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.

===========

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.

View 690 Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The day was devoured by locusts. It’s late now, and tomorrow morning I have an appointment to be driven to a studio in Del Rey to talk about Robert Heinlein., so I will be late tomorrow.

As I write this, the Speaker has not acquiesced in the President’s request for a Joint Session of Congress. The President can’t demand, he can only request. The Constitutional Framers were all familiar with the history of the English Civil War leading to the execution of Charles I in 1648, and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Protector Oliver Cromwell: and how Cromwell dismissed Parliament by sending troops into the House of Commons. That was as long before the Convention of 1787 as the Civil War was before our time, but the historical memory was vivid among all educated English.

I don’t think any Speaker has ever rejected a President’s request for a Joint Session, but I don’t think any President has ever requested such a session to be held at the same time as a debate among presidential candidates. It was a very curious request, given that the debate has been scheduled for weeks. Perhaps Obama was unaware? Not at all hard to believe, why should he know about schedules of debates he won’t be in, but even so, someone among his advisors should have known. Rush Limbaugh thinks it was deliberate, and that the White House staff were having a grand old time laughing it up. The President wants to present his JOBS program. He wants to read it from his teleprompter with the entire Congress waiting breathlessly to hear it. The people will be waiting expectantly. And no one will hear the Republican candidates debate, or see Perry in action. Ain’t that funny! Have another drink. Snark, snark. And it’s the President, and about JOBS, and boy did we get a horse on them with this one! A college stunt.

We will see how this plays out. The Speaker may well refuse to give the President that date. There will then be political recriminations and accusations. Some will wonder why the President is in such a hurry, only it’s not that – after all, it’s next week. We don’t even have a budget. And why he couldn’t have his people call the Speaker’s people to arrange a mutually convenient date. Others will say the Speaker wouldn’t have refused the request from a white President, it’s only because he’s Black that they dare to do this. And each side will accuse the other of being divisive. Such is the state of the Republic. Fortunately that is a long way from slaughter in the streets and proscription lists.

I see that they have agreed that the Joint Session will be held Thursday,

Bacteria Causing ‘Black Death’ Likely Extinct, Study Finds

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/08/30/bacteria-causing-black-death-likely-extinct-study-finds/?test=latestnews

Which is great news, if true. I just hope there is no possibility of any spores or other survival of the Black Death from the corpses they examined. It seems unlikely. They would have to be dormant for a very long time. And we have antibiotics now, at least until resistant strains of Plague develop. The return of the Black Death has been the subject of many science fiction novels, and of course La Peste was one of Camus’s great works. And we don’t have so many rat fleas around now. Or do we?

President Obama is going to present his economic recovery plan in a week. I have already presented mine, but I’ll try to write up a refined version before Obama speaks.

The question that must be answered is, what’s more important, reducing CO2 emission in the US (it isn’t likely to be reduced world wide), or restoring the US economy. California is committing economic suicide and the Green Regulations are part of the deal.