Blue State Meltdown

The Blue-State Meltdown and the Collapse of the Chicago Model — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

Not that the MSM likes to focus on it much, but the states that are in the most trouble are the most liberal ones. Our founding fathers wanted "13 laboratories" in which we could test the various theories of government and decide what worked and what failed. We have done our best to water that down with Federal rules and money transfers, but we have never been completely successful. The "Blue States" are in the worst shape of all because in case anyone missed Japan, the USSR, Western Europe, Cuba, and Chile, "socialism doesn't work".

On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.

Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area.

So we have BO pushing the "Chicago Model" of "pay to play" at a national level with the idea that all we really need to do as a nation is to move money between those that make it and those that support BO. "Don't play (or work) and don't pay" is sounding like the best model.

How long until the American people get wise to this? I have no idea -- but there isn't much need to worry about it. Just watch the Blue States melt, no doubt followed by the whole country, and EVENTUALLY I bet more folks will realize that "the rich" aren't the complete patsies that BO and company has made them out to be.

F-22, The Importance of Symbols

The remarkable vote to kill the F-22 and what it means for America's military future. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

I like fighter planes, I have no idea how bad we need F-22's. Neither BO or Slate would be on my list of sources that I would want to go to for the specific advantages of the F-22 system, but one thing that I do have at least a reasonable grasp of is relative amounts of money.

The Air Force brass wanted $4 billion in the fiscal year 2010 budget to build 20 more F-22s. Gates slashed the request to zero. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted, 13-11, to shift $1.7 billion from other programs in order to fund another seven planes. That's the line item that the full Senate excised this afternoon.

So we saved something between $1.7 and $4 Billion. Our federal budget is approaching $4 Trillion. $4B is 1% of $400B and .01% of $4 Trillion. Folks that are angry because the multiple trillions spent on "stimulus" money "wasn't big enough"! are giddy because someone decided to not spend $.01% of the budget on a set of new fighter planes.

Symbols are very meaningful.

The Lure of the Single Party

Hope, caught up in a sea of obstruction - The Boston Globe

For the majority of Democrats, trapped in the permanent adolescence of "I want it all and I want it NOW at zero effort to me", Republicans are as permanently backward as parents who claimed that resources were limited, curfews were for your own good and tomorrow and "never" were not the same thing. This whole article should be a must read for folks that still have just a smidgeon of connection to reality.

But today, beneath the optimistic rhetoric, lurks another possibility that no politician and few pundits want to admit: that the system is no longer up to the task and that the factors that once brought relief are no longer operable. There is the real possibility that this time we will not win but rather founder the way Japan has done since its economic catastrophe. There is the possibility that this time it is hopeless.

Wow, the last time I remember it being "hopeless" was when Carter was in the White House. So why is it "hopeless" this time? Well, because we still have those damnable Republicans! That's why!!

What those Fathers could not have anticipated was a political party dedicated to total obstructionism - dedicated to making certain that the government would fiddle while the nation burned. For this we have the Republicans to blame for their actions and the Democrats to blame for their inaction. As comedian Bill Maher recently put it, “The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.’’

Yes, anyone that isn't in complete agreement with multi-trillion dollar deficits, government takeover of major industries and a foreign policy of apology to all  is insane! At least we can see that the "moderates" at the Boston Globe want to have an intelligent discussion on merits!

... you can readily see that not even the Democrats’ 60 votes in the Senate are sufficient to move legislation even if there is a public outcry for action. According to polls, roughly 70 percent of Americans want a public option in healthcare. With that kind of support, the fact that it is even being debated is testament to how decrepit our system has become.

And so we are now a nation with great professions of faith that we will succeed but little real confidence that we will, a nation that focuses more on what can go wrong than on what can go right, a nation that can’t seem to get action. We are a timid nation with small dreams and even smaller plans - a nation that seems to have lost its capacity to do big things. We all know the nation is broken, but we may no longer have the will or the institutions to fix it.

I wonder how many Americans want to live to be 100? have true love? win the lottery? I'm thinking it is way over 70%, to that must be REALLY a testament to how broken our system is that we haven't guaranteed THOSE items!!! Every teen knows that the prime determinant of what we get is very much supposed to be what we want. 

So we have a "timid" nation spending Trillions more than we have, taking over private business and rushing government programs through to gaurentee us everything from the right climate to the right healthcare. It is clear that the only thing that can "save us" is to get rid of the Republicans. Can't we abolish old age, sickness and baldness while we are at it? What could POSSIBLY limit folks that can say "yes we can!"???

Meaning of Military Deaths

We had five soldiers from MN die this past week in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I listen to MPR all the time, so I've had a reasonable number of opportunities to hear of the tragedy of losing our soldiers.

Today was an interesting departure for MPR. The person they talked to was a military person that had formerly had the job of informing families, so the focus was on the value of the sacrifice and the importance that the military places on dealing with the families.

Over the previous years when Bush was president, the standard MN military deaths reporting on MPR involved interviews with the family and friends of the lost soldiers and almost always included the obligatory voice saying something about "optional war", "we were lied to", "he went into the guard never expecting to be deployed", "this is a senseless loss", etc.

I'm often struck with how significant the more subtle bias differences are. The vast majority of people that I know of a somewhat moderate to conservative leaning either never would or no longer listen to MPR -- they simply get irate as to the level of bias inherent in the reporting model.

My sense is that with the increase in media forms, capacity and diversity, Americans less and less listen to each other. Many Americans pine away for the days of Walter Cronkite -- yesterday MPR devoted the noon program to an hour on him. The idea was "EVERYONE trusted Walter", and that was a GOOD THING. One man should tell millions what to think as long as he is a left winger!

Naturally, the points that were covered in the interview were that he was one of the first on Watergate, he decided the Vietnam war was going to be lost in '68, and it was interesting to hear him talk about "favorite presidents of his life", FDR and Kennedy. He didn't want to go to "worst", but it was pretty obvious "Reagan and Carter". Carter because he was a failure, Reagan because he successfully "rolled back the new deal" in Cronkite's words. Strange -- last I checked both Social Security and Medicare faired quite well under Reagan (HUGE tax increases) and it was under CLINTON that welfare reform happened. But I digress.

The point is that from MPR and the general MSM view, their ought NOT be "competing political views" -- we ought to all "listen to and believe Uncle Walter". We ought to all use our "freedom" to "freely" believe the same thing.

How does that happen? In general, subtly -- each little story about soldiers dying, the economy, natural disasters, etc is "crafted" ... naturally by the views of the reporters, not a "conspiracy" to fit into the narrative of their world view. All humans have a world view narrative, and we all have "confirmation bias" to accept that which fits our view and to reject that which does not.

So must we all just live with our own stories, not being able to understand each other and believing that there is no truth? In my opinion, not if we are willing to accept the wisdom of the ages and to fight the confirmation bias by being able to cogently argue as many points of view as we can. I think the best we as humans can do for knowledge is "approximation", but that means that some approximations are FAR closer to reality and truth than others and there is ALWAYS room to improve your own approximation!

Our tendencies are the same -- and will NEVER be completely modified, because we are all human, but it may be possible to temper them by at least being able to listen to both sides and ideally to be able to argue either side reasonably well.

Jail-order Brides

Jail-order Brides - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online

No question Bush is evil, and we all know how "chilling" the US "Christian Right" is with all their hypocrisy and "peeking into bedrooms". No reason that the US should have anything bad to say about Muslim nations.

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."

I'm thinking that if BO just sits down and has a chat with these people they will be quick to see things our way -- unlike those evil Christians and Republicans which have a tendency to be intransigent.

Captured Soldier Afraid?

U.S. soldier captured by Taliban: 'I'm afraid' - CNN.com

The US media needs to get to this guy right away. Doesn't he know we have closed Gitmo? Doesn't he know we have sworn off any interrogation techniques more stringent than saying "pretty please"? Most of all, doesn't he know that we now have the worlds most competent and respected leader in charge of the US forces, the incomparable his holiness BO, potentate of the masses?

Most of all, his captors know that if anything untoward was to happen to him, BO would be VERY UNHAPPY! Nobody wants to make BO unhappy, he may look stern and say bad things about you in a speech. That would be too much for anyone in Al Quaeda to bear, so I'm certain they will treat this guy fairly and humanely.

What else would we expect from them? They aren't like "Republicans" or anything evil!

Apollo, Murray and Cox

I had to read a nice thick detailed Apollo book in the past week as my way of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing tomorrow. Excellent book, it ought to be on the top of the list for anyone interested in the engineering, planning, procedures and management that were responsible for one of the milestones of human history. Vietnam, Kennedy, MLK and much more will be forgotten, but "Man Walks on Moon" is one of those milestones for humanity that will be remembered as long as humans exist.

The book is loaded with detail and anecdotes about the people that dedicated a decade or more of their lives to the quest for the moon. The challenges of getting the F1 engines in the mammoth Saturn V to be stable ... 2 tons of LOX and a ton of kerosene into each of the 5 F1s in each second producing 1.5 million lbs of thrust each.

A lot of details on some folks that had a lot of responsibility but were far from household names -- Joe Shea being one. He took a lot of personal responsibility for the building of the Command Module, and strangely, would have been in the capsule below the astronauts feet if they could have gotten a com plug for him the night that Apollo 1 burned. He was devastated by the loss of the crew and always felt personally responsible, but he lived on with the pain and had a pretty successful life.

There is a lot of focus on the decision to do "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous", which was originally seen as "off the wall risky", but eventually came to be seen as the only reasonable way to do it.

Most of all, I'm struck by the fact that we haven't been back to the moon since '72. I liked this quote:

A new all-purpose political truism entered the language: "If this nation can put a man on the moon, then it should be able to ..." Cure cancer, stop crime, end poverty. All it would take, many seemed to think at the time, was the same kind of money and commitment that the US had lavished on Apollo.

First of all, we are no longer "this nation". The nation that put men on the moon had values, courage, faith and a spirit that is WAY different from the nation that we have become today. Could THIS nation put a man on the moon? I'm not so sure.

Of course, even if we could, going to the moon is primarily an ENGINEERING PROBLEM, and while it is a difficult problem, it can be done with known technology. It isn't primarily a "science problem", or a "social problem". Curing cancer requires massive invention, and there is a non-zero chance it is "impossible" (to do it and have a living patient with a reasonable quality of life).

The hubris of "if we can send a man to the moon ..." is unbelievable. Stop crime or end poverty? What would that mean? We don't even know what it would mean to do those things, let alone have any starting point as to how they might actually be achieved. It is very likely that the "cure" might end up being worse than the problem.

The moon was hanging in space for all of human history. We ALWAYS "knew what it meant" to go there. Once we had put unmanned landers on it, it was certainly "possible" to send a man there -- THEN, the issue was one of "merely" time, money, commitment, and the willingness to risk (and lose) human lives in the pursuit of the goal.

It is most often those who have accomplished the least that have the most to say about "if we can send a man to the moon ...", or "it seems to me it OUGHT to be done thus and so ...". Sadly, we now have a president that has accomplished nothing in his life save a couple good speeches and yet has huge confidence in his ability to do nearly anything. Knowing your limits as well as your abilities engenders "confidence". Being supremely confident you have no limits is hubris.

We once were a nation with the confidence to go to the moon, today we are a nation with the hu bris to believe that "we" (well, maybe the rich, the smart, the dedicated) could "do anything" -- if they would just get down to it.

We Came We Saw, We Lost Interest (Moon, Shuttle)

RealClearPolitics - The Moon We Left Behind

Just read it all. I'm half through "Apollo" by Murry and Cox that I'll Blog on later, but the lament of 40 lost years of the American and human spirit of exploration and conquest is a sad tale. In remembering and reading the histories of that era, we get some sense of the focus and passion that we lost.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive. 

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

The Secret Victory

RealClearPolitics - An American Victory

As the MSM misdirects us with attempts to call a slower declining economy in the face of trillions of bailout debt being spent "success", and the BO administration works hard to burden us with a dark future of high energy costs and Post Office Healthcare, it is important to note that the MSM and BO were 100% wrong about the Surge in Iraq.

As the US troops very quietly withdraw from the cities in victory, something that 2 years ago was hammered home by the US media and the political left including BO as "impossible", it is worth noting that BO is far from infallible, and consider where the economy is likely to be 2 years hence!

I'd Rather Have Shame

Op-Ed Columnist - White Man’s Last Stand - NYTimes.com

But the barbed adjectives didn’t match the muted performance on display before the Judiciary Committee. Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral. 

W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge. 

Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity. 

Senator Graham said Sotomayor would be confirmed unless she had “a meltdown” — a word applied mostly to women and toddlers until Mark Sanford proudly took ownership of it when he was judged about the wisdom of his Latina woman. 

And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.
Faced with that warped case of supreme empathy, no wonder Sotomayor is so eager to follow the law.

Oh those horrid Republicans. Have they trotted out some staffer willing to claim that Sonia sexually harassed them? Have they elected any bomb throwers as bad as Ann Coulter to give them 60 votes in the Senate (Franken)? How about racist titles? "Black Man's Last Stand"??

One doesn't have to go out to the fever swamps of the Kos kids or MoveOn. Even with everything coming up roses for the lefties, the hatred springs eternal. I guess hate is one of those itches that just never gets fully scratched.

While killing the unborn is "settled law", the Supreme Court lacks the capacity to decide on an election -- at least if it goes against the left. We well know that they would be completely fine if they had ruled for Gore.

Inequality Made Simple

Thomas Sowell : A Personal Inequity - Townhall.com

Very fun to read use of basketball as an analogy for inequality. With some excellent points, one of the first being that "equalize" means "everyone move toward the lowest".

The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward. If the government were to spend some of its stimulus money trying to raise my basketball ability level to that of Michael Jordan, it would be an even bigger waste of money than most of the other things that Washington does.

While it is certainly true that if there is any economic freedom at all, we can't all be at the top, it is also unfortunately true that the vast majority of us CAN end up at the BOTTOM in a failing totalitarian system. When we make the grossly unnatural condition of "equality" an objective, rather than the broad set of naturally selected objectives -- falling in love, raising a family, having a nice dinner with a good beverage, gaining knowledge, earning what we individually think is a "decent income" -- given each of our radically different ideas of what sorts of gratification delays, time/effort trade offs, etc go into that, it is highly likely that our "equality optimized system" ends up being radically less productive than the one that was "individually optimized".

Most activities do not exist for the sake of equality. They exist to serve their own purposes-- and those purposes are undermined, sometimes fatally, when equality becomes the goal.

Change I Expected

RealClearPolitics - The Consequences of Big Government

For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP, and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO's projection for 2020 -- which assumes the economy has returned to "full employment" -- puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP, and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow.

When dealing with Democrats, the "belief factor" is always interesting. Bush Sr said "no new taxes" and broke his promise so I voted for that crazy Perot and got Slick Willie. The odd thing with Democrats is that even their consituency assumes that they are lying -- BO says he is not in favor of Gay marriage, yet most of his constituents say "he really is, he is just saying that he isn't to get elected". He now claims to NOT be in favor of single payer, but he said he was in the past, and his supporters say he is -- he is just acting like he isn't to fool the conservative rubes into supporting BOcare which will lead to single payer.

Once one has slipped the surley bonds of even having any thought of veracity, a whole new level of chicanery is almost assured. BO talked about how bad the "Bush deficits" were -- even though the worst of them happened with Democrats firmly in control of both houses of congress. Now the BO deficits are so much worse that it is frightening to compare.

Cost, Price, Value

RealClearPolitics - Alice in Medical Care

Sowell does a good job of reminding us of the obvious we seem to have forgotten relative to health care.
It is short, easy, and instructive to read -- worth following the link, but here is the take away at the end:

Politicians may talk about "bringing down the cost of medical care," but they seldom even attempt to bring down the costs. What they bring down is the price-- which is to say, they refuse to pay the costs.

Anybody can refuse to pay any cost. But don't be surprised if you get less when you pay less. None of this is rocket science. But it does require us to stop and think before jumping on a bandwagon.

The great haste with which the latest government expansion into medical care is being rushed through Congress suggests that the politicians don't want us to stop and think. That makes sense, from their point of view, but not from ours.

One point that Sowell doesn't go into is what I call the issue of "Learjet health". Why do we fly my 70 something aunt from N Wisconsin to Mayo TWICE on a helicopter? I can't afford it, she can't afford it -- why do we nationally think we can afford it? Is it "nice" that we ALL are getting the absolute "top flight healthcare"? I guess -- but then complaining about cost doesn't really seem to be very rational.

What would we say if everyone that wanted "the best" had to have "$50K in an account" (lor $100 or whatever) that would be used for "care beyond that normall avaiable"? If I wanted to be sure that my family could "get the chopper", then I'd be required to come up with those assets and have them sitting in an account -- otherwise, it's the ambulence.

Cruel? Heartless? Well, we KNOW that Teddy Kennedy, famous athletes, corporate CEOs, etc **WILL** be taking the chopper -- no matter what BO and company decide. If we can't afford "all" (and I think it is pretty clear that we can't), then we are going to ration. If we don't find a way to have something approaching a rational discussion on cost, price, value, then we are going to do what all the other countries do, which is have a MUCH worse system for 98% of the population and the upper 2% have the best there is.

The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson

The subtitle of this work is "A Financial History of the World". GREAT book, one of those gems that one feels lucky to have tripped over and will likely be reading a couple more times in the next few years.

Niall is Scottish, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, PHD, and an EXCELLENT writer. A real find. Here are his "main summary points" from the introduction:

1. Poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the LACK of financial institutions, with the abscence of banks, not their presence.
   
2. If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong.
   
3. Few things are harder to predict accurately than the timing and magnitude of financial crises.

He does a great job of supporting these, but I'd argue that they are close to self-evident. When one lacks credit, a safe place to put assets and the ability to exchange value with others (1), it is pretty likely that poverty will be rampant. Finance is just one more "technology". All ANY technology does is "magnify what we are" -- it is completely unsurprising that finance would do the same. Lastly, in the words of Yogi Berra, "predictions are hard to make, especially about the future".

The interaction of "money" and "value" back through history -- gold of course, bonds, "fiat money", etc are all covered with nice stories to help make them memorable. The Medici family, the Rothschild family, and the nexus between Jews, banking, and why. Mainly, interest was called "usury", and the church prevented Christians from charging it -- therefore, the Jews got the role. The use of commodity backed bonds is well covered using the Confederacy and cotton as examples.

Probably the biggest surprise to me was the level of involvement of Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago in the Pinochet administration in Chile and the results. Here is a paragraph from one of the Chilean government officials of the era that might be of slight interest to someone in the US today that is not in the complete thrall of BO:

What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today's contributions being used to pay today's benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future use. This "pay-as-you-go" approach had replaced the principle of thrift with the practice of entitlement ... but this approach is rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave. It destroys at the individual level, the link between contributions and benefits. In other words, between effort and reward. Whenever that happens on a massive scale and for a long period of time, the final result is disaster.

Imagine that!! A welfare system that breaks the connection between effort and reward doesn't work for humans!!! What a concept! He covers it for Japan, Europe (especially Britian) and some for the US, but I'd argue that effectively, we all really understand this. "There is no free lunch" -- everyone would LOVE it for "someone else to pay", but the bottom line is that they aren't going to. You can demand that they do and force them into concentration camps and even kill them in the final analysis, but just like China, the USSR, N Korea, N Vietnam, etc, you find that unless you allow the "profit motive" to have a solid effect, you end up with a disaster where everyone is poorer with the exception of a few folks in the central government.

He covered hedge funds and especially George Soros quite a bit. I'm always amazed at how someone that one would assume that the left would see as "the worst of the worst" -- making money on international currency flows with no concern as to what country, what jobs, or whatever is injured. In 2007, Soros made $2.9 B himself, yet because he gives entirely to left wing causes (ACORN, MoveOn.org, and the Daily Kos) his making of $2.9 billion is just fine, while some other exec that makes a "mere" $50 million or so for running a real company and making real things is considered to be a "robber baron".

The reason is simple -- the majority see the government as "providing" for them rather than the people that produce the wealth. The producers are bad -- they don't pay enough, they need to work harder. Long live the re-distributors!

The book is an excellent read -- derivatives, credit default swaps, sub-prime loans and a host of other things are covered in a relatively easy to understand and narritive manner. The bottom line is what one might expect. "Value" is based on what people are willing to pay, and "risk" is changeable and not computeable. Not only is there " no free lunch", there is also no "safe haven". There ARE principles that would seem to work well in even the medium term, and nearly certainly in the long term, but in the short term, "markets fluctuate" -- sometimes violently.

In the big picture, that is GOOD, but ONLY if the governments let the process of "creative destruction" take place -- if unions are no longer competitive, then they lose. If cars need to change, then the companies that build the new kinds of cars fast enough survive and those that don't die.

Esentially we have turned to the socialist direction that has failed miserably across the globe over and over because it is human nature to want to remove risk and to get a lot more for a lot less effort. Both are very good impulses if being pursued by creativity, hard work and lots of mental effort in a competitive environment. Both are huge disasters if being pursued by government officials trying to force the markets to be calm and business to be stable by fiat.

This knowledge isn't new ... Shakesphere had it down pretty well:

Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Glendower:
Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil

Hotspur:
And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil—
By telling the truth. Tell truth and shame the devil.

BO seems to be doing a lot of calling.

BO May Be Human

http://www.pdnpulse.com/2009/07/obama-steals-a-glance-in-reuters-photograph.html

One of the occupational hazards of being male and being photographed all the time. Since Jesus is fully God and fully man, my take would be that the "glance of admiration" would be automatic enough that his humanity would take notice of an interesting female form as well.

Of maybe his worshipfulness BO is just "acting human" ... I'll give him high marks for doing a good job of it!