What, I ask myself, is Psy-Ops when applied to political matters?  And I answer:  It is the military name for doctoring spin and though it uses identical methods it is far less well paid and intended to be more truthful and less deluding.

 Fox news is beginning to lose me. I was rather proud of the motto, “We Report; You Decide” of my favorite news provider, especially in the early days. Indeed I finally learned the meaning of “looked askance” when folks would drop their chins, cock their heads, and look to the side when I told them where I learned this or that tidbit. These days I catch my own chin dropping.

In choosing items to cover, any news or commentary show makes one particular choice. It decides to tell me, implicitly, what is important. This week I am about fed up with flying donkeys, angry elephants, and an attacking “buffalo”, which is actually a “bison”… I find nothing important in the tears of a starlet over being “forced” to take off her hair falls and false eyelashes. The health problems of this or that celebrity leave me cold. It’s not so much that I find these matters boring before the fourth or fifth time. I just don’t find entertainment to be news. Waiting an hour, it seemed, for an air crash that didn’t happen is tedious. I’ve decided that I don’t have so much time to waste.

This week I’ve run into my irritations face on. Shepherd Smith’s infectious glee over the “problems”, not difficulties, of Mr. Blagojevich is offensive. “Blago” and “Planet Blago” pepper his continuing coverage. Would he care to use similar zippy terms, and we all know many, to describe Mr. Obama or Ms. Clinton, or “Fearless Leader” (for those who remember Rocky and Bullwinkle) from North Korea?

But it was Megyn Kelly just now who prompted this post.. She began an item on former Rep. Tom Tancredo by introducing him by way of his “outlandish opinion” That was in the first sentence. The last was this: “We’ll leave it to our viewers to decide”. Oh really.

We Red-Staters rely on Fox to be fair and balanced and they give us that, mostly. But when they start telling me what is important and what to believe about it I start checking out www.onlinenewspapers.com. It’s good to know what North Korea thinks of us, or Tokyo’s attitude toward whales as opposed to Greenpeace’s, or how the Icelanders feel about the global financial mess.

Megyn just did it again. And folks, I swear I am not making this up. We were just treated to an item on pregnancy fashions, whether people will stop a woman on the street to tell her there is toilet paper dribbling down her backside, and telling, (or not) a male colleague his fly is unzipped… with accompanying giggles from the panel. Well Megyn, and well Roger (Ailes), make up your minds. Either this sort of thing goes, or the motto and I do. There is better material out there and you are all better newsfolks than this.

This business of NASA doing uplift for Islam on science and math is pure religious and political hokum. The zero was invented by Aryabhata, who was Indian and born 100 years BEFORE Muhammed. The Medes, Persians, Egyptians had astronomy down to a science many hundreds, even thousands, of years before that. The Greeks and Romans were before Islam as well. The Chinese were handing out marihuana for menstrual cramps 3000 years ago. And if quantum physicists and cosmologists bothered, it would be clear that Moses beat Heisenberg, Einstein and the rest to quanta, uncertainty and the big bang by at least 2500 years. So for what are we to credit Islam? Well if we do credit them for something then I suppose NASA should credit the Wehrmacht, which mostly invented rocketry, for Pythagoras having started the geometry that makes guidance possible. That is equally silly. But the Wehrmacht had Greece at the time and Islam claims the fertile crescent now.

These last few weeks I’ve been keeping watch…waiting to see how often the fundamental truth of economics is mentioned.  It’s a law, not a theory, that has never been violated in all of history save, though Abraham doesn’t refer to it, perhaps in the Garden of Eden.  Remember it?  They taught it in the first economics lecture and then ignored it.  Don’t feel bad if nothing comes to mind.  Nobody mentioned it in the over two months I’ve been watching.  Nobody on the internet and nobody on the radio or television wrote or spoke of it.

The truth is this: Economics is the study of scarce resources.  Dig even a moment longer and you will realize that this means that there is never enough of anything available to satisfy people in general.  Indeed if you read fellows like Suetonius, an historian who tells stories worthy of the National Rag, you discover that no truly rich person was ever individually rich enough to be satisfied.  Read on to the so called “robber barons” and you may conclude, as I have, that Andrew Carnegie was satisfied.  But then he gave away organs, and libraries, and teacher pensions, and even the odd rowing ponds in one of which I used to wade.

So, I wondered, if nobody thinks about this in public does it matter?  And there, boys and girls, I discovered a dividing line between Republicans and Democrats which I suggest you ponder carefully.  Republicans, on the whole, believe that there are absolute rules of economics, politics, and business with which we diddle at our peril.  Democrats, again on the whole, believe that rules are arbitrary and temporary and can be adjusted as needed by bright folks of “good heart”

That means we disagree, in economics and other things, about fundamentals, the basic stuff of our political approaches.  More to what is reported today… we can not even begin to agree as to where to start a discussion.  We can’t even agree as to what is a right.  Republicans, if you will, believe that rocks fall down.  Democrats, especially the humanist sort, believe rocks fall where we legislate.  That’s why there are “dog” Democrats today but “Liberal” Republicans have generally disappeared.

I went down to the pier here in Portland. Maine for the first “Tea Party” rally.  I stare at the tea bag I was given to pin on my coat as I write.  It was the first political event I attended since 1969.  So I’m an old guy.  Most everyone I talked with was lots younger than me.  One girl, about 16, impressed the heck out of me.  And it was she who asked me about scarcity.  Where do the Democrats create all the money, all the wealth?  I asked her if she had three or four hours to spare.  She was off to a dance that weekend so I sent her (Email – I’m not an entire antique.) a list of good things to read.  About three months later I got a reply. “Oh S**t!”   So I sent a reply: “Now you know how I feel.”

What I have learned from this is that all the blathering media, whatever adjective you may apply, restores my and my fellow honest citizens’ faith in our founders.  There is a divide upon which most of us fall on the republican side.  Let us market (as a former management prof. I refuse to say sell) ourselves in those terms.  It is not the convenient words of current political discourse, as used by all the media types of both sides,  that describe most Americans.  There are realists and dreamers.  Get that boys and girls:  “Realists and Dreamers”!  Our founders were realists.  Refusing monarchies, they knew just what a mess dreamy representative government could be.  They, as I, had read L’Encyclopedie  (Diderot and Voltaire).

It is far too easy to be dreamy about economics, especially about it being a mere snap of the fingers that separates us from all our individual dreams of health care.  The Democrats are right in their economic analysis: things can be cheaper and more plentiful for all at the same time.  But their eyes fog over and they see gracious purple visions when someone says this can be done without reining in the lawyers and refusing, sometimes, extra-expensive treatments.  My dying documents say this.  My attorney assured me they do.  I couldn’t put it in simple words of my own.  These are my words:  “If I am bound to die plug me into whatever and feed me ‘happy drugs’.  Don’t work too hard keeping me alive but let me be entertained as my body, or brain, or whatever, drifts away.  But do keep me clean, cleanly dressed, and temperature-comfortable.  And sneak me a nifty snack from time to time.  Don’t let my family get bent because I am somewhat round the bend.”  I wrote this when I knew what I was doing.  I fought over a clause about having flowers.  I’m none too fond of flowers and wanted any sent for me to be diverted to folks who would enjoy them.  Turned out that was a very expensive clause in DC at the time.

This last, the longest paragraph of this essay, is dedicated to sending flowers sent to me to others because I don’t want them.  That’s dreamy thought at work messing us all up.

I suggest we Republicans go back to the realism of our founders.  Read Lincoln.  And read the fellows who got him to run for President.  Especially read those folks if you are black.  And then for the hide-bound constitutionalists like me… read deeper.  Let us advance from the turf we invented to meet the needs of ordinary folks.

To finish.  We are fundamentally realists.  They are dreamers.

Best wishes.

Joe Dehais

Handotai@aol.com

In Maine, ordinary folks create the best sound bites and they spread by word of mouth.  I heard this one in the grocery today.  It made it from one end of the store to the other in less than five minutes.  That’s fast.

Republican to Democrat:  “Will you guarantee every elderly sure-to-die cancer victim the same kinds of treatments Ted Kennedy got?  Helicopters and all sorts of cancer treatments.  And for the same reason: just to keep him alive long enough to vote.”

Joe Dehais – Portland ME

We systems types are fond of simple calculations. They keep us from getting so lost in the trees that we forget there was a forest. When we get lost we can end up with those $600 toilet seats or worse. Obama has not done this thinking for his health care plan. Or maybe he would rather not say.

So look at this little table:

The last column shows what we must have to pay off on what Obama is promising. I echo three of his stated presumptions. No plan means no care; services will be at least as good as they are now; and we can, must, do it all right now. So Obama and his next crew of czars will need to materialize half a million doctors and nurses, 644 hospitals, and 20 medical schools.

The bottom row is my own contribution. I simply estimated how long it would take for the existing system to take care of 46 million new customers before seeing any repeat customers. That delay gets worse as time goes on. It’s not fancy but it gives you some idea of how long you might have to wait for your first next doctor’s appointment under the new plan.

All of this, which roughly equates to conjuring the greater Albany New York area in the middle of nowhere, makes David Copperfield’s vanishing and reappearing the Statue of Liberty look like a minor parlor trick. Compared to that, making that $250 billion a year in expenses vanish is child’s play.

To do all this Obama must… not might, must… violate the law of the conservation of mass and energy. That’s physics, folks, and it’s a law not a theory. Basically, you cannot create something out of nothing and that is exactly what Obama proposes to do. Any reasonable systems thinker knows that you can’t get from here to there in anything less than the time it takes to create the needed trained people and infrastructure. It takes 10 years to grow a doctor, maybe half that for a nurse. Hospitals take years to design and I don’t want to think about what it takes to put together a medical school. That, as I pointed out my previous post, is why fascists are always asking you to trust them. They don’t know what they’re going to do so they can’t tell you.

All of this holds unless, as some say in faith and others in jesting, Obama really IS God, the anointed one. I don’t think so. If we start down this road as now described to us we are going to have one ungodly mess. And we won’t get the medical care most of us want, many of us need, and American economic competitiveness seems to me to require. Republicans needed detailed, rational, explainable, and fundable alternatives. We need to get out of the trees of politics, interest, and power to take a hard look at the forest. And we must remember that good capitalism is as much about destruction as it is about preservation. It is not about adding on; it is about creating the new.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of “pure” free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a “bold” move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our “wise” Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper…but a “freeman” whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set “fair” maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin

The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists. 

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of “pure” free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a “bold” move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our “wise” Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper…but a “freeman” whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set “fair” maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin

The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina

I find myself the most unlikely of defenders for Judge Sotomayor, a person whose judicial attitudes both offend and frighten me. But dragging up her opinions from the early 1970s and judging them by today’s standards is unfair and dishonest. You all need a little background on Princeton in those times to make fair judgments. I am going to pass along a few of my personal experiences as a student and administrator.

I arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1967. I had a black roommate, one of less than 20 in my class of over 800. We never became friends in the ordinary way roommates often do not but he influenced my life profoundly. I knew about discrimination, having had perhaps the only black boy in a city of 15,000 as my friend. I had seen a burning cross in northern Florida. I had been cut off by all the boys in the neighborhood. But at Princeton I learned a new lesson. The most vehement racist in our dorm used terms about me and my roommate that make me blush even now. I was astonished to find that this fellow was Jewish. He did not know the Jews had been so treated at Princeton within the past 15 years. It was my second day on campus.

There were not to be women students for two more years and most of us would have been astonished at the possibility. I got to know a few Hispanics: John whose real name was Juan; Francis whose real name was Francisco; and Richard whose real name was Ricardo; among others. You can’t feel very comfortable about yourself or your heritage when you feel that you have to change your name. This was no casual thing. The anglicized names had been submitted for all the printed lists of our class including the picture book. All of that in the late spring of 1967. Later I knew a Cuban refugee of Northern European extraction. His description of the Cuban natives would curl your hair. And, of course, “West Side Story” was a very recent memory…not that it had altered anyone’s prejudices.

The arrival of women at Princeton was a surprise and something of a shock. Male social lives were upset when, though it was never explained it this way to students, the administration informed other schools in the area that busloads of their women would no longer be welcome at our parties. Of course no one at the time had a clue as to what a Princeton woman ought to be. So the roughly 120 who arrived in the fall of 1969 were evenly divided into three groups: the liberationists, the nerds, the husband hunters, and the right sorts. One of the liberationists sent me to the infirmary when she planted her knee in my groin. My crime? I opened the door to the library for her on a rainy afternoon. I took one of the right sorts to my eating club for lunch. It was suggested that I be expelled from the club.

Senior year I got my greatest eye-opener. At the end of an evening of drinking in the 1915 Pavilion on the lower athletic fields I was given a guided tour of the campus by a black and an hispanic friend. It was like walking through a quiet dark city full of dangerous ghosts. The names on buildings took on frightening meanings: Witherspoon, Frick, Palmer. And the hero of heroes, Woodrow Wilson himself, was revealed as a malignant racist. I heard folklore stories of Princeton passed on by janitors, ground workers, and other menials to these new Princetonians judged fit to hear them. I had never thought much of the idea that Princeton was a southern school but now I knew better. To this day I cannot walk the campus without being reminded of what an alien and unwelcoming place it must have been to my two friends.

When I slipped behind the curtain to become an administrator I learned some of the back story. Once Robert Goheen, late president of the University, gained sway over the faculty in the 1950s and came to control the trustees in the early 1960s he and his cohorts resolved on what we now call social justice, coeducation, and the college system. Their methods and techniques involved lies, the falsification of data and reports, and careful tailoring in the hiring of new faculty and administrators. All highly dishonorable. But their crowning glory I think was what is now known as Wilson College. It was designed as a college and so specified in the planning documents. It was built as a college. But to all comers it was explained as an architectural experiment. There it sat as a complex of noncollege buildings for years in plain sight. And its collegiate operating funds, including a remarkably ample wine and cheese provision, were built in to the university budgets before the trustees knew they would be asked to make it a college. The same had been true of coeducation. The trustees were quoted a total cost figure for coeducation which was substantially less than physical facilities had determined for the cost of converting campus lighting and bathroom facilities. In addition it was arranged that a judge, without reading any documents of the cases, would conclude that whatever a donor might have said or written (and some of it was fairly starchy stuff) they had all, ALL, intended the funds or whatever to be used for the education of women. So while confronting the Princeton I did as a student, Judge Sotomayor was learning how to confront and subvert whatever might stand in the way of what she might believe to be right. She may not have been aware of it but she was caught up as an active participant in one of the dirtiest and earliest episodes of that sort of thing. I am continually astonished at how many of the Obama administration’s tricks have been lifted wholesale from what I saw at Princeton.

Meanwhile, back in the trenches, we drones were trying to figure out how to accomplish these things. Conspiracy types have long held that it was one big scheme. Down in the muck we worried primarily about one thing. Let’s not screw those kids! And that wasn’t easy. Many women applicants and almost all minority applicants were unqualified. I don’t mean that they fail to measure up to some nice standard. Their academic backgrounds were such that they could not do the work. The fellow who wanted to major in Physics had taken no math beyond Algebra and no science beyond Earth Science. Or the potential English Lit major who spoke almost pure Ebonics and had no idea that English sentences need verbs. We tried several things. First we conducted a crash analysis in identifying minorities and women who had the character and motivation to overcome these things. This was no fun. We had no data to operate upon, no idea what kind of profile in an admissions folder we should be looking for. Praying a lot, we would make our choices. It was suggested in one meeting that the simple solution would be to admit minority foreign students. We had enough such applicants to fill the entire freshman class and those were all, based on academic qualifications, in the top percent or two of all applicants. We didn’t do it. And of course we had to lie to the alumni. We hyped the special treatment of their children to camouflage the fact that we were admitting many less qualified applicants to fulfill our social goals.

Once the students arrived we had three options. We could channel that would be physics major in sociology, the lit major to ethnic studies. It worked but I know more than a few minorities and women who felt we had lied to them by not telling them that if they followed their dreams they would fail. Second, we adjusted the content and rigor of some elementary courses, even change requirements in a few cases. That way the students had some chance of catching up. Third, though rarely used option by students, we laid out a support system of tutors, faculty advisors, and mentors that would put a Big Ten football support program to shame. We didn’t blame the kids for avoiding our systems. Who wants to come to Princeton, where it is generally known that two thirds of your education is outside the classroom, to ignore those opportunities altogether and become a toad. In the Engineering School we took a slightly tougher line. I remember holding a meeting with our incoming minorities at which, in no uncertain terms, I laid out in detail what they faced and their options for dealing with that. We caught hell. It was considered impolitic to tell students the truth when it might upset their belief in the honesty us of our promises. We also worked quite hard to create support structures as they call them today. We hired a woman to work in the Dean’s office to assist us with women’s stuff. So I was volunteered to join the Society of Women Engineers. We only had one official female engineering major at that moment. When Judge Sotomayor bemoaned a lack of role models for her as a student she was being very kind. There weren’t any that I ever met. We hoped that we were raising the first generation of such folks. I think we have succeeded in that.

You should understand that institutions like Princeton were catching far more than their fair share of heat for the lack of achievement of women and minorities. It wasn’t our fault… exactly. Mostly we were caught between the even then lamentable product of public education and the immutable requirements of future careers. In some ways we even went beyond what the loud public voices of the day demanded. We knew that the Choo Choo train to engineering began in junior high. And we had a couple of studies, primitive at best, that said similar things about motivation and drive. So, to the astonishment of most of the admissions establishment, we diverted some of the funds we had previously used to recruit at high quality feeder schools to setting up dog and pony shows for junior high schools. Six years later some of those kids began to show up in our classrooms. Three of us had a party of celebration. But we were lucky. There were quite a number of good candidate junior high schools in our general neighborhood. What must it have been like in Puerto Rico?

So please consider that Judge Sotomayor is, like all of us, a product of her experiences. We may leave them behind but they never leave us. I would have liked to know that girl. Oh, the arguments we could have had.

Obama’s economic policies can’t work.  This has nothing to do with politics.  It has to do with the complex understandings of systems that engineers and techies have gained over the last century or so.  They apply whether you are talking about an economy, your personal health, rocket design, or persistent toe holes in your right socks.

When we engineers learn about these things they are generally embedded in messy equations or at the least in very messy problems, though rarely as complicated as a national economy..  This stuff is as far beyond algebra one as algebra one is beyond learning to count.  But you don’t need the math to understand what is going on.  So I won’t be using it here.  What you do need in practice is to have a few competent techies around to advise you on systems, systems in general.  Obama and his people seem hell-bent on breaking all the rules about systems.  Apparently they have no one on board to tell them what an incredible mess they are going to create.

Systems are collections of various bits and pieces that tend to work together as a whole.  Let’s look at those socks.  You’re right toe keeps wearing through.  Are the socks too thin?  Did you forget to cut your toenail?  Is your heel out of line so your right foot is longer than your left?  But clearly the answer to your problem is not a triple layer of duct tape, however simple and direct that may be, nor is it deciding that you need to revise the diet of sheep in New Zealand to get stronger wool.  One thing is clear.  If you fail to understand the system; if you fail to consider all its component parts or at least most of them; you will get the wrong answer and really ugly things can happen.  Remember that brittle O-ring on the space shuttle?

So techies run tests.  They build small scale models and pilot plants.  Closer to home any good cook will tell you that you’d better try that fancy new recipe a time or two before unleashing it on an important dinner party.  With economic and political systems you generally don’t have that luxury.  You are changing the system as it works.  So you need to be all the more careful and move all the more slowly.  When you jump in with both feet and change everything you or any of your friends think ought to be changed without a very specific idea of what you want to achieve and a great deal of thought you always, I repeat always, will end up with a mess.  In politics and economics where you are listening to the emotionally loaded opinions of folks who know little to nothing of systems theory, and could care less, you end up with a very large mess.

Consider a car.  It’s older, well-worn, making a number of strange noises and not behaving at all the way it did when bought  new.  I talk to my friends that listen to their advice, taking most of it, even from my aging hippie friend who thinks a new coat of paint will make the car feel better about itself.  On with the new tires, on with the special gas saving fuel injectors, on with the self-leveling shocks, the custom computer chips, on with all those little gadgets they advertise on television too.  I go nowhere near the expensive dealer service department.  And then, as Obama’s policy advisers will be, I am astonished when I start the car up.  Clunk, grind, bang!  And then a cloud of black smoke from the engine compartment.  There goes that custom paint job.

One other rule of systems you should remember.  Different changes can have vastly different effects and almost always take different periods of time to have those effects.  Beating up on executives for following the rules, out of personal envy whether you believe it or not, is immediately gratifying to some regardless of the unconsidered effects on the career choices of young people.  Pouring money into education will take a decade or two to produce all those doctors and expert techies.  Firms like Cypress Semiconductor know this.  They also know that they can’t wait a year, much less ten, to get their hands on the brains to design their new chips.  And last thing they need is folks who have been indoctrinated in remaking society but can’t do calculus or write a sentence with good grammar.  So they want to hire foreign graduates whose education systems are more concerned with providing useful knowledge than politically correct attitudes.

Obama’s plans violate another fundamental rule of systems.  Never let matters that have nothing to do with the system itself influence your design.  Like the paint on that car didn’t make it run better, seeking votes and paying back friends has no beneficial impact on prosperity.  Obama’s folks have the engineering hubris to claim that their fixes will all have immediate and positive effects.  Don’t worry, they tell us.  We’ll just fix things as they go along.  Just give us a blank check and have faith.  That, to use engineering jargon, is the mark of someone who doesn’t know his posterior from a hole in the ground.  It is an admission that they have what they believe to be marvelous goals and only the ideas from dead economists and political philosophers to guide them.  So they want the power to change their plans on no notice at all.  I guess I’ll drain my car’s tank of low octane and replace it with avgas.

I can’t tell you what kind of mess Obama will create.  But it will be a whopper.  And one thing it will not do is fulfill his promises.  It will fail.

Obama’s economic policies can’t work.  This has nothing to do with politics.  It has to do with the complex understandings of systems that engineers and techies have gained over the last century or so.  They apply whether you are talking about an economy, your personal health, rocket design, or persistent toe holes in your right socks.

When we engineers learn about these things they are generally embedded in messy equations or at the least in very messy problems, though rarely as complicated as a national economy..  This stuff is as far beyond algebra one as algebra one is beyond learning to count.  But you don’t need the math to understand what is going on.  So I won’t be using it here.  What you do need in practice is to have a few competent techies around to advise you on systems, systems in general.  Obama and his people seem hell-bent on breaking all the rules about systems.  Apparently they have no one on board to tell them what an incredible mess they are going to create.

Systems are collections of various bits and pieces that tend to work together as a whole.  Let’s look at those socks.  You’re right toe keeps wearing through.  Are the socks too thin?  Did you forget to cut your toenail?  Is your heel out of line so your right foot is longer than your left?  But clearly the answer to your problem is not a triple layer of duct tape, however simple and direct that may be, nor is it deciding that you need to revise the diet of sheep in New Zealand to get stronger wool.  One thing is clear.  If you fail to understand the system; if you fail to consider all its component parts or at least most of them; you will get the wrong answer and really ugly things can happen.  Remember that brittle O-ring on the space shuttle?

So techies run tests.  They build small scale models and pilot plants.  Closer to home any good cook will tell you that you’d better try that fancy new recipe a time or two before unleashing it on an important dinner party.  With economic and political systems you generally don’t have that luxury.  You are changing the system as it works.  So you need to be all the more careful and move all the more slowly.  When you jump in with both feet and change everything you or any of your friends think ought to be changed without a very specific idea of what you want to achieve and a great deal of thought you always, I repeat always, will end up with a mess.  In politics and economics where you are listening to the emotionally loaded opinions of folks who know little to nothing of systems theory, and could care less, you end up with a very large mess.

Consider a car.  It’s older, well-worn, making a number of strange noises and not behaving at all the way it did when  bought  new.  I talk to my friends that listen to their advice, taking most of it, even from my aging hippie friend who thinks a new coat of paint will make the car feel better about itself.  On with the new tires, on with the special gas saving fuel injectors, on with the self-leveling shocks, the custom computer chips, on with all those little gadgets they advertise on television too.  I go nowhere near the expensive dealer service department.  And then, as Obama’s policy advisers will be, I am astonished when I start the car up.  Clunk, grind, bang!  And then a cloud of black smoke from the engine compartment.  There goes that custom paint job.

One other rule of systems you should remember.  Different changes can have vastly different effects and almost always take different periods of time to have those effects.  Beating up on executives for following the rules, out of personal envy whether you believe it or not, is immediately gratifying to some regardless of the unconsidered effects on the career choices of young people.  Pouring money into education will take a decade or two to produce all those doctors and expert techies.  Firms like Cypress Semiconductor know this.  They also know that they can’t wait a year, much less ten, to get their hands on the brains to design their new chips.  And last thing they need is folks who have been indoctrinated in remaking society but can’t do calculus or write a sentence with good grammar.  So they want to hire foreign graduates whose education systems are more concerned with providing useful knowledge than politically correct attitudes.

Obama’s plans violate another fundamental rule of systems.  Never let matters that have nothing to do with the system itself influence your design.  Like the paint on that car didn’t make it run better, seeking votes and paying back friends has no beneficial impact on prosperity.  Obama’s folks have the engineering hubris to claim that their fixes will all have immediate and positive effects.  Don’t worry, they tell us.  We’ll just fix things as they go along.  Just give us a blank check and have faith.  That, to use engineering jargon, is the mark of someone who doesn’t know his posterior from a hole in the ground.  It is an admission that they have what they believe to be marvelous goals and only the ideas from dead economists and political philosophers to guide them.  So they want the power to change their plans on no notice at all.  I guess I’ll drain my car’s tank of low octane and replace it with avgas.

I can’t tell you what kind of mess Obama will create.  But it will be a whopper.  And one thing it will not do is fulfill his promises.  It will fail.

The New Dope Peddlers

In the 1960s, while my fellow students grew wistful with Simon and Garfunkel, reveled in one-hit wonder protest songs, and smirked at obscure lyrics of free sex with everyone from Janis Joplin to the Beach Boys, I was learning the American sense of humor and perspective anywhere I could find it.  One of my favorite songs was “The Old Dope Peddler” by Tom Lehrer.  I quote some of the lyrics here:

He gives the kids free samples

Because he knows full well

That today’s young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow’s clientele.

The Obama movement convinces me that Democrats heard something very different from me in that 60′s song.  They chose to become the largest conspiracy of pushers in history, to create the fascism which lonely Ayn Rand was then predicting,.  They want to hook us on political drugs, fulfilling the fears of de Tocqueville and many others down the years.  They claim that only they can provide us with the goods and services we want and covet when we see them in the hands of others.  We must merely tolerate their thefts, violations and ignoring of laws, perversions of opinions into fact, and fiat corruptions of our Constitution and worse still our sovereignty.  They never tell us that the price is to behave as addicts always do towards their pushers.  We must patronize them both in attitude and action, vote unquestioningly for them and their proposals, and condemn those who would cure us of our addictions, those we have and those that tempt us.  Lately the pushers are teaching us, by example, to hate those who would save us from the gutter.

As we red folks work for the future, we must use easily understood contexts that can not be twisted by the wordsmith children and grandchildren of the 1960s.  One way is to focus on our increasing national addictions and name the pushers for what they are… in all specific crudeness.  Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi sell different drugs on different streetcorners.  Name the pushers, drugs, addicts and streetcorners.  The pushers are not the kindly altruists they claim to be.  They themselves sacrifice nothing as they work to gain power over us.  They want us to destroy whatever is civil in our society to stay high as long as we can, to gratify their needs and wants, not our own or those of America.

I will take no free samples from political pushers.  They will give us what may be one hell of a pleasant jolt just long enough to hook us.  They have no intention or economic ability to continue our high.  They say so clearly if you look and listen carefully.  They expect, in our drugged political fog, that they will convince us to let them steal to prolong the buzz until they create an America which looks, not like Sweden, but Mussolini’s Italy or something worse.  They want a world in where they get the lockstep salutes.  I will be no addict!  Those who want us to grant them a blank check to pay for all their free samples with our own money are con men and women as well as pushers.  They are the “enemies… domestic” of all honest Americans, red AND blue.

Thanks Tom.  I can spot all kinds of pushers now.