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View 691 Thursday, September 08, 2011

The fallout from the debate continues. We will see what Obama makes of it tonight.

The media continue to pound on Perry for saying that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. The problem is that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme, and there is no possibility that it can continue as it goes. The nation can afford to pay those already on pension (including those on disability who never paid into the fund in the first place – a sizable portion of those now entitled to Social Security) – but those just entering the work force have no chance of getting anything at all from Social Security when they read retirement age, and if they plan to be disabled they ought to be quick about it, because the fund will run out of money for that in a couple of decades at most.

I am nearly 80, and I expect that my Social Security payments will continue through my life; but were I 55, I would think hard about what to do when I reached 75.

Madoff used his Ponzi money to buy mansions and yachts. The US government used the Social Security revenue to hire bunny inspectors. That is, there was this revenue, and it made the deficits smaller, so there wasn’t so much incentive to eliminate Bunny Inspectors, and those closing down Gibson Guitars, and those who closed the restaurant that didn’t have a front door ramp for the handicapped (you had to go in through the back – it was a Cliffside restaurant and the way into the front was appropriate for the location). And the inspectors who caused the owner of another restaurant to close it and retire because he was damned if he would pay a bribe to a man in a wheelchair who said the mirror in the bathroom was 4 inches too low to allow him to groom himself. That’s what the Social Security income went to, not into any trust fund; which is why those who paid into this Ponzi Scheme can’t get their money back.

But the media are pounding on Perry for daring to say what is obvious to anyone who cares to spend a few minutes thinking about it. When Social Security first happened, within days there were checks going to people who had just joined it. Clearly that was not from the money they had paid into it: it was from all those paying into it who weren’t retired yet. For the first decades there were a hundred people working for each one receiving. But over time the number receiving got larger and larger – they lived long enough – while the work force didn’t grow that fast. And then there were added to Social Security the young disabled who had never paid into the system in the first place. Go to your local Social Security office – I had to a couple of years ago – and you will be astonished at how many young people, recently unemployed, have become “disabled” although their disability is not obvious. Many are disabled from a psychological aversion to work or a desire to pursue hobbies while Social Security pays them. Others are genuinely disabled, some by work, some from birth. Social Security is obliged to pay them and give them other benefits. I am told that some even get extra money to pay for a housekeeper. In at least one case the post of housekeeper seems to have been used as a party favor. All that comes from Social Security.

Now Perry, we are told, is not fit to be President because he dares say the truth about this Ponzi Scheme. In fact it’s not really a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi was just a thief. Social Security is a money laundering scheme to let the government borrow more and more money to pay for Bunny Inspectors and other overpaid government employees and their pensions.

And no one dares say so.

As Cain said, the problem is not identifying what Social Security is: the problem is fixing it. We have a number of people who paid into Social Security and made no other provisions for their retirement. This was probably foolish of them, but they were encouraged by government. They can’t just be abandoned, and no one proposes to do so. There are others on Social Security who never paid into the system and ought not be there. Some, alas, have spent a good part of their lives there, and there’s no way out. All this must be dealt with when we fix Social Security.

Note that at its best, Social Security must be a combination of a compulsory savings and investment program, and a welfare grant. That raises the question of who is entitled to what, and why? If someone is entitled to something, someone else must be obligated to pay for it. With charities that is voluntary, but if government is involved, the obligation is quite real to the point of depriving the reluctant payer to poverty or jail. We do not seem to be agree on where that obligation comes from. Everyone is for rights, but the obligation to pay for those “rights” is not so often discussed.

When I was young we had slogans about Freedoms. In 1941 Roosevelt proposed four of them:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

The first two were not controversial, but there was a firestorm of discussion about the 3^rd and 4^th: where in the Constitution did we get those? How were they freedoms? My freedom from want corresponds to your obligation to pay: where did you get that obligation?

Fixing Social Security will require that we address all those problems; but before we can fix Social Security we have to recognize that it is broken, and that it is not longer simply the retirement program enacted during the New Deal.

The global warming debates are heating up. Pun more or less intended. Now, it seems, Spencer’s paper on the misinterpretation of sensor data is both small potatoes and seriously flawed. I am not sure how it can be both.

From what I can discern, I can probably change the average temperature of the Earth by small manipulations in the weights assigned to the measures of the temperature of the sea at various depths. How you get an average sea temperature is itself a puzzle to me: it’s a dynamic process, with volcanoes, winds across the sea, rains, currents and circulation, all of them affecting temperatures at various depths – is even the notion of an average a sensible thing? And the measurements are in no way random: we take the measures we have, and we have no possibility of getting a random sample of temperatures at various depths and locations. How could we? It’s similar with atmospheric temperatures and altitudes. Does the very notion of an average make sense?

I don’t mean that there is no climate; but I keep noting that the charts all show what amounts to 0.1 degree measurements, and I don’t know how they arrive at those, since I do not think their original measurements are anything like that accurate. I have had people try to explain to me that enough random measures at 1.0 degree accuracy can give me a measure reliable to 0.1 degree accuracy. That would possibly be true given enough independent and unbiased random observations, but I don’t see much evidence that this is the case.

Meanwhile, Perry is being pounded because he rejects science. The evidence of this is that he says the science on global warming is not settled, certainly not sufficiently settled to be trillions of dollars on by adopting policies that harm the US economy and leave China and India free to siphon off the work that US regulations hamper. If it’s all true and the CO2 is dooming the planet, then a poor and bankrupt US will have impoverished itself for nothing: China and India will continue to build CO2 emitting power plants. A wealthy US might be able to save the Earth with some new process; a prostrate US will be able to do little or nothing.

Or am I being over dramatic? In any event I did not hear Perry reject science. I heard him reject the notion that the Science in AGW is fixed and settled. I have heard no refutation other of this other than the traditional proof by repeated assertion, coupled with a typical Al Gore speech. Of course we can trust Al Gore. Can’t we?

Eph Konigsberg, RIP

http://www.sierramadrenews.net/?p=4678

Eph was a very old friend. At one time he was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, but that was well before I knew him or about LASFS. I met him as part of a discussion group in the 1970’s when he was married to Josepha. We went to each others birthday parties, and I very much liked going to dinner with Eph at the Cal Tech Athenaeum of which he was a member. Eph owned and was chief scientist of an instrumentation company that did fabulous work on physiological instrumentation, including a pill that troops could swallow and thereafter broadcast their fundamental physiological data. He did all this in early days when Moore’s Law hadn’t made such work easier.

Eph was a very well read man, and our discussions ranged through human history. He was a scholar of Jewish early writing and history, and he liked to lecture even more than I do, but he was less inclined to inflict this on unwilling listeners. I was very much willing to listen to him.

He used to call me every couple of months to tell me of some development he thought I’d be interested in, and he was a long time reader of my work. We were long time friends, and although we didn’t meet as often as we used to, I was always glad to hear from him. After my cancer treatments I have tended to be an interrupt driven system, meaning that he called me more than I called him simply because my mind doesn’t range so far as it used to; I regret that because I meant I didn’t call Eph every couple of weeks as I had before the radiation.

A scholar, a local community activist, and a very good friend. I’ll miss him.

Jerry Pournelle

I have heard that Amazon is trying to make a deal with California on sales tax. I can hope this means they will restore the Associates Program, which paid me a modest but not insignificant sum. I know nothing more than having heard a news item on this. Perhaps I’ll learn more.

View 691 Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Sable went to the groomers for a bath and combing today. Huskies grow underfur when the days are getting shorter, and shed it when the weather is hot, so there was a lot of combing needed. My Explorer displays external temperature, and it was 102 F. It was also muggy. I don’t work very well in hot weather.

We wanted to watch the Republican debates, but we couldn’t find them live. MSNBC broadcast an “analysis” for an hour and a half. They did a repeat of the debate at 9 PM PDT, and I’ve just watched that. If there was an earlier broadcast I never saw it. And I certainly had no desire to watch an MSNBC analysis.

The Republican Presidential Candidate Debates

In my judgment, the clear winner, and by quite a lot, was Newt Gingrich. He was focused, decisive, on point, laconic, and very much on point . He was efficient with the time given him, and he wasted none attacking the other candidates. He reminded me of the Newt Gingrich I knew when he was Minority Whip and then Speaker.

The Washington Post makes him a loser, saying:

* Newt Gingrich: Bashing the media for trying to get Republicans to disagree with one another is a sure applause line in front of a GOP crowd. But, in a debate the whole point is for the candidates to, well, debate their positions on issues. Elections are about choices so the best way to inform people about their options is to probe the candidates on where they differ with one another. Right?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/the-reagan-library-republican-debate-winners-and-losers/2011/09/07/gIQA2XfpAK_blog.html

Newt well understood the hostility of the two “moderators” (inquisitors would be a better word) and their objective which was to induce the Republican candidates to attack and damage each other. When he told them flat out that he understood what they were doing, the inquisitors were taken aback.

I was favorably impressed by Michelle Bachman. The last time I watched her in a debate she seemed shrill and more interested in fighting the other candidates, This time she displayed the gravitas of a leader, and showed some understanding of the magnitude of the problem. Once again the Washington Post has a different view, placing her among the losers:

* Michele Bachmann: The Minnesota Congresswoman was a total non-entity in the debate. At one point, she didn’t say a single word for more than 20 minutes. Bachmann supporters will almost certainly blame the moderators for freezing her out but she needed to find ways to inject herself into the various fights between the likes of Perry, Romney and Huntsman. Bachmann seemed to get the message towards the end of the debate but it was already too late. It felt like she was irrelevant to the conversation tonight — and that’s a bad place for her to be.

I thought she did well with the time they gave her. The inquisitors were condescending to her which was to be expected. She demonstrated the necessary gravitas, which was less obvious in earlier debates.

Continuing my record, I was not at all impressed with Perry’s first hour. I thought he spent too much time bickering with Romney. Of course the Post gave him a win for his first hour:

* First 45 minutes Rick Perry: With all eyes on him, the Texas governor started out strong — delivering a solid answer on jobs and showing a willingness to mix it up with Romney. He was confident without being brash and seemed well versed — or at least well rehearsed — on the issues of the day. If the debate ended after 45 minutes, we might be talking about how Perry had dispelled all doubts about his readiness for the national glare of a presidential race and all it entails.

On the other hand, I thought Perry came off very well toward the end. The Post again has a different view, putting him among the losers:

* Last Hour Rick Perry: After a strong start, Perry seemed to lose focus — meandering on his answer on Social Security and badly fumbling on climate change. Some of Perry’s struggles in the middle portion of the debate had to do with the fact that he was getting tough questions and having to weather a steady attack from his opponents — he joked at one point that he had become a “pinata” — but that’s what you get when you’re the frontrunner. Perry salvaged the second half of the debate with a very strong answer on the death penalty. But his uneven performance will likely keep the conversation about whether he is a clear frontrunner alive, which is not what the Perry forces wanted.

Of course what the Post dislikes is what Perry said about global warming: that the science isn’t settled and we have no business betting the US economy on the theory in its present state. What the Post likes is that Perry was willing to wound Romney. They would have swooned in ecstasy had one of the candidates physically attacked the other.

The Post doesn’t mention Cain, but I thought he came off extremely well. He had decisiveness, gravitas, and focus. As for example given a chance to speak on jobs:

CAIN: Let’s cut to the chase, this is what business people do and politicians don’t do. Here’s how I would fix this economy, first, eliminate the current tax code. It is a drain on entrepreneurs, it is the biggest barrier that’s holding this economy back, and what I would do is to propose a bold plan, which I have already released.

I call it my 9-9-9 economic growth plan. Throw out the current tax code, a 9 percent tax on corporate income, our 9 percent tax on personal income and a 9 percent national sales tax. If 10 percent is good enough for God, 9 percent ought to be good enough for the federal government. This will replace all federal income taxes. It’ll replace all federal income taxes.

It will also replace the payroll tax, so everybody gets some skin in the game. And it replaces the capital gains tax.

He made it clear that he would return a great portion of federal activities to the states. He looked very Presidential. Whoever wins this should keep him in mind for the Cabinet.

My general conclusion: as Newt said at one point, anyone on that platform would be a better President than the one we have; and like Newt I was angered by Brian Williams and the Politico hack. They didn’t even try to conceal their contempt for the participants, and they openly tried to set the candidates at each others’ throats. Of course the Washington Post listed among the Winners:

* NBC/Politico: In politics, it’s just as important to be lucky as it is to be good. NBC and Politico were both with a well-timed debate that gave America a chance to take an extended look at Perry, and a series of quality questions that forced the candidates to sometimes go beyond their talking points. The first 45 minutes of the debate were, without question, the highlight of the race so far. Kudos.

Not surprising, of course.

It’s late and bed time. And it’s a long way to the next but one November. I find it interesting that none of the candidates wanted to be seen as the “establishment Republican” candidate. Some worked a bit at looking “moderate” but not excessively so. No one wanted to wrap himself in a Bush legacy. In 1996 the Republicans ran the only man in America that Clinton could beat. After all, it was Bob Dole’s turn, and even though Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America had taken the House and Senate in 1994, the Republican establishment saw to it that the nomination went to Bob Dole. Dole was a genuine war hero, but that had been a long time before. This debate indicates that things will be different in 2012. I doubt any of these candidates will be appearing in advertisements for ameliorating their erectile dysfunction.

View 691 Tuesday, September 06, 2011

It is well over 100 F outside in Studio City, and has been all weekend, so I took the long weekend off.

The economic news continues to be discouraging. A number of “well, that wasn’t s bad as we thought” news reported last month was quietly revised and the revisions quietly released. None of the revisions were encouraging.

A week ago the President’s speech on job creation was important enough that the Speaker was chastised for delaying its presentation to a Joint Session of Congress – itself generally a Big Deal – by a single day. The implications from the White House Staff were that the speech was a Big Deal, and delaying it by a single day was a shameful thing to do. Of course this is the same staff who requested that the Republicans schedule the President’s Jobs Speech against the Republican candidates’ debate at the Reagan Library. Bonaparte warned us “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, “ but for a political advisor to be unaware of his opponents’ public debate plans is just one whack of a lot of incompetence. More likely they thought of this massive ploy, as a primary hamper (in the language of Gamesmanship). Not precisely malice, but not as good a ploy as they had anticipated.

Now we are being told not to expect too much from the President’s Jobs Speech. The Teleprompter may not be as smart as we have been led to believe. The situation is more horrid than thought, and it’s all pretty well the fault of the Republicans since last January, and of course from the years of Bush.

I haven’t had any reason to change my own jobs program, most of which could be implemented almost immediately. I suppose I ought to worry lest it happen – if there’s a big economic growth in the next months, Obama may get above the magic 43% approval rating and have a chance to win. (I haven’t followed this for years, but when I was in the political game it was a truism that any officeholder with an approval rate of under 43% simply could not be reelected.) On the other hand, I doubt that Obama will or even can allow any of these proposals to happen.

My general principle is that economic growth happens when energy is cheap and there is a maximum of economic freedom, and of those two, economic freedom is probably the more important.

First, change all the rules for small business exemptions from regulations by doubling the maximum number of employees you can have for the exemption. There are a number of regulations that apply only to businesses with fewer than 10 employees; make that number 20. There are other regulations that apply only to this with more than 50 employees. Make that 100. Etc. The first time I proposed this I got mail saying it was useless because there aren’t any successful small businesses willing to expand but prevented by the threat of regulation. I have considerable evidence to the contrary; and besides, if there are no such businesses, then there won’t be any consequences of adopting this. In fact, though, I am quite sure there are many businesses successful enough to expand that would do so if the regulations weren’t so onerous.

Second, repeal Dodd Frank. It is estimated that Dodd Frank costs a hundred billion dollars a year. We have already seen that many banks find they have more people working in regulation compliance than in banking. Dodd Frank doesn’t do what it was supposed to do, and we got along without it before we enacted it. It hasn’t worked, and it ought to go.

Third, repeal Sarbanes Oxley. That’s another that costs too much and doesn’t accomplish what it set out to do.

Fourth, establish two commissions whose job is to recommend federal practices that ought to be eliminated on the grounds that we can’t afford them, or never needed them in the first place. The commissioners should not be government employees, and ought to be paid no more than $150 a day consulting fee and $50 a day expenses. Let it be a typical commission, with three members appointed by the President, three by the Speaker, and three by the President pro tem of the Senate. The whole thing shouldn’t cost more than $2 million a year. Any federal position that a majority of the commission recommends for elimination is automatically unfunded unless explicitly refunded by the Congress. If Congress doesn’t restore the position, that position is redundant and that task is no longer performed.

That’s one commission. There ought to be a second Bunny Inspector Commission. This one is to consist of 100 persons, one from each State and fifty to be selected regardless of state. They are to be selected by lot from a pool of volunteers who have high speed Internet connection. The Commission meets on-line once a week for four hours. Once a year it meets in the District of Columbia, expenses to be reimbursed. Each commissioner gets a laptop computer and conferencing software, and the government pays for high speed Internet connectivity for the year. Same rules: if 51 Commissioners agree that a federal regulatory activity is needless, then that activity is defunded, and those who perform that service are declared redundant. (Civil service rules for redundant federal employees apply.) Congress can restore any of those activities and positions, but if it does not, it goes.

The Commissions probably won’t do a lot, but they will at least get rid of the ridiculously obvious, and over time the various government activities will be examined and debated.

Apply all these immediately, and there will be an immediate effect on jobs. It’s not enough: recovery is going to take some systematic examination of government spending and regulation, and that will take a lot more work; but it will move us in the right direction, and the Commissions have the potential to do a lot more good than I expect they will. They will certainly save the few million a year they will cost just in reduced government expenses; and some government regulatory activities are very effective at preventing economic growth.

The President has presided at a Labor Rally in which Labor Leader Jimmy Hoffa calls for civil war. The President didn’t demurr. Those familiar with American history can remember other times when large organized groups called for extra-legal “solutions” to social and economic problems.

It’s easy to dismiss this sort of thing as mere abusive rhetoric, but it’s getting common.

Yesterday, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa said in a warm-up speech for an appearance by President Obama in Detroit that unions would serve as the Democrats’ army in a war against conservatives and Tea Party activists where they would “take these son-of-a-bitches out.” Also on Monday, Vice President Biden​ referred to his political opponents as “barbarians at the gate” who must be stopped. When asked about Hoffa’s remarks the next day on the “Fox and Friends” cable news program, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz refused to condemn or disassociate her party from such sentiments. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/06/liberal-civility-democracy/.

Those familiar with the history of the Roman Republic may recall rhetoric like that.

How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? And for how long will that madness of yours mock us? To what end will your unbridled audacity hurl itself?

We live in interesting times.

Climate Change

The debate continues. My views have not changed: we don’t know enough, and the Climate Modelers continue to act as if we do. When all this began back in the 1980’s I said that the modelers were agreed that there was man-made global warming, and the data collectors did not agree at all. Over time that changed, not be collection of better data, but by the ascendency of the modelers over the people who actually studied climate and climate data. It’s still relatively true: the people who actually study climate are nowhere near as certain that they know what’s going on as the modelers – and the whole thing has got political enough that those who do find results contrary to the consensus are denounced, called Deniers, and are denied places to publish. Contrary opinions tend not to be published – which in these days of the Internet is an exercise in futility. But when contrary views are published the consequences for those who do the peer reviews and actual publishing can be severe.

I presume we have all heard the story of how Wolfgang Wagner has resigned his editorship of Remote Sensing because he allowed the Spencer and Braswell paper “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” to be published. For a pretty cool analysis of this incident, see William Briggs, http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4311. Briggs is a competent statistician, and his analysis, once he cools the opening rhetoric down, is both comprehensive and competent. (Note that I tend to agree with his opening rhetoric, but I might have preferred it if he had reserved it for his conclusions.)

Everywhere I look I see the hockey stick; it’s very prominent in the current issue of Science News, which is a publication of Believers, and you will often see it in Scientific American. It is no longer called the Hockey Stick, and the scandal about how the hockey stick curves were generated is mostly forgotten, but the curve, which shows thousands of years of global temperature oscillating within limits, suddenly shoots up at the end of the 20^th Century and the beginning of the 21^st. That spike isn’t found in the data so far as I know, but it’s still there in the chart, and that chart is ubiquitous. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/332612/title/Small_volcanoes_add_up_to_cooler_climate

Someone looking at a graph of global temperature since worldwide instrumental records began in 1880 might reasonably conclude that the recent upward trend is not terribly extreme. But longer records are available. The ones shown here use a number of “proxy” records: tree ring thicknesses, the chemical composition of lake and ocean sediment cores, rates of coral growth and other natural phenomena that vary with temperature. Each colored line represents a slightly different interpretation of the data, but they all clearly point to the same conclusion: The past few decades have been the warmest in centuries.

Credit: R. Rohde/Wikimedia Commons, adapted by E. Feliciano

That was in, of all things, an article on how “Ocean currents and sulfur haze deliver global warming hiatus” on why we aren’t getting warm as fast as the global warming theorists were sure we would. But yet there is that chart with that “back story” telling us in the voice of calm reason that “the past few decades have been the warmest in centuries.” A close look will show that the chart is in tenths of a degree; and how we are sure that it is hotter now than it was during the period of the Viking Greenland Colonies (when there were wine grapes in Scotland, and longer growing seasons in China, and generally warmer climates across the northern hemisphere) is not really explained. In other words, the consensus is assumed, and the accuracy of the data assumed.

Something else hasn’t changed: the approved means of dealing with Deniers.

Repeat it

The original and still most popular approach to dealing with climate deniers is reasoned persuasion: facts and figures and reports and literature reviews and slideshows and whitepapers. This hasn’t ever really worked, but climate types keep trying, like American tourists in a foreign country who try to overcome the language barrier by talking louder and more slowly.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/08/13/271676/whats-the-best-strategy-for-dealing-with-deniers/

With trillions at stake, with the future of humanity at stake, it’s time for the inquisition. We’re so sure we know.

The Science News article, in case you have forgotten, is about why the earth has not warmed up so much in the past decade.

Like Burt Rutan, I have had to do data collection, and try to produce meaningful averages from fluctuating data – fluctuating because of noise in the lab, as well as fluctuating because the data stream itself was fluctuating. In my case we were testing human performance in extreme conditions: inside a space suit furnished with oxygen at about 95 F, with the astronaut in an altitude-temperature chamber whose interior temperature could go as high as 200 F. The flight surgeon insisted on core and skin temperatures, heart rate and to the best we could get it an EKG: this back in the days when medical EKG was only taken from restrained subjects flat on a metal table in a noise-free room. My lab was in an industrial area at Boeing. Since that time the electronics for EKG data have got a lot better, but the sensors for temperatures remain thermistors and thermocouples, and I can tell you that getting an average temperature for a human being in a lab to a tenth of a degree is very difficult. For that matter, getting the temperature inside the experimental chamber was not and still is not trivial. We used “globe”: the temperature of a hollow copper ball about 4 inches in diameter, which takes a measure based on both conductive and radiative temperature. Next time you want to know how hot it is outside, think about how to measure it – now think about getting an average that tells you how hot it is in the city – now the county – now the nation – now the world. How deep in the ocean? How high in the sky? But we have been through all that before.

Here’s Burt Rutan on much the same subject:

Not a Climatologist’s study; more from the view of a flight test guy who has spent a lifetime in data analysis/interpretation.

My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different prospective in which I am an expert.
Complex data from disparate sources can be processed and presented in very different ways, and to “prove” many different theories.

For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data.  I became a cynic; My conclusion – “if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who’s merits are dependant on complex experimental data, he is likely lying”.  That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.

Burt Rutan: engineer, aviation/space pioneer, and now, active climate skeptic

All of which takes us out the same door we came in. I do not believe we know enough about climate to bet trillions of dollars on our theories.

View 690 Friday, September 02, 2011

The high dudgeon kerfuffle continues. A bunch of White House kids snuck in a fraternity prank: let’s schedule the President addressing a Joint Session of Congress opposite the Republican debate! That’ll drive them nuts! Yeah! Let’s do it! It’ll be a gas! And so they did. Apparently the adults in the White House didn’t notice that the President was requesting time to upstage the Republican candidate debate; at least they claim they didn’t, which is a bit odd because you’d think that the President might actually want to watch to see what the opposition looks like, but they say they didn’t know, and of course the White House official spokespeople would not lie to the American people, so it must be so.

And then – and then – the Republican Speaker declined the opportunity to step all over the Republican presidential candidates! He had the temerity to decline! And the President wanted to improve the economy!

Today, however, the Republican primary debates have suddenly become more important, so much so that the U.S. president was asked to take a rain check to accommodate them.

This week, Boehner rejected a White House request for Barack Obama to address a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7, the date the president wanted to deliver his much-anticipated speech on job creation and plans to improve the economy. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/09/02/f-rfa-champ.html

And that beat is repeated all over. In today’s Los Angeles Times:

"We consulted with the speaker about that date before the letter was released, but he determined Thursday would work better," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. "The president is focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy, so he welcomes the opportunity to address a joint session of Congress on Thursday, Sept. 8, and challenge our nation’s leaders to start focusing 100% of their attention on doing whatever they can to help the American people."

The original timing of the president’s speech request was seen by Republicans as political big footing, and a sign that the partisan tension hasn’t dissipated much, if at all, over their summer vacation.
The situation struck some Capitol veterans as almost unprecedented in modern times.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-jobs-20110901,0,2876753.story

Of course there was no consultation in advance, because however unaware the Democrats are of the Republican campaign schedules, people in the Speaker’s office know very well what’s happening in the Reagan Library next Thursday. Anyone who isn’t won’t have the job very long. There’s no possibility that the Speaker’s office agreed to a date and then later withdrew it. As to the intent of Democrats to place a primary hamper on the Republicans, the White House pleads incompetence rather than malice, and one suppose we ought to accept their plea, although were there any way to resolve the bet I would bet fairly large sums that there were some staffers thoroughly aware that the Republicans were holding their debates on the day the President was requesting, and there was among them much yukking it up and general merriment.

There is no indication of why the President has waited this long to present his jobs plan, or why it is suddenly so urgent that it be presented to a Joint Session of Congress. Perhaps this will be explained Friday.

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As I was digging about looking for a reference to link to Primary Hamper, a Gamesmanship term than I suspect most of my readers will find puzzling (Gamesmanship and Lifemanship were cool topics when I was in graduate school, but so were Kerouac and On The Road) I found this gem

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/intellectual/intcap1.html . There are several 1998 essays in this collection, including the real story of IBM vs. Microsoft, the Microsoft monopoly trials, and some predictions about the future of the computer in the 21^st Century. It all holds up surprisingly well. I am thinking of collecting my Intellectual Capital essays into a Kindle book for convenience, but they are in fact already available free here (but of course not in Kindle format). One more thing to do. Many of my old works are out in Kindle editions, and the revenue is not astounding, but it is significant. Publishing seems to be moving to the eBook, and Kindle sales are 85 to 90% of those sales. Note that includes sales to people who read through Kindle apps on PC’s, Macs, iPads, iPhones, and various other readers. Anyway, the section noted above has some interesting essays I wrote back when the computer revolution was in full swing. They include an explanation of Bayesian Analysis as it ought to be applied to global warming back when that debate was barely on the horizon.

Qaddafi remains uncaptured. He’s doomed, of course. There seem to have been some masterful information ploys (there we go using Gamesmanship jargon again) played by someone in Tripoli, such as the announcement of the capture of one of Ghaddaffi’s sons causing the lad to reveal his location in order to prove he was alive lest all his troops defect, and various other timely releases of disinformation. One supposes the interim Council that is trying to coordinate the Libyan revolt is getting advice from professionals, presumably French or British, possibly American but I doubt it. The White House has chosen to lead from behind and let the Europeans take the lead in wringing the neck of this enemy of the United States. That looks like a good move; cheers for President Obama on this one. The Libyan war cost us a bit, but nothing compared to what it would cost if we took responsibility for the outcome.

Another plus for the Obama administration is the rejection of the AT&T takeover. I don’t want to see The Phone Company get any larger. The old regulated public utility was arrogant, but they were at least obsessed with technical reliability; the new one is less competent and obsessed only with profit. Why should they take over another phone company? Competition is a good thing, and there is no natural monopoly involved here.

I tend to opposed the whole notion of companies that grow by buying their competitors. Growth by offering better services at lower price, driving the competition into bankruptcy, is the best route to the creative destruction required by capitalism; buying out the opposition is more of a Marxist growth, consolidation for the sake of consolidation, and I do not think the public or the Republic is well served by such things. This is a topic for another time, but cheers for Obama on this one.

That’s two cheers. I don’t think of any more just now.

We are so obsessed with hate crime that we can’t deal with a 14 year old kid who murdered a classmate. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. I wonder how many murders by 14 year olds can only be satisfied by trial as an adult and life imprisonment? I seem to recall that the penalty for gang murder, even by 16 year olds, is somewhat less. Very odd.

The whole notion of hate crime is disturbing . Thoughtcrime.