A quick budget proposal

July 12th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Given the ongo­ing cir­cus about the bud­get, I pro­pose the following:

Go back to the Clin­ton 2000 bud­get of $1.8 tril­lion. (The cur­rent Fed­eral bud­get is $3.8 trillion.)

Add 20% for infla­tion and pop­u­la­tion growth over the last eleven years. This gives the U.S. a new oper­at­ing bud­get of $2.2 tril­lion, cut­ting $1.6 tril­lion annu­ally which iron­i­cally, is the cur­rent annual deficit.

Since it was a demo­c­rat bud­get, Pelosi, Reid & oth­ers can’t com­plain about it; since it elim­i­nates the deficit, Repub­li­cans will be happy. And since it saves the coun­try, every­one should have cause to celebrate.

Education

June 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

My Money-saving mea­sures will start with the Fed­eral Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion.
Twenty years ago, a ‘National Com­mis­sion on Edu­ca­tion’ con­cluded that “If a for­eign gov­ern­ment had imposed this sys­tem of edu­ca­tion on the United States, we would con­sider it an act of war.” Based on the con­tin­ued head­lines about the decline of edu­ca­tion, I can only con­clude that the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion has failed and thus must be thrown out.
The President’s Pro­posed 2012 Budget:

Ele­men­tary and Secondary: (in thou­sands)
ESEA Title I Grants to Local Edu­ca­tional Agencies 0
Read­ing First 0
Striv­ing Readers 0
High School Intervention 0
Impact Aid 1,276,183
Improv­ing Teacher Qual­ity State Grants 0
Math­e­mat­ics and Sci­ence Partnerships 0
Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy State Grants 0
21st Cen­tury Com­mu­nity Learn­ing Centers 0
State Assess­ments 0
Indian Edu­ca­tion 0
Teacher Incen­tive Fund 0
Choice Incen­tive Fund 0
Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Com­mu­ni­ties State Grants 0
Eng­lish Lan­guage Acquisition 0
Spe­cial Education 12,861,351
Career and tech­ni­cal education 1,007,860
Other 231,786
Total, Ele­men­tary and Secondary 15,377,180
Dis­cre­tionary 15,377,180
Manda­tory 0
Post­sec­ondary:
Fed­eral Pell Grants 41,156,059
Fed­eral Sup­ple­men­tal Edu­ca­tional Oppor­tu­nity Grants 757,465
Fed­eral Work-Study 980,492
Fed­eral Perkins Loans 0
Fed­eral Direct Stu­dent Loan Program 0
Fed­eral Fam­ily Edu­ca­tion Loans 283,031
Aid for Insti­tu­tional Development 484,768
Fed­eral TRIO Programs 920,089
Schol­ar­ships and Fellowships 40,717
Howard Uni­ver­sity 234,977
Other (25,048,105)
Total, Post­sec­ondary 19,809,493
Dis­cre­tionary 59,642,048
Other:
Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Ser­vices and Dis­abil­ity Research 3,541,111
Adult Edu­ca­tion 658,346
Edu­ca­tion Research and Statistics 0
Research, Devel­op­ment, Dis­sem­i­na­tion and Regional Laboratories 330,063
Sta­tis­tics 117,021
Assess­ment 143,844
Research and Inno­va­tion in Spe­cial Education 58,085
Pro­gram Administration/Administration of Credit Programs 479,870
Office for Civil Rights 107,772
Office of the Inspec­tor General 67,187
Other 111,460
Total, Other 5,614,759
Dis­cre­tionary 2,493,047
Manda­tory 3,121,712
Total, Depart­ment of Education 68,031,391
Total, Dis­cre­tionary 77,400,391

Note that we are spend­ing $41 Bil­lion on Pell Grants alone. Now, I agree that col­lege edu­ca­tion is impor­tant, but this much money is dri­ving the cost of a col­lege edu­ca­tion through the roof. Fur­ther, what is the coun­try get­ting for this money? I pro­pose let­ting the mil­i­tary con­tinue its GI Schol­ar­ship pro­grams. If you’re will­ing to serve, we’re will­ing to pay. Other schol­ar­ship pro­grams can be made avail­able under HHS, for exam­ple, where MDs can get their school paid for in return for 3–5 years ser­vice to the poor and needy.

With the expec­ta­tion that ~$10 will be spent by other fed­eral depart­ments, the total sav­ings from abol­ish­ing the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion would be:
$58 Billion.

We’re %5.8 of the towards the goal of cut­ting $1 Trillion.

Saving Money

June 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Over the next few weeks, I plan on spend­ing a lit­tle time review­ing the fed­eral bud­get. My goal is to ‘shave’ a tril­lion dol­lars from gov­ern­ment expenditures.

A Triumph

March 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

As I write this, Japan is in its third day of recov­ery after suf­fer­ing one of the largest earth­quakes ever recorded. Keep this pri­mary fact in mind: The fifth largest earth­quake, fol­lowed by a large tsunami which did more dam­age than the earth­quake itself. Regard­ing this event, it is safe to use terms like ‘dis­as­ter’, ‘unprece­dented’ or even ‘bib­li­cal’. Unless a giant meteor fell from space, I can­not imag­ine things get­ting much worse. Godzilla would have been better.

Next, I want to point out a sec­ond fact: Every­thing worked as designed. The rea­son Japan doesn’t have a mil­lion dead peo­ple is that a lot of smart engi­neers built sys­tems that were designed to han­dle events of this mag­ni­tude. Any other place on earth would have been laid waste. In the aspects of engi­neer­ing and prepa­ra­tion, the Japan­ese are to be com­mended, admired and emulated.

Now, regard­ing the nuclear power plants that are suf­fer­ing prob­lems. The gen­eral press– world­wide– seems to want another Cher­nobyl. I’ll draw this line in the sand:

Things are work­ing as designed.

First, the reac­tors and their equip­ment sur­vived the earth­quake. As designed.
Sec­ond, the reac­tors prop­erly shut down. As designed.
Third, the backup sys­tems func­tioned. As designed.
Oops: a 30-foot wall of water wiped out the on-site gen­er­a­tors, needed to keep the lights on and the pumps func­tion­ing (remem­ber, the reac­tors are shut down and no longer pro­duc­ing elec­tric­ity.)
Sec­ond Oops: mobile backup gen­er­a­tors (mounted on trucks) were unable to ‘plug in’. Rea­son unknown.
With the power off, we’re now down to the fail-safes designed into the sys­tem more than 40 years ago. Remem­ber, engi­neers asked them­selves, “what’s the worst that can hap­pen?” Then, they designed solu­tions, back-ups and safeties into the sys­tem. Let’s see what’s going on:

First off, though the reac­tors are shut down, they’re still hot, ther­mally and radioac­tively. The radioac­tive by-products of the pri­mary ura­nium reac­tion are con­tin­u­ing to fis­sion and cre­ate heat. With­out coolant, the heat will build up, and if things get hot enough, the CLADDING of the fuel rods will melt. The ura­nium itself is essen­tially in a ceramic matrix (Ura­nium Oxide) and has a melt­ing tem­per­a­ture a thou­sand degrees higher than the zir­co­nium alloy used to hold the ura­nium pel­lets together as a ‘fuel rod’.
If the cladding melts, the pel­lets will fall to the bot­tom of the reac­tor ves­sel– where water remains. This remain­ing water will help to keep these pel­lets far away from their melt­ing tem­per­a­ture (of some­thing over 3000 degrees) for some time.
Keep in mind, all this is still hap­ping inside a stain­less steel ves­sel, 5 inches thick. If the hot com­po­nents inside melt their way through, the result­ing slag (still only dri­ven by resid­ual reac­tions, which are rapidly decreas­ing as time pro­gresses) will spill out onto a specially-designed, yards-thick rein­forced con­crete basin beneath the reac­tor ves­sel. This con­crete pad is designed to allow the slag to spread out, to encour­age it to cool.
There isn’t enough energy to burn through the con­crete pad, and all this is still inside a steel and con­crete con­tain­ment build­ing.
In other words, as designed.
Noth­ing is going to get out. At worst, the cleanup bill will have a bunch of zeroes after it.
Finally, these reac­tors were sched­uled to be shut down in just a few months and replaced with reac­tors of a mod­ern, advanced design. The power com­pany already has clean-up equip­ment and money on hand.
Again, the engi­neer­ing worked, under the worst con­di­tions imag­in­able.
A tri­umph. Con­grat­u­la­tions to the engineers.

Egypt

February 11th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink


Well, we’ve finally suc­ceeded in totally desta­bi­liz­ing the mid­dle east. The lit­tle good achieved by Jimmy Carter (the Camp David Accords) is now undone.
The Mamelukes are now in charge of Egypt; they will select a new leader for Egypt. Sure, there will be ‘elec­tions’ and the United States will declare every­thing ‘demo­c­ra­tic’, but the real story is this: who­ever has the best-organized polit­i­cal struc­ture will end up in con­trol.
After Sadat’s assas­si­na­tion (by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood), the Army has been largely vet­ted of ele­ments with polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions. Under Mubarak (the vice-president under Sadat, and wounded in the assas­si­na­tion), who insti­tuted mar­tial law after Sadat’s death (and which has been in effect ever since), the Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment has effec­tively quashed any polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions. Despite being ille­gal, and occa­sion­ally hunted down, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood remains as the only effec­tive polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion.
Thus, the Broth­er­hood is most likely to achieve effec­tive, if not explicit, con­trol over Egypt. The Army may be able to remain in con­trol, but that is unlikely. Elec­tions in a few months will merely bring Iraq-style dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion.
Here is what at stake:

  • Egypt’s con­trol over the Gaza Strip: cur­rently, Egypt tries to keep weapons and other banned mate­ri­als from the Gaza strip. (Enforces UN sanc­tions against Hamas, helps pro­tect Israel.) What hap­pens now?
  • Egypt’s con­trol over the Suez Canal. (Oil and Mer­chan­dise traf­fic.) What hap­pens now?
  • Egypt’s posi­tion as the only western-friendly, Israeli-tolerant nation in the Mid­dle East. (Force for peace and sta­bil­ity.) What hap­pens now?
  • Egypt cur­rently receives bil­lions in US aid every year to sup­port the Camp David Accords. (US Treaty oblig­a­tions.) What hap­pens now?
  • Because of Amer­i­can sup­port since the 1970’s, Egypt has one of the best-equipped mil­i­tary forces in the region, with M1 tanks and F16 jet fight­ers. What hap­pens if Egypt becomes and Islamic Repub­lic, like Iran?

In the name of ‘democ­racy’, we have with­drawn sup­port from a US ally and allowed his depo­si­tion. What les­son does this send to other ‘Allies’ who rely on US sup­port? What do pos­si­ble friends learn from this?
Answer: You can­not rely on the cur­rent Pres­i­dent of the United States to stand by your side.

The Arizona Shooting

January 11th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Second Amendment
Well, the debate has begun on what moti­vated Jared Lough­ner to shoot peo­ple and what should be done about it.
Wait every­one, just step back. This is a guy who shot a U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, a Fed­eral judge, a grand­mother and a young girl. In pub­lic. With no appar­ent inter­est in escape or eva­sion. This is a per­son who wanted to kill, and he would have done it with a car, knife or chain­saw if he was unable to get a gun.
Keep in mind, that he bought the gun last Novem­ber. He’d been think­ing about this.
No law– no gun con­trol law, no back­ground check, no impris­on­ment, no penalty– not even death– will ever pre­vent a per­son like this from com­mit­ting a crime of this nature. Once again: There is no rem­edy, no fix. This is the price we must pay to enjoy our free­dom and lib­erty.
Any ‘fix’ will only con­strain nor­mal, law-abiding cit­i­zens, enfee­ble our nation and do noth­ing to pre­vent future tragedy. Any­one who says they can ‘fix’ or ‘pre­vent’ this sort of thing from hap­pen­ing again is either lying or so filled with hubris that they can­not see the pre­dictable out­come of their ‘fix’.
The best thing to do? In my opin­ion?
Manda­tory firearm safety for all 6th and 7th grade stu­dents. Pub­lic schools pro­vide sex edu­ca­tion, dri­vers safety courses, drug abuse resis­tance pro­grams, phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion. Why not edu­cate every­one about what a gun is, how to treat them safely, and how to shoot? Ignor­ing the fact that Amer­ica is a gun-owning nation is half the prob­lem and con­tributes greatly to our chronic prob­lem of gun vio­lence. A twelve-year-old who shoots a .38 revolver in a range at school is far more likely to respect for firearms than a kid who has never seen a gun out­side of Halo on his XBox. Who is going to be safer with a firearm in a unsu­per­vised sit­u­a­tion?
No, firearm safety edu­ca­tion won’t fix crazy and stu­pid peo­ple. But we can start fix­ing other prob­lems, in safe, afford­able and easy ways. Let’s start fix­ing prob­lems, rather than ignor­ing them.

The United States saves the world… again.

December 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink


Records released by the Fed yes­ter­day show that the United States saved the world from finan­cial dis­as­ter.
No, more than dis­as­ter. You can recover from dis­as­ters.
The world stood on the brink of finan­cial anni­hi­la­tion. Had the cri­sis con­tin­ued for much longer, the global finan­cial sys­tem would have col­lapsed. With that fail­ure, all inter­na­tional trade, large cor­po­ra­tions and most banks would have ceased to exist. Many gov­ern­ments would have failed. We wouldn’t go back quite to the stone age– not every­where, at least– but things would have been pretty bad for a few gen­er­a­tions.
Why? How could it pos­si­bly be that bad?
Sim­ply, with the fail­ure of banks and other insti­tu­tions, all the accu­mu­lated wealth they were respon­si­ble for would have also gone away. Many tril­lions of dol­lars would have van­ished like so much smoke. The last I checked, the power com­pany didn’t take barter and trade for pay­ment, not that they would have been able to get nat­ural gas or coal brought in to gen­er­ate power with.
We saved the world. Who is say­ing ‘Thank You’?

Roughing it

November 1st, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

A problemI’m slow­ing writ­ing a book about the whys and where­fores of Fam­ily Camp­ing. One sec­tion attempts to help the reader fig­ure out where they are on the “rough­ing it” scale. I thought it would be fun to post that scale, of my own design, and solicit com­ments.

For me and my fam­ily, “Rough­ing It” is when:

  1. Room ser­vice is late
  2. Your mobile says, “No Service”
  3. The power goes out
  4. Sleep­ing in a tent in the backyard
  5. Sleep­ing in a tent, and the car is less than 100 feet away
  6. You had to back­pack in to sleep in your tent
  7. You’re a day’s walk from the near­est road
  8. You’re 3 days from the near­est road
  9. At your cur­rent alti­tude, oxy­gen is only half that at sea level
  10. The guy next to you says, “Hous­ton, we have a problem.”

Stuxnet

October 4th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink


I’ve been work­ing on a few new posts, but Stuxnet has erupted to the top of the list of items to com­ment on.
If you haven’t heard– and Stuxnet hasn’t got­ten much main­stream press, yet– Stuxnet is a com­puter virus focused on infect­ing indus­trial equip­ment, par­tic­u­larly sys­tems made by Germany’s Siemens. This doesn’t sound so bad, since pre­vi­ous news-making com­puter virii have largely affected indi­vid­ual and cor­po­rate com­put­ers. Stuxnet has invaded a num­ber of sys­tems, mostly in Iran. In fact, Iran claims they were the tar­get of a strate­gic cyber attack.
What makes Stuxnet so unique? Check it:

  1. Uses four so-called ‘zero day’ weak­nesses in Microsoft Win­dows to spread itself. (Pre­vi­ous record was two.) These weak­nesses are tough to find, and to use four new flaws indi­cates a seri­ous deter­mi­na­tion to make stuxnet successful.
  2. Stuxnet is the first virus to infect indus­trial systems.
  3. Through its abil­ity to repro­gram and con­trol indus­trial machin­ery (the machines mon­i­tored by Win­dows PCs) Stuxnet has the abil­ity to take con­trol of whole indus­trial complexes.
  4. Through this con­trol, it has the abil­ity to destroy things– shut­ting down cool­ing or lubri­ca­tion sys­tems, dis­abling alarms and mon­i­tors, allow­ing pres­sures or speeds to exceed safe lim­its. Stuxnet may very well be the first Michael Bay virus.

There has been much spec­u­la­tion that Stuxnet was tar­geted at Iran’s nuclear reac­tor and/or cen­trifuges. I don’t intend to go into that spec­u­la­tion here. The point is, Stuxnet, what­ever pur­pose its design­ers had in mind, is real and reveals scary capa­bil­i­ties. I make an asser­tion here: All that fears raised about the ‘Y2K Bug’ are real­ized in Stuxnet and its even­tual descen­dants. Just wait.
I point this out because:

  1. Stuxnet is the cyber equiv­a­lent of the first atomic detonation.
  2. Tech­no­log­i­cally advanced coun­tries have the most to fear.
  3. Stuxnet will set off a chain of mali­cious copy-cat viruses. Most will be weak, but even the weak ones will have harsh effects. Indus­trial com­pa­nies will be forced to spend money and time pre­vent­ing and repair­ing such attacks. You think Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon was a prob­lem? Wait until you see what China devel­ops in 3 years.
  4. National gov­ern­ments will see the need for sim­i­lar capa­bil­ity. Expect many gov­ern­ments to increase fund­ing to pro­vide offen­sive and defen­sive capa­bil­i­ties. Weapons of this type will mul­ti­ply. Bank­ing sys­tems, refiner­ies, power grids, power plants, any auto­mated sys­tem is a tar­get. Is Exxon ready?
  5. The prob­lem with cyber weapons is there are no silos, no run­ways, no vis­i­ble tests to indi­cate capa­bil­ity. North Korea could threaten the United States with­out actu­ally hav­ing a weapon.

Poten­tially the worst thing about cyber war­fare is deter­min­ing the attacker. If the pumps in the Alaska Pipeline were all to over­speed and cause the pipeline to be destroyed, how would the United States deter­mine who attacked us? How would other coun­tries react to sim­i­lar attacks? Who will be wrongly blamed and pos­si­bly attacked as a result of a cyber attack? Respon­si­bil­ity is awfully hard to assign.

Watch out, we’re in a Brave New World.

The Koran and the Mosque

September 8th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink


The Rev­erend Terry Jones con­tin­ues in his plans to burn a Koran this week­end. As a result, the world is in an uproar. Eric Holder, the Attor­ney Gen­eral, says this is idi­otic and dan­ger­ous. Sec­re­tary Clin­ton spoke against it. Gen­eral Petraeus said the book burn­ing could endan­ger U.S. troops.
Even Angelina Joile is upset.

On the other hand, the brouhaha over the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ con­tin­ues. This Mosque (styled more like a com­mu­nity cen­ter with reli­gious wor­ship areas) is six hun­dred feet from the World Trade Cen­ter site.

Pro­posed Mosque near Ground Zero

Well.

I think it worth­while to include a quote which cap­tures the feel­ings of many Americans:

New York cur­rently boasts at least 30 mosques so it’s not as if there is press­ing need to find space for wor­ship­pers. The fact we Mus­lims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a delib­er­ate provo­ca­tion to thumb our noses at the infi­del. The pro­posal has been made in bad faith and in Islamic par­lance, such an act is referred to as “Fitna,” mean­ing “mischief-making” that is clearly for­bid­den in the Koran.
The Koran com­mands Mus­lims to, “Be con­sid­er­ate when you debate with the Peo­ple of the Book” — i.e., Jews and Chris­tians. Build­ing an exclu­sive place of wor­ship for Mus­lims at the place where Mus­lims killed thou­sands of New York­ers is not being con­sid­er­ate or sen­si­tive, it is undoubt­edly an act of “fitna”

This is Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah, board mem­bers of the Mus­lim Cana­dian Con­gress, writ­ing in the Ottawa Cit­i­zen.
Indeed, it is clear to every­one that the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be provoca­tive. In this, it is no dif­fer­ent than the inten­tions of Rev­erend Terry Jones and his con­gre­ga­tion. Both sides are spit­ting on the other, intend­ing to hurt.
Unfor­tu­nately, Amer­ica is caught in the mid­dle. Amer­ica, as in ‘all of us’, and Amer­ica, the one some still sing about:

O beau­ti­ful for spa­cious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For pur­ple moun­tain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
Amer­ica! Amer­ica!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with broth­er­hood
From sea to shin­ing sea!

O beau­ti­ful for pil­grim feet
Whose stern impas­sioned stress
A thor­ough­fare of free­dom beat
Across the wilder­ness!
Amer­ica! Amer­ica!
God mend thine every flaw,
Con­firm thy soul in self-control,
Thy lib­erty in law!

O beau­ti­ful for heroes proved
In lib­er­at­ing strife.
Who more than self their coun­try loved
And mercy more than life!
Amer­ica! Amer­ica!
May God thy gold refine
Till all suc­cess be noble­ness
And every gain divine!

O beau­ti­ful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
Amer­ica! Amer­ica!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with broth­er­hood
From sea to shin­ing sea!

Rev­erend Jones has every right to burn a book. We have no laws against meat­head­ed­ness. What he and his con­gre­ga­tion are doing has been blown com­pletely out of pro­por­tion– inten­tion­ally. Sadly, this is what he wanted, and far more than he hoped for. The media cov­er­age is only going to encour­age more of this type of behavior.

Imam Rauf has every right to build a mosque on prop­erty he owns (or leases). What he and his sup­port­ers are doing is know­ingly out­ra­geous and insult­ing. Those who fund the build­ing– money likely to come from the mid­dle east– know full well what this sym­bol­izes. Their pub­lic state­ments aside, they know this build­ing will not improve reli­gious tol­er­ance for Muslims.

This– the cul­tural and reli­gious con­flict between east and west– will not end well. May God shed His grace on us, because we’re cer­tainly lack­ing it ourselves.

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