Why Conservatives Suck

Here it is, in their own words, by their own admission.

Give Cain a Chance

It appears that someone from the Rick Perry campaign has leaked that someone in the past may have accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment. If any other political office were at stake, I would be interested. But this is the Presidency of the United States of America. Neither Herman Cain nor Rick Perry have done anything that Bill Clinton didn't do. In fact, Bill Clinton was accused of doing worse. But Bill Clinton was a pretty good president. So, I give both Cain and Perry a Clinton pass on this one. I recommend that you do the same.

The nation stands on a precipice regarding its power to influence world events in its favor, while the media focusses on the banal and the trivial. The media are not serving us well. There are other, better reasons to reject or to consider either of these men for the office they seek.

And there are other, more important stories to follow, like crony capitalism on the part of both Democrats and Republicans, the gerrymandering that undermines the foundations of our Republic, and the proliferation of rules and laws that undermine the Rule of Law itself.

Message to Republicans on the Eve of Your So-Called Victory

Tomorrow is election day, and I plan to vote largely Republican. I expect and hope that the Republicans will make some major gains. But I have a message for them.

Don't take whatever victory you get as a mandate. Almost all the independent voters and a good fraction of the registered Republicans hate your party and what is stands for, which is different from what it says it stands for. In fact, they hate you. It's just that the other party has over-reached (just the way you do when you get too much power) and needs to be stopped.

We who hate you are not opposed to health insurance reform. We actually want reform, and have wanted it for nearly two decades. It's just that the health insurance reform proposed by Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner needed to be stopped. I know, because I actually read the bill, which was only two-hundred odd pages. I opposed it, because it tried to even the playing field between the rich and the poor by outlawing fee-for-service medicine. That is, if Hillarycare had come to pass, you couldn't opt out of the system by privately paying a physician for services Hillarycare didn't cover. Or for services bought outside the system because the system provided poor services, as when I had to take my mother out of her home state to find a doctor who could diagnose that she had suffered a stroke, give us a prognosis, and recommend a rehabilitation regimen.

This time around, I haven't read the Obamacare bill. This monstrosity is between ten and twenty times longer than Hillarycare. It was written by a horde of unelected technocrats, and read by nobody, not even those who voted for it. It may be well-intended, but anything that long is bound to be full of unintended consequences (and special interest "gimmes"). But more importantly, it is a form of tyranny. Consider that in this Information Age, nearly everyone has access to the bill on the Internet. But making it so long and convoluted has the effect of keeping us out of the game. The door to the legislative chamber may be open, but we are getting impenetrable smoke blown in our faces.

So, Republicans, we who hate you want you to reform health insurance. But if you can't say what you mean in a hundred pages or less, you don't know what you want to say, and you are letting special interests do your writing for you, to the detriment, if not the peril, of us all. Just like your opposition.

And don't think you can get away with playing the Abortion card, any more than your opponents. That's becoming as passe as the Race card. You can wave either one. But we're no longer willing to let you waive on every other issue of our time.

Finally (for now) be clear on this. We want clean air and water, and we want to stop using petroleum for fuel. But we don't want to stop the engines of capitalism to achieve those things. We want smaller, more agile, more efficient, more accountable government. Which means stop the gerrymandering and hand back some power to the states. We want targeted action against Islamofascist terrorists, but not large-scale land maneuver warfare, because it costs too much to sustain. We want a minimal social safety net. It should be enough to keep a person alive, but if a person wants more than that, then he or she should work for it. And we want a country in which hard work and planning pay off.

This last point means you should resist that most tempting of all taxes - inflation. Inflation doesn't just tax income. Inflation taxes wealth. Maybe a person saved so that she can have some say in what her circumstances will be when she is old. If you try to inflate that away, or if you let your opposition do it, the rest of us may show up on your doorstep demanding some of your wealth to make up for what you stole from us.

So, if you Republicans win much tomorrow, don't crow about it. Shut up and get to work. Too many more canned platitudes and scripted talking points without any real change may just get your party split in time for 2012.

Mother Russia

My Aunt had a little book entitled Russia Dies Laughing, which contained a joke that attempted to recapitulate Soviet history. It went something like this:

Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev were riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Suddenly, the train broke down and came to a stop.

"Fix the train," ordered Stalin. For a long time, nothing happened. "Shoot the engineers!" yelled Stalin. The engineers were shot, but still nothing happened. Stalin screamed useless orders until he got apoplexy and died.

Khrushchev got up, heaved Stalin's body out the window, and ordered, "Rehabilitate the engineers!" The engineers were rehabilitated. "Fix the train!" yelled Khrushchev. Still nothing happened. Khrushchev yelled orders until Brezhnev got up and heaved him, still yelling and flailing his arms and legs, out the window.

"Close the windows and close the window shades!" demanded Brezhnev. "Now, everyone pretend the train is moving." Everyone pretended for a long time, until Brezhnev died. Gorbachev got up, dragged Brezhnev's body to the window, opened the shade and the window, and heaved him out.

Then Gorbachev stuck his head through the open window, and looked all around, right, left, and up and down. He pulled his head back inside, stood up and declared, "Ladies and Gentlemen, there appears to be nothing holding up this train." And the whole thing collapsed in a big mess.

Now, in that spirit, comes this YouTube video, "Complete History of the Soviet Union Arranged to the melody of Tetris" (which was invented by Russians):



Hmmm. Have you ever noticed how much Vladimir Putin looks like Dobby, the house-elf, of the Harry Potter series?

Anyway, the Soviet Union is no more. But at least for a while everyone, nominally, had "free" health care. Such as it was.

Ideological Intelligence

I caught a bit of Michael Krasny's program Forum on NPR as I was driving to work this morning and was appalled by the segment, The State of National Intelligence:



He interviewed two guests: John Arquilla, director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an alumni unit of intelligence officers seeking integrity in the profession. Together they gave the impression that a significant fraction of the Intelligence Community is like the majority of other folks who live in and around the Washington, D.C. Beltway. They're hard-over liberals.

Now it's great to be politically engaged. But there is a form of engagement on the part of both conservatives and liberals that I think is pathological enough to put in next issue of the psychologists' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Political Attachment Disorder (PAD). These guys appear to have it.

They both agreed that the root cause of "Islamist" terrorism is American foreign policy, specifically, the use of Predator drones to kill terrorist leaders, and US support for Israel. The only other hypothesis they entertained was a straw man they constructed to represent all viewpoints other than their own: the idea that "drinking the water in Pakistan" turns one into a terrorist. Further, killing terrorist leaders was a "self-licking ice-cream cone," because it just made more people mad, which made them turn terrorist, which meant we could pay contractors to kill them with Predator strikes.

To me, this is a hallmark of PAD-L (Political Attachment Disorder - Liberal). The idea that the root causes of terrorism are much more complex, that these roots go back well over a hundred years, and that the terrorists have an agenda of their own independent of American foreign policy which includes annihilation of the American way of life - is an idea that cannot be discussed. It must be denied, papered over with, "It's not the water."

Now it is perhaps reassuring that we can contain and control Islamofacist terrorism merely by standing down our side of the conflict and throwing Israel under the bus. But it is a false idea. Giving the Islamofacists such a big and easy victory will only encourage them to continue and will actually help their recruiting efforts. It is also racist. It is as if they are saying, "Don't worry. The little brown people don't have their own plans. They are just reacting in an understandable way (however unkind and unthinking) to what we do."

Quite frankly, I respect the Islamofacists too much for that. They may delude themselves into idolatry and blasphemy against Allah, but they are not puppets of our policy. Rather they seek to control our policy and ultimately to destroy us.

A more detailed look into who the Islamofacists are, what they think, and why they think it is here.

But more important than the biases of two ex-members of the US Intelligence Community are the effects of the ideological and methodological divides in that community. The ideological divide is alluded to above. When part of the Intelligence Community is liberal and part conservative, and they are so hard over on their positions that they cannot understand or trust one another, they impair the functioning of the community as a whole. In many cases, the political divide may make it impossible to get an unbiased intelligence estimate, let alone a consensus intelligence estimate that says very much.

The methodological divide is almost as bad. Consider that the Civilian side produces intelligence estimates that are hoped to withstand the scrutiny of history. They are therefore meticulously researched, closely held for long periods of time and carefully hedged (which can sometimes make such estimates non-actionable). Military Intelligence, on the other hand is all about action. The battle is going to take place tomorrow, and we are going to use your estimate, or do without it. Therefore, the quality of your intelligence work is inversely proportional to its lateness. Do the best you can with the time and resources you have, but do it now. After tomorrow your work might be discarded or even declassified, because it no longer has value.

This creates a cultural divide in which the Military and Civilian Intelligence communities don't trust each other and are reluctant to share information. In particular, the Civilian side seems to act as if it views the Military Intelligence agencies as careless in their analyses and lax in their security. This in turn, frustrates the Military side of the house. Now, given that different, but complementary sources and methods may be used by the two sides of the house, any division of the house against itself may undermine its effectiveness.

This is where the Director of National Intelligence comes in. The DNI's job is (or should be) to enforce the "need to share" principle that enables information to be used, and to balance that principle against the "need to know" principle that enables information to be protected. It is not (or should not be) just another layer of bureaucracy.

I could be wrong. I'm not a member of the Intelligence Community. But I've been around.

The Second Amendment

We are about to be treated to the Senate hearings to evaluate Elena Kagan for the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. No doubt she will be grilled regarding her thoughts on the Second Amendment. If only it would start with a little honesty. Like this:


Senator: Ms. Kagan, what are your thoughts on gun control laws and the Second Amendment?

Kagan: You mean, what do I plan to do to protect the people of the United States from your dereliction of duty? How will I make up for you and your colleagues abundance of cowardice and paucity of wisdom in regard to proposing an updated version of the Second Amendment to be ratified by the States?


The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution reads

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

When it was adopted in 1789 its meaning was clear. The Americans had no standing army, no Department of Defense, no Military-Industrial Complex. In order to raise an army, the federal government relied on the states, which in turn relied on their citizens to gather at their call, and to bring their own weapons with them. These weapons were state-of-the-art military-grade muskets and rifles, and most male citizens were expected to have them. Indeed it would have left the country defenseless if they did not.

But the framers of the Constitution (as amended) were mindful of another potential source of tyranny - the federal government that they themselves were working to establish. The states could use their militias to defend their rights against the federal government if the need arose. The abuse of this idea to defend the indefensible system of slavery (human beings were enslaved by human-Neanderthal hybrids) led to the Civil War of 1861-65.

Nevertheless, we can still derive a useful concept from the idea of raising militias. We, the People of the United States, in order to enjoy a greater degree of domestic tranquillity, voluntarily give our governments (local, state, and federal) a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence. This monopoly is ours to bestow, and ours to rescind, by inalienable right given to us by our Creator.

Indeed, losing the monopoly on socially legitimate violence is what makes a "failed state." It is therefore our government's responsibility to conduct itself in such a way that we continue to be willing to give it the monopoly on legitimate violence. If it loses our confidence, the founders expected that we would have both the armament and the courage to take back that monopoly, using whatever force was necessary.

Now taking back the government's monopoly would be something to give us pause even if it could be done without violence of our own. It's really nice to live in a society where the government enjoys a monopoly on legitimate violence. You can walk out of your house without having to be prepared to fight to the death every day. If you don't carry a gun, sword, or dagger, it is because you don't need to. Almost nobody else does, either. If you get into an argument, it is very unlikely that either you or the person you argue with will do or even threaten to do physical harm to the other.

In many other times and places, such a thing would be an unheard of luxury. In order to survive, you must be armed. And even then, it's not enough. On your own, you still can't defend yourself or your family. You need a larger unit, whether its the males of your extended family, your tribe, or your gang. The extended family, tribe, or gang has always been the natural unit of human organization, not the nuclear family. It results in a relatively constant, but sustainable level of violence. Think of the Hatfields and McCoys, or if you want a more literary example, the Montagues and the Capulets of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Or think of Afghanistan or the tribal areas of Pakistan. Or even Mexican drug cartels fighting each other. (It takes a lot of dedicated socialization and values training of our young to keep societies from reverting to this kind of organization in one or two generations.)

So, it was the Founder's intent that we keep and bear military-grade weapons. In their day, that meant muskets and Kentucky rifles. The equivalent in our day is the AK-47. It's a great weapon, powerful, reasonably accurate, delivering a high rate of fire. And it's relatively low-tech, cheap and easy to make in large quantities. It's not finicky, it works in almost all conditions. But a guy going berserk in a crowd with a musket might get off only one or two shots before the crowd overcomes him. The same nut with an AK-47 might mow down everybody in sight. Unless, of course, the crowd was full of well-meaning citizens carrying AK-47s. But we don't want to live like that. That's how they live in Afghanistan.

So we ignore and otherwise subvert the Constitution of the United States, thereby undermining the Rule of Law, because we don't let the supreme Law of the Land mean what it says. We do this by passing gun control laws willy-nilly without benefit of amending the Constitution to reflect the technology of our time and our relationship to it.

What we need is an amendment that is intended to reduce the level of violence by our society and our government by providing a balanced incentive for both parties to calm down. Something like

We the People of the United States, in order to increase our domestic tranquillity do voluntarily limit our right to keep and bear arms such that no citizen, resident, or visitor in the United States shall keep and bear arms exceeding the military capability of the arms kept, borne and used by local police walking their beats.

This by construction excludes SWAT teams. Now without SWAT-style weapons it will be impossible to sustain an insurrection or insurgency against the government. But insurrections and insurgencies are always by definition illegal. It is absurd to expect legal protection for an illegal act. If you want to rebel against the government, please have the decency to obtain your illegal weapons by illegal means. I hear there are some good AK-47 factories in Colombia.

This can't be good enough to be the final form, but you get the idea. Incentivize both the police and the crooks to carry less firepower. And let the rest of us have whatever they have. Make it a societal disarmament race. If the government wants a less armed citizenry, the let the government limit the armament is uses to control the citizenry. Fair enough?

Here is our previous attempt to update the Second Amendment.

Points of Rebellion

I appropriate the title of Justice William O. Douglas' book (worth a read, by the way) because I am outraged by the following bit of bureaucratic skullduggery:



Joseph Diliberti, a Vietnam combat veteran, is about to have his home confiscated by San Diego County because he can't pay a $60,000 bill for weed abatement that he did not need, want, or consent to. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody was scheming to get him off his land, and the public good of weed abatement seemed like the way to do it. The original bill was for $25,000, but late fees and fines have inflated it (Mob-style) to $60,000. Diliberti can't pay, because he doesn't have much income. He lives in a kiln-fired clay house he built himself on 30 acres of semi-desert. He needs more than a lawyer. He needs a criminal investigator working to see who and what is behind this illegal taking.

See the Chapparal Institute article on this case.

This is the kind of government abuse that undermines the legitimacy of government itself. Surely some of our politicians will intervene on this man's behalf. Or will they? Here is the kind of ad you will be seeing this fall:

My Brother's Keeper

A cornerstone of Obamacare is the sharing of risk, which means sharing the cost of covering that risk. In order to insure the uninsured and the otherwise uninsurable, we must compel young, healthy people to buy health insurance. So far, so good - as long as you don't think the Federal government's compelling people to buy something infringes on their liberty.

But then, young healthy people can jeopardize their life and health by engaging in risk-taking behavior, which could turn them from being a source of funds into being a very expensive sink. So, if your risky behavior puts my financial well-being in jeopardy, I might want to compel you to wear a helmet whenever you bicycle. I might want to make it illegal for you to smoke - anything. Maybe I want to monitor your drug and alcohol intake. Maybe I need to compel you to take all your medications, exactly as your doctor prescribed. Perhaps I should consider making you take anger management classes to keep you from hurting yourself or other people whose health care I may be required to subsidize. If I am my brother's keeper, I want some say over how well my brother takes care of himself.

You get the idea. There is an unavoidable trade-off between taking care of each other -  sharing risk - and curtailing individual freedom of action. At one extreme we have Libertarianism - which maximizes liberty by letting everyone go to hell in their own handbasket if they can get one, and at the other we have Woody Allen's dictator from Bananas proclaiming that everyone must wear underwear, and "Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check."

So, maybe you don't object to my keeping you from smoking, drinking too much alcohol, or abusing drugs. But maybe I need to prevent you from engaging in promiscuous sexual activity, because that puts the whole society at risk for Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs). Nah. That would never happen. I mean, if Social Conservatives ever come to power again, they would just dismantle Obamacare. They wouldn't just change it to suit their agenda, would they?

But then, the whole idea behind Obamacare is that the changes it makes should be very hard to reverse. This is supposed to be a permanent change to do permanent good. Right?

MTS

MTS stands for Member of Technical Staff. I first heard it at the old Bell Labs, where I was an MTS and an MTS-Supervisor. Since then, the label has propagated to tens of companies where scientists and engineers (aka S&Es) develop hardware and software for new products and services. It is now industrial "best practice," to call industrial scientists and engineers MTSs instead of by their actual specialties, such as plasma physicist, solid state physicist, electrical engineer, nuclear engineer, inorganic chemist, mathematician, spectroscopist, etc. The bland designation "MTS" gives the illusion that it is easy to compare the contributions of these uniquely trained and experienced individuals across disciplines. That way one can have a uniform compensation policy across disciplines, which simplifies salary administration and avoids litigation.

The risk of such an industry best practice is that management can actually come to believe that it represents some kind of ground truth. At the old Bell Labs, my management actually told me that any MTS should be able to do any other MTS's job. As a corollary, they also told me that a good manager ought to be able to manage anything, no matter what it is.

It should be obvious that neither of these statements are true. And if they weren't true at the old Bell Labs (which is now defunct) it is even less true at the US National Laboratories, particularly those involved in maintaining the US Nuclear Weapons Stockpile. And yet, the US National Labs are adopting the MTS designation, and abandoning job classification by discipline. Why? Because the Labs have been privatized. They are no longer run by the University of California as a service to the nation and under contract to the US Department of Energy. They are run by Limited Liability Corporations, of which the University of California and Bechtel Corporation are senior partners.

You can't blame the Obama Administration for this. The delusion that everything will run better if it's run like a business is a Republican delusion, and this one was foisted on the National Labs under the Bush Administration. The first problem with this is that nobody, especially nobody in Congress, thought through the implications of privatizing the National Labs. As a result, the Labs lost many millions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax exemptions, and incurred millions of dollars in additional management fees - all of which resulted in thousands of layoffs, because the Lab's budgets were held flat. The second, longer term problem is that Research and Development (R&D) is not a business. It is a cost of doing business, and most businesses minimize that cost by not doing R&D. Or at least by doing only D (development) and not R (Research). This is because the only one thing in the Universe more inefficient than Research is ignorance.

Now the bean-counters, the efficiency experts, are forcing the National Labs to conform to industry best practices by adopting the MTS designation for all members of its scientific and engineering workforce. At first, this will be harmless. But, by making the members of the National Lab workforce look superficially like everybody else's workforce, it may enable the delusion that they can be managed by "more professional" executives from outside corporations who don't really understand what all those MTSs do. Who believe they don't have to understand, because "a good manager can manage anything." And then, with that lack of understanding, they may begin to mixmaster the workforce whenever they need to move people around to save jobs, because "any MTS should be able to do any MTS's job." It took about 20 years for that mentality to destroy Bell Labs. The risk is that the same mentality may be allowed to creep into the National Labs, which are part of what maintains our National Security in terms of both defense and energy.

Now the National Labs may fare better than Bell Labs, because Bell Labs was funded by a competitive business (once the old AT&T was broken up in order to settle a lawsuit by MCI). And as I said, industry survives competition by doing as little research as possible. The National Labs are funded by the US taxpayers, as represented by their President and their Congress. That should give us all confidence, right?

Oh, well. I might as well close with some levity. Imagine these words sung to the tune of the "M.T.A Song," (better known as "Charlie on the MTA," written in 1948 by Jaqueline Steiner and Bess Hawes, and made famous by the Kingston Trio's recording of it in 1959:

The MTS Song

Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie

Who was put to a fateful test.

He used to be a chemist,
A very good chemist
'Till they made him an MTS.

Charlie lost his uniqueness

When bean-counters from Bechtel
Forced him to make a change

When he balked his boss told him,

"They need you in Lasers.

Your transfer has been arranged."

Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may lurk forever
'neath the beams of Lasers
He's the man who never returned.

Now all day long

Charlie sits in his office

Crying, "What will become of me?

I wanna be a chemist
But now they tell me

To do Plasma Spectroscopy!"

Chorus

Charlie's colleagues go down

To the diagnostics station

Every day at quarter past two
And in between shots
They hand Charlie a sandwich

As the data come pourin' through.

Chorus

Now employees of LLNS,

Don't you think it's a scandal

That our titles are meaningless

Get our uniqueness back!
Go talk to George Miller!

Charlie's a chemist, not an MTS.

Chorus:
Or else he'll never return,

No he'll never return
And his fate will be unlearned

He may lurk forever 
'neath the beams of Lasers.

He's the man who never returned.

He's the man who never returned.

He's the man who never returned.

See also: Leviathan, Inc.

Are UFOs for Real?

We meet the most interesting people while out walking the dog. An internationally known concert pianist. A marriage and family therapist. A lifestyle and weight management consultant. And today, a cabinet maker who put me onto this video of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper recounting his UFO sightings, while in the air, on the ground, and in space (the voiceover narrator is Jonathan Frakes):



Gordo is no spring chicken. Are we seeing the effect of a few TIAs (transient ischemic attacks, aka mini-strokes) which may have altered his memories, or did he decide to embellish his experiences a bit for what seems to be a paid interview, or is he for real?

First of all, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton studied UFO experiencers, and found them to be psychologically normal, and truthful. They are not nuts, and they are not lying. But just because you are sane and telling what you believe to be the truth doesn't mean you can't be mistaken. Second, there are people who have made reasonable arguments that even if Extra-terrestrial Intelligent beings exist, they would probably have so little in common with us that neither we nor they would notice each other, and even if we did, we would have nothing in common we could talk about. As in this article, for example.

But if UFOs really do exist, and if they actually buzz us from time to time, how in the Universe did they find us, and why would they bother? Then again, we have explored every place on earth we could get to, just because we could. And some of us now go to the ends of the earth as tourists just to see the wildlife.

All that, however, leaves the question of why so much secrecy? How could all the governments of the earth manage to collude successfully to keep official records of such encounters from the global public? And why would they continue to bother? The most parsimonious explanation is that there is nothing to hide.

Still, I wonder. If I look up at the sky and smile, will I wind up on Google Earth, or some more distant image archive?

Contempt for Congress, Among Others

The US House of Representatives has passed a healthcare reform bill. If it makes it through the Senate unaltered, it will, according to Betsy McCaughey writing in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, require employers and insurers to offer only "qualified" plans which can differ only in premiums and co-pays, not on what is or is not covered. The message is that the Democrats think you're too stupid to choose between competing plans if the choice is any more complicated than just dollars and cents. Their solution is to make health insurance a commodity. According to the Congressional Budget Office, your premiums will go up, not down, and the bill doesn't specify what a qualified plan is or is not. Otherwise translated as "we'll stick it to you later."

There is more, much more, to this 2,000 page piece of trash, but this much is clear. The Democrats are enemies of your economic liberty because they think you're too stupid to handle it. They just want to make life simpler for you. This doesn't mean that the Republicans are friends of liberty. No way. They want to take away your sexual liberty, because they think you're too irresponsible to handle it. And they've taken away a good bit of your privacy because they think you're too cowardly to accept the risk of terrorist attacks that real privacy brings.

In other words, if you care about your liberty, you might as well lump the parties together and call them Republicrats. Neither of them are comfortable trying to govern a free people who take responsibility for themselves and live with the consequences of their choices, wise or unwise. They are well-intentioned, but their desire to take care of you, to keep you safe from either yourself or from others, does not make them your friends.

Of course, the Republicrat discomfort with liberty (which compels them to seek the power to limit liberty) is only one reason why our legislation has been so outrageous of late. The other is that Congress as arrogated unto itself so much power and authority that it can no longer effectively handle its workload. As a result the Congressional Staff now numbers around 24,000. About 11,000 of them work of individual Senators and Congresspersons. They tend to be just out of college or law school, and they view their positions as stepping stones to real careers somewhere else. In other words, they have little or no real world experience, and they are not going to have to deal with the consequences of what they write as legislation. And what they write are not so much like laws as they are like bad term papers - there may be flashes of brilliance in somewhere in them, but they're too long and too full of other junk to find them out.

If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make Congress delegate a significant amount of their power back to the states so that local problems could get local solutions, and to the federal regulatory agencies so that more time and thought and less politics might go into those curbs on our liberty that we must accept in order to have a functioning republic. Then I'd cut back the Congressional staff, and turn more of their positions into careers rather than transitional jobs, so that there would be some experience and historical memory among the staff.

I'm not sure what I'd do about the bribery. It is clearly more widespread than Congress and exists at higher levels than I had thought. How else did some of New York City's wealthiest employers get H1N1 vaccine ahead of the city's medical clinics?

Of course, I could be wrong. Both the American Medical Association and the American Association of Retired Persons have endorsed this monstrosity of a health care bill. Or maybe big businesses and big lobbies aren't necessarily friends of liberty either. After all, the main reason that we are trying to reform the health care system in the first place is that we are currently at the mercy of big businesses (our insurers and employers) and big lobbies that look out for their interests rather than ours.

Health Care Reform is Easy

Health Care Reform could be really easy. Did you know that every health care provider is free to charge anyone whatever they can get away with? The result is that every insurance company negotiates with every provider organization (hospital, medical group, etc.) over what price they are going to pay for what procedures and services. A big insurer can command low prices, so the costs get shifted to the smaller insurers. The result is that some insurers will pay $1500 for an appendectomy at a given hospital, while others pay $13,000. No wonder you can't find out what your hospital bill will be in advance. Nobody knows until all the insurance codes get put in, and the database lookups are done.

Now, people have to be hired and paid to do all that negotiating and to enter in all those insurance codes. Here is an opportunity for reform. Make cost-shifting illegal nationwide (not just in Maryland). Each healthcare provider (including pharmaceutical companies) organization can charge whatever they want for any given service, product, or procedure - but make them charge the same to everybody. And force all insurers to use the same codes for the same things.

A lot of people would lose their jobs, but healthcare costs would come down.

Without doing these things a "public option" would just bring the Government in as another big insurer, commanding low prices, and the costs would get shifted to everyone else. It would actually make the cost of healthcare go UP for most people.

But, noooooooooooo. We have to enact a public option to "compete" with private insurance companies, because competition drives prices down. Not so in this market. The healthcare market is neither free nor regulated. A public option would have the opposite effect to what is intended. At least until the private insurers are cost-shifted out of the market in just a few years and we get the Government as single payor. Then only the really rich or well-connected will be able to afford the best healthcare. The rest of us will get Government rationing.

That is to say, we need healthcare reform. But the bills under consideration don't fix healthcare. They just make the problem different, and for the most part, worse.

Why do we keep re-electing swine who dedicate all their thought and energy to political posturing and none to actually doing the right things?

Note to Congress

For those of you in Congress who are dismayed that the Iranian election appears to have been stolen, consider whether you were elected in a gerrymandered district. Then, either fix the gerrymandering, or hold your peace.

Next, please note that if you support health care reform that exempts you and your staffers from its provisions, then you must implicitly consider yourself better or more important than the rest of us. But we are supposed to have government of the people, by the people - not by an elite. If you aren't willing to be one of the people, to have health care rationed to you the way it is rationed to the people, then you hold your office falsely, because you have deceived the people into thinking you actually cared about us so we would vote for you.

Of course there is a difference between you and Brother Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But for many of you it is a difference in degree.

Yes We Can - Value Mortgage-Backed Securities

I can't tell what exactly the FASB (Federal Accounting Standards Board) did about "Mark to Market" valuation. (Earlier I wrote about how Mark to Market is destabilizing, making up markets go up too fast, and down markets go down to far.) Not even the Wall Street Journal seems to be able to report in any detail on what they've done. But it seems that firms can now mark assets to what some sort of extrapolated market would do, if the market were functioning "normally."

Bullshit. That's make-believe. If the actual market is non-existent, just make one up. There is no justification for this nonsense, because there is a real way to value assets, which I've also written about earlier. It's called expected discounted cash flow.

Let's pick what the Wall Streeters claim is the hardest of all assets to value right now - mortgage backed securities. For each one of them, an electronic and/or written trail exists to track down each mortgage and mortgagee that is bundled into each one of those securities. It is therefore possible to track down each mortgagee and do the due diligence (check his/her credit history, income, employment stability, loan amount, monthly payment, payment history, historical and present market value of the property that is mortgaged, etc.) and make a probabilistic determination of his/her likelihood of continuing to pay that mortgage. That probability times the number of payments, times the value of the payments discounted for inflation (again estimated from the historical moving average of the Consumer Price Index over any n-year period, where n is the number of years left on the loan) is the expected discounted cash flow from that mortgage - that mortgage's value.

Now if a non-accountant like me can figure out how to value mortgage-backed securities, you can be sure that the Wall Street accountants know how to do it. So why don't they do it? Because they already have a pretty good estimate of the answer and they don't like it. They don't want to know. And more importantly, they don't want you and me to know.

In other words, they're lying. They're still trying to keep from having to come clean and do business the right way.

It is not conceptually hard to value mortgage-backed securities. It is conceptually easy. The only hard thing about it is that it is tedious. A lot of people are going to have to hit the streets and do a lot of due diligence that was not done when these things were bundled up and sold and bought in a vast game of financial musical chairs.

Well, get to work all you lying assholes in the financial industries. I'm a taxpayer, and I want my chair back.

Squirting Money

If you want to give yourself a rude shock, go to the Thomas website, and look up the bill H. R. 1, under consideration by the current Congress. That's the economic stimulus bill.

It reads more like it was not written, but excreted by a bunch of inarticulate, immature staffers in a terrible hurry. They just threw anything they could think of against the wall and are waiting to see what sticks. As if someone else was going to come and bail them out. The problem is that we are counting on them to be the adults. They are supposed to bail us out.

I was expecting several large, well thought out directives to make long neglected investments in infrastructure that will help to avoid or minimize future problems or that will stimulate growth in economic areas that we need to remain strong and free at home and dominant in the world. Things like fixing the levees in the Sacramento River Delta, and around New Orleans. Like inspecting and repairing or replacing bridges and tunnels. Like drawing fiber optics to replace CATV cable and twisted wire pair throughout the country. Or even - gasp - reviving the integral fast reactor (IFR), a type of inherently safe, proliferation resistant nuclear reactor that could power the country and the world for decades without a nuclear fuel enrichment cycle. We would have had dozens of them by now if they hadn't been nixed by the Clinton Administration.

I was also looking for things to draw investment preferentially into this country's economy, like reducing, suspending or eliminating the capital gains tax.

But no. What we get are a bunch of placeholders without any executing or enabling legislation that reserves money we don't have for spending on everything the Democrats have felt deprived of for the last eight years. Of course, some of those things need to be funded. Like insulating and weatherizing our homes and buildings. But not the whole load.

This thing looks like the product of brainstem rather than frontal lobe thinking, like it was produced by reflex rather than reason. It's Democrat trickle down economics, and it will work about as well as Republican trickle down economics.

Which means that it will work, sort of, if you don't mind the unintended consequences. Like the pseudo-neo-populist protectionism put into it that could start a beggar-thy-neighbor trade war that could tip the world into another Great Depression.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that at our President's urging, our trusted representatives will get it all sorted out and voted on by tomorrow. They aren't just going to lay a turd on us. They're going to have the legislative and economic equivalent of diarrhea. The hershey squirts of money.

When it's all over, I hope I can afford Lysol.

Bull----ish on the Economy

Nightly Business Report did a short piece on Barack Obama's tax cut plan that featured Moody's estimates that the cuts would raise the US Gross Domestic Product by some percentage. I like tax cuts rather than big government payouts because tax cuts let us control more directly how our money is spent. But Moody's estimates have to be bulls--t. That's doesn't mean they are going to be wrong. It just means that the estimates are founded on inadequate models.

Now I'm no economist, but I am a modeler of complex physical systems, so here is what I think is going on.

Consider that the global economy is a giant network of people, corporations, and governments all interacting with each other in a highly complex and dynamic way. Mathematically we can represent each economic actor as a point or node or vertex, and each interaction between any two actors as a line segment or or edge connecting them. This collection of nodes and edges is called a graph. The graph theory literature is large, even though the subject is relatively new. It is new because large graphs can't be analyzed by continuum mathematics (like calculus). They have to be analyzed by large computers.

But the simplest questions one can ask about large graphs can be very hard even for a computer to answer. NP-hard in fact, which means that in practice you can't get the answer in a useful time. Even searching a large graph can be hard, let alone trying to compute how a graph of interacting agents will evolve in time. But that is exactly what you have to do in order to predict how the economy will react to a given stimulus. Such a model is currently beyond the capability of anyone, Moody's included.

Moody's, like all the other predictors, must be using a much simpler, and thus over-simplified model. It has to be over-simplified because, if it weren't, they would have predicted the current economic slowdown and done their investment rating much differently.

The modelers are getting a clue, however. I noticed that an Economics and Math professor is getting geared up for these kinds of problems, a book has been published, and another one is on the way. And while you're at it, check out the blog of Valdis Krebs, one the the world's go-to people on the subject of graphs and networks.

Don't hold your breath waiting for them to do real predictive economic modeling, though. Manipulating these large graphs may require quantum computers, and we don't quite have any of those yet.

What not to do if you are a Republican

Here is a list of some things not to do if you are a Republican:

1. Speak platitudes about controlling spending and limiting government. You clowns didn't deliver when you had the chance, so why should we give you another? If you give a specific proposal or two, I'll listen. Otherwise, I may heckle.

2. Make Sarah Palin your next Presidential candidate just because she's an engaging speaker and a "Caribou Barbie." I'm fed-up with imagery. Four of the last five presidents have been long on image. I'd rate one as good and another as fair. Can we have substance, too?

3. Talk about values. I'm tired of values-talk. I want to hear concrete, achievable proposals that will implement those values. If I like a given proposal I'll support it. But you double-talking borrow-and-spenders don't get any more passes because you say you have values. In the last eight years much of your values have been negative, as measured say, by my portfolio.

4. Keep trying to take over the Federal judiciary in order to stop abortion. Abortion is only one sub-heading under a main topic called "Justice." All you have achieved is the longest backlog ever in the appointment of Federal judges, resulting in backlogs of federal cases.

5. Call for reform. You wouldn't know what to reform if it ran over you like a truck. Consider something minor, like the way Congress spends most of its effort in influence peddling rather than legislating. Or the way everyone in the US House of Representatives comes from a gerrymandered district. Together these two things paralyze our politics in a "Culture War" that serves only to distract everyone from anything too complicated. Again, specifics are welcome: tell us what you want to reform, how you want to do it, and what will be the effect of the reform. And make sure that reform starts with you.

6. Claim to be strong on defense. Military procurements can take 20 years and cost more than some of our recent wars. This is because military procurements are intimately bound up with Congressional influence peddling. And it threatens our ability to defend ourselves because it makes our defense technology unworkable, obsolete, and unaffordable. You didn't fix this when you had the chance - instead you made sure to benefit from it, as measured by contributions to your campaign coffers. I'm not saying that the Democrats didn't do it, too. But they aren't smug about being perceived as strong on defense.

7. Wrap yourselves in the mantle of religion. My favorite example of a politican who wrapped himself in his religion was Saddam Hussein. So, let's say you're a Christian. I'm glad of it. So am I. So what? There are over 2 billion Christians on earth to choose from. What I want to know is why I should vote for you.

I could go on, but it's late and my dog needs to be let out to pee. She is big, beautiful and very conservative. You may pet her, but you may not make her your standard-bearer.

The Corporation Cannot Love You

Do you love your company? Your government? Are you counting on either one to take care of you when the chips are down?

Think again.

According to psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, wrote a remarkable book entitled A General Theory of Love (2000), love in humans (and what behavioral psychologists call "attachment" in mammals) is mediated by the brain's limbic system. Mammals have this system, reptiles don't. That's why you can't get your pet snake to greet you as enthusiastically as your dog.

With regard to corporations they wrote:

A company has no limbic structure predisposing it to recognize its own as intrinsically valuable. People who extend fidelity and fealty to a corporate entity - legally a person and biologically a phantom - have been duped into a perilously unilateral contract.

Steeped as they are in limbic physiology, healthy people have trouble forcing their minds into the unfamiliar outline of this reptilian truth: no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists outside the limbic domain.

In other words, your corporation cannot love you. Neither can your government.

Something to bear in mind even when we elect officials of high ideals and soaring rhetoric.

The Long View

Some 80,000 years ago modern humans began leaving Africa and settling the rest of the earth. We came to the end of that process only in the last century. The long term trend is for people to become ever more able to communicate and travel. The resulting homogenization is likely to culminate in the end of the nation-state as we know it.

The problem is that for the last 230 years or so, the nation-state, particularly the United States of America, has been the only earthly guarantor of individual liberty. By this I mean that we respect and enforce limits on what any group, including the nation-state, can do to any individual. (See the Bill of Rights for details.)

My solution is to be a partisan for individual civil liberty, to assert that it is a positive value for all people of all cultures and religions. My hope is that civil liberty will become so accepted and common as to be taken for granted all over the world. So that by the time the nation-state disappears, liberty will remain.

The problem is that, as the planetary society gets homogenized and crowded, as technology empowers individuals to do ever greater good or harm, as governments must therefore monitor individuals ever more closely, will we simply dumb down the concept of liberty to the point of being meaningless Newspeak?

In a free society the fundamental tension between the good of the collective and the good of the individual is never finally resolved. Going too far one way will crumble the society, and going too far the other will crush the individuals who make up the society.

And as we develop the biotechnological tools that will enable us to change what it means to be human, maintaining the balance between the individual and the collective will become ever more complicated, delicate, and difficult.

In a way, it's not my problem. I'm already middle-aged, and I have no progeny. But the rest of you will be sorry if you screw this up.

The Working Rich

A New, Taxable Socioeconomic Class

You've heard about the "working poor." I would like to introduce a new socioeconomic class, the "working rich." These are people who are rich, as long as they're working. They are rich enough to pay the lion's share of the taxes in the United States, but not rich enough to buy their own politicians — and too few in number for their votes to make a difference. They are not to be confused with the rich, who are even less numerous, but who can make those big soft money donations, award those sinecures, and otherwise buy political influence, and who oppose tax cuts because (a) they've already bought their loopholes, and (b) they feel guilty about that part of their wealth that they haven't earned.

If you are not one of working rich, you still enjoy the benefit of having them work an extra 10 to 15 years so that they can fund your favorite social programs and still maintain their lifestyle in retirement. So, the next time you see someone who has worked their ass off to get and hold one of those really great jobs that pays good money, be thankful rather than envious. Whenever you want to take their money you and your fellow working non-rich citizens can tax them any way you like. You can even call it "taxing only the rich," to make yourself feel better. But the really rich won't pay a dime — that will be left to those who haven't quite made it, the working rich.