jims musings

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.

It’s been rain­ing in Pak­istan. This is known to hap­pen; it’s called ‘Mon­soon Sea­son’, which lasts until Sep­tem­ber. Fur­ther­more– no sur­prise, this hap­pens every year– Mon­soon Sea­son coin­cides with the period of high­est snow melt runoff from the Himalayas.
So why are things com­ing unglued this year? Why is this year a par­tic­u­lar cat­a­stro­phe? Part of the prob­lem is the way the Indus river has been diverted over the years to irri­gate farm­land. Wet­lands and buffer zones have been removed, and what used to be empty flood­plain is now farms, vil­lages and towns. (Source: National Geo­graphic) In other words, the Indus river now has fin­gers that reach through­out the coun­try, and there is less room for flood waters to spread out.
In July and August, the Mon­soon (on aver­age) brings 10 inches of rain. In an ironic twist, drought has been a seri­ous prob­lem this year.
Before I get to my con­clu­sions, one more impor­tant fact needs to be put forth: Much of the wheat stock­piled by the Pak­istani gov­ern­ment was lost in the floods. This will affect not only food but next years seed avail­abil­ity.
Likely outcomes:

1. With the loss of Pakistan’s wheat crop from inter­na­tional mar­kets, wheat prices will climb quite high this year. (Remem­ber also that Rus­sia and Ukraine are cut­ting back on wheat exports.) Thank­fully, US farm­ers have had a good year.
2. The Pak­istani gov­ern­ment screwed up, and badly. This will have pro­found effects on the ‘War on Ter­ror’ and our rela­tion­ship with Pak­istan. Expect the cur­rent (demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected) gov­ern­ment to get shaky, and per­haps even collapse.
3. The U.N. is request­ing nearly $500 mil­lion for imme­di­ate aid to Pak­istan. This is a lot of money, and I sus­pect the world is going to have a tough time shelling out. Expect to see China lend a big hand in return for pref­er­en­tial food, raw mate­ri­als and energy deals. China is a hun­gry place.

As a Smart Per­son™, it is incum­bent upon me to tell the rest of you– The Lit­tle Peo­ple– why we are dif­fer­ent from you. Noblesse oblige. It’s what I do. This is how I give back. Besides, you need it– trust me.

The key idea you must com­pre­hend is that Smart Peo­ple™ use their brains for think­ing. We have sub­ju­gated the base instincts of our ani­mal her­itage to the power of our intel­lect. No longer need we jump at shad­ows or quiver in idol­a­trous fright when a shaman pro­claims trans­gres­sion. We know bet­ter. We have achieved an enlight­en­ment beyond nature.

With this enlight­en­ment, we can see how good soci­ety can be. With minor adjust­ments, we can remake the cur­rent world of bru­tal­ity and want into a utopia undreamed of. All that remains is your coop­er­a­tion. You want to protest, I know– but those are mere self­ish desires, the ani­mal instincts we’ve already over­come. One day, per­haps, you can be like us. But first, just obey.

It’s very sim­ple. This is where the lit­tle peo­ple can do some­thing Big and Impor­tant. Really– we’ve already got The Plan. All that remains is for you to fol­low and do. Obvi­ously, any fail­ure is your fault, but we can regroup and make a new plan to over­come any mess you may make when you fail to fol­low The Plan. We are the Smart Peo­ple™. We are that awesome.

Please stop com­plain­ing about costs and taxes. Again, those are thought­less, self­ish desires. That whole con­cept of ‘yours’ is some­thing you’ll have to get over, it’s only get­ting in the way of The Plan.

What is The Plan? It’s very sim­ple. Here it is: you work hard and give us every­thing. We’ll use all the money, ideas and prop­erty to make the world won­der­ful. Nobody will be poor, or sick, or sad, or lonely. We’ll get rid of war and dis­ease. If nec­es­sary, we’ll wrap the world in bub­ble wrap so nobody can trip and fall. We’ll issue hel­mets to chil­dren under 18.

Best of all, we’ll get rid of all mean feel­ings. We’re well along on black, brown and white. Now we’re work­ing on rich and poor. Next we’ll focus on those that are taller, stronger, more coor­di­nated or bet­ter look­ing than you. Equal­ity is what America’s about. Isn’t that the thing? Why should any­one have an advan­tage over you, the poor down­trod­den lit­tle person?

We’ll fix it all. Trust us, we’re the Smart Peo­ple™. Resis­tance is futile.

I note the Reuters head­line today: “Nearly 3/4 of BP spill gone from Gulf.“
How inter­est­ing. I thought the world was end­ing, lis­ten­ing to some pun­dits talk. Don’t let a good cri­sis go to waste!
This is the cat­a­stro­phe some wanted:

And this is what hap­pened:

This dis­con­nect is impor­tant to understand.

I strongly rec­om­mend you get a copy of Sagan’s “The Demon haunted world” and read it. It will help.

Here in Amer­ica, we have cer­tain rights. Most of our rights are indi­vid­ual rights, as opposed to group rights, where the right is mean­ing­less or non-existent with­out the group.
Anti-discrimination laws, for exam­ple, are an exam­ple of group rights. So is the con­sti­tu­tional right to a jury trial. The Pres­i­dent believes in a right to health care, which would also fall into the domain of group rights. In the case of a jury trial or health care, you have the right to call upon the time and resources of your fel­low cit­i­zens and require some­thing of them– which cer­tainly inter­feres with their indi­vid­ual rights. How­ever, we feel jury tri­als are so impor­tant that par­tic­i­pa­tion and ser­vice on a jury is seen as a duty of cit­i­zen­ship.
There is a story float­ing around on the inter­web about a Ver­mont state rep­re­sen­ta­tive who has a unique alter­na­tive for gun con­trol. (The ear­li­est ver­sion of this story dates from 2000, and I can­not find any infor­ma­tion about Rep. Fred Maslack.)
As the story goes, if a cer­tain piece of leg­is­la­tion passes, Ver­mont cit­i­zens who choose not to own a firearm would be charged a tax of $500. The foun­da­tion of this idea rests on the 2nd Amend­ment and Arti­cle 9 from the Ver­mont con­sti­tu­tion:

That every mem­ber of soci­ety hath a right to be pro­tected in the enjoy­ment of life, lib­erty, and prop­erty, and there­fore is bound to con­tribute the member’s pro­por­tion towards the expense of that pro­tec­tion, and yield per­sonal ser­vice, when nec­es­sary, or an equiv­a­lent thereto, but no part of any person’s prop­erty can be justly taken, or applied to pub­lic uses, with­out the person’s own con­sent, or that of the Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Body, nor can any per­son who is con­sci­en­tiously scrupu­lous of bear­ing arms, be justly com­pelled thereto, if such per­son will pay such equiv­a­lent; nor are the peo­ple bound by any law but such as they have in like man­ner assented to, for their com­mon good: and pre­vi­ous to any law being made to raise a tax, the pur­pose for which it is to be raised ought to appear evi­dent to the Leg­is­la­ture to be of more ser­vice to com­mu­nity than the money would be if not collected.

Cer­tainly, a bill requir­ing a tax, fee, fine or other pun­ish­ment for those who choose not to par­tic­i­pate wouldn’t stand a chance of pas­sage, despite the con­sti­tu­tional man­date to “pay such equiv­a­lent.” A lien of that sort runs counter to our sense of lib­erty and free­dom.
So why does the health care bill, cur­rently before the sen­ate, have such a pro­vi­sion for those who do not main­tain ‘accept­able health insur­ance cov­er­age… as deter­mined by the Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury”? (See “TITLE V–AMENDMENTS TO INTERNAL REVENUE CODE OF 1986″ in H.R. 3962)

Solu­tions. We all want them. Here are some broad strokes to some prob­lems we face.

Health Care
I reject the idea of a “Health Care Cri­sis.” A cri­sis as such sim­ply doesn’t exist. Go to any hos­pi­tal, urgent care cen­ter or what have you, and you will receive the care you need. Nobody is turned away.
What we do have is a prob­lem of pay­ment, which is tied to our insur­ance, which is tied to our employ­ment. Note the two-step link­age; this is also a prob­lem.
Solu­tion:
1) Revoke, amend or repeal the fed­eral leg­is­la­tion which encour­ages receiv­ing health care through an employer. HIPAA only went a small way towards portable health insur­ance; we need to com­pletely decou­ple health care from employ­ers alto­gether. (Doing so would also reduce the over­head of run­ning a com­pany.) This prob­a­bly means los­ing the pre-tax excep­tion on health care pre­mi­ums, and it means peo­ple begin pay­ing the true cost of their health cov­er­age. This would be painful, but with a tran­si­tory period (say, 24 months) it would be doable.
2) Now that insur­ance is truly portable– like auto insur­ance– and costs are more trans­par­ent to the con­sumer, we can work on what insur­ance is for. Namely, health insur­ance is for emer­gen­cies. Heart attacks, can­cer, bro­ken bones and that sort of thing. Insur­ance com­pa­nies can also offer addi­tional plans for those will­ing to pay more. The point is, for the mil­lions of healthy peo­ple and fam­i­lies out there (whose demand is cur­rently hid­den by the ‘pools’ of employ­ees in com­pany insur­ance plans), plans with low pre­mi­ums and high deductibles will be offered. This is true insur­ance and dif­fers greatly from cur­rent plans, which are more akin to pre-paid med­ical care. Inter­est­ingly, plans like HSAs would prob­a­bly tran­si­tion quite well.
3) In no case is addi­tional fed­eral involve­ment needed, except per­haps to allow (under the Com­merce clause) insur­ance com­pa­nies to oper­a­tion across states. This leg­is­la­tion shouldn’t vary much from the fun­da­men­tal rules which gov­ern inter­state bank­ing.
4) Medicare and Med­ic­aid can be mod­estly expanded to cover basic pre­mi­ums for cit­i­zens who do not work, sim­i­lar to other gov­ern­ment plans which cover auto insur­ance.
There. We end up with a health care sys­tem which is avail­able to all with­out gov­ern­ment man­aged care (so-called ‘Death Panels’).

The Mid­dle East
If I were sud­denly made King of the United States, I would adopt a sim­ple plan for the mid­dle east. The plan is sim­ple, and one that we west­ern­ers are good at: igno­rance.
The prob­lem with the mid­dle east, you see, is oil. They have lots of it, and cur­rently we need it. We pay through the nose for it, too– not only at the gas pump, but in mil­i­tary involve­ment in silly places. These con­di­tions need to change, and the only way to do that is for the United States to become sov­er­eign in its energy needs.
Con­ser­va­tion is good, but doesn’t solve the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem: we sim­ply require unholy amounts of energy. There­fore, we must pro­duce more. More oil (gasp!) for the near-term (1–7 years). For the medium-term (7–30 years), we need nuclear power. We have about 100 nuke plants today. We should have 500. This would pro­duce cheap, clean energy for our entire nation– not to men­tion the con­struc­tion, engi­neer­ing and other ancil­lary jobs. You want an effec­tive ‘stim­u­lus’ bill? Take half that $787 Bil­lion and build nuclear plants.
Now, that we’re inde­pen­dent of the mid­dle east, we have a free hand to act in a man­ner that is mean­ing­ful to us and clear to the rest of the world. If we then choose to con­tinue sup­port­ing Israel, we can do so with­out fear of the oil weapon.
They can drink their oil. And, if they hap­pen to develop nuclear weapons, we can deal with that threat as a sov­er­eign nation, instead of as a depen­dent client state.
For the long term, we need to develop tech­nolo­gies which allow us to pre­serve our hydro­car­bon sup­plies, rather than burn­ing them. Oil is far too use­ful as a chem­i­cal feed­stock for us to be burn­ing it.
Per­haps one of these future tech­nolo­gies would be space-based solar power, but we need cheaper access to space for that to work.

The Envi­ron­ment
We’ve made some silly moves recently with regard to the envi­ron­ment, the most note­wor­thy of which is the politi­ciza­tion of ‘cli­mate change.’ This is not a venue for me to dis­cuss my views on this mat­ter, but I will say that changes such as this have occurred and will con­tinue to occur regard­less of what we do– I’m sure the Polar Bears will sur­vive.
I do fully agree that dump­ing bil­lions of tons of CO2 in our atmos­phere is a bad idea. Since much of this CO2 comes from burn­ing hydro­car­bons, shift­ing to a nuclear-centric power grid could only have good effects for our envi­ron­men­tal impact.
We should also con­sider National Oceanic Pre­serves– places where fish­ing is not allowed, and where marine life can find refuge for breed­ing and migra­tion. Ulti­mately, these areas will also help sup­port exist­ing fish­eries and species diversity.

Edu­ca­tion
The fed­eral gov­ern­ment should not be involved at all in pri­mary edu­ca­tion. Uni­ver­si­ties, as research insti­tu­tions, can very much use fed­eral dol­lars. Edu­ca­tional assis­tance pro­grams– Pell Grants, Stu­dent Loans and such, should be elim­i­nated. Yes, I know all about the costs of col­lege– and the pri­mary rea­son for these increas­ing costs is the avail­abil­ity of gov­ern­ment money. Think of the hous­ing bub­ble, but applied to class­room seats. The myth that every­one needs or deserves a world-class edu­ca­tion is a fan­tasy. At some point, if we con­tinue on our cur­rent course, the eco­nomic ben­e­fit of a col­lege degree will be out­weighed by the debt of acquir­ing such. What will hap­pen then?
Best to get out now and let the bub­ble deflate.

National Debt
This is the Mother of All Prob­lems. Our debt load lim­its our flex­i­bil­ity and saps future capa­bil­ity. My per­sonal incli­na­tion, if I were King, would be to fol­low the path of cut­ting busi­ness reg­u­la­tion (see the Health Care com­ments above) and elim­i­nat­ing most cor­po­rate income taxes. For cit­i­zens below a cer­tain income level, mort­gage pay­ments and per­haps even rent pay­ments would be entirely tax deducible.
Cor­po­ra­tions which pro­vide funds to sup­port National Parks, Pre­serves and other such spaces would be allowed cer­tain exemp­tions in their oper­a­tions. (This would be extended to cor­po­ra­tions like Google, which uses tremen­dous amounts of elec­tric­ity.) In short, I would do every­thing pos­si­ble to encour­age long-term eco­nomic growth. Short term ‘solu­tions’, like rais­ing taxes, only dam­age long-term growth trends and make the debt more dif­fi­cult to pay off.
Pay­ing off the debt would increase the strength and buy­ing power of the dol­lar. As this occurs, I would require a gen­eral import tar­iff– per­haps 5–10%- to hold ultra-cheap goods at bay. My goal is not pro­tec­tion­ism, but to level the play­ing field so US man­u­fac­tur­ers have a com­pet­i­tive chance.

That’s the short story, ladies and gentlemen.

A would direct you to this fan­tas­tic arti­cle in The Atlantic. It is the best sum­ma­tion of the health care sit­u­a­tion in the United States and an appro­pri­ate primer before any seri­ous dis­cus­sion of how and what to ‘fix’ can really begin.
Again: I don’t sub­scribe to all the con­clu­sions reached by the author, but it seems silly to me to even begin think­ing about change with­out hav­ing read this arti­cle and con­sid­er­ing what is said.

The school dis­trict my chil­dren attend uses a mix­ture of phon­ics and whole word meth­ods to teach chil­dren how to read.
Hap­pily, my chil­dren were read­ing before begin­ning kinder­garten, so I have lit­tle per­sonal emo­tional involve­ment in this issue. To sum up, the Whole Word tech­nique endeav­ors to teach chil­dren to read by encour­ag­ing them to mem­o­rize entire words, their mean­ings, and how to pro­nounce them. The Phon­ics approach teaches chil­dren how to sound out words by assem­bling sounds from the let­ters in the word, and from there to deter­mine a word and its mean­ing. In sim­ple terms, they are some­what oppo­site in their approaches in teach­ing chil­dren to read.

This is a good spot for me to acknowl­edge that chil­dren are spread across a broad spec­trum of learn­ing abil­ity, and what works for one may not work for another.

Whole Word read­ing makes no sense to me. It is equiv­a­lent to teach­ing chil­dren to read hiero­glyph­ics. One of the great devel­op­ments in human his­tory, and a key advance­ment in wide­spread learn­ing, was the phonic alpha­bet. A small set of sim­ple char­ac­ters, each rep­re­sent­ing a basic sound, com­bined into word-groups to con­vey mean­ing, makes pos­si­ble cheap mov­able type. Cheap type enables cheap print­ing, and thus lots of books. A sim­ple alpha­bet also enables a flex­i­ble lex­i­con– inven­tion of new words and terms to match a growth in knowl­edge and learn­ing.
Hiero­glyph­ics leads to a small clois­tered priest­hood and a strat­i­fi­ca­tion of soci­ety between those smart enough to mem­o­rize thou­sands of unique sym­bols and those that can’t. Push­ing whole word learn­ing on chil­dren seems to be a step back­wards.
Yes, I under­stand that our brains even­tu­ally mem­o­rize thou­sands– or tens of thou­sands– of dis­crete words, which allows us to read quickly with high com­pre­hen­sion. How­ever, a phonic back­ground allows us to eas­ily man­age new words. An phonic-method abecedar­ian would get through this sen­tence with min­i­mal difficulty:

Bathykolpian women attract col­pos­in­quanon­i­acs.

A whole-word reader would be totally stumped by the new words and unable to pro­nounce them.

And yes, the ABC was intentional.

Jeep­ers, are we seri­ously think­ing of giv­ing gov­ern­ment con­trol of 15% of GDP?

Remem­ber, this is the same group that allowed Enron, invented McCain-Feingold Cam­paign Reform, brought us the Real Estate Mort­gage Melt­down, runs Amtrak and the Wash­ing­ton D.C. school sys­tem, res­cued New Ore­lans after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, voted over­whelm­ingly to sup­port war in Iraq, and annu­ally spends more than a tril­lion dol­lars beyond its means.

In case I’m unclear, Con­gress’ track record isn’t so good. Crys­tal Clear: they have a bad track record. Look at it this way: can you imag­ine your health in the hands of the TSA?

The national debate of the day is ‘fix­ing health care’. The Clin­tons tried this back in 1993, and failed. That attempt used a panel of experts– peo­ple who under­stood health care and were more or less qual­i­fied to weigh in on some sort of fix. Now we’re leav­ing it up to… politi­cians and lawyers. If the effects of the cur­rent pro­pos­als were weather on the hori­zon, it would prob­a­bly look like this.

Side­step­ping all the issues of social­ism, end-of-life com­mit­tees, death pan­els, increased taxes, rationing, and trillion-dollar bud­get increases, I’ve got one question:

Why isn’t health insur­ance more like auto insur­ance?

Sure, I’m prob­a­bly miss­ing some­thing here. But here are my points:

• Auto insur­ance is portable. Noth­ing changes if a get a new job– or have no job at all, for that matter.
• Many states man­date that I carry auto insurance.
• If I want more cov­er­age, or a lower deductible, I pay more.
• In many ways, auto insur­ance groups com­pete for my business.
• My rates go up if I’m acci­dent prone or have areas of risk.
• States which man­date auto insur­ance have pro­grams to assist dri­vers with poor risk profiles.

I think health insur­ance jumped the rails when employ­ers began pro­vid­ing group insur­ance cov­er­age. Back in the day, when most employ­ees worked an entire life­time for one com­pany, this may have been fine. Nowa­days, most employ­ees will have sev­eral employ­ers, and the non-portability of health insur­ance has become a problem.

If we switch to the auto insur­ance model, insur­ance com­pa­nies will com­pete for the healthy, states will assist the less healthy and needy*, and we get insur­ance that is portable and prob­a­bly cus­tomized to each indi­vid­ual or family.

Per­son­ally, I’d like cov­er­age with a fairly high deductible, but with great cov­er­age for cat­a­strophic injury or health prob­lems, more or less like I keep on my cars. Why is this so hard to do?

*We already have a prod­uct for that: Med­ic­aid. It’s been around since 1965.

With respect to the two words ‘gen­eral wel­fare,’ I have always regarded them as qual­i­fied by the detail of pow­ers con­nected with them. To take them in a lit­eral and unlim­ited sense would be a meta­mor­pho­sis of the Con­sti­tu­tion into a char­ac­ter which there is a host of proofs was not con­tem­plated by its cre­ators.
–James Madi­son, quoted in Lib­erty Ver­sus the Tyranny of Social­ism
By Wal­ter E. Williams