Altruism as Evil

Those of us in an ideology free zone are often amazed by our ideological brethren. The amazement is caused by their remarkable ability to embrace belief systems that are utterly contradictory. Paul Ryan is a devout Catholic and a disciple of Ayn Rand. If you have even the slimmest understanding of those two philosophies, this should make your head throb. It is as if a celibate pacifist celebrated the life and times of the Marquis de Sade.

But then, Ayn Rand, the individualist who wanted to dismantle government programs, gratefully embraced the collectivist wonder of Medicare when her health failed.

Paul Ryan is considered an "intellectual" in the conservative movement. In a land of the blind, a one eyed man can be king.

This land is your land.

"People don't generally care what politicians read. But Rep. Paul Ryan is different. His fascination with the Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand could spell trouble for the GOP's new vice-presidential candidate. It could put him at odds with the Christian right and the Roman Catholic Church.

It all depends how much you believe that he is in the thrall of Ayn Rand.

Rand (1905-1982) is controversial because of the extremism of her views. In researching my recent book, I found that Rand's influence on the Republican Party, which dates back as far as her endorsement of Wendell Willkie in 1940, has been sharply growing, largely due to her vise-like hold on the imagination of the tea party and people like Ryan.

Rand was the author of two best-selling novels, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged." These books, along with her other novels and essays, set forth an ideology which she called objectivism. ...

College students notoriously go through an "Ayn Rand phase" because her books emphasize self-reliance and breaking away from one's parents. For most people, it's a kind of literary infatuation. But for a few, Rand becomes a lifelong passion.

What made her books controversial is not violence or sex, though both "Fountainhead" and "Atlas" have their share of bodice-ripping, but an extremist vision of America that celebrated greed and selfishness, rejected altruism as "evil" and opposed the fundamental tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. (She was also a militant atheist who favored abortion.)"

Read More:       Is Paul Ryan For or Against Ayn Rand?

The 100 Million Dollar Question

Mitt Romney somehow accumulated 100 million dollars in non-taxed, IRA funds over the past twenty years. The absolute maximum that you can put in such funds is $30K per year. Since Romney isn't several hundred years old, he had to accumulate this astonishing tax hedge in some other fashion. 

I wish I knew Romney's secret. A little simple math suggests that, if I could come up with only $3k  a year, after 20 years I would have 10 million dollars. If Mitt can show how we all can do this, I will not only vote for him, I will volunteer for his campaign.

Tax experts are scratching their heads over this and other Romney financial matters. The conventional wisdom is that he hasn't released his previous tax returns because the answers to his tax mysteries are much, much worse than hiding them from the voting public.

"Mitt Romney is extraordinarily wealthy, but that is not a justification for nondisclosure. He has made no secret of his wealth, and required campaign disclosures already hint at its magnitude. While Romney may have dissembled about when he actually left Bain Capital, he has been disassociated with the firm long enough that he cannot argue that his tax returns will reveal proprietary secrets.

Nor is this just an exercise in financial titillation or gossip. Disclosure goes to the heart of the truthfulness with which a nominee engages the American people, and it assures us that he in fact has comported himself before the election with the high moral character we associate with a future president.

Romney's 2010 tax return, when combined with his FEC disclosure, reveals red flags that raise serious tax compliance questions with respect to his possible tax minimization strategies in earlier years. The release in October of his 2011 return will at best act as a distraction from these questions.

So, what are the issues?

The first is Romney's Swiss bank account. Most presidential candidates don't think it appropriate to bet that the U.S. dollar will lose value by speculating in Swiss Francs, which is basically the rationale offered by the trustee of Romney's "blind" trust for opening this account. What's more, if you really want just to speculate on foreign currencies, you don't need a Swiss bank account to do so.

The Swiss bank account raises tax compliance questions, too.

The account seems to have been closed early in 2010, but was the income in fact reported on earlier tax returns? Did the Romneys timely file the required disclosure forms to the Treasury Department (so-called FBAR reports)?

The IRS announced in 2009 a partial tax amnesty for unreported foreign bank accounts, in light of the Justice Department's criminal investigations involving several Swiss banks. To date, some 34,500 Americans have taken advantage of such amnesty programs. Did the Romneys avail themselves of any of these amnesty programs? One hopes that such a suggestion is preposterous, but that is what disclosure is for -- to replace speculation with truth-telling to the American people.

Second, Romney's $100 million IRA is remarkable in its size. Even under the most generous assumptions, Romney would have been restricted to annual contributions of $30,000 while he worked at Bain. How does this grow to $100 million?

One possibility is that a truly mighty oak sprang up virtually overnight from relatively tiny annual acorns because of the unprecedented prescience of every one of Romney's investment choices.

Another, which on its face is quite plausible, is that Romney stuffed far more into his retirement plans each year than the maximum allowed by law by claiming that the stock of the Bain company deals that the retirement plan acquired had only a nominal value. He presumably would have done so by relying on a special IRS "safe harbor" rule relating to the taxation of a service partner's receipt of such interests, but that rule emphatically does not apply to an interest when sold to a retirement plan, which is supposed to be measured by its true fair market value.

Third, the vast amounts in Romney's family trusts raise a parallel question: Did Romney report and pay gift tax on the funding of these trusts or did he claim similarly unreasonable valuations, which likewise would have exposed him to serious penalties if all the facts were known?

Fourth, the complexity of Romney's one publicly released tax return, with all its foreign accounts, trusts, corporations and partnerships, leaves even experts (including us) scratching their heads. Disclosure of multiple years' tax returns is part of the answer here, but in this case it isn't sufficient. Romney's financial affairs are so arcane, so opaque and so tied up in his continuing income from Bain Capital that more is needed, including an explanation of the $100 million IRA.

Finally, there's the puzzle of the Romneys' extraordinarily low effective tax rate.

For 2010, the Romneys enjoyed a federal tax rate of only 13.9% on their adjusted gross income of roughly $22 million, which gave them a lower federal tax burden (including payroll, income and excise taxes) than the average American wage-earning family in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. The principal reason for this munificently low tax rate is that much of Romney's income, even today, comes from "carried interest," which is just the jargon used by the private equity industry for compensation received for managing other people's money."

Read more:     Why Won't Romney Release Tax Returns?   CNN

Growing Jobs in China

Mitt Romney is a remarkable fellow. He wants to be president, and to be president he must tell working class people that his policies will grow jobs in America, allowing them to participate in the American dream. Yet his personal wealth was built from a business model that sends jobs overseas.

This dissonance, rather than giving him pause, seems to be consistent with the alternate universe he lives in. He nurtures job growth, the only problem is that it is on another continent.

"The shock of losing a precious job in a town afflicted by high unemployment is always hard. A foundation for a stable family life and secure home instantly disappears, replaced with a future filled with fears over health insurance, missed mortgage payments and the potential for a slip below the breadline.

But for Bonnie Borman – and 170 other men and women in Freeport,Illinois – there is a brutal twist to the torture. Borman, 52, and the other workers of a soon-to-be-shuttered car parts plant are personally training the Chinese workers who will replace them.

It’s a surreal experience, they say. For months they have watched their plant being dismantled and shipped to China, piece by piece, as they show teams of Chinese workers how to do the jobs they have dedicated their lives to.

“It’s not easy to get up in the morning, training them to do your job so that you can be made unemployed,” said Borman, pictured, a mother of three who has worked for 23 years at the Sensata auto sensors plant.

Borman knows her eventual fate in the stricken economy that surrounds Freeport. “I am going to be competing for minimum wage jobs with my own daughter,” she said.

Such scenes have been common in America as manufacturing has fled abroad in search of cheaper wages.

But, in the midst of the 2012 presidential election, Freeport is different. For Sensata is majority-owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once led by Mitt Romney, that has become a hugely controversial symbol of how the modern globalised American economy works. Indeed, Romney still owns millions of dollars of shares in the Bain funds that own Sensata.

So as Sensata strips out costs by sacking American workers in favour of Chinese ones, the value of Romney’s own investments could rise, putting money into the pockets of a Republican challenger who has placed job creation in America at the heart of his bid for the White House."

Read more:    Bain Capital plans to outsource jobs at profitable Sensata plant in Illinois

The .001 Percent

A sum of money larger than the entire U.S. economy, between 21 and 32 trillion dollars, is being held in tax-sheltered, off-shore accounts - much of it by a mere 92,000 people - or less than .001 percent of the world's population.


Let's be clear. This, not a few protestors in a New York park, is what constitutes class warfare.


These 92,000 people, who include presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have pledged their allegiance, not to a country, but to their money, revealing themselves as being less patriotic in regards to their country of origin than they are to their wealth.


Spare me the flag waving, flag lapel pin, "ours is the greatest country in the world" theatrics. We know where these folks passions lie, and it isn't with their country.

Report: $21 trillion hidden from taxman in offshore accounts

Some $10 trillion comes from just 92,000 people scattered around the globe.

The wealthiest people in the world have exploited loopholes in international tax rules, evading the taxman and sheltering a staggering $21 trillion or more in offshore accounts, according to a report released Sunday.

To give perspective to the scale of the offshore economy, the economic transparency group Tax Justice Network said the sum is larger than the entire United State’s economy, or enough money to entirely solve the European debt crisis.

The report, called The Price of Offshore Revisted, says between $21 trillion and $32 trillion could be hidden in tax havens in countries like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The first details of the report were released to the Observer in London.

And most of the money hidden overseas comes from people who would make the was majority of the top 1 percent turn green with envy, economists said.

Instead, some $10 trillion that has been stashed in off-shore accounts is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001 percent of the world's population, the report finds.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show,” said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "People on the street have no illusions about how unfair the situation has become."

Private banks and investment firms have enabled these wealthy individuals and corporations to take advantage of loopholes and gaps in cross-border tax rules, according to the report.

Questions about offshore accounts and tax shelters has recently become a major point of contention in the U.S. presidential campaign, with Democrats accusing Republican candidate Mitt Romney of stashing some of his wealth in offshore banks to avoid taxes.

The Romney campaign dismissed the allegations as an "unfounded character assault."

According to the Tax Justice Network report, almost every country has suffered from the billions of dollars in lost tax revenue, But, it says sub-Saharan Africa and oil producing states like Saudi Arabia have been especially hard hit. In some cases, the total worth of these hidden assets far exceeds the international debts owed by these countries.

The report was compiled using thousands of pieces data and sources, including information from the IMF, the Tax Justice Network said.

Read more:         http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/report-21-trillion-hidden-taxman-offshore-accounts-article-1.1119613#ixzz21UM3Ltr2

Quantum Physics and God

"Does Quantum Physics Make it Easier to Believe in God?

Not in any direct way. That is, it doesn’t provide an argument for the existence of God.  But it does so indirectly, by providing an argument against the philosophy called materialism (or “physicalism”), which is the main intellectual opponent of belief in God in today’s world. 

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”  

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things.  No less a figure than Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that materialism --- at least with regard to the human mind --- is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” And on the basis of quantum mechanics, Sir Rudolf Peierls, another great 20th-century physicist, said, “the premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being ... including [his] knowledge, and [his] consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.” 

 "If the human mind transcends matter to some extent, could there not exist minds that transcend the physical universe altogether? And might there not even exist an ultimate Mind?"

Read more:      Quantum Physics and God        Stephen M. Barr

The Latest Sucker

I am simply perplexed by Wall Street and the large multi-national banks ability to continue to operate with impunity. Yes, there is an occasional fine, a regulatory slap on the wrists, and every so often a minion gets a brief jail sentence. These things are a minor expense, along the lines of sundries and incidentals, noted in a column in a spreadsheet marked "cost of business". The guys that run the operation are untouchable, retaining vast wealth and never, ever going to jail.


But every few months we find out that the system they inhabit (regulated in the most part by retainers and ex-employees) has been gamed in a new way, their clients wallets pilfered, the tax payer pummeled. There follows a few headlines on page two of the business section, and the people responsible go back to business as usual, generating vast wealth for themselves and their firms, living lives that would have shamed Rockefeller.


The latest scandal has revealed that they manipulated a key element of global interests rates for their own benefit - and to their clients detriment.


An ongoing trial has further exposed how Wall Street operates. They identify a situation, often involving tax payer funding, where huge amounts of money is changing hands, and insert themselves into the transaction in such a way as to lighten the taxpayers load. But that is never enough. They subvert the system to make a little more, crossing over into criminal behavior. 


I can only figure that key elements of our economic structure are rigged so that institutions are forced to go to Wall Street to engage in vital financial exercises. Given Wall Street's record, I can't imagine why any institution would go to them otherwise.

"When it comes to Wall Street scandals these days you can pretty much bet who the biggest loser will be: Your hometown.

The recent Libor fiasco is no different. The banks' alleged manipulation of the key benchmark interest rate may have cost municipalities, hospitals and other large non-profits as much as $600 million a year, according to one expert."


"this is what Wall Street learned from the Mafia: how to reach into the penny jars of dying hospitals and schools and transform their desperation and civic panic into fat year-end bonuses and the occasional "big lunch." Unlike the Mafia, though, they were smart enough to do their dirt without anyone noticing for a very long time, which is what defense counsel in this case were talking about when they argued that towns and cities "were not harmed" by the rigged bids. No harm, to them, means no visible harm, i.e., that what taxpayers didn't know couldn't hurt them. This is logical thinking, to the sociopath – like saying it's not infidelity if your wife never finds out. But we did find out, and the scale of betrayal unveiled in Carollo was epic. It was like finding out your husband didn't just cheat, but had a frequent-flier account with every brothel in North America for the past 10 years. At least now we know how bad it was. The trick is to find a way to make the cheaters pay."




Read more:      Wall Street's Latest Sucker: Your Hometown


Read more:      The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia

The Best Among Us

"In April, the Vatican’s orthodoxy wing, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith [follow known as the office of the Inquisition], , slapped down the majority of American nuns for being “radical feminists.”

It lambasted them for being too interested in poverty and injustice and insufficiently fixated on abortion and contraception the way the male hierarchy is.

The Vatican authorized a takeover by bishops of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

It was a legalistic, misogynistic maneuver and an affront to women who have dedicated their lives to the church."

I was raised as a Lutheran, and always had a fascination with the church of my Catholic friends. It seemed so exotic and surreal, which offered an attraction for one raised in the somber atmosphere of the Lutheran Church. I heard stories about nuns, some of them not flattering, and marveled at the outfits they wore, making them seem of another time.

Later in life, I somehow found myself working in a Catholic school in spite of my skepticism of some of the certainties of Faith, and it turned out to be one of the most satisfying experiences in my career as an educator. The biggest revelation during that time was how wonderful the nuns were. They were dedicated, devoted, loving, hard working and interesting people. I can honestly say they were among the most inspirational people I have ever known. Their examples regarding the journey of Faith shamed my often cynical view of religion and served as a model for me to grow on my own journey.

I have watched with dismay as the universally male church leadership of the church, trying to roll back Vatican II, have demonized the good souls who do so much of the Church's work. The manner of the criticism is all the more disturbing. The Bishops are attacking the nuns because of their focus on social justice, as if focusing on the least among us is contrary to church teachings. The irony is heartbreaking.

Carol Marin, journalist extraordinaire for the Chicago SunTimes, is taking the bishops to task.

Read more:     Nuns Who Won't Be Bullied


Read more:      Nuns Take to the Road


Read more:      Priests Come to Nun's Defense


Read more:      The Silence of the Nuns

The Age of the Database

"But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."


"because computers cannot come to us and meet us in our world, we must continue to adjust our world and bring ourselves to them. We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can “understand.” Their dumbness will become ours. "


This, friends, is the Age of the Database. If you own a phone, or a computer, or go to the store, or go to the bank, or interact with the government, or utility company - in short, if you are a human being - they influence and undergird your existence as much as any phenomena in human history. You interact with them constantly, and your behavior is in turn tracked by dozens of databases a day. They way the computers handle all of that data is fascinating - in an Orwellian fashion. The people who have figured out the best ways to collect, process, and leverage that data are the modern titans of commerce and influence.


Read more:     The Stupidity of Computers

Cogito ergo sum ​​liberum

From the 2012 Texas Republican Platform: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that ... have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."


There you have it. The GOP has officially opposed thinking. 


Anyone who follows the modern Republican Party know that this has been their de facto position for some time. This simply puts it in writing and extends it to their children.


You can't make this stuff up.




Read more:       Texas Rejects Critical Thinking Schools for Schools

Killing Creativity

As the U.S. plows, obliviously, towards more standardized testing, standardized curriculum, and one size fits all lunacy in our schools, the rest of the world is reengineering their schools to be creative, collaborative, project based institutions. One hopes that American education leaders soon wake up and see that we must change course quickly in regards to the focus of our schools. As India and China join the modern world and make it more competitive than it has ever been, it is vitally important that our young people are trained to think in terms of creativity and innovation and collaboration - rather than being trained to regurgitate disconnected facts and ephemera.


Their is a better model for our schools, Finland is pioneering it, and the rest of the world, unburdened by the through the looking glass dissonance of no child left behind, are following Finland's lead. 


"creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”


It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”


Read more:     The Creativity Crisis     Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman     
Read more:     Finland as a Model for U.S. Education
Video:      Schools are Killing Creativity     Sir Ken Robinson's TED Lecture

Some of the most remarkable research these days involves the disconcerting possibility that we crystalize beliefs  in advance of gathering proof to support those beliefs. Books like "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt, and "The Believing Brain", by Michael Shermer all touch upon this phenomena. This research mirrors Schopenhauer's assertion that reason isn't what drives us, but rather emotion and desire.


Political Operatives have taken note of this research and are using it to manipulate you to vote for their candidate. Would you expect anything less?

Born This Way

The new weird science of hardwired political identity.

• By Sasha Issenberg
•  Published Apr 8, 2012

• 
  

Afew weeks before the 2008 election, Democratic strategists were running out of ideas for how to help Al Franken. His race against incumbent Minnesota senator Norm Coleman was a stubborn one: Even after some of the country’s highest ever per capita spending, the contest remained close, with a small number of undecided, seemingly unbudgeable voters.

The job of pollsters in these situations is to figure out who the undecided actually are and what could make them move. Often, they focus on demographics (playing to older suburban women) or issues (talk of school reform). But one pollster working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Mark Mellman, felt it might pay to look for more primal distinctions.

Mellman added to his Minnesota polls a battery of questions inspired by research in psychology and neuroscience, borrowed from personality tests and designed to separate those with more rational processing systems from those who relied on emotion in their decision-making. Here polls did discern a latent split: Franken led Coleman by one point among those they identified as “feelers” but lagged by seven points among “thinkers.” The committee changed its ad strategy in response. Highly stylized television spots, like a movie spoof that showed Coleman as a fugitive fleeing George W. Bush, were replaced by messages that were “a little more flat, a little more factual, a little more sourced,” Mellman said. One defended Franken against Coleman’s charges with a calm narrator reading off a checklist of straightforward rebuttals under the words “The Truth.” Franken won, after a long recount, and in 2010 Mellman used the same battery of questions to shape media strategy for Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer.

That kind of science may seem alien to the war room, but Mellman’s hunch, that the differences in how people process politics may be more innate than we’ve thought, is becoming the default assumption in research labs worldwide. There, over the last decade or so, scientists have been extending to politics the imperious insights of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology that have so shaken other social sciences.

At the vanguard of this movement is Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist whose best-selling new book,The Righteous Mind, collects his own experiments—testing biases, prejudices, and ­preferences—and the work of like-minded colleagues to unmask much of our political “thinking” as moral instinct papered over, post facto, with ideological rationalization. We may tell ourselves that we believe welfare is just or that abortion violates the sanctity of life, but we’re really using borrowed language to express much more visceral attitudes, oriented around one of six moral dials—harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, liberty, and sanctity. Much of what passes for the daily scrum of electoral politics, he says, is merely an effort to find language that can help citizens justify these instincts. “Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix,” Haidt writes. “They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere.”

But the new science of primal politics goes quite a bit deeper than psychology. Over the past few years, researchers haven’t just tied basic character traits to liberalism and conservatism, they’ve begun to finger specific genes they say hard-wire those ideologies. If that work is to be believed, it would mean that an individual’s path to a political identity starts not with a series of choices but with long-ago genetic mutations, and that our collective experience of politics may be less a battle of ideas than a Darwinian contest in which we are all unwitting participants. After a team of geneticists claimed in a 2005 American Political Science Review article that they had evidence of DNA’s influence on politics, Duke political scientist Evan Charney rebutted that their findings “would require nothing less than a revision of our understanding of all of human history, much—if not most—of political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as, perhaps, our understanding of what it means to be human.”

The thing most in need of revising may be our reflex for self-flattery. We revel in the idea that personal politics are perfectly deliberative, never more than in a year when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney—two dispassionate rationalists with great confidence in their skills of persuasion—will cross the country to win over their fellow citizens’ hearts and minds. But the comforting metaphor of a grand national debate to determine where the swing voters will end up has never seemed so out of sync with trending science. After all, what is the point of everything that happens between now and November 6 if our wiring dictates how we vote?

Read more:       Born This Way      Sasha Issenberg   NY Magazine

If You Think This Wasn't Predictable, You Live in a Fantasy World

I am old enough to remember the terrible atrocity at My Lai. American soldiers, essentially driven mad by the demands of their role on the ground in Vietnam, butchered scores of innocent men, women, and children. It played no small role in turning the citizenry against the war.

That war was a bit more egalitarian than the current wars. Men from a broad spectrum of American life were drafted to fight in that war (excepting a handful who gamed the system because they had "other priorities"), and they usually only served one tour in the steaming jungles of Vietnam.

Now volunteer soldiers, mainly representing working class Americans, man the front lines of our wars. They often serve multiple tours in war zones, returning after being wounded, after multiple concussions, after being promised they wouldn't have to go back to the daily horror of warfare.

When Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and all of the other Neo-Cons decided to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade one of the most unsettled places on earth, when they chose to massage intelligence to create a pretext to send our troops into a country having nothing to do with 9/11, they let the genie out of the bottle and it will never go back.

They betrayed our fighting men and women for political and personal psychodramas.

A soldier with concussions, grievous wounds, a shaky job, a shaky marriage, an underwater mortgage - all the result of his repeated tours in the middle east, on his 4th tour in a war zone snapped. Innocents were butchered. I bet Bush and Cheney and all the rest are sleeping like babies each night. This is the predictable harvest of what they sowed.

Blame Shared by All
By David Horsey - LA Times

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is accused of murdering 16 villagers in Afghanistan. It is alleged he quietly walked from his base to two nearby villages and, unprovoked, started killing innocent human beings, including nine children.

This atrocity appears to be the act of one man, but the blame can be shared from coast to coast.

Our all-volunteer Army has been fighting for a decade in Afghanistan, and in Iraq as well, for most of that time. The burden of battle has fallen mainly on a tiny number of Americans -- men like Bales, who was on his fourth combat deployment. Multiple journeys into the hell of war have taken a terrible toll. The number of suicides among service members has skyrocketed, and incidences of post traumatic stress disorder among returning soldiers are so common they seem almost the norm.

As a society, we have tried to make up for the fact that so few of us share in the killing and dying by putting our troops on a pedestal. They are warriors, we say. They are the best of us. They are heroes, every one. We slap stickers in the shape of yellow ribbons on the backs of our cars and trucks, ribbons trailing the message, "Support Our Troops." Any president can win a standing ovation from Congress with a single mention of "our men and women in uniform."

Yet all this adulation and easy rhetoric conveniently glosses over the harsh truth. These men and women are not a warrior class. They are not uniformly heroic. They are not necessarily better than those who do not don a uniform. Excluding singular exceptions -- the Navy SEALs, for example --  our soldiers are people not all that different from any of us. They are well trained, but they are human, and war can and does sear the human soul and subvert the sane mind. Coping with brutality, fear, constant danger and hideous forms of death can change anyone and the longer a person is exiled in a house of slaughter, the harder it is to come back.

According to men who served with Bales, he was not an aberrant person. In a Facebook message quoted by the Seattle Times, Capt. Chris Alexander asked that Bales be kept in people's prayers. "I know his alleged crime is terrible, but he is not terrible," Alexander wrote. "He is one of the best guys I've ever served with."

If one of our best can snap and commit such a terrible crime, we should all ask ourselves if the soldiers who come from among us are being pushed to sacrifice far too much while the rest of us sacrifice nothing at all. A volunteer Army lets us off the hook. Even worse, it makes it too easy for the politicians. They speak with bravado about standing up to tyrants and bearing any burden for the sake of liberty. And then, to make good on their bold words, they find another place to take the nation into war.

Except it is not the nation that goes. It is a few men like Robert Bales, and all the yellow ribbons on all the pickup trucks in America cannot save him from the horror he has seen and the things he has done."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-killings-in-afghanistan-20120319,0,7608832.story