Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The Budget of a Thousand Cuts

The following numbers are a summary of this year's budget and where the money goes. The hubbub centers on how to deal with the deficit, decrease spending or raise taxes. Now I am very opposed to the transfer of financial decision-making from earners with a vested interest in the result to politicians pretending to have no non vested interest in the results but I look at this simple chart and I can not figure out where the spending cuts will come from. I simply see no alternative to a grossly inefficient tax increase with its attendant decrease in productivity and taxes. That translates into a slow, gradual decline of GDP and living standards for the producers.

National Budget: 3.83 Trillion $

Non-discretionary Budget: 2.417 Trillion $
Components:
1. Social Security: 730 Billion $
2. Income Security: 580 Billion $
3. Medicare: 491 Billion $
4. Medicaid: 297 Billion $
5. Interest Nation. Debt 251 Billion $
6. Vets Benefits: 68 Billion $

Discretionary Budget: 1.415 Trillion $
Components:
1. Military National Security: 895 Billion $
2. Nonmilitary Security: 520 Billion $

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/05/budget-and-citizen-cuts.html

STARTing in any Direction

Any treaty purporting to control and/or limit nuclear weaponry seems on its face to be reasonable and desirable. The current START Treaty under discussion raises several interesting questions. The first is the curious decision to include defensive weapons with attack ones. What could possibly make a nation create and include that equality? One could argue that offense=defense might decrease some effectiveness and desirability of research but, with the obvious danger of offensive weapons and their availability to misuse, it is hard to understand why that equation would become a priority.

The next question is more difficult. What does a treaty mean? Historically treaties created boundaries that could be drawn on maps and compliance could be confirmed from watchtowers. Agreements now are quite different and depend very much upon the nation's honesty and motives. In 1972 the U.N. wrote an agreement that outlawed the development of bioweapons and all the nations eagerly signed--except a few like Israel, South Africa and the United States. The year following its ostentatious signing, Russia opened the first of its bioweapons research center under the umbrella program Biopreparate. At this facility they meticulously developed horrifying hybrids of killer germs, some aimed exclusively at children. At the risk of sounding like "Guns don't kill people, people do", agreeing to outlaw certain weapons and research does not matter much if the party or parties are insincere.

This just raises the truly uncomfortable question: Is anybody here serious? Or is this all the usual public drama and international verbal placebo? Or is this simple the reflex of the lost, to start in any direction.

Knowing the propensity of the Bathoes for posturing and insincerity, one does worry.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Wikileaks and Stuxnet

The recent leaks on government communications will have some interesting effects. First, it will exaggerate the nation's serious problem in finding good government workers; no one with job expectations will want to work where his opinions or musings are periodically made public. Second, those in government will stop being public. Meetings will be done in silent or on notepads passed around written in invisible ink. A lot of information to explore now, a lot less in the future. And the reason these self appointed moralists who leaked the information give: more transparency. The righteous always seem to confound themselves.

Yet these diplomatic leaks are minor invasions compared to Stuxnet. This story, if accurate, signals a new era in international antagonism: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/26/secret-agent-crippled-irans-nuclear-ambitions/ So far it looks beyond the capacity of terrorists but at some point nations will be able to infiltrate the computer systems of enemies and disrupt the systems or turn them in some way, either against the host country itself or trigger actions from the host country against anyone, friend or foe. Imagine taking over a country electronically and using its own computers to attack its own ally or to raid a stock market or currency, all by proxy.

Most of these problems are just over the heads of the administrators.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Capital Punishment

Ingmar Guardique, a San Salvadore illegal, was convicted yesterday of murdering Chandra Levy, a young intern in Washington D.C., nine years ago. The evidence was orderly and convincing. Capital punishment is a possibility.

Now what is to be done with Condit? This guy, a typical sleazy politician who had an affair with the victim, was almost lynched by the media. Well established legal minds debated his motive and how he carried the murder out. Dominick Dunne said he had strong evidence Condit had arranged the kidnapping of the girl and had her sold into slavery in the Middle East. Every profound and nodding head declared him guilty. Some began to connect the dots and wonder aloud if Condit had killed Joyce Chaing. He lost his election, was vilified and whipped out of the fort. Now what? We're sorry? We're sorry but you brought a lot of this on yourself? Or is this a random punishment we voters inflict, the price for being in the nation's Capital?

But this is not just an occupational hazard for the powerful and well-connected. Richard Jewell comes to mind. Working as a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, he finds a suspicious package and leads many people to safety before it explodes. It turns out to have a pipe bomb in it. Rather than lionizing him, the press turns on him as the likely perpetrator and virtually indicts him before Eric Rudolph is caught and convicted as the real bomber. In a twist of brutal irony, his lawsuits against the people who defamed him were ruled invalid because he was a "public figure"; the press makes him a public figure, destroys his life, and then escapes his legal response because he is a public figure!

Plausibility should be left for coffee houses. Responsible people simply can not behave like this without any recourse on the part of the defamed--unless you bring back dueling.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Mapping the Future

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility. --Four Quartets


Ancient maps are wonderful and wonderfully human. They are the confident and altruistic sharing of knowledge, carefully researched and drawn, beautiful and elegant, often the products of the brightest and the bravest. And usually they are wrong. Time and better information displace them gradually, sometimes suddenly, and they become an artifact, a relic of their time. Their more modern usurpers reign awhile , then they too are gone. They appear, are the obsession of every sea captain, every explorer, and then are trumped and worthless, pushed back on the evolutionary trail and fall from the culmination to a mere contributor.

Importantly, every seaman and explorer knows this. They know the limits of these observations and recollections made flesh. They swear no fealty but work within the map's limits.

Explorers, mapmakers and sea captains should be more prominent in our society.

There is an interesting story about China's recent contribution to the massive tome of Unintended Consequences. In the 1960's the State decided to control the population growth and limited each family to one child. One child per family would make the huge population manageable and stable. As males were preferred in families the effect was to discourage the birth or survival of infant girls. Over time a noticeable change developed in the population: The usual 50-50 gender birth rate tipped 4% in favor of males. Jobs for women went unfilled, women were lured to population centers for better work. Now there are small towns and communities that have no women at all. Family farms and businesses are at risk. Men expecting to raise families with local wives are getting older. Some communities have resorted to raiding--RAIDING--neighbors for women.

In an effort to stabilize the population, the government created shortages. But they started with a really good map.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Nature Girl Sarah vs. Academic Man

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."--Sarah Palin
"Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes."--Paul Krugman


Palin got a lot of criticism for the quote above, some by Paul Krugman, so it was interesting to see Krugman's new and improved opinion last weekend on ABC. Inadvertent honesty? A lapse into truth? An outbreak of sincerity? Or just a new personality change in a major character of the Washington Wrestling Federation?

There are similarities between professional wrestling and American politics. Both demand intense posturing, laughable insincerity and faux action. Indeed, there are few pursuits which can be defined by posturing and insincerity. Professional wrestling can be at least understood as entertainment and drama that both the actors and audience agree upon. Politics is different there: In politics the aim is deception; entertainment, like Rangle or the guy who thinks Guam will be tipped over by too many marines, is an unintended but merciful comic diversion.

At a recent lecture, Andrew Ross Sorkin spoke about his investigations writing his book Too Big To Fail and opined that most of the principals--perhaps all but Jamie Dimon--really did not understand the problem or its implications.

There are negatives with the people who think that 90% of life is just showing up. It's hard to make progress or a contribution when you are just treading water. Sometimes problems demand specifics, hard thinking and difficult choices. Hard choices usually mean deciding against someone with a good argument, an argument you recognize as good. But in the world of cartoon wrestling characters, everything is straightforward, all the decisions obvious.

Indeed, the only time they show their human side is with deceit.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Happy Meals and the American Way of Life

This little graph on the astonishing failure of the nation's individual states to develop a competent educational system in comparison to the nations of the world was picked at random. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e20133f5cbd3b4970b-popup
Any crisis would do, the graph of the Dow vs. the price of gold over the last years, a graph of the national debt, of the individual state debt, of personal debt, of student debt, of the Ogallala Aquifer, of American production over the last twenty years...on and on. This country faces countless problems that demand analysis and action. And what do we do? We ban the inclusion of toys in McDonald's Happy Meals. And why? Because people are overweight.

Ponder that a moment. All the incredible problems facing the culture and the country and a city declares war on a children's snack.

The science is profound: Children seem to be fatter, children like Happy Meals, Happy Meals have calories and other things that currently are out of favor and are associated with obesity, toys in the snack box are enjoyable to kids, stopping the toys will make kids less fat.

Aside from the stupidity of the gesture, why would responsible adults turn to such trivialities when so many important things are screaming for their attention? Has the failure of the educational system trickled up to leadership? Are we led by symbolists? If everyone lights just one little candle? Perhaps some or all of these contribute to this intense shallowness but there are glaring overriding reasons to chose such a soft target: It is easy and it allows for significant posturing.

An easy target. Posturing. The avoidance of the significant. All part of the physiognomy of the un-serious. And the Bathoes.