The Stall

Republicans tend to forget the power of the media as they push through an election year. Nearly all of them have a lot of life work to do with work, family, church, friends, etc, and one of the big reasons that they are Republicans is that they believe in less Government anyway, so if not a lot gets done they are often less than concerned.

Democrats and the media of course have a different view. The election in 2004 was a horrible disaster for them, so they needed to do all they could to make sure that what the voters voted for never came to pass, thus “The Stall”. As I watch them hold up yet another vote on an Ambassador to some irrelevant organization in based in NYC because he might have been “intimidating”, or he “hung up on a couple of people”, while the media reports along as if such things were “normal” the level of bias in reporting is breathtaking. It would be great to go back to ’93-’94 and do some Lexus-Nexus searches on “obstruction”. It is a word that has fallen off the map.

Here in MN we have a Democrat Senate that locked things up enough last year so no bonding bill or other legislative action happened at all. Faced with a Republican Governor and House, they just did nothing. For the wackos (like me) that listen to MPR, we got to hear Dean Johnson, Speaker in the Senate, declare “We aren’t running for anything this year”. As one might expect, the media was silent on the idea of “obstruction” as they were on some financial shenanigans that allowed the Dems to spend a hunk of money on local races. Joy of joys, they were rewarded with a bump of 13 seats in the House, only 1 from a majority.

Having tasted the success of obstruction, they waited until the end of the regular session this year to propose a 3% tax on the highest earners in the state which would make MN the undisputed champ of the highest income taxes for those people. Apparently, they are not aware that this is a free country and high income people can actually MOVE, but I digress. The Governor ran on a “no new taxes pledge”, which is of course something that the Democrats and the media see no reason should be kept. The idea that politicians would follow through on campaign promises would pretty much be the end of any Democrats being elected, so must be stopped. A special session resulted.

The Governor actually went out on a limb and broke his promise with a .75 new tax proposal on cigarettes. Unfortunately he didn’t just call it a “tax” but rather obfuscated about it being a “fee”, proof that even Republicans are politicians. The Dems however have spurned his offer and are heading full speed to a state shutdown. Interestingly, even the local liberal rag paper is getting a bit of cold feet wondering if playing politics might have a limit, and enough people would see what is being done as a blatant attempt to angle for gains in the next election. NPR and the Star Trib might need to come down here and pound them back into the party line.

If the past is a guide, the Democrat strategies at both the Federal and State levels will be successful, but fortunately the past isn’t ALWAYS a guide. We have the Internet, Fox, and Talk Radio as outlets today. Beyond this, things looked pretty grim for Bush in ’03 with a ton of media beating him up, and for the “general public”, (the public not getting a decent percentage of news from alternate sources), there wasn’t much to listen to but the media echo chamber.

Next year though, there will be an election. Parties will start to spend money to put Ads on TV, start walking door to door, and the “silent majority” of Republicans that are busy at work, home, school, and church will turn at least a bit more of their attention to the political. The Democrats have made it obvious that “little majorities” aren’t going to be enough given the Senate rules, so there needs to be a run at 60 Senators on the Federal level. At the state level, MN should have a “defense of marriage” amendment on the ballot by then, something which 70% of the state will want to get out and vote for, and of that 70% a large majority will lean Republican.

Most Republicans aren’t very much oriented to “anger” at politics, but the Democrats and media are certainly doing their best to “energize the base”. Will it be enough to allow a shot at a 60 vote Senate? It is a high bar, but it is clear that the Democrats have no interest in allowing majority rule.

Freakonomics, Roe Effect

I’m still enjoying my Buckley Biography, and savoring it a bit. I’ve had the opportunity to hit a bookstore or two lately though, and picked up a book that I really wouldn’t recommend, but found to be a quick little read anyway. “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner. Levitt is considered a bit of a young genius in economics, but what he really does is use the tools of the dismal science (largely statistical) to understand sets of data not normally analyzed using the questions he poses.

One of the interesting quotes to think about from the book is “Morality represents the way that people would want the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually works. Economics is above all a science of measurement.”. I’m wondering if that isn’t a bit of a fallback position, since it seems that economic prediction has a pretty bad track record. Maybe they are going to settle for just trying to explain historical data.

He argues that one of the key reasons for the drop in crime in the ‘90s was the legalization of abortion. The kinds of kids most likely to grow up to be criminals were aborted, so we had less crime. It is a correlation that is surprising to people on both sides of the abortion issue, but what struck me about his analysis is how it mirrors a political analysis done by WSJ called “The Roe Effect”. Levitt talks of the kinds of babies that were never born because of abortion being likely criminals, the WSJ talks about them being likely Democrats.

Levitt asserts that the worst kinds of mothers … the poor, the addicted, the very young, the single, and the mentally disturbed are very likely to have abortions as long as it is fairly low cost. Legalizing abortion made it much lower cost, and the number of abortions that women in the high risk of crime classes went way up, and the number of live births went way down. Less babies of the wrong kind, means less criminals. While the media rarely puts it this starkly, the sorts of people that are likely to grow up to be criminals, are the same sort that are likely to grow up to be Democrats (providing you can get them out to vote).

The Roe effect asserts that most people that kill their unborn babies tend to be Democrats, and that dead babies never grow up to be Deaniacs, or even Hillary voters. It would seem to stand to reason that more strong supporters of abortion would be more willing to avail themselves of the actual procedure, and it would seem to go without saying that most strong supporters of abortion are Democrats. The assumption is that people who feel that it is wrong to kill the unborn would be more likely to carry the baby to term, have the child, and likely raise it in a home where may be some values beyond “if it feels good do it”, possibly even the concept of Religion, morals, value of life, and other issues that would increase the potential for the child to grow up as an evil Republican.

I’m not quite ready to give either theory as much credence as Levitt or WSJ do respectively, but another data point is another data point. While the left would tend to point to the WSJ as “known crackpots”, they are somewhat less inclined to do the same with Levitt, yet there is this same odd correlation that a dead baby who commits no crimes will clearly also not commit to voting for a Democrat. Democrats have a long history of being able to bring out the dead vote, but potentially they have silenced these voices too early for them to raise their tiny hands from their unmarked trash bin resting places to pull the “D” lever.

In Defense of Marriage

Blogging has become a bit slow. For one factor, it is summer, for a second, this past week was our 20^th wedding anniversary. On that note I will provide my observations on 20 years of actual married bliss. I have some guesses that each marriage is about as unique as a snowflake or a Microsoft OS installation, but I do believe there are some basic principles that can be of huge service.

First and foremost, remember that women are in charge. A trip to any major shopping mall will prove this. If men were in charge, how many jewelry stores, women’s clothing stores of various kinds and shoe stores that are essentially or actually all women’s shoes would you find? Most likely about the same number as you find of stores dedicated to men in malls today. In a world in which men were in charge, the MOA would be a combination of Cabela’s, Bass Pro, Hardware Heaven, and every big box electronics store known to man with help imported from Hooters, peanut shells on the floor, and shopping carts that were raced from store to store in NASCAR fashion. In case you haven’t checked, that isn’t the world that we live in, so get with the current program if you have fallen out of sync. Delusions as to which planet you are on can cause all sorts of problems in a marriage.

Second, you must realize that women want only one thing from men. Heat! The average woman has feet and hand temps that run around 35 degrees on a 90 degree summer day, and if they can’t find a guy with spare body heat they are doomed to sit and shiver. When girls refer to a guy as a “hottie”, they actually mean; “I think his body temp is really high”. They like guys with shirts unbuttoned or no shirt at all because they assume that means that he is trying to cool off. If they can find a way to put a foot or hand in close proximity he will receive immediate 3^rd degree frostbite, and they will have a few moments of thermal bliss. When a woman refers to a man as “cold” it means the end of the relationship, since women can put up a with a lot, but if there is no potential for thermal fulfillment, the relationship is at end. 500Mg Niacin before bed could be the miracle drug to save your marriage.

Finally, the best marriage advice that I’ve ever been exposed to was on a T-shirt (huge source of wisdom), it said; “If Mama ain’t happy, Ain’t nobody happy”. I often find men to be quite willing to put up with adversity at work, in sports, and in life in general, and sometimes I think we feel that “everyone needs to put up with adversity”. I don’t really disagree, there will always be adversity, but it is also true that “If Mama IS happy, it goes a long way to everyone being happy”, at least at home. If things are happy at home, maybe the rest of adversity isn’t all that adverse after all.

GLBT / WHM

GLBT is of course “Gay Lesbian Bi-Sexual, and Transgender”, and as the posters and the e-mail from the corporation inform us, this is “June is GLBT Pride Month”. One of my co-workers quipped; “Gee, I can remember the old days when June was Dairy Month”. There are a lot of special months in the year, Black History Month was February, March was National Woman’s History Month. “WHM” would be “White Heterosexual Males”, can one imagine the outcry if there was a call for such a month?

Such an idea is absurd in America these days. To even suggest it would be instantly labeled “racist, sexist, homophobic”, and no doubt a much longer list of names. To recognize the “contributions” of such men in history is of course a horrible idea since the position of the left elite is that they have NO achievements … at least properly gained ones. All the supposed advancement by the WHMs of history was because the minorities and women had been subjugated and “held back”. There is nothing for the properly educated to “honor” about WHMs, so were they to have “a month”, it would be a month of infamy, a month in which the wrongs, the injustices, the lies, and the hubris of this infernal group could be exposed. The more I think about it, I guess I’m wrong … since an awful lot of WHMs are Republicans, it is actually WHM “month” all year long in the major media.

The second thought that GLBT brings to me is the idea of “loss of freedom”. We of course regularly hear about the evils of “The Patriot Act” in the loss of “our basic freedoms”, and every few weeks we hear of the “chilling effects” of having to be around Christians … “living in a Theocracy” is a common theme if not always stated in those words. In at least our company and from what I understand in nearly all major US corporations, any negative statement about “GLBT Month”, or really anything else to do with that agenda is potential grounds for dismissal. I haven’t been able to even figure out how an “average American” could run afoul of the Patriot Act, nor how anyone in any place of business that I’ve ever seen would get into trouble by not being a Christian.

The “beef” from the left is really that Americans OUGHT to be able to directly support terrorists with dollars, assistance, and meet freely without threat from the government to plan all the terror they want. That is the kind of “speech” that they find is “chilled” by the act. On the “theocracy front”, their issue is largely that society hasn’t progressed as much on “freedom FROM religion” as it has on preventing any speech not in favor of the GLBT agenda. It is still acceptable to have some religious symbols displayed on our persons or in the workplace (cross jewelry, pictures of Christ, Bible verses, etc). If the left gets its way, those symbols and religions speech will be removed from the public and the business sphere so that THEY can be “free”.

Another case of the “looking glass world”. Because of the gigantic power of the “mainline media”, most people see “religion on the rise” in the US, and they see that as “chilling”. They also see “a loss of freedom” … from the anti-terrorist legislation, and to a lesser degree, the “power of the religious right”. They can’t be blamed, that is exactly what they are told from what they read and see on TV.

Meanwhile, the GLBTs are constantly gaining power, and the power they are gaining is coercive to the extent that a challenge to that power can cost people their jobs. How far are we from the point at which people can be fired for being against “Gay Marriage”? My guess is that the ’06 vote may see that barrier being tested. We have seen the Boy Scouts become a pariah organization for not knuckling to the GLBT pressure. My guess is that we are very close to seeing people being sanctioned for attempting to protect marriage.

Why is the country divided? For the same reason that adolescence (and the “terrible twos”) tend to be a challenge for parents. Children are testing the boundaries in those times. The left in this country is no longer in political ascendancy, but they ARE still in control of the media, the universities, and generally the courts. Since they still maintain large levers of power, their agenda of radical social change continues unabated, and they continue to “test the limits” of what society will let them have. Each item gained, will provide an invitation to remove the next barrier.

What will be the next barrier after homosexual “marriage”? I suspect the “GLBT” acronym gives a good clue. Shouldn’t bi-sexuals have the same rights as everyone else? After all, they have no choice in how they are oriented. Ponder for a moment the requirements of “a committed, loving, bi-sexual marriage”. As you will be told when it comes up, it is no threat to your or any other marriage, and to oppose it is bigotry of the worst sort. Always remember, it is Christians and the Patriot Act that are curtailing your freedoms. If you don’t believe me, just read the New York Times.

Friends of the Media

This is one of those times I don’t really have time to Blog, but doing it anyway. Took another short fishing vacation, and now have to pay for it big time at work this week since the work doesn’t seem to do itself while I fish.

I’ve been forced to mostly just listen to what I could pick up from the mainline media on the failure of France and Netherlands to ratify the new EC “Constitution”. From what I hear, it is more a “list of rules” than a “Constitution”, but no matter. It sounds like the far left and the far right joined together on this one and decided to say “no”. The left seems to take that course because there was too much competitiveness and not enough socialism in the document, and the right because some people still want to have a country rather than “A United States of Europe”.

What is of interest to me is how the anti-American bias of the press has been in such flower on this one. They love Chirac, because he stood against the USA in the UN on Iraq. They ALSO seem to love the idea of a “United Europe”, since they see it as a “balance” to evil USA. I suppose loathing for your own country is fairly normal for a liberal, but it always strikes my funny bone. I’ve stood in conference rooms at IBM and listened to some liberal get positively incensed on how “The Republicans are letting Corporate America run wild”. When I ask the question “But isn’t IBM a corporation, and don’t you work for it”?, they look at me as if I was from another star system.

It took me about 35 years to fully realize the liberal principle of “consistency is not an issue”. As a liberal, you can hate corporations and work for one, and you can hate America and call yourself a Patriot. It is the idea of consistency that a liberal finds to be beyond understanding.

Further evidence of this phenomenon is watching a discussion of say Airbus beating out Boeing for a contract. As long as the company is European, it is actually GOOD to see them beat out a big American Corporation and take away jobs. We don’t mind EUROPE doing that, we only mind China or Mexico doing that.

The same goes for Canada. It turns out that Canada is our #1 trading partner from which we import 255 billion dollars of goods. We import 196 billion from China (2004). This means that CANADA is “taking more jobs” than China, yet it is nearly impossible to get a media story on the “evils” of that. No, they LIKE the idea of Canada taking jobs, because Canada is more socialist than the US, and the idea of US $ supporting a more socialist system (even if it costs US jobs) is just fine with them.

It is true that the balance of trade with Canada is better, only a $65 Billion deficit vs a $162 Billion deficit with China, but the trade deficit is not the same issue as the loss of jobs … lefties LOVE to talk about “all the stuff imported from China”, but their lack of concern about “all the stuff imported from Canada”, our #1 partner, is extremely telling

WFB

As I’ve started on “Miles Gone By”, an Autobiography of William F Buckley JR., it has caused me to reflect on one of the voices that led me out of liberalism. The name takes me back to ’78 and the “Carter years”. Having just graduated from college and started a career at IBM (which at that time was fighting an anti-trust suit from the Government), I got to experience the essence of Democrat leadership. I was too young to have any recollection of JFK, and only the barest of interest during the LBJ years, so Carter and Clinton are pretty much my view of “actual Democrat leaders”, as opposed to some imagined ideal.

 I’m sure there must or at least "ought be" some better “abstract Democrat leaders” somewhere, but potentially the party should consider what impression it has left with the real leaders it has picked. It can be hard to imagine the “good” once one has experienced the "supposed to be good".

The late '70s found us in the throes of the energy crisis with inflation spooling up like a turbine from hell. My salary kept going up, but the taxes kept pace with a vengeance, and of course since I wanted to drive a car and buy a house, the situation was pretty grim. Through it all, “Jimah” let us know that the best years of America were behind us, it was time to let others lead, and we had taken too big a piece of the pie for too long. 

He also put on a sweater, sat in front of the fireplace at the White House and told us to not have Christmas lights, turn down our thermostats, and drive 55. He “miscalculated” on the USSR, he thought they were nice folks, but then they went wild and invaded Afghanistan. He really showed them. He kept us out of the Olympics, and made sure that US farmers didn't get to sell grain to the USSR.  I'm sure they were likely very impressed by his willingness to sacrifice the farmers in his own country to make his points on the evils of conquest of their neighbors.

While the USSR marveled at President Peanut’s resolve, apparently the Iranians were less in thrall. On November 4, 1979, they took 66 US citizens hostage.  If the world had any doubts of how far the US had fallen,  they were erased with “The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic”, the botched attempt to free the US hostages that resulted in the loss of the lives of 8 servicemen and never even got close a rescue. It was the perfect Democrat military operation ... it cost American lives, nothing was accomplished, and no enemy, or even property (other than US Military equipment) was lost.

As I watched things unfold I realized that the USSR had a golden opportunity -- they could have taken Europe, and in my opinion, had they decided to launch a couple of nukes, Jimmuh would have surrendered on bended knee, and the remaining people of N America would be slaves. I like to think I would have had the courage to have been shot as a spy, dissenter, rebel or something by now, but who knows, I might have been corrupted and become a party member. One never knows until they face real events. 

Somewhere during this economic and foreign policy debacle, disco, gays, and the Village People, it occurred to me that there really OUGHT to be some other ideas around. Somehow I stumbled on National Review, then edited by Bill Buckley, and the scales fell from my eyes. A liberal family background, sixteen years of liberal education, and 22 years of a steady liberal media diet made it unbelievable that there was “another side” out there. 

In those times, if one wanted to hear of a conservative viewpoint, NR was about the only source available, and Buckley stood like a colossus for the “view from the right”. The joys of finding some souls out there that were FAR from convinced that the best years of America were behind us was a nearly religious experience. People that KNEW that we could compete successfully with Europe, Japan, and the USSR on all fronts … military, economic, and ideological, and WIN!! In these days of post Reagan and post USSR, such ideas seem so obvious, but in the days of “Ask Amy”, such ideas were radical.

I suppose Bill won’t be around for that many more years, but as a breath of fresh air and a great influence in my thinking, “WFB” stands way up there. (and what a WONDERFUL set of initials! ;-) ) Another very enjoyable book.

Who Will Help Flatten?

There is little doubt that Friedman is a Democrat, but one wonders as he looks at the key challenges to the US relative to globalization … education, willingness to move to new industries and ideas, take risks, and the “creative destruction” of whole industries, how does he ever expect that to come out of the Democrats? He quotes Jerry Yang, cofounder of Yahoo! as saying “Where people have hope, you have a middle class”. Friedman agrees that the “middle class” is really a state of mind, but what does one hear Democrats preaching? “The system is unfair”. ”The deck is stacked against the little guy”. “Corporations and the rich are the only ones that can succeed”. The Democrats are the cheerleaders for “victim society”, not the “ownership society” or the “opportunity society”. A nation of victims has no hope in the global ecomomy.

He understands the anti-globalization movement as driven by 5 forces:

1. Upper middle class American liberal guilt at the incredible power that America had amassed in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dot-com boom
2. A rear-guard push by the Old Left – socialists, anarchists, and Trotskyites- in alliance with protectionist trade unions.
3. People protesting the speed at which the world was changing to flat … the “anti-change” folks.
4. Anti-Americanism.
5. “Serious and constructive groups” … NGOs, environmentalists, trade activists, etc. He claims they were more there to “help globalization work right” … I suspect his liberal roots have a bit too much faith.

I liked his comment about “the Old Left”; “These Old Left forces wanted to spark a debate about whether we globalize. The claimed to speak in the name of the Third World poor, but the bankrupt economic policies they advocated made them, in my view, the Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor.” If he would take a closer look at the left wing of his own party, he would find much the same kind of coalition right here in the good old US of A.

He also correctly figures out that the terrorists are not really after any specific target, or any specific action of the USA. They hate us because we are who we are and we are successful. He calls them “Islamo-Leninists” because what they are after is a form of “idea conquest” that has to do with the defeat of America and the rise of a “perfect Muslim state”. Much like the original Leninism, it is short on methods that are likely to work to create that state, but unfortunately, not short on concepts that motivate young Arab men to suicide missions.

One of his “summary phrases” is “There are two ways to flatten the world. One is to use your imagination to everyone up to the same level, and the other is to use your imagination to bring everyone down to the same level.”. The second is of course the Osama way, but I’d argue that the first is not possible. It is VERY possible to do things that “raise everyone” (or by far the majority), BUT, it will not be equal. Whatever mechanisms are created for benefit, some will be able to avail themselves of them more than others. The age old problem is that it is FAR easier to make sure that everyone has nothing than it is to get the virtuous cycle of economic growth to begin.

My hope is that there is enough “left” in this book to get some of the left side of the middle reading and understanding as well. In general, these are concepts that could help move America off the “parked on polarized” spot we are in. If we understand the challenges and the potentials of globalization, it should be something that center, as well as center right and left can reach agreement on and find a way to move the country forward to be a more competitive and successful player.

The Edge of Flatness

Finished up “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, a NYT columnist, originally from Minnesota. 

One of the things that strikes me from the book is the fact that there are only two political parties, and if you want to be seen as an “intellectual” and hang out with folks that the NY Times, there is really only one. I’m sure Friedman would swear to his dying day that he is a Democrat, but while 97% of the book sounds like a Republican free trader, the only places he actually mentions US political parties are the 5 times he mentions that “The Republican Led Congress” cut funding to the NSF, which he takes as a hugely foolish thing to do. The other is that he gets a couple of Bush bashes by name in, one for Bush’s failure to do the “obvious thing” and start an “energy Manhattan project" , and the other when he claims that history will show that Bush shamelessly used 9-11 to promote a right-wing Republican agenda. 

I hope those small fig leaves are enough to allow the lefties to consider a lot of the highly factual information in the book on globalization, the futility of socialism, and how important it is for us to understand that we are in a global economic competition, and the only way to maintain our standard of living is to compete successfully. A little Republican bashing is a small price to pay for the rest of the book.

Friedman Lists 10 “flatteners”:

1. 11/9/89 – The Fall of the Berlin Wall … no walls, open world, capitalism won.
2. 8/9/95 – Netscape goes public, the birth of the “Internet Platform”
3. Work Flow Software – Breaking work up and controlling it.
4. Open Source – Self-organizing collaborative communities
5. Outsourcing – Y2K … the Indians got a foot in the door, specific pieces
6. Offshoring – Moving whole major parts of business overseas
7. Supply Chaining – Horizontal collaboration
8. Insourcing – UPS, hiring other companies to be part of your company.
9. In-Forming – Google, Yahoo, Information at EVERYONEs fingertips
10. The Steroids – Digital, Mobile, Personal, Virtual

These flatteners, along with the “Triple Convergence”:

1. At Y2K, all ten of the flatteners made the global playing field level.
2. Businesses and individuals adopted new habits, skills, and processes to make use of the flat world. Vertical to horizontal.
3. A whole new group of people walked out on the playing field from China, India, and former Soviet Union.

The core messages of the book are:

· Technology, in the form of transportation, communication, computers, software, standards, the internet, bandwidth, etc creates a “flat world” where distance is hardly a factor, and even barriers like language and local government policies are less important than the “global competitive platform”.

· In a flat world, the barriers to competition are small to non-existent. People at computer terminals with phones in India or China can compete very well with people at computer terminals with phones in Ohio or Utah.

· As has been happening for 1000’s of years, the effect of this in the globe is that the size of the economic pie is increased … drastically. When more people create and compete with better tools and less barriers to competition, the economic pie grows for everyone. (failure to realize this is one of the reasons that some fight globalization, just as they fight capitalism)

· All of this means change, and change is never smooth. The growth won’t happen in all the same places as it does today, income will be distributed differently, economic and political power is changed … shifted, different players “win and lose”. People that are in the business of “keeping things the way they are” will be very angry. Socialists and Islamic Fundamentalists have a lot in common as far as being against globalization. Both lose a lot of power if it is successful.

· Free markets and capitalism go hand in hand with globalization. Tom seems to not particularly like that fact, but accepts that once people are seamlessly connected by something that you can’t, and likely don’t want to stop (the internet), the fact that they will “compete” is sort of like gravity coming with mass. Trying to stop it is a waste of time.

That covers a lot of the key points, more commentary in the next post.

The Dark Side of Acting

The remainder of the family finally made the pilgrimage to see “Revenge of the Sith” tonight. The effects get better all the time, and the film is obviously a pivotal point in what is probably great film saga of my lifetime, but one wonders if there is a limit to how bad acting can get.

I try to intellectualize, and think that MAYBE if we didn’t know what was going to happen and have all our expectations built up for it, the acting wouldn’t seem so bad … but then I’m forced to conclude, nah, it would still be horrible. The moment of conversion to the dark side would seem to be worth a re-take or two, but I have to wonder if Lucas didn’t just let them stumble through it and hit the showers without ever bothering. At least I HOPE so, it would be an awful shame to be one of the actors and have given that “their best”.

Some ado has been made about the supposed “lines that sound like Bush” from the fledgling Darth Vader. One item is supposedly a little mix of “those that are not with us are against us”. However, Bush didn’t exactly invent that concept, one place to read it is Luke 11:23 “He that is not with me is against me”. I suppose I could try to put some meaning into Darth’s promises to “end the war”, “provide safety, and FREEDOM” … and some comments about “democracy”, but it seems like a stretch to me. The use of the term “freedom” did seem a bit odd for Darth, he never really struck me as that sort of “free and easy” kind of guy, but if the Lucas eye for acting will let some of the things pass that did, I would guess that dialog precision for characters isn’t something he wakes up at night over.

There are plenty of Evangelicals out there that get pretty excited over the whole “force thing” as being dangerous for kids to play with. It certainly has a bit of a Zen flavor with it on the “attachment is a bad thing” front, and “don’t become a control freak” … which of course Vader is hard to beat as en embodiment of. On the other hand though, it does seem to pretty starkly identify the concepts of good and evil, which is somewhat rare in the modern world. It also lets a vast amount of the secular world play with the idea that there MIGHT be “something more” than just matter and technology.

It seems to me that the answer on most of these things is “it’s only a movie after all”. The light saber fights were great, lots of special effects, and what had to happen happened … even if the acting did make that part rather painful at times. I remember sitting in the theatre and watching the first one in Eau Claire WI the summer of ’77 before my senior year of college. Not many movie tales play out over that much of our lives. Better acting would be nice, but I still tip my hat to the genius of George Lucas. Star Wars has become one of the shared experiences of nearly all Americans and most of the world, and on balance, it has been a pretty good force.

Extraordinary Times

On the way into work this AM I heard the joy on NPR that “compromise had been reached, crisis had been averted”. Whenever I hear NPR happy, I’m pretty sure that something bad has happened, but in this case I’m more and more thinking that they just don’t know what happened.

They were interviewing their darling, John McCain. With the press, the quickest way to be a darling is to be a “maverick” Republican (an endearing term for “weasel”, or “Republicans acting like Democrats”). This is an area they are 100% consistent … the quickest way to be insane, a pariah, the filthiest scum alive, is to be a “maverick” Democrat (someone that a Democrat would see as a “weasel”, acting like a Republican). Zell Miller is a great example of a Democrat like that. All he did was SPEAK at a Republican convention. When McCain was being courted by Kerry as a potential Democrat VP CANIDATE, he was treated by the press as the closest thing to divine as could be found on this earth. Just one of the 1000’s of examples where press bias is completely clear.

This AM, King John was in fine form. I suspect that the biggest single element in this “compromise” is a calculation by McCain relative to his ’08 run. His MIScalculation is always that he discovers too late that it is REPUBLICANS that vote in the Republican primaries … the kind that actually believe in what the party stands for, and think that if they vote for Republicans, they will get folks that act like Republicans. Very odd concept to McCain, but he enjoys press adulation just too much to remember that when a primary isn’t actually on. He was a happy camper, and who wouldn’t be, when you get to be the main guy to pick what a suitable judge is, rather than having to have it come up to a vote for 100 guys in the Senate? You get to lead your little merry band of “moderates”, and at BEST, 14 guys hold the power. Actually, since you are their leader, and setting up for ’08, you hold the most sway. PLUS, you get some nice free press adulation for being such a super guy. It is good to be King.

However, all that really happened is that three Bush nominees that the Democrats hate, get to be voted on and nearly certainly approved. True, 2 guys that very few people have ever heard of are denied the up or down vote that every nominee has gotten in the last couple hundred years (with the exception of the LBJ stunt). That is of course a new height of partisan obstructionism, but if you are a liberal press, you just use the looking glass, and call it the other way around. Doing something that has NEVER been done (filibustering a judicial nominee that made it through committee) is “normal”, PREVENTING that new tactic, is “a threat to the Constitution, and UNPRECEDENTED”. Things look different through the looking glass.

The Democrats preserved the right to go where no minority has gone in obstructionism by promising not to go there … unless of course it is “extraordinary”. Democrats have a huge problem with words like “is”, so my faith in their understanding of “extraordinary” is quite limited. On the odd case that they mean what they say, and unless Bush does something really extraordinary, like appointing a liberal, one might fall for the idea that this deal means that they aren’t going to filibuster judicial nominees. Somehow though, I suspect that extraordinary times are ahead.

The Byrd Option

Having just returned from a highly successful walleye fishing trip to Lake Mille Lacs, I return to the Blog. Walleyes of 27”, 24”, 23”, and 21” were my big catches, but the numbers of big fish were even well exceeded by another guy on the outing. Great way to spend a long weekend.

I’ve been generally away from the news, but couldn’t help hearing a bit as we turned on a show this AM that had Joe Lieberman on it. In ’95, Joe argued that the filibuster not be allowed to block judicial nominees, and proposed a sliding vote scale that would allow the cloture vote to eventually get down to 51, so the Senate could give the nominee an up or down vote. They had him on tape arguing that it was wrong to filibuster nominees, and when asked what he had to say. He got away with “the situation has changed”. The biggest change of course is that the guy doing the nominating at that point would have been a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Lieberman is about as good as the Democrats come, it is sad to see him reduced to being just another partisan hack.

There has only been one case where a judical nominee was filibustered before, and that was Abe Fortas in ’68, a truly odd case of LBJ trying to deny Nixon appointment of the new Chief Justice, and appointing a shady guy that both sides agreed was not qualified. He was filibustered by the bi-partisan group of Democrats and Republicans, and resigned rather than face the music of financial his financial dealings. Hardly a precedent for what we have now.

It has been argued that the Constitution says something about the 60 vote super-majority and appointments, but it does not. Treaties, impeachment, and amendments to the Constitution are the only things that require 60 votes. The only thing that drives filibuster is “tradition”, but of course the “tradition” of “advice and consent” was that an elected President had the right to an up or down vote on his nominees … until Abe Fortas (discussed above), and of course now.

Only in the liberal press land of American can we see ex-KKK Klegal, Robert Byrd, who talked for 14 hours to prevent civil rights legislation, and has used and threatened to use Senate rules in the past to limit debate, now talk about such limits being “like Hitler”. The comedic skills of the Democrats never cease to amaze. Byrd himself has used, and threatened to use, the very same mechanism that the Republicans now hope to use to limit debate. It is very odd to listen to the media on this subject. One senses that with the Democrats in the minority, they have a very strong desire for “minority rule”, something which was ALWAYS considered 100% “obstructionism” in ’92 – ’94 when the Republicans were in the minority.

While Dick Morris is often a flake, this is one time I fine myself in perfect agreement with him. In his article at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1393564/posts , he argues that the Republicans need to quit being a bunch of pansies and get an honest to goodness 24x7 filibuster going over some of these circuit court nominees. It is a great opportunity to see what the left wingnut Senate minority thinks are important issues vs the economy, the war, Social Security, roads, etc. I personally would relish seeing the ex-hooded knight of the South, Byrd, reading a phonebook to block a Black Woman CA Supreme Court Justice, elected with over 70% of the vote. It is the kind of picture that can only happen in America.

At least there should be some fireworks to watch this week!

Fake But True

We used to call the Minneapolis Start Tribune the “Red-Star Tribune” in honor of it’s Pravda like adherence to the Communist line of thought, but the world has changed since Reagan destroyed the Evil Empire. With the rise of “Red State / Blue State”, the “Red-Star” could be confusing. Maybe the “Blue Flame” since it is certainly on the side of Blue, it’s anger is constantly flaming. For example, http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5409054.html “Newsweek, It doesn’t Deserve the Diatribes”.

The old saying “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” comes to mind pretty rapidly when a Republican says anything critical of the press. It is definitely different with a Democrat … there was a lot of press hand-wringing about “are we being too critical” during the Clinton serial affairs. In 2002 after the Republicans won seats in Congress in an off year, old Billy C chided the press on “not being critical enough post-911”. They fell all over themselves with recrimination and got on the “Bash Bush” theme with haste.

One wonders if there isn’t some “central casting” somewhere that gives liberals their ideas. The piece picks up the wacko; “Bush was wrong about WMD, so what is the big deal about Newsweek being wrong” comparison. Let’s see … the UN, UK, both houses of Congress, including Hillary, Kerry, Edwards, McCain, … every paper in the US (how many times did we read of concerns about Saddam using chemical weapons against our troops in ’91), etc were “wrong”. Of course there is the uncomfortable fact that Saddam actually USED chemical weapons against the Kurds.

The fact is, we never FOUND chemical weapons (in quantity … we did find some, plus shells to use them, and suits for protection during their use). If it wasn’t for the DNA stain on the blue dress, liberals would still be chortling that there was never any PROOF that Clinton walked the halls of power with his pants around his knees. I sometimes suspect that there is nothing that makes a liberal more happy than a bad guy that “gets away with it”. Saddam of course didn’t EXACTLY “get away with it”, but their level of glee that he managed to escape getting caught with incontrovertible evidence of WMD seems to be one of their only remaining sources of joy. Well, I guess that and Abu Grab.

So what is the difference between going to war with a known killer that has used WMD in the past, claims he still has it, everyone believes he has it, and with intelligence that he plans to use it on our nation, and writing a piece in a weekly rag claiming some new horrible atrocity committed by the troops of your own nation when you have very little evidence that it is true? I don’t know, the two seem VERY similar don’t they? I mean think of all the potential downside of Newsweek NOT publishing that piece? What if they hadn’t published it and it WERE true? Maybe there would be less anti-American sentiment around the world? I suppose when you are Newsweek, or a lefty, one just can’t pass up an opportunity to increase anti-American sentiment.

The Star Trib couldn’t even leave Dan Rather’s sorry memos lie in their grave. No, it seems that the lefties are hard on the “fake but correct” standard of journalism these days. If you are a lefty and you can make up a plausible story (or even an IMplausible one that is bad for Bush), fake some evidence, and print it, you should “stand your ground”. Anyone that tries to question such tactics is “Nixonian”. The wagons seem to be circled and the lines drawn. The good point is that unless you are completely blind, what side the media is on is pretty clear.

Newsweek Lied, People Died

To any American awake enough to realize that the mainline media has been left-biased for years, the Dan Rather story with the fake memos last fall was no surprise, other than for the level of incompetence. Dan and CBS thought that a one hour prime-time special that was completely one-sided anti-Bush would be a great way to help their buddy John Kerry. Mainstream US media works to get Democrat elected … no news there, except of course that the memos were faked. Golly, what a shame.

It seems however that Newsweek as stepped over a new line. Their May 9^th issue carried a story that US forces were defiling the Muslim holy book, the Quran, by flushing it in a toilet. This story spread across the Arab world, including Afghanistan and has apparently been a major factor in the latest round of violence, which have included at least 15 deaths. We know the press is anti-Republican, and the far left tends to be anti-American. What we are seeing now is the mainstream press moving more to the anti-American side.

The whole Abu-Grab story is an exercise in attempting to create as much of a problem for the US in Iraq, or other Arab countries as possible. When the NYT had it on their FRONT PAGE over 40 times last year, one could at least hope it was just another thinly veiled attempt to defeat Bush. This years “celebration” of the “anniversary” (of the story breaking, not the event) lets us know that it runs deeper than that.

Anyone with a couple firing neural circuits knows that the whole prison abuse story is going to help inflame Arabs. The media and the left has CONSTANTLY pointed out that one of the key reasons that the war in Iraq is a bad idea is because “it makes terrorists faster than we can kill them”. They must be a bit concerned as to the truth of that assertion, since their treatment of Abu-Grab and now the Quran desecration fable one year later show that they feel that there may need to be an “assist” in the minting of new terrorists. Newsweek is deliberately printing a story that has every potential of getting people including US soldiers killed … if it was true, that would be bad enough. When it isn’t true, it is unconscionable.

The mainline media is of course going to back off this as fast as they can, it is already off the CNN headlines, replaced by “Looks Like a Bad Hurricane Season”, but it is still available at http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/15/newsweek.quran/index.html.

I wonder how quickly it would be buried if Rush Limbaugh or Fox news made an “error” of similar import? "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's May 23 issue. Touching.

Newsweek lied, people died. BUT, they said they were “sorry” … but why did they need to do this story in the first place? It turns out they used some of the same logic as CBS used to “verify” the memo story. They asked officials, and they “didn’t deny it”. There may be a couple of flaws in that logic. Dan Rather was duly accused of being the Queen of All Space Unicorns on the Internet last fall, and is yet to deny this serious charge. If the logic of “failure to deny means it is true” works, the Space Unicorns can rest, their Queen as been found!

We have an American press that is trying to give Al-Jezeera a run for it’s money on being anti-American and inciting Arabs against America and Americans. Fox news is considered biased because their position on the War is to attempt to provide a “pro-American view”. Isn’t it just as biased (and a bit harder to understand) to go out of your way to provide and ANTI-American view?

It would be nice if something could be done here. Freedom of speech doesn’t include the freedom to yell “fire”! in a crowded theatre (when there is no fire). I’d argue that Newsweek as crossed that line. Had the story been true, it would have just showed a short-sighted interest in not caring about what was likely to happen, including loss of life. Since it is turning out to NOT be true, Newsweek lied about a story that cost lives. We could do with one less left-wing pamphlet.

Retiring Models

Anyone that reads this Blog will get sick of “models”. Partially because of the computer software background, and partially because of reading too many books on the brain and how we think, I am tied to the thought that we NEVER work with “reality”, as humans we are ONLY able to work with a model of reality in our brains. A common way of saying this is “the map is not the territory”. Note that this does NOT mean that I find “truth” or “reality” to be “relative”. Your “model” may be that you can jump off a 100’ cliff without being injured, but reality will show you that model is flawed. One definition of “intelligence” is “how predictive are your models”? Unfortunately, that often means changing models to conform to reality.

Today’s model to be explored is the “retirement model”. Prior to FDR, many folks hoped that they would die before they were FORCED to “retire” by ill health, or that they could find some way to “slow down easy”. FDR created Social Security with the model that if you lived beyond the average life expectancy, you would be able to stop working and have enough of a “pension” from the government to get by. There were two fundamentals to this model:

1). The average person would never use it, since they would be dead before they were eligible to receive payments.

2). Since the set of people that received the money was small, and the set of people paying in was large and growing, it would never cost workers very much.

Like all government programs, Social Security became an institution. What is more, businesses bought into the model as well and came up with ideas like “30 and out” … again, with roughly the same assumptions. Much like the lottery, younger people could be motivated (by business), and votes could be bought (by the FDR Democrats) with the idea of a sweet deal at the end of the working years. Both parties had the expectation that most of the employees would never see the money, and both the Social Security programs and the Pension programs were set up so that you didn’t “own the pot”. The business or the government “had the money”, the government of course had NONE, and just kept moving it from younger workers to the elderly, business funded the pensions and some percentage, assumed to be “enough”.

Both of the assumptions of these programs have of course turned out to be FALSE in very large ways. The life expectancy has shot up and shows signs of shooting up more, the population growth as stalled, so less and less workers are making payments to more and more retirees. But, like typical humans, we would rather wail and wring our hands than look at the situation that we are now in. Unfortunately, the signs have started to show up that indicate that the fallacy of the kind of retirement model that FDR bequeathed on the nation is coming unraveled faster than the Social Security program.

United Airlines declared Bankruptcy last week and their retirement plan was too under funded to pay out the rates that retirees had counted on. It sounds like their pensions will be cut by 40%. When IBM declared disappointing results the first quarter, a major part of the reason was the need to put $250 Million in the pension fund, and it sounds like that will be done every quarter this year for a cool 1 Billion $ drained off profits. GM and Ford have had their bonds reduced to “junk” status, and a major reason is the cost of funding their pensions. This has been coming for some time of course … IBM has NO pension plan for people starting out today … they have a nice 401K plan and they do some good matches, but YOU carry the task of saving for your retirement. The model of retirement that we were sold is simply not possible with the changes to reality.

The old model has been broken for a long time, and if we were honest with ourselves, we would have seen it long ago. We rarely are that honest though, we LOVE “wishful thinking” … some folks have been able to retire with pensions and Social Security, so it isn’t “fair” if we can’t too. I certainly know the feeling VERY well, I signed up for “30 and out” when I came into IBM, just as I signed up for “Lifetime Employment”. Both of those are gone now. There is still some chance that I might be able to do “35 and out”, but an honest appraisal would indicate that while I may well be out of IBM at that point, being out of the workforce will be more problematic.

We ought to enjoy a good laugh at ourselves. What we are complaining about is:

1). Living longer

2). The population not growing as fast

I won’t waste effort trying to convince anyone that living longer is a good thing, if you aren’t convinced already, my efforts won’t help. On the population, when I was in school, the idea of the population growing too fast was a HUGE problem … mass starvation, lack of room, horrible pollution, and general disaster were a “certainty” before the millennium. Having a relatively stable population, growing as much because of the elderly living longer than because of the birthrate, is supposed to be completely wonderful.

It is very human to “feel entitled”, to want reality to conform to our mental models. When we see reality failing to conform to our models, our natural reaction is to behave much like a child … to bluster that “someone in charge” needs to CORRECT this RIGHT NOW! We need to have our way! We need to have models, but when reality changes, we need to change our models to conform or things tend to be much more painful.

Flattening to the Middle

“The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman is going well. Another “globalization book”, I liked his “Lexus and the Olive Tree”, but since he has come out with this one , anyone with an interest can just as well skip that one and move directly to this. Lot of the same ground with some more advanced thought and information.

One of the things that I like about Freidman is that he seems to be a voice that both the “middle left” and the “middle right” can at least understand, and in many cases, come to agreement on. There is a lot of discussion of “polarization” of the country (not in the book, this is a “meta-discussion”, the book will come on other days), and there is a lot of truth to that as well, since we live in a time where what used to be “shared values” are not nearly as well shared as they once were. I’d list; Christian faith, commitment to family and moral values, basic support for the US system as being “very good, or the best”, belief that individuals need to have personal responsibility, and a strong value to hard work as a good thing. Pre-1960, I see these basic values as holding an 80/20 kind of majority in the US. The 60’s changed that, and a significant part of our country turned “hard left”, with their list of values being; there is no God, little commitment to traditional family, strong commitment to personal gratification, lack of individual responsibility (I’m a victim), basic animosity to the US system as being “unfair”, and a sense of “right”, or “entitlement” rather than value of individual work.

The “new left” rose in power through the 60’s and 70’s, but likely never reached much over 30-35% of the actual electorate. Their power and influence however has been magnified by the fact that they are the voices of the mainline media, Hollywood, and Universities. They make of 90%+ of those elites, so their “values” (or lack of values) is constantly displayed and presented in a positive light. The vast majority of people feel much more comfortable to be on the “popular side”, so while many of the actual views/agenda of this group likely was never really espoused by more than 35% of the electorate, the left elite has always been able to package their agenda to appeal enough to make them very competitive politically.

When the media talks about “polarization”, it really means that it’s agenda is being questioned. From the 50’s to the 90’s we were a “majority Democrat” country, but during much of that time, the Democrats were far more to the center than they are today. A lot of the old Southern Democrats were quite conservative, especially on moral issues, so Democrat / Republican was largely a discussion about role of Government and Business Climate … the parties often agreed on “American values”, “American exceptionalism”, and “American Defense”. The big change in American politics is really just the Democrats moving left. Looking at most of the values of the Republicans, they are very little changed from “American Consensus” shared by BOTH parties in the 50’s.

One of the general topics I’d like to explore over the next few days or weeks are areas where Americans can “come together”. I see Friedman as a “center left” guy that can make sense on some of those things in a way that can bind people to the center, and hopefully shrink that angry, and often anti-American left wing.