Whenever making an extraordinary claim, it is rather important that there should be extraordinary evidence to back it up. This reasonable requirement doesn’t seem to bother followers of organized religion, but that’s another topic for another day. Today’s topic is the paranoid delusion known as birtherism.

Human inclination towards conspiracy theories can be easily explained by cognitive biases inherent in our evolved decision-making, but trying to explain to birthers that their beliefs are simply the result of malfunctioning neural processes is probably not a productive argument.

To believe that our President was born anywhere other than Honolulu, given the available evidence, also requires believing in a conspiracy so bizarre and unlikely that any self-respecting proponent of it would need to deliver an incontrovertible smoking gun the likes of which the world has never seen.

Some jackass named Lucas Smith claims to have it and has sworn under penalty of perjury that it is real: A signed, sealed Kenyan birth certificate for BHO. See below.

The forgery here should be rather obvious to anyone familiar with titles. In all of the crumbling British Empire circa 1961, there was one (and only one) person allowed to have the suffix “II” attached to her name:

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and Lord High Protector of the Ministry of Silly Walks.

(I’m j/k about the last title but I wish I wasn’t because it would be awesome.)

Roman numerals are poor taste (and arguably unconstitutional) as nominal suffixes in the U.S.A., but they simply do not exist in British custom outside the royal family and would not constitute a legally acceptable naming convention in any British protectorate whatsoever.

So, I hope that the Government of the U.K. files amicus briefs in whatever lawsuits arise from this silly nonsense, because forgeries like these insult the intelligence of the British people and constitute a small (but nonetheless real) affront to the sovereign herself.

np: Explosions in the Sky – Your Hand in Mine

Well well well.

At today’s meeting of the Colorado General Assembly’s Long Term Fiscal Stability commission, members of the public were invited to give brief remarks before the commission regarding what to do to help solve the perpetual fiscal crisis caused by Colorado’s constitutionally-enshrined Gordian knot of competing, internally inconsistent, arbitrary, and meaningless fiscal formulas.

One of the citizens who gave testimony was Herb Fenster, a recognized Colorado Super Lawyer with a freakish academic CV and professional record.  He first suggested that the University of Colorado at Boulder ought to be set free to operate as a private institution with a public charter à la Cornell University.  This would normally be thought of as controversial (although as a CU-Boulder class of ‘02 alum, I think it’s a great idea), but what he announced next will make life interesting in Colorado for years to come.

On behalf of several yet-to-be-named plaintiffs (including several state legislators, apparently), Fenster’s firm (McKenna, Long, and Aldridge, a high powered firm with a presence on K Street) will be suing the State of Colorado in the  United States District Court for the District of Colorado on the following complaints:

1.) The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) violates Article 4, Section 4 of the United States Constitution (and, by extension, the Enabling Act of Colorado) because, by taking away the power to tax from the General Assembly, Colorado is in fact a direct democracy in violation of federal guarantees of a republican form of government; and

2.) The General Assembly violated the federal False Claims Act by transferring privately donated funds and restricted federal funds to Colorado’s General Fund.

As you may imagine, the entire room was stunned.  For perhaps the first time since he was in diapers, Senator John Morse (D-Jesusland) struggled to speak in well-articulated, complete sentences.

The complaint, which will be filed sometime this fall, will be sealed for sixty days so as to allow the United States Attorney General the opportunity to examine the complaint and decide whether to join as a plaintiff.

From a quick discussion with several lawyer friends who shall go nameless, it appears the plaintiffs have an uphill battle.  There is case law in Oregon regarding challenges related to a “republican” form of government; basically, they fought the law and the law won.  In addition, this could be the kind of case where the Judicial Branch completely steps aside (as happened recently in the ongoing New York Senate coup d’etat clown show power struggle).

As far as I am aware, this is the first time a Colorado constitutional amendment has been challenged in the federal courts since Senator Pat Steadman took down Amendment 2.  Regardless of the outcome, prepare to be thoroughly entertained.

How very interesting.

I submitted the following update on my personal Facebook page:

“is fascinated by the President’s stand on Israeli settlements. First time in 8 years that the U.S. is a neutral player in the Israeli-Palestinian discussions. This can only help U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another demonstration of the futility of neoconservatism.”

That wasn’t censored, which is nice.

However, I then commented on my own post and wrote something to the effect of:

“This also is a refreshing change from eight years of cynical pandering to Israel by the pathetic Bush-era Christian Right.”

It was probably less eloquent than that, but whatever I wrote was censored because the comment vanished from my page.

Note that at no point did I say anything bad about Israel, explicitly or implicitly.  I don’t think a truly reasonable person could have found otherwise, but I’m not sure because I didn’t memorize my comment.  I wasn’t exactly expecting the Facebook thought police to rein me in.

I can understand Facebook’s actions here.  Their product is unusually useful for spreading viral messages, and could be easily used to spread antisemitism or other intoxicating faith-based nonsense.

Facebook is playing a serious game of Cover Your Ass, and I can hardly blame them.

I’m just disappointed that I became the collateral damage of Facebook’s conservatism by making (as far as I can tell) a true statement.  I think “cowardice” may be too strong a word, but whatever it is, it’s not endearing.

Net effect: Facebook is doing the know-nothing Christian Right a huge favor by filtering out all criticism, legitimate or otherwise.  Sadly, this cop-out will continue until that demographic is so small that it’s commercially irrelevant.

So, the forces of reason and common sense fight on with a handicap.

It should be obvious already that Slate is just about my favorite website.

A few weeks ago, on my Colorado Senate District 31 campaign blog I wrote a piece about how I thought there were four types of Republicans.

A few days ago, John Dickerson agreed with me but drew his categories in a slightly different way.

It’s always fun to beat an expert to the punch, whether it’s the NFL play-by-play or just blogging about politics.

np: 2pac – Changes

Neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists will tell you that humans are predisposed to inferring correlations where there are none.  I pause a little bit when I hear someone say “bad things always happen in threes”, but June 1 was one of those days.

In increasing order of awfulness:

1.) GM, We Hardly Knew Ye - Years of mismanagement, short-sighted overreach by the UAW, and inferior vehicles finally caught up with Government Motors today. I am one of those people who argued that any public money spent subsidizing GM would just forestall the inevitable, and at the highest possible cost.

I’m encouraged that GM is shedding Saturn, Pontiac, Saab, and especially Hummer.  I hope Saab finds a European buyer, and wish that they would have killed off Buick and GMC and just rolled with Chevy and Cadillac.  Just as BMW owns Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen owns Bentley, and Mercedes owns Maybach, we could have an American car company with a solid product lineup and an upscale alternative for those who like to travel in style.

If President Obama’s experiment in industrial policy doesn’t turn out very well (which is what I, the cynical pessimist, naturally expect), we should wind GM up so that Ford can be more competitive with the Japanese and German automakers.  At the moment, foreign competition is too strong for three (or even two) U.S. car companies to survive, and that is actually a good thing for America in the long run.  

These days, it makes no sense to think of car companies as being domestic or foreign anyway. We already make excellent cars in America, they just happen to be Toyotas and BMWs.  

The sooner we stop thinking that politicizing business decisions will somehow make America better off, the sooner we can spend billions of dollars on public policies that actually make sense, like comprehensive, universal healthcare for all children and pregnant women.

Let’s encourage President Obama to restructure GM as quickly as possible and then sell it. I fear GM turning into what British Steel was in the 1970s.  The sooner the politicians are rid of GM, the better for all of us.

2.) Air France 447 Goes Down in the Atlantic – The same day that the last survivor of the Titanic died, a freak natural occurrence destroyed another vessel thought to be superior to the challenges posed by the weather, taking hundreds of people to premature deaths.  As horrible as this must have been, we should remember that 40,000 people die on American roads every year and that commercial air travel is the safest form of transportation in the U.S.

Rail travel should be the safest mode of transportation in America, but we’re decades behind the Europeans in rail safety. 

3.) Religious Terrorism Strikes in America – Although only one person was killed this time, the assassination of George Tiller by someone unworthy of distinction who probably sleeps with the flag in one hand and the cross in the other was a reminder that the poisonous mixture of government and religion creates a lot of collateral damage.  

The best article I’ve found today on the Tiller assassination was William Saletan’s piece in Slate.  I agree with it completely, and would add the following:

For many years, our first Marionette President George W. Bush and his puppetmaster Dick Cheney insisted that, by invading sovereign nations without provocation, we were fighting the ubiquitous terrorists on their turf.

Unfortunately, their turf is Iowa and Florida, not just the hills of Afghanistan.  It is clear now that the terrorists who pose the greatest day-to-day threat to America are people who look and sound just like us, seem to care about America (in a misguided way), and who are completely convinced that the best way to do something about America’s slow decline is to kill people who commit various religious sins.  

Not good.

Regardless of how one feels about abortion, shooting doctors is not a smart tactic to win the hearts and minds of the American people.

It’s time to call a spade a spade: There is a slowly-burning fuse of sectarian violence in America which if left unchecked has the potential to blow up, Northern Ireland style.

To be clear, I’d rate the likelihood of this at less than 1%.

However, that’s more than enough risk for me.  If things deteriorate in America, I can just use my British passport to live and work anywhere in the European Union.  Most of you don’t have that luxury, so I’d encourage you to get involved with the forces of sanity and decency and defend America from benighted sectarian nonsense.

np: My Dying Bride – Thy Raven Wings

On election night, I was the first of the ten candidates to give a speech.  I didn’t enjoy it very much, and if I never have to deliver a speech again I will die happy.

One of my fellow candidates mentioned in his speech that “TABOR isn’t rocket science”. 

I beg to differ.

In order to truly understand how government works in Colorado, you must have an analytical understanding of the fiscal, economic, and social impacts of several mathematical funding formulas set forth in the following:

1.) The Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR);

2.) The Gallagher Amendment to the Colorado Constitution;

3.) The Arveschoug-Bird General Fund allocation formula;

4.) Senate Bill 09-228 (The replacement for Arveschoug-Bird)

5.) The urban renewal statutes of Colorado;

6.) The Tax Increment Financing (TIF) ordinances of several municipalities across Colorado; and

7.) The Colorado Public School Finance Act

When taken together, these arbitrary formulas create a nonlinear system of interrelated equations whose impacts cannot be properly understood without doing some fairly straightforward vector calculus. 

Vector calculus happens to be one of the tools used to understand the dynamics of the position, velocity, and trajectory of rockets. Regardless of what anyone else may say, you really do need to know rocket science to completely understand everything that TABOR does.

It’s not realistic to expect everyone in Colorado to be a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics, yet we expect rank & file Coloradans to be well-enough informed to vote on twenty ballot issues every year.

It’s time to admit that Colorado’s experiment with direct democracy is leading to suboptimal, schizophrenic public policy that wastes money, demoralizes elected officials, and denies Coloradans the republican form of government guaranteed by the federal Enabling Act of Colorado.

np: Porcupine Tree – II

Hi all,

This will be my non-campaign blog. I’ll talk about politics, sports, music, literature, international affairs, etc.

And math. 

Lots of math.

For the moment, I’m not migrating my campaign blog’s material over to this one, because I need to take legal advice as to whether I can or should do that.  You can still visit http://Byrne31.blogspot.com to learn about the policy positions I took during the Colorado Senate District 31 vacancy race, which culminated in a well-deserved victory for my excellent new friend Pat Steadman.

Cheers,

Patrick

np: Fear Factory – Cars