Friday, July 30, 2010

The Slide from Fixing to Complaining

Lawrenceville, Pa. residents had a meeting chaired by a Pittsburgh city councilman last night. The topic was the Marcellus Shale Formation. A member of the Marcellus Shale Council, which is a body of oil and gas drillers, was present as well. There were a number of concerns voiced, the prominent one the potential poisoning of water by the drilling. The consensus was that the community was opposed to drilling even though the drilling representative stated there were no plans for any driller to drill in the Lawrenceville area and it was unlikely anyone would.

The process of drilling in shale formations includes "fracing" where a liquid, usually water, is fired into the shale area after the area has been approached with conventional drilling. The theoretical problem is contamination of water sources by the fracing liquid. The depth of the drilling is usually away from groundwater sources; drilling usually is at several thousand feet at least. While this possible contamination is a real concern, the examples of contamination are usually not active drilling or fracing but rather abandoned and collapsed wells. Indeed a recent report from the EPA paraphrased in a journal stated: "Although thousands of wells are fractured annually, the EPA did not find a single incident of the contamination of drinking water wells by hydraulic fracturing fluid injection. Effective state regulation has made hydraulic fracturing a safe and environmentally-sound way to maximize and conserve our nation's natural resources." (See http://www.iogcc.state.ok.us/hydraulic-fracturing).

Southwestern Pennsylvania has been a hotbed of shale drilling recently. The Marcellus Shale has promise of being a huge, productive natural gas source for many years. In a nation with acute energy concerns one would think such a find would be applauded, its aspects analyzed and plans for maximum benefit for all made. In an area with a devastated economic base one would think that dancing in the streets might be the order of the day. (It has been said the natural gas industry in western Pennsylvania has potential to be larger than steel at its zenith.) Yet what do we see? We see a community organizing to stop an economic venture that has no intention of going there. It reminds one of the old vaudeville joke of the man who is found in Central Park cutting newspaper into small pieces and scattering them around. When asked the reason for this behavior he says: "To keep away the elephants." When he is told incredulously that there are no elephants in New York he replies, "See, it's really working."

There is a need for us to intervene in our history, to be an active participant in what is happening to us. Action, like responsibility, can be taught. It can be made part of the community ethos. Necessity might hurry it. The first step might be to attempt not to look ridiculous.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Athletes and their Crowd

When Steinbrenner was buried, not a Yankee player was in attendance. When LeBron James weighed his choices he thought not once of the Cleveland fan or his community. Yet somehow the fan feels the athlete has an investment in him and his world, has some concern about him, responds to his cheers and exhortations. He feels they are joined by their common interest in his team, that the fan is the famous "twelfth man."

This identification is a true public relations miracle. How the coddled, babied, egocentric, self-absorbed and money addled athlete could possibly be seen by the public as representative, heroic, outgoing and responsible in his community staggers the imagination. How many local citizens have to be shot, throttled, beaten, thrown up on, wrecked, groped, raped and terrorized before the community figures it out? The athlete is not one of them. He is not a community member, not a local citizen. He is an obnoxious visitor at best, an alien mercenary at worst. And he cynically exploits the community's best unifying hope: To create a common bond and direction among its people.

This world needs achievers and we need to note them. Heroes would be great, too, but we need achievers. We need them to prove the value of distinction, to show the rewards of effort and sacrifice. We need them to emulate. And we need communities; we need the feeling of some occasional unifying point where we can gather, like around a campfire, and share in our commonality and recognize our filial bond.

We ask too much of these athletes. Let them play. It's the game and the audience we are there for.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

American Gigolo

There is a recent article in Slate by Anne Applebaum whose title tells all: American Hypocrites. http://www.slate.com/id/2260968/ The thrust is that Americans demand much more from their government than they admit and that the talk of downsizing it is little more. Her focus is on the absurd preoccupation we have with safety. We seem to hold the government responsible for everything from the actions of madmen to natural disasters. Following every such event the actions and reactions of the government are carefully analyzed as programs, people and policies are reviewed, removed, replaced and repositioned.

What is not included in this insight is the government as a willing participant, more, a volunteer. The prevailing thought seems to see the government as quite capable of meeting such goofy demands. We watch as they pursue down narrowing alleys of diminishing returns. We applaud as they start to wonder aloud about the health habits of its citizens. There is a national crisis of shower heads!

We are less hypocrites than gigolos. We have given up whatever talents we possess and, having reviewed the nasty combat in life, have cynically surrendered to premature fatigue, sidled up to the gaudy aging woman at the party and sold ourselves to her.

The problem is the old gal is living beyond her means.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Entropy and the Order of Things

We are homo sapiens, from the Latin "wise man" or "knowing man". This term is neither accurate nor defining. In our early agricultural days we must have been splendid, planning and creating and changing our environment for all the world to see. Now our knowledge has fallen on hard times. Information trumps wisdom; things seem beyond our reach--even those things we have created. We have gone from the sorcerer to his apprentice, lost in a complex world of a master's making. Both art and science now declare that accuracy and understanding are impossible as a maxim. Despite our massive influence, something has been lost.

Nor is the phrase defining. Our brain is startling and vastly different from our competitors but we are not thinking beings with emotional baggage, we are emotional beings with thinking added. We are an elaboration of those very competitors we have outrun. We are a palimpsest with the look of thinking but emotions-- deep, ancient and mysterious-- bleeding through.

This incredible mixture of emotional hardware and thinking software do not exist on a border of antagonism and conflict, they complement each other. They are intertwined. They allow for texture, scent and hue--the complexity of life. But this wondrous gift comes with a price: There must be order. There must be structure. We each must impose ourselves upon the potential chaos of these independent elements. Just as God has devised his innumerable macrocosms, so we must our microcosm.

All systems deteriorate, wind down. Even a solar system, or a galaxy of solar systems, built and fired from some primal furnace will eventually cool and lose its integration. Entropy is the order of things. And each of us must create his world--and maintain his fragile order against the decay--with his "knowing" will.

Monday, July 19, 2010

We Are All Atomic Soldiers Now

A summary of the recent Romer study on the relationship between taxes and gross domestic product: "They find that an announced tax change equivalent to one percent of GDP causes a three percent reduction in GDP over the next two and half years, which would indicate that we are approximately at the Laffer maximum - that increases and decreases in taxes do not have a long term effect on revenue, that increasing taxes merely increases the relative status of people in the state sector by reducing the absolute wealth of people outside the state sector, without increasing the absolute wealth of people in the state sector."

What does any of this mean? This study implies that taxation has a direct effect on the productivity of a nation, that taxation reduces national wealth. It doesn't just shift wealth; it reduces wealth across the board! This implies there is no ability of the state to redistribute wealth, the state can only redistribute poverty. The recipients of the tax largess are net losers as are the taxed.

The nation is at the mercy of the good intentions of the Bathos, regardless of the risks involved. Surely one would look at a study like this and be cautious. One would think of ways to create these circumstances in a smaller area with less potential fallout, to test these ideas further. But no, this plan marches on. And Christina Romer is in the Obama administration!

Years ago the government, eager to see how fighting men responded emotionally to atomic explosions, put a number of soldiers close to an atomic ground zero site. (http://nsdl.org/resource/2200/20061003172814974T) Those men were exposed to tremendous radiation. There are debates over the cause and effect of the illnesses those men subsequently suffered but there should be no debate over the nature of the experiment itself. It was stupid, shortsighted, ill conceived, careless and cruel. It was a bunch of sorcerer's apprentices playing at science. A bunch of curious, well meaning men behind desks making suggestions and plans, everyone with a "good idea", none of them realizing they were over their collective heads.

We are all atomic soldiers now.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

The New Inquisitors

"If you're going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth," said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. "It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect." Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts "connector," the beta version of ObamaCare's insurance "exchanges," and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator...
(WSJ 7/7/10)


Liberty demands the ability to make a free and reasonable decision, and then act upon it. This also implies an atmosphere of truth. Information may be limited. The information may be by the very nature of the question obscure to human knowledge. It may be technically complex and obtuse. But liberty cannot exist without the mutual agreement between the governed and the government that both will be fair and honest with each other. From the governed side, the rules, responsibilities and limits of the government should be clear and concise. From the government side their aims, methods and obedience to the rules should be honest and transparent. Most importantly, the government should never hold its citizens in contempt, never place itself as the censor of the citizen's reality. No servant of the people --no servant or tool--should ever be allowed to define itself.

Power and its abuses come from pride. From arrogance. The leader knows the truth; he knows more than the citizen does or can. This arrogance used to be conferred by God on special families and bloodlines. More recently it grew out of concepts, pseudo scientific notions that elites agreed linked individuals in a human herd of behavior the elites could guide. Now this pride is self conferred; you just come up with an idea and value it because you are so able and everyone else is not.

In any free society, a statement such as Mr. Kingsdale"s above should be the end of his public service. With prejudice.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Heroes and Bathoes

It has been a long road from making the Enlightenment flesh in the Declaration of Independence to the worrying over the Army's risk of capsizing Guam. There have been ups and downs (Jackson, Polk, Buchanan, Lincoln) but no one would make a graph of highlights or a few points. Still, the leadership from Wilson on has not been stellar. Roosevelt get points for not losing a war, Truman for being an honest human being, Eisenhower for building a road system and confidence, Kennedy for being inspiring, Clinton for being malleable, the second Bush for being steadfast but none of these qualities look good isolated on a resume or an on-line dating questionnaire. And none of the negatives are included. None of the goofy experiments, none of the immortal bad ideas. True, these errors have not been limited to the executive branch. Social security, separate but equal, the draft lottery, the federal pharmacy plan--all special little Edsels from their own little designers--all designed as products of our best and brightest.

Adams was not always right (see Sedition Act), nor was Jefferson (see his reason for not freeing his slaves) nor was Lincoln (see McClellan, for Heaven's sake) but the one quality that seems different in the more modern America is the scope of government vision, the state as seen from the government pinnacle. Reagan's appeal was his refusal to be mired in small fights, his insistence that the government was first a concept, a philosophical creation. Why one of America's least abstract leaders would be so correct in his assessment of this need is beyond me but others should understand and follow. This is simply a different country and, even when it is not, it still wants to be. Special interests, unions, abortion pros and cons, race, internal combustion pros and cons--all of these competing and haggling partisans--must always be the sideshow of the towering American Experiment. As much as these debates get under our collective skin, and as much as the new communications allow for dental drilling intensity of these debates, they are Lilliputian in comparison.

And any political leader who aligns himself primarily with these debates diminishes himself and will diminish his legacy.

Experts and Critics

A recent article by a federal reserve economist laments the intrusion of nonprofessionals and amateurs into the field of economic discussion. http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655771/Economics-is-Hard She is inclusive; she dislikes bloggers but Krugman too. There is simply too much information, too many things to consider and the subtleties of these complexities mixing with the abstractions of general theories...well, it just can overwhelm the little people.

And then there is this declaration:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
This article claims that not only are people generally ill informed, they are resistant to making better decisions when given better information. Worse, the more sophisticated thinkers are the worst students because, presumably, they are more confident in their opinions and more convinced in the value of their starting points.

What's a guy to do?

The reflexive answer would be minimize the damage these poor thinkers can do. Professionals as well as critics. But critics do little damage; they just worry people. The experts on the other hand can do plenty. One is reminded of the dearly departed Long Term Capital Management, an investment company created by Nobel Prize winning economists whose brilliance was so great that they made all but a few cast a shadow. They invested and behaved almost in isolation--like a cult--with no criticism from without because no one could make any sense of what they were doing. And they created a disaster. The fund went bankrupt and almost took Citicorp with it. My bet is they would have benefited from a few more average opinions from minds feeding on less rarefied air. But they sought no advice. Nor did they take any lessons. Indeed, a few years ago, the same people came back to the marketplace with the same philosophy and attracted three more billion dollars which they then lost in a new and improved bankruptcy.

There is a theme here. History is littered with the efforts of men trying to shape the hard world to their mental vision. But unlike the scientific world which is intensely critical and hostile to anything but the most rigorously proven cause and effect, this softer world of quasi-science functions in a atmosphere virtually devoid of self criticism. So however flawed the critics are, they are mandatory by default.

And the experts? They should contract their horizons, minimize their scope. They should be cautious when their analysis is that the failure of a system was the result of not doing it hard or long enough. They should try to learn the differences between law and notion. They should be made to study Heisenberg and Quantum Entanglement. Then they might be able to reach the Nirvana that is the hallmark of scientific search for knowledge and its ideal, truth.

Humility.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Don't Play Lacrosse at Duke

Yesterday my youngest son was driving home from work when he saw a child, four or five years of age, toddling alone along the sidewalk. Concerned there was no adult in sight, he slowed, waited and finally called to the boy and asked if he was lost. At that moment a man and a woman turned the far corner and started down the street. They were obviously the parents and my son waved and drove off. The man smiled; the woman was furious. She may have written down his license number.

We have become very sensitive to certain risks in society. And our approach has been to emphasize the marginal, to accept no small chance. In spirit this is not unlike much of our approaches elsewhere. We do not stop therapy for the terminally ill, we will stop using a drug with a tiny complication rate, "impairment starts with one sip", we do not build nuclear plants because despite the country's safe nuclear history there is always that chance.

All hospitals now have newborn units that are isolated from the rest of the hospital with complex entrance codes; regular hospital ids, even for physicians, do not allow access and special response teams--for example cardiac arrest--are admitted to these units only by visual recognition. (I can not imagine how anyone would get out in a fire.)

My shoes were x-rayed by airline security this weekend.

Every college campus has a rape counselling center.

These precautions are taken against terrible but rare crimes that the society takes very seriously.(In the last several decades I can recall three specific and separate instances where day care employees were tried--and convicted--for crimes against children that included acts that were physically impossible and at any other time in history would be considered witchcraft.)The original estimates of campus rape reported by Koss was one in four. 25%! (The chance of being the victim of any felony in Detroit is 2%.) Yet the average visit to a campus rape center is 5 women annually for private schools, proportionally higher for larger. Kidnapping of newborns in hospitals from 1983 to 2006 averaged 5 in 4,000,000 births annually. 1 in 800,000. Shoe bombers are rare as well. There are 23,000 kidnappings in the U.S. a year, over 80% by family or acquaintances. In 1999 115 children were taken by strangers overnight for the purpose of abuse or ransom. 115 in 40,000,000.Yet these are crimes that are personal and community disasters. What cost or inconvenience should be spared?

In a culture that seems to be searching for community, suspicion and fear are ruinous acids in the cultural fabric. Individual experience will always trump general experience. I have no answer to this but I do have advice for all males: Protect yourself first. Always , always think the worst. The worst will be thought of you.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Spies and Influence

The recent Russian spy arrests gives more than an insight into a changing, gentrified spy world; it comments on the very nature of society and where the leverage is. LeCarre is quite gone. The spy no longer looks to compromise an official with the proverbial "dead girl or live boy" in bed. No more complex financial exchanges, no simple sex and/or cash. Nor is there the search for the famous deluded idealist. No, these spies go to Harvard and then try to get on commissions.This is the line from the Russian headquarters to one of the spies, Murphy, quoted in the L.A.Times: "The group allegedly attended one of Moscow's most elite spy schools before landing in America. Their mission was spelled out, somewhat awkwardly, in a 2009 message to the Murphy's from Moscow Center.'You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,' the message read, according to the FBI affidavit. 'Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e, to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels [intelligence reports] to C [Center].'"

"Policymaking circles?" Guys just sitting around? Is the implication here that the informal groups that casually discuss and advocate policies are a real power that infiltrating units hope to learn from and perhaps influence? And are those Russian interests so acceptable to us that they could be advocated by a seemingly honest American without much suspicion or risk? Have the enemies of the United States analysized us and decided that weapons and tactics are not as rewarding a spy target as formal and informal policy conferences? Does a spy get more bang for his buck sitting at a GDP luncheon than stealing a guidence system blueprint? Does a bullet he inserts in a Power Point have more impact on his manipulative plans than a titanium one? Has confrontation become a nudge? Can the aims and opinions that advance the Russian state really be presented to American conferences as just other ideas?

One of the great problems in the government occurs when a policy seems to confound logic and national benefit. The immigration debate stumbles to mind. The advantage of coming to this country illegally is to have your children automatically made citizens and recipients of welfare benefits, education and safety. Moreover you are an attractive employee as you have lower wage demands with no withholding or social security taxes. But the declaration that the government cannot control its own borders reveals an ineptness in an area that most people think is basic and consequently undermines the government. Moreover, to make an illegal immigrant a citizen has no effect on his children but eliminates the major reason to employ him as his wages and tax expenses will immediately rise. So amnesty will make the government a laughingstock , creates a huge number of unemployed and will not solve the underlying problem of terrorist infiltration or the attractiveness of illegal workers. So it makes no sense and consequently inspires theories that try to make sense of the decision by emphasizing more shadowy motives.

This administration has been making and supporting some peculiar decisions. This new spy information should make great talk show fodder.