A preference cascade is forming.

February 26th, 2016

trump

Glenn Reynolds has known about this for a long time.

“This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related
issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

Peggy Noonan has written about it several times.

But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

This is something I have been looking at for a while.

Can the GOP really be so out of touch with the legions of out-of-work Americans — many of whom don’t show up in the “official” unemployment rate because they’ve given up looking for work in the Obama economy? With the returning military vets frustrated with lawyer-driven, politically correct rules of engagement that have tied their hands in a fight against a mortal enemy? With those who, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres by Muslims, reasonably fear an influx of culturally alien “refugees” and “migrants” from the Middle East?

I think it is. Today at Ann Althouse’s blog, I saw some interesting comments.

I don’t understand how it works to just crudely throw insults at Trump when your substance is that Trump speaks bluntly. David Begley, you, in particular, sound like the very problem you are trying to attack. Except your type of attack has been plainly unsuccessful, and Trump’s speech — whatever it is, however it is the same or different from yours — has been phenomenally successful. Don’t you think you need to analyze this communications problem? Or do you just spout simple insults that pop into your head? Is that what you imagine Trump is doing? Because you are wrong, and you don’t even bother to find out exactly how you are wrong. There is an art to blunt, clear, surprising speech. Most politicians don’t try to do it because it’s too hard to do right. At least KNOW that you’re not doing it right. Otherwise, this is just headslappingly stupid.

That was Ann to a commenter. An informed commenter who has attended quite a few public meetings of candidates in Iowa. The commenter responds:

AA

Just fighting fire with fire. Trump called Bush “low energy” and it worked.

Trump is a coward, four time bankrupt loser, con artist, bully, 12 time business failure, WWE character, hypocrite, liar, dullard, loose cannon and has very poor character. He will lose in November and people need to wake up to that fact. Otherwise, hello President Hillary.

I think Vietnam vets will especially be interested in Donald’s own personal Vietnam, as told to Howard Stern. Google it.

I just don’t think this is helpful although venting may be useful in the Kugler-Ross stages of grief that seems to be going on. If it gets too far into the potential pool of GOP staff candidates, it might cause harm as Trump might avoid people who seem to hate him and choose less competent people to staff an administration. More from Peggy.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

We are seeing the same thing in Britain, which has an even worse problem with immigrants.

in Britain, both London Mayor Boris Johnson and mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith have come out against staying in the EU. On this news, author Jim Bennett emailed me: “Are we seeing a preference cascade for Brexit? Although many are already for it, of course, mostly they have been either old-line Tories or working-class marginal malcontents. Boris and Zac are part of the rich, well-connected, cosmopolitan London set which has always been presumed to be Europhiles. Watch this phenomenon.”

It used to be, of course, that the lower and middle classes were stuffy and constrained by social convention while the freethinkers at universities and in the ruling class got to experiment with unconventional ideas. If their experimenting got enough success, then it might eventually filter down to ordinary people. (The sexual revolution worked this way, more or less).

That was Reynolds about the situation in Britain. We visited friends in Britain in September.

It seems that traditional English are self-segregating into smaller cities in the southeast that have sky high real estate prices, somewhat similar to Orange County prices in California. In both cases, I think they are islands of safety and traditional values in countries being over run by immigration and deteriorating urban cores.

Here is another attempt to explain Trump.

But all that is not enough to explain his sudden rise. The missing piece of the puzzle is the artificiality of public life in the United States. In a land of chain stores, internet memes, pop-culture formulas, and endless consultants, Trump has his own highly charged way of communicating. Whatever the topic, he attracts notice when he speaks.

He’s a successful entrepreneur with a brand he’s created for himself without the aid of pollsters, focus groups, or handlers. As such, his words and actions are of course designed for effect—he’s a pro-wrestling version of a politician rather than an Andrew Jackson or a Mr. Smith trying to go to Washington—but his calculations are his own. They reflect intuition and long experience rather than the advice of consultants, and he’s willing to provoke outrage. So the effect is wholly different from that of another candidate repeating commercially prepared talking points.

I agree with this. What are his points ?

So he’s not for sale, part of the club, or susceptible to pressure, and today that counts for everything. To put it differently, he seems his own man, and he’s not politically correct. That matters, not just as a selling point, but substantively, because p.c. is a serious matter. At first people thought it a joke, then an annoyance, and eventually a constant drag on life in general. Now, in the age of flash mobs that enforce insane beliefs by destroying careers, people are realizing that p.c. is much more than that.

In fact, political correctness is a genuine threat to any tolerable way of life.

I agree with this as well. We are in an era when Brendan Eich, a successful technology expert and founder of the Mozilla Corporation, can be forced to resign because he once donated $1,000 to Proposition 8 in California that would have restated the status of marriage as “between a man and a woman.”

Critics of Eich within Mozilla tweeted to gay activists that he had donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, leading Eich to say on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Gay activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with OkCupid declaring they would block access to the Firefox browser unless he stepped down. Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor. Board members wanted him to stay in the company with a different role.

On April 3, 2014, Eich stepped down as CEO and resigned from working at Mozilla after it was revealed that he donated funds to a California Proposition 8 campaign whose objective was to ban gay marriage in California.

Actually, the language did not mention “gay marriage,” but stated “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,”

The proposition passed with 52% of the vote and was overturned by a federal judge with a history of leftist activism, who later married his gay lover.

The 9th circuit, a well known leftist court, upheld the ban and Jerry Brown, then Attorney General, declined to appeal. The gay activist movement also pursued the LDS Church and any other supporters of the proposition they could identify. The reign of terror toward opponents of gay marriage has continued with lawsuits and fines imposed by bureaucrats on cake bakers who declined to participate in gay marriages. Wedding photographers have also been pursued and punished for declining to participate on religious grounds.

Today the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that Christian photographers cannot decline to participate in gay-marriage commitment ceremonies,even though that state does not have gay marriage and the court acknowledgedthat providing services for the ceremony violated the Christian’s sincerely-held, traditional religious beliefs. This becomes one of the first major cases where religious liberty collides with gay rights, and could now goto the Supreme Court of the United States.

And the “protected” wonder where Trump came from.

In other words, p.c. is Totalitarianism 2.0: a bureaucratic system, seemingly gentle, that possesses unlimited power over human attitudes, understandings, and relations, and feels called upon to use that power to construct a self-contradictory system of equal freedom and esteem. The attempt will fail, just as Bolshevism and Maoism failed, but it will do immense damage before it is given up.

One aspect of that attempt, which is responsible for much of Trump’s popularity, is a radical reduction in popular influence on government. If popular habits and understandings need constant transformation in ever more basic ways, because they always fall short of evolving standards of decency, they obviously shouldn’t guide public policy. That is for those who know better.

Political correctness itself, with its celebration of diversity and suppression of traditional distinctions, advances the cause in a fundamental way by suppressing social connections—family, inherited culture, religion—except for the bureaucratic and market arrangements through which the intended system would function. Those older arrangements are considered irrational, unequal, and uncontrollable, and they act as if they have the right to decide things, so why allow them any legitimacy? Why not get rid of them by multiplying incompatible versions of each and insisting they all have equal status?

I rest my case.

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The next war.

February 21st, 2016

Richard Fernandez, as usual, has a good thought on where we are likely to be at the end of Obama’s presidency.

Even as America’s rivals are probing its defenses all across the globe, the Pentagon seems decidedly leery over taking on any new missions in the Middle East. “The Obama administration and the Iraqi government are eager to retake Iraq’s second-largest city from the Islamic State, which would allow President Barack Obama to claim a major victory over the terror group before he leaves office. But the top U.S. military brass says not so fast.”

The debate over the timetable for taking Mosul … highlights the competing pressures of an administration seeking to craft its legacy and military professionals worried about rushing into a bloody urban war.
It may also suggest an implicit consensus that it would be best to avoid risky undertakings for the remainder of the Obama administration and prepare instead for the serious threats that the administration’s mistakes have unleashed.

I just finished Robert Gates Memoir of his time as Sec Def for both Bush and Obama.

My own review of his book is here and I consider it excellent. He liked and respected Obama although some of that may be diplomacy. He disliked and did not respect Obama’s staff, who probably reflected his disinterested attitude toward governing. Obama told Gates that he liked making decisions but Gates believed he showed little interest in making them work.

Foreign Policy writes, it’s “crunch time for Washington and Beijing in the South China Sea” as satellite photos showed China fortifying its new island bastions with missiles.

“Is there anything Washington can do to slow China’s land grab?” it rhetorically asks? The answer is: probably not with the current leadership of the free world. Nobody really wants to follow president Obama into a crisis.

There is about the current international situation the atmosphere of fiasco. The Russia/Iran buildup continues, fueled as the Free Beacon notes by cash the Obama administration gave Tehran itself. Russia is now increasingly in command of the Syrian Army fighting beside an Iranian “foreign legion”, eliciting nothing more than a squeak from the president. There are warnings it is now time to start preparing for the collapse of Saudi Arabia without the expectation of being able to prevent it.

No solutions appear possible for the present. Plans appear to focus on the world after Obama.

This is exceedingly dangerous. The collapse of Saudi Arabia is one crisis that faces us.

For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is the trust that U.S. special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable.

But is it?

In fact, Saudi Arabia is no state at all. There are two ways to describe it: as a political enterprise with a clever but ultimately unsustainable business model, or so corrupt as to resemble in its functioning a vertically and horizontally integrated criminal organization. Either way, it can’t last. It’s past time U.S. decision-makers began planning for the collapse of the Saudi kingdom.

Fortunately, and contrary to the policies of Obama, the US is now self-sufficient in energy. The Obama aid to Iran has further destabilized the Saudis.

Everyone is making shift for themselves because that is all that is possible. But the most significant actions have been undertaken by the Pentagon itself. It has proposed the largest budget in years for the express purpose of rebuilding the deterrent force against Russia. The New York Times reported plans to “fortify” Eastern Europe. Real Clear Defense reports a crash program called the Third Offset Strategy to boost up the combat power of the US military in the short term. The current Defense Budget is a tacit mea admission of a need to make up for ground squandered in the last 7 years.

Gates has high praise for Ash Carter so Defense is probably in as good hands as is possible now.

It seems clear there is widespread consensus there will be a major period of instability or conflict after Obama leaves office, perhaps even before he departs. Conflicts in Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, China, etc. are not only possible, they have actually started and each is escalating.

What is still unclear is how bad it will get. That depends on two things: the extent to which Western defenses can be rebuilt and the judiciousness with which foreign and security policy leadership is exercised. Political events in 2016 are crucial not only in America, but all over the world because they will determine, more or less, who is in charge when the balloon goes up. If the West can prepare in time and uses its assets properly, the worst of the crisis can still be avoided and a general peace might still be preserved. If nothing intelligent replaces the last seven years of foolishness then the embers now smoldering may burst into open flame, merge and threaten everybody with the major conflict Dmitry Medvedev warned against.

There will still be some calls in the next few months for president Obama to “do something” but there will be fewer than you would expect. The word is out, even among allies. He’s a busted flush. For the moment, the consensus appears to sit tight, get ready, take no chances and wait out Obama’s term.

That seems to be all we can do.

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What should the next President be like ?

February 20th, 2016

trumpmugger

This is not the same as who the President should be. Richard Fernandez has some ideas on what he (or she) should be like.

let me suggest that only four things matter in selecting a man (or woman) to face a challenge whose present dimensions cannot be predicted. For purposes of debate, let these four qualities in descending order of importance be:

1.An ability to face the facts, however unpleasant they may be.

Yes, this is critical and we have had enough of liars and careerists. Is Trump a liar ? I don’t know.

2. An unswerving patriotism. This is not the same as a sincere feeling of love or empathy for America, though that is good. In this context it means the willingness to share the fate of the principals of which he is an agent.

Yes, we are ruled these days by elites who do not plan to share any pain. This is unrealistic but they have been raised to believe they can avoid unpleasant reality. What do we do about this ?

3. Nerve. This is the quality of grace under pressure who no one, unless he has the misfortune to be tested, can be sure he possesses.

Yes, the only real test is the reality and then it is too late. A few have tried to analyze this, and it is not easy.

some individuals did not panic because their body naturally protected them.
Unlike the majority of people who were flooded with a stress hormone, they had much lower levels and also showed signs of another hormone that actually calmed them down.

He referred to Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of the aeroplane that was successfully landed on the Hudson River in New York last month, as an example.

“There are some individuals who when confronted with extreme stress their hormone profile is rather unique,” he said.
“It doesn’t reach the same peak as the rest of us. So we’re all ready to scream in our chairs, but there are certain individuals who just don’t get as stressed.

“Their stress hormones are lower and the peptides that down-regulate that stress are higher, so you can see in action the hormonal regular system really hitting overdrive.

“Certain people are cooler under pressure and they perform very, very well during these periods of time.”

In his novel, “Once an Eagle,” by Anton Myrer, the author was critical of men in combat who had no fear. They are abnormal and dangerous. Still, Hemingway defined courage as “Grace under Pressure,” and that implied that fear was still present.

In the novel, “Once an Eagle” Anton Myrer was critical of men with no fear in battle. He considered them dangerous. Hemingway defined Courage as “Grace under Pressure” suggesting that fear was still present. In the movie “Patton” a story is recounted of the General Patton attacked three men who he believed to be kidnapping a woman in New York City.

patton

Does Trump resemble the young Patton ? They have a similar expression.

My own life has been lived as a surgeon and there are surgeons who take beta blockers to deal with tremors caused by high levels of stress hormones. I have never had a problem with anxiety during surgery but, of course, I am not the one under the knife.

4. Intelligence. This is important, because it determines basic competence. But it surprisingly the least important attribute in this list. Intelligence, though rare, is not nearly as hard to find as the 3 characteristics above. You can find staffers who can give you intelligent advice. You cannot find staff to give you a character that you do not possess.

This is so obvious that it should not need to be said but we are ruled by staffers.

What do we make of all this ? I don’t know. Trump is an interesting character and I have no idea how he would function as president. I do think we might get a chance to find out. We should know more in a few weeks.

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Trump and China

February 15th, 2016

sse-stock

Trump has, famously, gone after China on its trade policy.

In January 2000, President Bill Clinton boldly promised China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization (WTO) “is a good deal for America. Our products will gain better access to China’s market, and every sector from agriculture, to telecommunications, to automobiles. But China gains no new market access to the United States.” None of what President Clinton promised came true. Since China joined the WTO, Americans have witnessed the closure of more than 50,000 factories and the loss of tens of millions of jobs. It was not a good deal for America then and it’s a bad deal now. It is a typical example of how politicians in Washington have failed our country.

There is an interesting analysis of China’s stumbling economy in the Observer today.

Here is a top ten guide for the perplexed.

Central Planning: Central planning, central planning. The history of the abject failure the Soviet Union’s five-year plans should tell you everything. Command and control economies that report to one man (in a nation of 1.3 billion people) are doomed from the start. Top down economic decisions often look bold and start out highly stimulative, but then degenerate into inefficiency, waste, politics and fraud.

Political Corruption: As the command and control economy generates liquidity, the demand and direction of the distributed capital becomes a political tussle. Decisions on how much steel, cement, coal, glass solar panels, high speed trains and shopping malls—in short everything—are not done in China as a cost benefit analysis by risk capital, a job difficult enough in itself. (Witness the capitalist economies’ booms and busts.) In China, this liquidity was allocated by political muscle, massive bribery and kickbacks, rather than economic justifications.

Basic Gangsterism: Counterfeiting, knockoffs, copyright infringement, theft of intellectual property – these were a part of the booster rockets of China’s economic rise. It was all supposed to go away after China joined the WTO in 2001. It didn’t. It just became more institutionalized. Foreign companies needed Chinese “partners” in auto production, healthcare and technology. These “partners” crippled the potential productivity of the investments and led to frequent disputes and even more corruption… as in the GlaxoSmithKline scandals.

There are a total of nine reasons, many addressed in Trump’s piece above.

Now, the economy of China may be in free fall.

Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan has accused “speculative forces” of targeting the country’s currency, the yuan.
He said there was no reason for the yuan to keep depreciating in value and that China would not let international speculators dominate market sentiment.

Mr Zhou’s remarks come as Chinese markets prepare to reopen on Monday after a week-long New Year holiday.
Efforts to defend the yuan have eroded China’s foreign currency reserves.

Another reason quoted by the Observer is something I have previously posted on.

Jack Lew, speaking at the Brookings Institution in July, confidently assured that Americans were immune from weakening markets in China.

“I will say that China’s markets still are pretty much separated from world markets,” the secretary of Treasury, said. “They’re, obviously, moving towards being more integrated, but right now they’re not.”

I guess that statement is “inoperative” right now.

What actually happened is that China’s stock market began as a Potemkin project to assure the world of Beijing’s strength. Chinese investors knew the government would be propping up a mere facade; that the worse China’s economy got, the more the Communist Party would paint the facade. Harlan writes:

Let’s take a moment to state clearly that the stock market and the “real economy,” particularly in China, don’t always dance together. Until 2013, China’s major indexes were among the poorest-performing — which made almost as little sense as what happened next.

China is not a “transparent economy.”

Reckless Gamblers: How did China’s debt-to-GDP ratio go to 240% from 160% in nine years? How are nonperforming bank loans (if honestly tallied) hovering around 20 percent? There is a recklessness in early stage wealth. It happened in England in the 18th century as exemplified by the South Sea’s fraud and a hundred frauds like it. The recent Sino-Soviet forest stock fraud is an exact mirror. Rapid wealth produces intoxicated investors prone to scams. Remember how the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abby invested a fortune in a fraudulent American railroad. I wonder if there is a Chinese translation of Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”?

China has a small very rich segment of their people who are giddy with riches. They have been foolish with their investments.

China became a binge investor in absurd countries and silly projects. As if to poke the U.S (its largest single-country trading partner) in the eye, China sidled up to Venezuela of all places. Instead of buying oil on the open market, they went deep into infrastructure projects, loans and even endorsed the psychotic foreign policy rantings of Hugo Chavez. No rational government, unless intoxicated by its economic prowess, would do that. The China Syndrome was also applied to Sudan, Zambia, Angola and Nigeria. Look at the bankrupt failed resort in the Bahamas, Baha Mar, if you want to see what “binge capital” looks like.

Trump may be correct but it may not matter.

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Another update on the NHS, Bernie’s favorite health plan.

February 12th, 2016

NHS

I have mentioned problems with the NHS here before.

That was about emergency care.

Last fall there was a concern about junior doctors emigrating to other countries.

Britain is already suffering from a serious, and unprecedented, shortage of GPs, on a scale that doctors’ leaders say is fast becoming a crisis.

According to figures released last week, a staggering 10.2 per cent of full-time GP positions across the UK are currently vacant, a figure that has quadrupled in the past three years.

Two-thirds of practices are now finding it ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to find locums — freelance medics — to cover the shortfall.
As our population gets steadily older, and sicker, frontline surgeries are becoming increasingly swamped.
‘We are in dire straits if we do not act to address the GP recruitment crisis immediately,’ the Royal College of GPs warned last week.

In standard government medicine fashion, the British Health Minister imposed a new employment contract that ignored doctors complaints.

The result ?

Junior doctors are threatening a mass exodus to Australia after Jeremy Hunt forced through his controversial new contract yesterday.
There has been a huge surge in the numbers seeking certificates to practise abroad and some have already lined up jobs.
Almost 760 doctors were issued with documents by the General Medical Council in the first four weeks of this year – nearly 200 a week and almost double the usual number. Although they include some older GPs and consultants, the vast majority were disillusioned younger doctors.

Becoming a doctor is a classic middle class occupational choice. Few doctors become rich and almost none do so from actual practice. There was a phase in the 1960s when doctors suddenly became much more prosperous as Medicare was introduced, providing payment for care that had been done for no charge mostly. With time, the US government has reduced compensation and imposed rules designed to reduce costs. With the imposition of Obamacare, many older doctors who do not have heavy student loan balances and whose own children are educated, are choosing to drop all insurance, including Medicare, and practice for cash.

Obamacare has resulted in many hospitals consolidating and buying up medical practices to develop a vertically integrated system of health care delivery that resembles old industrial models. The result for physicians is a trend to salary jobs and dissatisfaction with their careers.

I met a woman geriatrician, the only fellowship trained geriatric specialist in central Iowa. She had quit Medicare. That sounds a bit suicidal if all your patients are Medicare age. What had happened was she was being harassed by Medicare because she was seeing patients too often. Many of them were frail elderly living at home. She dropped out and began charging her patients cash for services. She was making a decent living after a year and was happy with her decision. I don’t know how many realize that geriatrics, as a specialty, is a university subsidized field. There is no private geriatric practice because the doctor can’t survive on what Medicare pays. She tried and had to quit. She is doing it on her own now.

That was about Medicare. The same is happening with Obamacare and the medical conglomerates that have been assembled in anticipation of the “Industrial Model” of medical care. How is that working out in Britain ?

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Trump Rampant.

February 10th, 2016

I have been thinking about the Donald Trump Phenomenon for a while.

I have been mulling Revolution since last summer.

I am amazed but Peggy Noonan actually gets it !

I have thought for some time that there’s a kind of soft French Revolution going on in America, with the angry and blocked beginning to push hard against an oblivious elite. It is not only political. Yes, it is about the Democratic National Committee, that house of hacks, and about a Republican establishment owned by the donor class. But establishment journalism, which for eight months has been simultaneously at Donald Trump’s feet (“Of course you can call us on your cell from the bathtub for your Sunday show interview!”) and at his throat (“Trump supporters, many of whom are nativists and nationalists . . .”) is being rebelled against too. Their old standing as guides and gatekeepers? Gone, and not only because of multiplying platforms. Gloria Steinem thought she owned feminism, thought she was feminism. She doesn’t and isn’t. The Clintons thought they owned the party—they don’t. Hedge-funders thought they owned the GOP. Too bad they forgot to buy the base!”

The GOP Congress has been a huge disappointment.

At this this time in history the Left may be correct about what truly matters. The institutional Republicans are still playing the game of administration. By contrast Obama is playing the game of revolution. By slow degrees the entire political system is coming around to Obama’s point of view. Perhaps this is no ordinary time. When Hillary calls Republicans “terrorists” and Obama calls them “crazies”; when Sanders and Trump are outflanking the established wings of their respective parties, each of these in its own way suggests the emphasis of the next ten years will not be on public administration but on determining the power relationships within America and among the countries of the world.

The Constitution says that Spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and the Ways and Means Committee is supposed to write those bills. It has not been happening even as the GOP has taken Congress.

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

So, we now have Donald Trump, who has almost no supporters known to GOP officials in New Hampshire where he just won the primary with 35% of the vote in a large field.

During that state GOP meeting a couple of weeks ago, I asked former Gov. John Sununu, a man with a lifetime of knowledge about New Hampshire politics, if he knew any Trump supporters. Sununu pondered the question for a minute and said he thought a man who lived down the street from him might be for Trump.

Immediately after the story was published, I got an email from a real estate executive and former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives named Lou Gargiulo, who happens to live down the street from Sununu. “I’m the guy!” Gargiulo told me. “Not only do I support Mr. Trump, I am the Rockingham County chairman of his campaign. The governor would be shocked to know that many of his other neighbors are Trump supporters as well.”

What a surprise ! Pauline Kael would be shocked.

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The end of Obama’s Syria policy.

February 4th, 2016

aleppo.sized-770x415xc

The US foreign policy conducted by the Obama administration has been a disaster all along. He abandoned Iraq and the rise of ISIS has followed. I have read “Black Flags,” which describes how the al Qeada organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has morphed into ISIS after Obama pulled US forces out of Iraq. Now, as Richard Fernandez explains in another masterful analysis, Assad is about to rout the last of the non-ISIS opposition.

Reuters reports that Bashal al-Assad’s forces have made major advances behind a major Russian air offensive and are now poised to destroy the non-ISIS rebels opposing the Syrian government is rocking the foreign policy establishment. “After three days of intense fighting and aerial bombardment, regime forces, believed to include Iran-backed Shia militias, broke through to the formerly besieged regime enclaves of Nobul and Zahra.”

The Russians have been surprising US military leaders in ways that are very unpleasant.

The performance of the miniature, “rust bucket” Russian air force has formed an invidious baseline to what the USAF has achieved. The Independent reported:

Their army’s equipment and strategy was “outmoded”; their air force’s bombs and missiles were “more dumb than smart”; their navy was “more rust than ready”. For decades, this was Western military leaders’ view, steeped in condescension, of their Russian counterparts. What they have seen in Syria and Ukraine has come as a shock.

Russian military jets have, at times, been carrying out more sorties in a day in Syria than the US-led coalition has done in a month.

We are not serious and the US military has to wonder what will happen if Putin decides to take the Baltic republics.

All this is happening alongside the weak consequences of Hillary Clinton’s massive breach of security in her “e-mail server.”

Remember, Mrs. Clinton reviewed her e-mails before finally surrendering them to the State Department, and she initially insisted there was no classified information in them. Now, it turns out they were so threaded with classified information that the State Department and intelligence agencies have fallen hopelessly behind the court’s disclosure schedule: The task of reviewing the e-mails and redacting the portions whose publication could harm national security has proved much more complicated than anticipated. Thousands of remaining e-mails, and any embarrassing lapses they contain, will be withheld from voters until well into primary season.

From the level of disinterest in this matter shown by Politico in its piece about Clinton’s “vulnerabilities” in the Democrat primary race, there seems to be no interest at all in foreign policy by Democrats. That may change if the Baltic republics are in jeopardy but, perhaps not. Democrats seem to believe that the US is the root of all evil, not our enemies.

As America’s foes gain in the Middle East, the confusion surrounding the administration’s goals correspondingly grows. If Aleppo falls, and its defenders and inhabitants massacred it will prove that Obama cannot protect anyone. A huge humanitarian disaster whose spillover Europe must inevitably endure will ensue. There is genuine international cooperation. Russia generates refugees and Germany absorbs them.

And as for Geneva, well what of it?

Someone has to ask: what goal does America still have in the Middle East beyond defending the tattered political image of president Obama?

I wonder ?

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Schizophrenia’s cause ?

January 28th, 2016

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Today there is an article in the Washington Post that describes a genetic site that may be the source of schizophrenia.

The researchers, chiefly from the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, found that a person’s risk of schizophrenia is dramatically increased if they inherit variants of a gene important to “synaptic pruning” — the healthy reduction during adolescence of brain cell connections that are no longer needed.

In patients with schizophrenia, a variation in a single position in the DNA sequence marks too many synapses for removal and that pruning goes out of control. The result is an abnormal loss of gray matter.

For years that has been a search for the reason why this mental illness appears in adolescence in people who seemed normal until that stage of development. It is known that adolescence is the time for”pruning” of excessive neuron synapses. Now, it seems that this may be the target f the genetic defect.

The fact that the answer might come from genetics has been known for a while.

To date, around 30 schizophrenia-associated loci10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 have been identified through GWAS. Postulating that sample size is one of the most important limiting factors in applying GWAS to schizophrenia, we created the Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). Our primary aim was to combine all available schizophrenia samples with published or unpublished GWAS genotypes into a single, systematic analysis24. Here we report the results of that analysis, including at least 108 independent genomic loci that exceed genome-wide significance. Some of the findings support leading pathophysiological hypotheses of schizophrenia or targets of therapeutic relevance, but most of the findings provide new insights.

The new paper, just out yesterday in epub, has narrowed the search to the C4 gene on chromosome 6.

After conducting studies in both humans and mice, the researchers said this new schizophrenia risk gene, called C4, appears to be involved in eliminating the connections between neurons — a process called “synaptic pruning,” which, in humans, happens naturally in the teen years.

It’s possible that excessive or inappropriate “pruning” of neural connections could lead to the development of schizophrenia, the researchers speculated. This would explain why schizophrenia symptoms often first appear during the teen years, the researchers said.

This is huge news. I have a chapter on my own experiences in treating schizophrenic men in the early 1960s in my book, War Stories: 50 years in medicine.

My teacher, George Harrington, told me he thought schizophrenia had to be organic in origin and he speculated that it could be deficiency of an unknown vitamin. Genetics were very primitive in those days. The discovery of the number of human chromosomes had only recently been announced when I began medical school. The number was only discovered in 1956, six years before I began medical school.

Using postmortem human brain samples, the researchers found that variations in the number of copies of the C4 gene that people had, and the length of their gene, could predict how active the gene was in the brain.

The researchers then turned to a genome database, and pulled information about the C4 gene in 28,800 people with schizophrenia, and 36,000 people without the disease, from 22 countries. From the genome data, they estimated people’s C4 gene activity.

They found that the higher the levels of C4 activity were, the greater a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia was.

The researchers also did experiments in mice, and found that the more C4 activity there was, the more synapses were pruned during brain development.

This is not therapy by any means but it is a huge step toward something that may prevent the disease is susceptibles.

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Trump’s sense of humor.

January 26th, 2016

I am not a Trump supporter but I enjoy the outrage which the corrupt GOP establishment views him in.

Now he has done it ! He won’t be in the Thursday debate. I agree that Megyn Kelly acted like a school girl in the first debate. I don’t blame him for resenting the way she acted. The establishment GOP are criticizing Trump for dropping out. Personally, I think a Trump-Sanders debate would be entertaining. The Weekly Standard is as looney as The National Review.

Then, he dropped a bombshell !

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Personally, I think this is hilarious. Hillary was the source of the original questions about Obama’s birth. I think he was born in Hawaii but I also think he used his alleged foreign birth as a way to get favors at east coast colleges, like Columbia and Harvard. Nobody seems to remember him at Columbia.

I, for one, am enjoying the show.

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Will California real estate prices collapse ?

January 26th, 2016

I sold my house in 2010 and moved to Lake Arrowhead where I bought a house on a rare level piece of land that I fenced for my dog.

After, living there for two years, I found that I could not tolerate the altitude, even though it is only 5200 feet. I was short of breath and had trouble sleeping. I had to sell the house and move back to sea level. In doing so, I lost a lot of money and have been renting since 2012, first a small condo and now a three bedroom house in Mission Viejo. I have slowly rebuilt my funds and have started to think about buying another house. I would really like to move to Tucson but my children are in California and I would be alone in Tucson. Jill and I are back together since 2014 and so one reason for staying here is less important. I would not be alone.

The other reason why I am reluctant to buy another house in southern California is the insane level of real estate prices. In moving to Lake Arrowhead, a resort, I found the only real estate market that is NOT increasing in value. Mission Viejo, where I have lived since 1972, is in Orange County and has some very high real estate values. I have been nervous about another collapse in prices and don’t want to buy at the peak of the market.

Recently there have been a few signs that the party may be over.

In the 1980s, there was a surge of buying from Japan as Japanese used the towering real estate prices in Japan to borrow and buy expensive houses in southern California. When Japan entered the present 25 year slump, the prices of southern California homes also dropped and many were sold for a fraction of the previous price. An impressive example, is what happened at the Pebble Beach golf resort. In 1989, a Japanese investor bought the resort for an amazing price. Ten years later, he had to sell for a fraction.

The sale will end nearly a decade of Japanese ownership of Pebble Beach, which became a symbol of the exorbitant prices paid and, subsequently, the massive losses suffered by Japanese investors who flooded into U.S. real estate during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“We think it’s the best golfing place on the globe,” said Ueberroth, who began negotiations to purchase the property in March. “I’ve been lucky enough to have played there over the last 40 years.”

The purchase of Pebble Beach Co. includes the Pebble Beach Golf Links and three other nearby courses; two luxury hotels, the Lodge at Pebble Beach and the Inn at Spanish Bay; and 17-Mile Drive, a popular tourist destination.

Pebble Beach Co. is owned by a partnership between Taiheiyo Club Inc., a Japanese golf resort company, and Sumitomo Credit Services Co., one of Japan’s largest issuers of Visa cards. The partnership purchased Pebble Beach in 1992 from golf tycoon Minoru Isutani, who bought the company only two years earlier from a group headed by oilman Marvin Davis. However, the debt-ridden Isutani was forced to sell the property at an estimated $350-million loss.

That’s a big loss and an example of what happened. Now, China is is seeing a stock market crash similar to the Japan real estate crash in 1990.

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China is still going through a difficult transition from socialism to capitalism, meaning its government that once tightly controlled the economy is slowly letting the global market take the wheel. That’s a tough process, particularly for a government that is used to being able to turn the economic knobs as it pleases. It still likes to do so from time to time, as it did on Thursday — a currency move that will get to in a bit.

But to show how precarious things are, a relatively small tweak sent investors into a pretty steep nose dive. And when China dives, so does everybody else, as evidenced by the market declines around the world.

So, how much effect will that have on Los Angles real estate ? This much.

Prices for the top 5 percent of U.S. real estate transactions remained flat in 2015 while all other houses gained 4.9 percent, according to data from Redfin Corp., a real estate brokerage and data provider.

In the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia, where Zhang is struggling to sell the six-bedroom home, dozens of aging ranch houses were demolished to make way for 38 mansions built with Chinese buyers in mind. They have manicured lawns and wok kitchens and are priced as high as $12 million. Many of them sit empty because the prices are out of the range of most domestic buyers, said Re/Max broker Rudy Kusuma, who blames a crackdown by the Chinese on large sums leaving the country.

And now, the Chinese market is crashing. Hmmm. Can southern California real estate be far behind ? I’m waiting. Meanwhile, I still like Tucson where prices are much lower.

For example. We are still thinking about it.

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