Media and Myth

Today’s media are bursting with the latest developments in politics, economics, culture, technology, and science, but in one area they remain stagnated in the Middle Ages. No matter how hard you look, you will rarely find a word in any newspaper, magazine, television, or internet source contesting the widely prevailing and erroneous belief that somehow, out there, there exists an invisible, all-powerful being called “God.” Nobody, from the President on down, dares challenge the taboo against seriously discussing this widespread myth. Even the most sophisticated media outlets dare not expose the fact that the emperor, called “religion,” has no clothes.

I am a retired attorney who practiced in New York and Connecticut for 37 years. My entire life was devoted to the consideration of rational evidence. Every court in America adheres to the proposition that the assertion of any claim requires evidence. There is no place in the legal world where you can claim that someone exists who is invisible. You cannot go before any jury and claim that it ought to accept your argument on faith. You have to come up with the cold, hard, empirical facts or you and your client will be tossed out of court on your collective duffs.

For some reason, when it comes to discussing God, this is not the case in the media and popular culture. It is not only de rigueur today to fully accept the claim that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good and loving being who tools around in the sky and controls our lives, but it is a violent sin against political correctness and good manners to suggest that this absurd belief is without any foundation.

Every city, town, and village in this land is peppered with churches. A thousand meetings a day are commenced with invocation of a remote deity. Every funeral serves up the comforting pabulum that the deceased is not really dead but has gone to a “better place” (Paris?). We are incessantly assured that despite the conflicting raw evidence of the Holocaust, earthquakes in Haiti, tsunamis in Asia, deadly diseases, the slaughter of 9/11, and the terrible suffering of children everywhere, “God loves us.” We are perpetually advised to pray to this aloof and detached spirit despite the fact that in thousands of years there has never been a scintilla of solid evidence that the divinity has ever answered a single prayer.

Much of organized religion today surrounds itself with medieval rites and trappings calculated to inspire awe and mystery. Many less ostentatious groups, such as Protestants, practice ancient rites of healing, speaking in tongues, and the singing of sacred hymns. Connected to all of this there is a considerable amount of baloney and angling for money. The faithful seem numb to the fraud and deceit inherent in these activities.

Why are the media unable to confront this subject with rational discourse? Why do they shun it like the Swine Flu? Is it because they are afraid of losing customers and advertisers? Is it because they are afraid of offending the hierarchy of the various organized sects and denominations? Do they fear retaliation from conservative politicians? Are they afraid of the millions of ordinary citizens who have invested so much emotional capital in these fairy tales?

Perhaps it would not be a good thing to open up these sources of comfort and consolation to critical examination. Perhaps people should be left alone with their delusions about God, saints, angels, devils, and a moral law based on the word of the Almighty. But I ask, is it moral and proper to go on promulgating a false myth just because it is widely accepted?

The mathematician, William K. Clifford, put it well when he said: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” To Clifford, the life of the man who suppresses doubts and avoids inquiry about questions which might disturb belief is “one long sin against mankind.”

Muslim Rage

Although I realize that there was more to the Muslim protests of a trashy American Film than mere humiliation over religious blasphemy, I think that commentators may have missed one important element in the violent demonstrations which have engulfed the Middle East. That element is ignorance. I believe that the vast majority of the people demonstrating out on the streets were too ignorant to understand that this film was the work of a small group of anti-Muslims living in the U.S. and that the United States Government and the American People had nothing to do with it. Moreover, they are too ignorant to understand the American dedication to free speech and the inability of our government, under the First Amendment, to punish the makers of this garbage.

I have no doubt that the people who are stoking this conflagration are not so stupid. They recognize that the majority of the people on the streets do not have the intelligence to make the fine distinctions necessary to see the film as the work of a tiny group of outsiders. They see it as an opportunity to heighten the level of anti-Americanism and anti-western hatred. The head of Hezbollah called on all Muslims to protest the film and demonstrate against America. While he may be feeding into a lot of other issues that motivate Islamic mobs to hate America, he is also feeding into profound mob ignorance.

Let’s face it. Although there is plenty of ignorance among the ordinary citizens of America and most western countries, and although any mob is almost by definition ignorant, the ignorance of western mobs is nothing to compare with the ignorance of the Muslim mobs. Centuries ago the West began to outpace the Middle East in industry, education, arts, sciences and civilization. It is one of the things that rankles the Muslims. They envy and resent that fact that in almost every field of endeavor the western countries have vastly outdone them. They see the prosperity of the western world and its adherence to Christianity and secular thinking as a rebuke to and humiliation of the Muslim religion. They feel that this superiority of western civilization is a new type of Crusade, and they call the western nations “Crusaders.”

This backwardness and lower civilization is not shared by the Middle East country of Israel. Israel is populated by people, or their descendents, who came from northern civilized countries. With the exception of a minority of ultra orthodox Jews, their religion, Judaism, does not have the same kind of anger and paranoia found with the Muslims.

Because Muslims resent the great advantages western countries have over the Middle East, they turn to their religion as a consolation. They believe not only that theirs is the true religion, but also that adherence to this religion makes them superior to western believers in other religions. Thus, their religion makes-up for their feelings of inferiority when confronting the West. Their religion gives them a special place that more than compensates for their backwardness in most other areas. Any western attack on their religion, particularly by means of comedy or satire, is an attack against their whole system of self-respect.

This is not an uncommon phenomenon. People all over the world use religion to overcome the many disadvantages that would otherwise give them feelings of inferiority. Even in the United States you will find that people of the lowest income groups and social class cling to religion as the one thing that compensates for their low status.

I do not know the whole reason why the West outpaced the Middle East in all aspects of civilization, but I have no doubt that the Muslim religion bears a large part of the blame. In its more orthodox aspects it is a highly restricting religion. As practiced by Muslims all over the world, particularly the Taliban when they controlled Afghanistan and by the people in Saudi Arabia today, it is a deadening religion that does nothing to encourage innovation and freedom of thought. It is a religion that teaches men to treat women as lesser beings, that makes women wear unattractive clothing, that forbids women to do many things allowed in the West, and that punishes them severely for infractions of these many restraints.

What is it that makes Muslim mobs so ignorant? Why are they incapable of the kind of peaceful demonstrations found in western countries? I believe that it is accounted for by the lower level of civilization found in the Middle East. I have come to believe that the critical moral element in the world is civilization. I believe that the ethical and moral content of most human actions is largely governed by the amount of civilization achieved by the actor, his group, his society, and his nation. Although most people in the world share certain moral values, the extent to which those values are practiced depends largely on the level of civilization present in the actor and his fellow actors.

To give one example: During the protests in Egypt that unseated President Mubarak, Lara Logan, an attractive newswoman for CBS, was covering the protests in Tharir Square, Cairo. Somehow she got surrounded by men. These men proceeded to attack and sexually assault her. She was saved only when a group of Moslem women came to her aid. Thus, Moslem men, whose religion is very strict about sex, had no problem with gang-rape of a female reporter in a public place.

Now try to imagine this happening during a demonstration in New York, or Washington, or London, or Paris. It couldn’t. The reason that it could happen in Egypt, and not in a western country is simply that the people of Egypt are less civilized than the people of those western nations. It is not difficult to imagine such an attack taking place in other cities of the Middle East or Africa, but it is impossible to imagine it happening in America, or Canada, or any western European country.

Why do Muslims in the Middle East resort to violence when confronted by blasphemy of their religion? Why were there no such demonstrations in the United States when an artist exhibited a piece called “Piss Christ” in which he had a crucifix standing in what he claimed to be his own urine? Why have there not been violent demonstrations against many other blasphemous works of art, literature, and film in the West? The answer is that the West is simply far more civilized than the Middle East.

To a large extent, civilization is and has always been geographical. The most religious, backward, uncivilized countries are in the southern parts of the world. Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeastern Asia, and South America are all far less civilized than Northern Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Even within countries, the geographical distribution of the population helps explain different levels of civilization.

The southern states in America, where slavery prevailed until eliminated by the Civil War, are less civilized than the northern states. This kind of dichotomy is found in large countries throughout the world. One of the factors indicating lower civilization is religion. The people of the Middle East are more attached to their religion than are the people of the more secular West. When you look at the countries of Scandinavia, you notice a far higher percentage of the people are atheists. Those countries have the highest levels of civilization. People demonstrating on their streets are far less likely to be violent than the people in the Middle East. I do not know the full explanation for this difference, but I am certain that the lower civilization, the religion, and the ignorance of the people of the Middle East helps explain the stupidity of their demonstrations against a low budget, anti-Islamic movie.

Romney and Jobs

Jobs, jobs, jobs--the Republicans have made jobs the central issue in this campaign. Their claim is that President Obama has not done the things needed to improve the economy and create more jobs. In their effort to make Mitt Romney appear to be the businessman capable of bringing real expertise to the economy and creating job growth, they deliberately obscure the facts

The first obscured fact is that when President Obama took office the country was in a terrible recession and millions of jobs had been lost. That recession continued after he was inaugurated, but the recession eventually ended and the economy began to turn around. Through stimulus and bailouts the President has helped add over 4.5 million jobs to the economy. His actions have saved the American automobile industry and the millions of jobs connected to that industry. It is an industry that Romney would have allowed to expire in bankruptcy. The President’s actions have also saved many US banks from going under. Many people criticize the bank bailout, but without it we would probably have gone into a deep depression.

Most people fail to realize what effect the President’s stimulus and bailouts had upon the economy. The Republicans point to the fact that the stimulus did not create the millions of jobs necessary to make-up for the huge loss of jobs during the recession. That is because those programs represented a finger in the dyke that prevented a nightmare collapse of our entire economy. Matt Bai of The New York Times put it this way: “Obama’s first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later the stimulus doesn’t really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it’s also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn’t really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared — which could well have happened without federal intervention. According to figures kept by the administration, Ohio received some $3.5 billion in additional Medicaid payments, and more than 860,000 residents received expanded unemployment benefits. In addition, Ohio claimed about $8.8 billion for other projects, including public school systems, roadwork and police departments. It stands to reason that Ohioans, who make up about 4 percent of the country, received about that proportion of nearly $540 billion in tax breaks and income subsidies. If the Recovery Act didn’t turn things around in Ohio, it surely kept things from getting markedly worse.”

Bai went on to describe the effect of the auto bailout: “We can’t know how many new jobs would never have existed if not for the auto bailout, but it’s beside the point. What’s more relevant, and all but impossible to calculate, is how many previously existing jobs would have disappeared in Ohio had at least two of the three major American automakers gone under. The Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, who undertook the first federal intervention in the industry back in 2008, estimated (probably conservatively) that a million American jobs would be vulnerable, most of them in the Midwest. Obama’s advisers during the auto crisis privately discussed the possibility of a ‘Lehman risk’ if they stood by while the auto companies tanked — in other words, a sudden collapse of the automakers might cause a catastrophic failure of the entire industrial sector, just as the dissolution of Lehman Brothers sunk the financial markets.”

The economy has continued to grow. The fact that growth has been slower than desired can be attributed to many factors, not least of which is the opposition by congressional Republicans to any bill or program that would stimulate the economy and add jobs. In September 2011, President Obama submitted to Congress his jobs bill, the "American Jobs Act of 2011." It is a bill that economists say would create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. You would think that the second it was introduced the Republicans in Congress would, out of love of country and concern for the lives of working Americans, have supported and enacted it even if they had doubts as to its effectiveness. But no, they blocked the bill and prevented its enactment.

Perhaps in this political world I am being too dramatic when I describe this opposition to any program for job enhancement as cold-hearted and un-American. But think of the robust hypocrisy of Republicans speaking out of one side of their mouths about the need to create jobs while preventing any progress on the jobs bill. How do the millions of unemployed people out there benefit from the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress? It seems that in their zeal to prevent President Obama from being reelected, they have decided that it is in their interest to prevent the economy from rebounding and to prevent the jobs picture from improving. This is a callous abandonment of those millions of people suffering from lack of jobs.

Mitt Romney has put-out a jobs plan which we must assume he would enact if elected president. The question is whether this plan would bring-about the huge increase in jobs necessary to overcome the current stagnation. Keep in mind that in the American Jobs Act of 2011, the President aims to create jobs now, not somewhere down the road. The Act would invest billions in infrastructure, hire more state and local workers, double the size of the payroll tax cut, and add a new set of tax cuts for small businesses and companies that hire new employees. If the Act had been passed back in September 2011, there would, by now, be many thousands of those jobs in evidence. Instead, because of Republican opposition, there is nothing.

Economists have stated that President Obama’s jobs plan is far better than Romney’s. This is because Obama aims to create jobs now. Romney aims to improve the economy so that jobs will be available somewhere in the future. Romney’s plan calls for negotiating trade agreements with Latin America, confronting China’s trade policies, rewriting a new corporate tax code, expanding domestic energy production, building the Keystone pipeline, and cutting taxes on billionaires. While some of these programs might help create jobs in the future, each would take a long time to have a serious effect on the national jobs situation.

In a recent statement  by Romney, you get a taste of his plan to delay immproving the jobs situation and try to upgrade the economy instead : "My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility and becoming employed again, particularly those who don't have work," he said. "His (Obama's) whole campaign is based on getting people jobs again, putting people back to work. This is ultimately a question about direction for the country. Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?"


So the real jobs candidate is not Mitt Romney. It is President Obama. All Mitt Romney and his party have to do is pass the American Jobs Act of 2011 and get people back to work. Then, once we have a jobs bill in action, the Republicans can sit down with the Democrats and work to enact some of the ideas put forward by Romney.

Romney Wants to Abolish Medicare

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan realize that the public should remain confused about Medicare because the budget put forth by Ryan in the House of Representatives, approved by Mitt Romney, and voted for by all of the Republicans (but defeated in the Senate by the Democrats) would completely demolish Medicare and substitute a system of private medical accounts to be paid to private insurance companies with limited voucher help from the government.

The television ad campaign by Romney makes many charges against President Obama, and deceitfully attacks Obama's efforts to strengthen Medicare. The truth is that Romney and Ryan would destroy Medicare. Their attacks are deliberately misleading. For example, Romney and Ryan claim that the Obama reform law has “cut” $716 billion from Medicare, with the money used to expand coverage to low-income people who are currently uninsured. The fact is that the budget produced by Paul Ryan and approved by Mitt Romney contains the exact same cuts in Medicare as are found in the so-called “Obamacare” law.

The $716 billion is not a “cut” in benefits but rather a savings in costs that the Congressional Budget Office projects over the next decade from wholly reasonable provisions in President Obama’s reform law.

A substantial part of the cut will be accomplished by reducing the hugely wasteful subsidies being paid to private insurance companies for a program called Medicare Advantage. These plans cost the government far more than regular Medicare. People with Medicare Advantage plans will not lose any benefits from the cut. They can go on paying high premiums for Medicare Advantage or they can get the same benefits by switching to regular Medicare and purchasing Medicare-plus policies to cover the additional things provided for in the Medicare Advantage plans.

There is not going to be a cut in the amounts paid to hospitals and doctors. What the Reform law does is reduce the annual increases in amounts being paid to health care providers — like hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies — to force the notoriously inefficient system to find ways to improve productivity. These recipients of Medicare payments are not going to opt out of the system just because of this reduction of annual increases.

A further cut will come from fees or taxes imposed on drug makers, device makers, and insurers — fees that they can surely afford since expanded coverage for the uninsured will increase their markets and their revenues.

Under the Obama Reform Law there will not be any reduction in benefits to seniors. On the other hand, if Romney and Ryan are elected, they will try to repeal the Reform law. The result will be much higher costs to seniors. For one thing, the Reform law gradually eliminates the doughnut hole for prescriptions under Medicare Part D. Repeal of the law would retain the doughnut hole, and seniors would have to pay the full cost of their prescriptions after reaching approximately $2500 in drug costs. Moreover, the elimination of Medicare would mean that seniors would have to rely on vouchers to help them pay for private health insurance. The amount provided in Ryan’s budget for vouchers would not cover even half the cost of health insurance for seniors in the coming decade. The repeal of the reform law would also drive up costs for seniors who are receiving preventive services, like colonoscopies, mammograms, and immunizations, with no cost sharing.

There is an abundant amount of information on the internet about how Romney is distorting the facts about Medicare.

Romney's Pick--Paul Ryan

Mitt Romeny has now chosen Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running-mate. By doing so Romney has thumbed his nose at those people who said that he should choose a moderate to satisfy the great majority of American voters who are moderates. Paul Ryan is no moderate. As Chairman of the House Budget Committee, he is the author of a right-wing Republican budget proposal that should scare every thinking American. He is an Ayn Rand Libertarian (ignoring Rand's atheism) who would lower taxes on the wealthy, abolish programs for the poor, and destroy Medicare and Medicaid.


Mitt Romney has already approved of the Ryan budget proposal. The Republicans in both houses of Congress are now on the record as voting for the Ryan budget proposal which abolishes Medicare as we know it. The Ryan plan attacks the deficit by lowering taxes paid by the wealthy and makes the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Ryan’s plan to demolish Medicare would save the government billions of dollars by shifting the burden of paying for medical care from the government to the senior citizens who would have been covered by the current program.

The way Medicare works today, the government pays for all approved medical care for senior citizens. Let’s say that you need to have heart bypass surgery. The surgeon will bill Medicare for the cost of the surgery, which might be in the tens of thousands. Medicare will approve a percentage of that bill and pay the surgeon. Most surgeons will accept as full payment the amount paid by Medicare, but if there is a deductable or amount in excess of the Medicare amount, many seniors are able to pay it by taking-out Medicare-Plus insurance. That insurance is affordable for most senior citizens.

Under the Republican plan put forth by Representative Ryan, the government will no longer make Medicare payments for people 55 years old and under at the time the legislation is enacted. When those people become eligible for Medicare, there will be no Medicare for them. They will have to purchase private health insurance. The government will assist people earning less that $80 thousand per year by giving them a voucher to help pay for health insurance. For people earning over $80 thousand, the voucher will be half the amount, and even less for people earning over $200 thousand per year. The voucher amount will be pegged to the cost of living.

There is one basic problem with the Ryan plan. The cost of health insurance is rising at a rate far higher than the cost of living. In ten years, when the 55-year-old generation reaches eligibility for Medicare, the cost of health insurance will be more than double the amount provided in the Ryan budget. Sure, this will save the government billions of dollars, but it will deprive millions of seniors of health care during that period of their lives when they are most in need.

According a new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, health insurance premium are going up much faster than overall inflation and workers’ wages. By the survey’s calculation, increases over the next decade would translate to the average policy for a family costing in the neighborhood of $24,000 a year.

While Medicare may be an expensive program, the solution is not to eliminate it. There are ways to lower the cost of Medicare without the drastic kind of demolition envisioned by the Republican budget. President Obama has offered a proposal which would lower the cost of Medicare by lowering the cost of the terribly wasteful (private insurance) "Medicare Advantage" program. There are many other steps that can be taken without lowering the benefits to seniors.

The Ryan budget also calls for the repeal of President Obama's health care reform law. That would save billions in federal subsidies that will be given to lower-income people to buy insurance. Such repeal would bring-back the doughnut-hole for seniors under the Medicare Part D prescription law, would put over 40 million people back into the list of uninsured, and would, among other things, restore the right of health insurance companies to deny insurance on account of pre-existing conditions.

According to The New York Times: "As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan has drawn a blueprint of a government that will be absent when people need it the most. It will not be there when the unemployed need job training, or when a struggling student needs help to get into college. It will not be there when a miner needs more than a hardhat for protection, or when a city is unable to replace a crumbling bridge.

And it will be silent when the elderly cannot keep up with the costs of M.R.I.’s or prescription medicines, or when the poor and uninsured become increasingly sick through lack of preventive care.

More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan, and eagerly accepted by the Tea Party-driven House, come from programs for low-income Americans. That means billions of dollars lost for job training for the displaced, Pell grants for students and food stamps for the hungry. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops raised their voices in protest at the shredding of the nation’s moral obligations."

Supposedly, the impetus for the Ryan/Republican budget comes from the huge deficit which was initially incurred during the Bush Administration due to tax cuts for the wealthy and two wars. Because of Republicans’ refusal to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, the deficit has continued to rise during the Obama Administration. Ryan’s solution to the deficit is to—cut taxes! Yes, Ryan and the Republicans want to cut the tax rate on the wealthy and on corporations from 35% to 25%. They also want to make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent! Needless to say, Ryan intends to reduce the deficit and support this reduction in revenue by cutting programs for the poor, disabled, and aged.

According to Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton: "That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low income people, according to the nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts  proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs."
The Nobel Prize laureate and economist, Paul Krugman, says the Congressional Budget Office: “finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade, the (Ryan) plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law."

We now know that Ryan is also a liar--first class! He has repeatedly said that he did not ask for stimulus funds, but the newspapers were able to turn up several letters by Ryan to the government asking for such funds. Funds were paid to Ryan's projects in Wisconsin. He is therefore a liar. This is what we have to look forward to with Paul Ryan.

So this is who Mitt Romney wants as his running mate. This says a lot about Romney. He is in bed with the most radical right--wing of his party. He is willing to destroy Medicare, health insurance reform, the middle class, and the poor.

Mitt Romney--Flip Flopper

George Romney, father of Mitt Romney, and former governor of Michigan, was too honest. He admitted that when he visited Vietnam he was “brainwashed” by the generals. For this candor he lost his bid to be Republican nominee for president. His son Mitt learned the lesson well. He decided that the last thing you need in politics is honesty and integrity. With his abundant fortune, and vulpine character, he is now the Republican candidate in the race to get the prize that escaped his father.

In 2006, when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he supported and signed a health care law that became the model for the federal health care law, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) signed by President Obama. The Massachusetts health care insurance reform law mandates that nearly every resident of Massachusetts obtain a state-government-regulated minimum level of healthcare insurance coverage. It provides free health care insurance for residents earning less than 150% of the federal poverty level (FPL) who are not eligible for Medicaid. The law also subsidizes health care insurance for those earning up to 300% of the FPL.

Now that he is again running for President, Romney has condemned the federal health care law that was based on his state law. His most fervent distinction is that his was a state law and that the law signed by President Obama is an excessive exertion of federal power. This is not the first time Romney has had to explain his many flip-flops on political questions. Like all of his other flip-flops, however, the explanations he provides are little more than nit-picking and quibbling.

In 1994, when Mitt was running against Ted Kennedy for senator from Massachusetts, he said: “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.” During the 2002 governor's race in Massachusetts, Romney said: "The choice to have an abortion is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not the government's." Yet, when he first began campaigning for president, Romney came out in support of state laws forbidding abortion and criticized the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. He said: “I am firmly pro-life.”

In his 1994 senate run, Romney indicated that he opposed prayer in the schools. In 2007, he called for allowing prayer in school ceremonies.

When he ran for governor in 2002, Romney strongly advocated stem-cell research and promised to lobby President Bush to provide federal funding for such research. During his presidential campaign, however, Romney renounced his 2002 position and said that he now agreed with Bush's decision to ban federal funding for stem-cell research.

In Romney's 2002 race for governor, he said: "We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts; I support them. I won't chip away at them; I believe they protect us and provide for our safety.” But just before declaring his candidacy for the 2008 Republican nomination for president, Romney joined the National Rifle Association. He said: "I have a gun of my own. I go hunting myself. I'm a member of the NRA and believe firmly in the right to bear arms.” The Associated Press reported in April 2007 that Romney never sought a hunting license in any of the four states where he has resided.

In 2002 Romney supported the right of homosexuals to form civil unions and said he would support domestic partnership benefits. He said: "All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual orientation." During his first campaign for president, however, Romney stated that he is opposed to such civil unions as well as same-sex marriages.

These are just a few of the issues on which Slick Mitt has changed positions since he started running for president. Romney has calculated that the base of the Republican Party is far more conservative than the electorate in Massachusetts. He simply could not get nominated with the positions which he embraced during his races for senator and governor of Massachusetts. He appears to have calculated correctly. Republican voters do not care that this man is a total fraud and liar. They like him now that he is speaking like a true conservative. What does this say about the values of the “values” Party? Is honesty not one of the Republican values?

In an editorial, The New York Times said of Mitt Romney: “It is hard to find an issue on which he has not repositioned himself to the right since he was governor of Massachusetts. It is impossible to figure out where he stands or where he would lead the country.”

Romney called himself the candidate of “change.” What did he mean? During the 2008 run for the presidency John McCain made a good point when he said that sure, Romney was the candidate of change because had changed his position so many times.

What this country needs is not the small change of an imposter like Mitt Romney. It still needs a man of integrity like Barack Obama. Romney has frequently and unapologetically reversed his position on many issues when he thought it politically convenient to do so. Perhaps I am too idealistic, but I would like our presidents to be men of strength, integrity, and honor. I feel that Mitt Romney is a spineless fraud who looks which way the wind is blowing before stating his positions.

Unafraid of Aging?

The New York Times recently did a profile of Dr. Linda P. Fried, Dean of the Medical School at Columbia University and an expert on aging. The article, titled “Unafraid of Aging,” described how Dr. Fried’s work had opened all the wonderful possibilities of aging. I wrote the following letter to Dr. Fried:

“ Dear Dr. Fried:

I read the Times article about you today, and I wonder if you have ever considered aging for what it really is. Aging is an incurable disease. It is a terrible, horrible, wasting-away of what was once a healthy and beautiful body. I am 73 and I know. They talk about the "Golden Years," and that sounds to me like Disney nonsense. I think that aging should be looked upon by intelligent people as a tragic fact of life, one of the things that makes life miserable. While some people may be able to deal with aging through our genetic tendency to optimism, a realistic look at aging would necessarily cause deep depression.

If it were not for aging at least half, maybe more, of the medical profession would not exist. In most specialties the job is to diagnose and treat the illnesses of aging. The older you get, the more medical problems you face. You lose your ability to do many things. You lose your sexual ability. Your skin sags, your eyes, ears, and teeth go bad. Your hair turns white and falls out. You lose all energy. I'm not just talking about myself. I am talking about everybody.

The older you get, the more medications you must take. After a while you have to keep your medications in special boxes for each day. Your body gets more and more feeble. You face a multitude of problems and you keep the doctors busy. You may even lose control of your mind through one of the horrible diseases and syndromes that cause dementia. There is no cure for this. It is part of life. Eventually, you develop some problem that leads to death. By the time you die, it is almost a relief for you and your family.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but there is no good side of aging. It is a human tragedy.”

What explains our ability to go on living, even happily, while our bodies deteriorate year-after-year? Why does this disintegration of our bodies not cause every one of us terrible disgust, anger, and discouragement? The answer probably lies in our genes. In an article by Tali Sharot in the June 6, 2011, issue of Time Magazine entitled: “The Optimism Bias,” the author, a cognitive scientist, finds that we are all genetically programmed with optimism. She says that without a neural mechanism generating optimism, all humans would be mildly depressed. In other words, even though the events of life should make us depressed, we tend to look for a silver lining because of an evolutionary adaptation of our brain which makes us optimistic even in the face of horror and tragedy. This is a tremendously important finding about human nature. It is actually this genetic tendency toward optimism that keeps the human species alive. Without it we might all commit suicide.

I do not suggest that we should all become terribly depressed by our aging, but I would prefer not to hear the absurd claims that old age is the best part of life, the “Golden Years,” the last of life for which the first was made. Old age sucks.