Do We Really Want the World To End?

I have always loved reading science fiction. As I was earning my undergraduate degree in Chemistry, learning the limits of the scientific method, reading science fiction allowed another side of my mind to explore what if: "What if there were no limits?"; "What if the impossible where possible?"; "What if we humans were something else?" Strictly fun, so to speak. Not reality at all.

My second exposure to post-apocalyptic fiction was Lucifer's Hammer, a 1978 Hugo-nominee by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's the story of the buildup to and early follow on of a comet strike. (My first post-apocalyptic novel was Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank.) In Lucifer's Hammer, Harvey Randall is the producer of a documentary series about the coming approach of a small comet and the story of earth scientists' efforts to gather data about the comet. While gathering "man in the street" interviews about the approaching comet, he discovers rising end-of-the-world alarm, and a desire by some for escape from the existing world order.

For Harvey Randall himself, it's the mortgage on the house and the tuition for his son's school that keeps him trapped in his job. For his next door neighbor, Gordie Vance the banker, it's the embezzlement. For Maureen Jellison, the Senator's daughter, it's the life of a socialite, empty of purpose. And so on.

Suddenly, the comet strike that is a million-to-one odds against occurs, and millions of people are dying. People lose that modern world, lose all that technology, and discover that the simpler life they had romanticized wasn't such an easy life.

A World That Might Have Been

In everyone's lifetime, there is an event so different, so dramatic, so unlike every day life, that it causes people to say: "I remember exactly what I was doing when..." For my grandparents, it was Pearl Harbor. For my mother, it was JFK's assassination. For my generation, it was 9/11. I was working from home, and got a call to turn on the TV, just before the second plane hit the WTC. 9/11 and America's subsequent rush to war marks a pivotal change in the world, a before and after event standing between two different worlds.

So whenever I discover facts about that event, that time, and what happened after, that cause me to question what happened, why it happened, they cause me to question my entire frame of reference for the world.

The first WTC attack, the Al Qaeda attacks on US African embassies, the USS Cole bombing, the second WTC attack. They were described as a war by terrorists that required not one but two wars against enemies. We were told that war was necessary, that we could no longer rely on pre-9/11 thinking, we could no longer rely on judicial proceedings, that only war would work.

After 9/11, how many Americans wanted justice? How many wanted vengeance? Regardless of whether it was 1% or 100%, the administration wanted it, and they were determined to have it. However, just before 9/11, four Al Qaeda operatives were given life sentences for the 1998 suicide bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. What would our world be like today if the Bush Administration had sought a judicial, instead of a war, resolution in 9/11? The FBI's New York Office and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of N.Y. already had an indictment for Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11.

Would the Iraq invasion have occurred? How much better would America's reputation be if the entire WMD controversy never had occurred? How much better off would the government bottom line if some of the $4 trillion that was spent in the post-9/11 global war not been fought? The 2008 financial crisis has been blamed on everything from loose lending standards for mortgages to the poor to lax regulatory standards on big banks. One reason for the 2008 financial crisis that most accept is the creation of too much debt. How much of that was due to the debt created by an un-funded war on terror?

James Risen's new book Pay Any Price Greed Power and Endless War has a number of vignettes illustrating how unbelievable amounts of money were spent in the war on terror. It is tempting to state that unbelievable amounts of money were destroyed, thrown away, wasted. But, of course, they weren't. The money went somewhere. The money went to people "on the in". People with pull, people with a connection. The sad thing is that these people, by and large, don't need more. And they money came from people that couldn't afford it.

President Eisenhower, that last president with the guts to say "Enough is enough", also said the following:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. The world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Where were you when the first documented case of Ebola transmission in America was announced? Perhaps wondering if some of those $4 trillion spent on a war on terror might have been better spent on research? On hospitals? On health worker education? Maybe its time we declare the end to the war on terror, before it eats us alive.

HEB Helps Again

I am always looking out for ways that HEB is trying to help me save money. HEB is the local grocery chain in Texas that is working to save Texans money. My first real job, way back in 1974, was working as a bag boy in HEB store number 2 in Alamo Heights. I sacked groceries (back when we used paper sacks) and carried them out to the cars for customers. I worked my way up to late night stocker. We would come in at 8 or 9 pm, break down the pallets of groceries, attach a price sticker (that was a long time ago, before barcodes and scanners) to each box or can, and distribute the groceries to the shelves. We would finish up before 4 am, and then head to Mie Tierra for dinner/breakfast. I would then head for school; I was a senior in high school, and I am convinced that that experience was what helped me get my Undergraduate Degree. Taught me what I didn't want to do for the rest of my life. But I digress.

Fast forward to today. I am currently located in Austin, but I do my banking with United Services Automobile Association (USAA) Federal Savings Bank in San Antonio. I don't have a local, Austin Bank. I have a small box full of loose change that I wanted to recover. HEB happens to have a Coinstar machine that is advertised to help. I know that some of the Security Service Credit Unions have change machines in their locations, but I don't have an account with SSCU. So I took my box of change to my local HEB for "help".

It turns out the Coinstar machine at HEB has three options:

1. Cash Voucher - With a fee of ONLY 10.9 cents per dollar of change tendered,
2. Gift Card - You can exchange your change for a gift card, useable at such locations as Applebee's, Home Depot, etc. but NOT HEB,
3. Donate your change to charity

So, HEB will "help" you exchange your loose change. But if you want to buy groceries with your loose change, it will cost you 10.9%. Thanks for the help, HEB.

Norway and the 2022 Winter Olympics

Norway will NOT host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Instead, that "honor" will fall to either Kazakhstan or China. And after reading some details of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) requirements, I say that the IOC will be lucky to find any country that will have them. It really is a case of the 1% being out of touch with reality. And it is a shame. Norway has more winter olympic medals than any other country, and Norway hosted the 1952 games in Oslo and 1994 game in Lillehammer. Perhaps the cost of the Sochi game ($51 billion) was a bit too much. But more likely, it was simply the IOC demands, which were detailed in a Norwegian newspaper article.

The requirements were more than 7000 pages long. That perhaps is understandable in light of modern day security needs. But here were some specific requirements:

1. Prior to the opening ceremony, the IOC delegates will be provided with a cocktail party with the King and Royal Family, to be paid for by the Royal Family and/or the Norwegian Olympic Committee (NOC). The type and brand of alcohol was specified.
2. Full control over all advertising spaces throughout the city of Oslo must be provided to the IOC, to be used exclusively for IOC sponsored items only.
3. The NOC to provide and pay for Samsung Cell Phones and cellular service.
4. The NOC and/or City of Oslo to provide cars and drivers for all IOC delegates and members.
5. IOC members in their cars to be provided right-of-way, including a dedicated center lane, throughout the City of Oslo. Schools to be closed and Oslo Citizens to be encouraged to take vacation and leave the city throughout the duration of the Olympic games. Public transportation to be halted throughout the games.
6. IOC members to be given dedicated walkways throughout the City, and Oslo Citizens to be restricted from walkways for IOC members.
7. Separate, dedicated facilities for arrival and departure of IOC members at the Oslo airport.
8. Traffic rules and traffic lights to be prioritized for IOC members.
9. Specific seasonal fruits and cakes to be available on arrival in the IOC member's hotel rooms.
10. Hot breakfast buffet with new dishes daily for IOC members. Additional breakfast staff to serve IOC "bosses only" queue.
11. 24-hour room service, butler service and laundry for IOC members.
12. Hotels must have shops and must not display any items that compete with IOC sponsors.
13. Hotels must provide IOC meeting rooms that provide instant access to all-inclusive banquet service.
14. Meeting rooms to be kept at 20C (68F).
15. At Olympic Stadium, IOC members must be provided with access to sufficient food and drink of "high-quality". Light snacks and canapes are not of sufficient quality. Provision of hot foods must be replaced regularly.
16. During the opening and closing ceremony, a full bar must be provided. Beer and wine are sufficient on competition days.

I was trying to imagine what the reaction would be to the IOC handing over 7000 pages of demands requirements to an American city, say, Salt Lake City, and what the response of the American Olympic Committee chairman, say Mitt Romney, would be. Would it be: "You are out of your mind"? Or would it be: "Hey, we can all make money together out of this"?

Now, which country is more likely to come up with $50+ billion, Kazakhstan, or China? Dedicated traffic lanes? Didn't they try that in the U.S.S.R.?

On U. S. Exceptionalism

The Opinion page of USA Today from September 23, 2014 featured a commentary on the College Board's AP U. S. History exam and its associated framework, or more accurately, on critics thereof. The counterpoint by Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project, entitled "Exam Erases U. S. Exceptionalism", stated "The origins of the framework have been traced to the philosophy that the U. S. is only one nation among many, and not a particularly admirable one at that." In other words, if you can't quote features from U. S. History that illustrate that America is better than other nations, don't say anything. And especially don't be critical.

As for the Curriculum Framework, Robbins urges: "Read it." Which I did. The framework advocates teaching critical thinking skills, based on broad themes of Identity, Economics, Politics and Power, America in the World and American Ideals and Culture, through 9 historical periods ranging from 1491 through the present. It encourages comparison and contrast, and the kind of thinking that is fostered by a liberal education.

So what's wrong with the ideal of U. S. Exceptionalism? Shouldn't everyone enjoy a little nationalism? Be proud of your country and its accomplishments? There are several problems: First, blind belief in American Exceptionalism prevents the viewer from seeing the real problems that every country has, and that need fixing. And to understand a problem, you need to know how you got there, which is what the study of history is all about. Second, the approach to history that Robbins advocates is the blind acceptance of cherry picked facts, which prevents the development of critical thinking skills which Americans desperately need.

And indeed, the deeper fear that conservatives like Robbins have is that students will develop thinking skills, that they will learn to think for themselves, and not accept what Robbins is pushing: dogma and romanticism.

Recalling history, rather than studying it rigorously, involves human memories, which are colored by human emotion. This leads to selective memory and romanticism. When political belief systems are involved, this leads to dogma. Neither have a place in the process of critical examination and thinking necessary for a student's education.

Inequality for All

Over the weekend I watched the film Inequality for All. The movie features former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Nick Hanaeur and former Conservative Senator Alan Simpson examining the current widening gap between the rich and poor in America, how it came to be, and when it has occurred in the past. They also discuss whether it is a bad thing for America in general and Democracy in particular.

A similar gap between rich and poor formed in the 1920s, just prior to the great depression. A chart of the top 10% richest Americans' share of the economy shows that the top 10% share rose throughout the 1920s to peak at over 50% just prior to the 1929 Stock Market Crash. That share fell steadily through the Great Depression and World War II to about 35% and remained flat at about 35% through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. However, it started rising again in the 1970s, until peaking again at about 50% just prior to the start of the Great Recession in 2008. (Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty and Goldhammer).

I have repeatedly heard it said that high marginal taxes inhibit jobs. In other words, if we want to create jobs, we need to cut taxes so that the "job creators" (the wealthy) are free to create jobs. Unfortunately, the facts show otherwise. During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when Income Inequality was low, and jobs were plentiful, the US had very high marginal tax rates. The following chart illustrates this:

A lot of things were going on after World War II that allowed for full employment in the United States. The US was the only developed country that had an intact economy. The arrangements at Bretton Woods, that put American Dollars into the role of the sole exchange currency, put the US Economy in a position of considerable advantage. The large numbers of union workers helped to give all American workers, union and non-union, a considerable degree of power in wage negotiations.

Finally, something I haven't heard talked about much is the degree to which Americans felt like they were all part of society. America had sent a considerable percentage of its population into the military to fight the war. Many workers had migrated to work in war-time industries, producing good for the war effort. Families worked in "Victory Gardens" to grow food to replace the shortfall from a shortage of farm workers and the purchase of farm goods for the military.

When America demobilized, a significant fraction of civilians were now veterans (see table below). Perhaps for some period of time, business felt an obligation to "take care" of its workers through good wages. Is it possible that Corporate America, in the post-WW II era, felt that being good corporate citizens towards workers was also an obligation besides maximizing profits?

Size of the military versus US Population:

Year	Army	Air Force1	Navy	Marines	Coast Guard2	Total	American Population	% Military
1939	189,839		125,202	19,432		334,473	130,879,718	0.25%
1940	269,023		160,997	28,345		458,365	132,122,446	0.35%
1941	1,462,315		284,427	54,359		1,801,101	133,402,471	1.35%
1942	3,075,608		640,570	142,613	56,716	3,915,507	134,859,553	2.90%
1943	6,994,472		1,741,750	308,523	151,167	9,195,912	136,739,353	6.73%
1944	7,994,750		2,981,365	475,604	171,749	11,621,468	138,397,345	8.40%
1945	8,267,958		3,380,817	474,680	85,783	12,209,238	139,928,165	8.73%
2001	480,801	353,571	338,671	184,574		1,385,116	285,081,556	0.49%
2007	519,471	337,312	338,671	184,574		1,380,082	301,230,367	0.46%
2011	565,463	333,370	325,123	201,157		1,468,364	311,593,589	0.47%

1. Prior to 1947, existed as the Army Air Corps. 2. Coast Guard listed only as wartime strength.

One of my favorite movies is the 1946 Academy Award Winner Best Years of Our Lives.Fredrich March plays Al Stephenson, the banker placed in charge of administering the GI Loan program in his old bank. At a dinner to honor his return, and promotion, Al gets drunk and talks about a loan application from a vet who wants to buy a farm, but who has no collateral for the loan. Al tells the story of how, during the war, he was ordered to take a hill. " 'But sir, I can't take that hill, I have no collateral.' So I didn't take the hill, and we lost the war." He goes on to tell his bosses, the senior bank officials, that the vets have collateral, their war experiences, and that the bank is going to make the loans based on the vets experience.

One question in my mind, is this: How long will the current level of inequality remain before movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street recognize the true source of the wealth inequality and seek to overturn it? Will the top 1% make some effort to rebalance the gap before they are force to do so?

Blame For Breaches, And Where That Gets Us

American Business is suffering an epidemic of data loss. Today (09/09/2014) it is Home Depot that has suffered the latest breach of credit card data. In mid-December 2013, it was Target. Fortunately, we have new notification laws so that we learn about data breaches. In past times, companies kept their losses secret, for many reasons, but primarily to prevent business revenue loss. To blame is human. Embarrassment and shame for mistakes made is also human, and a little bit is a good thing. It acts as an incentive to do better next time, a motivator to improve. But too much fear/shame is an inhibitor. An RSA Conference 2013 presentation on October 2011 SEC Disclosure Requirements for Risk Factors noted that by requiring registrants to disclose their risk factors and incidents, so that the real incident rate can be determined, business can move beyond the fear/shame cycle to realize that "stuff" happens, and deal with it. Because too much fear/shame is paralyzing. But to return to the blame factor, the onus is almost entirely on the target business to prepare and comply with regulatory and legal requirements. Our current InfoSec model is that a company adopt an InfoSec policy, have management support it, perform a risk analysis to determine what assets to protect from which risk factors using these specific controls and perhaps transferring some risks to third parties, implement those controls and transfer the risks, monitor and repeat periodically, and be in compliance. And take the blame when something fails. That model is way too simplistic. And unrealistic. Simplistic because software always has residual bugs and is exploitable. And all of our InfoSec controls, from firewalls to Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPSs) to Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms are software controlled themselves. And the business of businesses is generally not InfoSec, but their primary business. Our model is unrealistic because the motivator to produce software is not to produce quality software that resists exploits. The primary motivator to produce software is a deadline, whether that is to be the first to ship and thereby capture a market or to meet a client schedule. I'm not saying that people purposely write exploitable code, although some do. I'm saying that, because the primary motivator is not to produce quality code, code is shipped with exploits. David Rice was hired in 2011 as Apple's Global Chief of Security. He has a Masters Degree in Information Warfare Systems Engineering from the Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His book Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software is about the economic incentives for writing software. His quote of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki says it all: "Don't worry, be crappy. Just get your product out there". I'm also not saying that everyone ships bad code, but rather that the incentive is to ship code as soon as possible to capture market share. That is over and above the technical issues of software testing and residual bugs. So, American businesses are asked to work with flawed code. They are asked to protect their businesses with security products that have residual bugs. And they are asked to shoulder the blame when they are, inevitably, exploited. What's wrong with this picture? The biggest flaw is that we don't recognize the flaw. We blame the business. It's time we acknowledge that our software has problems, and that the blame should be shared. Yes, the targets need to follow the model, flawed as it is, or they are grossly negligent. But the software suppliers and the security companies share the blame, because their products harbor the exploits, product liability limitations not withstanding. We need to move beyond our model, tone down the blame game, get over the shame, and start reporting every breach, every exploit, so that we can start to understand the true magnitude of the problem and work to fix it. And move beyond merely blaming the targets.

For Lack of Configuration Control

DevOps is a software development methodology that calls for the close integration of software development teams and the operations teams that run their developed software in production. One of software development's dirty secrets is "The Wall", as in "throw it over the wall", the idea that you can develop software without considering operations, and when it doesn't work in production, you can throw it back on development for them to fix. DevOps calls for, among other things, simple, repeatable processes; quality testing; small, frequent releases; and, above all, close collaboration, if not integration, between the development and operations teams. In short, it attempts to change the process of developing software and putting it into production from an artistic to an engineered process. Because DevOps attempts to add engineering discipline to software development, DevOps personnel can learn a great deal from the kinds of problems engineers in other disciplines have encountered, and solved. A Fiery Peace In A Cold War is Neil Sheehan's biography of General Bernard Schriever, the USAF Officer that lead the US ICBM development effort in the 1950s and 1960s. He was appointed to lead Western Development Division, which managed the development of the Thor, Atlas, Titan and Minuteman missile systems. Nominally a native Texan, he was promoted to General in 1961 and commanded Air Force System Command, managing all USAF weapons systems and approximately 40% of the Air Force budget. After the launch of Sputnik in 1959, the US believed itself to be in a "missile gap", behind the Soviet Union. The Air Force's first ICBM, Atlas, was rushed into early deployment, but had major bugs. Most of the bugs were not in the missile system, but in the support systems, for example, the liquid oxygen (LoX) fueling system. One Atlas exploded on the pad during a fueling exercise. Earlier, a Thor missile had exploded four seconds into flight. Subsequent analysis showed that the fueling crew had allowed the LoX hose to be dragged through the sand on the way to the pad, leading to sand contamination of the LoX lines. After instituting a configuration control system, it was discovered that the missile supplier, Convair, was modifying parts at the missile test site in order to get missiles to fly without notifying the assembly line and without making any records of the changes that they were making. The configuration of a successful launch could not be duplicated; the Atlas program was getting random success, as well as random failure. To prevent uncontrolled and undocumented changes, seals and locks were placed on missile compartments and launch equipment cabinets, so that changes would only be made after review by a configuration control board. In my 28 years in IT, I can remember many instances when the looming deadline justified a quick fix and a test. I can also remember the instances where the quick fixes lead me to a point where I could not return to a known, good state. Automation and methodology are the engineering tools necessary to prevent those hubris-induced states that we can get ourselves in by believing we can meet the crisis with our artistic rather than engineering skills.

Let's Talk About EMP

I have to admit a personal weakness. For some people it's chocolate, for me, it's post-Apocalyptic fiction. It all started back in the early '70s when I was in high school and read Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. Written in 1959 during the Sputnik crisis (when I was one years old) by Pat Frank, it is a post-World War III survival story about a Florida community struggling in the aftermath of the US-USSR one day war. Along with On The Beach, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, Alas Babylon is a classic piece of cold war fiction. It was written in a year when many Americans thought America had fallen behind the Soviets in the technological race for supremacy. America hadn't; Ike knew we hadn't. He knew, from U-2 spy flights, that America had an infinitely greater capacity to destroy the Soviet Union, using SAC, and that the Soviets had no ICBMs. Yet he felt that he couldn't divulge that information, and the "missile gap" helped propel John F. Kennedy into office. So I continue to read post-Apocalyptic fiction. And non-fiction. There's a solid body of stories built around the end of American society due to an EMP event destroying the power grid and everything containing microchips. And it is based on a very real vulnerability of our electricity and electronics dependent society. The question is: How likely is it? Every day, we make decisions based on the probability of risks, whether we realize it or not. Do I buy this house in this neighborhood? Probably based on the risk of crime, among other things. Do I put my 401k into stocks or treasuries? Based on the risk of the stock market declining, versus the (perceived) safety of the US Government. Do I drive over the speed limit? What's the risk of getting a ticket? Do I buy a hide-out in the country? What's the probability of an EMP event destroying the grid? As an Information Security Professional, I decide how to protect a system by listing every knowable threat to the system, attempting to determine the probability of that threat, determining the cost of the control to mitigate that threat, comparing the cost to the value of the asset that is being protected, and rank ordering the controls. The process is called a risk assessment. It's standard practice, whether you are in information security, trying to protect a web site from defacement or in site security, trying to protect a nuclear power plant. So, how about an EMP? First of all, what would cause an EMP event that could cripple American society? What is EMP? What would cause it? What do we know about it? EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, is high energy electromagnetic radiation. Radio, TV, microwave, radar, all are forms of electromagnetic radiation. The devices that detect them, radios, TVs, radar receivers, detect radiation of specific frequencies with very low power. In 1958, and again in 1962, both the US and the USSR tested nuclear devices, atomic and thermonuclear, high in the atmosphere and in outer space. Among other things, the US was trying to determine if they could destroy incoming ICBMs with atomic warheads in flight. Instead, both the US and the USSR discovered EMP. When a nuclear weapon is detonated in the Ionosphere, between 10 and 1000 kilometers above the earth, about 0.1% of the energy yield is released in gamma rays with energy of 1-3 million electron Volts (MeV). The gammas collide with air molecules and strip off free electrons (Compton electrons) with energy of MeV. These electrons spiral around the Earths lines of magnetic force and generate electromagnetic radiation, with frequencies of 15 to 250 MHz. This radiation can then be picked up, or couple, with things made of metal, that act like an antenna. Metal things like electric transmission lines, the power line leading into a home, pipes that may be used as a grounding point. During Operation Starfish Prime, a 1.4 MT warhead was detonated over Johnston Island in the Pacific. The resultant EMP shorted out street lights, power lines, transformers, burglar alarms, and microwave relays in Hawaii, 800 miles away. Also in 1962, during the Soviet K nuclear test, a 300 KT warhead detonated at 290 km altitude fuzed 570 km of overhead telephone wire with 2500 A current, started a fire in a power station, and shut down 1,000 km of buried power cable between Aqmola and Almaty. The risk of damage of our modern society to EMP is much higher, for several reasons. First, our electronic devices built on semiconductors, which use much smaller amounts of power, but which can handle a much smaller overload. Second, we use many more electronic devices, personally and throughout our society, than were in use in the 1960s. So, that is the risk. What is the threat? Because without a threat, a risk remains and unexploited potential. And here is where I have a problem with some of the people warning of the EMP threat. Not that I doubt the risk. Just the probability of the exploit. For example, Michael Maloof, an advisor to the Congressional EMP Commission, in his book A Nation Forsaken, outlines an attack on the US where a missile is fired off the east coast of the US that lifts a 1 MT warhead to an altitude of 100 miles to detonation just north of Pittsburgh, causing an EMP event that destroys the grid and most electronics throughout the East Coast. This is a scenario that is quite popular in EMP post-Apocalyptic fiction, a missile or missiles from off the East or West Coasts that explodes high over portions of the US, leading to an EMP event that destroys some or all of the US grid and most electronics in the US. As Maloof writes: "All the Sabalo-type's crew needed to do was position the submarine close enough to the East Coast to get a missile with a basic nuclear warhead up and over a good portion of the U.S." My problem with this is that a 1 MT warhead is not a basic nuclear warhead. A basic nuclear warhead is a uranium or plutonium bomb, such as North Korea or Pakistan have, with a yield of 20-40 KT. It takes very sophisticated technology to produce a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. The Soviet K nuclear device was thermonuclear, at 300 KT. The Starfish Prime device, a 1.4 MT warhead, was also a hydrogen bomb, and it required a Thor missile because it was a W49 and not very miniaturized. It is popular to write of terrorists acquiring MT-class thermonuclear warheads. However, only the US, USSR, China, France and the UK are known to have produced hydrogen bombs of the 100 KT and up yield. Israel, perhaps. India and Pakistan claim to have tested tritium-boosted atomic bombs, but it is doubtful that they have produced warheads with yields of greater than 100 KT. North Korea has only tested basic atomic bombs in the 10-20 KT range. The "size" of the EMP is the amount of gammas converted to Compton electrons. The Starfish Prime event, at 1.4 MT had an output of about 0.1% gamma, or about 1.4 KT of prompt gammas, since about 0.1-0.5% of the warhead yield is converted to gamma radiation, depending on bomb design. So a basic atomic bomb, for example, a 40 KT plutonium implosion device, might generate about 0.04 KT of gammas. Unfortunately, because the US and USSR only had a limited number of atmospheric tests, with specific yields, and the electrical and electronic devices of the era had a certain hardness, compared to today, it is difficult to say what damage the EMP from a basic bomb producing 0.04 KT of gammas would do to our modern society. What is the probability that North Korea or Pakistan would let loose a basic bomb to terrorists? What is the probability that a terrorist organization could acquire a missile capable of lifting that basic bomb to an altitude of 10-100 km above the US from the East or West coast? Or the probability that a nation state that owned the two would attempt to use them in such a way against the US? I would say that the probabilities are very low. What is the cost of attempting to mitigate that threat? The Congressional EMP Commission had recommendations. I didn't find specific costs in the Executive Summary. What would be the estimated loss if such an event were to occur, however small the probability? If such an EMP event was produced, it would eliminate the grid across part of the US for years, simply due to the lead time in procuring the large transformers necessary for high-voltage transmission lines, which have lead times of more than a year. Hurricane Katrina caused an estimated $108B in damage. Loss of the grid for the East Coast for several years would be orders of magnitude greater. Simply the loss of the US Stock Exchanges, in New York and New Jersey, would create $ Trillions in losses. Prudence would dictate that the costs of mitigating such an event would be warranted, no matter the low probability of the event, given the potential loss from such an event. In today's world, the probability of a house fire has become very low. Yet the costs of a house fire are so great, that no prudent homeowner can live without homeowner's insurance. Can we afford not to purchase insurance against an EMP event, no matter how unlikely for it to occur?

Was the Cold War all a Misunderstanding? And What About Ukraine

For all of my life, which started in 1958, the depths of the cold war, it has been an article of faith that the USSR was bent on global conquest, and only the containment of the West, led by the US, preserved the fate of the free world. According to this view, Stalin was second only to Hitler in desire for lebensraum. It was this view, articulated by George Kennan to Truman, and the resulting Truman doctrine, that started the cold war and produced the nuclear arms race. But how true was this interpretation? And if we misinterpreted the USSR and Stalin, and spent the cold war and almost 50 years and uncounted trillions of dollars, what does that say about our ability to interpret the current situation in Ukraine, or our relationship with China? I am currently reading A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan's biography of Bernard Schriever. Bernard Schriever, who also hailed from San Antonio, was an Army Air Corps officer in World War II who went on in the post-war Air Force to manage the development of the US ICBM forces, which had a very rocky development. In describing the transition from ally to enemy that occurred immediately after the war, Sheehan describes the view of the world that Stalin held, as has been determined by Russian historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, who sifted through Soviet archives that became available in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That world view and associated territorial aims are different from that which I was told all my life. Stalin was a monster. He slaughtered millions of his own people, through paranoia and sadism. But he was not an expansionist monster in the likeness of Hitler.Stalin believed the post-war world would be multipolar, with Germany and Japan regaining their strength. He believed in the triumph of Socialism-Communism, but not through conquest. Rather, he believed that the Capitalist countries, such as the US and Great Britain, would eventually compete with each other over markets and colonies. He wanted control in Eastern Europe as a buffer with Germany. In Asia, he wanted the return of southern Sakhalin that Russia lost to Japan in 1904. He wanted to control access to the Mediterranean through the Turkish straits, and he wanted to stay in Northern Iran. He had no intention of invading Western Europe, the dash to the Channel through Fulda that every American Army officer would anguish over for the next 50 years. On February 9, 1946 Stalin gave his first major speech following the end of WW II. In it, he called for a return in economic development to the prewar emphasis with three five-year plans. In his speech, he praised the anti-fascist coalition of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, America, and freedom loving peoples. George Kennan, the US charge d'affaires, responded by sending the long telegram, which set into dogma an interpretation that became the doctrinal basis for containment. I remember reading the long telegram. I remember it being quoted as reality. The long telegram stated that coexistence between the USSR and the US was impossible. Kennan saw the USSR as "committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken if Soviet power is to be secured." The long telegram argued that the Soviet Union was highly sensitive to the logic of force, and would withdraw when faced therewith. The long telegram was accepted eagerly and was widely read. George Kennan returned from Moscow and was given his own State Department planning section. His reputation was made. Meanwhile, with demobilization the US relied on its sole possession of the atomic bomb, and estimates that the USSR would take decades to produce their own. The work of the atomic spies, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, would ensure that the Soviets would detonate their first atomic bomb, a copy of "Fat Man", in 1949. This became the threat driving the super, the H-bomb, and the cold war arms race was really on in earnest. If the world view outlined by the two Russian historians is true, if Stalin was not bent on world conquest, if Kennan misunderstood Stalin's Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, is it possible that the cold war didn't have to happen? Or at least not in the way it did? If we were able to misunderstand Stalin and send our country into 50 years of competition and spending for weapons of mass destruction, what does that say for our ability to understand Russia today? In America, we have this belief that we have the one true way for everything in life, that God made us unique, gave us something special. We have a tendency to travel the world and insist that everyone else be like us, become us. Yet as Americans, what's the one most important thing we want? We want to be left alone, to do things the way we want, to live our life the way we choose. Isn't it time we treated the world and other countries the way we want to be treated ourselves?

Weapons of Mass Destruction and the United States

How many times has a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) been used against the United States of America? It's an important, if trick, question. Basically, members of the Bush administration, the neoconservatives, or neocons, believed that the traditional means of preventing the use of WMDs by terrorists or rogue states, detterence and containment, wouldn't work. Unless Ameriva was free to strike first, or pre-empt, Amefica would be hit. The 9/11 attack was used as an argument to pr-empt in Iraq. Containment of Saddam was breaking down. Unless America attacked, pre- emptied, Saddam would use his WDMs against us.

   Lest you think much has changed, the policies written in 2002 and later extended, are being used to argue for new classes of weapons. America's WDMs are getting old and new ones are needed, as well as new classes if weapons never fielded before.

   As for the trick question, we should all remember that America is the only country to ever use WMDs: the two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagisaki. 

1979 - 35 years ago!

In 1979 I was a college senior, getting ready to graduate and study medicine. Things were a little different in those days. I didn't own a TV, so I didn't follow the news as closely as I might have. Yet, one of the defining moments for me was coming back from class and viewing the wreckage of the failed Iran hostage rescue mission at Dessert 1. I remember thinking "Can't America do any better?" I would vote the next year for Reagan, and for years I would believe that things were getting better. Only in hindsight - 35 years of it now - can I see that Carter was right, Reagan was wrong, and that the terrible crises we are in today stem from decisions, poor ones, made at that time. My entire college career was marked by the economic and energy shocks of the late 1970's. Both winters of 1976-77 and 1977-78 (my Freshman and Sophomore years) were severe. The University of Notre Dame had its own energy plant burning coal, and in both winters, ran its coal reserves down very low. In January 1978, a sever blizzard closed the school for 2 weeks (it had never closed for more than one day for weather before). Students were dorm-bound. The snow drifted to the third floor and higher. I remember walking to other dorms: you exited on the first floor, then climbed "stairs" in the drifts and walked on pathways that were even with the third floor until you reached your destination, where you took the "stairs" back to ground level. One student was injured when he jumped off the 4th floor roof of his dorm and landed on a bicycle rack buried in the snow. Notre Dame had a basketball scheduled with the University of Maryland midway through the blizzard. Since the game was televised (and paid) the University contracted the City of South Bend to make special snow plow jobs of the city airport and roads to get the Maryland basketball team in for the game. The game was thrown open to the entire student body free to give them something to do. Set against the unusual weather, President Carter's goals for energy self-sufficiency seemed important, although his calls for cutting back seemed to counter-progressive. Driving 55 and turning the thermostat down sounded quaint. But his earlier plans were nothing compared to his speech of July 15, 1979. Dubbed the "Malaise" speech, (a word that never appeared in the speech), Carter identified the crisis' cause not on an external enemy but on American's themselves. The crisis was due to American materialism, self-indulgence and consumption, and a failure to find meaning therein. A crisis of values among the people. Carter spoke of a "system of government that seems incapable of action", of "a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful self interests". The common good was lost: "You see every extreme position defended to the past vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another." Finally, Carter indicated that America was at a turning point: "There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that path lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility." The alternative - a course consistent with our past traditions, lead to the restoration of American values. The problem was never-ending consumption, the desire for more. The alternative, living according to our permanent values, meant living within our means. How we dealt with energy, would determine the type of freedom that would prevail in America. Carter outlined a plan to decrease, and eventually end, our dependence on foreign oil. His plan, though, would require sacrifice, and effort. I personally didn't hear the speech. I do remember the reaction, and the "malaise" label. And I remember Reagan, and his "morning in America". I also remember his promise that the problem with our lack of energy was a lack of domestic drilling and production. Reagan insisted that we could not insist on doing with less. 1979-80 played out as a backdrop to my finishing and graduating. Then in the spring of 1980 came the failed Iranian Hostage rescue, and my personal crisis with American military power. I went on to vote for Reagan; practically everyone else did to. He promised a great future. It's interesting to look back now and see how his promises turned out. He promised to restore economic order in government spending: "You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why, then, should we thing collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation?" The average Carter deficit was $54.5 billion annually. During the Reagan years, average deficits grew to $210.6 billion, on average over his two terms. Federal spending doubled from $590.9 billion in 1980 to $1.14 trillion in 1989. The federal bureaucracy grew by 5% under Reagan. Most of all, I remember Reagan as a great sales man. He learned that as an actor turned spokesman for GE. He sold Americans what they wanted: self-indulgence and consumption. The Reagan revolution was not a conservative revolution at all. It was a revolution for American invulnerability and global supremacy. His support for SDI, "Star Wars", made the Soviet Union paranoid for good reason. Its basis was to make American invulnerable to any kind of retribution. This would allow America to demand anything necessary for its "survival", specifically, foreign oil. The Global War on Terror (GWOT), and especially the war in Iraq, had little to do with terrorism and everything to do with access to Iraqi light, sweet crude. Despite Reagan's assertion that America's energy shortage was the work of Washington preventing domestic production, and despite the fact that Alaskan oil discoveries where brought to market as gast as geologically possible, American oil production peaked in 1972 at about 9.7BB per day. Even today, with the shale revolution and "fracking", production is "back" only to 7BB per day. Imports peaked in 2005 at 10 BB per day, and fallen to 7 BB per day. The question I have come to ask myself is this: I know that we American's are not aggressors. I know that we maintain our military supremacy to deter and defend against aggression. The question is, what do Russia and China and North Korea and Iran and Syria believe? And since the military maxim is to look at your enemies capabilities, not intentions, does it matter? Looking back to Carter's questioning American consumption, especially with regards to oil, the choice was summarized well in a slightly different regards by Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, after 9/11. "We have two choices, Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter." So, instead of choosing conservation, higher mileage standards, alternative energy sources, decreased consumption, and trying to live within our domestic oil production, or living with what oil we could import from friendly sources, America chose to pursue global hegemony, so that we could pursue getting oil from the entire world, despite making the world change the way they live. Since Russia has enormous amounts of oil and gas, it is any wonder that they alone have been able to resist our demands for oil, no doubt due to their remaining stocks of nuclear weapons? No doubt why Iran continues in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It seems the only way to resist America.

Trying to Get Certified

I started a new job on July 28, 2014. I was hired as a Senior Consultant by Avalon Consulting LLC, a Plano, Texas company that specializes in Web Portals, NoSQL databases and Hadoop. My IT experience and skill set is fairly diverse. While I have been been involved with Hadoop installation, monitoring and development over the past 3 years and expected to start working with Hadoop, I have more than 10 years of experience as a relational database administrator (DBA), have worked on several NoSQL database implementations, and spent more than 5 years as a lead client-server developer. More recently, I worked as a VMware Virtualization Engineer and most recently was a Python Cloud Developer.

I only hold two certifications: I am a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP) and I hold a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) Windows 7 Client Systems Administrator. The CISSP is an active certification, in that the examinations are regularly updated and maintaining the certification requires 120 hours of Continuing Education (CE) per 3-year cycle. The MCTS is no longer being maintained; Microsoft points candidates towards newer certificates in active technology. I was hired in June 2011 to work as a Contract VMware Virtualization Engineer for the US Army Medical Information Technology Center, contingent upon my earning an MCTS prior to my commencing work. I already held the CISSP which, along with the VMware skill set, was required to work in a secure position. The choice of subject area for the MCTS was left to me; I chose the Windows 7 Client Sysadmin based on my prospective manager's advice that it was the easiest to earn. I purchased the two Microsoft Press Self-Paced Training Kits that corresponded to the exam: 70-680 Configuring Windows 7 and 70-685 Windows 7 Enterprise Desktop Support Technician and spent the next 3 weeks cramming on the 1500+ pages of material. I had used Windows 7, performed multiple installs, and, in general, had some familiarity with the product. However, there were a number of capabilities that I had had no opportunity to examine, not having been a Windows 7 Enterprise Support Technician previously. The self-paced training materials included several very-short practice tests of about 10 questions each. The certification exam itself was, I believe, 120 questions over 3 hours, if I remember correctly.

I did not pass the first try. In fact, the nature of the questions on the exam were very different from those in the practice exam. Not passing the first try was fairly distressing to me. I had always been a fairly "good" test taker. Great SATs, great MCATs, passed the National Medical Boards, Part I in a previous career, passed the CISSP. I had an employer that wanted me, the position had actually opened a month prior so they had tasks stacking up for me to perform. Well, exposure to the test told me how to re-study, and I passed a second try a week later.

All of these tech companies that offer certification exams also offer training classes, and they are, of course, the "preferred" method of preparation. I have known people that attended training classes paid for by their companies as a cost of business. I have known people that paid their own way. I completed a year as a VMware Engineer, and my contract was renewed. However, I very much wanted to become VMware Certified, and one hard requirement to sit for the VMware Certification exam was to attend (and, of course, pay for) the appropriate training class. My manager had promised to send me once my contract was renewed, but was unable to keep that promise when his manager decided that training dollars could not be spent on contractors, and the three slots were filled with individuals that were not performing VMware Engineering tasks. I thought of paying for my own slot, but the $2999 for the class plus the travel costs (~$1600) plus the wages lost (I was an hourly contractor) was just too much for my wallet. So the Army lost a VMware Engineer, and I moved to Austin to work as a Python System Security developer.

Fast forward a couple of years. Tomorrow I sit for a Hadoop System Administration exam, one of two I need to start doing real work for my company. The past 3 weeks studying have been déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. Sitting on overhead in a consulting firm is just like for an attorney. You make money for the company by billing hours to clients, not to overhead. I am less than enamored with this certification process. The company that offers the Hadoop distribution that I am testing on has outsourced the training classes to a handful of companies around the world, and also outsourced the testing process. Between the three entities, it has been difficult to get a feel for the type of questions on the exam. (Some would argue that is good for the testing process; that it encourages the student to study harder.) Perhaps they want to sell more class slots. I do know that I could pass their competitor's corresponding exam, as their competitor offers more practice questions. Undoubtedly, this is merely a reflection of my own insecurities and frustrations over not being able to quickly test out and get to work. not to mention the fact that I don't have the $2999 in my pocket to pay my own way to the class, which they "almost guarantee" will help you pass. Perhaps I should just stop writing, get a good nights sleep, and then do well. So I will!

On Doctor's Syndrome

When I was in medical school, decades ago, I recognized a syndrome I will call Doctor's syndrome. I call it that because I noticed it among MDs, but I have come to see over the course of my life that it is a more common syndrome associated with highly learned individuals, many who receive doctorate degrees of one sort of the other. And since there is a real hierarchy in the snobbery of individuals with doctorate degrees (as evidenced by one of my professor's who, upon learning I was attending medical school instead of graduate school in chemistry, remarked "Oh, so you want to be a real doctor, not just a PhD" in a not so kind voice), I continue to call it Doctor's syndrome, although a lot of economists seem to be afflicted. Doctor's syndrome works like this. An individual goes through a long, difficult period of training in one particular field. It is associated with a deal of hazing, put-downs, trials and tribulations, in short, an initiation. Eventually, mastery of some portion of the field is noted and acknowledged, and the individual practices according to the master of that sub-portion of that field. Somewhere, there comes the delusion that, because the individual is at the top of their game in their area, they are now capable of solving the problems of every field. Because a guy (and they always were men) could take out an inflamed appendix or solve a case of gonorrhea, they must be capable of running a business. Or solve political problems. But it really seems to reach its ultimate in the real of economists. I pick on economists because they have always seem to equate their mastery of a soft, observational-based area of study with that of the physical sciences, with the attendant rush to use mathematics to "prove" their theories. Anyway, individuals with learning, and mastery, of the field of economic behavior, are allowed to comment and set policy on areas, such as energy policy, that they really have no business being involved with. Imagine calling your MD to get advice on buying an electric car versus sticking with a plain old gas vehicle. Or calling your power plant operator to get advice on treatment for your lymphoma. Or calling an economist to help you with (or, I should say, when) we might run out of cheap oil. My point is this: now that I am out of the medical profession, and instead practice on computer systems, I have an obligation to tell you I can't take out your appendix. As a CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional), I practice under a code of ethics that says that, that I will only do work that I have knowledge and training and expertise, and will tell my clients when they should seek expert opinion on any other area of mastery. Don't any of these other guys operate under a code of ethics?

So, You Have a Headache?

On Executions

I live in the state of Texas. The state executes more individuals than any other state in America. The fact that I have not thought a great deal about this is related more to the fact that I try to live my life so that the ultimate penalty is not a factor in my life, rather than my not thinking much about it. However, with the number of executions in America being performed with differing and alternate drug cocktails, and the number of people commenting on the length and apparent 'painfulness' of the death of inmates, I thought to make a few comments. While I have not observed any such executions, the description of inmates 'gasping' for minutes to hours after receiving the 'lethal' injection sounds like agonal breathing. Agonal breathing occurs when an unconscious person suffers ischemia or hypoxia, and is the last stage of respiration before apnea, or complete lack of breathing. The method that executioners use to kill someone is to stop the executioners breathing, so that the body dies of lack of oxygen. The fact that these 'alternative' cocktails seem to take so long is a testament to their inefficiency, not their methodology. My understanding is that physicians (ie MDs and DOs) will not participate in an execution, due to their oaths to protect life. So you have individuals with less than complete medical training and understanding planning and performing the execution on behalf of the state. Then there is the issue of obtaining the specific drugs that would perform the most 'efficient' execution, where execution is measured, I guess, by the duration from injection to death. The published story of the latest execution in Arizona indicated the inmate was injected with a mixture of a benzodiazepine to cause unconsciousness, followed by an opiate to induce respiratory depression. The inmate took more that several hours to die, and exhibited 'gasping' breath types. While the choice of the two medications might have been made strictly by the availability, it is a reflection of the lack of medical knowledge by those individuals to try to execute someone with that drug combination. Opiates, while causing respiratory depression, are a poor choice for a drug to cause apnea and brain (and therefore body) death. While many people die of opiate overdose, it has rarely been proven that the opiate was the cause of death. Many times, the death is a result of other drugs taken with the opiate, such as alcohol. Opiates are a poor choice to kill someone. As I mentioned earlier, I have not pondered deeply the right of the state to execute an individual. When I was practicing medicine, which I did only for a short time, there where procedures I would not have participated in due to personal beliefs, one being performing an execution. However, if the state is going to insist on performing an execution, I think that it should at least learn how to do in the "best" way possible, if such a thing exists. When a patient is undergoing a surgical procedure, say for thoracic surgery, the anesthesiologist induces deep unconsciousness and then paralyzes the skeletal muscle system. This renders the patient unable to breathe on their own, and the anesthesiologist places the patient on a respirator to breathe for the patient. Without the respirator, the patient will die within 4-7 minutes from anoxia. This is exactly the method that the state should use to execute an inmate, if they wish to be "efficient" and merciful. (If you can call executing someone merciful.) These drugs are used in hospitals daily. There are alternative drugs for causing muscular paralysis. There are alternative drugs for inducing unconsciousness. I have to ask, if the state is so powerful that it can take the life of one of their members, is it so weak that it can't procure the necessary drugs to so in a proper fashion? Or are its workers so incompetent or lazy that they can't execute the power of the state properly? This article in the Royal Society of Chemistry, outlines the triple drug cocktail that mimics surgical anesthesia for inducing unconsciousness, muscle paralysis, and heart stoppage. It notes that as far back as 2007, executions by this method caused external signs, such as 'gasping', that caused observers to question the method of execution. Here's another article, an interview with an anesthesiologist. Now, with states deviating from the most ideal drug combination, is it any wonder that people question the methods being used? Also, in a Florida cases, the executioners couldn't even place the catheter properly into a vein, so that the drugs could speed directly to the heart and brain, the site of their action. Surely this is a sign of true incompetence of the state to perform its function. I have had trouble placing a needle into a vein in patients, but I never injected a drug without first drawing back and ensuring the needle was in a vein and had free flow of blood. If an airline pilot could't land a plane, he wouldn't be allowed to fly. If bus driver couldn't keep his bus on the road, he would lose his license. The state is responsible to see that individuals that can hazard life by their performance due so properly. Likewise, the state is responsible for seeing that the executioner, even when taking a life, does so properly. Inmates scheduled to die have the right to a merciful death. Otherwise is cruel and unusual punishment, outlawed by the Constitution. One thing that is interesting is that here in Texas, dogs and cats can't be executed except by sodium pentobarbital. Furthermore, there are mandatory training programs that are required for individuals euthenising a dog or cat in Texas (Sec. 821.055). Could it be that we have better standards of care for our animals then our inmates?

The Rule of Law

I've been reading several books recently trying to figure out why America is, ahem, "slowing down". Two that shed some light on the mystery include Niall Ferguson's The Great Degeneration and Philip K. Howard's The Rule of Nobody. I haven't finished Ferguson's book, but his examination of "The (English) Rule of Law" seemed a perfect tie-in to Howard's entire book. Howard's thesis is that America used to function according to the Rule of Law, but that, starting in the 1980's, the flexibility and efficiency with government and courts had operated were taken away by the over-specification of laws. Ferguson contrasts the economic development of countries under common law, like England, and civil law, like France. Common law countries:

1. have stronger investor protections and provide companies with better access to equity financing than civil law countries, as manifested in larger stock markets, more numerous firms, and more initial public offering;
2. have better protections of outside investors relative to 'insiders', whereas French civil law countries have poorer protections;
3. make it easier for new firms to enter the market, as manifested in the number of procedures, number of days and costs of setting up a new business;
4. have more efficient (because less formalistic) courts, as measured by the time it takes to evict non-paying tenants and to collect a debt after a cheque has bounced;
5. regulate their labor markets less and therefore have a higher labor participation and lower unemployment rates than civil law countries;
6. have more extensive mandatory disclosure requirements, which again encourages investors; and
7. have more efficient procedures in cases of insolvency, such as a hypothetical hotel bankruptcy.

You can purchase his book to get the footnotes; each point is footnoted with a study.

He goes on to quote:Legal investor protection is a strong predictor of financial development...[as well as] government ownership of banks, the burden of entry regulations, regulation of labor markets, incidence of military conscription, and government ownership of the media...In all these spheres, civil law is associated with a heavier hand of government ownership and regulation than common law...Civil law is 'policy implementing', while common law is 'dispute resolving'.And this is the tie to Howard. America, inheriting a common law tradition from England, used to implement the Rule of Law much more in a fashion of resolving disputes. However, can anyone look at America's modern mode of law and government and claim that we have not strayed into the policy implementing arena? And why? According to Howard, it was a reaction to the 1960's, where America was forced to look at it's shortcomings. Looking at Jim Crow and a corrupt ('I am not a crook') president and no longer trusting the ability of government and judges to have any flexibility or interpretation of the law, the individuals that wrote the laws started writing law in such detail and minutiae to prevent any interpretation or flexibility. And we, Americans, wanted that, because we no longer trusted our judges to interpret the laws or trusted government workers to implement or interpret a law. But by taking away the flexibility we deviated from the common law heritage, and would up with something far worse: an ungovernable system.

Our tax code is so complicated that no one can possibly understand it, except those who specialize in it. Dodd-Frank, the 2010 law that is supposed to prevent another financial melt down is so complicated it is still not implemented. Section 342 requires the regulatory bodies that are to "promote the financial stability of the US" to establish "An Office of Women and Minority Inclusion". My point is not that we don't have problems with too few women and minorities in our workplaces and in the regulatory bodies. My point is that we are developing a morass of laws and regulations and guidelines and findings and "stuff" that is impossible to perform under. Certainly impossible to achieve within.

The 1946 Academy Award Best Film was "The Best Years of Our Lives". The movie is about three WWII vets who ride home in the same B-17 to Boon City. Fredrick March is the banker who is thrust into the spot of evaluating Vets requesting GI-Bill loans. His board is giving him pressure to "be responsible", "look at collateral", be a banker. At a dinner celebrating his promotion, he get's drunk and tells the other bankers a story, about when he was ordered to take a hill. He says: "So I told them, but sir, I don't have any collateral. So we didn't take that hill, and we lost the war." He then tells them that the bank is going to trust the Vets, give them the loans, because their war accomplishments and their character is their collateral. And, of course, those Vets did prove their collateral. That movie was in 1946, and America did very well over the next several decades. Of course, the rest of the world was in ruins. And not everything America did over the next few decades was right or just or noble. But Americans trusted each other, its government and its courts. It lived by the Rule of Law.

America lost that trust, and tried to replace it with a rule for every situation. Don't trust a judge; codify the sentences. Don't listen to a bureaucrat, spell everything out in the rules. Until there are now just too many rules, too many laws. Any more, and America will sink under all the laws.

"HOUSE PASSES BILL TO AVERT 'CONSTRUCTION SHUTDOWN' " and Illustrates all that is wrong in Washington.

The House passed some short term funding to keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent until next May, thereby kicking the can down the road just a little bit, and doing nothing to solve the real problem. Until Congress stops using stopgap funding and putting bandaids on top of bandaids, so long as hearings about Bengazi replace entitlement reform, as long as members of Congress are more interested in trashing each other and raising re-election fund than they are in working together: Congress will continue to be irrelevant to the rest of the country.

It's Time We Did a Little Comparison Shopping.

Hey, psst! You know that colonoscopy your doctor insisted you have last month? Did you know your doctor charges more than any other doctor in the city? Yeah, you want to know how much more? Well, I can't tell you. You can look it up. Any one can. But you can't publish the numbers. You can't set up an app so that the next guy who needs a colonoscopy can do a little comparison shopping. Even though you and I are paying the bill, either through insurance, or medicare, or through reduced salaries every paycheck. Why can't anyone publish the numbers? Because medicare says so. Even though we, as taxpayers, pay the bill. As part of the Obama Administration's efforts to make our healthcare system more transparent, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) prepared and released a data set that lists the numbers and costs of all the services provided by physicians and paid for by Medicare in 2012. You can get the data set here. For every different procedure performed by each doctor, the data set lists the number of times the doctor performed the service (delivering a baby, replacing a hip, giving a facet-block injection), the average amount (s)he billed for the service, the average amount allowed for the procedure, and the average amount paid to the doctor. Great stuff, right? Time to do a little comparison shopping, right? It would make a great app! Put in your city, the operation you need, and see which doctor is the most expensive, which is cheapest, maybe select one in the middle? Or that great surgeon your neighbor loves, maybe rule him out 'cause he's twice as expensive as anyone else. Any other business in the market, but not healthcare. The data set has a very restrictive license.

"You, your employees and agents are authorized to use CPT only as contained in the following authorized materials of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) internally within your organization within the United States for the sole use by yourself, employees and agents. Use is limited to use in Medicare, Medicaid or other programs administered by CMS." "Any use not authorized herein is prohibited, including by way of illustration and not by way of limitation, making copies of CPT for resale and/or license, transferring copies of CPT to any party not bound by this agreement, creating any modified or derivative work of CPT, or making any commercial use of CPT. License to use CPT for any use not authorized herein must be obtained through the AMA, CPT Intellectual Property Services, AMA Plaza, 330 N. Wabash Ave., Suite 39300, Chicago, IL 60611-5885. Applications are available at the AMA Web site, http://www.ama-assn.org/go/cpt."

That's the good old American Medical Association, arm-in-arm with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that want to make all that cost data "more transparent". Maybe they just want to keep the good old over-priced system running, where the insurance companies and the hospitals and the doctors divide up the pie, and keep the customer, the patient, in mushroom mode. Of course, all this medical information is too important to allow the patient to see it; they might get confused, might not understand just exactly why they need to be charged so much. Even though that poor patient pays more than twice the average amount as patients in any other industrial country, and get results that put that poor patient out of the top 20 in terms of results. Seems to me it's time we demanded that we be given the data we have paid for, to do what we wish with it. It's time we be allowed to do some comparison shopping. It's time the patients were treated like consumers, to be given a service, and treated, rather than a condition to be billed. Hospitals and physicians in Sweden and India are getting better, and cheaper, results, better outcomes, and costing less, by improving their care. Our system is working hard to preserver the status quo, and outcome we can't live with.

Man's Footprint on the Earth

Have you ever pulled up Satellite view in Google Maps and looked down on the Earth, as if you were in a plane gazing out and down through the window? If Google has given us nothing else than the ability to virtually "fly" across the Earth, looking down at wherever we wish we could be, this is the best for me. I have spent many a time, using Google maps to try to find a place to live or my next vacation trip, or just looking at a place that I wish I could go to live. I expect to be moving soon, and I was looking at some of the smaller communities around where I expect to be soon. I was looking at the area south-west of Dallas-Fort Worth, and I noticed a huge number of pale tan "spots" fairly uniformly scattered around.

Zooming in a bit, I could see them all over, but I couldn't figure out what they could be, to be so common in North-Central Texas. Wind turbines? No, lots of them in West Texas, or along the coast. Not Minuteman ICBMs, they are all in the Dakotas. I was stumped.

Each seemed to have its own small driveway in, with a wide dirt area, and close to the roads. I was still stumped.

Zooming in all the way, it finally hit me. Oil! Good old Texas oil and gas wells, and the associated storage tanks. Oil, petroleum, has become controversial. The industrial revolution would never has gone as far as it did, and our civilization would never have grown as large as it has and become as technologically complex as it is on coal alone. And the climate change and sea-level rise and the other impacts we are seeing would not have occurred if we had never discovered oil. You could say that we owe almost everything we have now because of oil. Yet it is so easy to forget our footprint on the Earth, the impacts of our technologically complex, oil-fed society. We need to be reminded of it by looking at the Earth. I can almost understand how the climate-change deniers can deny the changes that are occurring. Sitting inside your air-conditioned office or riding in your air-conditioned limousine to the next campaign stop doesn't expose you to the real world. And that is a problem, because we can't begin to take on all those big problems our country faces when we don't even see them, don't want to see them, and (maybe) are paid not to see them.

How Spoiled We Are!

Today we live like kings and don't realize it. How spoiled we are! Let's compare our lives to the those of the ancient Romans. Tonight when you sit down to dinner, look up at the light that lights your table. That 100-watt bulb or 18-watt CFL is the equivalent of a slave on a pedal powered generator pedaling away to illuminate your table. How many cords of wood would you need to burn to cook your meals or heat your home this winter? How much work is done when you burn one gallon of gasoline in your car? What is the value of that energy? Sure, about $4, right? Crank up your car and drive from home until that gallon runs out. Now, push your car back home. How much was that gallon worth? $4? How much would it cost you to cover the same distance in a wagon pulled by 200-400 horses? How much would all that hay cost? The petroleum we are using was assembled by millions of years of sunlight, harvested by plants and then crushed and baked by the weight of rocks and sediments over millions more years. We are about halfway through burning all the oil we have ever used, just in about 150 years. In much less than the next 150 years, we are going to need alternatives. We simply can't burn the remaining the same way as the first half. We need to start now on the alternatives, as well as save as much as possible of the remaining as a feedstock for the synthesis of products like pharmaceuticals and dies that only come from oil. We need programs in America like the Germans instituted to put solar cells on homes to generate electricity from sunlight. We need better batteries to store wind- and solar-generated power to feed back into the grid when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Finally, we need to value our remaining oil realistically to match the elevated lifestyle it gives us. We live like rulers, like kings of old, through the application of cheap oil. We should become good stewards of our energy resources, so that our grandchildren and their grandchildren won't have to live like slaves.

Who Has The Top Schools? The Best Students? The Most Prestige?

I started to setup a testing environment for development of web code using the AngularJS library. As a Python programmer, I have gotten used to using the interpreter to develop in a more-or-less test driven fashion, using REPL (Read, Evaluate, Print, and Loop). Mozilla's C++ based open source JavaScript environment, Spider Monkey, has an interactive JavaScript shell, as well as full source for the whole environment.

I was curious about the implementation and started reading through the source. This is the complete JavaScript environment that supports all of the platforms that Firefox runs on, including Linux, Mac, Windows, Intel ARM, MIPS, Sparc, the whole Universe. (Well, the whole planet, anyway. Maybe that's why the fox is embracing the entire globe.) Major subdirectories in the SRC tree include ASSEMBLER, BUILD, CTYPES, DEVTOOLS, JIT, JIT-TEST, PYTHON, SHELL, TESTING, TESTS, V8, VM, and a few others. SRC.ASSEMBLER.ASSEMBLER includes C++ code for ARMAssembler, MacroAssemblerARM and MacroAssemblerX86.

Looking at the (C) Directives in the comment blocks, it was interesting the different companies and schools that had contributed "chunks" of knowledge towards definition of this JavaScript cross-assembler. The Sparc code was from (C) Mozilla, while the MIPS code was (C) Apple (no surprise!). The biggest surprise to me was the (C) for ARM assemblers - University of Szeged. It is a large research university in Hungary which is located in Hungary's third-largest city, Szeged. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2003, 2004, 2005), the University of Szeged was ranked 80-123rd in European Universities and first in Hungarian Universities.

I shouldn't have been surprised. John von Neumann, a Hungarian mathematician demonstrated in 1945 the concept of the stored-program technique of computer architecture which allows computers to execute different programs without hardware modification. He demonstrated the use of a main routine calling subroutines stored in libraries. While Edward Teller (another Hungarian!) is generally regarded as the father of the H-Bomb, it was von Neumann that "proved" through modeling that Deuterium, Tritium and Lithium Deuteride would burnwhen ignited by an atomic bomb. In 1946 von Neumann collaborated with Klaus Fuchs on further designs of atmic weapons, and in late 1946 von Neumann and Fuchs filed a secret Patent on Improvement in Methods and for Utilizing Nuclear Energy which used radiation implosion to compress Deuterium and Tritium for burning.

He became a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and participated in targeting studies for ICBMs, and helped develop the concept of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, as a method of stability.

When I took my first two courses in Computer Science some 25+ years ago, the Computer Science professor that made the greatest impression on me was Donald Knuth, and his three volumes on Computer Science. Donald Knuth cites John von Neumann as the most influential Computer Science professor.

Would You Go To This Doctor?

Healthcare, like government, is something that we could do better in America. American car companies learned to innovate after Japanese car companies surpassed them in cost and quality. Sweden has an aging population, just like the US (indeed like every other country), but it has reformed its state pension system, from projected insolvency (Social Security) to solvency. The overall labor productivity in America has increased by 1.6% per year over the last two decades, while the productivity for health care in America has gone down by 0.6% per year over the same period. One place the AMA could look is India, but would they buy it? Would you?

Devi Shetty is an Indian heart surgeon, trained at Guy's Hospital in London (quite prestigious). He performed the first neonatal heart procedure in India, and took care of Mother Teresa. He has taken the assembly line to health care. His flagship Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital in Bangalore has 1,000 cardiac beds, compared to an average of 160 in American cardiac hospitals. He and his team of 40 cardiologists perform about 600 procedures a week in truly assembly line style. The sheer number of procedures allow his surgeons to acquire world-class expertise and specialize, and the hospital has true economies of scale in purchasing power. Individual surgeons perform 4-6 times as many procedures as American cardiologists. Richer patients pay more so that poor patients get free, but because of the economies of scale, the hospital can perform open heart surgery for about $2,000 versus about $100,00 in the US (cost; never mind the insurance issues here). Their success rate is as good as the best American cardiac hospitals. He has established a health-insurance program with local self-help groups that covers 2.5 million people for a premium of $0.11 (yes, 11 cents!) a month that provides one-third of his patients.

His group has built three other hospitals adjacent to his cardiac hospital in Bangalore; a trauma center, a 1,400 bed cancer center and a 300 bed eye hospital. They share common labs, blood banks, radiology centers, etc. and save from a common economy of scale. Shetty plans on increasing the number of beds in his practice to 30,000 over the next five years, which would make his the largest practice in the world. His hospitals have video and internet links with hospitals in India, Africa and Malaysia, so his staff can practice tele-medicine.

Finally, he is building a 2,000 bed hospital in the Cayman Islands that will offer Americans heart operations for less than half of what they pay in the US. Would you go to this Doctor?

Lest you worry over assembly line surgery, there was (I am not sure if he is still in practice now) a plastic surgeon that did breast implants in Houston, who had an operating room that featured four beds in a cross-shape that rotated. As soon as he finished with a patient, the next would rotate into position, while at stations 3 and 4, patients were loaded and unloaded.

America's Not So Best Healthcare System

After reading about Sweden's hospital system, where statistics about length of stay by disease (a direct indicator of health and recovery) by hospital are available to the people, I decided to try to find the same statistics for US Hospitals. Zip, zilch, nada. Oh, you can find averages for the US, averages for community hospitals, averages for non-federal hospitals, averages by year from 1950-1968, etc. etc. But try to find them for the hospitals in your city, so you can pick the best. No way.

Here is how it works: the longer you stay in a hospital for a given disease, the more likely you will either a. get another disease (generally a hospital-acquired infection) or b. die. Now, granted, individual cases of pneumonia or pancreatitis or liver transplant or whatever will vary by individual. But averaged over a patient population, the hospital that fixes 'em quicker will have better outcomes. So in Sweden, people can find out how their hospitals perform. And, not surprisingly, length of stay has gone down as the difference between the best and worst has decreased. Making the information available seems to stimulate improvement.

However, my goal of finding the corresponding statistics for US Hospitals was sidetracked by my investigation of the kinds of "improvements" that the US Hospitals/US Insurance companies/Health and Human Services are working on. America's not so best Healthcare System (#1 Switzerland, #8 Sweden, #24 USA; see is really a triumvirate, with the Medical Community saying what we need, the Insurance Companies saying what we can pay for and H&HS trying to regulate the other two. Our Healthcare System is sidetracked on trying to make sure that when we are struck by a turtle (either the initial encounter W59.21XA or subsequent encounters W59.21XD) or are burned due to water skis on fire (again, either the initial encounter V91.07XA or subsequent encounters V91.07XD) both the hospitals can properly code it (using the new ICD-10) so that the Insurance Companies will pay for it. And here's an interview, from PBS News Hour, with a consultant who can explain why that's a good thing.

Seriously, for the very small number of people who get bitten by a Diamondback and suffer tissue necrosis, it is very important that their medical records can distinguish them from the (equally) small number that get bitten by a Coral snake. And with the adoption of electronic medical records, it is no longer sufficient to rely on the physicians description of the disease. But having read Wendell Potter's Deadly Spin about the American medical insurance industry and its PR campaigns, I have to believe that some of the new codes were reactive to past payment fights, rather than attempts to improve patient care.

In today's information age, with the Internet providing us with so much of the information in the world, isn't it time that we get some information about how well our hospitals and doctors treat us? The American parents now know that American children perform about equally in math to Slovakian students at more than twice the cost. Naming and shaming needs to come to health care the way it has to education. And just like in education, with teacher's unions complaining about the comparison, hospitals and doctors will tell us that comparisons are "unhealthy". But it is not unreasonable for us consumers of health care to know how much a hospital costs, how quickly it heals, and what are the chances of surviving. Swedish health registries (open statistics) are no joke.

Figuring Out the Economy

I bought a loaf of bread yesterday at the local grocery chain here in Austin. It was a loaf of Pepperidge Farms Whole Wheat, weighing in at 24 ounces. I didn't notice the price in the store, not at the shelf when I picked the loaf, nor at the register when I paid. Today, as I was making a sandwich, I noticed the price on the closure tag: $4.29. Whenever I see the (escalating) price of a loaf of bread, I remember back to my Junior year in high school and my Latin teacher, who one day predicted that when the price of a loaf of bread rose past $1.00 there would be rioting in the streets.

Now this was back in 1974, and fortunately, his prediction has not come to pass, although there has been rioting in other countries when bread and other staples became more expensive. Who hasn't heard (mostly in history class) of bread riots in France (1725), Russia (Petrograd - 1917) or Richmond (1863). Revolutions and Civil Wars have accompanied (correlation, not causation) bread riots. Yet today, with bread having more than quadrupled (OK, expensive bread, not white) over 40 years, (10% per year) we accept it. I guess it's the old story of "How do you boil a frog?" The price increases, year by year, perhaps haven't seemed so much.

In comparison, my wages have gone up, on average, about 8% per year. Unfortunately, due to various events like an auto accident and rehab, changing jobs, changing home towns, recessions, I haven't earned those wages every day of every year since I entered the work force. I am fortunate to have skills (software engineering) that are in demand. Unfortunately, quite a number of Americans in the middle class have seen their wages stagnate and/or their jobs eliminated by globalization. To them, $4.29/loaf bread probably feels like something to cause a bread riot.

Over the past several years there has been an outcry against over-paid government workers. Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, broke the government worker's union over pay issues. However, I know of government workers here in Austin, doing valuable work for society, who make 1/3 of what I do. Take away their function, and the people of the community would be up in arms over their loss. Yet their pay scale forces real hardship on them.

I studied chemistry and medicine, yet despite attending a liberal-arts university, I never took a class in economics. Since the Great Recession, I have been reading a number of books on economics, trying to figure what happened. I was lucky (I guess) to have been in an auto accident in January 2008 and to have spent the year concentrating on my rehab, and not on the economy. So I didn't experience it firsthand, really. Instead, I got the effects throughout the "recovery". I wasn't willing to accept what I heard from Geithner or Greenspan or Obama or Santelli.

So far, the best book I have read for explaining the Great Recession is House of Debt, by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi. While both economists, this is one of the few books on economics that I have read that backs up each conclusion with data. So many of the economics books attempting to explain the Great Recession seem to limit themselves to logic arguments or word games, rather than any approach examining real data. Or else the authors work hard at proving their conclusions by eliminating the observations that don't fit their assumptions.

House of Data lays the case for the cause of the Great Recession on the huge increase in household debt that lead up to the 2007 crash. The authors present many previous financial crises that arose from the same cause. Never mind whether the debt expansion came from eased lending restrictions to poor (quality) borrowers or from predatory load behavior chasing origination fees or big banks harvesting securitization fees or politicians seeking higher home ownership statistics or a president intent on waging two wars without economizing (and household saving). Or all of the above.

Where do we go from here? Will continued globalization result in the decline of America? Or can more American companies do what Apple has done - redefine the state of the art. Will capitalism continue to dominate the world's economies in its current form? Or will the free flow of information and technological innovation produce the Zero Marginal Cost Society that some believe will provide greater equality through cheaper production? Will bread top $5.00 a loaf and bring about the second American revolution?

Memories

Just before I left for college, I purchased a stereo system. Back then, we listened to music on records, so my system consisted of a receiver, two speakers and a turntable. I left for school with a stereo, but no records. I can easily see myself in my mind's eye in the college bookstore purchasing my first three albums: Grover Washington Jr.'s Mister Magic, Jean luc Ponty's Aurora, and Ronnie Law's Fever. Every night, either my roommate or I would cue one one of the three before we went to sleep.

One trac, in particular, has the power to instantly catapult me back in time 30+ years to the '70's whenever I hear it. Hearing Ronnie Law's Night Breeze does more than just bringing back memories. It seems to stimulate so many of the feelings that I experienced one year back in 1976. It turns on the feeling that everything was new, that the whole world was opening up to me to be experienced, and that nothing was impossible. That "the sky's the limit" feeling.

As an individual, it is easy to re-experience such feelings. We have an average day, nothing seems new, everything's the same. We pop in a song, or call up a friend, or have a dream, and suddenly, we are re-energized. But how do we do that as a group? How do we do that as a nation? How do we do that as a people?

What Middle Class?

The Great Recession (aka Second Great Depression, Lesser Depression, the Long Recession, the Global Recession of 2009) officially ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the group of economists in the United States who are in charge of telling us these things. Lasting 18 months, the Great Recession was the second only to the Great Depression, as most of us know. If we take the European definition for a global recession, i.e. two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction (corresponding to two quarters of US GDP contraction for a US recession), the Great Recession lasted from July 2008 through March 2009. The University of Hong Kong School of Social and Community Health estimated (http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5239.pdf%2Bhtml) that there were an additional 5,000 suicide deaths as a result of the recession. According to the IMF, the recession was confined to only one calendar year - 2009 (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf).

Speaking for myself, the years since the Great Recession officially ended have continued to be difficult. The majority of Americans consider themselves to be part of the middle class, and the American middle class had been most concerned with getting a "good education", generally college; internalizing middle class values and mannerisms; networking and learning socialization skills. But lately, in the last decade, it has become just getting by.

My mother was a New-Deal Democrat. Born in 1932, her teen-age years were during WW II. My grandmother was an RN and my grandfather an MD. They both left the continental US and were working in the Panama Canal Zone where they met. He server in the Army Medical Corp as a psychiatrist, taking care of battle fatigue. My father was an electrical engineer who served his ROTC obligation in the AirForce; he was killed in a C-124 crash when I was 6 months old. Both his parents were emigrants from Portugal. My grandfather was an electrician and my grandmother was a house wife.

I didn't have as much political interest as my mother did. I went to college in the Midwest, from 1976 to 1980. That was the era of multiple energy crises and oil embargoes, and Carter's malaise speech. I remember during my senior year, coming back from class one morning and watching on TV the debacle at Desert 1 and the failed Iran Hostage rescue mission. I remember thinking "Can't the U.S. do anything right?" So when Reagan was elected, I too thought things were going to get better. And they sorta did. We certainly spent enough to fix the military many times over.

I worked on a project for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), trying to solve the problem of where to put the waste from reactors, power plants, bomb programs. For 9 years, I watched the contractors spend, the government talk, no one reaching agreement. Maybe no one wanted to. Maybe the whole idea was to keep spending, keep talking, and never solve the problem, so that the money keeps flowing.

Every year the Republicans claimed the deficit was going to bankrupt the nation and unborn generations, until it was time to pass more tax cuts, and spend more on defense. Then there was no problem with deficits. David Stockman, Reagan's Budget Director, was the darling boy when they were cutting taxes from 70% down to 28% (the lowest since Treasury Secretary Mellon had lowered them in the 20's, just before the Great Depression). But even Stockman realized the numbers didn't add up,and he lost his popularity in the Reagan White House.

But it wasn't Reagan who undid the New-Deal/Great Society Social Safety net. Reagan cut taxes and built up the deficits, and setup Clinton. Bill Clinton campaigned on bringing changes like FDR had in 1932. "To turn America around, we've got to have a new approach... we need a new covenant, a solemn agreement between the people and their government to provide opportunity for everybody... a new covenant to take back from the powerful interests... and give it back to the ordinary people of our country (October 23, 1991, Georgetown University Speech).

But just before he was inaugurated, he received a visit from Robert Rubin, CEO of Goldman Sachs and future Treasure Secretary for Bill Clinton, and Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve. As documented in the BBC's "The Trap" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)) Clinton was forced to choose political expediency and "cut our massive debt". Similar to an incoming Democratic President-elect in 2008, in 1992 massive deficits were built-up by Republican tax cuts and Republican spending, leaving the incoming Democratic President to capitulate to the Wall Street interests. Furthermore, Clinton compounded the error by buying in to the Reagan myths of "welfare queens" by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 that undid LBJ's Great Society programs that had reduced poverty from 22% in 1963 to 12.6% in 1970.

Clinton was lucky in one regard. The economy took off and tax receipts went up, and as a result, the Treasury had a net surplus. There was even talk of paying off the National Debt. For a year or two, middle-class wages actually rose, something that hadn't happened since the 1970's. Unfortunately, it didn't last long.

During his 1992 campaign, when H. Ross Perot was running for president, Perot stated in one of the debates: "you make more making computer chips than potato chips." I'm pretty sure that $1 income from potato chips equals $1 income from computer chips. While my laptop runs better on Intel, I run better on Frito-Lays. Herman Lay got rich on potato chips. Stalin helped contribute to the demise of the Soviet Union by insisting that certain types of production (steel, for example) are "better" than others, and planning a whole economy around that one goal. So did Mao, insisting that steel could be made in the back yard. But Perot was right in a different regard: the technology that supports the manufacture of computer chips adds more to the overall level of technology than that for manufacturing potato chips. America bought into the idea of conversion from manufacturing to service, and then watched as many of the service jobs, especially the high-tech ones, were off-shored just as fast as the manufacturing jobs had been. CT scans were just as likely to be read in Bangalore as Detroit. Stalin was right in one regard, that manufacturing (heavy industry) is necessary for a leading country. And manufacturing jobs have historically have been the high-paying jobs that nurtured the middle class, first in Great Britain and then in America.

Then came another Bush president, 9/11, two wars, and America entered another era. Bush everyone to keep spending. Never before had a country tried to run a war without saving. The two world wars were synonymous with war bonds, cut-backs, restrictions, shortages. The middle-class was urged to tap their savings, take out that home equity, and spend, spend, spend. The bubble burst in 2008, leaving many home owners under water, and which group got bailed out? During the Great Depression, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) purchased and refinanced the mortgage's that home owners couldn't afford. Just as now, home prices had fallen a median 33%, and home owners were under water. The HOLC served two purposes: to help the home owner and relieve the lender. This time around, however, home owners have received little relief, a great divergence between FDR and Obama. Many call this "the biggest policy mistake of the Great Recession."

And today, summer of 2014, not much has changed. The middle class has shrunk. The number of people in poverty has risen. The number displaced from the middle class down to the lower class (economically speaking)by a job loss or medical problem or divorce or accident has risen. Income inequality has gotten larger. America continues to outsource its manufacturing, sending technology overseas. The population continues to age. More and more people feel like their children will have life worse then they did. And that, in a nutshell, is the reversal of the American Dream, that things will get better, that your kids will have a better life than you did.

America is in a tight place. We can't cut taxes and spend our way out. We can't inflate our way to prosperity. Other countries are tired of paying for our excesses. America needs to save and invest in infrastructure, R & D, and manufacturing plant. We need to retrain the people who's jobs have been lost. We need to realize that flipping burgers is not equal to making a product, an appliance or a vehicle. We need to stop the fighting among ourselves, stop the business versus labor, stop the Republican versus Democrat, stop the Conservative versus Liberal. We need to work together. In Germany, the average auto worker makes $67 an hour, is a member of the National auto workers union, they almost never strike, and they work together with management to make highly desirable cars. In the US, the average auto worker makes $33 per hour and gets less vacation and benefits. The CEOs of German and American companies get comparable pay. Shouldn't the workers?

Back in 1979, I felt shame when I heard about the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission. In 2006, I felt shame over Abu Ghraib and water boarding. Then, as now, I asked, can't America do better? The only thing I can control is myself, so I try to work hard and do the best I can. Is my country doing the same?