The future is uncertain by definition, but we have learned to manage risk. Our increasing ability to identify and manage risk is one of the too often overlooked foundations of our complex modern civilization but we never eliminate it and there are many situations where there is so much uncertainty that we cannot even properly assess the risk, i.e. figure out the odds. (I read a couple good books on this. I recommend the Black Swan & Against the Gods) This is what drives people crazy. It seems counter-intuitive to some, who seem to think that if we could solve our big problems if just worked hard enough and planned well enough. We things go badly wrong, they look to blame someone. Well, sometimes we just have uncertainty. Sh*t happens in ways nobody could have reasonably predicted and sometimes in ways nobody could have predicted at all.

Not all of this is bad, however. In fact it is mostly good. There are upside and downside surprises but in the long run the upside surprises are more important. Why? Even if the ups and downs are distributed randomly, we can apply human intelligence to adapt to them. Within broad parameters, the quality of our lives depends less on the good or bad luck we experience than on the responses we make to what comes along. We have to use an iterative approach that learns from experience and changes responses to changing circumstances.

Einstein was right when he said that we cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them.

O Fortuna velut Luna

The best system is not one that plans in detail for all the challenges but rather one that is robust enough to adapt to changing conditions and exploit opportunities, one that embraces the statistical nature of the future and takes advantage of it. We need more of a planning process than a precise plan. We cannot anticipate all the events but we can have processes in place that can recover from setback to adapt to changes. I think of it like a tool box and portfolio. In an uncertain world, you have to diversity and empower those closest to evolving events. This is how markets work, BTW.

This is a harder sell than the dishonest or self-deceptive statement that you have anticipated and planned for all the eventualities. Most people crave certainty and they love those who claim to have it, even when they know or should know it is bogus comfort. We make systematic errors in the direction of imposing patterns of certainty where none exist. That is why we think clouds look like Snoopy or Albert Einstein. There is even a five dollar word for it ”apophenia”.

Anyway the simple advice is to find or create adaptive robust systems that can survive downside shocks and move quickly to exploit upside opportunities, all the time understanding that the Lady Fortune’s Wheel never stops turning. (BTW I am thinking of this in terms of Boethius, not Pat Sajack and Vanna White) It can pull you up and down and some big things can come up pretty fast.

Now you’re cooking with gas

One upside surprise that is a real game-changer is the recent technological advance that allows us to get natural gas from shale deposits. In the last couple of years, we have made available natural gas deposits with more than the energy potential of all the oil in Arabia. A solution that was unavailable and largely unforeseen five years ago will change all our lives … soon. I wrote about this a couple of months ago as I drove through the Pennsylvanian coal – and now natural gas – country.

Natural gas is the perfect partner for wind energy, since gas plants can be turned on and off relatively easily. Wind is very good when it is blowing but it can cut off quickly. In other words, it is unreliable w/o backup. Nature gas is the backup.

Natural gas can help us squeeze oil out of our transportation network. According to the linked article, “the chief obstacle to developing a natural gas infrastructure capable of supplying service stations and highway rest stops is regulatory. If that is removed—and here we do need government action—we could expect to see trucks, buses, and cars running on natural gas in a relatively short period of time. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would be considerable.”

This new energy future will not only help us free ourselves from the despots who control most of the world’s oil reserves (it seems like kind of a divine joke that most of the world’s easy to get oil is under such regimes) but it will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions w/o the draconian measures contemplated just a short time ago. Natural gas is cleaner than oil and much cleaner than coal in terms of pollution and in terms of CO2.

So a problem that was intractable with the conditions and technology of 2005 could be party solved in ways that nobody really anticipated. But we have to use our intelligence to make an upside surprise into good fortune … before it is OBE’D or Fortune's wheel takes another turn.

Americans still remember how to have kids; evidently no longer a universal skill

The U.S. is unique among developed country since we have a positive rate of natural increase. It is not very much above replacement level, but that is more than others, some of which are almost in free fall. America is also an anomaly in that in some of our suburbs wealthy, well-educated women sometimes have three or more kids. (I recall reading an article about the big families in affluent Loudon County, VA.)

We also still get millions of immigrants. That means that the America is growing older slower than other developed countries and the American labor force will continue to grow through 2050, while others suffer greater or lesser proportional decline in their productive populations relative to their dependent ones. The interesting thing about his data was that it also shows that the world's most populous country - China - will begin to suffer labor shortages (at least for skilled labor) very soon. The Chinese labor force will start to decline as early as 2015 (yes, five years from now) as a result of their perhaps necessary but draconian one-child policy. (Long term predictions are always tough, but by 2050 the U.S. labor force is projected to rise by 42%; China’s will drop by 10% and Japan’s labor force will decline by an astonishing 44%).

More old people, fewer young workers

This labor force decline will be accompanied by a big growth in the elderly dependent population, both in relative and absolute terms. The world has never experienced anything like this before and our lack of models will require adaptions we cannot fully anticipate. We are truly going where no human societies have gone before.
But America will suffer these declines later and less severely than most others. In addition, the U.S. has a very robust & adaptive economic system. National power is based on economic strength, innovation and demographic clout. Among the great nations of the last generation, only the U.S. will still have these elements in abundance in the next generation.

Managing genteel decline not the same as planning robust growth

This U.S. outlook contributes to disagreements with old allies. For example, the Europeans can also make demographic projections. They see that their populations will decline and their economies will grow much slower than ours. When your population will get smaller and your economy won’t grow much, you don’t worry very much about promising cuts in CO2. You need different policies if you are managing a genteel decline than when you are planning for robust growth.

The U.S. will change internally too. The growth of the last fifty years went mostly to the coasts. The next fifty years will see a return to the heartland. Kotkin doesn’t say that all the little prairie towns will be back, but space and affordable housing will draw people away from the coasts. He says that the whole idea of suburbs has become meaningless. There is more a blending of suburbs, cities and rural areas. Kotkin foresees what he calls an archipelago of villages. More people would be connected by new media in greener and less crowded communities. It sounds a lot like the Loudoun County communities mentioned in the article I linked above.

Today's ethnic & racial categories will not mean much in 2050

Much has been said about the changing ethnic composition of the U.S. population and in 2050 the white native born population is projected to drop to around 50% of the labor force. But how significant will this be? Kotkin pointed out how foreign the large immigration of Irish seemed in the 19th Century. We just forget how different earlier waves of immigrants had been and how completely they have been integrated into our society. We may have already seen the cresting of the Hispanic wave, BTW. When my grandfather and his brother Felix came to the U.S., they spoke no English and probably had never seen an American before. There is probably no population on earth today that is so "foreign."

The younger generation doesn't really care very much about race, with vast majority of the millennial generation favoring things like interracial marriage, so by 2050 today's categories will be as meaningless as some of the national and religious distinctions made when our grandparents were young. In other words, by 2050 nobody will care.

Still some challenges and skills mismatched

The road to this bright happy future is not necessarily certain. We have a challenge of education, not so much college but technical. We might, in fact, be pushing too many kids into college (firms are not crying out for more PhDs in gender studies, but try to find a good plumber at short notice) when the more appropriate skills might be technical. Our community and technical colleges should get bigger roles providing working degrees rather than a kind of way-station to a four-year college. Kotkin thinks it is just a problem of incentives. We reward careers in finance and law more than we do those who actually make useful things. If that changes, so will our career paths.

We have been able to import skilled labor, but that might be slowing. We have some competition now. Places like Canada & Australia are also pleasant and welcoming like the U.S. They are also "countries of aspiration" and they drawing in some of the skilled immigrants. There are also now more opportunities in many source countries, as people around the world reap the benefits of market liberalization reforms of past decades. Indian engineers, for example, now may have good opportunities at home.

The general pool of attractive potential immigrants is also shrinking, as birth rates drop even in those place that traditionally had very high rates of growth, such at Mexico and parts of Asia. A good example of what this pattern can look like comes from South Korea, which a couple decades ago sent millions of immigrants to the U.S. and now absorbs its own population growth, which is now much lower than that of the U.S.

We need more Engineers & plumbers and fewer leaf blowers & Lawyers

We Americans screw ourselves, however. Canada or Australia favor the skills their countries need. An immigrant with skills has a better chance of getting into those places. Our immigration policies give too little weight to the skills and education we can use in our economy. We are too "fair". We don’t need to import any more unskilled labor or even worse - people who don’t plan to labor at all. We have the right to ask potential immigrants what they will contribute to our country. Besides the relatively small numbers of bona-fides refugees, we have no moral duty to admit anybody. As long as we will limit total numbers and we have a choice, we should choose the best and the brightest, not people we need to train before they can operate a leaf blower.

Unfortunately, unskilled labor can create its own demand. My personal complaint is against leaf blowing. That is usually a job that just need not be done at all and if unskilled labor wasn’t so cheap maybe we wouldn’t do it very often. You can learn to use a leaf blower in about thirty seconds. We don’t need more of those things. We are better off with people with useful skills. Some jobs - such as leaf blowing - are worth less than zero.

Demographics is almost destiny

Nobody can really predict the future, but demographers are among the most perceptive prognosticators because some of their predictive information is already cooked into the data. For example, you can say with 100% accuracy that the number of people who turn 65 in 2030 will be smaller than the number of people who turned 45 this year and the generations that will enter the labor force within the next 15-20 years have already been born. We won’t be able to make any more no matter how much we need them.

All that means that demographers can guess sometimes better than other, although still not perfectly. The book is interesting and I recommend it.

Gay marriage – fighting for or against – is a big money maker for special interest groups. The big bucks would dry up if the issue ever was settled or if the passion drained from the debate, so neither wing has any incentive to diminish the threat/promise.

The Rich are Different than You & Me

Gay people are prominent in the entertainment industry and tend to be well represented in the richest urban neighborhoods, in the creative community and in academia. This gives the issue higher visibility and makes it – literally – a cause célèbre. Opponents of gay marriage, the majority in every election contest so far, get the impression that gays are more common and that their lives would be deeply impacted by changes in the law. The change is much harder to accomplish BECAUSE of the high profile. (This prominence can cut both ways, of course. Funding for AIDS research is much higher than the number of cases would normally indicate.)

Lifestyle Fears

Related to the oversized celebrity of the gay community is the stereotypical lifestyle. Gays are often portrayed with a flamboyant lifestyle and this is almost always a SINGLE lifestyle. Gay marriage opponents believe that gay couple might debase or change the nature of marriage, by introducing a much more swinging lifestyle into the monogamy (even if it is sometimes serial or episodic) ideal of marriage.

None of These Things Are Valid

We believe that the “problem” of gay marriage is just a scam. We believe that gay marriage should be made legal in the sense of being recognized by the state, but religious groups should be allowed to recognize it or not. We further believe that gay marriage would be rare and that many Americans would have little personal contact with married gay couples. This is too bad.

Marriage is Good for Society & We Want Gay Couples to Be Included Too

Married couples on average enjoy better health than similarly situation single people. They get in trouble with the law less often, are more stable, make more money and score higher in almost all quality of life measures. Reasonable monogamy would reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS is not a significant threat among monogamous couples. We would be delighted if lots more gays chose to leave behind the single scene and we wish society would give them the legal option.

When it is all done, nobody will really care. So let's just do it.

But we don’t think it would make much of difference anyway.

Any society has at least four big building blocks that command the energy of the people: government, non-governmental/voluntary organizations, business/economic firms & traditional institutions. Almost nothing important or useful happens w/o an interaction among all or most of them, but the relative weight of each varies greatly among societies and over time in the same society. (1)

The U.S. has been unusual in its reliance on self-organized groups, private firms and even private individuals to do tasks often monopolized (and often done poorly) by governments in other places. In that way, it has achieved a better balance among the components of the nation. There was a certain degree of self reliance and contempt for authority in the American character from early times. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that nearly two centuries ago and it was evidently already well established by the time he made his observations. It is not because the American government was corrupt or ineffectual. In fact, American governments (Federal, state and local) were well organized and run by contemporary world standards, but they often stood aside and let the people solve problems for themselves. (2)

Getting more than promised is better than getting promised more

Even today, the U.S. government is a relatively smaller part of the American nation than is the case in most other places. C&J lived overseas for more than sixteen years total and visited dozens of countries for extended periods. One thing we noticed about almost every place outside the U.S. is this. Most places you are “guaranteed” things that are not considered rights in America, but you cannot always get them. In America you are guaranteed less, but you can usually actually get your hands on it. Really getting something you want or need is usually better than having the right to it in the abstract.

An example illustrates – I (C in this case) was very frustrated with day-care in Norway. When we signed up for day care for our daughter, we were assured that day-care was a kind of right. When we asked when our daughter could start, I was told about the multi-year waiting list. When I asked about private day-care, I learned that there wasn’t any – at least none officially sanctioned – because the government provided it as a right. Returning to America with our son at about the same age, we found good day-care within a week, although I guess we had no right to it. (Norway has one of the world's most honest and well-funded governments, BTW, so it is a matter of overreach, not incompetence.)

The same goes for lots of things. If you count only services provide officially by government, the U.S. looks bad. If you count all the services provided by the total nation, we do very well. You have to look at the whole picture. That is why even people who are very critical of the U.S. often want a visa to come here.

When the authorities "big foot" the rest, it takes more effort but less gets done

This is not mere chance or coincidence. When one part of a nation gets too big, others atrophy. It is possible to achieve less by working harder in the wrong ways.

I had a boss once. She was a woman who did the work of at least three employees. She was amazing, smart, organized and energetic. She had only one big flaw, and it was big. She discouraged or even destroyed the initiative of others, since she was highly critical, demanding and quick to defend her turf and prerogatives. Indeed, she did the work of three, but when she managed a unit of five or seven people, nobody else did anything. More correctly, they spent their time avoiding her, doing the make-work she assigned and ducking her wrath. Her “work of three” also suffered as her staff expanded since the more people she had in her unit, the more time she had to devote to watching and punishing others. Pretty soon nothing at all was accomplished, although there was a great deal of activity and bloody effort.

She complained when she was reassigned. The guy replacing her was a lazy screw up, she complained. In fact, she called him “Mr. Sluggish.” He didn’t take the job seriously enough, she said. Sure enough, after she left activity dropped like a stone. But after a little while productivity rose phoenix-like out of the ashes. People started smiling again and new ideas started to become common. Mr. Sluggish didn’t seem particularly engaged. He didn’t do the work of three. On some days he didn’t even do the work of one, but the unit did the work of many.

Mr. Sluggish understood what my hyperactive former boss could not. He was not lazy or a screw up. He just understood where and how to deploy his efforts. Creative people do not like to be told exactly what to do and in any really complex situation no leader can legitimately tell them in great detail anyway since nobody can anticipate all the challenges and opportunities they will face. You have to let people use their own best judgment in a system that is robust enough to shrug off mistakes rather than one that seeks to avoid all error, and along the way also avoid most error inducing innovation. The best leaders are those who create conditions where others can innovate, prosper and imagine something better.

Government should be like that too. It should not do for people, but make it possible for them to do for themselves. There is a useful division of labor and a balance. To paraphrase Mark 12:17, we should render onto Caesar (government) that which is Caesar’s; render onto God that which is God’s; and leave everything else to the people and the private sector. Everybody is a lot better off in the long run.

**** ****

1. Extreme cases, illustrate the point. Government accounts for almost everything in a place like North Korea and the authorities work actively to delegitimize or destroy competing power structures. Where state power breaks down, such as in Somalia or Afghanistan, people fall back on traditional relationships such as family, religion or tribe. There have been commercial republics, such as Venice, the Hanseatic League or even 17th Century Netherlands where trade issues dominated almost everything else. I cannot think of any countries that have been dominated by NGOs or voluntary organizations, although those things have certainly had important influences on politics and policy. Anti-Slavery organizations were instrumental in British policy in Africa in the middle of the 19th Century, for example.

2. Some of this reticence is explained by the frontier nature of American society, but other frontiers in places like Latin America or Russia did not produce similar societal organizations, although Australia did. Perhaps it has something to do with the transplanted British traditions (cf Albion’s Seed or the relative lack of other dominant traditions, such as a universal church. Suffice to say that the frontier experience in Montana was different from the frontier experience in Siberia.

The President is still trying to play the fear/blame game. He corrected stated that Our economy has lost 7 million jobs over the last two years, tactfully leaving out that the vast majority of those jobs were lost since he was elected president and all of them were lost since the Democrats took over Congress. These tactics worked well last year. They don’t work nearly as well now and they will not work at all within a few months.

Let’s return to deficits. It is better if the money the Federal government is not borrowed, but what really counts is the size of the spending. It is like my favorite fat guy eating donuts. It is better if he doesn’t have to borrow the money to buy them, but it is the donut eating, not the borrowing that is at the source of his problem. Federal spending jumped to 25.4% this year, up from 21% last year, which itself is slightly higher than the 40 year average. President Obama promised to “cut” this to around 23%.

So get this straight. Even IF the President is telling the truth about his intentions and even IF he can carry out his plans, the Federal government will still spend 2% more of GDP than it has for the last 40 years, which means that it will have grown 10% above the long term average. And this is the optimistic scenario. Even if the Democrats can cover this higher spending with massive new taxes, it is still a big rise.

Luckily, the American people have caught onto this trick. We didn’t give President Obama a mandate for this much change that we cannot believe in. He needs the discipline that a divided government gave to an equally arrogant Bill Clinton.

First, the world is soon to be destroyed, thanks to global warming. Bin Laden: "The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent."

Next, it's America's fault, for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and being the patsy of big corporations, who are, says bin Laden, "the true criminals against the global climate" and are to blame for the global economic crisis, driving "tens of millions into poverty and unemployment."

Thus, he nails another leftist bromide: corporations have caused the global recession (why entities that sell goods and services would want to create a climate where customers cannot afford to buy goods and services remains unstated in this great economist's announcement).

What's the solution to the crisis? Boycott America of course. Bin Laden wants the "wheels of the American economy" to be brought to a halt. "This is possible ... if the peoples of the world stop consuming American goods."

He goes on, "We must also stop dealings in the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible. I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America."

In case you're having trouble following this great thinker's line of, er, thought, he is saying that America and big corporations are destroying the environment and have devastated the world's economy. The way to protect the world economy from further damage is to send it into absolute ruin by boycotting all things American.

Bin Laden's new approach is to appeal to the nobler instincts of the "world community." Apparently, cutting off heads and slaughtering innocent men,women, and children hasn't sold well. "People of the world, it's not right for the burden to be left on the mujahedeen (holy warriors) in an issue that causes harm to everyone," he said. "Boycott them [America, corporations, everything] to save yourselves and your possessions and your children from climate change and to live proud and free."

How inspiring. Perhaps Chris Matthews got a tingle up his leg.

There's more. It's not just America and the big corporations that spawn evil, but a particular culprit is--what else--big oil. "The world is held hostage by major corporations, which are pushing it to the brink," he said. "World politics are not governed by reason but by the force and greed of oil thieves and warmongers and the cruel beasts of capitalism."

"Reason"? This from the murderer of thousands.

Being sure to include all the villains that the left requires in our political drama today (good ole Katrina and George Bush), bin Laden, in the spirit of a true fanatical leftist--or a Congressional Committee--calls for the "punishing and holding to account" of corporate executives, adding, "this should be easy for the American people to do, particularly those who were effected by Hurricane Katrina or those who lost their jobs, since these criminals live among them, particularly in Washington, New York and Texas."

To put it midly, it strains credulity to think that this "new" bin Laden (eco-friendly social justice activist) will take off. Would anyone dare ask his greatness if he ever considered the "carbon footprint" created by the explosion of four jetliners loaded with fuel, and the implosion of two hundred stories of steel and concrete?

Can a cave-dwelling jihadist who would like to bomb the world back to the stone age be taken seriously when he advocates environmental protection and economic development?

Then again, anyone sophisticated enough to have diagnosed all the world's ills so penetratingly must be given his due. America bad, capitalism bad, corporations bad, big oil bad, Katrina bad, Bush bad.

Now that I think of it, maybe there's a Nobel Peace Prize in this clown's future.

One of our good friends does heating and air conditioning. He makes more money than either C or J and probably does more useful work.

IMO – more kids should start out in community college. It is a lot cheaper and allows them to do other things. We also believe that almost ALL kids should do some kind of manual work within the first couple years of their adult lives. Too many kids go from HS to college to internships w/o ever getting their hands dirty.

The military is also a great option for those who are not ready to go or cannot afford college. After you do your duty to your country, your your country will do its duty to you. Besides, the military can give young people a fantastic experience that is hard to duplicate in any other line of work that a young person can get.

But I started with loans. A student loan is a great way to redistribute income. A poor student gets the loan; a college educated professional pays it back; AND it is the same person who gets the benefit and pays the costs. Great. But it is great only if the people involved has a their skin in the game.

It is hard for C&J to remember that far back, but they recall thinking about the future when taking the loans. J chose not to go on a study trip to the Soviet Union because he couldn’t afford it and didn’t want to add to the loan balance. C&J both worked throughout their education. McDonald’s offered very good terms. You could work during lunch times and get a free meal in addition to the wages.

So why don’t I like President Obama’s loan proposal? Because – dare I say – it smacks of socialism. Okay, I wrote that word just to bother some readers, but there is good and bad ways for government to implement such policies, some rely more on “socialist” methods and some rely more on freedom of choice and its consequences.

It seems to me that a proposal that limits payments and forgives the principal balance after a period of time encourages irresponsible borrowing. Once you guess that you have reached that magic 10% level, you have an incentive to borrow as much more as you can, since you won’t be paying it off.

Imagine the same situation in home buying. You would be a fool to buy a small, inexpensive house, since once you reach a maximum payment everything else is free. Oh wait! That sort of happened, didn't it?

It gets worse. Two of our kids are at university now and we pay the full amount. The kids have a sweet deal and so do the professors. Even at the relatively austere state universities, they have wonderful facilities. It is like a holiday camp. I am glad that my kids can have such a nice place, but how much non-education expenses are larded into the costs? And why can they do that? It is because most people don’t pay for most of the bills. There is an incentive for everybody to demand more when somebody else pays the bills.

A lot of things need to be done to reform our education system. We have to be careful. Our university system is the best in the world and we don’t want to throw out the good with the bad. We spend a lot more on university education than any other country and money is good for education. What I think we should do is make it more accountable and that means creating a better correlation between who pays, who receives the services and who decides what those services should be.

And we shouldn’t think that just getting more people into college is always a good thing. IMO, young people have three broad choices: college, profession/apprentice training & military service. None of these is appropriate to all, but all are appropriate to some and we should not default into college for every eighteen year old.

His dropping of the intimidation charges against the Black Panthers who were caught on tape menacing potential voters right outside a polling station was misconduct. Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen.” They were making racial threats and one of them, according to Bull, yelled, “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!"

He never should have gotten the job in the first place. You would have thought his dirty dealings to get a last minute pardon for Marc Rich would have kept him out of public service.

This guy has got to go. He is bad for the country and in the long run bad for President Obama. When you associate with guys like Holder, pretty soon people associate you with guys like Holder. Obama is better than that.

I don’t suppose economists will ever agree on the precise root causes of this downturn, since they still don’t agree on the details of the cause of the Great Depression of the 1930s or even the shorter lived but very deep Panic of 1907. But these along with the stagflation of the 1970s continuing to the recession of the early 1980s, as well as our own slippage in 2007 were all international crises that that had in common relatively rapid transfers of wealth and economic power and an inability or unwillingness to recycle the money.

The precursor the problems of the 1930s was the rapid rise of the U.S. as a creditor nation along with the circular flow of funds from Germany in the form of reparations to the allies, to the U.S. in the form of loan repayments back to Germany as loans, all the while the U.S. market was not absorbing significant imports. The great economist, John Maynard Keynes foresaw some of these problems in his “Economic Consequences of the Peace” (1919). In the 1970s, we had the problem of recycling petro-dollars after the quadrupling of oil prices in the early 1970s and further hikes around 1980. That liquidity went into loans to developing countries which soon became a problem. Recently, we had the rise of China, which has followed a neo-mercantilism strategy of selling outside while maintaining trade barriers and an artificially low currency. The dollars that pooled up in the Middle Kingdom were/are recycled into debt in the U.S. and elsewhere, helping keep interest rates low, but also helping to create a debt overhang.

The Panic of 1907, which I include only for the sake of completeness, because it spurred the creation of the Federal Reserve and because I just finished reading the book in the link, was also precipitated by rapid growth and investment in the U.S. It is unusual in that it was largely “solved” by the intervention of one individual, J Pierpont Morgan. This would be the last time that one individual was ever able to take on that role. The Great Depression ended only with the onset of World War II, which is a fairly high price to pay to end an economic downturn. Amity Shlaes has written a good book called “The Forgotten Man” that details some of the policy fits and starts that did not alleviate the depression and may have deepened it. The end of the recession of 1982 is still way to close to be dispassionately assessed. We forget how bad that one was. Unemployment reached 10.8% but it soon eased and we had a quarter century of decent economic growth punctuated by two short recessions. We don’t know what will bring us back to prosperity this time, but I have confidence that we will recover. We always do.

If you look back at history in the last century, it seems we have a painful downturn every twenty-five years or so. The times of trouble last for around ten years (except in the 1907 case). Let’s hope this one will be shorter. But since nobody has been able to “predict” even the past accurately, I don’t have a lot of confidence in anybody’s ability to predict the economic future.

"61% Say It’s Time for Congress To Drop Health Care" And with that, it's time to move on to other America destroying legislation.

“We’re not on health care now,” Mr. Reid said. “We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” [Like yesterday?]

He added, “There is no rush,” and noted that Congress still had most of this year to work on the health bills passed in 2009 by the Senate and the House. ~nytimes.com

And now that Healthcare is dead, it's time to pretend to be fiscally responsible!

According to the CBO our trainwreck of government debt is now flying down the tracks toward the Barack Hussein Memorial Precipice. Oddly enough, Obama's ascension to office has been accompanied by an acceleration of spending beyond anything in the history of this nation and there's no slowing down despite some talk (finally) about possibly, maybe, theoretically, at some future date of putting on the brakes.

The CBO baseline contains two important messages. First, Washington is accumulating debt at an unsustainable rate. After the debt slowly grew to $5.8 trillion through 2008, the more realistic baseline shows the federal government adding an astonishing $16.3 trillion in new debt between 2009 and 2020--$130,000 per household over those 12 years. ~heritage.org

The government we need today is smart, lean, small, efficient and minimally intrusive. It protects us from foreign threats, takes care of the big infrastructure but otherwise leaves us alone within the rule of law. It recognizes that the American nation is greater than the American government and that most Americans want their government to be supportive but not to provide all the support, to help the people achieve their goals w/o directing outcomes.

We came close to running off the tracks and we still are not out of danger. Reid and Pelosi are chastised but unreformed. President Obama has a choice. He can start acting like President of all Americans and govern from the middle, which may give him the kind of success Bill Clinton achieved, or he can play to the left and do a Jimmy Carter redux. As Fareed Zakaria writes, Obama needs to understand that his role as President of the United States is more important than his position at the head of the Democrats. We have presidents, not partisan prime ministers.

Police authorities may be experts at interrogation techniques, but their training and experience is designed to find evidence that will solve individual crimes or uncover evidence for future prosecution. Their skills are designed to look backwards, to reconstruct past situations. These skills are useful and essential, but not sufficient, when we need to look to the future and prevent crimes that may not yet have even been planned.

Imagine you are asked to interrogate this guy. Assume you have a great ability as an investigator, but are not an expert on external terror networks. Our toasty little friend may mention many names and places, but you just don’t know the significance. You dutifully record everything he says, but your lack of specific knowledge means that you cannot ask meaningful follow-up questions. This would be especially true about the crucial human network questions, the ones that might take us from the individual bad guy to the nest.

We missed the chance and we won’t get it back. We got one bad guy and we probably can convict him with all the legal bells and whistles. We can congratulate ourselves because we have elaborately protected the rights of a trained terrorist who hoped to kill hundreds of Americans on Christmas Day. We have treated him as we would a punk who knocked over a local liquor store. We have gained the feeling of self-righteousness. I am sure the terror masters will be grateful. Maybe when they see how good we are, they may give up their attacks.

But a Yemen-trained bomber is not just like the liquor store robber, so now let’s talk about what we don’t have. What have we lost? “Having rested and received more extensive medical treatment, Abdulmutallab was told of his right to remain silent and his right to have an attorney.”

”He remained silent.”

1. If the federal government can speak in issues of politics and policy one must assume the government to be either a completely benign or a completely neutral entity not to be concerned at the inherent advantage it will necessarily have in determinations of whether and how much it will be empowered.

2. The federal government is LITERALLY a corporation, an organization of human beings chartered on behalf of many individuals to act legally on their behalf as an individual for the accomplishment of specific goals.

3. As an organization of human beings the government's leadership will find its limitations frustrating and will seek to eliminate barriers that limit its capacity to achieve its members' conceptions of its prerogatives.

4. It is entirely reasonable for people not within the power structure of the federal government to see some of the prerogatives asserted by those who are within that structure as a threat to the general welfare of the population as a whole. Further, it is reasonable for people not within that power structure to see the corporate imperitives of government as a danger to their capacity to do good and productive things in a way government's corporate culture abhors.

5. Based on the above arguments it is entirely reasonable for people subject to the power of government, but not specifically within the power structure of government, to believe that government both does and should be expected to attempt to limit the people's access to information concerning its operations. Such limitations of information would be expected to limit the public's capacity to act in a manner critical of government's actions in pursuit of additional power.

6. Since the government can and does act freely in speaking with a corporate voice on behalf of the individuals both within and supportive of its power structure it is, further, reasonable for people outside that power structure to seek access to corporate speech representative of their, perhaps differing prerogatives.

7. Corporate speech, then, is merely a tool for the exercise of the inviolable individual right of free speech. It is an absolutely necessary tool for the public's desire to create a balance of powers in the exercise of public discussion of politcal matters.

It is understandable that there is opposition to this concept, particularly from those who have no conception of the corporate power of government. For the reasons stated above, though, I wholeheartedly support the Supreme court's decision lifting limits of corporate free speech. We have a great national corporation able to speak freely on behalf of its desire for power. It would be suicidal for us to limit our responses to such a concentration of expression to a cacophany on individual voices or to eschew an effective tool by which many individuals can focus their voices into harmonious opposition.

Science is in a state of constant change, as theories are tested and refined. There is no such thing as “settled science”. Science also tends to be subtle and equivocal. Certainty is unscientific, but certainty and hysteria is the stuff of politics. When the IPCC claimed that the glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains would melt by 2035, somebody should have done a little calculation. The melt rate can be figured, if you know the temperatures and there was no possible temperature rise - even in the worst case scenarios - that could melt those glaciers in the time periods allotted.

The ability to count past ten is a useful skill not universally possessed at the IPCC

The IPCC evidently got that date from an Indian magazine article, itself sensational and hysterical because the research on which it was ostensibly based was talking about changes by 2350. You see the problem: 2035 & 2350 are only a couple keystrokes away but they are a lot farther apart in the real world.

Science and politics don’t mix well. Science is interested in truth; politics uses truth when it is convenient. The ethos is different. Add to that the legendary corruption, incompetence and mendacity of the UN and it is not surprising that they could lose more than 300 years and not let it bother them.

The politics of hysteria trumps the reason of science

The quick melting of the glaciers was important to the story line. It put large areas of South and Southeast Asia at risk, since most of the major river systems originate from glacier melt from the Himalaya mountains. Adding 315 years takes a little of the urgency out of the equation. But even in this case the IPCC conclusion would be mendacious.

Water, ice and phase transitions

Water and ice have a very specific characteristic. They are subject to a phase transition at 32F/0C. It the water is below that temperature it is solid (i.e. ice). Above that it is liquid. It doesn’t make a difference if it is 20F or -20F, so if global warming raises temperatures from 0F to 10F up in those mountains it won’t matter. On the other hand, there is more precipitation when temperatures are warmer. It rarely snows when it is below zero; it snows a lot when it is a bit warmer. If the warmer temperatures cause more snow to fall and the temperature remains below that magic phase transition of the freezing point, glaciers may actually grow bigger or at least compensate for additional melting near the edges.

Beyond that, the IPCC claimed that there would be water shortages because of decreased river flow. How would this happen? If glaciers are melting at greater rates, wouldn’t MORE water flow, at least until the glaciers hypothetically disappeared around 2350?

A lot can happen in 315 years. The whole industrial revolution took place in less time and our own country rose to continental greatness from a few clearings in the woods most no more than a day’s journey from the Atlantic Ocean. I am sure we can think of something in 315 years.

This will be the time of adjustment and debunking … and real science

Al Gore’s hysteria ruled the roost for a couple of years, but as the science comes in more detail we see that we have a manageable problem on our hands. We should apply reasonable solutions, but we don’t have to go nuts about this and we certainly should not put anymore power into the hands of UN bureaucrats, who evidently cannot or will not learn to count beyond what they can see on the fingers of both hands.