Don't Pay the Ransom

Don't Pay the Ransom, Honey, I've Escaped is the name of a little know country song in which the protagonist text messages his wife after staying out all night and knows he needs a really good excuse to explain his absents.

I don't know if the excuse worked, but it sure makes a good country song, and I'm wondering if it works for delinquent blog postings too.

Why have I not posted? I've been really, really busy. I need a new computer (If you've read my Dell Hell postings, you know what I mean.) and I don't want to work on the one I got. The luster of blogging has lost its sheen and become a chore. I was never able to post a comment on Frank Rich's column early enough to get noticed and I didn't want to do anything else until I did that.

All the above is true, but that's no excuse when the intent was write for the sake of writing. To paraphrase Churchill: it's the planning not the plan that's important. That is true of writing also. So if I don't blog, the writing suffers.

Like staying away from the gym, the health suffers. I need to get in there and bench-press some prepositions – see if I can notably dangle a few – run on some sentences, endurance testing even myself, and bulk out my writing physique.

Continuing Adventures at the New York Times

Continuing with the exciting story of last week, I looked and looked and never found my comment posted. And so I got up what I thought was early and posted a new comment last Sunday's (Sept. 27) Frank Rich column. It was a little after 8:00 when I logged on.

I dutifully read Mr. Rich's column and tried to compose a comment that would attract recommendations. I posted at 8:30, and then I waited.

And I waited. I finally found it the next day. Finally it a appeared as shown below.

A comment submitted at 8:30 am was finally was posted at 1:18 pm, and it was 250 in the count. I really do need to get up early or maybe even stay up and post that night if I'm ever going to get an early position and a better chance at those elusive recommendations. Even at two hundred and fiftieth, I got one recommendation, so I just got to get posted earlier.

I thought I was not showing up because my opening line poked fun at Frank Rich's name, and they warn of abusive or defamatory language, and I thought they were just being overly sensitive, but it was because I was posting late in this game. I was being overly slow.

We shall see what we shall see. Stay tuned. And here is the post as it appeared in the New York Times:

Comment on Frank Rich Column

I got up early this morning to comment on Frank Rich's column just to see if it would get noticed and the test of that is "reader recommendations". I have noticed in the past that the earlier birds get the recommendation worms, so I'm testing to see it I can catch a few myself.

I did not get up as early as I should have. When I began reading the column, no comments were posted, but by the time I had finished and composed my little ditty, 37 comments had been posted. There's probably hundreds already in the comment queue, waiting to be reviewed prior to posting. So, if this doesn't work, if my post is too far down in the list of comments, I'll try an even earlier time next time.

Here is what I posted:

Let's be frank, Rich.

Some people just got to hate. Extreme prejudice against anyone or anything different is as natural as nature itself. We tell ourselves human beings are supposed to be different, but unfortunately, we are not, or we are not for a significant portion of society.

Some people have got to fix their hate on something, somebody, or some group. They are not truly happy or content in their life unless they do. Rational thought of why or how come has nothing to do with this. It's emotional. It's basic unconscious autonomic response, and it is a part of some peoples' lives as much as food and oxygen.

The Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, George Wallaces, and Adolf Hitlers of the world tap into and mine this rich and rewarding vein for their own purposes. And it's not just the great unwashed on the right. As your ref to Michael Moore indicates, it going down on the left, too. It's just more prevalent on the right. It's part and parcel to being a conservative.

I've posted elsewhere about liberal ideas becoming conservative foundations over time, i.e. when the second amendment was originally stuck into the Bill of Rights it was a very liberal concept. Royalty and the ruling classes could certainly carry and use weapons at their discretion, but the very idea of a commoner having the right to keep a gun was eat up with liberalism. Wrap your cold dead fingers around that, Mr. Right-wingnut.

Also, as any political advisor worth his salt will advise, don't mess with Social Security if you want to get elected. Hopefully, one day universal heath care for all will be like that. And those on the right can begin wrapping their fingers around it as if it was their own.

End of Frank Rich comment.

So, now we wait. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, and here's the link to the post about liberal ideas becoming conservative foundations.


Late update: As of 5:14 my time, my comment had not been posted. I scanned all 637 comments and did not see it. Either it was found offensive (My "Let's be frank, Rich." may have got me kicked out), or they get so many comments, they never got to mine even this late in the day, or I just missed it. At any rate, I didn't get to test if getting a comment in early gets readers recommendations.

So, I'll just have to get up earlier and run this test again. Stay tuned.

Krugman's Economic Roundup

Wow! Do they have a Nobel Prize in journalism? No on second thought, using a term synonymous with noble together with "journalism" is a bit oxymoronic.

Anyway, Krugman's roundup of just how all - or most - of the economists got it wrong in the recent economic unpleasantness renews my faith that the American economy is still the poster child of chaos theory. Perhaps the Keynesian economists and the free-market thinkers are nothing more than strange attractors in chaos theory.

Two things not mention in Krugman's article – or maybe it was and I just missed it – was expectations of investors and the other was the Cold War.

In the collapse of the whole sub-prime based financial investment instruments, if only investors had known the true risk. These packaged risky investments did not have the diversify risk their rating would seem to indicate. The rating houses did a great disservice to the economy. They sold their souls (their credibility) to the devil for the huge revenues to be made rating this new investment. The rating house that gave the highest rating to these new untried and untested instruments got the most business, and of course, profits. Had investors known the true risk involved with these sub-prime backed instruments, the risky investments would have only been for those who like to take risk – market players.

The sub-prime backed investment sellers would not have been as able to raise money to further their risky operation by loaning more money to those that any rational evaluation tells you they cannot pay. The eventual economic collapse may have been more the usual restriction or downturn, not the wiping out of investment strategies. The rating houses work for the seller not the buyer, and it should be the other way around. Their incentive should come from how well their rating of a bond proves true, not how much business they can get from the sellers.

Next, the winning of the Cold War at the end of the previous century proved that free markets are more productive than planned economies. The strategy of détente was the most important decision made during the Cold War. It was not the forces with the strongest, most powerful army but the one with the more efficient economy that won, and this could only occur if peace reigned. Like the legend of the emperor with no clothes, communism's centralized planning, no mater how well controlled or planned, could not keep up with free markets – and with peaceful co-existence, everyone could see it and acted accordingly, and communism as a future economic concept began to die. While not all countries of given of the communist ghost, they will always be at a disadvantage against free market economies.

What lesson can we learn from this? While I like the headline: If it's too big to fail, it should be regulated. In our rush to fix what we perceive as problems in a free market, let's not do away with what drives, incentivizes, and produces the return that so recently defeated a more plotting and planning foe.

A simple tweaking is all that is needed. Re-direct the incentives for the rating houses, but leave the free market, and in this case, the free financial market alone. Had the riskiness of the sub-prime investments been shown in the lower than acceptable ratings, investors betting the rest of their lives would not have bought it, and the sub-prime back investments would have been the playground for those players looking for risk.

And we could have all lived happily ever after.

GOP Death Squads

The consideration of government funded euthanasia counseling is just an extension of Obama's highly successful Cash for Clunkers.

What did wonders for the car industry – and needless to say the environment – will do the same for the healthcare industry and its environment.

Time Travel: If it was up your ass, you'd know

An article in Slate about the movie The Time Traveler's Wife, or more, about time travel in general since it laid down some fundamental ground rules on time travel caught my attention. I left a comment but somehow – most likely the ineptness of my posting – it got forever lost "in the Fray" of Slate. I had two basic principles that should be maintained when and if we ever learn to travel in time.

In looking for my comment to see if I got any replies or rating, I ran across a reply by the author of article, Dave Goldberg, a physicist no less. He covered one of the ground rules I had specified in my comment, and more importantly, offered a link to his blog, where he covered it even greater.

I'm way out of my league here since he and certainly some of those leaving comments are physicist while I am only a devotee, but that never stop me from commenting before, and since this is all about time, certainly not now. This is my comment to Mr. Goldberg's A User's Guide to the Unverse.

[Begin comment]
Your put off of the concept of conservation of energy and matter is a bit too flippant. Did this not point to the neutrino long before we found it? Is this not the only concept that illuminates dark matter? Is it not a basic concept in both the space-time relativity camp and those in the quantum group? It does not say we cannot travel in time. It just says that if we do, energy and matter will be conserved – and some would add momentum, but let's keep it simple.

One possible theory: atoms and/or energy are exchanged between two different times. Or maybe, you are right and the same mundane, identical atom can exist at two different places simultaneously, but the conservations equation is satisfied elsewhere.

Another fundamental I would add to your list is the constraints we currently face in the three dimensions we do travel, not even considering time. Your left hand cannot be your right hand. If you are moving in one direction, you cannot be moving in the opposite direction. Moving up while the elevator is going down only means the rate of descent has decreased. (True, both of these should include that time bitch, simultaneous, but simple solutions to complicated concept should be kept…simple.) The point is we are constrained in how we travel in the three dimensions we have mastery. The same should be true of the time dimension. This could explain the "grandfather paradox" or that pool ball thingy.

Another mind game you might play in trying to come to grips with time travel is to imagine how an individual from a two dimension world would experience our three dimension world. How would they comprehend that third dimension? Insights here could translate to insights about this fourth dimension in which we can only travel in one direction by experiencing it.
[End of comment]

Anyway, that was my comment. As to the title of this post: it's Navy unofficial jargon. While doing time in the Navy, I soon discovered that whenever you went looking for something or somebody and you made the mistake of asking a group of sailors if they knew the whereabouts of that for which you were seeking, the response ad nauseam: If it was up you ass, you'd know. A truism if ever there was one.

Autogoogling Health Care

In the heath care debate presently before the body politic, before anyone expresses an opinion, either in support, against, or offering an alternative, they should state the answer to two questions:

1. What sort of heath care program do you currently have?

2. Have you, someone in your family, or someone you know closely been faced with a major medical expense or ongoing, constant expense?

Stating the answer to these two questions, up front, before anything else is said, colors everything that comes after. Once I know that, I know what baggage the opinion brings.

For instance: While I don't know who or how much a U.S. senator or his family has suffered a medical catastrophe, I know the senator has a rather good heath care program – all government employees do. I take this into consideration whenever I hear a senator or representative issue statements on the current heath care packages.

Anyone who has faced today's medical expenses with a heath care program that has protected everything else of value knows that heath care insurance is essential for a normal lifestyle. That is if anyone thinks leaving anything to their children is normal, or even having children is normal. Their opinion as compared to someone who has never had or needed much heath care would be quite different in regards to universal heath care.

I don't think wealth is a major factor since medical expenses today can drain even the largest of holdings in a very short period. We are all in the same boat as far as to the impact of expenses. What separates us is our ability to buy the insurance or access to a group plan.

And that's the sort of information that should be on the table for all to see before an opinion is ever issued. This self declaration needs a name, like the health care declaration or testament, or personal spin or disclosure, or how about autogooling heath care.