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Our Values
Defending Democracy
Here is carefully thought-out, non-partisan advice on how individuals can and should speak out for good government and democracy. The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto is only one of many signals that government of the people, by the people, and for the people is in peril.
All of us lead busy lives, and it’s tempting to think there is little we can do as individuals. I don’t accept such a cynical attitude of resignation. We are social animals, and peer confirmation is the most powerful of the persuaders that influence how people think. We must speak out for integrity and democracy. Here’s a practical guide:
Countering Disinformation
I’m not an engineer, but I think like one. I’ve disciplined myself to be analytical and logical and to distinguish between assumptions and known facts.
Humans are not naturally rational. We must train ourselves to consciously construct a theory about the nature of reality, and then test our theory by experimenting and observing. Absent such scientific practices, we instinctively invent stories to explain patterns we observe. These stories need not be accurate representations of reality to serve as an organizational tool or a memory device. We may call these stories “hunches” or “intuition” about what’s beyond our certain knowledge.
Our stories may influence our behavior more readily than our reason. But stories are inherently fluid, and unlike the laws of physics or chemistry, they can be manipulated. People can lock on to a narrative (story) and act upon it without deliberation. Bad actors exploit this human tendency to their advantage and gain, often to the detriment of individual wellbeing and the common good. We get played and duped by persuasive narratives designed to harm–disinformation.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has come to understand how disinformation and misinformation can overpower factual contrary evidence. People will continue to trust and rely on stories that have been thoroughly debunked by rigorous scientific research to establish a true perception of reality. We need only look at the anti-vaccination movement, the false narratives asserting that global warming is a hoax, or the denial of the risks of smoking tobacco to verify the power of disinformation and misinformation.
Science Rising and UCS have produced training materials that are intended to help science advocates push back more effectively. On Sunday October 16th at 9:45 am, I spoke on the topic using UCS materials as the core of my presentation. The bibliography of all my sources is below.
Video of October 16th Presentation
Here is a video recording of the presentation done on 10/16/22 at Newtown Friends Meeting Adult Firstday School.
Rumors
Some of us think of rumors as the idle speculation of a social gossip–just superficial trash talk, not to be taken seriously. If someone characterizes our conversation as gossip, we are offended.
Rumors are a serious and lucrative business these days. They have been weaponized and are tools for social and political manipulation. Rumors are a favorite ploy of those who manipulate because they are cheap and effective. Once seeded, they take on a life of their own, traveling with dazzling speed and persisting for months or years. They bypass most people’s skepticism because they often come from a friend or relative–a person we trust.
Frequently the seed is a photo, a video, or a fake news item that is cleverly crafted to look authentic and launched in a context that lends credibility. It’s easy to be fooled.
We can train ourselves to recognize the seeds of disinformation so that we don’t contribute to the spread. None of us wants to be dismissed as one who gossips. To learn more, check out RumorGuard.
Blackout Averted
Imagine! People act in service of one another to avert a disastrous problem. Californians did just that.
Blackout
California deftly avoided rolling blackouts this week amid an energy surge through a novel innovation in the green energy space that researchers are calling “text everyone in the state and ask them to cool it.” It worked phenomenally well. At 3:20 p.m. on Tuesday, power demand hit a new record of 50.6K megawatts, and at 5:50 p.m. the state sent a text message alert mentioning that heat is straining the energy grid, and that there might be outages unless people turn off nonessential power until 9 p.m., please. It worked pretty much instantly. Power demand dropped 1.2 gigawatts within five minutes, immediately mitigating the issues, and by around 8 p.m. the emergency level was cancelled without a blackout. Wow, it’s almost as if slight collective action can have a meaningful impact addressing the ramifications of climate change if a state is willing to intervene; who could have possibly seen this coming.
One of the advantages of digital networking is the possibility of instant notification. Since the 1950s, the US has had a nationally coordinated system for sending emergency communications to radio, TV, cable, and other FCC-regulated public media. It started as Conelrad during the cold war and morphed into the Federal Communications Commission’s EAS (Emergency Alert System). That raucous buzz you hear on your radio, TV, and cellphone just before a weather warning is the digital data burst that allows such messages to propagate from a single source to virtually all electronic public media in mere seconds.
Now, with mass text messaging to mobile phones, written alerts can be communicated to private and public networks with even greater speed.
It’s heartening to see California’s example of large numbers of people taking the trouble to cut their energy use so that there would be enough for all with nobody left out. Perhaps there is a moral lesson here.
The GOP’s Moment of Truth
Sometimes things have to go very wrong before they come back right. I hope we have reached the moment when rational Republicans decide to sink the extremist wing of their party instead of riding it to power and scuttling the democracy they have sworn to serve virtually every time they were installed in an official position.
Heather Cox Richardson gives an excellent summary of what is now going public about GOP loyalists having a moment of truth, an opportunity to change course and purge their party of its cancerous extremism.
Opinion | We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists.
Moderates of both parties will need to build trust and cooperate in campaigning.
HCR’s article has links to other current articles. If you have strong feelings about democracy, now would be an excellent time to make them clear to the Republican elected officials in your district.
And vote your conscience at this and every election going forward.
Mint the Coin
Various writers, tongue-in-cheek, have urged that the Treasury Secretary mint a one trillion dollar coin and use it to buy back debt. This would resolve the debt ceiling crisis.
Whoa!, you say. If they just print more money, won’t that cause inflation? Maybe not. Money is created and destroyed all the time. Your bank routinely makes loans it doesn’t have the funds to cover. It is not required to have deposits equal to its loans. When the market price of housing, soybeans, or General Motors stock fluctuates, money is created or destroyed.
In its essence, money is only a promise to pay. We rely on the Federal Reserve to impose monetary policies that keep us as close to 2% annual inflation as they can. It’s an art, not a science.
The unknown is whether minting the coin would alter the world’s faith in our promise to repay.
There is little question that failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause the US to default on its existing debt. This would certainly shake faith in our monetary promises because we would be breaking them. So maybe the risk of minting the coin is small relative to the alternative of certain default.
Here’s my suggestion. Let’s mint eight of those $1T coins. Put Mitch McConnell’s likeness on one side and the GOP elephant on the obverse. Use them one at a time during Biden’s presidency to pay down the deficit and keep the economy rolling. Why eight coins? That’s about equal to the record-setting deficit that accrued under #45’s four-year term. So, it would be bold political theater to remind us all that the GOP is not fiscally more responsible than the Dems. Quite the opposite – they are willing to scuttle the economy and throw us into recession to game the political system.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/05/trillion-dollar-coin-faq/
News We Trust
How to know what information is trustworthy has grown in importance since Sue Mehrtens and I wrote our books on the topic. Political propaganda is now openly fostered. It’s not just spin, it is deliberate campaigns of tactical disinformation that target vulnerable groups in our electorate.
The national media also skews left or right to segment the market for their “product” — the shows that command big advertising revenues. Regrettably, journalistic integrity suffers.
On Tuesday, September 28, I hosted a panel of local journalists who spoke about how they know the truth. I was expecting to get stories about tells of the sort that poker players look for. You know, a nervous flutter of the eyelids, the use of phrases like “let me be perfectly clear,” and such.
I got much more. The three journalists spoke candidly about how very hard it is to get to the truth, and what it costs them in emotional energy and stress. I’m sharing the video here because I think you will find it both inspiring and reassuring to know that local news has people of this level of integrity.
Subscribe to a local paper, contribute to public radio and TV, donate to organizations that do investigative reporting without political motive — in doing so, you defend democracy and the independence of the working press.
BIG Round Numbers
The US National Debt grows ever faster. Now it is $28 Trillion dollars. The deficit (increase in debt) during the last presidency was 7.8 Trillion, or just shy of two trillion a year and double the one trillion rate of the Obama years.
Our lame-duck US Senator Pat Toomey would like you to think that the present administration is profligate. Here’s what he says:
Yes, $3.5 trillion is big. But we also need perspective here. If this is a spending spree, then what was the GOP’s thought in cutting taxes? That’s about $3 trillion in lost revenue. But the GOP also left us a legacy of future debt. FactCheck.org quoted the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget as follows:
By September 2020, CRFB estimated the legislation and executive actions signed by Trump would be responsible for $3.9 trillion in higher deficits through 2026. The bulk of that — $2.3 trillion — was attributed to lowering taxes, while increases in defense and veterans spending ($950 billion) and nondefense discretionary spending ($700 billion) made up the rest. “It is important to note that this debt was also approved by Congress, about half on a broad, bipartisan basis,” CRFB said.
These are significant numbers, and Toomey over his many years in politics has been complicit. Both parties spend our money on a grand scale, the difference is who and what they spend it for.
Business people say, “You have to spend money to make money.” Biden wants to build back better. The GOP says, … hmm I can’t recall. I think it was eliminating the national debt that they promised. Well, have they actually proposed anything? Or did they just spend reactively, with little or no real plan except for the tax cut?
Choosing Party over Country
As we go about the ordinariness of our lives, making breakfast, chatting with friends, shopping for groceries, and watching Netflix, our government is under attack by a political party that holds its power to be more important than our democracy. The GOP, for more than 20 years has been on the attack, and the end game grows more clear with each passing day.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” chronicles the events. The post below cites some of the current actions that should alarm all of us. But it is the inaction of GOP leadership that signals where the GOP is headed.
September 24, 2021
On Monday, we learned that after last year’s election, John Eastman, a well-connected lawyer advising former president Donald Trump, outlined a six-point plan to overturn the outcome of the election and install Trump as America’s leader. They planned to cut the voters’ actual choice, Democrat Joe Bi…
Some will say that HCR is an alarmist, others that she is partisan. Ask yourself this, “What behaviors do you see in the GOP leadership that suggest that we should NOT be concerned?”
Here is what I see:
- Actions to foster distrust of our elections.
- Years of strategic work to disenfranchise opposition.
- Support of secretive gerrymandering.
- Pandering to fringe elements of the GOP base.
- Inaction on obvious corruption.
- Near total partisan obstructionism.
- Purges of moderate leadership.
- Improper courting of foreign propaganda support.
- Desperate efforts to prevent investigation of January 6th.
And this is only an off-the-cuff partial list.
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