My Name is Legion
Two recent news items featured a routine business activities that by rights would never have been noteworthy. The first involved a man selling his company on the best tax terms he could get. The second involved a company hiring some security guards. Why should anyone care about these unremarkable transactions?
Maybe because the businessman selling the company in the first case was former vice-president Al Gore. The buyer as also named Al. Al Jazeera. The New York Times explains:
Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But the deal was not signed until Wednesday. …
Going forward, the challenge will be persuading Americans to watch — an extremely tough proposition given the crowded television marketplace and the stereotypes about the channel that persist to this day.
“There are still people who will not watch it, who will say that it’s a ‘terrorist network,’ ” said Philip Seib, the author of “The Al Jazeera Effect.” “Al Jazeera has to override that by providing quality news.”
With a handful of exceptions (including New York City and Washington), American cable and satellite distributors have mostly refused to carry Al Jazeera English since its inception in 2006. While the television sets of White House officials and lawmakers were tuned to the channel during the Arab Spring in 2011, ordinary Americans who wanted to watch had to find a live stream on the Internet.
Gore will now be part of the new outlet’s advisory board. The second otherwise dull item was that the Journal News was hiring security guards. Don’t thousands of businesses do that? Well yes, but the Journal News was the anti-gun newspaper that published the names of registered gun owners in its area in order to shame them. Now they’re defending themselves with guns.
The Wall Street Journal writes “under normal circumstances, a company’s lawful security arrangements would hardly be newsworthy. But as we noted Monday, the Journal News provoked the bitter backlash that so frightened McBride by publishing a report in which it named residents of the two counties who have done exactly what the Journal News has now done: lawfully availed themselves of their rights under the Second Amendment.”
Caryn McBride [the editor], was receiving vaguely menacing “negative correspondence” and phone calls. At least twice she made reports to police, in one case telling them “she was worried because an email writer wondered ‘what McBride would get in her mail now.’ ”
The cops told her there was nothing they could do, for the communications were not true threats and thus “did not constitute an offense.” That didn’t reassure McBride, who was understandably worried that the missives might have come from a dangerous criminal. So she decided to protect herself with guns.
Sigh.
One can only wish Al Gore and McBride both prosperity and safety respectively. Neither has apparently done anything wrong. But the irony that the former Democratic Party stalwart was trying to wriggle out from under having to pay his “fair share” to the taxman or that the anti-gun newspaper was defending itself with guns will probably not escape readers.
Nor will it pass unnoticed by those following the contrasting fates of Washington DC residents David Gregory and Army private Adam Meckler. One is a celebrity journalist and the other a former enlisted man. Neither has been accused of harming anyone, but their situations are now a world apart.
It’s been more than a week since police in Washington, D.C., opened an investigation into NBC’s David Gregory’s possession of a “high-capacity magazine” that’s prohibited in the District on on national TV. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier’s spokesman refused Monday to respond to whether Mr. Gregory had even been interviewed yet. This is a rather curious departure for a city that has been ruthless in enforcing this particular firearms statute against law-abiding citizens who made an honest mistake.
In July, The Washington Times highlighted the plight of former Army Spc. Adam Meckler, who was arrested and jailed for having a few long-forgotten rounds of ordinary ammunition — but no gun — in his backpack in Washington. Mr. Meckler, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, says he had no idea it was illegal to possess unregistered ammunition in the city. He violated the same section of D.C. law as Mr. Gregory allegedly did, and both offenses carry the same maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.
These anecdotes bring into focus an issue that is rarely presumed to exist in a society in which everyone is supposedly equal before the law: exception handling. “Exception handling” is the process by which a system deals with anomalous or unforeseen events.
In the real world there are exceptions to every man-made rule and we recognize their occasional necessity at sight. If one were told there were armed men at a school there might be a moment of worry — then we learn they’re just the President’s bodyguards. Rule meets exception. Handled.
What is less widely appreciated are the economic costs to exception handling, a fact is well known in the IT industry but often missed by political theorists. In the computing world everyone knows that the best case is where code is so well written that exceptions occur rarely. Moreover exceptions are handled according to severity and level with the resulting error information channeled with design performance in mind. Because error handling across different parts of the system (i.e. domains) is expensive, you deal with things at the lowest level you can properly do so. Otherwise a poorly designed exception system can slow things up by several hundred fold.
But none of these considerations seem to apply in public life If anything best exemplifies spaghetti code it is the politically correct legal system. It is riddled with unworkable provisions, unaffordable mandates, conflicting penalties and special interest loopholes. It’s nightmare code. The legal system can be thought of as a Congressionally written source program which, when fed into government, is somehow supposed to compile into executable code.
It probably doesn’t compile at all. The only way anything works at all is through the ingenuity of old hands on the job, who by the application of unofficial rules, winks and nods and shortcuts manage to get things from 9 to 5. In other words the entire thing is a mass of exception handlers. Nothing can be just routine except rejection. Everything that actually happens must be just a little bit special. What can go wrong in such a system was explored by programmers in a book titled Anti-Patterns. Some, but not all of the pitfalls are listed in this Wikipedia entry. But the reader may recognize these dire symptoms as the condition of runaway government.
Bystander apathy: When a requirement or design decision is wrong, but the people who notice this do nothing because it affects a different group of people.
Big ball of mud: A system with no recognizable structure.
Race hazard: Failing to see the consequence of different orders of events.
Anemic Domain Model: The use of the domain model without any business logic. The domain model’s objects cannot guarantee their correctness at any moment, because their validation and mutation logic is placed somewhere outside (most likely in multiple places).
God object: Concentrating too many functions in a single part of the design (class).
Accidental complexity: Introducing unnecessary complexity into a solution.
Action at a distance: Unexpected interaction between widely separated parts of a system.
Blind faith: Lack of checking of (a) the correctness of a bug fix or (b) the result of a subroutine.
Cargo cult programming: Using patterns and methods without understanding why.
And my favorite: “Coding by exception: Adding new code to handle each special case as it is recognized”. Coding by exception is really a recognition that you’ve put the wall in completely the wrong place and that unless one opens an increasing number of doors in it then nothing will work. It’s an admission that things are so screwed up that without fancy footwork you’ll wind up arresting yourself.
A world in which it’s bad for a prosperous plumber not to pay his “fair share” but OK for Al to sell to Al for $100 million; where a newspaper can do what it denounces or where a journalist can commit a crime on TV may not yet be a world where there are legal exceptions, but it’s getting there.
This is probably how politically correct systems function, if at all. They create multiple categories of exceptions to everything. There are exemptions handed out by race, religion, ethnic origin, fame and political affiliation. Eventually they make such a mockery of the rule that when the system actually operates unmodified it is an exceptional event. In such a morass it no longer even pays to know what normal is. All that is necessary is to make sure you belong to the exceptional category.
And having arrived there things are “fixed”. But not in the correct sense.
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The American legal system’s method of handling spaghetti coding in the law books is the jury.
Laws are written by a group of government employees (legislators), executed by another group of government employees (cops and prosecuting attornys), organized and conducted by yet another group of government employees (judges).
While I’m sure they ALL do the best job they can in service to their employers (we citizens), one group stands as a final quality control checker – the jury composed of peers to the accused.
This check has been given a bad name – jury nullification – but it remains the last ditch against tyranny – or just plain f*ck*ps.
However, government continues to find work-arounds against juries. Forbes had a good piece as to how the DoJ prevents adequate defense in cases where it is really eager to win:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2013/01/03/black-whitey-how-the-feds-disable-criminal-defense/
Elizabeth Warren merely had to assert her inclusion in the “exceptional” category. Actually being part of category she said she was part of turned out to be irrelevant. Kind of like Clinton was first “black” president, actual skin color notwithstanding.
From the PJ Media commentary guidelines helpfully displayed above:
It seems like we all have our little exemptions. This is only to be expected. You cannot please everybody all the time, and you cannot govern or manage any organization of people without occasionally resorting to fiat.
The problem with our current system is not that it is Byzantine (life is Byzantine), nor that it is applied unequally across all members, for that too will always happen. The problem is that it protects all sorts of behavior which is morally indefensible, all under the rubric of individual rights.
A legal regime which does not acknowledge the supremacy of truth, both natural and supernatural, and instead rests its foundation upon the inviolability of the individual, must eventually become little more than a concatenation of whims. A legal regime which does acknowledge truth will still have to deal with Byzantine complexity of facts, but it will do so under the guidance of a correct principle. This is called prudence.
It follows that any society interested in self-preservation must adhere to the moral law, but I do not see that this is possible unless that society is organized hierarchically. The whirling whims of individual ambition express themselves in “democratic” movements. Every liberal reform was indeed an excercise in the very liberty the Constitution enshrines—the words are cognate for a reason. Against this the true conservative ought to stand firm: that is, with the hierarchy and the defenders of morality. But today’s conservatives advertise themselves as the friends of—what else?—the Constitution, the very document born of revolt and enabling, even demanding, future revolts. With the Constituion and its beloved exaltation of individual liberty firmly in place, nothing can stop the inevitable whittling away of traditional society by the progressive emancipation of individual wills.
Is this what “conservatives” really want, or should want? This topsy-turvy situation puzzles me greatly, nor do I understand why so many fail to grasp it. What do those who call themselves the Right really believe these days? Where are their hearts really at? I try to defend both natural and supernatural law, i.e. I defend traditional society and the truths embodied therein, and thus I call myself a conservative. Consequently I cannot defend the US Constitution and remain at all consitent. But the typical Rightist of today lives squarely in this world of cognitive dissonance, which is why (I suspect) that their message is fraying and their electoral prospects faltering.
It is time to ask yourselves what you really believe and why; and having diligently interrogated your conscience on this matter, you must then write your name down in the appropriate column. Conservatives and Constitutions do not mix. You can only have one or the other. And if you choose to circumsize yourself into the law of the Constitution, you must understand that you are then obliged to follow all of it—Obamacare, the IRS tax code, everything. It’s all “Constitutional” now.
I will take my stand with tradition and I hope, God willing, some of you will join me there.
Matt, that was a very long-winded way of pointing out that today’s “Conservatives” are liberal, and today’s “Liberals” (presumably including yourself) are reactionaries.
Neil,
It’s not exactly as you presume. Today’s Liberals are evil but honest. Today’s Conservatives are shallow and dishonest. Today’s servants of truth are Reactionary.
Matt: Could you be little more specific about the “natural and supernatural law” that you defend? I’m gonna have trouble going along with you on that if you can’t put it in writing . . .
“And my favorite: “Coding by exception: Adding new code to handle each special case as it is recognized”. Coding by exception is really a recognition that you’ve put the wall in completely the wrong place and that unless one opens an increasing number of doors in it then nothing will work.”
Nothing but truth in that paragraph. Reminds me of my first FORTRAN code back in the 60′s, mortally wounded by an army of IF statements.
Of course there is another time honoured way of handling exceptions. It’s called “exception handling by bribery”. Endemic corruption is certain when a ridiculous system choked by silly rules works only by making exceptions. Targeted marketing by those with exceptions to sell and insider trading in the exception market can only increase as the U.S. drifts into a miserable era of bigger government and more unpaid bills. Corruption gives “exceptionalism” a whole new meaning.
The year 2013 is shaping up to be just as confusing as the thousands of years that came before it. Do something you guys.
Here is a story tip for
Current TVAl Jazeera AmericaThere is an old legal adage that is too often forgotten by both progressives and conservatives: Surety of the law is more important than justice in any single case. That is why a “living constitution” is so flagrant an abuse of law. If there is no surety, there can be no law, only might. No surety means Gregory gets away with it while Meckler gets hammered. No surety means Obama gets to make it up as he goes along with his “czars”, his signing statements, and so on. Lack of surety is a progressive mantra, their way of doing political business. Adherence to the constitution is how we try to ensure surety. That is what conservatives attempt to achieve, Matt; not reaction but known and dependable action. Surety is what protects us all, especially those who fall afoul of it. Laws can be changed but a lack of surety cannot.
Wretchard, you are far more an optimist than I. I see us as having already “gotten there”. Those of us who are Conservative and who pay attention see the exceptions you list and are upset at them. But note that to the mass of the country, this is nothing …. exceptional. It is the norm.
David Gregory has no fear of prosecution, and his resume is enhanced thereby. And the example is set for other Journo-Lists who violate the law. Al Gore has no fear that his reputation or [gag, retch] “moral authority” on the Left and with the media will suffer the slightest hit. The move by the Journal-News was a deliberate counter-strike to the opposition. The meme that will circulate is not that the Journal-News and its management is hypocritical. It will be that the EVIL, murderous people who own firearms are a deadly threat to the poor innocent organization that buys paper by the truckload roll and ink by the barrel.
There is no possibility in our poor, beknighted country that these and any “special” people will ever pay any criminal or civil penalty for anything they do that would deserve it under an equal application of the law. And it is accepted tacitly as the norm.
And they know that Adam Meckler will suffer as much as can be arranged regardless of the rightness of it, because he does not have the connections Gregory does. As will George Zimmerman, who was originally targeted specifically because his name gave his media accusers the impression that he was a politically correct target, white male and Jewish. The facts of the case had no bearing, and he will be destroyed by the system. Oh, and it is not only a matter of the Left doing it. In my conservative county we have judges and a DA who operate by connections.
And in the heart of hearts of the American people, this is also known as fact. We still claim to be a country under the Rule of Law and Constitution. We claim a lot of things that we know are not true for our own self image; but we live in accordance with the facts that are.
The second weakest claim one can make when facing the Nomenklatura is that the law and Constitution are on your side. The absolute worst is that right is on your side. If you are targeted by them, being right draws more fire from them.
Such a system is not stable over time [measured in generations]. But the longer it exists, the harder the collapse will be. We are in the first full generation.
Subotai Bahadur
@Matt – 3 and 5…
On this subject, I consult my intellectual superior:
“The growing number of people who consider the modern world “unacceptable” would comfort us, if we did not know that they are captives of the same convictions that made the modern world unacceptable.” – Don Colacho
“… but the Journal News was the anti-gun newspaper that published the mans of registered gun owners in its area …”
Should perhaps read “…that published the names of registered gun owners…
”
Respectfully, Armageddon Rex
“Today’s Conservatives are shallow and dishonest.”
Not sure if you are talking about politicians or anyone who is trying to conserve a limited government with limited powers and a working system of commerce there Matt. We need to evolve with the socialist program to get along by first destroying what capitalism built?
Published the mans name, every last one of them and a few womans too.
Matt,
There is nothing dishonest about preferring a certain amount of liberalism, while recognizing that it tends toward entropy. There is nothing honest about claiming the mantle of liberalism while urging despotism.
You claim to seek truth, but are ignoring the fact that any hierarchy, no matter how moral, has the same tendency to entropy as a republic or a despot.
#12 fixed
Like many leftist things this goes back as far as the Protestant Reformation. Some thought that because believers were justified by faith, that alone made them good people, and so they didn’t really need to follow any rules at all. Luther actually wrote a piece opposing “antinomianism” but the idea is clearly engraved in Protestant theology, or at least a primitive, self-serving version of it. If you believe certain things, that makes you a good person. If you are a good person, whatever you do is good, and asking you to follow any fixed set of rules is not only wrong and oppressive, it’s actually blasphemous. Conservatives constantly complain that leftism doesn’t make sense, but it makes perfect sense, and all that conservatives see as bugs are actually features. There is no double standard or as Wretchard is phrasing it here, no exception.
I agree that from their point of view all is working as planned. But it’s damned inconvenient for those who have to share the universe with them. Just now, for example, I am trying to read some data in a JSON format because we agreed it should be in that way.
Those rules are like the social rules we observe in daily life. You drive on the right and pass on the left. It could be the other way around, like the Brits do it. But it happens to be drive on the right because that’s the agreement.
Now suppose the “good people” decided that they could drive on whichever side of the road they felt like that day. Or my compadre felt like sending me data in some other custom format he happened to invent that day. They all felt unbound by the agreed standard by reason of superiority.
Well whatever the rights and wrongs are, it is fairly certain that it would play havoc on the roads and the import routines. The reason we agree on common rules — the Constitution that a professor from Georgetown thinks is so dispensable — is that it would be hell on earth if every thing was an exception.
Then I could reply in Chinese and he in turn could respond in glossolalia. We might have fun, but there would be disadvantages.
Bill Clinton has a talent for contempt. He is particularly disdainful of two people, Barack Obama and Al Gore. From taking a bribe from the Chinese Army at a Buddhist temple to enable critical technology transfers to taking money from the Qatari regime to enable Salafist intrusion Gore has proven to be the world’s least subtle or competent bagman.
Rush said today that Glenn beck’s organization offered to buy Gore’s network for even more money than Al Jazeera offered, but was turned down. And today one of Gore’s partners stated that Al Jazeera’s and Gore’s objectives were similar, without stating what the objectives are.
So we have the man who tried so hard to hamstring the development of new energy sources in the USA, and who is in agreement with the objectives of an ME oil-funded news network. No conflict of interest there, no sir; they have similar objectives, even if they ain’t saying just what they are.
So….if I vote democrat and call my self a liberal leftist world changer I can own a Machinegun with an underslung assaultrifle?
I’ll bet Algore invented Islam, too.
Long ago when I had an attention span a tad bit longer than that of a gnat, I made an attempt at becoming a programmer. In one book that I was reading on the subject there was a comment from the head of a Japanese IT department, IIRC it went something like,” My problem isn’t that my programmers don’t know their programming languages, it is that way too many of them don’t know Japanese.”
I suspect that the writers of out laws, rules, and regulations know legalese but lack the ability to read and write in a real language like English.
Al Gore has been a toady for Big Oil for years. This just moves it out further into the open.
Matt Damon is starting to see.
Illusions, deceptions, lies.
On the bright side, Al-Jazeera probably isn’t nearly as pro-terrorist and anti-US as MSNBC is.
I think the Goat Rope should be included.
obsidian @20
Only insofar as, and for so long as, you are useful to the cause.
@RWE:
Here’s how the red/green/green (hard-left/eco-freak/pro-jihadi) axis operates.
“Al Gore has been a toady for Big Oil for years. This just moves it out further into the open.”
Some say Abe Lincoln was a toady for cotton, a man wouldn’t give up his top hat to end slavery (made of cotton). One can’t deny the role of Big Cotton in tearing apart the fabric of this country and splitting the seat of democracy.
How ’bout an underslung gerbil launcher?
Blast #18:
Back during the 2000 Florida Recount the news came out that Gore had cut a deal with the Russians to allow them to provide missile technology to Iran. At that time I thought, “Forget the recount. Even if he is elected, we will have to proceed directly from inaugeration to impeachment. With a suitably expeditious prosecution, he’ll be executed for treason before his first year in office is up.”
But he lucked out and lost the election to Bush, thus getting away scot free.
For the Right, even if you did not do anything wrong it must be assumed your did, because you are a Public Figure and the standards of behavior must be so high. If it is even rumored you did something it looks so bad you should at least be required to resign.
For the Left, no matter what you did, you get away with it, because you are a Public Figure and thus cannot be judged by mere mortals.
Well when it comes to languages, in the programming world, a lot of it rides on hope. Frankly, show me someone who’s well versed in Kernighan and Ritchie Plain Old boring, structured, tortuous extern “C”, and I’ll agree you might have actually found a programmer instead of a script kiddie.
The “hot” programming languages are so far removed from that world. They’re slick, and targeted to a task. And they’re also usually implemented in that plain old boring “C”. These languages are in fact whole luscious environments subsidized and irrigated by the flow of plain old “C”. They are pure linguistic abstractions designed to hide the dirty work. They are subsidies. They are beneficiaries. And they are, thus, commodities. Presentation layers.
Our political discourse isn’t far removed from the programming language wars. Yes, let’s seek a “balanced” approach to the fiscal cliff! The algorithms look so much neater in clean, “efficient” Ruby or Matlab than in horrible, tortured “C”.
And that horrible, tortued “C” is itself a mere abstraction from the bare metal machine huff and puff. C itself is a “high level language”. Just not, apparently good and remoted enough. Abstractions of the abstractions are the only thing that will do, these days. The farther away from the real problems, the better off we are. That’s the modern way!
O, come, come, embrace us, Cacoon!
Cowboy,
Personally, I prefer assembly language. But when I finally had an embedded processor with enough cycles and memory, I fled to the open arms of C. Y’see it doesn’t matter how much I like having control of what operand goes to which register, if it makes documentation and maintenance a bear. So long as I can afford the extra silicon required, it’s a better option.
On the other hand, I do my simulations in Matlab for the most part. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it gets the job done. Until, that is, I have to do FEA in three dimensions. Then it’s back to Kernighan & Ritchie…
… Hello, world.
Not only that, but I proposed to re-write IEFBR14 in structured code so that it would be more efficient…
773154 dep and then go … boot to RSTS … on an 11/45 … with 8k. and 32 users…
Algore listened to the sirens that told him he could be President when he had lost. Supping with the devil requires a long spoon, and Algore didn’t realize that. He thought it would be no problem to ‘count the votes’ of those who voted for him, but SCOTUS intervened. He lost not only the election but his mortal soul.
tom
Launch all gerbils on warning! Ok, seriously, wasn’t it Merritt Edson who said ammo was overrated? That any good man with 5 rounds was well set for a week of intense combat? And didn’t Chesty reinforce that just a few years later? Holy smokes, people…waddaya think bayonets and fists and teeth are for?
any of you ‘youngsters’ do FORTRAN on CDC 6000 back in prehistorical times?
Fortran debugging aids, UT-CDC 6000
maybe we can debug US politics, no way.
Event driven code is also exception code. Sandy Hill was an event. The “fiscal cliff” was an event. Obama’s Saul Alinsky community organizing — rooted in turn of the century NYC mob-run union organizing and extortion operations — is a way of driving a system into event handling overdrive.
Plays to emotions, just the way emotional coders, immature system designers and programmers, react to real world problems by throwing code and design up against the wall with every new event of knowledge getting — the actual knowledge is hidden from their lazy or immature natures, but the news that the code doesn’t work in event (x,y,z) does get out. More blind throwing of feces-level code occurs until in a sort of a self-evolutionary code happens. The code mess works for some small observed space-time region.
Such systems survive for a time (and that time can be quite long) yet most often the establishments that produced them, as well as the establishments that continue to use them, are killed by competition.
Nasty stuff, not pretty or kind to psyche to be caught up in. Yet here we are.
I did Fortran II on an IBM 1620, with card reader, sense switches and Executive typewriter interface in high school summer math camp, a taste of the old days, then after college went to work for Data General doing compilers for the Nova and Eclipse, back when 8k of hand-wired core memory filled a pizza box, then a high-speed math library for Honeywell, and various other excursions. This heah C language is some kind of newcumber or something? Like me some C++ rather better if only for the &address operator, much more robust coding styles. But I *like* the higher level more modern languages, if only they would follow the lessons of Algol 60 about clean elegant and orthogonal design. Ah what do these kidz know, give’m a few gigamips on their smart phones and they just waste it all.
Since it seems we’ve abandoned the metaphor for discussion of the real thing (besides, I can’t add anything useful, Wretchard said it very well), I’ll just chip in my $0.02 and say that I do embedded development using plain vanilla C. I have no desire to go back to assembly, even though I find it fascinating to tinker with, it’s hard for me to maintain properly in my work projects. I need that level of abstraction. Guess I’m not a manly coder because I don’t do bare metal. Although I did earn my chops as a kid hand-compiling 6502 op-codes into machine language on my Atari 800. That counts for something, right? No fancy exception handling there. It’s every leftist’s Dog-Eat-Dog nightmare.
And a question for our financial gurus like Josh. What’s this $1E12 platinum coin thing I’ve seen mentioned online today? I don’t really know any details about it except that it’s supposed to magically ease our national debt. Is this as ridiculous as it seems on its face to me?
Wretchard and Matt (@3) are both eloquent. But Wretchard is speaking truth to power, and Matt is talking in tongues.
There is some surprisingly good news buried in the story of alGore’s latest multi-million dollar heist — that lots of cable companies in flyover country would not carry Al Jazeera, thinking it to be a terrorist network. It is a good thing that those flyover people are so dumb — change the name from Al Jazeera to Currents and they will lap it up. Or not!
Having seen Al Jazeera a few times, it is significantly more sensible than the once-esteemed (and universally available) BBC. Although all the news channels are a waste of time (to a greater or lesser extent), my personal favorite among the “exotics” is Russia Today. Don’t want to sound like Not Uncle Joe here, but Russia may well evolve into the last bastion of freedom on the planet today. Their ruling clique has pulled out of the Kyoto scam and offered Depardieu sanctuary from high-tax France. I wish Western ruling cliques were as smart.
Times they are a’changing. Corrupted code eventually goes into the trash can; and other codes get written.
Speaking of Al Gore, I first learned ALGOL W at Univ of New Mexico in early ’70′s.
db @ 38: What’s this $1E12 platinum coin thing
IIRC, the fed can print money, Obama can’t, but Obama (Treasury) can mint coins and set their value, so he can issue a single (one ounce) coin and call it a trillion dollar asset, therebye cancelling a trillion dollar deficit. As Clinton said, “Stroke of the pen, law of the land, pretty cool, huh?”
–
k @ 39: Corrupted code eventually goes into the trash can; and other codes get written.
Even software has a half-life, bit-rot sets in, as they say.
#38 Dworkin Barimen
Not a financial guru, nor do I play one on TV. But like you, I recognize fiscal BS.
Here is what they are talking about.
When a coin is minted, it counts as money for its face value. Let us say a quarter, which counts on government books as 25 cents. But the materials and labor to make the quarter cost far less than that. Let us say 5 cents. The 20 cents difference is called seigniorage and is a profit that accrues to the government and in fact counts on the government’s books as income the same as tax receipts.
OK, button your codpiece, here is where it gets cute.
$1E12 = 1 Trillion dollars, a good part of the annual deficit.
So, let us say that they mint a coin made out of platinum. Make it weigh 1 lb. Platinum is running in the vicinity of $1500 an oz. For simplicity, let us assume standard ounces as in 16 to a pound. Costs about $24K. So what if the coin’s denomination is $1E12. The seigniorage is $1E12 minus $24K. Of course, the government still holds the coin. So the net plus on the government books is $2E12 minus $24K. The budget is magically in a surplus, and the Federal Reserve and the Mint can print with paper and electrons to their heart’s content.
Yes, it is a scam. But is a legal form of fraud and theft.
We may be doing it.
I am reminded of a commercial a few decades ago, for a pseudo-Mexican condiment. Something about New York City. The last three words were, “Get a rope!“.
Subotai Bahadur
41 @Josh & 42 @Subotai
Thanks, that’s pretty much what I suspected, another Executive Branch end-run. Hell, why not just call it a $20E12 coin and we’ll be in the black!? Did Krugman think up this brilliant plan? LOL, right out of the ending of Dumb & Dumber. Buncha frickin’ geniuses we got in DC.
Time to revisit the fall of the Weimar Republic of Germany. “The period of hyperinflation that hit the Weimar Republic in 1922-1923 was on a scale seemingly without historical parallel. The mark traded at 4.2:1 to the dollar prior to the outbreak of hostilities in July 1914, . . . By the time that the Weimar government introduced the Rentenmark in November 1923, the exchange rate had risen to 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar.”
Excerpt:
‘Measuring the longer term effects of the years of hyperinflation is equally difficult, and it is important to avoid broad generalizations when discussing groups that may have most suffered during this time. Lacqueur held that “the middle classes who had invested their funds in state loans, shares accounts and such, like the pensioners and the working classes, suffered from the steep decline in the real value of their income.” Mommsen argued that hyperinflation also had a deleterious effect on wage earners, and that “this favored a gradual shift of power within the economy to the employers.” Widdig noted that postwar rent control policies made the financial crisis especially difficult for “those who depended on rental income.” Craig noted another pair of demographics especially hard hit by the period of hyperinflation:
“The persons, however, who proved most vulnerable to the effects of the inflation were the sick and the young. The mounting cost of hospital care and the increase in doctors’ fees placed adequate medical treatment beyond the capacity of millions at a time when the ballooning price and frequent shortage of essential foodstuffs were causing widespread malnutrition and the reappearance of diseases that had been common during the worst days of the Allied blockade.”
‘The analyses of those who gained or lost during the period of German hyperinflation is of critical concern to Weimar and NSDAP [Nazi Party] researchers, argued Kolb, given the events of the next decade:
“It is of great importance since, in the opinion of many historians, a direct or indirect connection exists between the traumatic experience and social consequences of hyperinflation on one hand and, on the other, the rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s victory. A direct connection, since the inflation turned part of the middle class into a proletariat, politically disoriented and susceptible to Nazism; and an indirect one, since during the world depression the German government dared not take the necessary measures to alleviate unemployment for fear of causing another inflation.”
‘It was the worldwide Great Depression, however, that brought about both extreme economic catastrophe as well as political opportunities for extremist political parties in Weimar Germany. The causes of the economic collapse are the topic of another essay altogether, but of critical relevance to Weimar history was the New York stock exchange crash in 1929; investors – predominately American – who had deposited short-term funds in German stocks and bonds suddenly withdrew their money to cover debts on Wall Street.
‘Within months, German firms began to declare bankruptcy, and the numbers of unemployed German workers began to skyrocket. From a level of 1.5 million in May 1928, unemployment rose to 3.1 million in September 1930, and peaked at about 5.5 million workers by July 1932. Over 30 percent of German workers were unemployed at the height of the Great Depression; Evans remarked that out-of-work Germans, however, were but a component of the larger picture of misery:
“These terrifying figures told only part of the story. To begin with, many millions more workers only stayed in their jobs at a reduced rate, since employers cut hours and introduced short-time work in an attempt to adjust to the collapse in demand. Then many trained workers or apprentices had to accept menial and unskilled jobs because the jobs they were qualified for had disappeared. . . . The problem seemed insoluble.”
‘The collapse of the German economy created conditions ripe for those on the Weimar political extremes. The experiment in representative democracy, in the eyes of many Germans, seemed a dismal failure, and voters began to turn to groups whose presence in the Reichstag had previously been inconsequential.’
[More here, and an alarming history it is!]
http://historymike.blogspot.com/2007/07/fall-of-weimar-republic.html
Oh yes, I did FORTRAN, I do FORTRAN, and I adore FORTRAN. The problem is that I work in the field of image processing, and getting images into FORTRAN programs is a horrible bitch.
So I read the images in C and pass them into FORTRAN, where I can operate on them. Why bother? FORTRAN compilers are still the bomb when you’ve got a real one – tuned to your metal.
That makes me very weird. Everything’s done in Matlab these days. Young engineers coming out of college can’t program. They hand me their disastrous Matlab code and I translate it and optimize it.
I keed, but if this is the level of depraved joke that they are willing to stoop to in order to kick the can down the road for just a little bit longer, then it shows just how close to the edge we’ve come. The information in #44 may be relevant to our interests very soon.
Weimar Germany was rockin’ in the 1920′s. It was the 1930′s that torpedoed them, and this was precisely because the United States was Germany’s biggest backer. Once the financial panic of 1929 hit, American finance evaporated in Germany. The Great Depression was on, and it hit Germany worse than most. The ground was sown for the rise of Hitler.
Germany’s movement from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi regime was fitful and full of pitfalls for the Nazis. The Nazis actually lost popular votes in the period from 1933 until their consolidation of power. These were dicey times for Hitler.
But Hitler prevailed based on his raw magnetism. Yes, Hitler was a magnetic personality. He was a clearly passionate man whose dedication to Germanic Hegemony was real and palpable.
Of course, he was mad as beans, too. But that’s something that got politely overlooked.
I did FORTRAN IV on a variety of mainframes; IBM,CDC and Honeywell. At first I thought that FORTRAN was made especially for us FOResters. By the time C came along I was hiring computer science guys to code my simulation models. At first I thought that C stood for Canadian.
Yes I invented delusional computing, a concept that the U.S. Congress now depends upon when debating government revenues and expenditures. The U.S. Government is obviously going to do the EU thing of never making a hard decision and always kicking things down the road. That’s not a delusion. It’s the reality that we all have to adapt to now.
#5:
Only if pathological liars are “honest”. And remember, under post-modernism (a staple of the left, indistinguishable from schizophrenia), facts are arbitrary, reason is a tool of Western imperialism, etc.
Why people are so opposed to Al Jazeera is beyond me. AJ is no more propagandist than BBC, CNN, etc. In my corner of the world, I only get AJ, BBC, and Press TV (Iranian state news) and I actually prefer AJ over BBC. One is backed by Islamic fascists, the other by European far leftists. Given the choice between two evils, I’ll go with the one that provides the better, (slightly) more impartial news coverage, and that’s actually Al Jazeera. Additionally, AJ’s international news coverage is refreshingly devoid of stupid entertainment stories and an unhealthy obsession with the Duchess of Cambridge’s womb.
And because of Al Jazeera’s reputation, watching their news often makes you weigh the information they’re relaying instead of just accepting its veracity without thinking, as you perhaps might with more “established” news outlets. For that matter, I actually watch Press TV every now and then as well (for the same reason I read HuffPo, Salon, etc.) just to see what the opposition has to say. Believe it or not, it’s less bullsh*t than I thought it would be, with many of their news stories being easily verified by other sources.
Following up on my last post, regarding the knowledge of the system, in systems that are long-developed, complex, huge. Ofttimes spanning a number of human lifetimes, at least a few project personnel turnover cycles. Reactionary responses are piecemeal, poorly understood outside of some very local (and always emotionally magnified, aka “telescoping”) context. Yet the KNOWLEDGE of the system and its dynamics is in the system, for just the fact that it works to ant extent is a proof of that knowledge. Working code and working legislation emended with judicial case histories and rulings is a form of perfect specification. It perfectly describes what it has done. Yet to what end? Will it work in the future? Is it a good, a blessing?
To the extent that it did work for some time, yes it will work in the future, and the a culture running in nearly all edge-efect mode will not do anything much to address minor and tolerable instabilities, quirks, mal-behaviors and injustices. The Founders recognized this as a human characteristic inherent in societies: “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” But what causes the correction if any is to avail? In the world of engineering and computer systems competition usually comes to present an alternative — one where the KNOWLEDGE of the system is used more effectively and at least at the beginning, more peacefully — ease, lack of quirks, predictability are all attributes of peace.
To those in thrall of the old system, true deep knowledge has become hidden for many periods, it is buried in the system, inscrutable. Yet the political marketplace, the world of cultures and nations does not have the same recourse that engineers and system analysts do in order to scrap old systems. The American Founders recognized that too. After stating that mankind does not easily adopt major changes to systems politic, to the very form and structure of government, they go on to give one way that major change, revolutionary change, becomes inescapably clear to men: “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”.
Abuses and usurpations are aplenty today. Yet that is not enough to provoke a general uproar against them. What more is necessary? Two things stated, and one they left out. Two things that motivate men, the other unstated thing is the means and opportunity. Motive, means, opportunity. It is not clear at all that we even approach having the unstated things — the means or opportunity. But perhaps the means arises just from motive? Consider then the two key motivating factors of which the Founders spoke.
First that those abuses and usurpations must be seen as part of plan pursuing the same goal (the Object). Second that the goal be clearly and generally seen as something to terrible to tolerate. For many years, from the 1880′s until the 1970′s, the first motive criterion was met — the plan was socialism-communism-Marxism. And that common view that state socialism is a bad plan kept it at bay, not completely, but certainly more than in most nations. Regarding the second, that the plan produce an intolerable object, has always been ambiguous. That is to say, for nearly a century, in the common knowledge of political systems, that communism or socialism is a TERRIBLE outcome, has been proposition supported in part and denied in part. Wilson, FDR, Johnson, Nixon, and even to some extent Ike, imprinted forms of socialism into the fabric of Federal Governance. Meanwhile we all eventually came to despise and fear the outcomes of socialism in Nazi Germany, and by that terrible example, the socialism of Italy and others. As we learned of the gulags, the mass starvations we came came to similar conclusions about Communism, and Marxism. But in that later, not everybody.
And those who extolled Maxrism did have a plan and have carried it out. They have taken over our schools and colleges. Thus since the 1970′s the general consensus has become to a majority in actual practice (receiving money from government) that socialism is wonderful, not terrible. And motive one — that a nefarious long plan be evident, has been negated. “So what?” is the answer.
So what happens now? Well, we are in a place, a time of politics, that the American Founders can no longer give us advice to handle. Their solution — revolution, rebellion — seems unachievable at this time. The people are not in an uproar. Some of us, even a large number are, but not enough. We have to breach the “So what?” mindset.
And we can. For we understand better than our enemies the knowledge buried in the chaos of our cultural systems. Their reactionary immature, not deep thinking natures — encouraged and inculcated by the long march plan of the Marxists, by the deconstructionist morals and education they have taught — their emotionalism makes them weak, prone to error and mistakes. We all will suffer for their problem, for they have the hill, they have the commons. We are in hidey holes, in crags, remote places or live among them in shadows of social detachment. Yet we will have opportunities, and we must hone the ability to utilize them.
re: $100M. Be interesting to see the final details. Wasn’t it reported last year that the channel was deeply in debt? Not unlike leftist talk radio. Wouldn’t surprise me if the net to Mr. G. was $0 – with a big annual director’s check as sweetener (and bribe).
Once upon a time there was a distinction between the common(ly understood) law – and everything else (rules of the road, standards, etc. that preserved order). With the golden rule and the 10 commandments being examples of the former. And the latter being much less important (could be determined by coin-flips, as long as a choice was made). Nowadays the (leftist) value system has succeeded in inverting the equation (where elites dictate thru ever more constraining regulation – so a jury of 12 (or 6) can no longer just apply common sense) – which is fundamentally destabilizing to civil society.
This cannot end well.
3. Matt: You and others who point out the flaws in government systems forget that in regard to the Republic that the US Constitution defines, the Founders were under no illusions whatever about what would be required of the new country’s citizens in order for the system to succeed.
When Ben Franklin replied “A Republic, if you can keep it.” he was talking about the shared foundation of personal virtue that would handle the exceptions at the most fundamental level – the individual. The Founders wagered that establishing a system that allowed the greatest individual liberty (and therefore the greatest positive potential for each person) would survive the risk of abuse of such a system by virtue of the wit and morals of the participants.
It had never been tried before. I suspect that it will last until the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ overtakes it.
@ 27 Yes. It’s globalism, stupid. What else could unite Al Gore with the Emir of Qatar? The Qataris sit at the globalist big boy table and run guns and cash to whom the globalzis wilt. If that includes murderous scum jihadis in Syria and the people who killed our Ambassador to Libya, so be it. Even the fanatic Russophobes now and then get a cluebird and realize Qatar is playing dirty and funding some very very bad people and has even violated Russian diplomats’ persons, a big no-no under the Vienna Conventions:
http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=6909
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20111205/169361690.html
but they still don’t get that global-zism is as real an ideology as Nazism and Communism once were. And globalzis could be summed up as people who want to return to feudalism aka the Dark Ages but with all the high tech gadgets. Think the ‘Hunger Games’ with them in the Capitol. And Al Gore thinks he’s one of the folks at the top.
Or to use another example, from “Generation Kill”, if the Marines are America’s little pit bull, than Qatar is globalism’s little jihadist pit bull, to maul whom they wilt.
Where Will It end @ 35 – I was doing simulations for the design of the A-6E in FORTRAN IV on Grumman’s IBM 360 when they did not shut me down to land men on the Moon during the Summer of ’69. Something about “priorities”!
Oh well, I guess I’ll just pull out my sliderule and do it the “off the grid” way.