Romney 3.9 Percentage Points Behind Obama

It is obvious by now that both Obama and Romney campaigns were trying to keep the race as close as possible in order to maximize fund raising. Our political campaigns are in the potlatch tradition. They provide the means for us to make payouts within the tax code without the appearance of impropriety. Very little of the activity has much to do with influencing votes.

Dick Morris, the manic-depressive Delphi, argues that the United States electorate should be romanced like an adolescent with a constant barrage of upbeat optimism.

When we step back from all the clutter there appear to be some fundamentals driving the voting choice. I believe that we can build a model for these beliefs based on our history. It is generally held that we Americans have no historical sense or memory but I contend that we do have a mythology based on our collective memory of historical events.

One of our collective modern issues is that most of us, at least below a certain age, have never been in a true drag out physical fight. In the past, one of the earliest lessons learned on the playground was that you can be right and you can lose the fight. Conversely you can be wrong, and you can win. Deprived of practical experience and subjected to constant bombardment of TV people seem to have confused winning with moral superiority. A classic example is the statement:

-We were wrong to go to war in Vietnam because we lost.

The “because” is the fallacy. We may well have been wrong, and we certainly lost but that is not the reason.

Unions are a good example. The success of unions in the thirties and forties was met by legislation restricting trade unions, wild cat strikes and boycotts. Once the union movement was stifled most people took the position that unions were no good because they failed. I have yet to hear a free-market proponent call for unleashing our unions because international competition will keep them in check.

This moral vindication paradox is the reason that the Romney people speak of disillusionment. For them Obama’s ideals must be invalid because they were not implemented.

Looking back in recent memory, who were the best and worst presidents? Over time presidents that were reviled have become sainted and the accomplishments of the heroes have been lost.
Eisenhower looks pretty good, getting the troops out of Korea and into Little Rock. He was a general, he excelled at using the minimum force necessary to flip governments, suppress rebellions and put out brush fires around the world. Later, however, each of his successes became new and greater conflagrations. Much as we have come to realize that we need brush fires to prevent catastrophes, stifling national autonomy leads to eventual global crisis. Eisenhower, because of his competence, may have been our worst president.

Kennedy is the most frightening, by his own count taking us to the edge of nuclear destruction three separate times. The portrayal of Kennedy and his brother as idealistic has once again conflated idealism with recklessness.

Nixon has the greatest infamy, but he was handed the worst mess in recent history. He blew smoke, kicked sand and somehow bluffed us through our international bankruptcy while convincing the China lobby to go along with recognizing China and the strategy of Vietnamizing the war.

Bush Senior is another who pulled us out of disaster. Clinton gets the credit for sticking to the course that Bush set.

Given this history, it is not surprising that Americans almost preferred a lying double talker to a party ideologue.

How can you criticize someone for selling out his ideals when the ideals are so rotten? Good for Romney, taking the tease party for a ride with that ridiculous platform.

The one group I really disliked from the Vietnam War was the Vets for Peace. They would always start their speech by saying that they didn’t know what they were getting into when they went off to war. Talk about not listening. What did they think the peace movement was carrying on about? This passionate naiveté is our worst quality. Please don’t tell me you didn’t know that going up to Tyson’s hotel room would end badly. The Vietnam War wasn’t Johnson’s mistake. It was the price Johnson paid to the China lobby for backing his legislation. Being disappointed with Nixon’s illegal activities is a howler. Who would have thought that big spender, fight anyone anywhere Bush Jr. would lead to fiscal disaster?

I suppose that the voters were frightened that Romney might actually believe that his platform had popular support, rather than that we were hoping for his betrayal of it.

Veteran Grandfather

Fritz, as Grandmother Hilda called him, his name was Fred, served as a lieutenant in the German army in World War I. He served on the western front, so he may have been fighting Americans. He won the Iron cross:

-Everyone went over the top, except me and this other fellow. So, we looked at each other and decided it was better to be killed by the enemy than our own side. The job of the second line of the German army was to kill anyone in the first line who didn’t attack. We couldn’t find our guys, so we kept going; the other side must have withdrawn. Eventually our side caught up with us, so they gave us the medal.

Years later, I realized that this is the story you tell when you don’t want to say what you did.

When Fritz got taken into concentration camp, he wore that cross. They took it away from him. Hilda bribed a consulate for visas and got him and her family out of Germany. He was very calm describing the conditions in the camp except when he talked about them taking the cross.

Plasticene Porters

When you’re talking about police and soldiers, you’re essentially talking about a lot of guys who like to play Call Of Duty and Halo. It is difficult to appreciate the level of hypocrisy they confront and the depth of compartmentalization that this requires. Most of us at some fundamental level believe that there is some equitability or justice that plays its way out. This deep human desire is one of the foundations of religion. Whether it is reincarnation, heaven, rapture, eventual human development, fatalism or just the naïve joy at seeing the downfall of the wicked and horror at the victimization of the innocent, we all want the world to confirm our human perception of right and wrong. Justice, as any other ideal, is found as common or as rare and beautiful as your perception of it. The police dilemma is more extreme than the accommodations that we all make. Because of their situation, they stare into this moral disjoint every day and it can drive them mad. A good day for a police officer might be five driving under the influence arrests. They may have saved lives, or ruined someone’s career, pondering leads to folly.

They are essentially a clerk with a gun, collecting data for their bosses spread sheet and power point presentation. As Mayor Richard J. Daley said:
-The police are not here to create disorder; they’re here to preserve dis order.
We are all in the vise between judgment and obedience. Usually, the consequences are not as extreme.

Normally police are about making the case. Once they have identified a crime and a perpetrator, they gather, secure and present the evidence for the purpose of conviction and sentencing. It gets trickier when they attempt to be preemptive.

People dismiss the National Security Agency PRISM operation because they do not consider the implications of surveillance. Imagine, for whatever reason, that you have become worthy. It could be your actions, your associations, or error, but for whatever reason, you have made the list. Your surveillance is not inexpensive; at the very least it involves administration, audit and review. At some point it becomes cheaper to send around a person.
That person writes a report. That individual is now an informant. You are their subject. Their activity may be as innocuous as calling to see if you are at the same address. They may strike up an acquaintance with you. They may be a friend or business associate. They may be a date. They may be family.

A business may hire you. This is perhaps the most effective and efficient means of surveillance. Your employer has the right to all your personal records. They can account for all your activity during your work time. Conversely employment, or promotion, may be denied you. Obviously your academic career can also be determined for you. If you want to know about someone you can’t passively watch them. You have to be involved in their life.

Do you have a life? Have you made any decisions? Have you dated? Quantitative change leads to qualitative change. Defenses against paranoia collapse against multibillion budgets. As to intent, consider COINTELPRO, the FBI program descended from Elliot Ness who learned his tricks from Irish policemen. Since the data is there it would be silly not to collect it. Once you have the intelligence it would be irresponsible not to use it. Perhaps this errant young person needs a job, or perhaps they should lose one. Maybe a little match making would distract them. Maybe if these groups fought each other, it would take some of the piss out of them. The example of Linus Pauling being denied a visa to visit England, preventing his participation in DNA research comes to mind.

Imagine you were the one charged with tracking a group of subjects, your very own Sims. What lives would you choose for them? Forget big brother, this is big mother. Do you want to increase your budget by provoking radicalism? Or demonstrate your efficiency by frustrating it?

I can see all the wealthy, influential, famous or even attractive readers raising their two fingers in sarcastic violin bow serenades. Deceit and swindle is of course common. It is human nature to be manipulative. Even ownership of a digital device can make you fair game. There are many with black marks on their permanent record: DUI, sex offender, felony conviction, bankrupt. Why should subversives get legal dispensation even if they have yet to be convicted of a crime? Whether they have alerted some data mining analyst through their multiple degrees of separation, patterns of consumption, ill-considered observations, or mean-spirited informants, they share many companions amongst those who have lost their privacy and legal protection.

The difference is one of scale. People Magazine and Equifax, for all their spite, do not have the resources of the National Security Agency, although they may share them. More to your self-interest, how do you know that you are not one of the subversives? It was asked how many American citizens are under surveillance. The question was refused as classified. The correct answer is, of course, all.

How do you build democratic controls on a totalitarian process? It is difficult for Americans to have an ideology, although it may occur implicitly. We have rounded up various groups in our history: Japanese, union organizers, Native Americans, Confederate sympathizers, runaway slaves, Tories.

Cost cutting is a possibility. At some point it may occur to the committees that it is cheaper to remove all these irritants rather than follow them. The metadata allows for more efficient scrubbing.

More likely, eventually some practical person will make the point that crime and corruption are far more dangerous to our nation than mere terrorism. When analysts are able to find obvious criminal activity, perhaps in some cases aiding and abetting terrorism or in the enormous grey areas of overseas business activity, for instance, it would be a shame not to tip off investigators. Could NSA be of use in a kidnapping or murder investigation? Can they cross reference IRS data? Comparing reported income to expenditure comes to mind. In general the trend has been to ignore constitutional niceties in the aid of effective prosecution.

When I first wrote this, the DEA use of PRISM was not known. The DEA very practically came up with parallel construction in order to conceal their information source. I now predict some prosecutor is going to subpoena PRISM data, probably from a phone company, for a local investigation. Once you realize that phone companies use bit compression to transmit conversations then it becomes obvious that all these conversations could be saved. If they can do it, then they have done it.

Could we at last have accurate financial models?

Teachable Moments

I am not going to get into the issues of truth and justice because I am not a good advocate for that. I think there are some teachable moments in the Martin/Zimmerman case. It is so rare that children might pay attention to us older folk and this instance may give an opportunity.

Given that all phone calls are recorded it seems to me that Mr. Martin’s last call should be subpoenaed from the phone company. There was some doubt about testimony that could be answered and it would give a more reliable timeline of events as well as state of mind. The precise GPS coordinates may be helpful as well.
http://open.salon.com/blog/paul_j_orourke/2013/07/17/where_was_trayvon_the_missing_minutes

There has been an observation that the administrations characterization of vigilante justice could also be applied to our foreign policy:http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/holders_amazing_anti_drone_war_speech/
I think we should hunt down all vigilantes.

There has been condemnation of Florida as unusual. This may be. But the slaughter of young black men is not that particular as to place. In Chicago such events are categorized as gang violence regardless of circumstance. The thinking is that the families do not need the additional pain of knowing that their children were engaged in wrongdoing.

In Chicago Mr. Zimmerman would have been found guilty because he was out looking for it. In Chicago we go to great lengths to appear unpremeditated:
-So why did you have a baseball bat?
-I was coming from a game.
-At 3: AM?
-I was out afterwards and I didn’t want to drive.

Mr. Zimmerman was concerned about a rash of successful burglaries in his area. Since the burglaries were successful it is likely that they were a neighbor rather than someone passing through. Probably someone in the citizen watch group as they have the interest and the time. I am curious as to whether the burglaries have continued.

If you can get the children’s attention it might be worthwhile to point out that young Martin had a tool in his hand, not just an emotional support system. I realize that this is a difficult concept. What would have happened if either of the children on their call had suddenly realized that it was appropriate to notify the authorities? I’m not saying that the consequences would have changed but imagine the moment if Martin had handed Zimmerman the phone and said:
-The dispatcher wants to talk to you.

Once both young men had decided to stand their ground the only issue remaining is which one would be left standing. According to Zimmerman, he was on the ground screaming for help. The second dispatcher recording and subsequent testimony raised doubt on this issue. But Zimmerman’s is the only immediate deposition. This brings to mind the advice of my own sweet dear little mother. Physical conflict is not a form of recreation or discussion. Please children, there is no reason to get someone down just to let them get back up again. Whether you run or stand, you were given feet.

Arendt and Community

After Marx, academics had a serious issue: they had to build on his work without referencing it. This isn’t all that different from the difficulty academic psychologists had with Freud. Freud talked goofy and it sounded silly when you were writing grant proposals. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the latest attempt at building a rational sounding justification for talking therapy. Sounds like a prissy version of Freud to me.

With Marx the difficulty was much more immediate. One citation and your funding disappeared. Poor Keynes had to throw in Calculus and talk all the way around his fulcrum to say that if you wanted to keep the game going you had to grab money away from the winners and keep the losers in the game.

Sociology hung onto its journalist roots; that shred of honesty kept it halfway decent. But then they threw in statistics. The real ugliness was when they coopted Marx’s use of the word alienation. Alienation meant losing you inheritance, your position in your family. Marx with his German sense of humor used it to describe tradesmen working an assembly line and no longer owning their tools.

Marx was trying to answer Adam Smith’s division of labor by giving examples of its destruction of people’s self-worth. The only way out Marx could see was for people to take advantage of their forced collectivization to form unions. Communists would later take his description of farm people forced into factory work as a prescription for collectivization with disastrous results.

Sociologists grabbed the alienation word to describe people’s loneliness in society. Loneliness is a real issue but to say you are alienated from society is nonsense. You are your society. If you are not yourself, then who are you? Once they had a specious issue the only thing left is a solution viola: community. A meaningless duality, what could be more perfect for writing grant proposals.

When the baby boom sent a hydraulic stream of undergraduates hurtling into academia, those of a more idealistic bent had the idea that sociology had something to do with solving people’s problems with society. Let the punishment fit the crime. Forced to undergo and regurgitate meaningless prattle to then enter the ranks of the unemployed it is hardly surprising that so many terrorists have sociology degrees.

So, it is discouraging that Arendt’s discussion of Revolution finishes with talking up the committees that form in the developmental process of government. My own experience with boards and associations is bad. It always ends with wondering why all these people hate me. Successful committees are to purpose and transitory. Standing committees are deadening.

I dusted off Revolution because of all these demands demanding that Occupy Whoever come up with demands. Since any agenda becomes the basis for repression we are left with this Dadaist movement. It’s not enough to have a silent majority, now they have to be inarticulate as well.

Columnists keep trying to link Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party. The fundamental distinction is that the Tea Party hates poor people and OWS doesn’t want to become them.

Arendt argues that political process can’t solve economic inequality. With Marat Sade thundering in the background I believe I understand her argument. But until the messiah comes we have to scrape around and stall off the inevitable savagery predicted by Marx, sort of an American expression of Mao’s perpetual revolution.

Despite the insurance and drug companies, Americans have, as definitively as we ever have, made it clear that we want health care. We can’t all live in hotel rooms surrounded by Mormons. We recognize that our individual health depends on the health of the population, and by the way, mental health is infectious. Usually at this point the majority is respected. Instead we are confronted by these statesmen who are determined to keep the poor out of the middle class. The Tea Party archetype is a franchise owner, SBA loan in hand.

What everyone seems to agree on is that our current process sells too cheap. We’ve played this game for over two hundred years and either our standards have raised or the bosses have wired it too tight. For instance everyone knows drugs should be legal; what chance is there of that? Everyone understands that the process is failing, yet no one states the obvious conclusion: it’s time for a rewrite. The Constitution was predicated on protecting slavery. It is unfair to us to maintain those advantages.

The greatest criticism of representational government is the toll it exacts on candidates. What person wants to beg hundreds, thousands, even millions of people for their job? The whole process was conceived and designed to keep politicians snugly and securely in the hip pockets of the owners and manufacturers. Sociologists sometimes study the dynamics of power, the personalities and character of leaders. They usually are trying to prove that individuals can surmount social process. What they don’t consider is that most leaders belong to someone else and they couldn’t accomplish anything otherwise.

There are two other possibilities: plebiscite and lottery. As Ross Perot said, plebiscite has recently once again become practicable. Just as we maintain online bank accounts we could maintain an online voting account. The proposal of new initiatives could be made sufficiently onerous through petition and consideration. The lovely thing about plebiscite is how auditable it is. Perhaps we could have a third house of congress. It would represent the people’s will directly.

Lottery has the advantage of making corruption more difficult. You have to bribe the official after they have been selected. Executive lottery is perhaps the best way to organize an underground movement, or one subject to oppression, making it more difficult to take over.

I think chance should officially be reintroduced into the court system. Litigious parties, or even criminals, should have the option of flipping a coin or rolling dice.

America was founded on the idea of checks and balances. I don’t think we took that far enough. In particular our military adventures are out of hand. I propose that we assign our military functions to that third house of congress whether plebiscite or not. If it is elected I don’t know what the divisions should be, perhaps something different from geographical. We could give this house its own funding; control of natural resources should be enough money. The idea is that this house would manage our natural resources and foreign affairs. Maybe this could be the new function of the House of Representatives, and the plebiscite would cover the domestic issues, with the Senate over both.

Claiming to be an honest politician reminds me of claiming virginity in a bar. I’ve always been upset with the small sums that congressmen receive for influence. Committeemen in Chicago get more money for zoning variances than Congressmen get for billion dollar spending bills. Separating out the foreign policy and natural resource issues would remove the hypocrisy and put Congress on a realistic footing. Having the entire nation vote on domestic spending authorizations would be a useful restraint.

There are other possibilities: the Senate could be chosen by lottery for fixed terms of longer duration, similar to the Romans. This would isolate political parties to the House and Presidency.

I haven’t figured all this out. It’s going to take those wretched committees, hopefully for a limited period of time, to do that. It will not be perfection, but as a measure, it should be a lot more difficult to conduct imperialist adventures, a lot easier to make drugs legal, TARP would have failed a referendum, the jobs bill would have passed, and Supreme Court judges would be a lot more discrete about being on the take.

In any case, the bar has been raised. When my congressman returns to the district and says they don’t have the votes, I’m going to want to know why they didn’t shut down the government. I take my issues at least as seriously as anyone else takes theirs.

Kinison and Syria

Just recently some Americans from Bulgaria were warning me about the dangers of Muslim immigrants.

I said:
-If we can survive the Irish, we can survive anything.

They responded.
-You don’t understand. They are violent fundamentalists who want to impose their religion on everyone.

Sam Kinison was the comic who made the observation that since people were making poor geographical choices, the solution was not to feed them but bring them somewhere else. In the case of the Irish, the British subjected them to a horrific policy of mono-culture, deprivation and abandonment. The United States did not conduct a military campaign of evacuation, but it came fairly close. It was a terrific social and economic burden for the United States. But it was far preferable to conducting a military campaign against the British on behalf of the Irish, although the Irish may have preferred that solution.

In Syria we have two million Alawites who most likely want to leave. The sooner they get out of there the faster the Sunni can get back to killing each other. Protecting the evacuation and resettling and assimilating them is cheaper and more positive than busting them up and watching them get slaughtered.

More importantly it would be a mature recognition by the American people that our foreign policy has consequences. We helped make this mess. We should help fix it. If we adopted a general policy of accepting refugees, then we could also start to recognize how our policies create refugees.

Bicycle Safety

Someday Bicyclists will have to pass a driver’s test, get a license and have a plate on their bicycle just like motorists. Until then some observations on bicycle safety:

To begin with, ride straight. The bicycle version of the two footed goof who drives with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake is the cyclist who ducks in and out of traffic to keep away from the cars. It is more difficult to keep track of you when you are playing games. If you are hiding from me it is no longer my fault. Just like the two footed moron who thinks they should stop more quickly, the phantom cyclist is un-teachable, certain that they are courteously providing more room.

Next, understand one fundamental fact: you are a nuisance, and the longer I have to be in your company, the more of a nuisance you are. You are not a traffic warden. Police officers and crossing guards take a class in how to direct traffic. You haven’t taken that class. The moment you start waving your hands you have messed up. If you feel obliged to direct traffic no one else is at fault, you are. You have messed up and I sincerely hope that no one is taking direction from an idiot like you. If you don’t want to take your turn at the intersection, then get out of the intersection. Cyclists use hand signals. I suppose it seems a small transition from signaling intent to directing traffic.

I doubt that most drivers care that much about taking turns with bicycles. You are a rolling liability and the sooner you are out of the intersection and on your way the better for the rest of us. Drivers know full well that cyclists run in herds and the idiot in front waving their hands give us no information about the fools behind them. The reason everyone is watching you is because you are a hazard, not an authority.

There are three steps to getting through an intersection safely:

1. Claim the intersection. Don’t shoot through it. Arrive at the intersection and make your claim. This means bringing your bicycle into the circle of people waiting their turn to enter the intersection. Many bicyclists and pedestrians claim the intersection when it is not rightly theirs. That is they enter the circle of consideration when opposing traffic has the right of way. What this accomplishes is that it slows down aforesaid opposing traffic, thus making it more difficult to cross. Obviously you should not claim the intersection if you do not have a legitimate claim. This means staying back. Don’t scare people by edging out when it is not your turn.

2. Once you have claimed the intersection, take the intersection. Everyone is terrified of you. You are riding a bicycle and therefore you must be an idiot. If no one is moving it is your turn to proceed. If you claim the intersection and you do not take the intersection, then you are an asshole. Waving your hands is no help.

3. Get out of the intersection. This is not the time for discussion, deliberation or observation.

Let’s take the most common scenario. Cars are lining up for a light or stop sign. In principle, the bicyclist should take its place behind the last car. Then the following car pulls up next to the cyclist giving them no reward for their courtesy, so experienced cyclists thread the line to move to the front. When they are at the head of the line, the car turns on its right turn signal trapping them both in an endless dialogue of courtesy and terror. I suppose the cyclist should pull up behind the first car in the line, but then they will be cut off by the next car in the line that is also turning and now the second car is following the first car which is sort of an unofficial custom. If the motorist had signaled earlier, alerting the cyclist, then they could have approached the car on the left side. This maneuver seems correct, if a little nervy, but following motorists might feel cut off. On either side of the car the cyclist may stall out because of the oncoming traffic from their left, in the opposite intersecting lane.

I feel some sympathy for the cyclist until they attempt to direct traffic. We have been making it through this intersection without them.

Experienced motorists might defer signaling in the hope that the cyclists would depart and then they could signal and make their turn. At which point they would be smacked by the following laggard cyclist hauling ass to catch up.

I’m pretty sure any decent lawyer would advise the automobile driver to stay put until the idiot has cleared away regardless of how they dance around on their bike. If the driver did succumb to the bicyclists blandishments they may have the emotional satisfaction of seeing the bicyclist collide with the following car while taking what they judge to be their turn. Even with the emotional satisfaction this seems a less than optimal result.

Part of the difficulty is that bicyclists inhabit that nether region between motorist and pedestrian. Because motorists have licenses and are thus operating with state sanction they have greater liability than cyclists who are unlicensed and are therefore lumped with pedestrians. Because they are licensed, motorists are expected know what they are doing.

Bicyclists are supposed to behave as cars, just with a shared lane. On the left hand turn this leaves them in the admittedly uncomfortable position of sitting with the cars in the left hand lane waiting to take their turn. To avoid this discomfort cyclists often return to their pedestrian status and use the cross walks. Unfortunately they do so while on their bikes. This means they start from the motorists right hand blind spot and proceed much more quickly than a pedestrian through the two crosswalks to the intersecting lane. It is interesting that the bicyclists have more confidence that motorists will notice them in this maneuver than parked in the left hand turning lane. Some motorists have the unfortunate habit of creeping into the intersection.

Some cyclists always take the right hand turn if in any doubt. This allows them to avoid stopping. Then they cross the street on a break in traffic and either work their way back or proceed the wrong way on the opposite street until they find a suitable side street. This means that once they’ve made the turn they keep pausing and looking over their shoulder further confusing motorists, then they cross in the middle of the street.

Of course, this list can be elaborated with countless variations and details, which should all be part of that future bicyclists driving test but let us be clear and brief: I don’t like you and you don’t like me. I am an exhaust-spewing automobile that can do you significant harm. You are an increase in my liability insurance. You may think that because you socialize with other cyclists that automobiles should also be in your domain of discussion. It would be better for us both to have as little company as possible.

The League of Illinois Bicyclists has come up with their bicycle safety test. We are not in total agreement, but they do explain the law: http://bikesafetyquiz.com/

Gatsby

My girlfriend’s fixation on the Great Gatsby took us to Sands Point and the Howard Gould estate on Long Island. It became obvious how F. Scott Fitzgerald came to the device of a pedestrian accident. It is just hilly and winding enough to encourage adventurous driving.

It also confirmed my initial premise on reading the book that Gatsby is Jewish. Fitzgerald’s new money/old money is an obvious McGuffin. If money has any sense at all it respects money. Old money is happy to accommodate new money and that is one of the many ways it survives. The bootlegging device is also specious. Many of the wealthy made some investments in this profitable enterprise.

Visiting Hempstead house and hearing of the Gould’s who inspired Fitzgerald’s story it becomes clear that the one great social sin was being Jewish and not knowing your place. The Gould’s and Gatsby are yet more examples of the tragic mulatto. They didn’t see themselves as Jewish and they could not have acceptance as WASPs.

Fitzgerald may have felt that he lacked the ability or qualifications to do the story justice. Or perhaps as the great script doctor that he was, recognized that the story lacked broad appeal. He was correct. The almost pornographic old money/new money device is the emotional underpinning for the story. Everyone has that sense of being the new kid at school and the idea that the wealthy would continue these fruitless distinctions is comforting.

Antisemitism was real, however. I think Daisy works better as a passing Jew as well.

The working definition of old money is inherited wealth and a social support system. This definition would include Donald Trump.

Action Movies

This should be read at poetry slams, open mic events, or wherever writers might congregate.

All movies, romance, comedy or drama are really horror movies. The one thing that cinema does well is draw you into their premise and then surprise and shock you. That sense of outrage as you find yourself sympathizing with the loser, cheering for some victorious social deviant and then realizing its absurdity is what makes movies so entertaining.

The last good action movie I saw was Heathers, the humor, violence and sex seemed believable to me. I liked the premise that adults would accept a rash of teenage suicides that were really homicides. Body Heat was good; the combination of mystery and sympathy for the villains enchanted me. The Three Stooges shorts were a respectable depiction of violence. Most action movies suck. The hero gets captured, the villain gets killed. This is because they have to have the dialogue between the hero and villain. In what way is that realistic? All problems are solved by Karate, guns, or if creativity is called for, large pieces of falling scenery. When has an action movie said, as really happens:
-Quick, get the cash and the lawyers!

I can’t stand the constant monotonous bang-bang boom-boom yell thud scream of the typical action soundtrack pounding the intelligence out of its jaded audience in perpetuum. It would be difficult to make an audience suffer through the explosion of a real gun shot. Guns are loud. One of the problems with shooting a gun is that an explosion has gone off in your hand and it is difficult to keep it steady for the next shot. The famous Dirty Harry “five shots or six” sequence in real life would have gone something like:
-…so the question is, do you feel lucky?
-What?
-What?
One was firing a magnum .44 the other a 12 gauge pump; their ears were ringing. They weren’t talking to anybody.

I think everybody should have the experience of actually firing a gun and trying to make that little bullet go where you want it to in a consistent fashion. It’s not that easy and if you are not wearing ear protection it is not that fun.

Most depictions of hand-to-hand combat are ridiculous. As Jim Harbaugh learned punching Jim Kelly, your hand has a lot of little bones in it and your jaw is a large solid piece of bone. I suppose if you have sufficient practice with various formalized, ritualistic forms of martial arts, it will be possible for you to administer enough impact to the jaw to rattle the brain and bring on concussion without breaking anything in your hand. But I think most people who have experience in such matters would rather use a tool, preferably one that will extend your reach.

Fights are not stylized choreography but a panting crying screaming mess between people who are very upset and scared. Part of the difficulty is that it is almost impossible for cinematography to have enough frames to capture the speed of real movements. So, we are given a series of frames resembling animation.

My biggest complaint is the setting. The Old West or a modern metropolis is not particularly violent. There are times and places in America that were dangerous. If you were a Native American in California during the gold rush your prospects were bleak. Chinese immigrants were often the victims of crimes.

The nature of discrimination was usually that those areas did not receive adequate police protection and enforcement of the law, even when people were arrested, was lax. This meant that if disputes were not settled immediately they were never settled:
-We stomp drunk drivers.

What the movies have done is taken characters and plots out of their original context in order to give them broader appeal. There may have once been a Dirty Harry, but that Irish stereotype was back in the 1930’s at the latest. More recently, in the 40’s and 50’s there was a Two Gun Pete, Sylvester Washington, but you will not find him on the screen. Two Gun Pete was a Chicago policeman who realized that there was little point in making arrests as the courts didn’t care if black people were killing each other. If you were one of the Jones Boys, the gang that ran policy, he would call you up and tell you to turn yourself in. But if you were a common thug he would leave you bleeding out, on the street.

In order to give it broader market violence is stripped of its class, ethnic, racist and gender qualities. For instance, saying a police officer was dirty meant he was on the take. Violence is most often a top down rather than bottom-up endeavor. Offering it as the general solution to social problems only adds further confusion.

South Side Vignette

It was difficult for me working against fourth ward Alderman Timmy Evans. I liked his people. They were better than some, try as they might to distinguish themselves. I was carpet bagging, coming into their precinct/ward from my own ward, the fifth. There are fifty wards in Chicago. You would think that with fifty aldermen it wouldn’t be such a big deal, yet the aldermanic elections are the most hard fought. Mom had called me out at the last minute to poll watch for a new candidate, Toni Preckwinkle. I had to go to my job, so I was more like the old regular democratic workers who showed up in the morning and the night, to check in and get the count. Timmy’s people just wanted their three extra votes. The way it works is that they report their expected vote count. Then Timmy, or whoever, says:
-That’s great, can you get me three more.

This is somewhat insulting. Either you were holding back on your reported count, or you have some magic way of convincing people to change their beliefs and vote for your candidate. A good precinct captain knows how the vote is going to go; they know who votes in their precinct, how they voted in the past and how they are likely to vote in the future. That’s what a precinct captain does.

Three more means steal three votes. This federal crime was routinely committed. The judges didn’t want any fuss so they gave me the option. I guess Tim just wanted the practice; we weren’t going to win this one, so I blessed the three bad ballots, got the count and dropped it off at the Preckwinkle headquarters.

Toni kept running, election after election, until finally Alan Dobry, the fifth ward democratic committeeman, went to the mat for her and sent Timmy off to his judgeship. One of Timmy’s idiots printed up some fliers picking on Toni’s husband and Dobry gathered them up and redistributed them where they would do some good. Since Dobry hadn’t printed them, he broke no laws. Nonetheless, brave Alan received considerable criticism from those who are not good enough to even breathe his air. I think of this whenever I receive solicitations for WTTW. I’m sure my sweet old mother was smiling down on Alan from on high.

In an earlier election, after the first one I was in, but before the one she won, Toni had called on mom when one of her new people was experiencing some difficulty working his precinct. The fourth ward wasn’t near as nice as it is today. He wasn’t sure how to cope and asked for help so Toni sent her best. Mom showed him how to whoop and holler, to let people know you are coming, and stand back from the door after you knocked. I’m not good at canvassing myself, too big I guess. I ask them how they are voting but they just take my literature and smile. What you want voters to do is be comfortable and tell you what they think. Like many things, mom had an easier time teaching this to others than to her sons.

Mom pulled out her old jokes, when people asked for money, she’d laugh and say:
-Well, we don’t have that much, but they do. Don’t vote for free. You know they are giving it out.

I guess it worked; Timmy’s people got some heat from people expecting payment, because eventually Gentleman Tim came by and asked how much it would take for her to go home. Recognizing that a bribe is an implicit threat, mom took the money.

She was very impressed with the new Preckwinkle precinct captain.
-He’s going to be somebody, she told me.
-What’s his name?
-Barack Obama.
-Not with that name, I said.

I think it is worthwhile, now that the elections are over and hopefully no harm can be done, to show that the neighborhood did try to raise the president correctly. Unlike most candidates, Obama has actually been in the trenches and done the work.

The Difference between an Academic and a Scholar

Some years ago, after many academic adventures I found myself taking an introductory programming course as a general requirement for graduation. The best part of the course was the computer problems book. It encapsulated all the uses for a computer up to the undergraduate senior level. I wanted to get my computer programs out of the way at the beginning of the semester so I could clear the decks for the important courses I was taking in mathematics. Several computer program problems were required, but some were electives; they were ranked in order of difficulty. In the back of the book, there was a list of how many lines of code each problem took. Cross referencing each list to get the most credit for the least lines of code lead to the problem called partitions. Partitions was defined as the number of different ways to sum integers to reach another integer. For instance 2 is 1 + 1, 3 is 1 + 1 + 1, 2 + 1, 1 + 2 and so on. The problem was to list the number of partitions for each integer up to twelve.

After a few minutes struggling with pencil and paper, I was back cross referencing the two lists to find a different problem that would maximize my grade with minimal effort. Then I remembered. For I had attended Kenwood High School, Shimer College, Oxford University, University of Chicago, and now I was at Illinois Institute of Technology. So I knew that often books had an index. Looking up partitions in the index, I found a further discussion that gave me the algorithm I needed. I finished my problems, turned them in before the teaching assistants had been coached to be fussy about comments and style, and went on to the rest of my classes. I remember thinking,
-Glad I’ll never have to do that again.

Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that I was missing my good friend Jeremy. We usually met in the cafeteria. He was majoring in biochemistry. I was concerned enough to go to his room and there I found him surrounded by pencils and scraps of paper looking more like a biochemistry major than I had ever seen him before.
-Jeremy, I asked, what are you doing?

At IIT, the most common discussion was “how do you do this problem” so I was not surprised when he held up a book. I was surprised that it was the computer problem book.
-Have you seen this one?
It was partitions.
-Oh Jeremy, the algorithm is further on in the book.
Jeremy’s reaction was inappropriate. He was not filled with joy that he could finish his requirements and go on to make his fortune in bioengineering. Instead, he was angry.
-No, it’s not.
Jeremy was being a scholar. I was being an academic.

Many years later I was the lead computer programmer on a report generation system written by the ancient ones with hairy knuckles. It was in Assembler and used macros to create a user language that generated marketing reports. Some of the reports had gotten so big that they broke the assembler. It used execute channel program (EXCP) processing which was unusual for an application system. The major hog in the system was the newly developed library maintenance system so I used a minor requirement as a justification for cleaning that out. Then I kicked, screamed and pleaded until I received enough resource to foreground test the report system, stepping through it as it ran, rather than trying to puzzle out what it was doing. This allowed us to tackle several issues, opening the door to a rewrite.
We had yet another management change and the new manager who had once worked in our group came to me with an idea of consolidating some of the report functions. I said:
-What’s the cost benefit?
So, one of my junior people became the new project leader. I was being the scholar rather than the academic.

I first noticed this distinction at Shimer in the course Natural Sciences II. We read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Evolution is not a straight forward subject. For instance here I am the product of thousands of years of sexual selection. Obviously something isn't quite working. Or take the fact that I require glasses. You would think that poor vision would select out very quickly. Toward the end of the semester my roommate Carl gave me a quick lesson in how not to read a book. He flipped through the syllabus and said:
-The only thing they can test us on is the Scientific American reprints.
He spent a little under an hour reviewing those and aced the class.

The life of the mind is a dangerous place; it is easy to lose your way, difficult to know where to focus. The academic survives in that world and recognizes the pitfalls and snares. Survival forces him to narrow his focus and search for the payoff. In that sense, trying to learn scholarship from an academic is like trying to learn love from a prostitute.

Can the President Kill People?

The short and simple answer is yes. The various authorities and means available to him are as diverse and varied as our government agencies. Most obviously as Commander in Chief the president commands the military. The military will carry out his orders. The military should also record his orders and report the consequences. Such reports should be available for review by authorized persons making it likely that they will become public.

The military has overcome this oversight in the past by various well-known mechanisms. One legendary example was the order to troops in the Pacific to feed captives from their own rations. Another is to maintain favored units or individuals who well understand that their privileges depend on obedience and discretion. More normally certain areas or endeavors are categorized as off limits and subject to summary execution.

J. Edgar Hoover was a remarkable instance. His homosexuality made him so vulnerable that he would carry out any executive order.

The National Security Agency, now under military authority can carry out any activity approved by a rubber stamp court. Richard Nixon crossed the line when he was caught using NSA authority in his political campaign. At that time the NSA was overseen by a committee rather than a court.

Outside the vast array of military intelligence groups there are seven known US intelligence agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency is unique in the world as the only government agency chartered to operate without pretext or legal protection. Their direction is to not get caught.

The national police agencies include the Treasury, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement Agency, the aforementioned FBI, Forestry and the new TSA.

It seems reasonable given this assortment that the president could find someone to do his bidding.
Kennedy maintained relationships with gangsters, presumably under NSA authority, George W. Bush found it necessary to circumvent review of some of his projects and Franklin Roosevelt worked with British intelligence. Whatever the means, one would think that a reasonably competent government executive could have as much effectiveness as a corporate leader.

Apparently, they just noticed that there is a black guy operating the crane.

Coffee Problem

The major task in marketing is categorization. For instance once you have categorized groceries you can compare the UPC codes sent against the categorized items you have and kick out the ones that are new. Assuming that you have correctly categorized the current ones and no one complains then only the new items are subject to human review. Automating the process utilizing their item description seems like a tempting application until you consider the coffee problem. What is coffee? It is a product, a flavor, a color, and an appliance, at the very least. Cross referencing to the UPC manufacturer code gives an indication but you get the idea.

The general solution to the coffee problem as mentioned above is one that humans routinely use. We cheat. That is, we make use of other information, such as the UPC manufacturer code.

Open Salon has its own version of the coffee problem, the spam issue. How do we distinguish between someone venting their opinion and someone generating gibberish? Perhaps the sheer number of posts or length of posts would be useful. I believe at one point Salon knocked me off because I hit a spam filter. I feel confident that I can recognize spam when I see it. But given that it is automatically generated I see little point in a manual process. Even worse they are malicious. Any screen or guarantee will meet further ingenuity. It is obvious that this is an attack on the site. Whether the justification is search engine optimization or stealing server resource, it is an attack against the commons. What pointless silly futility.

The slush pile is another example. How can a publisher winnow all the authors who want to publish? Again spam filters sound like a good start. “Heaving bosoms”, “communist menace”, “limpid pools”, it seems fun at first. How do we determine a positive result, that something is excellent or at least marketable? It’s difficult enough when people do it. Usually, we follow successful authors. Bayes meets regression to the mean.

The internet itself is the perfect example. The rare joy I feel when I actually find something. It seems like libraries and search engines are in the business of concealment rather than revelation.

On the other hand, think of the poor NSA. What is subversive? What should they be tracking? “Blow up the Pentagon”, “flight training school”, “bushmaster”, what connects to what?

Confusion is the only refuge of freedom.

Liberate Unions

Mark Ames has written a rant against Michigan passing the right to work law:
http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work
Howard Zinn would have been proud.

While all his facts seem correct, he has missed the point about the Wagner act. The reason for all the atrocities he lists and for the Wagner act itself was that the unions were winning. If the unions had been losing the act would not have passed. It is true that violence decreased after the act but that can also be explained as a consequence of the constraint on organizing.

As the act itself makes clear the unions were winning because they had finally developed the rolling wildcat strike and the boycott. It would have been difficult to ban these two super weapons without giving something in return so the strike as an election process was developed.

The established unions were willing to trade because they thought they had won and saw little hope of organizing the rest of the labor force. As we now can see this was a mistake. Even worse they conceded the organizing of trade unions for new industries. A phone marketers union would have to petition for exemption from antitrust law. A company can demand that the company be the bargaining unit rather than a trade.

As Ames himself points out, the current process makes organizing new unions almost impossible. The unions are jailed and the companies are fined. We would be far better off without the department of labor. Is it surprising that the abandonment of the unorganized workers and destruction of our current unions has led to a massive right-wing reaction in America?

Real Estate Tax Deduction

The greatest and most difficult issue facing humanity is social segregation. This issue allows all other issues to fester unaddressed. The fictional town of Pottersville has one significant advantage over our real civic arrangements: Potter lives in Pottersville. The cost per student at The Cairo IL high school is $8,817. In Highland Park IL it is $17,636. That is because education, security, maintenance and recreation are funded by real estate taxes. The corporate ghetto, Oak Brook IL, is organized to minimize services in order to benefit the companies that reside there. Other suburbs minimize their education expenses because only the servants use those schools or the residents are old.

The real estate tax itself could be very progressive. But using it to locally fund our services maximizes the benefits of social segregation.

The cherry on top, isn’t it great to live in America, is that social segregation is then subsidized by our income tax code. Because the real estate tax is deductible, I get to pay more in taxes, or we borrow the difference, to encourage the stratification of our society.

The real estate tax deduction is the most vicious and depraved regulation of our entire tax code.

Chanukah

Chanukah is packaged as some sort of gooey sweet adjunct of Christmas. Maccabees were sick twisted.

 They hated the Greeks. That’s understandable:

-Oh, you have a god; well of course we can include him. 

-He’s the greatest? Hmm, work with me here, we conquered you, right? 

-So, you study the law while we study the world, how interesting.

 
Here you are, proud of reading, writing and developing a sophisticated integrated society and the newbies are in charge, treating you like hicks. What we are celebrating is a fundamentalist homophobic resistance movement engaged in terrorist activities against a modern world civilization.

Mortgage Interest Deduction

The problem with taxes is that people refuse to think systemically. Take tax rebates for instance. Imagine everyone got a million dollars from the federal government. It sounds good until you realize that prices would have to rise. Admittedly there is a lot of slippage and friction in prices so there would be points of advantage but everyone understands at some fundamental level that if everyone has a million dollars, then millionaire doesn’t mean what it used to. The same thing is true if everyone gets five hundred dollars. Again there is some slippage and friction on prices so you aren't quite as equal as you might think but in a great hydraulic sense, no one has made anything. In order for tax rebates to work, someone has to be losing money.

 
This doesn’t mean that Keynes was wrong. Keynes argued that government should borrow to flatten the business cycle and get people through the recession. One of the fundamental market paradoxes is that someone can win. Almost everyone has played monopoly. No one plays it to resolution with the shoe circling the board yelling out that it won with every shake of the dice and all the other players shivering out in the cold or in debtor’s prison, but this can happen in real life. There is no point in giving the shoe any more money. The shoe is not going to build more hotels or buy more property. If you want to keep the other players in the game you have to take money and property from the shoe and give it to the other players. Keynes didn’t explicitly say that the money borrowed would have to come from somewhere and be repaid with interest devalued by inflation, but that is what he meant. Keynes opponent, goofy Hayek, the shoe concerned with moral hazard, keeps whining:
-I won, I won!
-Don’t you want to share with the other children?
-No, I won!
-They won’t want to play with you.
-I won I tell you! 

If a deduction is truly fair, then no one got the deduction. The same thing is true for a rebate.

 
Let us apply this same systemic thinking to the mortgage interest deduction. People think that the mortgage interest deduction holds up house prices, but the true subsidy is to mortgage holders. Banks get to charge more interest on mortgages because of the subsidy. It seems reasonable that a subsidy for interest expense would increase home purchases but not when banks get the first cut. The mortgage interest deduction was originally intended and functions as a bank subsidy. Since all home buyers are getting the deduction the banks would be foolish not to increase their prices to meet the subsidy.

 
The $250,000 home exclusion on the sale of a house after owning it for three years does increase market activity. People are more willing to sell at a lower price since they don’t have to pay as much capital gain tax and they are more willing to purchase since they can expect to get tax free return. It also has operational benefit for the IRS in that they aren’t concerned with fraud on sales that generate tax free return.

 
Doing away with the mortgage interest deduction would lead to a small drop in mortgage interest rates and not much else. We would pay more in taxes and less in interest. Since banks merely generate mortgages and no longer hold them, they may even favor dropping the deduction as that would encourage refinancing.

Arafat Conspiracy

This is an example of the dog that didn’t bark. Arafat was killed by polonium poisoning. This poison has the property of leaking residue all over the place, which residue is traceable to whichever nuclear reactor created it. Any intelligence agency worth anything has its own private sample of this poison and determined which country killed Arafat and no one is saying.

 
If it were Israel, the stool pigeons would have reached a crescendo. This leaves one likely candidate.

 
The poisoning of Litvinenko two years later by polonium seemed odd. It appeared that Russia intended to put a big greasy thumb print on the murder as a warning to other dissidents. Were they also waving a big sign pointing at Arafat?

 
Currently the US government has claimed the right to murder terrorists. But this was the poisoning of a world leader in 2004. It appears that taking out Saud’s stooge was irresistible to the Bush administration

1984 Buildings

You can do this for any city. Here are my picks for the Chicago buildings to use for the four ministries in 1984:
Ministry of Truth:
http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1063/Leo-Burnett-Building.php

Ministry of Peace:
http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1051/The-Boeing-Corporate-Headquarters.php
For those who like that sort of humor it is located on Riverside.

 
Ministry of Plenty:
http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1031/Chicago-Board-of-Trade.php

Ministry of Love:
http://www.blueprintchicago.org/2010/12/22/metropolitan-correctional-center/
Obviously, Orwell’s descriptions are bleaker, give it time.

Mom - Him Too?

I was disturbed by Romney’s reference to “his kids” in the second debate. Being a northerner he might be ignorant of all the various implications of that phrase in American culture. Still being from Utah he shouldn’t be. I suppose he was talking about Massachusetts. That kind of paternalism has a poor reputation.

Prohibition and the Great Depression

You would think that if econometrics and modeling had any validity at all then the issue of the cause and resolution of the great depression would be resolved. Obviously they don’t. The debate generally centers on some well propounded common sense axiom that has been violated and the ensuing consequence as proof of its validity. A good synopsis is in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression

It is generally held that World War II ended the great depression. This correlation has been unfortunate for America’s self-perception and foreign policy.

 
The debate for whichever cause is met by instances where such stupidity did not cause the great depression.

 
I offer prohibition as a major factor. The untraced illegal flows of capital may have severely burdened all the other extenuating circumstances. The opium trade should also be considered. When investors can get much larger returns with substantially less risk why should they consider legitimate markets?
If we ever can model economies then capital must be considered. It is well understood that various investments and industries impact people’s livelihood in different ways. The aforementioned defense industry requires large capital investment with relatively less employees. Whereas smaller manufacturing enterprises spread the risk and employ far more people for less investment.

There is also the social cost of enterprise. For instance, mining and logging while initially profitable can have much greater costs for the nation than any profits extracted.

 
If it is ever possible to reasonably model the flows of money and investment then it may well be found that prohibition, by absorbing so much cost and investment was the unique and underlying cause of our financial ruin.

OJ

The OJ case was remarkable in that it encapsulated all the deficiencies apparent in our criminal justice system. Part of the difficulty of recognizing the problem is that it is so easy to dismiss incompetence without recognizing its systemic nature. The vagaries of state law and tradition make it easier to dismiss aberrant events in other jurisdictions. Illinois laughs at the foibles of Wisconsin judges and police. Even the antics of Buffalo Grove and Arlington Heights are merely sources of entertainment to the rest of us, unless you are the one being stopped. Regardless of his guilt, if OJ had been tried in Chicago he would have been convicted.

As OJ demonstrated in the Bronco episode he couldn't even break the speed limit. He was framed in Vegas for running his mouth. He didn't murder his ex and her boyfriend; he hired it done.

Put yourself in the shoes of the Los Angeles police. OJ’s plane is in the air when the two victims had their throats slit, the kids aren’t disturbed, and there is no evidence. It was obviously a professional job. I suppose if this were television they would devote their efforts to finding the hit man. Good luck with that Matlock. Do you really want all the copycat clones in Malibu hiring hit men?
-Hey cheaper than a divorce.

It was also obvious who paid for it. So, they decided to smear up OJ. Rule number one: don’t disrespect the police. Bless them for trying. This seems a little risky, what if OJ had an alibi for the time before he was in the air? People don’t really have servants nowadays and celebrities value their privacy. Conversely even though older people remember OJ running through the airport in the Hertz rent a car commercial, detouring to kill his ex and her boyfriend before making the flight seems over scheduled.

Unfortunately, the police went overboard on the evidence. Blood in the Bronco was more than sufficient. The, hat, the shoe, the glove, the socks, where was the underwear? The stuff they grabbed hadn’t even been worn yet. Memo to police, when framing celebrities, look for signs of wear on their clothing. Rule number two: don’t disrespect the jury. It is well documented that police coerce confessions and influence witnesses, why should they stop at physical evidence?

Vincent Bugliosi wrote a book Helter Skelter where he described his prosecution of Charles Manson. He put on a very quick case and then let the defense talk their client into a conviction. At the end of the interminable defense Bugliosi got up and said something to the effect of:
-Remember me? You know he did it, right?

The jury was so furious at the defense that they convicted Manson even though he wasn't at the scene of the crime. Unfortunately the Los Angeles prosecution hadn't read the book, and they traded blows with the defense, answering their every point. At the end of a yearlong trial, the jury met; someone said:
-Does anyone still care?
Someone else on the jury raised their hand and the case was decided.

DNA evidence has revealed the total failure of our court system. In Illinois it was proven that half the people on death row were wrongfully convicted. This doesn't mean that the other half was rightfully convicted. It means that they were able to prove that half were wrongfully convicted. As Governor Ryan observed if we can’t decide these cases correctly what makes you think that we are doing any better on any other cases, criminal or civil? We would do better flipping a coin. We routinely convict the innocent and free the guilty. We haven’t progressed from the day of stocks and witch dunking. Governor Ryan went on, rightly or wrongly, to be convicted on suborned testimony of conspiracy charges.

Now that DNA evidence is understood, the establishment is attempting to paper over the immense breach of reality revealed by all the falsely decided cases. What we should be discussing is how to improve our court system. Instead we are indulging in CSI fantasies of justice. Someday a new technological wonder will arrive and once again we will be shocked, shocked I tell you, at all the injustice.

How should we improve the courts? One obvious issue is that it is the incompetent lawyers who become judges. The OJ case demonstrates how dangerous this Dilbert Principle can be for selecting judges. I have never heard of someone entering law school because they want to be a judge. The most successful lawyers never see the inside of a court room unless they get caught. I propose that the pool of lawyers be subject to service as judges, perhaps for five-year terms, just as citizens are subject to jury service. The sitting judges should favor this system as it would open up more opportunities for them.

Romney Tithing

How odd that Romney doesn't reveal his tax records. It seems like he is not serious about running for president. He must have known of his ambition for some time, perhaps not ten years but at least a few. I find it hard to believe that anyone will be worked up about a Republican avoiding their taxes. So what could it be? I suspect it’s the charitable deduction. First I thought of an early imprudent donation to Planned Parenthood. Then I remembered: tithing. An LDS member is supposed to give ten percent of their income to the church. Problem is there wasn't that much income. The whole point of tax avoidance is to move it into capital gains. As usual, it isn't that he broke the rules, but that the rules, even for the church, favor the rich. If someone can dig out video of Bishop Romney speaking on the joys of tithing and then lay it against a return where ten times his contribution is a lot less than his post-tax net, the ensuing discussion could be difficult not only for Romney but a lot of other members.

Peace Foundation

If you were to ask anybody from Tanzania to Toronto how to get something done in the United States, what would they tell you? Say I wanted a tax on wind chimes, how do I accomplish that? They would tell you to hire fund-raisers, lobbyists, advertising agencies, pay for results, flip congressmen, finance a political action committee and generally participate in the adult discourse of politics. No one would mention singing songs in a church, taking long walks, or fighting with police.

We have an NRA, ACLU, NAACP, think tanks, PAC’s, organizations supporting every possible cause. Why isn’t there an organization that opposes military aid, military bases and military force in a sensible modern way? There are hundreds of member organizations in the war lobby. Where is the peace lobby?

Being a pacifist doesn’t mean you have lost all sense of perspective and judgment. The lack of any such organization proves that the peace movement is thoroughly infiltrated and controlled by the Federal Government. The tactics used provoke repressive force. These are the tactics of provocateurs, justifying their budgets to their police/intelligence handlers. Provocateurs would not be able to justify their participation by reporting on board meetings or advertising buys.

When events are staged and reported, their message is at the mercy of the reporters. Outrage at police brutality can cross the political spectrum with no impact on policy.

Without control of their message, the peace movement lacks legitimacy and voting power. Correctly packaged, the peace movement message could be extremely powerful. Imagine what an advertising firm could do with the message that we gave billions in military aid to Pakistan who then created the Taliban; if we had cut off the aid, Bin Laden would have been picked up at the airport. Or follow around a local war lord, beating his wife, molesting young boys, stealing from neighboring villages and then killed by a million dollar missile.
I’m not sure what would work and what wouldn’t, but that is the point. I’m not so arrogant as to believe that the sing-along mob tactics of 1930 will work in 2012. If anything, they cement the opposition. It isn’t that professionals know what is going to work, but that they try things, test the results, and try again. Peace is too important to be left to dilettantes cruising for dates.

Critique of General Relativity

All forces are points. In particular, gravity is a point source. If you wish to distinguish between falling and weightlessness suspend two balls in front of you. If they move, ever so slightly, toward each other then you are falling. If they do not, then place them in the opposite direction and repeat the experiment. If you visualize a sphere, by positioning the balls diametrically opposite each other around the sphere you should be able to determine the direction of the gravitational force, or at least the maximum one. The balls are following their V path to the center of gravity. It should be very unusual to be actually weightless. If they are so far out that the movement can be explained by their mutual attraction then changing the direction should produce exactly the same movement.

In order to do any math we make use of gauge invariance. That is we say that for all practical purposes we can ignore this curvature. For all practical purposes, until very recently, the earth is flat. By itself, this is perfectly fine. But then we turn around and apply these derivations to the universe.

I propose two experiments. They both involve sending a probe as far from the sun as we can communicate with. Once there repeat the measurements for the red shift and the microwave background radiation. I believe that our proximity to the sun is a factor in these measurements.

How to Save the Palestinians

Some years ago, George Ball wrote an article entitled: The Middle East: How to Save Israel in Spite of Herself. I remember observing at the time that if he knew anything of Jewish faith it should be that the last thing Israel wanted was a savior. In it he propounded, as though it were new, the essential formulation of the most consistent foreign policy America has. That is: that if Israel returns land to its Arab neighbors there will be peace in the Middle East. To this end, America has bullied and bribed Israel since 1948. Given the stated objective, this has not been a particularly successful policy. Until one realizes that by “peace,” America means status quo. America, in particular President Truman, was essential to the founding of Israel. Since then, I suspect that without our help Israel would have achieved a position of stability and respect in the community of nations that has been denied her. By our consistent policy of forcing Israel to concede land, we have forced Israel to concede sovereignty and identity as a nation. Given that history, it is not surprising that most Israelis are beyond the limits of reason.

There has been some question of Palestinian legitimacy. These arguments note the small numbers of Palestinians actually expelled from Israel and view the creation of the Palestinian people as a function of United Nations relief. The detachment of military units and financial aid from other nations supports these views. But if six million, or more, people view themselves as Palestinians that will suffice. The questioning of legitimacy is a perilous and slippery slope.

There are those who believe that Israel has undue influence within the United States. The essential function of the Israel lobby in American politics is to keep up the price. This was made clear during Desert Storm. At the same time, that Israel was begging for loan guarantees to borrow ten billion, Saud was writing checks for fifty billion for Desert Storm. This difference is orders of magnitude. As this much ambiguity doesn’t make for a sound bite, I doubt that America is going to be much help.

The Palestinian position seems the most foolish. Does anyone believe that another nation in the Middle East is going to make things more peaceful? The Palestinian campaign to install themselves in a reservation between Jordan and Israel without oil or water can only be the product of foreign sponsorship. It doesn’t make sense in a democracy to demand disenfranchisement. The Palestinians can put Israel on the spot so easily, put up or shut up, in or out, what’s it going to be? If the Palestinians reversed position and demanded full citizenship, service in the army, etc. the world would finally have to appreciate their situation. They would be entering the arena of modern discourse.

Of course, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis, trapped in the discussion of sovereignty, can appear to recognize this option. For the Israelis, Palestinian enfranchisement is far more terrifying than Palestinian sovereignty. They would probably offer the Palestinians Tel-Aviv rather than citizenship. Given the heterogeneity of the Palestinian people one has to wonder where their nation building would stop, is each town going to be its own nation? Can the Palestinians and the Israelis share a nation? Can the Israelis share a nation? This is the wonder of democracy. The United States is shared between two of the bitterest opponents in the history of the world: North and South. We don’t like each other, but we somehow manage. Although we do seem to have a particular affinity for other peoples civil wars, always supporting the south.

It is unfair to demand exceptional behavior of Israel. Israel is a nation in the Middle East, no more, no less. For instance, Israel doesn’t mistreat its Palestinians any more than other nations mistreat theirs. However, someday, Israel, like all nations, will have to decide if it’s a religious artifact or a nation. Once the Palestinians enter Israeli political life, all questions are on the table, the flag, the nation, its identity. Obviously the Palestinians will not be welcomed, the future never is.

Therefore, we see that Hamas, the PLO, or something like it, is essential to Israeli policy. What they do is frame the discussion and prevent the terrifying option of enfranchisement.

Palestinians entering Israel’s political life would not be a peaceful solution. Success would be the most dangerous result. Israel, or whatever its name would be, would be a modern democracy in the Middle East. This would terrify the world. It’s likely that everyone would attack them.

Efficient Market Hypothesis

This is a perfect example of common perception inflated to economic theory. It tells you to wait in line and take what’s coming to you. The fundamental fallacy is the belief that the game is fair. The moment you start depending on the efficient market hypothesis, you find yourself joining a buying club, in a time-share; your stop loss positions wiped out in a flash crash and trapped in the slow lane behind a befuddled shrivel.

Do not confuse the efficient market hypothesis with the cost of investment decision paradox. This is the famous cost accounting paradox predicated on the belief that the time spent on an investment decision should be tempered by the value of the expected gain. Beloved of lazy accountants who refuse to get out their rulers and measure floor space, it leads to the off shoring of production facilities and the black hole of corporate Calcutta, where more and more employees are squished into cheaper and smaller offices.

When I go into the car dealership and ask for the cheapest one, I am not using the efficient market hypothesis or optimizing the cost of my decision. I am giving up. I know that the manufacturers have spent millions beating me on this game and I am overmatched.

Anytime I enter a tastefully decorated home, I shudder. I know that with the slightest prompting they will inventory their purchasing victories. Consider the enormous man-hours that went into that effort, counted as part of the cost they would have done far better to work extra jobs and hire a decorator.

-Oh but antiquing is my recreation.

Not to mention the cost of the vehicle necessary to lug those tasteful decorations home.

-Besides this gives me time with my family.

So multiply the time wasted by the family size.

-You just don’t love me

I have noticed that the proportion of goods manufactured for the resale market has steadily grown, as would be expected.

You should always check your eggs , ice cream and milk.

Awnings

Large office buildings are unoccupied during the weekends. Even when they are occupied, office management, by custom if not fact, feels entitled to turn down the heat. On Monday mornings the heat is turned up again and the ice that has collected on these buildings falls off onto the streets below. Certain buildings seem designed to take maximum advantage of this effect. In particular the diamond topped Smurfit Stone building at Michigan and Randolph used to be the best example of this effect. The diamond roof dropped all the ice directly on the entrance.

If there ever is a nuclear disaster, I am sure that Chicagoans will still go to work. I vividly remember people inching along the walls of the building hoping to get to their offices before being brained by the ice. The ice dramatically shattered in the plaza before them sending fragments up into the air. Since then the building has constructed an entryway with shops on its plaza giving tenants greater safety.

The Citibank center, formerly the Northwestern train station was a wonderful example of architectural spite. The scalloped roof would gather heat at the top, sending the ice and snow onto the lower levels, each iteration gathering more mass until some hapless commuter would be buried under an avalanche. The management finally built a large awning over the entrance area, spoiling the entertainment, or at least moving it to the street.

The sensible bungalow solution of an awning in front of many Chicago skyscrapers is not for concern over rain or sun but because while we are willing to accept the occasional rare fatality from falling ice in the street it is more difficult for a building to get a favorable settlement if they were injured or killed in an entrance.

Counting the Real Numbers

The real numbers as described by the decimals can be completely counted for each order of decimal place. Take all the real numbers from zero through one. For one decimal place, they are the numbers 0.0 through 0.9, there are ten of them or 101 real numbers and this list is exhaustive. That is, there is no real number that can be generated from this list that would not be redundant. For two decimal places 102, there are 100 of them, the numbers 0.00, 0.01, through 0.99. For each decimal place, there is a matrix 10n that completely lists all the real numbers to that many decimal places. As n approaches infinity, the real numbers are completely listed.

St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

I am always startled at my own innocence and naiveté. Every Chicagoan knows that the police killed the Moran gang. The papers reported it as:
-Men in police uniforms.

This may be the origin of that journalist’s trick that persists to this day:
-Men in government army uniforms, etc.

Of course, who wears official uniforms? Officials, but that would be in poor taste and might lead to misadventure. Yet I was surprised when I read Get Capone by Eig; I think most of us assumed that the hit had been ordered by the gangster establishment. This had always been puzzling, as Capone usually observed the proper and traditional forms.

What Eig suggests is that the Chicago police operation may have actually belonged to the Chicago police.

Capone was coming under indictment, his grip was loosening and the Police, with the backing of the FBI, wished to reassert themselves as equals rather than juniors. It seems perfectly logical. I admit I never would have considered it on my own. As Walter Arnold says:
-The Chicago mob is a front for city hall.

Dearborn Park Chicken Salad

There was a wonderful summer when my friend Phil had a boat in Monroe harbor and we sailed the beer can race each Wednesday. One of my fondest memories is working the wheel while we rounded the crib, keel over as far as I dared. I was worried until I realized, it wasn’t my boat. One evening after the race some guests brought a salad with chicken in it. I took one bite, looked up and with a great big smile said – Harold’s.

I worked next to a guy who brought a McDonald's Burger and fries every day and ate it at his desk. Determined to communicate with him, I brought a Billy Goats double cheese with grilled onions and ate it at my desk. It didn't make an impression. Then I brought some take out Sushi, no effect. Next I got a side of white from Harold’s. The whole floor knew what I was eating. He considerately ate in the lunchroom ever after.

Harold’s is a chicken franchise in Chicago. What he does is take a great big old chicken and fry it. Each store has a different taste because each fryer has a different history. When rents got low downtown, some Harold’s opened up there. I walked into one just west of the loop that had white people working. I saw something there I had never seen in Harold’s before or since, a big white block sitting in the fryer, they were melting lard. The service was slow, as usual, and with decades of payback at stake, I gave them the look, and they hurried up!

If you don’t have a Harold’s, find some place that fries big old birds. Discard the bones, skin, breading and bust up the chicken. Use mesclun or arugula, anything with bite, it has to fight the chicken. Scallions, cherry tomatoes, peppers, almond slivers, radishes, you get the idea. Add olive oil and balsamic vinegar of course.

Don’t accompany it with white bread and Richard’s. You can say it but don’t do it. Instead, have a nice chewy sourdough and a Riesling. If you must be authentic, push the cork in and drink out of the bottle. Don’t bother checking your cholesterol for a month, it’s too high and you’re going to die and that’s all there is to it.

Chicago Facade

When I was a kid, there was urban renewal. This meant many vacant lots with construction debris, rebar, huge piles of dirt; they were perfect. When they rebuilt the neighborhood, the adults asked us what kind of playground we wanted. We tried to tell them: construction debris, rocks, huge piles of dirt, what we were saying is that we wanted our vacant lots. So they put a bump, a little hill, in the middle of the playground.

LaSalle Street is an architectural success, in large part, because the buildings have a common proscenium. I have heard that word used to describe the theatrical nature of the buildings street level. I think of it as a kick plate, like the ones at the bottom of kitchen cabinets or doors. Even the State of Illinois Thompson center has a line distinguishing the bottom of the building from the rest. On other streets, the buildings kick plate/proscenium, in deference to Chicago’s plaza law, raise their skirts to give more walking space. On LaSalle they come up to the sidewalk.

The building at 10 S. LaSalle is particularly odd. It replaces the Otis building. That experience has been so traumatic that the new building does not have a name. On top, it is a normal blue skyscraper. The kick plate however is an old granite facade tacked around the bottom of the building. What happened is that the developers didn't coordinate their normal process of destruction and building sufficiently and they destroyed several landmarks at the same time, the Otis building and the Chicago Stock Exchange building. There were conservation meetings, a photographer, Richard Nickel died in a salvage expedition; the developers had to respond.
One story has the sister of the Heller brothers attending a conservation meeting:
-This is terrible, who owns that building?
-You do.

For her they took a room out of the Stock Exchange building and installed it at the Art Institute. Another sop to the preservationists was to take the old front of the Otis building and stick it around the bottom of its new blue skyscraper. Just as the adults had tried to assuage the kids’ nostalgia with the playground, the developers halfheartedly made a gesture to preservation.

Turning a disaster into a tragedy, this response became an architectural fashion, trotted out whenever they need to flatten landmarks. The worst example is the flying saucer landing on the coliseum at Soldier Field. The fashion has reached the neighborhoods. Walgreens, the destroyer of the Car Kabob in Berwyn mentioned in Wayne’s World, is now carefully keeping the Midwestern storefront at Oak Park and Madison on the front of that new store.

It’s not enough to raze landmarks, now we have to make fun of them.