Category Archives: Social Issues

Thus Begins Cold War II

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Russia celebrated a holiday recently with a large scale military parade on Red Square. Just like the bad old days. Putins sock puppet, President Dmitri Medvedev, smiled while Putin stood stern-faced at his side at the annual Parade of Hardware.  Insiders claim that Russia’s effort to modernize its military forces is anemic and plagued with corruption. Putin and followers are plainly appealing to that voice in the Russian soul that longs for strongman leadership.

China, on the other hand, is quietly constructing a secret underground nuclear submarine base on Hainan. Hmmm. A secret underground lair. Sounds like Dr. No.  I doubt there are miniskirted nubiles with machine guns. Bummer.

Whereas Russia is fighting infrastructural inertia in its return to the platform, China is methodically ramping up its military with an economy flush with cash. With funding from its exports of Wal-Mart inventory and other Cheap Plastic Crap (CPC) marketed through its many outlets in the USA, China is moving closer to a blue water Navy and an SSBN fleet.

In the next 20 years, we are likely to see China flexing its muscle by positioning naval (carrier ?) groups and hints of Chinese submarine fleets prowling the continental shelves of the world.  Just like us.

While the USA shadow boxes with multiple terrorist threats around the world, China plods forward minding its own business and funding its own growth.

Four US presidential terms were squandered following the fall of the Soviet Union- 2 x Clinton and 2 x Bush.  US efforts to engage Russia in economic cooperation were weak at best. The highlight was perhaps the downgrading of Soviet era nuclear materials.  Instead of building friendships and trade cooperation, US presidents were distracted by faulty nation building exercises and dubious foreign adventures. Mikhail Gorbachev himself recently lamented that “… every US president has to have a war…”. 

US government needs to spend a 4 year term focused inwards. We must address US infrastructure as eagerly and aggressively as we land troops on the sandy reaches of the earth. The US needs an upgrade in electrical power distribution, bridges, its rail “system”, and its ports.

Collectively, we must find ways to keep factories and businesses in the USA. We need to reconsider the structure of the Code of Federal Regulations. Our regulatory structure is now so complex and extensive that we face the real risk of killing innovation. Our tax code is too complex and too burdensome on citizens and businesses. The government is funding far too many activities.

In short, the USA must get back to basics. The country is in a existential crisis and we need to get grounded again. We need fewer rules in our lives, not more. We need fewer people telling us how to live an authentic life. More of us need to spend a bit more time in the pursuit of happiness.

The Corporation

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LinkTV has been running a documentary called The Corporation. I find it rather thought provoking and would recommend it to others.

The quote that sticks with me is from a business ethics seminar I took. Our prof said “sometimes it is dumb to be too smart” in business.  Witness the pesent banking disaster.  Some of our B-school geniuses have devised instruments of finance that are so convoluted and complex that the mechanism and magnitude of failure was not widely appreciated.

What has always puzzled me is that conservatives who profess open scorn and distrust of big government are somehow able to accept the privatized power of big business.  Big government extracts the wealth of our labor and disperses it in ways that are not economically efficient. But at least there are constitutional means of remedy.  If you do not like the way a business operates, you are free to quit buying their widgets.

Big business extracts wealth from labor and resources and disperses it to shareholders.  Government pays for national infrastructure to support business activity and business practices tax avoidance. Government has gotten too big and business has learned to game the tax system.  Taxpayers are left to subsidize both big government and corporate welfare.  The system is wildly out of balance.

The essence of power is in the ability to allocate resources. Governments and businesses are centralized organizations that have large resources to allocate. Consumers are dispersed and disorganized units that have microscopic resources to allocate.  The consumers biggest leverage is the ability to make politicians fearful with respect to their re-election prospects.

Russian Oil Production in Apparent Decline

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According to an article by Greg Walters at Bloomberg.com, crude oil output in Russia is expected to decrease for the first time in 10 years.

“Two years ago, we said the growth rate was falling, and we said this was bad for Russia, remember?” Trutnev said in televised remarks after a government meeting in Moscow today. “Now we’re saying the production rate is falling this year. This is not a bogeyman, unfortunately, this is real,” Trutnev said, without giving a specific forecast.

The petroleum problem in Russia seems to stem from the lack of investment in exploration in combination with exorbitant taxes on the industry.

Gail the Actuary has an interesting post on the post-peak-oil economy. Gail is a contributor to The Oil Drum Discussions.  It’s all kind of gloomy.  Time for a nice glass of Bordeaux.

Passport Control

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According to the AP, emloyees of Stanley, Inc., have beed fired for reportedly viewing the passport records of Sen. Obama.  The New York Times reports that the passport files of Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain have been accessed inappropriately. Whether they revealed more than name, place and date of birth, and social security number remains to be seen.

No doubt this will result in a flood of rule making and billable hours for consultants. It seems to me that there is an alternative to devising higher security for government records.  If the government collected a lower volume of sensitive information, then there is less information that can be inappropriately viewed. 

The gov’t collects a good deal of information from people who fill out forms for some service or consideration. The question is, just how many different data fields are really necessary for a given service? In other words, how much excess information is being collected to satisfy the just-in-case doubts suffered by the gov’t form designer?

Passport information may be a bad example on which to raise this question owing to the gravity of passport issuance.  But the larger questions still exists- Just how much information about citizens is truly necessary to run the government?  Are there any checks and balances here?

Shermer’s “Mind of the Market”

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Google has been posting a series of interesting talks by contemporary authors. This talk is by Michael Shermer, author of Mind of the Market, and editor of the popular magazine Skeptic. It is a lengthy 53 minute video, but I would highly recommend it. I think Shermer has a good grasp on the anthropology of our present world.

This is off-topic, but useful. This link gives a bunch of really good hints on how to save money for your start-up company.

Open Letter to Congress. The Question of Authorship.

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Dear Honorable Members of the US House and Senate,

I write to you in an effort to bring a measure of clarity to the legislation that is drafted and voted upon by both houses of the congress. The matter I wish to address is the matter of authorship of the actual text of bills sponsored by members of the House and Senate.  In the interest of transparency, it seems reasonable for citizens to know exactly who deserves credit for the intellectual content, or the ideas and the language, that is put into law.  We know that the actual legislator is far too busy to do the wordsmithing and idea crafting that goes into the drafting of a bill. In that vein, I believe that the citizens or groups who actually craft the document deserve some credit for the work.

Consider for example, HR 5695.  The header of the document lists all of the sponsors of the bill.

HR 5695 IH

109th CONGRESS2d SessionH. R. 5695

To amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to provide for the regulation of certain chemical facilities, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

June 28, 2006

Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California (for himself, Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi, Mr. SHAYS, Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California, Mr. LINDER, Ms. HARMAN, Mr. MCCAUL of Texas, Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas, Mr. SIMMONS, Mrs. CHRISTENSEN, and Mr. FOSSELLA) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Homeland Security, and in addition to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

But the actual owner of the concepts, the crafter of the ideas is at present unknown. It is hard to believe that the Honorable Representative Lungren spent countless hours in the library of congress researching this bill. How much supervision is given and how close does the language represent the will of the constituents? Somehow, the person or persons who drafted the bill are accorded anonymity in their composition of a bill that affects the entire country.

I believe that the persons and the organizations who draft documents which become public laws should be given some kind of co-authorship or citation. In fact, it should be manditory that they be given co-authorship. Ideas good or bad that wind their way into public law should be traceable to the Author. How else can we find out what they were thinking? Could it be true that major pieces of legislation are being imposed on the people of the United States under the pen of ghostwriters? Who are these ghostwriters?

Kindest regards,

Th’ Gaussling (pseudonym, just for irony)

Economic Katrina

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I’m reluctant to sound alarmed, but with the apparent shape of an impending economic Katrina moving over North America, it is getting harder to grant the benefit of the doubt. The dollar is sinking, exposing this import-heavy nation of ours to price increases in nearly every sector. The petroleum resources that energize global production and grease all economic skids is generating considerable doubt and turmoil in financial circles.

Oil production is flat in many key regions but the demand for consumer goods by the global middle class is expanding.  Our television-enchanted population, brains scrambled to numbness by chronic exposure to American Idol, are seeing only what the media powerbrokers want us to see. The eternal message that comes from TV is spend, spend, spend. 

The popular economic indicator is the stock market. The DJIA up- good. The DJIA down- bad. It is a sort of pallative. We’re lulled into a false comfort zone by the meta-stability of todays stockmarket.  Other dots are beginning to line up into a harmonic convergence, however.

Yesterday, as a humorous conversation starter, I asked a senior colleague well placed in the petroleum industry this question- “when will crude oil hit $150/bbl?”.  His reply surprised me. He estimated that it would happen this summer. Later, tempering his answer somewhat, he suggested that it would be more like $130/bbl, and mostly on the strength of nervousness in the market. He added that at present, crude oil stocks in the USA were in ample supply. 

The extended weakness in the dollar seems to favor American exporters and disfavors import consumers. Hmmm.  Does gov’t inaction on the weakness of the dollar amount to bias for corporate constituents and neglect of unincorporated citizens? Curious.

Advice- payoff as much debt as possible. Insulate your house. Get rid of that gas guzzler. Accumulate greater savings. A lot of the soon-to-be-unemployed are going to face higher higher gasoline prices for their commute to the new job at the auto salvage yard. And when they get back to their trailer at night, the thermostat will be set low due to higher heating costs. Beans and weenies, Mac-n-Cheese. Bon apetite!

Eviction Action on CNN

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On CNN this morning I happened to see a story on mortgage defaults in the Atlanta area. As the reporter spoke of the 7,000 evictions scheduled for February in Atlanta, we watched two police officers enter a house with service revolvers drawn.

No doubt there is a backstory to this particular event. All states have extensive statutes covering the resolution of landlord/tenant disputes. The statutes governing lender/mortgagee disputes is certainly full of delays in consideration of due process as well. So, the scene of the State storming into a home- through the agency of the police- is at the end of a procedural chain of events leading to forcible eviction.

But you have to ask the question- Is this heavy handed treatment of mortgagees necessary?  Are the police storming into homes with firearms drawn routinely? Maybe the mortgage lenders should be forced to go into the home and do it themselves? Maybe we should herd a pack of mortgage brokers door-to-door to do the dirty work.  This includes the industry finance geniuses and their pencil-necked B-School professors .

Evicting deadbeats is one thing.  I have done this distasteful job myself sometime back when I was stupid enough to have a rental property. It’s disturbing and ugly at the very best. But to have this finance fiasco end in such a way is a disgrace and the ethical-midgets and business cretins who devised and executed this negligent finance scheme need to see, taste, and smell the trouble they initiated. They should be dragged out of their office suites, tarred and feathered, and run out of the business community, or at least tatooed with a big red I for Imbecile on their foreheads and banned from finance for life. 

The borrowers who signed their names to such instruments should be forced to take a remedial math class where they must demonstrate a knowledge of compound interest. Exponents, people! Exponents!

Scalia On Torture

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2/12/08.  Let me paraphrase what I just heard Justice Antonin Scalia say on NPR. In a replayed BBC interview, he said that he didn’t see anything in the constitution that prohibits the use of torture to get information. On the other hand, he said that the use of torture as punishment would be unconstitutional.

This is the first time I have heard this particular bit of analysis. That is the tack you’d expect him to make. A few colleagues and I had the opportunity to sit and have coffee with Scalia some years ago when he was on our campus. I left the gathering with the impression that he is a very formidable character. Defending a case in front of him would be nerve wracking.

It is worth remembering that the Supreme Court’s job is to deliberate and rule on matters of interpretation of the constitution. I would offer that the comments of a justice of SCOTUS are not to be taken as promulgation of moral authority, but rather as constitutional scholarship.

Highly civilized countries like Switzerland, The Netherlands, or Sweden have surely wrestled with the calculus of this matter. I wonder what they have concluded as to the merits of torture.  Maybe they are less squeemish about it than we are.

Addendum 2/13/08:  If you think about what torture really is, it is hard to come to the conclusion that Scalia is offering.  Interrogation torture is a circumstance wherein a person is detained and put under the requirement to disclose information.   To qualify as torture, as opposed to simple questioning, the detainee must be subject to a negative outcome. I think in the normal use of the term, merely serving time in confinement isn’t ordinarily considered torture. The customary understanding of the term includes negative treatment that produces stress, dread fear, pain and discomfort, or injury. 

You could argue that infliction of negative treatment as a result of detainee non-compliance is a form of punishment.  Infliction of negative treatment in anticipation of non-compliance would be cruelty.  To put it another way, if the infliction of pain and suffering is not a result of non-compliance, then it must be cruelty. If it is a result of non-compliance, then it it must be considered punishment.

I’ll have to disagree with Scalia’s assertion. I cannot escape the conclusion that the application of torture in questioning is either punishment or mere cruelty and therefore unconstitutional.

The notion that our form of “negative treatment” isn’t really torture is fatuous and should be abandoned. If we want to allow our elected government to torture people, then we should amend the constitution in the customary fashion to make allowances for this action. My guess is that most thinking adults will not gladly endorse a constitutional right to torture.

Breaking Bad

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The AMC channel on cable is running a series called Breaking Bad. It is about a high school chemistry teacher who, for various reasons, begins to make high quality methamphetamine with a former student. It is actually quite interesting to watch. Never before have I seen so many details of chemical synthesis on an entertainment tv program.

The 2nd episode portrays a lecture on chirality to a chemistry class. The technical details seem well researched and the dramatic situations are unexpected and novel. I have to say that it is quite well done.

The teacher is a kind of anti-hero. We can identify with him to a point. But where we depart from him is where he breaks bad. The scenes of a chemist working in a respirator and tighty-whities may frighten some viewers. Caution is advised.