I have been watching a bunch of PBS documentaries about the financial crises,

and I have been shocked about how the financial regulators were doing their jobs. I guess I haven't been paying that close attention, but apparently people like Alan Greenspan thought that regulation was unnecessary because the market would punish companies that committed fraud, and that the market would self stabilize. There seem to be two major concepts that struck me as insane:

1. People always made the best rational decision economically and almost always made the "right" decision. This assumes that the person has all the information about options and can calculate the "optimal" outcome.

2. Emotions did not factor in to economic decisions and people made totally detached, rational decisions.

Both of these concepts were completely, utterly, tragically wrong. And there is tape of Alan Greenspan in front of congress saying he was wrong.

Now, in the 2012 election, we have the GOP campaigning on the EXACT SAME IDEAS which were completely, unequivocally determined to be wrong.

What the heck is going on, and why aren't more people freaking out about this?

Here are some of the videos if people are interested. They are worth a watch if you haven't seen them already.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/breakingthebank/view/

I guess this one is a full movie; it is on Netflix

I think the latest spate of GOP insanity reinforces how important sex ed is in public schools

It has become clear with the latest comments by prominent GOP and the personhood amendments show that the GOP leadership has absolutely no idea how the human reproductive system works. If they had sat through a science-based sex ed program (and payed attention), they would realize instantly how insane they sound. The problem is the conservatives treat sex as so taboo that it can't be talked about it in real terms, and their positions just go completely off the rails. There isn't any point in hiding the reality of sex from kids; if they know what it really is they can make informed choices.

We, as a society, have a crisis of "metrics"

In optimization and other fields, a "metric" is a measure of how good or how bad something is. Right now we use metrics like GDP, quarterly profits, stock market indexes, etc to measure how well our country is doing. We award bonuses to executives based on quarterly or yearly earnings. The problem is that these metrics are completely out of touch with reality. CEOs and politicians game the equations used to generate these metrics for their own purposes. China, with its ghost cities, is an extreme example of this metric gaming gone wild. We need to use metrics that include things like quality of life, quality of education, quality of the environment, quality of our educators, scientists, medical personnel, etc. Until we can change our metrics of success, there is no chance of getting out of our current funk because the easiest way to improve the metrics is not necessarily the best for the country or the companies that run our economy.

Include the fact the the GOP is doing anything they can to push the metrics down and the situation becomes even more dire.

The Paul Ryan budget does NOT leave current seniors unscathed

I have not studied the Ryan budget in detail, however they were trying to spin it that current seniors would not be affected by the cuts because the Medicare changes would affect younger people. The cuts to medicaid are different and would start immediately. What nobody seems to talk about is that most of the medicaid money (or at least large portion of it) goes to paying for nursing home care for seniors. This is not covered under Medicaid. This means that if Ryan and the GOP are elected with big enough majorities, nursing home care would disappear overnight. The GOP actually won in 2010 by claiming that Obama was going to cut senior health care funding. I see an Obama campaign commercial coming...

There may be cuts to current SS beneficiaries too but I am not sure.

Google's Self-Driving Cars: 300,000 Miles Logged, Not a Single Accident Under Computer Control

While the right wing focuses on debt, culture wars, and hatred of working together,

we need to focus on the way forward. The landing of Curiosity makes me proud to be an American and a nerd, and proves that we are capable of stunning things when we work together. It takes the power of a nation to split the atom, land men on the moon, and now land a car sized rover on the surface of Mars. The government in this case provides the ability to do research and exploration that will never yield a profit, yet is critical to our civilization and humanity as a whole. We can do great things when we work together, and our government is how we accomplish this task. We need to fight against forces that would take away the best of all of us because of spite and petty greed.