Category Archives: politics

I Have a Question

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NPR has said that if Federal funding is cut off, it may well see 180 local NPR stations forced to close due lack of funding.

NPR compiled a lengthy document in 2011 that outlined what would happen if the government cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed company that supports both NPR and PBS….

Neither NPR nor PBS appear to have updated that claim, or the underlying data, in the 14 years since.

Which raises my question: why have NPR and/or PBS not done anything in those 14 years to shore up their finances so as to keep those stations operational?

Bonus question: given that laziness or sloppiness or deliberate dependence on Uncle Sugar, on what basis would any rational American think Federal funding continue?

Federal and State Funding for Abortion

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There is a move afoot in Congress to remove from Medicare reimbursements for abortion, and there is a case before the Supreme Court that will impact States’ ability to remove funding for abortion from Medicaid reimbursements. The removal from Medicare, should it come to fruition, would be entirely consistent with the Court’s Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which rescinded Roe v Wade and put the abortion question entirely in the States’ hands. Now many States are attempting to act on their newly restored authority—hence the case before the Supreme Court.

It’s true enough that it’s a fraught decision for the mother to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term, but my concern here is for the life of the baby. From this, I see two boundary cases that are especially difficult.

One is where the health of the mother is at risk if the pregnancy continues. In this case, the mother’s health must be weighed extremely carefully against the life of the baby. This weighing may need to occur—must occur?—in open court, with competent, well-trained lawyers speaking for the baby.

The other is a mother’s pregnancy as a result of incest or rape. Carrying the baby to term here is an especially terrible choice for the mother—the pregnant child incest or rape victim may be too physically young to carry her baby to term, in which case, see above. Even where the victim mother can safely do so, it remains an especially terrible choice to carry inside her body a constant reminder of the monster who did this to her. Carrying the baby to term isn’t a matter of the mother’s inconvenience for nine months as some extremists on the right claim—the emotional damage to the mother from that is real, extreme, and often irrepairable.

Conventional wisdom is to permit abortion in the these narrowly defined, and not so often occurring compared to “ordinary” unwanted pregnancies, cases of incest or rape. Conventional wisdom here is not a completely bad bit of wisdom, but I remain concerned: why should the baby have to pay with its life for the crime of another? The baby needs competent, well-trained lawyers speaking for him or her in these cases, also.

It’s also true enough that, while Republicans are attempting to do more to provide fiscal support for those mothers during their pregnancies, in the period surrounding birth, and in the early years after birth (here including adoption options), they need to do better at specifically identifying those needs and then providing for them—and to do so publicly. That shortfall, though, shouldn’t be allowed to impact whether the baby is allowed to live at all.

Reviewing Harvard’s Federal Funding

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The Trump administration has begun reviewing Harvard University’s $9 billion in Federal funding. The question I have is how badly does Harvard need any Federal funding?

Harvard’s endowment is some $53.2 billion as of last year, and the school got a 9.6% return on its endowment’s investments last year. That allowed its endowment to grow by nearly 5% year-on-year despite disbursements from the endowment.

Harvard claims $6.4 million in annual operating expenses as of last year, and it spent $749 million in scholarships and its own grants for its students.

With all of that, I ask again, how badly does Harvard need Federal funding? The school’s endowment doesn’t seem to be doing much more than collecting dust, investment returns, and net growth, while the school collects billions of average citizens’ tax money for its programs. Given that, why should citizens of Iowa, or Montana, or Utah—or New York, or Illinois, or California—pay for Massachusetts-domiciled Harvard’s spending decisions?

My answer: Harvard has little to no need for taxpayer monies.

That Includes You, Mr Newsom

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom claims to be worried that Party is too judgmental and toxic and that We talk down to people. We talk past people.

Then he said this:

I mean, this idea that we can’t even have a conversation with the other side…or the notion we just have to continue to talk to ourselves or win the same damn echo chamber, these guys are crushing us[.]

These guys are crushing us. Not, “We need to converse/debate/argue/talk with folks about ideas that we think help all Americans.” It’s “We need to do better at beating the other side so we can win.”

Party will remain toxic to the American idea as long as its goal is wholly independent of working toward the national weal and wholly focused instead on doing down the other side.

Golden Dome

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William Forstchen, historian, author, and reputed EMP expert, wants us to build President Donald Trump’s (R) golden dome, an evolution of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which was designed to destroy incoming ICBMs before they could reach their detonation locations in an attack on the United States. He’s right, but his emphasis is too narrow. His concern:

We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes.

He cited studies, as summarized by Fox News, some statistics:

Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.

That would result from energy and water distribution network failure, power failure, financial system failure, transportation failure, and the resulting lack of food in the cities and the lack of water in urban areas from small to large.

The problem that’s not being addressed, though, is that an EMP does not need a nuclear detonation to generate it. Small EMP devices can be built relatively easily, and our destruction can be achieved with a collection of these small devices being used to destroy our financial and communications data centers, nodes in our energy distribution networks, nodes in our water distribution networks, nodes in our mass transportation and shipping centers.

All of these would aggregate to a nuclear EMP in their end result, and these smaller devices are much harder to detect. The several Departments in our Federal government and the several private companies in our tech industry need to get seriously involved, both in partnership with each other and separately, in figuring out how to detect and neutralize these devices, also.