That is the foundation of two controversial Supreme Court decisions that have been made since the turn of the century--and one of those decisions was made today.
You've probably heard a lot about it. You're probably sick of hearing about it. But this is an important matter--something that effects my ideals and beliefs about the world, and it should be important to all of you, as well.
This cartoon was done back in 2010 with regard to the other Supreme Court decision known as the Citizen's United case. In that case, as in the one that was decided today, part of the central premise for the decision was that money is equal to speech.
To most people that last analogy is ridiculous--as ridiculous as the idea of corporations being people. And yet, those are the ideas that have shaped a legal landscape that is, in the eyes of many people, undermining our political system.
So let me say this: our campaign financing laws are a joke. There are as many loopholes in the laws as there are in the tax code, and if there is a way to avoid having to do something that garners someone more ability to do something else, I'm pretty sure that there are people out there doing it. In short, the people making the laws are able to create laws that allow them to do, more or less, whatever they want to do. Campaign finance reform is just a big, showy flag that they're waving in front of our eyes to keep us from looking behind it at what's really going on, because as far as I can tell, there is nothing reformed about the corruption that has infiltrated our government in the form of money.
I am not saying that all money is bad. What I am saying is that the perceived need for it and the desire to hide where it comes from in order to win elections has created a monster--a proverbial dragon as terrible as those cast in fantasy roles as the villains and destroyers of life.
There are so many correlations regarding today's Supreme Court decisions and why they voted as they did that I could make some probably-accurate suppositions, but rather than speculate, I'm going to leave you to do that on your own.
We have a very broken system, and some of the people we've elected aren't working to fix it; in fact, they are exploiting it for their own gain--legally.
By agreeing with the idea that money is speech, we are saying that those who have money speak the loudest--and that we believe they have our best interests, as a country, at heart, and not their own. We are saying that actual speech can be equated to money; and yet, I don't see anyone allowing me to buy my groceries with speeches, or pay for my health care with them.
These decisions are ridiculous, and those of us who continue to elect people who support such decisions are ridiculous, too.
To read more about the decision, check out this article on MSN.
To find out who's funding what campaign, take a look at this website.
To find out more about this election year's campaign limits (and the overall limits that were just overtuned,) check out this page.
To learn more about the Federal Campaign Finance law, check here.
And to read a legal interpretation of that law, and its exceptions, take a look here.
With that said, I found a few more things I want to share with you all today that I hope will be of interest to you.
First is another MSN article regarding space travel and how it affects the shape of the heart. Of importance, scientists had created models that accurately predicted how the heart would change--becoming more spherical while in space. This has some very real and useful applications not only for future space exploration (such as a mission to Mars), but also here on Earth with regard to how various stresses will affect the heart and how bedridden people can work to exercise their heart muscles.
Last is an article that a friend of mine linked on Facebook. It deals with the way that culture affects our perception of the world. In short, the fields of psychology, economics, and pretty much every other human-centric field of study has had a bias--a Western one--that the scientists who recently published their findings labeled "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).
It all started with a game, and from that game came the idea that peoples' brains adapt to see things differently based on the cultures from which they come--which goes against a long-held idea that people are, inherently, all the same--in short, that no matter where we come from, our ideas conform to a norm, such as fairness. The truth is, however, that this is not the case, and the fact that we've been basing our studies on only a small segment of people (mostly Western cultures and, in many cases, Americans) is fundamentally flawed. In fact, it seems that Americans are the weirdest of the weird--outliers among the outliers.
Rather than try to explain poorly what Ethan Watters has done phenomenally, though, I urge you to read the article, and if this is of interest to you, check out the paper that he has linked from it.
As a strange aside, I have always thought that our cultures affect the way we see things; knowing that ideas and customs are different, I assumed they shaped the way we thought about the world and that our brain chemistries, our brain wiring, and our bodies may have slight, but significant, differences based on the cultures from which we come. For example, a hunting culture would value those who can run faster or shoot accurately such that those traits continue to be passed along via off-spring, or teaching. In the same way, a religious culture would value beliefs, conformity, and cooperation and pass along those ideas and traits. The fact that Darwin's idea of evolution was not just of species, but of culture as well, seems obvious; we pass on the ideas that allow us to continue living.
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