Cities, Countryside, Tradition and the Second Amendment

There are parts of big cities where Glocks, AR-15s and big fat magazines are all over the neighborhood… or should I say the “hood.” In Chicago and Detroit, northern towns to the max, murder rates are soaring. Major cities are places where people rub shoulders, crowding their way to work or even the local store. More people, tight spaces, more human flow and interaction, add frustration with a touch of anger, and you get yelling, the middle finger and some form of confrontation. Where weapons proliferate and gangs prosper, revenge and duty add new levels of danger to this world.

Let’s add more guns to the mix. Let’s encourage city people to buy more weapons and carry them on their person. Let’s allow simple anger, rising to rage on occasion, to go from middle finger expressions to those emotional peaks that happen all-too-often where the passion of the moment, perhaps heighted with alcohol or some lovely narcotic, self-control minimized by emotion, and let the forefinger now express itself on the trigger of a gun. Let’s allow guns to proliferate throughout cities, keeping background checks between private sellers off the books (40% of guns sales fit this category, by the way) and simply assume that guns will only find their way to sane, responsible adults. We all know what really happens. We hear it on the news all the time.

Now let’s go to the rural parts of America, or those towns (common in Texas, for example) where rural values still define contemporary life. We teach the young ‘uns to hunt and fish, to defend home and church with pride and to consider skill with a weapon one of the basic rights of passage, a system that has lasted generations, passed from father and mother to son and daughter for as long as anyone can remember.

Let’s add an extremely well-funded organization – the National Rifle Association – that has never remotely adequately explained the first half of the Second Amendment – that “well-regulated” part – and focused almost entirely on a raw and unrestricted right to bear arms. But this deeply-respected organization has sold their rather obviously inadequate explanation of the Second Amendment to just about everyone in the GOP and a whole pile of folks who call themselves Democrats. Not as a talking point, but with a passionate commitment that borders on religious fervor, where logic and a need to keep us safe in our ordinary lives need not be considered.

In the early 19^th century, the United States was, for the most part, a nation that was defined by rural values and recently struggled in revolution against a British oppressor. As the years passed, the Supreme Court upheld the kinds of restrictions on arms that would keep someone from having a private nuclear arsenal loaded onto attack fighters purchased in the open arms market. In the Reagan era, after an assassination attempt, the Brady Law added restrictions to gun ownership… common sense if you will. But saving lives and applying common sense to weapons is not part of rural values, and even the NRA leadership has told us that having assault weapons is our insurance to allow us to overthrow the government if they repress us too much.

It is religion, if you listen to those involved. On Saturday, October 19^th, a rather large and well-armed bevy of gun owners rallied in America’s seventh largest city, San Antonio and took their loud but peaceful protests in favor of gun ownership to the Alamo (pictured above, taken by Pat Dollard). “For tourists, it was a startling sight: men, women and children openly carrying loaded and unloaded shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s as if they were purses or backpacks. A young man in jeans ate a breakfast sandwich with his assault rifle resting behind his back. A rally speaker with his own assault rifle confronted and quizzed police officials about their views of the Second Amendment, and the officials calmly looked on.

“Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, teenagers and retirees all had their guns out, as visitors to San Antonio came and went from the Alamo. Police officers monitored and filmed the rally from a building across the street… Demonstrators were exercising a little-known privilege of Texas gun culture; Texas law allows people to walk down the street with an assault rifle, shotgun or other type of long gun. A state-issued license is required to carry a concealed handgun.”

Picture the same rally in Battery Park in New York City or in a park in Beverly Hills. Doesn’t fit, right? Detroit and Chicago? And that’s the point. Almost every developed nation on earth thinks our gun laws are completely out of step with the 21^st century, that we have mass murders, serial killers and death row filled with perpetrators of homicide-by-gun of every motivation simply because we are gun crazy. Some stood their ground badly.

We all know that Congress can impose additional limits and restrictions on these machines designed solely to kill people… but we won’t. It’s time to recognize that our gun culture is no longer tenable as currently constituted, but I think a few thousand more innocents will have to die before anyone cares. If Sandy Hook can be ignored rather completely, punctuated by Aurora, it’s gonna be a very, very long time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I understand there is a legitimate place for guns in society, where is the amendment protecting me and my family from a saturation of guns that can easily be used on us?

Sea Here Young Man

In a wave that is seeking to curb entitlements, focusing heavily on cutting benefits under Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and perhaps still so-called Obamacare, it is interesting to note where federal expenses are not being trimmed. Even as pensions are collapsing, wages dropping, the middle class contracting and 90% of the earnings increases only reaching the top 10% of the economic ladder, entitlements will suffer as the military continues to play in a yard or a pool where the cost of technology is soaring. It is impossible to design modern, large-scale weapon systems without spending a multiple of the dollars of the systems they are destined to replace. The Sequester seems to little more than a blip, a pause in the rolling military spending machine we have become.

Proponents argue that we have no choice, that to be and remain the best military on earth, we have to spend the money. Strangely, these are the same segments of our political systems are screaming for a balanced budget. They ignore the fact that having this capability made getting into two wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan that sent the budget deficit through the stratosphere and have dramatically failed to produce the stated results of regional stability – too easy.

A just revealed insider statement tells us Dick Cheney, seeking to scare Congress into repealing all those restrictions imposed on the President’s war-making powers after the Vietnam War, needed a threat, real or manufactured or real to “kick some ass.” He seems all-to-easily to have convinced the President. “New York Times reporter Peter Baker is out with a new book that reportedly reveals some eyebrow-raising details about the Iraq War.

“A senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration is quoted in ‘Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House’ saying American troops went into Iraq because the U.S. was looking for a fight… ‘The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy,’ the anonymous official said, according to Politico.” Huffington Post, October 20^th. As the wars dragged on, a budget surplus became the biggest federal deficit in history, exacerbated by a recession that hobbled the country’s ability to restore fiscal balance.

The coming battles to reduce spending seem unfortunately unlikely to do much to a military budget that accounts for over 40% of the aggregation of all military budgets on earth, more than the next ten nations’ budgets in the sector combined. One example of what our military is building can be seen in its next generation of naval destroyers, a class of ships named for a destroyer commander (admirable Admiral Elmo Zumwalt) who, under the Nixon Administration, became this country’s youngest Naval Chief of Staff. The Zumwalt class, which is expected to generate an order for 20 vessels, is nevertheless an impressive piece of hardware. It saves money by requiring a smaller crew, and, equally impressively, it was delivered on time and on budget. The smiles at the cost savings have to stop there. At $3.5 billion a pop, these destroyers cost three times the cost of the ships they are replacing.

“[The ship] features an unusual wave-piercing hull, electric-drive propulsion, advanced sonar and guided missiles and a gun that fires rocket-propelled warheads as far as 100 miles. Unlike warships with towering radar-and-antenna-laden superstructures, the Zumwalt will ride low to the water to minimize its radar signature, making it stealthier than other warships.

“The ship was envisioned for shore bombardment, but its size and a power plant that can produce 78 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 78,000 homes — make it a potential platform for futuristic weapons such as the electromagnetic rail gun, which uses a magnetic field and electric current to fire a projectile at seven times the speed of sound… With so many computers and so much automation, it will need fewer sailors, operating with a crew of 158 — nearly half the complement aboard the current generation of destroyers.

“‘The concept of the Zumwalt is sort of a bridge between the traditions of the past and the new world of networked warfare and precision-guided munitions,’ said Lor­en Thompson, defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. ‘It’s not so much a radical concept as it is an attempt to pull off a full range of missions with a ship that has one foot in the present and one foot in the future.” The Washington Post, October 20^th. It’s that “future” part that is both compelling and disturbing.

As we have seen repeatedly, because we have the cutting edge of warfare, we have been less than restrained in deploying it. We have generally not been particularly good at building global intervention coalitions with broad support (we can usually find a couple of participants, however) and have had a bad habit of going it virtually alone. Iraq was really not a full NATO effort; the U.S. and the U.K. dominated this effort, for example. Even when conflicts arise without our fomenting them, where our British or French allies have made decisions of intervention in recent Arab Spring conflicts, our superior technology generally gets strong requests to join or assist, even if it is only in long-distance attacks.

Entitlements and unfunded government pension obligations do have to be balanced and placed on a stable and financeable plain, but we really have to look at how our government serves our people. While we need to be safe from attack, we seem to lure hostile extremists by our often-failed military expeditions, have been forced to create a mega-expensive Homeland Security defense as a result, and our deficits from such militarily-induced efforts have done as much economic harm as 100 al Qaedas. These angry zealots could never have inflicted as much damage on the United States, caused the same number of military casualties and driven us to battles and gridlock within our staggeringly dysfunctional political system, that we have inflicted on ourselves with the profound costs of our military and the wars they were directed to fight. Our massive military power seems to have made us less safe, and the battles from the resulting budget deficit have us at our own throats.

There is a deep philosophical chasm that we face. No one likes to talk about it, but from Sparta to the Ming Dynasty, whole civilizations have fallen because of excessive military spending. As we face trillions and trillions of dollars of debt, we are looking down history’s calling card of destruction if we don’t stop and figure out exactly what we are doing to our ability to survive into the future. We’ve denigrated our commitments to education, infrastructure and research (other than military research) to support and unsustainable “military industrial complex” (not following the early warnings of Republican war-hero and U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower).

We are willing to sacrifice training for high-tech-jobs, the elderly, the sick and the poor to feed this monster, a monster that all-to-often has turned on us. Want to face budget truths and economic realities? Then it’s time to face our overall military strategy rather from a ground-up analysis. Attack or defend? Alone or with allies? Want to see the hard cost numbers of our propensity to shoot first and ask questions later? Go to http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ and prepare to be blown away! Congress will undoubtedly compromise with the wrong direction, but history is less forgiving.

I’m Peter Dekom, and why is the obvious so completely difficult to understand?

Grid and Bear It

So we read about how vulnerable our power grid system is to potential attacks, either by outsiders taking control or hackers infesting the control systems with customized viruses and computer worms. The Department of Homeland Security is concerned, but for the most part, the software protection systems seem to have vulnerabilities that would allow a knowledgeable attacker with malice in mind to shutter major electrical delivery systems across the land. Just picture a great big blackout hitting your neck of the woods. Lights go off, elevators stop, electrically-driven trains/subways roll to a halt, traffic signals blank out, file servers and computer systems that don’t have back-up power sources shut off, data is lost, financial transactions go down in flames, emergency generators in hospitals and sensitive government venues kick on… but for how long… and the United States of America simply stops.

The problem is that how to shut down the grid is widely known by software engineers that work in the system, even those who are not security experts. We took down Iran’s centrifuge system, crippling their nuclear development activities for months, with our little Stuxnet malware worm. Well, vulnerability fans, here’s a little tale in the October 17^thBits section of the New York Times that should rock your world… dealing directly with how Americans get electricity… in a bad way:

“Adam Crain and Chris Sistrunk do not specialize in security. The engineers say they hardly qualify as security researchers. But seven months ago, Mr. Crain wrote software to look for defects in an open-source software program [that is used in running our power grid]. The program targeted a very specific communications protocol called DNP3, which is predominantly used by electric and water companies, and plays a crucial role in so-called S.C.A.D.A. (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems. Utility companies use S.C.A.D.A. systems to monitor far-flung power stations from a control center, in part because it allows them to remotely diagnose problems rather than wait for a technician to physically drive out to a station and fix it.

“Mr. Crain ran his security test on his open-source DNP3 program and didn’t find anything wrong. Frustrated, he tested a third-party vendor’s program to make sure his software was working. The first program he targeted belonged to Triangle MicroWorks, a Raleigh, North Carolina based company that sells source code to large vendors of S.C.A.D.A. systems. It broke instantly.

“Mr. Crain called Mr. Sistrunk, an electrical engineer, to see if he could help Mr. Crain test his program on other systems… ‘When Adam told me he broke Triangle, I worried everything else was broken,’ said Mr. Sistrunk… Over the course of one week last April, the two tested Mr. Crain’s software across 16 vendors’ systems. They did not find a single system they couldn’t break.” Uh oh! With too many unmanned, remote facilities on the grid, the ability to crack into the system though these isolated structures makes a bad situation a whole lot worse.

“In the case of one vendor, Mr. Crain found that he could actually infiltrate a power station’s control center from afar. An attacker could use that capability to insert malware to take over the system, and like Stuxnet, the computer worm that took out 20 percent of Iran’s centrifuges, inflict actual physical harm… ‘This is low-hanging fruit,’ said Mr. Crain. ‘It doesn’t require some kind of hacker mastermind to understand the protocol and do this.’

“What makes the vulnerabilities particularly troubling, experts say, is that traditional firewalls are ill-equipped to stop them. ‘When the master crashes it can no longer monitor or control any and all of the substations,’ said Dale Peterson, a former N.S.A. employee who founded Digital Bond, a security firm that focuses on infrastructure. ‘There is no way to stop this with a firewall and other perimeter security device today. You have to let DNP3 responses through.’

“Even more troubling, Mr. Peterson said, is that most DNP3 communications aren’t regulated. The original version of DNP3 worked on serial communications — a way of transmitting data usually found in things like coaxial cables — and is still widely deployed in large systems, particularly substations around the country. But current cybersecurity regulations, governed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (N.E.R.C.) Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee (C.I.P.C.) are focused on Internet Protocols, or I.P. protocols, and specifically exclude serial communications and the equipment that uses them from meeting any security requirements.” NY Times. We are a long, long, long way from solving this issue. If you can read about how to do this in the New York Times…

But we have to cut our federal budget, and we know that education – needed to train Americans for better-paying jobs, infrastructure – needed to keep America running (like our power grid) efficiently, and research – needed to create new-growth economic centers, are and have been on the chopping block as ultra-conservative budget slicers want everything to be reduced except military expenditures. I only wish they believed enough in America to invest in it… but they don’t. If you think this is a country worthy of such investment, let your representatives in Congress know how you feel… NOW! And if you don’t live in the United States, take a good look at how your country is dealing with these same issues.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I really hope we wake up and invest to restore both greatness and the opportunities that have defined this nation since it was founded.

Suicide Caucus or the New GOP?

The post-showdown/shutdown Republican Party has a problem. Its “whatever it takes” Tea Party faction, led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has vowed to try again as the current extensions in the budget extension and debt ceiling bills expire early next year. Obamacare has to go, no matter the consequences. While senior traditionalists in the GOP, most of whom are in the U.S. Senate which is not susceptible to gerrymandering, vow to reign in this strident faction that doesn’t seem to care what damage they might inflict on the economy to get their way, the rest of the world is skeptical.

The largest holder of U.S. debt – China with $1.3 trillion in U.S. debt instruments – is both angry and trying to figure out how to deal with what was once thought to be the ultimate safe investment – U.S. treasuries. They clearly aren’t anymore. The official spokes-arm of the People’s Republic, the Xinhua news agency, summarized the Chinese perspective immediately after our Congress relented and extended the vital bills: “[P]oliticians in Washington have done nothing substantial but postponing once again the final bankruptcy of global confidence in the U.S. financial system.” At almost the same time, the Chinese debt-rating agency, Dagong, dropped the A rating on U.S. treasuries to A-. They are less subtle in their statements, but the sentiments are held almost universally among the highest levels of the global financial community.

In additional to a significant loss of political influence, the United States faces new movements to wean the world off the dollar as the reserve currency and to require a higher interest rate on U.S. government securities to make up for the new risk to the underlying value. This could significantly increase our deficit – the opposite of what the Tea Party seems to want – devalue the dollar and increase borrowing and overall economic costs for most Americans. These consequences remain even with the above short-term extensions. And the more the Tea Party faction talks about shutting the government down again if they don’t get their way, the more the world will demand off-setting economic penalties against American economic interests.

There is nothing that is going to move the Tea Party in the House to accept reason, according to GOP insiders. Their mission to eliminate entitlements, kill the Affordable Care Act, contract America’s participation in global influence, contract spending on natural disasters, education, research and infrastructure and force social mandates in teaching creationism, banning gay marriage has risen to the level of a religious mandate where the ends totally justify the means. With state legislatures having defined the majority of Tea Party districts by jiggering the shape of the voting groups so that conservatives never have Democratic competition (gerrymandering), it will take another U.S. Census, not scheduled until 2020, to require reconfiguring these voting enclaves to reflect demographic shifts, the only way to get elected in such a Tea Party district is to tow that uncompromising line, perhaps even moving further to the right. Republican popularity has never been lower.

The question remains as to whether there are enough “other” Republicans to counter this seeming lemming march to the sea! The Tea Party faction calls the “breakaway” Republicans who supported the extension “the surrender caucus.” In turn, those moderates in the GOP call the Tea Partiers, “the suicide caucus,” threatening the GOP in both mid-terms and the 2016 presidential race. Mother Jones has gathered quotes from prominent Republicans who decry this seemly self-destructive move:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): "We're not going to go through the shutdown again. People have been too traumatized by it. There's too much damage…We're not going to shut down the government again. I guarantee it."

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.): "This party is going nuts."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.): "For the party, this is a moment of self-evaluation, we are going to assess how we got here…If we continue down this path, we are really going to hurt the Republican Party long-term."

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.): "On our side of the aisle, we've wasted two months focused on something that was never going to happen. I won't say that I did, but a number of folks did. What we could have been doing all this time is focused on those mandatory changes that all of us know our country needs, and we’ve blown that opportunity. I hate to say it.”

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.): Called Republicans advocating for the shutdown "lemmings with suicide vests…They have to be more than just a lemming. Because jumping to your death is not enough."

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Penn.): On his long-held belief that the government shutdown wouldn't work: "I was correct in my analysis, and I'd say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs."

Karl Rove: "Barack Obama set the trap. Some congressional Republicans walked into it. As a result, the president is stronger, the GOP is weaker, and Obamacare is marginally more popular. The battles over spending, taxes, and debt have not been resolved, only postponed. It's time Republicans remembered that bad tactics produce bad outcomes."

Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.): "All you need to do is look about 200 miles south of here to see the mess that Republicans and Democrats have made of our national government and we should haul all their rear-ends to Camden today to see how bipartisanship works and government works together."

The October 17^th Washington Post adds a few key observations from those recently in power on how the GOP should handle the renegade faction:

“‘You roll them,’ advised former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). ‘I do think we need stronger leadership, and there’s got to be some pushback on these guys who think they came here with all the solutions.’ … Only then, he said, can the party begin to push an agenda and ‘get things done,’ rather than obstruct… Added another Mississippian, former governor Haley Barbour: ‘They need to get back on substance.’ Barbour noted that the upcoming conference committee on the fiscal 2014 budget presents an opportunity to do that.”

But the harsh reality is that in the Congressional districts where the Tea Party has sway, in ultra-conservative states like Texas where Ted Cruz looks at reelection to the Senate as a sure thing, there is not going to be any wiggle room. The moderates in the GOP, with strong backing from business leaders who shudder at the results of economic mayhem tactics, are going to have to find a path to compromise that short-circuits the Tea Party… if they think they can buck this movement and still get elected. Or there might just be a need for a third political party that simple treats the Tea Party for what they are, a vociferous and committed minority pretty much out of step with the vast majority of Americans, right, left and center. Oh, and when that 2020 Census does roll around, does Texas move from red to purple? Maybe the kicking (and very stubborn) mule, viewed as the symbol of the Democratic Party, needs to move to a new political affiliation!

I’m Peter Dekom, and change mixed with uncertainty has ravaged political systems throughout history.

Corpus Callosum

So are you left or right brain-dominant? “According to the theory of left-brain or right-brain dominance, each side of the brain controls different types of thinking. Additionally, people are said to prefer one type of thinking over the other. For example, a person who is ‘left-brained’ is often said to be more logical, analytical, and objective, while a person who is ‘right-brained’ is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful, [artistic] and subjective…

“The right brain-left brain theory originated in the work of Roger W. Sperry, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981. While studying the effects of epilepsy, Sperry discovered that cutting the corpus collosum (the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) could reduce or eliminate seizures.

“However, these patients also experienced other symptoms after the communication pathway between the two sides of the brain was cut. For example, many split-brain patients found themselves unable to name objects that were processed by the right side of the brain, but were able to name objects that were processed by the left-side of the brain. Based on this information, Sperry suggested that language was controlled by the left-side of the brain.

“Later research has shown that the brain is not nearly as dichotomous as once thought. For example, recent research has shown that abilities in subjects such as math are actually strongest when both halves of the brain work together. Today, neuroscientists know that the two sides of the brain work together to perform a wide variety of tasks and that the two hemispheres communicate through the corpus collosum.” psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/left-brain-right-brain.htm

The University of Utah has worked to illustrate more particularly why the brain isn’t so simply divided in such clearly definable task orientation. “The research team conducted a two-year study of 1,011 people who were part of the International Neuroimaging Data-Sharing Initiative (INDI), and who were between the ages of 7 and 29… The scientists conducted the brain measurements using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis, which involved the participants lying in the scanner for 5 to 10 minutes while their ‘resting’ brain measurements were taken. This allowed the researchers to correlate brain activity in one area of the brain and compare it with another…The results of the scan showed patterns indicating that a brain connection may be strongly left or right-lateralized. But they found no relationship that individuals ‘preferentially’ used their left-brain network or right-brain more often.” MedicalNewsToday.com, August 19^th.

But brain fans, that little link between our two brain halves might tell us a bit more than we may have previously thought. Albert Einstein’s brain, for example, is simply fascinating. After all, “[i]n 1905, at the astoundingly young ate of 26, Albert Einstein came up with the quantum theory of light, proved the existence of atoms, and created the theory of special relativity. If you're wondering how so much genius could possibly be jam-packed into one head, a new study just published in the journal Brain, provides a clue.

“It turns out that Einstein had a killer corpus callosum--a large bundle of fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres to each other. ‘The corpus callosum keeps each side of the brain informed about what the other half is doing,’ says Dean Falk, a professor of anthropology at Florida State University, who contributed to the study. According to Falk, the corpus callosum is both physically and cognitively important. The inter-brain connection allows our hands to coordinate and our bodies to move with intention. But it also allows thoughts and ideas that are generated in the right brain to be processed and expressed with language, which originates in the left. ‘We all have that connection between the left and right,’ says Falk, ‘but for Einstein, the connection was extraordinary.’” FastCompany.com, October 17^th. All this determined from a bunch of photographs taken in 1955 and reanalyzed in 2010.

For folks with MS, it is this brain link that is likely to be a brain element that is being attacked. But if your corpus callosum is fat, you just might be really, really brilliant. Line up, smart folks, and let us scan your brain! Got all those brain functions coordinatin’ and rollin’ along! But I am terrified at what that corpus callosum might look like in too many elected officials. It might be a new branch of “string theory”!

I’m Peter Dekom, and space just might not be the final frontier… it just might be our very necessary desire to explore and understand the most mysterious part of the human body.

ID vs. IQ

I remember the reading the results of a poll commissioned by CNBC in September and shuddering that “these people are called voters.” Even jurors. Hart Research/ Public Opinion Strategies interviewed 812 people in a sample which they claim has an accuracy of plus/minus 3.4%. They asked their interviewees questions about “two” different subjects: Obamacare vs. the Affordable Care Act. Obviously, these are precisely the same thing, but the results suggest that Americans don’t drill down to much more than labels in their decision-making, with too many outsourcing their opinions to third party political or media powers.

CNN (September 27^th) summarized the results: “46% of the group that was asked about ‘Obamacare’ was opposed to the law, while 37% of the group asked about the ‘Affordable Care Act’ was opposed to the law…  At the same time, more people support ‘Obamacare’ (29%) than those who support ACA (22%). In other words, having ‘Obama’ in the name ‘raises the positives and the negatives,’ as CNBC put it… It's also important to note that 30% didn't know what the ACA was, compared to 12% who weren't familiar with Obamacare, according to the poll.” The issue is tearing America apart, gridlocking Congress, threatening to put the United States in default which, if the worst is to be believed, could send the dollar into a tailspin and restart the recession if not a depression. And too many Americans don’t even know what the fight is about!

As many conservative states, gerrymandered to the hilt, often focus on reinstating voter ID laws, as they cut education budgets as part of what they refer to as a “slimdown” (not a “shutdown”), Americans are, according to CNN editorial contributor (and lecturer at Northwestern University), L.Z. Granderson, getting just plain too “dumb.” In an October 14^th CNN.com editorial, he looked at a recent international study that included American educational levels among adults: “’[T]he Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its findings from the Survey of Adult Skills. The group's research measured the literacy, math and computer skills of 5,000 adults from 16 to 65 and compared those numbers with that of 21 other countries…The good news is that we didn't finish last in anything.

“The bad news is that we're in pretty sad shape when not finishing last is the good news… Trailing every country in the survey except Italy and Spain in math is rough. But how the OECD's findings may play a role in elections and the economy is disturbing.

“According to the report, ‘individuals who score at lower levels of proficiency in literacy are more likely than those with higher proficiency to ... believe that they have little impact on the political process.’ Also ‘in most countries, individuals with lower proficiency are also more likely to have lower levels of trust in others.’…U.S. adults ranked 16th in literacy proficiency.

“The OECD findings seem to be consistent with that of the U.S. Department of Education, which estimated back in 2009 that some 32 million adults lacked the proficiency to read a newspaper. This was captured by a witty USA Today headline about the findings: ‘Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. are unable to read this story.’”

But education is no longer considered a major American value. As developing nations throw all they’ve got to educate their populations, to prepare their workforce for a truly competitive global environment, Americans don’t even look at the fact that their crumbling educational system will make them the second (third?) class brains of the future employment marketplace… unable to earn enough to repay federal debt or pay for a world-competitive government in the very, very near future. To most Americans, that nasty educational system isn’t even a major issue we need to deal with. Granderson continues: “When Gallup asked Americans what was the country's top problem, after dysfunctional government, the top-listed items were the economy (19%), unemployment (12%), the deficit (12%) and health care (12%). Sadly education didn't crack the top five, despite being the one area that really links them all.

“‘Proficiency in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology rich environments is positively and independently associated with the probability of participating in the labour market and being employed, and with higher wages,’ the new OECD report stated… Educators will tell you the best catalyst for prolonged academic success is early childhood education… Among the 38 OECD and G20 countries that participated in a report released last year, we were 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds who are receiving early childhood education.”

The New York Post responded to the OECD report with this headline: U.S. adults are dumber than the average human. It’s funny… until you think about it. A recent Gallup Poll tells us that 60% of voting Americans think it is time for a third, moderate but fiscally responsible political party to enter the scene. Why do I get the feeling it won’t be called the “Education Party.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and somehow I don’t really thing we should be happy getting the government we deserve.