Elect Jon Huntsman!

Bring U.S. military in line with new reality
By Jon Huntsman
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/opinion/huntsman-foreign-policy/index.html

While he is still clearly a politician (and therefore a corrupt scumbag out to sell even his mother to get elected ;-)) Huntsman is the only potential candidate (given that Obama is very unlikely to see any sort of challenge) that seems like he might be good for our country, and not worse. He is clearly able to work toward the common good as shown by his willingness to be Obama’s ambassador to China. Also, by being the Chinese ambassador he likely has worlds better understanding of foreign policy than any of the other Republican blowhards (and quite possibly better than Obama, the great sellout). Huntsman seems to be the lone voice of reason in a polarized partisan world and while he has said a few things I object to, by far he seems a reasonable man of principle who holds out for the greatest good for the greatest number.

I am not sure he is a perfect candidate (not sure that anyone but me could be that ;-)), but he is way more perfect (or hugely less imperfect) than the other morons we have as our likely next President.

Too bad there is no ‘none of the above’ option when voting. I really don’t like Obama, I see him as an unprincipled sellout (in other words, a regular politician) and Romney clearly has no principles whatsoever, so no one can possibly predict what he will do in office and the rest are total morons (or worse). While occasionally the other candidates might say something sensible, so much utter crap comes out of their mouths that I have to believe they would be disasters if they get into office. Not that I think another 4 years of Obama does our country any favors either! Sadly, unless some miracle happens, I don’t see Huntsman as a viable candidate in the primaries, which means we are probably stuck with Romney, which leaves us with the horrible choice of which moron is worse as President to know who to vote against rather than being able to choose who we think would be best and vote for them.

Vote for Gerry Mandering!

Why your vote for Congress might not matter
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/18/politics/gerrymandering/index.html

I have written about this before (http://www.sol-system.com/koxenrider/bok/FrothingModerates.html) but thought I would comment a bit here (and maybe get someone to read my other article ;-).  While money is certain a prime contributor (possibly number one), Gerrymandering is clearly a huge contributing factor to our corrupt government.  By essentially arranging districts so that they are either wacko right or left (with the occasional center so at least the fringe doesn’t get diluted) has a lock on the election then the election decision is a forgone conclusion, thus allowing the representative to cater to whomsoever pays him/her the most.

I learned a new term: Teotwawki

I was reading this interesting article:

Infosec: The World’s Largest Rube Goldberg Device
https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/18168-Infosec-The-Worlds-Largest-Rube-Goldberg-Device.html

when in the comments I saw this: “Teotwawki”. I Googled it and lo and behold, this is the answer:

The End Of The World As We Know It

Nice! Like TANSTAAFL (“There’s no such thing as a free lunch”).

Anyway, regarding the article (I was thinking of blogging it already, but that cool acronym sealed the deal), I see the yawning gulf of ignorance even among people in so-called security environments.  Because real security experts tell executives what they don’t want to hear (that they are vulnerable and are probably hacked already), instead they hire consultants practiced in the art of telling the executives what they want to hear (basically, get all these boxes checked and you are done).  It makes a man think about going black hat sometimes…

Since the real problem is companies don’t want to invest in qualified people and wouldn’t listen to their information anyway I am not sure there is a solution.  I was being considered for a job as an IT director some years ago (next to my Alma mater down in Blacksburg), but declined once I found out that the previous director had been let go because he (or perhaps she) kept telling them they had to make changes in the way they did business.  Why swim upstream against that torrent?  I can stay at home and whack myself in the noggin with a hammer instead and have a better time!

As long as corporations don’t give a damn about security they won’t have anything effective.  It is very challenging to get security right and balance the needs of the users against the need to keep things secure (‘ideal’ security leaves you with a system that is totally unusable, so the simple, trivial act of making use of the information is itself an opening for security leaks) and after all, the rule of thumb is more than half of all attacks come from within.

More proof that money is at the root

Karl Rove spending millions lying about everyone
Crossroad GPS launches misleading ads against Elizabeth Warren, Jon Tester and Tim Kain
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/karl_rove_spending_millions_lying_about_everyone/singleton/

Now I admit I didn’t fact check the article, so I might be the fool here, but the gist of the article seems to mesh very well with my understanding of our current political money machine:

Rove has, it seems, realized that you don’t even need to base your attack ad on something that actually happened. You don’t need to take something out of context. You can just make up whatever attack you want! Jon Tester voted for spending taxpayer dollars on Magnolia cupcakes for pedophiles. Elizabeth Warren was a member of the Organizing Committee for the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

And the only checks on their lies are mealy-mouthed newspaper fact-checkers and, apparently, cable companies. Otherwise there are no serious downsides or risks to running anonymously funded hundred-million-dollar misinformation campaigns. There are no consequences, no fear of any sort of future professional repercussions for any of the people involved in producing and airing the ads, and really no compelling reason not to lie to destroy a couple of political opponents.

Since the sheeple have proven time and time again that they will swallow whatever is presented to them in their trough, the 1% has learned that repeat a lie often enough and it does indeed become truth.  Since they have the money to spend on the media saturation campaign, it wouldn’t surprise me if the attack-ee eventually starts to have their own doubts and maybe think they are evil incarnate.

What to do?  Modify the constitution and prohibit anything but public dollars to be spent on any sort of political advertising.  Yes, a dramatic pull-back on free speech, but when speech really isn’t free (try reaching a nation-wide audience for as little as 30 seconds and tell me that is free!) then what is at stake here is the uniform access of information and you can’t hear the melody of a single acoustic guitar when someone is blaring heavy metal at 11 (which, I want you to note, is not something I necessarily object to, being a bit of a heavy metal fan myself).

Don’t blame the ball players for their silly-assed salaries!

Executive pay: Don’t blame the CEO
Yes, huge stock-based compensation packages have distorted the incentives for executives. But CEOs aren’t to blame, their bosses are.
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/16/dont-blame-the-ceo/

Just like ball players asking for huge salaries, CEOs are just out trying to maximize their earnings. The dummy isn’t the one asking for the huge value (though you can look really stupid if you don’t get it), the dummy is the one who says ‘yes’. It always baffles me that sports team owners want to have salary caps. If you want to pay your players less, simply refuse to agree to higher terms! Of course, if other owners are going to pony up bigger bucks then you lose in a bidding war, but to me the real dummy is the one who gets involved in a bidding war to begin with. The same for corporations and the boards that hire their CEOs. They get into the ball player mentality and insist on hiring a specific person to the exclusion of all others. If that person insists on a huge salary, then to get him (notice how it is always almost ‘him’ (and white to boot)?) they have to pony up the bucks. The board may sugar coat it a bit by calling the compensation ‘options’, but when the options pay a certain amount no matter what the stock price, it is just compensation in another name.

Of course the true corruption is that board members are all part of the (in)famous 1% club and know that they won’t suffer a whit if they double the CEO’s salary (besides which, the CEO under question is probably a board member for other companies, so you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours), so up and up and up it goes.  Given the rather abysmal record most of these overpaid buffoons, it is hard to argue they are worth the increased bucks over an average MBA puke fresh out of school, at least the MBA punk is likely to have a wee bit of humility and might actually seek advice and justification for decisions rather than making them arbitrarily.

Life as we don’t know it

This article is very interesting as it proposes the possibility of life on planets that are not orbiting around stars:

Is Our Solar System Missing a Giant Planet?
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2099347,00.html

It suggests that an Earth-sized object could get thrown out of the solar system, yet still have the capacity to have liquid water because of a thick blanket of hydrogen acting as an insulator.  If this idea has any merit, then it would seem that any object capable of retaining a thick hydrogen blanket could also harbor life, including the putative 5th giant planet the article talks about (I have read about lots of ideas that suggest life in gas giant’s upper atmosphere).

I remember reading long ago a SciFi book by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson called “The Reefs of Space” (part of the “Starchild Trilogy”) that extended Fred Hoyle’s stead state hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State_theory) that posits an universe that is infinite in age as well as space. If you assume the universe is infinite in age as well as extent, then any event that has a non-zero probability not only has happened somewhere, but has happened an infinite number of times. Thus, the authors produced the idea of reefs in space that live off the hydrogen purported to pop into existence in between stars and fused that hydrogen to produce energy and raw materials for life. The stories had other interesting things going on, but I always remember the reefs in space with a lot of fondness. I have often thought that even in a non-infinite universe there is still room for some pretty low probability events to happen with rather pedestrian occurrence (to me, life is not just probable, but inevitable when water, minerals and a heat gradient are present; intelligence is, to me, a bit less likely, but still probable enough it happens all the time), so the idea of reefs in space still seem like a winner to me. Once some life form evolves in space and develops some way to maneuver, feed and reproduce, it has so much area to work with that it seems given the life of the universe I would feel surprised if there wasn’t life between the stars. It might be difficult to recognize, but then again it might not be.

I imagine if you had a very powerful telescope that looked toward a patch of sky that is dense with background stars, perhaps you would be able to see the stars being eclipsed in such a way that shows movement beyond plain orbital mechanics.  I wonder how powerful such a telescope would have to be.

Wow! A People’s Judge!

Finally, a Judge Stands up to Wall Street
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/finally-a-judge-stands-up-to-wall-street-20111110

As the author states in his closing paragraph:

… But equally disturbing is the fact that more judges haven’t done the same thing. Are people with backbones really that rare?

It is upsetting to see how through the corruption is from top to bottom. It is things like this, while briefly uplifting, that make the returning pessimism so much more weighty. That this article even needs to be written shows how unjust our so-called justice system is.

Man facing 105 years in prison for shooting at would-be thief

http://www.ajc.com/news/man-facing-105-years-1221252.html

What the title should also add is man loses kidney, home, business, car, everything because of hot-headed cops unwilling to follow protocol shooting at non-threatening individuals.

I have spoken with many people who say that cops deserve the benefit of the doubt and when things like this happen to punish the cops is to weaken their abilities, but I take the opposite approach.  Cops, because of their power and ability to make life and death decisions, need to be held to higher standards.  Based on the story, it seems like the cops were taking pot shots at someone they weren’t even sure was armed, let alone dangerous.

So, instead of ensuring that this man’s life isn’t ruined by the horrible mistakes the police made, the state is going to try this poor fellow and allow him to risk a century of jail time.

That is our United States Justice System!

I can no longer call myself a Republican

For a long time (before Reagan) I considered myself a Republican. I long considered the phrase “the government which governs best, governs least” to be a personal motto of sorts. However, I have always felt that government plays a critical and absolutely important part of our society, without which we would not have an environment where a dweeb like me could consider the idea of becoming a billionaire without also being considered insane. I have less and less felt in alignment with the Republican party over the years since Reagan (initially because they started tying the anti-abortion plank onto the party platform and using it as a litmus test) but the article below really crystallized that I will never consider myself a republican again.

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich
The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109

I am not sure what to call myself, though, because I still, for the most part, despise Democrats (though, to be totally fair in the matter, I pretty much despise all politicians, though when I was younger I felt that only, perhaps, half of them were crooks, not the 99% that I feel are crooks today).  What I have read about Libertarians doesn’t make me feel much better; there are things that free enterprise is basically incapable of doing in such a way that society benefits (roads, bridges, schools, police, fire, etc.).

  • I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number, but am against maximizing the greatest good to the extent that any minority gets crushed.
  • Free enterprise, to be successful, needs to have widespread competition and the gathering of resources into the hands of the few (or one) without heavy government regulation is a recipe for disaster (see our current banking situation).
  • Generally I am against unions, but I believe that attitude might be because I have read so much about corrupt union bosses who have never worked a day in their lives (much like most of our politicians!).
  • I believe that minimum wages create an environment where people can be abused because certain jobs will not be worth what the law says it must be worth, but somehow the job needs to get done.  I believe the minimum wage should be whatever it takes to get someone to do the given job in the local environment, not something arbitrarily set by some government official.
  • I believe in a progressive tax system and people at or below the poverty line should be paying the least (as a percentage of their income) and those at the top should be paying the most.
  • However, I do not believe that the progressive tax rate should ever get above 50% and feel that the range of 25-35% is optimal as it gives the person an incentive to work harder (I know there are places in Europe where Doctors only work 2-3 days a week because to work more would be to work for free).
  • I strongly believe our government should be operated more like a business in that people who under perform should be kicked out and people who over perform should be rewarded.  Additionally, our government should always be making the cost/benefit decisions like businesses, but where the cost/benefit is to society and the greatest good for the greatest number without causing minorities to suffer unduly.
  • In fact, I believe that our government should get involved in any enterprise where there is excess profit.  I am against privatizing of social security, for instance, because I see no point in paying Wall Street any portion of those funds.  However, I think social security purchasing treasury bills that pay slightly better (or perhaps not even slightly) than inflation is also a crime against society.  If social security was managed (by people getting paid government wages, not the exorbitant salaries and bonuses of Wall Street) like a regular pension fund, it could use that influence to help moderate the excesses of corporations via shareholder activism, trivial since the social security trust fund would likely be the largest shareholder of most large publicly traded companies.

I am heading home, perhaps I will add more later…

Is it possible to get campaign finance reform?

Can campaign finance reform unite OWS?
As the movement searches for an agenda, it gives new life to an issue recently thought to be a lost cause
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/can_campaign_finance_reform_unite_ows/singleton/

To me money really is the root of our political problems.  Now that the Supreme Court has ‘legalized’ the monied corruption that has always been part and parcel of our ‘democratic’ system the floodgates have truly been opened.  I believe I read somewhere recently that they expect over $8 billion to be spent on the 2012 election (note not all of that for the President election).  With that much money clearly elected politicians will be spending their time focusing on their major donors so as long as there is that massive flood of money involved I think it is impossible for our elections to even have the chance of fairness or for our elected officials to represent the majority.  Given the SC decision I think that the only way to truly implement effective reform would be through a Constitutional amendment.  Of course, I figure the chance of that is about on par with all the molecules in the room all the sudden grouping into one corner and causing everyone in the room to asphyxiate, but I haven’t shied back on writing about impossibilities, so I will outline my ideas for how to have fair and representative elections…

  1. Other than personal money (exclusively from the candidate, not from spouse, relative, etc.) all money spent on an election must come from tax payer funded pool.  That means, of course, that the money available to run an election is hugely diminished, which leads to…
  2. Candidates are given equal time/space on media (other than their own web site).  If the government is buying huge blocks of air time on radio and TV as well as space on news papers (are there any left?) and news web sites, I am sure the government can get a great deal and there would be no need for eminent domain or anything like that.  Each candidate would get an equal portion of the available resource.
  3. No one else can advertise on behalf of the candidates.  Since this clearly a violation of free speech it will need the Constitutional amendment to have any chance of success.
  4. Violators get real jail time, not just slap-on-wrist fines.

Since I am here anyway, howzabout some ideas for actually holding elections…

  1. Districts are created based on neutral, open source methods subject to peer review.  Something along the lines of minimum borders so we don’t get these damn Gerrymandered districts.
  2. Internet voting would become the norm and voting would be allowed over the course of a couple of days.  It is very practical to have open methods of voting that allow for any voter to know that their vote was in fact counted and not changed without giving away their vote (I won’t detail anything here).  It isn’t necessary for everyone to test that their vote was counted properly, but if the announced election results are in discrepancy with the expectations based on polls, I imagine many people would vet their votes and if enough people claim discrepancies then an investigation would ensue and the vote would not be certified.  People could still vote as they do now, in person, and could get the same record (which is nothing more than a one-way encrypted string) they can also compare to test their vote was recorded.
  3. Voters can rank their votes so they can vote for their favorite long-shot candidate without throwing their vote away.  By ranking their vote they can still virtually cast their vote for their second (third, etc.) candidate and their vote would automagically be assigned to their other choices if their primary candidate fails to get a majority.
  4. As mentioned in 3) there would be virtual runoffs.  If no candidate has a majority at the end of the voting period (I believe that the votes should be tallied and reported in near real time so people can decide if they want to cast their votes) then the candidate with the fewest votes is thrown out and the second choice for all those voters is accorded that candidate’s votes.  This process continues until either there is a candidate with a majority or we are left with a dead heat among the remaining candidates.  Then, I suppose, the remaining candidates would be left to decide things based on some game of chance (e.g., if there are two, a coin flip (perhaps if there are several they can play poker or something ;-)).

I feel that if these sorts of reforms were implemented the chance of getting elected representatives that actually represent the people who elected them is much higher.  I don’t think it is possible to eliminate corruption, but what we have now is legalized corruption where the wealthy simply purchase elections and those elected have no real choice (indeed, I believe most are attracted by the choice) but to accede to the wishes of those who paid to get them elected.