Just to prove that the Worcester Telegram & Gazette can sometimes publish comments that run contrary to the party line, I post the following message board comment that they chose to publish in the hardcopy version of the newspaper.

Maybe it is my constant repetition of this theme that has finally persuaded them to give in.

You can guess who the poster SteveG is.

If I can, I am going to repeat the truth as often as the misinformation is repeated.

There was an item Winning 101 – – Brown worked the basics in the Worcester T & G.

I know this is starting to get repetitive, but here is my response to this one:

Well you are right about Scott Brown going back to the basics. That is exactly what Martha Coakley failed to do.

She assumed that people understood the reasons and the rationale for the stimulus spending and the health care plan. She assumed that she had to go negative on Scott Brown. I kept sending her emails to stop the negative and go back to basics, but she didn’t listen.

When the economy is nose-diving, no individual in his or her right mind would boost their spending and their investment on factory capacity when they need to horde their reserves in case of Armageddon.

The only entity that can take a countervailing stance against the decline is the federal government. It must invest its spending on useful projects that assume that this is not the end of the world. This requires deficit spending.

After the economy is righted and the private sector is functioning again, then the Federal government can start to run surpluses and pay off the debt it ran up during the recession.

This simple explanation would show that an immediate cut in federal spending would be a disaster. It would also show that our children will not be paying off this debt for generations.

Without even mentioning Scott Brown, she would have shown why two pillars of his campaign were disastrous mistakes.

Remember, that the Clinton administration was able to run surpluses with policies that the Republicans said could not work. It took the Republicans and George Bush to reverse the Clinton policies and show us what really wouldn’t work.

As a practical matter, there is no reason why the presumptive leader in a race has to run against the underdog.  You just need to keep explaining what you want to do and why it will be good for everybody.

If you start running against the underdog, then the focus shifts to his message, away from your own.  You have just given up on your greatest advantage.  As long as you stick to what is right with your ideas, the underdog has to keep focusing on your message.  This is really what Winning 101 is about.

Of course you have to adjust your explanations to make sure the electorate sees why an attack on your plans is wrong.  However, you don’t even need to mention the other candidate.  Just keep selling your ideas.  Do not assume that everybody knows just because we have spent two years on these topics.  Memories are extremely short.  That is why we go back to the basics.

Well at least that was the point of the letter that JOANNE C. DELALLA wrote to the Worcester T & G

I keep trying to explain as in this reply:

Joanne doesn’t get the economy. The Obama stimulus plan has worked amazingly well for as far as it went. The stock market is up 60% from its low last March, before it started to tumble after Scott Brown’s election.

The health care mandate will ease the burden on corporations of rapidly rising costs of health care insurance that they provide for their employees.

The President has taken action to spur the private sector at the very same time that Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (R. Maine) removed the part of the stimulus that would have prevented rising state and local taxes and state and local layoffs. When you stimulate one part of the economy and shrink another, you are canceling out your attempts to help.

How do we stimulate new capital investment when huge parts of the industrial sector are lying idle from lack of demand? You would have to be a pretty foolish capitalist to invest your capital now when you already have idle capacity and you may need that capital to stave off financial disaster.

A strong dollar will make it more difficult for our industries to export. Since the local consumers have finally realized that they cannot count on rising real-estate values as extra income, they are cutting back on purchases to pay off debts. If they won’t provide the purchasing power to stimulate demand, exports are our next best bet.

If Scott Brown succeeds in immediately cutting government spending, the economy will go into a nosedive the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression when such foolish policies were last practiced.

Those of us who understand that the federal government’s interaction with the economy is on a scale unlike any average consumer, will try to continue to explain that you cannot model government policy solely on what a small consumer should do with their own budget.

If people start to open their eyes and learn, perhaps we can avoid the disaster that their misdirected ideas will bring about.

I ran out of characters before I could get in the last little dig.  If only Martha Coakley could have explained this, perhaps she would be a Senator elect.

Any interest in the emergency rally mentioned in this email that I received?

In the post Alzheimer’s/CellPhones/Turmeric–Call me and let’s do curry RichardH discussed a study that found:

Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows. The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease. The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

I just saw an article that mentioned a study that corroborated this result.

I started to imagine how a cell phone company could cause such publicity.

If you were a cell phone company, you could fund a study in which the mice were deprived of enough heat to be healthy.  In the study the researchers could then subject some of the mice to enough cell phone radiation to provide the heat they were missing.  The result would be mice that were healthier for the application of cell phone radiation.

Now everyone knows that you should not take a single scientific study as proof of anything.  You need some independent entity to replicate the study to see if they get the same results.  So as a cell phone company, you fund a second study that uses the same methods as the first.  Then you issue press releases about the study that corroborates the first one.

I am not saying that I have any information that this is exactly what happened or is anything like what happened.  It is not out of the realm of possibility, though.  The tobacco companies were notorious for funding studies like these.

This is why we need to know who funded the studies and we need to know the exact methodology of the study.  We also need a study by a truly independent group of scientists to corroborate or refute these results.  Of course, how do you know that the people refuting the study haven’t pulled some trick whereas the original study was completely honest?

To protect myself against these kinds of possibilities, I have decided that the amount of attention you need to pay to these studies depends on the seriousness of the consequences of any decision you make that depends on this knowledge.  If you make no decision or the decision is not very important, then who really cares.  If you are making a life changing decision, then you need to be a lot more sure of what you think you know.

This whole idea of a corporation being like a person reminds me of an experience I had in a humanities course in college.

We were reading some of the works of Plato. The descriptions of discussions between Socrates and one of his students used to drive me nuts. They would be discussing some subject and Socrates would say “isn’t a person like a horse”. In the context in which this came up, the student would agree. Then Socrates would say, “Well if you agree that a person is like a horse, then you must also agree to this other proposition.” The other proposition would always be some way in which a person does not in anyway resemble a horse. As Plato described it, the student would essentially respond, “Well, I guess you got me there. Because I agreed to the horse analogy before, I must agree to this ridiculous proposition.”

I wrote a paper mentioning what an idiotic way this was to reason about the world. I was rewarded with a D on that paper. This was the highest grade I ever got on a paper in that class, but I don’t think it was because the professor agreed with me. Maybe the D was because I got my sister, an English major, to help me with the paper. I wish she had told me that you don’t get good grades by criticizing the books that the professor has chosen for you to read.

Maybe the other lesson is that we need more technically trained Supreme Court justices, lawyers, and Congress members who understand a thing or two about logic. (and fewer non-technically trained humanities professors at a technical college like this professor and the art history professor that thought perpendicular and parallel were synonyms.)

I posted the original version of this as a comment on a thread on Tangelia Sinclair-Moore’s facebook page.

Just in case you have trouble making the connection between this post and anything that is happening in the world these days, I offer this explanation. This post is prompted by the brouhaha over the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overrule the restrictions on corporate spending on political advocacy. The arguments pro and con for this ruling seem to revolve around earlier precedent that a corporation is a person for purposes of applying the law.

Well, a corporation is not a person, it is a corporation. If it is like a person in some respect, then you can apply the law to it like a person because of the similarity in the instance under consideration. You don’t then abandon the notion of how it was like a person in that particular case and then go on to treat it like a person in other cases just because you used that analogy once in an unrelated matter. Such leaps of logic result in legal decisions that have little basis in reality and are very hard to defend as sensible.

Maybe the solution is to realize that the people in a corporation should be allowed to get together to spend money for political advocacy, but not as part of a corporation legally chartered by the state for some other purpose. Since a corporation is legally chartered by the state, the state should be able to define the rules about what people in the corporation can do in the name of the corporation. If people don’t like those rules, then they can form a group as something else, other than a corporation. What people in the corporation do when not acting in the name of the corporation comes under a different set of rules.

Of course how you separate a particular piece of advocacy from the original charter of the corporation can be very problematic.

My examples of news media corporations or magazine publishing corporations are immediately troublesome. Particularly for a magazine, its whole reason for being may be political advocacy. Freedom of the press is also protected by the First Amendment.

Non-media companies are allowed to advertise their products and tell you why you should buy them. T. Boone Pickens recently got into the business of wind energy and started airing commercials promoting wind energy. Is this political or corporate related?

Being a Supreme Court Justice is hard work. Where have I heard a statement like that before?