It seems 12 states have already passed laws granting all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the majority of the popular vote in the country as a whole. We all remember Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing the election due to the Electoral College system our Founders gave us. I understand people’s ire with that result, but we need to really consider why the Electoral system was envisioned as the optimal choice for our great country.

Even though the Federal government has been growing like a weed for decades and most people have forgotten, the United States was formed as a union of independent states. When the country was founded, the people in each state were proud of the culture, history and way of life in their state. I would like to believe we feel that way to this day. In my opinion, the elimination of the Electoral College is a direct affront to state’s rights, and may well lead to state governments being nothing more than the local branch offices of the Feds. I don’t think that would be a good thing. Here are a couple examples:

Let’s say you live in Iowa, where I spent many years and attended college. At the 2010 census, Iowa had a population of 3.0 million. In some future presidential election, imagine that 99% of Iowans vote for candidate A, about 1.5 million votes. Candidate B ends up winning the popular vote by 500,000 votes nationwide. With these new laws, Iowa gives all their electoral votes to B, negating the votes of virtually all Iowans. Perhaps the best candidate did win, but the will of the people of Iowa is wiped away.

Now here is the insidious part. According to that same census, the US population in 2010 was 312.9 million. The nine most populated states account for more than 1/2 of the total. The top 16 states account for 2/3s of Americans. The rest is spread among the remaining 34 states and our territories (mainly Puerto Rico). In a United States without the Electoral College, no candidate is going to campaign heavily in any of those other states or territories. What’s the point? Focus on the highly populated states and major cities. Spend a little money on a network on the next tier of ten states. The rest only account for 16% of the popular vote. You can afford to ignore them and spend money where the bodies are. If you prevail, you’ll get their votes by default.

To me, this will disenfranchise those states, turning them into back waters no politician every talks about or visits. That isn’t right. Each state should have its own voice and it should be heard. And so this isn’t considered a partisan post, here are the bottom ten on the list, excluding territories: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Washington DC, Vermont and Wyoming. Combined into one state, they would be the 12th largest in population, but now their 8 million voices will be silenced.

What the Electoral College does is to force candidates for President to campaign in every state. Not only is each person’s vote important, but so are the issues and needs of the states they live in. I believe these new laws will lead us backward in time to the days of the Boston Tea Party. What was that brouhaha about? Taxation without representation. Every state counts. When I was younger, I did not really understand state’s rights or the Electoral College. Now it seems so clear, and our Founders were right!

Did anyone see the Canadian ambassador to the United States on Fox News yesterday?

His take on the Keystone XL pipeline was amazing. First of all, he obviously has no dog in this political hunt. He is Canadian (much more liberal than the USA), and represents his country’s interests, not the Dems or Reps in our country. What he said is critically important, although no one is talking about it. He said that his country has already looked at the environment impact, as has our State Department. His point is that the oil is already flowing from Alberta to the American refineries. Right now, and into the future, that oil is moving by rail and tractor trailers. Therefore, the ruse that canceling XL will help the environment is a lie. He said the pipeline will actually help the environment as Keystone XL moves the oil by pipe rather than rail or truck, which generate significantly higher CO2 emissions than pipes. Therefore, fighting Keystone XL is actually a desire to increase pollution, not lower it.

Believe me, the Canadians are more environmentally focused than us, and that isn’t good, but in this case it lays bare the political agenda behind the fighting in Congress. The fricking market will do what it will do. The ONLY other option is to kill the pipeline, let the oil stay on rail and increase pollution, or ship it directly to China, where they don’t give a damn for the environment, and raise pollution even higher. Let’s all take a step back, and do what’s right for the USA for once. All of the helter-skelter in Washington is  a ruse (as it has always been) for the folks there to control all of us. If you love the NSA spying and all the other governmental abuses of power, you won’t care what I say. If you still think, consider this.

First of all, to be clear, this post does not express an opinion on the validity of claims of anthropomorphically caused climate change or global warming. What I wish to discuss is actually more important than that. When I heard the President of the United States claim during his State of the Union address that climate change was “settled science”, I almost fell off the couch.

Perhaps the President and other laypeople can be forgiven for their lack of understanding of how science works, but using the bully pulpit to say such things should make you squirm in your chair. The idea that anything in science is settled contradicts the very nature of scientific experimentation. Many progressives talk about the fallacy of religion, and yet, thousands of years ago when those faiths were beginning, they were the highest state of knowledge. When Isaac Newton discovered the laws of thermodynamics and physics, that was the state of the art for its time, even though the works of Einstein and others have shown Newton’s laws are approximations that work well within the macroscopic confines of our existence on Earth. Now, physicists know there is much more to science that what Newton knew, and that is fantastic. We live and we learn.

What does science know today? Probably a lot more than I can imagine, but let me share a few things I learned from reading and watching science television. First, we know that matter acts very differently on the quantum level than it does on a larger scale. The computer I’m typing on and all modern electronics rely on how things happen on the quantum level. Our machines work because those tiny bits that make up atoms and everything else act like both waves and particles and can be in many places at the same time. It is one of the great challenges facing science today to link quantum mechanics and macro-scale physics into a grand unified theory. So far, no luck on that one, which means we know how big stuff works, and we’re glad the small stuff does what it does, but we don’t know how to reconcile the two. In other words, there are two types of physics out there.

Then there is dark matter, which accounts for roughly 25% of everything in the universe. Without it, the galaxies would spin apart, since there is not enough mass in them to hold their lovely spiral (and other) shapes. What is it? Who knows? And don’t forget dark energy, my personal favorite, which makes up 70% over everything there is. When you ignite a firecracker, there is a big pop as energy is released, and then it’s over. Using that logic, after the Big Bang, the universe should have expanded very fast until the energy of the explosion dissipated and then start to slow down. Perhaps due to the vacuum of space, that could take a long time. Well, to our surprise, after 13.8 billion years, the expansion is accelerating! Imagine lighting a firecracker a billion years ago, and the explosion is still going and getting bigger. How can this happen? Dark energy. What is it? Don’t know.

So, science knows a lot about the quantum and large-scale action of 5% of the universe, but not why the two are different. While science is amazing and I love it, for a school child, that’s like getting an A in kindergarten. There is so much more to know than we can possibly imagine. Nothing in science is settled.

By the way, I love the Morgan Freeman series “Through the Wormhole” and “Beyond the Wormhole”. Those programs showcase real scientists working on some of the anomalies of science. Over the last two weeks, some pretty outrageous ideas have been floated. During one program, scientists were explaining their experiments that “prove” there is no such thing as free will. Wow! That’s really bad news for Al Gore. If that is true, there is nothing we can do about global warming, since we do not make choices. We are just going through the motions. I do not believe that, but I am no scientist.

Last week, it was suggested that existence is an illusion. I have heard that before, with scientists speculating that reality is on a sphere at the edge of the universe, and our reality is just a hologram. It all seems very unlikely, but it did remind me of my favorite book ever, Illusions by Richard Bach. After hearing those discussions, my head was spinning, but the one thing I realized is that nothing in science is settled.

Join the Adventure!

It is odd that no one seems very upset about Crimea being stolen from Ukraine by Russia. But it is a country that no one has heard of and it is so far away from the US. Yes, they did take a vote in Crimea to join Russia (under the watchful eye of 20,000 Russian troops not wearing any insignia), but that is not the point at all. If a vote was taken in Maine to join Canada, or in Southern California to join Mexico, would we just shrug our shoulders and say “whatever”? When groups of counties in California and Colorado try to secede and form new states, the news is full of stories and talking heads saying they cannot lawfully do that. But when it comes to foreign aggression, the result is a resounding “Who cares?”

Carlos Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Seventy-six years ago, Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia where a majority of residents were German. Again, Germany justified the move to protect the German residents against the Czech government, although there was no evidence of any discrimination. Now, I am not comparing Putin and the Russians to Hitler and the Nazis, but the similarity of the situations is startling.

Of course, you don’t have to look that far in the past to see the same thing. In 2008, Putin and Russia invaded and annexed part of the nation of Georgia. It was the same old story. “We must go in to protect our fellow Russians”, even though there was no evidence of harm to them. Where will this end? Will anyone care if all of Ukraine is annexed? What about Moldova? The Baltic States? Poland? Hungary? Eastern Germany? And the list of former Soviet satellites goes on.

My point is not that we should ship 100,000 troops (or any troops) into Ukraine. But when our leadership says Russia is acting out of weakness, or that Putin is acting like a 19th Century leader for whom there is no place among enlightened 21st Century leaders, the specter of their naiveté gives me a sick feeling in my gut. The world is a nasty place. Putin, Kim Jung Un, Mugabe, Khameini, Assad, and Bashir are all 21st Century leaders. You and I can go to Starbucks and have a latte, or sit back and write books about the future, but we cannot allow ourselves to be led by those who do not understand the dangers of the world around us. Let us not be blinded by our disinterest anymore. Martin Niemoeller famously said:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

Check out the current status in Ukraine here: http://abcnews.go.com/International/ukraine-date-guide/story?id=22768235

It’s hard to believe the Cold War has been over for 25 years. Being a bit older, I grew up in the 50s and 60s during the Cold War. We actually did the drills in elementary school where you would “dug and cover” beneath your desk. Looking back on it, a cheap wood and steel desk would offer little protection against a high-yield thermonuclear blast. But the activity thrust the terrible reality into our little minds. My dad was in the Air Force, and for several years, his job was to fly the technicians to the various missile silos in the West from our base in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Both the USSR and the USA had tens of thousands of missiles and warheads, only a few of which would have been necessary to eliminate all life on Earth. After so much time, it is hard to realize how things could have gotten so far out of control. Well, now we have Ukraine. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it is troubling to see the Russian Bear exercising its formidable power on another country. The people in every other former Soviet satellite country have to be quaking in their boots. What is it about the Russian psyche, or at least that of Russian leadership, to be so afraid of attack that they needed a number of buffer states to protect the Motherland?

I have two theories. On one hand, Russians have every right to fear intervention. Just look at the history books. Both Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte set their sights on Russia. In both cases, it did not turn out so well for the invaders. The other possibility is the desire for Empire. The glory days of Russia include the tales of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Most governments and cultures have given up on Empire, but I am not certain Russia has. If they are still of such mind, the future looks very grim for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, all of which used to be under their hegemony.

The one factor I am certain has nothing to do with it is Communism, which never worked in the USSR and continues not to work in China, North Korea and Cuba. Let’s face it. None of those places are Communist. They are autocracies. The folks at the top control everything (what Marx called the Benevolent Dictator, two words that should never be placed together), and mete out the least they can to keep everyone else alive.

I used to work with a factory in Partizanske, Slovakia, part of Soviet Czechoslovakia. I had many meals and meetings with people who lived under the USSR. A Polish production manager once told me why he looked forward to Christmas every year. Each December, every family would be allowed to buy 2 pounds of bananas (from Cuba). That’s it! The rest of the year, there were no bananas. It was a Spartan life, contrasted by the Politburo and their palaces and luxuries.

Enough memories! What do you think is going to happen next? And if Russia moves into Ukraine, what do you think the rest of the world will or should do about it?

Okay, I know the title of this post sounds partisan, but bear with me a while. My concern is more about the weighting of Senate members that their party affiliation. Now, I know the Senate is supposed to be the more calm, mature house of Congress where our elder statesmen rationally look at legislation and take state interests more in mind than citizen concerns. The theory of the founders was the House of Representatives was the people’s house, which is why they are apportioned by population and have shorter terms (after all, the populace changes their views often, and having them there for a longer term risks them losing touch with their base). Senators have a longer term so they are less affected by shifting political storms and can sit back and come to a consensus better. Of course, we all know that is not true, especially with recent changes to Senate protocol which has made the chamber strictly partisan, in my opinion.

Up until the early part of the twentieth century (before the 17th amendment), Senators were selected by their state governments. The thinking of the founders was that they would be representatives of the state, which is why there are two for each state. Each state would have equal representation so that more populated states could not run over the others. The 17th amendment changed that due to the cronyism of the body. The Senate was even called a “millionaire’s club.” It is funny that even after the change, it pretty much is a millionaire’s club even today, although many obtained that wealth due to their Senate seats. The drafters of the amendment clearly believed that by having the people vote for Senators, all the problems would go away. Of course, politics being what it is, that can never happen. Rather than having the Senate crammed with political buddies of the governors, it is packed with favorites of the political machines in each state. I cannot say which is better or worse. Even though I am personally in favor of repealing the 17th amendment, I know that will never happen. But let me cut to the point of this tirade.

The five states with the highest population have a total of 10 senators, obviously. Therefore, they get 10% of the vote in the Senate, while their states contain 37% of the people. On the other end, the five least populated states also have 10 senators, but in total represent just over 1% of the national population. That does not sound much like equal representation to me. So, if the senators do not really represent the state governments, who do they represent? Let’s compare the top and bottom states by population. I know each senator represents the entire state, but let us assume each represents one-half of the population. In California (where I live), each senator represents 17,6000,000 people. In Wyoming (where I did live for a while), each represents less than 300,000. I do not want to dredge up the issues that led to the 17th amendment, but if there are such large differences in populations by state, and their is no direct connection between the senators and state government, then who do they really represent?

To be fair, it should be known that I lean to the right, and as such, I probably should not say anything about this because most of the low population states are red. It still does bug me that solving one issue with the 17th amendment only created new issues. But hey, I am talking about politics, so who would imagine that anything ever gets solved by government.

Everyone is talking about growing income inequality in the United States, and they are correct. However, the reality is never as simple as what newscasters and politicians report. Currently, the QE (whatever) program provides that the Federal Reserve Board will inject $85 billion of new money into the economy each month in order to keep interest rates low so that companies will invest and grow, and just maybe, provide more jobs. It sounds great, but it is not and most likely cannot work.

Companies grow and hire people when the demand for products outstrips their capability to provide them, period. With an ongoing tepid economy at best, and a dragging half-recession at worse, there is no demand for companies to add sales people or build new factories. So, they do not hire anyone and they do not borrow money and all that cash just sits in the Fed and major banks. If a company is smart (and many are), and they have a heavy debt load, they will borrow new money (at virtually 0% interest) to pay off their debts, instantly increasing their profitability. Still, no new jobs. But what makes QE the disaster you think it is, Karl?

Let’s look at the average shmuck (namely me). He keeps some savings in the bank where the principle is nice and safe, along with a small IRA or 401k. Turns out the money in the bank is not so safe after all. If I earn 0% on my balance, and inflation is even only 2%, then in effect, I’m losing 2% of my principle each year. So, what can I do to stop losing money? I move my cash into the equity markets (stocks)! Let’s say I find an index fund or individual stock with an average return of 5%. That’s fantastic, going from 0% to 5%. Unfortunately, I am not the only shmuck who thought of this. We all take our cash and pump it into the market, causing stock prices to go up, which is exactly what we are seeing now. Where is this leading?

Let us say so many people follow suit that the price of my stock doubles. Well, the company is not suddenly going to grow or become more profitable because the stock price is up. The company does not get any money from stock sales in the market (assuming no new issues or company-held stock), so the return goes to 2.5%. Of course I am disappointed, but it is still better than 0% from my bank. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end.

The Federal Reserve is already ratcheting back on the QE program. Even they realize that if the money supply gets too big, the value of the dollar will drop like a safe (envision Germany post WWI). As they cut back on printing money, interest rates go up. If the prime rate reaches 2.5%, suddenly my stock value will plummet. Anyone can now put their money in the bank and get the same return as I get in the more risky market. Why risk your principle to get 2.5% when you can get the same in a bank? If my company was foolishly leveraged, they may even go bankrupt, as their debt payments exceed their ability to earn profits.

And that leads to income inequality. Most people cannot invest significant capital in the market. We just do no have the resources. So now, the rich get all the winnings from the soaring markets, which leads to big bonuses and stock incentives for their leaders. They may pay a heavy price when the market swings downward, but believe me, the rich will be just fine. Since there are no new jobs and inflation rises, the poor get poorer.

And none of this points to the disaster that will occur in government spending when interest rates rise! Think of the impact on spending when the interest rate moves from 0% to 2.5% on $17,000,000,000,000 in government debt. The payment on the debt goes up $425 Billion a year. That is money that can no longer be used to pay our service men and women, or pay benefits to the poor, fund Social Security and Medicare, or whatever else the government does.

Maybe I am exactly wrong. Perhaps sunshine and lollipops will abound and kittens and puppy dogs will save the planet. What do you think?