The nth Blog

Reforming the Heathcare “Debate”: Function Junction

2009-10-10T16:22:00.012-05:00

Alright, well, we discussed . . ok, I dictated. . . the problems with the healthcare system and no one seemed to complain; so, I will go on to step 2, Solutions. . .

Nope!!! Not yet. (Didn’t I say I was going to suck all the life out of this debate?) While we know at a high level what is probably bothering everyone about the Healthcare System, we don’t really have enough of an understanding of the System to actually start thinking about how to fix it. To go back to our broken car analogy, we’ve determined its problems (fuel efficiency is not what it is supposed to be; its acceleration is lacking; and its performance is continually degrading.), but we did this by comparing it to other similar vehicles. We can’t rationally decide how to fix it (or if we should just replace it), because we haven’t really looked under the hood to see what kind of engine it has.

Part of the reason we need a better understanding of the system is due to the nature of the brain. I keep using the car example, because cars are easier to think about than a massive transactional system. Cars are physical objects, and the human brain does really well with physical objects. All the way back in the womb, each one of us started unconsciously building a library of physical laws in our brains. Through our earliest years, we subconsciously and consciously conducted science experiments to refine this library (learning to roll, repeated interactions with toys, dropping spoons). So now, if you read “car” you probably (and immediately) think of a four-wheeled platform with a gas pedal, a brake pedal, a steering wheel and an engine (again, “engine” and all those other components trigger their own images). However, if you read “Social Security System” I will bet that you don’t quite get such an image. You might think of your Social Security Card or Number; you might think of income taxes or some personal view of the politics involving that System; but you don’t actually think of an image which brings all of those parts together (not as concrete of an image as you do with “car” or “engine”). This failure isn’t because such an image doesn’t exist, or that the system is really that complex, but because our brains don’t have such a well established and detailed library of transactional systems and the natural laws which make them work. (Think of the first time you really understood what a government was--not just the names of the founding fathers or state capitals. At that age you could already imagine a basic car (and could probably draw one—talent dependent).)

This limitation is important, because we have to understand that a transactional system like Healthcare can—and I say should—be treated like a physical thing. I say “should” because dealing with these concrete terms gives us major advantages over some philosophical concept, which is all we will really have otherwise. Once we define it in somewhat concrete terms, then we have a better chance of coming up with more reasonable and quantifiable solutions. The more measurable the definition the more likely we can be certain of the solution. We have to first accept the idea that the System actually does have definition like a car though it may be difficult for us to picture. One way to get that picture is to think about its most general functions. For example, a car has several obvious functions:

- It can move itself forwards or backwards.
- It can stop its motion.
- It can be turned while moving forwards or backwards.
- It allows one person, the driver, who rides on it to direct and coordinate these functions.
- It moves based on an energy supply that it carries with it.
- It has the capacity to carry more than the driver.

You’ll notice that this could fit the definition of a car, a moped, a motorcycle, or a bicycle-built-for-two (if you consider the people to also be energy supplies). “Car” is one solution to this set of functions. If we got more specific about these functions --“It can move forwards at 55 mph”—it can narrow down that list to “car.” Because of the challenge of picturing the Healthcare System, we should stay at this less detailed level of description. The Healthcare System will take a bit more work to think up, but it’s the only way to get a realistic and useful set of possible solutions.

Let’s start this by mastering the obvious. The Healthcare System revolves around human health. Sure, this sounds pretty clear, but it’s a philosophical rabbit hole. What is “health”? How do we measure “health”? We’re going to have to follow the white rabbit to get to the answer (a la Alice in Wonderland or Matrix—I’m sure Matrix fans would prefer “take the red pill” however, the white rabbit reference is valid, check it!). The first stop in the hole is that sign that says “Health is the state of being healthy”, which doesn’t seem to tell us much of anything unless you go deeper and is pretty much the dictionary definition. Where else should we go for this definition, the highly technical journals or the ads for Abrocker or Vitameatavegamin? I think the more reasonable path is actually to think about our own experiences with being healthy.

First, we’ve drawn the boundary of our Healthcare System such that it leaves out food production. This implies that we can’t actually talk about healthy diets, at least in this part of the discussion. This sort of limits us to thinking about what could possibly send us past the boundary we’ve defined. If you’re a male between 18 and 40, you probably aren’t going to be familiar with this term, but the standard point-of-entry into the system is called your “annual check-up.” This exam is the standard point of entry into the healthcare system. It normally involves the following, according to WebMD:

-Blood Pressure
-Heart Exam
-Lung Exam
-Head and Neck Exam
-Abdominal Exam
-Neurological Exam
-Dermatological Exam
-Extremities Exam
-“Sex Specific Exams”
-Lab Tests: Blood Count, Chemistry Panel, Urinalysis

Depending on what they find here you may go further into the system or stay out. Notice that most of these tests aren’t actually looking to tell how well you are, they are actually trying to find something wrong with you: signs of disease, cancer, disorders and other anomalies. Consider what can’t get caught in a doctor’s office, which might send us to the ER—none of those things would make you say “I am so incredibly healthy!” “Healthy” for the System seems more about what takes us away from some “normal” physical state than what could make us better than normal. If we think about what brings us into the system, we first have to think that it is about identifying problems with our health and then trying to find some resolution to those problems. Finding some resolution is kind of a target and not necessarily a “shall do” because there might not be resolutions to some particular problems. For this reason, let’s state our first requirement as:

The Healthcare System should detect health related problems of individuals and restore those individuals to as full health as possible with all available knowledge and technology.

I think this requirement is rather complete, but it really only talks to one aspect of the system. The other major component of the healthcare system is the business end, literally. Let’s not get into the solution side of this (federal program vs. individual funding) but talk to more of the obvious. More specifically, let’s talk about all the people in the system that should to get paid (leaving out how they get paid). Obviously, everyone in the system who provides a service should get paid. However, let’s get a little more specific. Everyone who participates in the function we previously described should get paid towards their contribution to that diagnosis and restoration. We can look at this as something more concrete, like a construction contractor. The contractor gets paid for doing to the work and that money gets split up according to the job: some goes to the guys who did the work (usually at a predefined rate agreed to before the job started and normally based on hours), some towards the rental or purchase of certain tools, some goes towards materials used on the job, some goes towards future growth of the firm, etc. The workers come in different price ranges dependent on their availability and any special skills they possess—the rarer, the higher the bill. Why should we consider the pay scheme to repair a house, a car or a refrigerator to be any different than that of a person? Yes, there are more specialties and equipment involved, but no matter how you combine them, they don’t really change this fundamental structure. Does hospitalization really change the structure of a Hotel payment structure combined with a repair facility payment scheme? The requirement for payment seems to be this:

The Healthcare System should pay those involved in the actions relative to providing goods and services as the real cost of labor and material allowing normal growth (as with any other business).

There is another side to this requirement, pricing. Not only should people be compensated for their actions, but they should also fairly reflect the pricing of their goods and services. I love to use pricegrabber.com because I can quickly compare the prices of things I’m interested in buying at a bunch of stores to find the best price for those items. It also gives ratings for those stores so you also know the likelihood of a good delivery, and how they handle any issues with the thing you bought. Pricegrabber is really only making the job of comparative shopping easier, but it is something we do (or should do) with any purchase. Comparative shopping is simply the market at work. The ability to compare prices and goods between different stores keeps those prices in check. The more competition that exists for particular products, the closer to the real price of the good or service one is likely to get. This pricing competition works for contractors and mechanics as it does for product retailers. Why shouldn’t it also be the basis of Healthcare pricing? The only unusual case which the users of the Healthcare System must deal with is the Emergency Room. One doesn’t normally have the time to compare prices for ER services which may cause price gouging. However, we can make one general requirement that covers both of these:

The Healthcare System shall provide a means provide fair pricing for services and products rendered.

The three preceding requirements are pretty cut and dry for a normal business (provide a service, pay people for providing that service, price your service reasonably), but we have one requirement that is far outside the norm for a typical business—access. Normally, businesses only provide access based on the ability of the customer to pay for that service. For instance, a mechanic is not going to do a job for free; they might not even diagnose the problem for free, but for Healthcare, we must mandate access to everyone. Let’s actually keep this requirement as vague as it sounds:

The Healthcare System shall provide full access to all available knowledge and technology to all potential users.

If we accept this as a “must have,” then we can consider all of the options towards meeting that requirement in the next phase. This requirement also does not exclude people who can pay or pay part of their care and will lead towards some novel solutions when we consider these requirements together. It also seems to make us start thinking about those who might abuse this access. What if people pretend they can’t pay when they can? Who actually will pay? When you think of large organizations, you can probably conceive of a million ways that system can be cheated. For our problem, I believe we should consider this cheater problem beyond just this requirement. It’s too vague to say “make sure people don’t cheat,” but something should be included about cheater prevention. Let me propose (again, I really mean “dictate”) the following requirement:

The Healthcare System shall have a means to regulate each functional requirement such that it automatically prevents abuse.

This requirement essentially means that for every idea we come up with for a requirement there should also be an idea for how to keep that concept from being abused.

So, that’s it, and by “it” I mean this part of “it” not actually all of “it.” Next time I’ll actually talk about potential solutions, and by the pace of the Healthcare “debate” I’m pretty sure I’ll have time to get into it.

Reforming the Healthcare “Debate”: Admitting We have a Problem

2009-09-20T16:57:00.009-05:00

What can I really say at this point in the healthcare debate besides “Shut up!” It’s the same reaction I have in some meetings at work, except I keep it to myself (unless, I’m saying out loud and no one is telling me because they all think I have turrets). If you think you attend too many worthless meetings at work, you’re probably right. It’s easy for meetings to go haywire, especially the more people you have in them. More often than not, the main problem is no one will have set a meeting objective up front or provided any path towards resolution of the issue—a key point here being, there should be an issue. The entire point of a meeting should be to resolve something which could not have been done without getting everyone in the same room. So, if you have everyone in the room, you should probably have a plan to get something out of it.

Similarly, people’s time has been wasted on this Healthcare Reform “debate” in the last few months. Like a haywire meeting, there is no structure or direction for a constructive resolution. Much like most political wrangling of the past couple of decades, we haven’t started with the basic agreement on the current accepted definition of the “Healthcare System” nor is there an accepted definition of the problem of that system. Can we at least agree to that? Without this foundation we cannot possibly agree to a solution, because we don’t know what we are trying to fix.

Let’s think of the Healthcare debate as a more concrete problem. Suppose your car started acting funny (its fuel efficiency dropped recently; it’s making funny noises, and it doesn’t respond to you as quickly as it used to), and you take it to a mechanic. After you drive it into the shop, the lead mechanic brings in everyone into the bay and has you start it up. Everyone is watching and listening to your car from the back of the bay—its hood closed and no one looking at the dash—he has you shut it off and asked for solutions from everyone there. Everyone chips in an idea and they establish a few camps: replace the engine, fix the NOX system, and do nothing.

You probably think this is a ridiculous scenario. You may not run a mechanic shop, but you know there are some steps to go through before jumping to solutions. First, understand the vehicle--we can’t normally understand the peculiarities of a Pontiac by reading the repair manual for a Porsche. Second, try to isolate the problem, normally by gathering as much data about that problem as possible. Listen to it run, yes, but also open the hood, look at the lights on the dash, check all the fluids, hook up a diagnostic computer, etc. One can’t be confident in a fix unless the problem is given some context which may also include what is working correctly. This research and investigation, a contextual foundation, is not part of this Healthcare Debate, and if we admit first that there is a problem, then we have to build the context of that problem. Our President and Congress are deadlocking in a debate of solutions without establishing the foundation of the problem and how their solutions resolve these points.

All sides are taking advantage of this ambiguity by playing on emotions, misrepresentation and tangents. What’s worse is that those who should be getting the debate on track are taking the bait and falling prey to these emotional misdirections. As I see it, the problem with the Healthcare System is a technical issue, just like the problem with your car. The system has definition: it has things it must do; it has particular ways it responds to individuals. Just because it is made of people and not metal, doesn’t mean it can’t be handled like a broken car. Emotions shouldn’t come into play when you’re trying to fix your car or when you’re trying to fix the Healthcare System. (A good rule of thumb for almost all political “debates” is “if you’re getting emotional, you’re getting played.” Emotional appeal is the weapon of choice for politician and those trying to manipulate the government for as long as there have been governments. People are emotional and some of us tend to use political philosophies as part of our identities, just as we do with our favorite sports team, or band. Unfortunately, in politics this makes us quite a bit more susceptible to manipulation and personal injury. Normally, the best answers are approached in a cold logical fashion (Live long and prosper)) Addressing this as a technical problem also means that we’ll suck the life out of the debate, but boring is good in this case.

To begin this emotional drain let’s define the Healthcare System as it is now. Now this has nothing to do with the future form of the system (a cuban/commie/barcoding system, an unregulated/free market/credit score-based system, or a witchdoctoring/juju wearing/tattoo-based system). A “system” just means we have some boundary to the thing. When we talk about the problems of the “Heathcare System” we probably mean doctors, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, health insurance, patients and the relationships between them. We won’t talk about agriculture, police departments, the military or clown colleges (unless they provide some related examples).

As part of this definition we need to also define the current healthcare system’s function. Can we say, “Provide medical care to all individuals when their health is at risk”?

This function seems kind of odd, and you may debate the “all individuals” statement, but as the system is defined right now, that is what it does. Since 1986, the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act has required that all Emergency Rooms accept ALL individuals no matter their ability to pay for those services. If you disagree with this, ask yourself what you would want an ER to do with you if you were mugged and beaten; wait until they could confirm you could pay? It might be a while, particularly if you were unconscious with no identification, and in that state would you really want them to wait to see if you were bleeding in your brain? More than likely, you would want the service immediately. The problem most people have with “ER for all” is the payment aspect of these services. The act did not provide for any type of funding for ER’s to provide this mandate. As a result of this act, hospitals just have to “work it out”, and they thought it was wise to make the insured patients pay for it. This payment aspects falls into the problem category of the system.

Let’s take the second step and try to define the problems with this system at a high level. The more measurably we can define this problem(s) the better chance we will have at finding a solution that we can prove will work. The numbers are most available for one of the most common complaints about the System. The following chart comes from data available at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The following data compares the capabilities of the healthcare systems with the cost of those systems per capita. In this table I have included the U.S. against the most efficient industrialized nation, South Korea, and the best “scoring” nation, Japan. (I considered the score to include the number of “Deaths per 1000 Live Births” and the “Total Life Expectancy at Birth.” My rationale for these parameters was as follows: if the “Death per Live Births” for these other nations were higher than the US then they would loose more at the “front end” of their system, just as if their “Life Expectancy” would cover their “back end.”) Both nations beat out the US in both of these categories while costing about a third to a sixth of what it does per each US citizen. If you care to cruise the OECD, you will also note that almost all industrialized nations are far closer to S. Korea and Japan in their numbers than to the US.

This means that in general, the US system costs us more while giving us less. When compared to most industrialized nations it costs us far more.

Problem 1: General System Inefficiency. Costs are High and Return Value is Low

The second problem we feel more personally than any other—the growth in cost of the healthcare system. We see this in the cost of our medications, deductibles, and the growing number of things insurance refuses to cover. We can see this through data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services site. The chart, below, is the per person cost of healthcare from 1960 to 2007. It looks like the elbow of an exponential curve, but we need to look at this data more realistically by using the growth in per capita income.

If we chart the cost of healthcare as a percentage of personal income (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), we can see that this is not as harsh of a runaway—not exponential at least, but we can see how much healthcare is biting into our personal incomes, a 194% increase since 1960. We’d all probably like to be paying 7% as opposed to 22% of our incomes to healthcare. (We should also recognize that this per capita isn’t really representative since there is a more complex distribution of who actually ends up paying versus receives care just as there is a more complex distribution of income. For what is a rather long blog post already, we’ll stick with these averaging assumptions—a “what would it cost if we shared it all evenly.”)

Problem 2: The growth in the personal cost of healthcare as a % of personal income.

Speaking of uneven distributions, we find another problem regarding the means of access to the Health Care System. As of 2008, 15.4% of the United States citizens (46.3 million) were uninsured. As we stated earlier, this doesn’t mean that they can’t get into the Health Care System—they can get into ER’s—they just can’t get into the places through which Health Insurance lets them in—a normal doctor’s office, to the pharmacists counter, etc. This access limitation normally means that instead of being able to see a doctor about some ailment that could be taken care of earlier, they have to wait until it is debilitating enough to send them to the ER. This of course means that the ER’s get backed up with issues that could have been handled earlier and cheaper elsewhere.

This access limit means that ER’s get overstrained because of their government mandate, health insurance providers have to negotiate the fair price of payment because they know they are being used to pay for the uninsured visits, and the insured patients are carrying the brunt of the cost of the system. In the end this means that hospital charges go up, deductibles go up, the percent of personal income that goes to healthcare goes up, and the number of people who can’t afford health insurance goes up which causes this feedback loop to feed itself to oblivion. Health Insurance providers don’t just respond to this loop by increasing deductibles, but also by pairing their clientele back to lower risk individuals. This means they can charge higher deductibles but be less likely to pay out, strengthening their bottom line, but at the same time increasing the pool of uninsured people who will eventually cause prices to go up.

This problem does not translate directly into “lack of access to health insurance” though we could go there. To be more general, it is fair to say that the problem is that there is a lack of access to all aspects of healthcare. Even the insured are limited in their access to the Healthcare System. As a function of their insurance provider, insured people can’t just go to any doctor or hospital. They are limited in their choice. This not only causes challenges to patients, but it means that any free-market competition with hospitals and doctors is based on their appeasement of insurance providers not patients.

This problem is most correctly put as “the limitations of patient access to all aspects of the healthcare system.” Meaning something to the effect of, few individuals can get to the services they need even if they are the best thing for them and the system as a whole.

Problem 3: The limitations of patient access to all aspects of the healthcare system.

The Healthcare System has some operational problems in itself. It might be hard to get some agreement to what the “Healthcare System” consists of, because it isn’t actually formally defined anywhere. It has been allowed to grow complex and implicit relationships so that it has become next to impossible to isolate just exactly what is going wrong. Take the ER examples discussed above. The reason we know it is a problem is because the function of the ER is defined by law—it’s a known quantity we can deal with. The rest of the definition is spread between other legislation, company contracts and industry traditions. None of this is compiled into a single document called “The U.S. Healthcare System.” Imagine if this was the case with our Air Traffic Controllers. Would you have confidence in flying, if you couldn’t guarantee that each airport handled traffic by the same set of laws?

It’s been said that the costs of the healthcare system spends about a 1/3 of its total costs on administrative tasks. Though, I couldn’t find this number specifically, I wouldn’t doubt it. From some experience with the hospital aspects of the Healthcare System, I can say that each health insurance company can have its own set of documentation which is required to be completed by the doctors, technical specialists, etc. for their patients which causes more overhead for keeping it all organized.

Aside from the paperwork problem, the challenges of mistakes and misdiagnosis also plague the system. I will lump this in with the paperwork problem because it is about how effectively the system as a whole operates. This involves not only mistakes by doctors but the interpretation of malpractice by patients. Again, we are missing a definition of expectations for the systems operation, and this vagueness seems to be leading to costly and deadly mistakes. Like the paperwork problem, since there is nothing defining how things “should be” how do we know what we can fix? This problem can be stated rather generally, “System operations are prone to failure without a clear path to resolution.”

Problem 4: System operations are prone to failure without a clear path to resolution.

These problems are a high level description whose intent is to cover with broad brush strokes the major aspects of our Healthcare Debate. I also tried to keep out any idea of solutions from those problem statements. From this set of problems we can begin to look at the system in more technical terms in a more rational way than is currently going on. In subsequent posts, I will devolve the problem into more technical terms so that we have a better chance at isolating the problem and in turn find the right technical solution.

It’s the Stupidity, Stupid.

2009-03-14T16:49:00.004-05:00

We, humans, only appear rational. Rationality is a funny illusion that the objective parts of our minds play on the subjective parts. Think of playing a piano. We can watch a concert by the world’s best pianist and remember every detail of their behavior, but we cannot go from that observation, untrained or experienced in piano playing, and play the same, magnificent concert ourselves.

The subjective execution of the objective observation does not connect. You might argue that this is due to the “muscle memory” of the pianist which the observer would lack, and it is really a physiological limitation than a neurological one. Let’s take trained behavior out of this and meet in the parking lot.

When you go shopping for groceries, pay attention to how the cars stack up relative to the entrance door. You will find the aisle in front of the door is stacked up much higher than any other aisle, and that the number of cars in those other aisles steeply decline the further away you get from the entrance aisle. In effect, the cars distribute in a bell curve.

If we were rational, we would distribute in the shape of a semi-circle. A semi-circle is the best way for everyone to get a close as possible to the door. A bell curve is the shape of randomly behaving individuals settling about a single objective, the entrance. In the lot, we are thinking more of our objective, the entryway, not as much our geometric distance from it. Our perception is that the best place to park is the location which gives us the best view of that entrance, the aisle directly in front of it.

One way we deal with our tendency to act irrationally is to limit our behaviors so that the randomness is safely bound. The parking lot, again, is a great example of this. While we allow individuals to park in any aisle they want, no matter how irrational, we don’t seem to mind obeying the lines with in which we must park (for the most part). What happens when those lines disappear?

A friend of mine had a great example of this, pictured. This picture was taken in his work parking lot after they had experienced some rain, enough to make the already fading lines disappear. His vehicle, unfortunately for him, is the jeep stuck in the middle. Let’s remember that this is a work parking lot, which means that the individuals who are parking here do so habitually (it should also be noted that some of these parkers are engineers, who should be highly rational). Erase the lines, and the illusion of rationality disappears.

The lines in the parking lot are the physical embodiment of regulation. They are an objective, observable indicator of the legal frame within which one can park. These lines are used to make the parking lot not only an effective place to park but to enter and exit. We accept these rules because they do, in fact, make our lives easier and safer by making them less random. They are in effect the admission that our subjective minds must be bound to work in an objectively rational way.

Effective laws work by properly bounding the randomness of our behaviors so that are free to act however we want. This way we can effectively be confident that these behaviors will do no worse than only affect ourselves. However, this is not the case with out current financial system.

Unlike parking lots and street signs, the world of finance exists in a conceptual form. The boundary of objective and subjective behavior is easily muddled since the only place they are effectively measured is in the mind of those operating within those financial institutions and the regulators which observe them. We cannot easily identify when someone double-parks a derivative or accelerates their bank into a high risk situation.

We need boundaries within which randomness can safely occur; where risk can exist, but not jeopardize the safety of the whole system. Right now we are heading the wrong direction. The TARP money and the directives regarding its use are not objective boundaries, but subjective directions, telling banks how to behave. Like valets parking cars, this method may work to some extent, but it is costly, time consuming and prone to failure based on the competence of the valets.

The reason the market lacks confidence to trade is because they have just experience a multicar pile-up in their parking lot far worse than the one pictured. Piles and piles of cars (probably a semi and a few campers) are jammed in end over end and no one knows how to get their vehicles in or out. There are no lanes so no one knows who to trust for direction.

Directing bank behavior, regarding lending, is if anything a short term solution. We want a financial environment in which banks are self-motivated to make their random, subjective decisions in a safe environment. To do this, we need to establish an objective, measurable parameter all the banks can agree to, lines in the lot. Start with either eliminating high risk loan types or limiting the percentage of high risk loans any single bank can hold. Second, we need to stop the ability to mix and mask loans into things such as derivatives or other secondary types of financial tools. We must know for certain that the parking lot is for parking cars and nothing else.

The function of loans is fundamentally to give a short term resource to help individuals get towards a long term gain. Any activity with that loan, derivatives or other kinds of repackaging, is fundamentally betting on those loans’ successes or failures and should be treated as gambling. Gambling on the success or failure of one’s fiscal solvency is also part of the challenge with the stock market as well. Tools like short selling also do this same thing with the stock values. Together these bets make a very dynamic and unstable economic system.

Imagine if we started taking bets on the ability of individuals to get in or out of the parking lot unscathed. By being able to bet on the success or failure of cars to get out undamaged would mean that some individuals will be putting money on the ability of some cars to destroy others. Those gamblers’ end objective is not to get cars in and out, but to make money by damaging cars in the lot. This is effectively what our banking system and stock market have done by allowing any type of bet beyond the initial stock buy or loan to be played. What we should learn throughout our recorded history, and from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that destruction is far easier, cheaper and a surer bet than construction and success. The risk of the initial act of loans or stock purchase is risk enough for the system. The rules of these are clear like lines in the lot.

Our economic system needs to be sorted out with a guarantee that the lot is indeed a parking lot and not a demolition derby. Until those laws are properly set, any confidence in the market will be short term and shallow, an illusion of rationality.

A Real GM Rescue Plan

2008-11-21T20:52:00.002-06:00

The "Big Three" automakers made their way to DC to beg for another bailout package despite their complete lack of a plan as to what to do with it. I actually think that Ford is already on the right path, and Chrysler is a lost cause. GM, however, has the makings of a recoverable company so long as they follow the right path which has yet to be defined.

GM has been trounced by the economic crisis as a result not just of the environment, but their business management to date. I have often said that the problem with GM is not their products but their board of directors who have never driven their company's executive leadership to take effective action to respond to their highly effective competition. This reality is a challenge to the idea that any infusion of cash, even with specific objectives, will only end up delaying the end.

The countering challenges to not taking action would not only be the loss of GM jobs but supplier businesses as well. The balance of these two strong forces leaves very few feasible options which will come close to providing a probable window for recovery. I believe the most reasonable option has yet to be discussed.

My idea stems from my frustration with the term "too big to fail," which has been popping up quite often recently. It seems the measurement of "too big" comes from the assessment of hard a thud the giant will make when it falls. The current philosophy of keeping the giant upright involves infusions of cash or government ownership. However, this infusion does less to restablize the giant as much as reduce the inevitable impact, and giant leaning on the government only disables the government as well.

GM needs something quite different than a shot in the arm or a government crutch. A failed megacompany needs a chance to revive in a low risk environment. This environment is all but impossible in the current economy. Creating such an environment for GM will force the government to buy them out as they did AIG and their buy-in of certain banks. This step towards Socialism is completely unacceptable.
Instead of extending the extraordinary effort to soften up the environment, the government should reduced risk by handling GM differently. The risk the government is ultimately trying to manage is to the economic environment, minimizing job and small business losses. To increase the likelihood of success, the best action to take would be to break GM into multiple, independent companies.

Normally, adding more parts increases the opportunity for failure, but the nature of the organization of GM already embodies most of this complexity. Breaking up GM would reduce risk to the economic environment once disassembled by reducing the chance that the larger current organization collapses at one time.

Splitting up the company allows free market forces to drive corporate reform by removing the inhibiting heirarchy of the current structure. Instead of telling businesses how to do business better, allowing independent companies to have equivalent economic authority will put them against each other inviting innovation in productline and business process.
Breaking it up also increases opportunities to small businesses and suppliers. The newly split companies will have the opportunity to look at suppliers which they had not previously been allowed because of supply chain volume deals in which large companies commonly engage. These new car companies will also have the chance to engage in their own advanced design and consider new technologies and configurations which also open opportunities for new suppliers.

The benefits of splitting up GM seem to outweigh the prolonging of its inevitable collapse. To do this, the government should propose a stimulus figure which will be provided only if the company is split into four equivalent parts by three months from the acceptance of the agreement.

Random Thoughts on the Bailout Crisis

2008-09-30T21:49:00.001-05:00

Lessons Unlearned

Which part of the last 7 years did the administration and Congress not get? They've been giving money to every size organization since the airline bailout in 2001, and none of it has stimulated any sustainable growth. Every tax cut and government rebate check have only provided a short term spike followed by continued instability on the downward spiral.

Market stability can't come from an infusion of cash any more than a broken engine mount can be fixed by stepping on the gas. Buying up the bad debt in the market won't stabilize them because the problem isn't the bad debt, but the means by which that debt came to tie up the markets. In the New Deal, the Glass-Steagall Act separated the operations of banking institutions to minimize risks by eliminating conflicts of interest and preventing the mixing of risks between these institutions.

In essence this act worked to ensure a stable economy by making sure the U.S. was sufficiently diversified, and that no common financial event could wipe out the entire economy. This would be similar to keeping your 401K diversified to an acceptable level of risk.

This act was repealed in the 80's and allowed the creation of sub-prime mortgages and the MBSs and CDOs that made them so popular. In essence the repeal of this act recreated the event which caused them to originally be written, but with a 21's century flair. Funny how that works.

Self-funded Bailout Plan

It's hard to get your money back from a bad investment because there may be nothing illegal about that investment. However, there is something quite illegal about an organization wide attempt to defraud individuals and banks. This is essentially what was occurring with many sub-prime mortgage, MBS and CDO lenders. We have heard many reports about this but haven't seen much action.

The problem is that the SEC isn't equipped to handle enforcement of something so widespread. However, the FBI is. I am not suggesting that the FBI enforce SEC policy, but they sure can enforce laws against wire fraud, 18 U.S.C. § 1343:

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.

The problem is obviously the fine limit (which should be updated for the 21st century), but this is an avenue to restore some balance. Everyone involved in the wire fraud is subject to being a participant in the act. Could they net 1000, or 10,000, for this crime when you involve all of the e-mail, blogging, texting, blackberry, and cellphones of the modern age? Guaranteed.

The money that would be received from the suits should be put into a general recovery fund. The recovery fund would first be used to refund those who were mislead into believing that they were in a fixed rate loan but found themselves in an ARM. Second, the fund would be used to repair those who were mislead into investing into MBS or CDO type vehicles. Remaining funds would be used to help out faulting mortgages and in renegotiation of those mortgages to acceptable rates.

Post-Facto Anti-trust Enforcement

Over the last few months, we've heard the term "too big to fail" too often. We have anti-trust laws, but they haven't been enforced for decades. Over the last few months, firms that were "too big to fail" were falling apart and being assumed by even larger firms. Doesn't it now make these firms "much much too large to fail?"

AIG was one of these firms, and the government bought them in the blink of an eye. The plan, as it's been portrayed, is to break the firm apart into smaller, lower risk elements which would not cause so much instability in a collapse.

The rest of these monstrous economic single point failures should be identified and broken into smaller, safer chunks. Not only would this be safer, it would create jobs, induce competition and provide more options for diversified growth.

Update: How Deregulation Socialized the US Housing Market

2008-08-02T10:28:00.006-05:00

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac line up for Federal Takeover!!!

The Socialization of the housing market continues under a "conservative" administration. By doing nothing to regulate the housing market which was going haywire for years, "conservative" economic policy drives markets into the brute force control of government ownership and control. So much for making government smaller and more efficient.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=home&sid=auCiw0BP4Fyk

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/business/08fannie.html?hp

The whole idea of deregulation is to get the government's hands out of the economy as much as possible. The scale of government involvement in the economy can be envisioned as having communism, complete economic control, on the far left, and no government involvement on the far right. No government involvement essentially is anarchy, and it is generally accepted that some government involvement is needed to perform specific tasks such as coining money or enforcing contracts.

Free marketeers seek to keep that government involvement to the minimum claiming that the market will find a solution to most problems. History is against the free marketeers as every age of industrial advance leads a litter of bodies pointing to horrific problems. The solution invariably ends up in the hands of the government. Why? Because the market is not a single entity, but a conglomeration of competing organizations. To change one's processes to fix a problem is costly to that company which would affect the potential profit from that companies product. If the competitor doesn't make the same changes, the more concerned company will take losses.

The government is a platform which provides a means to enforce changes in process in all competing companies such that all of their profits are effected equally, thus not making it a competitive disadvantage to fix the problem.

As mentioned in previous posts, most regulations come after national tragedies like airplane crashes and economic collapses. The regulations that are put in place after them are specifically tailored to prevent them from recurring (theoretically). Logically, when you remove these regulations, you expose yourself to re-enacting the history which put them in place.

In previous posts, I've already discussed how the financial mess we are in now is a result of this "deregulation," but the government's reaction to the fallout is baffling. The Bush administration frequently aligns itself as conservative and a free market supporter. They publicly discuss letting the market find a solution to a number of federal problems including global warming and the energy crisis. However, when it came to the economic crisis we are in now, they opened the government's resources to try to solve the problem.

The administration has taken the stance that the Federal Reserve will provide support to failing financial institutions which have been viewed as "too big to fail." This stance means that the federal government will act as an insurance firm to high risk businesses. Instead of redistributing risk and firewalling these institutions as it was before the deregulation, the government has accepted these fewer, larger higher risk companies and bought into being the owner to the risk.

This may not seem like a move towards socialization, but one must consider the function of these businesses before disregarding the idea. The businesses that the government has decided to prop up do not produce goods or provide direct customer service. They are financial lenders who take bets on what investments will pay out the greatest financial returns over time. They are by definition financial risk managers. To insure these businesses is to take away the lions share of their business and to reduce their free market function to simply deciding what investment they are willing to expose our tax dollars towards. These businesses are simply masks on the face of a gigantic social program brought to us by the free marketeers misguided understanding of the operation of government.

The Quagmire Default

2008-04-06T16:02:00.006-05:00

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

-Albert Einstein

A series of unfortunate, recent events have made me think about our (human) default operating procedures. Our minds are the products of millions of years of evolution. This means that the structure by which they currently operate more represents the challenges humanity had to overcome through that lineage than the travails of the modern world.

I will not argue that this same brain structure has allowed us to achieve the largest human population the planet has ever known. This achievement has been brought about by human innovations that have lengthened life expectancy, lowered infant mortality and reduced the per capita fatalities due to human on human violence. However, many of these innovations are easily and frequently turned against progress by the deeper default instructions.

Hierarchy is part of our most primitive cooperative tools. We know this because it is evidenced in the anthropological data of our ancestors and present throughout the animal kingdom—particularly within mammals. In Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson describes a variety of cooperative mechanisms employed by all types of animals, primates in particular, that are mysteriously similar to ours.

What does a tendency toward hierarchy have to do with our current global situation? Everything. Hierarchy makes sense in very particular environments (otherwise it wouldn’t be recurrent in the biological world). A few of those benefits include:

The fewer acceptable opinions, the fewer reasons to conflict.

Between individuals much time and energy can be spent arguing and conflicting. A recognized hierarchy stops this by asserting that only one opinion is valid, eliminating many reasons for internal conflict.

The greater the amplification of behavior, the greater the magnitude of the effect

A hierarchy is like any tool, it amplifies an individual’s behavior to achieve something he or she could not normally do on their own. To make a reasonable impact in some situations one must multiply his or her effectiveness.

These, of course, operate under a few caveats

The fewer opinions only work when few options actually exist. Otherwise the fewer opinions available, the lower the chance of success

In the pure numbers game of finding the right answer by guessing (which we do quite often), the more ideas we consider to fix a problem the greater the chance we come up with finding the most effective solution. In the animal kingdom this isn’t such a big deal because the hierarchy comes from generations of relatively consistent environments meaning that the actual options to make a decision are fairly limited.

The greater the magnitude of the effect, the more critical the decision maker

The quality of a leader is as good as the luck of the draw for most hierarchies. For animals, however, there is more equivalency in the capabilities of the leadership and the lead. This equivalency increases the chance of having a good leader since turnover is easier to achieve. Primates and many mammals that operate in hierarchy have roughly equivalent strength. Only slight physical edges make a leader the top dog. . .or chimp. This means that it doesn’t take too much to take down the leader, and that when push comes to shove (particularly in tough times) the leader can be shoved out. This also implies that the more equivalent the capabilities of leadership and lead,the more chance of instability and ineffectiveness.

The ability to participate in the cooperative acts that define a hierarchy requires only that the individuals recognize the individual who has acquired dominance and operate in a mode that corresponds to this relationship. The reason why they are recognized as leaders is normally based on the observation of a struggle and, as in tribal human rituals, markings of the leader. Loyalty to a leader is the closest human approximation of this biological programming. Loyalty disregards objective reasoning, based more on emotional associations. Loyalty is based upon trust normally earned in the animal world and our interpersonal lives through established and repeated interactions which build within each of our minds the personal cooperative score of those which we are most involved. These biologically programmed tools from our prehistoric ancestors can lead us to disaster as they have become easier to manipulate.

The founding fathers had an inherent mistrust for traditional hierarchy. They structured the Constitution with the base assumption that no man in power ought to be trusted. Power throughout the world was beginning to diversify in their time. Adam Smith had recently written On the Wealth of Nations which described the machinery of the new marketplace. The power of swords and guns was being divested into monetary exchanges for goods, service and slaves on a global scale. The power of the media was also growing at the time. The idea of the free press had exploded the notions of what was going on in the world, as well as what was true. The challenge to truth amplified the requirements for our mechanisms of trust so long as there was no objective way to recognize the reality of the situation. The lack of objective measures for leaders and organizations had always thrown open the gate to guessing who is right. Recognizing this, the founding fathers had come up with an electoral system that forced each person in power to be reconsidered, but they had no idea the complexity of the modern world.

In our modern, complex and highly intertwining world, our default to hierarchy thrust us into large scale catastrophes and long term self-destruction. Hitler, Hirohito, Lenin, and Stalin all have demonstrated the highway to hell was paved with unquestioned loyalty. The late communist regime dragged the Russian people into the mire, eventually ending its communist rule. Economically, antitrust laws were enacted in the United States to take apart monoliths of industry which stifled progress for the gain of those few on top. This enforced diversity ensured the stability of free markets. After the great depression, the instruments of the economy were also divided in their capacity by strict laws that created walls so that no risk transcended all institutions, allowing risk taking in specific areas while preserving reliable, sustainable growth in other sectors. These laws decreased the magnitude of the effect of individual decision makers by distributing power among specific sectors and defining measurable means of observing their behavior.

Recently, we have seen many of the steps to prevent the natural decay being undone. As I wrote about in previous articles, the overzealous liquidity of the housing market, it’s collapse, and the blast radius which is still engulfing high level financial institutions came about because the segmentation which had previously existed were taken away, assuming and trusting that we would not repeat the same mistakes. Not surprisingly, as the institutions mixed, the risk spread, and the collapse occurred. The new proposals by Paulson and the current administration do little to correct this as they suggest the merger of financial regulator agencies under a federal instrument which is answerable to no branch of our government—a step more characteristic of our default programming than the founding fathers’ inherent mistrust. But this is not the only place we can see our collapse back to the default programming.

For decades there have been multiple large aircraft manufacturers building aircraft with a diversity of capabilities. Over time they had been allowed to merge one by one, until there remained only one United States based aircraft manufacturer capable of building the “big iron.” As the air force looked to replace their decades old aircraft, they had no choice but to look outside of their own country. Patriots, politicians and unions protested as Northrop Grumman and European-based EADs were awarded the fuel tanker program even though they technically had the superior aircraft. Should we sacrifice technical capability for loyalty? This misleading question masks the real discussion. “Should we have gotten into this situation?” The idea of a national aircraft company has circulated since WWII, and was defeated time and again. Many thought an aerospace monolith would be a competitive advantage against other nations, but it is turning out to be a risk. Their monolithic decision making is failing technically, affecting the economic and strategic well-being of the country.

The reasons the mergers were allowed to occur is at its base, one of our default programming. We have begun to trust people and institutions to perform properly in situations in which they had failed before. Why? Hadn't we learned that too much trust was given to too few people who ended up with too much power? No, that was the lesson of a previous generation, and their replacement had failed to learn from history. We replaced the objective definitions of the roles of people and organizations with the inherent default to trust they will operate correctly when the rules are removed. Without those definitions we're unable to see beyond our trust to see the flashing warnings and the imminent collapse. Unless the definition returns we will not find a way out.

Economic Failure Analysis

2008-03-26T18:31:00.006-05:00

Last blog post railed against the jump to a quick fix seemingly without the benefit of a comprehensive analysis of this dramatic economic failure. As the economic collapse continues to ripple through the economy like a slow atom bomb, I thought I'd take a crack at seeing if I could pull up some credible sources on the topic. Through the wonders of Google, I found a plethora of credible material which helped me piece together this mess. This material tells the tale of a series of bad regulatory decisions made on gut feels and philosophical guesses as to how a market works. Much like the solutions that are now proposed, the story of the economic crisis is one of blind deregulation dating back to Reagan's "Morning in America."

Don't get me wrong. Regulations should always be questioned, but the elimination of a law should always be done with caution. Removing that law should be well substantiated with facts, data, and analysis. This is because laws rarely ever proceed tragedy; they are a reaction to it. The laws of aviation came after the number of crashes became too high, and the laws of bank came after the crash of our economy. These laws are based on data and experience often written in the blood of their unfortunate predecessors. To think that the economic model which caused the initial economic collapse had changed is to assume that the fundamental principles by which humans operate had changed. This idea is as much a fallacy as the laws of physics changing.

The story, written in quotes, below, is laughable if its effects weren't so devastating. The St. Louis Fed paper tells of the step by step process which brought about the subprime market: the deregulation of restrictions on financial institutions, loosening of restrictions on lending, etc. The process made more credit available to more people and that was thought of as a good thing. However, they also recognize that the most variable form of credit was now going to more people who were more at risk of not paying it back. Gov. Gramlich's speech from 2004 hints softly at the warning signs of this marked in a large number of foreclosures. The mentality at the time was that this is "ok" because more people are in "their own homes." However, unlike loans to a business, where credit can be applied to increase the business's chance of increasing its income, a home loan does not at all increase the payees ability to increase their own income and repay. The logic used to accept the reality staring these legislators and analysts in the face is ludicrous.

The failure of logic didn't stop with the creation of a fragile fiscal apparatus, it spread into higher forms of investment, as described in the Fed Reserve of Dallas's report. This article describes the deregulation of the barriers between investment banks and commercial banks allowing cross-pollination of large financial institutions. The hope was that this would "increase competition, thus generating greater efficiencies and economies of scale and benefiting consumers and the economy." However, the reality is that when the barriers fell the companies started combining and reducing options. It allowed Bear Stearns and other financial heavies to invest in the poorly established subprime market putting at risk enormous sectors of the economy that used to be firewalled by regulations to protect against just such a failure.

Any "recovery plan" that does not undo what these deregulations did will not stop the hemorrhaging. Pouring money into the system will only temporarily fill up the economic tub. The hole at the bottom of the tub needs to be sealed so that it won't become bigger.

The silver lining to this fiasco is that we can confirm that anyone who looks proudly at the economic deregulation of the 80's and 90's should probably be kept out of any further federal decisions before they risk any other critical function of government with their blind incompetence.

The Evolution of the Subprime Mortgage Market, January 2006
From the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

The ability to charge high rates and fees to borrowers was not possible until the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) was adopted in 1980. It preempted state interest rate caps. The Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act (AMTPA) in 1982 permitted the use of variable interest rates and balloon payments.

These laws opened the door for the development of a subprime market, but subprime lending would not become a viable large-scale lending alternative until the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA). The TRA increased the demand for mortgage debt because it prohibited the deduction of interest on consumer loans, yet allowed interest deductions on mortgages for a primary residence as well as one additional home. This made even high-cost mortgage debt cheaper than consumer debt for many homeowners. In environments of low and declining interest rates, such as the late 1990s and early 2000s, cash-out refinancing6 becomes a popular mechanism for homeowners to access the value of their homes. In fact, slightly over one half of subprime loan originations have been for cash-out refinancing.

The growth through the mid-1990s was funded by issuing mortgage-backed securities (MBS, which are sometimes also referred to as private label or as asset-backed securities [ABS]).

Remarks by Governor Edward M. Gramlich At the Financial Services Roundtable Annual Housing Policy Meeting May 5th 2004!

While the basic developments in the subprime mortgage market seem positive, the relatively high delinquency rates in the subprime market do raise issues. Even further social benefits would result if various institutions could agree on and implement changes that would lower foreclosures.

Ownership rates have now risen to more than 68 percent, and foreclosures are relatively high in the subprime market, an important source of new mortgage loans.

"Slow but Steady Progress Toward Financial Deregulation"
Southwest Economy, Issue 1, January/February 2003,
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, also known as Gramm–Leach–Bliley, was hailed as a major step toward ending government regulation that was initially imposed following the stock market collapse in the late 1920s and the ensuing Great Depression. Proponents claimed that eliminating the artificial barriers that divided the financial sector into distinct industries would increase competition, thus generating greater efficiencies and economies of scale and benefiting consumers and the economy.

Sluggish Car? Use Nitrous Oxide!

2008-02-13T22:28:00.001-06:00

We grow familiar with our cars on an almost subconscious level. We do so, because this subtle learning is really a matter of life or death. If you don’t know how quickly your car can accelerate through a turn, you might misjudge your chances of making the next left through that gap in traffic, or you might brake too late to avoid a collision. Drive your car long enough and you can swear you know when something is wrong before the lights on the dash tell you so.

Let’s say that your car isn’t accelerating nearly as fast as it used too. If you’re not mechanically inclined, you might take that car to a trusted mechanic to figure out what was wrong. The reason you trust your mechanic is because he or she gives it to you straight. A good mechanic will point out what is likely causing the irregular behavior, and how that failure is causing this behavior. Once they make the fix, your car behaves normally, which is why you keep coming back.

If only our government representatives were like good mechanics. Unfortunately, when it comes to the economy they aren’t. Humans have a subtle understanding of their economy as they do their automobile. We know when things just aren’t right. Ask anyone if our economy is having difficulty, and you will rarely get a questioning look. However, the numbers to confirm that situation can only be analyzed after the fact. In 2003 our economy was having trouble maintaining its normal acceleration and the government made a sad attempt to fix it.

Without much explanation as to what the problem was, the government sought to deal with the symptoms that everyone recognized. Sluggish economy? Speed it up with a rapid infusion of cash! This “fix” was akin to strapping on some nitrous oxide tanks to give a momentary boost in acceleration. Of course giving money away will make the economy rebound, but how did anyone in government actually know if that would take away the problem that was drawing the economy down. The questions of “Does it stimulate the economy?” and “Does it repair the economy?” are two completely different questions.

Now the nitrous has worn out, and the normal decline in acceleration is happening again. Without so much as a cursory glance under the hood, the government is ready to charge up the nitrous oxide tanks. Didn’t the nation replace the mechanics? Can someone in government explain how they know this repair will be a permanent fix?

Seven Steps to Stimulate the Economy

2008-01-19T17:50:00.000-06:00

Throwing money at a problem is no way to fix it. If the current stimulus goes as planned, this is exactly what will be done, again. It will cause a temporary recovery, fuel market instability, and eventually the economy will revert to the collapse which the package was masking. We should be more conscious of how this money is being spent and how we will know it is working. I’ve come up with an investment plan for the $140 billion that is expected to be distributed that should yield some more salient and permanent returns.

Distributions:

Increase the Benefits to Veterans

Costs are continually rising and the war rolls on. Increasing benefits on all fronts of the veteran’s package will increase access to college educations and small business starts as well as counterbalance the negative effects of the long term campaign.

Challenge CEO’s

By providing tax benefits to companies that give raises to more than 2/3’s of their entire company that is beyond the inflation rate would counteract the continual decrease in real wages that has been occurring for the last decade while increasing real per capita income.

Invest in Small Business

Investing in the foundation of small businesses is always a wise move in economic downturns. Because of the economic throttling, the markets favors buyers, and new businesses can actually get a greater purchasing advantage by buying at this time so long as they have the capital to do so and sustain a moderate profitability. The more small businesses we have, the better the probability that some successful business will emerge and stabilize, creating more jobs.

Build a McBiodiesel Infrastructure

The US has all of the makings of a strong Biodiesel infrastructure; distribution locations, fuel sources, and potential users in need. Biodiesel fuel can be made from a plethora of sources including used cooking oil. It just so happens that the biggest users of cooking oil are fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Wendy’s. Coincidentally, these fast food chains span the nation, many co-located with traditional gas stations along major national hauling routes. The biggest users of gas are national haulers and shippers. By partnering fast food chains with biodiesel entrepreneurs we can rapidly establish a bio-diesel chain along major shipping routes. By partnering major shippers and haulers with these chains, the US could initiate a lasting and self-perpetuating infrastructure requiring little federal investment. The results could be a massive reduction in fuel costs, improved air quality, and decreased dependence on foreign oil.

Enforcements:

Punish Weak Lending Practices

The idea of speeding tickets is to prevent accidents before they happen. The same can be done for weak lending practices which fuel massive collapse.

Enforce National Health and Safety Regulations on Imports

Did you know that the majority of products made in China aren’t regulated the same way as those made in the US? Recall the lead paint recalls of last year. To reduce the risk to the general public, the government should enforce the same regulations on all products no matter their origin. If the country we import from does not have a regulatory agency that is parallel to something we have in the US, their products should be tested on the docks to prevent them from infecting our supply lines. This will have an obvious cost impact, but that can easily be resolved with a “user fee” on all of those tested items. This will not only reduce health risks, but increase our visibility as to the cost of these regulations.

Partner with Mexico

With an unemployment rate of 4.5% it’s very hard to argue that illegal immigrants are taking American jobs. However, I believe in enforcing current laws regarding hiring illegal immigrants. Such enforcement will go a long way in reducing the tide of those immigrants. The bigger problem, however, is where these immigrants are coming from, not where they are going to. It may actually be cheaper to help stimulate native economic growth in the countries hemorrhaging their citizens to reduce the motivation to cross the border.

Made in China

2007-10-10T22:28:00.000-05:00

China has provided an interesting distraction from the war and political bickering which I have gotten tired of writing about. I find China so interesting because it adds to my cadre of data showing that it is better to trade with partners on the same regulatory footing as you, than with one that is not.

The FAA won’t allow aircraft into U.S. airspace unless the aircraft has received an FAA airworthiness certificate or one from an equivalent entity like EASA. This normally means that the aircraft design, construction and maintenance all have to occur under the strict regulatory guidelines of these agencies. Since many of the non-U.S. agencies have harmonized their regulations with ours, it is easy to know which aircraft to trust. If the aircraft has been off of the radar of such an agency for some time, maintained in a questionable manner, its airworthiness is questioned and can be revoked. The reason for this is simple: we need to know our airspace is predictably safe.

The United States requires we know everything about the aircraft within our system, from the mines where the aluminum emerged to the last person who performed maintenance on it. When an incident occurs, every element of that aircraft can be reviewed to identify how and why it may have happened, and that review must occur in a timely manner. The incident can be reviewed to see if it is a design, construction or maintenance issue: if it is a design issues, all aircraft of that type can be kept from flying; if it is a construction, certain serial numbers of a particular model can be grounded for review; and if it is a maintenance issue, the models that passed through that maintenance facility can be reviewed. All of this is made possible by the common regulatory foundation to prevent the reoccurrence of the incident and save lives.

While the U.S. also has steep regulatory compliance guidelines by the EPA for domestic companies, it does not impose the same requirements on goods entering the country even if they are comparable to a U.S. product. Unlike the FAA, the EPA apparently does not require those shipping goods into the U.S. to have a similar mechanism to the EPA to regulate or identify potentially hazardous materials used in the manufacturing of products for the home. It should be recognized that this is in fact part of the reason U.S. based companies seek to manufacture things in China; the high cost of regulatory compliance at home. The more frightening fact of our global economy is that we also need to realize this applies to the FDA as well.

The recent Chinese incidents should be a warning to us, that everything we import is suspect unless they can certify that it is not, as the FAA requires. If the country we are importing from does not act to put in place the regulatory framework to make this happen, our own regulatory agencies should have the teeth to force that the goods demonstrate they comply by stateside batch testing or other means. To not loose site of the true cost of dealing with these unregulated markets, those tests should be paid for by directly taxing the goods in question, to do otherwise is to wrongly represent imports as costing less than domestic alternatives.

The Fundamentals

2007-04-25T20:15:00.000-05:00

Yet another off-the-wall idea. Enjoy. . or not.

In Collapse, Jared Diamond, author of Gun, Germs and Steal, postulates that the ability of a nation to succeed is fundamentally based on its ability to sustain it population growth with the resources that are available to it. He goes further to suggest that the regions of current and future conflict are ones in which this critical point of population need vs. resources available has been passed. What he doesn’t explicitly state is that when that population growth exceeds the resources available, the population will strike out against its neighbors, or experience violence within.

Striking out as a nation requires resources, organization and infrastructure. For countries that have been languishing on the boundary of the critical point, these elements would essentially be eroded rapidly by the continued effort to retain control of the country. As resources declined across the land, those with the ability to secure resources (often those in government) would harden their position by rewarding those who helped them secure those resources with more resource than what they would have as part of the general public—thus warlords would be established. The rest would try to secure whatever land they could tactically keep out of the hands of newly formed warlords, or roam the land looking for tactical no-man-lands formed by the vacuum of the reach of the warlords. Generally, as predictable by genetic propensity, they would group together by family. Without a justice system that is seen as legitimate to exact any kind of fair retaliation, there is no means for the disempowered to help from getting victimized or killed.

This doesn’t entirely explain the civil war aspects of Iraq, but the collapse of Iraq was more sudden and dramatic. Remember inward collapse comes from the lack of access to resources, not necessarily lack of resources. For instance, Germany didn’t necessarily lack resources before World War II since it was able to generate tremendous amounts of infrastructure and weaponry. Germany and most of the world experienced a monetary infrastructure collapse, the depression, because of their monetary regulatory system. This collapse kept normal amounts of food and resources out of the hands of the public. Funny things happen when you restrict food from people, their brains react, putting them in hunting mode. With prolonged deprivation, this focused mentality looks for the means to acquire the much needed resources. If there is no governance that can facilitate finding these resources, or that governance has eroded, alignments of population subsets can form like hunting packs seeking to free resources from a perceived holder of them. To the starved mind, this enemy can be defined as simply as by the color of one’s skin or an association to a religion.

The mind is a difference engine. So long as it perceives it has nothing to lose and a chance of a gain it will engage in violence to try to solve a problem. If the infrastructure has eroded in Iraq such that businesses can’t open, jobs can’t be found, and resources are hard to come by, then there is little reason for the radical members of the population to restrain themselves from violent acts. So my radical theory is that by facilitating economic stabilization, you can quell violence, but that is far easier said than done.

My idea is similar to the Berlin airlift but on a much larger scale. The most efficient way to bring about stabilization through resource supply is to attack the region fractally. Identify multiple independent areas of an unstable region, certain block groups in Bagdad, Fallujah, etc. In each of these, place a portable power generation station capable of sustaining three times the power required for that area, likewise bring in food and water for a larger population than one is securing. Secure the area, the energy, food and water. Link these independent areas with supply lines such that one could connect three “stable” regions with secured supply lines, creating a triangle of stability with “unstable” areas between them. Create a grid of these regions such that a supply line could be indirectly created from the secured triangles. Do everything possible to secure these areas and the power supplied. This should be helped by the multiple failures required to knock down the grid. Choke out the unstable regions by growing the stable regions in all directions (the overabundance of capability by the generators and resources being able to handle the growth). Theory would suggest that blocks would willfully join the stable region. The constant flow of energy, water and resources would provide a fertile ground for rationality and economic stability, an attractive trait. It would provide something for others to lose, and as stability grew in the region the actual requirements on the grid would decrease since the area of the boundary would decrease because the unstable areas would be relegated out of the grid. Attacks on the very things that were stabilizing the region would work against terrorists since those in the stable regions would now have something to lose.

What is War?

2007-03-27T21:48:00.000-05:00

Let me start this out with saying that my perceptions of terrorism and terrorist behaviors are based on what I can glean from years upon years of news coverage. This mixed with an fixation on the study of human behavior which continues in my never-ending book brings me to prattle on about something I probably really know very little about. I only ask that the point be considered. Contrary evidence is always welcome.

What is the objective of war? Land? Money? Resources? Perhaps, but ultimately war is fought to drive a people from one system of authority to another. If there were no humans associated with the resources, land or money, with whom would one wage war? I would like to present a case that war is primarily used to shift the allegiance of people either by the physical elimination of the old authority, overwhelming force leading to the surrender of that authority, or convincing everyone that their allegiance should be changed. This simple theory has severe implications for the way we address the war on terror. It is not a new concept, but one that should be seriously considered in this new millennium.

The objective of terrorists seems incoherent and hard to grasp. Without the resources to launch a conventional attack, what does one gain by terrorist acts or random bombardments of munitions? With terrorist tactics there are no conventional ground troops to hold that land nor are there means to curtail a military onslaught by conventional means. In fact, the response to conventional attacks is to produce more and more small terrorist attacks, none of which have any total, effective strategic value. When Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire, Hezbollah paraded the effort around as a victory for them despite the fact that their land smoldered in ruins. What gives?

Consider the allegiance factor. The most efficient campaign one can wage, if the objective of warfare is to switch a populations’ allegiance is one of persuasion. In a world of uncertainty, individuals or groups who can provide you some reason to believe they can provide certainty more easily achieve this allegiance. Certainty does not come easily, but it works better if you share a common background, an implicit understanding that at least you know something about what’s going on from that person’s perspective. Next you have to convince them that your perspective of the world is the right one. In this age of communication multiple perspectives would be unavoidable, but if you are attempting to undermine a government you wouldn’t publicize it. In fact it would work to your benefit to sew distrust of any published material that wasn’t yours to increase readership of what you handed it out. Once this distrust is established—if the ruling authority had not already provided reason to distrust that media such as publishing obvious lies in a state paper—your next step is to provide an alternate context. To do this all you have to do is to predict major events, which would really be easy for anyone to do, but you supply your own story as to why that happened. This drives home the idea that you know what you’re talking about. And there you have it. But what’s the point? Well, if you begin to build on perceptions of distrust and replace those ideas with your new context, you essentially have a self-perpetuating virus of allegiance switching so long as your environment is consistent.

This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the attacks, bombings and rockets that are normally associated with terrorism. . .oh, how wrong you are. Conventional states use conventional forces to fight wars of overwhelming force. With the right leaders in power, their response to any sort of physical attack by any enemy, terrorist or state, is to respond with the full weight of their military force, their prime investments. Conventional weapons are impressively loud, obvious, and memorable. They are specifically made this way to deter warfare by making war a perceptual hell. This was the entire basis of the Shock and Awe campaign, which initiated the invasion. There is a story that the M1A1 was redesigned because it was too quite on the battlefield. It didn’t leave the same impression on opposing force that the Panzers had back in WWII. By attacking small but high profile targets or bombarding randomly into civilian areas, terrorist knowingly activate the conventional war machine. It is just the type of predictable response a terrorist organization would need to convince those in their grasp that they were right all along.

Further, the response of a conventional army is to strategize and define objectives to achieve. The problem with these objectives in a terrorist war is that having conventional objectives plays right into the hands of the terrorists. Terrorists would prefer that the conventional military they are fighting use massive armaments and huge explosions, those memorable weapons that conventionally warring nations have taken decades to advance to seer into the minds of conventional soldiers, because those weapons now seer into the minds of the terrorists “victims.” The conventional army and their methods become powerful terrorist tools of propaganda. Terrorist play to stalemate so as to prolong the exposure of the people to the military apparatus that has been recontextualized on their behalf in their war for allegiance. At the same time the conventional war machine chugs more money and lives until the nation which sent it passes over the cost/benefit threshold to say that they are receiving too little gain for their costs. The Russian involvement in Afghanistan is an example of this. The terrorist organization essentially lives off the land, raiding homes of those who could afford to leave, gaining allegiance of those who don't know any better and intimidating everyone else who had too few resources to leave. If the conventional military pulls out, the terrorist organization can then walk right into the state house.

This type of warfare goes beyond Sun Tzu in its unfortunate efficiency. You don’t even have to take your weapons from the enemy, all you have to do is have the enemy use their weapons on you.

This is a problem, because U.S. leadership has thus far either failed to recognize, or failed to understand what this means for regarding use of force. They want so badly to be in a conventional war that they threaten any nation which harbors such individuals. Since these nations are already so weak as to have a public organization of terrorists in their borders, they would certainly fail in attacks by a massive and modern military. . .just the way the terrorists want it. To fix it we need to shift the perceptual balance. First, we need to recognize the public affect of the overwhelming use of force. Terrorists would use this as a confirmation of their worldview. There are steps to being more surgical in the application of military force which would provide less fodder to the terrorists propaganda. Second, publicize good acts and involve citizens directly in those acts. Corrupt the terrorist modes of propaganda, sew distrust in their communication systems. It is not enough to give something to a population that can be turned as a sign of arrogance. To work with a large number of a population to build a school or restore a business is a much better PR move. Third, pull back. The more the terrorist can only attack civilians the more the civilians will turn on the terrorists. Fourth, seal the border. Terrorists demonstrate that their numbers are heavily dependent on the ability to recruit from the nation they infect, but civilian fatigue from prolonged terrorist involvement will eventually turn the population against the terrorists. Terrorist numbers should shrink if no new terrorists are allowed into the nation. Continued growth of terrorist organizations in a state demonstrate that there is a flow of foreigners.

The Rules of the Game

2007-03-16T17:30:00.000-05:00

One of the predominant works on cooperative game theory comes from Robert Axelrod’s, The Evolution of Cooperation. In a simple computer contest, Axelrod pits independently developed cooperative strategies in iterations of Prisoner Dilemma interactions. This simple competition revealed the basic necessities for cooperation, more specifically reciprocal altruism, to exist:

Recognize individuals
Remember the individual’s last move
Be able to retaliate if that individual cheats
Repeat interactions

The assumptions of the game are that each individual is seeking some gain, measured in points in the contest, and can retaliate, by refusal of points by the cheated to the cheater. This model meshes very well with several practical examples of cooperation from the simplest interactions of independent cells to the complex geo-political interactions of the day. It is a formative work in the understanding of how cooperation meshes with an evolutionary theory that at first glance would suggest evolution would only breed life forms that are solely out for their own good. On the contrary, the model shows that evolution perpetuates cooperation because in most instances it increases the ability of the living things involved to perpetuate their genetic code (a living thing’s main objective) better than living things only out for their own good. It also explains how not all living things need to be engaged directly in the act of reproduction so long as their existence provides some benefit, no matter how peripheral, to a relative which does reproduce.

This model also meshes with international politics. Consider the most recent struggle between Hezbollah and Israel. At a point in the battle, Israel and Hezbollah reached an agreement for ceasefire to be enacted at a certain date, not immediately. Consistent with the model, Hezbollah launched a barrage of rockets just before the deadline because they knew Israel would not have enough time to retaliate. This is a classical exampled of a common sense idea, get the last jab in. This also seems to be the guiding philosophy which keeps our troops from withdrawal in Iraq.

Bush said if U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq, insurgents would "use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against nonradical Muslim governments."

However, our situation in Iraq is not the same as Hezbollah and Israel or the Prisoner Dilemma. Iraq is for all intensive purposes an independent nation to which we are providing military support. They have their own military and police which would remain if American troops were redeployed out of the country. If the objective of our military presence is to make “sure al-Qaida doesn't get a foothold in Iraq” as President Bush states, then the long term consideration of the capabilities of that state must be considered.

“Success also means making sure al-Qaida doesn't get a foothold in Iraq, which they're trying to do in Anbar province. So success is measurable; it's definable; and last year was a year in which there was a setback to success.”

Unless the plan is keep American troops in Iraq indefinitely, Iraqi police and military MUST establish the capacity to prevent al Qaida from gaining that foothold. If that capability is developed, then there is no opportunity for al Qaida to get the last hit in because the Iraqi military and police can retaliate in place of US troops. Being hesitant to remove troops indicates that the US strategists do not believe that Iraq has developed this capability.

Axelrod’s model also tells us that Iraq will likely not develop this capability so long as the US military is unconditionally committed to stay. The US is currently in a tight spot in Iraq, because they cannot punish the Iraqi government for not developing this capability. By doing anything that would damage the government of Iraq, retaliatory act, may open a breach in Iraq’s capabilities in which the foothold can be established. Removing US troops is equivalent to this retaliatory act upon the government since we can assume that the terrorist threat is constant against the government of Iraq. Raising an army in a war torn country is nearly impossible, particularly if you are a fledgling government trying to revive the apparatus of a government obliterated by years of continuous warfare. There is little incentive for Iraq to throw resources in the development of their military and police so long as the perception of US involvement is unconditional.

Another big risk of continued involvement in Iraq is a terrorist possum play. This game is the perception that our current military involvement is having a permanent affect on terrorist involvement on Iraq. If terrorists act as if they were affected by the US military presence and reduce their attacks before Iraqi capabilities are fully up to par the US may pull out believing they have won, leaving Iraq open for attack. If this occurs, Iraq will be devastated by terrorist attacks and the US military will be strained to return. If any lesson should have been learned in the US involvement with the tactic of terrorism, it should be that terrorism CANNOT be defeated by a temporary tactical maneuver. Terrorism is a long term strategy.

The Fix

Most of US debate about US troop levels in Iraq revolves around removing troops from Iraq, but this is inverse of what needs to be discussed. Iraq requires the capability to stave off terrorism, therefore the discussion should revolve around getting Iraq these capabilities and pulling out once those tactical capabilities are established. Current military strategy is terribly flawed if the fundamental assumption is that a temporary military attack will permanently affect terrorist activities. Terrorism is a long term engagement, and all US plans must be revolve around the concept that the capability to retaliate against terrorism must be continuous. For Iraq this means we must focus on developing Iraq’s military and police capability as rapidly and effectively as possible. It is my belief that Iraq wants to be fully independent but is hindered by the continued fighting. A way to achieve a cooperative relationship with Iraq to get them to establish a capable military and police is to establish a reward system. A reward system is the logic we use every day when we work; if I work for two weeks, you agree to pay me. If I don’t work for that time, you can retaliate by not paying me, or if you don’t pay me even though I worked, I don’t have to work for you again. This can be applied to Iraq by establishing a reward system in which they are rewarded for achieving tactical capabilities by being given military and police infrastructure support they could not otherwise achieved on their own. Achieving these milestones should result in rewards which increase Iraq’s military infrastructure that would be difficult for them to achieve otherwise. For example, if they meet certain troop readiness numbers by a certain date, they get a specific number of attack helicopters, pilot training for those helicopters, and maintenance training. Missing this objective would result in a lesser reward to no reward at all. This technique is used in military and construction contracting and has been proven effective because it allows a retaliatory mechanism without truly damaging either party. From my limited perspective the fastest and seemingly most effective way to get out is to do the following:

Establish a tactical capability objective for the Iraqi military and police to have to sufficiently repel a terrorist attack. Figure out what it would take for the Iraqi military and police to repel al Qaeda independently.
Establish a reasonable timeline to achieve these capabilities.
Establish milestones for the Iraqi military to hit to get to that final objective.
Reward milestone achievement with rewards that Iraq could not otherwise achieve on their own—helicopters, for example.
Provide full infrastructure support. The US should provide as much support as practically possible to build the Iraqi military infrastructure including such activities as taking troops, and perhaps their families, out of the country to train.

Putting this system in place would mean that the schedule could also be made public because they are increasing the capability to defeat terrorist, and therefore, their achievement would be demoralizing to them while uplifting to Iraqi and US troops.

Six Errors of the War on Terror

2007-03-08T00:29:00.000-06:00

While I admit that I am no expert on terrorism, I have been continually bothered by certain elements of our “War on Terror” as presented to me through mass media. Like being in a room of frames that are not straight, I feel the compulsion to set a few things right, at least as far as I can perceive. Below are six of the errors that I felt compelled to discuss in a somewhat systematic manner.

The term “War on Terror”

Why it is wrong:
You can’t fight a tactic. Declaring a “War on Terror” is akin to declaring the fight against Germany in WWII the “War on Blitzkriegs.” You must fight those rallying individuals around an ideology which makes them want to employ terrorism. For the sake of this article I will refer to “terrorists” as those who organize to employ asymmetric military tactics in support of an ideology not directly supported by a nation.

Why the error is made:
Individual groups may be employing common strategies, but this is likely because they each have access to similar types of resources to use against the same military apparatus, the US Military. For decades the United States and Russia have been building and deploying conventional military weaponry around the world, but this equipment is difficult to attain unless you have the capital. Terrorists train with and deploy lower cost, less complex, easier to attain weaponry and specifically use it in a manner which conventional military find difficult to manage. They have commonly found a tactical weakness of that apparatus which they can exploit with the resources they have available.

What are the repercussions of the error:
If individual groups are treated as one bad guy simply because of the tactics they employ, then the United States loses the ability to accord peace from those rallying individuals to fight because they are essentially refusing to recognize the motivating force. Further, this forced association brings individual groups together on tactical matters and encourages them to share information and resources for further terrorist tactics while not necessarily merging their motivating centers. Since these groups were using a common technique (terrorism) initially because they independently found that to be the US’s weakness, they now are given the added benefit of being associated with groups that they may have previously opposed or been neutral to; their only common discussion points: terrorist tactics and opposition to the United States.

How can it be fixed:
For starters call it a “War on Tyranny.” Properly identify the individual organizations causing individuals to want to fight. Deal with the source and the reason it resonates with those willing to fight. Properly explain the illogic of their position in the same media which they use to convince others they are right. Do not shut down their media, infect it smartly. Either way, you can get out the message you want potential “terrorists” to hear or you destroy the credibility of the communication medium.

Not really a war without end

Why its wrong:
Propaganda-wise this idea gives radical groups hope and the “civilized world” despair. Ultimately, it’s clearly not true. Just because the current military minds can’t find the solution only means that new military minds need to be brought forward.

Why the error is made:
The Western philosophy of war is that the objective of war is conquest, but the objective of a “terrorist” war is to engage the enemy until there are drained of resources. Modern terrorism was forged in the cauldron of the Cold War. Their most public “victory” was against the Russians in Afghanistan in which they held out and drained down the conventional forces. Terrorists win more conscripts so long as the Western military is engaged and blowing things up. Every bomb dropped in front of BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera is a global recruiting video for their radical ideology validating their “need”. Every roadside IED which explodes shows they are being “successful.”

What are the repercussions:
The repercussions are exactly what the “terrorists” want: protracted involvement, resource strain by the traditional military system, terrorist entrenchment in the region, growing numbers of recruits for “terrorists” and decreasing recruits for the traditional military system

How can it be fixed:
Every war has an end, and it only serves the enemy to say that it won’t end or won’t end any time soon. New thinkers need to be brought in to understand the dynamic of terrorist strategy and undermine it. It should be apparent to those fighting that the world which would remain after such a protracted and violent struggle wouldn’t be worth retaining. Can we figure out why they still fight?

More military force will yield better results

Why its wrong:
Traditional military displays of force are recruiting videos for terrorists not deterrents. Displays of military capability were the cornerstones of the Cold War from which the modern terrorists sprang. Those who are using terrorist techniques are already aware of the military capabilities of its foes. How else can you explain why Osama hasn’t been caught? In fact, those who use terrorism count on the traditional military display of force to validate their hatespeech.

Why the error is made:
It’s hard to break old habits, and traditionally, displays of force are deterrents for formal military engagement because they display the capability to significantly destroy the military apparatus of the nation or its support apparatus. Terrorists do not care about the status of the state or the traditional military apparatus. Terrorists infect states and wait for it to collapse to gather up the pieces.

What are the repercussions:
Terrorists want the state they inhabit to collapse because they will be able to take it over. More force and display by the traditional military works in entrenching the terrorizing organization in whatever country they infect. If they become entrenched they will make the war so difficult, taunting the military to do more damage, that they will drive out everyone who can afford to leave, the upper and middle classes, leaving only the radicalized and those who they can recruit or intimidate.

How it can be fixed:
“Terrorism” is a tactic of propaganda and stagnation. Infect the avenues by which they transmit their propaganda and expose the vile condition that they would have that region run. Use force only as necessary, and as discreetly as possible. Provide highly visible displays of cooperation with the local population and actually assist the local population with trying to make their lives better by availing them more resources and the ability to create a stable life.

If we stop fighting, the terrorists will say we lost

Why it is wrong:
Literally, this is correct, but the idea that anyone should believe “them” is ridiculous. Terrorists work on a strategy of propaganda, of course they will say they won, but the question is why anyone should care.

Why the error is made:
Because terrorist will do this, and normal response is to say “nu-uh” or to just keep fighting until we can say we won. However, those who use terrorism aren’t aiming for conquest, they merely want a forum to gain recruits and to deplete their enemies resources. Without a war, they lose, but like good propagandists, they won’t admit it.

What are the repercussions of the error:
Protracted war, U.S. resource drain, U.S. recruitment drop, radical group recruitment gain

How can it be fixed:
Demonstrate terrorist speech to be invalid in all media including all of the means by which their networks communicate. Show how a world by the ideologies they support is so much worse than that which could otherwise be.

Democracy is a natural tendency

Why it’s wrong:
The idea of democracy comes from an explicit and implicit education of ideas which are required to understand how it is valid. One may think it’s a universal concept, if you are fortunate enough to be born and live in a country that is democratic, but that is only because your brain has made an illogical assumption that the rest of the world grew up in the same context which you have. This isn’t so. Democracy must be taught, and for this to happen one must have access to the information which teaches it as well as the ability to understand that information. Remember, humans have existed in non-democratic nations far longer than democratic. If the majority of a population grows up under a tyrant they may have no means of learning the fundamental concepts of democracy.

Why the error is made:
This error can be due to the commonality of perspective by those who were seeking to implement a democratic government. If the majority of the group planning to put in place a democratic government assumed the ideas of democracy were inherent because it was so ingrained in the societies which they grew up then they would have no reason to question it.

What are the repercussions of the error:
The repercussions can be grave in that if one assumes that “nature will take its course” upon the elimination of a non democratic ruling institution then they may make too few plans to direct the development. Chaos will follow as the population, lacking direction, either waits for a new leader or fights to establish a new tyrant.

How can it be fixed:

To start, education must be provided to the population in question in a pervasive and non-traditional way. Finding histories of democratic ideas in the texts of the region and publishing or teaching them widely is a good start. An autonomous government should be put in place to deal with the daily routine until a more robust government can be put in place. Build up to a democratic government by starting with towns, building to regions, states and then a nation.

Terrorism is a result of disconnected societies

Why it’s wrong:
This error is simply not true. Terrorist use the internet and cable/satellite TV, modern video production tools, and recruit for high tech personnel. They leverage the information superhighway. Radical groups actually increase in number as information systems come into formerly disconnected areas because it allows them to find eachother and to find radical resources more easily.

Why the error is made:
U.S. observers commonly make this error because they confuse the dislike of the message America is sending over the information network with dislike of the technology which carries that message. At its core the American message conflicts with the regional power base. That message is a convenient and pervasive scapegoat for corrupt leaders and conditions. They are not disconnected because they oppose these messages—in fact, they are connecting in these acts of opposition.

What are the repercussions of the error:
Keep pushing the message or try to get them to understand why their wrong, actually encourages the connection against that message and provides more avenues to organize against it. Pushing more information technology only encourages more connection between formerly disconnected groups and provides these groups the false perception that their numbers are greater than reality.

How it can be fixed:
Commercial trade and associated information shouldn’t be allowed with countries that don’t embrace our political ideologies. Tyrants will blame the invading brands and the associated country for their own failures and the conditions in those nations will continue; frustration and anger will fester; and the radical groups will grow.

It Worked so Well the First Time

2006-11-14T21:23:00.000-06:00

One of my colleagues decided to vote for Bush in 2000 because he thought that the, then candidate would surround himself with smart people that would help him make informed decisions. In his estimation, this is what Bush’s father did in the previous administration, and it was a somewhat successful venture. Of course, 41 didn’t get reelected because of his neglect of domestic issues, but internationally, things seemed to go fairly well with the collapse of the Berlin wall and rapid rescue of Kuwait from the hands of Saddam. In his road to the White House, Governor Bush appointed Dick Cheney to be in charge of his Vice Presidential selection committee. Cheney had been the Sec Def in 41’s cabinet, when the US was providing support to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan and aid to Iraq in the Iran/Iraq Conflict. George decided to go with Mr. Cheney as his running mate shortly after his committee appointment—this should have been a warning sign.

After winning the election, the new President formed what has been noted as nepotistic and cronyistic (even if it's not a word) Administration. This was beside the fact that many of 41’s cabinet members showed up in the 43 Cabinet. Appointments, reaching into the government’s functional areas, were granted to close campaign supporters; the most critical of these revealed by Katrina. The nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Mier to the Supreme Court should have made it obvious that the current Administration does not go out of its way to find the best, most qualified people to fill positions, and this behavior has not changed with the new Sec Def appointment or the members of the Iraq Study Group.

Yes, many of the people involved have particular experience in the defense and international relations fields they are being appointed too, but one should not lose site of the fact that these same people set the groundwork for what became the Iraq in which Saddam gassed his own people and the Afghanistan of the Taliban. Groundwork set by support or neglect. These appointees did not have the farsighted vision to understand the full consequences of their choices, nor where they able to conceptualize the growth of terrorism as a result. How can these people be counted on to stop a situation that their thinking created? As the world security situation becomes more unstable, it is time to require the Administration step outside of its very small box.

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -Albert Einstein

Finely Minced Words

2006-09-06T23:39:00.000-05:00

Words are tricky things. Their definitions are not the results of repeatable physical phenomenon, like a temperature or velocity, requiring particular characteristics to be the same. You can change the definitions of some words by simply distributing your particular definition to a population more often than other definitions. This works a good percentage of the time because the human mind acts as a probability calculator; it hard codes your associations to particular information which you interact with repeatedly. This is why you have a particular location in your brain for the identity of a friend or relative as well as Brad Pitt or your car. Burning repeated information into the hardware of your brain means that you can respond to that information faster. Speaking from the context of evolution, such a capability promotes the survival of that gene line by giving that line a faster response to a known quantity. This feature of our neuroscience is why practice makes perfect, and why you should do your homework—to reinforce and expedite good behaviors. If a word is associated to a definition enough, then it will become that new definition in your mind unless you already have strongly reinforced association with that word that would cause resistance. I've studied political science and history for years raising my resistance against the new definitions and the parsing of some words recently proclaimed in critical arenas.

Words have power. If you don't believe that and you're a U.S. Citizen, then you don't understand how your government functions. Of all the sites in Washington, D.C., the one that should be visited by all citizens is the National Archive. In there lies one of the most critical documents in the history of the world. The Constitution of the United States of America is a fixed reference point from which all parts of our government came to be. It is written such that it is adaptable to the needs of a growing nation, and it empowers individuals in specific ways such that their control cannot become so great as to invalidate that framework. This document does all of this by reason alone, no claims of divinity, to establish a government of reasoned debate, the representation of diverse opinions and the denial of absolute control by any one individual. The nation as we see it today was all started by a string of characters, the will of citizens, and the support of generations. But now I fear that other strings of characters are reasons for concern for the nation as a whole.

If there's one word that's been thrown around a lot it's “freedom.” We have to ask ourselves what freedom is and how is it distributed. Why? Well, the Constitution is the framework upon which our freedom is based, but it does this by NOT allowing us to be totally free. The Constitution is a document that actually guarantees specific rights to citizens by limiting other specific rights of those same people. Citizens can't blatantly break the laws their representatives create, but they can elect new representative to change the laws to be in their favor. The alternate, absolute freedom, is anarchy. The results of this are never good. Consider Iraq in the days immediately following the conclusion of the major combat operations. Those people had no law enforcement at all causing all hell to break loose. The same is true in Western Societies that are struck with disasters—-recall the shoot-to-kill order declared against looters in New Orleans. To guarantee freedom as we know it in the United States is to guarantee order, which must come from an agreement on the limitations of rights. This discussion requires the assembly of a diverse set of people who can at least agree to disagree. Their agreement must be fixed so that an organization can grow to support and enforce that agreement. Liberalism is the clearest solution to establishing this freedom, and it is also one of the words being redefined.

We hear much about “liberals” and how they are driving our country to ruin. “Liberals” are those who want to cave to special interests by wasting our national wealth on government programs, liberally spending your hard earned tax dollars on wasteful welfare programs and other Washington spending. This is what their opposition would like you to believe, even though, ideologically, this isn't really the meaning of liberalism. The fundamental definition of liberalism is a belief that promotes individual liberty by trying to guarantee equality of opportunity within a tolerant society. Much like any political ideology, there are different types of liberalism including welfare liberals which would more properly fit the “wasteful liberal” model that some speak of, but that is not the entirety of liberalism. To make such broad statements that all of liberalism is the same as one distinct group is irresponsible and hazardous to a liberal democracy such as the United States.

Liberalism is the core of representative systems. Equality in a tolerant society is established by creating a system in which all of societies members have a chance to be represented so that none of them would be oppressed. This is the theoretical ideal that is never fully realized, but it works to that end much better than the Monarchies and Empires which predated it; the entire reason our founding fathers established such a system-- oppression decreases when you must vie for the votes of a good swath of the population. This form of government, ours, is also dependent on the use of reason as I have already stated. Staunch dogmatic positions rarely result in your bill getting past because dogma cannot compromise. The technical reality is perhaps the best position to reason from, but no theory ever truly results in its ideal. Finally, a liberal democracy requires that you always question the decisions of your representative. If all individuals are to be considered equally, they should all be open to equal criticism and analysis. As Thomas Jefferson said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” This also helps the government stand together because such analysis should weed out the bad representatives. Looking at these criterion for a liberal democracy, we can build a definition for an ideology which opposes it. It would be one based on dogma and irrationality, elitist inequality, and staunch unwavering support of the leadership. There is a term for it, and it happens to be another of the words in play, “fascism.”

The latest term in the political ethers is “Islamic Fascism.” It is a phrase used to describe the political ideology which the terrorists are trying to institute through their actions. From what we can understand from the news and events, terrorism can be executed by almost any radical group: the IRA, Al Qaeda, or the KKK. Their methods are more a result of logistical asymmetry than their particular ideology. Islam itself is not a monolithic organization. It involves separate schools of thought and alignments. There is no pope-like structure, something which their beliefs reject. Some of these groups are strictly dogmatic to their own interpretation and obviously would likely try to implement something that would be like a fascist governing architecture if they had the opportunity and strategic capability, but what dogmatic institution wouldn't? For a liberal democracy, the “Islamic” qualifier isn't necessary when discussing the threats to the United States. It is an unusual qualifier for an ideology that, no matter the adjective, is a threat to our form of government. While Mussolini is most appropriately associated with fascism, Hitler also gets this label despite his socialist banner. Goebbel's propaganda is rife with anti-liberal statements. This is because fascism is best understood as a political ideology that works to erode the representative system from the inside to put into place a dictatorship. The starting point--socialist, Islamic, Bozo-the-clownism-- is irrelevant, so long as the aim is to undermine the free exercise of liberal democracy.

While seemingly unconscious, the new use of these terms raise the flags of concern. By generally attacking an ideology which defines the government, liberalism, and being overly specific in attacks on an ideology which in all cases opposes that government, fascism, dangerous associative paths are started in the brains of those who don't know any better. These paths can lead to misunderstanding, broader confusion and a road to a formerly unthinkable futures.

Creationism vs. Evolution. Why?

2006-07-15T10:53:00.000-05:00

This is from an answer I did on Yahoo! Answers. It was a bit lengthy, poor questioner, so I thought I was worthy for Blogging. Enjoy or be dismayed. . whatever

The Question: Why do Creationist try to debate evolution without understanding it?

Creationists are trying to facilitate a wider campaign of undermining reasoned, scientific thought by attempting to destabilize widely held, known scientific understanding. They aren't attacking evolution so much as the principle of scientific theory and the idea that the reason something is accepted in the scientific community is because there is more empirical evidence to support it.

Review any of the Creationist vs. Evolution debates and you will see that none of them present any scientific data that supports the idea that Creationism is true. Creationists believe that the complexity of biology is fundamental proof of a creator (the watch comparison). The flaw to that thought is that the complex things that humans make are entirely done by the hands of humans, and none grow, replicate or construct themselves from the molecules and atoms around them. We can readily observe the the biological creation of life every day, and it looks nothing like the creation of a watch or a jumbo jet. Living things start from a single cell which divdes. On their own power and by their own ability they grow into more complex forms from less complex forms, and it is all dependent on the available chemical resources around them. We know the properties of cells as facts; we know the properties of the genetics that drive those cells as facts; we know the properties of chemicals that form those genes as facts; and we know how those properties interact to develop complex living things. There are no hands involved. Creationists also can't substantiate their view scientifically because the entire point of a religious belief is to have faith and not ask questions. While science with the theory of evolution can account for billions of years using available empirical evidence, creationists start their timeline at the point of whatever religious texts they are using and however they chose to interpret it They say it all "just happened." But they can't account for how, why or where the entity that created everything came from. Creationist belief is no more substanitive than that of the Greek or Roman gods. Creationists also make a fundamentally flawed assumption that if evolution can't account for or complexity (or if they can get people to believe that) we default to a creationist belief. This is entirely untrue. In science the default is always the theory with the most empirical substantiation, and there is still no other theory with more data than evolution, even with their attacks. Creationists only want to undermine the theory of evolution even though the theory has decades of scientific data behind it.

But why would creationists and those who perpetuate this view wish to do so? Because it's good for business. If people start distrusting science and the scientific process, then they will be more likely to turn to whatever else says they have all of the answers. Would they do that if science was made to seem unstable? Certainly, look at American politics or any governing system, as there is less trust in the system more people turn away from it or become apathetic (the huge number of non-voters). No longer thinking that empirical evidence is fundamental, which scientific thought requires, there is no longer a reason to distrust them, even if they're making the whole thing up. People become more easy to manipulate and with the involvement of politics in the US as they are an organized group like the Christian Right has much to gain from perpetuating this. It is this political organization that is attempting to change scientific standards in states to perpetuate a poorer understanding of science. Look at the Kansas BOE, they reduced their definition of science to essentially include any idea independent of empirical evidence. We already have a school of belief for that, and it is philosophy. If kids can't understand it then they are more easily persuaded to apathy or fundamentalism.

But not ALL Creationists are consciously going this path. It is those who run the Creationist centers and those who give them money are perpetuating an obviously flawed logic. Others get caught up in it because it plays off of deeply emotional ideas such as fear of the eternal and unknown which can make people blank out any rational argument. They can do this even though the medication they take; insulin they use; and food they eat are all products of the understanding of evolution. Evolutionary psychology has shown us that self-denial is a palpable component of human psychology which allows humans to ignore the most fundamental facts to feel better.

The Grand Exhibition of Misunderstanding

2005-11-16T23:00:00.000-06:00

Scientists are boldly demonstrating their misunderstanding of the Evolution debate in New York with an extravagant display of their knowledge of Darwin. There are two major problems with this exhibit.

1) IT'S IN NEW YORK
2) IT'S ONLY ABOUT EVOLUTION!!!

As I will say over and over again, it shouldn't take a genius to see that the evolution debate is a symptom of a much broader problem. That problem is actually about communicating the proper understanding of science and that problem occurs in Midwestern states-- particularly states like Kansas. One should rationally conclude that a display regarding the problem (or a series of much smaller, portable exhibits) should be on tour throughout the states in question.

Of course, this may be an impractical request, but it's not. The Field Museum took Sue on a tour through some of the most ignored parts of the US including Hayes, Kansas. . .I don't even go to Hayes, Kansas.

The Big Week in Evolution

2005-11-12T07:20:00.000-06:00

After months of positioning, fake trials, and confronting the other roadblocks (logic, reason, ethics) the Kansas Board of Education finally got through its new science standards. These standards not only call for the discussion of Intelligent Design when discussing Evolution, but they also broaden the definition "science" so that unnatural causes can also be considered. Finally, the children of Kansas can learn that we are held to the Earth by the mighty hand of God and the way that disease mutates to become more and more dangerous to humans is simply part of God's plan to wipe out his creation.

As we look for those to blame for this mess and theorize as to their motivations let me propose another theory: it's the scientific community's fault. Oh sure, the scientists didn't propose these new standards, but they did fail to make certain that science was understood properly, which would have prevented the BOE wack-jobs from ever getting to office.

My reasoning is as follows:
1.) One can only learn from that to which one is exposed.

In an information scarce environment like rural Kansas, one can only learn the theory of science from a few randomly distributed individuals who are also under pressure by their social environment to conform the majority opinion or fear rejection by the small population of which they are a part. Consequently, there is a poor distribution of proper examples of scientific understanding and practice.

2.) The scientific community is neither scientific nor a community.

When was the last time the scientific community had a science jamboree in a "Red State?" As the media simplifies the discussion into cost efficient sound bites, they unfortunately lump that entire population of a state, good and bad, smart and dumb, together creating a regional biase. While this happens the "scientific community" is not present to say "Hey, we have scientists throughout that state, and the people of Kansas are intelligent, honest people who have been denied exposure to the proper understanding of science." The scientific community would use their brain power to make certain that every science teacher in the state not only taught science in the most effective way possible, but did so in such a manner that would perpetuate the development of more scientists and engineers (a drought of which the NSF constantly reports has been holding back the United States for some time now). A community of science would mobilize resources in such a way that when regions demonstrated a lack of understanding (as many now do,) they would devise a way to support a better understanding in those regions (travelling road show??).

3.) This isn't about evolution.

"What?" you say. "This has everything to do with evolution!" I call bullshit!!! The criticism of evolution is a symptom of the greater problem of being able to understand what constitutes a viable scientific theory. The support of Intelligent Design is a symptom of the greater problem of understanding the key tennants of science, ie. speculation only goes as far as empirical evidence suggests.

4.) You shouldn't expect poets to write about physics.

The only individuals who should be expected to be advocates of science are scientists. You wouldn't expect an auto-mechanic to advocate for the lace industry (the probablity exists but it is certainly low), and you shouldn't expect a farmer to wax philosophical about the proper understanding of science. Scientists all over the country need step up and figure out an effective way to spread the proper understanding of science. They can start by putting together and advertising simple, consistent, and clear websites similar to the crappy pro-ID ones that are probably being advertised on the ad stream of this blog, but the scientists' site would have the appeal of be based on facts.

Dropping Some Big Balls

2005-09-10T09:55:00.000-05:00

Ok, sure, it's hard to play the blame game unless you know the rules. . .so here they are. If a regulation says you can pass responsibility, then, so long as the proper proceedures are put in place, the ball gets passed. The last person with the ball is responsible. Here are the facts. Judge for yourself.

The FEMA Declaration Process
Note the final step

"The President approves the request or FEMA informs the governor it has been denied. This decision process could take a few hours or several weeks depending on the nature of the disaster. "

The FEMA Guide to Assistance

Louisiana Declares and Emergency, 8/27/2005 (please check their "i's" and "t's" to make sure everything is dotted and crossed appropriately).

The President Reponds. . .2 DAYS later

Yes, Katrina didn't make landfall until August 29th, but anyone who could watch Discovery Channel or PBS would know the disaster that awaited. Perhaps, the President didn't, which is fine, but that's what he pays . . I'm sorry. . . we pay his advisors to know.

Who knew, a day of action could save a few thousand lives?

In Other News

I don't like to speculate how an organization could have done better, unless I have some relevant comparison. So, I would like to say FEMA could have done better in delivering food, water, and ice to the stranded civilians. How do I know? Because WAL-MART was able to do it. So much for our new and improved FEMA under the DHS.

Tombstone Regulation: Katrina and the FAA

2005-09-09T16:54:00.000-05:00

The story of FAA regulations is one of historic disasters. The majority of the rules by which we design and build aircraft come from lessons learned through the unfortunate loss of life. Few other industries have to deal with such a critical design standard since most other technologies have the luxury of being shut off or pulled off the road if something goes wrong. If something happens once you're in the air the chance of your survival is dependent on the skill of the pilot and the integrity of the design.

Sometime in the past few months, I watched the National Geographic Special "Air Emergency" about Air Transat flight 236, an incident that occurred on a flight between Canada and Portugal in 2001. The show explained how there was a loss of power from both engines, and speculated in amazement how the aircraft, an Airbus 330, did not simply fall out of the sky once those failures occurred. The show included several interviews with passengers, pilots, and ground crew about the situation. The only explanation as to how the aircraft stayed in the air so long was provided by the passengers (not an engineer in the group) each of which implied a higher power. Were they held aloft on angels’ wings??

Actually, no.

Had National Geographic taken the time to interview a member of the design team from Airbus . . .or anyone in the aircraft design business . . .they may have been astonished to learn that aircraft today (particularly, large passenger carriers) are specifically designed to do just what flight 236 did--sustain controlled flight without functioning engines.

When designing flight controls, the mechanisms that allow the pilot to change the orientation and direction of the aircraft, the FAA and the federal aviation organizations of other nations require the design to be done in a particular manner to ensure particular problems don't arise. This design analysis is done in several ways to satisfy a variety of different criterion. The FAA and these other organizations won’t allow an aircraft to be built until that company demonstrates completion of their analysis. One of the types of analyses for flight controls involves considering combinations of single and probable failures. In simplified terms, the designer must analyze his/her control design by assuming one failure has occurred in that system and then consider the effects if another failure occuring at the same time.

There are many situations in our normal world where such an analysis could save lives, money and time. New Orleans is an unfortunate example. Most of the time New Orleans isn’t like an aircraft: people can normally come and go as they please, and no individual’s decision could really save the lives of others. However, as we have seen in a Hurricane, New orleans becomes like a ship in which people's lives are dependent on the the plans and decisions of their emergency response.

To analyze the city’s preparedness plans we must understand the situation. As everyone should know by now, NOLA is below sea level, which means that any Hurricane situation could cause potential damage to the city. The city is surrounded by levees that keep that water from deluging it, and there are pumps that help drain the city if flooding occurs.

The Situation
1.) The Hurricane. As the NOAA’s SLOSH models have demonstrated, if a hurricane is a class 4 or 5, the surge from that storm will overwhelm the levees and flood the city, regardless.

2.) The People. If we assume an evacuation is called, it is recognized that some individuals will not be able to escape or will be unwilling to leave. This number should be considered the maximum of those who do not own a form of transportation, 100,000.

3.) The Variables. We will only be looking at saving lives through dealing with drainage, because drainage is the only predictable design variable we can analyze. Normally, this would allow us to find a technical solution, i.e. build a better drainage system, but in this case, it will help us identify how likely we will have a critical problem.

Single failures.

1.) Levee Failure. According to the Army Corp of Engineers, the levees of NOLA are designed to sustain a moderate Level 3 Hurricane. Consider them lost

OR

2.) Power Failure. Power lines are fragile things in a massive hurricane. Unless the powerlines are buried from their origin to the pumps, and the power source is in Fort Knox, consider primary power lost.

Probable failures.

1.) Pump Mechanical Failure. The critical, shared mechanical parts from the pumps break from overuse/misuse.

OR

2.) Power Generation Failure. Secondary source of power fails.

Even this quick, broad stroke assessment shows that it is inevitable that the city will flood unless a more elaborate system is designed. Also, the EPA and several other organizations have long pointed out that this flooding, sustained over a short period of time, would allow industrial pollutants, feces, and disease to make a witch’s brew of prolonged disaster. Granted, I don’t know the details of their drainage system, but this seems to be pretty close to what is going on. Had this analysis been done before Katrina, it would have allowed the Emergency Response organizations to prepare for massive and rapid water-based evacuation operations, particularly dealing with, identifying and retrieving 100,000 people before the water got polluted enough to cause even more damage. While it is too late to implement this analysis in any useful way now, the lives that were lost can be another harsh lesson to be used to prevent the same catastrophe in future situations.

Oh sure, I've been busy

2005-08-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

Besides that whole wedding thing that I have been diligently tending to, I also happened to get a digital camera, and I happened to start a little Flickr site. . .in my spare time. Photo quality is low, so if you want something nicer, we can negotiate a price.

Keep it up. . . losers

2005-07-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was going to call this something different, but I felt the need to title it after the sentiment. I've been subconsciously collecting a lot of info on the topic and feel like leaking a bit of it here. Game theory suggests that when an environment becomes stable(behaviors of the participants are such that dominance between them is no longer truly sought), an alien behavior has a good chance at invasion and in the end domination over all.

We can see this easily in the major air carriers, who are consistently handed their rears by lower rate "cattle cars" which provide a minumum but extremely effective service. Despite the amount of federal funds we give to the dinosaurs of air transport, they just can't seem to get their act together, but it doesn't end there.

Japanese automakers are growing in their ability to hand the U.S. manufacturer's a large piece of their own posterior. While GM is not in the dire straights of air carriers, declaring bankruptcy multiple times, etc., they are losing market share to the growing demand for Japanese makes and models.

I would like to predict the next great industry to fall (dramatic pause) the US Film Industry. The US is not producing any significant movies this year that aren't remakes or derivatives of old TV shows or movies. Aren't the arts supposed to give us fresh and original ideas? Some may be surprised to know that many of the modern horror films like "The Ring" are actually remakes of Korean and Japanese films. You'd think that being as large a nation as we are, we'd be able to generate a significant number of solid new ideas ourselves. Who knew?

These three industries rely on one very shakey theory, that repeating and duplicating their past successes (or other peoples') will provide them guaranteed, proportional returns. But the world isn't the same as when the customer base "stabilized," and while they were assuming that their customers tastes were constants, their competition was busy assessing what made those customers actually taste those products in the first place.

Fat and happy corporations are not much for rapid course corrections or self evaluation, there are too many layers of lard to feel the pinch which initiates change. The same is true in politics and social theory. We often come to unconscious agreements that "what we have works and that's good enough," but often there's something better that just kicks its rear.

In short, the state of politics today gives me a little warm fuzzy that new and strong political theory (i.e. my book) will. . .eventually. . .do quite well. . .

Keep it up, losers!

2 years of this stuff

2005-06-24T00:03:00.000-05:00

I’ve been writing my non-fiction book for 2 years as of June 21st. It has been an incredible exercise on my part in terms of dedication and stamina. While I have tried to live a normal life, I haven’t read a non-fiction book in these last 2 years, I also have restrained myself from any of my other hobbies such as drawing or pastels. I’ve also built a library of rare books (to the Wichita area) and have developed a new understanding of human social interaction.

Since this book is on politics, I have had quite a challenge staying focused, particularly living in Kansas. I used to dig into political topics, get into online arguments, and research political activities, but now I write this book with the hope that it would clarify what is worth my time and what isn’t.

I started the book to try to articulate an idea of politics that seems implicit. I wanted to know what the term “Natural Law” actually refers too, and if I couldn’t find the answer, I would derive one. I wanted to understand that core context that I was using to make political decision, and the only way I could see to really do that was to articulate it as clearly as possible. This has proven itself to be a difficult task.

While it should be easy to spill out our thoughts onto the screen, it is certainly another thing entirely to do it in a way that would make sense to other people. As I have observed through life, people generally have a specific vocabulary for specific people they meet. They also have a vocabulary for themselves. If I am to articulate a political understanding—inherently a social idea—it must be generally understandable and generally accessible otherwise it should be considered only a personal idea.

Part of my actual job (engineering) is to verify that certain aspects of new aircraft designs meet federal requirements. To do this we have to write reports that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) ACO (Aircraft Certification Office) will understand validate their criterion. The design and analysis perspective on the company side is much different than the federal side. I’ve been told time and again “You answered the questions really well in these meetings; you just need to get those words into the document.” Consider the reader!

The problem with technical documents, which is essential what this book will be, is that they are typically 1) technical, 2) devoid of non-technical explanation, 3) written to other technical specialists, and 4) boring. While I need 1) I can’t have any of the others. I find that I have to educate as I explain, as well as keep it entertaining. It doesn’t help that I’m still learning small parts of it myself.

I’ve delved into areas I have no formal training in, and have attempted to integrate ideas that have not had formal associations before. My description of the book thus far, particularly the current chapter I’m working on, is this:

Being an engineer is easy. You have a bunch of different equations for a bunch of different problems, solution tool sets, that can help you figure out your answer. You have a thermodynamics set that helps you figure out how heat makes work happen, or you have the classical mechanical set that helps you describe the motion of mechanical linkages. These sets are derived from the laws of chemistry and physics but are neatly packaged into equations that are useful based on the type of problem one faces.
I don’t get so lucky with my project. I am essentially trying to figure out how to design a car, and all I have to go on is that “fire make heat” and “metal hit metal go bang.”

Social theory is really immature. The useful social science (that which could be considered consistent enough to generate tool sets from) has only been in development since the start of artificial intelligence 40-50 years?? How do I use AI to explain a 229 year old governing system? It’s not easy, but hopefully, some day you’ll read about it.

Debating a Frame

2005-06-05T17:45:00.000-05:00

Information isn’t power; if it were, librarians would rule the world. There is a problem with a large amount of information, figuring out what is useful. While a librarian could certainly find it, he or she would first need to have some incentive to look for it and some means to ascertain the value of it. Normally, for a librarian the incentive is to serve some sort of customer and the value of the information is assessed by that librarian’s knowledge of those particular sources or the ability of the customer to effectively search through all the data the librarian provides. As we progress through this information age we are faced with the increasing problem of having to wade through growing amounts of data through a widening array of sources each of which have a potential of dealing with our lives. One set of information can provide us with a set of options for our life. More information can multiply those options. The more information we receive the greater the probable choices we can have; we call this combinatorial explosion.

One way to deal with this is by framing. By putting a set of information in a frame we can judge the value of that information to that frame and consequently the relevance of that relationship to whatever we are trying to understand. In engineering we call this forming a Control Volume. Control Volumes in engineering are really easy to deal with, once you understand the science, because it is very specific. Thermodynamics, kinematics, and classical mechanics are just a few of the theory groups by which we begin to categorize the sorts of problems Engineers try to solve. From there we narrow problems into types of data that we can use to do analysis, normally these are things we can measure: temperature, distance, frequency, from everything else, which gets classified into noise. With these knowns we can draw an effective border around the problem we are trying to analyze, and that border will normally relate to some physical representation, a refrigerator from its plug to the door or the volume of air surrounding the space shuttle. This way we can calculate the performance of that refrigerator or the heat of the space shuttle as it re-enters the atmosphere.

Our social world is much more complicated. This is the reason that we can land a man on the moon, but we cannot establish world peace. We cannot seem to form the proper frame in our social world because that world seems to lack specific, measurable, repeatable features--unlike Thermodynamics which is tied to the rules of chemistry and physics.

The lack of a frame has caused many problems in our human history, mostly due to those who created frames on weak data and misguided assumptions. Racism, Communism, Fascism, and Nazism are frames that have had disastrous effects and were built upon poor understandings of the social world. Their unfortunate power is their ability to cut the social fabric of the world into more easily discernable perspectives, often to the detriment of specific social groups.

Another unfortunate result of improper framing is the creation of explosive frames. The original Star Trek did not last very long, but its contextual framework created more and more informational sets upon its very small origin. The same is true with the tremendous sports industries of the world, all of which began by very innocent games used to kill time. How is this bad? It’s not, necessarily, but sets of this type can be used to cause distraction from important data, or distract individuals from extending effort on something that could really benefit them instead.

Explosive frames can also push us to the use of such false social frames, mentioned above, by creating unnecessary complications in our understanding of the world or not giving us enough time to reflect on what is truly of value to us. To deal with this we must first be aware of what is pertinent to our lives. Then, we must consider the value and reality of the information we experience throughout our lives. It has been a useful exercise to myself and a few of my friends to try to articulate the pertinence and value in written form. By doing this we first admit that we are automatically generating frames to try to understand the world, and then we begin to ascertain what those frames are and how valid that understanding is.

A Bad Case of the Sith

2005-05-22T19:37:00.000-05:00

There's one thing I can say about allegories, they certainly can represent many things. It's often up to the reader or viewer to decide just what exactly those things are. Some, like MoveOn.org have taken to calling George Lucas's "Revenge of the Sith" an allegory about the current Republicans and their actions since the election of George W. Bush. The more interesting response to the film is not this interpretation, but an activist group's response. PABAAH, Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood, has decided to add the movie to its boycott list. They say "George Lucas and his intergalactic empire have now been added to our official boycott list. . .Sad ... but necessary. Our country is at war and Lucas spouts off this crap?"

A story of a senate leader who rises to authoritarian power in the name of defense of his federation is not an uncommon tale. Long before the rise of Hitler through the narrowly split German Parliament, the founding fathers warned against the collapse of Democracy in the name of national defense:

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home. --James Madison
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. --Benjamin Franklin

Is it hard to imagine that the fall of democracy begins with the elimination of those rights which the government protects? This is why I find the boycott interesting. It is an action which does not refute the comparison, but seems to solidify it by taking the oppression to the film itself in the name of defending the nation.

Will the causal chain go unbroken?

2005-05-10T00:00:00.000-05:00

Pedro Irigonegaray has been boldly defending the Kansas Science standards in the Kansas Board of Education "Trial" regarding evolution. He will be presenting closing statements on Thursday, having produced no witnesses because of the boycott by scientists. I began considering what he might say were I in that position, and it would go a little something like this:

What sets science apart from philosophy? Science speculates, it observes, it theorizes, and so does philosophy. However, science sets up some ground rules about that speculation. A credible theory in science is one based upon the known, testable realities of the world, empirical evidence. Philosophy does not have this ground rule. In philosophy the answer to "why?" can be "why not?" To a true scientist, the proper response to "why?" is "can you provide more specific information, please?" Empirical evidence once accepted as "law" (proven to a point of irrefutabilty) creates stepping stones upon which further hypotheses can be produced and tested for viability. It also allows us to speculate about that which we cannot test, the past, the distant, and the unobservably small. The theories which are generated are required to fall in line with the empirical evidence we already have. This means that the theory must be consistent with the laws which are already established. The results are part of a "causal chain" which connects physics and chemistry to other elements like biology and relativity. If we are discussing the definition of science, I propose that it can be nothing but this. Otherwise, we are teaching philosophy.
The meaning of "scientific theory" should also be discussed, here and in the classroom. It is fundamental to the practice of science and necessary to the understanding of the field, but evolution should get no more concentration than the theories of gravity, fluid dynamics, particle physics, thermodynamics, and classical mechanics. If we only say that evolution is up for grabs, we fail the students at understanding the pervasive and personal influence of the theories of science that affect their daily lives from the bus that takes them to school to the antibiotics they ingest.
Since the mid 1800's, evolutionary theory has been consistent with the observable world. Since the discovery of DNA, evolution has been consistent with the laws of chemistry and physics. While many may nit-pick the means of substantiation, none have proposed an alternative that so strongly ties to the laws and observations made to this day. None who testifiied are able to produce a verifiable start to the causal chain of life on Earth nor can they agree on the timeframe in which it happened. They are attacking one theory among many which they let go unscathed, and to what end? A scientific theory is a tool, like all of science, it holds no views on the world except that which is supported by empirical data.

When is a Debate not a Debate?

2005-04-14T23:19:00.000-05:00

Scientists are boycotting a forum that the Kanas school board will be having regarding the teaching of the concept of Intelligent Design along with Evolution in the science curriculum in Kansas schools. The BOE has been going throughout the state to hear opinion about the theory of Evolution and Intelligent Design to substantiate the decision to make the change. Scientists call the forums a sham since scientific theory isn’t decided by popular vote. If it were, we would still believe we lived on a flat Earth over which the Sun, driven by a God in a Chariot, circled on a daily basis.

Scientific theory should be self-sustaining, and blowhards need not apply their hot air to prove it true. The only thing that can actually unseat a substantiated scientific theory is another scientific theory that is better substantiated by objective data. The Intelligent Design “Theory” fails some basic tests in this area.

There is no proof of a Designer. Religions strongly make the point that “believers” must have faith that there is a God. Faith is belief without substantiation. One cannot both have faith in God and objectively substantiate Intelligent Design.

There is no proof of the Designer’s Process. Many in the intelligent design camp feel that the existence of complexity is enough to substantiate their philosophy. This is conjecture. Science does not allow a feature to imply a cause. It requires a substantiated link between a feature and its origin. Life that exists now comes from life that preceded it. Intelligent Design supporters must establish how and when this process was initiated in an objective scientific manner—they cannot.

I will not substantiate how Evolution meets all scientific criterions. If you doubt it, you should look it up yourself. I will suggest reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, or the Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Both men have far more in depth knowledge on the subject and far greater literary skill than myself. The explanation of evolution isn't truly the issue of the debate in Kansas, it isn’t about science at all; it is about the political extremism of those who are attempting to implement this radical and illogical change.

The questions that should be asked are regarding these individuals and why they would rather confuse their children’s ability to discern factual theory from philosophical conjecture. What can be gained from a population of those who cannot draw the distinction between a reasoned process and an illogical deduction? What do these individuals want of these children by making them less capable? Do they want them more easily swayed by a strong opinion than well substantiated reason?

Even if we assume that God had a hand in the design of all life, one must ask:
Why would a God who gave us a brain, which developed the concept of scientific theory – a theory which has cured disease, saved lives, brought people back from physical death, allowed us to survive on less land, in denser populations, and for longer than ever possible –, tell us not to use it?

The End of Debate in America

2005-02-27T11:36:00.000-06:00

Perhaps, we have always been a nation of name-calling partisans, and I only began to see it now. Instead of discussing the problems of government, we seem to be discussing our political affiliations. Instead of understanding the reasons for actions within government, we seem eager to accept statements without explanation so long as the speaker reinforces his or her allegiance with us. We dismiss views that are not in line with our own, and try to convert those opposed to us over to our side. We are eager to simplify how we view others, relegating them to categories, perhaps, before we even begin to talk to them. We take offense when we are put into categories ourselves and find those who put us there to be ignorant of our views and understanding.

Hate is self-perpetuating, even when it is done in a political context. We take offense and close ourselves away from rhetorical attacks. We avoid debate because we assume we know the answers we will get from others. We become insular and seek a community which supports our views only. We learn nothing. This is a dangerous road to take. It has been taken time and again throughout the human history of nations. The road which begins with bickering and ends with blood.

It all begins with feeling that we are under attack. We take the criticism of ideas which we hold as true to be personal attacks on ourselves and begin to wall off our views from any opposition. Our responses to the enemy barrage become condescending, our condescension becomes fuel for reprisal. We begin to label others to keep from getting in these debates where we feel hurt, and we begin to listen to communities which only accept our views. The division grows and both sides see eachother less as people and more as enemies. We are on the slippery slope to division and hate.

It is most important to understand that ideas do not hurt us, and debating problems should never lead us to severe emotional states. If we get angry because of something someone has said about us or our views, then we must ask ourselves why we feel that way. If we feel that someone is ignorant of our view, we should ask them to explain their view further so that we do not presuppose their ignorance. If we feel that we are under attack, we should turn our instinct of defense to that of reaching out further. If you feel this post would be good for someone else to read, you may consider rereading it yourself.

Chasing the Bottleneck

2005-02-04T10:07:00.000-06:00

At work there is an expression for "fixing" a process by passing the issue up or down the line. "Chasing the Bottleneck" happens when someone thinks they fixed a long standing process because they only look only at the immediate costs within their process. In the larger picture, they have only passed that cost in manpower, resources or time to the suppliers or customers of the process. This starts the improvement process of the newly burdened who will try to get that bottleneck out of their area. If it's done right, the bottleneck disappears; if it's wrong, the bottleneck gets passed on again.

One of the easiest indicators of this failure to improve the process is a continual and perhaps aggravated debt. Fixing a problem correctly can incur some up-front cost to implement and control, but if it is indeed done correctly, that up-front cost would be outweighed by long term gains such that these costs would be absorbed by the gains. A debt that isn't tied to the process, or that is not mitigated by savings is chasing the bottleneck.

Government routinely chases the bottleneck from one agency to the next. The federal deficit has become the granddaddy bottleneck collector for the past 50 years. Not only do government programs chase their bottlenecks to this fiscal holding tank, we as present day American citizens have been chasing the bottlenecks of our daily lives to future generations. We have amassed the largest national debt in our federal history. That long term debt increases more steadily than any potential long term gain in federal revenue. We've passed the buck to babies and anonymous generations. We've stolen their candy like the weakest of criminals.

Fiscal discipline begins with recognizing that incurring debt should only be done with some plan to mitigate it in a defined time frame. Whether your improving your line flow or correcting the Social Security system, you've done absolutely NOTHING if you simply chase the bottleneck.

Doing It (Over or Under): The balance of freedom and restriction

2005-01-30T01:53:00.000-06:00

Government is a balance of guaranteeing select freedoms by agreeing to give-up other freedoms. For thousands of years, humans have been making such agreements which have facilitated our growth in our societies as well as in population. Cities are examples of the results of such agreements. The history of cities is one of continual compromise mostly to abate nature. Plagues, infestations, and fires are only a few elements which cities have had to face to be able to handle the logistics of dense populations. Agreements in waste management, water purity, and building codes are examples of their compromises. By restricting how one deals with sewage, where to drain waste, how to protect drinking water, and how to build a more fire-resistant building, more people can live safely together in closer quarters.

Laws of conduct are also enforced on many levels in daily life. These are compromises of what are estimated to be less essential rights for the protection of more vital rights. The restriction of your right to kill another person in a rage protects the other person’s right to live should that rage be unjustified. The restriction of your ability to drive however you feel, allows other drivers a greater probability that they won’t get in an accident.

I work in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, commercial aviation. The reason it is so regulated, and the complaints about the regulations are not so loud, is that when an aircraft, particularly a large one, crashes the potential for a large number of human deaths is expected. Cars too have gotten safer because of the same issue. Cars don’t cause a large numbers of deaths in a single incident, but they can cause a several smaller incidents through common failures among common models. Technical regulation is easy compared to some social trade-offs which our government enforces.

The balance of our personal freedoms and social restrictions are constantly called into question in our government. It is called upon to deregulate industries and privatize its operations. These questions are reasonable and healthy for a representative system. It means that our political process is constantly testing the viability of laws and looking for better ways to govern. However, an issue in this line of questioning revolves around the nature of origin of laws.

Laws are normally based upon historic realities. As in aircraft regulations, no laws were put in the books randomly, they are the results often of unfortunate realities like causes of death and destruction. To call them into question is to believe the chance of that occurrence has dissipated for all of our future. In the technical world, this is rarely the case. So too should it be considered with humans. Have humans become less greedy or more altruistic in the past couple 100 years? Probably not, but for some reason we believe that the regulations which were used to stop abuse in the past don’t matter any more in the present. This can mainly be attributed to the fact that the laws worked well. As a society, we tend to forget the horrible origins of things if they have never directly touched our lives. This is why history has value and "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" is a cliche.

Then there’s the other side of the coin; what if we restrict rights which have nothing to do with the freedom we are trying to protect? If laws maintain the balance between our vital freedoms through acceptable restriction, we must be certain that the restriction correlates to the freedom. To preserve the green balloon population, should we restrict the sale of blue balloons? Does the blue balloon population have anything to do with the green even if they are both balloons? The slip towards social tyranny is made by unjustified restriction and poorly substantiated logic. Just as deleterious as removing laws, is placing laws on a false belief or shallow philosophy.

We should carefully consider the balance of restriction and freedom whenever our representatives seek to take action. It is our duty and right as citizens to scrutinize and understand the logic, substantiation and validity of any move to add or remove laws from our governing institutions. Slowly and without fanfare the little changes may find their way to your own rights.

Roses, Names and Things that Smell

2005-01-19T01:45:00.000-06:00

Wouldn't it be convenient if political parties were labeled based upon their actions instead of the appearance they wish to present or others wished to give them? It would be far easier to make sound decisions regarding the exercise of the Republic if the contents of party actions matched the PR packaging they provide, but the real world hardly allows us to do so. It's difficult enough understanding what exactly associates members of a political party these days. It seems that any individual can run for office under any banner even if he or she does not support a majority of that party's view, or disagrees with most of the party's members.

The crux of the problem is that the parties support no explicit ideology from which they derive the actions they
in government. They come up with loose planks on a shoddy platform to set sail from one election to the next. The ideology, if there is one, must be interpreted from the consistencies of their actions of their majority, not the nature of their organization. The "party" is a black-box, whose contents are unknown, but from whose inputs and outputs one can draw some semblance of understanding. I don't like black-box theories because they will generally have exemptions, but to try to understand something so critical we must start somewhere.

From a few years of politics and history classes I've devised a way to quickly measure just where in the political world parties are. You'll notice that these four spectrums do not involve the a head to head measure of
Democrats and Republicans, Communists and Facists, or Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. These are spectrums of the factors of federal governance, the largest dimensions by which any party can be measured.

Federal Ownership per Capita

Democracy ---------------------------------------------- Dictatorship

Certainly many governments will call themselves Democratic, but really, the last decision that was so, was to put the dictator in power. Per Capita Federal Ownership is the measure of how much say each member of a society has in the running of the government and the nation. Democracy means a sort of mob rule and Dictatorship meaning a single individual ruling. For political parties in the US this measure can be based upon the diversity of the electoral candidates they support, as well as the execution of Constitutional powers when in office. The less frequently new candidates are presented and the less diverse of economic strata those candidates come from, the closer to dictatorship that party is located. More importantly, the execution of Constitutional powers demonstrates the slip towards dictatorship when the Congress provides no challenge to the demands of a President of the same party.

Fiscal Discipline

Undisciplined ---------------------------------------------- Disciplined

Sometimes seen as the battle between liberal spenders and conservative spendthrifts, the actual financial positions of parties is more correctly measured on a spectrum of fiscal discipline. The complexity of federal debt and trade deficit means that how one spends the money is not the only concern. It is also concerns how one manages the continually growing interest of the debt the nation has accrued. Looking at the total financial picture of the nation, fiscal discipline can be measured by a comparison of the ability to decrease expenditure while stabilizing or reducing federal revenue. Actual numbers to do this comparison would be the per capita salary increase vs. the per capita federal debt increase. If the money is being used effectively we should see a continued or improved increase in per capita salary (adjusted for inflation) and a decrease in the trend of federal debt.

Social Involvement

Individual Freedom ---------------------------------------------- Social Tyranny

Some people think that government should stay out of people's hair, other think they should tell people how to comb their hair. What does your party think? The party's philosophy of social involvement defines how much of a role government should have in your personal life. Social tyranny means you eat, sleep and breath the party and it is your mission, nay the mission of the nation to make certain everyone else does so. Individual freedom means that it's ok to do anything you want, so long as your choices don't directly harm other people (we do assume there is SOME sort of government around). A party's position on this scale is judged based upon the scale and extent of social behavior they try to enforce. Enforcing behavior is saying that you CANNOT do something or you MUST do something (You MUST wear green pants on Thursdays). The extent of the political force the party tries to muster for these causes demonstrates the conviction they wish impart (a local ordinance or a federal mandate).

Federal Stability

Political Extremism ---------------------------------------------- Political Conservatism

The stability of a representative government is based largely on how frisky the parties are to change the rules. The scale is quite simple the party is judged based upon its tendency to try to change, amend, or write new rules. The more the party pushes toward dismantling the framework of the government the more towards political Extremism it goes.

Of course, this analysis isn't fun if you do it with just one party, do it with both, and look up actual legislation and votes to do this analysis. Perhaps, I'll come up with a more quantifiable set of scales when I get more time.

An Apache in Every Driveway

2005-01-11T23:24:00.000-06:00

Author’s Note: If you don’t know what satire is, or weren't required to read A Modest Proposal in school, please write to the representatives of the school district in which you were educated and demand they improve their curriculum.

Also, stop reading this!

Iraq has clearly demonstrated that the arms our Federal government protects in the name of the second amendment are not suffient to allow the people of this nation to defend itself against an attack by its own army. Military technology has gone far beyond the days when simple rifles were the most powerful and effective weapon readily available. A group of men armed and dedicated could hold off an invading force equally equipped, and the enemy force was normally just that. This is clearly no longer the case.

The Constitution must uphold this liberty by legalizing the ownership and production of arms such as RPGs and IEDs. No other such basic devices provide such a leveling of the tactical battlefield. Every day in Iraq the civilian mixture of black market arms and ad hoc explosives have shown that in a protracted battle, they are effective. While it is unreasonable to expect the Constitution to allow an Apache in every driveway or a warhead for every block, these smaller devices would provide a more symmetric warfare.

Talk of protecting assualt rifles, handguns and automatic weapons demonstrate the ignorance of a few in the public eye. These weapons could never take down the army they so strongly wish to oppose. No, something more powerful should be fought for or they should stop wasting their time and our attention.

It is clear the intent of providing the right to keep and bear arms is to protect the citizens from a wayward government. The Constitution is specific in its scope and intent. It is concerned only with the federal level of government, not the details of personal self-defense and other circumstance of daily life. The founding fathers threw these personal concerns to the state.

Protection of the citizens from the government is written repeatedly in the lines of the Constition. From the structure of the branches to the architecture of checks and balances, the design of the Constitution is the definition of the empowerment of the people. With all the tools provided before this right to bear arms, one should think that it might be more reasonable to exercise and protect those powers. A focus, myopically on a single right which has already been lost could only lead to the loss of the liberties one has taken for granted.

Questioning Patriotism

2004-12-18T22:46:00.000-06:00

Patriotism is the dedication one demonstrates towards their country. That dedication necessitates that not only a loyalty to the nation as sovereign, but a loyalty to its government, laws, and enforcement. In a representative government, there is a difficulty in defining views that are unpatriotic. The Republic necessitates that the citizens are responsible for knowing, understanding and responding to the decisions that their representatives make. They are called upon to openly criticize the decisions of these representatives as defined by the Constitution.

Unlike an authoritarian regime, the loyalty to the country does not require one to be loyal to those in the roles of its government. The individuals in the U.S. government are in positions which must be respected, but their decisions should be scrutinized. If we are in a truly representative nation, then those we elect into office should merely be agents of our views exercising those views in our best interest. If they fail to execute these offices in what we perceive as in that best interest, then we are called upon to act.

The question of one's patriotism can only be viable if it involves criticism of the need for representative government, or if it calls into question the sovereignty of the nation. This distinction is important because it realizes that even individuals in government roles can be working against the representative government. Hitler is the prime example of an elected official who with his co-horts manipulated a representative system to institute authoritarian rule. In his essay "The Radical Question and World Propaganda" Joseph Goebbels is so bold as to spell out this "triumph":

We told our opposition often enough that although we were using its weapons and rules for our purposes, we had nothing intellectually or politically in common with them. To the contrary, our goal was use these means to put an end to them and their methods, to finally eliminate their theories and policies. By both theory and practice, National Socialism opposes liberalism.

Open criticism of the decisions of our federal representatives is an essential component of our government. Without it the validity of that government begins to falter. From times of war to those of peace, the vigilance and expression of the public is essential to maintain a truly Constitutional government.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." – Theodore Roosevelt

"A man may be loyal to his government and yet oppose the particular principles and methods of administration." –Abraham Lincoln

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." – Patrick Henry

The Dangers of Pre-12/31 Thinking

2004-12-10T18:23:00.000-06:00

It is not surprising that the specter of terrorism has never faded into the background since 9-11. From investigations into intelligence failures to a war with a nation providing no immanent threat, terrorism has taken a powerful hold of the national psyche directing randomly. It has been said that we are at war with any nation that is found supporting terrorism, yet the funding of these groups points to current allies and some US groups. Iraq was accused of harboring terrorists but the worst of the terrorists were living in Florida and Germany. Funding of the 9-11 group points to elements of the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, but it also points to Muslim groups in Chicago. Timothy McVeigh, a US citizen, performed the last large-scale terrorist attack in the US before 9-11. However, after the Oklahoma City bombing we didn’t have an internal investigation of intelligence failures, and we didn't produce a color coded terrorism advisory system. These hypocrisies point to a problem with the "War on Terror". They indicate that we as a nation don’t quite know what this war is about.

The histories of nations are written in the blood of warfare. From invasion to internal conflict, the very definition of the nation-state has been a tale of defining boundaries and affiliations. The Cold War was the last great nation-defining conflict of the industrialized world. Knowing and declaring your side was imperative, and those who obfuscated their affiliation only did so because they were often the most loyal to the opposition: spies, operatives, etc. Since the final day of the Soviet Union, 12/31/1991, the industrial world has essentially stabilized in the definition of boundaries and direct and indirect warfare. The arsenals of frontline warfare became less useful as tactical objectives became less relevant.

Perhaps it all happened as an adaptation to these direct warfare conflicts, or a reaction to the spread of information technology, the development of terrorism as a tool of ideological warfare became prevalent. Loosely physically affiliated, low tech and strongly ideologically unified “terrorists” have become the new major enemy of the nation-state and the new focus of its old arsenal. The problem with the enemy on the battlefield is the natural progression we have seen for centuries, asymmetric warfare: red coats verses guerrillas. But the true devastating problem on the global scale is the asymmetric means of command and control.

The initial reaction of an archane system to a new asymmetric enemy is for the old system to do the same thing it has always done: find an enemy, blame the enemy, and bomb the enemy. Would the enemy actually be directly associated with a nation this method would be reasonable and correct, but it is no longer the case. “Terrorism” defines something the nation-state has never seen at this scale before. Because of increased access to communication technology, the central state is no longer needed to insight conflict. In fact, a central controlling organization is not needed either. “Terrorist nations” are not truly either. Terrorism is simply a tool of war. The "nations" which use this tool are ideological communities.

Ideological communities can be global associations of small groups. These groups simply need to agree on sets of small and simple units of information called “memes.” You deal with memes every day, from “gravity pulls me down” to “ the Constitution is the best form of government”. When these memes begin to include elements like “this is the enemy,” “remove the enemy,” and “this is where you can find out how to remove the enemy” the chance of violent action increases.

While these types of groups aren’t new, they are now more prolific largely due to enhanced communication technology as well as more affordable transportation. More memes can become more specific and spread more rapidly. Essentially, a “meme-state” can be assembled across the borders of several nations.

The problem with a meme-state besides those discussed is that they are strictly ideological associations. This means that they are self-reinforcing communities (members only talk to members who only agree with their view). With little input from the community immediately outside their own, the meme-state, being insular and ideological, reinterprets what its member see in their respective countries. Affilation to a meme-state is often stronger than a nation-state because members of nation-states are often not fully aware of the history and philosophical underpinnings of their nation-state (they are members by birth or some personal understanding). This ability to reinterpret one’s perception can easily be turned against any selected nation-state by associating that organization with some element that threatens the existence of the meme-state. Military conflict, particularly invasion by a nation-state, can easily be turn to strengthen the meme-state by using it as proof of the meme-state “knowing” the intentions of the nation-state.

The asymmetric negotiation capabilities of these states severely hampers the ability of nation-states to arrive at a peaceful resolution or even surrender with a meme-state. The meme-state is simply an assembly of identical ideas so the only way for a nation-state to truly deal with it symmetrically is to propose memes which will fair better among its people and its allies and a hostile meme-state. This truly is a battle of ideas and a war which must be won in the heads of those who would potentially be terrorists. It requires understanding why they would want to be the enemy of a nation-state, and why that idea is stronger than any other.

Conventional war and traditional politics are only means of addressing the symptoms of the problem and allowing (and sometimes reinforcing) the hostile meme-state to grow like a virus. The meme-state must be taken head-on to really deal with terrorism. Until then, we should never really feel safe.

The moral measure

2004-12-03T17:56:00.000-06:00

In this last election, a good portion of the electorate voted based upon morals and values relative to the environment of issues ranging from the Iraq War to Gay Marriage. Morals and values are social terms for the perspective by which they catagorized these issues. Perspective is relative to the observer yet can be identical to other observers if they are all trained by the same inputs. In essesnce saying that you voted based upon morals and values means that you voted the same way you always vote, unless you like to vote based upon strict financial forcasting or other complex quantifiable means of analysis.

Using the terms "morals and values" also means that the environment was such that the candidates themselves weren't important so much as their public stance on whatever was considered a moral issues in that short period of time before the election. Moral terms are strong in emphasis but weak in definition. To actually make a judgement of an individual based upon their moral judgement, you need to understand how they actually make that judgement. However, in the politics of today you don't see this process.

What we see of candidates is the packaged media profile which they want the public to accept, not the reality of the person. There isn't enough time to know the candidate, and it is physically impossible to get enough face time with the public on a personal level that normally allows us to assess that judgement. We, the people, only have a few things to go on, the individuals record and the media package.

Normally, the candidates packagers like to assert control of both of these elements of getting to know the candidate. The media image of the person will recharacterize the individual (past and present) in the light most likely to get him the win. To control the information easily they narrow down the individual to a select few issues which are both familiar to the public and able to somehow be substantiated through the individuals history or public personality.

The handlers try to make certain that these points match up with what a majority of individuals feel are important. Again, it's not what is quantifiably important for the office in question, it's what the electorate ascertains as being a important. It's easy to see what kind of characteristics would be good for the different positions in question, simply by looking at the Constitution and I think that there can be some scale to measure this based upon it, some of it being binary. Here's my take on a few of them, you can judge if it relates to any of the selling points in the election ads previous to November:

The President should be able to assert command effectively over his branch. An effective operator and initiator of policy. His key concern would be to ensure that all operations run smoothly and every sector which by law deserves federal services is getting them. He is a trustworthy surrogate of Congress to effectively communicate and negotiate foreign policy, an apt representation of the best this country has to offer. He is not a policy maker he is a policy blocker. He will stand up to bills which seek to weigh down or debilitate the operation of the federal government, but as a communicator and negotiator he is adept at working with the law making branch to ensure such bills won't get so far.

Congressional representatives assess the will of their people and effectively represent them and their interests in legislation. House Representatives have a firm grasp of the regional needs for today and for its future. His or her judgement is based at home but his or her skills are tuned at negotiating for these interests in chambers. He or she can prioritize the interestes of the region and align them most ably with that of the needs of the nation. He or she knows the realistic limits of federal assistance and would rather limit its exercise than embolden it. A Senator is a strong advocate of the state as a whole. They know the quantifiable inputs and outputs of the state and how the federal government augments it. They understand the states plans and works with the state government to make certain federal actions complement state actions.

An educated guess

2004-11-29T23:05:00.000-06:00

Did you know where Iraq was before we went to war with it (either time)? Did you know American foreign policy towards Afghanistan up to the very minutes we were attacked? Do you know what a stem cell is? Do you know why stem cells are important to science? Can you explain how DNA relates to evolution? Do you know how many life saving medications and vaccines have been formulated based upon evolutionary theory? Do you know what is significant about how the majority of medical insulin is produced today when compared to the processes of the past? Can you name three things that have proven to hold strong families together? Do you know the history of segregation? Can you scientifically prove that homosexuality is unnatural? Can you explain it in other animals? Do you know the origin of secular government? Do you know why the founding fathers were religious men, but excluded God from the Constitution? Do you know the historic definition of liberal and conservative? Can you provide a first hand source for any of your answers?

If you have a strong opinion about Iraq, Afghanistan, Stem Cells, Evolution, Homosexuality or the separation of church and state and cannot answer these questions, consider yourself manipulated.

The last question is always the ringer, particularly if you are immersed in a deceptive culture. The ability to quote a first hand source is crucial because there is no filter between the origin of the idea and yourself. Manipulators place themselves between the facts and the audience. They take parts of facts and attempt to equate them to the emotions of your daily life. In essence they try to get you to connect certain ideas to either positive or negative feelings.

In a democratic society, conversation should work toward the benefit of everyone, that's the idea behind Congress, but manipulators want to isolate and insulate you from other ideas so they control what you think, do and pass on to others. By making you emotionally tied to certain ideas, they drive you to take the issue personally so that you don't discuss it with anyone but those you know already agree with your view. You will automatically become defensive when the topic is brought up by anyone unfamiliar.

Manipulators don't want you to be able to quantify your reasons for supporting or rejecting ideas. Quantifiable ideas cannot be negotiated to the manipulators favor. Manipulators will put forth loose philosophical ideas without substantiation so they can readdress it's meaning to your life at whim.

Strong manipulators work to get you to trust few and selected sources for information. This narrowing of the information stream means less effort and more control. More importantly, a narrow stream means that there is no means or a reduced means of comparison between the manipulator's ideas and the ideas of others. If the manipulator's answers are actually always right, why do they care how the others answer?

In a democratic system, manipulators want everyone to think the same. If everyone thinks the same everyone can be made to agree to the will of a few. To create a mob mentality they must address the lowest of the intellects and the most common of ideas. Everything, no matter how complex, will come down to simple concepts that relate to your daily life.

Manipulators want you to think you are under attack. Humans tend toward cooperation when they feel they are part of a group under threat of a common enemy. In a democratic society, the enemy for a manipulator is representative government and its defenders. When a representative government is handed over to manipulators it will become authoritarian so that the manipulators control is ensured.

Welcome

2004-11-17T23:07:00.000-06:00

In my spare time between writing the book, working a full time job and maintaining some semblance of a normal life, I intend to rant and rave about the current political and social scene here. Why? Because what the world needs now is more Blogs!