And if Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, etc. had their own deterrent, could we have strong-armed them?
]]>It is difficult to achieve in practice, and that is why there are court cases and such. The most common dispute, where a school or other other state facility aids a religious group by allowing or subsidizing activity on its grounds, seems innocuous, but not to Jews and Muslims, or even Catholics in earlier times. And check what happens when a Muslim group wants to have activities in a school.
Churches already are subsidized by tax exemptions. There are more churches per capita in the US than in pretty much all other western nations. This is not a problem worth much discussion.
]]>The knowledge won't go away, so a disarmed world will not exist. What could be done is reducing stockpiles to modest levels. This is only possible if the deterrent theorizing of the 60s and 70s is better known and discussed honestly.
Fred Kaplan's book "Wizards of Armageddon" details the search for rationales concerning nuclear weapons. RAND and other groups tried to set actual numbers to vague concepts of deterrence and preemption or counterattack. They failed, basically, to arrive at anything coherent. Fortunate that these ideas were not tested, but without a sensible strategy there was no resistance to the arms race, no reason to stop building warheads and delivery systems.
While a few nukes, the "family atomics" in Frank Herbert's "Dune" books, have their use as a real deterrent to invasion, warheads in the thousands are truly insane.
Only one rather questionable use exists for nukes beyond deterrence. This would be a desperate defense against a large incoming surprise comet. While braking it into many pieces would not prevent impact, it would be less devastating than a single large impact. Comets can surprise us, but the odds are very much in our favor, so twenty would be plenty to keep on the shelf for this hugely unlikely scenario. Asteroids are predictable to a high degree, and eventually we will have all dangerous ones mapped. Long lead times will allow gentle steering to avoid collision.
If we do get surprised by a comet such as Hyakutake, with only 8 weeks between discovery and very close passage, we can expect a huge fight over the best defense, and religious radicals will get into the act, too. Fingers crossed.
]]>In contrast, I was recently in Berlin. That country is still publicly and and without stint atoning for its crimes. Bus stops tell the story of Nazism and the Holocaust. SS and Gestapo Headquarters are a museum called "Topography of Terror". The Wall is memorialized appropriately, with Checkpoint Charlie still a tourist stop. The tourists were mostly German, not Americans. And East Berlin is thriving and glamorous.
In Germany speech such as we hear from GOP and its fringe friends gets you thrown in jail. Extolling Nazism, or hateful speech regarding Jews, is simply illegal. And, of course, they have lower-cost universal health coverage.
Maybe we need to get our ass kicked, and our cities flattened. A bit of humility might be healthy.
]]>And since at the start, 2/3, not 1, personhood, was ascribed to slaves for census/legislative district purposes, there was a huge imbalance giving a non-representative advantage to southern, slave states. Aside from the injuries imposed on the eventually freed slaves through the sundering of families and suppression of language and culture there were continuing injuries caused by Jim Crow laws, vigilante justice, and simple unreasoning discrimination.
To imagine we could have simply announced Emancipation and left it at that is to ignore history. There was redress deserved, and extra efforts were required to make good the state-sanctioned injury. Whether we have achieved that goal is not certain, especially after hearing way too many people speak hatefully about the President because of his family heritage.
The tyranny of the majority does occur, regularly, and most of the Bill of Rights is intended to prevent that.
]]>BTW, when blogs misbehave, call up the entry ("manage entries") and see if any code got attached at the end. Happened to me once, and I found some cryptic text appended. Erased, published edit, problem fixed.
]]>I like to emphasize that the US surely has the world's richest physicians, of not the world's beat health care system. But we need the doctors on board, and many are, just not the entrepreneurial AMA, (which was formerly in favor of Truman's national system, as I understand it). Perhaps we can avoid an onslaught of well-funded AMA resistance if we offer incentives for salary-based doctoring, like a sunset-limited lower income tax rate for them, while the business guys get to keep their clinics.
What we want is for hospitals and clinics to attract salary-based docs interested in working in teams, as the Mayo example has proven. If we find it useful to offer tax holidays to businesses for start-up incentives perhaps we could do the same for health care.
To get the patients on board we should emphasize the empowering possibility of portable coverage, which allows employees to consider walking away from lousy jobs. Right now most of us, while we like our docs, are hostage to the coverage provider, our employer.
And for everyone with coverage, Dems should buy TV air time and run "Sicko".
]]>In other news, Europe looks good these days, especially Berlin. Had easy September weather, and with nothing bad to talk about I felt no need to comment. But I read this news with interest, more for the source than the facts, which fit with new thinking about low-temp solar-system stuff. It's that it was an Indian machine. Even if it had parts supplied by others, so do ours.
The future is here and we don't really notice; two-way wrist radios (cellphones) that also are video cameras and web browsers, artificial-intelligence systems correcting test papers or running machine guns, live video from Saturn's equinox, and plans for colonizing the planets.
]]>Old and In The Way.
]]>The problem is not states having them, but states possibly losing control of them.
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