Iraq, Global Warming, and the Meaning of Life

Water, water, nowhere

2011-02-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

What do the Arabs do when they run out of water, the Guardian is asking. Good question. One of the problems of autocracies is that they focus on staying in power with short-term policies, where a democratic majority might see the need to take action to save their countries. Oil wealth has allowed the populations to explode and people to survive unemployed in economies with no openings for them. Lack of jobs is one thing. Lack of water is another.

But democracy certainly isn't a cure-all. In our own democratic society, we are on track to eventually spend 100% of the GDP on employing the highest possible technology to extend the lives of our oldest and feeblest citizens by one more year each. We obviously can't get to that point, but we can destroy our economy in the attempt and it's a problem no politician seems prepared to address.

Health care policy in America makes it hard to feel superior to anybody.

Successful Business is never usual

2011-02-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

Maersk has announced plans to build the largest container ships ever, and in the process reduce their carbon emissions by 50% per container-mile. This is what business does. High costs are incentives to innovate. The prospect of increasing costs are even stronger spurs.

Businesses, left to themselves, will innovate their way to better energy efficiency. Private enterprise achieves the progress that bureaucracy obstructs.

What do we do with pirates?

2011-02-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

Somali pirates have killed four Americans and our armed forces have captured about 15 of them alive. Now what?

This isn't a difficult case. It's obvious piracy. It's obvious murder. And there are fifteen people who are complicit. Who did what doesn't much matter.

What we should do with them now is a problem. What we will do is doubtless bring them back to this country, give them respectable trials, and lock them up for decades at public expense.

This is not the way piracy has traditionally been dealt with on the high seas, and the 15 pirates should accidentally fall overboard. It would send a healthy message to their comrades in Somalia.

Serious about the deficit? You can't be serious!

2010-12-06T07:37:00.001-08:00

So the Democrats and the Republicans in Washington DC have a deal. The Democrats get to extend unemployment benefits. The Republicans get to keep the tax break for very rich people. All of this is in order to preserve tax breaks for the middle class.

All of this coming a week or so after the the blue ribbon deficit commission provided guidelines for cutting the deficit. In a stroke, the politicians have rejected any action on the commission's proposals and simultaneously increased the deficit by as much as the commission sought to reduce it for the first few years.

Yet they say that the very fact that the commission gave everybody the stark news means that people will see that soon, real soon, we need to do something.

Right. Sure. You betcha.

Pretty good work for Al Qaeda amateurs

2010-10-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the bombs from Yemen indicate that the bomb makers are amateurs and may be trying in a "foolhardy" way to create fear. Looks to me like they're generally succeeding.

Recall the claims that Ronald Reagan broke the Soviet Union by forcing them to engage in an arms race they couldn't afford. Maybe, maybe not, but if Al Qaeda's objective is to break the United States financially, they're doing pretty well. We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the War on Terror, in two military campaigns and a worldwide $80 billion effort at "intelligence" which can't have any other target than them. They don't need to successfully deliver bombs. They just need us to shut down the world's air transport system from time to time because we're worried. And tie us down in God-forsaken places while we try futilely to suppress terror and build democracy at the same time.

The world is moving past us. Other countries build high speed rail systems, effective nuclear power plants, spectacular bridges and tunnels. We spend trillions on defense and cower in fear. This isn't going to be the American Century redux. Probably not even a good American Decade.

Thomas Friedman misses again

2010-09-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman contrasts the attitudes of China and America to global warming, and smiles approvingly on the Chinese. We have not adopted legislation regarding greenhouse gases, while the Chinese are busily making their economy more energy efficient, with the intention of creating jobs.

Nonsense. The problem is not that we don't confront greenhouse gas emissions enough. We do quite a bit, and our economy produces more GDP per ton of CO2 than the Chinese do or can expect to do in the near future. The Chinese recognize that they don't want to depend on foreign oil, so if they intend to grow, they must become more efficient and generate more energy themselves from renewable sources. Nevertheless, if CO2 is causing AGW, then the prime drivers of the increase are China and, lesserly, India.

The Chinese are not becoming efficient to benefit the world, just themselves. We, on the other hand, adopt policies aimed at helping the world by reducing GHG's and shoot ourselves in the economic foot. We let the Chinese become the leaders in producing solar panels. We force our last incandescent light bulb plant to close and switch to itsy bitsy flourescents, which we buy from China.

We aren't generating green jobs and China is, but this is just one more symptom of the epidemic.

Alan Simpson: A demonstration why America is doomed

2010-08-28T14:36:00.001-07:00

I've been trying to figure out just what the issue is. "Tit" is the pronunciation, although the usual spelling is "teat," for what you get milk out of a cow with. Simpson said, essentially, that everybody wants to milk the cow.

Surely, a woman old enough to lead an old women's organization has heard the term before. The context is certainly not "sexist." Yet, Democratic lawmakers and "women's advocates" are calling for Simpson's resignation.

And clearly what these people want is to get rid of the conservative Republican and stop talking about Social Security, so they can focus on their agenda to "balance the budget." Except that you could eliminate the Bush tax cuts and slash defense spending and still not be balanced.

You need a bull that's going to gore everybody if the deal is going to be done, but that's not going to happen. The only support for shared sacrifice is support for all the other people to share it. Entitlements need to be reduced. The idea that we have enough wealth to police the entire world must go. Taxes will need to be raised.

And it won't be done with a partisan commission, and the idea that you can pitch Alan Simpson and still reach the goal is foolish. We need somebody blunt and willing to offend. In my mind, Alan Simpson has polished his credentials.

Dumb and Dumber

2010-08-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

It was not a smart political decision for President Obama to take any position on the building of an Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York City. The only thing dumber is that the Republican party seems intent on making this a campaign issue at the same time we're at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We are in the Middle East, trying to persuade people that when we bring in the army, we're fighting for their rights to a good life, free of oppression, and that we feel strongly that Islam, their religion, is great and worthy.

Then back home, we have one of our two main political parties seizing on the building of a peaceful, welcoming, educational center that Muslims in NYC want to showcase their ability to integrate into American society, and denouncing it as some kind of blasphemy. In so doing, making it clear that for Republicans, Muslim and Islamist are the same thing.

In New York City, where an infinitely rich blend of cultures, ethnicities and religions dates back many decades, this kind of islamophobia probably doesn't play well. But Republicans expect it to play well in East Armpit, Louisiana, where their political base lies.

Republicans seem intent on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan until we've exhausted the last dollar the Chinese will loan us, but if we're going to be serious, it makes no sense to undercut the mission with petty politics.

Funny Math

2010-08-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

The people who count things for the media are now saying that the Pakistan floods are going to be worse than three previous mega disasters -- two earthquakes and the Indonesia tsunami. Because "more people are affected."

OK, guys, "affected" is open to interpretation. But death is binary. On/off. You're dead or not. And while the death toll in Pakistan is above 1500, the three above mentioned were in the range of half a million stone cold dead. Defunct. Pakistan is a horrible and still unfolding story, but it's not in the same league.

Of course, whining aside, we should help Pakistan

2010-08-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

Not because they will be as grateful as Indians, or that this is a good use relative to other places in the world where there are more appreciative people, but the way to sell this is part of the war on terror. For that, we'll spend a billion dollars a day and not blink.

Things are getting worse and the Pakistanis may be getting a little tired of their government. They may not become cheerleaders for America out of this, but if we donated a bazillion tents, cook stoves, sacks of rice and porta-potties, all marked "Made in USA," it might do us some good, and the billion a day is doing less than nothing, so why not?

Of course, before writing "Made in USA" on the materiel, we would need to scrub off all the "Made in China" markings.

Pakistan Needs Our Help, They Tell Us

2010-08-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

It seems that Pakistan is going to need billions of dollars to repair damage from the monsoon flooding.

Now if I remember right, Pakistan is the country that helped North Korea get the technology for its nuclear bomb. Its intelligence branch has been helping the Taliban, which just murdered ten people for the crime of helping while Christian.

If we plan to assist Pakistan to boost our image, we should consider the recent past. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, the 2005 earthquake similarly opened an opportunity to boost the US image. Five years later, most Pakistanis view us as an enemy. They'll take our help again, but we aren't going to win any hearts or minds.

In India, a country with a generally positive attitude towards the United States, there are many among the dalits, formerly known as untouchables, who have suffered for a couple thousand years what the Pakistanis are suffering now for a few weeks. Bill Gates has recognize this and has started to help. Our money would earn us a lot more return if we spent it in India.

Rush Limbaugh on Sherrod -- No Surprise

2010-07-26T08:32:00.001-07:00

It's odd the people are showing shock and surprise at Rush Limbaugh for his goal line stand on the Sherrod fiasco. Limbaugh is a very rich man, who has built his fortune on his ability to present the world to a significant segment of the population in a manner that they support.

He's a successful businessman and his expressed opinions are his product. Whether they are genuine opinions, or whether they make sense, is as irrelevant as whether Lindsay Lohan thinks she should go to jail. He says what his rabble wants to hear and gets well paid for doing so. End of story.

Paul Krugman versus reality

2010-07-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

Krugman believes that without government opening the spigots of borrowed cash to solve our current economic problem, we're doomed to sink further. The Europeans, he assures us, have it all wrong. Gonna tank over across the Atlantic.

Despite his advice, the Europeans are showing signs of discipline in government spending. They are taking deficits seriously. Nevertheless, or in consequence depending on what you believe, the euro zone is showing signs of life, while the American economy, having "benefited" from trillions of deficit spending, remains in the doldrums.

How inconvenient!

Why the Washington Post is still needed

2010-07-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

If we saw anything from the Shirley Sherrod incident, it's the danger of allowing people who don't understand fact checking to lead national opinion. Bloggers have their role, which is to stir things up, but when the NAACP and the USDA take as gospel their "investigation" of something, and act immediately, we get what we have just got. Those people who were genuinely snookered will now be backing up, and claiming that it wasn't their fault. People like Fox News will be making excuses like they had nothing to do with it.

The truth is that the blogosphere has scared everybody in power to the degree that they feel obligated to respond quickly. This is what the social media people tell companies. When criticized in the evening, have a response on Facebook by midnight. Don't wait until the morning.

Responsible journalism, as practiced still by the Washington Post and some others, checks facts and gets as full a story as possible, or at least indicates that all the facts are not yet in. If they go down and we're left with the raving lunatics of the Internet, God help us.

Reality sets in

2010-07-21T07:24:00.001-07:00

In an AP article about how the well is soon to be capped, appeared the following telling items:

News that a solution is near cheered Jeff Hunt who scans the waves daily for telltale tar balls in Pensacola Beach, Fla.

If three months on, people are "scanning" for signs of the oil spill in Pensacola, we can assume that Pensacola isn't going to be much impacted. Things always wash up on beaches. Dead fish, dead birds, dead whales. A few tar balls aren't going to matter much.

The spill hasn't reached the big money beaches of Florida so we can assume that they either won't at all or won't in any material way. The surface of the water around the well is already starting to look better. There are many other seeping wells in the gulf that nobody bothers with because the gulf simply processes the oil.

In six months, except for a few locations, you'll have a hard time finding evidence that this spill ever took place.

Global Warming vs AGW

2010-07-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

Eugene Robinson, appearing in today's Register-Guard, considers the debate on global warming to be over. We should now proceed to the debate on how to deal with it. I'd be perfectly happy, except that warmists shut down any discussion of alternatives to their apocalyptic vision.

But leaving that aside, the debate is not really over warming, it's over manmade warming and specifically over the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere. NASA has a Key Climate Indicators site where they should a number of interesting graphs. One of these is temperature. It does in fact show a much steeper rise over the past 30 years than during the 30 that preceded. CO2 is also much higher. This could be taken as an indication of causation.

However, looking somewhat left on the same graph, we find the period 1910 to 1940. Also 30 years, also showing a rise of about .5 C, however without the corresponding CO2 concentrations.

It's probably getting a bit warmer. It has been getting warmer for the past two and a half centuries, since the end of the Little Ice Age. Still farther back in time, it used to be warmer than then and maybe warmer than now. At the point that science can explain why it's now CO2 and not the same factors that have played out before, then maybe the science will be settled. Not before.

Why liberals should support the Second Amendment

2010-07-10T12:11:00.001-07:00

Daily Kos has an article entitled, "Why Liberals Should Love the Second Amendment." Personally, I think this goes a little too far, but a more moderate position would be expect liberals, and most particularly ACLU liberals, to support the Second Amendment, whatever they feel about the NRA.

Back in the 1960's, Lyndon Johnson remarked, with reference to those attacking him from the left of his own party, "I'm the only president you've got." Those were different times and many of us probably would not have eased up, even knowing that it might lead to Richard Nixon.

What the ACLU and its supporters should now recognize is that the first ten amendments are the only Bill of Rights we've got. The horse trading ended two centuries ago. Actually, at that time the First and Second amendments were probably not appealing to separate constuencies as they do now, but no matter. They are both in the Bill of Rights.

For two hundred years, courts have been extending the interpretation of the Constitution from its literal form to adapt to modern realities and modern sensibilities. It's certainly true that the framers of the Constitution did not envision powerful and accurate handguns, or assault rifles beyond what anyone would use to hunt game for the family. But they also did not regard burning a flag as speech.

The problem is that by criticizing an expansive view of the Second Amendment, you call into question the expansive view of the First. Frankly, the Second isn't much of a problem. Gun laws haven't stopped gun violence, or even dented it in places like Chicago.

But actually reining it in would be a problem. I worry much more about my government than about my armed neighbors, and a possibly overwrought interpretation of the Second Amendment isn't going to change my priorities.

Dog Bites Man Again

2010-07-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

It seems to be news that the Afghan government won't allow prosecutions of corrupt government officials. It also seems to be news that the powerful people behind the "government" of Haiti are more concerned with further enrichment than rebuilding Port-au-Prince.

This isn't news. These are not governments in the sense we know them, organizations of people working generally for the betterment of the population. The "governments" of Afghanistan and Haiti, and many others throughout the world, are essentially criminal in nature and exist for the exploitation of the citizenry.

There isn't anyone who can fix Haiti. And nobody can fix Afghanistan except the Taliban. Oops, we're fighting the Taliban while insisting that Afghanistan be fixed. Just a small logical dilemma.

The third world is looking robust

2010-07-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

In two articles I've just read, Southeast Asia and Turkey seem to be booming while the United States and Europe are in the doldrums. To quote part of the article on Turkey:

So complete has this evolution been that Turkey is now closer to fulfilling the criteria for adopting the euro — if it ever does get into the European Union — than most of the troubled economies already in the euro zone.

The comfortable feeling that we know how to do things and everybody else needs to learn from us may have been true. Fortunately or unfortunately, they appear to have learned what they need.

Maybe this time, word will get around

2010-07-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

An Associated Press writer reports from the congo:

At the time, Jackson Ndengwa, 15, was inside one of the makeshift halls to watch one of his favorite teams, Ghana, play Uruguay.

"The hall was full of people," he said from his hospital bed in the lakeside town of Uvira, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) to the south. "We never expected that there could be a fire like this."

At first, I assumed it was a sudden event that nobody could escape. Now it turns out that the tanker was leaking for an hour and the UN folks were trying to get everyone out of the area because of the danger.

Instead, they wanted to watch the World Cup.

Bye, Bye, Karzai

2010-07-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

According to the LA Times, during the huge festivities to welcome General Petraeus to Kabul,

Karzai, whose relationship with the Obama administration has been strained amid fresh allegations of corruption in his government, was not present for Saturday's festivities, although the presidential palace said he was in the capital. He sent his foreign minister, Zalmay Rasul, to represent him.

We're spending untold billions of dollars propping up his sorry ass, and he snubs the ceremony. Let's get the hell out. Now. Today. Pack our gear, come home, and let the rump government sort things out. If they start any more trouble, nuke 'em.

They can't do the math in New York

2010-06-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

“The difference between us and him is $200 million,” said Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, “$200 million over what will be a $135- or $136-billion budget, which I suggest to you is less than a tenth of 1 percent.”

And we tell sixth graders that if they don't learn how to calculate percentages, they end up homeless, derelict, unemployable, or speaker of the New York Assembly.

Slower Progress in Afghanistan. Really!

2010-06-27T18:18:00.001-07:00

Leon Panetta seems to feel that things are going a bit slowly in Afghanistan. Slower than anyone expected.

Slower than expected by whom? I can identify quite a number of people, from the illustrious like William Pfaff down to obscure unknowns such as your present writer, who are not only not surprised that progress hasn't been greater, but would be surprised if there is in fact any underlying, sustainable progress whatsoever.

It reminds me of how Governor Kulongoski wants us to believe that the revenue shortfall in Oregon, identified in May, "couldn't have been predicted," although quite a number of people, again including this writer, predicted it twelve months earlier. People who make mistakes shouldn't assume that nobody else is able to see future trends any better than they can.

Another way of looking at the BP spill in the Gulf

2010-06-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

What we keep hearing is how bad it's getting. It's not good, but let's consider this.

There are half a quintillion gallons of water in the Gulf, and every one is full of microbes. The water is warm, the sun is shining straight down on it, and while fish may not eat petroleum, microbes do, and things eat microbes that are eaten by things that are eaten by fish, oysters, and shrimp. People talk about this as an environmental disaster for the Gulf. I look at it as lunch.

Of course, in the short term, those higher up the chain such as fishermen and pelicans are going to be stressed, but I worry about real national catastrophes that we might do something about, like why our sixth graders can't multiply. In the mathematical sense.

Violence at G20

2010-06-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

It is reported that Canada spent more than a billion dollars on security for the G20 conference in Toronto.

One has to ask: Haven't these people heard of teleconferencing?

A War Too Far

2010-06-24T01:49:00.000-07:00

Remember "A Bridge Too Far," the movie about World War II? I think we may be seeing the equivalent now. With General Petraeus taking over in Afghanistan, expectations are starting to crop up based on his "success" with the surge in Iraq.

And that would be what, exactly? We've given them elections, but they don't result in a new government and whatever government they had probably couldn't deliver reliable electric power to their cities. They've stopped killing each other quite as freely, but by any standards other than Iraqi, the civil war goes on.

But however weak his legacy really was in Iraq, there was at least a pleasant illusion that he had succeeded. Now he has Afghanistan. Nobody, from Alexander the Great on, has marched into Afghanistan and later marched out, thinking back about what a splendid idea it was. Not the Macedonians, not the British, not the Russians, and now not us. There is no good outcome in the works. And it's Petraeus' baby now.

They say it's technically a demotion. Technically, politically, spiritually, ...

American Demagoguery at its Worst

2010-06-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

H L Mencken said that America was ruled by the booboisie. It still is, a century later. Today there are two stories. Tony Hayward is catching hell for taking Father's Day off, and BP is making progress towards capping the spill.

First, why shouldn't he take Father's Day off? Would he be helpful, a Brit, working in the Louisiana bayous scooping up oil? Aren't there enough unemployed Louisianans looking for a paycheck to fill any vacancy?

And has he ever had anything to contribute personally to capping the well? This is the worst accident in oil drilling history, and the people who will solve it are petroleum engineers, working for industry not the government. I hope they succeed soon. I don't expect all the people who happily drive cars powered by the petroleum they find to express any gratitude.

There's a lot of talk about the possible impact of a hurricane. What will eventually solve the problem is the natural process of degradation, which takes place because petroleum is a natural, organic substance. It breaks down as a function of its surface area. The surface area of the petroleum that has spilled goes up as the spill is broken up. A hurricane will speed up the process.

There are a half a quintillion gallons of water in the Gulf of Mexico. That's a real number, not like a gazillion. A quintillion is a billion billion. In six months, you will have trouble finding a beach with a tar ball on it. In two years, you'll never know this happened unless you're a research scientist and know where to look.

None of this is to deny that Joe Barton is a bought and paid mouthpiece of the petroleum industry. That's a separate issue.

A silver lining for the BP spill

2010-06-11T22:01:00.000-07:00

As anger in the U.S. increases over British Petroleum's having done exactly what the U.S. economy's unrestrained lust for oil required, so the British resentment begins to rise, a sort of political version of Newton's third law.

This could work out well. For instance, after a little more British bashing by Obama, the Brits might say, "You're right. We're at fault here. And it's going to cost us a ton of money. So why don't you take care of Afghanistan from now on?"

As the "allied" effort in Iraq dwindles to just the United States, so might the war in Afghanistan. Maybe we'd just bag it.

Not likely, but one can dream.

Gaza and Afghanistan, a common attitude

2010-05-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

The actions of Israel against the aid flotilla headed to Gaza should be no great surprise. If you accept enough premises, you can justify almost any conclusion. The Zionist premise is that God gave them Palestine and the non-Jewish elements are there on sufferance. They cannot accept the notion of large numbers of people who hate them occupying much of Palestine and governing themselves. So they accept any method to defeat this result.

In fact, since the first establishment of a Zionist state in an Arab region, this outcome has been pretty much inevitable. The Palestinians are going to hate them and there are too many to drive away. Eventually, they will have a state and they will deeply hate Israel, even if they decide they need to do business.

Now consider Afghanistan. We refuse to contemplate a country governed by people who once allowed Osama bin Laden to hang out, so we try to change the country through war even though this won't work. We assume that given enough time, money, and American knowhow, anything is possible. All the evidence to the contrary will not change our leaders' minds.

The American view of nuclear weapons is going to be very difficult to sell in the UN now. Everybody knows Israel already has them. We want everyone to view Iran as the worst possible country in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons. Today, do we think this is going to fly?

We are living with North Korea's having nukes. We've lived almost 50 years with China having them. Pakistan and India live with the fact that each of them have them. Do we want Iran to have nukes? Of course not. Is it tolerable? Of course it is, and we will soon need to tolerate it.

David Brooks Scores Again

2010-05-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

In his latest essay, David Brooks is at his best, looking at the nature of risk management in a complex world. He offers some advice on directions we should collectively take. I'd like to think we will, but I don't.

Mexicans Boycott Arizona. Not a problem.

2010-05-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

There appears to be a movement by Mexican musicians to boycott performances in Arizona. I don't think they're getting the message. The majority of Arizonans will not miss them. And, in fact, if they can persuade their fellow Mexicans to stay out of Arizona, the citizens of Arizona are likely to feel that they got the job done.

Arizona police are not going to harass everyone who looks Hispanic. If you are legitimately in Arizona, you probably speak decent English. If you look Mexican and don't speak English and have no paperwork, there's a damned good chance you're illegal.

When The Free Market Isn't Enough

2010-05-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

The news the BP chose a riskier but cheaper approach to their well shouldn't be a shock. The world works on the sum of individual decisions, and individuals know more about what they are doing than the higher bosses, let alone investors. So when people drilling in the deep ocean look at decades of success, they will ask themselves whether it's more profitable for themselves if they cut corners.

Not whether it's better for the public, because that's abstract. What's concrete is that if you do a job for another year in a manner that has been successful for 20 years, you'll get paid. If you insist on safety measures that nobody understands the need for, you may get fired. And if you guess wrong, you can take your savings and go to Montana.

But would regulation have prevented the blowout? Is it likely that regulators will know what all the issues are, let alone the appropriate level of safety required? Unlikely.

At the end of the day, the lessons is mostly that this is a very uncertain world, where doing things on a large scale must involve large risks and we should prepare ourselves for mishaps. The lesson the most people are likely to take away is unfortunately that we should stop drilling in deep water.

Dump Potiowsky

2010-05-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the pattern of Oregon state tax revenue forecasts ever since the first time I ran for the Lane Community College Board. The person in charge for most of that time, except for an interim where he went back to academia, has been Tom Potiowsky. If nothing else, my observations have convinced me that Oregon should be cutting waste and inefficiency in order to balance the budget, starting by firing Mr. Potiowsky.

Yesterday, he announced that the revenue forecast for 2009-2010 was being reduced by a half billion bucks from what he had said three months earlier. He said this in an environment of no major surprises. No new flu epidemics. No wars or terrorist attacks. Nothing. But after three months, critically the three months during which the legislature went home thinking they'd done their job, the forecast plummets.

The problem is that the state's Democrats will spend almost every nickel that isn't nailed down, and the Republicans are so distrustful that rather than trying to nail much down, they prefer to ship it back to the taxpayers, especially since this earns them political points. A reasonable state operation would, after 150 years, have set aside enough reserves that it could proceed calmly through a biennium, spending what it estimated and handling noise in the revenue stream with reserves.

But this isn't going to happen. Nevertheless, if we're going to act stupidly we might as well save money. Let's get rid of the state economist and simply project Oregon's revenues to vary from the previous biennium by the average amount that CA and WA are estimating their own changes. I don't think we can do any worse, and it irritates me to think that our taxes in future years will be spent covering the amount of Potiowsky's PERS pension that we're not currently funding.

Palin Makes Inteligent Support Difficult

2010-05-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

On a day when Sarah Palin said something rare that I could support, namely that Highland Park IL is being stupid in not sending its girls basketball team to play a game in Arizona due to that state's law on illegal immigrants, she follows up with nonsense.

Noting the school has allowed student trips to China, Palin questioned whether school officials knew “how they treat women in China.”

Women? China denies many freedoms to its citizens, but I hadn't heard anything about women in particular. The only thing I can think is that she is referring to the country's aggressive campaign to limit the size of families.

China has one and a third billion people and a very urgent need to cap that. Should we be pleased if they let matters run their course and went for two billion?

A reasonable comment would have been that China suppresses its ethnic minorities, which would be a good analogy with Arizona. Instead, she shows that she is less opposed to curtailing human rights than birth control. She still stops my list of dangerous politicians.

The Intractable Greek Problem

2010-05-02T11:21:00.001-07:00

Everybody is getting into the act, with headlines that joke about Greek gods and phrases like "Acropolis Now." OK, the parody of "Apocalypse Now" is not new, but the meaning is.

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, bemoans the fact that the Greeks, by joining the eurozone, gave up the freedom to solve their crisis by devaluing the currency. He seemed to suggest that all they got in return was some prestige, which wasn't worth what they gave up.

But when they gave up the right to "fix" their economy with devaluation, they gave international investors the confidence to buy their government bonds at rates comparable to what would be charged Germany. The assumption was that the return on such bonds would be safe because the government could neither devalue nor default. Greeks saved a ton on interest.

However, the Greeks lied and cheated. They never qualified for membership without cooking the books and they have run deficits that they hid.

The technique which Krugman thinks so highly of is one that screws the international investors, who eventually get back their money in Greek currency but it's worth less than when they loaned it.

I don't see the exit plan. Loaning Greece money in euros, while the economy deflates, means that later they won't be able to repay the principal. Greece has a bloated civil service with cushy retirement plans. They need a more active private sector producing goods and services to be sold to foreigners, but this isn't likely to happen during the forthcoming austerity period. Whatever happens, it's likely to be ugly.

The Qatari Diplomat did not cause an incident

2010-04-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

Despite the news reports, nothing whatsoever happened on the plane that was diverted to Denver. The diplomat may have been sneaking a smoke in the lavatory, but the "incident" evidently was when asked, he said something like, "I was trying to set my shoes on fire." So all hell breaks loose.

Somebody at TSA or Homeland Security or wherever needs to look at the record of people who are in airports or on airplanes and make jokes about bombs. To date, over say the last century, there is no instance of someone making a joke who was actually serious. In the first place, it doesn't make any sense. More importantly, it never happens.

So a rational person, hearing the Qatari diplomat make a joke, would lean back and say to himself, "Well, at least I can feel confident that this guy isn't going to set off a bomb." Instead, we scramble the air force.

Lessons from Lewis Carroll

2010-04-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say, in the midst of his laughter and glee,
he had softly and suddenly vanished away, for the Snark was a Boojum, you see."

A word of caution is in order. Arctic ice extent is a Boojum. Many climate skeptics are entirely thrilled at the March anomaly, and it's not irrelevant. But as Serreze is being forced to acknowledge prior anomalies, we should not forget that this is one as well. Just a few months ago, Arctic ice extent was running lower than ever for the date. Now it's the highest in years, but past experience says that there will faster melting through June, when the extent seems to be roughly the same every year, and what happens afterwards isn't much affected by what happened in March.

We're seeing an increase in Bering Sea ice. Elsewhere in the Arctic, temps are above normal but not enough to melt any of the solid cover. The Bering ice will soon melt and the other Arctic ice may be setting up for a serious decline as well. Those who trumpet the "return to normalcy" may wind up like the Baker.

Although maybe not. An odd event may represent a fundamental change in pattern, or it may just be odd. A real skeptic reserves judgment, even while perhaps hoping deeply for a colder Arctic ASAP.

The Real China

2010-04-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

From the BBC, a Chinese activist who investigated whether shoddy construction contributed to deaths in the 2008 Sichuan quake has been sentenced to five years in jail. Another recent story told how Saudi Arabia is threatening to behead a man for make astrological predictions about them from his home in Lebanon.

People who think that buying from China is like buying from non-union plants in Arkansas only more so should think again. Or that running trade deficits with OPEC have no consequences.

There are a lot of foreign countries that I don't mind trading with. Pretty much all in Europe and North America, most of South America. Most of the Pacific Rim. But there are others that I detest and so should all freedom loving Americans. Starting with the Chinese and including pretty much all of OPEC.

We should pressure that Chinese to revalue their currency, and we should put enough tax on gasoline to cut demand to where our petroleum imports are mostly from Canada and Mexico. We are making tyrants rich and this folly will eventually come back to haunt us.

Live by the anomaly, Die by the anomaly

2010-04-03T08:56:00.001-07:00

Those who have watched Arctic sea ice extent fluctuate with an objective eye have noticed several things. Within each year, there are times when the extent seems to be the roughly the same each year. June for one, and a couple times in November and December. This means that, as one warmist blogger just pointed out, that it doesn't seem to matter a lot what the extent is in April. It will wind up the same in June and the minimum depends on the rate of loss in the following three months.

Quite true, although based on limited data, but the same could have been said when 2009 showed a brief streak last fall that was the lower than any other for the decade. Undeterred, Jeff Masters, alarmist-in-charge at wunderground.com, blogged that it was a foretaste of more record losses. It wasn't, as ice extent returned to the normal bundle soon thereafter.

It's also easy to see that the winter maximum does not correlate at all well with the summer minimum. So when people say that 2010 was "on track" to be as bad as 2007, because the winter data looked like 2007's, they are overlooking the obvious fact that earlier years were "on track" to be worse yet, but weren't. There is no winter track.

But while the correlation between winter and summer isn't robust, it's hard to believe that having more ice on April 2 than at any time in almost a decade isn't a material fact, likely to impact September's minimum. Other factors are probably more important, such as ocean currents and wind patterns, but there's a decent chance that the current anomaly will provide enough extra ice cover to put 2010 on the high side of recent years next September.

Which may be an anomaly but will be hard to explain by the warmists who were so urgent in their warnings about the other anomalies. I'd sympathize if they had been consistent, but what goes around, comes around.

When Climate is Only 20 Years

2010-04-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) publishes a graph of Arctic ice extent, updated daily. It has recently been showing a rapid rise in the extent compared with the long term average. The graph dated March 31 shows the 2010 ice extent nearly reaching the long term average.

But note what constitutes "long term" for NSIDC. 1979 through 2000. That's 22 years. The originating date is the start of satellite observations. No problem there, but the usual definition of a climate average is 30 years. NSIDC could have done that.

But they don't. If they did, they would include the years of the past decade that were below the first 20 years and that line would drop. If it were to drop, then the difference between what we now have and the average wouldn't be as scary. In fact, in 2010, it would show us to be above the 30-year average.

So why doesn't this government agency present the data in the most scientifically objective manner? If you don't know the answer, you haven't been paying attention.

Not unprecedented warming, even in last century

2010-02-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

I was just looking at the Key Indicators page from NASA, which shows global temperatures over the past 130 years. The smoothed line is based on a 5-year mean, which is arbitrary so this analysis should be taken only as a first-order calculation.

But it's clear that from 1880 to around 1915, nothing much happened. Then for the next 25 years, temperatures rose rapidly, roughly .4C. After which 40 years of very little change (actually a small decline) and then 25 years of rapid increase. Looks like just about .5C during the period. Due to the 5-year mean, data since 2005 is incomplete and not shown, but eyeballing, it seems to have leveled off.

Nobody of any credibility denies that we have warmed somewhat in the past 150 years, although some reasonable people think the rise is exaggerated by changes in land use. However, even taking NASA's numbers (not suggesting that they originated them), the pattern since 1880 makes the CO2 theory a little dicey. We had decadal periods with, respectively no rise, a sharp rise, no rise, and a sharp rise. The sharp rises took place in periods when CO2 was not a significant driver and when it was. The placid periods included a pre-AGCO2 period and one during which CO2 was rising rapidly. The CO2 "signal" isn't evident.

You can always fix this with a computer model by declaring a CO2 signal, subtracting it from the recorded numbers, and identifying whatever remains as natural variation. However, the argument that the increase can only be manmade CO2 emissions because the pattern is unprecedented doesn't stand up.

Thomas Friedman is Naive

2010-02-27T20:21:00.000-08:00

In a recent conversation with Christiane Amanpour, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times commented about how we should take strong action against a 1% chance of catastrophy. Also today, I've read that medical researchers doubt that all old men should take daily aspirin, because there may be no clear margin of benefit.

That's another story, but consider the difference in views. Friedman is prepared to spend wildly on the off chance that it will be needed. He sees no downside, just the positives of a cleaner environment and new technologies.

There are huge downsides. One is that government-sponsored research will be ineffective and will be distributed politically. The view that there is unlimited money available for research so whatever increment we achieve is a positive, is simply naive.

The other risk is that governments will gain extra power combating global warming and, coming to enjoy it, will decide not to relinquish it. We have avoided the world that George Orwell foresaw in 1984, because one of the superpowers resisted the encroachment of government.

In the new world order, people like Joe Romm will enjoy added influence. If you asked me whether that frightens me more than an extra couple degrees of heat, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute.

An interesting concept of "independence"

2010-02-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

I usually excerpt that reference other articles, but today's story about the new independent review of IPCC should be examined end to end:

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) — An independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the world’s top climate science panel, which has faced recriminations over inaccuracies in a 2007 report, a United Nations environmental spokesman said Friday.

The board’s work will be part of a broader review of the body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, who spoke on the sidelines of an international meeting of environment ministers here.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been under fire since it was pointed out that the 2007 report included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, although there is no scientific consensus to that effect.

That brief citation — drawn from a magazine interview with a glaciologist who says he was misquoted — and sporadic criticism of the panel’s leader have fueled skepticism in some quarters about the science underlying climate change. The climate panel’s assessments are a crucial source of guidance for policy makers addressing global warming.

But mainstream scientists and the United Nations have said repeatedly that the evidence that human activity is a major factor in global warming remains unshaken.

Mr. Nuttall said the review body would be made up of “senior scientific figures” who could perhaps produce a report by late summer for consideration at a meeting of the climate panel in October in South Korea.

He said that several countries had made clear at the meeting here in Bali that they would prefer that the review panel be appointed by an independent group of scientists rather than the climate panel. He said that plans for assembling the panel would be announced next week.

“I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue,” Mr. Nuttall said.

One area to be examined is whether the panel should incorporate so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports.

Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals, is crucial to seeking a complete picture of the state of climate science.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, told reporters here this week that he did not support a ban on the use of gray literature and that the news media had overblown the climate panel’s missteps.

The 2007 report on climate change cites more than 10,000 scientific papers and is more than 3,000 pages long.

So much to discuss. First, the IPCC report has been under fire for much longer than the Himalaya fiasco, and its problem is not a lack of consensus to support it. There isn't an iota of evidence to support it and there isn't a credible individual who supports it.

We were also told that the IPCC would use purely reviewed science. They haven't and rather than explain why this is not important, they are explaining why it is convenient. Because evidently it allows them to discuss things that aren't fully understood. Since this is indeed a document relied upon by international policy makers, why this is an advantage is not clear.

We are all getting tired of counting large numbers, which are supposed to prove reliability. This is a government report. Does anyone truly believe that there would be any problem finding 10,000 papers funded by governments which would support the government view, particularly since future funding depends on doing so?

Meanwhile Reuters, maintaining its legendary objectivity, divides the believers and unbelievers into two camps, described as "mainstream scientists and the United Nations," on the one hand, and "some quarters," in opposition.

Based on this, it's reasonable to suppose that the composition of the "independent" review panel will be chosen by the same people who chose the IPCC. Perhaps not the IPCC exactly, but people with a vested interest in confirming it. It's like the defense being able to choose the jury without consulting the prosecution. I'm nearly certain that Steve McIntyre will not be asked to participate, or even consulted on who should.

Another whitewash is underway. Penn State has delivered one for Professor Mann. The "respectable" scientists will do one for IPCC. But in the end, the problems remain. Temperatures are not rising. A lot of snow is in fact falling. Arctic ice is not changing much. CO2 and global sea levels are trending below the straight line, rather than rising above as we've been warned to expect. Hurricane seasons have been unimpressive.

Sooner or later, the warmists are going to have to deliver something more attention grabbing than CO2 concentrations, or Copenhagen is going to mark the high water mark of their influence, rather than just another step towards the goal.

Warming is causing snow

2010-02-12T11:13:00.000-08:00

OK, I'll buy the argument that heavy snow in Philly is the result of cold-enough temperatures and unusually moisture-laden air. But now we're getting in in the Deep South. They don't normally get snow now due to lack of moisture but lack of cold. This simply suggests we're having a severe February, that can't be explained by any flavor of global warming.

Those of us in the skeptic, not denier, camp don't object to the consistent use of science in support of public policy positions, but we get a little tired when heat waves in Europe, Katrina, and so forth are quickly attributed to AGW, but snow in Atlanta and record snow in Britain just mark a blip or even another consequence of AGW that nobody had thought to mention before. At least before 1998. With the failure of consistent warming to appear, there have been some "everything is due to AGW" warnings, but increasingly frequent blizzards haven't been mentioned that I recall.

A little consistency would be nice.

Our linguiistic losses

2010-02-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

Old people like me can only shake our heads at learning that Sarah Palin is criticizing Rahm Emanuel for calling people he disagreed with f*cking retarded in a conversation not intended for general public consumption. Not for "f*cking", which would have got you sent to detention when I was in school, but "retarded."

"Retarded" is a euphemism. It means "stupid," and was devised by well meaning people who didn't want to call stupid people "stupid." Unfortunately, as with so many euphemisms, after time it becomes associated with reality and people start to use it as such. Then we decide we won't call stupid people "retarded" either.

Now we have moved to "challenged," which has already moved to the joke level and will sooner or later become an insult. There is a silver lining to this. Eventually, the original words become so dissociated with reality that nobody remembers and they can be used freely. For instance, nobody complains if you call an idea "lame" or a person an "emotional cripple," although both words succumbed to euphemisms generations ago.

Maybe like Gaia, the English language has built-in response mechanisms to attacks on its integrity.

Arctic Ice and Solar Cycle

2010-02-02T01:42:00.000-08:00

The gurus of solar cycles were wrong about the timing of Cycle 24, but the sun seems to be kicking up and we're clearly on the rise. Whether we reach the oft-revised target date and intensity, I wouldn't hazard a guess. My interest was always a bit quirky, based mostly on my irritation that people were positively denying possibilities that were real, but I had no real idea why sunspots might affect climate. The Arizona guys were saying that it's the next cycle that will go really quiet, not this one, so we're a few years away from seeing if they're right.

Meantime, the Danish measurements of far North temperatures show somewhat colder weather this January than in the recent past, but the Japanese data on ice extent shows no clear pattern. The multi-year graph still looks like spaghetti. I'm guessing that September will be much like last September, which will disappoint Al Gore.

Also Time Magazine which has run an alarmist story about how ice in the Beaufort Sea seems thin. It's pretty close to a "duh" moment. The researcher discovered this in October. In mid October, the ice extent had grown by about 50% from the September low. On the edge, naturally, so if you take an ice breaker into the ice, you will first encounter thin new ice. This is surprising? That observation is accompanied by additional, unscientific observations of an ad hoc nature.

The author writes for a warmist Web site. I think when someone whose career depends on the success of AGW writes about global warming, there should be some sort of warning label.

When will China begin seriously running US Foreign policy?

2010-02-02T01:32:00.000-08:00

It's only a matter of time. They are unhappy that we want to sell arms to Taiwan. How do they expect us to earn the money to buy their poisonous widgets? Now they are disturbed that Obama might meet the Dalai Lama and are expressing their concerns with veiled threats.

When you sell your soul, you eventually have to pay the devil his due. We are addicted to improbable stories of easy benefits. We believe people who say they are honestly generating impossible financial returns and are then shocked when they turn out to be running Ponzi schemes. And we are now believing that the Chinese are beneficently letting us enjoy the fruits of their manufacturing labor with no expectation of eventual payment.

They will want payment. The veil is rising. They are tired of the United States exercising an independent foreign policy that may conflict with theirs, and it won't be long before the President realizes that he can't meet the Dalai Lama if our primary banker says we can't.

Abstinence only works with the right question

2010-02-02T00:43:00.000-08:00

The new "abstinence only" sex education report is supposed to be surprising. Leaving aside the small sample size, only about 600 divided into four groups, there is the oddity about condom use. Teaching about the advantages of condom use and disadvantages of unprotected sex should have had an impact. According to the report, it didn't. That fact raises a red flag.

However, a larger question is the methodology. How do we know they're not having sex? They say they aren't. Since no data is given on the results from students not involved in the study, the presumption is that only students in the study were asked, so they presumably knew they were being asked by the same people who had been instructing them.

So picture the situation. Child A has been getting instruction in safe sex. He is asked whether he's been having sex. He says yes. Child B has been getting instruction to the effect that sex is intrinstically unsafe. He is asked whether he has disregarded the instruction. He says no. Is this scientific?

Fewer than 100 girls took part in each group. I will be more impressed if, at the end of the ninth grade, it were to be calculated how many in each group got pregnant. Having sex is not a public health issue. Getting pregnant or spreading STDs is, and since the practice that brings them about is the same, the quickest test for that is objectively observing pregnancy rates. The jury is still out.

How long in Afghanistan?

2010-01-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

Evidently, Karzai thinks another 15 years to do it right. And we ask ourselves, why Afghanistan? Why are we building their economy and military and government for them? Why not Turkemenistan, or Uzbekistan? Or a reasonable democracy like India?

Because they harbored the mastermind of the greatest recent attack on the United States. For this, we will spend a trillion dollars helping them.

I have a better idea. We agree to buy their opium at reasonable wholesale rates, resell it to druggies in this country and use the profits to provide free drug treatment to anyone who asks for it. Heroin addicts either get cured or die, and either way they stop costing money. And Afghanistan can't say it has no economy to support itself.

And we tell Afghanistan that we are not interested in their internal affairs, which they can regulate as they see fit. But if they allow terrorist plots to be hatched within their country, we will show up without warning at some Annual Taliban Convention and turn it into a smouldering heap of mud and brick. Provided they behave themselves, they can oppress their women and behave backwardly and we don't care enough to interfere.

We have more important things to do with a trillion dollars than drag Afghanistan kicking and screaming into the 17th century.

Climategate and Solar Cycle 24, Yin and Yang

2009-12-06T07:59:00.000-08:00

As Climategate unfolds and the importance of the hacked emails is debated, another interesting and complementary story goes on and on. Or more importantly, remains entirely below the radar of the mainstream media. That's the extremely quiet behavior of the Sun.

There are actually three stories. The first two are about science in the abstract. About 3.5 years ago, research was reported at a major scientific conference and published in peer-reviewed literature that purported to show a sound basis for predicting the timing and size of peak sunspot activity. The prediction was made for Cycle 24 and, remarkably, the authors announced their intent to forecast Cycle 25 within a few years, more than a decade before its expected peak.

In the event, the predicted strong cycle did not materialize. Official predictions went down and down, until last May the official pronouncement was that Cycle 24 would be the weakest since the early 20th century. Soon thereafter, the second event took place. NASA, having prominently supported the early predictions, seized the fact that "new" research explained the slow start of Cycle 24, and combined that with some solar activity in June to announce with considerable fanfare that all was now clear and Cycle 24 was beginning is predictable rise.

On closer examination, the new research developed a trend based on one data point, plus another that was, at best, not inconsistent. To NASA's dismay, June did not foretell the onset of more activity. The summer was extremely quiet. The importance of NASA's PR barrage in June was not whether it was wrong, as it was, but the transparently self-serving opportunism. There was no science beyond speculation, which albeit a component of the scientific process is not to be confused with results. The purpose was to try to catch a break, announcing science which might with good fortune happen to correspond to the trend. Nobody seems to be criticizing NASA for this.

Finally, there's the possibility that this is important, so it's very odd that it gets no press. Being about half the activity that was predicted in May, a reasonable person would project that the peak will in turn be around half, which would put 24 in the range of the Dalton Minimum, which in turn corresponded with some very cold weather. But when I look at news.Google.com for that phrase, I get only two articles in the past two weeks, worldwide in English.

We can't really say what terrestrial effects a quiet sun will cause, but we can say definitely that it's too early to say it will be nothing. So it irks me when people who say that CO2's future impact is known, when it isn't, and that a quiet sun is known to have no impact, when they don't know.

The solar scientists are in a double bind. Their predictions have been wrong, making it seem that we're spending a lot on useless research. I don't think it's useless because I support basic research, but it's a public relations problem. The second is that the actual developments could cause at least a distraction from the onward march of AGW. Scientists who value their standing as team players don't want to appear to cast doubt on the most important principle (economics-wise) of modern science. So they don't, even though they clearly should. Their conduct is almost as ugly as the climate scientists.

The phony climate debate over smoothed trends

2009-07-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

There are a number of numbers that people compute which appear to be due solely to the fact that with so much computing power at people's fingertips, the urge to calculate cannot be restrained. Thus people calculate for every stock in the stock market its "200-day moving average." The point eludes me. You can't sell for the 200-day average. That 200 days is significant suggests that the dynamics of the stock market are somehow driven by base-10 arithmetic. Why not a 128-day (200 in octal) average?

But I digress. The ability to compute has led climatologists to calculate smoothed trends for climate changes. A well known German named Stefan Rahmstorf has determined that with his secret smoothing technique, a long-term global warming trend is obvious. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit is arguing that Rahmstorf's method is actually a 15-year triangular filter with some serious defects.

I have a more fundamental point. A 15-year smoothed trend isn't anything real. It's a construct. If it were a construct that helped, it would be one thing. Kinetic energy is defined as one half mass times speed squared. Why not the whole shebang? Because at one half, and with a well chosen definition of potential energy, you get an extremely valuable principle of conservation.

So artificial constructs are not automatically to be discarded, but one has to wonder what value there is in an oddly weighted 15-year average of temperature. Temperature at a given moment is a valuable piece of knowledge. Temperature over a 24-hour period can give a reasonable estimate of the need for heating a home, for instance. There may be some physical significance to the average of a year, but I'm not sure.

But a weighted number over 15 years? It's gibberish. The granularity becomes 15 years. You can do the computation once and then repeat 15 years later, although it's then no clear why you wouldn't just do an equal weight average.

But to get an annual trend out of a 15-year smoothing, as climatologists now do and announce breathlessly to the press, is preposterous. There is no physical reason, no theoretical formula, that depends on the period or the smoothing method. It's a construct without purpose except to impress the ignorant reporters of the mainstream media.

Joseph Romm, Zealot Extraordinaire

2009-06-23T05:48:00.000-07:00

My first, and evidently only, encounter with Dr. Joseph Romm of the Climate Progress blog ended on Sunday with my being banned. For the record, I ran across an old posting from last December where Dr Romm, in separate places, first proposed a $1000 bet that the second decade of the millenium would be warmer than the first and later said that it was "certainly likely" that the increase would be .25C. I challenged him to make the bet at .25 C rather than .1 C, which was his formulation.

When I realized that I had posted to something that nobody was watching any longer, I switched the comment to a current subject. Romm replies that I was making up his statement. I clarified several times but he just got angrier and finally banned me at the end of an irrational rant. You may still be able to read it. It's been there for two days so I guess it doesn't embarrass him.

Reading the blog extensively, I've been struck by how much Joe Romm sounds like the Reverend Billy Bob at the Saturday night tent revival. They have a book, which I can't remember, in which everything is explained. Anyone who doubts the absolute certainty of AGW should simply read The Book. Switch AGW for the Second Coming of Christ and there's an eerie parallel.

Ordinary people can make mistakes. Romm made a mistake by remarking that .25 C in the next decade is certainly likely. In the end, he effectively retracted the statement by criticizing it, but in such a way that it seemed as though I had made the claim rather than him.

Romm is plainly in the hysterical wing of AGW enthusiasts, and he's probably making a good living at it. He's a zealot. Zealotry isn't always bad. Zealots brought about the American Revolution. However, they also brought about the French, Russian and (perhaps first) Iranian revolutions, along with the Spanish Inquisition. On balance, they are to be feared.

Romm and his crowd need to start delivering, or the rabble will grow unruly. We are seeing very little actual warming, none for a few years. The oceans are rising but they have been rising on a geologic time scale and the current increase is minimal. There have been no tropical islands disappearing under the waves. There has been no outbreak of tropical disease in northern climes. Crops are not failing. Hurricanes are not becoming more common.

Maybe this will all happen. Most rational skeptics agree that the basic physics favors some degree of AGW, and since this is a poorly understood process, it's possible that everything claimed for it is true and the current slow progress is a long term trend masked by a short term anomaly. All this is possible.

But it's not certain, and it's bad science to claim that science knows more than it does. It's also bad for science to risk its long-established reputation for sober and non-political investigations. If in a few years, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk will be able to accurately portray the scientific community as having abandoned objectivity for activism, it will be a sad day.

Encounters with the radical wing of AGW

2009-06-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

I chanced on a Web site about climate change through a link at a blog that I pay a lot of attention to. It's Climate Progress and the guru is Joe Romm. After running through some links, I found a posting from December that included the following two items:

So for all the deniers and delayers touting the coolest year of the decade (if the decade starts in 2001) meme, I stand by my offer to bet $1000 that the decade from 2010 to 2019 will be warmer than the decade from 2000 to 2009. I’ll even give you 2-to-1 odds or spot you 0.1°C. And I’ll even agree to use the HadCRUT3 global mean surface temperature data set (but, no, I can’t agree to use the satellite data, since it covers parts of the atmosphere that are projected to cool).

Any takers?

And later, "JR" made a response to "Charlie":

Lots of things tweak warming, but barring another major volcano soon, the next decade is certainly likely to be above 0.25°C warmer than this decade.

So I posted a comment, and JR replied:

"“Denier” is a loaded word, bringing to mind the phrase “holocaust denier.” A good many of us are simply skeptical. The physics looks promising and it’s possible to dismiss the less than stellar correlation between CO2 and global temperature as noise, but there is an awfully poor signal-to-noise ratio here for the sort of pompous dogmatism that I read.

I’m not a physicist but I’ve got a good grip on math and I’d be quite willing to take up the offer of a $1000 bet on the second decade versus the first that was proposed back in December. I posted that response to what I then discovered was a December posting, so probably nobody has noticed. I’ll repeat it.

In December, the statement was made that it was “certainly likely” that the second decade would be warmer by .25 C than the first. I’d be happy to take that as a bet, $1000 straight up odds. It seems that $1000 is an acceptable amount to risk, and the statement implies that the odds strongly favor the hotter temperature. If that’s the case, this should be acceptable. If it isn’t, the statement should be withdrawn.

[JR: You deniers kill me -- or at least future generations. That statement was never made -- to clarify, you wrote "I'd be quite willing to take up the offer of a $1000 bet on the second decade versus the first that was proposed back in December." That statement of yours refers to a bet offer that was never made. I just can't waste time with people who misstate what is easily read on this blog.

Since you all think it's cooling, then the fair bet is whether the next decade (starting in 2010) will be warmer than this one. I'll bet $1000 it is and I'll give you 2-to-1 odds, and I'll even give you the Hadley data, even though the NASA data is probably more accurate. I'll also give you a straight up $1000 bet that the next decade will be 0.1°C warmer, with an extra $100 to the winner for each 0.01°C above or below that. If that isn't acceptable, you really should stop with your disinformation spreading.]"

You do not see part of the exchange, because I immediately responded that I was challenging him to bet at .25C, not that he had done so. He suppressed my comment and edited his own, reiterating that I was suggesting that he had already made the bet.

So I responded again, and so did he:

"JR, since you are now editing my posts before anyone gets to see what I say, this is probably a waste of time, but let me make myself unamiguously clear. You said in December that you would take a bet based on the second decade versus the first. You offered to wager $1000. In the same post, you said that it was “certainly likely” (with the caveat about a volcano) that the rise would be at least .25 C.

I don’t intend to take your bet as offered. I’m just saying that if you have $1000 to risk and think this is an odds on proposition, why aren’t you accepting it?

[JR: Shame on you. Let me make myself unambiguously clear. You are banned. I offered two wagers for deniers. Later on, I made a statement that I believe it is certainly likely that the rise next decade would be 0.25 C warmer than this one. The fact that you refuse to take a two-to-one bet that the next decade will be warmer than this one, or an even money bet that the next decade will be 0.1°C warmer than this, but are fabricating a claim that I offered a wager that the next decade would be 0.25 °C than this one, which is of course beyond the very upper end of recent decadal warming or most GCM predictions -- is proof that you are conceding that the planet is warming much faster than the models suggested and that your denial-oriented posts are pure B.S. Please go elsewhere to post comments. I'm only interested in people here who actually believe what they are posting, even if it is crap.]"

I said once, I thought, and then clarified twice that I did not claim that he had already made the bet, only that he should. For this he restates for the third time that I have misrepresented him and so he bans me.

It certainly seems that climateprogress.org is interested in "deniers," as they call all who disagree with them, but only the idiots. There are plenty of idiots who don't believe in AGW and if you're selective, you can swat away the straw men that they set up by the dozen.

However, when someone calls you on the fact that you have both said that a .25C rise is "certainly likely" and later that it is higher than even his most supportive science claims, he kicks me off the site. I think even Rush Limbaugh, someone I personally loath, has more integrity.

Government Motors is Inaugurated

2009-06-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

God, that was fast! Hardly had David Brooks' words about why the auto bailout will lead to lousy auto companies died away when Congress announces it will interfere in the management of its newly nationalized subsidiaries.

Is this going to be just the first instance? Probably. Certain Brooks thinks so and he is a pretty smart guy. The logic is strong. So here's a prediction. We have not seen the last bailout money. Once the taxpayers own most of GM, it becomes nearly impossible to let it actually die.

Since GM has spent half a century assiduously driving away innovators and risk takers, who exactly is now going to lead the innovation and risk taking that the company needs if it hopes to compete? We now own the equivalent of a manufacturing post office. Good luck to us!

The soot is falling, the soot is falling!

2009-06-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

The following two paragraphs appear in a NYT article by Felicity Barringer on soot and mortality:

"A new appraisal of existing studies documenting the links between tiny soot particles and premature death from cardiovascular ailments shows that mortality rates among people exposed to the particles are twice as high as previously thought." and ...

"The review found that the risk of having a condition that is a precursor to deadly heart attacks for people living in soot-laden areas goes up by 24 percent rather than 12 percent, as particle concentrations increase."

The mortality did not double. The estimate of "health risk," i.e. precursor conditions, increased from 112% of normal to 124% of normal, a rise of 11% not 100%. I've scanned the actual report and I can't find a direct correlation between HR and mortality, although it's a long report and I haven't read it all. However, the precursor condition is definitely not the same as mortality.

Furthermore, buried deep within the research paper is a statement that did not make its way into the New York Times. It seems that the particulates in question have declined by a third since the oldest part of the study, so that while it is true that the EPA hasn't lowered its standards for particulates, they are falling anyway. That the story gives the impression that the risk is seen as greater and nothing is ameliorating it is scandalous.

Researchers need headlines to maintain funding, so it's no use to say that you're studying an issue that is taking care of itself. Also, the New York Times is always inclined to favor more regulation of anything, so even if it's a declining problem, they think we should hire more EPA bureaucrats to harass American businesses. Judge for yourselves.

Sotomayor the opening step in a Latina Woman majority

2009-05-31T11:37:00.000-07:00

The right wing press seems to be in a great huff over Sotomayor's comments about the positive impact of a wise Latina woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. Let me make her defense for her, although she'll probably work this out in time for her testimony before the Senate. She was noting that one wise Latina woman on a bench with a bunch of old white guys might bring a perspective not otherwise available.

If there were already eight such and she was saying that only another wise Latina woman would work, I think we would have reason to criticize her. But that is not the case now and the likelihood that it will ever be a concern is minimal.

What we should be concerned about is that this will make six Catholics out of nine. Salon seems quite complacent, noting that we have had a majority of white Protestant men almost all the time since the founding of the Republic. Perfectly OK, except that I might note that until recently law schools graduated virtually no women so it would have been remarkable to have seen any on the Supreme Court, and that the country has always had a Protestant majority. Hardly surprising that this group formed a constant majority.

Frankly, I think the group most unrepresented is the unchurched. There are nine justices and, going by strict proportionality, you'd expect one of the justices to coincide with the number who publicly deny any religious affiliation. If you went further and accounted for the number who in practice have none, you'd expect a far larger number.

But it's impossible to get to the top of the judiciary, any more than to get elected to high office in this country, unless you publicly profess your faith. Any faith, it seems, is better than none, even though this is logically contradictory for those who seriously believe in the infallibility of their own inspiration.

Someday, a candidate for something important will state, when queried about his faith, "None. It's all rot and poppycock." But I'm not holding my breath.

One final point. English has no inflections for gender. If we're going to go beyond English, should we be saying "Latinas women?" Do we say "francaises women?" What do we do with languages we can't transcribe?

I don't mind importing words, but when they come ashore they should follow the rules. Latino is an English noun/adjective for people, primarily from this hemisphere, who speak or whose ancestors spoke, Spanish. It's the only word we need.

What now in Sri Lanka

2009-05-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

It has been announced that Vellipulai Prabhakaran is dead. The LTTE is finished as a semi-conventional military force.

In 1864, Lincoln ordered Sherman to march through Georgia to the sea. In 1865, after victory of the Confederacy, he aimed for reconciliation although he didn't live to achieve it.

In 2005, Mahinda Rajapaksa became leader of Sri Lanka with a hard-line view towards the LTTE. Now in 2009, he has succeeded in his own march to the sea. Will he take this opportunity to look on his devastated and divided country as Lincoln did in 1865? We can hope, but history has provided us with very few Lincolns.

The Error of Peak Oil

2009-05-11T21:02:00.001-07:00

There is a lot of worry that the world has reached its maximum petroleum production level and will now, or soon, begin to reduce the annual production. Given the assumed increase in world demand, led by China and India, this produces an alarming scenario.

First, of course, if production drops, prices will rise, and demand will fall. As prices rise, production sources that were previously uneconomical are brought online, although not immediately. To a considerable extent, this is a self-liquidating problem.

But more than that, there would be no tight supply situation except that Americans have been allowed to buy more than half their requirements on credit from foreigners. We have just about maxxed out that credit card. It's been a great run for people like the Chinese, as they have used America's feckless disregard for its own interests to excise most of our manufacturing capacity, but pretty soon, they're going to realize that they are taking worthless paper in exchange. The United States and Zimbabwe have more in common than we like to admit.

For years, we lived high by liquidating our capital. The capital is gone and we owe foreigners much more than they owe us. We are now living on their forbearance. With the federal deficit now above 10% of GDP, the myth that the federal government takes its debt obligations seriously isn't going to wash. When that bubble bursts, the greenback is heading sharply south and Americans will be paying record oil prices even if the rest of the world isn't. When Americans only consume the oil they can pay for, there won't be a peak oil problem.

Fixing California, along with much of the U.S.A.

2009-02-05T08:34:00.000-08:00

An interesting article in the L.A. Times talks about the destruction of a former drug house in an L.A. neighborhood. They talked about the amount of crime and violence that had surrounded it and how the neighborhood had become safer. Of course, the crime probably moved about five blocks, but it looks good on a bar chart.

It did get me to thinking about the California state budget crisis. If not completely balanced, the California budget would be much closer if the federal government were today to legalize marijuana and assign to the states the franchise for selling it legally at a moderate profit.

At a stroke, a massive amount of state, county, and local spending would be eliminated. Everybody gets paid in this futile "war on drugs," launched by Richard Nixon with a promise that it would be over in a few years. The snitches get paid, as do the cops, the public defenders, the prosecutors, the judges, and the prison guards, all for preventing the use of a substance less lethal than tobacco or alcohol.

In addition to the money saved, there is the money earned by selling it. The stuff is sold now, but the public sees no revenue. Billions would flow into state treasuries that now go to Mexican drug lords, who hire people to kill Mexican public officials. The feds wouldn't need to keep shipping our cash to Mexico and Colombia to fight the effects of the illegal cash we are shipping there.

While we're at it, we could legalize and tax prostitution. I notice that Eliot Spitzer's pimp in New York may go to jail for two years. At a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to achieve exactly what?

As the great thinker Lysander Spooner wrote in the 19th century, vices are not crimes.

Lane Community College is toast

2009-02-01T03:56:00.000-08:00

I've run for the LCC Board three times now, all unsuccessfully. In all three, in varying degrees, I've argued that the college spent money on grand gestures, such as KLCC and the boutique Women's Program, which could be better spent on getting larger numbers of students an education they could afford.

It doesn't matter now. The Oregon Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) has sunk the ship. Or is slowly sinking the ship in a process that will continue for years. Retrenchment will be the order of the day for the next twenty years. Those things I said should be replaced by more effective operations will gradually die off, not to be replaced by better options. There is no money left for good options.

This may seem grim, and far beyond anything yet appearing in the news, but it's all online, waiting for anyone who wants to check the numbers and consider the implications. PERS posts its monthly returns online. A year ago, PERS will roughly fully funded, not including the side accounts (more about them later). It shows a loss of 27% for 12 months on its investments. Since the actuarially assumed ROI is 8%, this puts it down by a third compared with where it needed to be.

But it's much worse than that. Two asset classes -- private equity and real estate -- have done so badly that they can't be properly valued. So PERS is carrying those investments at cost, which is reports to the last thousand dollars even though the market is not known within a billion dollars. Those two classes at the end of December represented a third of the PERS regular fund, $15 billion out of $45 billion. Knowing what highly leveraged positions have done in the past year, it seems certain that they have lost most of that money. It would be odds on that they've lost 80% of it.

January was another bad month in the market, and PERS probably dropped two billion more. A proper valuation would probably be between $30 billion and $35 billion on January 31. If the total PERS UAL is under $25 billion, it would be surprising.

Bringing us back to LCC. In 2003, LCC floated a $53 million bond and created a PERS side account. The theory was simple, borrow at a little over 5% and let PERS invest it at 8%. Unfortunately, after several good years, PERS has had an awful year and wiped out all the earlier returns. LCC has paid nothing on the principal and consequently now has a $55 million debt and a $30 million side account. Again, this is pending an honest valuation by PERS.

The LCC portion of the PERS UAL is hard to know, but I think half a percent is reasonable. That would make it $125 million. Add the $25 million shortfall resulting from the bond, and PERS represents a $150 million hole for LCC.

I suppose it could be as low as $100 million, although I'd be really surprised if it were less than $120 million. Whatever the figure, it's a colossal sum and will require contributions that would average $10-15 million (principal and interest) if spread out over 20 years. Since LCC won't even begin to dent the problem for several years, until the issue hits the board upside the head and even not then immediately, the cost is eventually going to reach $15-20 million/year.

If anyone can tell me where this will come from, I'd be interested to hear.

Consider Gillibrand Carefully

2009-01-27T21:22:00.000-08:00

It seems that the new Senator Gillibrand of New York is not entirely appreciated within her own party in her own state. That may be a good thing.

She's catching flak for her opposition to illegal immigration, for which she has earned the term "xenophobe." Note that senators are sworn to uphold the laws of the country.

I'm not going to defend her extreme enthusiasm for personal weaponry, but it's a fair statement that few of America's crime problems are due to people with properly licensed guns. Some deranged people have gunned down people on campuses, but I'm not aware of any of them who had a concealed weapons permit. Statistically, it would make more sense to require everyone attending classes to pass the test of earning such a permit.

But I digress. More important is Ms Gillibrand's opposition to the bailout last fall. Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) also opposed it, and he's fairly well established in the progressive wing of his party. We're used to Peter being an heir to the maverick Oregonian tradition, a much longer established theme than that of Arizona or Alaska. New York should be able to tolerate some dissent, even with their dependence on the financial industry that was bailed out. After all, Gillibrand and DeFazio lost and the bailout passed.

And interestingly, the consequences that it was supposed to prevent just seem to keep on coming down the pike. The taxpayers have forked over hundreds of billions, hundreds of billions are to follow, and yet bank lending is tight, bank solvency is questionable, the stock market has dropped to the area that people were fretting about, and generally everything stinks.

I'll be interested to hear her position on the stimulus, a much more benign word than "bailout." I'm getting very skeptical myself. It all seems like a Ponzi scheme, where we keep borrowing money to pay interest on what we borrowed before while distributing bread and circuses to the mob.

Rather than being a formula for recovery, it looks a lot more like a guarantee that there will never be one. Because we're only able to sell all this federal paper because people are so loath to invest in anything else. But if things once start to go back up, there's going to want their money back in order to invest in alternatives, and the treasury won't be able to handle it.

Some day we're going to have a run on the people we've designated to prevent runs on banks. I have no idea what happens next.

Statistics and rare events

2009-01-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

People with a fondness for statistical foolishness should check out Statistics.org for a regular dose of the follies perpetrated in the media. Sometimes ESPN serves the same purpose. A writer there commented that in a match between two pro teams, one of them was coming up against the "law of averages" because they'd already won the previous two games.

But in addition to the general misuse of statistics, there is also the problem of a general disregard for the wings of a normal distribution. Unlikely events happen, or to put it another way, the law of averages says that sooner or later, things that seem unlikely do in fact happen. Maybe not often, maybe not soon, but they will happen.

The problem with public fiscal policy is that it's impossible to impress that fact on the voting public. They will always favor the solution that discounts what they deem to be unlikely if there are short-term rewards. Such as having happy public employees, who are promised secure pensions at a rate that presumes no evil economic periods in the future, without enough taxpayer contributions to ensure the result.

All across America, there are public entities who made big promises that they now can't keep. Not the feds, of course, who simply print whatever they need, but at the state, county, and local levels, disaster looms. It's one thing to hope for an 8% ROI on pension assets, quite another to bet the taxpayers' future on it.

There's going to be a lot of resistance from public unions, with a lot of "but you promised ..." They are right that we made the promises and hired politicians on the basis of easy answers. On the other hand, we simply can't fulfill those promises and compromises are going to be made or bankrupcies will occur.

Fixing Derivatives and Short Selling

2009-01-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of government regulation. It's a necessary evil at times, but it should be a last resort.

We've been through a vast problem with derivatives, those arcane financial instruments through which people "invest" in anticipation of certain financial results. The problem is that supposedly conservative financial institutions got involved and wound up betting that certain outcomes were statistically insignificant. Those improbable events have come to pass and the banks and brokerages who became entangled are dragging down a system that the economy actually needs.

I think there's a simple way out. The IRS has a simple policy on gambling income. If you make money gambling, you must report it as income. If you win some and lose less, you're only taxed on the net that you win. But you have net losses, don't come crying to the IRS. There's no offset against other income for gambling losses.

Certain types of financial trades smell of speculation but can be reasonably included in regular economic activity. I may buy oil futures without actually wanting to take delivery. I may buy shares in a company I don't believe will ever make a profit, but which I think will look good enough that I can sell for a gain after three months.

But these are still legitimate, since the economy depends on people buying and selling oil and shares in companies. Other types of trades have no such cover. Consider futures trading on the Dow Jones Industrial Index. It's a simple gamble, entered into by two parties, about a future number. Not all that much different from the numbers racket that the Mafia used to run.

Or short selling. People who buy stocks may have different motivations, but the original issurance of shares and the subsequent trading of those shares is a vital part of capitalism. Short selling has no such purpose. The economy needs people to take chances that a company will succeed, but not that it will fail.

Without any government regulation, the entire problem could be fixed by having the IRS treat all gambling the same. It's much simpler than a transaction tax and avoids putting penalties on legitimate activity. But if I invest in DJIA futures or I sell Bank of America short, that's gambling and the normal IRS rules should apply.

It's always been obvious that when people say they are against drugs, they only mean drugs not manufactured by people with shares trading on Wall Street. The two most dangerous drugs in America are alcohol and nicotine. The worst form of gambling is derivatives. In both cases, Wall Street gets preferential treatment over the common man. We should level the playing field.

Is The Stimulus Another Bubble?

2009-01-18T09:40:00.001-08:00

It seems that more Americans favor the big burst of federal spending to regenerate the U.S. economy when tax cuts are included. The number of opponents falls by about one third under those conditions.

I'm starting to think we're looking at the third bubble in a decade. When the dot com mania was peaking, I noticed that Amazon was valued at more than the total revenue of all bookstores in America from 1776 to date. Forget profit, just revenue.

Then after the stock market crashed, we saw people shifting their assets into real estate. It became a retirement plan for many Americans to buy a larger house than they could realistically afford, live in it for a decade, and sell it to someone else for enough money to retire on.

That's a plan that may work for an individual, but it doesn't work for the economy as a whole. Eventually, we learned that what the economy can't afford, huge numbers of individuals can't benefit from.

So here we are in the wreckage of that insanity and a third bubble seems to be developing. We've screwed up and lost much of our wealth as well as personal income. So we'll have the government print a bunch more money and everything will turn out fine.

Of course, we're dressing this up and not calling it printing money, but it works out the same. The government acts on our behalf and we pay an even smaller portion of it. President Bush refers to the aftermath of the immediate past bubble as a hangover. Nobody is talking about what the aftermath of printing a few trillion extra dollars and injecting them into the economy will be.

In September when TARP was proposed, commentators were speaking darkly of future years in which our taxes would rise or government services would fall as a result. Nobody says that anymore. We are bailing out segments of the economy, maintaining government services, and reducing taxes now. Maybe later, we'll increase them, but only back to where they were.

Are we thinking that this stimulus will put the economy back above its old trend line, so that future tax revenues, at old rates, will generate the cash to repay all this borrowing? Not likely.

I've long held the view that inflation is God's way of restoring reality when people insist on doing things on a large scale that just don't compute. This is one of those cases, leading me to the following bold prediction. The stimulus won't work well. We are headed further down and government spending won't do much to reverse it.

Eventually, people who are loaning money to the government at trivial rates will calm their nerves and want to do something different. At that point, interest rates will soar. I don't have a crystal ball, but 2010 is not going to be one of those spiffy, zippy recoveries from a recession that people are so hoping for.

Fighting the Great Depression Again

2009-01-16T08:20:00.000-08:00

There's a quip about military thinking that says that every general staff devotes itself to preparing to fight the last war. As the government piles on more experts on the Great Depression, Bernanke at the Fed and now Christina Romer for the Council of Economic Advisors, I can't escape the feeling that the government is assiduously preventing the events of 1932.

But while it's possible to criticize Hoover and his ilk for making the situation worse through fiscal policy, there is no established method for doing any better. There's a lot of theory, but nobody has actually headed off a Depression through government action.

So when folks say that they'll do as much as it takes, they assume that what they are doing is what it takes. But I see the economy as the equivalent of a couch potato, waking up one day fat and unfit and having trouble just walking around. The cure would be diet and exercise. A temporary substitute would be meth, but sooner or later, you either crash from your meth high or die.

Only a little while ago, everyone would have agreed that running trillions of dollars into debt would not be good. Now it can be discussed almost nonchalantly. When interest rates start back up, with the extra few trillion of debt obligations, the feds may find themselves spending a trillion a year on interest. Does nobody else worry?

Lane Community College and the PERS bond

2008-12-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

About five or six years ago, when the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS)crisis in Oregon was at its worst, a number of public agencies floated bonds, took the proceeds and sent them to PERS to reduce their Unfunded Actuarial Liability (UAL). Lane Community College was one such entity. The theory was simple. Bonds could be sold for rates between 5 and 6 percent. PERS has an actuarially assumed rate of return of 8% on the funds it manages. Uncorrected, a UAL grows by 8% annually, so giving the money to PERS reduced that cost. It also allowed LCC to fund the UAL over 20 years, a much longer period than PERS would require otherwise.

In one regard, it worked great. The bond spreads that pain over a long period of time and shifts the burden to the next generation. This is particularly true since the bond was back-end loaded, so that initial payments are low and increase over time. Starting at $2 million and change, they pass $7 million in the final year.

Overlooking the immorality of this, it still only worked if PERS produced the 8% return. But that was never a guarantee, it was an actuarial assumption used to calculate the fund's ability to cover future liabilities. PERS may have earned 8% over carefully selected timeframes, more in some, but in the last 14 months they've been losing their shirts.

This includes their investment of the $55 million that LCC sent them. The college was lucky to time the bottom pretty closely and earned a good return over the first four years. But PERS has been hammered and I doubt that today the "side account" for LCC contains more than the $55 million it began with.

So after five years, the college

a) Has a greater UAL than it started with,
b) Still owes just about the full $55 million, since it has hardly been covering accrued interest,
c) Has a steadily increasing bond repayment schedule in the years ahead,
d) Faces a sharp decline in state funding, as Oregon, dependent as ever on income taxes, goes into a sharp recession.

Not all of this will become apparent at once. But there's no doubt it will come into full view over the next four years and budget making for LCC will be gruesome. The college is fortunate to now have available the abilities of Greg Morgan, who replaced the catastrophically incompetent vice-president Marie Matsen in 2007, but it takes more than administrative skills to get out of this mess. It will take a fundamental rethink of the mission of the college.

The difference between Madoff and the Oregon PERS

2008-12-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

Bernie Madoff differs from the managers of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System investments in one crucial aspect. Madoff pretended to be doing something brilliant to produce steady gains when he was not. The PERS managers are doing it in full view of the public. Amazingly, nobody seems to care.

At the end of October, they were deeply in the hole for the year, but they still were able to brag about doing better than the market. This is straight horse pucky. They are doing better because, for a very large portion (perhaps 20%) of their investments, they know they have lost money but not how much. Their investments in real estate and "private equity" are so illiquid that they don't know what value to assign.

So they are continuing to assign the last value they could come up with. In reality, based on what others in the same asset class have done in the past year, they have likely lost 80% of their value.

There's no great secret to making extra money in an up market. You simply use leverage, borrow at fixed rates, invest at higher returns, and the difference accrues to the small equity base rather than being spread over the whole investment. But as Galbraith wrote in "The Great Crash of 1929," when the market goes down, people discover that the magic of leverage works in both directions. Thus the spectacular gains the PERS enjoyed for several years are quickly turning into massive losses.

The source of all this woe is that the Oregon legislature has declined to fix PERS. It has permitted the managers to make risky investments that, during the good years, went a long way towards backfilling the Unfunded Actuarial Liability (UAL). It was never a sound, long-term strategy and the consequences are coming back to haunt the state.

Putting Mumbai in Perspective

2008-12-28T10:15:00.001-08:00

The violence in Mumbai last month was terrible, but also illustrated the fact that what captures the attention of Westerners is not people in India being killed by terrorists, which happens frequently, but people in India in expensive hotels being killed by terrorists. Nevertheless, it's a problem and India needs to take security mesaures.

On the other hand, before we hyperventilate over this, let's think about what the Santa Claus killer in Covina did. In one evening, one disgruntled ex-husband killed nine people. Adjusted for population, that's like 36 people in India. Less than Mumbai, but it happens here all the time. We only see it in the news when there's something quirky, like the guy dressed up like Santa or the victims in Jennifer Hudson's family in Chicago. But if you add them up, there's no doubt that the United States has as big a problem with angry ex-husbands with handguns as India does with terrorists.

Israel's Purpose is ... what?

2008-12-28T09:58:00.000-08:00

Israel has shown once again that its military machine, financed heavily by the United States, can wreak havoc on any military opponent in the Middle East. The pertinent question, is why prove it again?

An editorial writer for the Times of London opined that a military conflict with Hamas was inevitable. But that's to give Hamas much too much credit. They have been able to lob a few missiles into Israel, but they can't hit anything. They had recently stepped up a bit, but the casualties consisted of no deaths and not many injuries. The Israeli response produced a hundred times the death and destruction that they has sustained.

Skip the morality of this, the "right to defend" and all that crap. Does Israel ever want a solution? It's been demonstrated that the effect of bombing, from World War II on, has not had the effect of "breaking the spirit" of the bombees. In general, it strengthens their resolve. The Jews are proud of hanging together through a couple millenia of persecution. The Palestinians have maintained their identiy and their enmity through six decades. This will only redouble the hostility of both sides.

America can't bring peace to the Middle East, but we can stop financing violence. Times are now tough in this country and the federal budget must be reviewed, in every program, to see if we're getting value for our money. Subsidies to the Israeli military looks like a good candidate for elimination.

Huckabee the Magic Honky

2008-12-28T09:44:00.000-08:00

The point about the silly CD sent out by Mike Huckabee's former campaign manager, now hoping to head the Republican Party aparatus in the country, is not whether it rises to the level of indictable offense. It's simply a mirror on the Republican Party.

Imagine a Democrat, trying to distance himself from Joe Lieberman, writing a song that made fund of the senator becauser he's Jewish and sending it to the Democratic Party power structure in America. Hard to imagine? Of course, because he'd know that he'd be on tricky ground with a large number of Jews with influence in the Democratic Party.

That Huckabee's guy had no such concern about writing about Obama the Magic Negro says a little about his taste, but it speaks volumes about the Republican Party. He could distribute his ditty with almost no fear that an influential black Republican would object. If you're scrambling for the top in the Republican Party in 2008, you don't need to worry a lot about losing the black vote.

Opportunity Knocks

2008-12-25T13:07:00.000-08:00

After 9/11, my opinion of Thomas Friedman was pretty low. His support for the Iraq invasion and the even dumber remarks he initially made about Afghanistan turned me off. But his observations about America's relative position in the world have been insightful and his latest opinion piece, Time to Reboot America, is well worth reading.I'm pessimistic about America's economic future because, although as Friedman rightly point out, we have many advantages, we also seem so committed to a series of structural problems that I'm doubtful that we'll achieve our potential.

Compared with other countries, we overspend with little effect on health care, which cripples the competitiveness of some of our large, unionized industries. We allow lawyers to run wild, with little net benefit to the population. We keep energy taxes low, creating a huge national security problem, while we spend billions on the almost immaterial threat from Islamic terrorists. We allow our education system to be run by unions that insist that no teacher can ever be paid according to ability, only seniority and farcical "education" credits.

We've lost the momentum and it won't be easy to regain it. I wonder where we'd be today if in 2000, we'd elected someone like Obama instead of George W. Bush. It's asking a lot to thrust Obama into the current mess and expect him to fix it, but OK, we're asking.

Wall Street may bring Peace to the Middle East

2008-12-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

It may seem odd, but the Wall Street debacle of the past eighteen months may provide the impetus for peace in our time. I don't think this was intentional, although I'd be prepared to thank them if it turns out that this was planned and it proves successful.

The first stage was the destruction of demand for oil, which has brought the price of a barrel of crude down by $100. Without high priced petroleum, the leading sponsor of anti-American and anti-Israeli activities in the region, Iran, will not be in a position to do nearly as much. I rather doubt they will continue active pursuit of nuclear weapons. When you need all your money to buy rice, or whatever Iranians eat, you may have to give up on plutonium for a while. And Hezbollah may need to go on a financial diet as well.

On the flip side, the general decline of wealth and income among Wall Street types had affected their ability to fund Zionism with the same esprit, even before the events of the past week. To this, Bernie Madoff may have added the coup de grace. The $50 billion he seems to have stolen came disproportionately from Jews, and perhaps even more so from Jews with a special fondness for letting another Jew manage their money. Some of them were definitely among Israel's best friends.

Maybe it won't work out, but if it turned out that peace could come from the antagonists running out of the funds necessary to remain obstinate, it would be an elegant and symmetrical solution, as mathematicians would say.

Euphemism of the day

2008-12-14T17:39:00.001-08:00

The Wall Street journal has an article on Bernie Madoff that may set a new standard for euphemism. The quote is:

Colleagues of Mr. Madoff said he was fair to those he dealt with and generous to charities including the Special Olympics. Mr. Madoff treated employees well and loved to take friends and colleagues on his 55-foot fishing boat, called Bull, said Frank Christensen, a retired New York Stock Exchange broker. "I really think very highly of him," said Mr. Christensen. "People make mistakes."

The people that Mr. Madoff dealt with have been taken for about $50 billion. That doesn't strike me as particularly fair.

And if somebody gives me $50 for safekeeping and I misplace it, that's a mistake. And people might still think highly of me. But $50 billion? I don't think the word "mistake" is adequate. Mr. Christensen is understanding to a fault.

I think we will learn more about David Friehling in the coming week as well. Friehling's CPA firm, Friehling & Horowitz of New City, New York, had the task of doing a (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) "audit" of Madoff, if you know what I mean. Done without staff, it would seem.

A Google search for "David G. Friehling" shows that Cornell University had listed him on their Honor Roll of donors from the class of 1981. If you check out the URL that Google directs you to, the Cornell site responds with "Sorry, a problem has occurred." Another euphemism. They mean an error 404, but it seems more broadly applicable. Although Cornell has removed the page, you can still find it in Google's cache. Not long ago, Cornell grouped him on a list of honor. They are now maybe having second thoughts about associating him with that word, or for that matter Cornell.

Madoff -- Where was the New York State Society of CPAs?

2008-12-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

The firm of Friehling & Horowitz, auditors of sorts for Bernard Madoff's financial empire, belonged to the New York State Society of CPAs. You can go to their Web site and search for Mr. Friehling yourself. He's right there, a member, apparently in good standing. More than in good standing. A July 15 newsletter from NYSSCPA shows board members of their various chapters. David G. Friehling is shown as a board member for the Rockland chapter. Earlier in the year, on April 15, he has an article in the newspaper of the NYSSCPA and is identified as the president of the Rockland chapter. The newspaper is, ironically, named The Trusted Professional.

CPAs perform three levels of services on annual statements. They render compilations, reviews, and audits. A single person would have trouble doing a compilation on financials as complex as Madoff's. A proper compilation would have been impossible without a team of CPAs, and Friehling is reported to have worked alone.

But an audit?! It can't have been a secret in Rockland, or at the HQ of NYSSPCA, that Friehling & Horowitz audited Madoff. Any sensible CPA must have realized that he could not either (a) conduct an audit that would meet AICPA standards or (b) remain independent when clearly, he can't have had any other clients. He has no Web page and he runs from essentially a storefront. No alarms bells anywhere?

The NYSSCPA has noticed the Madoff scandal and published an article on it. The article does not note, as other journalists have, the peculiarity of Madoff's outside auditor.

Clean water or rising waters

2008-12-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

A number of things have started me thinking again about global warming and the analysis of Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish "skeptical environmentalist," that if we're going to address the world's ills, it makes sense to choose the ones with the greatest possible benefit for the least cost.

So despite Al Gore, I don't see anybody being swamped by rising oceans. Subsiding land is a problem, especially in deltas, but this has nothing to do with global warming. Stopping the rise in CO2, which thus far actually hasn't had a measurable effect on the rate of rise, would cost trillions, if it were possible at all. Moving people out of the fringe regions would cost a fraction. Having fewer people there in the first place, by producing and distributing a trillion condoms, is probably more economical yet.

Contrast this with clean water. There are definitely people dying, millions of them every year, because they don't have access to clean water. I don't know how much it cost per thousand people now, but putting this problem on a high priority list and developing high volume technologies would make the solution a lot cheaper. Certainly not more than a few hundred dollars per person.

So we might redirect the money we spend on Iraq and Afghanistan, provide clean water to a half billion people in the Third World and save a couple million lives annually. Or we could try to reduce CO2 emissions, or at least make them stop rising quite as fast, and delay but not stop global warming. And the consequent rise in ocean levels which have cost the lives to date, rounded off to the nearest whole person, of nobody.

Pick one.

Metric System -- the Best Infrastructure Investment

2008-12-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

At present, there are three countries worldwide that have not adopted the metric system (SI). Besides the United States, they are Liberia and Burma. Not the greatest company for the world's preeminent economy.

Barack Obama is calling for a stimulus package that will have immediate impact on employment and a long-term impact on the competitiveness of the country. I can't think of anything better than to begin the conversion to metric. There are a million small expenses. We need to begin with highway signs that display both systems. You could have people at work doing that in a month.

Some things are going to be difficult and expensive to convert. Buildings that have studs spaced in inches are going to be a challenge for decades. Nevertheless, this must be done eventually and there's no better time than when the economy is slow and much of the productive capacity is idle anyway.

Making life easier for India and Pakistan

2008-12-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

It seems that India wants to keep the consequences of the Mumbai attacks to a reasonable level and avoid war. We should applaud that. It would also be nice if we would put our trouble in this part of the world in perspective and make things easier for the parties to stay peaceful.

The death toll in Mumbai was significant, and clearly tragic for those directly involved. But every day in India, about 2,000 children under the age of six die of diarrhea. That replicates the Mumbai death toll every two hours, and if not addressed, will do so forever.

But however insignificant in the big picture, Mumbai is a political issue of great importance and Pakistan has problems. Muslims everywhere feel threatened and for Pakistanis, Kashmir is a permanent sore point. A government that tries to be reasonable about Kashmir, however, is compromised if required to support the U.S. war against the Pashtun ethnic group that straddles the Pak/Afghan border and opposes the current regime in Kabul.

For many, many reasons we should get out of Afghanistan. This just adds another. Pakistan's government is close to civil war against a segment of its own population because they are our ally and we're fighting in Afghanistan. Tensions would fall in Pakistan if the Afghan war were to end.

It would be nice to bring democracy and prosperity to Afghanistan, but the prospects have never been good and haven't gotten better since 2001. On the other hand, India is the world's largest democracy and Pakistan has a semblance of one. They have 25 times the combined populations of Afghanistan and Iraq. For what we're pissing away in Afghanistan and Iraq, we could bring clean water and basic sanitation to everyone on the Indian subcontinent and become relatively beloved.

Iraq and Afghanistan run by people we don't like isn't a disaster. Much of the world is run by people we don't like. This would have been a better proposal in years past when the United States actually had the wherewithal to be internationally generous, but we should start by ending the wars ASAP and then, after the depression, start to do something constructive.

Silly Economics

2008-12-13T08:49:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the dumbest suggestion I've read about curing the current financial crisis was published by Forbes on their Web site. It's by one Frank Beck and advocates a 30% devaluation. Not just by the USA, but by every other country in the world as well. There are a lot of comments attached and I haven't read them all in detail, but scanning through I only found two that raised the question, what does this mean? Neither suggested an explanation.

Since we're not on the gold standard, we can't devalue the currency relative to gold. If every country "devalues," then they aren't devaluing relative to each other. It's mathematically impossible to devalue the dollar relative to the dollar.

Mr. Beck seems to be confusing the fact that a rising CPI "devalues" the purchasing power of the dollar, but this has nothing at all to do with "currency devaluation," which he seems to advocate in some puzzling form.

And for historical accuracy, FDR eliminated convertibility between gold and the dollar, but not the peg. Nixon took us off the gold standard. And the economy did not recover much after 1934 before crashing again in 1937.

This is a good example of why the blogosphere will not ultimately replace serious reporting. Almost all of the 50-odd comments presented a strongly felt opinion -- ranging from support to denunciation as Keynesian and communistic. Nobody observed that "good" and "bad" cannot be applied to a concept that is self-contradictory. If you want to read about economics, check out Robert Samuelson, who has qualifications and is paid to write. Amateurs writing blogs are usually idiots. Present company excepted, of course.

Mr. Beck evidently earns a living giving investment advice. Caveat emptor.

Pirates are maybe not so simple after all

2008-11-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

Some time back, I offered the opinion that we could fix the Somali piracy problem by a quick military initiative. It's got much worse and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. It's particularly ironic that the muslim Somalis have now captured a Saudi oil tanker and a ship taking grain to Iran.

The problems, in addition to restrictive international law, seem to include the fact that the pirates hold a large number of ships and crews at this moment and military action would probably result in a great deal of death and destruction. The shipowners are probably less worried about the rule of law in general than their specific need to get their crews, ships, and cargos back intact.

There's the follow-on problem that since Somalia lacks what we would call a vibrant economy, or any functioning government, piracy is going to remain the career of choice for so many violent young men that suppressing once isn't going to do it. And a violent military intervention is likely to just make them more violent.

We had a solution, which was the Islamic Courts that ruled Somalia until we forced them out with the help of Ethiopia. Unfortunately, our substitute government can't govern. It's probably time that we stopped worrying about people who don't respect Jews and Christians particularly and concentrated more on who can maintain law and order.

Getting ready for Wednesday in Oregon

2008-11-16T10:59:00.001-08:00

The governor and the legislature obviously know that something bad is going to come out of Wednesday morning's update on the state's tax revenue forecast. They are already starting to ask agencies for suggestions for 5% reductions in their budgets for the current biennium. Since there are only a few months left, this is an impossible target. For the schools, with contracts in place for their expenses, it's not likely they can do anything at all.

So when the new estimate comes in, showing at least a billion dollars shortfall for the next biennium and enough damage for this one to wipe out the rainy day fund, there isn't much they will be able to do except spend it. They were already planning to spend the EFB (Ending Fund Balance) down to almost nothing, which means that the so-called rainy day fund was just the EFB. With the two combined reduced to almost zero, they will be legally obliged to super-balance the next biennium and restore some semblance of an EFB. So figure that the actual shortfall for 09-11 is already down a billion before it starts, and will be down two billion at least when the forecast comes in. When the forecast becomes realistic, which by policy in Oregon is always very and generally too late, it will be down three billion or more.

This is before considering the effect on costs of PERS. Maybe this time, we can collectively agree that making promises that oblige future generations is unethical, and that whatever money the current generation chooses to provide its public employees for their pensions should be given to them via 401(k) or whatever, at their own future risk entirely.

Another stimulus

2008-11-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

W.C. Fields said, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then give up. No point being a damned fool about it." So on the basis, maybe we should give another shot of federal stimulus to the taxpayers a second chance.

But that's when it seems at least to make sense to begin with, which the theory behind the federal stimulus doesn't. John Maynard Keynes said many years ago that the most effective way for a government to stimulate was to spend. That guaranteed economic activity. If the same amount is simply passed back to the taxpayers, if they are frightened, many of them will just pocket it.

Keynesianism was born from the Great Depression and held sway in economics until around 1979. There is some talk that is has been embraced again in 2008, because governments are using tax money to try to avoid another depression. But they are doing it in a way that Keynes would have argued strongly against.

In fact, we've really already given the money-back-to-taxpayers strategy its best chance, with the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, which have eviscerated federal revenues over the past three decades. Part of Keyesianism is to put money away during good times, which is anathema to both right and left, it seems.

My guess is that there will be a further stimulus package and it won't stimulate much. What will happen when the dust settles and we're a couple trillion farther in debt, I have no idea.

Oil and Military Spending

2008-11-15T08:34:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has just reported that Russia has backed off on its threat to expand its missile system provocatively close to the Baltic countries. The original threat was seen as a quick challenge to Obama, although he wasn't yet in office so he couldn't have responded. The withdrawal may be seen as an attempt to be conciliatory to him.

I see it as more likely a realization that it doesn't make political and economic sense. According to the CIA, Russia is still losing population. Its health care system is in tatters and men survive, on average, only to the age of 59.

Twenty-odd years ago, the USSR failed largely, according to myth, because they responded to the buildup of the U.S. military with spending on their own systems which they could not afford. I've always thought it interesting to think that, by ignoring the U.S. challenge and focusing instead on building what communist theory says they should have been building, they would have won the Cold War. That's the logic, but I don't quite believe it.

However, the Russians may be discovering that they have large civilian needs to meet and, what they could afford at $147/barrel of oil, they can't at $58. I expect Iran to ratchet down their pursuit of nuclear weaponry. I don't think this has anything to do with trying to act in harmony with Obama. It's the realization that international posturing won't matter if the mobs at home run you out of office.

Who exactly are we bailing out in Detroit?

2008-11-14T03:47:00.001-08:00

Understandably, the plan to bail out the Big Three has some formidable problems. First is that the $25 billion is probably three times the market value of the businesses. GM and Ford are worth about six billion and Chrysler can't be that hot itself.

When the CEO of GM said he just needed money to fill a gap, he said it was until 2010 when his UAW cost savings would kick in. Why 2010? We're not being asked to bail out GM, we're bailing out the UAW. Remember how they had this deal where if the economy slowed down, laid off workers got paid just like they were working?

The country is full of workers who have been displaced by the economy and who got no golden parachutes. Why tax money to make this happen for auto workers? I suggest we let them go bust, so they can start over. A new board, new management, and a new union contract. They can do all that without my money.

Testing my Iraq Theory of Dividing the Oil Spoils

2008-11-12T04:27:00.000-08:00

My theory that the relative calm in Iraq was the result of politicians realizing that there was too much money available at stake to waste time quarreling, is about to be tested. The price of oil is dropping so far so fast that the cash available to keep the typical Iraqi comfortable isn't going to be there.

There are some 25 million Iraqis, although a census now would be distorted by the number of refugees in other countries, and the daily oil production could be about 2.5 million bpd without much trouble. At $150, less $30 cost, that's $12 daily for every Iraqi. Most of that, of course, is siphoned off by corruption and mismanagement, but it's still enough that it could trickle down to the man on the desert fast enough to bring them all to the brink of the middle class, by Iraqi standards.

Knock $100 off that, and the post-cost figure is closer to $20, or $2/day. Now there isn't enough. The country can continue to do OK, but only if the 60% Shiite population agrees to stay economically marginalized. If the Kurds want the 40% that's in Kurdistan, the Shiites may want the balance that's in the south, leaving almost nothing for the Sunnis, who will then be forced to fight. That's been my theory.

The other possibility is that they are all just getting too tired of it all to go on fighting. We're coming up to six years. With luck, they have been pushed to the point that they just can't see why they benefit from more civil war. I hope so. One thing I share with the average Iraqi is the intense wish for the U.S. of A. to simply get the hell out of Iraq.

Time to Become a Republican Again

2008-11-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, I'm going to change my voter registration from independent to Republican. There's a measure on the ballot here in Oregon that would make it possible for me to vote in primaries, thus reducing the need to pick a party in order to have a say in who appears on the November ballots, but I'm going to switch anyway.

Frankly, I think the Republican Party is too important to be handed over to Sarah Palin and her ilk. After McCain loses, I expect those responsible to gain rather than lose influence, unless there's a counterattack. I'm sure that many of those who presently lead the Republican Party will be uncomfortable finding me within their fold. But it's mutual so that makes it fair.

I'm going to pick an issue to rally people around and it's going to be the "war on drugs." I just read an interesting comment about how it's going in Britain and it seems much the same as here. America's cost is pushing $200 billion a year, when you consider all the impacts. After nearly four decades, it has failed. Let's give it up.

Simply consider this alternative. All dangerous drugs are legal but regulated, taxed enough to pay for treatment, viewed as public health issues, and made the subject of unfavourable publicity. You become a drug criminal in the same way you become a booze criminal. It's illegal to sell to minors. It's illegal to hijack trucks filled with drugs, but then it's illegal to hijack trucks filled with Tootsie Rolls. If you treat drugs as health problems, there is very little to be unduly concerned about.

Which is different from being completely unconcerned. We tell people to fasten their seat belts, exercise, and cut down on fat. Employers pay uniform medical insurance whether or not we do these things. If we simply discourage drug use and treat addiction as a health issue, almost all the problems go away.

Mugabe should read the Wall Street Journal

2008-10-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

According to the AP, Robert Mugabe's party in Zimbabwe isn't about to bow to outside pressure. "They can't impose anything on us," they brag. Meantime, it is estimated that by early 2009, almost half the population will need food aid.

And where, pray tell, is that food going to come from? Perhaps from the people who produce a surplus beyond the food needs of their own people, many of them white. Such people are likely to get a little tired of being asked to save a people whose government denounces them incessantly for, pretty much, being white.

It's also going to become more difficult not to notice the obvious feedback loop facing anyone attempting to solve the food crisis in Zimbabwe. The reason the government is to keen in staying in power is that it is enormously profitable. There aren't a great many of them at the top, but they can extort money from anyone with hard currency who wants to help the people. This river of cash is what allows them to stay in power, oppress the people, destroy agriculture, and create the need for continued food assistance.

It's interesting to note the deep silence on Zimbabwe in the "progressive" press, compared with their concern over Darfur. In the Eugene Weekly, the acknowledged voice of the hard left in Eugene, Oregon, a Google search turns up more than 200 references to Darfur, and seven to "Mugabe," of which six refer to a local band.

It's not hard to understand their quandary. A couple of decades ago, the EW was probably full of approving comments about Robert Mugabe, a black leader, steeped in the tradition of Marxism, leading a government whose leaders called one another "comrade," and devoted to redistributing wealth so that landless blacks could get the prime farms "stolen" from them by the colonialists.

Now that the redistribution of wealth has run afoul of the related destruction of wealth, Mugabe has turned out to be a ruthless dictator, and the black-run governments of subsaharan Africa to be generally spineless, this is not a story that plays well. The Left seems to want America to jump into the mess in Darfur, with no clear idea how this is going to improve things. But not Zimbabwe, where the obvious question is going to be, why did we force Ian Smith to turn everything over to Mugabe?

Do we speak English or that one?

2008-10-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

It appears the John McCain has angered some people by his use of "that one" during the debate. To quote from an article on the subject:

Don Hammonds of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also took offence.

"Regardless of intent, it showed Senator McCain to be culturally ignorant, and completely unaware of the implications of what his off-the-cuff statement meant to people of colour," he wrote.

"Whether Senator McCain meant it that way or not, if you are a person of colour, and someone trots out the 'that one' remark, you instantly take it as racist. I know that I did."

OK, I'll bite. What are the implications to a person of color? These are two extremely common English words. I had never heard of them having racial overtones. "That?" "One?" Put together as "That one?"

It wasn't perfect style. The contrast should have been "Him and me," or "That one and this one," but instead he said first, "That one" and later "me." But apparently this transcends rhetorical style and reflects, somehow, on McCain's psyche.

In fact, it says nothing about him at all. It says much more about the people who have taken offense. McCain was indeed trying to show that Obama was the "risky" candidate but not because he is black. He's the Democrat. McCain would have tried the same tactic on Hillary. It's simply politics.

The word "racist" springs immediately to the lips of many people with holier-than-thou attitudes towards anyone they consider to be less sensitive. The effect has been to trivialize the word, and by extension the reality of racism. Kathleen Parker, who wrote in the Washington Post that, "McCain supporters have tried to explain what he meant, but there's a reason it was so stunning in the moment. I'm don't think it was racist, as some have argued. But it was objectifying. "That one" isn't the same as "that man." One is an object; the other is a person. A human being. 'That one' has a dehumanizing effect and one is right to recoil."

He used a freaking pronoun. What exactly does "objectifying" mean? A "dehumanizing effect?"

Obama wants the big one. Many people don't want him to get it, and would think so if he were defined by his 50% whiteness rather than his 50% blackness. They are not obliged to give him special treatment. I rather think Obama knew this going in, although his supporters don't. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

In an election year, it's cut taxes and spend

2008-10-01T02:03:00.001-07:00

The Senate has decided to upstage the House with its own version of the bailout, which is going to include tax breaks. So much for the notion that the crisis was going to impose a new fiscal discipline on America.

Granted the "tax cut" is a fix to the alternative minimum tax which was flawed when it was written because it wasn't indexed to inflation. Nevertheless, it adds more to the estimates of the federal deficit. For the moment, the feds have managed to create so much anxiety that everybody wants their debt, but if that ever changes, the U.S. government is just going to be a large scale version of Lehman Brothers.

Out here on the Oregon Coast, our little local governments have to keep expenses within revenues. Probably the same in Alaska. Maybe Palin has more credentials for running the national government than I've given her credit for.

Just kidding.

EmX doesn't really cost money, cuz its federal

2008-09-23T03:36:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, Andy Vobora, a spokesman for the Lane Transit District wrote in the Register-Guard that the cost of new EmX bus station at Gateway was only $2 million and, most importantly, none of it was local money. It was being paid for by the federal government.

It's true in the sense intended, that the local transit budget is not being drained for pay for construction. But, just as all politics is local, so are excise taxes, and the federal dollars provided for mass transit are due to some driver filling up at some gas station. Or more accurately, it's a penny each from 200 million drivers, none of whom is specifically aware of the fact.

The same newspaper editorialized earlier that the impact of RideShare, which is LTD's program to provide public transit services to people who can't ride buses, should not fall on local taxpayers, even though the disabled are Lane County residents. Since the federal government noted the problem and required a solution, the argument goes, they should pay for it.

A reasonable idea on the assumption that the feds have unlimited cash. That seems to be the popular belief. It underlies the notion that we can run a trillion dollar deficit and it won't matter. The LTD money is a little different, since it comes from a designated source, but in fact that source is rapidly running out of cash. The treasury overall is broke and borrowing madly to cover Iraq and Wall Street, stealing the money that Social Security will need in future years for current consumption.

Foreigners are not amused. Which is too bad because we need $2 billion daily from them to stay afloat. The US dollar is in decline, and it has a lot farther to fall.

Impoverishment at the highest levels

2008-09-23T03:17:00.000-07:00

It seems that one of the sticking points in our bailout of Wall Street is how much should we pay the bankers who come asking for help. John McCain is on record that bankers who ask for our tax money to get themselves out of their pickle should not expect to earn more than the highest paid person in the federal government. That being the President, who takes in $400,000 per year.

Secretary Paulson has responded that we can't make this work if we include "punitive" provisions like this. Punitive? There are no government employees in America, outside of college athletic coaches, earning that much. Are the banks pretending they couldn't get the talent they need? That you can't make ends meet, after years of 7 and 8-figure salaries, if you're reduced for one year to $400,000? Punitive?!

It should be clear now that the people running the financial world are not amazing geniuses. They just had really large sums of other people's money to gamble and, although they often did well, they once too often have done badly. They are probably reasonably bright and some of them may be good technicians, but they are not irreplaceable.

The free market advocates are all keen on Darwinian selection in the corporate world. Let's see it work. Let's see which banks are willing to throw some of their bloated executive salaries out in order to survive. Those that aren't, won't. Sounds good to me.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon ...

2008-09-20T10:09:00.000-07:00

Older people will remember when Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois said (or was supposed to have said): "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money." We've moved into a new era; when we talk about government disasters, the unit is trillion rather than billion. First the Iraq War, now housing and mortgages.

The figure of 700 billion is now being used for the bailout of Wall Street, but these are always low ball at the outset. It comes on top of $200 billion for Fanny and Freddie, plus 85 further billskis for AIG, plus whatever for Bear Stearns and sundry. Detroit wanted 25 billion, but they now probably realize that such an amount is chump change in the new landscape of public subsidies.

The long term impact on America is going to be horrendous, as people with real economies decide that we are addicted to government spending without taxes and that the dollar will become, if not worthless, then greatly depreciated. This will be unfortunate, as the American economy depends on such people exchanging their own hard currencies for greenbacks still damp from the printing press, at a rate of some $2 billion daily.

In the short term, I can only predict that the Democrats will pile on, asking for more unemployment benefits and other middle-class benefits. Oh, and I think I can safely predict that no politician will suggest the anyone should actually pay for any of this with taxes.

Here's hoping Ike hits New Orleans

2008-09-08T08:21:00.000-07:00

People are worried about Ike making landfall somewhere along the Gulf Coast. In general, this would be a bad thing but there's a possible silver lining. It might hit New Orleans and take the city out of its misery. It wouldn't need to be a direct hit, just something close enough to cause another evacuation and perhaps a minor breach of a levee.

It's not that I don't like New Orleans. On the contrary, I've been there, enjoyed myself, and look forward to a city named New Orleans, on essentially the present site, continuing long into the future. But the premises behind all reconstruction conversations I've heard are foolish.

Much of New Orleans lies below the level of the surrounding waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Until Katrina, it contained many poor people. Their homes have been devastated and now the theory seems to be that there should be some way in which New Orleans can be rebuilt so as to house a lot of poor people.

Sorry, but building a city below sea level is intrinsically expensive and nobody is going to do it on behalf of poor people. Nor should they. Many more poor people could be given decent housing elsewhere for the cost of doing so in New Orleans, assuming that the package included enough civil engineering to ensure that the new housing would not be flooded like the old.

The lowest portions of New Orleans should never be rebuilt. We should stop thinking of New Orleans in terms of the Florida Everglades and switch to Amsterdam or Venice. This is prime land for development, both residential and commercial, provided that some of it is moved up and surrounded by sturdy walls and the rest excavated to a level that would allow small craft to ply the newly created lakes and waterways.

This wouldn't be cheap, but we're the country that built the Grand Coulee Dam and this is certainly doable. And the result would be fabulously valuable. People will pay tons of money for waterfront, and New Orleans could have oodles of it.

What about the poor people? Well, what about the poor people? Is anyone building their housing today? Will they tomorrow? Let's get real, build subsidized housing somewhere on naturally-occurring dry land, and get over the sentimental attachment. Subsidence happens.

The Real Message about McCain and Palin

2008-09-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

I don't normally pay much attention to Andrew Sullivan but his comments on Sarah Palin, coming from a conservative, are on point. It's not whether Sarah Palin actually will ever turn out to have the talent for the job. It's that nobody has any reason to believe she does. We'll skip the fact that there are reasons for a progressive, or just somebody who thinks teen pregnancy is not a desiderata, to be actively skeptical. Even those who think she may pan out must admit that she hasn't proven anything. Yet, the GOP has nominated her to be VP. For no reason except that a large portion of their followers, who vote based on litmus tests rather than ability, love the idea.

Sitting out here in Florence, on the Oregon Coast, I have come to know a number of elected city officials. We have about the same population as Wasilla AK. I like these guys, but I wouldn't nominate any of them to be President of the United States.

And governor of Alaska? That's been for 20 months. When you're an executive, you make decisions and time tells whether they were right. There hasn't been enough time. Alaska has a budget surplus and worries mostly about who to give it away to, although they are not shy about asking the lower 48 to subsidize them. Put simply, there has been nearly nothing about her resume that demonstrates her ability to handle the job she's running for.

So first, it's scary that McCain might croak and she'd replace him. Then it's scary that he might not and this is the sort of considered judgment we can expect from him. Either way, it's Obama '08.

Sarah Palin is not riveting

2008-09-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

Writing for Newsweek, Howard Fineman suggests that Sarah Palin's performance tonight will be riveting, because we'll have a complete unknown in a situation where she will sink or swim and nobody knows what to expect.

I know what to expect. She'll be coached that she doesn't need to capture the right wing, which is hers already, so she'll use the opportunity to talk about silly things and make herself more human and appealing. None of this will have any real bearing on her ability to lead the world's largest economy, nor will it truly reflect anything that would be likely to result from her eventually becoming president. Remember the W. ran as a compassionate conservative, only to turn out in reality to be just another frothing-at-the-mouth fascist. Likewise the lovely Sarah, regardless of what sugar-coating she applies to her scanty resume in the speech.

Someone has remarked that Ms Palin is probably the first national candidate ever to know how to dress a moose. I can't speak specifically about moose, but I'll wager that some of the early 19th century candidates knew how to handle a knife to dress game. It was once an important qualification for dealing with life.

She may, however, be the first candidate for national office for whom that ability ranks high on the list of qualifications to hold the office.

Appalachia, the Ozarks, and evidently Alaska

2008-09-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

Levi Johnston's mom, commenting on the marriage plans of the children, said that they had planned to get married all along and that the pregnancy was a "bonus."

There are certain attitudes towards life that we have come to identify, fairly or unfairly, with hillbillies. Mrs. Johnston shows that they are alive and well in Alaska. Levi, a fine strapping youth, is not evidently attending high school. His mother says she doesn't know whether he graduated. We deduce that he's not planning on college. Apart from hockey, there's no evidence of an ability to support a wife. Yet he will be trotted out in St. Paul at the convention for everyone to cheer.

The Republicans must be just busting their buttons with pride.

Sarah Palin is the .... Words fail me.

2008-09-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

It seems that Sarah Palin's problems are all due to the liberal media. Reminds me of the line, that no girl ever got pregnant from reading a book. It seems to me that Bristol Palin didn't get pregnant from watching CNN. However, more relevantly, she may have got pregnant because in the Palin family nobody talks about how to avoid pregnancy and in schools in Alaska, if it happens, it happens against the opposition of Sarah Palin and her ilk.

I wasn't going to get involved. I was just going to write in Paris Hilton and let it go. It seemed like I could handle either candidate and with neither candidate saying anything I particularly liked with respect to war, this was going to be one that I could sit out.

Not anymore. Sarah Palin opposes everything I believe, which is that the world needs to be managed on the basis of evidence. She's George W. Bush without the deep intellect. There aren't a lot of people that I would not be happy to take over the White House after W. but given the decent statistical prospect that if we elect McCain, it will be her in less than four years, I find her frightening. What are we frightened of, the right wing asks querulously. You wouldn't understand, I reply. I'm sending a check to Obama.

Betrayal in Zimbabwe

2008-08-10T23:21:00.001-07:00

The Voice of America reports that supporters of Mugabe's opposition in the spring elections now fear they will be betrayed in the negotiation process.

Of course, they will be betrayed. These are "negotiations" with Robert Mugabe, who only sits at the table because he waged war on his people in order to steal the election results. The people behind him need to keep control in order to continue to steal the small amount of hard currency that the economy generates. It's a small amount compared with the 12 million or so citizens (hard to say who lives there since so many have fled), but it's enough to keep a handful of powerful and ruthless men living in great personal wealth. Negotiations with them mean sharing this crime. It certainly doesn't mean bringing to Zimbabwe a government that will be sensitive to their needs and will try to restore the economy.

There is no government bureaucracy to speak of in Zimbabwe, just a kleptocracy. This will not change as a result of negotiations that include ZANU-PF.

The Edwards Affair

2008-08-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

It appears that Senator John Edwards had an affair a couple years ago. I see three lessons from this.

One is that powerful men attract good looking women and, when temptation presents itself, are generally unable to resist. Our political system would be much better if we simply acknowledged this fact and left it between husband and wife to sort out in whatever manner they prefer. The Edwardses seems to have done so, and it's not clear why it's anyone else's business.

Two is that men will always lie (or at a minimum, prevaricate) when first confronted, hoping that the evidence will turn out to be insufficient. This means that when a man denies having had an affair, it is not newsworthy and should not be reported. If he confesses, that's unusual enough to merit attention, but denial definitely falls in the "dog bites man" category.

Third is that those who most strongly denounce the moral turpitude of philanderers are fully as likely as the rest of the crowd to be doing so already, or to do so in the future. John Edwards is just one more example. There should be a similar rule to that above. When a politician decries the immorality of another, it is meaningless and should be ignored by the press.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. Men will be caught in sex "scandals," which in mature societies would simply be ignored, and the press will hound them. They will deny everything. Eventually they will be unable to wriggle free and they will issue some mea culpa. Other prominent men will pontificate, although they are probably banging their secretaries. It's boring, really.

Ivins, Anthrax, and Guarding Tess

2008-08-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

Everybody remembers the resourceful Secret Service agent Doug Chesnic shooting the weasly chauffeur in Guarding Tess, thereby forcing him to reveal the location where Tess was being held? It all worked out fine, but remember what the chauffeur had said a few minutes earlier? I don't remember the exact words, but the gist was, "I know how this works. You people have to pin this on somebody and that person doesn't have to be guilty."

In the movie, of course, it worked out marvelously because he was guilty. But if he hadn't been? Then agent Chesnic of the federal government would have left him unable to walk without a limp for the rest of his life. He was already in a hospital, so I'm assuming he wouldn't have died.

The real FBI is much more cautious. I doubt that any agent would risk his career to go outside policy in the defense of a third party. But it's reason to wonder, as you think about the suicide of Dr. Bruce Ivins in connection with the anthrax letters case. Not having found the guilty party in such a high profile crime was obviously a stain on the agency's reputation. Six years on and they didn't have an indictment. This guy looked like their best hope.

So they searched his place twice, his computer once, and kept him constantly under surveillance by obvious agents for a year. Let's suppose for a minute that he was everything he said he was. A faithful government employee, a church-going Christian, active in his community, devoted to science. And the FBI spends half a decade putting his existence under an unrelenting microscope. Some of us might crack.

Years ago, I had a much higher opinion of government and this line of reasoning would have seemed outrageous, but after six years, if you haven't got an indictment you have a weak case. Nevertheless, the FBI has its desired outcome. They can reveal that they were close to an indictment, which is a couple of steps from a conviction but sufficient for the popular imagination. They wanted him dead. He's dead. They didn't actually have to shoot him. Pretty neat.

There's no such thing as a free war

2008-07-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Bush administration is now suggesting privately that the next fiscal year's budget will be at $490 billion. This is in the Neverland world in which the war in Iraq, which has been going on since 2003, is not a regular expense item. Add another $80 billion for that.

Then add another $180 billion of so for the Social Security surplus, which is going to be needed in another few years. If we're going to maintain that the SS Trust Fund exists, then its money is not also the general fund's. The general fund must be running a deficit of more like $750 billion. According to Wikipedia, "earmarks" are also off budget and run around $50 billion a year more.

$490 billion may be optimistic, since the administration probably expects a shallow recession, which may not be the case. I wonder how much the $490 billion depends on cheaper oil than we are now experiencing. The U.S. government is a huge consumer of petroleum products.

All of this, however, is very little compared with the rate at which the government is incurring actuarial liabilities for future retirees. It also assumes that foreigners will continue to lend America the money to fund its twin deficits while experiencing a declining greenback and low interest rates.

But why worry. It's summer. Everything's going to be just fine.