If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Luke 6:27-31)

The command of Jesus is to not fight back, but to rather give people whatever they want.

Now, certainly, this does not mean to acquiesce to rape or murder - there are certain violations that I'm sure Christ wouldn't say you should suffer, because of how personal they are and how long-lasting their damage is.  That said, we aren't supposed to fight back in most situations. 

My mother used to say that this passage only means you should turn your cheek once, that if the person hits you again, you have leave to beat the snot out of them.  However, it's clear from Jesus' language that that is not the case, that the point of this is not to say "give in a little bit, but not too much" but rather "don't fight back."

That's because we're supposed to do to others as we would have them do to us.  If we beat them or shoot them, even when they're threatening us, we are not doing to them as we would have them do, but instead doing to them what we assume they would do to us.

But that may not be the intent.  Most people who draw a gun don't intend to kill, but rather to scare.  The gun is supposed to be a motivator to acquiesce to what the person wants.  When we fight back, when we draw a gun, etc., we are escalating the violence, rather than defusing it. 


That said, it's a different story if the situation is already deadly.  A person who threatens you with a gun might not be willing to take your life.  A person who fires a gun in your direction or the direction of another person certainly is.  At that point, it's necessary to take the other person's life to save your own.  One problem with guns is that they make us react at the wrong times, shooting at people who are no threat.  They give us a false sense of security that our actual training in stressful shooting situations may not be sufficient to see us through.

Words can save our lives... but when we have a weapon, we tend to reach for it first, rather than trying to defuse with words.  That's what Jesus means when He says those who draw the sword die by the sword.

We're all murderers

Mental Health.  I've written about it before, here and here, notably.  It's our go-to explanation any time someone goes on a murderous rampage like the one in San Bernardino yesterday (or the 354 before that this year).  When something horrible happens, we immediately seek answers, and more often than not, those answers are extremely complex.  We simplify them by wrapping them up in the banner of mental health, though that is horribly unjust, both to those who suffer from mental health issues (that is, all of us), and for those who seek to create public policy based on those issues.  If you take a complex problem and reduce it to a simple cause, then your policy answering it will be simple, too, and will only address a portion of the overall cause.

Granted, a portion would be at least a start.  We still have yet to take any kind of action to address mass shootings.

As I've noted before, we can and should address mental health issues on a national scale while we have the political will from both right and left to do so, and the only time we have it from the right is after a horrible shooting disaster, when the left starts screaming for gun control and the right frantically runs out and buys up more guns and more ammo in response.  Such an expansion would need to see mental health become the first of America's nationwide single-payer healthcare system, because mental health is already somewhat covered by the Affordable Care Act, and our number of mass shootings is increasing rather than decreasing, as we would expect.  If we stick to our guns (pun intended) and stick to the story that mental health is the cause of all shootings, then the answer must be that the ACA has not done anything to improve mental health access, which means that a single-payer system is the natural next step.

But that assumes that mental health is the culprit.  It's easy to say and to understand how a person might become deranged, might abandon hope, might learn to blame the world for his or her problems, and might lash out.  In my Hitting Where You Aim post, I talked about how we're each the hero of our own stories, even when we take bad actions.  Slotkin says it's still possible for a hero to be a hero, even when undertaking violent actions, so long as the perception is that the people acted against are still worse (and note: it's really only the person at the top who matters - anyone serving that person is cannon fodder in our movies and tv, stick figures with targets on their chests rather than human beings with a right to life.  You can see this especially in The Matrix, where the computer can take over any human host, so Neo is outright encouraged to kill everyone.  Thus, if the person at the top is worse than the hero, it doesn't matter who dies in the hero's pursuit of justice).

Thus, the only step between violent rampage and silently sulking about perceived injuries is one little mental health disorder.   On his blog, Dr. Paul Mattiuzzi provides a brief list of personality types that are likely to engage in murderous behavior.  Take a look at the list, and challenge yourself: can you find your own personality traits in that list. 

I can find several of my own, and I'm relatively certain you can, too.  The difference between a murderer and a non-murderer, then, is a trigger - a "straw that broke the camel's back" moment where all of those little annoyances and grievances and dark thoughts that have been building up for years finally pass the breaking point.  This is why, almost invariably, no one ever saw it coming.  Even those close to the murderer say they can't understand why he or she would do this. 

Certainly, mental health experts might be able to identify and diffuse such tension before it builds into a mass shooting, but only if they're able to get the patient to open up about these thoughts.  If the patient believes the expert to be "part of the system," or if the patient isn't comfortable talking about such issues with someone, or if the patient lacks the knowledge that he or she NEEDS to talk to someone, then mental health experts can do nothing.  No one can force a person to reveal his or her darkest thoughts.

But what we can do is prevent such a person from having access to guns.  Almost without exception, mass murders are committed with a gun in hand.  When someone has a trigger moment and slips from being normal and quietly dealing with his or her problems to murderous rampage, he or she can easily get a gun, no questions asked.

Simply limiting gun purchases when someone has mental health issues is not enough - because we all have mental health issues, and because those can only be diagnosed in willing patients.  To be effective, we need to limit all gun purchases, perhaps entirely (going gun-free), perhaps to those who have routine psychological exams (at least monthly) and for whom the doctor or therapist signs off that the person is safe to own and operate guns.  Yes, this takes away the perceived "2nd amendment rights," but perhaps it's time to admit that another person's right to continue living trumps your right to own a gun.

In the mean time, it doesn't matter who you are - everyone has things that they let build up inside of them.  Talk to a mental health expert, get some relief valves in place for those issues, learn tools for coping with your world that will make your life happier and healthier.

Syriasly

Governors across the country are urging President Obama to reject refugees.  According to CNN, their stated reason is that they fear terrorists could enter the country disguised as refugees, as one of the terrorists in the Paris attacks had entered Greece in such a manner.  Nevermind that that accounted for only one of 400,000 refugees that have entered Greece, a paltry 0.00025% of all refugees that have entered that country, and nevermind the fact that, according to hyper-conservative Breitbart.com, 1.3 million Muslim migrants have entered the U.S. since 9/11, with no terrorist attack instigated by a foreign terror group (though several domestic terror attacks, some by right-wing Christians, some by U.S. citizen Muslims). 

And on top of that, the president has proposed bringing in an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees.

10,000.

Or less than 1% of the total number of Muslim migrants into the country thus far.

And since the refugee crisis started, the U.S. has already admitted well over a thousand Syrian refugees, who have shown no sign of terror activity.

In my mind, the risk of terrorism from a paltry 10,000 refugees is tiny - so tiny, that we can discount it as a legitimate threat.  That means there are two remaining possibilities for why these governors would move to reject them:

1. The terrorists won - that is, they induced so much fear into these governors that the governors are acting upon their fears and taking actions to make the U.S. a less-free place, as the terrorists want.
2. The governors are pandering - that is, the Republican voters (and only one governor who isn't a Republican has joined this cause) who elected them into office have stated a desire to reject Syrian refugees, and the governors are making an excuse to pander to them in order to win reelection.

At the risk of that being reductive, I'll state that there could be other reasons, but I have yet to encounter them.  Please leave comments with others you can think of.

For that second one, the possible reasons for their Republican bases to reject Syrian refugees are the already-stated fear of attack, xenophobia in general, and a misunderstanding of economics (the "they're taking our jobs" argument that has been proven false time after time, more on that in a moment).  Again, comment if you think of more.

What I've seen from my friends on Facebook points to those three things, but the third one happens in a very unusual way...

The "Why are we helping refugees when we're not helping vets" argument.  I think this is likely the chosen argument (instead of "when we're not helping starving children") simply because we just had Veterans Day, and so veterans are fresh on people's minds. 

That's great!  Let's help vets.  Let's figure out what we can do to get homeless vets off the street and into housing. 

But we won't do that.  Not because of Democrats, who have actively pushed to expand welfare programs that could help vets get off the street, who have actively pushed to expand mental health services for those suffering from PTSD and other mental afflictions that have impacted their abilities to hold down jobs, etc., who have pushed for improved educational opportunities to teach vets skills that can help them land those jobs in the first place.  When such things come up, the GOP blocks them.  Yet, it's the GOP that screams that we can't help refugees until we help vets first. 

We can't help refugees until we help vets, and we won't help vets because taxes. 

We have no problem creating vets by going to war, we just can't help them when they return because that would be too costly.

Republicans, listen closely: your argument that we shouldn't help refugees because we're not helping veterans is not sincere.  Until you move to actually help veterans, 

Syriasly.

The Prince of Lies

Right before the Supreme Court decision on equal marriage, a church in Virginia posted a sign reading, "Remember Satan was the first to demand equal rights" and a scripture, Isaiah 14:12-17:

Photo and info from WAVY.com.

Liz Palka at WAVY writes that the pastor

said the message doesn’t target a specific group. He said it’s about evil, referencing Satan trying to be equal with God, and he said he stands up for what scripture says.

Well, let's assume that's correct, and not touch on the obvious equality implications (which might make us assume blacks and women are evil in this pastor's eyes).  What does the passage say?

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:  I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners? (KJV)

Yet... that's not exactly what it says.  That is, the word translated "Lucifer" in the KJV was not a proper name - instead, it was the Latin word "lucifer" meaning "light-bringing" or "morning star," AKA the planet Venus (source).

Seeing that, we can and should read the rest of Isaiah 14 for context:

That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!  (Isaiah 14:4, KJV)

Ohhhh, it's talking about the king of Babylon, not Satan.  That makes much more sense, especially since it says "you shalt be brought down to hell," which we would assume had already happened to Satan if he had challenged God and desired to be equal.

This is the only place in the Bible that has been mistranslated to be about Satan's origins showing him as an angel cast out of Heaven.  The passage even says "I will ascend into heaven," meaning the person in question didn't start out there - impossible if Satan was an angel.

Rather, our belief that Satan was an angel who defied God, got cast out of Heaven, and wound up as prince of Hell, comes from John Milton.  The KJV version of the Bible came out right around the same time as Milton was born, and heavily influenced his work (source).  Paradise Lost is where we get the concept of an army of angels, too, as explained in this summary:

It also includes the story of the origin of Satan. Originally, he was called Lucifer, an angel in heaven who led his followers in a war against God, and was ultimately sent with them to hell. Thirst for revenge led him to cause man's downfall by turning into a serpent and tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. 

Raphael recounts to them how jealousy against the Son of God led a once favored angel to wage war against God in heaven, and how the Son, Messiah, cast him and his followers into hell. (source)

No such thing occurred in the Bible.  Satan is not a fallen angel, is not someone who went up against God and lost.  Sorry, but your entire concept of Satan is wrong.

And a church pastor should know better.

Economics 101

A Facebook commenter said the following:

the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money

So now, I feel the need to give a basic lesson in economics to the serially-idiomatic.

On this planet, we have a limited pool of money.  That money represents human capital - that is, every dollar was bought with someone's labor.  A million bucks is the same as 137,931 man hours at minimum wage (which is more than the average amount of hours a person will actually work in a lifetime - thus, a million bucks is a little more valuable than a human life in the U.S.). 

For these reasons, as long as people are working, there will always be money representing their work.

But, let's assume that all of the jobs somehow dry up, too.  If we were to freeze all work, right now, we would still have all of our amassed wealth.

See, wealth and income are different.  Wealth is the amount of money you've stored up.  Income is the amount of money you receive for your work.  Wealth is your house, your car, your land, your clothes, your electronics, and so on.  Everything you own.  It's also your stocks, your money in the bank, and so on.

According to Credit Suisse, the U.S. has 83.7 trillion dollars of wealth, which accounts for 31.8% of total global wealth.  Per household, that's about $348,000 in wealth.  Of course, I don't know too many people with $348,000 in total assets, and I'm certainly not one of them.  That's because of the growing wealth inequality in America, which is causing the biggest gains in wealth to go to the richest among us.

We could sell every asset in America to other countries, redistribute everything, and still manage to cover wages for more than 10 years - and that's assuming that all the money for all those things is now leaving the country and not coming back out to other Americans.

But that's also not what's happening.  In the U.S., the GDP was 17.4 trillion in 2014.  The U.S. spends only a little less than 42 billion importing goods (over our exports) right now, which represents only 0.24% of that total.  The vast majority of our GDP is spent inside the U.S. - that means that 99.76% of American money stays in America.  Most of that money is circulating.

So it's physically impossible for the money to simply disappear.  Instead, it circulates - and for the most part, it circulates within the system that created it.  It will never dry up. 

There is something, however, that can dry up the well: savings.  In a strong economy, people naturally save up money for harder times ahead, though if they didn't, times would be even more prosperous but we'd lack a safety net.  Newsweek explains how this is going horribly wrong right now:

Which brings us back to the savings rate. You've already seen that in normal recessions, the savings rate goes down and cushions the blow to consumer spending. But now we are in the midst of a strange kind of backward recession. As lenders retrench, instead of the savings rate going down it is, in fact, going up. This is what economists call "de-leveraging": In economic terms our "savings" go up because our borrowing goes down. This isn't savings as you normally think of it. It's an enforced regime of austerity thrust upon us because having relied on debt for so many years, we have no way to keep funding consumption.  (source)

Banks' savings are taking that money out of the economy.  The exact problem the Facebook commenter complained about is happening, just not for the reasons he thought.

A Dirty Shame

On September 3rd, a video went up on youtube that has been getting a lot of press.  I will link that video below, though I suggest you NOT watch it, both to keep its view count down and to prevent getting you angry.

The video is titled "Dear Fat People" and it's a message directed at those of us who have struggled with our weight.  Among its claims is that "Fat-shaming is not a thing," and this isn't the first time I've heard that argument.  So, let's talk about shame a bit.

Dr. Marc Miller offers this information about what shame is and how it's caused:

Shame is often experienced as the inner, critical voice that judges whatever we do as wrong, inferior, or worthless. Often this inner critical voice is repeating what was said to us by our parents, relatives, teachers and peers. We may have been told that we were naughty, selfish, ugly, stupid, etc. We may have been ostracized by peers at school, humiliated by teachers, treated with contempt by our parents. Paradoxically, shame may be caused by others expecting too much of us, evoking criticism when our performance is less than perfect. Some authority figures are never satisfied with one's efforts or performance, they are critical no matter what. Unfortunately, these criticisms become internalized, so that it is our own inner critical voice that is meting out the shaming messages, such as: "You idiot, why did you do that?," "Can't you do anything right?,"or " You should be ashamed of yourself," etc. (source)

Shame, then, is the feeling that you have failed at something, and feeling remorse over it.  It's failing to meet your own expectations and the expectations of those important to you.

When we shame others, we do so by pointing out their failings in a very negative way.  That is, it's one thing to acknowledge failure and offer encouragement to succeed at it in the future ("nice try, you'll get it next time"), and quite another to make fun of the person for failing.  The second is the one Miller offers is the one to be internalized negatively, so that our own inner voice says the same horrible things.

And, for many of us who fail at something we strive for continuously, those voices can be always present.  It's easy for other people to trigger them again, because they've been such a part of our psyche for such a long time.

As such, shame can destroy a person's self-esteem and make it impossible for that person to feel good enough about himself or herself to try to change - that is, it when we have self-esteem, we believe that we can succeed at things we attempt, and can give another shot at doing the thing we've so often failed at.

For some people, the fear of shame is enough to spur them to action, which is why we occasionally see people take those moments of shame and fight back against them, succeeding despite the adversity. That said, it's a big risk to take - you could help someone fine the strength to succeed, but you could also cause them to fail, and worse, to hate themselves enough to end the fight in a more final manner.

Shaming requires a few things:

• The target of the shaming knowing something is good
• The target desiring that something
• The target failing at that something
• Ridicule of the target for failing to achieve that goal

When Nicole Arbour says "fat-shaming is not a thing," we can test it against those objectives:

• Do fat people know that being fat is unhealthy?  (Yes)
• Do fat people desire to be thin? (I can't speak for all, but given the multi-billion dollar diet industry, I'd say this is true for the majority.  So yes.)
• Do fat people fail at dieting? (Again, multi-billion dollar diet industry.  Yes.)
• Are Arbour and others ridiculing them for failing? (Yes)

So, objectively, fat-shaming is a thing.

But then, Ardour says that it's "the race card with no race."  Let's try to unpack that statement.

First is the idea of the race card as an attempt to claim justification for something purely based on race.  It's an exploitation of race.  That's not to say that "the race card" does or doesn't exist; rather, people think it does or doesn't exist, and that others are using or not using it, based on their prejudices (here I do not use the word prejudice to necessarily mean "hatred of a race," but rather in its original definition of pre-judgement or inclination, though certainly they are connected). 

Thus, she's claiming that arguments about "fat shaming" are simply attempts to exploit obesity for political or social gain. 

Which of course is true - in that the social gains that fat people are trying to achieve are gains to simply be recognized as human beings instead of being objectified as "fat people."

Thus, it seems that what Arbour is saying is that fat people deserve to be objectified based on their weight, and thus deserve to be mocked and ridiculed for that weight.

And if you can't see what's wrong with believing that a human being is just an object deserving ridicule, then I can't help you.

But if you agree that fat people are human, with human foibles and human thoughts and feelings, then you should also understand how bloody difficult weight loss is.  It's really easy to gain weight.  All you have to do is eat what you're told.  But because science has been manipulated by a ginormous food industry (a food industry that has acted much like the cigarette industry in the time when science was starting to prove smoking was bad, by blocking legislation and using a huge propaganda campaign to push back against it) and because news media is notoriously bad at reporting on science, there's a huge amount of misinformation out there on what healthy eating is.  We're making strides in that department, but it's huge uphill battle.  And the result of that misinformation is that losing weight is hard.

It's even harder because sugar, the leading cause of weight gain, is more addictive than cocaine and heroin. 

While some people naturally metabolize this sugar better, that tends to be only while they're young.  In fact, there are two kinds of fat.  The fat you usually see is called "subcutaneous fat" and exists close to the surface. On most of the body, it's innocuous.  Tummy fat - both subcutaneous and visceral fat - is deadly  (source).  But a person can be thin and still have heavy deposits of visceral fat.  As a result, they can appear quite healthy and still be at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and so on.  As people get older, their muscles and good fats become less efficient at burning energy, and the fat storage accelerates.

Meaning some day, Arbour could join the ranks of the obese, without changing her diet or routine in any way.

She better hope fat-shaming ends by then.

Earning a living

I mentioned something in my post on Social Security and Welfare - that is, that 73% of those who earn welfare are in working families (families with at least one person working a full time job).  There are a few reasons why this might be the case.

Imagine that you are someone who has work experience, has a 4-year degree, but has been out of work for a while.  In your particular town or city, the work you're qualified for either doesn't exist or has too many people working in the field.  You don't have a bad reputation, you just can't get work.

You used unemployment while it was available, and you didn't slack off looking for work during that time, but you still failed to find anything.  Now, those unemployment benefits have run out, and your family is hungry.  During a more prosperous time in your life, you and your spouse had two or three children, but that prosperity dried up.  Now, you have mouths to feed.

Your spouse has similar problems finding work.

What do you do?  You take a job.  Any job.  Anything at all that can help put a roof over your kids' heads, food in their bellies, clothes on their backs. 

So you go to work at a fast food restaurant, and you find a job paying $7.25 an hour.  It's the only thing that's offered.  And so you work.

Working there pays $290/week.  Even the cheap apartment you found costs twice that, so you're left with only about $600 for the entire month to try to get through the month.  Your spouse can't afford to work full time - someone has to be there for the kids, and babysitting or daycare would cost more than your spouse could bring in at minimum wage. 

For reference, it costs about $50/month in clothes, $50/month in healthcare, $100/month in food for each child.  That's the entire monthly budget right there, and we haven't even touched transportation (if your cheap apartment isn't anywhere near your minimum wage job, or if you have to travel to see the doctor or go to the grocery store) or costs associated with education... or, for that matter, what you or your spouse will eat.

Sure, you have qualifications that could rescue you from this lifestyle at some point, when some kind of job opens up.  Until then, though, you're out of luck and out of money. 

This is the sort of situation the vast majority of people receiving government assistance are in.  The abysmal pay of those minimum wage jobs are exactly the reason why they need the government to help lift them up and keep them eating and getting to their jobs (if you thought "they don't need a car, they can use the bus" - congratulations on picking the government-sponsored transportation option), and exactly the reason why the government is now helping get them health insurance to keep those medical costs down and help them stretch their budgets further.

Of course, it costs us all money in the form of taxes.  A tiny amount of money.  For every $1 of taxes you pay, 0.0059% of that dollar is welfare; that is, if you pay $10,000 in taxes, you pay about $59 toward welfare (source).

But if that's too much for you, then perhaps you'd be OK with the alternative.  You see, if people such as I described were earning a reasonable living, then their need for welfare would disappear.  Raising the minimum wage to $15 would increase that person's pay from $290/week to $600/week.  If this person also had no tax burden (with 4 dependents, he or she would likely get 100% of taxes back), that means being ale to pay for everything I described and still have about $300 left for transportation or education (such as putting money back for the kids' college), or for finding a bigger place, like a house where they can actually be saving money in equity rather than throwing it out on rent.

That would take the vast majority of that 73% on welfare and remove them from welfare.  It'd mean decreasing that personal bill from $59 out of $10,000 in taxes to just $16 per $10,000. 

"But that will hurt the economy" you might think.  "Raising the minimum wage will make my hamburger cost more, meaning I'll be making functionally less."  Or, "It'll mean fewer jobs for minimum-wage workers."

All I can offer you there is what 600 economists said about the issue:

In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front. (source, emphasis mine)

Suddenly, those minimum-wage workers would have the money to buy things, such as things from restaurants and department stores where other minimum-wage workers work.  The increase in sales volume would more than make up for the losses such companies would endure paying more to their employees.  While certainly some of the more reprehensible companies (I'm looking at you, Papa John's) will protest and say that they'll have to cut hours or reduce the number of employees, the facts just don't support this at all.

 Join the effort for a nationwide increase in minimum wage today, https://berniesanders.com/

Real Citizens United

Citizens United.  In lower case, it refers to the very core of democracy - that is, that citizens can unite around common ideals and goals and evince change.  In capital, it refers to two things: an organization and the Supreme Court decision in a case involving that organization.

The organization speaks of itself in ways that seem to uphold the ideals of democracy:

Citizens United is an organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizens' control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United's goal is to restore the founding fathers' vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens. (source)

It starts off sounding great - citizens should be in control of the government, and an organization promoting education, advocacy, and grass roots organization means well-educated citizens engaging in the democratic process.  Everything after that speaks to exactly what their definition of a more perfect union looks like, and it's clear from all of their catch phrases ("traditional American values," "limited government," and so on) that their vision is for a Conservative (with a capital C) America. 

But they revealed a lot more when they went to the Supreme Court in the case Citizens United v. FEC.  In extremely brief detail: the group wanted to run its own political advertising, but the FEC said that violated electioneering law.  The SCOTUS decided that this was a freedom of speech issue, that Citizens United had the freedom to spend money however it wanted in order to support or oppose a candidate. 

The basic idea is that for messages to reach the larger public, they must have financial backing.  As a result, money is a necessary component of speech.  And, if money is a necessary component of speech, then freedom of speech requires freedom of money, or the freedom to spend money without regulation on such speech.

Taken on an ideal level, this is great.  Imagine if a million people gave $30 each to support an idea - that $30,000,000 could buy major advertising time on nationwide networks, and help their message reach millions more. 

Unfortunately, we've seen this become problematic, precisely because different people have wildly different amounts of money.  When one person has $20,000, and another has $20,000,000, the person with the millions has 1000 times as much money and therefore 1000 times as much influence over speech. 

And there are people with $20,000,000,000 - which would give them a million times as much influence over speech.

The result is unprecedented independent spending on elections.  Campaign spending had already been growing rapidly (which led to many attempts in the 90s at Campaign Finance Reform), but in 2010, after the Citizens United decision, it exploded.  OpenSecrets.org estimates that in 2008, independent spending was at $338 million.  Just 4 years later, it surpassed $1 billion.  (source)

In 2008, Liberals accounted for 63% of spending.  In 2012, Conservatives dominated, with 71%.  The increase for Liberals was 50%.  The increase for Conservatives was 540%.

While certainly not all of that 540% can be attributed to wealthy donors, the majority of it can - $412 million of the $720 million spend on the election by Conservatives was from the Koch brothers.


To a certain and very limited extent, this is actually a good thing.  After all, despite the Kochs dropping so much on the election, Obama still won.  Thus, their money was "wasted" on their ultimate goal, but did serve society by reentering society.  Their spending went into the coffers of major media organizations, which spent that money, etc. on down the line.  It was one of the few times that trickle-down economics actually trickled.

That said, such money only gets spent in "Battleground" states - states where the money might sway public opinion.  Oklahoma is not such a state, and receives little of the resulting money.

Time Magazine offers a state-by-state breakdown.  Their figures show that Oklahoma received a measly 0.435% of the total campaign expenditures in 2012 (despite having 1% of the national population). 

The goal of the Supreme Court in the decision was making speech more free, and, ironically, they ended up further restricting it.

Think about the last time you went to a loud rock concert or nightclub, and how you had to shout to be overheard by the person right next to you, let alone the person across the table.  That's the effect of unlimited campaign spending.  Those with billions to throw at campaigns are the ones on stage, blasting their message as loud and obnoxiously as possible, while the rest of us are left desperately shouting at each other in an attempt to be heard.

Certainly, sometimes our message gets through to one or two people, but no one else in the room can possibly hear it.  That's always been a problem with free speech, especially with a free media as well - the media can choose whose voices to promote and whose to repress - but now the media's choice is between those willing to spend billions on advertising and those who cannot.  And, that's really a false choice, because no one chooses to lose that kind of money.

This might be fine, if the messages promoted by the wealthy were messages that benefited all of us.  Sadly, that's not the case.  As I've pointed out previously, our incomes haven't been rising.  The Koch Brothers, however, have been making bank:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/09/22/325612/denier-koch-brothers-worth-50-billion-richest-americans/

Which is exactly what Donald Trump said about money in politics:

“I will tell you that our system is broken,” Trump said on stage in Thursday's GOP candidates' debate. “I gave to many people before this -- before two months ago I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. That's a broken system.” (source)

If we want a free democracy, we need to remove big money from politics, thus returning power to all the people, not just the richest among us.  Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you should be able to see how the system is rigged against you by this decision.  There are nominally only two politicians running who are fighting back against this system - Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  Trump is already one of the richest Americans, so he's an insider of the very system he's working against.  Sanders is more an average guy - worth enough to be upper-middle-class, certainly, perhaps even upper class, but not worth much more than that.  He is, in fact, the poorest person in the U.S. Senate. 

That's one of the things that makes him different, and his grassroots organization, which has avoided PAC funding, is proof that he can organize people and raise money without relying on the Citizens United decision.  He's our best bet for getting it overturned.

But he needs your help. 

Go to https://berniesanders.com/ today to volunteer and help spread his message.  Let's put an end to unlimited campaign spending by rich people seeking to get richer by buying the government.  Let's make government work for all of us.  It's good for America.  It's good for Oklahoma.

Social Security and Welfare

Saw a copy of the following running around on Facebook this week:

From Sodahead

This makes a few claims:

1. That Social Security and Welfare are similar.
2. Social Security is in danger of running out of money.
3. Welfare isn't.
4. That Social Security is only received by those who worked for it.
5. That Welfare is only received by those who don't work at all. 
6. It's right for people who worked for money to receive benefits.

Let's address them one at a time:

SOCIAL SECURITY
Social Security is run by the Social Security Administration, an independent agency within the government.  Its website explains that it "is financed through a dedicated payroll tax" of 12.4% of your income, half of which is paid by your employer if you are not self-employed (source). Only your income up to $118,500 is taxed in this way - anything above that is tax-free, meaning that someone earning $1,000,000 per year is paying an effective tax of 1.47%.

Social security benefits are determined as follows:

We base Social Security benefits on your lifetime earnings. We adjust or “index” your actual earnings to account for changes in average wages since the year the earnings were received. Then Social security calculates your average indexed monthly earnings during the 35 years in which you earned the most. We apply a formula to these earnings and arrive at your basic benefit, or “primary insurance amount.” This is how much you would receive at your full retirement age—65 or older, depending on your date of birth. (source)

So, someone who works *ever* - such as someone who works for two years and then quits (explained below), to retire, go on medical leave, disability, etc - is eligible for benefits.  The amount of the benefits are determined by how much the person puts into the system.

Retirement age was raised a few years back so that anyone born after 1960 cannot retire until 67 to receive full benefits.  (Interestingly, if you work until 70, you can earn more per year - quite substantially more, in fact.  For me, it'd be almost 25% more.)

Social Security also pays disability or death benefits.  When someone dies and leaves behind minor children, those children (and their remaining parent) earn a very significant amount of money (more combined than if the dearly departed had gone on disability, and disability is roughly equivalent to retiring at full retirement age) until the child is 18.

Before we get into "Welfare," I'd also like to throw in Medicare, since that is funded in a similar manner as Social Security.  It's a flat 2.9% (half for employer, as above); however, Medicare *has no cap*.  This will become important to the discussion later.


WELFARE
When we speak of Welfare as a thing different from Medicare or Social Security, we refer to 77 separate programs providing a variety of assistance - from food programs (such as SNAP benefits and school lunch programs) to housing (most notably HUD), to education (Pell Grants, Even Start, Title One, and so on), to medical (most notably Medicaid), to child care (notably Head Start), to community development, and on and on.

What we imagine, however, is something a bit different: an organization within the government that is tasked with handing out a 700 billion dollar chunk of cash, that looks for people who are not working at all and pays them to stay at home and pop out babies.  If this department exists, it exists as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (or TANF).

That imagery - and specifically the idea of the "Welfare Mother" who was predominantly black and single, and who had kids just to earn money on welfare without having to work - was a big part of the 1990s welfare reform movement that culminated in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which reformed the branch of welfare known now as TANF (formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC).

Of that 700 billion the federal government spends annually on Welfare programs not counting Medicare and Social Security, less than 7 billion, or less than 1%, goes into TANF.  (States pay a roughly equal amount into the program.)  This comes out of the general tax and is determined by the federal budget - meaning that Congress has complete control over how much is put into this and other Welfare programs each year, and the revenue stream is not dedicated.

TANF is notably temporary; that is, it lasts for a maximum of 2 years at a time, and up to 5 years over a lifetime.  No one who is earning it is staying at home for their entire lives farming TANF.

Even if they were, which they're clearly not, TANF's maximum payout is abysmal.  Last year, the Congressional Research Service put out a report titled Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF): Eligibility and Benefit Amounts in State TANF Cash Assistance Programs.  You don't need to read the mere 31 pages of awesomeness - the abstract alone is a gold mine.  It explains the problem with maximum benefits:

In July 2012, the state with the lowest maximum benefit paid to a family consisting of a single parent and two children was Mississippi, with a benefit of $170 per month (11% of poverty-level income). Among the contiguous 48 states and the District of Columbia, the highest maximum benefit was paid in New York: $770 per month for a single parent of two children in New York City (48% of poverty-level income). The benefit for such a family in the median state (North Dakota, whose maximum benefit ranked 26th among the 50 states and District of Columbia), was $427, a benefit amount that represented 27% of monthly poverty-level income in 2012. TANF maximum benefits vary greatly by state; there is also a very apparent regional pattern to benefit amounts. States in the South tend to have the lowest benefit payments; states in the Northeast have the highest benefits.

$170 per month.  And, while such a person is also eligible to receive some other limited benefits (HUD benefits to provide Section 8 housing, SNAP benefits to provide some food), such a person is still far below the poverty line, and definitely struggling to earn enough to keep children in clothes, much less fed and secure enough to do well in school.


So, what's the bottom line for #1? 
Social Security is a social welfare program, but it is not similar to TANF or any other welfare program besides Medicare.  It relies on a dedicated funding stream, and provides benefits for much longer periods of time than other social programs.


Social Security is running out of money:
Social Security has several problems; notably:

• People are living longer.
• Baby boomers are in their retirement years.
• Richer people are earning more.

People are living longer
This graph shows how life expectancy in the US has increased from 1960 to 2013.  In 1960, it was roughly 70.  That meant that the average person could expect to die 5 years after he or she started to receive social security benefits, so those benefits only had to be paid out for 5 years (on average).  Today, it's almost 79.  Even with the increase in the age at which people start receiving benefits (to 67), that's 12 years of benefits - an increase of 240%.

Baby Boomers are retired
Baby Boomers are those people who were born shortly after WWII, when soldiers returned home from war and celebrated by avoiding being celibate.  Birth rates since have somewhat declined, as shown by this graph.

We normally expect age distribution to be somewhat exponential - with a greater number of children than the number of adults producing them.  That is not, however, what we see:

http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/age_structure.html

While the top of the curve looks like we expect, it's largely to do with how quickly people die off as they get older.  Consider, though, that in that chart, almost everyone over 65 is receiving social security benefits - to the tune of 56 million people today. 

The rich are getting richer
Meanwhile, income hasn't substantially increased for the majority of Americans.  Wages have remained basically stagnant for the last 40 years for the bottom 60% of earners:

Originally from U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, reposted on Real-World Economics Review Blog.

Meanwhile, as is clear from that graph, the top 20% are earning quite a lot (and as I'm sure you've heard, the growth for the top 1% has been massive).

This isn't a gripe about income disparity; rather, it affects Social Security along with the other two points.

Social Security is a kind of pyramid scheme.  When you pay into the system, you aren't putting money away for your own future - rather, that money is going to pay for the Social Security benefits of people currently receiving them.  For Social Security to be successful, it requires two things: growing population and growing wealth.  These two things mean more money coming in than going out.  But when population is distributed the way it is now, the system becomes top-heavy, with too many people receiving funds.

This would be fine if income was also growing. It's the multiplication of people times per capita income that tells us how much income is getting taxed.  If income grows substantially, then population doesn't have to.

And income is growing substantially, but only for those already earning more than the maximum taxable amount.  Take a look at that chart again, and you'll see that the top line - the top quintile - on average has earned more than the maximum taxable rate the entire time, and it's the line that has been substantially growing.  All of the big income gains we've made haven't helped Social Security one jot.

It's for this reason that Bernie Sanders is calling for an end to the tax cap.  As I hope you can see, it's very much needed.  The alternative is to continue raising the Social Security tax rate, or the eligible age, or both (as we've done several times in the past).


Welfare isn't running out of money
Welfare works, as noted, quite a bit differently.  The 700 billion that funds non-SSA, non-Medicare welfare programs comes out of the general federal budget, rather than a dedicated revenue stream.  For this reason, it's dependent upon the whims of Congress each year.  While many welfare programs have grown in size and budget over the past 50 years, TANF - the one I mentioned earlier is the one we really think of when we think of welfare, has shrunk:

Meanwhile, Food Stamps and Medicaid have grown:

Source

Source

The 2008 economic downturn caused dramatic growth in the number of people seeking benefits - growth that far outpaced budget.  SNAP benefits had to be dramatically reduced as a result.  So, when we say "Welfare never runs out" - that's not quite true.  That said, it's theoretically easier for Congress to raise taxes and increase welfare spending than for it to change how Social Security works.  It just depends on who is in control of Congress as to whether or not that happens:

USGovernmentSpending.com

Do people who receive Social Security earn it?
Well, that depends on your definition of "earn," but using what I imagine the proponents of the progenitor argument would say is "receive in due course as a result of working and paying into the system."

If that's their definition, then the answer is "sort of."

You have to have done some work to receive Social Security.  That's because Social Security also pays out for disability and death.  In both cases, you may be able to qualify with a surprisingly small number of work hours.  Age and situation play into it a lot, but a "worst case" would be for someone under the age of 24 who becomes disabled.  Such a person only needed to earn 6 "credits."  Credits are a special system Social Security uses to determine eligibility:

In 2015 ... you earn one credit for each $1,220 of wages or self-employment income. When you've earned $4,880, you've earned your four credits for the year. (source)

That's only 673 hours of work at minimum wage (you get about 2080 in a full time year).  You can only get 4 credits per year, so such a person would've needed to work at least 337 hours in a previous year.

That's relatively easy to achieve.  Even in the best case scenario of someone who became disabled at age 62, such a person only needed to put in 4 credits a year for 10 years (source).

Sure, the benefits might not be much.  Someone aged 20 who goes on disability right now and earned only $7500 in the last 3 years would get $187 monthly, or $2,244 yearly (per the online calculator). But that's yearly for life - so if that person lives another 55 years, he or she will receive over $100,000 - well in excess of the amount paid in.

And the Social Security Administration estimates that 25% of people will become disabled at some point before retirement (source).

Do people who receive Welfare earn it?
Using the same definition of "earn" as above, the answer is still "sort of."  The difference in terms of "earning it" between welfare programs other than Social Security and Social Security is that the funding source isn't dedicated - that is, you don't pay into a fund and get guaranteed payout as a result.

But it's a mistake to think that people on Welfare haven't worked.

According to a report jointly from UC Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Urban & Regional Planning, "Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of enrollments in America’s major public benefits programs are from working families" (source).  They appear to be counting among those programs the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), SNAP, TANF, and Medicaid.

You might say, "well fine, that means 27 percent didn't."  But among those 27%, we don't know the story - it's possible such people are disabled like in the SSA estimates.  It's possible they're on unemployment and just waiting for something to come in.  According to the likely-biased (though they claim none) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "more than 90 percent of the benefit dollars that entitlement and other mandatory programs spend go to assist people who are elderly, seriously disabled, or members of working households — not to able-bodied, working-age Americans who choose not to work" (source).  Just looking at SNAP benefits, they estimate that 82% of households had at least someone working in the past year (source).

Sadly, better statistics on this subject are not available.

But, just from these, it seems a false narrative to say that people on welfare don't work - rather, the vast majority do work, but are paid abysmally.

It's right for people who worked to receive benefits.
I agree.  That's why I support welfare.  However, it is true that welfare helps keep people in dependency - not because of welfare, but because corporations are abusing welfare to get out of having to pay livable wages.  If you believe that welfare causes dependency, then you should support increasing minimum wage to help pull people out of that dependency.

If not, then you're just a horrible person.

Just watch this

Just watch this.  I tried to come up with something to add to it, but I've got nothing.

It is NSFW.

The Illusion of Paradox

There are two concepts I want to talk about - the Paradox of Choice, and the Illusion of Choice.

In 2004, Barry Schwartz released a book titled "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less."  If you haven't heard about it, the general theory of it goes like this: People like having choices, and like having more choices available to them, but when they are actually tasked with choosing between those things, they have a harder time choosing, they take longer doing it, they evaluate it on completely irrelevant data (rather than things that matter), and they are less-satisfied with their choice later (source 1, source 2).  In a recent follow-up to address some discrepancies in the theory (the paradox is not always true, it just really depends on the specific scenario, and no one knows why), Schwartz offers an examples:

a large retailer of office supplies reduced the number of options offered in its print catalog in many product categories. It did this not because of the research on too much choice, but to save money on production and postage. It assumed that the change would lead to reduced sales, but hoped that production and distribution savings would outpace sales losses. What the company found was that in virtually every category in which options had been reduced, sales increased. (source)

You can visit that link to read more about it.

The Illusion of Choice, by contrast, is this concept that you have a choice when you really don't.  There's a famous "intellectual" joke that features this:

Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, "I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream." The waitress replies, "I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?"

Part of this joke has to do with the illusion of choice - that is, when the waitress is out of cream, Sartre can't meaningfully make the choice between cream and no cream; therefore, she offers him the drink without milk, so that he can make the choice (interestingly, since Sartre believes nothing is something, the decision is really between the inability to choose and the ability to choose, which is itself a choice... ok my brain is hurting now).

For another example, let's say you know that the vending machine regularly carries bottles of water, and you would like one.  You hit the button for water after paying money in, but nothing drops, and the screen on the machine says that it's out of stock.  You seemingly had a choice between paying for water or drinking from a fountain; then, you had the choice between water and anything else, but that choice was just an illusion.

The Illusion of Choice is also present when two things seem different but are arguably not.  Let's go back to the vending machine example: let's say that it's also impossible to get a refund, so now you're left with a choice between sodas.  All of them are loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners, so your choice of which drink to get is merely between different types of junk.  The drinks are all arguably the same, and are certainly the same from a health perspective.  The choice between them is a false one - which one you select doesn't matter.

Definitions out of the way?  Good.  Let's move on...


Several years ago, I noticed that there were some issues regarding Paradox and Illusion with regard to online dating, and wrote a lengthy blog post on OKCupid which has since been deleted.  In essence, it went like this:

In online dating, you have the ability to select very discreet feature about your potential partner: a range of heights, sometimes a range of weights or self-selected body types, eye color, hair color, smoking habits, drinking habits, religion, political alliance, kids, location, marital status, sexual orientation, and so on.  It feels like you're building a person at a car dealership, selecting the options you'd like to add on. Each one of these things is a choice, and although you can certainly choose "all" for many of them, by offering the option to choose, and by further returning results for those options, it feels like the choices are meaningful (the choices are real and not illusionary) and rational.  It leads to a feeling of self-importance, since you have the power to make such choices, and to a feeling that if you relax any of those choices, you're "settling."

And then, once you have all of these choices defined and you do a search, if your settings are too relaxed, you get a ton of matches.  All of these matches represent a choice you have to make - whether or not to reach out to a person, whether or not to respond if they message you, and whether or not to block them entirely, removing them from your list so you never have to see them again.

And here is where the Paradox of Choice comes into play - because we have all of these potential matches, but we have perhaps too many.  It can lead us to backing away from the choice rather than making it, and when we do make it, in making it based on entirely irrelevant criteria.

Case in point: when my wife first messaged me on a dating site, before we started dating of course, I had to evaluate her profile and her message to me to see if I would be interested, and it was certainly possible that evaluation would've led me to turn her down, because her grammar was not perfect (and in the past I had demanded grammatical perfection) and she was divorced (I had wanted to meet someone who had never married).

Thankfully, because I had realized the effect that the Paradox of Choice had made on my dating life, I had decided it was necessary to relax my ideas about what I need to find in a partner.  It took a long time (I had written that article more than a year before we met), but by the time she sent that message, I had at least gotten to the point where I could say "well, this isn't really that important."  And those things aren't.  I clearly have thrown grammar out the window now, as you can certainly tell from my willingness to begin a sentence with a conjunction, and I also realized that someone's marital status wasn't always an injunction on that person's ability to make good decisions or that person's ability to follow-through on promises, and rather that it varied from person to person.

I decided to write her back, and a few days later we got together for a First Friday down at the Guthrie Green, and though the date should've been the worst date ever based on how much we both disliked the art we encountered, we both had a blast.  I knew before the night was out that I wanted to spend a lot more time with this woman, and it's a decision I'm happy I made.  Fortunately for me, she made the same choice.

So yes, this is a call to throw away those illusionary choices for what they are, and try to meet random people.  You never know what will click.  The same is true for clothes - try them all on, because even though yellow might not normally be your color (it's not anyone's color), maybe this particular shirt or dress or whatever will look amazing.

Try on everything.

That said...

The Paradox of Choice also comes into play in a lot of other areas of our lives.  One of the great benefits (to corporations) of the ways in which we shut down when presented with many options is that once we make a choice, we tend to stick with it forever.  That is, if we choose to eat at McDonald's, we'll choose to eat there all the time.  Evaluate your own eating habits, and I bet when you eat out you eat at a fairly narrow range of restaurants.  You may have your special date night restaurants (places you've never been before possibly, but maybe expensive favorites.  Mine is Ti Amo.), but you probably also have places you frequent, such as Starbucks, Panera, Arby's, and so on.

Thus, you're presented with both a Paradox of Choice (too many choices preventing you from making a choice at all) and an Illusion of Choice (because when you finally go there, you'll look at the menu meaningfully and choose from a much smaller subset of dishes you normally go with anyway).

It also comes into play with politics...

You knew I'd get here eventually...

The Republican presidential field suffers both from the Illusion of Choice and the Paradox of Choice - that is, there are so many candidates that you can't possibly learn everything about every one of them, and attempting to do so can prevent you from making a meaningful decision, but it's also an Illusion of Choice because the candidates are all functionally the same.

To illustrate this, I used data from http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/ to put together a chart of how well the candidates toe the party line.  The site simply gives the candidates a "Supports," "Opposes," or "Neutral/No Opinion" position as a distillation of their views, which may or may not be accurate (any simplification is always an error, as a person's views are complex), but which may be helpful to illustrate the point.

Across 18 different categories, candidates toed the party line 76% of the time.  The two "questionable" categories were "Women and Minority Rights" (which really shouldn't get wrapped up into one column) and "campaign finance reform."  Both of these are highly subjective, in that someone can say they support women's rights and yet vote against women's rights in every case, and can say they're in favor of campaign finance reform yet side with the Citizens United decision (case in point: Rand Paul, who has said "I agree with Citizens United").

Another questionable category is "Immigration Reform."  A person can be in favor of reform in that he or she could be wanting to make immigration harder.  Yet the site only gives a "supports" or "opposes," so it's hard to say what that really means.

Even with these problems, the chart is frighteningly red.  The biggest exception is Chris Christie, a man who single-handedly skews the chart 2 percentage points toward the left.  He's tallied as "supports" for same sex rights, despite vetoing a New Jersey bill that would have legalized it.  He's tallied as "supports" for "Peace and Diplomacy," yet does not support the current Iran nuclear deal. 

In the end, what we're left with is that in a large number of cases, Republican candidates are either completely right or just leaning right, and even when they lean left on an issue, it's only just. 

What does this mean?  That any choice between Republican candidates is, for the most part, a choice between personalities alone, rather than on beliefs. 

This is largely why Donald Trump is currently in the lead by a large margin - because in a field of similar voices, his is the only one able to rise above the tide by pure virtue of his personality.

This lead will one day end.  The way of primaries is to narrow the field.  He might win the first few by a large margin, but those first few primaries will serve to push out those people who have no chance of winning the election.  As the field narrows to five or six people, suddenly the din of voices will diminish, and people will be able to engage with the personalities of other candidates.  At some point in the process, someone will rise above the crush and appear to be sane by Trump's insanity, and the result is that Republican votes will flock to him.  This is likely to be Jeb Bush or Scott Walker - two people who represent the farthest right the party can go.

And here's where this whole thing comes to a head.  Eventually, we'll have the simple choice between a Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate.  Though this is likely to be Bush vs Clinton, it's entirely possible it could be Walker vs. Bernie Sanders.  But the paralysis that comes thanks to the Paradox of Choice present on the right could prevent less-engaged voters from participating, and less-engaged voters are often younger voters who lean heavily left.

Which will result in a landslide Republican victory, even when polls will indicate that the Democrat is ahead by several digits. 

The answer, fortunately, is not to fight fire with fire (running 20 Democrats), but rather the huge cult of popularity that's forming around Bernie Sanders.  If he can keep up his momentum, his voice rising easily above the voices of the right, he might just have a shot at winning.  He has the ability to fire up young voters in ways that other candidates haven't been able to, and that's exactly what it will take.