Category Archives: Current Events

It’s My Fault

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Art Buchwald (bless him) wrote an unforgettable article apologizing that the Vietnam War was his fault. The gist of the article was that several people warned him that there would be a full scale shooting war in Vietnam if he voted for Barry Goldwater for President. I haven’t found documentation of the article, although I remember it quite well. What I have found is the introduction to a 1965 Time Magazine article that asks the question, “How would the U.S. have fared if Barry Goldwater had been elected President? The mind boggles to think of it, mused Columnist Art Buchwald last week in the New York Herald Tribune. Nonetheless, Buchwald did his deadpan best to guess how things really would have turned out under Goldwater. To begin with, he wrote, the Viet Cong would have blown up an American barracks. Goldwater would have immediately called for a strike on military bases in North Viet Nam and announce a ‘new tit-for-tat policy.’ Democrats would make speeches that Goldwater was ‘trigger-happy’ and was trying to get us into…”

Unfortunately, the link ends at that point and indicates, “To read the entire article, you must be a TIME Subscriber.” However, I will ask you to depend on my less-than-reliable memory. I recall what followed was humorous and thought-provoking. I remember that Mr. Buchwald apologized (in this or some other article), saying something to the effect, “They told me there would be a war in Vietnam if I voted for Goldwater. I voted for Goldwater, and they were right. It’s my fault.”

That brings us to the current political situation. I was told that several bad things would happen if I didn’t vote for Barrack Obama. I was told the economic condition of the country would not improve. I was told that the unemployment rate would continue to exceed eight percent (not counting people who are underemployed or have given up on finding a job). I was told Guantanamo would remain the imprisonment site for suspected terrorists. I was told Guantanamo and military tribunals that would be held there would be the source of recruitment of others who wanted to commit terrorist acts against the U.S. In summary, I was told there would be many, many bad things that would happen if I didn’t vote for Barrack Obama. I ignored the warnings and didn’t vote for Obama. How can I possibly atone for my mistake?

I’ll end the sarcasm with the observation that I understand politicians will say many things to be elected. Newly elected Presidents then sit at the desk in the Oval Office and begin to receive classified intelligence briefings which explain why some of their promised policies might not be wise. They also apparently learn (perhaps to their dismay) that they do not control the legislative branch of government or the private economy. They are the leader of the most powerful country in the world, but there are limits for even them. I suggest we all keep that in mind as the Presidential campaign, which is predicted to be the most vicious in at least recent memory, proceeds.

Quality of College Education

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President Obama said in a speech at a college in Boca Raton, FL where he showcased his “Buffet Rule” to tax millionaires that college is the most important investment a young American can make. I suggest that parents and prospective college students think be a bit skeptical about that comment. There have been numerous recent reports with different conclusions. I’ll mention first a post from last year that had the title, “What are Young Americans Getting from College?” That posting documents studies that many college students haven’t improved their critical thinking or writing skills after four years in college. What they have done is rack up tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and tuition rates are still increasing. Those who graduate with less “marketable” degrees often aren’t able to find a job with a salary that will pay both living expenses and the interest due on those loans. Those who have student loans and don’t finish their degree are in an even worse position.

Money Magazine had a short article by Ali Velshi in the March 2012 edition titled “It’s Time to Give College a Rethink.” He warns “Americans are too concerned with whether their kids are ‘finding themselves’—at an average yearly tab of $17,100 (public in-state) to $38,600 (private).” The costs are justifiable if the student graduates with a degree in engineering or sciences. They would seem not to be justifiable if the course of studies is early childhood education (average annual pay $36,000), counseling/psychology ($29,000) and probably a long list of liberal arts degrees. I liked his closing sentence, which points out quite nicely that not all degrees are equal when it comes to finding a job in the real world. “At the least, make sure your kid knows the highest-paid English majors aren’t poets; they’re technical writers.”

There were some interesting facts about student loan debt in an article by Kevin Simpson on the front page of the February 29, 2012 Denver Post titled “A degree in debt.” There is a warning that student loans can’t be wiped out by bankruptcy. “The joke is there’s treason, murder, kidnapping, and student loans—no statute of limitations.” The article suggests that students consider the less expensive option of getting an associate’s degree at a community college before transferring to a four-year institution. That would reduce the overall costs, and the student would at least have the associate’s degree if for some reason they can’t complete the full degree program.

There continue to be compelling reasons to go to college, and not the least is to learn the skills to do the work required in, for example, an engineering career. Another reason is described in an article in the April 1, 2012 Denver post written by Dave Maney titled, “College degrees, resumes so old-school.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that employers are prohibited from giving prospective employees IQ tests. However, employers know that colleges determine whether someone is qualified to attend by their SAT and ACT scores. Attending and graduating therefore is important for employers who have to sort through the many candidates who applying for jobs. As a hiring manager I recognized for many positions a college degree was the ticket required to gain an interview.

The bottom line is that young people consider whether the degree program they want to pursue is marketable and whether the institutions being considered provide good value for the costs. In education as in everything else, it is advisable to be a smart consumer.

Global Warming is Causing Global Cooling

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A recent National Snow and Ice Data Center’s report on Arctic Sea Ice Extent must be confusing to those who have been telling us the melting of Arctic ice is proof that there is global warming caused by human activity.  The first graph shows that ice coverage is still below the 1979-2000 average, but is about a million square kilometers greater than 2006-2007. The written descriptions would seem to want people to think sea ice is still on the decline despite this recent increase. For example, it says, “This year’s maximum ice extent was the ninth lowest in the satellite record…” “Ninth lowest” is emphasized while the recent large increase in ice coverage is mentioned in passing.

The global warming theory is that increasing carbon dioxide levels will cause higher temperatures and more ice melting. That isn’t what has happened the last few years. One of the global warming advocates said that the fact temperatures aren’t rising with carbon dioxide levels is a “travesty.” The earth seems to be thumbing its nose at the theories, and that is considered to be a “travesty.”

I’ve written in previous posts that the only certainty is that the climate will change as it has throughout earth’s history. I now think there is another certainty, and that is the global warming advocates will use any data to justify their beliefs. In 2010 the fact that people on the East Coast were in their snowbound homes was “proof” of global warming. The actual words in the article “Climate Change Debate is Heating up in Deep Freeze” by John M. Broder were “…that occasional cooling is consistent with global warming, because ferocious storms and intense weather events are caused by global warming.” And now you know the source of the confusing title to this posting.

Global warming advocates have jumped at the chance to blame recent unusually warm weather in parts of  the U.S. and tornado outbreaks on global warming. I didn’t read that the brutal cold in Europe was also caused by global warming. However, I’ve learned to take for granted that any weather result can be attributed to global warming. Matt Drudge noted on his web site that a 2010 Senate hearing on global warming was canceled because of the weather. The federal government was shuttered by a snow storm.

There are numerous indications that the predicted global warming is not happening. There is a report by Dean Nelson and Richard Alleyne titled “Some Himalayan glaciers are advancing rather than melting, study finds.” The report challenges the 2007 UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035. The new report advocates that half of the 286 glaciers are increasing in size instead of melting. The report also observes that global warming has little to do with what happens to glaciers. The “…key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris—rocks and mud—strewn on their surface.” The debris prevents the glaciers from melting.

My hope is that there is sufficient energy from the sun to cause warmer temperatures. Those higher temperatures along with higher carbon dioxide levels would have all manner of positive effects. There are correlations between warmer temperatures and lower human death rates. Warmer temperatures and higher carbon dioxide levels contribute to increased plant growth. Faster growth of forests is good. Increased food production is an even better.

I know that the core of global warming advocacy is directed at convincing us human activities, and especially activities that are involved with energy production and manufacturing, are bad for the earth. I selfishly appreciate having relatively low cost energy to heat and cool our home and keep the lights and computer running. I also appreciate the life style provided by a healthy economy. I wish I could believe that “climate science” is really about science and not about a political judgment that we humans are a scourge on the pristine earth on which we are imposing.

Coming Apart, The State of White America 1960-2010

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Charles Murray has written this book to describe the formation of American classes that represent a remarkable societal change during the last fifty years. I found the book to be difficult to read despite the fact that I was interested in the overall subject. I sometimes wished for more analysis and less raw data.

The author writes that November 22, 1963 “…became the symbolic first day of what would be known as the Sixties and the cultural transformation…” That was the day after the ashen-faced Walter Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

The discussion of the early sixties is very interesting. There were limited choices in television stations, and you either saw a movie in the theatre or never saw it (absent DVDs and TiVo). People drove cars made in America, and there were few places where you could go out to a meal with ethnic food. Movies and television were carefully watched to eliminate any hints of racy themes or profanity. Marriage was nearly universal, and divorces were rare. A federal court had declared that the book Fanny Hill couldn’t be sent through the mail despite the fact it was well-written. The court wrote that “…filth, even if wrapped in the finest packaging, is still filth.” The North and South were both segregated, although laws allowing segregation in the North were gone. Most women were expected to stay in the home, and those who wanted to work did so as secretaries or teachers. There were few illegal drugs. Twenty percent of the country fell below the poverty line, but, the statistic I found most startling, was that 95 percent of Americans called themselves working or middle class. That means that most poor people did not believe they were “lower class.”

The author writes “This book is about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever know. I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America.”  He often refers to the “American Project” in which he describes that people left free to live their lives as they see fit was the basis for what made the nation such a powerful force in the world. He fears that “…America is coming apart at the seams—not seams of race and ethnicity, but of class”

Part 1 is titled “The Formation of a New Upper Class.” He defines the “Narrow Elite” as those who wield political and economic power. They are the owners and top executives of companies, news media, lawyers and physicians, college executives, and city officials. The children in the families of the new upper class have so many activities outside of school that they don’t have time to be children. The new upper class has become separated from the rest of society, and has become dominantly liberal. The people from the upper class neighborhoods of the four largest cities voted 64% strict liberal and 3% leaning liberal 2002 to 2008.

The new upper class is almost exclusively college educated. The lower end of wages for the top percent of taxpayers was in the $200,000 into the early 1990s, but that number had escalated to $441,000 by 2010. The people of this class are effectively segregated from the rest of the country. They tend to be isolated into what the author describes as “Super Zips,” or zip codes where the very wealthy are congregated. Some of these people have been called overeducated elitist snobs, or OES. They make decisions affecting the lives of everyone else, but increasingly don’t know much about how everybody else lives.

Blacks and Latinos constitute only 3 percent of the Super Zip population, but there is a higher percentage of Asians than what would be expected for their share of the population. On the issue of race, the author predicts that whites will be the minority by midcentury or sooner.

The book analyzes neighborhoods called Belmont (upper class) and Fishtown (working class) to discuss what has happened to marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Most people of Belmont (just about 90%) are married, the family is intact, the unemployment rate is low, and few have become criminals. In Fishtown the marriage rate has dropped to below 60%, over 20% of the children live in a single parent home, unemployment is more than the national average, and criminal convictions have increased markedly. The only graph that looks similar for the two towns is the one that shows how many “nonbelievers” there are (about 20% in both towns). Self-reported happiness has declined to about 40% in Belmont and a disturbing 20% in Fishtown.

Despite the fact that the subtitle of the book is “The State of White America 1960-2010,” the author reveals that “Expanding the data to all Americans makes hardly any difference at all.” “Coming Apart” may have told the story of white America, but its message is about all of America. It is predicted that we are on the path to no longer being a “super power,”, and unless things change everything that has made the country exceptional will disappear. This is happening because we are handing over the meeting of human needs “…to bureaucracies—the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for giving people the kind of help they need.”  We seem to want to mimic Europe where “The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible.” He observes that the more we pass laws and regulations, the closer we move to the European welfare state, and the American Project will be dead.

One of the harshest statements the author makes is how the members of the new upper class won’t use derogatory labels for anyone, including criminals. “When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.”

The book does leave hope that a new awakening will overtake the country. This could be based on the “…most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.” That will require that the American new upper class “…must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

Another False Alarm about Rocky Flats

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There was an opinion article in the New York Times about the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant that was intended to create an emotional response, or at least it created an emotional response from me. The first sentence reports that the author grew up “…in the shadow of a nuclear bomb factory, so I read the just-released report on the Fukushima meltdown in Japan with special interest.” You have to read several paragraphs before you find why the author had a special interest in the Japanese disaster.  “The connection between Fukushima and Rocky Flats was made explicit when recent soil tests for offsite plutonium at Rocky Flats found cesium — from Fukushima.”

Linking Fukushima to Rocky Flats is puzzling. The plant never had a nuclear reactor or a tsunami. There are background levels of cesium around where the plant once operated, but the same can be said of any other location in the world. Am I being too suspicious that the author has written a book about Rocky Flats that might sell better if there is some connection, no matter how tenuous, with a recent disaster?

The local cities, State of Colorado, and Environmental Protection Agency all performed independent monitoring of the site, and probably would find a comment about “little environmental oversight” to be surprising. The State of Colorado funded a massive nine year long project to study Rocky Flats, the environment around the plant, and risks to people living in the area. That one study is an example that oversight was extensive, and “extensive” is undoubtedly understated.

The most shocking statement in the article is that there was “…potentially three tons of plutonium…” released by Rocky Flats. Vincent Carroll has an article in the Denver Post titled “Again, raising a false alarm” (yes, I plagiarized part of my title to this posting from his) in which he describes how he contacted the author to learn the source of that statement.  “She responded in some detail, basing her case on various estimates of what’s known as Material Unaccounted For, or MUF…” She does note that there is “…some plausible explanation for where the MUF went—such as in waste drums buried at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory—hardly pose a threat to metro residents.”

The actual releases ranged from as few as two ounces but less than thirty ounces released from all routine operations, storage areas, and fires over the life of the plant. Details are given in Chapter Twenty-five of “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” with reference to the Colorado agency that completed the nine year assessment of plutonium releases from the plant.

The New York Times article proves the adage that goes something like, “It is easier to make an accusation than it is to explain the truth.” I do give points for creative language.  I don’t recall seeing “profoundly contaminated” and “drenched in plutonium” in previous articles that were critical of Rocky Flats.

Health Care Law Status

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The legal battle about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, which is commonly called “Obamacare,” has reached the Supreme Court. An article in the Washington Post by Robert Barnes leads with the Obama administration telling the Supreme Court, “Congress was ‘well within’ its constitutional powers when it decided that the way to resolve a crisis in health-care costs and coverage was to mandate that Americans obtain insurance or pay a fine…”  Lower courts have been just about evenly “…split on whether the Constitution gives Congress the power to require individuals to buy something they may not necessarily want.” Two judges wrote, “We are unable to conceive of any product whose purchase Congress could not mandate…” if the individual mandate is ruled constitutional.

There are many who do not believe the Supreme Court will actually rule on that issue at this time of high political drama, and the Obama administration is maneuvering separately to disarm some of the arguments against the law. Robert J. Samuelson wrote in the Washington Post that Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebilius is doing what she can to make Obamacare disappear as a liability for the President. She has decided to delegate the final decision on defining “essential health benefits” for minimum health insurance coverage to the states. That decision is crucial to answering the question of how 35 million Americans who are currently uninsured will receive subsidized health insurance by 2016. Millions more who receive coverage in individual and small group insurance markets also will be affected.

Sebelius has disarmed the criticism that Obamacare imposes “one-size-fits-all” by requiring each state to define “essential health benefits.” However, the question of how broad the coverage that is required has been scattered to 51 debates. The two goals will obviously be broad and affordable coverage, and those two goals are in direct conflict. Broader coverage will increase the cost to government to pay for the subsidies. Many expect that employers could begin to freeze raises and cost of living increases to cover their costs for the new health insurance benefits that will be required.

The states apparently can base their decision on ten existing plans. “The choices include, for example, ‘the largest plan by enrollment in any of the three largest small group insurance products in the state’s small market group’.” I have no idea what that means but hopefully the 51 states have a better understanding of that and the other nine possibilities. The “good news” is that states that can’t figure out what to do can be granted waivers beginning in 2017, and perhaps that would be the best approach.

The best article I’ve read to try to understand this issue is titled “Dissecting the Health Care Case, Election-year debate makes this term a mirror of the New Deal era” by Mark Walsh. I suggest you clink on the link to this article and read the second page. My quick summary is that the Court might (or is likely to) rule that the current challenge is premature. “Under this view, the law’s individual mandate may not be challenged until individuals who refuse to buy health insurance have to pay a penalty.” One Court of Appeals threw out a challenge to the health care law on that basis. The Supreme Court did not take up that ruling, but “…it did accept the Obama administration’s suggestion to consider the Anti-Injunction Act issue.”  The issue will be argued for one hour on March 26.

There are strong opinions on both sides of the issues, and I believe the key is whether Congress can mandate that individuals must buy something. However, as the article describes, there are politics involved beyond what is constitutional. The Supreme Court ruled some of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal laws unconstitutional. My personal favorite was a ruling in Schechter Poultry Corp v. United States in which the Court ruled that (simplistically) the poultry processor had not intentionally sold unhealthy chickens. However, the Court began to uphold his programs in 1937 to stave off FDR’s court packing plan to gain friendly rulings.

I believe the best thing government can do is to get out of the way, and laws that sound as if they are based on good intentions are generally destructive. Obamacare has already distracted the country from the most important issue, and that is how to create a better economy that will employ more people. I also believe the law has already been detrimental in discouraging entrepreneurs from having the courage to launch new businesses. I know I would question my sanity if I decided to begin a new business with the uncertainty of both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank standing ready to crush it with both costs and bureaucracy.

Back to the likely outcome of the Supreme Court and Obamacare, Professor Lucas A. Powe Jr., a Supreme Court historian, writes, “I cannot imagine that John Roberts intends to go down in history as the chief justice who struck down one of the most significant statues in American history.” My prediction is that the Supreme Court will avoid such a contentious ruling by accepting that the current challenges are premature. The Anti-Injunction Act requires that a challenge is not allowed until “…individuals who refuse to buy the health insurance have to pay a penalty.”

What does all of this mean? Elections matter and the American people elected a President and dominantly Liberal Congress based on anger and fear in 2008. Laws that were intended to “protect and serve” were passed and signed, and now we must deal with the consequences.