Cheering for laundry

I was watching a Reds-Astros game last night, and the announcers kept reminding us of the Astros winning streak at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati. It was at eleven games, going all the way back to 2007.

They also talk about how Houston’s Roy Oswalt is 23-1 lifetime against the Reds. But it doesn’t make any sense. The Reds in 2007 were a completely different bunch of guys, and Oswalt’s record goes back to a time when every single player, owner, manager and coach was different. It’s an outlying stat, nothing more.

Which reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld’s words:

Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city, you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it. You know what I mean, you are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt, they *hate* him now. Boo! Different shirt!! Boo.

I think he said somewhere else that we are in essence cheering for laundry.

Free Markets at Work

Wilson is a city in North Carolina of about 48,000 people. Its residents were fed up with Embarg, a Time Warner company, and the poor service it was providing for internet, TV, and wireless phone signals. They decided to do for themselves what Embarg would not do for them – provide low cost high-speed wireless services.

Brian Bowman, the city’s Public Affairs Manager: “I have a 10Mbps up/down connection at my house. Can’t get half that from the cable company. I buy it directly from the City of Wilson. After less than a year of residential service, almost 3,000 Wilson citizens are subscribing to Wilson’s fiber optic network. Local businesses can get up to one Gbps.”

Here’s Embarg’s reaction:

Embarg: “We would love to deploy DSL everywhere. We try to make smart financial decisions not only for shareholders but customers. In the very rural areas, sometimes it would take two, three or more years to even pay for the investment.”

This is odd – two or three years to pay for an investment is not outlandish. But Embarg is up against it, in that Wilson can quite easily do for itself what Embarg will not do. It’s not new technology, not rocket science. It’s something any community in the country can and should do. But right wing economics demands that if a private concern cannot make money providing a public utility, the public has to suffer.

So, Embarg and Time Warner did what any free-market loving company would do – the went to the state legislature to shut down Wilson’s city-provided services.

Rather than admit defeat to the pesky local service and go quietly, Time Warner Inc. and Embarq decided to take the fight to the state government, lobbying for several years to get the state government to pass laws to try to destroy the local effort. And sure enough, thanks to a lot of hard work (and money), the cable companies are close to getting their wish — North Carolina’s State Senate have proposed bills to not only effectively crippling or banning the local service, but also to prevent such services from getting funds under the broadband portion of the national Stimulus law.

Says Bowman:

“If the cable/phone companies really want a level playing field, they’d open their books just like we do in the spirit of open meetings and open records law. They don’t want a level playing field. They want to be the only team on the field.”

This is not untypical right wing thinking – private companies know all about free markets, and don’t much like them. They use their money and influence to 1) get regulations protecting themselves from competition; 2) prevent regulations that affect them negatively, and 3) buy access to the commons.

It should come as no surprised that Wilson could provide itself with better service than Embarg, and at a lower price. The rest of the world is years ahead of the American telecommunications industry in providing high speed wireless services. Our companies are too busy in a turf war to think much about customers.

Max and Health Care Reform

I have posted these before, but it is worth repeating. They are taken from a magazine called Covert Action Quarterly, Summer of 1997 issue:

Washington Rules — the unspoken handbook of rules for survival in the capital city:
1. If it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth fighting dirty for.
2. Don’t lie, cheat or steal unnecessarily.
3. There’s always one more son of a bitch than you counted on.
4. An honest answer could get you in a whole lot of trouble.
5. The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
6. Chicken Little only has to be right once.
7. “No” is only an interim response
8. You can’t kill a bad idea.
9. If at first you don’t succeed, kill all the evidence that you ever tried.
10. The truth is variable.
11. A porcupine with his quills down is just another fat rodent.
12. You can agree with any concept or notional future option in principle, but fight implementation every step of the way.
13. A promise is not a guarantee.
14. If you can’t counter the argument, leave the meeting.

I am thinking in particular of #12, the one about notional future options. That is what is going on right now with Democrats health care reform and reconciliation.

Reconciliation is a senate procedure that allows a bill to be treated as a budget item and be voted up or down by a simple majority, rather than having 60 votes. Reagan used it frequently – it is how he passed his tax cuts. Republicans used it freely when in charge, and threatened it when Democrats were about to grow a pair in regard to judicial nominees. (They called using it the “nuclear option”.)

A budget bill that passed both houses has come out of conference between House and Senate that allows health care reform to be treated as a reconciliation item. Listen now to the Democrats squirm – this is from The Hill:

Some senior Democrats have said throughout the budget-making process that they did not want reconciliation included in the final product. Indeed, the Senate version of the budget left it out, largely because of Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad’s (D-N.D.) strong feelings against it.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT):“Sen. Baucus and Sen. Kennedy — and I agree with them — think that we have no desire to actually use reconciliation whatsoever.”

Sen. Harry Reid, Majority Leader (D-NV): Sent a message to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a letter Monday. “Make no mistake — we are determined to reform health care this year. Our strong preference is to do so by working alongside you and your caucus,” he wrote.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI): says the public will side with those trying to reform the health care system and is not interested in partisan fights or procedural maneuvering.

And, of course, Max Baucus (D-MT) “If we jam something down somebody’s throat, it’s not sustainable. I want something sustainable that’s going to last.”

Memo to Stabenow: “partisan fights” is why you were elected. You are expected to take one side or the other and “fight” for your cause. Check it out – Republicans do it all the time. (See #11 above – the one about “porcupines with quills down”.)

Memo to Baucus: Last I looked, the Reagan tax cuts are mostly still in place. Seems that legislation that passes, even if only by 51 votes, has some staying power.

So what’s going on here? Obfuscation, plain and simple. They can craft a good bill, and have the power to pass it with 51 votes, and they might be able to muster those votes if Harry Reid wants the bill passed (not a given). Why are they insistent on reaching out to people who don’t want reform? Check the Washington Rules above – esp. #12.

Matt Singer at Left in the West praises Baucus for having reconciliation as a backstop should negotiations fail. However, he joins the obfuscation, if only a little:

Next came the question of whether the reconciliation process would be kept on the table and it has been.

There’s a problem with that – the Senate did not want reconciliation and did not include it in their budget bill. It is there because the House insisted. The Senate now, as one can easily gather from the citations above, does not like reconciliation, does not want to use reconciliation. They want Republicans to sign on to the final product. There is only one way to make that happen, as Republicans usually stick to their guns: Compromise.

In the end, that is what Baucus is after. He can’t kill health care reform, but he can sell it out to the insurance industry or water it down so much that it is worthless. I suspect the former – if he cuts the insurance people in on the bargain, we will add yet another layer of costs and one more subsidy to our already-overburdened health care system.

Montana Democrats are holding their breath, hoping that Max does the right thing. He probably won’t, and there’s a lesson there if they care to learn it: Unless you can hurt him somehow, he won’t help you.

Texas secession … please! Stop tantalizing us!

Here’s a website that answers all of the pertinent questions for Texans regarding secession. Do they have the right? Absolutely, they say.

It’s a complicated legal question – the constitution is silent on the matter. All we have are Lincoln’s actions and a Supreme Court case saying “no way”.

Lincoln believed that if the South were allowed to secede, it wouldn’t be long before others followed, before the South itself would fracture again. He thought it inevitable that our continent would be mired in regional wars. In his own words, he said “I must fight this war to prevent Balkanization of the Republic.”

OK. I made that up. He didn’t say that.

In theory, there is a right to secede, even though the Supreme Court (Texas v White) says otherwise. After all, joining the union was voluntary, leaving ought to be so as well.

But secession usually results in bloody war – check out the Balkans, Tibet, and East Timor. Russia’s campaign against Chechnya is bloody, as was our own Civil War. Countries don’t like losing territory, and don’t give it up without bloodshed. (Never mind the odd case of the USSR.)

The Republic of Texas was formed in 1836 in a similar war of secession from Mexico. Though history textbooks don’t say as much (textbooks are more about political correctness than history), Texas broke with Mexico over slavery. Mexico officially outlawed the practice in 1829, but the settlers who had crossed the Mississippi to settle there wanted to keep their chattel. Texas, after achieving independence, immediately reinstated slavery.

Who knows – maybe if they break again, they’ll reinstate the practice once more.

This I know: If Texas leaves the Union, we will have on our southern border an independent country with unstable leadership sitting atop large (though largely depleted) oil fields. I predict “Operation Texas Freedom”, another humanitarian intervention. We never stop caring.

The Magic Bullet

Arlen Specter has switched parties, and is now a Democrat. He was one of two or three remaining moderate Republicans. Since the Democratic Party has a whole wing full of moderate to rightist Republicans, he’s in good company.

I wondered for years about Specter – he’s the man who originated the “Magic Bullet” theory in the JFK assassination. It’s plainly ludicrous, but since it’s official truth, it’s probably in all the kids’ history books now, and Lee Harvey Oswald will officially be the assassin forevermore.

Lately I came to understand the nature and need for a cover-up of the true events of 11/22/63, and realized that Specter was operating on a higher plane than I ever gave him credit for. So no more mystery.

The switch is politically motivated, and hardly philosophical. And liberals are a far cry from holding any kind of majority in the senate, so sixty or 59 votes means nothing. It’s mostly a move designed to save the career of an aging senator, a good and smart man who will probably die in office.

Dog and Pony Shows

Will criminals in the Bush Administration be punished? The idea is ludicrous. Some time during the Obama Administration it will be revealed that everything Bush did was carried forward by the scholar president, including torture.

The U.S. tortures people. Has for decades. CIA has studied the art, made it into a science. They have trained others in its practice, right under our noses.

The debate about protecting ourselves, getting “actionable intelligence” is a diversion. Torture is about breaking people, and not about gathering information. Only very strong and patriotic people continue to resist prolonged bombing and torture campaigns. The Vietnamese people showed amazing courage. Their example came to be called the “Vietnam Syndrome” – we could not break their spirit and will to resist – our will was broken! George H.W. Bush took credit for “kicking” the Vietnam Syndrome, his greatest accomplishment as president. He put us back in the game again.

The Iraqis appear to be buckling, though I mean them no disrespect. They put up fierce resistance for several years. It’s hard to know what the Afghanis will do, but they seem resilient. Their lives are already brutal and short, so deprivation won’t much affect them. It could be long and bloody. And torturous, for them.

U.S. foreign policy is hard-wired, and is largely unaffected by elections. The public is ignorant and fickle, and leaders do not look to us for guidance. They manipulate us, divert our attention but do not care what we might think about things.

So it is safe to say that torture has not ended. It has only gone underground again.

Postdiction

I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have tried to make accurate predictions about the physical world using religious documents they have been famously wrong. By a prediction, I mean a precise statement about the untested behavior of objects or phenomena in the natural world logged before the event takes place. When your model predicts something only after it has happened, then you have made a “postdiction”. … In the business of science, however, a hundred posdictions are hardly worth a single successful prediction. Neil deGrasse Tyson

I have pretty much come to terms with religion and religious belief, and coexist with it without much friction anymore. Our local paper has a running battle in the letters section about intelligent design versus evolution. The the ID people are borrowing more and more jargon from science to shroud their silly beliefs with the cloak of serious research. Before I ran across the term “postdiction”, I thought of it as reverse engineering, like Microsoft did with Apple software – to take the finished product and work backward to reinvent it. ID people are not engaged in science but rather validation. They look diligently for any evidence that gives weight to their preexisting beliefs, ignoring everything else.

I once worked with a man (an engineer – why is that profession so littered with loonies?) who had gone off the deep end into Christianity. I asked him one day how he, a serious professional, could believe things that had so little grounding in evidence. “Evidence?” he said? He had seen the prophecies of the Old Testament fulfilled in the New. What more did he need?

I suggested that those men who wrote the New knew about the Old, and did some reverse engineering. It did not penetrate.

As I travel the blogs and litter it with snarky comments, I realize that we are all involved in postdiction to varying degrees. All of us have come to adopt philosophies of life and politics, from Budge’s libertarian outlook to Wulfgar’s Logic 101 to my own leftist rantings. We get sloppy (“I” get sloppy I should say), and habitually seek out validation of our beliefs. There’s this feeling I get – it happens when I see some personal failing on display or some belief seriously challenged. It’s painful and centered in the gut. It tells me that I might be detached from reality and hiding in a shell. I tell my kids that they must do the things that scare them to be successful. For myself, I need to follow that pain to its source. It’s hard work, I often find other things to do.

I like conservatism – I think it is the best possible container for a political philosophy. There is less leakage there than with liberalism, which demands that people be what they are not. But too often conservatism is predictable Ayn Randish counter-reality counterintuitive blather. People who call themselves conservatives usually don’t respect the wisdom of the past nor believe in gradual change. They are, as Paul Krugman says, more like revolutionaries, wild and careless and dangerous. They are oblivious to all the damage they have done. Anytime I hear someone talk about letting the “market work”, I immediately assume that person to be somehow exempt from the market. Professor Rob Natelson is the perfect example, sitting in his academic tower. He will never experience being fired. His medical needs will be attended to, now till death. He loves markets from a distance. Horny post-teenage boys have done some similar idealizing with Jennifer Aniston. But real live men who experience her first-hand grow tired of her very quickly.

If only the people who carried the conservative philosophy were more credible. The current right wing is a mixture of loony bats like the diagnosable Glenn Beck, drug-addled Rush Limbaugh, and bitch-personified Ann Coulter. Lately, with teabagging and secession, they are like a host of frantic rooftop Chicken Little’s. This because the American people saw fit to elect a center-right conservative (masquerading as a liberal) to high office. They are nuts, these “conservatives”, and their predictions about the fate of this country have no more credibility than those who tell us that the world will end on December 21, 2012.

Back to postdiction and prediction: Here’s a prediction from Tyson that scares me to death. He says that astrophysicists are in agreement now that our universe will continue to expand, never retracting. Expansion means cooling, so that eventually it will reach that point called “absolute zero”, or −273.15° Celsius. At that temperature, there is no molecular movement. Time will end.

I find that concept completely unsatisfying. I can see why people are drawn to religion.

A Game

The object of this game is simple – creative writing. Just let it flow. Come up with the most disjointed logic you can to get to a totally offbeat song that you really want to hear anyway, and do it by writing a special request to Kasey Kasem.

I’ll go first:

Dear Kasey, Last week I was playing ‘go fetch’ with my dog Sinbad. We play in the street here in front of our house in Millard, Arkansas. Sinbad is an Irish Terrier, and I got him for my tenth birthday. He’s ten now, and I’m twenty.

Sinbad enjoys running after the stick – in fact, he’ll do anything to get that stick. He’ll run in front of a truck or go down a sewer drain. One time he even went through the open window of a passing car. Boy was that scary. The driver stopped and threw Sinbad out and then said some very bad words before driving on.

Yesterday we were playing fetch. I had a new stick, maple. It had just come in the mail. Sinbad was anxious, like something was wrong. I threw the stick, but he didn’t run after it. I went and got it myself, and threw it again, and he still didn’t go after it. I thought something was wrong. I looked into his mouth, checked his paws. Nothing. I sniffed around his rear end. Nothing unusual. Then I heard it. Next door at the Hamilton’s, there was a loud pop.

Sinbad barked and went running off, and I followed. He went to the front door of Mrs. Hamilton’s house and barked some more. No one answered. I knocked. Nothing. I opened the door. There on the floor was Mrs. Hamilton, covered with blood. The back door was open. The garage door was too. I heard a car speeding off. Sinbad went to the body and sniffed around her face, and sure enough, Mrs. Hamilton was alive! I called 911, and the ambulance came and took her to the hospital. She’s recovering now, and is going to be all right. And we owe it all to Sinbad.

Kasey, would you play “Lady Godiva’s Operation” by the Velvet Underground? It’s for Mrs. Hamilton, who’s lying in her bed today recovering from her wounds. I think she’d really like it.

And Sinbad is fetching again, just like before. Sinbad, go fetch!

A Primer in American Health Care

It is my object here to write a short post. Here goes:

The private American health care system is dysfunctional because:

1) Insurance companies avoid people who might actually get sick. This would be the old and those with existing conditions.

2) Insurance companies avoid people who cannot pay premiums. This would be children and the poor and working poor.

3) Insurance companies are incentivized to deny claims. From their point of view, every claim paid dents the bottom line.

Doesn’t work. Can’t work.

The Silence of the Liberals

We’ve been traveling here and there this past week, and I’ve had a chance to listen to talk radio – the liberal side of the story. It’s basically Ed Schultz’s nationally syndicated show, and the comedienne Stephanie Miller, who broadcasts out of Los Angeles. At least Miller makes no claim to unusual insight. Schultz is a cruel joke – a Limbaugh-like blowhard.

They’ve talked a lot about torture. I don’t think they get it at all. Miller especially thinks that it’s important to know that torture does not result in good information. The presumption is that the people doing it are stupid or inept.

I doubt it.

As a creature of the left, I’ve been aware of torture by U.S. agencies for years – there’s nothing new going on here. Furthermore, the techniques are sophisticated and have been refined over the years. When I saw hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners standing on blocks I knew what was going on – the procedure induces psychosis. It was not done for fun or because Lindie England was being sadistic. Try it on your kids some time.

Poor Lindie had to fry – that is a standard cover-up procedure – to offer up someone down in the ranks to get the press and public to move on. This was no different than the 1960’s when Lt. William Calley was blamed for the My Lai massacre. Torture and murder of civilians was rampant in Vietnam, and My Lai, like Abu Ghraib, exposed a small bit of it. The military instantly beats a strategic retreat, offers up a villian, and closes the door. (One man who played an important part in the My Lai cover-up: Colin Powell.)

Anyway, liberals are, as usual, clueless. Torture serves a useful purpose – it breaks people’s will to resist. Iraq was to be permanently occupied, but there was a strong resistance movement in the population. The U.S. military methodically found and broke insurgents. They weren’t after information, per se. Unless young men were willing to give up their friends and comrades, they didn’t know much. It was never about “actionable intelligence”. It was directed at a larger goal. U.S. soldiers, then and right now, routinely went on Gestapo-like night raids, breaking down doors, lining families up against the wall, making mothers and children watch as fathers and young men were taken away. They were abducted and tortured. No doubt many were murdered. When those who survived returned to society, they spread their tales, and the result was just what the U.S. wanted – terror. The object of the so-called War on Terror was to create terror. It’s kind of funny, really. Orwell would admire it, no doubt.

That’s the object of torture. It is intended to terrorize people. It’s a standard device in the counterinsurgency tool box. Go back to Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Reagan Wars in Central America, and you will find the U.S. torturing people in the same manner they did in Iraq. The U.S. military even trained torturers at the old School of the Americas, since renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”.

It’s going on, right now, as we speak.

What is Obama going to do about it? Nothing. He’s no reformer – he’s magnificently weak. He’s not going to change the way we’ve done business since the end of World War II. He’s going to do what Clinton did with Iran Contra – turn his back and walk away.

This is taken from an interview with Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com. He and others have been investigating Mitchell Jessen & Associates, a Spokane company that has been working on torture and terror techniques for the government. He was asked if Obama was going to do anything about the Bush Administration’s terror activities:

No, I don’t think we’re going to see any arrests. And I think that the significance of what the Obama administration has done over the last few days or announced over the last few days has been largely missed, which is, if you look at the President’s statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, if you put those together, you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal even though they knew that it frankly wasn’t, none of those people will ever face charges. The Attorney General has announced that not only that, the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys.

And not only that, they have given this blanket immunity, if you will, in return for nothing. … Obama yesterday … was at the CIA and called these things “mistakes,” even though they were very carefully designed, and hasn’t demanded anything in return for this immunity. … it’s not like the Obama administration said, “Hey, let’s take a close look at this, and let’s have some people come forward and testify, and let’s take a close look at this program and see if the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney are really true, that we really did get some good information out of this program, it really was effective.” The Obama administration has demanded nothing and has announced … effectively that the story is over and nobody will be held to account ever.

Richard Nixon quietly let Lt. Calley go. Someday in the not-too-distant future, Lindie England will walk among us again, though under strict orders never to talk. What’s interesting to watch now is the Silence of the Liberals. Stephanie Miller was so clueless that she actually said that Obama is playing chess against checker players. She thinks he’s secretly planning to hang ‘em high. Good grief.