jp.jpg (13389 bytes)

THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 334 November 1 - 7, 2004

read book now

HOME

VIEW

MAIL

Columns

BOOK Reviews

 

SECURITY NOTICES PAGE

  For Current Mail click here.

FOR BOOKS OF THE MONTH 1994-Present Click HERE

Last Week's View                     Next Week's View

emailblimp.gif (23130 bytes)

Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun

Highlights this week:

 

This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 8,000 - 12,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so. If  you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front page of this site, click here for a better explanation of what we're trying to do here.

If you are not paying for this place, click here...

Day-by-day...
Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

For Previous Weeks of the View, SEE VIEW HOME PAGE

Search: type in string and press return.

read book now

 

If you have no idea what you are doing here, see  the What is this place?, which tries to make order of chaos. 

If you intend to send MAIL to me, see the INSTRUCTIONS.

 

Boiler Plate:

If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
.

If you subscribed:

atom.gif (1053 bytes) CLICK HERE for a Special Request.

If you didn't and haven't, why not?

If this seems a lot about paying think of it as the Subscription Drive Nag. You'll see more.

 

For the BYTE story, click here.

 

For Current Mail click here.

 

 The freefind search remains:

 

   Search this site or the web        powered by FreeFind
 
  Site search Web search

 

 

 

line6.gif (917 bytes)

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Monday November 1, 2004

All Saints Day :  Election Eve

I have not been entirely well this week. I'll have an election eve essay, but it is column time, and for once I am rather glad of it. There was as usual considerable discussion over the weekend, both in mail and in view.

See also the Beagle Virus Alert.

And I doubt I can say much more about the whole Iraqi mess than I said in a reply in mail.

 

 

Monday   TOP    Current Mail

 
This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Tuesday, November 2, 2004   

  We are both back in bed. This stuff is bad. And I have a column to do. We did manage to drag ourselves down to vote. You should too. Vote early and often...

 

 

 

 

Tuesday   TOP  Current Mail

 
 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Wednesday,  November 3, 2004

The Day After

Well, it is over, and ended about the way I expected, although the Republicans gained more seats in Congress than I had predicted. My election prediction was Bush by 53%; that looks a little high, but not very.

Roberta is worse than I am, and I am in pretty bad shape; either flu or a bad cold, but whatever it is, it is pretty bad. I get no sleep, but I am always sleepy.

I daily thank heaven for:

which is a nasal pump thing that opens up my nasal passages and sinuses enough to let me breathe. Without it I'd be addicted to nose drops, which are pretty awful things.

I will have to write an essay about what comes next, but it is column time, and I am not up to much. I did write a long reply to a letter of panic. That will have to do for today.

=========

Then we have from CNET:

Bloggers bold in election-night coverage
"What the matter, networks? Afraid to call Florida this time around?" says one blogger, who called the state for Bush at 11:37 last night.
Wed Nov 03 07:56:00 PST 2004 | Read Full Story

Which I suppose is fun, but in fact it's a bit like recommending race track touts, isn't it? Someone is bound to have it right, but in fact few of us "bloggers" have any resources other than listening to each other and paying attention to the networks; who have far better computer models than any of us.  I did in fact predict the election (I thought Bush by 53%; not all that far off) but it was mainly based on feels not calculations. Time ran a big piece about me predicting the 1969 LA Mayor election, I had to work at that one -- I was Yorty's campaign manager and paid to do the work. We didn't have computers so I had to have students with Monroe calculators do the weighted averages for the councilmatic districts and in some cases precincts within the districts. But that was prediction a week in advance of the election, not on election night.

======

Of course Bush won because the Democrats nominated a Boston Brahmin who honks at people, and considers everyone west of the Alleghenies and East of the California Sierra as "flyover country". I grew up in the Democratic Solid South (States Rights, Tariff for Revenue Only, welfare programs but administered by the states, etc.), all policies intended to appeal across the nation. In elementary political science at the University of Washington in 1958 Hugh Bone, American Parties specialist, taught that the Democrats were the only truly national party, because the Republicans had no followers in a very large part of the nation (the South).

How soon things change.

Kerry's condescension to Middle America should be a lesson to the New Democrats.

(See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html   )

Here is Tom Wolfe on the subject:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1340525,00.html

"Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred."

Exactly.

 Clinton certainly understood that you can't be contemptuous of people from Hog Wallow and Muscatine. Incidentally, Clinton comes off well: here the Clintons actually worked for Kerry although a Kerry victory would have sunk Hillary Clinton's chances in 2008. Now all she has to do is pick off a trial lawyer. Heaven knows who she'll run against. There is no anointed successor to Bush. Brother Jeb? Not impossible, I suppose. And Powell won't run. The scramble will be interesting...

 

 

 

 

 Wednesday  TOP  Current Mail

 

 
 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Thursday, November 4, 2004

This is an attempt to organize some first thoughts on the election.

First, the nominating process is seriously broken. If God had intended us to vote, He would have given us candidates. And while some characterizations of Bush are a bit over the top, I think few would have chosen Bush to be President given other choices among Republicans; and Kerry was hardly the best the Democratic Party could offer.

Second, if the Democrats hadn't been stuck with Kerry, they might have found someone who could beat Bush. Heaven knows Bush was beatable, even on his favorite issue, the war on terror: that isn't a "popular" war in the United States, but it is one perceived as necessary, as Kerry discovered. Unfortunately his attempts to show that he is more fit to lead the war than Bush were obscured by his personal problems -- he may have been a hero among most of his own boat crew, but all the other boats in that squadron didn't much care for his style. None of that was relevant to being President, but much of it was relevant to being elected President: not quite the same thing.

Had Kerry been someone other than who he was, the election might have been about something: about Republic and Empire, and the direction of the nation.

I conclude that for all its faults, the old Convention system for choosing (rather than merely anointing) a president makes more sense than our current system.

In the current system, the ability to raise early money and have an organization in being in Iowa and New Hampshire very nearly determines the nomination; this seems bizarre. Under the convention system it's the party workers -- the people who have to get out the vote, do what the papers are now calling the "ground game" -- who make the choices. I once wrote, a lifetime ago, that the United States was governed by about 30,000 self-selected party officials who used their mostly unpaid volunteer efforts to become district leaders, and who thereby chose the candidates for election to most Federal offices.

That was true, then. Now it's the primary process, and that means the United States is governed by fund raisers and the ability to raise early money; as well as the ability to keep a personal (as opposed to a party) organization in place, particularly in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In the old system, precinct committee members were elected (although in practice they chose themselves, as there were few contested elections for PC); the PC's chose the District Leaders, and the DL's chose the State Committee. The nominating convention consisted of the District Leaders. They chose delegates to the national convention. There were some direct primary states, but even there the party workers were fairly strong, favorite son primaries in which the delegates were pledged to vote for their man on the first ballot but not thereafter were common enough, and such practices kept the party structure together. Parties were organizations for nominating and electing candidates of their choosing; not for turning out the vote for whomever managed to win the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, neither of which has any rational claim to primacy in choosing the next President.

Now much of the precinct work is done by paid organizers; there is no power to district leaders; and the party filters which weeded out really unsatisfactory candidate who had money or a strong regional but no national base, are gone; and the result is Bush and Kerry.

That's the lesson as I see it.

There are some important demographic observations over in mail.

 

 

 

 

Thursday   TOP  Current Mail

 

 
 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Friday, November 5, 2004

Guy Fawkes Day

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Ever should be forgot!

===details=====

It's column time and my head isn't working right. This will be an interesting weekend. I am reminded of the old knight in Kipling's poem. Utterly whelmed was I, thrown under horse and all...

It is astonishing how irrational some people have become over the Social Security reform bill. They tend not to notice numbers.

Social Security takes about 20% of income up to the cap. No "privatization" scheme I have ever seen proposed looks to use more than 5% of that, which is about 1% of US wages. This is no small sum, but it's not so much as to court disaster on the downside, while the upside can be quite high. Back in the 60's for three years I paid into TIAA/CREF rather than Social Security. That money stayed there: and it now pays me back about 80% of what my thirty-plus years of paying into Social Security pays me. John McCarthy has said that his TIAA/CREF retirement fund pays him more in retirement than he earned before retirement, and full professors at Stanford are not paid chicken feed.

Something must be done about Social Security, which is a Ponzi scheme: it depends on an ever expanding number of workers coming into the work force to support all those retiring whose money was taken in and spent on the Great Society. That money is gone. There is no "trust fund": open that box and you find IOU's, not money. It was "invested" in US Treasury bonds, and the revenue from those bonds was spent: now we have to borrow the money to pay the obligations. And the Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age. This crunch is real, as Moynihan understood and tried to tell the Democrats back when something could be done about it. Now there isn't a lot of time left.

Doing nothing is not an option. Raising the tax from the current 18% or so (employer "contributions" are a trick: employers understand this is a wage cost and it's so treated in their books, and it matters little to them whether the money is first given to the worker then taken away in withholding, or withheld as an employer "contribution") -- raising that tax would be another cruel trick on the people who earn wages. Voting more taxes on "the rich" simply invites them to hire more lawyers and accountants and move more money offshore.

The US government operates as a money pump to take money from the young and give it to the old; and there's a limit to how much of that you can do. The soldiers are not stupid, and they are paying into this Ponzi scheme.

It will be interesting to see what proposals come out now that Bush has decided this is one of the hallmark issues of his Presidency.

========

Want a picture of the future?  http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html

 

 

 

 

 

Friday   TOP  Current Mail

 

 
This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Saturday, November 6, 2004

Column time. My head still isn't working, but we did get out for a walk. Sable considers it her sacred duty to make these humans get some exercise, which is a good thing.

There's an interesting observation about Ramadan in mail. And I'm working on the column.  Carmen tonight at the LA Opera: we're taking Alex and his bride. And I am trying to clean off enough of my desk that I can work on some new software.

For those who want some heavy reading, the murderer of Van Gogh left a message attached to the knife he used. I have a translation in mail.

This chart:

  State Avg. IQ 2004
1 Connecticut 113 Kerry
2 Massachusetts 111 Kerry
3 New Jersey 111 Kerry
4 New York 109 Kerry
5 Rhode Island 107 Kerry
6 Hawaii 106 Kerry
7 Maryland 105 Kerry
8 New Hampshire 105 Kerry
9 Illinois 104 Kerry
10 Delaware 103 Kerry
11 Minnesota 102 Kerry
12 Vermont 102 Kerry
13 Washington 102 Kerry
14 California 101 Kerry
15 Pennsylvania 101 Kerry
16 Maine 100 Kerry
17 Virginia 100 Bush
18 Wisconsin 100 Kerry
19 Colorado 99 Bush
20 Iowa 99 Bush
21 Michigan 99 Kerry
22 Nevada 99 Bush
23 Ohio 99 Bush
24 Oregon 99 Kerry
25 Alaska 98 Bush
26 Florida 98 Bush
27 Missouri 98 Bush
28 Kansas 96 Bush
29 Nebraska 95 Bush
30 Arizona 94 Bush
31 Indiana 94 Bush
32 Tennessee 94 Bush
33 North Carolina 93 Bush
34 West Virginia 93 Bush
35 Arkansas 92 Bush
36 Georgia 92 Bush
37 Kentucky 92 Bush
38 New Mexico 92 Bush
39 North Dakota 92 Bush
40 Texas 92 Bush
41 Alabama 90 Bush
42 Louisiana 90 Bush
43 Montana 90 Bush
44 Oklahoma 90 Bush
45 South Dakota 90 Bush
46 South Carolina 89 Bush
47 Wyoming 89 Bush
48 Idaho 87 Bush
49 Utah 87 Bush
50 Mississippi 85 Bush

 

 

 

was supposedly taken from data in IQ and the Wealth of Nations, but I doubt its accuracy. I do not think Mississippi is a full standard deviation below average, to begin with. Nor will Connecticut be nearly a full SD above it. The range is far more likely to be in the 90 - 105 range. Yet I see it all over the Internet now, but I just don't believe it. I haven't time to dig up the real numbers.

And in fact, I find that it is a hoax: http://www.isteve.com/04NovA.htm#iqhoaxrec has the story.

It hardly astonishes me, either that someone would make it up, or that a lot of people would like to believe it.

The interesting part is that the left purports not to believe in IQ as good for anything...

=====================

We have just returned from an excellent production of Carmen. There was only one oddity, and I am probably the only one in the audience to have noticed it.

Richard Leech, in stage makeup as Don Jose (but not in person; we had dinner with him Thursday and I did not notice this) looks enough like John Dvorak to be his brother.

 

 

 

Saturday   TOP  Current Mail

 
This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Sunday, November 7, 2004

Roland found this on education and school reform:

Subject: "I really didn't notice a change in morale."

Listen to the whole thing, it's maddening:

http://www.thislife.org/ra/275.ram

-- Roland Dobbins

which is a long audio from National Public Radio. It may be the best thing I have ever heard from NPR. It is also the best argument for small school districts in which the Board and the actual parents and teachers have some time to interact that I have heard in a long time. It is an hour or more long, but it streams nicely, and as Roland says, it is very much worth your time.

 

 

 

 

 Sunday   TOP        Current View  

 Current Mail

Entire Site Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved.

 

birdline.gif (1428 bytes)