Category: Uncategorized

*In Iraq

The Rockies are the Western Edge of the Real America and the Appalachians are the Eastern Edge. The Ocean Coast States seem to have been stuck emotionally in the cold war era, mostly against the United States, on the side of the Soviet Union and the Viet Cong.

So I delightfully ask everyone I meet here in Colorado, what Americans think. On the basis of a tiny number, the answer to my key question is: Yes, the United States will be able to stay in Iraq for several years without President Bush loosing either next year’s election or his Congressional lead.

*Kobe Bryant

Among men there is a Secret Pact. We have agreed not to talk to women about it. The core of the pact is: the understanding that women have gained excessive legal power over men and are too easily able to lie and exaggerate. Women are able to use the power of the law to unfairly intimidate and persecute men.

The Secret Pact is the reason for the decade long difference in voting results between men and women. Men look for political candidates they feel will someday right the legal imbalance that favors women.

My male friends in San Francisco think that the Kobe Bryant case is a frame. We don’t think the case will ever make it to trial. In Colorado, based on my tiny sample, the male opinion is that Bryant will go to trial but will be found not guilty.

In my Feb 9th blog I talked about the Medicare disaster that is about a decade off. I offered a number of imaginative suggestions.

The main point of this blog is that the Medicare prescription drug bill that just passed is designed to deal with this problem. The bill includes an experimental provision that takes effect in 2010 to have private insurers compete for Medicare services.

This bill, while unimaginative, is nevertheless good policy. It passed because many in Washington know that the time for any particular solution only comes along once and this is the once for Medicare reform and prescription drug coverage. AARP saw the light at the last minute.

The previous blog covered AARP.

Many people don’t know how the AARP operates. The D.C. office has several big conference rooms in the headquarters which is a three and a half block walk from Congress. The AARP conference rooms are equipped with large screen TVs. Members of Congress are brought to the conference rooms and a group of fifty of the legislator’s local constituents is offered live to the member of Congress. It is a free focus group for the Congress person who gets to ask constituents their opinion on anything. Congress listens when the AARP speaks.

Powerful lobbying. Among the most powerful in D.C.

What was the Department of Defense Bill that the President signed two days ago with little publicity and no Democratic furor?

It was the same issue that drove the Democrats insane about the Homeland Security Bill and what turned the Confederate Army into the Army that defeated 200,000 Iraqi troops in four weeks (actually, the battle began in secret with Special Forces two and a half months before the main battle).

The bill the President signed turned the civilians employed by the Department of Defense from civil service protected bureaucrats with chaotic union representation into a group of conventional employees who can be fired, promoted for merit and represented by one major negotiating union (rather than hundreds).

This all started after we lost the war in Viet Nam. The military introduced a meritocratic promotion system call ‘three failed reviews and you’re out.’ Meaning that officers who didn’t get promoted after three reviews were kicked out of the military.

The consequence was that the military, which was a direct descendent from the Confederate Army (because Southerners have made up the bulk of the members for 100 years) came to an end.

The efficiency of the new Army was so startling that the meritocratic advantages are now spreading in government. First to the giant Homeland Security Agency and now back to the civilian military workers.

The CSI program on television is about a previously unknown group of police officers who collect forensic data at crime scenes. Crime Scene Investigation. The TV show on this subject, that ranks at the top of the Neilsen chart week after week, is set in Las Vegas. A similar show with a different cast, not nearly as popular, is set in Miami.

CSI gets Neilsen ratings of 17 to 18, roughly 21 million households watching every show. This rating is one third higher than all other top rated prime time shows, which are in the 12 to 13 range. For every three people who watch other shows a fourth person joins the group to watch CSI.

What has CSI got? It has three elements that I consider additive. Additive meaning each element has an audience and the three audiences get added together to create the larger total audience.

Element one is a traditional murder mystery. The murder comes with an extra bucket of blood and gore, added on the pretense that it helps forensic understanding when the audience can closely view an arm mutilated by a shark, or to see a body that has been decomposed by a week in the water. Element one would get the program up to a a Neilsen rating of 9-10.

Element two is a large dollop of inter-personal friction. This is the usual melodrama and it adds a few Nielsen points. Melodrama would usually also lose points except for the fact that the inter-personal friction is in a white collar office setting, the kind that most working Americans experience everyday. So a surly and distracted boss becomes a subject of interest to most viewers. Realistic white collar office friction is not common on TV. It adds a significant audience, 2-3 Nielsen points. The total points now are in the 13-14 range. Higher than most programs.

Element three is science of the Sherlock Holmes variety. This brings in the educated reading audience. This group rarely watches TV and when they do they don’t admit it. The last time this group admitted watching TV was for Jerry Seinfeld. The total viewership gets pushed to 18 with the addition of this final group that seldom watches TV.

Voila, a successful TV show.

I declared the end of the Environmental Movement in my October 27th blog. I was just looking at the absence of a grassroots constituency and the failure of the movement to find any successful new sky-is-falling hysterias to rally the troops in the past decade.

Now I see an additional reason. The absence of intelligence, subtlety or sophistication at the intellectual level of the movement. This will take a little reading on your part.

This is the essay I submitted to the Shell-Economist contest. The Shell planning department that set up this contest was the mother of GBN, Global Business Network, an environmental-business-scenario consulting firm. Die-hard fanatics, but also the main thinkers in the environmental field. My essay, jointly authored with a close friend who writes well, argues that the environment, our own physical characteristics and especially our perceptions of the world are all interactive and constantly evolving. We give examples and offer what I feel to be an intelligent, subtle and sophisticated argument suggesting we, humans, don’t know what our environment actually is. We can’t know what our environment is with any reliability. The argument is tightly underpinned by contemporary American pragmatic philosophy.

The winner of the contest wrote a piece that is stylistically beautiful: the world from the vantage point of a fungus. The following is the main point of the essay:

“With the advantage of hindsight, I think we can summarize it (the development of human society in the past 20,000 years) as a failed experiment in individualism. The idea of the individual – and there is no fungal equivalent – arose during a period of rapid change in human society. In the abstract, individualism looked defensible, even appealing. The ideal individual was to be educated and enlightened, someone we’d all like to know. However, as a practical matter, the culture of enlightened individualism reformed itself after a brief period into a cult of personal freedom.

“Over the next several centuries, unbridled personal freedom and chance distributions of natural resources led to the creation of certain wealthy and isolated colonies of humans. Their prosperity excited envy and the rest of the world did what they could to emulate them. Large populations of humans moved from a very simple experience of the natural world to the expectation of a lifestyle similar to what the exploiters were enjoying. This clamour for plenitude – for meat in daily diets, for manufactured goods, for personal comfort, for leisure activities – put enormous stress on the biosphere. “

The literary quality of the piece is adult, the perspective is fourth grade marxist. The judges, one of whom I know, must view the public as left-wing ideological fools to commend this childish vision of the environment.

Two days ago Wells Fargo Bank lost a computer list of its California credit customers in a burglary of a contractor’s office in the East Bay. All the names on the computer are subject to identity theft because the list has names, addresses, social security numbers and probably some demographic data about each customer.

Wells took a number of exemplary actions, that should be noted by all businesses. First, the obvious letter to all affected customers. Second, personal phone calls to all affected customers. Third, a notice to the three credit bureaus to look for suspicious action in any of the accounts of the targeted Wells customers. Fourth, a free one year account with Privacy Guard that allows for direct customer interrogation of their own credit reports. Fifth a dedicated 800 phone number to call with any problems. Sixth, change in the credit account numbers. Seventh, a promise of indemnity against any losses due to identity theft. Finally, Wells has posted a $100,000 reward for the burglar.

The only two things Wells has missed is: a notice to all other customers who are worried and a more appealing reward offer to a burglar snitch than money, a reward such as a new Maserati.

President Bush already sits at the top of the pantheon of friends of the Jews. In 2,000 years, Jews have never had a friend like President George W. Bush. Only a few others in 2,000 years have entered the pantheon at all. The few members of the pantheon are all recent. Members include those who saved thousands of Jews, such as Rauol Wallenberg and Sugihara, Chiune and those who saved individual Jews, such as the saints memorialized in the line of trees at Yad Vashem. The Danes, as a nation, are in the pantheon of friends of the Jews..

President George W. Bush not only publicly supported the Jews when their enemies began indiscriminately killing Jews in September 2000 but adamantly vilified and punished the leader of the enemy camp. To this day he has never hesitated to support the Jews and vilify Arafat, the perverted leader of the enemy camp. President Bush has never spoken to nor met this evil man.

At the same time that President Bush joined the pantheon of friends of the Jews, former President Clinton gave a speech in the Fall of 2000 at Hebrew University calling on the recently victimized Jews of Israel to “be patient.” The sub-text that I read into Clinton’s indifference to murdered Jews is ‘ my long time friend Yasir tells me that killing Jews is only a temporary situation that he is trying to fix.’

Now here is my notice to all living and future Jews:

President Bush is the first president of the United States and the first leader of any major nation at any time in history to demand an end to European anti-Semitism.

I suggest that President Bush is no longer at the top of the pantheon of friends of the Jews, he has become the Zeus of the pantheon. I predict that President George W. Bush will become the most beloved figure in Jewish history and will be as important a part of future Passover services as Elijah is today.

The California New Progressive Movement ball is rolling. We citizens have recalled and replaced a highly partisan political governor. The new non-partisan governor is faced with a highly partisan legislature.

Let’s replace the legislature. We can replace the California Legislature with a sortition legislature. Sortition refers to a random selection of California citizens, selected just the way juries are selected. Real people chosen to serve three year terms.

Real citizens, just like jurors, will accurately reflect the population of California. The real citizens will serve at the same pay as current legislators and return to their lives, in El Centro and Richmond, after three years. Real citizens chosen to be representatives are just the kind of representative legislature that our founding fathers wanted.

We can have: no partisan infighting, no costly election campaigns, no candidate fund raising. We can have real people doing their job seriously and accurately representing the non-partisan interests of California.

The time is ripe for an initiative to replace the current California Legislature.

I wrote a book in the early 1980’s with co-author Chick Callenbach. The book is online. Just under 100 pages. Many op-eds have supported this idea and random selection of legislators is increasingly taught in university level political science classes.

It feels good to be right the next day. Today’s Chronicle reports that the runoff race survey had a few problems. I reported on the bias that I detected, yesterday.

I’m responsible for one of the survey problems and I can now understand the other problem.

The survey was done with a computer voice giving respondents their choices. “If you plan to vote for Matt Gonzalez for mayor press one, now, on your touch pad.” I’m responsible for that.

In 1966, I was doing political polling in San Francisco and tried out the idea of doing interviews by computer. Computers couldn’t do a survey in those days but the public didn’t know that. I used a tape message and I would manually stop the tape message to allow for the dial response (most phones in those days were rotary so the respondents choice had to be 1 for the first choice or 9 for the second choice). My reason for the pseudo computer experiment was scientific. I wanted each interview to be identical, because I was concerned about interviewer variation and resulting potential bias.

I did about 50 interviews with my pseudo computer and 50 with a real interviewer. I reported, in a published paper, to the Pacific Chapter of the American Public Opinion Research Association that: the response rate was the same for the pseudo-computer and the live interviewer and the results were the same. Which was a positive outcome.

The computer questioning part of the runoff race survey doesn’t bother me.

The problem is the surveyor’s answer to a question: “….was based on a telephone survey of 1,012 people in San Francisco who indicated they were registered and certain to vote on Dec. 9.” That my friends is nonsense.

No question or series of questions gives you “certain to vote” information. The best you can get is a probability of voting. This guy doesn’t know what he is talking about and the probability of voting issue is the key flaw with this survey.

My advice: Ignore the survey. There may be bias problems but the technical quality of the survey is too low to worry about the sampling bias problem.