Internal Monologue

My wife wrote an essay about our experience and how Jeff Sessions seems poorly suited to look after the interests of special needs education: Many people in the disability community are concerned that Sessions may fail to uphold the educational rights of children with disabilities. In a 2000 speech to the U.S. Senate titled, Education Discipline and IDEA , Sessions argued that “special treatment for certain children…may be the single most irritating problem for teachers throughout America today.” He was referring to children with documented disabilities who meet the strict eligibility criteria for receiving special education services. The underlying message in the speech is that children with disabilities who exhibit behavioral challenges should be disciplined or segregated from their peers in general education.

We're gettin' necromantic folks. The calamity of the probable election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency is prompting me to dust off my old political blog. Let's do what we can to save our nation from this unfolding disaster.

I'm testing.

IN VACUUM, AD NIHILUM

Dear President Obama: Please appoint a Federal Reserve Chair who will take unemployment (i.e. the interest of workers) at least as seriously as inflation (i.e. the interest of banks with outstanding loans). The economy is still very crummy for a lot of people and the person in this position should have some sense of urgency about that.

I will be performing Dust Storm at Theatre Esprit Asia in Denver on May 30th and June 1st.

I'm half-posting this just because I'm afraid my blog will "expire" or something if I don't. But PlayHaven is hiring ! I mainly post to Facebook now, so if you happen to be an Internal Monologue reader who isn't already my FB friend you should find me there. I like keeping this blog around because at some point I might wish to publish things to the world rather than just my FB community.

And this blog! Apple has accepted my update to Storyteller Dice Roller , my little tabletop RPG utility app. Wow, the Blogger interface has changed a lot.

Digby : So I understand from the twitter scolds that we are not supposed to talk about this mass murder except to share clinical details about what happened and express condolences to the victims. The shutting down any discussion of the social, cultural and political implications of yet another horrific act of deadly gun violence is becoming more and more successful after each event. Amen. Let's stop pretending there's nothing we can do about this. I'd like to make gun control a politically respectable issue again. I think there should be a hell of a lot of red tape involved in owning a gun. I don't think the Second Amendment refers to individuals, but rather to a "well-regulated militia".

GREE International, is a mobile social gaming and platform company. We are trying to double in size in under 6 months. We have A LOT of money and 73 open positions. These include Programmers (Android, iOS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Unity3d), Build Engineers, Sales Engineers, QA Engineers, Network Engineers, Product Managers, System Administrators, 2D Artists, Web/Graphic Designers, UI/UX Designers, Marketers, Studio Directors, Copywriters, Lawyers, HR Generalists, Recruiters, Japanese Technical Translators, and people who do Customer and Community Management, Data Analysis, Business Operations (whatever that is), Corporate Development, Business Development, Business Intelligence, Public Relations, and management (Director and VP level) for most of those kinds of positions. Must be able to relocate to Bay Area. There is a giant sucking sound of people being inhaled into the company. Apply here .

I really hope Starz and Netflix work out their differences and come to an agreement. For their sake, more than mine. If people can't get their video legitimately, that will just bolster the illegal methods. Really, BitTorrent clients are not that hard to use (or so I've heard), and the more people figure that out, the worse it will be for people who produce and distribute video content and hope to charge money for doing so. Have they learned nothing from the music industry?

Internal Monologue has long been an advocate of this : A national movement aimed at sidelining the Electoral College in presidential elections got a big boost Monday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation adding California to the list of states supporting the drive. Brown's signature makes California the ninth state to sign on to the effort, which would hand the electoral votes of all participating states to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide. Currently, California's 55 electoral votes go to the person who wins the most votes in the state. Note that this law only kicks in if states with a majority of the electoral college votes have a similar law. The Electoral College is a national embarrassment and needs to be sidelined. It is a vestige of anti-democratic forces that have no legitimate place in today's polity. This is a great way to get around the EC without amending the Constitution. The latter would be very difficult to do, becau

...when Google pays $12.5 billion dollars for Motorola , primarily to use its portfolio of patents in lawsuit wars. This is a lame-ass state of affairs and doesn't benefit anyone except lawyers and patent trolls.

The basic point of this TED talk is that at-risk children are woefully under-capitalized in our society. Early childhood intervention provides the public a fantastic rate of return that any venture capitalist would jump on immediately. This is exactly the sort of thing that will help our society be strong, and unfortunately it's exactly the sort of thing that gets cut, because the constituents lack political power.

Here's a chart that shows what dollar value various government agencies assign to a human life when doing their cost-benefit analyses. Via Yglesias . Some commenters reacted negatively to the very idea of cost-benefit analysis and human life. I guess my reaction to that is: "Grow up." Yes, it seems heartless and cold-blooded to place a dollar value on human life. But any safety decision we make (requiring seat belts, helmet laws, disease prevention, etc.) implicitly places a dollar value on human life. Indeed, many government policy decisions (health care, war, whether it is more important to fight unemployment or inflation) make an implicit statement about the value of human life. I think making those implicit statements explicit can help us make more just decisions.

The Oatmeal . A sample:

The main fault line in American politics these days is not between liberal and conservative. It's between conservative and bat-shit crazy. Conservatives have been raising the debt ceiling for years. Now suddenly right-wingers want to take the world economy hostage by threatening not to raise it. This is crazy, and weakens America. Thank you conservatives, for speaking out against this nonsense : Sane conservative economists recognize that not raising the debt ceiling on August 2nd would be a disaster. Sane conservatives understand that the ratings agencies will lower our credit rating if we won’t raise the ceiling, and that we have almost $500 billion in maturing treasuries that we need to roll over in August alone which, as UBS argues , is a problem [...]

If members of Congress think like partisans who want to capture the White House, then the smart strategy for them is to refuse to do whatever it is the president wants. The content of the president’s desire is irrelevant. But the more ambitious his desire is, the more important it is to turn him down. After all, if the President wants a big bipartisan deal on the deficit, then a big bipartisan deal on the deficit is “a win for President Obama,” which means a loss for the anti-Obama side. When Obama didn’t want to embrace Bowles-Simpson, then failure to embrace Bowles-Simpson was a valid critique of him. But had Obama embraced Bowles-Simpson, then it would have been necessary for his opponents to reject it. That’s why now that Obama has a position well to the right of Bowles-Simpson, his opponents are still against Bowles-Simpson. - Yglesias

[I]f you’re interested in labor and working conditions, you’ve got to be interested in full employment. Full employment gives workers meaningful leverage. Mass unemployment gives it all to the bosses. In strict dollars and cents terms, I think everyone is better off with prosperity than with sluggish growth. But in terms of power , mass unemployment is a boon to bosses. - Matthew Yglesias Amen. If the market value of a human being's labor is shitty, people will be treated like shit by their employers. If someone can say, "Take this job and shove it!", that's real power for the worker. If an employer can say, "I've got 30 people lined up ready to replace you.", that's real power for the employer. Everything else is fiddling at the margins. I'd take 4% unemployment and free agency over 10% unemployment and labor union backing me up any day of the week. The Federal Reserve's job is to keep both unemployment and inflation low. Low unemploy

This is a good thing: For sheer cynicism it’s hard to top McConnell’s latest bright idea , which is essentially to pass legislation that will give the Obama administration the power to raise the debt ceiling, subject to a 2/3rds over-ride by Congress. The practical effect would be to raise the debt ceiling while allowing Republicans to vote “against” doing so with impunity. Yes, it's a cynical ploy to make Obama look like a bad guy for raising the debt ceiling (to pay for a budget that Congress passes, of course). But it's a total cave on all the policy concessions they were trying to extort from Democrats by holding the economy hostage and threatening to let the US go into default. I'm glad to finally see some movement on this.