ShrinkWrapped

How Gubbmint Works!

This is making the e-mail rounds and is simply too good to pass up:

Once upon a time the government had a vast  scrap yard in the middle of a desert.  Congress said, "Someone may steal from it at night."

So they created a night watchman  position and hired a person for the job.
 
Then  Congress said, "How does the watchman do his job  without instruction?" So they created a planning department and  hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one  person to do time studies.
 
Then Congress  said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks  correctly?" So they created a Quality Control department  and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write  the reports..
 
Then Congress said, "How are these  people going to get paid?" So they created the following  positions, a time keeper, and a payroll officer, then hired two  people.
 
Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable  for all of these people?"  So they created an administrative  section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer,  Assistant Administrative Officer, and a  Legal Secretary.
 
Then Congress said, "We  have had this command in operation for one Year and we are  $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall  cost."
 
So they laid off the night  watchman.
 
NOW slowly, let it sink  in.
 
Quietly, we go like sheep to  slaughter..

Does anybody remember the reason given for  the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.... during the  Carter  Administration?

Anybody?

Anything?

No?

Didn't  think so!

Bottom line. We've spent several hundred  billion dollars in support of an agency....the reason for which  not one person who reads this can  remember!

Ready??  

AGW Fraud?

[Update at end]

From M. Simon:

 Have the AGW folks have been cooking the books? Do we have a smoking gun? No. A fire at the Colt factory. An explosion at the ammo dump. Three fish just above the keel. Abandon ship. Sauve qui peut.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-files-hacked.html

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/11/some-verification-of-hadley-cru-files.html

This may be the most important news to date about AGW:

Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

There have already been e-mails posted proving that the AGW proponents cooked the books:

Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous "hockey-stick" graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

The emphasis in the above quote was added.

Mr. Mosher offered this summary of the rest of the e-mails that he had found:

And, you get to see somebody with the name of phil jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre. And lots lots more. including how to obstruct or evade FOIA requests. and guess who funded the collection of cores at Yamal.. and transferred money into a personal account in Russia[.] And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain.. you get to see how they “shape” the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy. [Y]ou get to see what they say about Idso and pat micheals, you get to read how they want to take us out into a dark alley, it’s stunning all very stunning. You get to watch somebody named phil jones say that John daly’s death is good news.. or words to that effect. I don’t know that its real.. But the CRU code looks real

John Daly (not to be confused with the professional golfer of the same name) is identified in one of the e-mails as a global-warming skeptic who died in January of 2004.

[Please note M. Simon's second link to his post,  which offers Some Verification Of Hadley CRU Files Hacked; it looks like these files are the real deal.]

It will take time for the "skeptics" (who thankfully were never successfully silenced by the AGWers who likened skeptics to Holocaust deniers and wanted to make AGW denial a crime against humanity) to go through all the files but what has already shown up is damning.

When scientists refuse to release their raw data, they short circuit the workings of the scientific method which looks for independent confirmation of hypotheses in order to avoid unconscious bias and the even more egregious fraud.  The AGW academia-governmental complex is an industry that has siphoned off many, many billions of dollars in grants; it has spawned an entire parasitic industry devoted to managing and minimizing our Carbon output; it has threatened to cripple the global economy and return us to pre-industrial subsistence while empowering  non-accountable bureaucrats in their attempt to gain never before imagined power over every human on the planet.  How fitting that this construct which has been seized upon by the radical environmentalist left may well turn out to have been constructed upon a fraud.   

Update: Luboš Motl links to a statement by Phil Jones confirming the provenance of the files; Luboš notes:

The conclusion looks pretty clear. These people should be put in jail as soon as possible. You know, these are not just small tricks in an academic discussion. These people have acquired millions if not billions of taxpayers' money by methods that seem to be provably fraudulent.

I concur.

The Senates Attempts to Trump the House

There is now an avalanche of commentary concerning the Senate healthcare bill released with much fanfare by harry Reid last night.  Those in favor of the bill tout its provisions to increase the availability of care to almost all.  Nicholas Kristof does a representative job by pointing out that opposition to the original Medicare program, as well as to the establishment of Social Security before it, were overblown and have in time proven to be unfounded:

The Wrong Side of History

... ferocious hyperbole was unleashed on the proposal for Medicare. President John Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a government health program for the elderly, but conservatives bitterly denounced the proposal as socialism, as a plan for bureaucrats to make medical decisions, as a means to ration health care.

The American Medical Association was vehement, with Dr. Donovan Ward, the head of the A.M.A. in 1965, declaring that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate with Medicare would be “complicity in evil.”

The Wall Street Journal warned darkly in editorials in 1965 that Medicare amounted to “politicking with a nation’s health.” It quoted a British surgeon as saying that in Britain, government health care was “crumbling to utter ruin” and suggested that the United States might be heading in the same direction.

“The basic concerns and arguments were the same” in 1935 against Social Security, in 1965 against Medicare, and today against universal coverage, said Nancy J. Altman, author of “The Battle for Social Security,” a history of the program. (The quotes against Social Security above were taken from that book.)

These days, the critics of Medicare have come around because it manifestly works. Life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 65 has risen significantly. America is no longer shamed by elderly Americans suffering for lack of medical care.

Yet although America’s elderly are now cared for, our children are not. A Johns Hopkins study found that hospitalized children who are uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die than those with insurance, presumably because they are less likely to get preventive care and to be taken to the doctor when sick. The study suggested that every year some 1,000 children may die as a consequence of lacking health insurance. [Emphasis mine-SW]

[I emphasized the may because I want to call BS on this.  Those children may also be dying because their parents are neglectful.  Unless Kristof can show me some data, compete with controls, all we have is a factoid of uncertain significance.  There is too much of that in this discussion already.] 

I don't mean to be churlish but Medicare is now going bankrupt and a sizable percentage of Doctors will not accept new Medicare patients because the compensation has not kept up with costs.  Those do not seem to be attributes of a system that can work long term.  Further, the innovation that has led to increased survival rates for the elderly has been fueled by the profit involved in Medical care; for most Doctors Medicare is not a source of profit but a service that is subsidized by those able to pay at closer to market (or above market) rates.  However, that is not my main point in this post.

I suspect there are almost no Doctors and very few commentators who do not believe we should try to maximize the accessibility of health care for Americans.  The problem with the bill(s) is that they do not do what they claim to do, they all end up costing far more than suggested, and they will do significant damage to the innovation in Medicine that can keep us all alive for longer and healthier extents. 

As luck would have it, the Dean of Harvard Medical School agrees with me on almost all of these points: [HT: Roger Simon]

Health 'Reform' Gets a Failing Grade

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I'd give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama's agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

...

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

As a bonus, Dr. Flier notes that our leaders apparently think we are idiots and/or fools:

Selling an uncertain and potentially unwelcome outcome such as this to the public would be a challenging task. It is easier to assert, confidently but disingenuously, that decreased costs and enhanced quality would result from the current legislation.

So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

The problem for the Kristofs of the world is that the bills currently being discussed in Congress are extraordinarily complex, written by people who are hidden in the shadows and have clear ideological biases, and have been neither read nor understood by our esteemed solons.  Further what they purport to do can be done much more simply and cheaply; why do we need a 2000+ page bill?

Yuval Levin (who no doubt has his own bias) sums up:

So, to sum up: the idea is to spend trillions even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers as unemployment hovers above 10%, squeeze money out of Medicare not to fix the program’s finances but to create a whole new enormous federal entitlement alongside it, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today, pay even higher premiums, and find themselves herded toward a government insurance provider. Oh, and at the end of it all, if we use the methods of counting the uninsured favored by the Democrats, there are still 24 million people without health insurance.

I would add that my favorite aspect of the Congressional dishonesty is the idea that the (fantasied) cuts and revenues (taxes) start three years before the program takes effect, which allows the Congress to claim that they will save money that they know will never be saved.  In fact, expanding Medicare while avoiding cuts means that the cost of our already bankrupt system will sky rocket.

Finally, please go to Maxed_Out_Mama's site and offer her a hearty "Thank you."  She has helpfully posted the entire table of contents of the Senate Health Care Bill and plans to read it.  I am awed by her courage and look forward to her findings.  It should be fascinating.

Thomas Friedman: an Appreciation

I am grateful to Thomas L. Friedman  because he supplies a significant function and gives good value.  For anyone desirous of understanding the most conventional of elite conventional wisdom, Tom Friedman is one of the go-to writers.  His column today is a compendium of conventional wisdom, of the kind that  holds up poorly under any kind of scrutiny but has the virtue of adhering to the liberal party line.  His offering today is that special breed of snark that presumes to understand the motivations and beliefs of those who disagree with him:

What They Really Believe

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

In almost every sentence there is nonsense.  As just a few instances, it is not a belief that "the globe  has been cooling lately", it is a conclusion based on the best data we have accrued about the global climate and temperature over the last 10 years.  The reasons for the cooling in the last ten years are not well understood (though the decreased output of the sun must be considered high on the list)  but only those impervious to changing data can insist that AGW is a fact in the face of contrary evidence.  His logic is more impressive when he declares that those of us who think we should be utilizing our own energy resources to the fullest in order to ease the transition to cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy, prefer the world continue to be dependent on oil controlled by our enemies rather than on clean power.  Somehow wanting to extract more American energy (with all that means for high paying jobs, increased tax revenues, and decreasing our dependence on unstable, unfriendly regimes) means we want the world to continue to be dependent on others for their energy.  Where Thomas Friedman also fails is in noting that thus far there exist no alternative, clean energies that can scale properly to replace petroleum based products as sources of energy.  Germany, a bastion of wind power, has found the need to build coal fired electric plants in order to make up the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow; as a result their power generation is more inefficient and costly than if they had just built the plants in the first place and concentrated the money spent on windmills for already extant technology that could manage the coal fired plants' pollution. 

Finally, Friedman manages to confuse himself within his own article.  He insists that once a Carbon tax raises the price of energy alternative energy will flourish (although the technology is not yet mature and none of it is now scalable.)  He then proceeds to allege:

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

I'm confused.  If I believe we should drill, that means I want us to continue to be dependent on petro-dictators?  Who ever said the new Middle Class wouldn't want to live like us?  If the demand on oil increases, so will the price and supply will follow and as alternative energy gets cheaper and matures, the markets will naturally migrate to cheaper energy.  Why would we want a tax now that will damage the economy and make the natural maturation of technology slow down?  Wouldn't that condemn billions to continued poverty or a return to poverty?  Am I missing something here or do those who espouse the conventional wisdom not know what they are talking about?

As luck would have it, we have two recent examples that show that neither logic nor mathematics are strengths of the elite conventional wisdom doyens; the first features Al Gore on the Conan Program, via the magic of Youtube:

Video: The Goracle on geothermal temperatures

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

Where Gore is off by several orders of magnitude on the earth's interior temperature, John Kerry performs a marvelous, analogous transformation for our greenhouse gases, claiming that the emissions have increased in the last 8 years 4 times faster than in the 1990s; the facts?

Video: Kerry was against correct data after he was for it

 The Institute for Energy Research catches John Kerry using hyperbolically wrong numbers on carbon emissions in the US as a means to use the Chicken Little approach to passing legislation:

...

According to the government’s own numbers, CO2 emissions didn’t increase even by a factor of 1 during that period.  In an eighteen-year period (1990-2008), the total growth of CO2 emissions was only 15.9% from energy production and 30% from the energy-use sectors.  Moreover, the rate of growth year-on-year has slowed in both instances.  In 2008, CO2 emissions dropped 2.8% in energy production and 2.1% in energy use, likely as a result of the recession.  In 2006, though, while the economy remained overheated, CO2 emissions dropped 1.45% in energy production and 2.22% in energy use.

I don't mean to focus on the conventional wisdom of AGW, but these two examples were just too tempting.  They are, in fact, perfect exemplars of the tendency of the elites to ignore actual facts when it might interfere with their desired beliefs.  Barry Rubin places this tendency in its historical context, in a must-read posting today:

In Search of Déjà vu: For Intellectuals, Political Correctness is Twenty-First Century Communism

We are all searching, in this bizarre era we inhabit, for a healthy sense of déjà vu. By this I mean, we seek precedents for some of the strange things that Political Correctness forces onto people and current political debates bring into play.

Unfortunately, the virtually sole candidate brought up play in such matters is summarized by the word “fascism.” But the extremities of Nazi Germany generally don’t fit well with the relatively mild forms of mischief gotten up to in Western democratic states. Actually, the best parallel I can think of is the way that the Communist party and its fellow travelers tried to impose a cultural line on intellectual life, a process at its peak in the United States and in Britain during the 1930s, while continuingfor many decades longer in countries like France and Italy.

The experience described below by George Orwell in 1937 is a wonderful example of how history is repeating itself. I want to add quickly that I am not speaking here of subservience to a foreign state (the USSR) or even the kind of discipline exercised on party members, but how it permeated into the broader cultural, media, and intellectual scene.

To sum up the three themes:

--There is a party line which should be followed by everyone, even if they aren't in the party.

--Those who don’t follow it will be called all sorts of awful names which even horrifies the victim since these insults have nothing to do with what he was trying to do or say. In those days, it was fascist or Trotskyist; today it is racist, neo-conservative, or Islamophobic.

--The line is justified because not following it is said to lead to terrible results (historically, the triumph of fascism and big business; today, the triumph of racism, Islamophobia, and big business). Another reason is that telling the truth would help the enemy, in those days, fascism or capitalism, in these days, Republicans, George W. Bush, or various reactionary, Christian fundamentalist, or fuddy-duddy forces.

--The punishments are not torture, prison, and execution but ridicule, denial of a teaching job or tenure, or just not getting your book or articles published.

Please do yourself a favor and read Barry's whole article.  Our current climate is a near perfect imagining of "liberal fascism" where for the good of all of us, an enlightened few who know what is true,  must use all means at their disposal to enforce proper thinking in order to "save the planet", redress inequality, undo racism, colonialism, sexism, and any other -ism that captures their fancy.  AGW has been declared beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry for quite some time and the international consensus, that the West must pay for their assaults on the planet (while simultaneously enriching elites, impoverishing the most vulnerable, and beggaring the Western Middle Classes) is unassailable.  Rational discourse and true science, ie gathering data, testing hypotheses, and allowing conclusions to arise from the weight of the evidence, our wonderful and rich inheritance from the enlightenment, is an impediment to all that is good and must be jettisoned.

So, an appreciation for Thomas Friedman, who puts the conventional into conventional wisdom.

PS Here is some data that is bad news for the liberal elites:  Capitalism works miracles!

Thomas Friedman: an Appreciation

I am grateful to Thomas L. Friedman  because he supplies a significant function and gives good value.  For anyone desirous of understanding the most conventional of elite conventional wisdom, Tom Friedman is one of the go-to writers.  His column today is a compendium of conventional wisdom, of the kind that  holds up poorly under any kind of scrutiny but has the virtue of adhering to the liberal party line.  His offering today is that special breed of snark that presumes to understand the motivations and beliefs of those who disagree with him:

What They Really Believe

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

In almost every sentence there is nonsense.  As just a few instances, it is not a belief that "the globe  has been cooling lately", it is a conclusion based on the best data we have accrued about the global climate and temperature over the last 10 years.  The reasons for the cooling in the last ten years are not well understood (though the decreased output of the sun must be considered high on the list)  but only those impervious to changing data can insist that AGW is a fact in the face of contrary evidence.  His logic is more impressive when he declares that those of us who think we should be utilizing our own energy resources to the fullest in order to ease the transition to cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy, prefer the world continue to be dependent on oil controlled by our enemies rather than on clean power.  Somehow wanting to extract more American energy (with all that means for high paying jobs, increased tax revenues, and decreasing our dependence on unstable, unfriendly regimes) means we want the world to continue to be dependent on others for their energy.  Where Thomas Friedman also fails is in noting that thus far there exist no alternative, clean energies that can scale properly to replace petroleum based products as sources of energy.  Germany, a bastion of wind power, has found the need to build coal fired electric plants in order to make up the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow; as a result their power generation is more inefficient and costly than if they had just built the plants in the first place and concentrated the money spent on windmills for already extant technology that could manage the coal fired plants' pollution. 

Finally, Friedman manages to confuse himself within his own article.  He insists that once a Carbon tax raises the price of energy alternative energy will flourish (although the technology is not yet mature and none of it is now scalable.)  He then proceeds to allege:

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

I'm confused.  If I believe we should drill, that means I want us to continue to be dependent on petro-dictators?  Who ever said the new Middle Class wouldn't want to live like us?  If the demand on oil increases, so will the price and supply will follow and as alternative energy gets cheaper and matures, the markets will naturally migrate to cheaper energy.  Why would we want a tax now that will damage the economy and make the natural maturation of technology slow down?  Wouldn't that condemn billions to continued poverty or a return to poverty?  Am I missing something here or do those who espouse the conventional wisdom not know what they are talking about?

As luck would have it, we have two recent examples that show that neither logic nor mathematics are strengths of the elite conventional wisdom doyens; the first features Al Gore on the Conan Program, via the magic of Youtube:

Video: The Goracle on geothermal temperatures

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

Where Gore is off by several orders of magnitude on the earth's interior temperature, John Kerry performs a marvelous, analogous transformation for our greenhouse gases, claiming that the emissions have increased in the last 8 years 4 times faster than in the 1990s; the facts?

Video: Kerry was against correct data after he was for it

 The Institute for Energy Research catches John Kerry using hyperbolically wrong numbers on carbon emissions in the US as a means to use the Chicken Little approach to passing legislation:

...

According to the government’s own numbers, CO2 emissions didn’t increase even by a factor of 1 during that period.  In an eighteen-year period (1990-2008), the total growth of CO2 emissions was only 15.9% from energy production and 30% from the energy-use sectors.  Moreover, the rate of growth year-on-year has slowed in both instances.  In 2008, CO2 emissions dropped 2.8% in energy production and 2.1% in energy use, likely as a result of the recession.  In 2006, though, while the economy remained overheated, CO2 emissions dropped 1.45% in energy production and 2.22% in energy use.

I don't mean to focus on the conventional wisdom of AGW, but these two examples were just too tempting.  They are, in fact, perfect exemplars of the tendency of the elites to ignore actual facts when it might interfere with their desired beliefs.  Barry Rubin places this tendency in its historical context, in a must-read posting today:

In Search of Déjà vu: For Intellectuals, Political Correctness is Twenty-First Century Communism

We are all searching, in this bizarre era we inhabit, for a healthy sense of déjà vu. By this I mean, we seek precedents for some of the strange things that Political Correctness forces onto people and current political debates bring into play.

Unfortunately, the virtually sole candidate brought up play in such matters is summarized by the word “fascism.” But the extremities of Nazi Germany generally don’t fit well with the relatively mild forms of mischief gotten up to in Western democratic states. Actually, the best parallel I can think of is the way that the Communist party and its fellow travelers tried to impose a cultural line on intellectual life, a process at its peak in the United States and in Britain during the 1930s, while continuingfor many decades longer in countries like France and Italy.

The experience described below by George Orwell in 1937 is a wonderful example of how history is repeating itself. I want to add quickly that I am not speaking here of subservience to a foreign state (the USSR) or even the kind of discipline exercised on party members, but how it permeated into the broader cultural, media, and intellectual scene.

To sum up the three themes:

--There is a party line which should be followed by everyone, even if they aren't in the party.

--Those who don’t follow it will be called all sorts of awful names which even horrifies the victim since these insults have nothing to do with what he was trying to do or say. In those days, it was fascist or Trotskyist; today it is racist, neo-conservative, or Islamophobic.

--The line is justified because not following it is said to lead to terrible results (historically, the triumph of fascism and big business; today, the triumph of racism, Islamophobia, and big business). Another reason is that telling the truth would help the enemy, in those days, fascism or capitalism, in these days, Republicans, George W. Bush, or various reactionary, Christian fundamentalist, or fuddy-duddy forces.

--The punishments are not torture, prison, and execution but ridicule, denial of a teaching job or tenure, or just not getting your book or articles published.

Please do yourself a favor and read Barry's whole article.  Our current climate is a near perfect imagining of "liberal fascism" where for the good of all of us, an enlightened few who know what is true,  must use all means at their disposal to enforce proper thinking in order to "save the planet", redress inequality, undo racism, colonialism, sexism, and any other -ism that captures their fancy.  AGW has been declared beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry for quite some time and the international consensus, that the West must pay for their assaults on the planet (while simultaneously enriching elites, impoverishing the most vulnerable, and beggaring the Western Middle Classes) is unassailable.  Rational discourse and true science, ie gathering data, testing hypotheses, and allowing conclusions to arise from the weight of the evidence, our wonderful and rich inheritance from the enlightenment, is an impediment to all that is good and must be jettisoned.

So, an appreciation for Thomas Friedman, who puts the conventional into conventional wisdom.

Societal Regression Watch

From Terror and Societal Regression:

After a national trauma, there are a number of signs of "large group" regression.  (I will not here go into some of the characteristics of what constitutes a large group; it relates to elements that I have referred to in the past as our tribal nature; see also here.)  The panel chair, Vamik Volkan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, described 14 major symptoms of large-group regression:

...

9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization....Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this phenomenon in his reactivation of the shared memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serbian hero, Prince Lazar, was killed. [Emphasis added-SW]

There has been a great deal already written about the difficult to understand decision of the Obama administration to bring Khalid Sheik Mohamed to New York for trial within eyesight of the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.  Andy McCarthy has made the point that by bringing KSM to trial in a criminal proceeding, the Obama administration can effectively put the Bush administration on trial without taking respoonsibility for their behavior.  The Bush administration's dirty laundry (renditions, secret prisons, enhanced interrogations) can be put on trial, names can be leaked via discovery, and a host of untoward events can cause great pleasure to the left and great distress to those who were involved in protecting us for the last 8 years. 

James Taranto, quoted by Glenn Reynolds notes:

“You have to wonder if the Obama administration and its supporters bothered to think through the implications of their decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohamed and four other enemy combatants as civilians. An immediate effect, and one that will only be strengthened by an actual trial or trials, is to bring 9/11 back into the public consciousness. That can’t be good for President Obama. . . . When appellate courts decide questions of law, they set precedents for future cases. If they make allowances for the exigencies of the war on terror in order to uphold convictions of KSM and his associates, it could end up diminishing the rights of ordinary criminal defendants. That’s why the smart civil-libertarian position is to oppose trying terrorists as civilians.”

It would not be unusual for the unintended consequences to far outweigh the intended.  If the administration believes this will simply be a showcase for the wonders of our legal system and that the political effects will be helpful to them or at least minimally harmful, they may end up surprised.

However, whatever the conscious motivations of Obama and Holder, et al, the unconscious ramifications may be even more powerful, more long lasting, and deeper. 

John Opie pointedly notes the juxtaposition of trial and empty space:  [Emphasis mine-SW]

WTC as Metaphor...

I've commented on the absurd situation surrounding the rebuilding of the WTC before.

And yes, it was a comment to a post by Bret Stephens at the WSJ.

He's remindedonce again that there has been, functionally, no progress there, and that indeed there are multiple ways of viewing the WTC at this point in time.

It's where what effectively amounts to a show trial is now scheduled to be turned into a media circus.

It's where literally thousands of people are waiting for closure and rebirth.

It's also where petty scrabbling and pathetically disgusting incompetence has led to no reconstruction.

... what I really want to talk about here is the WTC as metaphor: a metaphor for how screwed up things really are.

After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we've got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence—of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.

....

Think of it this way: as long as the WTC is not rebuilt, things will not get better. There is a malaise here, a sickness unto the heart, the ritual self-loathing of what once was the great liberal tradition in the United States, poisoned by greed and corruption from within and deliberately targeted for subversion from outside.

Rebuild the WTC. Rebuild it now.

The empty hole where the WTC used to stand is a symbol of American impotence.  9/11 was traumatic not just because of the terrible personal losses of those who lost loved ones that day.  What makes a loss traumatic is the helpless rage evoked by the victimization.  America was rendered helpless on that terrible day and all who watched the planes fly repeatedly into the twin towers and saw those poor doomed souls falling to their deaths, who watched those towers come down, felt the helplessness deep in their emotional cores.  When George W. Bush, in his finest moment, stood on top of the pile of rubble and announced we were coming, it was a necessary turn from mourning to action, psychologically necessary even if the action taken was poorly executed. 

We have now returned to a pre-9/11 passivity in our National Defense.  (I am not here discussing any actual details of how our defensive posture may have changed or whether or not our military is carrying the fight to our enemies but of the atmospherics, the zeitgeist, which is much more significant at the moment.)  By returning KSM to the scene of the crime (rather than dealing with him in a military tribunal that would mete out justice, an active position, versus the enforced passivity of the legal forum) the Obama administration is reawakening the trauma.  When the vast majority of people are opposed to treating KSM with the kids gloves required in our legal system and their wishes are ignored, the sense of powerlessness returns.  Just as the abused child is secondarily traumatized by the parents refusal to listen, those who were traumatized by 9/11 can be re-traumatized by our "parents" refusal to listen.  But where a traumatized child is forced to remain passive, the once traumatized American people may well not remain passive.  The Tea party movement is an expression of the adaptive defense of turning passive into active.  The movement can only grow with each new insult.

Obama and those who share his pre-9/11 mindset (of a wishful fantasy world) would continue to reinforce the trauma and maintain us as a humiliated, helplessly people.  They have unconsciously "chosen the trauma" and moved well down the pathway to a regressed state.  There is a connection between the still vacant hole in the ground and a President who appears to be constitutionally incapable of exercising leadership and taking action.  (Impotence is not a problem in the Academy or the Senate but in the Executive it is disastrous.)  We are facing a genuine test of whether our society will continue to regress or if the people, that amorphous mass who define the zeitgeist in America, can refuse to allow the pervasive state of helplessness and trauma to persist.

Addendum: David Brooks, who is paid to have a sense of the zeitgeist, is in tune with my post today; note the tone of resignation and near despair as he compares our sense of the future and China's sense of its future:

The Nation of Futurity

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.

The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.

It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter’s essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.

As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon.

Evaluating Obama's Foreign Policies

President Obama's "kinder and gentler" foreign policies have been roundly assailed by foreign policy hawks and increasingly questioned by those most predisposed to favor his exertions.  This past weekend David Broder, dean of the Washington liberal press corps, used the "d" word (dithering) in regards to Obama's lack of action on Afghanistan.  At times it appears to be most salient to think of Obama's foreign policies as reflecting his longstanding disinclination to make difficult decisions, a hallmark of his tenure in the Illinois House and the US Senate, where his most frequent vote was "present."  Most commentators decry Obama's approach and suggest that we are all in greater danger because of his characteristic style of (non)managing crises.  Ralph Peters is a representative of this point of view:

Bam's Muslim-world muddle

Half a year ago in Cairo, President Obama addressed the Muslim world. Global leftists lauded the speech as heralding instant change in the Middle East.

The Obama-adoring pundits were right. Change came. But it's all bad.

Instead of listening to the extravagant claims of our leftward-plunging media about how profoundly that speech affected Muslims, let's look at what's actually happened since Obama praised Islam and trashed America:

Peters has good arguments that Obama's approaches to the Muslim world have increased tension and conflict from Yemen to Iraq.  He suggests that the Muslim world's response to Obama also must be thought of as including Texas, a complicated line of connected dots but defensible.  However, nothing in Peters's exegesis is definitive.  For example, it is quite likely that there would be no movement forward for Israel and the Palestinians, no matter what Obama did; progress cannot come until the protagonists are ready, and not a moment sooner.  Further, Afghanistan was faring poorly under the Bush administration's policies, there was never any guarantee of Iraq remaining stable, and Iran was well on its way to destabilizing the neighborhood and obtaining a bomb even with President Bush manning our foreign policy rudder.  Finally, Pakistan was a meta-stable construct before Obama and remains the same now. 

As an alternative, Tom Barnett, despite his concerns that Obama's protectionism could undermine the entire globalization enterprise, suggests repeatedly that Obama understands the importance of co-opting other great and near great powers into buying into the construction and maintenance of the global order.  He often blogs on signs that countries like China and Brazil are becoming more mature powers and doing their part to enhance and support globalization.  Although his arguments tend to be thinly supported (beyond his assurances that larger forces will be determinative, demographics, debt, economic prowess, etc) nonetheless his past record suggests that his ideas are worth careful consideration. 

So, given that I disagree with Obama's approach, what would be a fair metric or metrics by which to measure the success or failure of his policies?

Post-9/11, the greatest worry was that al Qaeda would someday come into possession of a nuclear weapon and we would lose a city.  President Bush and Vice-President Cheney were quite proud of their record in not allowing any further terrorist attacks.  (Some of this was verbal legerdemain, since the Beltway shooter claimed to be motivated by Islam, just as Major Hasan has claimed, and in both cases it has been in the administration's interest to deny the atrocities were terrorism.)  This much is incontrovertible: It is clear that President Bush, and thus far, President Obama, have not presided over a major terrorist attack on the order of 9/11 since that unhappy day.

And this is where the arguments become speculative and uncertain.  There are several potential disasters germinating in the world that could well derail globalization, prolonging the current quasi-depression indefinitely and leading to an upsurge in wars and terror.  The most important metric by which to measure Obama's success or failure would be in how many of these disasters come about.

This is not an exhaustive list:

1) Iran gains a nuclear capability and uses its new abilities to foment instability and unrest, spread its influence and threaten its neighbors.  For a description of the possibilities, consider Armageddon Time.

2) In response to developments regarding Iran's approach to the bomb, Israel, considering itself to face an existential threat (despite the reassurances of the Obama administration that Iran is amenable to containment via MAD) attacks Iran, leading to a widening war in the Middle East as Iran's proxies and allies attack Iran's enemies.  To paraphrase Tom Lehrer's discussion of Werner van Braun, "Once the rockets are up, who knows where they'll come down"*; escalation at that point would be extremely likely and outcomes extremely unpredictable.

[The idea that MAD worked is plausible, yet we must always keep in mind that MAD came  close to catastrophic failure on several occasions.  The margin of error for MAD is extremely thin and countries that already threaten first use of nuclear weapons are less likely to survive MAD than those who eschew such options.  See 7 Close Calls in the Nuclear Age and the saga of Stanislav Petrov for the close calls we know about.]

3) In our haste to exit Af-Pak, we release the pressure, the Pakistanis back off from their attacks on the Taliban, and Pakistan spirals into chaos, eventually leading to an Islamist takeover, which draws the attention of its neighbor, India, which has its own memories of Mumbai to motivate it. 

In one sense the clearest metric to score Obama's stewardship would be the increase or decrease in armed conflict around the Middle East (and the world.) 

A second metric would be a measure of the retreat of globalization and the attendant damage to our economic recovery attendant on a major upsurge in terror or a large scale, successful terror attack.

The third and most significant metric would be the loss of a city to a nuclear explosion.  Please note that this could be the result of terror or state on state violence.  If a nuclear weapon is used in the next 3 years, President Obama will have become the greatest failure in the history of the American Presidency. 

Here then are my three metrics for evaluating President Obama's foreign policy.  If his instincts are correct, the world will be a safer and calmer place when he leaves office than it was when he entered.

Finally, history is full of unexpected and unanticipated events.  To a large extent 9/11 was unanticipated by the vast majority of people; another 9/11 type event would not be a surprise since we have been warned.  Unknown unknowns remain among the most dangerous possibilities and were one to occur, we would then have an additional metric by which to measure Obama's performance.

*Once the rockets are up,

Who cares vere ze come down,

That's not my department.

Says Werner van Braun.

Islamist Terror and Psychosis

Since the terror attack at Fort Hood there has been a great deal of teeth gnashing and brow furrowing in the media and among military and government officials trying to make sense of what the President, in his speech, deemed incomprehensible.  When a person commits an incomprehensible act it is commonplace to wonder if he were psychotic, ie out of touch with reality.  NPR asks the question explicitly:

Walter Reed Officials Asked: Was Hasan Psychotic?

Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?

"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."

...

Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul."

...

But psychiatrists and officials who are familiar with the conversations, which continued into the spring of 2009, say they took a remarkable turn: Is it possible, some mused, that Hasan was mentally unstable and unfit to be an Army psychiatrist?

...

One official involved in the conversations had reportedly told colleagues that he worried that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide, like the Muslim U.S. Army sergeant who, in 2003, killed two fellow soldiers and injured 14 others by setting off grenades at a base in Kuwait.

I quoted liberally from the NPR article because it suggests some of the terrible difficulties we have in comprehending what is in reality not incomprehensible, and the ways in which our mental set, weltanschauung, inhibits our ability to understand and deal with Jihadi behavior.

The usual definition of psychosis is "a mental disorder characterized by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, that indicate impaired contact with reality."  Since there is thus far no evidence that Hasan suffered from hallucinations (hearing voices), his psychosis would need to depend upon the existence of delusions, defined as "Psychiatry. a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion."

There is an obvious limitation with this definition of delusion.  After all, to a non-believer, most religious dogma and mythology would be considered delusional.  what must be added to the definition is that the "fixed, false belief" be idiosyncratic; in other words, the particular belief is not part of a shared system of thought.  As an example, if a single person in 1985 became convinced that human activity was warming the earth irreversibly and would lead to the destruction of the biosphere (in the absence of any scientific data) we would have had no trouble considering him to be out of touch with reality, as understood at the time.  Today we might dispute the scientific data, remain convinced that most people who support AGW do not have a scientific grasp of the data, and that proposing to destroy our economy to "save the planet" is pernicious nonsense; however, it is clear that enough people share the belief system that it does not represent a delusion.  A person who believed in AGW because G-d told him the planet would be destroyed because of man's sins would be psychotic; a person who believed in AGW because AL Gore told him the planet would be destroyed because of man's sins would not be psychotic.  (Please don't take this as another argument about AGW; that has been discussed innumerable times here and elsewhere; eventually, the data will be determinative.)

The problem for all of those wondering about Major Hasan is that they are restricted by their own frame.  In a vacuum, an American who believes that the United States is waging war on Islam, that the West, especially the Jews and Americans, conspire to keep the Muslim world in despair, and that murdering unarmed American soldiers is an assured way to gain entrance to Paradise as a Jihad martyr, would be considered to have lost contact with reality.  Unfortunately for a Muslim int he Ummah these "delusional" ideas are shared by a significant portion of their coreligionists.  If major Hasan is delusional and psychotic then so are members and supporters of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Wahhabi and Deobandi Islam, and a host of other sects and groups.  The only way Major Hasan could be considered mentally disordered based on his belief structure would be were there to be an idiosyncratic component.  For example, if he were to believe that he is the embodiment of Mohammed, we would be correct to think of him as psychotically deluded, just as we characterize the multitude of psychotic patients through the ages who were convinced they were Jesus Christ.

The conundrum for all the sages in the media and our government remains how to determine that Major Hasan was a lone psycho rather than a Jihadi.  We may well be treated to an interesting juxtaposition as Khaled Sheik Mohamed, during his trial, espouses the same motivating "delusions" as major Hasan at his trial.  The reporting in the MSM should be fascinating.

Liberal Assumptions

Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the midst of a reasonable post suggesting there are multiple pathways we might take to improve our healthcare system and taking issue with a letter insisting Jews should support the current healthcare plan in the Congress and attack Senator Joe Lieberman for his opposition,  tossed off an aside that requires some remonstrance:

I don't agree with Lieberman at all -- I would like to see the profit motive completely removed from health care in this country -- but I don't think Lieberman is betraying his religion by taking the position he takes.   

This morning, Jefferey Goldberg posted a response from a reader taking issue with his wish:

Removing the Profit Motive from Health Care

(sic) spent years publicizing the work of brilliant scientists and physicians at two Ivy League medical centers. They are incentivized both by an altruistic desire to eradicate disease and by the prospect of seeing some financial reward for their labors, even when it is postponed for years while they toil in their laboratories, working for subsistence wages, until, with luck, they have a breakthrough or discovery. When a new drug, or treatment, or scientific technique does come to market, it's also a great boon for the university where the work is likely to have taken place, when they start to see an income stream from licensing their patent.  Take a look at any university with a large scientific research enterprise, and then look at their budget.  It's likely they are reaping significant revenue from intellectual property.  So it's a pillar of our educational establishment. These discoveries don't come out of a vacuum; scientists are just like anyone else, with families to support and expenses to be paid.

The letter writer adds that Doctors also have an interest in supporting their families and paying their bills.  Once upon a time, when in college, I was a confirmed liberal/leftist and accepted without question that the profit motive was immoral and unethical.  The finest organizations were non-profits run by altruistic people who lived on a pittance, supported primarily by the warm feeling engendered by helping those less fortunate and by the approval of all right-minded people.  It was axiomatic that liberals were good (better) people and that those who worked at places like NPR eschewed the profit motive as beneath them. (Imagine my shock and surprise to learn several years ago that so many NPR "talents" made incomes well into the high 6 figures.) Corporations were evil in direct proportion to their profitability.  It is easy to be a liberal when you are not supporting yourself, paying your own taxes and bills, and enjoying all the comforts that our society has to offer.

With entry into adulthood, things change.  First of all, "non-profit" is a meaningless term.  Any viable organization (except the government, of course, which can simply print money ... for a time) needs to bring in as much money as it spends or it will soon fail to be a functional entity.  Everything in excess of expenses therefore is profit.  Non-profits convince the gullible that they are not motivated by profits, by which they mean some surfeit of profit above what they deem reasonable.  They do this by offering their services for less than their competitors.  They manage this neat trick by either getting (evil) corporations and/or wealthy individuals (no longer evil capitalists once they donate money to liberal causes) to subsidize their services or getting the government (ie, the taxpayers who pay a percentage of their profit for the privilege of living in this country)  to subsidize their services.  Others who engage in non-profit activities are able to do so because they were lucky enough to have wealthy parents, or have found a wealthy spouse, who enable them to offer their services at below market rates while subsidizing the life style to which they have become accustomed.

There are only a limited number of ways to see the "profit motive completely removed from health care in this country"or any human activity, for that matter.  We could expect, or compel, all the scientists and healthcare professionals in this country to donate some fraction of their income to others by essentially working for below market wages.  Doctors and researchers who currently spend 50-70 hours a week on research and/or patient care would then donate their time, energy, and services for compensation deemed fair by those who would adjudicate what profit actually means in this setting.  (Should a Neurosurgeon clear $100,000 after expenses?  $200,000? $500,000? More? Should the developer of a new drug that saves 50,000 lives a year be compensated with $100,000?  $200,000? $500,000? More?)

People like Jeffery Goldberg misunderstand a fundamental about how the world operates when they dream of a world without a profit motive.  Please note, I am a great admirer of Jeffrey Goldberg's writing.  Though I often disagree with his point of view, I thoroughly enjoy his writing, which often is very incisive and well reasonsed.  He is entitled to Imagine a world where healthcare is offered without any desire for profit, yet he does not apply the same desire to himself and his field of endeavor.  He often exhorts his readers to purchase a subscription to the Atlantic.  Presumably if more people pay to read the magazine he writes for, he will be able to have a more assured income and gain a raise in his compensation.  At what point does his compensation become excessive?  Who should determine what constitutes profit and how much profit is acceptable?

It is unseemly to be greedy.  It is also, for many liberals, a difficult to digest fact that some people are endowed with greater abilities than others and that society, via the market, rewards some people, occasionally exorbitantly (and who wants to define exorbitantly?)  while rewarding others far less than they feel they deserve.  Yet, up until this time, there is no better way to discover value than through markets.  And the reason markets function is that people want to, in fact need to, earn a profit.  Profit, ultimately, is simply any excess over subsistence.  Without a profit motive we would still be living in caves, in a more egalitarian Hobbesian world where we would have no worries about healthcare profits.

Veteran's Day

Thank you to all our Veterans, without whom our Freedoms would not exist.

I want to especially thank my Father, who served in WWII and the Korean Conflict (USAF), my Oldest Son, a USAF Veteran, now in the Ga. Air National Guard, continuing to work on ways to protect our Nation and its people, and to my Middle Son, a future Veteran currently in the USN.

If you value your Freedom, thank a Veteran today.

If you want to help concretely, visit Soldier's Angels and donate your money and/or your time.