Goodman's Misplaced Rant in Newsweek

There’s a distinctly biased, inaccurate, cherry-picked anti-gambling, anti-online poker piece by Leah McGrath Goodman on Newsweek’s digital website. Goodman, a reporter not exactly known for being accurate in her journalism, has had her problems before, notably by blowing the story “blowing the cover” on the founder of Bitcoin where she fingered the wrong guy.

Most of the problems in Goodman’s piece have been noted by others and can be found in the scores of “comments” on Newsweek’s site. One thing they missed that’s worth noting is that Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), whom she identifies as one of the legislators looking at online gambling, was behind the stealth passage of the UIGEA in the first place. For those who have forgotten, the bill was ushered out of the House by Goodlatte and friends with the understanding that it would never pass the Senate. Then, at the last possible minute before a recess, Senators Kyle and Frist attached it to the Safe Port bill funding security at America’s ports which absolutely had to pass. Most estimates showed that only three or four Senators even knew the UIGEA was tacked on and that they voted for it.

But there’s much that is bothersome in Goodman’s article. Here are four key points.

First, it’s not going to be possible to stop online gambling and gaming. Criminalizing it or trying to outlaw it will result in unregulated, untaxed and unsupervised online sites run by folks who play fast and loose with everything. Why do we keep forgetting Prohibition? Why don’t we grasp what an across-the-board disaster the war on drugs has been? Why can’t we see the unending damage that comes from efforts to stop the sex trade? Criminalize something that people want and guess who shows up to run it. Legalize, regulate, tax the profits.

Second, in locales where gambling is far more common and socially accepted (e.g., the UK) the rate of problem gambling is far less that it is here. In fact, some studies show it to be only 1/5 to 1/6 as common (adjusted for population). When you make something illegal, it gains an allure that isn’t there when treated as just another thing to do on a rainy afternoon.

Third, while problem gambling (which is the issue that most moralists cite) is real, it has some intriguing elements that they seem to be unaware of. It is, for one, a highly co-morbid disorder. That is, it rarely occurs independent of any of a host of other psychological problems including substance abuse, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, among others. Wide-spread legalizing of online gambling will produce an increase in the incidence of problem gambling — but it won’t increase the incidence of psychopathology, it will just redistribute it. Similarly, eliminating online gambling will not reduce the rate of psychological problems in society, merely redistribute them. The moralists who seek to ban gambling don’t appear to have recognized this pattern.

Fourth, the anti-online-gambling efforts are spearheaded by Conservatives which has produced a brilliant blaze of hypocrisy. Whatever happened to the high ideals of Conservatism, the ones based on the fundamental principle that people should be free to make decisions about their lives, that government should stay out of people’s personal choices, that freedom demands the loosening of the binds of oversight? Conservatives, alas, seem to lose their Libertarian stripes when issues like gambling (and sex and drugs) are on the agenda. When seeking to ban something they don’t like, they suddenly become advocates of big government.

Finally, one can only hope that Newsweek’s editors see the folly of letting this piece of bad journalism on the newsstands. It was painful enough reading it online.

Fun Way to Kill Some Time

A cool way to spend an hour or so on a day when not much is happening is to see if you can find the stupidest thing anyone’s done recently. The easiest way to collect the necessary data is wander the Internet looking for positions taken by Republicans. And I found it. It’s a stunner. In fact, many readers may already know it. I sorta did but wasn’t aware of the magnitude till I saw the data in a recent report from the Urban Institute.

So here it is: the twenty-four states (all “red” as if you needed to be told) who have declined to participate in the Medicaid programs that are part of the Affordable Care Act will be, between now and 2022, sacrificing a total of $424 billion in Federal funds for health care for their residents. Analyses of the cascading impact of this shortfall predict an additional loss of $168 billion in direct Federal support to hospitals and all of this is projected to cost these states literally hundreds of thousands of jobs and the associated growth in their economy that would accompany this increase in employment (the Urban Institute’s estimate for 2015 alone is 170,000 lost jobs). If this isn’t bad enough, we still haven’t factored in the added cost to these states when those without insurance and who won’t be covered under Medicaid show up in the ER in public hospitals and will have to be cared for.

You might ask, “Why?” You might — and you’d get a peculiar answer: “Because the states can’t afford the costs of cooperating in Obamacare.”

And, it is true, there is an added expense that states must pick up in order to be part of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. Want to know what it comes to? A grand total of $31 billion. Yes, that’s correct. These Republican controlled states are willing to give up nearly a half-trillion in direct Federal support and many additional long-term economic gains in order to save themselves from having to shell out a pittance. That’s like my telling you that I’m prepared to hand over $100 provided you find a way to contribute $4 to smooth the process and you saying, “Nope, I can’t afford the four bucks.”

You might ask, “Why? Really, why?” You might — and you’ll not get an answer from the politicians in those states so I’ll have to tell you:

It is because they’d rather go to hell in a hand-basket than do anything that makes Obama look good.

A Dilemma - A Resolution

So here’s how the dilemma begins and slowly gnaws on your mind.

We live on a small, scrap of cosmic crust, caught in an unyielding orbit around a prosaic star. Our “Pale Blue Dot”, which Carl Sagan poetically called our home, is just one of eight[1] insignificant spheroids captured by the gravity of a star which, itself, is merely one of some three hundred billion swirling around a monster of a black hole in our Milky Way galaxy that is just one of some five hundred billion galaxies that extend nearly fourteen billion light years into space, space that’s expanding in ever-increasing rates into who the hell knows what.

We know when this all began. We can project how it will end. Our boring little star is only about 1/3 through its life cycle. In a billion years or so temperatures on earth will average around 120° and life will end. In about 1.2 billion years it will just about use up its hydrogen fuel and the resulting helium will cause it to expand. From there a variety of stages will unfold, resulting in a white dwarf star but no one will be around to care.

It’s all quite mathematical, inflexible, objective. Your role, my role, the thing that any of us does in this vast cosmic stew is as irrelevant as the life of the tiny spider we stepped on on our way out this morning never even knowing it was there. We, in this vast universe which may just be but one of a vast number of similar universes, are as insignificant as the bacteria that crawl through our gut.

Until recently we didn’t know this. In fact, the magnitude of it is only slowly dawning on us. Recently cosmologists turned the Hubble telescope on a wholly blank spot of sky, a tiny, insignificant dot of sky where there seemingly was nothing. They left it focused there, for weeks sucking in every scrap of light that emerged from this emptiness that stretched back some 13.8 billion years. And it was not dark. This “Hubble Deep Field” was filled with thousands of galaxies. Each was as huge and expansive as those closer to us. Each an assembly of additional billions of stars. And we saw it all from our tiny blue dot.

It was easier when we didn’t know all this, when we thought it all began and ended with us. When our planet was all there was, sitting at the center of everything with the sun carving out a perfect circle above us, the only rational species.

How have we respond to this revelation? I’ve observed three ways.

First, denial, a denial often marked by a cleaving to those early notions that there’s some eternal, over-arching godhead who has taken the time and effort to actually give a rat’s ass about us. But this strains credulity. Are we supposed to conclude that for some nutty reason this being just cooled his heels for ten billion years before bothering with our pale blue dot and then (what was this guy thinking?) waited until just a couple of hundred thousand years ago to breathe life into us and, for those who hold on to popular Christian notions, hung around doing odd things like drowning virtually the entire population (well, heck, why not, they’re his people) before deciding to ship his only son our way — a son who, like you and me, shared 98% of his DNA with chimps, 85%, zebra fish and fully 50% with bananas? It’s kind of tough to buy this story once you’ve come to understand where we live, once you’ve seen the remarkable photos of Earth taken from the edges of our solar system by Voyager.

If theology and faith doesn’t work, you might try another path, falling into an existential malaise. We know that we’re just another passing life form on this planet of ours. We understand the enormity of what is around us. We acknowledge that this just doesn’t make any sense. None. I mean that. None. One speck of stardust in one solar system in an arm of one galaxy among billions. Ridiculous. But, because we see all this we cringe from it. What’s the purpose of even getting up in the morning? Why should any of us care about today, or tomorrow or anyone else’s tomorrow? We’re just a couple of scraps of biochemical crud living out our limited lives and the whole damn thing will be toasted to a crisp when the sun goes viral. Sartre tried this route. It wasn’t very satisfying. In fact, if I had to choose between the illusion of theology and the despair of existentialistic angst I’d find God under some rock somewhere.

Luckily, there’s a third way — and it just happens to be the one Sagan counseled us to take in his book Pale Blue Dot.

Embrace the moment for it is all we have. It really doesn’t matter whether we’re just a random bio-dot in an endless universe because each pain we feel is real, each pleasure we experience is real, each relationship we carve out is real. Yes, we’re an unlikely outcome of chaotic, often random processes, a small chancy place in a great vastness. But we still feel.

So contemplate the vastness of it all but recognize, as Sagan noted, that everyone who ever lived, lived on this blue dot. Every event took place here. Every birth and death. Every war and every armistice. Every discovery was made here, every symphony composed here, every novel written, law passed, meal consumed, infant embraced, loved one’s passing mourned. There is everything about us but there is only us here. We don’t need superstition. We don’t need despair. We just need to treasure what’s here, embrace it, protect it.

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[1] Or nine, depending on whose side of the Pluto is/isn’t a planet dispute you’re on.

Dysfunctional DC: Cruz's Dark Plan

Charles Blow has an excellent piece in the Times on the current dysfunctional Congress. In it he outlines what’s not being done and presents data from various studies revealing what most of us know all too well. This is the most useless legislative group in the history of the country.

What he doesn’t do is focus on the deep problem. Blow bitches about nothing getting done but he missed the core element: this is precisely what the GOP wants. Getting absolutely nothing done is what the right wing is aiming for. The mastermind behind this fiasco is Ted Cruz — most of the Tea-Party bozos who traipse along in his wake aren’t smart enough to figure this out. In fact, most of them don’t even recognize the clever, long-term strategy behind Cruz’s campaign.

Do nothing. Let everyone see that congress is dysfunctional. Maintain that this is proof that big government, Federal government, doesn’t work, can’t work. Force it to shrink, undercut efforts to raise revenues, bust up unions, diminish the impact of minorities, work to repeal Federal laws that reduce the role of states.

This move is deeply distressing in its focus and really scary when you contemplate the long-term consequences of it. People like Blow think the problem is a lack of bipartisanship, a failure to find compromise, an inability for the various factions in Congress to work together for the betterment of life for Americans. It’s not. The right wing has no interest in compromise because they have no interest in passing legislation, ever, at all, on anything positive.

If the GOP — this one, the one aligned with the Cruz’s — ever gets control of both houses and the White House we will not see legislation suddenly emerging. It’s not as if there are ideals lurking below the surface that will emerge with a majority. There are no plans for any action from the Federal government. The entire focus is negative. Tear it down. Defund agencies. Undercut legislative action. Deregulate. Strip the last scraps of meat from the DC carcass.

Progressives who understand are horrified. Even middle of the road Democrats are disturbed — though, in truth, most moderates don’t see the deep, dark Cruzian plan. They merely bewail the dysfunctional elements, as Blow has done.

But anyone who thinks that the right wing of the Republican party isn’t pleased as punch over the current legislative slag heap that Congress has become doesn’t see what’s really going on.

Postscript: The GOP Begs Obama to Use Executive Power

You just can’t make this stuff up. I wish I could. I’m working on my fiction writing and it’d be so much funnier if I could.

While contemplating their response to Obama’s “so sue me” crack (see below), they managed to totally screw up their last chance before the August recess to do something about the humanitarian crisis on our southern border. So, after admitting defeat (even Boehner couldn’t get his unruly right-wing to cooperate) they withdrew the bill and went home. They left this message:

 “There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action, to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”

In short, they just asked him to use the power of the Executive. Wasn’t this the justification behind the suit? Wasn’t this the rationale for contemplating impeachment?

Irony is a cruel jokester.