The Democratic Electoral Trap

 

Sometime next year — mid-2013 or so — the U.S. economy will crater.  The Weimar-Republic-like inflation we've been worrying about will finally become a reality.  The dollar will crumble.  The "world's reserve currency" will have gone the way of the Euro which will likely crumble this year.  The new "world's reserve currency" will be the Yuan and China will call the tune.

The Democrats are hoping they will be able to play the game for another inning or two, but they are probably wrong.  Whoever wins the White House in 2012 will preside over the disolution of the American economy.  Both the Republicans and the Democrats are hoping to be that someone.  It is clear they have a death wish, because the party left standing when the music stops will never thereafter win another national election.

I'm assuming here that Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate and that Ron Paul will not be the Republican candidate.

There is a small non-zero probability that Ron Paul will secure the GOP nomination and go on to defeat Obama in November, but I'm not betting any actual money on it.  If such a miraculous thing happens and if President Paul really does yank all our troops out of foreign countries and if he manages to cut a serious chunk out of the bloated federal budget...  IF...  the economy might be saved at least temporarily.

The short odds are on Romney or Gingrich going up against Obama...  and losing.  The winner loses and the loser wins.  Could it be possible that the GOP is really smarter than we ever gave them credit for?  That they will back a known-loser so that Obama gets re-elected and is thus in a target position when it all comes tumbling down?

I don't believe that.  I believe the GOP is in denial:  they don't believe a meltdown is imminent and they believe they can beat Obama with the likes of Gingrich.  They will lose in November and thus save their party (accidentally) while condemning all the rest of us to Hell.

It will be a good time to be in debt.  The resulting inflation will wipe most of that debt out by allowing the debtors to pay it off with cheap dollars.  I may just refinance my house.

 

Searching For Truth

 

Every true thing was first believed by one person, then hundreds, then millions, then everyone.  Once upon a time, it was obvious to everyone that the stars were mere holes in the crystal sphere of the night sky, that if you were poor or sick it was because God wasn't pleased with you, that the Sun wheeled around the unmoving Earth, and that the Earth was flat.  Today, anyone who tries to convince you that the Earth is stationary is most likely to be judged a dangerous lunatic.

Today we are asked to believe just as many things whose truth is suspect:

• People who vacation in Paris are stupid because the French hate Americans.
• The Moslem world hates us because we're so good and so free.
• Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are traitors who want to see the Western democracies destroyed.
• Ron Paul is an isolationist who can't possibly beat Barack Obama.
• Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
• Bullshit doesn't stink and is actually quite tasty and nourishing.

In fact, none of that is true.

 

The Republican Electoral Trap

The GOP is in serious trouble.  They have tried with all of their might to marginalize Ron Paul, and they have been only marginally successful.  This is inadequate.  The GOP must be able to make Ron Paul a non-person, an almost impossible feat unless Paul is caught in bed with "a dead girl or a live boy".  Not bleedin' likely.

So, what's the trap?  It's this:  Ron Paul supporters — by and large — will desert the GOP if Ron Paul is not the party's candidate.  'Big deal,' you say.  'Big deal,' I repeat.  Yes, it is a big deal.

If Iowa can be believed, Ron Paul owns twenty-something percent of likely GOP voters, and over the course of time (if things go as they have been going) this will grow.  The problem for the GOP is that most mainline Republicans simply want to beat Barack Obama in 2012.  Ron Paul's supporters want Ron Paul to beat Barack Obama in 2012.  These goals are at serious cross-purposes.  If Ron Paul isn't the GOP's choice to cross swords with the incumbent, Paulistsas will either stay home on Election Day or vote Libertarian.  What if, on Election Day, 20% or more of Republican voters don't show up?  (I'm here positing that voting for some other party is, as far as the GOP is concerned, the same as not voting at all.)  In order to make a decent showing, whoever is the GOP candidate will need every available nominally-GOP voter plus a smattering of nominal Democrats.  A GOP candidate who cannot pull that off cannot defeat the incumbent President.  Cannot.

Ron Paul can.  Romney may if he sucks in a noticeable chunk of Democratic voters;  don't bet on it.  Santorum and Gingrich cannot, nor can any of those candidates who have dropped out of the race.

To summarize:  the GOP seems intent on having Romney go head-to-head with Obama, but he will do so without twenty percent or more of the voters he's counting on, the voters he's depending on.  Romney, no matter how good he looks the morning of Election Day, will lose to Barack Obama.  Ron Paul may also lose to Barack Obama;  it's possible a large chunk of Republicans will desert the GOP if Ron Paul is the candidate;  it's possible.  Walter Williams has already suggested that this election is a waste of money and air time.  Ron Paul is, however, the only Republican who has a prayer of unseating Obama.  That's going to be hard for mainline Republicans to handle.  Can they do it?  My money is on Obama.

 

Enemy Action

 

• Dec 15th, 2011 — Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler was arrested at an airport in New York City after he attempted to check-in a locked gun box holding his Glock 27 pistol and ammunition to a Delta Airlines ticket agent.
• Dec 22nd, 2011 — 39-year-old Meredith Graves, an RN studying for her MD and who has a Tennessee concealed weapons permit, was arrested on a gun-possession charge when she tried to check her loaded pistol at the WTC memorial.
• Jan 2nd, 2012 — Ryan Jerome was enjoying his first trip to New York City on business when the former Marine Corps gunner walked up to a security officer at the Empire State Building and asked where he should check his gun.

A prominent political activist from California, a Registered Nurse-Medical student from Tennessee, and a combat Marine from Indiana, three vicious criminals now safely stowed behind bars in New York City where they won't be able to threaten the peace and safety of the community further.  Score three for the Sullivan Law and New York's no-nonsense zero-tolerance for terrorists with handguns.

Military people will tell you: the first time it's an accident, the second time it's a coincidence, but the third time it's 'enemy action'.  Is it possible this all has nothing to do with H.R. 822 now working its way through Congress?  H.R. 822 would require states that issue concealed weapons permits to recognize permits issued by other states.  People would always have to abide by the local restrictions, but these three would not have been arrested had H.R. 822 already been signed into law.  'Enemy action' indeed.

For a hundred years, New York State's 'Sullivan Law' has made it difficult to get a handgun permit in most of the state and damn-near-impossible in New York City where you have to be a close personal friend of the mayor in order to qualify.  A NYS pistol permit is not even valid in New York City.  As a result, most of the violent crime in New York is committed with guns obtained elsewhere from states with horridly permissive laws.  Oddly, crime in those otherwise lax jurisdictions never seems to rise to the levels of New York despite Rudy Giuliani, 'America's Mayor', having turned the place into a veritable police state.  To deter malefactors from continuing their dastardly pursuits, New York imposes draconian punishments:  each of the three criminals mentioned above are facing three-and-a-half years in slam if convicted, loss of voting rights, and loss of their 2nd amendment rights — in perpetuity.

If convicted.

Therein lies the rub.  New York's DA, one Cyrus Vance Jr., has some experience prosecuting such cases, three of which are now on his docket.  Alas for Cyrus, that experience is mostly bad.  Early in 2011, Jonathan Ryan of Florida was stopped by NYPD for making an illegal right-on-red (legal in NYS, illegal in NYC, go figure).  During the stop, the police discovered a 9mm pistol in the car's glove box and arrested Ryan for illegal possession of a handgun.  Facing three-and-a-half years in prison, Ryan nevertheless rolled his dice for double-or-nothing.  The jury took thirty minutes to deliver a 'not guilty' verdict.  The cops kept Ryan's gun anyway, but he walked out of the courthouse a free man.  The newest three defendants are even more sympathetic and thus even less likely than was Ryan to be convicted.  In view of that, Cy Vance may not even bother charging them.  If Vance takes their cases to court, he will win or he will lose.

If he wins, he will spray gasoline onto the brush fire that H.R. 822 has been thus far.  If he loses, his credibility (and possibly his career as a prosecutor) will lie in tatters — and he will spray gasoline onto the brush fire that H.R. 822 has been thus far.  Win or lose, he loses.  Beyond doubt, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-founder of MAIG, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, smells blood in the water.  Is he smart enough to realize (or suspect) that the blood was put there on purpose?...  that high-priced lawyers in the suburbs around Washington D.C. are waiting for him to take a nice, big bite?  And I do mean 'big':  Gura and Possessky PLLC has just been awarded $1.3 million in attorneys' fees for their win in D.C. v Heller where the Supreme Court struck down D.C.'s total ban on handguns.  D.C.'s ban was barely more severe than NYC's regime whereby huge filing fees ($445) are necessary merely to have one's application considered.  There is no guarantee that consideration will result in a NYC concealed weapons permit; in fact, it is a near-certainty that the application will be rejected absent some extraordinary circumstances.  This 'restrictive may-issue' policy thus comes very close to a total ban, such that of NYC's 7 million-plus inhabitants, only 2,291 of them may actually carry a firearm with them wherever they go.

So...  D.C. has had their total ban burned to the ground in D.C. v Heller (2008), and Chicago's ban has been ruled unconstitutional in McDonald v Chicago (2010).  Is New York City next?  One can only hope.

 

How Do We Pay For It?

 

Whenever the question arises as to how a public works project will be paid for, the 'normal' answer is "Well, that's what taxes are for!"  Libertarians (and, yes, I am one of them) take issue with this answer.  It's a tough 'sell', but I believe that every thinking person, if they spend time actually thinking about the issue, eventually comes around to the libertarian view that almost everything in the 'public works' arena probably ought to be funded with voluntary contributions or subscriptions.  Let's take a look.

Let's start with an easy assumption:  Whatever the project, there will inevitably be those who think it's unnecessary or counter-productive or a poor use of scarce public funds.  They will be opposed to spending money on the project.  So the root assumption is 'you can't please everybody'.  Nevertheless, those opposed to the project will be taxed their proportionate share.

There is a corollary to this:  While nobody doesn't like Sara Lee, everybody doesn't like something.  Everyone will be able to point to some project they wish hadn't gotten enough votes.

If the number of 'antis' is small it's easy to dismiss them as mere malcontents, but what about when the vote goes down 50.2% in-favor to 49.8% opposed?  You have nearly half the populace being forced to fund a project they oppose.  "Well, that's how the system works!" some will say (if they're part of the 50.2%).  The rest will carry a grudge over their ultra-skinny loss.  This is a bad way to run a community.  Nothing good can come of it.  That, however, is hardly the point.

We tax the community wall-to-wall for tasks that we feel will benefit the community wall-to-wall, but the undeniable fact is that our opinions as to who benefits are not universally agreed-to.  We're guessing, and those guesses, good or bad, are backed by the political power to make them a reality via taxes, part of which comes from people who made different guesses.  Is this really what we intend?  Is this really a good idea in itself?  Because what we're seeing here, stripped of all the trappings, is that we're forcing someone to fund our pet project du jour against their better judgement, and it doesn't matter whether that project is a war in the Middle East or cancer research.  It is a given that someone will think it's a great idea and someone else will think it's a mistake.

The one great source of conflict here, the 'bone of contention', is what is called the 'free rider problem', and that has a corollary, a flip-side, too.  What of those people who will be taxed for this new 'benefit' but who will never use it?  You tax to fund a new art museum, but what of our blind citizens who cannot see the visually beautiful art that now populates the museum?  What of the hearing-impaired who cannot use the audio guides?  So we tax some more to provide Braille commentary and sign-language interpreters and on and on.  If we do the project on voluntary contributions, what of those who didn't contribute yet who will enjoy the new museum?  Having no universally fair method of funding the project, we fall back on what we assume is the least-worst solution: tax everybody.  When I point out that this solution is favored simply because it involves the least effort on the part of those who propose, that it's the lazy way out, I'm accused of being politically incorrect.

"Political correctness" has been called 'the absurd notion that a turd can be picked up by the clean end.'  There simply is no fair way to raise revenue, isn't that how it seems?  When the 'anti's suggest that the proponents 'put their money where their mouth is', that's when the cries of "unfair!" ring out the loudest, but there's something to be said in favor of that position.  If a project does, indeed, have broad popular support, it should be fairly easy to fund it from contributions.  After all, we're dealing here with a project whose benefits will far outweigh the puny costs, no?  Isn't that how such projects are sold?

If support for a project is so narrow that it cannot be funded from contributions, what does that say about how the people view the supposed benefit of the project?  And, really, shouldn't the opinions of those taxpayers have some weight in the deliberations?  If all they're willing to do is vote to have other people fund the project for their benefit, what does that say about the supposed 'benefit'?  "Yes, this will benefit me, but not so much that I'm willing to invest my own money..."

That, in fact, is the rationale for having private investors handle much of what we think of as 'public works'.  If a project is truly a beneficial improvement, the measure of that benefit is that people will be willing to pay for it after-the-fact on a case-by-case basis and for fees that far exceed what they might have been charged up-front in taxes.  That is how 'profit' is defined, and wise investors will be willing to 'put their money where their mouths are' for the prospect of future profit.

When wise investors are not willing to front money for such projects, it's a warning that we ought to be adding some salt — much more that just a grain or two — to those promises of pie-in-the-sky we get from proponents of the latest boondoggle.

Taxes for public works?  It would probably be more efficient to find an alternative way.

And before anyone holds up the Interstate Highway System as an example of 'a public works project that really worked out well', let me call all those people who complain that we don't have rail service like Europeans do and have them come over to talk to you.  Do you know why we don't have rail service like the Europeans do?  I'll give you a hint.  It has something to do with the Interstate Highway System.

When you take the path on the right, of necessity you cannot take the path on the left.  When you take the path of 'taxes', you give up the path of 'freedom to choose'.  Is that the kind of 'bargain' you go looking for?

 

Enter The Dragon — Remembering Ray Faulk

 

I've been seeing ads recently for Dragon Software which purports to allow a computer user to speak words and have the software load those words into a document or something else.  It made me recall my old IBM buddy, Ramon D(avid) Faulk, 'Ray' to his friends and associates.

Ray graduated from UTexas (Austin) back in IBM's heyday and got hired by IBM as a mathematician to work on a hot new project out of the Thomas J. Watson Scientific Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.  IBM in those days thought it might be possible to build a 'universal translator' given enough computing muscle, and it set a team to work making it a reality.  Ray was on that team.  After several years of disappointing (or 'no') progress, IBM's management reluctantly concluded that a Universal Translator was not as feasible as they had originally thought.  They cancelled the project and reshuffled all the participants into other parts of the company.  Remember, this was back when IBM didn't fire people or lay them off just because there wasn't any work for them to do.  It was always possible to find a spot for someone in a company as big as IBM.

Ray got transferred to IBM's Field Engineering HQ in White Plains, NY as a programmer.  FEHQ's Information Systems department (FEIS) back then did lots of heavy lifting, mostly concentrated on machine service schedules, replacement parts, and publications (manuals).  All of this had to be managed in an inventory sense, shipped expeditiously where and when needed, and accounted-for and reported.  There was lots to do for a talented application programmer, and Ray was that.

Unfortunately, Ray also had an obsessive personality.  He had been hired to create a universal translator and he felt mortified that he had failed so miserably as to get the project cancelled.  Yes, there were lots of others who had failed equally miserably or moreso, but Ray's failure was his and his alone.  He could not let the mere cancellation of a project stop him from completing his task.

So he did his FEIS application programming tasks from nine-to-five and did other things at other times.  Occasionally he would do those other things from nine-to-five as well because they were important.  On the occasions that those important tasks pushed aside the tasks Ray was getting paid to do, he would come (as Maxwell Smart might say) this close to getting fired.  But he worked for IBM;  IBM didn't fire people for silly reasons like that.

Eventually, Ray managed to develop the theory (and the method) that allowed him to take the first giant step toward the now-forgotten Universal Translator.  Here's the essential problem:

When we write, we put spaces between words and add punctuation marks to indicate to the reader where certain idea-clusters start or end.  When we speak, we don't, unless we're Victor Borge demonstrating Phonetic Punctuation.  (whenwespeakwedontunlesswerevictorborgedemonstratingphoneticpunctuation).  How does the brain split this sound from that sound?  They all run together in a continuous stream, yet virtually everyone who is fluent in the language spoken knows where those implicit blanks belong.  The answer is that the human brain has the ability to guess (accurately, most times) that this sound represents a word.  It guesses based on hearing that same sound thousands or millions of times in the past.  When it encounters a new sound, it guesses that it's a word because all the sounds around it have been accounted-for.  How in Hell do you get a machine to do that?  This way:

Ray's method involved taking a stream of data and parsing it as if it were continuous data like speech.  He had Barbara Argy, one of our co-workers, transcribe a chapter of a foreign-language book onto punched cards (that's how far back this was) eliminating all the blanks, commas, periods, etc.  Ray's method didn't care what language the original text was in, nor was that information part of the program's input.  Barbara used, I think, a Russian novel, using '@', '#', '%', and others for the Cyrillic characters our alphabet lacks.  Ray's program read the string and did a statistical analysis of the frequencies of all the one-character strings, then it did the same for all two-character strings, then three, then four, then...  At some point, he would start over at the head of the string and begin looking at the first character compared to the first two characters compared to the first three, four, five, six, etc., each time looking at the relative frequency of the strings.  Every now and then during this process, the relative frequency of a string would drop to zero or near it.  If he were looking at the prior sentence, for instance, he would notice a sudden drop when the string was 'everyn' as compared to 'every'.  From this, the program would conclude that 'every' was a word and insert a blank following it.

Ray once compared this process to what happens in the game of "Ghost".  In Ghost, players sit in a circle and one player starts by saying a letter.  The next player adds a letter to it.  Letters are added in turn until some player adds a letter that makes a word.  The object of the game is to add a letter, one that could be part of a not-yet-fully-developed word, but not one that actually completes a word — to make the word longer and longer until finally some player is forced by "the collapse of variety" to add the one-and-only letter that can fit at the end of the existing string.

Using this schema, Ray's program split that chapter of Russian text into its constituent words making only six errors along the way.  The errors were of the sort where a prefix might be snipped off a word or a portmanteau word would be split into pieces.  The program did not know that the original text was in Russian.  It did not use a dictionary.  It built its own vocabulary dynamically as it went along.

Well, if you can do that to Russian, you should be able to do it to Welsh or Hungarian with equal ease.  You should be able to apply the same technique to spoken language, breaking the stream of sounds to packets of sound and then assigning meaning to those sounds.  This is the method infants use when they are pre-verbal.  This is the method we will use when we meet our first extra-terrestrial.

When that day comes, and perhaps before that, I expect linguists will be splitting streams of continuous data and developing vocabularies from them, all the while wondering why they call the process "faulking".

Ray's method was the subject of a paper he published with his collaborator, Fran Goertzel Gustavson, and can be found in The IBM Systems Journal (1990), vol 29, number 2.  It was titled "Segmenting discrete data representing continuous speech input".  You can see the abstract here

Ray passed away a few years back.  I'm sure he would have gotten a kick out of Dragon had he lived to see it.

 

Sean Hannity is an idiot. — I get it.

 

Sean Hannity recently made this remark:  "Ron Paul is an isolationist.  I get it."

Except that he doesn't get it.  Or maybe he really does get it but would rather slander one of the few honest Congressmen around.  I'm attributing his remark to stupidity;  maybe it really is malice.  Nor am I writing this just to defend Ron Paul.  When Hannity made that (inexcusably stupid) remark, he wasn't just defaming Ron Paul;  he was defaming me and everyone who thinks like me and Ron.

"Isolationist", as defined by Hannity and the other neocons, means anyone who doesn't think the United States should have a military presence in 145 countries, anyone who thinks the United States shouldn't invade any foreign country without a formal declaration of war issued by Congress and naming the country to be invaded/conquered, or anyone who thinks the foreign policy of the United States ought to be focused sharply on 'minding our own business'.

The opposite of "isolationist" for people like Hannity is "patriot", defined as someone who thinks it's perfectly OK for the President, without so much as notifying Congress, to ship the First Marine Division into the hell-hole du jour in order to show those gooks just who's the sheriff 'round these here parts.  If a couple thousand or a couple million civilians get in the way, that's their tough luck.  They should have been smart enough to have been born Americans, shor 'nuff.

I define 'patriot' somewhat differently, in case you haven't guessed, and you probably suspect Hannity and I differ on the definition of 'isolationist', too.  To me, an isolationist is ready to pull up the drawbridge and seal off the kingdom, having first gotten everyone inside to hand over their passports.  Their intent would be to isolate themselves from the cold, cruel world outside.  An isolationist would never dream of popping off to Paris or stealing away to Stockholm.  Noooooooo!!  That would be...  sleeping with the enemy!  Horrors!  Can't have our citizens doing that!

Perhaps Sean Hannity is a stay-at-home.  Not me, and not Ron Paul, either.  Keep your passport.  Go to Barcelona whenever the spirit moves you.  Bring me back a souvenir.  The word Ron and I use for our foreign policy (singular, because we share the same one) is 'non-interventionism'.  We think it's a great idea to travel and trade, to meet new people who may speak a different language and who see the world through different eyes, to talk with them and learn their views on topics for which we have formed our own opinions.  What Ron and I don't advocate is forming those peoples' views for them by force of arms, nor do we advocate taxing American citizens to provide foreign aid to countries which are often ruled by dictators.  Ron and I know (too well) how close to the truth Lord Peter Bauer was when he said

Foreign aid is an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

But as long as we're trading verbal insults, I suppose it's only fair that I get the chance to label Sean Hannity and all those who think like him:  they're 'imperialists'.  They're the nutballs who believe their own fantasies about 'American exceptionalism'.  They think America is exceptional because God wanted it that way.  Oddly, they have no explanation for why God would make us exceptional and then let our economy turn to shit.  In truth, if America is exceptional it is almost entirely because of the inventiveness, the will to win, and the moral strength of all those who came here from other supposedly un-exceptional nations to make a better life for themselves, their families, and their fellows.  And they did this all without any help from the government.  What didn't make America exceptional was the foreign policy that led us to war with Mexico in 1846, to overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893^*, war with Spain in 1898, war with half of Europe in 1918, or any of the dozens of 'conflicts' since 1945.  It's not our military that makes us great, it's the people and the freedom of people to do great things.

People like Sean Hannity would like to see all that come to an end.  If anyone deserves the term 'isolationist', it's idiots like Sean Hannity.

 

(*) - I'll bet you didn't know it was the U.S. Marine Corps which overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy — at the request of American fruit growing companies whose owners were upset that the Hawaiians would no longer let foreign workers vote in local elections.  Golly, if Sean Hannity gets his way and we stop letting Mexican workers vote in our elections, maybe the Marines will overthrow this government?  No, doesn't work that way, does it?