WSJ | There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn’t one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Good pep talk from the Wall Street Journal

Mr. Obama’s campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.

He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.

This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign’s turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls.

There were several other pieces today that said some of the same things, essentially you cannot win against the progressive / liberal patchwork with a pure social conservative / fiscal conservative mantra.

The Republican side was made up of:

survivors of the old line right center Big Business Republicans
evangelical social conservative/moderate
moderate libertarians
constitutional originalists
small business owners
And a rather long list of single issue activists
anti immigrant
gun rights
anti-abortion
anti-tax

The problem seems to be similar to one that the democrats used to lay claim to, Big Tentism…trying to pander to too many one topic interests to the detriment of a centralizing theme. No party can offer blanket coverage for all the rather distantly touched special interests without weakening itself.

The centralizing theme of the Republican party is, personal responsibility and non intrusive government, based on the rule of law centered on a relatively strong reference to the Constitution.

The centralizing theme of the Democratic party might be seen as common responsibility, government central mediator, based on the interpretation of law referring to the constitution among other iconic law systems.

A key problematic special interests in the Republican party today is Big Business (as a themed entity not as the people in the companies,) not because Big Business is evil but because its interests are really more in line with the Democratic Party centralizing themes, not the Republican party’s. The only reason Big Business tents in the Republican camp is because the Democrats demonize it, and the actual ‘People’ (i.e. agents) who are the cells of the Big Business are generally very much aligned with the centralizing theme of the Republican party. But the Players and the Companies when operating in aggregate (or for the company) are much more likely to support the Democratic baseline than the Republican one.

Various single issues activists, particularly the semi organized Tea Party activists of various sub stripes, have pushed their way and their interests into the Republican party. As above providing huge clubs to beat the overall party to death with. The TP has tried to remake the Republican party in its image…which purposely does not exist. This has again and again wrecked the chances of the party by putting up candidates who are very easily caricatured by their opponents and driven into defeat.

That’s not to say that some of the single issues activists are not right and that they all should be driven out. The gun lobby while demonized is a strength in the party as long as it sticks to the line it has in recent years, this resonates well with personal responsibility and non-interference. Anti tax when not carried to caricature. Pro life, when not carried to the level of stupid anti-abortion extremism (as I’ve said before almost everyone is pro-life, most are modestly anti-abortion, but the paternalistic-extremism of an Akin or a Mourdock is nuts in this day.)

Consistency to theme should be considered strongly: For example: Pro-Life –>anti-abortion, anti death penalty, limits to the pursuit of extra territorial murder (drone wars.) pro scientific medical advances (with ethical limits.) In other words limit very tightly the ability of the government to kill anyone unless they pose an immediate threat to the US, which of course has to be defined pretty damned broadly but still consistently. (i.e. OBL raid was a perfectly reasonable action.)

If you look at the paragraph above you would realize that the Catholic Church while staying out of politics is going to support the Republican theme much more strongly than it did,does today.

Same goes for immigration, we are a nation of immigrants, and the nation needs the flow of immigrants because population growth is inherently good for the US economy in every way for the foreseeable future. Yes borders should be protected from military incursion (which I think we do pretty well) but no country with a border as long and open (no geographic obstacles like seas, cliffs or rivers) as the US’s can seal its borders without imposing a police state, which largely stops people coming because there is no reason for them to want to go into bondage, who really wants to go to North Korea, all their walls are to keep people in, not out. Like abortion this is a sore point with fundamentalists but at the end of the day I have never seen anti-immigration sentiment that is not at base about fear of the other or of having to compete.

One of the biggest most fundamental issues that the Republican majority has to come to grips with is that the US has always been about creative destruction and that nothing can stay the same in an evolving world. We have to compete on the global stage in every venue and that means that in some niches we go up and others we go down. At the end of the day nothing can protect you as a person from the winds of economic and social change and trying to do so just fosters tyranny. The only thing that provides you a shield is flexibility and the willingness to learn and adapt, which in general the average American has been better at than the rest of humanity, partly because of the freedoms that the country provides to fail and try again.

The Republican party needs to focus on the themes I think it stands for: personal responsibility and non intrusive government, based on the rule of law centered on a relatively strong reference to the Constitution.

Moderate taxes (limit on income taxes, everyone pays income tax
Moderate, smart and regulation (stop regulators getting captured by those they regulate)
Pro immigrant
Pro small business (not anti big business, just stop giving them special treatment)
Pro gun
Strong defense
Pro Life (not anti-abortion) (anti death penalty)
Pro Free trade even if it hurts

Then you have my dreams:

One term at a time (no re-elections, you can be president as many times as you want, but only one term at a time, then you take a break before running again.)
Individual Health Care:
Individual Retirement.

I’m with Ike!!!

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

And:

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

Also:

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.

And again:

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.

Most Famously…and foresightedly:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

With this as a postscript…from a man who would know:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

What we need in a president is someone with these understandings. And a person who is willing to talk to the people honestly and directly about the decisions being made the trade offs necessary without diving into the cant (dialect) of economics, financiers, government (acronymophilia) or academia (grecoromanobibliophilia.)

The truth is that the president is both the most powerful person in the world and one of the most constrained chief executives in government. This is a good thing, a different combination would be very frightening.

Our president should have clear moral and ethical lynch pins, but that does not mean that he or she can or should try to enforce those views except as permitted and directed by congress and the courts. For example the president to represent the Ethics of the people of the United States needs to be anti-abortion (always) but know that in the end it has to be a choice made by the woman with her own conscience, that is the meaning of individualism in politics/society.

Much about taxation and regulation is beyond the direct control of the president but the executive does control implementation. The number of laws is so huge that there is no way to actually enforce them all. [A problem congress needs to fix by timing out old laws and replacing them with simpler laws updated every decade or so.] A president needs to follow the letter of the law but always push for the most minimal use of resources to enforce them, sometimes (a lot of the time) to the point of ignoring them except as modifiers (adders) if someone is indited for other reasons. The biggest job an executive has is to ensure that the ‘system’ is not captured by those it is supposed to regulate…or if it is (by law) to ensure that they are self regulating to the advantage of the citizens in general, not their own enrichment or more dangerously their enshrinement. Far too many of our laws at all levels of government, intended (perhaps) to protect the poor defenseless citizen, are in action a way for a small group to ensure that their way of life (money siphon) is affected (throttled or knocked from their lips), for example: medical, bar, plumbing, electrician, cosmetician, licensing laws in each state.

What the Hayek?

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Economist Philosopher F.Hayek

The Road To Serfdom is often referenced and probably like many such books rarely read. This link goes to a real life Readers Digest version, that seems to hit hard and capture well his central thesis, at least it seems so from the references to his writing.

Its certainly making me think of buying a version either at Half Price books or more likely for Nook.

From the Post Referenced above a few key pieces:

From the preamble:

At that time it was a political philosophy that stood for progress through preserving the Autonomy of the INDIVIDUAL, and the protection of the INDIVIDUAL’S civil liberty. Oddly enough, today “liberalism” equals “socialism.” Equally as odd, conservatism (and in many instances, libertarianism) champions the independence of the individual.

From the first section:

Yet is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?

Planning and Power

In order to achieve their ends, the planners must create power – power over men wielded by other men – of a magnitude never before known. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires.

And despite the somewhat old fashioned and formal words this should have striking impact because it tells you exactly what is going on today and why so many fear it. It does not matter that we voted ‘the planners’ into place or that they are bureaucrats subject to dismissal. We are providing the keys to power and we are then likely to forget about them until they are far too entrenched to remove easily.

It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of “society” as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.

Now this sounds like Communism, Socialism or Fascism not the American way but the truth is that any major part of the social structure-economy in one groups hands creates a massive center of power, privilege and patronage, the 3P’s of tyranny writ small or large. The 3Ps lead to lawless, corrupt and ineffective organizations.

Individualism, in contrast to socialism and all other forms of totalitarianism, is based on the respect of Christianity for the individual man and the belief that it is desirable that men should be free to develop their own individual gifts and bents. This philosophy, first fully developed during the Renaissance, grew and spread into what we know as Western civilization. The general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which bound him in feudal society.

This is not a theologian’s statement it is a philosopher’s recognition of the Christian-European (unstated but clear) understanding of the centrality of the individual as the basis of societies. That societies are are the emergent organization of many individuals interacting with each other. And societies that provide ‘room’ for people to find their own level and best place in the social fabric are vastly more fair and kind than ones organized in rigid hierarchies and treat or form the person as an interchangeable cog.

From the post script a quote from Frédéric Bastiat.:

Individualism, in contrast to socialism and all other forms of totalitarianism, is based on the respect for the individual man and the belief that it is desirable that men should be free to develop their own individual gifts and bents.

Musing during a presidential election year…

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Disaster! Panic! Politics! Society! Government! Federal, State and Municipal Finances! Conservatives! Progressives! Libertarians! TeaParty! Occupiers! Obama-Biden! Romney-Ryan! Truth-subverted! Facts, obscured!

Its got to be a presidential election year!

Let’s start out with pointing some things out about some definitions:

Truth- Is always subjective, tied to the person assessing it and thus subject to that person’s knowledge and understanding of the facts , cultural background, personality, prior experiences, etc.
Lie- An untruth and subjective, what is clearly a ‘lie’ to one person may equally clearly be‘ Truth’ to another. There is no directionality to the words though it is often assumed, the one promulgating may know it is a lie and the person receiving could receive it as truth, or the opposite.
Fact- Is based on the physical world and physical record, is objective and concrete.
Fiction is as close as we come to the Lie equivalent to Fact. But Truth vs Lie is not equivalent to Fact vs Fiction . Fiction depends on lies (often willingly accepted) whereas Fact does not depend on Truth, Truth depends on Fact . Actually a lie can be tied to a fact as easily as truth the only way to distinguish is to analyse other facts about the first one more deeply
Accounting- Theoretically the objective, fact based ‘counting’ of sums and valuations. It can be almost pure arithmetic but when the sums are in computers and the valuations are subjective and relativistic then it becomes something more about Truth than Fact.
Finance- Formulating, creating, ‘raising,’ distribution of and ‘payment or rental’ of the discretized units of valuation we call money.
Statistics- Numeric / mathematical analysis of distributions and relationships within and between groups of related measurements.

It’s obvious that the past was simpler, in the 19th century even up into the mid 20th century you had a certain number of tons of gold in various repositories around the world. Finance and accounting were all about arithmetic tied back to those hillocks of gold stashed away under lock and key. We could count the number of ships in our fleets, measure the throw weight of their guns and the length of the coast or sea lane to be protected. The number of Aristocrats, Plutocrats, Technocrats, Artisans, Storekeepers, Farmers, Workers, Farm Hands, etc and know they would reliably vote one way or another (if there was a vote at all.) That world was chaotic in the eyes of those who lived in it, to us it looks like a pool of tranquility.

Today we have fiat money (its value is based on the credit of the person, corporation or government issuing it.) And the money is not in the form of a fixed number of coins or even pieces of paper, its an approximate number based on accounting that is based upon assumptions and approximations of a hundred different variables. While we know that the US has more firepower than the rest of the world combined we cannot really be sure that provides the level of assurance and protection we need, or if its vastly too much. The population is far more diverse in what they do and how they perceive themselves in relationship to others now and the fragmentation makes it almost impossible to create a coherent platform for change.

Everything has become political (in the worst sense) because there is no agreed upon foundation of facts and truths. The only time things get done effectively is when the (till the moment before, unseen) rocks of fact tear the guts out of the ship of state (the municipality goes bankrupt, etc.) So the guys who want to be in charge are always trying to predict the next disaster either to flog their favorite solution or to steer the ship away to keep it going for a few more weeks, months or years. While most ‘politicians’ are men and women of good faith in their own minds, they also WANT to hear Truth from their own side and Lies from the opposition, and consequently do so. Most are not able to unravel Facts from Fiction, Truth or Lies because of the complexity, (until the rocks start smashing in the planking.)

So…Panic! Disaster! Despair! Outrage! Fraud! Corruption! Cowardice! On and on, and on…..

So at the end of the day what? View the recent past in light of what history has to say and pick your poison. I see that regulation while important cannot run amuck and it is running amuck. I see that no state can run a deficit forever, and we need to have a long term plan. I see that there is only so much the state can take out of the pockets of the people and corporations without doing harm (or having to provide a substitute service of some kind) and we are at a decision point, and I do not want a government substitute. I think that government can only get so large before it distorts the society and market network, and government is definitely at that point and must be reigned in before we become utterly dependent on it. No government lasts forever, and when it collapses it pulls the society down with it, the US was designed so that ‘the government’ is always in a state of creative destruction, and we – society at large, are able to keep on going. There are forces (I think emergent from historical and social movement rather than Dr. Big Brain) at work in the US economy and political class to make the government – more and more rigid, this has to be stopped, and that means less government, less regulation, lighter taxes, and probably more personal risks, and I am ready to accept that trade-off, as are I think most citizens…

And that leads to one last definition: A citizen is not a legal title in my usage, its an attitude/philosophy. If you care about the future of the country and want what is best for ‘the country’ and other citizens, understanding that there is no free lunch, no equal outcomes or natural fairness in this world, you are probably a citizen of the US, not just someone who happened to be born lucky.

A world apart

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

We each live in a world apart from all others with only limited senses, knowledge and above all time, to understand the worlds of others, we tend to associate with those of a similar mindset either on purpose or by happenstance [family, region, career, religion, etc.] We associate with the similar because its easier and more effective than having to form a common base with someone whose world is very different.

Is the internet while making many things more common on one level, is breaking down some of the commonality that provided the ability to quickly relate to those you meet on a day-to-day basis?

With that rapid assimilation gone do we tend to live in a field of strangers who are getting less familiar all the time. And does that limit trust, the trust that is so critical to the success of the greater American culture?

The above is just a restatement of concerns expressed many times before. I guess I just had never thought through the ‘world apart’ metaphor and the reason we are worlds apart, even when we are touching each other.

Thoughts for a 4th of July in an early decade of the 21st Century

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

There have always been multiple visions of the future of the ‘American Experiment’ despite what comes across from the rather wan gruel we all get fed in public school unless we have unusually good and aggressive ‘social studies’ teachers.

I have read a few interesting modern histories of the united states and the best of these show that there were always multiple threads at work, more than just the now common Conservative / Progressive (NO, not Liberal.) And I don’t necessarily associate Conservative with Republicanism and Progressives with Democratic ideals.

I think if you go back to your math/geometry and get a view of a three-dimensional graph at the origin ( 0,0,0) with +&- axis for (x,y,z) showing. Got that picture in your head?

Now simplified political philosophy has taught the Left Right (x-axis) Dichotomy of Communism and Fascism … which supposedly goes from the people being sovereign to the opposite of one person being sovereign. With a smooth transition from one side to the other. This is the sovereignty axis in my opinion And America is not at the far right, its at the middle left, because sovereignty rests in the hands of the people’s elected representatives who can be tossed out.

Now don’t forget that while so-called Communist or People’s regimes claim the mantle of the People they are always in practice Fascist oligarchic or even despotic (one person) systems. And Fascist regimes (when they dared call themselves such) were in reality Party dominated Bureaucratic states and the best run of each type were much more alike than they were different. They are both basically Oligarchic with a tendency for one man rule.

So there has to be some other axis in play. Call it the ownership axis, who owns what? Say this is Up / Down, Up is personal ownership of everything, Down is state ownership of everything. Here you can parse out a philosophical though perhaps not so much a practical difference between Communism and Fascism as practiced in the real world. The Communist state owns all means of production (a person theoretically is still a sovereign actor and can own personal items) Fascism tends to accentuate diverse ownership of the means of production, in fact tends to focus on ownership and ‘winning/winners’ to the detriment of other things. If you look at the worst of the worst they didn’t really see anything wrong with slavery (but again in practice neither did the Communists, if you were sub-human enough to protest against the regime.)

And then you have the other political axis, call it the regulatory axis, one side you have anarchy, everyone establishes their own regulations, and on the other axis you have the regulatory state where every potential action is regulated by some rule.

Now mankind has never lived in either extreme, every animal has some innate regulation and the more complex an animal becomes the more it operates in some form of society which again has a set of perhaps unstated, but often iron clad, rules. With humans language and society co developed in complexity and at some point language grew in symbolic power to the point that it enabled humans to think up and then explain new ways to regulate life (as well as explain it and pass the knowledge along so others could build on to what was known before.) This is the foundation of modern civilization and while I’m a libertarian at heart, I know that humans have to live in a regulated world. Life in a unregulated world would be impossibly complex because you could never ‘trust’ anyone you did not know at least somewhat, to operate within the same social context as you do.

And as much as many Conservative pundits whine about it we do not live in a regulatory state. In practice only robots could live in the far limits of the regulatory state because they can be programmed and ‘flash’ reprogrammed to operate by the rules (if their ‘brain’ is big enough to contain said rule set.) A human cannot learn more than a relatively small set of rules in any lifetime and operationally using rules requires that you focus on a smaller sub set. This is the reality of the ‘joke,’ “…he knew more and more about less and less until he knew everything about nothing.”

Going back to Communist Fascist dichotomy, what does this new axis explain? Well to be honest, nothing, in practice both Communist and Fascist states tend toward the highly regulated but in both cases the regulations tend to focus on industrial and militaristic means and social control ends. However if you look at the ‘Democracy vs Communistic/Fascist’ it tends to show a huge spread, with distributed and relatively low levels of regulation in the Democracies and very highly concentrated and high levels of regulation in the Communist/Fascist states.

Concomitantly the D vs C/F spread on the sovereignty axis shows a wide spread and in my opinion shows a pretty concentrated blob for the C/F group well towards the single sovereign and the D’s a broad spread towards the all sovereign limit (though none get close to the limit)

And the D vs C/F on the ownership axis again shows (in my mind) the C/F’s practically as a spread towards to state ownership side and the D’s a spread towards individual ownership with the D’s getting closer to their limit than the C/F’s to theirs.

So I wandered far from my start point ehe? No, because if you look at that graph I have tried to form in your head you should see that our Democratic and Republican politicians are in all practical senses identical to each other. They are for sovereignty of the people, personal ownership of property and moderate levels of regulation all within bounds that most of us would find reasonable, if not totally laudatory.

As much as some ‘Con’ Pundits accuse the Pro Elite of despising America and ‘Pro’ Pundits accuse Con Elites of anti democratic tendencies, both sides almost to a man and woman love the United States of America and its People, in aggregate, if not in personal detail. Both sides recognize many of the same national failings, but attribute them to different causes, and often times assigning them different levels of importance. But we by and large live with in the same social memes and can Trust each other on a personal basis (fair dealing on a bet, honesty in word and deed, etc) even when we don’t necessarily agree or even trust them regarding political issues. As long as this social cohesion can remain to under-gird our political disarray. In fact I think we are just seeing the chaotic workings of a ‘society and polity’ that while vastly different in detail from what the founders would have recognized, is well within the bounds of what they could have hoped for given that most of what we experience day to day is utterly at odds with their day to day experience.

So, in closing: As a Naturalized Citizen of the United States I bid all that have always been, those who have become, those who want to become and those who have simply served the greater dreams of our great experiment, have a Joyous as well as Thoughtful, 4th of July.

Best Regards

M.A.Harris

Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Winston Churchill:

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Theodore Roosevelt:

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Go have a look at other interesting quotes: BrainyQuote

Two men, great men many will say, and with great flaws. But were those flaws…Bugs or just Features…in the time and society they existed in?

Looking backwards without the right perspective can distort more than it can clarify. Just like the too common view today that Christians have been crushing the poor Muslims ever since the Crusades. When in fact the Crusades were a rather haphazard and ultimately futile attempt to defend the Christian majority who had lived in the middle east since Roman times. Christians who were being conquered and subjugated by the (at the time) newly minted religion of Islam and the expanding empire it formed the basis of. It was Christian Europe (with all its faults) and probably modern civilization that was under threat, not the Moslems.

(UN)Common Sense

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Great piece from Stossel @ Reason on the need for fewer & simpler laws and regulations.

The Lefty Bosco Picture Show, a cartoon or soul teaser?

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

You are the co-star of The LeftyBosco Picture Show. In a variety of styles and subjects, from playful to poignant, Keith DuQuette, aka LeftyBosco, presents a drawing a day. Daily drawings by Keith DuQuette engage, inspire and challenge you to add your witty and wise comments. Play along with LeftyBosco and his friends – or have fun watching from the sidelines. The punch line starts here.

Catch it at GoComics.com

Sundays always get me down…

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Trying to keep up with a busy real job schedule and my desire to get Exotic Contraband ready for the first book to be published on Smashwords so blogging has not been prolific, will at least be home this week, hope to get a few meaty posts done.

Used to be that Sunday was the day before Monday and I dreaded school…until I got over that and actually started to like it. Then it was the day before Monday and I had to face the fact that I was just a cog in the gears of my job. Then I was a manager and I would have to face the folks who worked for me and keep up expectations. Next I was working for myself and Monday meant having to figure out how I was going to keep it up after the near term mana gave out. Then I was working for a small company and it meant another week of 12 to 14 hour days, and commutes that really sucked, though I enjoyed what I was doing. Still the case but now its the realization that I didn’t get to most of the things I’d intended to do over the weekend and the week is going to be clogged…

But then isn’t that the human condition, never really satisfied, isn’t that what keeps us moving forward?

Sorry edited, used the quick blog button and it made the central paragraph a differen color and unreadable on my blog….had to get into the HTML, I find that WP is a way to learn some HTML…again.