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Iran on the brink

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

The students and young people of Iran are again demonstrating in opposition to the regime. So far they have not been suppressed by the army. Why ?

The army may not be reliable and may side with the demonstrators.

Leading commentators and diplomats have been pondering for quite some time why the Iranian leader is not prepared to act against the revolution in a major way. The “China model” could be applied, a brutal, fast, and extremely violent strike against the opposition. According to conventional wisdom, tyrants will use all means to eliminate their opponents. So why haven’t the mullahs adopted Chinese methods?

First, China did not use soldiers who were from the area around Beijing. The soldiers who suppressed the students in 1989 were from the provinces and may not have spoken Mandarin.

The army has published an open letter to the regime.

Together we fought in the war with our brothers in the Revolutionary Guards in order to defend the country, the people, and the honor of the nation. They also emphasize that “the value of the land means the value of the Iranian nation.” This is very interesting. ??Value of the nation.

No mention of Islam or the Mahdi.

“The army is a haven for the nation and will never want to suppress the people at the request of politicians. We shall remain true to our promise not to intervene in politics. But we cannot remain silent when our fellow citizens are oppressed by tyranny.”

They go on: “Therefore, we warn the Guards who have betrayed the martyrs (from the war between Iran and Iraq) and who decided to attack the lives, the property and the honor of the citizens. We seriously warn them that if they do not leave their chosen path, they will be confronted with our tough response. The military is a haven for the nation. And we will defend the peace-loving Iranian nation against any aggression.”

The army seems to be making a statement beyond which they do not wish the regime to go.

Maybe Iran will deal with the mullahs without the help of Obama.

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Posted in middle east | 3 Comments »

The political left heads for the cliff

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

UPDATE: The Detroit News has a piece today on the Obama agenda and the possibility that a Depression could result. They make points similar to those I have been worried about.

The concerns of the majority of American citizens with out-of-control spending do not impress the left. They advise Obama and Congress to ignore those pesky voters.

MAJORITY STILL MISGUIDED ON ECONOMIC PRIORITIES…. The polling has been remarkably consistent on this all year. And it irks me every time.

Americans are more concerned with lowering the massive budget deficit than boosting the ailing economy, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNBC survey released Friday morning say President Barack Obama and Congress should worry more about keeping the budget deficit down even if that means delaying the economic recovery. That’s 23 points higher than the 33 percent who feel boosting the economy should be the top priority, even if that means larger deficits now and in the future.

This continues to be hopelessly backwards. Given the precarious state of the economy and widespread concerns about unemployment, common sense suggests concerns over the deficit should wane. But all of the recent polling suggests a majority of Americans really do care more about deficit reduction than growing the economy and creating jobs.

The left is still convinced of the efficacy of the command economy in spite of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evolution of Communist China into a semi-capitalist economy.

They are convinced, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that Roosevelt saved the country from the Depression by spending. The concept that the New Deal was the cause of the Depression is totally alien.

This is not just a repudiation of Amity Schlaes book, The Forgotten Man, but also new scholarship from serious academics.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

“Today” was 2004 when the Congress was still in the hands of Republicans. There are many things that Congress, and the Bush Administration, did wrong but no one would have predicted that the exact same policies these scholars condemned would again be enacted only five years later.

Another example that is never discussed is the 1920 recession. The fact that this recession was as severe as the 1929 crash is almost never discussed.

The end of World War I caused the federal budget to decline from $18.5 billion in 1919 to $6.4 billion in 1920. Although this decline in budgetary stimulus required an increase in investment and spending by the private sector, Congress raised taxes on individuals and corporations, while the Federal Reserve Bank restricted credit by raising its discount rate for member banks from 4.75 percent to 7 percent by 1920. Unemployment rose from 4.0 percent in 1919 to 11.9 percent in 1921, but subsided to 7.6 percent in 1922 and 3.2 percent in 1923. The recession contributed to the failure or merger of 2,024 banks (6.5 percent of the total) by 1925.The economy’s industrial and commercial sectors revived after 1921, but agriculture did not. Farm prices dropped sharply as world output rose after the war, and US farmers responded by overproduction, which created surpluses that drove commodity prices progressively downward through the 1920s. Farm income dropped from 15 percent of national output in 1920 to 9 percent in 1928; 454,866 owner-managed farms disappeared in the 1920s, and the farm population decreased by 3,000,000. The agricultural depression led to the closure of 5,400 rural banks during the decade.

The agricultural depression is usually emphasized in any discussion of the 1920s. My own family were farmers but left the farm during that decade. The fact is that national prosperity was also contributing as agricultural productivity soared with mechanization of farming and new technology with fertilizers and the systems of crop rotation.

What is almost never discussed is why the 1920 recession ended so quickly. Thousands of banks failed yet, by 1923 employment was back to normal even though a million men had been demobilized as the war ended in 1918. What happened ?

There is a good deal of speculation in the economic literature but the conclusions vary. What is clear, though, is that President Harding and VP Coolidge did NOT do what Hoover and Roosevelt did after the 1929 crash.

The 1920-21 deflation contains another striking feature. Not only was it sharp, it was large relative to the accompanying decline in real product. The ratio of the percentage decline in the GNP deflator for 1920-21 to the percentage decline in real GNP is 2.6 using the Department of Commerce figures, 3.7 using the Balke and Gordon data, and 6.3 using the Romer data. By contrast, during 1929-30, the first year of the Great Depression, the GNP deflator declined by 2.7 percent and real GNP by 9.4 percent, for a ratio of 0.3. The ratios of the percentage decline in GNP prices to the percentage decline in real GNP for 1930-31, 1931-32, 1932-33, and 1937-38, the other Great Depression years in which real GNP declined, were 1.0, 0.9, 1.2, and 0.3, respectively, all well below the 1920-21 figures.

The 1920 recession was more severe than the 1929 crash in its effect on prices and wages.

The contraction then became severe. By the year’s end, industrial production had fallen 25.6 percent below its January 1920 peak and bottomed out at 32.6 percent below its January 1920 level in July 1921, the general business trough. Wholesale prices were 42.9 percent below their May 1920 peak by July 1921. Industrial production had fallen by 32.6 percent in eighteen months, wholesale prices by 42.9 percent in fourteen months. The deflation eliminated more than 70 percent of the rise in wholesale prices associated with World War I.

In one year, 70% of the inflation of WWI was eliminated !

Friedman and Schwartz [1963, 205-39] attribute the severe phase of the 1920-21 recession and its attending deflation to monetary restraint. Monetary policy was expansive throughout World War I, including the period of U.S. neutrality. Policy remained expansive during most of 1919, even though by summer an inflationary boom was underway. The Federal Reserve was pegging interest rates at a low level using its loan discount rate in order to accommodate the Treasury’s funding of the war debt. The Fed also had an interest in protecting commercial bank portfolios, which contained substantial quantities of war bonds and loans secured by war bonds.

Monetary policy began to shift in December 1919, then changed markedly in January 1920.

What happened in 1920 ? There was an election.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s discount rate, which had been pegged at 4 percent since April 1919, was raised to 4.75 percent in December 1919, to 6 percent in January 1920, and to 7 percent in June 1920. Similar discount rate increases were made at the other Federal Reserve Banks.

This was still Wilson’s Progressive administration but Wilson was disabled by a stroke. Colonel House and Mrs Wilson were basically running the administration. The 1918 election returned control of the Senate to Republicans, who picked up seven seats. The war ended with the Armistice a week later. The Republican Senate is often blamed for the failure to ratify the League of Nations although Wilson’s failure to compromise on some issues is also to blame. Its influence on monetary policy is usually ignored.

There is much speculation about why the recession was so severe but little about why it ended so quickly.

Austrian School economists and historians argue that the 1921 recession was a necessary market correction, required to engineer the massive realignments required of private business and industry following the end of the War. Historian Thomas Woods argues that President Harding’s laissez-faire economic policies during the 1920/21 recession, combined with a coordinated aggressive policy of rapid government downsizing, had a direct influence (mostly through intentional non-influence) on the rapid and widespread private-sector recovery.[11] Woods argued that, as there existed massive distortions in private markets due to government economic influence related to World War I, an equally massive “correction” to the distortions needed to occur as quickly as possible to realign investment and consumption with the new peace-time economic environment.

That is the last paragraph of the article. It may be the most important. Harding cut government spending and let the private economy alone to recover. It did so completely in one year. Ten years later, Hoover, followed by Roosevelt, enacted progressive prescriptions and the Great Depression followed. Now, we seem to be on the same path.

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Posted in financial, politics | 1 Comment »

Why I think we should get out of Afghanistan

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

I was in favor of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and, although the post-war period was botched, I think the Surge has made it a modest success. Iraq was always a better bet than Afghanistan because it is a rich country and had a modest middle class already. In fact, I think Iraq has a good chance to become the most successful Arab state. On the other hand, I think Afghanistan is a very risky situation.

During Afghanistan’s golden age which consisted of the last king’s rule, the country consisted of a small civilized center in Kabul while the rest of the country existed much as it did in the time of Alexander the Great. I have reviewed Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerilla, which explains much of the Afghan war. He is not optimistic about it and neither am I. Aside from the fact that Obama is a reluctant, very reluctant, warrior here, Pakistan is a serious obstacle to success.

Today, Andy McCarthy calls our attention to an explosive editorial in Investors’ Business Daily on the links between the Taliban and Pakistan’s army and intelligence services.

it’s an open secret the Taliban are headquartered across the border in the city of Quetta, Pakistan, where they operate openly under the aegis of Pakistani intelligence — and the financial sponsorship of the Saudis.

Sending more troops to Afghanistan is a necessary, albeit unfortunate, rear-guard action against marauding Taliban fighters armed, trained, supplied and deployed from Quetta — and funded from Riyadh.

NATO and U.S. military command know this. They’ve complained about it over and over in military action reports. So have Treasury officials regarding Saudi funding of the Taliban.

“Saudi Arabia today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism — to Sunni terror groups and the Taliban — than any other place in the world,” testified Stuart Levey, Treasury undersecretary.

This is Viet Nam all over again. The enemy has a sanctuary and our allies are siding secretly with our enemies.

Here’s how the game works. The Pakistanis are currently engaged in a much heralded crackdown on jihadists. But they are limiting those operations to the jihadists in the northwest tribal region — i.e., those whose primary target is the Pakistani government. By contrast, the Taliban — i.e., the jihadists targeting the U.S. and Afghanistan — are holed up in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, under the protection of the ISI. In fact, there are now reports that Mullah Omar has been moved to Karachi to protect him from U.S. drone attacks.

Pakistan is playing a double game. Secondly, our troops are handicapped by absurd rules of engagement.

The Times compiled an informal list of the new rules from interviews with U.S. forces. Among them:

• No night or surprise searches.

• Villagers have to be warned prior to searches.

• ANA or ANP must accompany U.S. units on searches.

• U.S. soldiers may not fire at the enemy unless the enemy is preparing to fire first.

• U.S. forces cannot engage the enemy if civilians are present.

This is ridiculous. Pakistan is protecting the enemy and our troops are restricted to idiotic limits, such as warning hostile villages before attacks. We should leave.

Then, if things deteriorate, Pakistan may become the target instead of Afghanistan.

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Posted in military, terrorism | 4 Comments »

Cui Bono ?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

There is an ancient Roman proverb, Cui Bono ? This means, “Who benefits ? The meaning also implies that there may be subterfuge in the situation.

L. Cassius ille quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat identidem in causis quaerere solebat ‘cui bono’ fuisset.
The famous Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a very honest and wise judge, was in the habit of asking, time and again, ‘To whose benefit?’

Who is George Soros ?

To read his foundation web page, he is a benefactor of mankind. His superficial biography is one of a young man who sought freedom in the west.

Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930. His father was taken prisoner during World War I and eventually fled from captivity in Russia to reunite with his family in Budapest. Soros was thirteen years old when Hitler’s Wehrmacht seized Hungary and began deporting the country’s Jews to extermination camps. In 1946, as the Soviet Union was taking control of the country, Soros attended a conference in the West and defected. He emigrated in 1947 to England, supported himself by working as a railroad porter and a restaurant waiter, graduated in 1952 from the London School of Economics, and obtained an entry-level position with an investment bank.

How did he make his fortune ? The foundation web site doesn’t say. We know, though.

He attacked the currency of the country which gave him refuge.

George Soros gained international notoriety when, in September of 1992, he risked $10 billion on a single currency speculation when he shorted the British pound. He turned out to be right, and in a single day the trade generated a profit of $1 billion – ultimately, it was reported that his profit on the transaction almost reached $2 billion. As a result, he is famously known as the “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros is also famous for running the Quantum Fund, which generated an average annual return of more than 30% while he was at the helm. Along with the famous pound trade, Soros was also cited by some as the “trigger” behind the Asian financial crisis in 1997, as he had a large bet against the Thai baht.

He seems to do quite well by attacking national financial stability. Why should this concern us ?

His other biographical information tells us he is a “philanthropist.” What does that mean ?

The effort or inclination to increase the well-being of humankind, as by charitable aid or donations.

Where does attacking the national currencies of peaceful countries fall under that definition ? Philos is the Greek root for love and Anthropos is another root for man. Maybe we should call him a Philosoros.

Why does this matter ? Well, he is a major funder of the Democratic party and, especially, the left wing of the Democratic party. Some people are worried.

Why would a plutocrat with a history of currency manipulation be supporting left wing activists ?

One aspect of the Democrats’ policy positions is really puzzling. Why are they so adamantly opposed to domestic oil and gas production ? I know they are devoted to the global warming theory but they have not made any attempt to seek alternatives, like nuclear power. What is George Soros’ position on carbon dioxide and global warming ?

Well, he is on record supporting the Democrats’ position, even offering to donate a billion dollars and “I will also insist that the investments make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change.” So there he is, on record.

Why then, is he the largest investor in Brazil’s massive offshore oil program ?

Petrobras, which until recently was little known outside oil circles, has launched a five-year, $174 billion project to provide platforms, rigs, support vessels and drilling systems to develop tens of billions of barrels of oil. Energy officials here project that Brazil — still an oil importer five years ago — will in the next decade have one of the world’s biggest oil reserves.

“It’s going to change the role of Brazil in the geopolitics of oil,” Petrobras’s president, José Sergio Gabrielli, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. “We are going to become a much bigger producer.”

So, Brazil, unlike the US, is planning a massive drilling operation offshore. In fact, even if we belatedly decided to “drill, baby, drill” in our offshore oil fields, we could not do so as Brazil has long term leases on all the deep sea drill rigs for the next 10 years.

Who is the largest investor in this massive project ?

With a market capitalization of more than $220 billion, Petrobras is one of the world’s 10 biggest companies. Over the past two years, it has been the most frequently traded foreign company on the New York Stock Exchange, trade data show. Among investors bullish on Petrobras is George Soros, who last year made the oil company the largest single holding in his investment fund, according to Bloomberg.

Is this another of George’s ventures where he sells his country short, makes yet another fortune and retires to some small country that is safe and secure ? Are the Democrats that stupid ?

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Posted in energy | 4 Comments »

The CRU files were leaked, not “hacked.”

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Here is a very solid explanation of why the files were leaked by an insider at CRU.

The released emails are a gold mine for a system administrator or network administrator to map. While none of the emails released contained headers, several included replies that contained the headers of the original emails. An experienced administrator can create an accurate map of the email topography to and from the CRU over the time period in question, 1998 thru 2009.

The entire post is a detailed explanation which is easy for a unix user to understand.

POP deletes email on the server usually after it is downloaded. Modern POP clients do have an option to save the email on the server for some number of days, but Eudora Light 3.0.3 did not. We can say that Professor Davies’ emails were definitely removed from the server as soon as “Send/Recv” was finished.

This revelation leaves only two scenarios for the hacker:

Professor Davies’ email was archived on a server and the hacker was able to crack into it, or
Professor Davies kept all of his email from 1999 and he kept his computer when he was promoted to Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer in 2004 from his position as Dean of the School of Environmental Sciences.
The latter scenario requires that the hacker would have had to know how to break into Prof. Davies’ computer and would have had to get into that computer to retrieve those early emails. If that were true, then the hacker would have had to get into every other uea.ac.uk computer involved to retrieve the emails on those systems. Given that many mail clients use a binary format for email storage and given the number of machines the hacker would have to break into to collect all of the emails, I find this scenario very improbable.

Which means that the mail servers at uea.ac.uk were configured to collect all incoming and outgoing email into a single account. As that account built up, the administrator would naturally want to archive it off to a file server where it could be saved.

The details of how these files were configured make it very unlikely an outsider hacked them.

So given the assumptions listed above, the hacker would have to have access to the gateway mail server and/or the Administration file server where the emails were archived. This machine would most likely be an Administrative file server. It would not be optimal for an Administrator to clutter up a production server open to the Internet with sensitive archives.

This means it is very unlikely that the server which had the e-mail archive was connected to the internet.

The ./FOIA/documents directory is a complete mess. There are documents from Professor Hulme, Professor Briffa, the now famous HARRY_READ_ME.txt, and many others. There seems to be no order at all.

One file in particular, ./FOIA/documents/mkhadcrut is only three lines long and contains:

tail +13021 hadcrut-1851-1996.dat | head -n 359352 | ./twistglob > hadcrut.dat
# nb. 1994- data is already dateline-aligned
cat hadcrut-1994-2001.dat >> hadcrut.dat

Pretty simple stuff, get everything in hadcrut-1851-1996.dat starting at the 13021st line. From that get only the first 359352 lines and run that through a program called twistglob in this directory and dump the results into hadcrut.dat. Then dump all of the information in hadcrut-1994-2001.dat into the bottom of hadcrut.dat.

….Except there isn’t a program called twistglob in the ./FOIA/documents/ directory. Nor is there the resultant hadcrut.dat or the source files hadcrut-1851-1996.dat and hadcrut-1994-2001.dat.

This tells me that the collection of files and directories in ./documents isn’t so much a shared directory on a server, but a dump directory for someone who collected all of these files. The originals would be from shared folders, home directories, desktop machines, workstations, profiles and the like.

Remember the reason that the Freedom of Information requests were denied? In email 1106338806.txt, Jan 21, 2005 Professor Phil Jones states that he will be using IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) to shelter the data from Freedom of Information requests. In email 1219239172.txt, on August 20th 2008, Prof. Jones says “The FOI line we’re all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI – the skeptics have been told this. Even though we (MOHC, CRU/UEA) possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don’t have an obligation to pass it on.”

Is that why the data files, the result files and the ‘twistglob’ program aren’t in the ./documents directory? I think this is a likely possibility.

This file existed because someone was planning to honor the FOIA request. Then, it was denied.

The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn’t be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.

It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.

If as some say, this was a targeted crack, then the cracker would have had to have back-doors and access to every machine at UEA and not just the CRU. It simply isn’t reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.

Occam’s razor concludes that “the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one”. The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.

Diogenes searched the world for an honest man. He seems to have found one (or an honest woman) at University of East Anglia.

Posted in corruption, energy, media, politics | 3 Comments »

A pretty good statement of what I think

Monday, December 7th, 2009

My personal philosophy is pretty simple and I am not one to spend time ruminating about it. Today, I discovered a piece that sounds like something I would have written if I were to try to put down my philosophy. It also states pretty much my own opinion about politics in this country rght now. I just wish I were as optimistic as the writer.

Way back in the depths of time, Greek philosophers ended up with two basic and incompatible ways of looking at the universe. One way was materialism, which says that there is a material universe which behaves in a consistent way, and if you study it you can learn the way it works.

That’s the world view of engineers and scientists — and businessmen, for that matter. It’s the world view of people who understand and use mathematics, and statistics. It is a place where cause leads to effect. It’s the place that game theory studies. It isn’t necessarily inherently atheistic; a lot of religious people live in the materialist world.

But there are people who don’t. A different epistemological view is teleology, which says that the universe is an ideal place. More or less, it
exists so that we humans can live in it. And human thought is a fundamental force in the universe. Teleology says that if a mental model is esthetically pleasing then it must be true. Teleology implies that if you truly believe in something, it’ll happen.

This is pretty much it for me.

Another piece that I have previously referred to is appropriate to quote again here. This was a comparison of Gorbachev and Obama.

they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

I think these two excerpts say much the same thing. Consequences derive from wishes. If we want something, it will happen. I even remember a movie with that theme. I will add a final quote that is also pertinent.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

I think that says it.

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Posted in general | 3 Comments »

Where do the tea parties go from here ?

Monday, December 7th, 2009

A Rasmussen poll suggests that the tea party movement is gaining strength. Right now, it outpolls Republicans among all but Republican self-identified voters, and isn’t far behind with them.

In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.

Obviously, if you combine the tea party and Republican votes, you have a plurality.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top. Thirty-three percent (33%) prefer the Tea Party candidate, and 30% are undecided. Twenty-five percent (25%) would vote for a Democrat, and just 12% prefer the GOP.

These may be independents or they may simply be people who are uninterested in politics. What it does show is that the tea party brand is powerful, even among the least likely voters. They may also be those who do not read newspapers, a major source of Democrat propaganda.

The generic Congressional ballot shows the Republicans well ahead, suggesting that those supporting the tea party movement in principle are going to vote Republican.

Real Clear Politics tries to decipher the polls and concludes This is because “policy preference” questions or questions involving other political figures can ultimately skew the result of a later horse race question, by unintentionally leading readers to view the horse race in a certain frame. . The other polls tend to ask a list of questions about specific policies that may skew the party identification with some voters. Close to elections, this is often called “push polling” and it may help to win elections but it also make pollsters miss trends.

A second major factor is that Republicans don’t have much faith in party leaders and consider them out of touch. I would not be that charitable. I think they have entirely different goals from most voters. They want to get elected. We want them to govern responsibly. A weakness of democracy is the tension between those goals.

The tea party people I have met, and I have attended tea party events in two cities, are largely libertarian and have little patience with the pandering behavior of most politicians. The best solution, I believe, is for the tea party movement to take over as much of the Republican Party as possible before the next election. That means going to meetings and running for local offices, including the local party committees. This means a lot of boring work; I know because I’ve been there, but it is the key to reviving this party and, possibly, saving the country from decline and debt repudiation.

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Posted in politics | 7 Comments »

Why I don’t go to movies anymore.

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

I rarely, very rarely, go to movie theaters. Partly that is because I don’t want to see many current movies. Once in a while, I will go to see Gladiator or another traditional style film. I saw “300” last year, something quite unusual, but that is also rare. I just got another reason to avoid movie theaters.

Taping three minutes of “Twilight: New Moon” during a visit to a Rosemont movie theater landed Samantha Tumpach in a jail cell for two nights.

Now, the 22-year-old Chicago woman faces up to three years in prison after being charged with a rarely invoked felony designed to prevent movie patrons from recording hot new movies and selling bootleg copies.

Samantha Tumpach, 22, is charged with one count of criminal use of a motion picture exhibition, a Class 4 felony, according to Rosemont police Sgt. Keith Kania.

But Tumpach insisted Wednesday that’s not what she was doing — she was actually taping parts of her sister’s surprise birthday party celebrated at the Muvico Theater in Rosemont.

So, they had a surprise birthday party at a movie theater and the sister who organized the party ended up in jail.

While she acknowledged there are short bits of the movie on her digital camera, there are other images that have nothing to do with the new film — including she and a few other family members singing “Happy Birthday” to her 29-year-old sister at the theater.

She’s lucky she didn’t get charged with copyright violation for “Happy Birthday” as it is still in copyright after 115 years.

“It was a big thing over nothing,” Tumpach said of her Saturday afternoon arrest. “We were just messing around. Everyone is so surprised it got this far.”

She was nabbed when a worker saw her shooting video during the movie, Rosemont police said.

Managers contacted police, who examined the small digital camera, which also records video segments, Cmdr. Frank Siciliano said. Officers found that Tumpach had taped “two very short segments” of the movie — no more than four minutes total, he said.

Tumpach was arrested after theater managers insisted on pressing charges, he said. She was charged with criminal use of a motion picture exhibition. She remained jailed for two nights in Rosemont’s police station until being taken to bond court on Monday, where a Cook County judge ordered her released on a personal recognizance bond that didn’t require her to post any cash.

If I were a family member, I would consider burning that theater to the ground. Of course, I’m in California so, if it should happen to burn to the ground, I had nothing to do with it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

This is not reform

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

UPDATE: If you needed more information about why this is not reform, here it is.

Reporting from Washington – Acupuncturists, dietary-supplement makers and other alternative health practitioners, some of whose treatments are considered unproven by the medical establishment, would be brought more squarely into the mainstream of American medicine under the health legislation now before the Senate.

The feeding frenzy, once health care decisions are political, would resemble the California legislature. The politicians also regard these remedies as cost effective because the providers will tell them they charge less than an MD. Of course, an ineffective treatment is never cost effective, no matter how cheap it is. What we find is that the alternative remedies have no limit on frequency since it is difficult to measure the effect of something that doesn’t have a scientific explanation. I personally have seen a workers’ comp case who received 900 chiropractic sessions in one year. The California law has now been changed to limit chiropractic to 24 sessions per year.

Here we go.

A good piece today from a Johns Hopkins program for the poor, points out that the present legislation will do nothing to improve care. In my concept of health reform, there are two tracks for health care delivery. One is free choice based on a private fund that pays a basic flat rate for doctor and hospital care. It would apply to ambulance service and other ancillary services like durable medical equipment. Anyone who has seen the constant TV commercials for scooters should understand what a huge cost center this is for Medicare.

The second thread would be HMO care, especially for the poor where case management and cost control is imperative. Poverty often coexists with poor health choices and chronic disease, both good targets for case management. What I mean by case management is the supervision of care delivery by a manager, usually a nurse with physician backup. This is often done by insurance companies with major illness. Medicare does little.

Here is what Johns Hopkins thinks of the legislation:

We at Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM) endorse efforts to improve the quality and reduce the cost of health care. But we also understand all too well the impact a dramatic expansion of Medicaid will have on us and our state—and likely the country as a whole.

A flood of new patients will be seeking health services, many of whom have never seen a doctor on more than a sporadic basis. Some will also have multiple and costly chronic conditions. And almost all of them will come from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds.

We know this because we've been caring for Medicaid patients in a managed-care setting for 14 years, as well as providing world-class care to people from all over the country and the world. Our experience provides a glimpse of the acute cost bubble that the health-care system will suffer with the reforms now being proposed.

This is a large organization that provides care in a city, Baltimore, with more than its share of poor inner city residents. It is also one of the most famous medical centers in the world.

Priority Partners operates under a capitated system—that is, it receives a set payment per individual per month from the state. Over time, we've developed the ability to manage the care of these individuals in a way that is both cost effective and that provides them with quality care. We've done it by tapping into our extensive delivery system, which includes four hospitals, a nursing home, the largest community-based primary care group in Maryland, and much more.

They know how to do this because they have been doing it. You cannot put the poor into a fee-for-service system, as Medicaid did in 1965, and avoid massive fraud and abuse. The volume of services being provided causes the system to reduce reimbursement. That is why good quality care under Medicaid requires large institutions like John Hopkins or Los Angeles County General Hospital. In 1965, I was at LA County, "Big County" as we called it. I saw what happened. Lyndon Johnson thought he could wave a wand and turn the poor into middle class with money. I actually knew residents who quit their residency program to open a Medicaid mill. They knew there was big money to be made. The big city hospitals, called "charity hospitals," were stiffed by the system in the expectation that private care would take over. The poor would become middle class with the same behavior patterns as middle class people. Instead, the Medicaid system became an arcade for fast money hustlers. I knew a few of them. Some went to jail but not enough.

Now, Obama plans to expand Medicaid eligibility to 140% of the poverty line. This has been done before by states. What happened ?

The key fact is that for years the state did not cover all the costs our Medicaid program incurred. As a result of new patients whose costs were not completely covered by the state, Priority Partners lost $57.2 million from 1997 to 2005.

We stanched the losses by ensuring that the payment from the state was appropriately risk adjusted to match the health conditions of our members, and by investing heavily in primary-care and care-management and disease-management programs.

Yet this past year the losses began again, because the state expanded the program's eligibility to 116% of the federal poverty level up from 40%.

They never learn. I was at the Post Office this morning standing in line to buy stamps. There was one automatic machine with a line waiting to use it. Soon it will be healthcare.

Congress can help, or at least learn from our experience to use the reform legislation to bend the cost curve if it encourages other states to institute and appropriately fund capitated systems that allow capable providers to adjust payments based on risk. There is nothing in the House or Senate legislation that does that now, even as both bills will expand Medicaid.

They never learn.

Posted in health reform | 1 Comment »

Climategate: Be Skeptical of Envirojournalism

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

By Bradley J. Fikes

Someone who is paid to find evidence of environmental catastrophes would probably find them more often than someone whose pay doesn’t depend on finding them. That’s something to keep in mind when you read environmental reporting on Climategate.

Any large news organization, such as the Associated Press, has reporters assigned to cover environmental issues. The agenda in environmental reporting is that humans are damaging the planet, and the role of the reporter is to wake people up to the damage. Otherwise, the beat would not be justified. For example, here’s how the New York Times explains its Dot Earth blog:

“By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.””

It’s not hard to see what the point is — humans are a plague on the planet, and overpopulation is the problem. This is the discredited enviro-Malthusian view that prompted discredited doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to make his famous bet with Julian Simon that the price of five metals — selected by Ehrlich — would rise as demand increased. Ehrlich lost.

A field based on the premise that humans are ruining the planet is naturally going to attract reporters who think that way. They talk to like-minded scientists, they talk to each other, they talk to Greenpeace, with a token skeptic or two thrown in to give the pretension of balance.

So the output of these environmental reporters is generally swayed toward the most alarmist views. Global warming is the poster child.

Climategate is an unwelcome gate-crasher at the doomfest. Top climate scientists are caught red-handed discussing how to hide information that would call man-caused global warming, AGW, into question. They discuss how to squeeze skeptics out of peer-reviewed journals, and even blackball journals that discuss skeptical work.

(more…)

Posted in corruption, energy, media | 9 Comments »

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