Came to an interesting conclusion just now...

Was reading a WaPo anti-trump piece, on Election Day, and there's a comment:

"[trump] massively overestimates his abilities so he is forever driving things into the ditch, and ends every venture with disaster but still manages to walk away as everyone else is carted off the emergency room"

Remember the book "A Spell For Chameleon" ? By Piers Anthony. One of his best.

I read that when it was new, 40 years ago. The book is about a parallel universe zone in Florida near Okeechobee where magic is a real thing. Each person there has a magic skill. Except the hero. He has nothing. The book is a classic "voyage of self-discovery" in that he DOES have a skill, but it's a passive skill, not an active skill. That passive skill is that he cannot be harmed by magic. *Something* will happen to negate or block any magical attack on him. It's not a thing he controls, it just happens. 

The quote in the comment feels like this. His actions may produce disasters, but he emerges largely unaffected by the outcome, and always claims a win.

The problem in the book was that "sticks and stones could break his bones, but magic could never hurt him". Most of the rest of folks had what could be attack magic, which was rendered useless, but everyone could use a stick.

Trump feels like that, a bit. Reagan, the "teflon president", kinda did too. Altho Reagan's disasters were not on the same scale. 

That'd lead to some weird personal assumptions--like "everything I do works out good", even when it doesn't. 

A little political humor

Stable genius:

On the left...

Stable genius?

It ain't this guy:

The Very Model

Post election blues.

It went about as I expected. I could tell at 8pm that Hillary was going to lose. Except that she didn't. But she did. (What was the final vote/point spread? About 2%, wasn't it? Just about what I called it for months ago)

What happens in Presidential elections?

The thing to understand there is that polling fails to tell the correct story. It just tells a story, probably a little closer to being the story pollsters want told.

What really happens: Look at who was elected President since WW2. What's the common thread to (nearly) all of them?

We do NOT elect "Washington insiders" to be President. Except Johnson, who was elected in 64 really as a continuation of JFK as a sympathy vote. And Nixon. And we all know how that ended. Otherwise: Truman. Eisenhower. JFK. Carter. Reagan. GHWB. Ok, GHWB was kinda insider, really got elected on being Reagan 2.0. Bill Clinton. GWB. Obama.

Really, mostly those guys are "outsiders". We don't elect "insider" presidents. So on that measurement Hillary wasn't ever going to win--she's as "insider" as it is possible to get. And sure as hell Trump is as far from being an insider as anyone could get.

Look at who the losers were. Mostly Washington insiders.

And now the Republicans are four state legislatures away from achieving absolute and permanent control of the country. That could happen in 2017, and then Obergefell will fall. Roe v Wade will fall. Etc.

Presidential Election 2016

This has certainly been the craziest election season. End of August now. Trump is possibly the worst candidate who's ever run. Hillary has some massive negatives (whether true or not). Either side should be able to slam-dunk the other, but it ain't happening.

Why?

Hillary is polling ahead, although not excessively so. Do the polls tell you much? Those involved certainly think so, but there are some spectacular failures in the not-too-distant past.

You can readily find speculation that there are a lot of R people who will secretly vote for Hillary but not say so in advance. And that there are R people who are saying now that they won't vote for Trump.

I suspect that this is wrong. I think that what's likelier is that people who have always voted R will do so again, because once they are in the voting booth, they will simply be unable to vote for her. Trump gets the same voters Romney did. All of them.

So those non-crazy Trump voters...what are they thinking?

Voting for Trump is a protest vote. Simple as that. It doesn't matter one bit about whatever his crazy statements are, that's not important...what is important is that he is so non-politician that he will really shake things up.

I know about protest voting. I voted for Ross Perot in 1992. Ross would not have been that good a President, he was a little wacko, although not like Trump. I knew that Ross wouldn't win, but I didn't like GHWB or Bill C.

(aside: recall 1991: Gulf War 1. GHWB handled that well, although you could argue that he should have rolled on to Baghdad anyway. By late 91 he had the highest approval rating a President ever had, like 93%--he could have achieved ANYTHING. And he wasted it, because he had no vision. And when he was running again the next year "I'd like to be there to handle whatever comes up" was his reason for running. Brilliant. Doofus.)

So all the questions today on the D side about "what are these Trump voters thinking?" They have misunderstood completely. It's about protest, nothing else is relevant. Need to shake up Washington really bad. Trump will certainly do that, Hillary will not.

Of course Trump's crazy supporters want all non-white people booted out of the country. Or eligible for target practice, like in "The Purge". As though that will fix anything. As though the white folks who don't have a job right now would take a suddenly vacated job being done by someone brown.

So time for the inevitable prediction: well, several of them.

Option 1: Hillary 50, Trump 48, Johnson1, Stein 1.
Option 2: Trump 50, Hillary 48, etc.
Option 3: Hillary 60, Trump 30, Johnson 5, Stein 5.

I think option one is the likeliest. I think option 3 is least likely--Trump's "floor" as it is called, is not the 28% you can read about, it's more like 46%. All those Rs who've said they won't vote for him are lying, to themselves and to everyone else.

Option 3 happens if all those who were R but say they will vote D actually do so. I find this unlikely, but if the "women who vote for Hillary because it's the first chance [only chance] they get to vote for a woman" do in fact vote for her, I think Hillary gets 52%

Remember what happened in 2008 when the first black man was a candidate. Lots of votes for him for just that reason. He didn't have the negatives.

I also think:

Warren 65, Trump 25, Johnson 5, Stein 5.

Elizabeth Warren has the positives without the negatives, and picks up the Bernie voters. She crushes Trump. But it'll never happen...she's too old for a retry in 8 years.

Politics

"What would be the prospects for any Republican seeking their party's nomination today at any level if he or she stated that they believed in evolution, that the earth is over 3 billion years old, that the Bible is not the literal word of God, and that separation of church and state is an essential part of the American way of life as envisioned by the founding fathers? Thirty years ago, none of these ideas would have been controversial for Republicans as a whole. Today, espousing any one of them would be death in the eyes of the GOP base voters."

Forget where I read that, it was a comment on a story on Daily Kos.

Why are those topics so toxic?

What is it about their "base voters" these days that makes them this way?

I couldn't possibly vote for someone who did NOT believe the above things...

The Congressional Budget Battle

and the debt ceiling...man what a psycho episode.

Made worse by the spineless president. That was not what I voted for. I would agree with a post I saw online today, where someone wrote that Obama should have acted more like LBJ would have, by saying something more like: "You want cost of gov reduced? I'll halt all the projects in your district tomorrow--that'll reduce the cost of government." Which can be done...USG can issue a stop-work order at any time, on any contract, and you as contractor cannot bill any further. The executive branch makes those kind of decisions regularly.

Which means that of course the executive branch can always turn off expenditures anywhere, at any time--so even if the President can't make the budget law, he can simply not spend all of what's allocated.

What continues to amaze me is that so many folks are complaining about how we can't raise the retirement age on Social Security--it has been clear for years that the eligible retirement age needed to go up. It really ought to be 70 *now*, rather than sometime next decade. *I* expect to have to work until I'm 70 (or die at my desk, whichever comes first). The economic downturn over the past several years I think pushed back my retirement opportunity a few years.

Recall when SS started? 1935? The retirement age was set at 65 because that was the actuarial expected lifetime for someone in America at the time. So you could retire at that point, and start getting $, until you died, which probably wasn't all that far off (not to suggest that folks couldn't live longer, IIRC both John Adams and Ben Franklin lived to be 90, more than 100 years earlier). Now, thanks to all the medical improvements, we can now expect to live well past that, the actuarial average death age is about 80 (from USG website). Which means that you are likely to be able to collect 15 years worth of payments. Or more. That really isn't sustainable.

While it sounds good to say "well, let's index the retirement age to follow the actuarial numbers", it's a near certainty that your work years past 70 aren't going to be as productive as those just before. We all are starting to slow down at that point, so 80 isn't really a feasible date. I think 70 is good, now, however, because we can all do better at living healthy lives to that point. That said, I know folks age 80 who are pretty active, but not like they were at 60.

If retirement age rises, that should let SS be stable for any foreseeable future.

Means testing is critical on this, too. If you believe what you hear, most folks will face retirement with only around $50K in savings--which means that SS is critical for them, the only thing separating them from poverty.

Of course the Republicans, for all their scare talk of Death Panels, would prefer that anyone who can't take care of themselves just die, that no "social safety net" even exist in such a way that they are taxed for any of it.

Taxes and government

It continues to amaze me how poorly so many people understand economics and government.

Where I live, as with very nearly every other state, we have budget problems. We have things that need money spent on them, and the state doesn't have the money to do so.

Services cost money. Plain and simple. We need road work. We need police. We need fire/emergency help. We want good schools. We want a working court system. These things cost money.

There are groups which advocate more government-run activities, and groups which oppose such.

I am in neither. Government should do some things, and not others. Government should do things where all citizens need exactly the same thing at all times, or as close as is feasible to provide. (By "do" here, I could mean "regulate", as well, where the actuality is performed by some other organization, like your electricity supplier).

If you want, for example, snow removal service during the winter...that costs money. That could be commercially provided, but how would that get done? I want all the roads I am likely to use to be plowed right away. And my driveway. I don't care about other people's driveways, nor do I care about roads I don't use...Except that maybe I need for others to be able to use those roads in order to make deliveries I will need access to, like the grocery store. "Stock up in advance" you might say...and that certainly works to an extent, given that where I live snow generally doesn't last too long (although it has been known for one single snowfall--a blizzard--to last a couple of weeks). But there was a time when I lived in Massachusetts, in 1994, and there was 9 (yes, nine) feet of snow that winter (two years later it was ten). That snow didn't all melt away for four months. Not really feasible for me to "stock up" (although the Pilgrims must have done so somehow). I can't get to work without plowed streets, so that blizzard here in 1996, which the county did not deal with effectively, kept me stuck at home for a week.

So I am willing to have some tax dollars go to providing this service. Lacking a county-funded provider of snow removal, I'd have to get all my neighborhood together, and we'd have to pool to hire someone, or buy the plows ourselves to fit the pickup trucks of those who live in the neighborhood. The question then is what do you do about the people who live in your neighborhood who don't want to pay for this? The government has some measure of coercion it can apply, but you do not. Do you just pile up the snow in front of their driveway? Suppose they need an ambulance?

So this is a thing that government should do, or regulate. It will work best if there's a single provider, for uniform results.

In contrast, trash collection is done differently. There are county-gov sanctioned providers of collection service, I pay the provider directly, there is competition, it's not too expensive, and I could change providers if I wished. What I can't really do is let trash pile up, if I wished to not pay for it at all, although that's mostly because I don't *want* it to pile up. I recycle a lot of stuff, but that's the same service provider there. I could take recyclables to the center, for free, and if I could keep my packaging-materials limited to paper, I could probably go without the trash service; paper I could burn, or compost to an extent. Could snow removal work the same way? Maybe...it's an expensive business to be in, you only need it a few times/year, whereas trash service is every week. I'd be willing to do some plowing of the neighborhood, and maybe bit beyond, but no way I'm plowing the highways. I think that could work, except for those folks who would want it done but not pay for it.

Government needs to do other things, too, but plenty of folks don't want to pay for those things.

So what I'd like to see...recall how we keep hearing that the "states are little experimental test areas where ideas can be tried out" ?

Let's try out the idea of zero government.

No taxes. No laws. No police. No courts. No water/sewer service (unless you dig well, septic). No electricity (except self generated). No roads except those you create yourself. No trash collection, no snow removal. No regulated businesses. What would that really look like? Who would live there?

Partly it would look a lot like "the wild west": the guy with the biggest gun and greatest willingness to do grievous harm to others will be in control. Most people would get along with each other ok, I expect, but they'd also become victims.

But it'd be an interesting experiment. Could it work?

This idea was triggered by a couple of things: one was some interviews with protesters in DC a week ago, and there was this one woman who said she wanted government out of her life completely. The guy with the mike/camera didn't pursue that far enough, but I suspect she doesn't *really* want government entirely out of her life, because she does want water, sewer, trash, snow, electricity, police, etc. She might want her taxes to be zero (who doesn't?) but she probably doesn't understand what all those taxes actually pay for. My impression is that most folks don't.

And of course going along with the "pay for it" issue, you also hear "waste, fraud and abuse". I really think that's a euphemism for "fire people", but since we can't seem to figure out who to fire, let's just fire them all.

politics 2

so Sen (R) Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, doesn't like Sonya Sotomayor, a non-white, non-rich non-male as a Supreme Court candidate.

born in Selma, Alabama, according to his wikipedia page...you'd think he'd have a better appreciation...but...

is anyone surprised? The guy's an insensitive jerk. Why is he still in office? Why did he ever GET into office?

Presidential dining

Apparently when Obama went to Ray's Hell Burger there last week he wanted some Dijon mustard on his burger. Probably been even worse if he'd wanted the foie gras on it. (I happen to like some funky mustards, and have been known to put dijon on one)

And has since caught A LOT of flack about that, at least from the standard bunch of tired old conservative/republican talking heads. You can tell that their lives are pretty feeble if this is what they need to complain about.

Of course, you can tell this is all out-of-town chatter, because whoever wrote about it couldn't manage to get the restaurant name correct. This is probably the same bunch that thought "Freedom Fries" was a good idea.

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I haven't been to Ray's HB, which is because I'm not much at my company office the past 3 years...Ray's HB is just up the road a tiny bit. Ray's The Steaks is even closer, and I have been to that, shortly after it opened; it's probably better now, I thought it a shade high-priced and under-good right at the beginning. [later: it IS better now]

Is our President read?

Just a week ago, Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, reacts to an op-ed piece by Karl Rove some days earlier that I didn't see, asserting that apparently George W Bush reads A LOT. Apparently something like 100 books per year.

That's two per week. Really? Shouldn't take an Advanced Degree to figure this out...

For comparison:

I have been a heavy reader since about 1972 or so. Prior to that I just didn't have enough access. About 1970 or so I began to have enough of my own books that I was re-reading them a lot, in addition to new ones. Mom took us to the library fairly often, as she was a heavy reader too (from having been stuck in bed for a year as a child, apparently with TB, although apparently decades later that was debunked).

Since 1972 I've read about 3000 books. I still have most of them. That's almost two per week. The shortest ones are probably 125 pages. The longest, over a thousand pages.

I read fast. Damn fast.

In 5th grade I had a nearly unique experience in school--all the 5th-graders took speed-reading. This was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968/69, not a location you connect with advanced thinking like this...I'm not aware of this happening anywhere else, really. i was only there for a year, but this was almost unimaginably valuable. (I was back there in 10th grade, and took typing, comparably valuable.)

The scoop: we learn to read by reading aloud. (Think back on your earliest years in school, and before.) So we read at the same speed we talk. On average, this is about 150 words per minute. Everyone in my class started speed-reading training at 150 words a minute. The trick to going faster, in your brain, is that you have to decouple reading and speaking. This is doable by most folks, and pretty much everyone can progress to about 300 words a minute. This is roughly one page in a novel every minute (a page in a printed book usually has about 300 words, I've counted this a number of times in the past; it varies with font-size, but 300 is a good approx). I think I remember everyone in my class being at least at 300 by the end of the school year.

(Lacking speed-reading training, you don't read faster than you talk, and I don't mean the "Evelyn Wood" noise, that isn't really speed reading, but it too requires you to decouple from your speech.)

How was this done? They had a film-strip-like machine that would move a sliding box across a line of text, L to R, then repeat with a new line of text. (There's a computer program that more or less duplicates this, called "Ace Reader"; the sliding box motion is jerky rather than smooth, I found it jarring to try to read that way.) You have to move your eyes to follow the box, so you begin to separate eye movement and subconscious vocalizing. The complete text was a story. You'd take a quiz at the end. High enough score on the quiz, and you moved ahead 25 words/min the next week. The machine's speed incremented in 25 words/minute quanta. So we only did the jumps once a week. At the beginning of the training everyone is at 150. Next week, some still are, some have moved on. By the end of the school year, the spread has increased, and there are kids at most speeds. Nearly everyone has moved beyond 150. I am in the fastest group, at 625, along with 2 or 3 others. Yes--I read 4X faster than I did before.

Damn fast. I still read pretty fast now, but it's variable, depending on the content. A technical manual is a slow read; Janet Evanovich is fast, maybe even faster than 600...

Which means that most novels unfold for me at the pace of a theatrical movie. AND, it means that reading 100 in a year isn't that hard or unlikely. Altho these days I'm busy enough with other things that I don't read that many. Suppose you read one page/min. Suppose the average book is 300 pages, so Bush reads 600 pp/week. Roughly 100 per day, or 100 minutes per day. Does he actually have that kind of time?

But apparently in this Karl Rove article they've been keeping a list of them (which sounds a bit artificial to being with). I haven't seen the list, apparently Cohen has. Apparently the list content has its own interesting features, but that's his discussion. My blog entry argues against his even having done the reading, regardless of what it was.

I don't even have a list of what books I've *bought* in the last year, much less read.

But wait...what did Rove mean by "read"? Did Bush read every word? Or just the first paragraph in the chapters? Skim the chapters? If we assume he reads at 150, then he didn't read 600 pp/week. The President just would not have that kind of time, that's about 3 hours per day. Any more, *I* don't manage to have 3 hours/day for it (although 100 pp takes me < 1 hour).

Cohen's article is about the books themselves. Apparently they are biographies, and their thematic content is such that they would be reinforcing Bush's self-image, and offering some personal vindication for his actions as President. Are there in fact 500+ books like that so that one *could* read that many? That too strikes me as unlikely--but I can imagine it, and if there's really a list...

My conclusion: the mechanics of it indicate that Bush does not, and has not, read 100 books per year. (Of course, if he's had that same speed-reading training I have, well, maybe he did.)


(Aside: why I think this reading machine does this well: our eyes/brains are attracted to motion. Why? I think it's probably ancient racial memory--things that are moving could be predators, so we need to focus on them. There's an interesting bit of imagery/video I'm thinking of here; it begins with a still photo, mostly of non-uniform vertical lines, but when you see part of it move you are able to resolve that it is a tiger (vertical stripes) obscured by nearly-vertical vegetation leaves; no motion = no danger, motion means the tiger (danger) needs to be watched.)

great quote

it's political...from Talking Points Memo, referring to the Blagojevich issue this week.

"What could be more patriotic than to distract a presidency from its first attempts at fixing a damaged nation?"

What do you bet there will be no Republicans who come out saying it is not ok to criticize the [new] President on a wartime footing. They certainly said it about Bush--will they say it about Obama?

It's ok to criticize the President anytime. Has to be.

That said...it needs to be a valid criticism. Distractions are dangerous time-wasters. This attempt to smear Obama with some of the Blagojevich crap is just that. I'd be willing to bet that the guy doing it, apparently Mike Duncan, head of the RNC, would be unable to be so obnoxious and strident if he actually had to say the words to Obama's face.

Time for some politics

It should be clear to anyone who thought about it hard that the North Koreans really had/have no intention of actually shutting down and dismantling/destroying the Yongbyon nuclear plant. The only reason I can think of that they would agree to allow the inspectors in etc is because they had already removed everything that they cared about that was portable...i.e., nothing to see remained behind.

And therefore bringing it all back would be relatively simple, as soon as it was appropriate to do so. Which it now seems to be...

You can figure the same will be true in Iran as well. Excepting that at the moment, they are busy bragging about all their centrifuges, when the time comes that they have to allow inspections, it will probably turn out that they tell us they were lying about how many they had...but that will be a lie too.

So don't be surprised by what's going on in North Korea. It was always going to happen this way. They have no intention of not having nuclear fuel processing capability, and will lie about it every time.

Personally, I think we should have gone with the invasion route a few years ago. You don't seriously think we couldn't invade NK and pound the crap out of them, do you? Station two carrier battle groups offshore, there's plenty of space there between NK and Japan, start the air assault, drop HARM missiles on their radar installations, continuous targeting of the DMZ, Patriot batteries to protect SK (because you know that NK's #1 target is Seoul (#2 targets are in Japan), not us, as in "if you attack us we'll hit your friends"), continuous air assault on all the military installations across the country (which, in fact, isn't all that big), a few diversionary sea landings along the eastern coast (also with close air support), and of course the final ground assault across the DMZ once it and all the troops on the north side have been pounded into rubble.

i.e., no land war until physical installations have been pounded flat.

You also have to figure that NK has left a few goodies behind that are going to blow up later, so we don't want to be standing around waiting at the DMZ.

Of course, what would actually happen would be that as soon as the first CBG started to get close, NK would go all crazy and launch missiles at SK, and probably throw some of their experimental stuff at us. We'd want to begin with a number of Patriot counter-missile batteries, brought in quietly. Then the CBGs. and eventually pound Yongbyon into rubble no large than peas.

Political Thoughts

I live just outside Washington DC, so there's a daily load of politics inundating you.

I used to think that "gridlock" in Congress was a bad thing, but after 12 years of Republican control, I now believe that one party should not have control of both halves of Congress AND the Presidency. Gridlock is not so bad.

I generally vote anti-incumbent. Throw the bums out! Term limits are good--no one should have that job for too long, it's clear that most congress[wo]men are out of touch.

You gotta wonder: since the 06 election, where control of Congress flipped parties on both sides, Republicans have begun to abandon Bush's policies on Iraq...would that have happened if control had not flipped? What would have been different on the ground in Baghdad? Anything?

Why is it so difficult for politicians to say things like this: You are going to have to work past age 65--do not count on that being instant retirement age, that was never the original intention. Don't expect Social Security to completely fund your retirement, it can't.

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Something else: I find myself wondering when Cheney is going to say something about our "precious bodily fluids".