We just had to ...

This is Ruby, our new Rhodesian Ridgeback, at 14 weeks. Today, at 15 weeks she is about 1/6 larger and considerably more active. We just couldn't resist. She now takes the baton from Samwise, Frodo, Maya, Pongo, and Nessa of blessed memory.

Healthcare Reform

I turned off the news coverage. I'm not one of the loudmouths in the town hall meetings. I have not been organized by anybody. I just have a memory.

The last time we tried to reform the American healthcare system, the Democrats over-reached so far that they swept Newt Gingrich and his fellow neocons into a Congressional majority - specifically to stop a poorly thought-out and un-tested healthcare reform bill. The Democrats took the wrong message from this. They figured they needed to do the same thing as before, but in stages. They are now trying another such mindless and untried overreach.

They are doing so because the Republicans also took the wrong message. The Republicans figured they should do nothing about healthcare reform.

The real message was that we need healthcare reform, but not what the Democrats propose. (As if they knew. None of them has actually read the current bill, and none of them wrote it. Their staffs pieced it together and probably no one human being knows everything in it.)

What we need is to take some baby steps.

(1) For the uninsurable, mandate at the Federal level that all health insurers pay into an Assigned Risk Pool, just like auto insurers pay into such pools for uninsured motorists. Let these pools be administered by the states. That way we can get 50 parallel experiments to find out how best to do it.

(2) To promote public health (part of the general welfare mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution), continue and strengthen Federal programs to vaccinate all people living in America (legally or otherwise) against common communicable diseases. Strengthen programs to maintain and improve our nation's water, food, and sanitation infrastructure.

(3) Create a minimal national standard for providing statistically based ratings of all health care providers in terms of patient outcomes and costs for all known conditions. These ratings need to be understandable, accurate, and fair. Then make them publicly available on the internet and by other means. Mandate that providers inform their patients of these ratings.

That's enough for now. Give it a few years to see how it works. Have we improved things, or made them worse? How have providers and insurers and consumers learned to game the system? What adjustments need to be made? This implies

(4) Create a tracking system to measure the improvement in the quality, availability, accessibility and affordability of healthcare, so that we will know whether the reforms are having a positive effect.

What I really object to is the idea of enacting a complex, major new system that no one understands with lots of unintended consequences that cannot be undone. In other words, the Democrats must be stopped again, but we still need healthcare reform. Just not their preposterous and ponderous "solution" that breaks what isn't broken, and fails to fix what is.

Remembering Nessa

This Thursday past, we sent our Great Dane Nessa to walk with our Master. We were facing at heat wave and fireworks, either of which could have precipitated a terrifying and agonizing death for her, and she was on her last legs as far as getting into the car was concerned. Her death was peaceful, as was her life, considering that she was, after all, a dog.

And she was our dog, or rather we were her people. From the moment we brought her home she liked the place. She explored it quickly, even going up and down stairs (a thing she had not encountered before), and settled in. She didn't whine her first night. So intent on claiming the territory was she, that she ate the rosebush under which we had buried the ashes of Maya, her predecessor. We didn't punish her for it, and it was the only one of our plants she ever destroyed. She chewed it to bits, thorns and all. It seemed like a kind of doggie exorcism.

Her greatest enthusiasm was food. She is shown above as a puppy relishing her first taste of sour cream! The greatest tragedy of her life was that she became lactose intolerant, and had to do without it in her last years. This was more than compensated by our discovery of liverwurst as a medium for administering her medications.

Her second greatest enthusiasm was fur-to-skin deep conditioning aromatherapy spa treatments which she would self-administer by rolling in carnivore scats, or preferably cow manure. (Horse manure was a problematic decision - should one wear it or eat it?) Once during a walk through what turned out to be a pasture, she encrusted herself from head to tail in a cow manure rind over an inch thick. We had to shout to other hikers not to pet her lest their hands get stuck. Cleaning her (and our car, and ourselves) took hours, causing us to miss an opportunity to reconnect with former neighbors.

She took no trophies during her life (she didn't even like raw meat) other than title of Miss Congeniality. She was the easiest to train, most obedient, most compliant dog we have ever owned. When we put her on the lunge line we used to train Maya, our first Great Dane, she didn't lunge anywhere. She just looked at us as if to say, "OK. Where do you want to go?"

She was also a champion sleeper, having spent less than 2 of her almost 10 years on this planet in a state of wakefulness. Nevertheless, she was a quick learner of obedience commands and a student of human behavior who developed the ability to tell when we were going to take her for a walk before we knew ourselves. Or perhaps she had learned to shape human behavior rather than to predict it. She never revealed her secret.

She was the girlfriend/dominatrix of Pongo, our German Shorthaired Pointer, who preceded her in death. Although they rarely cuddled, they played until they were played out.

She struggled with early onset arthritis which eventually spread from her neck to her tail, laryngeal paralysis which gave her breathing difficulty, and female spay incontinence. This last could be spectacular: she awoke to greet us, wagging her tail which had been soaked in the puddle that appeared while she was sleeping. We were up until the wee hours cleaning the wee off the ceiling! We got this under control with PROIN (phenylpropanolamine), but in her last months she anointed the chair she inherited from Pongo so deeply that we had to let it go after she no longer needed it.

She was also great protection. When she held her head up, her nose was about chest height for an average sized person. This gave a new meaning to the phrase, "Eat your heart out," and served to help door-to-door salespeople take us seriously when we said we weren't interested. Her bark was loud enough to make the reflections in the windows waver.

As a puppy, she was afraid of children, and would bark at them. After some socialization, however, Halloween became her favorite day of the year, because she could greet the trick-or-treaters. Their parents even got used to her looming over their costumed kids. Although she was not cuddly, she was sweet and friendly, and loved to be stroked and petted. If she particularly liked the way she was being petted, she would lean on the person petting her, and sigh.

She never lost her enthusiasm for a good walk, provided it wasn't too hot or too long. This picture is from her last one.

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.

Is Iran Burning?

The Anchoress has some news and opinions, as well as some links. The present Iranian government was established by a revolution. It is acutely aware that it can be replaced by another one, and is taking active steps to suppress the possibility.

Coming Around Again

I walked early under the Shadow of Death. It approached with the loss of my mother's parents, and again with the death of my father's dog. Just when I began to put it out of my mind the father of the girl next door was killed when a tractor-trailer jack-knifed into his car on a wet road. Then my own father died of a heart attack. I was twelve. Shortly after I turned thirteen, I was struck by a car and would not walk again for over six months. Then began a series of losses of relatives and friends such that by the time I graduated from college I felt weighed down by a burden of grief. I had a girlfriend, but she had doubts about spending her life with me. I just wasn't fun. I had become a serious young man.

So, I walked in the woods behind my childhood home. I stopped at the edge of a large pond (long since drained) and said goodbye to all the people I had lost. One by one, I let them go. I promised to visit them now and then, but I could no longer carry them with me. I had to take time to just enjoy being alive.

It worked. I later learned that my meditation was similar to one psychotherapists recommend for grief/depression that consists of putting all your losses or sad thoughts in a little boat on a river, and then letting it drift away with the flow.

The problem is that the river flows in a circle. Sooner or later, the boat comes around again to pick up another passenger. Until it's your turn to get in.

Now we're getting ready to euthanize our remaining dog, a Great Dane. She is old, arthritic, and suffering from laryngeal paralysis, which means her vocal folds snap shut when she gets hot, excited, or fearful, or whenever she walks more than a few steps. Which means she strains and wheezes and whistles to suck in air. Our vet said that if we don't euthanize her first, then a day will come when she will simply go into cyanosis (her tongue and mucuous membranes will turn blue from lack of oxygen), collapse, and die. For the first time in 31 years, the house will be empty when we come home.

The boat has picked up about a dozen people in the past few months, including my mother and many family friends of her generation. Now it's time for the dog. And next month, my childhood home. We will put it up for sale, because we don't want to be absentee landlords, and the neighbors were good to Mom. They deserve a new neighbor who will be good to them. And the house deserves an owner that will bring it out of the 1970s.

For the first time in 53 years I will be unable to visit the home I grew up in, except as a stranger who can only stand on the street and look at the outside, nostalgic for an interior that no longer exists. Indeed, I will help disassemble that interior by putting the contents into an estate sale.

Its OK, really. You get used to your griefs like you get used to your aches and pains. They recede into the background, and you can do what you want to do, and experience what you want to experience. Including joy, including elation. But every once in a while, something just yanks that background to the front.

We rented "My Dog Skip" from NetFlix and watched it the other day. At the end, well, oh s--t. We just cried.

Hospice is Safe

My mother fell ill in March and took another turn for the worse in April. In the end, there was nothing for it but hospice care, and she died in three days. With the help of the attentive staff we kept her safe from suffering, to the extent we could know what she was experiencing.

Shortly before she passed on, I opened a Bible to wherever the spirit led me. Though she was not religious, I read her Psalm 70 and First Corinthians 15:51-56. I hope they comforted her.

I haven't been posting lately, and I expect not to for a little while longer. I'll be back when I have words of my own to say, on matters of less importance.

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.

Why Hospitals are Dangerous for Old People

Every time she is hospitalized for a major adverse event (stroke, breaking a hip, heart attack, etc.) she shuts down for a while. By which I mean she is overwhelmed by her own anxieties about death and dying, winding up in a nursing home for the rest of her life, losing control of her fate. Alright, I'm guessing. She rarely speaks directly about such things. And when her anxiety gets too high, she doesn't speak at all. She breathes through her mouth until her mouth is so dry that she can neither speak nor swallow.

The staff at every hospital she has ever been in (except one) interprets this as some severe neurological insult that must be evaluated thoroughly before anything else can be done with her. Up goes the sign over her bed, N.P.O. Medical jargon for Nothing by Mouth. Don't give food or water. She seems semi-comatose, and only groans when stimulated. The staff leaves her alone. Even with an IV, dehydration and starvation begin. Whatever the original condition that brought her to the hospital was, things get worse, by neglect. Neglect which only increases her own anxiety that she is really dying this time. The people who do speech and swallow evaluation won't be in until after the weekend, and all they'll find is that she can't speak or swallow.

"It's fairly common for old people to go into decline like this," says the physician on call. "We really can't give you a prognosis at this time."

What to do? Get there from wherever you are as fast as you can. Fly 3000 miles, call a cab, dump the suitcase at a hotel, get to the hospital. Walk into the room. Observe for a while to see if this is like the other times. Call the nurse. Describe the hospitalization syndrome in this patient. Ask for a sponge swab. Do what the nurse is forbidden to do. Swab the inside of her mouth with water. Rub her arms and shoulders. Speak to her. Swab some more.

An intelligible phrase comes out. Swab again. Another phrase. Conversation begins. Get a straw and give her a sip of water. She chokes and coughs a bit, but she swallows most of it. More conversation. Another swallow of water. The nurse begins to believe the narrative of hospitalization syndrome.

The next days are spent training the staff to hydrate and feed her like an infant. She cannot feed herself. Yes, maybe she did have another stroke. But we had to do this for the hip and the other things, too. It happens every time. The anxiety will keep her brain unwired until she gets out of the hospital, out from under the shadow of death. And unless she is fed, she will not get out. Really fed. Even when the staff learns that they must hand feed her, the shift change brings on a new person who brings in a meal and asks if she wants to be fed. She says no, and he leaves. Eventually someone comes to take away the untouched tray.

So one must check, every meal, every day, except for that one remarkable hospital. The one that can be trusted to really take care of old people. The one that lets you take a night off, or even a day. The one that even checks for the usual infections without being told.

Otherwise, generally, hospitals are dangerous places for old people. Without an assertive advocate, elderly patients can die from what is effectively neglect by a well-intentioned staff. That's what I've been re-learning the last couple of weeks. Oh, there was a new twist this time. A change of blood pressure medicine that left her slipping into and out of psychosis for days, even after it was changed back.

Counter-insurgency @ Home

I've heard that the Stimulus Bill includes $4 billion for "neighborhood stabilization, a program begun under the Bush Administration, and Community Development Block Grants, which were begun under the Ford Administration." A big rice bowl, to be doled out by some sort of competition, not handed over to organizations like ACORN. Neighborhood stabilization appears to be the buying and redevelopment of foreclosed properties, whild CDBGs are more flexible.

Neither involves the comprehensive provision of social services to neighborhoods that are otherwise being taken over by gangs, which I think of as domestic counter-insurgency funding. Because who you go to for physical and economic security is who controls the turf. And if the good folks abandon the turf then the bad guys take over. In the case of gangs, the bad guys are a loosely organized criminal insurgency. In some towns they outnumber the police. ACORN does provide some of these services, but not a complete set. We are leaving a gap which both trustworthy and untrustworthy organizations (gangs, "charities" with ties to terrorist organizations, etc.) can try to fill.

On the other hand, if we try to create a domestic "Peace Corps" to provide these services, we run the risk that the Corps could be politicized and abused to skew elections. This can be dealt with by reasonable oversight and checks and balances. But the possibility should not be ignored.

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.

The War on Whatchamacallit

Right-wing radio and its blogosphere has been all a-twitter about members of the Obama Administration not using the phrase, "War on Terror." Well good for Obama!

Terrorism isn't an enemy. Terrorism is a technique. You can't win a war if you can't even name your enemy. But what do you call it when everything you can think of is Politically Incorrect.

It is certainly not a war against Islam. There are too many Muslims on our side to call it that. Like the ones I saw inside the Pentagon.

Academics get more specific. They call the enemy the "Global Salafist Jihad" or the "Jihadists" for short. But Muslims have positive associations with the Salafs (may Allah be pleased with them) and with jihad. It would be like someone calling the US Military the Freedom Fighters in the names of the Founding Fathers of the Republic.

If we need a short name for the enemy (and we do need one) I nominate the term introduced by Francis Fukuyama: Islamofascism. It connotes the toxic combination of a malignant narcissistic fantasy retrojected onto the founders of Islam, combined with modern Western fascist techniques of agitation, propaganda, and thuggishness. And of course, Western weapons. The worst of the Middle East in unholy matrimony with the worst of the West. It is a bad name for a bad thing.

Nobody should like it as a name for the enemy. That's the point.

Hope and Concern

Let us hope that Barack Obama has become and will remain a powerful symbol in the minds of urban youth that if you go to school and work hard, you just might make it. You might even become President. If that is the major change wrought by the Obama Administration, it will be change enough.

On the other hand, Obama has already moved to change things. He's closing GTMO, which has become a public relations disaster for the US. But what will we do with the 250 remaining detainees? Even if we manage to repatriate the 60 we want to send back to their countries of origin, there are 80 that the CIA says are really bad guys but that there is not "enough evidence" to try them in US courts. That could be code for "if we put them on trial a bunch of classified information might get put into the public record." The kind of information the CIA is skittish about because it might reveal what they call "sources and methods."

And that still leaves 110 bad guys who could be tried and presumably convicted, and then what? Do we have the will to keep these SOBs in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives so that they can't recruit other convicts to their cause while they're in prison? It's not as is we haven't had home-grown Islamofascist terrorism before.

Then there is the next big round of bailout money. Which, given the relentless politicization of the Washington crowd, will be misspent either all or in part. But that's not so bad. What bothers me is that it will be spent in the absence of a viable economic model that predicts the effects of the expenditure. It's like the scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard boards a ballon whose mooring rope is loosed prematurely. When Dorothy shouts for him to come back, he shouts back, "I can't! I don't know how it works!"

Once all that taxpayer money has flown away, we won't be able to get it back, because nobody really knows how the economy works. My concern is that we will have set in motion the chain of events that leads China to world hegemony and makes the US an also ran. You can bet that China will not be as benign a hegemon as the US.

Finally there was the "all hands meeting" that our new Secretary of Energy, Steve Chu, held today, which was broadcast throughout the DOE complex. He didn't have much to say about the National Nuclear Security Agency, much less the future of nuclear deterrence and nuclear forensics, or even next-generation nuclear power that doesn't require enrichment. He might be a Nobel prize winning physicist and a brilliant administrator, but it looks like there is a gap in his awareness thus far.

A Good Beginning

At my lab today they broadcast the inauguration of Barack Obama, the 44th American to become President of the United States, but the very first African American. Afterward they marked the lab's annual celebration of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday with a panel discussion on the question of whether Dr. King's dream that people would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" had been achieved.

If the panelists hadn't said it, I would have. We have been forcefully reminded these past few weeks by the killing of Oscar Grant that it has not been achieved. Not fully, not yet. But today a huge stride has been made toward achieving that dream.

I remember another stride, taken 45 years ago.

In 1963, I heard that the middle-aged woman who was to be my fourth grade teacher told her class in our segregated, all-white school that they should "never let a colored child be your friend." I was in her class when the school was desegregated in 1964. As far as I could tell, she never let her prejudice show to her new students, white or black. At the end of the academic year, as was her longstanding custom, she kissed each and every one of her students on the forehead as they left her classroom for the last time. That year was a big step for her, and for all of us fourth-graders. Those purple lipstick marks on those dark foreheads could have been little prophecies that this day would surely come.

Energy, Wealth and Money

Wealth is energy.

Let's say you buy a potato. The potato was produced by energy - the energy of the person who planted, tended, and harvested the potato, the energy of the sunlight on the potato vine's leaves that enabled it to grow, the energy of sunlight on the earth and oceans that evaporated the water that condensed into clouds that rained on the potato vine and watered it. Add to that the energy used by vehicles that transported the potato to the market, and the energy that you used getting yourself to market as well.

In other words, the potato is made of energy. And what is true of the potato is true of everything else. Wealth is energy, or rather the ability to command or use energy to do, to make, or to bring you whatever it is that you need or want.

There are those who claim that the nations of the world should use less energy, which they hope to achieve by economic contraction. If you get poorer, you use less energy.

But it is also true that if societies use less energy, they get poorer. They can get more efficient in their energy use, but eventually as human populations grow, they will get poorer unless more energy can be made available.

On the other hand, if more energy can be made available to humankind, we may eventually achieve the kind of utopian, moneyless economy envisioned in the old television series Star Trek. In Star Trek any character could walk up to a matter-dispenser, and get anything he or she requested, made from energy congealed into matter and re-constituted according to a pattern of information stored in the associated computer's limitless memory. To do this in the real world would take an enormous amount of energy, probably the equivalent of the output of a star for each person's lifetime.

But the economy of plenty eliminates money. Of what use is money when everyone has access to unlimited energy, i.e., unlimited wealth? If the tyranny of money galls you, then there is only one constructive solution - create so much wealth, create access to so much energy, that money is no longer useful or meaningful.

Notice that I said create access to energy, but I did not say create energy itself. All energy on earth comes from the sun, and all the energy in the sun comes from thermonuclear fusion of the sub-atomic particles created in the Big Bang with which our universe began. All energy "generation" is just finding ways to unlock the energy stored in little caches throughout the universe from that primordial event.

So the path to a utopian economy is not via using less energy, but more. By unlocking the energy in the little batteries left throughout our universe when it was created. By more technology, not less, by nuclear energy and whatever we can discover to succeed it. Sure, we need to avoid wasting energy, and we need to be careful how we "generate" energy and how that impacts our environment. But more is the ultimate path, not less. Not unless you think universal poverty is good.

Your wealth, your ability to use your energy can be dissipated by your culture or amplified by it. In the United States, it is normally amplified by the infrastructure in which we have invested, as well as by the relatively high level of trust we have in each other and in our institutions. In Mexico and Russia just to mention two examples, your energy is typically dissipated by lack of infrastructure and endemic corruption. But that is another story.

California Dreaming: Irma La Duce goes to Sacramento

First, some background for what I'm about to say. We have had "The Wire," a serial TV drama on HBO about the illegal narcotics trade in Baltimore. Now HBO wants to do one about prostitution in Oakland, CA.

Dellums unhappy HBO drama about pimp set in Oakland

By Kelly Rayburn, Oakland Tribune, 12/21/08

OAKLAND — An HBO drama that would examine the world of prostitution in Oakland has come under fire from Mayor Ron Dellums and other city officials even before filming has started.

The show, called "Gentlemen of Leisure" and based on the 1999 documentary "American Pimp," would be set in Oakland and would focus on a pimp in his 40s and his attempts to get out of the business.

The show’s production, slated to begin in 2009, could be an economic boon for the city, which has made efforts to bring in more filmmakers, but officials such as Dellums worry about what impact the show would have on Oakland’s image.

Oakland under Jerry Brown and now Ron Dellums has become the murder and corruption capital of California. We already have a role model for how this should be handled in former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, but this being Northern California, there is no chance anyone remotely like him that would ever get elected mayor of Oakland.

But that's not my point. My point is that California is running a 40 billion dollar deficit, and its august body of state legislators can't seem to agree on what to do about it. Maybe they need Californians to get mad enough to march on Sacramento and demand that the legislators do their jobs. Maybe they need to be locked into the statehouse with no water going to the restrooms.

Perhaps we should combine these two stories. Why don't Californians pick any random collection of pimps and prostitutes and send them to Sacramento to solve the budget problem? They'd probably do a better job than the current legislature. At least pimps and prostitutes have demonstrated that they can handle money.

Where have all the Vikings gone?

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

My psychologist wife says that if they don't have unstable personal relationships then they're probably normal people just having a good time. I think they're in-f__king-sane!

Why are Palestinians still Refugees?

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Natan Sharansky opines in How the UN Perpetuates the 'Refugee Problem' that the Palestinian Authority, and then Fatah and Hamas have actually prevented the Palestinians in Gaza from moving into the settlements from which the Israeli government forcibly evicted its own Israeli citizens as part of a peace process. This is being done because the Palestinian leadership views the suffering of the "refugees" as essential to their broader political struggle to eliminate Israel. He quotes both Palestinian and European diplomats in support of this thesis.

It would be nice to see a map or a satellite mosaic that could confirm or disconfirm whether Palestinians have occupied former Israeli settlements, but best map I could find was in this BBC article. The only conclusion I can draw is that it's been 60 years: its time to build out the camps into cities, with real functioning infrastructure, and stop granting refugee status to their second and third generation inhabitants. They aren't refugees from anywhere anymore. They are living on the land of their birth, and their parents' births. Rather than build up the land and its people, the Palestinian leadership insists on engaging in behavior that repeatedly bankrupts their economy, squandering the foreign aid they receive.

But Sharansky also alleged that the Palestinians engage in the "most shameful military tactic: pimping the suffering of their civilians as a weapon of [propaganda] war." That accusation is easily corroborated. Further in this post, Yaacov Lozowick notes that,

Sometime this afternoon we killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in a school. The Palestinians claim more than 40 dead civilians, the BBC says it was 30. The IDF says mortar shells were fired from within the school, and even names the two Hamas men doing the firing; both were killed and must be counted among the dead. (I continue to be amazed by the level of micro-intelligence the IDF is working with). These dead civilians are added to the many dozens, perhaps even a few hundred who have been killed so far. Which is horrifying, and terrible. I'm a father, my children now all responsible adults, but I can remember fondly when they were younger. I think I can imagine the terror of the Palestinian parents in Gaza, and I can feebly feel the pain of those losing children. So can any Israeli. Contrary to what the Guardianistas tell you, we're human beings, not monsters.

See also this article.

The point I'd like to extract is that two Hamas men were firing mortar rounds at Israeli troops from within the school while it was full of civilians! Don't people normally call off school in a war zone? What on earth were the civilians doing in the school during a shooting conflict? Or, consider the opposite question, if civilians were in the school, why on earth would Hamas gunmen draw fire onto the school by launching mortar rounds from it? Understand that one sets a mortar down on a hastily prepared position and then fires it - shooting a mortar is not an impulsive act, it is done with planning, execution and intention. Only one conclusion is possible - for whatever reason, the Hamas gunmen wanted Palestinian civilians to be killed by Israeli counter-battery fire. There is no way the choice of a school full of civilians as a firing site could have been accidental on their part. [Note added 1/9/08: More corroboration - see this.

And Pope John Paul II called Western secularism a "culture of death." I think that epithet applies much more strongly to what passes for culture in Gaza.

While we're at it, see this little video I found at Perpetua of Carthage.

Gaza and Proportion

Shrinkwrapped has written "Adolescence and Societies" and "Gaza and the Palestinian Hostile-Dependent Adolescent."

I think he's on to something, although I reserve judgement regarding his take on the meaning of Insh'allah. He also neglects the role that honor/shame culture plays into the violent refusal of Hamas and the Palestinians to "grow up," but that's because he's a psychiatrist, not a sociologist.

And what does the world do? The world subsidizes the genocidal ambitions and persistent violence of the Palestinians. The aid does not help build the Palestinian economy, it merely preserves the Palestinians in their state of adolescent hostile-dependency. And yet, aid to the Palestinians can be analyzed in more detail to make it seem a complicated business.

The most charitable interpretation one can put on the Palestinian situation is this: every time the Palestinians raise the level of violence against Israel, Israel limits access to its economy to the Palestinians. The Palestinian economy tanks, and the world steps in to rescue the Palestinians from starvation. That is, the world steps in to rescue the Palestinians from the consequences of their actions.

I could blame the Palestinian leadership, Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, claiming that these two parties oppress their people and perpetrate violence against Israel that their people do not condone. But that would be a lie. These two parties mislead and rip off their people, but their violence against Israel is wildly popular.

What is Israel to do? What would you do to me if I took up the habit of firing a few shotgun blasts into your house every night? If there were a functioning government over us, you would call the police. But suppose this is lawless country, and that you are on your own. I fire my shotgun a few more times into your house, while you are thinking about it. I blow the arm off one of your kids. You try to reason with me. I shoot your kid in the leg. You try some more. I shoot your kid again. And so on.

At some point, you stop trying to reason with me, you stop apologizing for whatever you did that gave me cause for anger, and you try operant conditioning. You shoot back. Then you wait. If I shoot again, you shoot again. If I stop, you stop. You keep this up for as long as it takes, cycle after cycle, for me to figure out that this is a dance, and I am playing the tune. If I play war, you dance war. If I play peace, you dance peace. It's up to me. If I am not willfully stupid, I will eventually stop shooting into your house. Especially if you have a cannon that can blow my house to bits, should I make you angry enough.

Yes, I know. The actions of the Israelis look like disproportionate use of force compared to the military weakness of the Gazans. Apparently they have decided to give the Palestinians the propaganda victory in exchange for achieving a limited military objective, namely degrading the ability of Hamas to shoot rockets into Israel. To all the world it looks like Israel lost the conflict in Lebanon against Hizbollah, but no rockets have been launched into Israel from that area since then. If the current operation achieves a similar result, Israel will live with it. As they have said.

On the other hand, there was no worldwide appeal for a cease-fire while Hamas was shooting rockets into Israel. The images are gruesome, but given the anger they must feel, the Israelis must think their actions are restrained. Or are only Muslims allowed to get angry? The Palestinians hit Israel with all they've got, and the Israelis hold back. When they finally react, they do it with their hands mostly tied behind their backs, compared to what they could do if they really let their anger have free rein. The world does not complain about the Palestinians's violence, but it never fails to complain about the inevitable Israeli reaction.

And what would a "proportionate" use of force look like? Would the world stand by while Israel sends exactly the same number of rockets into Gaza every time Gaza launches rockets into Israel? Would the world stand by while Israel drops a bomb into a Palestinian market every time a Palestinian suicide bomber strikes in Israel?

Would you want to live like that? Or would you prefer to strike your enemy hard enough to get them to rethink this whole rocket business in the first place? And just how hard is hard enough, when your enemy seems impervious to learning from the previous six decades of experience?

Perhaps Israel should negotiate with Hamas. What would a "proportionate" opening position look like? Hamas has dedicated itself to genocide against Israel, which it calls the "Zionist Entity." Should Israel dedicate itself to a proportionate position with respect to the Gaza Strip?

Instead of calling for the Israelis to be proportionate, maybe the world should call for the Palestinians to grow up and build their Palestinian state if that's what they really want. They have already had more foreign aid per capita than it took to reconstruct Europe after World War II. And no small part of that, I might add, has come from the United States.

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.