Potpourri Essays

MY ESSAYS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

2011-09-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

A Philosophical Social & Economic Essay-62
The Burgeoning National Debt-61
FDR & LBJ-60
United States Presidents in my Lifetime-59
Liberty and Security-58
Perceived Incivility in Politics and the True Peril of the USA-57
Muslims Taking Over Europe and North America-56
The USA Military-55
The Copenhagen Conference – The Supreme Irony-54
Mid 1950’s Adventures in the Crawfish State-53
Congressional Term Limits-52
Our Universe-51
Common Expressions Explained-50
1948 - 49
The Banking and Financial Crisis – Redux-48
The Banking and Financial Crisis-47
A Vulture’s Tale-46
California Dreamin – Or is This a Nightmare?-45
Federal Income Taxes-44
Marbury V. Madison-43

Black Swans-42

Free Speech – Free for Whom?-41

Too Much Freedom? You Bet!-40

Women’s Suffrage and Voting-39

Crime and Punishment-38

A Personal Vignette-37

Mourning Dove Tales-36

Free Enterprise vs. Big Gov.-35

Free Enterprise vs. The Welfare State-34

Do As I Say Not as I Do-33

Hurricane Katrina-32

Sen. Joe McCarthy-31

Our English Language-30

Honesty-29

The Myth of a 50/50 Country-28

Is War Worth it?-27

The Myth of Social Insecurity-26

Christians & Muslims-25

The Misunderstood Amer. Economy-24

FDR-23

Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails-22

An Offal Tale – 1854 London-21

Thomas Sowell-20

Global Warming-19

Further Thoughts on Dissimilation-18

Misused or Abused Words-17

Eric Hoffer-16

Fools, Frauds, & Fakes-15

Exercise & Weight-14

Freakonomics-13

Energy-12

Politically Incorrect Science-11

Sixth Sense-10

The Great Mortality-9

Miscellaneous Ruminations-8

The First Miracle Drug-7

Beer Consumption & Other LIA-6

Global Cooling or Warming-5

Lincoln Stories-4

Hormesis-3

Giving to Charity-2

Honorable Half-Dozen-1

A PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIAL & ECONOMIC ESSAY-62

2011-09-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

This essay is a philosophical one based on hard data concerning economic and social conditions in the USA. It contrasts the past and present and projects the near future path the country is on using current trends. While the trends are troubling, the situation is not completely hopeless. There are difficult choices that voters of this country will have to make in order to preserve and sustain the economic prosperity and freedom the vast majority has hitherto enjoyed.

The reader will discover this is not a partisan critique or screed. Fault, backed up by incontrovertible data, is shared by both Democrat and Republican politicos, remembering that in a democracy citizens are ultimately responsible for their own fate. This does not mean that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are equally to blame for our current and pending problems, just that all can be cited as not doing what is right and necessary for the good of the country.

I have used several sources for the data I am quoting to bolster my arguments with the latest being Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute.

In finally trying to address the problems of the current and future projected spiraling national debt and the stubbornly high unemployment and under employment rates, President Obama lectures incessantly about “fairness” in the current federal tax code. His solution is to raise federal income taxes on the “rich” as a basic matter of “fairness.” But just what is “fairness?”

There are basically two ways to define “fairness” in an economic sense where there is mal-distribution of income. One is “redistributive fairness” which President Obama and other liberals in and out of congress favor. The idea is through taxes or financial favoritism to take from wealthier Americans and give to less wealthy Americans and thereby to even out, to some degree, the income people have regardless of whether they have earned it.

The other definition is “meritocracy fairness” which holds that people should receive monetary compensation based on hard work, ingenuity, and innovation – i.e. the money that people make should come as a result of merit.

In his 2010 book The Battle: The Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future, Arthur Brooks states that inequality is “fair” if it is based on merit and equality would be “unfair” if what someone has earned on merit is redistributed to others who have not earned it. There should be penalties, not rewards, for corruption, stupidity, laziness, and incompetence. Where does the public come down in this? According to a comprehensive survey, 89% of Americans believe in “meritocracy fairness” and only 11% opt for “redistributive fairness.” People in the past, our ancestors, came to the United States for economic opportunity, not for redistribution of wealth.

What does a merit or opportunity society entail? It simply means the chance to move up the economic ladder. From the years 2001 to 2007 44% of the people in the bottom 20 percentile of the income spectrum moved up to a higher income group. However, this is, to use a cliché, a double-edged sword. In the true spirit of competition in this same time period 34% of the people in the top 20 percentile fell out of that group. C’est la vie.

Even considering the Obama, et al., redistributive philosophy what is the federal income tax breakdown per income group? The top 0.1% of income households pays 16½% of all federal income tax; the top 5% pays 59% (in 1980 they paid 35% - so much for the idea that the rich are paying less of the tax burden than formerly); the top 20% pays 89%. The next 20 percentile pays 15%; the following 20 percentile 4.0%; the one following that 20 percentile -4.3%; and the last 20 percentile pays -3.8%. On average the last combined 40 percentile groups receive more money from the IRS than they paid. Adding it up, the bottom 80 percentile income groups pays 11% of the tax burden which leaves the top 20% paying 89% of federal income taxes.

Between 47% and 51% (depending upon what year is being considered and who made the estimate) of families in this country paid no federal income tax. When questioned, 2/3 of these people say that everyone should pay something in income taxes. There is an estimated $1,000,000,000,000 per year in deductions, exceptions, and credits sheltered from federal income taxes that benefit people in all income levels.

Another way of stating the federal income tax burden is a breakdown of the amount of income levels: In 2009 1470 households with incomes of $1,000,000 or more paid no federal income taxes owing to tax deductions, shelters, and tax dodges. This represented 0.6% of all 237,000 households with incomes of $1,000,000 or more.

People with $1,000,000 or more of income paid 29% of the federal tax burden; those in the $50,000 - $75,000 income level paid 15% of federal income taxes; $40,000 - $50,000 paid 12½%; and $20,000 - $30,000 paid 5.7%.

What about business and capital gain taxes? The business tax in the USA is 35%, which is the highest in the industrialized world and puts this country at a competitive disadvantage. The president and congress need to get off their collective duffs and lighten this unnecessary weight to our global competitiveness. And the capital gains tax? In the USA it is 15% (on a capital asset held for at least one year). For other countries it is all over the place: Japan 20%; UK 18%; Switzerland 0%; Brazil 15%; Denmark & Finland 28%; Egypt 0%; France 20%; Germany 25% (before 2001 it was 0%); Israel 20%; Italy 12 1/5%; and Netherlands 0%. In many other countries these capital gain taxes are either comingled with other taxes or are dependent upon the capital gains amount. Should our capital gain tax be lower, higher, or the same? As far as I can tell economists are divided on that question. It might help our current economic recession if the rate were at least temporarily lowered a bit.
How about payroll taxes you ask? It is true that Social Security and Medicare taxes are regressive, however these are not the same as federal income taxes. Despite their financial problems one has an expectation of receiving benefits when one retires based on what one pays into these programs. There is no expectation of anyone receiving benefits from federal income taxes commensurate with what one pays.

How has the size of government varied over the years in the United States? In 1913 federal, state, and local government expenditures comprised 8% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP); in1940 even after the massive New Deal federal spending of the FDR administration it was 15%; in 1980 at the start of the Ronald Reagan administration it was 30%; in 1988 at the end of his presidential term it was 32%; in 2008 at the end of the Geo. W. Bush administration it was 33% and in 2011 it is 36%. At this rate of growth the current administration estimates that by 2038 it will be 50%. In the interval from 1913 to 2011 there have been various periods where Republicans or Democrats have controlled either one or both houses of congress. And during this time there have been eight Democrat presidents and 9 Republican presidents.

An argument might be made that government was too small 100, 80, or even 60 years ago to supply essential services to its citizens which are properly the purvey of the federal government and to be vigilant and protective of people’s rights against business interests, big and small. If that were ever true it certainly is not now. The question today and in the future is who is going to protect the public and preserve basic freedoms from what has become a too big, too intrusive, and overweening federal government?

In 1970 our national debt was 40% of GDP; in 2011 it is 100%; and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that by 2030 it will be 200%. These trends are clearly unsustainable – we are on what Friedrich A. Hayek titled his 1944 economics book, The Road to Serfdom.

Don’t despair too much because there are some rational reasons for hope. As quoted by Arthur Brooks, the Virginia Declaration of Rights was written by Founding Father, George Mason, 30 days before the U.S. Declaration of Independence and contained the phrase, “Unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Means of Acquiring and Possessing Property.” The writers of our Declaration of Independence copied that phrase, but changed it to “…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” because they believed there should be a moral rather than a material emphasis to the Declaration of Independence.

According to the Pew Research Center 76% of Americans favor free enterprise versus a more socialistic state and 69% want lower taxes and less government even if it means fewer services for themselves.

The Tea Party movement came into existence because Republican conservatives, independents, and moderate Democrats became alarmed that the country was on a road to an unsustainable and crippling national debt and a too big, too expense, and overly intrusive national government. The midterm 2010 elections marked these concerns with unmistaken finality. In the U.S. House of Representatives 63 seats changed from Democrat to Republican; in the state legislatures 680 seats changed from Democrat to Republican; and the governorships went from 23 being Republican to 29. Only an imaginary guru can know what will happen in 2012, however the signs are that Republicans will make additional gains at the expense of Democrats. If that eventuates does this means that the country will be out of the ditch and on the proper road as the image that politicians are so wont to put forth? Judging by the historical record, only if Republicans have at long last learned what the majority of rational voters have been demanding in the past couple of years. If not, then those miscreant politicos will be thrown out of office in turn.

Is wealth really what makes people happy? The correct answer is a resounding no. Really? Yes. Consider people who win a substantial lottery. They all put up their money in the hope (probabilistically insane) of winning the jackpot. Yet survey after survey finds that these same people by large majorities are less happy after they won than before for a variety of reasons. Again surveys reveal that people in relative wealthy countries are not happier than people in poorer countries so long as they are not starving and get a reasonable amount of healthcare. In 1972 31% of Americans said they were happy. Today still 31% of Americans say they are happy despite having, on average, 150% more purchasing power.

What then makes people happy? It is earned success. The money made from earned success is enjoyed, but it is the knowledge that one’s success was earned on merit that brings satisfaction and happiness to people. This should be a cautionary tale for those who want to take from those who produce and give to those who have not earned it.

I will close with the following comment: Societies that don’t believe in meritocracy and individual opportunity are motivated by envy and spite – this is characteristic of the hard left in America and elsewhere around the world.

THE BURGEONING NATIONAL DEBT-61

2011-06-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

Given the burgeoning national debt which has now technically exceeded the $14.3 trillion debt limit mandated by congress I would like to ask the reader (1.) if you believe this country is on an unsustainable trajectory where the Obama administration projects the National Debt will be just under $21 trillion by 2016 if there are no changes in government policies and (2.) if the first answer is yes, then what should be done.

A few background data follow:

By mid 2011 the National Debt (ND) is now $14 ½ trillion and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $14.7 trillion. By comparison the ND in 1946, at the end of WWII, was $269 billion ($3 trillion in inflation adjusted 2011 dollars) with a GDP of $222 billion ($2.5 trillion). In 1970, the first time the GDP reached a $ trillion, the figures were ND $371 billion ($2.1 trillion) and GDP $1.04 trillion ($5.8 trillion). In 2000 these figures were ND $5.7 trillion ($7.1 trillion) and GDP $9.8 trillion ($12.3 trillion).

Therefore for the first time since the understandably large spending by the federal government during WWII (after all the country was in a fight for survival) the ND will soon overtake the county’s GDP. Everyone, politician and layman alike, agrees that these large national deficits cannot continue to be piled up with the possible exception of hard left politicos such as Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and other liberal loons in and out of congress. President Obama says he recognizes that the country cannot continue with these huge deficits, yet his actions, so far, belie his words. As I stated, the current National Debt is about $14 ½ trillion with the federal government currently running up a $4 ½ billion per day ($1.64 trillion per year) increase in the debt. Fortunately there is a brewing revolt of sensible Democrats in both the House and Senate, and not just the ones up for reelection in 2012, who are opting for meaningful federal budget cuts along with the Republicans.

How did this country get into this frightful financial mess? There is bipartisan blame and it will take a bipartisan solution to correct the problem. The George W. Bush administration increased the nation’s debt from approximately $5 ½ trillion to $10 ½ trillion in eight years. The two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, the prescription drug program, and the No Child Left Behind initiative, all unfunded, were major causes. This damn “Nation building” effort under taken by Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan was a naïve policy destine to fail as any knowledgeable student of history could have surmised. I do not impugn the motives of President Bush. I believe the evidence shows that he was sincere and honorable in his actions. His intentions were good, but everyone knows what the road to hell is paved with.

How about the policies of President Obama where an approximate additional $4 trillion of debt has been run up in just 2 ½ years of his administration? His then chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously said “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” so after the colossal waste of the almost $1 trillion government stimulus package the next major item on the Obama and Democrat leadership in congress agenda was the health care overhaul representing 1/6 of the American economy. With no bipartisan support this increasingly unpopular legislation was rammed through congress. A sensible approach would have been to concentrate on improving the American economy and lowering unemployment.

What policies do I advocate? The following are a good start: Concentrate on lowering government spending in a major way rather than raising federal taxes (more on that later). It is axiomatic that most government spending tends to crowd out private spending thereby, on balance, increasing, not decreasing unemployment. Big Government advocates will never admit this fact even with the prime example of the greatly expanded federal government spending during the Great Depression of the 1930’s (first by President Hoover, then even more so by President Roosevelt) that contributed to the most protracted and severe economic downturn in American history.

Where the federal government can make positive contributions towards encouraging a robust economy is by not trying to overregulate private enterprise and by not imposing onerous individual and business taxes.

What am I referring to in particular? In West Texas there is an attempt by the EPA to curtail the exploration and production of oil & natural gas in order to save the habitat of one particular lizard that most people in that area have never even seen. The corporate tax rate is currently 35% in the United States. This is the highest rate in the industrialized world. There are myriad examples of these types of anti-business policies by congress and federal agencies. These noxious practices did not originate with the Obama administration or when Democrats gained control of congress, but they have been grossly expanded since 2008. In order to create a healthier economy the opposite should have occurred.

There is another positive aspect to downsizing government. There is and always has been waste, fraud, duplication, and inefficiencies in government; much more so than in the private sector of the economy where there is a self-correcting mechanism such that companies that are badly run or do not adapt to a changing business climate tend to go bankrupt. No such force exists with government agencies that always seem to grow like “Topsy” whether they are efficient or needed. Even given that waste, fraud, duplication, and inefficiencies are not palliated, these problems should, seemingly apodictically, be automatically reduced with significant shrinkage of government.

Apart from these decreases in government spending there should be $billions in savings for the government from better policing of their ubiquitous spending programs. For example, Medicare expenditures in 2010 were $528 billion with the Reuters News Agency estimating that $200 billion was due to fraud; the CBS “60 Minutes” TV program put this figure at $60 billion. New York State leads the nation in Medicaid expenditures with $44.5 billion spent in 2005 of which 40% or $18 billion was attributed to fraud or waste.

How about raising taxes to help lower the national debt? I previously suggested that our too high corporate tax rate has resulted in job loses by encouraging companies to transfer to other countries. The individual income tax rate is already heavily tilted towards upper income families such that, according to the latest data from the IRS, 51% of the lowest income families pay no federal income taxes. In fact, many of these families are paid by the federal and state governments (read tax payers) in the forms of the Income Tax Credit, food stamps (one in 7 families in the USA are currently receiving them), subsidies to dependent mothers, and other welfare programs. It is an unhealthy situation when half the population does not contribute to this major part of the financial maintenance of their country. There seems no better way to create a dependent and entitlement segment of the population with their temptation to encourage or at least not object to taxes being raised on everyone else. These people may fall into the trap of believing they would not be affected because they would still not pay taxes, but they would be affected in lost job opportunities.

Will congress and the president finally address this colossal national debt problem before the country fall into a second rate or worst financial and social status? The battle has been joined, but a definitive outcome will not be decided before the 2012 presidential and congressional elections by the voters of this still great country.

FDR & LBJ-60

2011-03-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

I know that many people (mostly Democrats) believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president and they also believe that Lyndon Baines Johnson initiated or pushed many good government programs for the country. I may not dissuade them, but let me present a contrary view anyway, supported by facts, not just opinions and assertions.

First for the mensuration of FDR. Whenever government spends money there are bound to be recipients who benefit. Important questions to ask are: at the expense of whom and would there have been greater good done if the private sector of the economy had been allowed to operate in those areas instead of government? The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), initiated under FDR, brought electricity to many rural homes and businesses in that area – a good thing. The negative aspect is that it was done at the expense of other taxpayers who did not benefit at all. Private utility companies would have eventually provided electricity to that region as they did to other rural areas so it was just a matter of time for those people being electrified and how efficiently it was done.

The Great Depression was one of many depressions or recessions in the history of United States. There have been 47 defined recessions or depressions in the USA since 1790. The difference between a depression and recession is not well defined, but is simply its severity. An old joke is: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours. The Great Depression of the 1930’s was the longest in American history. There has to be a reason for that, so the question is why. Never in previous economic downturns has the federal government intruded into the private economy nearly to the degree that, first President Hoover, then President Roosevelt did even much more so. There is a perception by some people that WWII brought us out of the depression. I do not subscribe to that position; it is too facile. What the war did was to effectively create full employment. When there is rationing or a scarcity of basic commodities such as autos, gasoline, tires, sugar, clothing, shoes, and many other items, in my opinion, that is hardly an economic boom one would expect coming out of an economic depression. After the war the pent up demand and money people had saved did cause an economic boom. When new automobiles started being sold, such was the demand that for a while customers were paying more than the auto companies suggested retail price. I remember one slogan from the period immediately following the war was “beer in cans will soon be back”, although for the life of me, why beer in cans was better than beer in bottles left me, and still leaves me, perplexed.

From 1934 to 1940 the median annual unemployment rate in the United States was 17.2%. At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14%. Year by year the unemployment rates were: 1931,15.9%; 1932, 23.6%; 1933, 24.9%; 1934, 21.7%; 1935, 20.1%; 1936, 16.9%; 1937, 14.3%; 1938, 19.0%; and 1939, 17.2%. Our current rate of unemployment seems a bit benign by comparison. While there was episodic recovery between 1933 and 1937, the 1937 peak was lower than the previous peak in 1929, a highly unusual occurrence. Progress had and has been the norm. In addition, the 1937 peak was followed by a crash. As economics Nobel laureate Milton Freidman observed, this was “the only occasion in our record when one deep recession was followed immediately on the heels of another.”

Owing to this intensifying of the recession in 1937 the stock market went into a nosedive and by November 1937 unemployment had soared to 11 million with another 3 million working only part time (the population of the country was approx. 130 million). Statistics showed that the United States was lagging far behind other countries in recovering from the depression. American national income in 1937 was 86% of the 1929 high water mark while Great Britain’s was 124%. Japan’s employment figure was 75% above the 1929 number. Chile, Sweden, and Australia had economic growth rates in the range of 20% compared to the United States’ dismal -7%.

During the Hoover administration congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act – a bill that more accurately could be called the Smoot-Hawley-Hoover Act because Hoover not only signed it, but supported it all the way through congress. So when the United States imposed tariffs on foreign imported goods, surprise, guess what? Go to the head of the class, you are correct; these other countries retaliated by imposing tariffs on imported American goods thereby compounding the worldwide depression. While FDR cannot be blamed for passing this destructive piece of legislation he did nothing to attempt to repeal it.

What FDR did was triple taxes during the Great Depression, from $1.6 billion (when a $ billion was more than chump change) in 1933 to $5.3 billion in 1940. Federal taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) jumped from 3.5% in 1933 to 6.9% in 1940. FDR increased the tax burden with higher personnel income taxes, higher corporate income taxes, higher excise taxes, higher estate taxes, and higher gift taxes. He introduced the undistributed profits tax. Ordinary people were hit with higher liquor taxes and Social Security payroll taxes. All these taxes meant there was less capital for businesses to create jobs, and people had less money in their pockets.

At this point the well-known admonition of philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) comes to mind: “Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” Despite the deleterious effect of raising taxes during the Great Depression, Obama and the Democrat leadership in congress wanted to raise taxes in this current recession. Of course they only wanted to raise taxes on the wealthy; that is to say on the people who create jobs, so perhaps we can excuse them – not.

Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Democrat primary election (which was tantamount to the general election in Texas at that time) as a United States Senator in 1948 by a margin of 87 votes over former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson. It has been widely believed since and documented by Democrat leaning LBJ biographers Robert Caro and Robert Dallek that there were more than 200 fraudulent votes, and in some estimates double that given to Johnson. For this extremely slim and questionable margin of victory, Johnson acquired the moniker ‘Landslide Lyndon’.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by congress in 1964 to allow President Johnson to carry the Vietnam War to North Vietnam. Even Johnson himself later admitted that the circumstance of the military naval incident with North Vietnam was misrepresented to congress at the time. Do you get the idea that LBJ was far more dishonest than the average American politician?

To his credit President Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, both initiatives of President Kennedy, with the help of Northern Republicans – many of Johnson’s fellow Southern Democrats opposed him on these pieces of legislation.

So much for the good legislation Johnson passed. How about the rest? His overarching anti-poverty programs such as the Food Stamp Act and Revenue Act in 1964 and the Economic Opportunity Act, Head Start Act, and the Vista program in 1965 were all intended to eliminate poverty in America. Over the decades these programs have cost $ trillions, but is poverty a condition of the past? Not according to official statistics and the definition of poverty in this country. All of the federal aid to single mothers has done one thing – it has created more of them. Bill Bennett did a study of single motherhood in the 1960’s and declared there was a crisis in the big inter-cities. That rate of single mothers in now similar to the average of all populations in this country with the rate in the big inter-cities approaching 90%. It is the old, old story of the best of intentions being negated by unintended consequences.

And speaking of unintended consequences, let us consider one of FDR’s social programs, Social Security (created in 1935) and two of LBJ’s, Medicare and Medicaid (created in 1965). One could argue that millions of Americans (and some illegal immigrants) have benefited from these programs. However, let us consider what are the biggest threats to the financial wellbeing of this country today. Yes indeed, these are the ever-increasing unfunded liabilities of those three federal programs. When these benevolent programs were initiated it seems nobody anticipated the overwhelming financial burden that would accrue for the country in the future. There is considerable debate over how big the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are and over what time period, but all agree that the number is in the 10’s of $trillions. Medicare and Medicaid are creating more than 5 times the unfunded liabilities than Social Security so they are the bigger problem. According to the nonpartisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) if these three programs continuing growing 2.5% greater than the GDP then they will consume nearly the entire federal budget by 2050!

There are now only two choices: (1) significantly reduce the payouts and increase the pay-ins of the participants in these programs or, (2) let the country collapse economically and socially. Anyone game for that? It is a truism that once entitlement programs are given curtailment of the benefits are greatly resisted. But done it must be, whether by so called “means testing” or across the board cuts in payouts, or reduced or withheld services, or all of these. The solution will not be pleasant or welcomed by the public. By all means let us give thanks to FDR and LBJ for the unavoidable coming pain.

If anyone either agrees or disagrees with my thesis in this essay I would welcome hearing it. Just remember the oft quoted words of the late Democrat U.S. Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”

UNITED STATES PRESIDENTS IN MY LIFETIME-59

2011-02-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

The following is a thumbnail sketch of my evaluations of all the U.S. presidents in my lifetime. I trust that any reasonable reader will render the conclusion that my opinions of the individual presidents are neither overly censorious nor too encomiastic:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945) is widely credited by the public for ending the Great Depression with his greatly expanded federal spending by creating myriad of what were called “alphabet soup” agencies and programs (SEC, WLRB, TVA, NLRB, FHA, HOLC, PWA, CCC, LWA, WPA, NRA, AAA, USHA, etc.). Historians are increasingly coming to the conclusion that not only did this pythonically increased federal spending, regulation, and intrusion into the private sector (again contrary to population perception, this big government answer to the depression was started by Herbert Hoover) did not help to ameliorate the economic depression, but prolonged and deepened it. A recent historian of this persuasion is Amity Shlaes, a self described liberal, with her 2008 book, The Forgotten Man.

I rate the wartime Roosevelt differently. Leading up to WW II the country was in an isolationist mood, yet Roosevelt recognized that the totalitarian and expansionist regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to be confronted if the democratic nations were to preserve their freedoms. Roosevelt did as much as domestic politics would allow to aid Great Britain in its war with Germany. And once the USA got into the war, Roosevelt was an effective war time leader even if he trusted the Soviet Union, then an ally against Germany, a bit too much. By the summer of 1944 Roosevelt had serious heart disease and should not have run for a 4th term. After all, by that time the outcome of the 2nd World War was not really in doubt so he could have allowed another Democrat candidate to run for the presidency knowing that the war was essentially won. However, the downside was the likely outcome that the country would have been deprived of the services of Harry Truman as president (for much more on Roosevelt see my blog essay #23 titled FDR).

Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) left office with about a 25% approval rate owing mostly to the stalemated Korean War. Over the subsequent decades his rating has risen until now he is generally considered one of the best presidents of the 20th century. Truman’s recognition of the threat to the West from the Soviet Union and his Marshall Plan massive aid to Western Europe as well as his assistance to Greece in successfully opposing the Communists attempted takeover of that country have contributed substantially to his increased stature. Truman is now given more credit than formerly for being an honest plain speaking politician who said what he meant and meant what he said.

Dwight David Eisenhower (1953-1961) People really did “like Ike” not only in this country, but generally around the world, especially in Western Europe because of his position as Allied Commander in Europe during WWII. It has been suggested that his administration was a calm and tranquil one, which was exactly what the American people wanted after the dislocation and frenetic activity of WWII and the Korean War. Wartime taxes, especially individual income taxes, were kept too high during the Eisenhower years, a condition which would be corrected in the next administration. At the finish of his administration Eisenhower issued a valid warning about the “industrial – military complex.” Overall I would rate the Eisenhower administration a success, but not a particularly distinguished one.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963), the first U.S. president born in the 20th century, was one of the least experienced (although as we shall see experience is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a completely successful presidency), certainly of the more modern presidents. The Bay of Pigs fiasco was a near disaster; then there were the comedic plans and even attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba. Also early in his administration Kennedy had a summit meeting in Vienna, Austria with the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, who came away with the impression that Kennedy was weak which led him to make the irrational decision to put missiles in Cuba capable of launching nukes. Kennedy faced down the Soviets, forcing them to remove the missiles. For that reckless action it was Khrushchev who was replaced by the Politburo and sent into involuntary retirement.

Kennedy was a fast learner and recovered quickly after this shaky start of his administration. He pushed for much needed civil rights legislation for minorities, especially blacks, cut the high tax rates, and through his brother, Robert, who he had appointed Attorney General (JFK jokingly said to give his brother legal experience), took on organized crime with a good deal of success. JFK’s charisma (as well as Jackie’s) not only made him increasingly popular in this country, but also around the world, thereby enhancing the image and prestige of the United States. Despite his personal peccadilloes (not unlike Bill Clinton) I would rate Kennedy as a good president who might have become a great one had he not been so tragically assassinated by that loser and cretin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969) was an archetypal political hack. The Vietnam War did his presidency in, but not before he had damaged this country socially, economically, and in worldwide prestige. The sooner he is forgotten the better.

Richard Milhous Nixon (1969-1974). If he had not resigned in disgrace he would have been the only U.S. president to have been impeached and convicted – the votes were there in the House and the Senate. Nixon said that the American people had a right to know if their president was a crook and he said he was not a crook, which proved that he was a liar as well as a crook.

Gerald Rudolph Ford (1974-1977) was the only president of the USA not elected president or vice-president. Mediocrity seemed to be the watchword of his administration. One plus was that he was an innocuous person who was able to heal some of the ill will, which was extant in the country after the disaster of Richard Nixon.

James Earl Carter, jr. (1977-1981). Incredibly Jimmy Carter recently said that he considered his presidential administration a success based upon the amount of legislation he was able to get passed by Congress. Few Americans agree nor agreed at the time of his attempted reelected. Carter won only 6 of the 50 states and 49 electoral votes to 44 states and 489 electoral votes for Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980.

Not every position or decision Carter took was wrong headed. He led the effort to give sovereignty of the Panama Canal to Panama, which Reagan opposed. And the treaty even gave the United States government the right to keep the canal open, by force if necessary. Thus in turning over the canal to Panama one more contretemps with Latin America was avoided. Carter brokered an important peace agreement between Egypt and Israel that has stood up to this day, and for which he should have been given, but was not, the Nobel Peace Prize similar to President Theodore Roosevelt being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his part in brokering peace in the Russo-Japanese War.

Carter’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Peace Price Committee during the George W. Bush presidency was more a repudiation of Bush and embracing of Carter because of his criticism of Bush than it was anything that Carter had accomplished in promoting peace around the world. In fact Carter has made it a habit of publically criticizing Republican presidents after he left office. This breaks with the tradition of former presidents not speaking ill of their successors and shows a distinct lack of character by Carter. Whatever faults one finds with Bush I & II, and that will be evident in what I have written further on, both of them had the class not to publically uttered any criticism of their successors.

Carter’s answer to the high inflationary conditions during his administration and accompanying high energy costs and shortages was to advise people to put on sweaters and to declare that the country was in a deep malaise. That was not what people wanted to hear or accepted. Carter’s inept and inherent weakness in responding to the Iran Hostage Crisis was the final dénouement in his defeat for reelection in 1980.

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1981-1989), similar to Barack Obama, inherited a horrible economic condition when he took office. Unlike Obama, however, Reagan reacted in an effective way to lead the country back to prosperity such that he was reelected by one of largest mandates in history, winning 49 out of 50 states and 525 electoral votes to one state and 13 electoral votes for Walter Mondale.

Reagan made people feel good about themselves and their economic future and proud of their country after the dour economic outlook and loss of standing in the in the world following the Nixon debacle and uncertainty of the Ford and, especially, Carter administrations.

One might argue, as I do, that Reagan convinced congress to spend too much money rebuilding our military, but what is abundantly clear is that the attempt to keep up with the United States spending on military preparedness, contributed mightily to the Soviet Union dissolution. Some credit also has to go to the Soviet leader and reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, but clearly not all of the credit as the news media in the United States and elsewhere were wont to do.

I rate Reagan the greatest president of the 20th century. It is interesting that in the attempt to rebuild the reduced image of President Obama, the Main Stream Media have been describing Obama as “Reaganesque”, using it as a positive. Give me a break. During his presidency and for years after, the liberal media trashed Reagan, calling him a “dunce”, saying he delegated way too much, slept half the time he was in office, and was not very bright. Certainly not as bright as they were. These clowns must believe we will not remember what their description of Reagan was in the past.

George Herbert Walker Bush (1989-1993) convincingly proves my assertion that experience is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a successful presidency from start to finish. Bush was a U.S. Representative in Congress; the Director of the CIA; Ambassador to China; Ambassador to the United Nations; Chairman of the Republican National Committee; and two term Vice-President of the United States. How much more government experience could a person have? I would rate Bush a mediocre president. He was not defeated for reelection for nothing. Yes, Bush was brilliant in putting together a coalition of many countries including the Europeans, and the Arab countries of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates to expel the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Even with this great success, Bush committed a grave error by not giving his commanding general, Norman Schwarzkopf, 48 more hours to destroy Hussein’s army and thereby driving that brutal dictator from power. Bush compounded his error after the armistice by giving Hussein permission to fly his helicopters in the South of Iraq ostensibly to supply Iraqis with essential supplies, but actually to suppress the rebellious Shiites who were opposed to the regime of Hussein. Seemingly the Bush administration allowed Hussein’s army to do this because of the fear that the Shiites in the South of Iraq would align with the Shiite government of Iran to the detriment of the United States.

Then who can forget Bush’s infamous “Read my lips – no new taxes” statement? After getting the Democrat controlled congress to promise they would significantly cut expenditures, Bush agreed to raise taxes on the American people. Of course congress did no such thing as cut government spending. What good does all of that experience do if one can be fooled so easily?

William Jefferson Clinton (1993-2001) Unlike the previous Democrat president, Clinton was reelected. Presidents are doing something right if they get reelected. True, one could fault Clinton for not taking the threat of Islamic Terrorism seriously enough, but at least he did not get this country bogged down in foreign wars the way his successor did. After the midterm election defeats in 1994 suffered by Democrats, and therefore which reflected a repudiation of his policies, President Clinton made a course change to the right. Co-operating with the then Republican Congress, Clinton cut federal spending, including welfare reform and continued his cutting of military spending. Most conservatives were opposed to that;
not me however (for an explanatory view of my position on the United States military read my blog essay #55 The USA Military). Without factoring in the liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, in Clinton’s first five years the budget deficits were relatively low and in his last three years and in the first year of Bush’s administration there were budget surpluses. In his entire eight years there was a modest $700 billion increase in the national dept. Owing to the growth of the GDP (gross domestic product) during that time this $700 billion deficit actually became a smaller percentage in relation to the GDP than previously. How appealing does that sound now in our current fiscal funk?

On the negative side Bill Clinton had the sexual morals of an alley cat (If one can attribute moral standards to animals.). For lying under oath about his escapades with “that woman”, Monica Lewinsky, the House of Representatives impeached Clinton – the Senate then proceeded to find him not guilty, at least his crime (lying under oath about a personal matter) was not considered significantly serious to remove him from the elected office of president. Republicans should give thanks for this outcome because it would have been highly likely that as the succeeding president, the insufferable Al Gone would have been elected president in his own right in 2000. What grade do I give the boy president (as R. Emmitt Tyrrell, jr. called him)? A low one for his first two years (again there is the inexperience factor owing to Clinton’s relative youth); considerably higher for the last 5 or 6 years thanks to the repudiation voters gave the Democrats in the mid term elections and the change of course for the president, even taking into account the impeachment verdict meted out to Clinton by congress.

George Walker Bush (2001-2009). Before I excoriate this president, justifiably in my opinion, I will recount a couple of positives for him. His income tax cuts, which he convinced congress to pass, were justified and highly stimulative for the economy through the proper mode; that is through the private sector rather than the government. Bush wanted to make the cuts permanent, but had to settle for a 10-year period in a compromise with congress. At least from a conservative viewpoint the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to SCOTUS were excellent choices, but who can forget the abortive nomination of his White House Counsel, the unqualified Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court where even Republicans in congress rebelled and forced Bush to withdraw his candidate.

Now to the objurgatory part of the evaluation of President Bush – and where to start? How about the circa $5 trillion increase in the national debt, from $5 ½ trillion to $10 ½ trillion, that occurred in the eight years of the Bush presidency? What caused this colossal doubling of the national debt? It was federal spending of course. The unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unfunded prescription drug program contributed mightily to this debt and there were other expansions of federal spending. Many on the left are wont to say that the “Bush tax cuts” added to the debt because they look at it as a zero sum game. This is disingenuous and wrong. Every time federal taxes are cut the revenues to the government go up. You do not have to take my word for this – read what two of the preeminent economists in the country today, Drs. Thomas Sowell (for more on Dr. Sowell read my blog essay #20 titled Thomas Sowell) and Walter Williams, have written.

From about the year 2000 there was a housing boom where unrealistic prices for housing rose at an unsustainable rate and it should have been inevitable and predictable that a correction was overdue, but the correction, a housing bust, when it came, seemed to have been a Black Swan (for a definition and examples of a Black Swan see my blog #42, Black Swans). The worldwide economic downturn starting in 2007 was triggered by the housing bust and led to banks, other lending institutions, auto companies, Wall Street financial firms, and other businesses ostensibly to need government bailouts to keep them from going bankrupt and causing an even much more ruinous economic and social catastrophe. What would have happened without government intervention is a matter of speculation, so perhaps intervention was the better option to have taken. Was this economic collapse avoidable? I believe it was, but there were multi-varied factors involved in its cause too numerous to comment on here. For a cogent explanation and quick read of the whole mess I refer you to a 2009 book by Thomas Sowell titled The Housing Boom and Bust.

The charge by the far left that Bush (and Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al) had evil and rapacious intentions in invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan is absolutely bogus. Bush is and was a good and decent man who, in my opinion and many others, was tragically wrong in his attempt at “nation building” by use of military force. Although a final verdict is not in on the outcome of the type of societies and governments which will eventuate in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other counties in the Muslim world and therefore whether stability will ensue, at this juncture it appears that the sacrifice in blood and treasure was not nearly worth it. George W. Bush will not be considered a mediocre president like his father; he will be either a resounding success or a dismal failure.

Barack Hussein Obama (2009 - ?). As with his presidential predecessor, it is too soon to give Obama a final evaluation on his presidency, however, based upon what he has done so far, midway through his term, it does not portend positive for him. During his campaign for the presidency, Obama characterized himself as a new style politician, one that evoked the slogan of “hope and change” and he sold himself as a unifier, not a divider; bipartisan not partisan, and a post racial president (He did not say that, but his acolytes did). True, the president inherited a financial mess, none of which was his fault. Unlike Reagan, Obama chose the strategy of using the coffers of the federal government to bring the country out of the recession with massive (nearly a trillion dollars) stimulus spending, with no more success than FDR had in the 1930’s.

Obama’s first important legislative program after the abortive stimulus package was an effective federal takeover of the healthcare system in this country, representing approx. 1/6 of the U.S. economy. With the country stuck in an economic morass, Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, candidly said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Using overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate, Obama and the Democrat leadership were able to pass this legislation against the will of a majority of the American voters and increasingly so as more became known about this monstrosity of a healthcare bill. Much of the first year and one-half of Obama’s term was devoted to selling and passing healthcare legislation that has become the centerpiece of the first two years of the president’s term. The unpopularity this and the stimulus, as well as unrelenting deficits contributing to an ever burgeoning national debt combined with a high and intransigent unemployment rate were resoundingly reflected in the mid-term elections where Republicans easily recaptured the majority in the House and closed the gap in the Senate. Obama himself said that he and the congressional Democrats took a “shellacking.”

So has Obama learned anything from his historic midterm election defeat? Despite some early sounds that he had; apparently not. His proposed fiscal budget was a joke as far a trying to curtail spending thereby shrinking the deficit and lowering the national debt. Instead spending increases were the order of the day (what Obama and Democrats refer to as “investments”). In just over two years of the Obama administration the national debt has expanded from $10 ½ trillion to approaching $14 ½ trillion with yearly deficits of over $1 trillion as far down the road as can be forecasted. During the Obama presidency 200,000 federal jobs have been added while total employment jobs have diminished by 3.3 million. The Obama budget for the coming fiscal year is $3.7 trillion. “….O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that.” King Lear Act III, scene IV. Truly, the direction the country is going is madness. Further if this trend is not reversed the country will slide into second rate and worst status. The way Obama and the left wing Democrats in Congress (led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) are reacting it seems as if the mid-term elections never happened.

President Obama inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in a responsible way is trying to extricate the United States from these unfortunately conflicts after making naïve and unrealistic promises to do so during the election campaign and in the embryonic days of his administration. Personally I wish he would get on with the withdrawal, but I understand the political and security factors that have to be considered.

Nowhere, except perhaps with the economy, has Obama’s inexperience, arrogance, and naiveté shown itself more clearly than his attempts to negotiate with America’s enemies such as Iran and North Korea. Clinton was played for a fool in trying (partly through the uninvited auspices of the meddlesome Jimmy Carter) to deal unsuccessfully with North Korea and Obama learned nothing from that failure. When it comes to Iran, Obama failed even more miserably and with even greater negative consequences. Apparently fancying himself the anti-Bush, Obama seemed convinced he could successfully talk Iran into giving up their nuclear bomb ambitions. Of course he could not as any sensible person would have fathomed. The outcome was even more potentially disastrous than his dealings with North Korea. In an attempt to curry favor with the Iranian régime, Obama did not wholeheartedly support the Iranian people when they came out in the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest against the repressive, brutal, and fanatically fundamental Islamic government. Perhaps the overthrow of the Iranian government still would not have occurred even if the Obama administration had given overt and covert support to the rebellious Iranian people, but that is an outcome that will forever be unknown.

Starting in the presidential campaign and continuing into his presidency, Obama criticized past actions of the United States in a series of speeches in Cairo, Istanbul, London, and at the United Nations. When asked if he thought the United States was an exceptional country he replied that many countries believe they are, thereby strongly suggesting that he did not consider the United States exceptional. And as if to cement that belief he made a number of bows to foreign leaders from around the world when he first met them: He made a deep bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in April 2009 (It is true that President Bush held the hand of then Crown Prince Abdullah, who was the actual ruler of Saudi Arabia, at his Crawford ranch in April 2005, which was dopey, but not demeaning); He made a slight bow to Russian Prime Minister Putin in July 2009; another deep bow to Emperor Akihito of Japan in November 2009; and a pronounced bow to President Hu Jintao of China in April 2010. This obeisance by the president of the United States is demeaning to the presidency, the country, and to Obama himself. Why did he repeatedly do it? The answer may lie in Obama’s attitude toward this country as he implied in his statement about the USA not being exceptional which is in sharp contrast to President Reagan’s characterizing the United States as a “Shining City Upon a Hill.”

I will close with this quote from over 2000 years ago to show that the fiscal problems and their solutions we face at this time are hardly new or original:

“The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC)

LIBERTY AND SECURITY

2010-11-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

“Those who can give up essential liberty, to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin, to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1755. There have been attributions of this sentiment by various people over the centuries, but Franklin’s is the one most quoted.

I could stand it no longer so I have decided to weigh in with my own exegetic thoughts on the U.S. airports security screening brouhaha. As one could surmise from the foregoing quote, I am more than adumbrating that I am not in favor of what the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) is doing to that portion of the American public who fly on commercial airlines. In fact I find these procedures of full body scans and intrusive body pat-downs highly offensive. Paralogistical bureaucrats asseverate, ipse dixit, the necessity of these outrageous practices which is so highly predictable: It is solely to make the flying public as safe as is possible. What offal! I would wager that the overriding concern of the TSA and the rest of the Obama administration, and Obama, himself, in case an Islamic terrorist blows up an airplane in mid-flight, is to claim they did everything humanly possible to thwart it. But did they? As has been stated myriad times, the Israelis have the best airport security system in the world. So what do they do? They profile. The passenger list is scrutinized before the flight to attempt to identify any potential terrorist; certain passengers are questioned; and all are observed to spot any nervous or peculiar behavior. Particular attention is paid to young Middle Eastern, Eastern, or North African looking types (after all where are these Islamic terrorists from, Muslim countries or Scandinavian countries?). Isn’t that profiling? Absolutely, and we should be doing the same thing, except political correctness is so rampant in this country that we put ourselves at risk and endure humiliating procedures just to avoid contravening it.

Amendment IV to the United States Constitution says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…..” Is what the TSA doing to the American flying public in violation of their constitutional right not to be subjected to unreasonable searches? I believe most of these flying passengers and certainly the airline flight crews would agree. If this issue would ever reach the U.S. Supreme Court, how it would be ruled on is problematic.

Far more liberals than conservatives do not object to the governmental enhanced airport screening techniques now being used. Many of those same liberals opposed every method used by the Bush administration to interdict the terrorist acts of the Islamic extremists including warrantless wire taps, rendition, and enhanced interrogations of known terrorists, especially, horror of horrors, water-boarding all of three high profile Islamic terrorist chiefs. The claim was always that the civil rights of these people were being violated by an overweening government. Yet with the civil and privacy rights of ordinary Americans now being violated by enhanced airport screening, these liberals have no problem with it. Let’s see, do you suppose that what is now being done by the Obama administration rather than the Bush administration has anything to do with the attitude of liberals?

A recent poll showed that 50% of the American public thinks the intrusive body pat-downs go too far and 48% do not think so. Who are these benighted 48%? In his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, scene II, Shakespeare wrote “What fools these mortals be.” The label fits those idiots perfectly. The poll also said that by a 2:1 ratio they were not troubled by the full body scans. In fairness to the American public I believe it highly likely that if only the flying public were polled the outcome would be considerably different in favor of more opposition to an overly intrusive government. As far as the non-flying American public is concerned when and in what society have the Plebeians ever been introspective or critically thoughtful?

Do these enhanced airport security methods actually make people in airplanes safer as the TSA and liberals who have no problem with an overbearing government claim? Ask yourself: How many terrorists have been apprehended with these “safety” procedures? The answer is zero, none, nada. The would-be “shoe bomber” was foiled by other passengers and the failed “underwear bomber” by his own ineptness after they were already on an airplane. The upshot was airline passengers were required to remove their shoes for inspection and have their underwear searched. It is always the same with these bumbling and fatuous government employees in their inchoate and always reactive, but never proactive response to the tactics of Islamic terrorists. If these Islamic Jihads start making buses and trains in the USA their targets of attacks will the federal government then expand their current “security” protocols in airports to bus and train stations? By what violation of apodictic reasoning could anyone doubt that the proven unimaginative and obtuse government bureaucrats would react any differently to that situation than they have to past threats? N’est-ce pas?

There was a Drudge Report headline that stated: The Terrorists Have Won. That may be a bit premature, but given the reaction of the U.S. government to the attempts (unsuccessfully) since 9/11 by Islamic terrorists to perpetrate acts of terrorism against the United States and given the cravenly acceptance by so many of the American people to these government actions then the direction in this war with terrorists is definitive. The airport so-called “security” methods which are gross intrusions of the civil and privacy rights of American citizens do not demonstrably make anyone any safer. It clearly is not necessary for these Islamic fanatics to success in their quest to bring down the West in general and the United States in particular by killing and maiming hundreds or thousands of people with violent acts. Once they have cowed a sufficient number of people such that the will to resist is gone and their spirits crushed, then the Islamic terrorists have indeed won. With the American public surrendering their liberty for a little perceived safety to an increasingly expansive government is to lose the first battle in the war with Islamic terrorists. If this trend continues can there be little doubt that the war will be eventually lost one step at a time?

PERCEIVED INCIVILITY IN POLITICS AND THE TRUE PERIL OF THE USA-57

2010-07-17T16:23:00.000-07:00

Let me contribute a few cautionary comments from my perspective of decades of observing the contemporary scene and being a student of history that one need not fear for our country because of perceived incivility in the body politic today. The history of politics in our country is replete with more personal attacks, vitriolic discourse, and shameless slanders since the founding of the Republic than what takes place today. Two of the Founding Fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were political allies and personnel friends in the revolutionary days and during the George Washington presidency. In the contest to succeed Washington, Adams and Jefferson became bitter enemies accusing each other of particularly unflattering calumnies and down right falsehoods. Fortunately, Abigail Adams, the accomplished and intellectually gifted wife of John Adams, had been a good friend of Jefferson and her persistence in trying to reconcile the pair finally allowed the two former friends, turned enemies, to resolve their differences during the last 17 years of their lives, after their political careers were over. Thus were created and preserved many priceless letters exchanged between them in those 17 years. As a matter of historical note they both died (Adams was 7½ years older than Jefferson) on the same day; the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Republic.

In 1856, leading up to the Civil War, antislavery Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made an intemperate speech on the floor of the Senate criticizing proslavery Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Three days later Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a relative of Butler, walked up to Sumner who was seated at his desk in the Senate chamber and beat him with his cane so severely that Sumner was absence from the Senate for three years while recovering. The people of South Carolina sent Brooks dozens of canes to replace the one he had broken while he was pummeling Sumner. For weeks afterwards many of the senators and representatives carried pistols and knives on them while they were in the Senate or House chambers and in their offices. Still think there is relatively gross incivility in politics today?

Even, along with George Washington, our most respected, admired, and honorable president, Abraham Lincoln, was not above nasty politics in his youth as a politician in Illinois. As people were wont to do at that time, Lincoln anonymously wrote a scathing, not to say slanderous, parody in the local newspaper of one of his political opponents. Lincoln was soon discovered to be the author and his opponent challenged him to a duel. Friends of both of them interceded so that the dispute was settled without the antagonists resorting to shooting at each other – fortunately, else the country might have been deprived of one of its greatest presidents.

Historians have well documented that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what was called the era of “yellow” journalism, newspapers and politicians put forth the most outrageous and villainous descriptions of their opponents than anything that could be imagined today.

Audrey, a little advice from an old codger who has seen it all. If you use an example to illustrate a finer point make sure the example has validity. Other than former respected civil rights activist and now Representative in the House, John Lewis (D-GA) who allegedly said he heard the “N” word used against him by the Tea Party protestors in Washington D.C. there is no evidence that it occurred. Lewis would not go on any TV network, not Fox News or the other left leaning networks, and repeat that claim. Lewis himself had used over the top and therefore uncivil criticism during the presidential campaign, calling John McCain and Sarah Palin segregationists and comparing them to George Wallace. Prior to that Lewis was the first major House member to call for the impeachment of George W. Bush.

A website owner and conservative Jew, Andrew Breitbart, was suspicious of the claim that Tea Party participants had used foul or racist language toward black members of congress so he offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could produce any camera cell phone recording or other evidence that it happened. He had no takers so he increased the amount to $100,000 and is still waiting. Given how ubiquitous camera cell phones are now (just consider what happened to the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones. If you have not heard the story this past week I could relate it to you) one would think that someone would have recorded it. Also not one of the dozens and dozens of Capital Police has said they heard anything untoward directed toward black members of congress. I am just saying be sure your “facts” can not be reasonably disputed by someone like me.

There are always fringe people in any group and the current government protestors are no exception. These yahoos go beyond acceptable bounds and Bill Clinton was right to point this out a couple of days ago. However, if one is to be a moral arbitrator, then it is imperative to be consistent in this position. Where was Clinton a few years ago when some of the anti Iraq and Afghanistan wars protestors were calling George W. Bush a murderer, liking him to Hitler, and displaying signs with crosshairs on the forehead of a picture of Bush? It is necessary to be fair and consistent when impugning the character and motives of others in order to avoid the appellation of hypocrite.

Is there a reason to be concerned about the course of our country today? Yes there is, but it is not about incivility in politics – it has to do with the economic well being of the country. The vast majority of the protestors today are deeply concerned about the explosive growth of and expansion of the power of the federal government and the burgeoning, seemingly out of control, federal dept. The cause of the rapidly increasing dept is bipartisan and the solution to this grave problem will have to be bipartisan also.

During the first five years of the Bill Clinton administration the federal government ran what by now seem like exceedingly small budget deficits and during his last three years and the first year of the Bush administration (thanks to the Clinton and congress policies) there were budget surpluses. In the entire eight year Clinton administration there was a modest $700 billion increase in the national dept, which, because of the growth in the GDP (gross domestic product), actually caused the debt to became a smaller percentage in relation to the GDP. Whatever the moral failings of Bill Clinton and his under emphasis on the Islamic Terrorist threat during his presidency, there is no denying that the Clinton administration was fiscally conservative and responsible.

For the eight years of the Bush administration the national dept increased by circa $5 trillion, from $5½ to $10½ trillion. Much of this debt increase was due to the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the increase in the subsidies of the Medicare/Medicaid prescription drug program. In my opinion this was highly irresponsible because if wars are worth fighting and federal subsidies worth granting then they are worth paying for by either cutting other federal expenditures or raising taxes or both.

In the 21 months of the current presidential administration the national debt increased by $3 trillion, from $10 1/2 to $13 1/2 trillion. A severe financial crises and recession were inherited, true enough, yet instead of sensibly concentrating on improving the economy, lowering unemployment, and trying to control the rapidly increasing national debt, the Obama administration zeroed in on healthcare reform as its primary program.

The debt and its projected growth over the next ten years are unsustainable and if not reversed will do irreversible damage to our economy and society. As of Oct. 2007 the national dept has increased an average of $4.16 billion per day! This explains why the idea of a VAT (Value Added Tax) which means that in every step of the manufacturing or production of goods a tax is added. The concept of going to a VAT in this country is now starting to be bandied about by both liberals and conservatives, but for political reasons will not be proposed before the November bi-year elections. There is simply not enough money available from raising income taxes on the rich to have a significant impact on the dept. As it is, according to the latest figures from the IRS, 47% of the bottom income group of USA households does not pay federal income taxes. In fact the lowest 40% of income households actually receive subsidies from the federal government each year to the tune of $70 billion. The top 1% of income earners (making $390,000 or more per year) pay about the same amount of federal income tax ($450 billion) as the lowest 95% (making $150,000 per year or less). The top 50% of wage earners pay 97% of all federal income tax leaving the bottom 50% paying only 3%. Thus the only realistic alternative of raising significant amounts of revenue for the federal government is the VAT which will be paid by everyone. The estimate is that every 1% of VAT in this country would generate about $100 billion in revenues. Therefore a 10% VAT would mean one trillion dollars for the government coffers. That is quite a temptation for politicians.

The European nations pay for their welfare programs with income taxes and a VAT. In Western Europe the top income tax rate varies from 40% to 54% with the average being 48% and the VAT varying from 16% to 25% with the average being 20%. In Eastern Europe the top income tax rate ranges from 10% to 45% with the average being 22½% and the VAT from 15% to 23% with an average of 19%. Do we really want to go down the road to European socialism?

In the United States the top federal income rate is currently 35%. When the so called Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2010 the top income tax rate will go back to 39.6%. What is a comparable tax in this country to the European VAT is the state and local sales tax. In Plano it is 8¼%, not quite at the 20% European level. If a VAT were enacted here it would be added to, not replace, the sales tax.

Is there any justification for the USA to have a VAT to help bring down our dangerously high and rapidly increasing national dept? I think yes – with several caveats. (1.) It should not be enacted until our economy and unemployment level have shown clear signs of improvement. (2.) It should be a temporary tax of “X” years where “X” is just long enough to have a measurable and significant impact on lowering our debt. (3.) It should expire after “X” years with a 2/3 majority in both houses of congress required to extend it. (4.) Congress has to enact legislation, signed by the president, for major reductions in government spending including the military and entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid) as well as pork barrel spending so favored by the rascals in congress (Is it any wonder that congress has a 50 year high disapproval rating of 75% to 80%?).

I may be overly optimistic, but I believe when the ever increasing national financial peril of our country is at last appreciated by a large majority of the voters then our elected representatives will finally act to correct this dire situation. Not this year perhaps; still the way the national dept is mushrooming, not so far in the future that it will be too late to save this great nation.

MUSLIMS TAKING OVER EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA-56

2010-04-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

There is a widely circulating video on the internet, titled demographic_problem.wmv, which shows the dire probability of Muslims taking over Europe and North America in a few decades on the basis of population expansion relative to the indigenous Europeans and North Americans.

Demographics is a subject I know something about so I will make this essay as concise and informative as I can. I have written on the subject before in the last third of my blog essay titled Energy (there is a link between population and energy requirements) so you may want to look at that; also one of the best sources around, as I noted in my essay, is the 2004 book Fewer by Ben J. Wattenberg who is recognized as a demographics expert and who has been following and analyzing population trends for the last 40 years or so.

That video is alarmist and extreme and illustrates how selected facts can be used to draw unrealistic, false, and even outrageous conclusions. The video says that action must be taken before it is too late (presumably too late to prevent a takeover of the world by Muslims), but what is the action that is recommended? It is not specified. The video is correct in stating that the replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman; anything less leads to population decline and of course anything more will cause population growth.

Before I start refuting the ominous conclusions of this video I will denote what some of the real concerns are for the coming worldwide and individual country population declines as anyone who is paying attention knows. Just as our Social Security system is now predicted to be in the red in 2010 because fewer and fewer workers are paying into the system and more and more retirees are collecting benefits, the Europeans have greater economic problems because of their even more severely aging population and concomitant falling total fertility rates (TFR). There may well be massive societal dislocations and reordering of priorities and possibly lowering of economic well being, in spite of technology advances, in the coming decades. As I noted in my essay, quoting Wattenberg, the world population will rise from approx. 6 3/4 billion in 2010 to 8 to 9 billion in 2050 and then may drop to between 2 and 3 billion by 2300!

Now let’s discuss the supposed Islamization of Europe and North America in the coming years. The figures for the TFR for several European countries given in the video are as follows with the figures given by Wattenberg in parentheses: Germany 1.3 (1.35); France 1.8 (1.89); Italy 1.2 (1.23); Great Britain 1.6 (1.6); Spain 1.1 (1.15); Greece 1.3 (1.27); and the average of 31 countries in the European Union 1.38 (1.38). As you can see these figures are practically the same so there is no dispute for these data. The claim in the video for an 8.1 TFR for the Muslims in France is highly suspect given the TFR for various Muslim and Arab countries in North Africa (where most of the Muslim emigrants to Europe come from) and in the Middle East as given by Wattenberg: North Africa as a whole 40 years ago had a TFR of 7.1 and now is 3.2 and sinking like a stone and Tunisia is now 2.0. In 40 years Syria went from a TFR of 7.6 to 3.3; Jordan 8.0 to 3.6; Iraq 7.2 to 4.8; Saudi Arabia 7.3 to 4.5; Iran 7.0 to 2.3; and Egypt, the most populous Arab/Muslim country in the world, went from a TFR of 7.1 in 1960-65 to 3.3 in 2004.

The total population of all of the Arab nations in the world is approximately the same as the USA with the world Muslim population being circa 1/6 of the total world population. The non-Arab country with the largest Muslim population in the world is Indonesia at about 230 million and is the fourth most populous nation after China, India, and the USA. The TFR of Indonesia went from 5.7 in 1960-65 to 2.35 in 2001. In addition to Indonesia, the TFR in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are falling rapidly although the TFR is Pakistan was one of the world’s highest at 5.08; however it fell one full point from 1990.to 2000.

The oft expressed fear that the Palestinians would overwhelm the Jewish population in numbers is not materializing. The TFR for the Jewish population in Israel was 2.6 in 2002; the Arab women in the Occupied Territories went from 8.0 in 1970 to 7.0 in 1985 and 5.6 in 2002. The trend is favorable to the Jews.

A few years ago lawyer Alan Dershowitz and columnist Richard Cohen were lamenting that 1/3 and an increasing ratio of young Jews in the United States were marrying outside their religion. They were concerned that Jewish people in the USA were losing their culture and something needed to be done about it. Wattenberg’s comment was “Yah, and good luck with that.” In democracies, people, especially young people, are going to do what they want to do.

To quote Wattenberg: “The Catholic Rule is broken and so too is the Muslim rule. It would be remarkable if it were not so as it has happened everywhere else. Joseph Chamie, Director of the UN Population Division (UNPD) puts it this way: “There was the Industrial Revolution. There was the Information Age. Now there is the Demographic Revolution.” In his PhD dissertation in 1976 and his 1981 book, Religion and Fertility Chamie clearly predicted just what has happened.” This was in stark contrast to the inchoate and chimerical, ipse dixit, population predictions made by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb (see my blog essay Fools, Frauds, and Fakes).

Again quoting Wattenberg: “People are people; sooner or later Catholics behave like Protestants; and Muslims like Christians.” Some people react emotionally to what they perceive as alarming situations. As for me, I prefer to act rationally and be guided by what the data reveal.

THE USA MILITARY-55

2010-02-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

This essay is not an anti USA military screed; rather it is an analytical and dispassionate conspectus of the current USA military encompassing its philosophy, budget, and the worldwide distribution of its personnel. The truly anti-military far left loons may agree with what I am initially espousing, but wait – they will violently (as only they can) oppugn my wrap-up. You may not accept my thesis completely; that is your prerogative. Still, I shall endeavor to make my case as logically and persuasively as I am capable of.

My premise is simple: I believe the United States of America should not be the world’s policeman and yet that is what we essentially are. There may have been justification in some people’s minds, although not in mine, that the USA needed to fill that role during the Cold War. During this War on Terrorism we should certainly co-operate with other willing nations to oppose and thwart the Islamic fanatics who want to kill us. On the other hand, I don’t think the United States would be abrogating any moral imperative by not shouldering the burden of large scale military action against the client states of the terrorists as we are now doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The nominal USA military budget is $664 billion of which $534 billion is the base budget. This represents 40% of all of military spending in the world. Total military spending for fiscal year 2010 will be between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion. In 2005 the military budget was 4.06% of GDP; the low in recent years was 1999-2001 where the figure was 3.0% of GDP. The high occurred during WWII in 1944 at 37.8% and during the Vietnam War in 1968 it was 9.4%.

There are 1,454,000 active duty people in the USA military and 848,000 in the military reserve. Only China has a larger standing active military, but their military expenditures are 1/9 of ours. That represents considerably lower pay and more modest benefits for their soldiers as well as a mere fraction of the complex military hardware developed and manufactured by the United States.

There are 820 USA military installations in 135 countries around the world. These vary from small scale observer sites manned by a couple dozen or fewer people to huge military army, navy, or air force bases with tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, or air force personnel. The USA has 142,000 soldiers in Iraq; 56,000 in Germany; 40,000+ and increasing in Afghanistan; 33,000 in Japan; 28,500 in South Korea; 9700 in Italy and Great Britain. By geographic area these figures breakdown as follows: 85,000 in Europe; 78,500 in North Africa, the Near East, & South Asia; 70,000 in East Asia & the Pacific; and 2000 in the Western Hemisphere (excluding the USA).

A partial list of the countries that the United States has military personnel in is as follows: Aruba, Australia, Bahamas, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Djibouti, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Greenland, Hong Kong, Iceland (one can never tell when hostilities are going to break out in Iceland requiring intervention by USA troops), Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Oman, Qatar, Saint Helena, Senegal, Singapore, Uganda, UAE, US Virgin Islands. How on earth can the citizens of the countries, possessions, or principalities other than the 135 the USA protects, sleep peacefully at night?

Never in the history of the world, not during the time of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the reign of the Mongols, the Mayans, or the Ottoman Empire has one entity spread its military might to more places on earth as the USA has currently done. It is not for conquest or subjugation of other peoples that the USA has done this. It was done with the best intentions. However, never let us forget what the “Road to Hell” is paved with. It is time, nay it is past time, the USA, however well meaning, solely occupies and protects its own land. Few other countries merit or, in fact, even desire we do this for them.

If we are to greatly curtail our overseas military, then how are we to protect ourselves? Here is what we should not do: give captured terrorists the same rights USA citizens get in civilian courts; so restrict our intelligence community that they can not monitor our ubiquitous enemies; impede communications between our domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.

What we should do is spend enough money and attract sufficient talent to ensure that we are in the forefront of nuclear weapon and delivery technology so that potential enemies such as Iran, North Korea, possibly Pakistan, and whomever are sufficiently deterred from even thinking of attacking us without the fear of themselves being completely destroyed by our retaliatory might. Let the nations who would appease the terrorists go down the path of nuclear disarmament. The modern “Better Red than Dead” crowd would be horrified and appalled by my assertion in this paragraph – so be it. I am for protecting this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

To accomplish this transformation of pulling in and reducing our military from around the world would take time, even a decade or longer, as a matter of simple logistics, treaty agreements, and so not to unnecessarily disrupt our economic equilibrium. What is the chance that this will be done? Likely in this decade, as the cliché goes, slim to none. Yet, done it must be, if only for economic reasons. As a people we are economically impelled to put Social Security and Medicare /Medicaid on a sound financial footing else the country will sink under unsustainable debt. There are several ways to do it: cut benefits, increase the fees for both the beneficiaries and working contributors, and increase medical services efficiencies by instituting tort reform and allowing interstate health insurance coverage. Likewise our military expense must share the cost reductions of Social Security and our health service. The voting public will insist upon it.

THE COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE – THE SUPREME IRONY-54

2010-02-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

Before launching into the crux of this essay, let me settle a small point of pronunciation. Is the capital of Denmark pronounced Copenhāgen, with a long “a” or a short “a” as in Copenhăgen? The answer depends on whether one uses the American pronunciation or the Danish, and actually all of Europe, pronunciation. Columnist Charles Krauthammer brought up a rather picky point by scolding Barack Obama for using the European pronunciation of Copenhăgen when speaking to an American audience. Krauthammer asked if Obama would be telling us that he would be stopping in Paris (pronounced Părē) and Deutschland on the way home.

President Obama had to make a hurried departure from the Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen back to Washington D.C. because of the heavy snowfall which was accurately predicted for much of the Northeastern Coast. On RAI News (the Italian Worldwide TV Network) on 12/20/09, the headlines on the weather segment of the broadcast were: “Il Posto Piu Freddo d’Italia”(The coldest place in Italy); “Gelo Nord & Centro d’Italia”(Icy conditions in Northern & Central Italy”; “Tutta Europa Sotto la Neve” (All of Europe is under snow); “Washington, Nevicata Record” (Record snowfall for Washington D.C.). An added benefit of reading my essays is being given the opportunity of learning esoteric words or, as in this case, foreign phrases.

And of course the cold and snowy weather in Europe did not exempt Denmark. During a snafu for several hundred journalists waiting in a queue to enter the conference hall some conference official was handing out sandwiches and coffee to the waiting journalists. One of the journalists shouted out “I don’t want food, I want heavy socks, I am freezing my a** off!” We all know that during adversity, journalists are far less likely than normal people to suffer in silence.

This two-week Brummagem and paralogistic Global Warming Conference was attended by representatives from 120 or so countries. In order for these people to get to Copenhagen there were 1200 limos and 140 private aeroplanes used. In fact there was insufficient space for all of these aeroplanes in the Copenhagen airports so some pilots had to fly to neighboring countries and wait there until it was time to return to Copenhagen to pick up their passengers. A rather large carbon footprint was left for this event I would say, but then these crapulous G.W. enthusiasts never have worried about their own carbon pollution high jinks.

After all of this expenditure of money, time, energy, and pollution was anything of substance accomplished? The straight up answer is no and for valid and logical reasons. No country, industrialized or becoming so, wants to cripple its economy. China, India, Brazil, the European countries, and the United States, hopefully (although with the current administration I am not so sure), will not commit economic suicide just to appease the G.W. mob. By the way, the majority of the protestors at this conference are the same motley gang of hoodlums who protest at G-8 and G-20 meetings. They are self-avowed Communists and Marxists who are parasites living off the unearned fruits of capitalism. What a revolting and contemptible lot they are.

I have addressed the Global Warming issue in three previous blog essays (Global Warming; Global Cooling or Warming – Which the Heaven or Hell is it?; Beer Consumption & Other Little Ice Age Phenomena) so I will confine myself here to just a few ancillary remarks.

Is global warming occurring and is it anthropoidally caused? The answer to the first part is that it depends upon what time period you mean. From the late 1970’s to the late 1990’s there was perceptible global warming after cooling in the 1960’s to middle to late 1970’s such that the mainstream news media were all atwitter about how there appeared to be another Little Ice Age in the making. In the past 10 years there has not been any worldwide warming. This, by itself, does not prove anything – there could be CO² warming going on which is temporarily being overtaken by certain cooling factors.

The second part of the question is a decided yes. As I have stated previously (somewhere) Pittsburg, PA used to be known as the “Smokey City” due to all of the pollution from steel mills, but not anymore owing to anti-pollution devises and greatly reduced steel making. Los Angles had more pollution 30/40 years ago than now largely from automobile emissions which were greatly reduced over the intervening years. The topography (LA sits in a bowl) and wind patterns made the Los Angles area particularly susceptible to man-made pollution. London had fewer hours of sunshine 100 years ago and more, than now because of all the coal that was burned in factories and homes at that time.

Therefore if anthropoidic activity can influence weather and cause significant pollution locally, then surely more widespread pollution could conceivably affect weather on a broader worldwide scale. Having said that, the question, and a multi-trillion dollar question it is, is what is the evidence that man-made pollution is causing the globe to warm to increasing and dangerous levels to the detriment of the earth’s inhabitants? Given the myriad periods, on long term (1000’s of years), intermediate term (100’s of years), and short term (10’s of years) where mother earth (Gaia) has alternately been hotter and colder long before humans had initiated the industrial age or in fact were even around, what logical reasons are there to definitively assert that any current warming (especially since the end of The Little Ice Age, circa 1850) is caused by perfidious and unkind mankind?

Before committing to an international policy where the industrialized nations of the world cripple their economies, therefore retrograding to past decades the economic wellbeing of their citizens, and transfer 100’s of billions of dollars annually to third world nations, especially the so called kleptocracies, this whole subject of climate change needs to be thoroughly, honestly, and objective discussed and debated. Unfortunately the Global Warming “True Believers” clearly have no desire to engage in an exchange of data and discuss this singularly important question, as the infamously leaked East Anglia e-mails and previous refusal of Global Warming energumen such as Al Gore, Michael Mann, James Hansen, et al to debate the issue show.

Mid 1950’s Adventures in the Crawfish State-53

2009-08-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know the official state name for Louisiana is the Pelican State; however nothing describes Louisiana better than the crawfish. Whether in gumbo or in étouffée, I developed a decided taste for the little critters.

In the summer of 1955 I worked for Shell Oil in Baton Rouge (French for Red Stick), Louisiana while still a student at Michigan Technology University. During this time the Democrat primary for governor was going on with the major opponents being Earl Long and the then mayor of New Orleans. The Democrat primary was tantamount to the general election because the Republicans and independents could put up only token opposition. Long was two years younger than his more famous or notorious, depending upon your viewpoint, brother, Huey (The Kingfish) Long who had been governor, U.S. Senator, and virtual dictator of Louisiana from 1928 to 1935 when he was supposedly killed by a political opponent, 28 year old Dr. Carl A. Weiss. There is uncertainty yet today whether Long was shot by Dr. Weiss or accidentally shot by his own overzealous bodyguards. There were a reputed 61 bullet holes in Dr. Weiss’s body. With that much lead flying about it would not be surprising if Long were hit by one of his bodyguard’s stray bullets. The state of Louisiana and the entire country were arguably better off with the early demise of the demigod, Huey Long, at the age of 42.

Earl Long had a poor formal education, but in his own right was a gifted politician who was a compelling stump speaker and his election record proved it. Long once joked: “Some day the people of Louisiana will get a good governor [i.e., an honest one] and they won’t like it.” His opponent, the mayor of New Orleans, was DeLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison, Sr. Where else but in Louisiana would there be a politician with such heterodox first and middle names and a plebian surname? The Long supporters called Morrison “Ole de la Soups” and Long said of him that “He never before saw a man who could speak out of both sides of his mouth, whistle, and strut at the same time.” According to author and magazine columnist A. J. Liebling, Louisiana politicians used to tell their political opponents and other people they did not like, “You ain’t nothin but a little piss-ant.” The expression apparently comes from the urine-like odor of certain ant’s nesting material of needles and straw from pine trees; especially the two genera of Forelius and Irydomyrmex. Louisiana politicians had an absolute talent for insulting their opponents with colorful metaphors.

In Baton Rouge I met a strange, but dapper and voluble little man (I don’t remember his name) who was an ardent supporter and hanger-on of Morrison and who seemed to be straight from the pages of the novel Guys and Dolls by Damon Runyon which became a musical on Broadway and was made into a 1955 movie of the same name starring Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons, and Marlon Brando.

He tried to convince me that Morrison would be elected governor of Louisiana. He told me “Don’t you know that Chep Morrison will become the next governor of Louisiana? Don’t you know that this is the end of the corrupt Long regime? Don’t you know that Louisiana will finally get an honest governor?” And on and on. I suspect that part of his reason for telling me this was to practice his political oratory. I was not much interested in Louisiana politics, but I listened because of politeness and he was in fact an interesting speaker. He said that a day or two before he had attended a rally for Morrison. When he started to speak a couple of Morrison’s advisors tried to shut him up. Morrison himself said, “No, let him speak.” My little acquaintance seemed to derive a lot of pleasure in telling me this.

Came the day of the election and Long buried Morrison and the minor candidates so thoroughly that a runoff was not necessary. When I ran into my friend on the street the next day he had a large Earl Long campaign button pinned to his suit jacket lapel! I asked him ”What the hell are you doing?” He replied that one had to do what one has to do to survive in the political jungle that was Louisiana politics or some such nonsense.

Where else but in Louisiana and with the Longs would the situation arise that a sitting governor of a state would be put in a mental institution (perhaps in Illinois?)? During his last term as governor Earl Long was committed to a mental institution by his wife, Blanche Revere Long and her political allies. As governor, Long fired the head of the mental institution he was in and appointed a political ally who released him. Why did his wife conspire to confine him to a loony bin? He was having an affair with a stripper named Blaze Starr and when it became known to the public it caused her no end of embarrassment.

There was a true story making the rounds when I was in Louisiana. While he was governor, Earl Long was drunk in the best hotel in New Orleans, The Roosevelt. Because he was too lazy to find a bathroom or too stewed or crazy or all three, he urinated in a corner of the hotel lobby. It is now thought that Ole Earl was bipolar. That might have explained some of the craziness, but perhaps his wife was right – he may have been just plain nuts. Still think that Louisiana politicians back then even approached normalcy?

I met another interesting fellow during my sojourn in Baton Rouge; a young immigrant from Puerto Rico who worked as a draftsman for the state. He was an archetypical worrywart. He worried that his colleagues at work did not like him; he worried that he would lose his job; and he worried that he would get sick so that he could not work. As far as I could tell he was not only young and healthy, but personable and fun to be around with an increasing number of friends. One thing he did not worry about was the purchase of equities. His favorite was Fruehauf Trailer. He said that when you buy stocks and the prices go up you make money. I asked him what if the price goes down. He replied then he would buy more. Made sense to me.

He had a sister in San Juan, Puerto Rico who he showed me a photo of and tried to entice me to write to her. She looked alright, but I told him that she would not be coming here and I would not be going to Puerto Rico so what was the point.

While in Baton Rouge I lived in a boarding house which was just a couple of blocks from the Shell Oil office. It was a private home where the owner, a city policeman, and his wife took in a few male boarders who slept in the 2nd story of the house. The cost for room and board, with breakfast and dinner provided six days per week (only breakfast on Sunday), was the princely sum of $13/week! Seems like an outright steal doesn’t it? However, my starting salary the next year, after I graduated as a geological engineer, was $400/month ($4800/year), up from $250/month ($3000/year) four years earlier for the same job.

During the last month or so of my summer job I was transferred to Crowley, LA, to the west of Baton Rouge and into Cajun territory. I rented a room in a proper boarding house and was charged $15/week. When I complained at the Shell Oil office about having to pay $2 more per week for board and room than I had paid in Baton Rouge the people at the office laughed and said that it seemed like a good deal to them. They were likely right.

For a couple of months in the summer of 1956 as a permanent employee I worked in the district office of Shell Oil Company in New Orleans (Shell Oil USA was then a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell in the Hague, Netherlands). I lived in a boarding house on St. Charles Avenue and rode the streetcar to work every day. This was the first time that this young man from Michigan was confronted with institutional racism. I was surprised and bemused at what I saw. The street cars had movable boards with pegs on each end that slid into the backs of each row of seats. On these boards was printed “For Colored Only.” The idea was to keep blacks and whites separated, with blacks literally sitting in the back of the streetcars, while making accommodation for economics. As the mix of black and white passengers changed, the boards on the backs of the seats were either moved forward or backward to allow space for either more blacks or more whites yet keeping the cars as full as possible. How do you like that? The philosophy was to maintain segregation while maximizing the economic income of the city through streetcar revenues. Talk about “deals with the devil.” What is even more unbelievable relative to the racial equality and mores of today is that the blacks themselves moved the segregation boards forward or backward.

I saw more of this and other discriminating racial practices in the South at that time than any black person under 40 today has ever experienced. Yet to hear some blacks whine about and accuse whites of racist words and acts one would think that the 1950’s in the United States was still with us. Author and longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, said it best 40 year ago that it is not when people are being oppressed that they make trouble and complain about it most - it is when they are well on the way to respectful and equitable treatment. The recent brouhaha between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, jr. and the Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley as well as the addlepated and unjustified insertion of President Obama into the matter is but the latest bogus claim of racial profiling by blacks.

Working out of the Mobil Oil Exploration office in Dallas I made numerous business trips to the Mobil Oil office in New Orleans in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The difference in the treatment of blacks, both officially and personally was like night and day compared to what I witnessed 20 years earlier. And of course there has been further improvement in the status, treatment, and opportunities for blacks in the South as well as the North since then to the extent that discrimination against blacks and other minorities is now less prevalent that favoritism towards blacks and I suspect there is now more, on a percentage basis, racial animosity and resentment against whites by blacks than vice-versa.

Bernard Goldberg, erstwhile CBS Television newsman, current Fox TV commentator, and ten-time Emmy Award winning journalist and author, recently said that race relations in this country is a wound that never heals. C’est une pitié.

CONGRESSIONAL TERM LIMITS-52

2009-05-29T18:17:00.000-07:00

A convincing argument can be made that congressional term limits are necessary for achieving better elective government. Despite the mantra by some people on both the political left and right that there are term limits – they are called elections, there is simply too much of an advantage for the incumbent in a congressional election. The other argument that if there were limited congressional terms then staff people would really be in charge. My response is that both presidential and congressional staffs have become grossly overgrown and should be drastically cut in the number of staff people and cost of the presidential and congressional offices.

When Abraham Lincoln became president he had one private secretary/assistant, John Nicolay. Lincoln soon added another, John Hay, whom he paid out of his own pocket until congress appropriated money for his salary. By the middle of his term Lincoln added a temporary secretary, William Stoddard. Edward Neill succeeded Stoddard when the latter became ill and was in turn succeeded by Charles Philbrick. According to the ten year census of 1860 the population of the United States was 30 ½ million (Lincoln served as president 1861-65). The current population of the country is just over 300 million. Compared to Lincoln, on a population proportional basis, the current president should have at most 50 assistants counting all of Lincoln’s assistants individually. The actual current number runs into the hundreds with a few interns, but with overwhelmingly most as paid permanent employees. Congressional staff, amanuenses, and assorted flunkies are similarly grossly bloated in numbers. And it is not as if there was inactivity during Lincoln’s presidency – America’s bloodiest war, a civil war, essentially occupied Lincoln’s entire tenure as president.

Now that I have logically and rationally presented a solid case that presidential and congressional staffs should be drastically reduced, permit me to tackle the question of term limits. By an amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Amendment XXII, ratified February 27, 1951) the presidency for any single person is limited to 10 years. Why not two terms or eight years you ask? The answer is straightforward and simple. No person can be elected to the presidency for more than two terms; however, for example, if the vice-president should replace the president at any point in the first half of the president’s term then that person would be eligible to run for two more terms. Quad erat demstrandum; that could amount to as much as ten years.

Could congressional term limits be achieved? It won’t be easy and is perhaps impossible, still consider the reform now being debated in Italy. There are 630 members of the Chamber of Deputies (equivalent to our House of Representatives) and 322 senators for a total of 952. Contrast this to our 435 representatives and 100 senators for a total of 535. Italy has a population of circa 60 million to our 300+ million. There is broad agreement on reducing the total number to around 500 or fewer, but Italian politicians have differing opinions of how to accomplish this reduction even as the debate goes forward. A similar reduction in the number of members in the House of Commons in England where there about 200 more than we have is also being debated.

There are at least two excellent reasons to limit terms. One of them is age and another is mendacity as well as moral failings. This next may sound as if I am taking a gratuitous shot at aged people. If so then as one myself I can assure you that it is intentional. Some of our senators and representatives have been in office since the George Washington administration – well perhaps not, although it seems like it. Strum Thurmond (R–SC) was a senator until he was 100 years old – literally! He ran for re-election when he was 94 years old. In his last few years in the senate he clearly had no idea whether he was in Washington D.C. or the Land of OZ. Robert Byrd (D-WV) is 91 years old and was elected to his 9th term as senator in 2006. He has been a senator since 1959 and is now the longest serving U.S. Senator in history. He has become so infirmed that he is barely ambulatory, with help, on the senate floor. Known for his florid and rambling oratory it would not be surprising if he started expostulating in a senate speech about his near fin-de-siécle days in West Virginia. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) is 84 years old and has been a senator since 1963; the third longest serving senator behind Byrd and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who was elected in 1962. Inouye (in-no-way) was first elected as a U.S. representative from Hawaii in 1959. Surely our Republic would have been better served without these old fossils having hung around for so long.

Among the moral turpitude members of congress were pervert Mark Foley (R-FL), the married Gary Conduit (D-CA) who had an affair with the tragic Chandra Levy, and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) who was a client of a prostitution ring headed by the “D.C. Madam” despite being married with four children. The irony is that Vitter originally replaced Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) who resigned because of an adulterous affair. The pervert and liar Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) refused to resign after an encounter in a bathroom with an undercover policeman at a Minneapolis airport, but at least did not run for reelection in 2008. Then who can forget Barney Fag, I mean Barney Frank (D-MA) whose intimate friend ran a male prostitution ring out the basement of Frank’s house. Of course Barney said, like Sgt. Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes, “I know nothing” just as Rep. Frank knew nothing of the problems leading to the banking and financial institutions failures.

Worst yet are the risible and infra dignitatem brigands who, taking advantage of their positions as senators or representatives, cheat and steal from the public they are suppose to represent. There are and were many in this category on both sides of the political isle. One of my favorites is William Jefferson (D-LA) who is charged with taking several hundred thousand dollars in bribes and kickbacks. During Hurricane Katrina he was discovered to have had $90,000 in cash in his freezer in his house. After he was indicted, Jefferson won the Democrat primary for his house seat, however he lost the general election in a close race to a Republican Vietnamese-American, Anh Joseph Cao, despite the district being 2/3 black. Because Obama, naturally, carried that district overwhelmingly it is likely Jefferson would have won the general election if both the presidential and congressional elections had occurred simultaneously. Because of Hurricane Gustav the congressional election was held one month following the presidential election. After several delays by Jefferson’s defense team the trial is now scheduled for June 2, 2009.

Another favorite of mine is Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) who in 1981 was charged with corruption and perjury as a federal judge. In 1988 a Democrat controlled House of Representatives voted 413 – 3 to impeach him. A Democrat controlled Senate voted 69 – 26 to convict him and thus he was removed as a federal judge, one of only six federal judges to be removed in U.S. history. In 1992 Hastings ran for the U.S. representative from his district and won! He has won reelection to the House of Representatives ever since. Did I mention that like Jefferson he is black from a predominately black district?

Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) was not as lucky. He resigned as a U.S. Representative after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion. He was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. That is what we want, honesty in our representatives.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) was found guilty on all seven counts of failing to report gifts by a federal jury. One week later he lost in his bid for reelection to the senate. A few weeks later, owing to serious prosecutorial misconduct, he was acquitted of all charges by Attorney General Eric Holder. What a shame. If the acquittal had come before the election then old Ted Stevens (he is 85 years old) might have won reelection. We need people in congress who have been there since the dawn of the Republic and if they are dishonest, so much the better.

A name from the past and a more colorful character you could not find than that of James Traficant (D-OH) - he of the ill fitting wig. In 2002 he was convicted by a federal jury of taking bribes, filing false tax returns, racketeering, and forcing his office staff to work on his farm in Ohio and his houseboat in Washington D.C. After his conviction he was expelled from the House of Representatives and is currently serving an eight year sentence in federal prison. He is due to be released on September 2, 2009.

Remember Tony Coelho (D-CA)? He served six terms in congress and was the Democrat majority whip when he resigned from congress in 1989 owing to stories about him receiving a loan from a savings and loan executive to purchase junk bonds. Although he was never charge with a crime, one would have thought that he would not have resigned from his powerful position in congress if he had done nothing wrong.

And speaking of the Savings and Loan industry don’t forget the “Keating five”: Senators Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis Deconcini (D-AZ), Donald Riegle (D-MI), John Glenn (D-OH), and the lone Republican John McCain (R-AZ). After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in its investigation of Lincoln Savings and Charles Keating, with Cranston receiving a formal reprimand. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised "poor judgment." Compared to others these were not serious miscreants, nevertheless I don’t believe they should be applauded either.

In my opinion, John Murtha (D-PA) is arguably the most corrupt current member of congress. Murtha has been a member of congress for 35 years and he got off to an early start with his scrofulous behavior. When the Abscam scandal broke in 1980 one U.S. senator, Harrison Williams (D-NJ) and five congressmen (four of them Democrats) were indicted and convicted of receiving bribes and either resigned or were unceremoniously booted out of congress. Larry Pressler (R-SD) refused to take what he thought was a bribe and reported it to the FBI. Walter Cronkite called him “a hero.” Pressler modestly responded, “When was one considered a hero for refusing to take a bribe?” Considering the flagitious nature of congress I believe that Cronkite was more correct than Pressler. The FBI classified John Murtha as an unindicted co-conspirator. They just could not quite get the goods on the slippery Murtha and to ingratiate himself with the FBI, Murtha agreed to testify against two fellow Democrat congressmen.

In 2006 the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) called Murtha one of the 20 most corrupt politicians in congress and in 2008 Esquire magazine, hardly a conservative bastion, called Murtha one of the ten worst congressmen. In March 2009, the Washington Post reported that a Pennsylvania defense research center regularly consulted with two "handlers" close to Murtha while it received nearly $250 million in federal funding via Murtha's earmarks. The center then channeled a significant portion of the funding to companies that were among Murtha's campaign supporters.

Murtha is one of the worst abusers of “earmarks” in congress having directed an estimated $600 million to his district in the last four years and $2 billion so far during his tenure in congress. The John Murtha Airport is a prime example. There are just three flights per day which fly only between Murtha’s home town in Pennsylvania, Johnstown, and Washington D.C. The airport gets large subsidies from the government thanks to Murtha. It is all legal, but a colossal waste of tax payer money.

More recently Murtha is being investigated by the FBI for allegedly using his position in congress to influence government contracts being directed to a company his son is part of. Previously he was accused of doing the same for his brother, Robert. If one to were to postulate that Murtha does not possess an honest bone in his body then it is likely that an anatomical examination would verify it.

What can be said about the San Francisco liberal and non-blinking Democrat Speaker-of-the-House, Nancy Pelosi other than her name in Italian means “hairy?” For one thing she is one of the wealthiest members of congress. She and her husband are worth at least $20 million with investments in real estate, a vineyard, and Apple computer stock. With her recent nervous and addlepated press conference denial of being briefed on “water-boarding” and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques previously by the CIA and accusing the CIA of mendaciously misinforming and misleading her and other members of congress the denouement of her speaker-ship seemed imminent. Enough of the Democrat leadership rallied around to rescue her from that peril, at least temporarily. Perhaps they were motivated by the old saw that you do not wound a king (or queen), you kill him (her) or suffer the same fate yourself. Being less charitable and not political, I say of Nancy, “liar, liar pantsuit on fire.” Only an extreme partisan with blinders firmly in place would believe her word against the evidence and the CIA. Certainly fellow Californian Democrat and director of the CIA, Leon Panetta did not.

It is too facile to say “They are all a bunch of crooks.” They are not. I will not argue that at any given time a majority or even a big majority of congressmen are thieves and knaves who not only make a career of feeding at the public trough, but do so dishonestly. However there are numerous exceptions. I am sure everyone could come up with a list of their own. Here are four examples only out of many others that could be cited. In the name of being “fair and balanced” there are two Democrats and two Republicans. They are politicians yes, but honest and honorable men who all left congress voluntarily before becoming infirmed and senile: J.C. Watts (R-OK) served 8 years in the House of Representatives and left congress at the age of 45; John Kasich (R-OH) served 16 years in the House of Representatives and left at the age of 49; John Breaux (D-LA) served 18 years and left the Senate at age 61; Sam Nunn (D-GA) served 24 years and left the Senate at age 58.

Term limits would certainly reduced the ranks of those old codgers, both men and women, who stay in congress unit they enter their dotage. Would term limits remedy the problem of dishonest and parasitic congressmen? I believe amelioration would be achieved if for no other reason than it usually takes a number of years for congressmen to establish a base with enough power and influence to turn public duty and service into personal graft and corruption. I would personally opt for a maximum of two terms (twelve years total) for a senator and six terms (also 12 years total) for a member of the House of Representatives – no partial additional term allowed as is the case of the president. I would even be open to changing the length of the senatorial and representative terms. With senators perhaps two five year terms would be better and with representatives how about three terms of three years each?

A reduction in the numbers of presidential cabinet offices and other federal agencies would be in order. I will go back to the comparison of the Abraham Lincoln administration. There were seven cabinet officials under Lincoln: Secretaries of State; Treasury; War; Navy; Interior; Postmaster-General; and Attorney General. Currently there are 20 cabinet members and 20 more top level departments such as the FBI, the CIA, NASA, FEMA, the FAA, and the FCC. In addition there are the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Pentagon which employs 23,000 military and civilian people and 3000 non-defense support personnel. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends $29 billion annually on medical research. The federal government has expanded exponentially in the last few decades. It is not only the industrial-military complex that President Eisenhower warned the country about in his farewell speech on January 17, 1961 that is a problem; there are all the other added and expanded federal agencies which have exploded in number and size. In my opinion it is not sufficient merely to stop the growth of the federal government in its many guises, but to reverse, that is to say to downsize, in a responsible and structured manner, this out of control colossus. In the words of the Bard of Avon, “It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Our Universe-51

2009-03-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting philosophical question about the universe we live in. And that question is: Was the universe built just for us? Consider the following facts with which astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, and physicists all seem to generally agree as based on an article in the December 2008 DISCOVER magazine among other sources:

If the force of gravity were just a bit weaker, then there would have been no clustering of matter after the Big Bang and as a consequence no galaxies or stars or planets would have formed and therefore no us.

On the other hand, a beefed-up gravity would have compressed stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. The results would have been that these stars would have burned through their fuel in millions of years instead of billions, thereby not allowing enough time for life to have formed. Again no us.

As we all know, atoms consist of electrons, neutrons, and protons. Now if these protons were just 0.2% more massive than there are, they would be unstable and would decay into more elementary particles. In that case, atoms would not exist and again neither would we.

Stars produce energy by converting two hydrogen atoms into one helium atom. During that reaction, 0.007% of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted into energy as illustrated by the famous e=mc² equation of Albert Einstein. If that energy conversion percentage were as little different as 0.006% or 0.008% then untoward (in respect to us) events would have occurred. The lower number would have resulted in the universe filled only with hydrogen; the higher number would have left the universe with no hydrogen, therefore no water, no stars like our sun, and hence no us.

The early universe was delicately balanced between runaway expansion and terminal collapse. Had the universe contained a great deal more matter, additional gravity would have made it implode. If it had contained considerably less matter, it would have expanded too quickly for galaxies to have formed. In both instances, no us.

If matter in the universe had been more evenly distributed after the Big Bang, it would not have clumped together to form galaxies. Had matter been clumpier, it would have condensed into black holes. Again in either case, no us.

Atomic nuclei are bound together by the so called Strong Nuclear Force. If that force were slightly more powerful then all of the protons would have paired off and there would be no hydrogen which fuels long-lived stars. Water would not exist either, nor would any known form of life, which arguably includes us.

In 1998 two teams of astronomy researchers, observing supernovae, found that the expanding of the university is accelerating. The discovery was baffling in that just about everyone else involved in astronomy expected that the cosmic expansion, which started with the Big Bang, must be gradually slowing down, braked by the collective gravitational pull of all of the galaxies and other matter in space. However, it seems that built into the very fabric of space is some unknown form of energy. Physicists call it simply dark energy that is pushing everything apart. Many cosmologists, astronomers, and astrophysicists were skeptical at first, but follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope along with independent studies of radiation left over from the time of the Big Bang, have powerfully confirmed the reality of dark energy.

What to make of all this. One could claim that God made the universe just for us. That may be satisfactory for some, but then the discussion is closed as there is nothing more to contemplate. What I want to know is how this seemingly unique situation came to pass. Postulating that God created the universe and His method is unknowable by us, however true or not that might be, does not advance the explanation in any way so let us consider a non divine hypothesis.

One theory, quite controversial, called the Multiverse Theory, is that there are many universes, as many as 10 5ºº of which ours is the one suited for carbon based life. That is an extremely large number, larger in fact than the number of dollars the U.S. government is using in the current economic bailout. Let’s see how much larger. The one dollar bill is close to 6 1/8 inches long. If laid end to end it would take approximately 962 billion to reach between earth and the sun (the mean distance of the earth from the sun is about 93 million miles). One billion is 1 followed by nine zeros. To get to 10 5ºº we need 1 followed by 500 zeros.

How many one dollar bills would it take to span the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy? Our galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years across (a light-year is the distance light travels in one year – circa 5.88 x 10¹² miles in the vacuum of space). So it would take on the order of 6 x 10²¹ one dollar bills laid end to end. Still a bit short of the 10 5ºº number.

What about the number of one dollar bills stretching across the diameter of the known universe? The universe is estimated to be 156 billion light-years across. Therefore it would take on the order of 9.5 x 10 27 one dollar bills to span the known universe. How much of a deficit do we still have from the 10 5ºº number? The answer is approximately 10 5ºº / 10 28 = 10 472. It seems we have not made much of a dent in the 10 5ººnumber. What is the evidence there are 10 5ºº different universes? It is part of the Multiverse Theory, but is not absolutely provable.

The specific term “Multiverse” was coined in 1895 by psychologist William James. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called “alternative universes”, “quantum universes”, “interpenetrating dimensions”, parallel worlds”, “alternate realities”, “alternate timelines”, etc.

As previously stated, different universes within the Multiverse (also called the Meta-Universe) are called Parallel Universes. According to this theory each universe starts with its own Big Bang and acquires its individual physical laws as it cools and traces its own cosmic cycle. Physicists do not like the idea of a Multiverse because it lacks testability and without hard physical evidence is non-falsifiable outside the methodology of scientific investigation to confirm or disprove. Yet there is no other current satisfactory explanation of why our universe is the way it is thereby allowing us to exist.

The concept of other universes has been proposed to explain why our universe seems to be fine-tuned for conscious life as we experience it. If there were a large number (possibly infinite) of different physical laws or fundamental constants in as many universes, some of these would have laws that were suitable for stars, planets, and life to exist. The anthropic (human) principle could then be applied to conclude that we would only consciously exist in those universes which were fine-tuned for our conscious existence. Thus, while the probability might be extremely small that there is life in most of those universes, this scarcity of life-supporting universes does not automatically implies intelligent design as the only explanation of our existence.

Strikingly the temperature of space is everywhere the same, just 2.7 ºC above absolute zero. How could different regions of the universe, separated by such enormous distances, all have the same temperature? In the standard version of the Big Bang theory they couldn’t. Cosmic inflation is the hypothesis that the nascent universe, just after the Big Bang, passed through a phase of exponential expansion in the very early universe. Cosmic inflation answers the classic conundrum of the Big Bang cosmology of why the universe appear flat, homogeneous, isothermal, and isotropic in accordance with the cosmological principle when one would expect, on the basis of the Big Bang, a highly curved, inhomogeneous, and non-isotropic universe.

A counter argument that life simply began and evolved to meet the physical conditions of our universe, galaxy, solar system, and planet is not persuasive in that it seems more than implausible that life could come about without stars and planets, to say nothing of atoms or water molecules.

This is heavy stuff and also involves string theory which is a physically and mathematically complex concept involving up to 11 dimensions. It was co-invented by world famous professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Michio Kaku. Professor Kaku has appeared on various television programs about science and is a best selling author of such books as Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, and Physics of the Impossible.

I do not pretend to comprehend these abstruse physics and mathematics principles, yet before one dismisses them as flights of fancy the nagging question of why our universe, perhaps uniquely, is seemingly inexplicably suited for us must be confronted.

Common Expressions Explained-50

2008-12-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

The following expressions, except as where I have indicated I have sourced the definition and etymology from my previous writings, are taken from a little 2007 book I Didn’t Know That by Karlen Evins. I hope you will find them as interesting and illuminating as I did:

A-1
More than a steak sauce, the phase itself connotes the very best, because, by definition, it was the highest rating that could be given a ship ensured by Lloyd’s of London. Lloyd’s registry of ships and shipping was categorized by letter and number (with ships rated by letter and cargo by number). “A” meant the ship itself was perfect and “1” meant the cargo was in perfect condition.

Aftermath (From my other sources)
Aftermath is commonly and erroneously used to simply mean the period following an event, usually a disaster such as a fire, hurricane, or tornado: “In the aftermath of the tornado, many people in the neighborhood are still homeless.” Television and newspaper reporters are especially guilty of misusing this word. ‘After’ means second and ‘math’ is a mowing or harvest. So an ‘aftermath’ is a second happening, usually a disaster, following and caused by the first event. The San Francisco fire was an aftermath as it was a disaster following and caused by the earthquake of 1906.

Backseat Driver
Think backseat driver and you think of one who complains or one who thinks he can see better from the rear seat than from the front of a vehicle. But the original backseat drivers weren’t complainers. Matter of fact for what they were watching, they could see better! In the days of the early fire engines there was a job for backseat drivers. Someone needed to watch the ladder as fire engines rushed to the scene. As quick turns and abrupt stops were causes for accidents, a backseat driver was as vital a part of the fire team as the firefighters themselves.

Beyond the Pale
Pale is from the Latin word palus which was a stake or boundary marker that fenced the territory under rule by a certain nation. Paling or pickets were quite common as boundary markers in Roman times. Those believed to be beyond the bounds of social or moral decency were once literally exiled beyond the pale or beyond the confines of civilization as determined by the townspeople.

Blackball
Early social clubs in England had a practice of voting for their initiates by dropping white balls or marbles into a ballot box. Those voting against a particular candidate dropped a blackball, hence the term. While the term was first coined in the late 1700s the custom dates back to ancient Greek and Roman times. Even our word ballot refers to voting by little balls.

Cahoots
Cahoots were quite simply little cabins or kajuetes as they were called in medieval Germany. Often known to be occupied by robbers and bandits, these little cabins became planning centers for attacks. So in reality it was the goings-on inside the cabins that became known for what the cabins themselves were called. Today we use cahoots to refer to any shady partnership or less than upright scheme.

Carte Blanche
Ask for carte blanche in France and you just might receive a white sheet of paper because translated literally that is what the term means. Custom has it that a man would trust his closest subordinates with blank sheets or correspondence cards with only his name at the bottom in order that they might use them for whatever needs they might have in a time of crisis (not much different from a blank check today).

Clean as a Whistle
You might not think of a whistle as being so clean that we would use it as a measure of cleanliness, but if you ever tried to make one from a reed (as they were made originally) then you would understand the phrase. To obtain the pure wind sound derived from a reed whistle the tube must be totally free of debris – clean and dry. So to have a thing clean as a whistle today means to have it as orderly as possible, with nothing blocking the passageways.

Crocodile Tears
Those insincere tears we have come to know as crocodile tears are quite literal in origin. For you see, a crocodile does indeed cry over its meal as it eats. But the crying has nothing to do with a croc’s sense of the situation. Instead, as a crocodile eats, his food is pressed to the top of his mouth, causing pressure against the glands known as the lachrymals. These secrete a tear-like substance that flows from his eyes. From this biological active of the reptile we draw our meaning for crocodile tears.

Curmudgeon (From my other sources)
The coinage of curmudgeon is beyond interesting; it is downright fascinating. Dr. Samuel Johnson decided to write his dictionary of the English language because he thought the language was being ‘corrupted’ (after delving deeply into the subject and being astute and intellectually honest, he rejected his original conviction and came to the conclusion that language is a living, breathing, evolving entity).

As related by Bergen Evans, while Johnson was compiling material for his dictionary he received a letter suggesting that the word curmudgeon was derived from the French coeur (heart) and méchant (evil). Either the letter was unsigned or he lost it and forgot who wrote it. The suggestion, though unsupported, was plausible and in his dictionary (1755) Johnson set it down for what it was worth: “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant, Fr. an unknown correspondent.” In his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775), Dr John Ash, cribbing from Johnson, but, unfortunately for him, knowing no French entered it as “from the French coeur unknown, méchant correspondent.” This is one of history’s most amusing and notorious instances of plagiarism. The antics of authors Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were drab and colorless by comparison.

Dead as a Doornail
What is a doornail anyway? Well, I am here to tell you. A doornail is that plate or knob upon which a door’s knocker knocks! As it never moves and is pounded upon repeatedly, we assume it’s dead. Hence the reference (some things are just too easy).

Dessert
It is the French who gave us both the word and the custom of the dessert. By definition their word desservir means to “clear the table,” which originally consisted of clearing both dishes and the tablecloth to make way for the final presentation. Most often that final course was a pastry or ice cream, but in all cases it was something sweet to end the meal. It was believed at that time that the sugar in the sweet was necessary to give a rush of energy in order that all of the foods consumed during the meal could be digested.

Dressed to the Nines
No, this does not mean that on a scale of one to ten, one is dressed almost perfectly. The expression is English in origin and was (when spoken correctly), “dressed to thy’n eyes.” (quite obviously in reference to one spiffed up from head to toe). Leave it to us to make it slang, mispronounce it a bit and make it a popular expression, even though “dressed to the nines” in and of itself makes no sense!

Earmark
[We have heard about earmarks in the past couple of years from corrupt congressmen (Are there any other kind? Yes there are – corrupt congresswomen). So let’s see where this word came from.] Long ago in England farmers found it helpful to mark the ears of their cattle and pigs to prevent thievery. Matter of fact earmarks worked so well that the law decided that one caught taking an earmarked animal or altering one to make it his own should be earmarked himself (literally!) as punishment for the crime. [I guess if it was good enough for a pig……come to think about it how about earmarking (literally!) those congress people who use earmarks as a devise for political patronage to enhance their reelection odds.]

Fiasco
By definition, fiasco is a total, foolish failure, but for its origins you have to go back to the glassblowers of Italy who created beautiful bottles. The story has it that if a bottle was noted to have a flaw it was set aside and reworked into a flask (fiasco in Italian). Not as artsy, but more practical in function was the re-created piece that was salvaged.

Getting One’s Goat
It was a common practice in the early days of horse racing to place a goat in the stall with a high-strung horse to calm him before the race. The two made good roommates, but it was also common practice for an opponent to steal his competitor’s goat in order to upset his horse before the race. Many a good racehorse was ruined by someone getting his goat!

Having a Screw Loose
It’s easy enough to conjure up the image of a machine with a screw loose, but which machine originally gave us the phrase? It was the cotton gin, the advent of which caused cotton mills to multiple at an unbelievable rate in the late 1700’s. So frequent were the breakdowns of the earlier machines that loose screws were nearly always blamed for the problem. As a result the phrase was adapted by most everyone who needed to blame something or someone for just about anything. By the early 1800’s having a screw loose became the catchphrase for something gone amiss.

Influenza
The common flu has a superstitious origin. The phrase was coined in the mid 1700’s when the first outbreak of the virus was recorded in Rome. It was believed at the time that the stars influenced such evil and contagious epidemics and influenza (the Italian word for influence) became the given name for this particular one!

Kick the Bucket
This has nothing to do with a pail being kicked out from under a man being
hanged. The phrase originated in the slaughterhouses of old, where hogs were slashed and hung (by their heels) and strung by a pulley weighted with a wooden block called a bucket. (The name was borrowed from the bucket-in-the-well concept.) Often, in the last efforts of life, the slaughtered hog was known to kick the bucket, just before it gave up the ghost.

Lame Duck
The original lame duck was a member of the British Stock Exchange who couldn’t meet his liabilities on the settlement date, and thus flew off without settling his account. From that we applied the term to our political candidates who, by way of losing an election, can’t return to the flock, even though their own party has been retained. [In recent years this term has applied to presidents serving out their term when either they are not eligible for another term or have been defeated in their bid for a second term. As with his predecessors, George W. Bush has been called a lame duck president, yet with Bush and his administration so involved, for good or ill, in the current financial crisis, he has been described as a lame duck who roared.]

Letting the Cat Out of the Bag
Back in the Middle Ages when the Muslims invaded Southern Europe, suddenly pork was declared unclean and thus became a premium on the open market. Because of strict laws forbidding such, pigs were sold undercover, stashed in bags (or pokes, which some cite to credit the expression “pig in a poke”). On occasion a cat was substituted for the more expensive pig and it wasn’t until the new owner let the cat out of the bag that the scam was revealed.

Lunatic
We get the word lunatic from the same base word that gives us lunar, which, of course, means it pertains to the moon. Lunatic was coined by the early Romans in reference to the mentally insane, as a description of one they thought was moonstruck. For centuries, man has believed that full moons have an effect on behavior. The Romans simply gave it a name and we still use it today.

One Fell Swoop (From my other sources)
At one fell swoop means all at once, as everyone realizes. As pointed out by Bergen Evans, what is not as well understood is that the word “fell” in this phrase is derived not from the past tense of “fall”, but from the noun “felon.”

In Macbeth (Act IV, scene III) when news of the murder of his wife and children by Macbeth is brought to Macduff, he exclaims, “Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?” A kite is a fierce but ignoble hawk or falcon that preys on small quarry and Macduff sees the tragedy in the metaphor of a hawk striking defenseless prey.

Sour Grapes (From other sources)
The words sour grapes leave a sour taste in my mouth – not literally in a gustatory sense of course, but with the figurative ill-tasting sensation of misconstruing what it means. Inevitably this expression is used to mean someone who whines or complains when they do not receive or achieve something they feel they are entitled to.

The expression comes from one of Aesop’s fables where a fox sees some delicious appearing grapes which are out of his reach and try as he might he can not get them. In frustration and resignation he allows as how they are probably sour. The expression really means that the claimant, unable to achieve his objective, declares that the prize was not worth his time and effort.

Three Sheets to the Wind
True the origin of this one is nautical, but no, the sheets are not sails. The sheets being referred to here are the ropes attached to the corners of the sails, which are used for lowering or extending. When all three sheets (on a vessel with three sails) are loosened, the ship will rock and reel as though without course or purpose, much like a drunk would if walking about while intoxicated.

Turn a Blind Eye (From my other sources)
Admiral Horatio Nelson is credited with having said this when willfully disobeying a signal to withdraw during a naval engagement. Tales of that sort, especially when they are about national heroes like Nelson, tend to be exaggerated or entirely fictitious. That doesn't appear to be the case here though and there's very good evidence to show that Nelson was indeed the source of this phrase.

In the naval battle of Copenhagen in 1801 Nelson led the attack of the British fleet against a joint Danish/Norwegian enemy. The British fleet of the day was commanded by Admiral Sir Hyde Parker. The two men disagreed over tactics and at one point Hyde Parker sent a signal (by the use of flags) for Nelson to disengage. Nelson was convinced he could win if he persisted and that's when he 'turned a blind eye'. In their biography Life of Nelson, published just eight years later, Clarke and M'Arthur printed what they claimed to be Nelson's actual words at the time:(Putting the glass to his blind eye) "You know, Foley, I have only one eye - and I have a right to be blind sometimes... I really do not see the signal."

Verdict
The word describing a jury’s decision at the end of a trial is one that dates back to the Middle Ages. With the introduction of the jury, it was superstitiously believe that twelve men in a group would hold some mystical power in drawing a truthful conclusion. The number twelve was considered holy both in reference to the twelve tribes of Israel and Jesus’ twelve apostles. It was the French who gave this body of twelve the name veir (true) and dit (said). Even in homicide cases today, a verdict cannot be obtained until all twelve on the jury reach an agreement. [The phrase for the examination of prospective jurors by the attorneys and the judge is called voir dire which is French for “too see, to speak.”]

Veto
One powerful little word is veto! With four little letters, the head of state has the power to cancel out laws passed by lower governing bodies. The word comes directly from Latin, its translation is literally “I forbid.” It was used in a political context as far back as the time of the Roman senate and has carried the same meaning both within and without political circles for hundreds of years.

Visa
Short for the Latin phrase carta visa, a visa is that official authorization that permits entry into another country. The original phrase means “papers seen”, which was the stamp of approval by those on border control, monitoring the visitors coming into and out of a foreign country.

Win, Place, or Show
Most folks know that the origin of “win, place, or show” dates back to the earliest racetracks, but most may not know that the phrase was so named because of the way in which the finishes were announced. As small boards were used to record the names of the winners of each horse race, and as these boards were so small that only the first two could be “placed” on the board, the titles “win” and “place” were soon coined. Shortly after, a second board was used to “show” the third winner and “win, “place”, or “show” became synonymous with first, second, and third.

Xmas
While some consider it disrespectful to substitute an X for the Christ part of Christmas, others know that the letter X was in fact the symbol used long ago for Christ. X represents the Greek letter chi, which is the initial letter of the Greek word for Christ. According to first century history, the early Greek Christians used the letter X to stand for Christ, much as they used the fish with the X in the tail to represent Jesus.

Zip Code
We refer to it every day, but how many of us knew [before they read this] that the ZIP stands for “Zone Improvement Program”? Okay, so you may have known that, but do you know what the five-digit code represents? Well, according to our reliable postal people, the first three digits indicate a district, usually a city, while the remaining two digits correspond with a local zone.

1948 -49

2008-10-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

The 1948 War between, first the Palestinian Arabs and Jews, then the Palestinian Jews and the Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq (Lebanon did not take part in that war) actually started in late 1947 and ended in mid 1949, although most of the fighting occurred in 1948.

Unlike the civil war in Lebanon which started in 1975 and lasted for 15 years, the Palestinian War was definitely not a Black Swan – it was building for decades (see my blog essay Black Swans for an explanation of a Black Swan). Small pitched battles and clashes between Palestinian Arabs and Jews started in the decade of the late 1900’s and continued sporadically into the 1910’s, 1920’s, 1930’s and late 1940’s.

One of the best histories of this 1948 war may be the 2008 book 1948 – A history of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris. Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. One might presume a certain amount of bias on the part of Professor Morris, yet I did not perceive any. For example Morris states that the Jews committed more atrocities and massacres against the Arabs than did the Arabs against the Jews. The reason for this was logical in that the Jews overran many more Arab towns, villages, and settlements than vice-versa on the order of several hundred versus a couple dozen. None-the-less this is an indication to me that Professor Morris is a historian first and an Israeli second.

In 1958 when I was working in Libya, North Africa for Mobil Oil, I met several young Palestinian men in Tripoli who said that in 1948 their families were given 24 hours to leave their homes in Palestine. All were allowed to take as much of their personal and household effects as they could with them, but they had to leave. Their hatred of Palestinian Jews in particular and all Jews in general was palpable. As a child in June 1948 Lidia witnessed Jews in Tripoli being stoned by Arab mobs in reaction to the war between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews (according to Professor Morris 13 Jews were killed in Tripoli). At that time Libya was under United Nations jurisdiction with the British police and military on the ground as the UN representatives. The British did not intervene in the mayhem for 24 hours. What could have motivated the British for their non action? The answer must lie in what happened in Palestine prior to the 1948 war. Palestine was a British mandate so that the British were charged with administering the area and providing security. The Jews wanted the British military out of Palestine and toward the end of the mandate resorted to committing act of terrorism to drive them out. Among the terrorism acts was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where civilians as well as British military personnel were killed.

In 1948 the Jewish population of Palestine was circa 750,000 and the Arab population almost twice that. The surrounding Arab countries which went to war had a combined population of about 40 million. How on earth could such a relatively small population beat a so much larger one? And make no mistake; although the Jews lost a few battles, they overwhelmingly won the war. There are rational reasons why this was so as I shall endeavor to explain later, with no little credit to Professor Morris.

In 1881 the population of Palestine was made up of approximately 450,000 Arabs – 90% Muslim and the rest Christian and 25,000 Jews. From 1882 to 1903 the first wave of Zionist settlers – some 30,000 Jews came to Palestine. Zionism is an international political movement that supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The word Zionism was derived from Mount Zion, a mountain near Jerusalem. The Arabs were wary of these new Jewish settlers whom they regarded as inexplicable, foolish, strange infidels, and vaguely minatory. The Jews in turn thought the Arabs devious, dirty, untrustworthy, simple, and lazy. Nothing like two peoples getting off to a good start in the Holy Land. The mantra of the Zionists was, “A land without people for a people without land.” The Jewish settlers must have been blind if they did not notice there were plenty of people in the land already.

Until around 1908-09 there were few acts of violence except of the common criminal kind. In 1909, David Ben-Gurion, who would become the first president of Israel in May 1948, was waylaid by an Arab with a knife, bent on robbery. Ben-Gurion suffered a wound to his arm and an abiding suspicion of Arabs thereafter. From 1909-1914 violence increased and took on a more nationalistic fervor – that is a more Arab vs. Jew connotation. The 1st World War from 1914 to 1919 diminished the Arab-Jew confrontations as Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, which in turn was part of the Central Powers, was allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire as concentration on the wider war was the order of the day.

On November 29, 1947 the United Nations put Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into two sovereign states – one Jewish and one Arab, to a vote. When the tally was finished, 33 UN member countries voted “yes” and 13 voted “no” with 10 abstentions. The resolution barely achieved the necessary 2/3 vote with only two votes to spare. One of the two Palestinian protagonists was jubilant and the other was angry and morose. Guess which was which. The countries voting in the affirmative were the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, the Soviet Bloc, and most of Latin America. The nays were the Arab and Muslin countries, Greece, Cuba, Chile, and India. Strangely, among the abstainers was Great Britain; perhaps motivated by allegiance to both the Arabs and the Jews. The acts of sabotage and terrorism in Palestine by the Jews against the British were still in the future so that was not a motivation to be neutral. As can well be imagined the lobbying by both the Arabs and the Jews in the months leading up to the vote was intense. Especially contested by both sides were Latin America and Asia.
North America, Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc (that was to change a few years later) were firmly in the Jewish camp while Africa, a couple of Latin American countries and of course the Middle East sided with the Palestinian Arabs.

The Civil War between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews began in earnest on November 30, 1947. The Arab world called this the First Palestine War and the Jews called it the War of Independence. The war was to have two distinct phases: The civil war which began on November 30, 1947 and ended on May 14, 1948 and a conventional war beginning when the Arab armies of the surrounding states of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan invaded Palestine on May 15, 1948 and ending with armistice agreements with the Arab countries (Egypt on February 24, 1949, Jordan on April 3, 1949, Syria on July 20, 1949. Iraq refused to enter into armistice negotiations). There were several temporary truces intermixed during this interval where both the Arab and Israeli sides tried to derive advantages.

After 5 ½ months of fighting the Palestinian Arabs, the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine called themselves, won a decisive victory. The Jewish leaders, headed by the homunculus in stature, but leviathan in achievement, David Ben-Gurion, went to Tele Aviv on May 14, 1948 and, to the roar of approval and celebration of the crowd, declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The United States immediately recognized this new state and was followed quickly by the Soviet Union.

Where did the Yishuv get its arms to fight the war? Though money (and volunteers mostly Jewish, but some non-Jews as well) poured in from various places around the world, a large percentage came from North America and Europe. Interestingly enough, initially the Skoda Arms Works in Czechoslovakia supplied much of the military hardware. The motivation for the Checks was hard currency rather than ideology. They also sold arms to the Arabs, but considerably fewer. Other sources were also utilized by Jewish arms buyers around the world. Some few hundreds of the Jewish officers and enlisted men gained military experience fighting for the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and American armed forces during WWII.

The Israelis were highly motivated to win this war because not to do so was to risk another Holocaust. The Arab soldiers from the other countries, on the other hand, knew that if they should lose they could always go back to their home countries. There are other factors which favored the Israelis. Not only were they more highly motivated, had superior coordination of their forces, and knew the terrain better than the invading Arabs armies, but the Israelis had one objective – to win. The various Arabs countries had a variety of objectives which were seldom conductive to defeating the Jews. Three of the Arab countries which invaded Palestine were kingdoms, Abdullah in Jordan, Farouk in Egypt, and Prince Abdul al-Llah who served as regent for the underage Faisal II in Iraq. Only Syria had an elected president, the nationalist Shukri al-Quwwatli, who had led the opposition to French rule after WWII. These Arab leaders were not as rabidly anti-Israel as the current leaders of those countries today. Although they opposed the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, of greater concern for them and their military commanders was their suspicion of the other invading Arab armies whom they thought were trying to carve up Palestine to their own advantage. Then, as now, the virulently anti-Israeli “Arab street” was a major factor which had to be taken under consideration else their regimes might be overthrown. Still this mistrust and reluctant or non-existent cooperation between the various governments and armies caused a significant diminution of battle effectiveness which accrued to the advantage of the Israelis. Not that the Jews did not have some divisions within their ranks, but they were not of the same magnitude as the Arabs. At the start of the civil war the main Jewish force was called the Haganah. A much smaller and more militant group was called the Irgun Zvai Luemi (IZL), also called the Irgun. After a showdown between forces of the Haganah and the IZL in one battle where both sides fired on one another, peace was made between them and the IZL was absorbed into the Haganah, thereafter called the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Before the start of the first phase of the civil war when British forces were still in Palestine, Acts of sabotage and terrorism were committed by the Irgun against the British. The Haganah opposed the wanton acts of terrorism by the Irgun including murder of British military personnel and civilians. This situation was recounted in the 1960 movie Exodus based on the book of the same name by Leon Uris.

Professor Morris stated that Arab sources claim that 900,000 to one million Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes in Palestine. A better estimate might be on the order of 750,000 or approximately ½ of the Arab population before the war. Was there a deliberate and formulated policy by the Jews to expel the Arabs from Palestine? This charge has been made over the years, yet there is no credible evidence to support it. What is undeniably factual is that as the war went on, the Jews, both government officials and military commanders in the field, increasingly chose to expel the Arabs from their towns and settlements by direct orders or intimidation rather than trying to subjugate and control them, but leave them in place. The thinking of the Jews on this issue turned on the considerations that Arabs left in Jewish territory might become a “Fifth Column” to surreptitiously work against the Jewish occupiers. A further factor, strongly argued by Ben-Gurion, was that after the war if a sufficient number of Arabs remained in Israel then by demographics the Jews might become a minority and could conceivably lose control of their own country through the democratic process.

The other side of this logical, but tarnished nodus is the 500,000 to 600,000 Jews who emigrated, were intimidated into leaving, or were expelled from Arab lands in the years immediately after 1948. In Yemen 43,000 Jews left; in Iraq 80,000 to 90,000 who mostly went to Israel; in Syria the number was 15,000; in Libya it was 40,000; in Morocco 60,000 out of the pre-1948 total of 300,000 with a second major wave leaving in 1961 after the death of the sultan Mohammed V such that now there are only about 4000 Jews left in the country – still the largest Jewish community in the Arab world; and lesser numbers in Iran, Algeria and Tunisia. A number of Jews in these various countries did not leave – they were killed; hundreds in Iraq, 76 or so in Aden, 13 in Libya, and dozens more in other Arab countries. Everyone knows that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees after the 1948 war. What is not so well known, in fact hardly known at all, is that a half million or so Jews were forced, one way or another, to leave their home countries in the Middle East often being required to leave their money and personal property behind. Where is the outrage from the likes of Jimmy Carter, who is oh so sympathetic to the Palestinian Arab cause, but is silent on the injustices which were done to Jewish civilians in the Middle East after 1948?

Apart from being interesting history in itself, what is the significance of familiarity with the 1948 Arab/Israeli War? Factoring in the 1967 war (the so called “Six Day War”) between Israel and the trio of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria as well as the 1973 war (The Yom Kippur War) between Israel and the duo of Egypt and Syria there are lessons to be learned and hopefully profited from. The Arab world was humiliated in 1948, again in 1967, and to a lesser extent in 1973. Given the more than 1000 years of suspicion, rivalry, and contempt between Arabs and Jews and the establishment of Israel in the middle of the Arab world along with the aforementioned wars, what is there to be surprised about at the level of animosity and bitter hatred of Muslims toward Jews today? Another lesson from the 1948 war is the jealousy, distrust, and duplicity between the various Muslim or Arab countries and also within the countries themselves with their disparate social and religious (Sunni, Shiite, Coptic, Druze, Christian, etc.) makeup. Any country such as the United States or collection of countries, such as the UN or EU, who wants to “nation build” in the Middle East, should fully understand from a historical perspective what the difficulties, not to say impossibilities are. Bring peace between the Jews and Muslims just might take a thousand years or the complete destruction of one side or the other. Certainly the ill-feelings today between the two protagonists are greater than ever since the imbroglio of 1948.

There are criticisms and petty bickering among religious groups, e.g. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, etc. in the United States and elsewhere , but I do not hear of them strapping on explosive vests and blowing themselves and others to kingdom come. Can the same be said of Muslin fanatics? Of course only a small minority of Muslims does this, yet the number of Muslims who do not unqualifiedly condemn these acts is not small. And even a minuscule number of people from other religions are not bent upon such extreme violence.

THE BANKING AND FINANCIAL CRISIS - REDUX 48

2008-09-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

In my essay, The Banking and Financial Crisis, I blamed the officials in the financial institutions and both political parties. If the impression I gave was that Democrats and Republicans should be equally blamed, then consider the following facts in contemplating who is more culpable:

In 2001, Bush’s chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government’s “implicit subsidy” of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system. Barney Frank (D-MA) denounced Mankiw, saying he had no “concern about housing.” The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “under heavy assault by the Republicans,” but these entities still had “important political allies in the Democrats.”

April 2001 – The 2002 budget request by the Bush Administration said that the size of Freddie Mac (FHLMC) and Fannie Mae (FNMA) was a “potential problem.” “Financial trouble in either could cause strong repercussions in financial markets.”

2003 – The Bush administration upgraded its warning to: “Systemic risk could spread beyond the housing sector.”

Sept. 2003 – The Bush administration pushed Congress hard to create a new federal agency to regulate and supervise FHLMC & FNMA. Barney Frank pushed back saying, “Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are not in a crisis. The federal government should be doing more to get more low-income families in houses. Too many people have a sky is falling mentality which I do not see.” The legislation was blocked.

Feb. 2005 – Federal Reserve chief Allen Greenspan testified before Congress after officials at FHLMC & FNMA admitted there were accounting screw-ups: “Enabling these institutions to increase in size – and they will once this crisis, in their judgment, [has] passed, [is] placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”

April 2005 – Allen Greenspan: “If we fail to strengthen GSE [Government Sponsors of Enterprises] regulation we increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis.”

April 2005 – Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY): “I think Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae over the years have done an incredible job and are an intrinsic part of making America the best housed people in the world. If you look over the last 20 or whatever years, they have done a very, very good job.”

John McCain (R-AZ) in 2006 co-sponsored a bill in the Senate: “For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae …. and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. They need to be reformed without delay.” All of the Democrats voted against this bill in committee so the Republicans, fearing they could not get it passed, did not submit it to the full senate. Obama did not weigh in on it.

During the Clinton administration, the federal government put pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50% of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low-to-moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001. Threatening lawsuits, the Federal Reserve during the Clinton administration demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage.

There is also an accounting rule used now, which was not in force during the Savings and Loan scandal that would have worsened that financial crisis and which did not cause, but has exacerbated this one. The rule is this: financial institutions are forced to value the mortgages they hold at their current value rather than their long term value or even the amount of money these mortgages generate. Financial institutions typically loan 10 times as much money as the value of their capital. Therefore, if a financial institution such as a bank or a mortgage company is forced to write down say $10 billion worth of their capital due to the short term fall of their real estate holdings then their ability to give loans will be reduced by $100 billion. The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) could change this requirement immediately.

THE BANKING AND FINANCIAL CRISIS 47

2008-09-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

What caused the current banking and financial crisis? Who is principally to blame, what is the best way to correct it, and should there be more government intervention and regulation or less? These are complex questions where only the politically biased with their paralogistic reasoning have simple answers. Before I attempt to expound on this, a history review is in order.

Every time there is a financial crisis, to some it is a new day. In fact it is history repeating itself in a new guise. It is widely believed that when the Great Depression descended upon the country, as well as much of the world, President Hoover did nothing while President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he came into office, brought the country out of the depression with massive government intervention and myriad federal programs. A review of the data does not support this belief. Hoover used the federal government to try to correct the situation without success. He actually made the economic depression worst by, among other schemes, pushing for and signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which more accurately could be called the Hoover-Smoot-Hawley Act. This Act greatly restricted imports to America to protect American producers. Of course other countries retaliated so world trade was reduced thereby further slowing economic activity.

What is the evidence that the federal programs of Roosevelt did not bring the country out of the depression? Consider: The United States unemployment rate was 16% in 1931 and 19% in 1938, after nine years of the New Deal – three under Hoover and six under Roosevelt. The unemployment rate in 1929 just prior to the stock market crash was 3.2%. There was an intensifying of the recession in 1937. The stock market went into a nosedive and by November 1937 unemployment had soared to 11 million with another 3 million working only part time. Statistics showed that the United States was lagging far behind other countries in recovering from the depression. American national income in 1937 was 86% of the 1929 high water mark while Great Britain’s was 124%. Japan’s employment figure was 75% above the 1929 number. Chile, Sweden, and Australia had economic growth rates in the range of 20% compared to the United States’ dismal -7%.

In the late 1980’s there was the Savings & Loan scandal. Then in 2000-2002 the high tech bubble burst causing the NASDAQ index to go from more than 5000 to around 1000. The early 2000’s was the era of the brigands of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Arkadelphia, et.al. Now is the time of the banking and financial institutions meltdown. Do you get the idea that these crises reoccur, but with different sectors of the economy? Does anyone want to bet this pattern will not happen in the future?

Who are the bad actors in this current climacteric of many of the banking and financial institutions? Let us start with the officials at Freddie Mac (FHLMC) and Fannie Mae (FNMA). Franklin Raines, currently an advisor to Barack Obama, was the CEO of FNMA from 1999 to 2004 when guaranteeing of mortgages and other real estate loans given without down payments and weak financial backgrounds to home buyers and investors was getting underway. Later it got even more irresponsible when paperwork was not required for many of these loan recipients. During his six year tenure at FNMA, Raines took home $90 million. Jim Johnson was CEO of FNMA before Raines and made $21 million in his shorter tenure. When he retired in 1998 he got a $600,000 per year consulting contract. This clown who also is an Obama advisor and headed Obama’s vice-presidential search committee worked at Lehman Brothers.

Another Scaramouch is the infamous Jamie Gorelick. Remember her? She was Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno. In that position Gorelick was primarily responsible for maintaining and strengthening the wall of separation between the CIA and the FBI. To say the least it did not help to prevent, if it had been possible, 9/11. In 1978 Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) was the driving force behind the passage of the Foreign Surveillance Act which set up this wall between the CIA and FBI. As with all such actions, the intent was good, but the country paid for it later. At any rate, Gorelick was appointed to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission (set up in November 2002) by then senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Daschle and the Democrats wanted Gorelick on the commission so she could not be subpoenaed to testify before the commission on her role in handicapping the FBI and CIA. In the spirit of bipartisanship the Republicans stupidly went along with Daschle.

Gorelick was vice-chairman of FNMA from 1997 to 2003 and collected $26 million during that time. All of these people were appointed by President Bill Clinton. Before Republicans start to say “see it is all the fault of the Democrats” I would opine that the current crew at FHLMC & FNMA were appointed by Bush and did not seem to be any more aware or competent than their Democrat predecessors.

There are more scoundrels. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-CT) is the chairman of the banking committee in the senate. What did he do to try to forestall this banking problem? Nothing that I can discern. Rep. Barnett (Barney) Frank (D-MA), who strangely or maybe not is unmarried, is chairman of the Financial Services Committee. What did he do? Again the answer is nothing – in fact in both cases it is less than nothing. Dodd received more political contributions from FHLMC/FNMA than anyone in congress. Obama was third on the list of most contributions.

Carl Rove said that the Bush administration tried to get laws passed to reform the banks and financial institutions, but was stymied by the Democrats in congress and especially Frank and Dodd. While there is no reason to disbelieve Rove, the president has a bully pulpit (as expressed by Teddy Roosevelt) so he could have done what Ronald Reagan would sometimes do, that is, go over the head of congress directly to the people. Fact is that at one time even Bush bragged about how many Americans owned their homes. As it turned out, the problem was that too many of these people didn’t really own their homes; the banks did much to the chagrin of both nominal home owners and the banks. Suppose that the Bush administration and Republicans in congress had insisted that these credit institutions not allow people with bad credit history and few assets or poor income prospects to obtain mortgages. What do you think the reaction would have been from the Democrats in congress and the Main Stream Media as well? How about something along the lines of “There the Republicans, the party of the rich, go again in favoring the wealthy and discriminating against the poor.” Before the crisis occurred and especially if it had then been averted, what defense could the Republicans have used? It would have been impossible to prove that a financial crisis would have happened but for the prudent policy of the GOP.

My purpose in discussing the Great Depression was to issue a cautionary note about assuming that more government regulation and involvement in this banking and financial situation will be the denouement. It goes back to the warning by President Eisenhower at the end of his 2nd term about the military-industrial complex. Money corrupts the system such that government regulators are co-opted by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Even if there is honest regulation that does not mean the problems will be ameliorated.

The solution for this current financial mess by both major political parties as well as the overwhelming majority of Americans is for more federal government oversight and control. That has not worked well in the past so why should one expect it to work now? What then to do? Clearly at this point there has to be government intervention via financial bailouts to keep the credit and equity markets from truly collapsing. When this crisis is over and before the next one occurs, as it surely will, there should be a firm commitment by the federal government to yes, enforce existing laws by convicting greedy and culpable corporate and political knaves and prevent collusion between institutions, but to generally maintain a hands off position from private enterprises. To quote economist Walter Williams in a recent column who quoted English philosopher Herbert Spencer: "The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."

A VULTURE’S TALE 46

2008-03-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

In 2005 vultures in the form of trial lawyers not only circled, but drew a beady eye on their prey, drug company Merck, the makers of Vioxx. In the Dallas Morning News ads from law firms exhorting victims of Vioxx to contact them appeared and one even offered a free medical/legal seminar in case Vioxx patients needed coaching to formulate their maladies. This process was repeated in newspapers all across this broad land - and on television and the internet as well.

A dozen nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are available by prescription with the best known, because of extensive advertising, being Vioxx (rofecoxib) and Celebrex (celecoxib). Over-the-counter NSAID medications include aspirin (Bayer & Ecotrin), ibuprofen (Advil & Motrin), and naproxen (Aleve). Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not technically an NSAID, but is considered an analgesic (pain reliever).

Why are these drugs called “nonsteroidal” and “anti-inflammatory?” Because they are not steroids which treat inflammation by suppressing the immune system; rather they inhibit the body’s ability to synthesize prostaglandins (fatty acids) which contribute to inflammation, pain, muscle cramps, and fever.

The main inflammatory diseases which are treated with these drugs are osteoarthritis (a degenerative joint disease) and rheumatoid arthritis (an autoimmune disease). Of the people who are treated for these diseases in the United States, circa 60% are women and 40% men. Rheumatoid arthritis occurs in about 1% of the U.S.A. population and is three times more prevalent in women than men. Perhaps some consolation for women can be extracted from knowing that a secondary disease, gout, which is treated with NSAIDs, mostly afflicts men.

Essentially what are the differences between the prescription and over-the-counter drugs used to treat arthritis? The answers are drug strength and price. To equal the potency of one tablet of one of the prescription drugs a person would have to take several of the over-the-counter drugs. An increased risk of heart attack or stroke seems to occur with long term (years or at least many months) use of either prescription or over-the-counter drugs.

Whether a person takes one of the prescription or several over-the-counter pills daily, long term, the health risks are the same. Therein lays the artificiality of the liability claims against Vioxx. Given that hundreds of millions of people in this country have taken aspirin or ibuprofen or naproxen over the many decades (aspirin has been around for more than 100 years) these drugs have been available it is practically a certainty there are and have been many people who have taken large doses for years and have suffered increased mortality or disability from heart attacks or strokes yet how many lawsuits have resulted? None that I know of – at least none that were successful. Perhaps Merck can be faulted for not making public sooner the measured long term risk of Vioxx. It appears that although the long term risk of Vioxx is low, it is twice the risk of people not taking the drug. Still who possesses such naiveté as not to believe that the birds-of-prey (lawyers) would not swoop down in a frenetic feeding fury even if Merck had been timelier in its disclosure?

It is interesting that in a speech during the 2004 presidential political campaign, the world renowned homeopathic physician Dr. Teresa Heinz-Kerry of Mozambique weighed in on the issue of treating osteoarthritis by the use of gin & raisins. Her formula, dating back to the era of old wives tales, is to soak nine white raisins (only white raisins; dark raisins simply will not do – even for an African) in a large glass of gin for two weeks then throw away the raisins and gulp down the gin or some such procedure. We should all take comfort in the knowledge that such an ingénue as Mrs. Heinz-Kerry is in the forefront of our political, social, scientific, and medical life.

As an aside, the reason for the past shortages of influenza vaccine can be largely attributable to these aforementioned rapacious trial lawyers of which Sen. John Edwards is an archetypical example. John Kerry even had the temerity to launch a jeremiad against George Bush, blaming him for the then flu vaccine shortage. If Kerry wants to assign culpability for the lack of flu vaccine he would do well to look at his partner in crime the egregiously greedy Johnny Edwards who compiled his fortune by foisting junk science arguments on gullible juries.

A generation ago there were a dozen pharmaceutical companies in the United States making flu vaccine – today there are only two or three. Why? The answer is tied up in the concept of capitalism. Manufacturing flu vaccine was never a highly profitable enterprise in the first place then when lawsuits were filed because there are always some bad reactions in any medical intervention the companies logically decided just to get out of the business.

For the uninformed who believe the answer to this problem is to have the federal government produce flu vaccines I would suggest the following: I made five trips to the old Soviet Union in 1990-91 and I saw what a socialist society wrought in the sphere of economics. They were a half century behind us in all sorts of consumer products and services and the people I talked to knew it. So for those Americans who would opt for government medical services I would paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy from a speech on June 26, 1963 in West Berlin if it were possible to go backwards in time: “Let them come to the Soviet Union!”

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN – OR IS THIS A NIGHTMARE? 45

2008-02-11T19:05:00.000-08:00

In his 2007 book What’s the Matter with California? Jack Cashill (author of the 2005 book Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture – see my essay Fools, Fakes & Frauds #15) has laid out an illuminating exposé of the modern incarnation of the Golden State. Kansan Cashill states that if someone from Kansas is asked what is the matter with Kansas the usual reply is: Why, is there something wrong with Kansas? If someone from California is asked what is the matter with California the common reply is: How much time do you have?

Do you know there is a parallel between the two Californians, O.J. Simpson and John Walker Lindh (the American Taliban)? One is black and the other is white, so that is not it. Both of their fathers divorced their mothers and left their families without any financial or social support. Unfortunately not too unusual, especially in California. What is a bit bizarre, even for California, is that they both left their wives and families and took up with another man. So far as I know John Walker Lindh’s father is still alive while O.J. Simpson’s father died from AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) or more correctly medically since people do not die directly from AIDS, he died because of an opportunistic disease brought on by a greatly compromised immune system. Still think California is not a bit weird? Read on.

In California, 1969 was a seminal year. It was the year the Crips gang was formed; the Tate – La Bianca murders by the Manson mob; and no fault divorce was passed. The prison population in California increased from 23,264 to 168,035 in the 25 years from 1969 to 1994. Was there a link between this much bigger incarceration increase than the population increase of the state and no fault divorce? The answer is an unqualified yes as I will justify later. For the moment consider that in 1970, the first full year of no fault divorce, the numbers of divorces was a record 112,942, a 38% increase from 1969 and was 60% higher than the nation as a whole. By 1980 California registered a new record 138,361 divorces which was more than twice as many as in 1966. What was the response of the politicians in California to the embarrassment of this accelerated divorce rate? Why, they simply stopped keeping or publishing statistics on divorce! Well, that would certainly ameliorate the problem of excessive divorces.

As related by Cashill, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) weighed in on the issue in 1999 with their program Sesame Street. In it, Kermit the Frog, as an inquiring reporter, asks one little bird where she lives. The perky baby bird coos that she lives part of the time in a nest in a tree with her mother and the rest of the time in another nest with her father. She cheerfully explains that they both love her. What PBS doesn’t explain is that this potentially traumatic and unnatural situation might cause some of the little birds to behave badly and a few to become sociopaths the way their human counterparts do. A mere trifle in the grand scheme of things PBS might rationalize.

Californian Susan Atkins’ mother died when Susan was 10 or 11 years old. Her father was a functional alcoholic when his wife was alive and a dysfunctional alcoholic when she died. This left Susan Atkins on her own when she was 15 years old and as a result she easily became emotionally dependent upon and under the spell of the malevolent Charles Manson. The story is similar for the other three people, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Tex Watson, who Manson dispatched to carry out the bloody business of the Tate – La Bianca murders as well as the 15 or so other young people, mostly women, who were lured into the Manson fold.

Charles “Charlie” Manson was a murderous monster – the very epitome of evil. Even far left loons might concede that he was worse than Joe McCarthy; or maybe not. Although he possibly was born a psychopath, Manson’s family background sure did not help his social development. Manson was born to an unwed mother. For a short time after his birth she was married to a laborer named William Manson. He never knew his biological father. His mother, a heavy drinker, once sold him to a childless waitress for a pitcher of beer. His uncle retrieved him a few days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a service station in 1939 (Manson was five years old) he was placed in the home of a very religious aunt and uncle. Unfortunately when his mother was paroled in 1942, Manson was returned to her. In 1947 his mother tried unsuccessfully to place him in a foster home. The court put him in a school for boys, but after 10 months he fled and returned to his mother. She rejected him. What a pretty, uplifting, and inspiring story this is.

Since the Crips gang was formed in 1969 (the Bloods were formed as an opposition to the Crips in 1971) circa 100,000 Californians have been murdered and not a small percentage of them by California gangs. There are four times as many black males in California prisons as in California colleges. Approximately one out of three young black males is in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or under pretrial release in the California criminal justice system. An African-American in California is four times as likely to be in prison as a Hispanic and seven times as likely as a white. A counter to the charge there is a racial component to the inequalities of these numbers is the fact that it is 20 times more likely for a black Californian male to be incarcerated than a Californian male of Asian descent. It is simply the case that so many African-Americans are incarcerated because they commit so much crime.

Unwittingly and with the best intentions (remember, the road to Hell is paved….) federal and California officials encouraged young men, especially minority ones, to abandon their kids. The Aid to Dependent Children program was expanded to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1960. Or, in reality, Aid to Moms with Dependent Children. A working dad at home did not fit the state definition of a family. In 1964 the federal government sweetened the pot for forsaken moms with food stamps and in 1965 with Medicaid. Shortly thereafter public housing switched from fixed rent to the ability to pay. Each additional financial improvement for single moms was a discouragement for working dads to be in the home supporting their families. Talk about unintended consequences.

In 2006 the Episcopal Church’s diocese of California, headquartered in the Grace Cathedral at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill, was tasked with the appointment of a new bishop for the first time in 27 years. What made the selection process newsworthy was that three of the seven finalists were openly gay or lesbian. Three years earlier the appointment of Eugene Robinson as the first openly homosexual bishop in New Hampshire had almost unraveled the church worldwide. The Episcopal Church had been hemorrhaging members for 40 years prior to the elevation of Robinson. In 1960 1.9% of Americans were Episcopalians and 0.8% were Mormons. By 2002 these figures were reversed; 0.8% were Episcopalians and 1.9% were Mormons. There is nothing like defying tradition and morality to alienate people and California has a haecceity for that.

There are 250 mass graves of children in the Evergreen Cemetery in the middle of Oakland, California. Who were they? Victims of the most horrendous one day murder of children in the nation’s history. They are the remains of the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana. Gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk said: “More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than any other reason.” He could not have more mistaken in his assertion that religion was the cause, but he would not live to be corrected. He was shot and killed a week later by the termagant and disappointed former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White who killed the San Francisco mayor George Moscone for good measure. After a trial in which the infamous “Twinkie defense” was introduced, White was only convicted of manslaughter. A little more than a year after he was released from prison in 1985 he did the proper job himself by committing suicide. After the verdict the normally oh so liberal, against the death penalty, homosexual community was outraged and demanded that White be executed. Only in San Francisco.

The malefic Jim Jones was the architect of the Jonestown killing fields and he was no religious leader. He was a self-professed Marxist who used religion for his evil ends. Jones founded the Peoples Temple and as one of his henchmen said “We are not a church, but a social organization. We must pretend to be a church so we’re not taxed by the government.” Jones himself said “Those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment – with socialism.” Jones reflected near the end that “There wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist.” In all 918 people died that day at Jonestown, only some of them voluntarily; 276 children and almost as many seniors. There are jokes to this day about Kool Aid drinkers, unmindful that three year olds do not commit suicide.

So far all that I have written is rather tenebrous and caliginous (grim and gloomy), but I will conclude with a bipolar vignette which gives a ray or two of hope for California and therefore for the nation.

When Dr. Ben Chavis, a Lumbee Indian himself, although a genetic mixture of American Indian, black, and white dating back many generations, became principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA the school’s Academic Performance Index (API) score (the minimum being 200 and the maximum 1000) was 436 for the academic year 2000-2001. Under his leadership steady progress was made so that by 2005-2006 the API had reached 920. What was he doing right to achieve such dramatic success? Chavis said “The students were playing Indian when I got there despite the fact that the student body was almost equally divided into African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian. The school was in total chaos.”

Chavis replaced every teacher he inherited when he came to the school. Using the personnel freedom inherent in the charter system he replaced them with smart, ambitious teachers who did not have an education degree. Given the sorry state of teacher training in California he considered this a liability. He also paid his teachers $5000 per year more than they would get in other public school in California and saved money by avoiding all of the trainers, consultants, and assistant what-nots that clutter up public school payrolls.

Every class, every day begins with 90 minutes of no-nonsense language arts. The math is just as serious and intense. Even the special-ed kids take algebra. Chavis says “I have high expectations. I don’t want excuses.” Chavis believes strongly in punctuality and attendance. A student who arrives even one minute late gets detention, but a student who completes a year without missing a single day gets a monetary reward. The classic carrot and stick approach. Many students at the school go the entire year without missing a day. The daily absentee rate is 0.33% while other intercity public schools boast of a daily 8% absentee rate. There is a sign on Chavis’ office door with 16 posted rules. One says “Squawkers, multicultural specialists, self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers, and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best efforts will be booted out.” Another says “Our staff does not subscribe to the black swamp logic of minority students as victims. We will plow through such cornfield philosophy with common sense and hard work.” Chavis does not adumbrate his teaching philosophy. The school building is leased from a church next door and still has a large cross on the front. Asked how he is able to get away with that, Chavis answers “I tell the authorities that it represents the four directions of the wind and I haven’t gotten around to putting feathers on it.” Of course only an Indian could keep the PC police at bay in this topsy-turvy politically correct environment.

A second school success story is that of the Oakland Charter School. When Jorge Lopez took over the 92% Hispanic school in 2004 it was failing just as badly as the American Indian Public Charter School had been and for the same reasons. Lopez observed that the school was forcing “culture crap” on the students and mixing in enough “liberal jargon” to turn the kids against their parents. He fired the entire staff down to the janitors and started over with the Chavis model. “Culture is the job of the parents, my job is to educate the kids” said Lopez. In 2006 with 100% of the students taking the API test, Oakland Charter scored 875, second only in Oakland to Chavis’ school.

FEDERAL INCOME TAXES 44

2008-01-26T10:38:00.000-08:00

With the sempiternal Democrat/Republican debate over federal income tax increases or cuts, now or any time seems an opportune occasion to weigh in on the issue. The Democrats claim that tax cuts favor the rich and they are right. The Republicans counter that after all it is the rich who pay the overwhelming bulk of taxes and they are right. What then is ‘fair’?

Federal income tax distributions for the year 2000 show two interesting and important factors. (1) Higher income people pay a greatly disproportionate amount of federal income taxes – and naturally the higher their income the more they pay. (2) Despite the notion widely held (correctly I believe) that this is a country of middle class people, there is a mal-distribution of income. The top 1% of income, almost 1.3 million taxpayers, have an avg. Adjusted Gross Income of $1,042,725 and pay an average of $286,216 in taxes while the bottom 50% of taxpayers (more than 64 million) have an avg. AGI of $13,012 and pay an average of $598 in taxes. And the average income for lower income people as represented by the AGI figure as well as the tax paid figure may be overstated because there is a large but unreported number of people outside this IRS report who, because of their low income, do not pay taxes and are not required to file income tax statements. On the other hand there may be significant unreported cash transactions which would cause the income figure to increase.

What is the answer to the question of what is ‘fair’? My answer is to forget about what is ‘fair’. Fairness is (1) impossible to define, and (2) its perception is in the mind of the disputant. Better in my opinion to turn to an objective analysis of federal taxes as explained by the 1940’s to 1970’s economist, Abba Learner, who in 1959 - 1965 taught economics at Michigan State University. According to Prof. Learner, except for relatively minor taxes e.g., the so called ‘sin’ taxes - tax on alcohol and tobacco to discourage consumption, there are two reasons for federal taxes. (1) To redistribute income and (2) take money out of circulation to keep too many dollars from chasing too few goods and services - in other words to keep inflation under control. No, federal taxes are not levied to pay for government spending per se (see Everybody’s Business: A Re-examination of Current Assumptions in Economics and Public Policy by Abba P. Lerner). That is why the current claim, mostly by Democrats, that tax cuts should not be enacted now or at the very most should be minimal since we have an ever growing federal deficit is bogus. The economy needs the stimulus that tax cuts would provide and the bigger the better so long as this does not reignite inflation. We have been in a period of relative low inflation although currently inflation is becoming a greater risk. Forget the deficit so long as inflation is low. We are not saddling future generations with our debt. Just who are these government obligations called bills, notes and bonds owed to? Some foreigners it is true, especially the Chinese, but for the most part owed to Americans - like me for instance. In Lerner’s words: “We owe the deficit to ourselves.”

What is the best way to frame the tax cut debate? First thing is not to turn it into class warfare rhetoric the way some Democrat politicians, especially John Edwards, are doing. Across the board cuts for all taxpayers should be made and since higher income people pay the most in taxes, they should get the higher cuts – not in percentage necessarily, but in amount. To be bluntly candid about it, to varying degrees, people in descending order of tax payments are being subsidized by those who pay more tax to the point that those who pay no federal income taxes are given a free ride and those who even collect money via the so called, ‘Earned Income Credit’ are paid to ride. That is the way it is, which is not to say it is fiscally, socially, or morally wrong, but the reality of it should be recognized and admitted.

The issue of whether there should be such a big disparity in income is a different subject. Some incomes are skewed from a pure free marketplace determination by tax policies which affect enterprises such as professional sports for example. Without businesses being able to expense ticket and sponsorship fees and thereby being able to lower their own taxes, salaries for professional athletes probably would not be quite as high as they are. A major problem in this regard would to decide what are to be allowed as expense items and what are not. In fits and starts, there have been efforts made that discriminate in what is allowable and what is not. Remember the ‘three martini lunch’ brouhaha of the Carter presidential years? Then there is the issue of people who spend many years of sacrifice and depredation to eventually arrive in high income levels only to be ‘punished’ for their efforts by high taxes. Indeed making judgments on who ‘deserves’ high income and who does not is something best left to socialists and communists and other adherents of failed economic systems. To even ask the question of whether, for example, Ray Romano of the hit television show, Everybody Loves Raymond, deserved his $1.8 million fee for each ½ hour program is to exhibit a profound ignorance of free enterprise economics. He deserved it if the marketplace supported it and it seemed to.

Recently the increasingly pixilated Warren Buffett has stated that the top 10% or so of U.S.A. taxpayers should pay more and our tax structure is unfair because his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. Let’s analyze this latter assertion. His secretary draws a salary so, apodictically, she pays at the putative income tax rate. Buffett draws no salary so let us say he derives all of his income from long term capital gains. The capital gains rate in the U.S.A. is currently 15% (5% for people in the lowest two income tax brackets). Buffett’s net wealth is estimated at $55 billion or so. With the financial market downturn so far this year (2008) let us round that down to $50 billion and supposing a realized capital gains withdrawal of .1% from all of his assets he would have a pre-tax income of $50 million and a post- tax income of $50 x .85 = $42 ½ million. I could live on that. Incidentally the long term capital gains rate in Belgium, Germany, and Hong Kong, exempli grātiā is zero and in the idyllic country of Iceland (it was rated the best country in which to live in 2007) the C.G. rate is 10%. Wouldn’t you know that the C.G. rate in socialistic Sweden is 30% so perhaps Buffett should move to Stockholm.

If Buffett feels guilty for not paying more federal tax I would like to assure him that he may give the IRS as much money as he desires and they will accept it so long as he makes clear he is voluntarily over paying his taxes.

Buffett is a bit eldritch in other aspects as well. He married his wife Susan in 1952 when he was 22 years old. She died of a stroke (she also had cancer) in 2004. In 2006 when he was 76 he married 60 year old Astrid Menks, from Latvia who had been his assistant and companion for 20 years. What about his wife? They had lived apart since 1977 and allegedly did not disapprove of her husband’s liaison with his paramour.

As an addendum consider the following facts: In 2006 the bottom 50% of federal income tax payers (65 million) paid $27 billion in taxes - 3.5% of all income taxes paid. The ExxonMobil corporation paid $41 billion worldwide in taxes that year. In other words, ExxonMobil paid $14 billion more in taxes than 65 million U.S. tax payers.

MARBURY V. MADISON 43

2008-01-09T17:46:00.000-08:00

One of the most important Supreme Court decisions was Marbury v. Madison in 1803. I knew what it was, but did not know the story behind it. Perhaps you did, if not however, you may be interested to read about it now.

John Adams, a New Englander from Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson, a Southerner from Virginia were revolutionary period colleagues and friends during the founding of the Republic even though they could not have been more different in personalities, temperament, and politics. It was perhaps inevitable they would have a falling out. Jefferson was the Vice-President of the United States when Adams was President from 1797-1801 on the basis of Jefferson receiving the second most electoral votes even though they belong to different political parties. When Jefferson challenged Adams for the presidency and won in 1801 not only was the rupture in their friendship complete, they became bitter enemies.

During the last days of Adams’s one presidential term the majority Federalist Party in congress passed legislation greatly expanding the number of federal judges including justices-of-the-peace. Adams proceeded to name people of his political persuasion to these positions. A few weeks before Adams had named his Secretary of State and 2nd cousin of Thomas Jefferson, Virginian John Marshall as Chief Justice of the then six-man US Supreme Court (the court was increased to the present number of nine in 1869). Marshall thus became the 4th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing President Washington appointed Oliver Ellsworth (John Jay of course was the 1st).

Adams was literally still writing out the names of the people he appointed as judges on his last day in office. As Secretary of State, John Marshall had the task to deliver these written commissions to each individual. Because he simply did not have time to deliver all of them he gave half to his brother James to deliver. His brother, apparently being less conscientious or less industrious, did not deliver all of them. When the new administration came in President Jefferson told his Secretary of State, James Madison, not to deliver the remaining 17 commissions.

Ten months later William Marbury who had been appointed Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia took his case to the Supreme Court. The Jefferson dominated congress passed a law canceling the next session of the Supreme Court. When the court finally convened 14 months later the first case it took up was Marbury v. Madison. Marshall, being an astute lawyer, realized this was an important case for the nascent court to consider. He knew if he refused to take the case the court would look weak, but if he took it and ruled in favor of Marbury he also knew that the Jefferson administration would simply ignore the court’s order in which case the court would likewise appear weak and ineffectual. So what to do. Marshall formulated a strategy to strengthen the court at a time when it was very much the weakest and least respected part of government relative to the legislative and executive branches. His solution defined the genius of John Marshall and set the Supreme Court on the path to becoming an equal to the legislative and executive branches.

In the court’s long and detailed decision Marshall scolded the Jefferson administration by writing that Marbury had been treated very badly by having his commission illegally withheld and he should be given it now. It looked like Marbury had won and the Jefferson administration had lost. But wait; there was more to the decision. Marshall also ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction in this case - then came the key to the ingenuity of the decision. Marshall wrote that the law expanding the judiciary was unconstitutional thus establishing the precedent of judicial review by the Supreme Court. Article I section 7 of the constitution clearly gave the president power to veto legislation and the congress power to override a presidential veto. It was John Marshall who gave the Supreme Court power to invalidate laws passed by congress and the president by implicit, not explicit, language in the constitution. Not article III which authorized the Supreme Court nor in any other place in the constitution is the power of judicial review mentioned.

When the decision came down, some of the Jeffersonians thought they had won. Thomas Jefferson however quickly realized that in fact he had not won, but was caught on the horns of a dilemma. He did not want it to appear he had been dragooned by the court into giving Marbury his commission and besides he did not want more Federalists on the bench with lifetime appointments, but by not granting the commission he was implicitly conceding the court the power of judicial review. He did his best by seemingly ignoring the ruling; however a precedent had been set which would be built upon in future court decisions. It is instructive though that John Marshall, who the longest serving (34 years) Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, never again declared a law passed by congress and the president unconstitutional. He had extricated the court from a difficult position in Marbury v. Madison and he did not want to press his luck.

BLACK SWANS 42

2007-12-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

This essay is based on the 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960 - ). It is hardly an obscure tome, having been on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. Before I get to the essence of this essay I believe explaining what the term “Black Swan” means and saying a few words about the author would be in order.

It was once thought in the Old World that only white swans existed. Then from Australia came the realization that there were black swans. And no, they were not white swans made black by bootblack or any other artificial coloring medium. After millennia of observations in the West of millions of white swans, the sighting of one black swan was enough to invalidate this long and firmly held belief. In a broader sense then A Black Swan is a sudden, monumental, and completely unexpected event. WWI, WWII, and 9/11 were Black Swans. If one were to win a multi-million dollars lottery that would be a personal Black Swan (Black Swans are not all negative, although given the troubles experienced by some of these huge lottery winners, this might also be negative).

But a Black Swan is more than this – it goes to the heart of and challenges the putative acceptance of Gaussian probabilities. Least you think Gaussian or bell shaped probability functions are theoretical only and not important in real life, then consider that not only mathematics, but engineering, medicine, social sciences, economomics, the insurance industry, Wall Street, and other fields of science and the arts use Gaussian probabilities in their calculations and predictions. I will get much deeper into this later in the essay.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an odd name to the Western ear. In fact he grew up in a family from the Greco-Syrian community from what was the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria and which was incorporated into the country of Lebanon after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This part of the Middle East was relatively stable until the last quarter of the 20th century. The mosaic of cultures and religions in this region consisted of Christians of all varieties – Maronites (The father of the reputed richest man in the world, Mexican Carlos Slim Helú, was a Maronite Christian who emigrated from Lebanon to Mexico), Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, Byzantine Catholics, in addition to a few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades; Muslims (Shiites and Sunnis); Druzes; and a few Jews. The Taleb family had been successful for generations. On his mother’s side both his grandfather and great-grandfather were deputy prime ministers of Lebanon and on his father’s side (his father was an oncologist) his grandfather was a Supreme Court Justice. In 1861 his four times great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.

The Civil War between Christians and Muslims which began in 1975 came completely out of the blue and, although Taleb did not realize it at the time, would later contribute to his philosophy of the Black Swan. At that time people would say with seeming confidence that the war would last at most just a few weeks. It went on for 15 years.

Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D in management science from the University of Paris.

It is difficult to define the métier of Taleb. Clearly he is a polymath. He has worked as a securities analysis on Wall Street, a Visiting Professor of Marketing at the London Business School, the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center. He previously authored a best selling book titled Fooled by Randomness which has been published in 20 languages.

Predicting the future based upon the past is universally done, yet there are pitfalls in this. Consider the turkey which has been fed for 1000 consecutive days. This avian creature has no logical reason to believe this pattern will not continue indefinitely. Think of the surprise awaiting the hapless bird when on Wednesday, day 1001, the process starts for making the turkey the center of attraction for the feast the next day. Sacre blu!

Explaining historical events in hindsight is facile and far from convincing since, for the most part, nobody could or does predict what eventually unfolds beforehand. In a very general way there may be some basis for assigning cause and effect to certain events. One may reasonably hold that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 contributed to WWI which in turn led to WWII. The Prussians won that 1870 war, temporarily occupied Paris, extracted a billion dollars in reparations, and expropriated previously held French territory. After being on the winning side of WWI, the French imposed onerous conditions on the Germans at least partially because of what happened to them in 1870. In WWII the Germans reacted to what had happened to them after WWI with a fury that was unjustified, to say the least, yet without the dour economic conditions which occurred in Germany after WWI, WWII may not have happened.

Even so, after the Napoleonic conflicts, except for the 1870 Franco-Prussian casus belli, the European continent experienced a period of peace that would belie any anticipation of the carnage that would result in WWI, The Great War of 1914-19, that would be the deadliest conflict, until then, in the history of mankind.

In the summer of 1982 large American banks lost many billions of dollars as countries in South and Central America defaulted at the same time on loans made by these banks. The early 1990’s brought the now defunct savings and loan industry meltdown which required a taxpayer funded bailout of close to half a trillion dollars. Now in 2007 it is the turn of the home mortgage lenders and lendees in what is called the “sub-prime” market, to require many billions of dollars in another bailout. There are obviously serious problems with standard Gaussian risk assessment tools employed by the people in these industries.

With the following example many people would get it wrong: A town has one large hospital and one small one. On a given day in one of the hospitals 60% of the births were boys. Which one was it likely to be? The correct answer is that the smaller hospital would more likely have the bigger difference in parity of births because the sampling would more likely be smaller and therefore more prone to deviate from the average.

An acronym used in medical literature is NED (No Evidence of Disease). There is no such thing as END (Evidence of No Disease), yet Taleb related that during a routine cancer examination he was told by the doctor that “There is evidence of no cancer.” When Taleb asked him how he knew he said, “The scan is negative.” I have never heard a scientist or even a medical doctor make a claim that observational absence of something was evidence that it did not exist, yet who am I to say that Taleb remembered incorrectly?

We see the obvious and visible consequences of certain actions, not invisible and less obvious ones. When Islamic terrorists flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, flew an airplane into the Pentagon, and caused an airplane to crashed in Pennsylvania, approximately 3000 people died. In the final three months or so of that year an estimated 1000 people also died as a result of the terrorist attack. How so? These were the people who, out of fear of flying, chose to drive on the country’s highways and because of the much higher mortality rate versus flying became additional casualties.

There are drugs which can prolong people’s lives, yet occasionally someone will have a fatal reaction to that drug. When this risk is known will doctors still prescribe this drug to their patients? Many will not because of the threat of lawsuits by the few thereby claiming invisible victims for the many.

A coin which we are told is “fair”, that is to say, it has an equal probability of either being heads or tails, is flipped and comes up heads 99 times in a row. What is the probability of it being heads on the 100th flip? Theoretically the odds would be 50%, but what would the practical answer be? Given that the coin has come up the same 99 times in a row it would be far more likely that the given initial conditions are wrong, i.e. the coin is not “fair” and therefore the probability of it being heads again is far more likely.

Three relatively recent technologies that have had the most impact on the world today are the computer, the internet, and the laser. They were all unpredicted, unplanned, and unappreciated – they were all Black Swans. In fact, in terms of their anticipation and utility, almost all of the great discoveries in the world were Black Swans. Occasionally there is a discovery which was predicted, although its use not even close to being fully realized. After the invention of the wireless (radio), in 1908 someone predicted that people would be able to carry around a device, a portable telephone, to communicate with each other over wide ranges of distances. That was remarkable insight given that earth satellites and microwave towers were not even dreamed of. It was the rare exception. It was what might be called a White Swan.

In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed that one of his bacteria plates which had been contaminated with a mold had the odd effect of clearing a zone around itself in which the bacteria did not grow. He assigned so little importance to it that he turned to the then popular investigation of sulfa as an anti-bacterial drug. It wasn’t until years later that Fleming got interested in the strange properties of the mold. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945 for his contribution in the discovery of penicillin.

One of philospher Karl Popper’s central insights is that in order to predict historical events you need to anticipate technological innovation which is fundamentally unpredictable.

Henri Poincaré was one of the first mathematicians/philosphers to formulate the limits unlinearities put on forecasting.

Predicting the first impact of billiard balls on a table is not difficult given the initial state of the billiard balls, the table, and the impact of the cue. In predicting the 56th impact every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be accounted for in the calculations.

In the 1960’s an MIT meteorologist produced a computer model of weather dymanics that ran a simulation projecting a weather system a fews days in advance. Later he tried to repeat the same simulation with the same model and what he thought were the same input data. He got wildly different results. He initially thought he had a computer bug or a calculation error. Subsequently he realized the different results were caused by small roundings in the input parameters. This became known as the “butterfly effect” since a butterfly moving its wings in India could cause a hurricane in New York two years later.

In 1931 Belgian Roman Catholic priest/cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, postulated that the universe started as a primeval atom. Astronomer George Gamow expanded upon this idea and predicted in 1948 there should be background radiation left over from the Big Bang (The term was coined sardonically by Fred Hoyle who believed in the steady-state theory of the universe). In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow of Bell Telephone Laboratories were working on a radiometer to be used in radio astronomy and satellite communications. They kept getting an anomalous background noise which was of the same intensity wherever it was pointed in the sky. It turned out they had inadvertantly discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang. It was a Black Swan. In 1978 they received the Nobel Prize in physics.

Our intuition about nonlinear multiplicative effects is rather weak. According to the story (possibly apocryphal), the inventor of the chessboard requested the following compensation for his invention: one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on. The king granted his request thinking he was asking for a mere pittance. The king was outsmarted because the total amount of rice was more than all of the possible rice reserves in the world (2 to the 63rd power = 9.2234….times 10 to the 18 power + 2 to the 62nd power = 4.6117….times 10 to the 18th power, etc.)!

The empirical methods of the Greeks of two millennia ago are being revived. Before the role of bacteria in disease was known, doctors distained hand washing because it made no sense to them despite the evidence of a meaningful decrease in hospital deaths when hygienic methods were used. Similarly it may not “make sense” that acupuncture works, but if pushing a needle into someone’s toe systematically produce relief from pain then it could be there are functions too complicated for us to understand, so why not do it while we keep an open mind on the subject.

The notion of asymmetric outcomes is central to the alternative of Gaussian probability. The unknown will always be by definition unknown. However one can guess how it might affect them and therefore base one’s decisions on that.

The mathematician and philospher Blasé Pascal proposed the following: I do not whether God exists, but I have nothing to gain by being an atheist if God does not exist, whereas I have a great deal to lose if He does exist. Hence this justifies my belief in God. Theologically this makes no sense because God would surely know if someone’s belief in Him were so contrived and self-serving. Outside of theology it makes a great deal of sense. It eliminates the need to understand the probabilities of a rare event; rather we can concentrate on the payoffs and benefits of an event if it takes place. The probabilities of very rare events are not computable; the effects of an event on us are considerably easier for us to ascertain. We can have a clear idea of the consequences of an event, even if we do not know how likely it is to occur. We don’t know the odds of an earthquake, but we can imagine the effects it would have on San Francisco.

Before the currency was replaced by the euro, the German 10 deutschmark bill contained a portrait of Carl Friedrich Gauss and a representation of his Gaussian bell shaped curve. There is irony here because the reichmark, as it was then called, went from four per dollar to four trillion per dollar in just a few years in the 1920’s. In the random fluctuations of currencies there is no possible accounting for such a colossal deviation from the norm with Gaussian probability distributions.

Casino owners understand the principle of not relying on Gaussian probability distributions by limiting the size of the bets for each gambler. They will take limited bets from many individuals while rejecting very large bets from a few. No casino is going to lose a billion dollars on a single bet.

Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin and Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, was blessed with no mathematical baggage, but he had a rare obsession with measurement. Galton applied the bell curve to areas like genetics and heredity, in which its use was justified. But his enthusiasm helped thrust nascent statistical methods into social issues.

Galileo Galilei said that the Great Book of Nature is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Taleb asks: “Was Galileo legally blind? Mountains are not triangles or pyramids; trees are not circles; straight lines are almost never seen anywhere.” I ask, how could such a normally perceptive and original thinker as Galileo be so self-deluded?

The problem of the circularity of statistics is as follows: How can we tell if we have enough data to put forth a hypothesis? From the probability distribution. If it is a Gaussian bell curve then a few points will suffice. And how do we know the distribution is Gaussian? Well, from the data. So we need the data to tell us what the probability distribution is, and a probability distribution to tell us how many data we need.

As measured by the S&P 500, by removing the 10 biggest one-day moves in the stock market in the last 50 years there is a huge difference in returns – and yet conventional financial analysis interprets these one-day jumps as mere anomalies. Similarly if the top 40 best single market days were missed in the last 10 years one’s market returns would be greatly reduced even though 21 of those days came during the brutal 2000-2002 bear market. The equities market is too dominated by Black Swans to allow successful market timing.

The entire statistical business confuses absence of proof with proof of absence. You need only one single observation to reject the Gaussian, but millions of observations will not fully confirm the validity of a Gaussian distribution. Why? Because the Gaussian bell curve disallows large deviations, but non-Gaussian distributions, the alternative, do not disallow long quiet periods.

“Forget everything you have ever heard in college statistics or probability theory. If you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.”

“If you ever took a (dull) statistics class in college, did not understand much of what the professor was excited about, and wondered what “standard deviation” meant, there is nothing to worry about. The notion of standard deviation is meaningless…..”

“Standard deviations do not exist outside the Guassian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Guassian family (which includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson Law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and average) is sufficient to describe. You need nothing else. The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded.”

“This monstrosity called the Gaussian bell curve is not Gauss’s doing. Although he worked on it, he was a mathematician dealing with a theoretical point, not making claims about the structure of reality like statistical-minded scientists. The bell curve was mainly the concoction of a gambler, Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), a French Calvinist refugee who spent much of his life in London, though speaking heavily accented English.”

These are the words of Taleb. He has a point, but in my opinion he goes a bit too far in rejecting Gaussian probability functions. Where there are extreme deviations from the normal as in the examples of currency inflation or in single day stock market moves clearly Gaussian distributions are useless, but if, for example, one would measure the length of squirrel tails, there would be a standard bell shaped Gaussian curve. Nature does not always reject Gaussian distributions. However, Taleb is certainly correct in aserting that overwhelmingly most monumental events are Black Swans.

Free Speech – Free For Whom? 41

2007-11-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the inane and insane writings of the beyond egregious University of Colorado professor, the ersatz American Indian, Ward Churchill, the issue of “free speech” has been freely, so to speak, bandied about by commentators on the right, left, and in the middle. Interestingly, although this story had been all over talk radio, the internet, Fox News, and in many newspapers, there was only one brief mention on ABC television and none at all on CBS and NBC. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson: The mainstream news media have an absolute talent separating wheat from chaff, then throwing away the wheat and planting the chaff.

Fact is there is no such thing as “free speech”, nor should there be. A rather provocative statement would you not say? Especially for one who thankfully and appreciatively lives in a representative democratic society – the greatest one on earth in my opinion. Yet, it is a statement I think I can rationally and logically defend. I must say I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “There is not a truth I fear or wish unknown to the world.”

For openers let’s consider the U.S. Constitution. That is the basis for our freedom of speech is it not? Well, what does the constitution actually say? The 1st Amendment to the Constitution (the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 and are called the Bill of Rights) states, “Congress shall make no law…….abridging the freedom of speech…….” Congress is defined as the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. There is no mention in the Constitution about states, counties, municipalities, businesses, associations, universities, etcetera being circumscribed in limiting someone’s speech.

As a matter of course most of us, as a society, tend to ignore the constitution when it suits our purpose. For example, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to declare War…..” The United States has fought the Korean War, Vietnam War, First Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and now Second Iraq War, yet Congress has not declared war since December 8, 1941 ( the vote was unanimous except for pacifist Representative Jeannette Rankin [1880-1973] of Montana who was the first woman elected to Congress). Representative from Texas Dr. Ron Paul (obstetrics/gynecology) is the only current member to object to Congress having abrogated its authority to declare war to the president. And I don’t see people demonstrating in the streets over this issue the way the Ukrainians did when their democratic election for prime minister was in the process of being stolen.

At other times some people invoke what they perceive to be in the Constitution when it is convenient for them whether it is done ipse dixit or not. Unfortunately and importantly many of these people are judges; especially federal judges.

For those who still insist there are practically, short of endangering public safety, no limits on speech without consequence, even if it is only implicit in the Constitution, you should consider the sanctions and/or contumely which were imposed or heaped on the following: Trent Lott, Robert Byrd, Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Don Imus, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Andy Rooney, Bill Maher, and Larry Summers (It is notable there is nary a woman on the list. An amalgam of Al Campanis and Larry Summers might say women lack the “necessities” to be top notch mathematicians or physicists, but I would say when it comes to discretion and good sense in speech women apparently have a distinct advantage over Neanderthals; that is to say men). There was no deus ex machina to save these men from discomfiture and embarrassment and I for one do not believe they were treated too harshly, possibly excepting Trent Lott. Even he may have deserved it on the basis of stupidity – after all he is a professional and long time politician and decidedly should have known better.

Then there is the aphorism spoken by former four term governor of New York and unsuccessful 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith, “There ain’t no free lunch.” There might be a lesson in there as applied to speech.

By all means indulge yourself in the exercise of free speech. Your lot might be to gather scorn and pejorative comment. Still, consider it a fair bargain for the sheer joy of saying what you want, however dopy or misguided. What curmudgeonly lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson had to say on the subject seems a bit harsh, yet may be realistic: “Every man [person] has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man [person] has a right to knock him down for it.”

Too Much Freedom? You Bet! 40

2007-11-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

At the start I want to make it clear that I am talking about the West and especially the good old USA, not countries in general, especially Islamic or other totalitarian societies where there are indeed deficiencies of freedoms.

And let’s dispose of the mantras where security/safety and freedom are positioned as polar opposites. An example is the aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Liberals might posit it advantageous that absolute freedom was preserved for everyone, including the brigands who would dispatch them to the “undiscovered country”, but I would think it a poor bargain. Give me not “liberty or death”; give me life and a little less liberty for those who would do us ill.

Liars (sorry, I mean lawyers, I seem to frequently confuse those two words – I wonder why?) who claim their clients were innocent yesterday, are innocent today, and will certainly be innocent tomorrow are not doing the law abiding, decent, and considerate rest of us any favors. We pay in treasure and blood when criminals are either not convicted or subjected to shorter incarceration than they deserve and which is not conducive for the non commission of crime.

How many people are actually assaulted, restrained, or even incommoded by law enforcement other than felons and malefactors? I have been on this planet for more than four score minus ten years and not only have I not been harassed or harangued by the gendarme, but I do not know anyone who was unjustly subjected to same. The ones who seem to suffer or feign suffering the most in regard to what they interpret as overzealous laws and law enforcement are the lachrymose, hand wringing, hysterical social liberals. For witnessing such an entertaining spectacle as these posturing wimps I would almost, but not quite, be willing to endure a really overly aggressive or even repressive regime.

In 2004 there were approximately 16,500 people murdered in the United States. That does not include the hundred of thousands who were senselessly and unjustifiably beaten and crippled by criminal cretins. True, some of those were miscreants who received proper punishment; still the large majority was innocent men, women, and children who were blameless and tragic victims. Does anyone seriously doubt that with fewer nonsensical restraints on law enforcement and indeed on individuals in their own or someone else’s defense these numbers would be reduced? I thank God I live in Texas where one may dispatch to inferno home intruders intent on larceny and mayhem. There are some states where, as difficult as it is to believe, the home occupants are first legally required to try to flee rather than confront these vandals and villains before attempting to send them to perdition. How do you like them apples? From the foregoing one might conclude that I am advocating for more freedom not less. Yes, more freedom in defense of life, limb, and property, but certainly less freedom and fewer rights for the criminally inclined. Least you think I am exaggerating on this point about criminals being emboldened by lax laws and insufficient law enforcement then let me relate the following stories which were in the news in 2006: (1) In London, England there are gangs of juvenile punks, called “hoodies” because they wear hooded sweatshirts, who rampage through suburban parks destroying property, knocking down bike riders, and threatening picnickers. On buses they laugh while punching passengers in the face and recording the attack on their mobile phones. In some cases they were imitating such extreme-stunt shows as MTV’s Jackass. They beat a 16 year old girl unconscious while recording the attack on a mobile phone and messaging it to their friends. A 41 year old man who had fallen asleep at a bus stop was permanently disfigured and burned over 22% of his body when these punks set him on fire. A 5 year old boy escaped death after being lured from his yard by these teen age cretins who placed a noose around his neck and attempted to hang him. A 49 year old man was left brain damaged and in a coma after he challenged the gang youths who were throwing stones at his car. A Manchester schoolteacher used a pellet gun to fire warning shots at teens that had repeatedly harassed her family and were vandalizing her son’s car. The schoolteacher was fired from her job which she had held for 25 years and received a 6 month prison sentence for the illegal use of a firearm! Is this an “Alice in Wonderland” reality or what?

(2) There is a video game called Grand Theft Auto which has sold 35 million copies and grossed $2 billion worldwide to date. The objective of this interactive “game” is to commit as much virtual murder, mayhem, robbery, and violent anti-social acts as possible. Included in the interactive activities are forcibly stealing cars; decapitating people, complete with simulated squiring blood; beating people to a pulp; and shooting gaping holes in cops. One virtual scene is a police station where the “fun” is to kill as many cops as are encountered and then escaping by stealing a police cruiser. The defense the producers of these abominable videos games fall back on is the claim that it does not cause people to actually commit these acts in real life. What is beyond dispute is that kids with other at-risk factors, e.g. being from dysfunctional families, absent parents, delinquent friends with the same background, and the offspring of criminals, among other risks, are negatively influenced by repeatedly playing this video. There are examples of kids who after being arrested admitted they were influenced by this video game.

(3) Young male motorcyclists travel at high speeds and perform acrobatic stunts on public highways while being video taped by their friends. The videos or DVD’s are then sold. Incredibly there seems to be a market for this insane and criminal spectacle. Often these stunts are done in traffic, putting motorists at high risk and scaring the hell out of them as any sensible person would be. Additionally these motorcyclists challenge the police in their police cars. At times with the motorcyclists traveling well over 100 miles per hour, sometimes the police abandon the chase because not to do so would not only put their own lives at risk, but other motorists as well. In an interview with a television journalist one of these lame-brained motorcycle morons allowed as how he thought, if one could call it thinking, that nobody had the right to set speed limits on public highways. And he said that he didn’t believe any motorist would get hurt when a motorcycle occasionally got out of control. Of course there are motorists who have gotten killed or seriously injured when the motorcycles sans rider have gone careening and careering out of control, but that idiot could not or would not admit it.

(4) In 2006 the US Supreme Court voided two death penalty convictions – one in Texas. There was never any doubt about the guilt of these two murderers. The court ruled that they did not receive a “fair” trial. These decisions were widely applauded by liberals. Neither they nor the court commented on whether the murdered victims received a “fair” hearing from their vicious murders. At the risk of sounding highly provocative and perhaps to some even unhinged, I must say I do not give a damn whether anyone gets a “fair” trial so long as there is no rational and reasonable doubt as to their guilt.

In 2007 the US Supreme Court, in effect, put a hold on executions until it could render a decision on whether the method of execution by states using fatal chemical injection was “cruel and inhumane.” As could be expected, one of the plaintiffs in this case was the ACLU (American Criminal Liberties Union). No decision has yet been made, but I wonder if whether the victims of these heinous criminals were treated in a “cruel and inhumane” manner will be considered.

Whether the robbers barons Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom; John Rigas & son of Adelphia; Gary Winnick of Global Crossing; and Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow of Enron had “fair” trials troubles me not a whit. These crooks have stolen from and caused equity prices of their companies to decrease by billions of dollars inflicting financial pain and woe on hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders. I am an unaffected and impartial bystander, yet I would punish them with the maximum fines and prison sentences possible by law. The 80 year old cancer patient John Rigas was given 15 years by the judge with the proviso that if, at any point, medical authorities told the judge that Rigas had only 3 months or so to live he might be released from prison. I would have given that old bastard 30 years in the slammer and if he said he could not do it because of his advanced age and ill health I would have told him then he must do as much as he can.

If anyone wants to disagree with my thesis that we in the West have too much rather than too little freedom or I am engaging in a bit too much Sturm und Drang, then by all means respond with your arguments. The only caveat I would make is that your response be well reasoned with valid examples.

WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND VOTING 39

2007-10-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

This essay may raise a few hackles, especially on the distaff side of the human spectrum. Don’t blame the messenger – I just try to go where the data lead.

For a long time there has been speculation by economists such as Dr. John Lott and others why the government began growing when it did. Excluding wartime, the federal government comprised 2% to 3% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) until WWI. In the 1920’s non-military federal spending began steadily growing. There is a widely held premise that the growth of the federal government was caused by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to counter the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This is demonstrably not true (see my essay FDR). What can be logically postulated is that the growth of federal spending was triggered by women’s suffrage. Let me attempt to make that case.

In his 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, economist Dr. John R. Lott states that women have voted differently from men as has been shown by polls for many decades. In the presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 the difference in the political parties men voted for compared to women was in double digits in six of those seven elections, culminating in a 22% margin in 2000. Naturally women voted for Democrats and men for Republicans for reasons I will explain. If women’s votes had been excluded (perhaps a not unwarranted pretermitted action – don’t get riled, just joking) Republicans would have won every presidential election but one from 1968 – 2004 (1996 being the exception).

On average women are more risk averse than men and therefore they are more supportive of government programs to attempt to insure against certain risks. Yes, we all know women who don’t hesitate to take chances in sports and other aspects of life far more than some wimpy men, but I am referring to averages. Single women whose income is lower than their single male counterparts tend to vote for the political party (Democrat) which favors higher income taxes. When these same women marry and their husband’s or their combined incomes rise, they tend to shift to the Republican Party.

The 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote was ratified on August 18, 1920. That is not when the majority of women in this country was allowed to vote. Women’s suffrage was first granted in some Western states (Wyoming 1869; Utah 1870; Colorado 1893; Idaho 1896). Eight more states granted this right from 1910 to 1914, and another 17 states from 1917 to 1919. Therefore women in 29 states could vote before the 19th amendment became the law of the land.

As women voted in greater and greater numbers the size of government expanded. The question is did women’s suffrage cause the expansion of government or did some other political or social change cause government to expand? Happily there is a circumstance which provides a unique answer. Of the 19 states which had not passed laws granting women the right to vote, nine approved the constitutional amendment while ten had it imposed upon them. If some other factor caused both a desire for larger government and a desire for women’s suffrage, then government should have grown only in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. But this was not the case – after the approval of women’s suffrage, a similar growth pattern was seen in both groups. This is an important point so allow me to elaborate. Assume an unknown event ‘A’ causes both the presumed independent events of ‘B’ a desire for women’s suffrage and ‘C’ a desire for an expansion of government. If this situation occurred then for the states which did not exhibit a compelling velleity for suffrage there would be no logical reason for a concomitant expansion of government.

There is a great deal of genuine confusion and indeed obfuscation concerning the 2000 presidential election. The Democrat left came out with the mantra that ‘Bush was selected, not elected.’ That is bogus; however it is legitimate to say that Bush was an accidental president. I will explain. The Bush/Cheney ticket won Florida by 537 votes and therefore all of Florida’s electoral votes and with it the presidency. In my opinion the Al Gore team made a strategic mistake in calling for three heavily Democrat voting precincts for recounts instead of opting for a recount in the whole state. Their idea was that they would have a better chance of gaining the necessary votes in the selected precincts rather than in all precincts – still if they had called for a complete state recount, after all, every vote in Florida was equal, the Republicans could hardly have objected and, who knows, the outcome might have been different.

After several weeks of ill tempered arguing, quibbling, quarrelling, hassling, name calling, and unseemly ad captandum vulgus between the Republicans and Democrats the Florida Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, declared the recount over according to her interpretation of Florida law with the vote margin down to, if I remember correctly, 367 in favor of Bush/Cheney. Quite naturally the Democrats appealed to the Democrat dominated Florida Supreme Court which ruled that the recount should go on. The Republicans in turn appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which, and this is what many people forget, voted 7-2 (with only the doctrinaire liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens descending) to remand the case, Bush v. Gore, back to the Florida Supreme Court for that court to uphold Florida law. Despite a warning by the Democrat Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, the full court ignored what the U.S. Supreme Court had said and ruled that the recounting could go on.

When the case was again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court this time the ruling was to end the recount with the breakdown 5 to 4 on a political basis with the four liberal members, Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer voting to allow the recount to go on. The official vote count difference then went back to 537. A month or two after the final Supreme Court decision, the Miami Herald, CBS, and the New York Times reviewed the results of the election in Florida and could find no evidence that either there was widespread fraud or that a recount would have given the election to the Gore/Lieberman ticket. Therefore the original voting result, the recount, and a postmortem by a hardly conservative news media consortium all gave the election to Bush/Cheney. It may be fairly stated that Bush was an accidental president in that the vote difference in over 7,000,000 votes cast was within the margin of error by any system of voting, be it paper ballots, punch cards, optical scan ballots, or electronic machine voting.

Did voter fraud and voter discrimination occur during the 2000 election in Florida? The answer is yes. There has never been a national election or perhaps any state or local election where voter fraud has not occurred. And in Florida in 2000 it did, although it was not what you may think.

In every election there is a problem called “non-voted” ballots. This is where there is either a vote for more than one candidate in a single race or for none. In Florida’s 2000 election, among others, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Mary Francis Berry, then chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Right Commission, claimed there was a clear pattern of suppressing the African-American vote. They were right, but not in the way they alleged. There were 22,270 registered African-American Republicans voters in Florida in 2000 - about one for every 20 registered African-American Democrats. The African-American Republicans were 54% to 66% more likely than the average African-American voter to have a ballot declared invalid. Additionally, the over-all rate of non-voted ballots was 14% higher when the county election supervisor was a Democrat and 31% higher when the supervisor was an African-American Democrat. It would appear that George W. Bush was hurt more by the loss of African-American votes than was Al Gore.

The news media made early presidential calls in 1980, 1996, and 2000. During the Republican landslide victory in 1980, NBC named Reagan the winner well before voting was closed on the West Coast. In the 1996 election contest between Clinton/Gore and Dole/? (Who was the Republican vice-presidential candidate? Yes, it was Jack Kemp), now it was the Republicans turn to cry foul because the TV networks called the elections for Clinton before the pools closed on the West Coast. Given the size of both election victories it is highly unlikely that the outcome of either was affected. In the 2000 election all of the major networks erroneously declared that the Democrats had won Florida and further stated that the polls in Florida were closed. But all of the polls were not closed. The 10 counties of the western Florida Panhandle were on Central time, not Eastern time like the rest of Florida. Calling the Florida election an hour before those polls were closed doubtless caused some voters in the heavily Republican western Panhandle to forgo voting. Democrat strategist Bob Beckel estimated that the early news media call cost Bush 8000 votes. Comparing the drop off rate in voting in that last hour in the western Panhandle counties with the rest of Florida and with past elections yields an estimated loss of circa 7500 votes for Geo. W. Bush. As in 1980 and 1996 the result of the election in 2000 was not altered by the early calling of voting by the news media, but the margin of victory might have been large enough to have spared the country and the political parties the anguish which resulted. I rest my case.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 38

2007-10-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

This essay is about crime and punishment, but it has nothing to do with the novel Crime and Punishment by 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Rather it is based on the 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t by American economist Dr. John R. Lott.

A fundamental tenet of economics is that if something is made more expensive, people will do less of it and conversely, if cheaper, more of it. There is no earthly reason this principle should not apply to crime and punishment. The more certain and harsher the punishment, the less likely the crime will be committed and vice-versa. An example from professional baseball is that the American League has more hit batsmen that the National League, but this only occurred after 1973. Why? The answer is that was the year the American League went to designated hitters for the pitchers. When the American League pitchers had no fear of being hit with a baseball being thrown by the opposing pitchers, they started throwing more beanballs. Of course there were some constraints – the pitcher might be confronted by the hit batsman using his bat to treat the pitcher’s head as a baseball and the pitcher’s team-mates might take exception to being served up a bean ball in retaliation for the pitcher on his team beaning an opposing player. Still, the direct jeopardy to the pitcher was removed.

Speaking of baseball, why are there no women players in the major leagues in this the 21st century? Surely a woman Olympian track star such as Marion Jones-Thomson, a dual citizen of the USA and Belize, could compete with men. And she would be right at home in the steroid milieu of professional baseball.

Violent crime in the United States increased from 1960 to 1991 by an astonishing 372%, well outstripping the population gain. Then just when some academics had predicted even more accelerated rates of additional violent crime, a strange thing happened. The rate of violent crime dropped by 33% from 1991 to 2000 and a similar pattern occurred in Canada. Why the rate of violent crime decreased after 1991 is the subject of this essay.

In their 2005 book FREAKONOMICS (see my essay: FREAKONOMICS – WHAT IS THAT?), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner theorized that the drop in the violent crime rate after 1991 was largely due to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. They posited that many of the abortions after 1973 were performed on young intercity unmarried minority women. Had these unwanted babies been born, by 1991 a disproportion of them would become young violent criminals. This thesis is disputed by John Lott who offers his own views on the reasons for the decrease in violent crimes.

If, as Dr. Lott asserts, abortion and affirmative action policies increased crime, then what decreased it in the 1990’s? There are a number causative factors; one of the main ones could be the U.S. Supreme Court decision to rescind the death penalty ban in 1976. Although ¾ of the states re-imposed the death penalty soon after the Supreme Court ruling, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that significant numbers of criminals started being executed.

Yes, I know that it is a mantra (Hinduism: A word or formula to be recited or sung - from the Sanskrit word for speech) of the left that the death penalty does not deter murderers. That has long been said, is still being said, and will be said in the future. But what is the truth of it? Capital punishment clearly increases the risk to murderers, but is it a deterrent? It is singular is it not that when criminals are convicted of murder, their lawyers, with the concurrence of the convicted, go to great effort in the sentencing phase of the trial to get long term confinement in prison rather than a death sentence?

One of the most dangerous widespread jobs is that of police officer. In 2005 of the nearly 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States, 55 were murdered on the job and 67 were killed accidentally. This murder rate is one in 12,500 and one in 5,600 including accidentally deaths. A variety of steps are taken to reduce this risk such as the wearing of bullet-proof vests, development of special procedures in approaching stopped cars, and sometimes waiting for backup even if it increases the chance of the suspect escaping. Police officers undertake these and other measures to avoid or mitigate the risks of their profession. This self preservation rule applies to criminals just like everyone else – it is human nature. The risk of execution for a violent criminal is greater than the risk of a police officer being killed. In 2005 there were about 16,700 murders in the United States and 60 executions which gives a rate of one execution for every 278 murders. In 2005 criminals were approximarely 20 times more likely to be executed than policemen were to be deliberately or accidentally killed.

A New York Times study of murder rates in 1998 compared states with and without the death penalty. The Times concluded tendentiously and, as it turned out, with dispositive paralogism, that capital punishment was ineffective in reducing crime, noting that 10 out of 12 states without capital punishment had homicide rates below the national average while ½ the states with capital punishment had homicide rates above the national average. This overly simplistic study was disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, but seems to be de rigueur for social issue stories by the NYT. The 12 states with the death penalty have long had low murder rates due to factors unrelated to the death penalty. When the death penalty was suspended in the interval of 1968-1976 those 12 states still had murder rates lower than most other states. More definitive is that by 1998 the states that reinstituted the death penalty had a 38% larger drop in murder rates than states that didn’t. During the 1968-1976 period when executions were proscribed, murder rates generally skyrocketed in the United States.

After 1976 a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Isaac Ehrlich, began studying the death penalty issue and concluded that each execution deterred as many as 20 to 24 murders. The liberal academics, which include most academics, found his results anathema. Those outraged academicians condemned his work and he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. He even had difficulty finding employment at other universities. However his work sparked new research into the effectiveness of the death penalty. This research was conducted in the 1990’s as violent crime was plummeting and executions were rising. Between 1991-2000 there were, on average, 9100 fewer murders per year while the number of executions per year rose by 70. Those new studies resurrected Ehrlich’s earlier conclusion that the death penalty significantly deters murder. The consensus of the newer studies estimated that each execution saved the lives of 15 to 18 potential murder victims. I would propose that if executions were carried out say within 5 minutes of guilty verdicts being rendered (more reasonably, make that six months) instead of the 12 to 20 years delay we now have, capital punishment would be even more of a deterrent because a specific violent crime would be more easily correlated with a specific execution in the minds of criminals. Not every type of murderer is deterred by the death penalty of course, serial killers for example and other psychopathic degenerates who seem to enjoy killing.

Incarcerations increased in this country during the 1990’s while crime rates decreased. Is that so surprising? Apparently it is to those criminologists who don’t believe people respond to incentives and to writers of the New York Times. Those deluded souls somehow doubt that locking up criminals deter crime, yet many studies indicate that the more certain the punishment, the fewer the crimes committed. The arrest rate of criminals is one of the most important factors in reducing every type of crime. During the 1990’s, increases in the arrest rate account for 16% to 18% of the drop in the murder rate. Conviction rates explain another 12% of the drop.

The right-to-carry concealed hand gun laws have increased over the past 20 years, adding 30 states and bring the total right-to-carry states to 40 by 2007. Is this a deterrent to crime? There are over 4,000,000 concealed hand gun permits in the country today. It is interesting to note that not one state that has passed right-to-carry laws has ever rescinded that right. This would indicate to me that, at the very least, no bad outcomes have resulted from these laws.

Texas passed a right-to-carry concealed hand gun law, taking effect in January 1996. You have heard the clichés about there are lies, there are damnable lies, and then there are statistics; and statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics, and so on. Statistics, if used honestly and properly, provide useful data, however, if misused, statistics can lead to downright false conclusions. Here is an example from Texas: At the end of 1997 a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News wrote a front page story about the first two years of the right-to-carry law in Texas. He pointed out that at the end of the 1st year (1996) there were 114,500 permit holders who were charged with 431 felonies or misdemeanors during that year. At the end of the 2nd year there were 161,702 permit holders charged with 666 felonies or misdemeanors – a 54.5% increase ([666-431]/431 = 54.5%). He quoted opponents of the concealed carry law saying the numbers prove the need for increasing restrictions on handgun permits.

Consider what those data actually show. At the start of the 1st year (1996) there were, apodictically, zero permit holders; at the start of the 2nd year there were 114,500 permit holders. I do not know what the distribution of permits was on a month-to-month basis, but surely a more valid comparison would be to take the average number of permit holders during 1996 ([0 + 114,500]/2 = 57,250) and during 1997 ([114,500 + 161,702]/2 = 138,101). Using the data in a statistically more meaningful and logical way would yield a normalized decrease in the rate of crimes committed during the 2nd year (431/57,250 = .7528% [1st year] & 666/138,101 = .4823% [2nd year]; then ([.7528%-.4823%)]/.7528% = 35.9%). Of course there were more felonies/misdemeanors during the second year – there were more permit holders on a month-to-month basis, but if the number of permit holders is normalized, the rate of crimes committed by permit holders decreased by 35.9% in the second year. The clueless Dallas Morning News writer, Scott Parks, should have taken an elementary course in probability and statistics before he wrote his article. If I had been in a letter-to-the-editor writing mode at that time I would have set the DMN straight. Nevertheless I kept the article for future comment, as, for example, now.

While the use of concealed hand guns allows people to protect themselves from criminals, there are potential drawbacks of increasing the number of gun carriers. People can accidentally shoot themselves or others or they may use their guns irresponsibly. The pertinent question is: do they save more innocent lives than they put at risk? Most legal gun owners pose few risks to themselves or other law abiding people. They are overwhelmingly conscientious and careful people by nature, unlike criminals who generally obtain their guns illegally.

The finding of the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey that has been conduction since 1973, was that having a gun is the most effective deterrent to being victimized by violent criminals. During the 1990’s, assault victims who used a gun for self-protection were injured 3.6% of the time; 5.4% of those who ran or drove away were injured; 13.6% of those who threatened the attacker without a weapon were injured; and those who undertook no self-protection fared the worst, they were injured 55.2% of the time. Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance may have worked against British imperialists who could be embarrassed by public opinion, but criminals require more forceful opposition.

Economists Stephen Bronars and Lott found significant evidence that criminals move out of areas where concealed handguns are legalized. Their study analyzed counties that border each other on opposite sides of a state line. In such cases, counties in states that adopt right-to-carry laws see a drop in violent crime that was about four times larger than the simultaneous increase in violent crime in the adjacent counties without such laws. However violent some criminals are, they are not necessarily self-destructively stupid. At least some of them are smart enough to leave towns where they risk being confronted by law abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns.

According to Dr. Lott, overall, there are three crime fighting techniques: increased use of the death penalty; rising arrest and conviction rates; and the passage of right-to-carry laws which collectively account for 50% to 60% of the drop in murder rates in the 1990’s. Although Dr. Lott does not think so, I believe that abortion is also a contributing factor in the reduction of violent crime, even though I can not quantify it.

Gender and age are important factors in crime statistics and despite the risk of sounding politically incorrect, it must be said that race is also. African-Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. The national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people in 2002, while the rate for African-American males between the ages of 17 to 25 was 78 per 100,000 or 14 times the national rate. It should also be noted that young African-Americans males (17 to 25 years old) committed murder at a much higher rate than African-Americans in general which was 24.1 per 100,000 in 2002. Murderers overwhelmingly kill people of their own race. Of the African-Americans who are murdered, 91% are by other African-Americans; and 84% of white murder victims are murdered by other whites.

Gun control advocates predicted that when the federal assault-weapons ban expired on September 13, 2004, 10 years after taking effect, gun crimes would surge out of control. Among those advocates were Sarah Brady who said the ban’s termination would effectively “arm our kids with Uzis and AK-47s” and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) who ratcheted up the rhetoric, labeling the banned guns “the weapon of choice for terrorists.” The gun control advocates warned that only states with their own assault-weapons bans would escape the coming bloodbath. So what actually happened? FBI statistics showed that nationally the murder rate fell by 3% in 2004, the first drop since 2000, with firearms deaths dropping by 4.4%. Even more confounding for the gun control advocates, after the ban expired, the monthly murder rate plummeted 14% during September through December.

The murder rate for the seven states with their own assault-weapons ban declined by 2% in the same time period that the 43 states without a ban experienced a 3.4% decline in their murder rate. One can not claim with a great degree of certainty that these murder rate reductions were due wholly or partially to the assault-weapons ban or lack thereof, but it does seem clear that the ban did nothing to reduce crime. The “gun grabbers” have not proven their case.

A PERSONAL VIGNETTE 37

2007-09-28T13:59:00.001-07:00

The following is a personal vignette from yesteryear. I have told this story to my grandchildren as it illustrates what I believe is a useful moral or two:

In 1966 after being transferred to the Geophysical Services Laboratory in Dallas, TX from my initial Mobil Oil assignment in Libya, North Africa I joined a group doing geophysical testing and research. The other members of this small group had either PhD’s or Master Degrees in science and since I had only an undergraduate degree in geological engineering, I reasoned that I would benefit from expanding my formal mathematics education. Therefore I enrolled in night school at Southern Methodist University. Even though I had been out of school for 10 years I was impatience to immediately take advanced mathematics courses, so instead of taking a review course in calculus, I started with a course called Advanced Calculus.

There was a problem from the outset. I was studying from not only the course textbook, but also from two calculus books, an algebra book, and a trigonometry book. Mathematical theories, formulae, and principles easily slip from one’s memory. On the first test I received an F. And this was not just a run-of-the-mill F. It was a low F; call it an F-. My next test score was better – it was an F+; the third was a D. Naturally my mid-term grade was an F. At this point, after recovering from the shock (I was an A student in mathematics in high school and B student in college which was not bad in an engineering school), I figured it was time to talk to the professor.

In the next class after the mid-term grades came out, the professor, anticipating our concerns, told us he knew many of us had been out of school for 10 to 15 years and were struggling. He said if we kept getting better scores on the tests he would discount the earlier scores, but if we were up and down on each test, he would have no choice other than to weight each test equally. I and the rest of the students thought that was fair.

Mobil Oil would pay for the course tuition, but only if I passed, and much more importantly my final grade would be sent to my supervisor. It would certainly not help my career if I did not receive a respectable grade. However, I was reasonably confident that I could keep getting better test scores and indeed I did. On the next three tests I received a C, C+, and B. On the final test I received a C+ and so my final grade was a solid C.

Intrepidly, I took the next semester continuation of Advanced Calculus from the same professor and received a B-. My third mathematics course at SMU was called Probability and Statistics taught by a graduate student. There was something about this subject that I found much easier to comprehend than the arcane principles of advanced calculus. Queuing Theory and the Rule of Bayes-Laplace, or as it is also called the inverse probability theorem, are logical and easier to follow than trying to grasp the advanced calculus concept of poles in a complex plane. C’est pas?

Not only did I get an A in the course, but of the circa 30 people in the class I received the top grade. A fellow Mobil Oil employee I knew, although had never worked with, received a B. He told me now he knew why I was a supervisor and he was not.

The graduate student instructor was not only an outstanding teacher, but a great guy as well. He had done consulting work for an oil exploration company and he explained to us that lease block bids fit nicely on a log-log plot – valuable information for any oil exploration company interested in oil/gas lease blocks.

There is a saying, aphorism, cliché, or whatever you want to call it, that you should quit when you are ahead. I did not follow that sound advice. For a fourth course I took linear algebra. My luck ran out in getting good teachers. This SMU professor apparently had psychological problems. At any rate he seemed determined to make the course material and tests as abstract and difficult as he could. I actually did not know what final grade I would get beyond knowing it would be somewhere between a D and a B. Most of the students were as mystified as I was. We only knew that he marked on a curve so one’s final grade depended upon its relative to the other scores in the class.

Late in the course one of the students told the professor, in front of the class, that he was a poor teacher. The professor responded incredulously, “I am a poor teacher?” I never knew what the motive was of that student, whom I had talked to a few times. He may have given up getting a passing grade by then or perhaps he was just the type of impulsive person who says what he thinks - the consequences be damned. After that I cowardly or wisely, depending upon your perspective, refrained from being seen talking to him in view of the professor. I received a C in the course.

What are the moral precepts of this story? (1.) It may sound trite, but whatever endeavor you are engaged in, always give it your best effort and do not get discouraged if you initially fail. There is no guarantee that you will eventually succeed, but if you quit you will always fail. (2.) When someone tells you of their successes, be it in financial investing, job achievements, academics, or whatever, ask them about their failures. If they can not come up with any tell them you just remembered that you have something important to do – you have to watch the grass on your lawn grow. Unless they are stone-stupid they will get it.

MOURNING DOVE TALES 36

2007-09-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

So far this spring and summer (2007) we have had four nests of mourning doves (Zenaidura macroura) in three different hanging flower baskets in our patio. The hanging basket which was occupied twice was the one nearest (and very near) the patio door. It would appear to me that in the trade off between being wary of humans versus the protection of their eggs and hatchlings from predators by having their nests near humans, the mourning doves have chosen the latter. Are their little “bird brains” capable of making such intelligent decisions? Whether by instinct or conscious choice, it would appear these avian folks are sufficiently sophisticated to effectuate the proper course of action.

What I can say by virtue of observation is the following: Building the nest is a cooperative effort between the male and female mourning doves. The one bird (presumably the male) brings small sticks, twigs, and what other building material he can find to the female who, mostly using her beak, weaves these into a nest. Of course these nests were in hanging baskets so they did not have to be outstandingly structurally sound. Still they were constructed with interlaced materials without the use of proper five fingered hands – remarkable. I don’t know where the male got his material, but it must have not been far away because he made round trips in just a couple of minutes or less. The whole nest building activity was completed in a couple of hours. A short time later the female sat in the nest and must have laid her eggs soon after.

In the last mourning dove brood there were two eggs (as there were in the other three) which took 15 days to hatch. This is a bit tricky to determine as the parent birds not only sit on the eggs, but sit on and conceal the squabs, as they are called after they are hatched. I detected when the two eggs were hatched by getting so close to the nest that the parent bird flew away. Not to worry. After I moved away from the nest the adult bird returned in less than one minute.

The encyclopedia states that the male bird incubates the eggs from the morning to the afternoon; the female at night and the rest of the day. I observed that the first change occurs an hour so after sunrise, again circa an hour after noon, and an hour or less before sundown. The timing was so consistent from day to day that I almost suspected they both possessed Rolex timepieces. The changing of places on the nest contained a bit of variability. Sometimes the bird on the nest would fly away a second before the other came to the nest. More frequently the incoming bird would land on a ledge above the patio door and wait for the nesting bird to depart – usually in less than one minute. Only rarely did the incoming bird land directly in the nest before the other departed. Perhaps how soon the bird on the nest left was a function of how cramped he/she felt. I listened carefully, but could not hear any recriminations about “Where have you been all this time?” But that may have been because I don’t understand mourning dove talk.

The chicks are fed by both of the adults with what is called pigeon’s milk (dove milk) which is partially digested food (the diet of mourning doves is normally 99% seeds) in the adult bird’s crop. This food which has the consistency of cottage cheese, is regurgitated (Medieval Latin regurgitatus meaning to engulf) into the beaks of the chicks, ugh! It makes the human mammary system of feeding babies downright civilized and sanitary by comparison.

Mourning dove chicks are altricial (from Latin altric meaning nourish) at birth as opposed to precocial (from Latin praecoci, the same root as the word precocious); that is to say they are born blind and helpless instead of being capable of defending themselves or fleeing. The parents do not voluntarily leave the chicks alone for one minute until they are eight or nine days old. During this rapid growth period the chicks become too big to be concealed by the adult bird sitting on the nest and also the chicks appear to be curious about their immediate environment so they want to see what is going on. As the chicks mature they are left alone for an hour, then for a couple of hours and an increasing number of times per day until they are two weeks old. At that point the chicks were left alone all night for the first time after being on their own almost all that day. The next day (the 15th day after being hatched) first one, then several hours later, the other chick left the nest. An adult mourning dove (probably the mother) was perched nearby watching and seemingly encouraging the chicks as they left the nest. Even a couple of days later the mother was with the chicks as they appeared to be hanging around our enclosed backyard although they were fully capable of flying.

It takes a certain amount of courage for the chicks to attempt to fly out of the nest after being confined there during their maturing stage. In the first brood the chick stood on the edge of the hanging basket for several minutes before trying out his wings all the while the adult bird was perched on the backyard fence as if to say “come on youngling, you can make it.” The second chick in the last brood actually flew up to the ledge above the patio door before flying down to the patio floor. The mother mourning dove was on our house roof where the chick soon joined her. With seemingly simple minded mourning doves being so solicitous and protective of their offspring, what is the excuse for a few humans who carelessly or deliberately endanger their children?

FREE ENTERPRISE VS. BIG GOVERNMENT 35

2007-09-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said don’t blame FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) for the delays in getting relief supplies to victims of Hurricane Wilma, blame me. Why should any government official at the local, state, or federal level be blamed for not anticipating or responding with complete efficiency to natural disasters such as hurricanes which are by their nature capricious and unpredictable? For that matter why, quo jure, should the survival or deliverance from these disasters not devolve as the prime responsibility to the individuals and families of the people affected? This is not to say that succor, from governments and from private charities, should not be provided to the unfortunate people who find themselves in those circumstances, but where is individual responsibility? People were told prior to the arrival of Hurricane Wilma, as well as the other hurricanes, by federal/state/local officials to lay in at least a three days supply of nonperishable food and potable water, but many did not. It should not have been necessary to so instruct people, say nothing of them ignoring sound advice and for the ones who would choose to leave the area there was sufficient time to plan that. Free to Choose – that’s the ticket. The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson from Chicago wrote eloquently on the subject of personal responsibility including for the people caught up in hurricane disasters this season.

The implicit assumption among the general population and certainly the mainstream news media now seems to be that it is the primary responsibility and imperative of first, the national, then the state, and finally local government to take care of people caught up in natural disasters. It would make more sense if our form of governance were like the old Soviet Union, although I would not put much faith, so to speak, in an entity like that. It makes absolutely much less sense for people living in a free society to so think. In September 2005 in a repeat of a C-SPAN Book-TV program originally telecasted in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the F.A. Hayek book The Road to Serfdom, economist Dr. Milton Friedman explained what it means to function and live in a free society. Hayek, an Austrian economist, won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 – Friedman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976. Friedman wrote an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, a slightly expanded version of the introduction he wrote for the German 25th anniversary edition.

In his 1994 C-SPAN interview, Friedman went on to expound that all over the world socialism had failed and everywhere it was tried, capitalism had succeeded. He said that everyone admitted it (perhaps that was a slight exaggeration – the hard left, in this country and elsewhere, would not admit anything of the kind) and yet free enterprise/capitalism has been losing ground for some time. When Friedman was born in 1912 the percentage of the GDP by the federal government in this country was approximately 15% - 85% was due to private enterprise. In the immediate years after WWII, 1947-50, the government’s portion had grown to 25% and by 1994 it was 45%. And considering the controlling effect of governmental regulation on private business, the percentage realistically was over 50%. The good Dr. Freidman seemed as bemused and perplexed at this illogically continuing trend as any savant or ordinary clear thinking folk would be.

Yet this growth of government, especially at the federal level, seems inexorable, be it under control of Democrats or Republicans. What are we to make of this? If economic history has taught anything it is that economic wellbeing for most people is best served by as free an economic system as it is possible to create and encourage. I am not advocating license for an absolutely laissez-faire system without regard for laws or morality. The brigands of WorldCom, Global Crossing, Arkadelphia, Enron, et.al. were not engaged in free enterprise. They were particularly immoral and destructive thieves who undermined a true free enterprise system with their unconscionable deception and fraud. A possible punishment, although perhaps considered immoderate by a few, would be to subject them to the same extreme treatment that the Sindero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerillas perpetrated in Peru a number of years ago. To prove they could it and to terrorize and intimidate the people, they decorated Lima by hanging half of a dozen black dogs from lampposts around the city. It may prove unsettling to some and I would not recommend it, but the sight of the aforementioned thieves swinging from lampposts in New York, Philadelphia, Houston, etc. should, quod erat demonstrandum, have a deterring and salutary effect on would-be future corporate malefactors.

In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman states: “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine.” He goes on to explain why that is so. It is my observation that many (perhaps most) people think that ExxonMobil is in the business of selling gasoline, motor oils, and elastomers and other petroleum derived packaging materials; Proctor & Gamble is in the business of selling soaps and household cleaners; and General Electric is in the business of selling electrical appliances. They are not. These corporations are in business to make money and the more the better – so long as they play by the rules by engaging in open and free competition, without deception and fraud. These companies and others make money by supplying their customers with goods and services to the best of their ability. If they satisfy their customers they will succeed and make money. If not they will go out of business. Clueless Bill O’Reilly and people of his ilk are in dire need of a course in Economics 101. O’Reilly had repeatedly said on his television show, The O’Reilly Factor, that “greedy” major oil companies should give back a portion of their profits to their customers. His arrogance is exceeded only by his ignorance.

As the price of gasoline kept increasing this year what was the result? After a slow reaction until it was obvious that higher prices were not transient, drivers began changing their habits by driving less and opting, in some cases, for more fuel efficient vehicles. And in the past couple of weeks gasoline prices began to abate. This is exactly what should happen. Price is the most efficient mechanism ever conceived for regulating supply. What if, under public pressure, government intervenes in this price/supply regulating couplet? By the imposition of a price ceiling on gasoline set below the natural market price, shortages would ensue. This is not mere speculation – it has happened with commodities, services, and labor all through history. I remember WWII price and wages controls and concomitant rationing. Of course war time has special exigencies from peace time as the country went into survival mode for the preservation of freedom. Still economic laws were not repealed – shortages or rationing inexorably follow price controls and during non war times there are no survival excuses.

Again quoting Milton Friedman: “[Price and wages controls] clearly would produce [commodity] shortages, labor shortages, grey markets, and black markets. If prices are not allowed to ration goods and workers, there must be some other means to do so. Price controls, whether legal or voluntary, if effectively enforced would eventually lead to the destruction of the free-enterprise system and its replacement by a centrally controlled system.” There are those to whom a centrally controlled system sounds splendid. I for one believe that the examples of Albania, Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, et al. and, the most striking of all, the 70 year miserably failed experiment of the Soviet Union are definitive. It is hardly accidental that mainland China has become and is increasingly so an economic colossus when they set out on the road to capitalism starting in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

It is not only in the sphere of economics that big government is inimical to personal wellbeing. As government grows its influence intrudes into non economic areas such as personal freedoms of speech and actions. Differentiating between necessary laws for the preservation of public safety/welfare and excessively restrictive or intrusive laws is a whole topic which needs extensive elaboration. The recent Supreme Court decision allowing local government to use the constitutional right of eminent domain for seizing land for non exclusive public works such as shopping malls or sports arenas is but one of the latest intrusions. Such actions may not directly affect everyone, but to paraphrase 16th & 17th century English poet and clergyman John Donne: Do not send to know for whom those tenets affect, they will eventually affect you.

FREE ENTERPRISE VS. THE WELFARE STATE 34

2007-09-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Can anyone imagine what would happen to any politician who even vaguely intimated that the victims of Hurricane Katrina themselves bear some responsible for their plight? After the mainstream media and the left-wing Democrats were through with him/her for even daring to suggest that the people of New Orleans were partly to blame for not reacting collectively with responsibility and unselfishness he/she could forget about ever running for elective office again. There are some differences between what happened to the people in New Orleans and the ones in Australia, yet there are also important similarities. Would you ever expect the left in this country to admit fallibility of their overweening assumption that only government can help people despite all the evidence extant that private enterprise and self-reliance will always be more efficient and effective? The welfare state has hurt the very people it was suppose to help, yet there is not the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell of getting any meaningful change in that flawed philosophy.

There are too many assumptions which are never challenged, especially by the left. This is one example which is that in an emergency ordinary people are helpless and must depend 100% upon government for their salvation. In the constant drumbeat of the affluent Western democracies having a moral responsible to share their wealth with the poorer countries of the world when have you heard the question asked about what is wrong with these countries anyway? Just why do so many people from Mexico and Central America feel compelled to illegally enter the USA in order to have an economically decent income. The same question should be asked about the people from Northern and Eastern Africa, as well as Eastern Europe illegally entering Western Europe. A more permanent, equitable, and stable solution to this problem might eventuate if the UN would seriously address and act upon it in conjunction with the countries themselves – assuming a majority of the people in those countries want change and after the UN is reformed because as currently constituted and working the UN is so bureaucratic, inefficient, and corrupt as to make it useless.

Speaking of false assumptions, there is a great 2004 book titled How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas J. DiLorenzo which challenges some of those assumptions. Among the issues and historical examples he dissects are these:

1.) The common belief is that the British settlers at the Jamestown (Virginia) colony in 1609 (the second group to go there) and the Plymouth (Massachusetts) colony in 1620 were kept from complete starvation by the largesse of the Indians. That is not what happened. Of the original 104 Jamestown settlers in 1607 all but 38 died - most by starvation. A second group of 500 came in 1609 and 440 of those died of starvation and disease. The problem was the lack of private property. Everything that was produced went into a common pool for the community and to repay the investment and generate profits of the Virginia Company back in England. In 1611 a “high Marshall”, Sir Thomas Dale, went to the colony and quickly diagnosed and corrected the problem. He gave each man three acres and required only that each would have to work for one month a year to repay the Virginia Company. The colony soon began to prosper since each was benefiting from his own labor and there was no more free riding. Whereas the Indians were originally implored to sell the colonists corn, after the transformation of the colony into an individual enterprise system the Indians bought corn from the colonists in exchange for furs and other items. Thus mutually beneficial trading and bartering between the colonists and Indians occurred. Similar conditions existed with the Plymouth colony. Originally there was collective land ownership and pooled output for the entire colony. Approximately half of the 101 Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 were dead within a few months. Another 100 arrived in the next three years and were barely able to survive. The governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, solved the problem of low productivity by introducing individuality owned land, the same policy as was pursued in the Jamestown Colony and the result was the same. The Plymouth colonists prospered. It is clear that collectivization fails every time it is tried and free enterprise succeeds. Why is it that each generation has to learn this lesson anew? It would seem that as Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.”

2.) The so called “robber barons” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Grenville Dodge, Henry Villard, James J. Hill and others are generally considered to be no more than greedy, exploitative capitalists. In truth they supplied goods and services through a competitive economical system, created many jobs, and increased the economic prosperity of the country.

3.) Herbert Hoover is forever remembered as a “do nothing” president who allowed the country to go into and remain in a protracted economic depression. The facts are different. Hoover was a hyper-interventionist who instituted many federal government programs which made the economic depression worse. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act greatly restricted imports to America and predictably also greatly restricted American exports after other nations retaliated against us and further hurt our and other countries' economies. This act should more accurately be called the Smoot-Hawley-Hoover Act as Hoover strongly supported it.

4.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt is celebrated as the champion of the people who brought the country out of the worst economic depression in history through the creation of myriad federal bureaucracies and work programs. In fact although WWII brought on nearly full employment through production of war materials and millions of people being employed in the military, the depression ended only after the end of the war. There was a shortage of consumer goods during the war years (most production was directed towards materials of war) with inflation held in check by wage and price controls and rationing. During the depression years of the 1930’s the unemployment rate did not decline despite the federal spending of the Roosevelt administration. The USA unemployment rate was 16% in 1931 and 19% in 1938 after nine years of the New Deal – three under Hoover and six under Roosevelt. The unemployment rate in 1929 just prior to the depression was 3.2%. It is true, for instance, that the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) program brought electrification to many rural American homes and small business and employment to thousands of others, yet it was at the expense of other Americans. It is always the problem that the spending on government programs robs the private sector of funds and opportunity. Who is more efficient in spending – government or private enterprise? There is seldom proper accounting for waste and inefficiency in government spending while the viability factor and profit incentive of business keeps down waste and inefficiency. Pay attention to the upcoming expenditures in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast and especially New Orleans for a further lesson in government waste, corruption, and ineptitude.

5.) Despite claims to the contrary by agitprop liberals the energy crisis of the 1970’s was corrected by deregulation formulated by the Reagan administration in the 1980’s. The recent blackouts in California and the Northeast were not caused by deregulation, but by restrictive federal and state government policies which curtailed exploration, production, refining, and transmission of multifold forms of energy. Artificially restrict supply and shortages ensue – wow, what a novel concept.

That above mentioned book is excellent I highly recommend it. I did not discuss all of the issues such as the differences of mercantilism vs. true free market capitalism, but it is in the book.

DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO 33

2007-09-07T09:10:00.000-07:00

A 2005 book Do As I Say (Not As I Do) by the conservative Hoover Institute’s Peter Schweizer exposes the hypocrisy of sanctimonious and prevaricating liberals such as:

►Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn’t invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore’s IRS forms show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton (Can you imagine that – the company of the arch enemy, Dick Chaney, the bete-noire of liberals and according to them the apex of evil humans and corporations), Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric, and McDonald’s.

►Staunch union supporter Nancy Pelosi has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union, but the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of congress in recent election cycles. The Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. None of them is in a union according to Schweizer. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is – you guessed it – a non-union shop.

►Ralph Nader claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights, but when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on his office door.

►Linguist and socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as “the vilest institution on the face of the earth” and has lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. However over the last 40 years Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon (one has to wonder why) and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.

►Al Franken says that conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action, but less than 1% of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-Americans.

►Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters, but he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family’s fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn’t even set up in the U.S. – it’s in the Fiji Islands.

►Another Kennedy, environmentalist and congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources, although he receives an annual check from the family’s large holdings in the oil industry.

►Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessary of unions to protect a “living wage.” As for herself, she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada where she can pay less than American union wages.

►Bill & Hillary Clinton have spoken out in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill Clinton vetoed a bill seeking to end it. Yet the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification, but she barred 13 year old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO. Good for Hillary for making responsible decisions about her daughter – too bad she is such a hypocrite when it comes to other people’s children

►Billionaire Hungarian-American businessman and money exchange manipulator George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates, but he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.

Schweizer writes: “Liberals claim to support affirmative action, but don’t practice it. They support higher taxes, but set up complicated tax shelters to avoid paying them. They claim to be ardent environmentalists, but abandon their cause when it impinges on their own property rights. The reality is that liberals like to preach in moral platitudes. They like to condemn ordinary Americans and Republicans for a whole host of things: racism, lack of concern for the poor, polluting the environment, and greed. But when it comes to applying the same standards to themselves, liberals are found to be shockingly guilty of hypocrisy.

Interestingly Peter Schweizer was served legal papers demanding to know where he obtained his information about some of the people he targets. Note there was no allegation of slander or false information in his book. His critics simply wanted to know how he found out about them. Fortunately there is this important document which states that: “Congress shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…..” Liberals might want to review our Constitution occasionally.

HURRICANE KATRINA 32

2007-08-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

I am not sanguine about us being any more prepared for the next disaster than we were for Hurricane Katrina. There simply has been and is increasingly now too much bureaucracy and too many centers of power and authority in the various levels of government trying to respond to disasters.

Who is to blame for the catastrophe that befell New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Where to start? The then and still, mayor of N.O., Ray Nagin, can be faulted for not responding fast enough (the order of response should local, state, then the federals) and not following his own disaster plan by supplying transportation (school and city buses) for the people who could not get out of their neighborhoods. And once people were in the Superdome, according to the plan, they were supposed to be given water, RTE meals, and security. None of these was provided.

We are a nation of laws and the law states that the governor has to request help from the federal government in the form of disaster aid and the military before the federal government can legally act. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco bears a great deal of blame for not ordering the state national guard into N.O. sooner and not allowing Bush to send in federal and other state guard units to help. The Red Cross was standing by to go to the Superdome with supplies, but was not allowed in by the Governor’s homeland security dept. because the governor felt that people would then go to the Superdome in greater numbers and she and the mayor did not want that. Where the hell were people supposed to go? Bush actually called Blanco and urged her to act, but she still dithered another 24 hours. Incidentally there was bad blood between Blanco and Nagin even before the hurricane because Nagin supported Blanco’s moderate Republican opponent, current Louisiana congressman, Bobby Jindal, for governor in the last race (I don’t know why). Blanco’s performance as governor is in contrast to Haley Barbour in Mississippi who acted quickly and decisively even allowing that his problems were not of the same magnitude as Blanco’s.

When Bush saw that the mayor and the governor were not up to the monumental task they faced he should have acted and the law and precedent be damned – lives and the suffering of many people were at stake. Bush was 24 hrs. late in acting. He did not come through with the same stellar performance he did after 9/11. Even though FEMA was not set up as a first responder in a disaster it is a hopelessly inept bureaucracy and Michael Brown was an archetypical bureaucrat. He deserved to be canned and Bush showed bad judgment in appointing him in the first place. The type of person who is needed in a job like that is Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. The wife of one of the firefighters from McKinney (a city just north of Plano) said on the radio here that when her husband’s unit volunteered and went to New Orleans a FEMA official there gave them the job of passing out FEMA flyers and told them there would not be doing any firefighting and rescue work because he knew they were just there for the glory! That SOB should have been fired on the spot, but of course was not.

The politicians are not covering themselves in glory with their carping and unseemly criticizing even as the rescue effort was ongoing. For the egregious Howard Dean to say that the slow federal response was racially motivated is just plain nuts and divisive. The tendentious remarks of the insane Nancy Pelosi were inane. Hillary Clinton while more restrained in her criticizing came out with the same old canard of calling for a bipartisan commission. Good lord, doesn’t that woman have any imagination or originality? Who remembers what even the recent 9/11 commission said or accomplished? Name just one thing. I can not. Among others, two Louisiana politicians, Mary Landreau and Bobby Jindal have bitterly complained about the response of the federal government. It is as if they have been complete outsiders and not influential politicians in Louisiana. Landreau is a United States senator, her brother was the Lt. governor, and her father was a long time powerful politico in Louisiana. To paraphrase what Dr. Samuel Johnson said about the American colonialists, Landreau and Jindal should be thankful for any punishment for their culpability for this catastrophe - short of hanging.

What does come through is the generosity and just plain goodness of so many ordinary Americans. There are always the scam artists (according to the FBI there were 2300 phony Hurricane Katrina disaster relief web sites – some came from overseas) and as we all saw there were looters in New Orleans and Mississippi. When the massive amount of government and private relief monies came flooding in, so to speak, there were the inevitable stealing and ‘misappropriation’ of some of the funds.

SEN. JOE MCCARTHY – A BALANCED ACCOUNT 31

2007-08-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

I will attempt to do the impossible. Not literally, of course, because the impossible is by definition impossible. I will try to do the extremely difficult, which is to summarize a balanced story of the late junior Republican senator from Wisconsin – Joseph Raymond McCarthy.

There are few Americans who have been criticized, maligned, marginalized, shunned, demonized, disparaged, and just plain reviled as much as Joe McCarthy – not completely without cause I might add. If one wants to bludgeon opponents just accuse them of “McCarthyism” which to imply they use tactics of smear, deception, lying, demagoguery, and guilt by association to destroy a person’s good name and reputation. McCarthy was sometimes guilty of doing that and so were his opponents – in spades. The word “McCarthyism” has long ago become an obscenity; however with some exceptions (Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot [born Saloth Sar] for example) people are the sum of their parts. It is not useful or accurate to completely demonize or deify them.

Kvetching writers such as Richard Rovere, Ellen Schrecker, and David Caute compared McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusades to Hitler and Stalin’s Great Terror. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions, including an estimated 6 million innocent Jews, and the suffering of tens of millions of blameless people. Soviet Union scholar Robert Conquest estimates that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 14 ½ million Soviets from 1930 to 1937. Millions more were killed or caused to die by Stalin in the years of WWII and after, continuing until his death in 1953.

Author Arthur Herman says in his 2000 book Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator “We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947-58, no American citizen was interrogated without benefit of counsel, none was arrested or detained without due process, and no one went to jail without trial.” Who was way over the top, McCarthy or his critics?

It is interesting to contrast the disrepute McCarthy is held in with the respect given to the Kennedy family despite the friendship and support given to McCarthy by the Kennedy clan. Joseph Kennedy Sr. greatly admired and agreed with McCarthy about the threat to America by Communists. He was delighted that during his bachelorhood McCarthy dated two of Joe’s daughters, Patricia and Eunice; Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations until a personal quarrel with chief counsel, Roy Cohn, caused him to quit. McCarthy was the godfather of Robert and Ethel’s first child; and John F. Kennedy’s views on Communism and the Soviet threat were not much different from McCarthy’s. Author Arthur Herman recounts how one night in February 1952 when he heard one speaker at Harvard’s Spree Club denounced McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss, Kennedy shot back, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Herman states that Kennedy backed the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy ever proposed by virtually outlawing the Communist party in the United States (good for Kennedy for doing that).

Conservative Republicans were also supporters and admirers of McCarthy. Among theses were William F. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell jr. (the father of the founder and publisher of the Media Research Center, L. Brent Bozell III) and currently the comely columnist Ann Coulter.

There is confusion in many people’s minds about investigation of Communists in the United States by McCarthy and by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). McCarthy essentially searched for Communist spies, Communist non-spies, and Communist dupes, security risks all, in the U.S. government as the chairman of a Senate sub-committee starting in 1951. HUAC was formed in 1937, but started interrogating Communists outside the government under its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX) in 1947. It was HUAC, not McCarthy, which compelled the entertainment elite, including the infamous “Hollywood Ten”, to testify under oath whether they, “are now or ever have been a member of the Communist party?” It made those Hollywood snobs very cross to have to admit whether they were supporters of the evil regime of Joseph Stalin – one of history’s most villainous mass murders. The mainstream media, apologists then as now for malevolent groups and governments, were beside themselves with indignation over the treatment of those traitorous or complicitous buffoons.

McCarthy investigated the State Department for Communist spies or communist sympathizers and, contrary to popular belief, found some. Also there is confusion about the Army – McCarthy hearings of 1954. It was not McCarthy who was investigating the Army, it was the Senate who was investigating McCarthy for his charges that the Army was infiltrated with Communists spies and was covering up. It was those hearings starting on June 9th, 1954 which sank old Joe (actually he wasn’t old – McCarthy died at age 48 in 1957). Weepy old (he really was old) Joseph Welsh, the lead lawyer for the Army, put on a thespian performance that should have won an Academy Award. When Welsh repeatedly baited and ridiculed McCarthy’s lead counsel, Roy Cohn, about revealing the names of any real Communists, “before sundown” McCarthy could take it no longer and told Welsh that he should look to his own staff if he wanted to find Communists in the form of one of Welsh’s young assistant lawyers by the name of Fisher. That revelation became a trap and the sly old fox Welsh sprang it. With words that are remembered to this day Welsh told McCarthy: “Until this moment Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us…..Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel [he repeated the words ‘reckless’ and ‘cruel’ just to make sure nobody missed them] as to do injury to that lad……Let us not assassinate this lad further. Senator you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” From that moment McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was effectively over. And it wasn’t long before his senate career and his life too were over. After the exchange between Welsh and McCarthy the committee chairman, Carl Mundt quickly called an adjournment. Outside the hearing room Welsh, with tears streaming down his face, repeated his oration in front of television cameras. When he finished and rounded a corner, out of sight of reporters and cameras, he asked a colleague: “Well, how did it go?”

Edward R. Murrow’s television broadcast, See It Now, on March 9th, 1954 inflicted a serious wound to the reputation of McCarthy. Like the performance of the sanctimonious fraud, Joseph Welsh, three months later, Murrow’s broadcast was intellectually dishonest. According to Arthur Herman, Murrow and his staff spent two months cutting and editing film clips to put McCarthy in the worst possible light. Murrow added his own sardonic commentary: “Upon what meat does Senator McCarthy feed?” The answer: “Two of the staples of his diet are investigations (protected by immunity) and the half-truth.” The broadcast was a hatchet job without any pretense of being fair and balanced. Murrow himself had engaged in innuendoes and half-truths. Liberals loved it of course. I have not seen it, but just as a wild guess I am willing to bet that the movie good night, and good luck produced by clueless liberal George Clooney is a paean to Murrow showing him to be a paragon of virtue and McCarthy the personification of evil. Any takers? Has anyone heard of Lawrence Duggan? Ann Coulter says that Duggan was a close friend of Murrow. Duggan was also a Soviet spy who did great harm to the security of the United States. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan leapt to his death from an office window. His death was ruled a suicide, but as Coulter said, given the people he was doing business with, he might have been pushed. Murrow, along with others in the news media, vehemently denied that Duggan was a spy. So much for the perception skills of Murrow and his cronies – decrypted Soviet cables (the Venona Project) and documents from the Soviet archives have since proved beyond any doubt whatsoever the culpability of Duggan.

Arthur Herman tells how in 1953 the former McCarthy critic Alistair Cooke noted “a developing discrepancy between ‘McCarthyism’ and McCarthy.” The cultured Cooke, a graduate of Cambridge and a naturalized American and political liberal was famed for his radio program Letter from America which was broadcasted on the BBC (I remember listening to it when I was in Libya from 1957-65) and lasted for 58 years being the longest running series in history to be presented by a single person. Cooke and others realized that McCarthy was proceeding “with careful planning and masterful discretion. He is patient with witnesses whose FBI files would give ordinary citizens the creeps. He has consistently protected the anonymity of highly suspect witnesses.” This judicious and discreet McCarthy was “a new turn which,” Cooke added, “liberals are loathe to acknowledge.”

Asking how many spies McCarthy exposed in his anti-Communist crusade is to ask the wrong question. A more important and pertinent question is to ask whether McCarthy helped or hurt the cause of identifying and rooting out Communist spies, dupes, and sympathizers from the federal government. The 1930’s and 1940’s were lax times as far as awareness of Communists was concerned and certainly many people did not consider them security risks. After Alger Hiss in 1949 and the Rosenbergs in 1950 were charged with espionage the mood in the country changed even if the major news media did not. That there were numerous Communist spies or people otherwise favorably disposed toward the Soviet Union in the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations is beyond dispute. How much harm they did to the United States and how enthusiastic an effort was made to identify and excise these people from their sensitive positions in the government is a matter of a great deal of dispute. Who were these Communist spies and fellow travelers (a term coined by Stalin himself)?

The departments of State, the Treasury, and Interior harbored the most of these Reds. Prominent among the ones at State were Alger Hiss, John Stewart Service, and the aforementioned friend of Edward R. Murrow, Lawrence Duggan. At Treasury were scofflaws Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Solomon Adler. Owen Lattimore (the hypocritical creep who coined the term ‘McCarthyism’) while never an actual employee at the Department of State was any extremely influential consultant. There were dozens of others in the government, including Noel Field, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, who were either outright Communists spies or who were so enamored with Communism that they put the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the United States. Of course there were many more agitprop people outside of government - authors, university professors, Hollywood writers, directors, producers, and actors who adhered to the Communist line.

It is sometimes claimed by people on the right that Eastern Europe was ceded to Stalin after WWII and China was “lost” to Mao Tse-tung in 1949 because of the influence of Communists in our government. This charge seems extreme and logically indefensible to me. There is no doubt that as an important State Dept. official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Alger Hiss, especially while attending the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, tried to expedite the takeover of the Eastern European countries by the Soviets, but since the Red Army occupied those countries at the end of WWII, short of starting WWIII nothing could have prevented the hegemony of Eastern Europe by the Soviets – it was a fait accompli. Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore along with John Steward Service worked diligently to prevent or delay the funding of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek by the United States and otherwise promoted the interests of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists. While their efforts may have accelerated the downfall of the Nationalist government it is highly unlikely that even without their sabotaging machinations the Chinese Communists could have been defeated.

On December 2, 1954 the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure Joe McCarthy. Joining the majority was moderate Republican senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut – father of future president George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of current president George Walker Bush. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote on the resolution as he was having a back operation at the time. Some say he scheduled it so as not to have to cast a vote. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona said “Of course Joe McCarthy has made mistakes…… Let the members of this body search their consciences and say whether or not they themselves have made mistakes equally regrettable.” Or did the Senate vote to censure McCarthy? Actually the senate resolution did not contain the term ‘censure’, rather it said ‘condemn’. It is an interesting sidelight, but perhaps not an important distinction.

The censure committee considered five categories of charges against McCarthy ranging from contempt of the Senate, abusing colleagues (he had once told a reporter that Senator Hendrickson of New Jersey was “a living miracle, without brains or guts”), and encouraging government employees to violate the law. Even so, abuse of senate colleagues was a time honored practice. Every senator could remember when former majority leader Tom Connally said of Michigan’s Homer Ferguson that “everything he touches is covered with the vomit of his spleen.” Some could even remember when another Wisconsin senator, Robert La Follette, said on the senate floor that God had given one of his colleagues “a hump on his back” because he was “by nature a subservient, cringing creature.” A total of 46 separate counts were considered, but in the end only one count was agreed to. So what was McCarthy censured, or more accurately condemned, for? For lying, perjury, reckless behavior, and without any foundation, falsely accusing innocent people brought before his committee of being Communists? No. The senate resolution charged him with insulting some of his fellow senators by calling them “handmaidens of the communist Party.” McCarthy had hurt their feelings. One is reminded of the incident where Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) implied that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa) was behaving in a cowardly fashion by calling for the immediate withdrawn of American troops from Iraq. The Democrats on the House floor began braying like, well donkeys, in their feigned indignation. Never mind that Murtha, a former marine colonel who served in Vietnam, had not only lost his nerve, but seemed to have lost a few marbles as well.

Did Senator McCarthy make positive contributions towards raising awareness of Communist activity in our government which was detrimental to the country? And did he wreak havoc on and trample the civil rights of innocent citizens? I believe the first answer is yes and the second is a qualified no. Even some of McCarthy’s friends and supporters admitted he was occasionally too ardent in his zeal to rout out Communists and fellow travelers from the government and his excesses lowered his effectiveness as an anti-Communist fighter and gave ammunition to his enemies to use against him. In his 1964 presidential nomination speech Barry Goldwater famously (or infamously – depending upon your viewpoint) said: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.” Words to ponder when considering the reputation and legacy of Joseph McCarthy. And if the following words apply to Joe McCarthy then they are even more appropriate for his critics: “O shame! Where is thy blush?” Hamlet III, iv.

OUR ENGLISH LANGUAGE 30

2007-08-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Wherefore do we speak English? The word ‘wherefore’ as in the dialogue from the Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet plaintively and rhetorically asks, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” means ‘why’, not ‘where’. After all, Juliet knows where Romeo is – he is right there below her balcony window in Verona talking to her. She is lamenting that Romeo is member of the Montague family and she is a Capulet. She fears that the bitter feud between the two families will forever keep them apart.

Unlike Italian, Spanish, French and a couple more languages based on Latin, English is a mess. Yes, English is derived from Old English and therefore in turn from Middle English, but also from German, French, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian languages, Indian (from India), Indian (from North America), Sanskrit, directly from Latin and Old Greek, and myriad other languages.

The greeting ‘good morning’ in German is ‘guten Morgan’. It is not a co-incidence that the words are similar – both are derived from the Old English ‘göd’ meaning excellent or pleasant and ‘morgen’ the beginning of morning. Determining the etymology, morphology, orthography, phonology, syntax, polysemy, and just plain evolved and evolving usage of any language is impossibly complex and convoluted and English is one of the worst.

When Americans pick up a telephone or press the talk button on a remote or a cellular phone they usually say “hello.” Why? Italians say ”pronto” which means I am ready to talk (Of course they are ready to talk; why else would they answer the telephone?). Spanish speakers say “si” (yes) or “bueno” (good). The French say “Allô” (they are copycats). Germans say “bitte” (a multiple usage word which means ‘please’, or a reply to “danke” (thank you) would be “bitte schón” (your welcome). It is also use as an equivalent to ‘pardon?’ when one did not hear or understand something correctly. It is always a polite word.

The person who originated the use of ‘hello’ to answer a telephone was Thomas Edison. As the telephone started to come into wider use in the 1880’s no standard greeting was used in answering telephone calls. People would use such awkward phrases as “Are you there?” or Are you ready to talk?”, completely foreign to the direct and right-to-the-point American predilection. One day Edison picked up the telephone receiver and shouted “hello!” The term is a historically nautical one used by sailors from one ship to hail sailors on another ship.

When you think about it you realize that answering a telephone caused a dilemma in social relationships. In face-to-face greetings people have difference ways of addressing who they are talking to whether it is family members or close friends, subordinates to superiors, strangers to strangers, or adults to children. Even now with caller ID (this is a term which did not exist a few years ago), initially one can not be sure who they are talking to so a neutral way was needed to answer the telephone. Once again necessity begat invention.

In a 2007 book INVENTING ENGLISH: A Portable History of the Language the author, Seth Lerer, discusses the origin and evolution of the English language. He describes his book as about inventing English (invent from the Latin invenire, to come upon or find). The development of English can roughly be divided into the periods of Old English (circa 600-1100 A.D.), Middle English (circa 1100-1450), and Modern English (1450-present).

As pointed out by Lerer, by the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, Old English words with a long a sound changed to a long o sound. Thus ban became bone; ham became home; twa became two. Old English had consonant clusters at the beginning of words (hl-, hw-, hr-) that were simplified in Middle English. For example hlud became loud; hwaet became what; hring became ring. By a phenomenon called metathesis, the same thing which causes some children to pronounce spaghetti as psghetti and for a dialect to change the pronunciation of “ask” to “aks”, sounds in some words from Old English were reversed in Middle English. The Old English word for bird was brid and third was thrid.

According to Lerer, Old English largely built new words out of the familiar stock of roots or morphemes; instead Middle English borrowed copiously from other languages. The Normans (the Norman Conquest at the Battle of Hastings was in 1066) imported new words from France for administration, commerce, the church, cooking, learning, technology, etc. Such words are easily recognizable because they are often polysyllabic with distinguishable sounds. In fact the language of the English monarchy was French well into 13th century. The Anglo-Saxons generally were the food growers while the Normans ate it. Not surprisingly the names of animals such as calf, cow, deer, sheep, and sow remained Old English while the words for meats changed to French: beef (boeuf), mutton (mouton), pork (porc), veal (veau), and venison (venison).

The languages of Europe, Northern India, Iran, and parts of Western Asia belong to what is known as the Indo-European group. Words that share a common origin are called cognates. For example, the word moon appears in recognizable form in such diverse languages as German (Mond); Latin (mensis- meaning month); Lithuanian (menuo); and Greek (meis-also meaning month). The word yoke in German is (Joch); Latin (iugum); Russiam (igo) and Sanskrit (yugam). The word wind in Latin is (ventus); Russian (veter); Irish Gaelic (gwent); and Sanskrit (vatas).

As the various language families from the Indo-European group developed there were also cognate words. Latin gave rise to what became known as the Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. The word for wolf in Latin is lupus; French (loup); Italian (lupo); Romanian (lupu); and Spanish (lobo). Because English is a branch of the Germanic languages there are many words which are cognate with German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. Most words for numbers are cognate. Consider the English numbers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, hundred. In German they are: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, seiben, acht, neun, zehn, hundert. Dutch: een, twee, drie, vier, vijf, zes, zeven, acht, negen, tien, honderd. Swedish: en, två, tre, fyra, fem, sex, sju, åtta, nio, tio, hundra. The days of the week and months of the year are spelled so similarly (or are the same) in Swedish that it isn’t even necessary to give the English equivalent (even though the Swedish alphabet has 29 letters to 26 for English). Thus: Söndag, Möndag, Tisdag, Onsdag, Tordag, Fredag, Lördag, and januari, februari, mars, april, maj, juni, juli, augusti, september, oktober, november, and december. Comparing words from Germanic languages and Latin we have: English (bear); German (Bär); Danish (bjorn); but Latin (Ursus). Also English (sea); German (See); Dutch (zee); Danish (sö); but Latin (mare) and Greek (thalassa).

The Celtic language which still exists as Gaelic in Ireland, Welsh in Wales, and Cornish in Cornwall contributed to Old English. Afon is the Celtic word for river with the most famous example as the birth place of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon. The name of the river Thames is also a Celtic word.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400) was almost to Middle English as William Shakespeare was to Modern English. I say almost because although Chaucer’s influence on the use and forms of English was similar to Shakespeare’s, especially through his stories in the Canterbury Tales and his greatest poem Troilus and Criseyde, he did not coin many new words and phrases although he did introduce many French and Latin words into English. By contrast William Shakespeare (1564-1616) coined nearly 6000 new words and phrases. Many people today use these words and expressions without realizing they came from Shakespeare. These are but a few examples as given by author Paula LaRocque: Eating me out of house and home; Kill with kindness; Laid on with a trowel; Forget and forgive; Sweets to the sweet; Elbow room; Naked truth; Charmed life; A dish fit for the gods; Salad days; Over hill, over dale; Middle of the night; Quiet as a lamb; Sink or swim; Pound of flesh; A motley fool; Bag and baggage; Brave new world; Forever and a day; Men of few words; Not a mouse stirring; In my mind’s eye; The undiscovered country; The better part of valor is discretion; and At one fell swoop. More Shakespearian sounding are: To be or not to be; What light through yonder window breaks; Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown; Cowards die many times before their deaths; The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers; Something wicked this way comes; To sleep, perchance to dream; That way madness lies; Loved not wisely, but too well; Parting is such sweet sorrow; More sinned against than sinning; What fools these mortal be; Brevity is the soul of wit; and All’s well that end well.

Beyond the coinages by Shakespeare, the contributions to the uses and evolution of the English language by both Chaucer and Shakespeare are immense and can hardly be overstated. This advancement in the language was accomplished through some of the most entertaining and insightful stories, poems, and plays ever written in English and in the case of Shakespeare arguably the greatest plays ever written in any language. English would truly be much impoverished had these two giants not existed.

There was a process which occurred approximately from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 17th century and was called The Great Vowel Shift. It was first studied by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) who coined the term. This was an important, but complicated, major change in the pronunciation of the English language which separates Middle English (1100-1450) from Modern English (1450-present) and this change made the language of the age of Chaucer largely opaque by the time of Shakespeare. It is difficult to understand, let along explain. Nevertheless, I will do my best, in my limited linguistic way, to clarify it.

The pronunciation of the long vowels form the main, but not the only, difference between Middle English and Modern English. And the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) was one of the historical events marking this separation. In order to get a feel for how the vowels sounds changed it is necessary to explain what a diphthong is. In phonetics a diphthong (literally with two sounds or tones) is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick, but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. While monophthongs or ‘pure’ vowels have one target tongue position, diphthongs have two target tongue positions.

Each of these long stressed monophthongs may be said to have occupied a place in the mouth. Vowels could be high or low – that is, pronounced with the tongue high in the mouth or low in the mouth. And they could be front or back – pronounced either in the front of the mouth, towards the lips, or the back, towards the throat. Linguists have come up with ways of representing the place of these vowels schematically, and much of the business of explaining the GVS has in fact gone on by coming up with visual representations of its stages. Diphthongs are considered to be long vowels and monophthongs short vowels. Examples of long vowels are bait, beet, bite, boat, and beauty. Examples of short vowels are bat, bet, bit, bot(tle), and put. In the course of the GVS only four words (great, break, steak, yea) and one proper name (Reagan) that had the long open e and were spelled ea did not change their pronunciation. The reason for this is unknown.

Why did the Great Vowel Shift occur? There are no definite answers, just speculation. Some theories attach one cause to the mass immigration to South-East England after the Black Death (1347-52), where the differences in accents led to certain groups modifying their speech to allow for a standard pronunciation of vowel sounds. The different dialects and the rise of a middle class in London led to changes in pronunciation which continued to spread out from London. Another highlights the language of the ruling class – the medieval aristocracy had spoken French, but by the early 14th century they were using English – the King’s English. This may have caused a change in the “prestige accent” of English, either by making pronunciation more French in style or by changing it in some other way, perhaps by hypercorrection to something thought to be more “English” (England was at war with France for much of this period - the same reason that the British Royal family changed their name to Windsor from Hanover during WWI when Britain was fighting Germany). Another influence may have been the great political and social upheavals of the 15th century which was largely contemporaneous with the GVS.

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was one of England’s best known literary figures and the most quoted after Shakespeare. In the mid 1700’s he became convinced that English was being “corrupted” by misuse, especially by the masses. He therefore set out to write a comprehensive dictionary of the English language to establish standard word usage. Other dictionaries in English had been written, but they were all on specialized subjects – none was comprehensive. The French had their comprehensive dictionary so Johnson thought it was time the English did also.

Although Johnson could legitimately be called a curmudgeon (more on this word later) he was also brilliant and intellectually honest. In the years (1747-55) of putting this dictionary together Johnson came to realize that language was not static – it was naturally dynamic and evolving so he changed his opinion on what he had previously thought was incorrect and debased use of English.

As was to occur later with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) except that was on a much larger scale, Johnson received many suggestions from the public for words to be included in his dictionary. One suggestion was the definition and etymology of the word curmudgeon. The writer suggested that the word was derived from French words coeur (heart) and méchant (evil). Either the letter was unsigned or he lost it; nonetheless, Johnson thought it plausible so he set it down for what it was worth: “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant, Fr. An unknown correspondent.” Twenty years later in 1775, in his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Dr. John Ash, cribbing from Johnson but, unfortunately for him, knowing no French, entered it as “from the French coeur unknown, méchant correspondent.” This was one the most flagrant and jolly instances of plagiarism in English.

When he was wrong Johnson was quick to admit it. In his dictionary he defined the “pastern” as the knee of a horse. On being queried by a admirer who was of the horse riding set as to how he could possibly make such a mistake he replied, “Ignorance madam, pure ignorance.” What could one say?

That Johnson was an irascible and crabbed old man can not be gainsaid as illustrated by the following stories. Quakers had moved into the area fairly recently where they had some women preachers. Johnson was asked what he though of women preachers. “Ah, yes, women preachers” Johnson opined ” are like dogs walking on their hind legs, you don’t marvel that they do not do it well, but that they can do it at all.”

During the period the American colonists were objecting to being taxed without representation in the British parliament and had British soldiers quartered in their homes without their permission, Johnson exclaimed that the colonists deserved anything that was done to them, short of hanging. After the Revolutionary War began he did not exempt that. A nice fellow, that Johnson.

Mark Twain (1835-1910, came into the world and went out in consecutive appearances of Halley’s Comet) did more than any other single author to define American English. The words hello and dude were used for the first time in literature in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (published for the first time in 1889). He is considered the archetype American novelist and the foremost exponent of the American idiom in his writings. Twain is legendary for his aphorisms. A few of them are: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.” “Always do right. That will gratify some and astonish the rest.” “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the one who can not read.” “Remember the poor. It cost nothing.” There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.” “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” “Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of others.” “One of the most remarkable differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.” “Be good and you will be lonesome. Be virtuous and you will be considered eccentric.” In addition to humor, these sayings are liberally laced with sardonic insight.

By a process called onomatopoeia (Greek: onomatopoiiā – from onoma name + poiein to make) which is an agglutinative language formation of a word in imitation of a sound, languages are enriched and English is no exception. Some of these words are: zap, zip, click, clank, sniff, snort, boom, crackle, and sizzle in addition to animals/insect sounds of quack, roar, meow, buzz, bleat, oink, cuckoo, chickadee, whooping crane, and whip-poor-will. In Gulliver’s Travels Jonathon Swift named the race of horses endowed with the power of speech the Houyhnhnm in imitation of the whinny of a horse.

If this essay has been informative and entertaining then I have accomplished my task.

HONESTY 29

2007-08-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

Honesty is the best policy. Or is it? Let’s examine that concept in some of its myriad aspects from a practical standpoint and try to avoid, as much as possible, moral strictures.

A few of the world’s, or at least Western World’s, deepest thinkers and writers have something to say on the subject: (1)“Confidence in others’ honesty is no light testimony of one’s own integrity.” Montaigne: Essays I.xl; (2)“Take note, take note, O world, To be direct and honest is not safe.” Shakespeare: Othello III.iii; (3)“Honesty is the best policy.” Cervantes: Don Quixote II.xxxiii; (4)“He that resolves to deal with none but honest Men, must leave off dealing.” Thomas Fuller: Gnomologia; (5)“An honest man’s the noblest work of God.” Alexander Pope: An Essay on Man IV; (6)“Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.” Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale IV.iii; (7)“No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Shakespeare: All’s Well that Ends Well III.v; (8)“Every man has his fault, and honesty is his.” Shakespeare: Timon of Athens III.i; (9)“The honest man though e’er so poor, Is king of o’ men for a’ that.” Robert Burns: For a’ That and a’ That; (10)”Clear and round dealing is the honor of a man’s nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it debases it.” Francis Bacon: Of Truth.

Those are decidedly a mixed lot of opinions. No help there in trying to decide whether honesty is helpful or a hindrance.

It may be more useful to try to come at the question from a different direction. It once was that most parents taught their children to be honest and when the little tykes fibbed they were lectured to and disciplined. To be fair some parents still do, although my memory and perception is that it is now a ”custom more honored in the breach than in the observance.” That of course begs the question (begging the question means to assume as fact what is under dispute) whether honesty is a beneficial practice to be pursued.

There is honesty and then there is honesty, e.g. there are lies and little ‘white’ lies (interesting isn’t it, as has been commented upon many times, that ‘white’ is good and ‘black’ is bad as when the good guy wears the white hat and another, a dangerous and menacing fellow, wears the black hat). My personal take on ‘white’ lies is that I would not be so gauche as to tell a woman her suit was ugly unless she asked me for my opinion, then I would be as truthful as reasonably proper manners would dictate. Likewise if a man asked me if I liked his dress I would simply tell him it was not my style.

The animal kingdom of course is replete with examples of deception, i.e. dishonesty. Even plants get in on the act. Venus’s-Flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, deceptively presents the chance for a meal to a roving insect, but it is the innocent insect which ends up as the meal. It makes me believe there are plants which will not make it to plant heaven. Would you want to share paradise with such a diabolical character as the aforementioned insect eater?

An African monkey, the Vervet, gave gratuitous leopard alarms when challenged by a rival male, causing the other male to flee up a tree and a chimpanzee was observed using his fingers to readjust his mouth in order to hide a grin before turning to bluff a rival.

The common Mockingbird, Mimus, M. polyglottos, (which means many-tongued mimic) mimics the songs of many other birds and one would think for reasons other than its own amusement. The Brown-Headed Cowbird, Molothrus ater, lays eggs in other bird’s nests thereby shirking the responsibility of raising its own chicks.

A natural question is do we or should we, Homo sapiens, consider ourselves morally superior to plants and animals and therefore strive to be as honest as humanly possible?

What are the practical aspects of dishonesty? Nobody believes anything you say. You are not trusted in any business dealing or social situation. And as a general principle you are held in disrepute and obloquy. The positives? You might, to your gain, get away with it, at least for a while.

The main advantage for honesty can be summed up with the word, “credibility.” Reputation for honesty is of no small moment. The deserved appellation of “Honest Abe” served to enhance the image of and respect given to Lincoln. If former President Bill Clinton were to be described as honest most people would interpret it to be meant ironically. An exception is Dan Rather who, in an interview, answered a question by stating that he thought Clinton was an “honest man.” This could occur only in ‘Dan’s World’ where reality was not always recognized.

It is interesting to speculate that if some prominent political leader were to resolve not only to always tell the truth, but also to be candid and complete in answering questions and stating positions what would be the net result for their standing and effectiveness among political peers and the public? They could refuse to answer certain questions for a variety of legitimate reasons, yet never lie or mislead when responding. My sense is that the disadvantages of having to admit fault or error would be more than offset by the earned credibility and believability when, as often occurs, there is doubt as to the truth of situations and claims. My recommendation is, what the heck, give it a try.

THE MYTH OF A 50/50 COUNTRY 28

2007-08-03T14:46:00.000-07:00

The elections in the past two presidential cycles prove this is roughly a 50/50 country don’t they? The country is split equally right down the middle – half Red and half Blue, right? Well, actually not. Balderdash, you say. Alright let’s just consider what the evidence is on that score:

Author Morris Fiorina has written a book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, in which he explodes the myth that people in this country are at opposite poles on the issues which are important to them and are divided equally. In fact when it comes to the important social, financial, and political issues, a majority of people, whether they are in the Blue states or Red states, are not that far apart in their opinions. In survey after survey when people are asked their positions on issues such as national security, government role in education, abortion, taxes, state and national government involvement in health care, gay marriage, appropriate punishment for crime, government enforcement on civil rights, government protection of the environment, and the degree of separation of government and religion one sees the results plot in the familiar bell or Gaussian shaped curves. And interestingly enough there is not much difference whether these opinions come from people in Blue or Red states. Further, these data have not changed to any important degree in the past generation.

It is instructive that three of the Bluest states, New York, California, and Massachusetts currently have Republican governors. They are moderate Republicans true enough, but that is exactly the point.

Why then this apparent severe and almost equal divide in presidential elections? The answer is simple. When voters have only two and not a continuum of choices they have to pick one or the other, i.e. Democrat or Republican. The total for all of the third parties (Ralph Nader, Libertarian, Green, Constitutional, Socialist, Flat-Earthers, Aliens-Among-Us, etc.) in 2004 amounted to approx. 1% - Bush received 52% of the popular vote and Kerry 47%). It turns out that currently as happens more times than not in history the electorate is split between Dems & Repubs almost equally. Even when there is what is called a ‘landslide’ the vote may go 55% to 45%; hardly an overwhelming difference.

Naturally the tails of the opinion curves contain the crazies – on both the left and the right. Of course according to us sane, rational, and appealing people there seem to be more loonies on the left than on the right. That may be because they have bigger microphones. Consider the strident, unstable, and famous (some would say infamous) Hollywood types; then there are the well known U.S.A. haters, e.g. Michael Moore, George Soros, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Al Franken, Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd, Eric Alterman, Robert Scheer, E.J. Dionne, Bob Herbert, Michael Kinsley, and Katrina vanden Heuvel to name a few (She is the editor of The Nation magazine and is not a wild-eyed loony – she is a Communist or close enough to it to count. Unlike many liberal gals she is attractive and in her generally smiling and cheerful way she would simply consign conservatives to the Gulags if it were within her power. Come to think on it the egregious Michael Moore was a Leninist as a youth and may still be for all I know although being sent to a Gulag would be the least onerous sentence one could expect from him).

A couple of days after the elections Michael Moore posted a map on his web site showing the Blue states linked with Canada with the title The United States of Canada; the Red states were labeled Jesusland. Paul Krugman wrote in a syndicated column in the New York Times that George W. Bush was a radical. That is not the pot calling the kettle black – that is a pot calling a silver chalice black. Carole Simpson of ABC News likened the Red states to the old slave holding Southern states. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi explained after the elections that the Democrats were holding a caucus to “save civilization as we know it.” Geraldine Anne Ferraro said all the talent and wealth of the country are in the Blue states; implying that the Red states are peopled by hicks, losers, and religious nuts. If the Democrats keep that up the country will become Redder and they will be consigned to a permanent minority status. But if they want to avoid relinquishing their position as a competitive political force they need to find more prominent places in their party for such moderates as Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democratic Leadership Council, Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, and especially they need to listen to Senator Zell Miller of Georgia.

The rightists, in particular some local talk radio hosts, have a few of their own lunatics. Ann Coulter qualifies as a hard right spokeswoman and is a best selling author, but lacks the vicious and hate-filled persona of bomb throwers on the left. Coulter flails the libs, leaving them raw and bloody, yet how can anyone be too put off with such a good looking long-legged blonde? The females on the strong left, with a couple of noted exceptions, look like they deliberately make themselves as homely and unadorned as possible.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt in your philosophy.” Who would have dreamed that the chasm which has opened up in the ethos of the Old World (Europe) and the New (U.S.A.) makes this country seem like one Big Happy Family by comparison? Fewer than 5% of Europeans go to church or synagogue regularly contrasted with 40% to 50% who do so in the United States. Europeans make the word ‘secular’ seem religiously devout in juxtaposition to their nihilistic philosophy. Apparently, especially after seeing the devastation of WWI & WWII, modern Europeans would sooner surrender to Muslim religious fanatics than confront them in another conflict. The “Rather Red than Dead” slogan of the 1960’s has apparently been replaced by the cringing admission of ‘better to be Muslimized that decapitized (not real words, but they rhyme).’

In a recent survey, before Yasser Arafat became brain dead (some would say that occurred 20 years ago), 13% of the French considered Arafat a terrorist, and 27% thought him a freedom fighter; 13% favored Israel and 34% favored the Palestinians in their ongoing battles in the Middle East. Doubtless part of the preference is due to anti-Semitism which is rampant in Europe today (technically since Arabs are also Semites it should really be called anti-Jewish bigotry).

There are no Good Guys and Bad Guys in the Middle East. Author Richard Ben Cramer wrote a 2003 book entitled How Israel Lost. He was the foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Enquirer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Middle East in the 1970’s. Cramer points out the economic ties between Israelis and the Palestinian Authority. Cement, steel, other durable goods, and even fuel oil and gasoline are sold by Israel to the PA to the profit advantage of both even though the Palestinians could do better on the open market. The Israeli equivalent of our CIA, the Masad, was instrumental in setting up and financing Hamas. Naturally they did not do this so Israel would be subjected to terrorist attacks; they did this to try to counter the power of Arafat. It was a colossal miscalculation. When he was growing up in Philadelphia Cramer remembers the mantra he heard at the synagogue: “A people without land for a land without people.” In his assignment in the Middle East he saw first hand that although the first part of that formulation might have some validity the second part certainly did not. There were plenty of Arabs as well as a few other peoples in Palestine before the Jews forced them out in 1948. In fact I met several displaced Palestinians when I was working in Libya in the late 1950’s. To say they were bitter about the situation would be to indeed understate it.

Still there is no moral equivalency between the murderous acts of terrorism committed by the Palestinians against non-combatants, especially women and children and retaliation by the Israelis. Terrorism trumps everything. When you commit heinous crimes against humanity you cede the moral high ground to your opponent regardless of how legitimate your cause. This is where the self-serving and perfidious Europeans go wrong in their one-sided bias against Israel.

Examples of how anti-Christian Europe has become is shown by the case of Italian European Union minister, Rocco Buttiglione, who is a personal friend of Pope John Paul II. When Buttiglione expressed reservations about gay marriage, mind you he only expressed reservations he did not outright condemn it, the EU blocked him from becoming an EU cabinet member. The Pope lobbied hard to have Christianity noted as part of Europe’s heritage in the EU constitution, a historical fact that even an uninformed visitor to Europe’s museums and urban centers would observe. He failed. Never mind, the Euros in the not too distant future can forget about Christianity (see the paragraph below).

In the 8th century A.D. Muslim armies tried to conquer Europe and failed. Europeans are not reproducing themselves in any great numbers and Muslins have a high immigration rate into Europe and are considerably out reproducing the natives by apparently being reflective rather than periodic ovulaters (just joking). Respected Middle East scholar and author, Bernard Lewis, estimates that by the end of the current century Europe will be essentially an Islamic continent. The Muslims will have triumphed this time without firing a shot. The young grandchildren in Europe today might be well advised to teach their children to say Salam Alekum and point out the direction to Mecca so they will be able to pray properly.

IS WAR WORTH IT? 27

2007-07-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

Despite the tremendous costs in life, limb, and treasure can it rationally be claimed that wars are sometimes worth it? Some would answer with a resounding no. Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) R-MT who was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives voted against United States participation in WWI and for good measure was the only member of congress to vote against the USA entering WWII. Would you believe it – she was a pacifist. Her modern day equivalents are not so much true pacifists as they are simply philosophically opposed to whatever actions are taken by Republican administrations, especially if headed by G.W. Bush.

What are the attitudes of people, in particular voters, concerning going to war and once at war, staying the course until the war is either won or lost? I would maintain that putatively everybody loves a winner and conversely loathes a loser. In August 1864 just three months before the presidential election, Lincoln said that unless something changed he was not only going to be beaten, but beaten badly. After more than three years of war and with horrendous casualties the people of the North were war weary with no end of the war in sight. Small wonder that Lincoln was so pessimistic about his reelection chances. In fact Lincoln wrote out a plan to attempt to save the Union to be implemented between the time of the election (1st Tuesday of November) and the inauguration of the new president (then the 4th of March 1865). As Lincoln said, the new president (former Union Armies commander, George McClellan) would have secured the election on conditions such that he could not possibly save the Union after the election. It is instructive that Lincoln sealed his plan in an envelope and had all of his cabinet sign the envelope without reading it. The men in Lincoln’s cabinet, Sec. of State, Wm. Seward (later, in 1867, he was stupidly derided with the appellation of “Seward’s Folly” for being instrumental in the purchase of Alaska from Russia. We need more such ‘foolish’ people in government); Sec. of Treas., Salmon Chase; Sec. of War, Edwin Stanton; Sec. of the Navy, Gideon Wells; Attn. Gen., Edward Bates; Postmaster Gen., Montgomery Blair; Sec. of Interior, John Usher initially all thought they would do better as president than Lincoln, but by 1864 realized how mistaken they were and by this time had so much confidence in Lincoln that they would sign off on an important presidential document without reading it.

Things changed, of course, with the taking of Atlanta by Gen. Sherman, the destruction of the Confederate breadbasket, the Shenandoah Valley by Gen. Sheridan, and the conquest of Mobile Bay by Adm. Farragut. With the fortunes of war now firmly on the side of the North, Lincoln swept to an electoral landslide winning 212 out of 233 electoral votes and a 400,000 popular vote margin (equivalent to 4,000,000 today). As I said, everybody loves a winner. N’est-ce pas?

Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” With Wilson reelected the United States did enter the war in 1917, but American troops fought for only about 15 months and suffered 116,500 deaths vs. 405,000 in WWII and 620,000 in the Civil War so there was not sufficient time for the general public to recoil from the slaughter of this most unnecessary and bloody war. Of all the wars in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, certainly the ones the USA fought in, the First World War was the one which had the least excuse to have been undertaken not only by the United States, but especially by the European nations. It is not just the carnage the war wrought, but it was a major causative factor of WWII.

Once Germany, Italy, and Japan launched their military expansionism, the Allied countries led by Great Britain and the United States had no other option than responding with their own military might. From the Allied nations standpoint the Second World War was a necessity. The alternative was to have been conquered and subjugated.

While there was some opposition in this country to the Spanish-American War (April – August 1898) it was minor at most. Why? We won. And the war was of a very short duration. Nevertheless, consider the ethical and moral factors. The United States committed unjustified military aggression against Spain forcing them out of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. One can make a case that Spain was a colonial power who had no moral imperative to occupy those lands, yet who appointed the USA as the international sheriff?

The casus belli for the conflict was flawed – either deliberately wrong or mistakenly wrong. The battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor and the cause was attributed to sabotage by the Spanish. In fact it was poor ship design. Owing to heightened tension between Spain and the United States the fires for the ship’s boilers while the ship was waiting in the harbor were never banked so as to be ready to get underway in a minimum of time. This resulted in the single bulkhead separating the boilers from the powder compartment where the powder for the ship’s guns was stored (the poor design) overheating, thereby setting off the powder.

Initially President Wm. McKinley resisted a military solution, choosing diplomacy to try to force concessions from Spain towards Cuba. After the Maine blew up killing 260 seamen, McKinley capitulated to public pressure by endorsing a declaration of war against Spain by congress on April 25, 1898.

The Mexican-American War of 1846-48 generally had high approval in the United States. Not only did American generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor (he was elected president in 1848) win all of their important battles, but there was a mood in the country at that time of ‘Manifest Destiny’ – the belief in the inevitable territorial expansion of the United States in North America. The USA gained over ½ million square miles as a result of the war. One can argue whether this war and the resulting acquisition of territory were just. One might also hold that given the millions of Mexicans who have illegally enter this country to find jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities, perhaps the USA should have taken over all of Mexico at that time.

Not everyone agreed back then that the war was necessary and proper. A first term Whig congressman from Illinois made a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives strongly condemning not only the war, but Democrat president James Polk as well. He was Abraham Lincoln. One and a half decades later Lincoln would receive his own harsh criticism for leading the country into war. Isn’t there a cliché about “what goes around…….?”

Can the Korean War be defended without paralogistic argument? How about the Vietnam War? The First Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the Second Iraq War? I can absolutely guarantee there is wide disagreement by the public as to how these questions would be answered even if some respond in the negative, ispe dixit. The war against the Taliban & al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11 clearly has the highest approval rating and the fewest number of dissenters with perhaps the Vietnam War the least popular. There is a commonality among these conflicts. The ones which were won or appear to be going well are the most popular. The United States lost the Vietnam War – not on the battlefield, but we lost. The Korean War was stalemated. Neither was popular. The popularity of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be determined by their final resolution. If the results ending up being beneficial for the United States then their approval is assured and naturally if their outcomes are detrimental to the interests of the USA, unpopular. Yes, I am saying the moral aspects of these wars are not the determinate of their acceptance by the general population of our country. That is my claim even if I can not assert it apodictically.

I am reminded of the dialogue in the movie Unforgiven between the characters of the old gunfighter played by Clint Eastwood and the sadistic sheriff played by Gene Hackman. Eastwood is about to dispatch Hackman to the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns’ with a bullet from a Spenser carbine (invented during the Civil War). Hackman says “I don’t deserve this.” Eastwood responds, “Deservin’ got nuthin’ to do with it.” Similarly the popularity of war is largely independent of moral concerns, but rests on the outcome. It is not just from the likes of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, or even Eric Hoffer where insightful apothegmatic philosophy can be found.

THE MYTH OF SOCIAL INSECURITY 26

2007-07-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

With the Social Security debate now coming to the foreground in the New Year (it has not been particularly deep in the background for some years now) it is time for me to weigh in on this issue in my perhaps mistaken, but certainly non conventional style. One person who will not be discussing SS as an elected member of congress is the former Congressional House Speaker, former House Minority Leader, 2004 Democratic primary presidential candidate, and now private citizen as the 109th congress convened in January 2005, namely Little Dickey Gephardt of Missouri. He had an inexplicable, even strange way of calling it, “Soc Security.” Why did he call it that? Was it a way to economize his words? Being a Democrat, economy of any thing associated with the government is unlikely. I just observed it - I can’t explain it. As a private citizen perhaps Gephardt should try to cajole Linda Daschle, the 2nd wife of Tom Daschle and Miss Kansas of 1978, to leave her highly paid job as a lobbyist in the US House of Representatives for the law firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Coldwell and replace her. Ex-Senator Tom (Puff) Daschle, praise Allah, was ousted from the senate by John Thune R-SD. Linda Daschle’s influence must be greatly diminished given that her nexus to congress has now been severed. Alternately, Gephardt may want to join Fannie Mae now that both former Clinton administration members Franklin Raines resigned under pressure as chairman & CEO and former Attorney General Janet Reno’s ex-henchwoman and 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick quietly slipped out as vice-chairman in the face of a $9 billion restatement of earnings. Lower earnings of course, but then what are a few billions among friends?

The orthodox arguments concerning whether to implement major changes in Social Security and if so what kinds of changes generally go something like this: (1) there is no need to do anything now because it will be solvent until circa 2042 or until 2018 if one counts when it is estimated that outflows will first exceed inflows. (2) The system will eventually go broke so the sooner changes are made to lengthen the solvency period, the less painful the fix will be. (3) What ever is done to change the system, privatizing any part of it should not be considered as that will cost X trillion of dollars over Y number of years (some say $2 trillion over 10 years, but then there are people who believe the earth is flat and even deny that men have walked on the moon, so there you are). In addition to some others, National Public Radio’s moderate liberal Mara Liasson allowed as how anyone who would invest any part of their SS in a private account would be gambling because there is no guarantee their investment would not go south. Of course there is no certainty that the earth will not be hit by another comet or asteroid tomorrow as that which may have extinguished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago or the entire world will be not be enveloped in a giant tsunami the day after tomorrow. I would not bet a large amount of money on these scenarios and so would recommend that Ms. Liasson stick to politics and not make irrational statements on a subject she clearly knows little about. Given the long term performance of the equity markets and the proposed built-in safeguards and restraints of the investment vehicles the returns for private SS investors are about as sure a bet as the sun rising in the east each morning. Would you or Mara like to bet me against that? (4) The best way to restore confidence that younger SS contributors will be permitted to collect benefits upon their retirement is to privatize a significant part of the program on a voluntary basis. (5) In the long term the only way to keep the system solvent is a combination of increasing the ages of eligibility, decreasing the payments to retirees, and increasing the contributions by working people given that the ratio of worker to recipient will changed from 16 to 1 in the past to, oh say, 1 to 16 respectively in the future. Can everyone say, spell, and cogitate the word bleak?

One myth which needs to pass from the scene in order to raise the level of rational discourse is to forget about the “Lock Box” concept concerning Social Security or other government receipts. Even the term seems to have disappeared from the political lexicon in recent years. The last time I heard it was in the 2000 presidential campaign where the angry Algore went down to defeat still insisting that under his administration there would be a “Lock Box” for SS monies that would be inviolable from siphoning off for other government programs. Poor Al was always easily confused. Remember when he couldn’t decide whether to take the advice of one Ms. Naomi Wolff and assume the guise of an Alpha Male dressed in earth tones or stick to his boring nature dressed in conventional dark business suits? He ended up fatally combining his drab demeanor with a harsh and accusatory stump speech delivery which as an incumbent Vice-President against all odds of a still thriving economy and non-militarily active milieu managed to lose a close election which he should have won going away. The Fates were kind to the American people that time.

I do not get all exercised because money is not set aside in what is called a “Social Security Trust Fund” the way many commentators do for reasons discussed below. That does not mean I do not favor privatizing at least part if not all of Social Security savings, on a voluntary basis of course, because I do. Not only will this be income retirees can count on receiving, but it will almost certainly be more than that paid out from the “public” sector funds. Thomas Sowell concluded a January 20, 2005 article by stating, “No matter how much money you have paid into Social Security over the years, and no matter what you were promised when you paid it, the government always has the option to pay you back only what future politicians decide they can afford, given all the other things they might prefer to spend the money on.”

“Owning your own private pension plan means that those who owe you have to pay you what they promised. It also means that if you die without ever using it, you can leave it to your family, instead of having the government keep the money.”

Forget all of the above Social Security folderol (excepting the wise counsel of Thomas Sowell) which I am sure y’all have heard from various and diverse pundits in the past few years. Mostly these opinions are recycled over and over apparently without any original positions to input into the cauldron of bold new ideas.

Social Security is a program of the federal government which makes it different from state, municipal, corporate, or private financing. Only the federal government can legally create money and one of the major functions of the federal government is to regulate the money supply. In addition to manipulating several interest rates, the federal government is so dominant in this country’s overall financial and social structure that the welfare of its people is intimately tied to government policies. Therein lays the regulating mechanism for the purchasing power of our money and by extension to Social Security. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.

As a practical matter the federal government does not have a fixed and limited amount of money to spend on individual programs such as Social Security, Medicare, etc. As a consequence there will not come a time when no more money is available to distribute to SS recipients as calculated by how much in receipts are coming in from current SS contributors. This is an important point which should be differentiated from the orthodox acceptance of the balance of SS receipts and payouts, but one which must not be over interpreted. Clearly the economy is not immunized from suffering dire consequences caused by the federal government dispensing vast and uncompensated quantities of money.

In additional to redistributing wealth, another important purpose of federal taxes, with individual income taxes being a prime source, is to remove monies from the economy so as to alleviate the problem of having too much money chasing too few goods and services, i.e. inflation. It therefore follows that payouts in SS will have to be compensated by a diminution in the supply of money. But it does not matter whether this money comes from SS receipts or other forms of taxes. This is not some fanciful hypothesis I originated but rather is the theory of the 1930’s to 1970’s economist, Dr. Abba Lerner, who in 1959 - 1965 taught economics at Michigan State University and at that time was as respected and almost as well known as economist and later Nobel Prize winner Dr. Milton Friedman. According to Prof. Lerner, except for relatively minor taxes e.g., the so called ‘sin’ taxes - tax on alcohol and tobacco to discourage consumption, there are two reasons for federal taxes: (1) To redistribute income and (2) take money out of circulation to keep too many dollars from chasing too few goods and services - in other words to keep inflation under control (see Everybody’s Business: A Re-examination of Current Assumptions in Economics and Public Policy by Abba P. Lerner).

The other side of this federal equation is expenditures. Compensating for SS payouts could also be accomplished, in part or in whole, by decreasing other federal spending such as for social programs, the military, corporate welfare, or even, God forbid, by genuinely decreasing the size of the federal government which both Democrat and Republican politicians are not wont to do. However, like the animals of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, all expenditures are equal - except some are more equal than others. There is the question of efficiency of money spent as well as perceived need and political expediency. These are issues which would have to be balanced by the reality, need, and political clout of retirees.

At this time congressional Democrats and even a few Republicans seem intent on obstructing any and every change to Social Security being contemplated by the Bush administration for what appear to be impurely political reasons. I predict they will either come to an acceptable, to most Republicans, compromise or they will be estopped in their obstructionist tactics considering their previously declared claim for SS reform.

There are those who say that Medicare is a bigger unfunded government liability than Social Security and therefore a larger looming problem. I am reminded that during the American Civil War when the “Trent Affair” threatened to engulf the country in a war with Great Britain, Abraham Lincoln tamping down the fires of conflict told his cabinet, “Gentlemen, one war at a time.”

CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS 25

2007-07-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

There was a lawsuit in a London, England court room concerning plagiarism and copyright infringement. Was that an interesting story? Not particularly, but what is worth writing about is the content of the suit. You see, this was about two books – The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigert and Richard Leigh and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Additionally there was a movie which was in theaters in May 2006 based on The Da Vinci Code book which has sold 40,000,000 worldwide to date.

The central theme of both books and the movie is that Jesus, yes Jesus, the son of God, fathered a child with Mary Magdalene and an ultra secret organization called the Priory of Sion has concealed and protected the bloodline of Him which exists even today. I do not classify myself an especially ardent Christian, yet I find this postulation extremely offensive. How much more must the millions of highly devout and fervent Christians around the world feel the obloquy caused by the lese majesty and calumny heaped upon their religion?

There has been some criticism and complains about The Da Vinci Code book and was more when the movie came out, yet there has not been worldwide rioting, murder, and mayhem (don’t get ahead of me here – wait for the following paragraph). I understand why not in secular Europe where fewer than 10% of the people find themselves in church on Sundays. It seems only the young unhinged anarchists and Luddites in Europe feel passionate about anything. Perhaps that explains why most European countries have a less than replacement fertility rate. Yet how about the Christians in the Americas, Africa, and Asia?

In my mind and I believe in many others, the cartoons which ridiculed and imprecated the prophet Mohammed were no difference in substance as applied to Islam from the aforementioned books and movie as referenced to Christianity. What then accounts for the difference in reactions of Christians and Muslims? A Muslim might say that if Christians do not defend their religion then that is their problem not ours. I suppose, for Muslims, issuing fatwas (fatwi plural?) willy-nilly, calling for the deaths of every Tom, Dick, and Harry even remotely connected to the cartoons, once again calling for the death of Salmon Rushdie now that he is being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and the now ever so tiresome mob marches through the streets burning flags and shouting death to Israel, America, Denmark, etc. qualify as normal defenses of their faith. Rational people would disagree. Does it mean then that Muslims are irrational fanatics? Christians are flaccid and craven? Or Christians are tolerant and kindly? And Muslims are simply mawkish and emotionally immature? One thing can be stated with reasonable certainty: There is and has long been, as written about by octogenarian Islamic specialist, the British Bernard Lewis (he reads the Koran in the original Arabic), a continent wide chasm in the general philosophy, religious, social, governmental, and world outlook of Muslims and Christians.

THE MISUNDERSTOOD AMERICAN ECONOMY 24

2007-07-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

All of the meaningful jobs in this country are being outsourced to places such as India, mainland China, Taiwan, etc. Our manufacturing sector is diminishing faster than our waistlines are expanding. We will soon be left with only service jobs – hamburger flipping and the like. Real wages for the average family are going down, not up. Our economy is stagnating and the American Dream has become a nightmare for most folks.

If people believe the above dreck (What a wonderfully appropriate slang word which means worthless, junk, trash - and it is derived from the Yiddish word threkkr meaning excrement.) then they have been getting too much of their ‘information’ from such sources as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and, as it turns out, the Sunday supplement, PARADE magazine. The Washington D.C. presidential press corps would be proud of them for believing such nonsense.

I apologize up front for the length of this article, but there is simply too much information to cover by using fewer words while trying to be both informative and entertaining. Many of the data are derived from the book MYTHS OF RICH AND POOR: Why We are Better off than We Think by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm. Michael Cox was the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas and Richard Alm was business reporter for the Dallas Morning News so both are well credentialed.

Hourly wages rose an average annual 2%, adjusted for inflation, between 1953 and 1973. For the next 5 years wages were flat, and then fell by an average 0.7% per year through 1996. Case closed right? Living standards have been declining since 1973, apodictically. Well, not so fast. There is more to the story – much more.

A better indicator of how well Americans are doing is consumption, not a proxy such as wages or salaries. The statistics on consumption clearly reveal that Americans are better off now than at any time in history. No one doubts that Americans are better off materially, perhaps not spiritually, today than 100 years ago when people lived without electricity, telephones, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and disease fighting antibiotics among other things. How much better off are we than people were 30 years ago in the 1970’s? Consider this partial list from the Cox & Alm book:

ITEM 1970 Mid - 1990’s
Avg. size of new home (sq. ft.) 1500 2150
New homes w/central heat and A/C 34.0% 81.0%
Homes lacking a telephone 13.0% 6.3%
Households with computer 0.0% 41.0%
Households with no vehicle 20.4% 7.9%
Households with two or more vehicles 29.3% 61.9%
Households with color TV 34.0% 97.9%
Households with two or more TV’s 30.7% 72.8%
Households with cable TV 6.3% 63.4%
Households with answering machine 0.0% 6.5%
Households with cordless telephone 0.0% 66.0%
Households with computer printer 0.0% 38.0%
Households with CD player 0.0% 49.0%
Households with cellular telephone 0.0% 34.0%
Households with clothes washer 62.1% 83.2%
Households with clothes dryer 44.6% 75.0%
Households with a microwave <1% 89.5%
Households with outdoors gas grill <5% 28.5%
Households with frost-free refrigerator <25% 86.8%
Mean household net worth $86,095 $216,843
Median household net worth $27,938 $59,398

Additionally fewer than ½ the homes built in 1970 had two or more bathrooms; by 1997 nine out of ten did. In 1970 58% of new homes included garages – by 1997 87% of new homes had them. The garages like the homes have gotten bigger. In 1997 ¾ of the garages had space for two or more automobiles compared with a little more than 1/3 in the early 1970’s.

More up-to-date data on housing (the Cox and Alm book was published in 1999) are that in 1973 the median home had 1660 sq. ft. while in 2005 it was 2412 sq. ft. In 1973 23% of homes had 4+ bedrooms, in 2005 it was 37%; in 1973 12% had 3+ bathrooms, in 2005 24% did; in 1973 44% had fireplaces, in 2005 there were 55% of homes with fireplaces.

Americans are enjoying more luxuries than ever too. Adjusted for inflation, the average spent on jewelry and watches more than doubled from 1970 to 1996. On average 11 gallons of bottled water were consumed per person per year in 1996, up from one gallon in 1970. American spending on services has risen 83 % since the early 1970’s. Included are health clubs, financial advisors, landscapers, caterers, pest-control companies, dry cleaners, car detailing shops, and hundreds of other businesses that entertain, pamper, and save us time. Per capita donations to charities, adjusted for inflation, rose from $402 a year in 1970 to $569 a year in 1996. We eat out more often too. Adjusted for inflation and a growing population, spending on restaurant meals is up 45% from the early 1970’s to the middle 1990’s. We travel more often and to more exotic places. On a per capita basis, average annual miles on commercial flights have more than tripled in the past 25 years and we take nine times as many cruises. Per capita spending on overseas travel and tourism is nearly three times what it was in the 1970’s. In terms of consumption Americans are much better off now than in the 1970’s.

As queried ironically by Cox and Alm, Americans could be paying for a fin-de-siécle spending spree by depleting their assets. Yet this is not borne out by the data. The above list shows that U.S.A. households had inflation adjusted average net worth of $216,843 in 1995 compared to $86,095 in 1970 and half of American families had a net worth of at least $59,398 in 1995, more than double the median net worth in 1970. As a proportion of net financial assets, average consumer debt in 1997 was approximately what it was in 1970 at roughly 5%.

How then to explain the seeming antilogy, without falling into a paralogistic trap, that while real wages declined by nearly 15% from the 1970’s to the 1990’s the living standards for Americans increased significantly by all measurements? A straightforward alternative to real wages is inflation adjusted per capita personal income. Its virtue is that it captures all sources of income – not just wages but interest, dividends, rent, and profits. The statistics on real wages suffer a glaring omission: fringe benefits. Over the past quarter of a century, as tax rates grew steeper and incomes rose, the country witnessed a surge in non-wage benefits. Another factor in increased prosperity not measured by wages is that there are many more small entrepreneurs now than three decades ago or so. In fact much of the hiring is now done by small businesses with work forces of fewer than a dozen to a few hundred employees. Not all of the small enterprises are successful of course, but many are and people with an entrepreneurial spirit are not easily dissuaded, trying again in the same business or a different one after initially failing.

In the view of most people on the political left, the rich get all of the breaks, take advantage of, or otherwise benefit at the expense of the poor. I would like to offer a contrary interpretation. In nurturing infant industries and product lines, the rich pay most of the new industries’ early fixed costs – including research, plant and equipment, and market development. According to Cox and Alm, a three minute telephone call from New York to San Francisco cost $20.70 when first available in 1915. A three minute coast-to-coast call cost less than 50 cents in 1997.

Without the rich, fewer new goods and services would find their way to the rest of us. Over the years wealthy Americans financed the emergence of the automobile, airplane travel, color television sets, computers, and many other products now readily available to the masses in America. As goods and services filter down to the less affluent, prices more nearly reflect companies’ variable cost, including labor and raw materials. The ratio of fixed to variable costs differs from one product to another. That dichotomy helps to explain why some goods and services show quick, steep price reductions, while others go through the process more gradually. Big declines usually occur when fixed costs are high – computers, electronics, pharmaceuticals, for example. Where fixed costs are not overwhelming, companies start out charging prices closer to variable cost. The low-fixed-cost pattern fits food and personal services.

The critics of capitalism fret that the economy works to the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Nothing could be more wrong. Economic progress actually emerges from a system of price discrimination – against the wealthy not the masses. Still not empathetic toward the rich – neither am I, yet I am biased towards the truth, wherever it leads.

Remember when……when the economy of the Land of the Rising Sun (Japan) rising from the ashes of WWII like the proverbial Phoenix was considered by the middle of the 1980’s to be an unstoppable juggernaut? The Japanese were going to own the entire world according to some alarmists at that time. They even bought Rockefeller Center in New York City for heaven sake. That’s sake (sāk) not sake (säkē), although I’m sure they had a large amount of that too. Something seemed to go a bit wrong before total ownership eventuated. The vaunted co-operation and putative synergy between corporations and the Japanese government, so trumpeted by the West’s socialist leaning economists and journalists, lost its economic magic. The Japanese economy went into a funk for the next 15 years or so, only recovering a bit in the 21st century. And they ended up selling Rockefeller Center along with other properties.

The tocsins of today tout the quondam Red Menace, mainland China, as the next industrial giant that will dominate the world economically. These people seem unfamiliar with the philosopher, George Santayana: “People who do not know history are deemed to repeat its mistakes.” Not withstanding the extremely low probability that China will be the lone superpower in the next half century, the forecast of Ben J. Wattenberg in his 2004 book Fewer, does not sound irrational when he claims that by 2050 there may be three economic super powers in the world: The United States, China, and India. China, however, is facing major problems in the next several decades, not the least will be a growing demand from the increasingly prosperous middle and upper classes for more social and political freedom. There is also the looming quandary from the current ratio of 150/100 boys to girls being allowed to be born. One can imagine the social turmoil and dissatisfaction which will result in a generation from now. The nimiety of young Chinese men can not be rectified by all becoming interior decorators or hairdressers.

An example given by Cox and Alm of the static nature of jobs and professions in the past are the surnames of families: Farmer, Hunter, Fisher, Fowler, Archer, Wheeler, Dyer, Gardner, Glover, Carter, Hooper, Shoemaker, Taylor, Carter, Crocker, Cook, Carpenter, Baker, Weaver, Miner, Mason, Miller, Sawyer, Collier, Chandler, Porter, Planter, Potter, Shepherd, Shearer, Spinner, Fuller, Wright, and Smith. Nobody today is named Charley Computer, Tammy Telephone, or Harold Harddrive except in a failed attempt at levity. Some of the professions were unknown when people now were born and new professions will arise when the next generation comes of age. All of which is a way of saying that with our modern rapidly evolving economy there are bound to be dislocations in the labor market effecting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people with layoffs each year and the necessity of retraining. It is temporarily tough on the people being laid off, or downsized if you will, but would it be preferable if the job market and therefore the economy were as static as it was in the past? A good example of an economic success and dynamic job market is Wal-Mart. In his 2006 book, The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman details how 90% of Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart and over 50% are within 5 miles. Wal-Mart which was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, the same year as Kmart and Target, now sells approximately ¼ of all the groceries, apparel, and pharmaceuticals in the United States. There are more than 4000 Wal-Mart stores in the USA (almost 5000 worldwide) with 1.3 million employees. Astonishingly about 650,000 or ½ of the employees quit each year thereby causing Wal-Mart to have to hire 12,500 new employees each week just to stay even. One would think that it would be a sound financial decision for Wal-Mart to reduce the expense of hiring and training by attempting to retain more of its employees with more generous salaries and benefits. Wal-Mart may very well double in size in the next ten years, but the growth will have to come from overseas because how many more stores would be economically profitable for Wal-Mart to build here? Mainland China has about 45 Wal-Mart stores and India zero. As you can well imagine Wal-Mart is lobbying these countries heavily to increase market share in China and get established in India. Incidentally although Fishman declares that it is a morally neutral position for corporations, unknown to most people Wal-Mart is the largest contributor to charity in gross amount of all businesses in this country.

In a capitalistic economy, people, whether individually or in groups called companies or corporations, act on the powerful motive of making oneself better off economically. Call it the profit motive, self-interest, or pejoratively, greed; it is what make the economy tick. Through relentless turmoil, the economy re-creates itself, shifting labor resources to where they are needed, replacing old jobs with new ones. A descriptive shorthand term for this process used by Cox and Alm is “the churn.” Whereas the expression “downsizing” focuses solely on the discomfiture side of economic change, the image of the churn captures the whole process – the jobs that are created as well as the ones lost. The churn isn’t new. Through out history each generation of jobs has given way to the next although at a slower pace in the past than now. And there has always been resistance to this change because of the jobs lost. There is a letter reproduced in the Cox and Alm book which illustrates this point. The complainant, the governor of New York, was beseeching the president of the United States to protect the canal system from the newfangled mode of conveyance, the railroads. He claimed captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and tenders would be left without a means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers employed in growing hay for the horses; additionally boat builders would suffer and tow-line, whip and harness makers would be left destitute. Another point he made, apparently seriously, was that canal boats were absolutely essential to the “defence” [sic] of the United States. Further he wrote that “railroad carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children.” This letter was written to President Andrew Jackson by Governor Martin Van Buren in 1829. No, I did not make this up or exaggerate it – it is on page 134 of the Cox and Alm book. The problems envisioned by Van Buren seem comical now, but the joke is on us – these are the same types of concerns in modern dress that people come up with now. Not in this book but in a 2006 book titled Martin Van Buren by Edward L. Widmer and as a matter of interest, Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook in upstate New York went on to become the 8th president of the United States from 1836-40. He was the vice-president in the second term of Andrew Jackson from 1832-36 and was the last vice-president to become president, without having filled the job before being elected to it before George H.W. Bush did so in 1988-92 (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson were vice-presidents who were elected president, but were sitting presidents when elected, having assumed the office after the elected presidents died or were assassinated – McKinley [Roosevelt]; Warren Harding [Calvin Coolidge]; Franklin Roosevelt [Harry Truman]; John Kennedy [Lyndon Johnson]). Van Buren was the only president of the United States who’s first learned language was not English (it was Dutch). Having been defeated for reelection by William Henry Harrison, Van Buren toured the country in 1842 becoming the first politician to do so, in an unsuccessful bid to win the next election. After leaving Chicago (he was the first president or ex-president to visit that city) his carriage broke down so he was put up overnight with a family near Springfield, Illinois. In order to entertain a former president of the United States the family summoned a young lawyer who lived near by. Van Buren and the young man stayed up until the early hours telling each other stories. Van Buren later wrote that he laughed until his sides hurt at the stories of his companion. That young lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. Much later a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle wanted to write an advice column, but was told by the editor that her name was ‘too ethnic’ – meaning too Jewish. She took the surname of a former president and titled her byline: Abigail Van Buren. The irony is that Van Buren was considered an ethnic name in his time.

The United States has not run a foreign trade surplus since the Nixon administration which has caused much hand wringing among people who are prone to that sort of thing. Over the years we have had large trade deficits with Japan and now even larger ones with China. Do we have cause for concern? The short answer is no. Here’s why: (1.) The deficit reflects only merchandise trade, not services. In 1997 the nation’s positive balance in services was almost $88 billion and has been positive ever year since. (2.) According to Cox and Alm the trade deficit is a red herring (I would not have used a cliché that goes back to the Truman administration). The trade deficit and capital surplus are two sides of the same coin. Other countries’ surpluses earn them dollars to purchase more of our services and invest in America. If we don’t buy from foreigners, they can’t buy from us and invest with us. The long-running furor of the merchandise-trade deficit can be turned on its head. What it really signifies is that the United States remains the best place to invest – by a large margin. Again according to Cox and Alm, in the mid 1990’s direct investment from overseas in the United States was more than double that in any other country. Japan’s trade surpluses reflect the opposite. The Japanese economy, where profits and interest rates are low and prices are high, hasn’t been a good place to invest. (3.) When corporations set up manufacturing plants and service and distribution centers outside their original countries, as many do - the so-called multi-nationals, then how can imports and exports be meaningfully differentiated?

The Sunday supplement PARADE magazine ran a front page story on April 23, 2006 questioning whether the American Dream was still possible. The first clue that the story was a politically correct bit of propaganda was the three families shown on the cover. There was an Anglo childless couple, another Anglo family sans father, and a black family with father intact. If a black family had been shown without a father present you know that, to use a synecdoche, the magazine would have been accused of perpetrating racial stereotypes, yet the probability of a black family missing a father is much greater than a white family. Some of the claims in the article bear scrutiny: (1.) “The real median [the number above and below this figure being equal] household income declined 3% from 2000 to 2004.” (2.) “The percentage of households earning $25,000 to $99,999 shrank 1.5% from 2000 to 2004.” (3.) “Credit –card debt is at an all-time high, averaging $9,312 per household.” (4.) “The average cost per year of a public school college (in state) is $12,127, a 25% increase since 2001.”

(1.) & (2.) Three years of the five chosen years (2000-20004) were severe corrections in the equity markets after the “irrational” share price appreciations in the 1990’s as expressed by Federal Reserve Chairman, Allen Greenspan at that time. In fact, the tech heavy NASDAQ declined from over 5000 to under 2000 from 2000 to 2002. (3.) The credit-card debt amount although high is not corrected for inflation so the comparison is meaningless. (4.) Costs for education are certainly going up faster than inflation, still people are not helpless in dealing with it as is implied by the article. Every state has a program where parents can pay into it either as a lump sum or over a number of years in advance to cover future college costs for their children thereby locking in inflation protected prices. Many states even have reciprocal agreements with other states that cover costs for out-of-state students.

Three of the four families quoted in the article believe the American Dream is out of reach for them, yet in a survey of “more than 2200 Americans” 80% say that the American Dream is still possible. The families profiled are not representative of the broader sampling and do you think that was inadvertent?

Cox and Alm quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim: “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door” and point out the fallacy in it, mistaking what customers want. “People don’t want better mousetraps, they want dead mice. People don’t want cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or bicycles – they want transportation from one place to another; they don’t want daily newspapers, magazines, TV news channels, or the internet – they want information; they don’t want records, tapes, or CD’s – they want music. Our needs and wants are insatiable, but the ways of realizing them are limited only by our ingenuity and imagination. In a dynamic economy there’s a relentless quest for new, better, or cheaper ways to give people what they want.” The reason free enterprise economies outperform command economies such as socialistic or communistic ones is that consumers determine what will be produced or supplied for the market not bureaucrats. Yet there are unceasing calls for government to intercede in the supply and demand marketplace to the detriment of both consumers and producers. The battle continues.

FDR 23

2007-06-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

If Americans think they know anything about the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and many, especially young people, do not, in addition to being elected president to three terms or was that four (it was four), it is that he brought the nation out of the Great Depression and with stellar leadership guided this country to the successful winning of WWII. There is much to be disputed about those assertions as will be made clear in this essay. Roosevelt called himself a “trickster” and said he did not allow his left hand to know what his right hand was doing.

Let’s address one oft made charge that Roosevelt ‘knew’ the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, but did not warn the military commanders there because he wanted a surprise attack to get the American people in the proper frame of mind for war. There is no credible evidence to support that claim. It is one thing to ‘know’ something and quite another to posit that something ‘might’ happen. The Roosevelt administration and the military thought it far more likely that, if the Japanese were going to attack, it would be in the Philippines which they did days after Pearl Harbor. That Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into war by embargoing gasoline, scrap metal, and rubber to attempt to discourage their imperialistic ambitions in the Pacific is also beyond dispute.

Despite manifest shortcomings and wrongheaded policies and even though it can not be asserted apodictically, I believe that Roosevelt was an effective war time leader. Few if any American political leaders realized the inevitability of war with the Axis powers and took action to prepare for it as did Roosevelt. Because of his blindness to the nefarious ambitions of the Soviet Union and perhaps also because of his fondness for socialism I think it not unreasonable to believe that Roosevelt would have been a disaster for America and the West as a leader during the Cold War. Remember, as storied and praised as Winston Churchill was as prime minister of Great Britain during the war, he and his conservative party were turned out of power little more than two months after the end of the war in Europe. Never one not to have the last word, Churchill said of his Labor Party successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee, “He is a very modest man…..and has much to be modest about.”

WWII is remembered as a ‘good’ war – the last good one fought by this country. Yet there are similarities with the current contentious War on Terrorism. Then, as now, many Americans did not want us to go to war and even after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (similar to the twin towers and pentagon attacks), they were not, to say the least, in dithyrambic agreement with our war with Germany and Italy (cf. Iraq). Many of the policies of the Roosevelt administration were repudiated by the public and congress. And especially the “New Deal” element of the Democrat party lost power and favor during the war. Having the idea that everyone was on board and enthusiastically supported Roosevelt’s efforts in conducting the war is to misread history. For a fuller analysis and more detail of the FDR administration in peace and war I would recommend the 2001 book The New Dealers’ War by Thomas Fleming.

When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936 he won by one of the greatest landslides in American history: 27,751,612 to 16,681,913 against Kansas Republican governor Alf Landon. The New Deal was in full flower – Democrats had majorities of 334 to 89 in the House and 75 to 17 in the Senate. Can anyone imagine such lopsided political power today? However, there is more to it than meets the eye and therein also lies a cautionary tale of hubris and overconfidence.

Roosevelt decided to use his newly enhanced popularity to exercise control over the judiciary with legislation to give him the opportunity to appoint 50 new federal judges including seven additional associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court - the infamous ‘court-packing’ plan. A funny thing happened on the way to fulfilling this disreputable démarche. There was immediate opposition to this legislative bill led by Southern conservative Democrats (remember this was still the time of the Democrat “Solid South”) and traditional Western Democrats. For once the senate Republicans played it smart by remaining mute while the Democrats tore themselves apart. The Gallop poll which had gain credibility by forecasting the Democrat landslide in the 1936 election showed that the American people were split on the issue 45% for, 45% against, and 10% undecided. The senate buried the plan 70-20.

There were more political embarrassments to come than just the overwhelming and humiliating court packing defeat. In fact Roosevelt’s travails were just beginning. In the 1938 mid-term elections Roosevelt revealed an all too common characteristic for him – his vindictiveness. He set out to defeat 13 of the mostly Southern and Western Democrats who had led the court bill fight. He went to their home states and spoke against them or made hostile statements about them in the newspapers. FDR was never one to shrink from traducing his political opponents. All but one of them were resoundingly reelected. As much as politics was Roosevelt’s métier he was not always successful in his machinations. In the mid-term election the Republicans went from 88 to 170 seats in the House and gained eight seats in the Senate.

Additionally there was an intensifying of the recession in 1937. The stock market went into a nosedive and by November 1937 unemployment had soared to 11 million with another 3 million working only part time. Statistics showed that the United States was lagging far behind other countries in recovering from the depression. American national income in 1937 was 86% of the 1929 high water mark while Great Britain’s was 124%. Japan’s employment figure was 75% above the 1929 number. Chile, Sweden, and Australia had economic growth rates in the range of 20% compared to the United States’ dismal -7%. At a cabinet meeting a seemingly traumatized and possibly paranoid Roosevelt complained that the new economic collapse was the result of “a concerted effort by big business and concentrated wealth to drive the market down just to create a situation unfavorable to me.”

There was some doubt that Roosevelt would be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 1940. The country was not doing particularly well economically and there was resistance to breaking the maximum two term rule initiated by George Washington. When Roosevelt made it known that he wanted Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to replace John Nance Garner of Texas on the ticket as vice-president he almost had a revolt on his hands. Wallace was far too liberal, not to say outright socialistic, for most Democrat politicians and operatives at that time. His nomination was saves by Eleanor Roosevelt who had a reservoir of good will not only with Democrats, but with most people in the country. She flew to Chicago to plead with the delegates to give her husband the man he wanted to help him bear the immense burden they were placing on his shoulders. Wallace received 627 votes out of 1,100 delegates present. That meant that 43% of these official spokesmen for the Democrat Party went home in an ill tempered frame of mind.

Harry Truman was up for reelection in 1940 to the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt and the people in his administration did not support him in the Democrat primary which was tantamount to the election in Missouri. Truman still won by a slim 8000 vote margin and his victory meant that he was not beholden to Roosevelt in his term in the senate. This political independence for the man from Independence, MO may be what allowed him to gain the recognition in his senate activities that propelled him to the vice-presidency and as a consequence the presidency.

In 1941 after being reelected to the Senate, Harry Truman was appointed to head a committee to investigate military preparation and contracts. What was called the Truman Committee reported that in 1942 German submarines sank 12 million tons of Allied shipping. The U.S. Navy, having stonewalled about the U-boat offensive along the East Coast, which accounted for a heavy percentage of these staggering losses, issued a furious denial. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox sneered that the report was based on “common gossip.” The perspicacious politician Truman asked one of the Republican members of the committee to warn Knox that he would be called before the committee to settle the argument. Knox hastily issued a statement saying the figures were correct. Early in 1943 an investigation by the Truman Committee revealed almost incredible carelessness and corruption in the manufacture of aircraft engines by the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical Corporation. In secret committee hearings the army sent an array of generals and colonels who told lie after lie claiming they never saw or heard of a defective engine by Curtiss-Wright. Truman published a scathing report on the company’s defective inspection procedures and malfunctioning engines. The company launched an intense attack on the Truman Committee and for a time even the New York Times was convinced that Truman was wrong. Instead of going public with the dispute, Truman sent the committee’s chief counsel to the Times to tell them the truth and invited Under Secretary of War Robertson, who had declared that the Army Air Force had never received a single defective engine from Curtiss-Wright, to his office for a chat. The Under Secretary soon admitted he was wrong and the newspaper attacks on the committee stopped. If you now begin to understand why, seemingly against the odds, Harry Truman would be chosen or at least not opposed by Roosevelt to be his Vice-Presidential candidate in 1944, these examples of competency and honesty should be instructive.

The election on November 5, 1940 was a record 49+ million votes cast. Roosevelt/Wallace received 27,244,160 versus 22,305,198 for the Republican ticket headed by the liberal Wendell Willkie who had been a Democrat until 1938. This was a comfortable margin for Roosevelt, but less than half of the 11,000,000 vote difference in 1936.

In late 1940 Admiral James O. Richardson strongly recommended to President Roosevelt that the U.S. fleet be stationed at San Diego instead of Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt demurred stating the fleet in Hawaii would have a “restraining influence” on Japan. This made no sense whatsoever because 1.) the fleet would still be 5600 miles away from the Philippines and even farther away from other vulnerable places such as The Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Malaya; 2.) the fleet was not ready for war because it lacked enough tankers, supply ships, and training to operate at sea for long periods of time; 3.) the fleet was diminished by the reassignment of many ships to the Atlantic. When Admiral Richardson told Roosevelt that the navy did not have trust and confidence in the administration over this policy the president was offended and replaced Richardson after the 1940 presidential election. The good admiral could have counted himself lucky because his replacement was Admiral Husband Kimmel who became the scapegoat of the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In August 1941 Roosevelt met with British Prime Minster Winston Churchill in Placentia Bay, New Foundland for the Atlantic Charter conference. With Britain at war with Germany, Churchill urged Roosevelt to bring America into the war on the side of Britain. Roosevelt responded that he “planned to wage war, but not declare it” and would become more and more “provocative.” The U.S. House of Representatives just had extended the 1940 Selective Service Act by a single vote thereby keeping a million men in the army’s ranks for another 6 months. Roosevelt had reason to be cautious and devious about his intent to get the United States into the war against Germany and so he was. It came natural for Roosevelt to scheme, mislead, and to downright prevaricate.

In the opening months of 1942 the United States was being humiliated on both oceans. While the Japanese army and navy rampaged through the Far East, Germans submarines wrecked havoc along the U.S. east coast. By June 1942 German subs had sunk 397 oil tankers, cargo ships, and assorted other types. The Roosevelt administration stonewalled on this catastrophe and the American public had no idea of the magnitude of what happened even though a few swimmers occasionally saw a ship being sunk. Secretary of the Navy Knox declared that the number of German U-boats being sunk was classified for “security” reasons. In fact none was sunk. Have you heard about this before?

In a fireside chat on February 23, 1942 Roosevelt solemnly assured the American people that “your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching or losing heart.” He then proceeded to minimize American losses at Pearl Harbor. Instead of admitting the Japanese had sunk six battleships, damaged two others plus three cruisers and two destroyers, he claimed only “three ships” had been permanently put out of commission. Roosevelt then proceeded to tell an even bigger whopper. He said that “to date, including Pearl Harbor we have destroyed considerably
more Japanese planes than they have destroyed ours.” At Pearl Harbor 180 American planes were completely destroyed and 128 damaged. Japanese losses were 29 planes. In the Philippines, within two weeks, General MacArthur’s 277 plane air force had been reduced to a handful of fighters and a few bombers. By the time FDR spoke these too were gone. If you are going to tell lies in war time to attempt to boost morale that is one thing (although the Bush haters would not concede that), but don’t insult the character of the American people by first saying you know they can handle the truth then not telling them the unpleasant facts.

Knowing that Democrats would have a fight on their hands in the 1942 mid-term elections, Roosevelt wanted to change the odds by launching an invasion of North Africa before the vote. To minimize causalities the military wanted a moonless night, but the next one on October 8th was too soon for proper preparation. The one after that was on November 8th, five days after the election. The GOP gained 44 seats in the House, leaving the Democrats with a slim 8 vote majority. In the Senate the Republicans gained 9 seats. Without the largely conservative Solid South, the Democrats would have been in the minority. Thomas Dewey won the governorship in New York which was the first time since 1920 for a Republican and in California Republican Earl Warren handily beat incumbent liberal Democrat governor Culbert Olson. Two even more personal bitter pills for FDR were the reelections of Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan who once called Roosevelt a “crazy conceited megalomaniac” and right-wing Republican Hamilton Fish who represented the district including Hyde Park. Roosevelt spent considerable time campaigning in his own district against Fish – all to no avail.

On January 9, (for me personally a most auspicious day) 1943 Roosevelt began a top secret train trip to Florida. There he and his entourage boarded planes for North Africa to meet Winston Churchill for the 10 day Casablanca (Morocco) Conference. At its conclusion Roosevelt declared that the two allies had reached complete agreement on the future conduct of the war. FDR was being his usual disingenuous self. The precise opposite was closer to the truth. General George Marshall was so infuriated that the British refused to agree to a cross-channel invasion in 1943 that he threatened to shift American troops and resources to an all-out effort in the Pacific. At the concluding remarks before reporters Roosevelt invoked the name of American Civil War general U.S. Grant who early in that war was known as (U)nconditional (S)urrender Grant. Likewise Roosevelt said the Allies should pursue a policy of unconditional surrender against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Churchill did not publicly disagree, but privately was dumbfounded and dismayed by a stated policy that he thought could negatively impact the war. As Roosevelt continued pursuing this policy Churchill’s worst fears would be realized.

One of the New Deal’s alphabet agencies was the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) run by Roosevelt’s uncle, Frederick Delano. In March 1943 FRD sent congress two hefty reports, the first was titled After the War – Full Employment and the second After the War – Toward Security. These reports called for creation of a nation transportation agency, the consolidation of the nation’s railroads, a government role in developing air transportation, permanent public works program, a big expansion in social security benefits, and federally funded medical care for the poor. There was no better proof of the New Dealers’ fondness for a government controlled economy. The Wall Street Journal called the package a “totalitarian plan” and denounced it as an enemy of liberty and prosperity. The Senate cut the requested funding for the NRPB from a modest $1,000,000 (think $10,000,000 in today’s dollars) to a pathetic $200,000. In conference the House insisted that the program be entirely eliminated. The Senate went alone. The president had previously issued an executive order imposing a salary cap on the rich. A majority of House Democrats joined Republicans to repeal the order by a huge veto-proof margin. The Senate piled on with a 74-3 vote to kill it. For better or worst the country would face the post-war era relying on the free enterprise system.

On July 25, 1943 the Italian Fascist General Council deposed Benito Mussolini and appointed retired 72 year old Field Marshall Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. Two days later before the House of Commons Churchill said, “It would be a grave mistake…to break down the whole structure and expression of the Italian state.” - another signal of his readiness to negotiate with Badoglio. That same day General Eisenhower broadcast a statement offering the Italians a chance to surrender “immediately.” If the Italians stopped supporting the Germans and returned all allied prisoners in their hands, “the ancient liberties and traditions of your country will be restored.” There was no mention of unconditional surrender. The next day FDR went on the radio and unilaterally declared that “our terms to Italy are still the same as our terms to Germany and Japan – unconditional surrender. We will have no truck with Fascism in any shape or manner. We will permit no vestige of Fascism to remain.” The prospect of a relatively bloodless surrender of Italy went down the drain. A dismayed Eisenhower could only obey.

When FDR took office in 1933 he had already decided to recognize the Soviet Union. He moved cautiously toward this goal as the administration argued that trade with the USSR would be large and profitable and would help revive the American economy. There was a serious economic, not to say moral, impediment to these plans. Stalin instigated famine and terror in the Ukraine that had killed an estimated 10 million farmers in 1932-33 as he tried to impose a forced collectivization on those kulaks. So intense was this pogrom that at its peak 25,000 people were dying per day (As I have mention in a previous essay read Robert Conquest’s book Harvest of Sorrow for the full story of this horrendous barbarity). Rather than trying to ascertain the truth of this horror the Roosevelt administration relied on the reporting of the New York Times’ agitprop Walter Duranty who grandly assured his readers that the famine was “mostly bunk.” Incredibly Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union in 1932. There was no excuse for the American government or the New York Times for accepting the Duranty account of what was happening in the Ukraine as there were many other reports of the induced famine. Writers such as Frederick Burchall of the New York Times and Brits Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones told what was really going on and were unmercifully attacked by Communists and liberals in the West.

At the Tehran conference in late November 1943 between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin the Soviets agreed, in principle, to give the American Air Force landing rights to six airfields in Western Russia so that the American pilots would not have to make the long dangerous flight back to England after bombing runs in Eastern Germany. The Soviets effectively reneged on that agreement despite, at the expressed command of President Roosevelt, the Soviets being given a copy of the famed Norden bombsight, as part of the agreement, even though this bombsight had not been shared with the British.

In the spring of 1944 Roosevelt’s old friend, Commander George Earle went to the Oval Office to show Roosevelt irrefutable evidence that the Soviets, not the Germans were the perpetrators of the Katyn Massacre in Poland where 10,000 Polish military officers were murdered. FDR dismissed it with a wave of his hand saying “George, this is entirely German propaganda and a German plot. I am absolutely convinced the Russians did not do this.” This was just one of many times that Roosevelt, despite the evidence, did not want to believe the worst about the Soviets. One is led to think there was much about the Soviets and their communistic system that Roosevelt admired.

At the Democrat convention in the summer of 1944 the incumbent vice-president Henry Wallace received 429 votes for the vice-presidency on the first ballot of the 589 needed to win. Harry Truman was second with 319 and the rest scattered among the favorite sons (I suppose today one would say favorite sons & daughters or perhaps favorite children). Even though the convention had been in session for 6 hours and it was nearly dinner time the Truman supporters decided to gamble and call for an immediate second ballot, risking Wallace getting enough votes to win. The gamble paid off because first Oklahoma switched from their favorite son candidate to Truman then Maryland and several other states also switched. The tally stayed close at 477 for Truman and 473 for Wallace until Senators Bankhead of Alabama, Lucas of Illinois, and Barkley of Kentucky changed their votes to Truman. As is the usual course of action at political conventions, there was a stampede towards Truman with the final vote of 1,051 for Truman and 105 for Wallace. It is interesting to speculate how much the course of history not only for the United States, but for the world would be different negatively had Wallace remained the vice-president in 1944.

Goaded by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, in the summer and fall of 1944 Roosevelt pushed on with his “unconditional surrender” policy towards Germany, ranting “Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.” This wrongheaded policy which rejected the many overtures from Germans in the military and diplomatic corps prolonged the war in Europe and caused unnecessary death and suffering. In December 1944 the Wehrmacht surprised the Americans and the British by assembling a quarter of a million men and 1000 tanks and smashed out of the perimeter of the Ardennes in a desperate attempt to recapture the port of Antwerp, Belgium and strand the Allied forces on the battlefield without food or gasoline. The fierce fighting at Bastogne in the snow and mud and at other more obscure crossroads in the ensuing Battle of the Bulge cost the Americans 80,000 casualties. Overall the Americans suffered 418,800 casualties after the breakout from Normandy and the capture of Paris. The British and Canadians had 107,000 casualties. Including German and Soviet military and German civilians from Allied bombing the total number of post D-Day casualties approaches 2,000,000. Adding in the Jews killed in the last year of the war could double the 2,000,000 figure.

How much if any of this carnage can be laid at the doorstep of the White House owing to Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” policy? Quantifying the numbers is impossible, but certainly there is amply evidence that the efforts to overthrow the Nazi regime were greatly discouraged if not actually impeded by what the Roosevelt administration promulgated. Given the information that was known about the even then millions of Holocaust victims the personal animus of Henry Morgenthau is explainable by his religion, but what about FDR? Perhaps it was his vindictiveness which was previously displayed when, by executive order, he sent an estimated 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans to internment camps in the United States at the start of the war.

In the 1944 presidential campaign, Republican candidate and New York governor Thomas Dewey accused the Roosevelt administration of being heavily influenced by the communist head of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organization) union Sidney Hillman and Communist Party boss Earl Browder. Roosevelt sarcastically fired back by stating that “Never before in my lifetime has a campaign been filled with such misrepresentation, distortion, and falsehood.” Any candidate for high office who claimed the American government was infiltrated by communists was revealing ”a shocking lack of trust in America.” According to the Venona decrypts which were made public in the 1990’s Roosevelt has no less than 329 communists in his administration including several at the highest levels of the White House, among them Lauchlin Currie; Alger Hiss and Lawrence Duggan (he was a close friend of Edward R. Morrow – see my essay on Joseph McCarthy) in the State Department; and Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department. Although FDR likely did not know there were actual Soviet spies in the government, if he did not know these people were so overly friendly with the Soviet Union that they posed a security risk, then it was, like the Katyn Massacre, because he did not want to believe it.

On March 9, 1945 a squadron of American B-29’s totaling 172 aircraft took of from Guam and dropped 1165 tons of incendiary bombs from an altitude 4,900 feet on Tokyo a city of then 5,000,000 people. It was estimated that almost 88,000 Japanese died and 1,000,000 homes damaged or destroyed. There were more causalities than in any military action in the history of the world up to that time. No public protests were forthcoming in the U.S. or Britain because the War Department had released the details of the atrocities of the early 1942 Bataan Death March.

On February 3, 1945 in a joint military operation between the United States and Great Britain call Thunderclap, the city of Berlin was fire bombed resulting in an estimated 25,000 civilian deaths; in the following few days Munich and Leipzig were hit; it was Dresden’s turn next with about 60,000 deaths and much of the historic city destroyed.

On August 6, 1945 the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima with 90,000 people dead that day and perhaps as many as 200,000 dead as a result of radiation poisoning and burns within five years. On August 9th the B-29 Bock’s Car (Did you know that was the name of the second bomber or care and who comes up with those names?) dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki killing approx. 40,000 people immediately and circa 140,000 within five years. These initial killings were of the same magnitude as the conventional bombing of Tokyo were they not? Why then the subsequent hand wringing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not Tokyo, Berlin, and Dresden?

Shortly after Harry Truman was sworn in as president he had a meeting in the Oval Office with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov who was on his was to a conference in San Francisco on the formation of the United Nations. Molotov wanted to know if Truman would honor the commitments of Roosevelt regarding the Soviet Union. Truman assured him he would, but then said the United States was “getting tired” of waiting for the USSR to implement the principles of the Declaration on Liberated Europe in Poland and other countries occupied by the Red Army. Molotov blusteringly started to interrupt him when Truman said “I’m not interested in propaganda” and ordered Molotov to tell Stalin that he was concerned about the situation in Eastern Europe, reminding Molotov that friendship required both countries to live up to their obligations. It could not be maintained on the basis of a “one way street.” The translator, career diplomat Charles Bohlen, reported that Molotov turned “a little ashen” and huffed: “I have never been talked to that way in my life.” Truman responded: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.” When Molotov tried to get the conversation back on the American commitments Truman said, “That will be all Mr. Molotov.” Bohlen never forgot how much he enjoyed translating Truman’s words. “They were probably the first sharp words uttered by an American president to a high ranking Soviet official during the war.”

Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails 22

2007-06-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

The title of this essay was unashamedly taken from the 2006 book MR. LINCOLN’S T-MAILS: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War by Tom Wheeler. Even though a book title can not be copyrighted and therefore I may use any title I choose with impunity, I did not plagiarize this one because, quod erat demonstrandum, I have just given credit for the title to the author of the book.

A sometimes heard apothegm is: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Despite that statement being a cliché, it often contains an element of truth. Practically instant communication with the modern technologies of e-mails and cellular voice and text messaging seems completely new to young moderns, yet is it? No, it isn’t. Two inventors named Cooke and Wheatstone patented a telegraph that worked by electromagnetism in 1837. Later that year Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) developed the first successful electromagnetic telegraph in the United States and made a singular contribution with his invention of a series of dots and dashes called Morse Code to send messages.

Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to have almost instant communication with his military field commanders in time of war by his use of the then new technology of the telegraph. It is altogether fitting and proper that this was so. Lincoln is still the only U.S. president to hold a patent. As young man, Lincoln invented a devise to re-ballast a boat stuck on a sandbar by use of adjustable buoyant chambers. Although the devise was never built, this does show that Lincoln was attuned to new technology to solve old problems.

As would be natural, even for someone as open and receptive to new ideas as Lincoln, the concept of a president communicating with electronic speed with his officers in the field was not speedily embraced. With the American Civil War starting in April 1861, Lincoln sent few telegraphs to his generals in 1861. This quickly changed as 1861 passed into 1862. Once Lincoln realized the great advantage of this new communication tool he utilized it more and more. Strangely, or perhaps not, Lincoln did not have a telegraph link tied into the White House. Instead he would walk across the street from the White House to the telegraph office. This may have provided him with a diversion from his other duties and allowed him to get away from the office seekers and other visitors to the White House who devoured his precious time.

Another example of there being “nothing new under the sun” concerning Lincoln is his address at the Cooper Institute in New York City on February 27, 1860. In this major political speech Lincoln used the expression “that is cool.” Of course the meaning was different from what that expression means now. Lincoln was referring to threat by the Southern states to secede from the Union, then blaming their decision on the North. Or as Lincoln put it: “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’”

Tom Wheeler tells the story that when Lincoln would go to the telegraph office he would start reading all of the incoming telegraph messages whether they were intended for him, his Secretary of War, or the Commanding General in Washington. When he came to the last one he had read in his previous visit he would say, “Well boys, I am down to the raisins.” After this occurred a few times the curiosity one of the telegraph operators got the better of him and he asked, “Mr. President, what do you mean when you say ‘I am down to the raisins?’” Lincoln told the story (as is well known, he had a million of them) of the girl back in Springfield, Illinois who, at her birthday party, over indulged in food, got sick, and started throwing up. The last thing she had eaten were raisins for dessert. A doctor was called and in examining the basin where she had “cast up her accounts” saw the small black objects, the raisins, in the basin and told the anxious parents that the danger had passed as the child was “down to the raisins.” So said Lincoln, when I see the last message I had read on my previous visit, I know I need go no further. Whether it was something trivial or important, Lincoln had a talent for illustrating the point with a simple but appropriate story (see my essay: Lincoln Stories).

As anyone who has ever seen people try to ‘micro-manage’ every job, business deal, political problem, or any situation, knows, instant communication can be more of a bane than a blessing. Lincoln did not fall into that trap. He did get involved in the details of earlier, to varying degrees incompetent generals, but once he had the winning team of Ulysses Grant and William Sherman in place he mostly deferred to their judgments. When he appointed Grant to the rank of Lieutenant General and overall army commander he told him, “I do not know, nor do I want to know the details of your military plans for defeating the Confederate armies.”

Lincoln was what would be known today as a hands-on, walking-around executive. He realized the importance of personal contact with his administrative assistants, politicians, and military commanders. When personal contact was not possible, Lincoln also was aware that written communications in the form of letters were sometimes necessary and more appropriate than the more limited telegraph messages. Few people, including U.S. presidents, were better at communicating than Lincoln. There are several examples where Lincoln would write letters to his military commanders when they missed an opportunity to deliver decisive blows to their Confederate foes. When he was finished writing the letter Lincoln would quietly file it away because he instinctively knew the general would resign if he received it. It was a cathartic exercise for Lincoln to write his criticism thereby relieving some of the stress he was under without causing an action he might regret.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the communication power of the telegraph contributed materially to the preservation of the United States as one indivisible nation. Without President Lincoln having the means to interject himself into the important daily actions and decisions of his field commanders, the outcome of the war might well have not been decisive for the North. Of course it is one thing to have the technology to do this and quite another to possess the wisdom and skill to make these interventions useful. Whether it was fate or luck that the country had Lincoln as its president at that time, the nation then, and in the future, profited from it.