Herd Immunity versus Herd Mentality

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, pandemics, covid-19, sars-cov-2, politics, epidemiology, sociology

During what we now know was an early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, Johan Anderberg wrote his analysis of the unique approach taken by Sweden, as compared to all the other First World nations: The Herd: How Sweden Chose Its Own Path Through the Worst Pandemic in 100 years, translated from Swedish by Alice E. Olsson and published in English in 2022.

The book covers from early March 2020 until the end of the year. Writing in 2021 a book to be published the following year, the author could not have foreseen how absolutely middle-of-the road the results would be in Sweden, or how the pandemic would play out for another two full years, followed by a sputtering endemic infection that has become a slightly-worse-than-usual type of flu. Four other coronaviruses are known to cause fall-to-winter colds, and now there is a fifth, that is a little more deadly than the other four, but on a par with Type A influenza.

The action centers on two significant men, Anders Tegnell, Sweden's state epidemiologist, and Johan Giesecke, advisor of WHO to the Public Health Agency of Sweden. Other important men and women played their parts, including the Prime Minister of Sweden, but these two, with Tegnell in the lead, helmed the Swedish strategy for coping with the pandemic, for at least the year 2020.

Just as the two men began to collaborate, on March 12, Giesecke quoted a 17th Century noble who had written to his son, "An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regulatur" and thoughtfully provided a translation, "Don't you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" (p.73) This attitude was the underlying basis for dealing with the hundred-odd world governments and hundreds of news agencies that questioned, then decried, then condemned the light touch taken by the Swedes.

Early on Tegnell and Giesecke sought not to limit transmission but, in the absence of a viable vaccine, to allow the infection to spread while taking measures to protect the frail elderly and other vulnerable persons, with the goal of establishing herd immunity. There is much discussion of this concept in the book, with an equation or two related to R₀, the expected number of persons one infected person infects. Later, discussion moved to such buzz phrases as "limit the spread" and "flatten the curve", which caused confusion and had no discernible effect.

I remember well that President Trump authorized the military to make available great numbers of hospital beds and ventilator equipment, many on Navy ships. These went largely unused. To my discernment, being put on a ventilator was a death sentence for 50% of patients who were thus treated, and a great way to lose a quarter to half of one's body weight and muscle mass for those who survived, leading to months of recuperation. 

This is as good a time as any to note that a good friend of mine, a physician, and I worked out a plan: 

1. Since the main killer of Covid patients is pneumonia, and the lung-filling fluids of pneumonia are primarily composed of sugars, at the first symptom it is best to stop eating, ingesting only water, for at least 2-3 days.
2. Rather than fighting a fever, seek to enhance it into the 102°F range (39°C), to support the T-cells that are fighting the virus. He intended to use hot water baths or to get in the car on a sunny day and turn up the heat all the way. I preferred to not use anti-fever medications such as Tylenol.

As it happens, the doctor and I, in spite of being "fully vaccinated", both contracted Covid-19 twice, and survived quite well. In my case, effective antivirals were available by that time, which no doubt helped a lot.

The Swedish epidemiologists didn't stay "in the silo" of epidemiology, but took a more sociological approach. They disdained the notion of locking down a society, and while the rest of the world (or at least Europe and North America and developed Asia) was mandating masks, forbidding church and other gatherings, closing schools, and issuing "6-foot spacing" guidelines, they kept Swedish society almost completely open.

It seems the rest of the world took their cue from an amateur scientist with no epidemiological training, Tomas Puevo, who published an essay, "The Hammer and the Dance", predicting that the attempt to attain herd immunity would result in 10 million deaths in the USA (pp. 124-5). The actual total by end-April 2024 was 1.2 million, and at the end of 2020, about 380,000. But politicians and some scientists worldwide bought into this totally, and we were all locked down.

I'll jump forward to the denouement, which begins on p. 288 with a bit of genuine epidemiology: comparing year-on-year death statistics to discern "excess deaths" that might more properly be attributed to Covid-19 (or any other epidemic agent). 

• In 2020, the total number who died of all causes in Sweden was 98,124. 
• The annual average for 2015-2019 was 90,962. 
• In 1993, the year of a bad flu outbreak ("the Beijing flu"), the figure was 97,008. 
• Swedish population in 2020 and in 1993 (rounded): 10,369,000 and 8,574,000. 
• Divide deaths by population. 
• In 2020: 9,463 per million
• In 1993: 11,310 per million 
• Population average 2015-2019: 10,109,000. Divide it out: 8,998
• Delta per million in 2020 = 465 excess deaths per million
• Delta per million in 1993 = 2,312 (almost 5x!).

Conclusion: The Covid-19 pandemic was far from being "the worst pandemic in 100 years". It was probably second-worse.

Note: CDC data (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00016654.htm) indicates that in an "ordinary" flu season, flu leads to about 10,000 deaths in the USA. In the 1992-1993 seasons, 45,000 such deaths occurred each of the two years. Dividing these figures by a population of about 330 million, we find that flu deaths are "usually" about 30 per million, while the sum of 1992 and 1993 deaths by flu comes to 273. The Beijing flu hit Sweden 8.5 times as hard as it did the USA.

Backing up to p. 223, where the scientific community "turned from evidence-based reasoning to the precautionary principle": One scientist wrote of the reasoning of Anders Tegnell, "If he's wrong, it costs life. If I'm wrong, what harm does it do?" This is a markedly false dichotomy, for the lockdowns and other draconian measures not only did much harm, they cost many lives in themselves, including a great increase in suicide among younger people. The scientist who wrote that statement doesn't deserve to be called scientific.

Even in Sweden, by the end of 2020 the situation was no longer driven by science (protestations by fraudulent scientist Andrew Fauci notwithstanding), but by politics, specifically the totalitarian politics of control and the amassing of power. So-called "cancel culture" took control, such that the final sentence in the chapter titled "Science!" is, "What was regarded as a scientific discussion in Sweden was deemed to be misinformation in other countries." (p. 247). This is still true!

Considering the polarizing politics that arose from this, or rather that took advantage of it, I need to point out that on p. 243 the author quotes Glenn Kessler's article in The Washington Post that claimed Donald Trump issued 16,241 false and misleading claims in his first three years in office. He is apparently unaware that the article was debunked within a week by real journalists at the New York Post and The Atlantic. They found that at most, Mr. Trump lied outright no more than a handful of times; rather, Kessler printed thousands of lies in his article. True to form, Kessler just doubled down and issued further claims. The debunking has been so covered up it is hard to track down the truth. In actuality, since 2015 The WaPo, NYT and other "leading" publishers committed tens of thousands of lies against Donald Trump weekly, and continue to do so.

Let's look at some charts from Worldometer, which is cited a few times in the book. Note that the last update to their figures was April 13, 2024. Reporting has become too sporadic and unreliable for them to continue. I must add that early reporting is also somewhat questionable, and in particular, nothing that was "reported" by China or North Korea (DPRK in Worldometer) should be relied upon.

First, to discuss the summary for the whole world:

The fluctuating death rate shows the progress of the different "waves", ten of them, counting the late, rather tiny, bump from November 2023 to February 2024. The biggest wave of cases, in early 2022, with a wave of deaths that is lower than two of the others, shows how infectious the Omicron variant of the virus was, and how much less deadly it was.

When The Herd was written, the third wave, counted worldwide, was just ending. These figures help us establish some criteria. New daily cases in 2022 peaked at 500 per million persons, and exceeded 100 for much of the year; at all other times there were fewer than 100. The current case rate is 2/million or less.

The worldwide Covid-19 death rate exceeded 1/million persons for all of 2021 and the first third of 2022, and then, as the Delta variant petered out, it dropped very low and apparently remains well below 100 total deaths daily, or some 0.012 deaths daily per million population. As mentioned, this is in line with seasonal influenza. This is why, although some nutty politicians continue calling for restrictions to be imposed again, nobody is paying attention.

Next, let's look at how Sweden fared in all this:

It is worth noting that, while the daily case rate prior to August 2020, worldwide and in Sweden, is almost not visible on these charts, the daily death rates in this period were quite high. The very early death rate exceeded 10% of (known) cases. Two factors combine: figuring out how many actual cases there were was very difficult early on, and the large number of deaths represent "low-hanging fruit", or people who were at death's door already. In the USA, this was exacerbated in five states whose governors required nursing homes to take in people dying of Covid-19, which spread through those nursing homes like wildfire, killing many. I contend that those five governors are the five greatest mass murderers of the early 21st Century.

During the second wave at the end of 2020, Swedish politicians were spooked that Covid-19 deaths had again exceeded 100 per day (10/million in a population of just over 10 million), and as is noted in The Herd, began to swerve from the open stance of the prior year.

The figures in brown at top right of these charts show that the total case rate in Sweden was three times the world average, and the total death rate was just under three times as much.

Arguably, the country worst hit by the pandemic was the USA:

I am not sure whether the lockdowns in the USA were the worst in the Free World, but in my experience they were pretty bad. They varied from state to state. The first wave of deaths was not quite as bad, on a per-capita basis, as for Sweden, but the second wave was clearly worse. After the end of 2021, the USA case rate was much higher than that for Sweden, and this apparently continues, but after the middle of 2022 the Covid-19 death rate in the USA is quite a bit lower than Sweden's.

Compared to the world, the total case rate for the USA is 3.7 times higher and the total death rate is just over 4.0 times as high.

I originally prepared two more similar graphs, for the UK and for Norway, but instead I'll present the following:

The vertical axis is deaths from Covid-19 per million population of a country. Sweden, shown as "Swe", is right in the middle. The USA is to its upper right, with the UK in between. Among more authoritarian European countries, I've marked Bulgaria, Hungary, and Bosnia/Herzegovina, which had three of the four highest death rates in the world. The highest was Peru, for reasons I won't plumb here. By contrast, look at Canada and Norway ("Nor"; in each case except "World" the title is to the right of the dot). Nearly all the dots below them are countries in Africa and poorer parts of Asia, places which had few infections and very low death rates. 

I would think an ambitious epidemiologist could make a career of finding out whether there was something more than dumb luck that "blessed" the Third World. But I also must note that I have, from the beginning, strongly suspected that the USA was targeted by China, which released this bug with malice aforethought. I am flabbergasted by the number of American pundits who defend China at every turn. I know enough Chinese people to have an inkling of their way of thinking. Not every war goes fast. The Chinese way is patient, slow, and—insofar as they can ensure it—irresistible. To their way of thinking, WW3 has begun, and if they can manage it, our enemy will remove our head before we notice we have died.

The core message of this chart is that lockdowns had no discernible effect. Every European nation and most others locked down a great deal more than Norway, which stayed open during that very crucial first year, and has remained more open than most other countries thereafter. As a preacher once said about faith healing, "God may heal you today, but eventually you are going to die of something."

We learned from this pandemic that we have more to fear from totalitarian politicians than we do from a global disease outbreak. Sweden showed that society could remain open, taking only certain rather cautious measures, without harming the citizens either medically or politically. It is hard to tell whether any country achieved herd immunity, but it is certain that with the exception of Sweden, most countries fell victim to herd mentality, from which they are still in a very slow recovery.

The other cDc

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, information technology, hacking, clubs, politics

There were hackers before there were computers. Many were golfers, which is where the term "hacker" originated. It meant "enthusiast", and in golf, a player with more zeal than accuracy would just hack away at the ball. Soon "hacker" meant any non-pro enthusiast in many endeavors, frequently a hobbyist.

Once people could build their own hobby computers in the late 1970's, they also came to be known as hackers, and within a few years, a hacker was someone who programmed for the fun of it (I was one such). Among programmers both amateur and professional (we weren't called coders until the early 2000's), a bit of nicely-written code or a routine that did something really well or even with elegance was called a "good hack" or a "clever hack".

Of course, pushing the ethical envelope comes along with any enthusiastic pursuit, and all kinds of shady behavior showed up. To many folks, locks exist to be picked. In his autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist wrote of a practice he had while he worked on the Manhattan Project, of figuring out the combinations of the locks on all the filing cabinets in his colleagues' offices.

When people who used either computer skills or social-engineering skills to break into computer systems (either determining/stealing a password or finding a way around the password authentication) began to be called "hackers" in news reports, those of us who wore the term proudly protested that they should be called "crackers", by analogy to "safecrackers" (safecracking was what Dr. Feynman was doing). It was to no avail. For close to 40 years, "hacker" has come to mean "criminal interloper".

Curiously, many of the famous "hacking" exploits didn't involve computer skills, but rather fooling someone into revealing privileged information a criminal could use to penetrate a phone system or computer network. But programmers were also busy learning various ways to extract passwords. An early "window into Windows" took advantage of a lazy error by Microsoft programmers in the way passwords were processed. That may have been corrected, but laziness by computer users still provides a wide-open door. Let me explain.

Modern encryption methods produce a "hash", turning a password into a string of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 bytes (when you read of "128-bit encryption", for example, that's 16 bytes). Of course, 32 is best. One would think that would make it hard to decrypt, but brute force attacks work this way:

Someone with access to a server (legal or otherwise) copies the pwd file or its equivalent. It contains hashed passwords for all the accounts. The cracking procedure is to create all possible passwords of a specific length, hash them, and see if any of the hashes match those in the pwd file. Specially-built hardware can generate and test billions of combinations every second. The fastest I've read about can "crack" more than 300 billion per second, using a big stack of GPU's (Graphical processing units).

Do you still use mainly 8-character passwords? I hope you at least use both upper- and lower-case letters. Here are some numbers you need to know.

• 8 lower-case letters, 26^8 = 210 billion possibilities. All passwords of this sort in a pwd file can be found in less than a second.
• 8 letters, both cases, 52^8 = 53 trillion possibilities. The time to crack them all is about 3 minutes.
• 8 letters, both cases, plus digits, 62^8 = 218 trillion. Crack time is now 12 minutes.
• 8 letters, all typeable characters (excluding é, ø, etc), 95^8 = 6.6 quadrillion. Crack time 370 hours, or just over two weeks.

That two-week epic cracking session has already been performed. I suspect someone somewhere has a room full of disks with all the resulting hash decryptions stored in about 160 petabytes. This is why you need passwords longer than 8 characters. I use passwords ranging from 12 to 15 bytes. I call them "million year passwords".

Some of the specialty cracking work was done by members of hacking groups with various quirky names. One group that is probably not quite as unethical as others is one of the oldest, named Cult of the Dead Cow, or cDc. In the book Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, Joseph Menn outlines the formation and history of cDc and many of its prominent members.

Ignoring for the moment the first chapter and last two chapters, the book does dig into fascinating history, that of cDc and a number of other groups, and into the conferences and other events that made them famous, at least in IT circles. It seems that cDc members mostly straddled the boundary, some working with government and industry in a "white hat hacker" rôle (breaking in to show how it is done and to advise on how to prevent future intrusions), and some feeding hardware and software to what I prefer to call the cracking community, the black hats.

I was puzzled by the "save the world" bit in the subtitle, until I read the last two chapters and saw their connection to the first chapter. An early member of cDc was Robert "Beto" O'Rourke (AKA Psychedelic Warlord), who had left the group after around a decade and gone into politics. You may remember him from the Presidential primaries. He hasn't been named yet, but during the Biden campaign last year, Beto was to be Biden's front man for disarming the American people. Whether that makes you love him or hate him depends on your own political leanings.

It became clear that the book is more properly viewed as campaign material for the future political aspirations of Beto O'Rourke. It opens and closes with fund-raising being carried out on his behalf by a prominent member of cDc, and ends with a long musing on his prospects in future (and now, present) administrations and Presidential ambitions.

The history is interesting. The politics, not so much. For that reason, I can't recommend the book.

Why the Democratic Party needs illegal immigrants

kw: politics, abortion, analytical projects

I have been mulling over a curious phenomenon for about twenty years, since I began to gather threads of this idea after the amnesty for illegal immigrants enacted in 1986. At that time there were three million of them. In the past 34 years a further 11-12 million people have entered the U.S. illegally. That is the curious phenomenon: The Democratic Party has increasingly pushed for a further amnesty, and many, perhaps most of the party's national leaders even call for open borders. Open borders would eliminate national sovereignty! I wondered, "Why?"

I think I know why. The population of Democrats and potential Democrats (children born to parents who are Democrats) has not been growing as rapidly as the population of Republicans and potential Republicans. As I figure it, the primary reason behind that trend is legalized abortion, which began January 22, 1973. From that date until the end of 2001, plus the first ten months of 2002, the number of abortions reported to the CDC was a bit over 34.4 million. That is the number of persons who would nearly all be living today, and eligible to vote.

34.4 million. That is more than 10% of the current U.S. population. That is a lot of "missing Americans," who simply faded into the ashcan of history (This does not take account of any children that could have been born to babies aborted before about 1984, some of whom would also be eligible to vote this year).

Who obtained those abortions? For the entire period of about 47 years, Republicans and some Democrats who are people of faith have decried the Roe vs Wade decision, and legislatures in "red states" have enacted numerous laws to restrict abortions. All that time, Democrats, and a very few Republicans, have loudly supported "abortion on demand", and have either fought restrictive legislation or initiated lawsuits to get such laws struck down.

How many of the women who chose abortion were Democrats and how many were Republican? It is inconceivable that there is an exact 50:50 split. Millions of the women who chose abortion were Republicans, but even more were Democrats, but what is the proportion? It is certain that Democrats were the majority, whether it is a slender majority or a great majority. Republican women have the hurdle of belonging to a political party that is vocally anti-abortion, and usually also belonging to a religious establishment that opposes abortion. Fewer Democrats are religious, so in general there is no such hurdle for a Democratic woman.

Based upon my experience with many people of all political stripes, I think the proportion is between 60:40 and 55:45. It is quite possible that the real ratio is even more skewed, but being a conservative, I'll be conservative in my estimates. This table of "missing" voters shows the implications.

The column "Difference" shows the impact. I estimate that if there had been hardly any abortions, legal or otherwise, since 1973, the number of Democrats eligible to vote would be between 19 million and 20.7 million more than there are today, while the number of such Republicans would be between 13.8 million and 15.5 million. Many "purple states" would have become solidly "blue," as would the country as a whole.

The apparent "loss" of between 3.4 million and almost 7 million Democrat voters over the past forty years is tough to make up. Thus the need for illegal immigrants. It is no surprise that in border states, and to some extent in the tier of "next-to-border" states, illegal immigrants can get more "services" than retired veterans. It is a national shame that homeless veterans are living in the streets not far from nice houses filled with criminals (that's what illegal aliens are).

The cynical Democrats look upon the twelve million illegals as a gold mine. It is worth spending tons of money on them, all the while reminding them that it is the Democrats who are "caring" for them. Whenever they get amnesty, and voting rights soon after that, they will remember. If just five million of them begin to consistently vote Democratic, there will be little chance for anything resembling bipartisan politics to be found anywhere in this country. They will be free to enact whatever they want without effective opposition. This alone has a greater potential to bring an end to liberal Democracy in America than any other factor.

Truth be told, there are at least a few billion political views

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, political science, textbooks

In addition to The Politics Book, which I reviewed about two weeks ago, I got Political Science for Dummies, by Marcus A. Stadelmann, PhD. The former book is mainly on the practical side, presenting history and practice. This book is more theoretical, plus broader in scope, because it deals more with international politics, and it is not until the fourth section (Chapters 14-17) that we find an explanation of the development of modern political camps across the spectrum. It is also more "textbook-y", and thus less pleasant to read, but I got through it.

When I took a Civics course in Seventh Grade, we learned this political spectrum, from Left to Right:

Radical – Liberal – Moderate – Conservative – Reactionary

However, other terms, that perhaps belong on different spectra, have showed up and are being bandied about as though people understood them. I suspect most do not. I see terms such as Progressive, Fascist, Authoritarian, and Totalitarian. We also hear much lately about Socialism, a little about Communism, and even less about Capitalism.

From my reading in recent months, and particularly from Chapters 16 and 17, I learned that modern Conservatism (I'll skip the fancy font from here on), in the U.S. at least, is derived from Classical Liberalism; that Pre-FDR Conservatism was a kind of Fascism in disguise; that Progressivism in the time of Teddy Roosevelt was a Moderate-and-rightward stance, which Wilson moved leftward, and FDR moved even further leftward, almost into Radicalism. That shift was carried out primarily in the Democratic Party, which in the early 1800's was so pro-Slavery that the Civil War resulted, and which created Jim Crow America for about 80 years, but then morphed into a super-Liberal party by embracing the Civil Rights Movement (mainly after the murder of Dr. King), jumping in front of that parade as though they'd created it. This movement to the Left had the result that the Republican Party, which was originally Liberal in the Classical Liberal sense, was labeled Conservative. Republicans eventually embraced the label. But from about 1940 to 1970, it was hard to tell who was a Liberal and who was a Conservative, even with a scorecard.

(Side note: A Conservative conserves, keeping what works already, and making change slowly. Environmentalism is at its core a Conservative value, for example. Liberalism is more about freedom than about change, but Liberals are more willing to embrace change, particularly in the direction of more freedom for a greater number. Progressivism as now practiced is for changing everything, discarding the old regardless of its possible value.)

The left-shift of the D party, while the R party largely stayed put, has been called "switching places", but that's only if you accept that the midpoint between the political stance of the R's and the D's has been a straight line through time axis. It was anything but.

Where do Socialism and Capitalism come in? They are not political entities, but economic. When Marx and Engels published their theory of Communism in The Communist Manifesto, more than 170 years ago, they thought a changeover to Communism would be almost automatic. As it turned out, Socialism is so against the grain of human nature that it has to be enforced, and Communism as they envisioned it was rendered moot by welfare programs that modified Capitalism without eliminating it. So Communism changed, primarily under the iron thumb of Joseph Stalin, leading to the modern understanding that Socialism has to be enforced by a strong central government, and such enforcement is Communism. I am reminded of this statement:

If people were perfect, Socialism would work; but if people were perfect, Socialism wouldn't be needed. (No source found)

I do know who said this:

If a man under age thirty is not a Socialist, he has no heart. If a man over forty is still a Socialist, he has no head. —Winston Churchill

Politics and Economics overlap, and feed on one another. Why? I summarize them thus:

• Politics is about the use of power (I like to say, it is about forcing people to do what most people will do anyway)
• Economics is about the allocation of money (more broadly, resources)

Money by itself is useless, unless you have the power to make use of it. Power by itself is useless, if you can't afford to engage it. They need each other.

By taking a step back, we can identify the core tenets of true Liberalism, now called Conservatism in the U.S.:

• Liberty for persons, independent of one's citizenship.
• Minimal government interference in the private affairs of persons.
• Each person is responsible for his or her own decisions and actions. Corollaries:
• If such actions result in damage to another, the government may sanction the offender.
• Persons may request legal remedies for damages against an offender.
• Taxation is kept to the minimum required to carry out governmental functions.

Those last few items indicate that some amount of government is necessary, to prevent anarchy, or the rule (at least locally) by the strongest. How the powers of government are defined and shared with the people are the subject of most political writings. The usual framework is that laid out by Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago. Without getting into the details here, the usual, and growing, preferred form of government is the Constitutional Republic, in which the Constitution defines the power-sharing arrangement. Long ago I learned this proverb about the difference between Republicanism (representative Democracy) and Communism:

In a Democratic Republic, whatever is not forbidden is allowed. In a Communist Dictatorship, whatever is not mandatory is forbidden.

Look at the four items listed above, ignoring for the moment the two sub-points. More could be added, but these are sufficient to show that modern American Conservatism has taken the mantle of Classical Liberalism, and still holds it.

A conclusion the book's author reaches echoes that of a number of philosophers of politics: while many nations carry on republicanism within their borders, the world as a whole is anarchical, in which the nations, thought of as persons with a great variation in power and control, act selfishly. Although wars for territorial acquisition are now outlawed by (mostly) general agreement (AKA treaties held by the United Nations), other kinds of wars happen. These days war is more likely to occur along ideological lines. Thus, we've been in a slow-burning World War III since the first set of attacks by Muslim extremists against America in the late 1990's. The attacks of 9/11/2001 were their main successful "battle". Don't think Radical Islam has given up. They've been beaten back temporarily. If nothing else works, Islam in general has a program of outbreeding the rest of the world until it can become the new superpower.

Looking inward, I find that, while I have thought of myself as Conservative for decades, I find I am actually a Liberal, in the classical sense. In the U.S. I pass for Conservative, but I suspect my political and economic views are considered Liberal and Capitalist in the rest of the world.

Those being called "Liberal" by the "Conservative" talk show hosts aren't Liberals, not really. They are Totalitarians. Consider the four points above again, with their contrasts:

• Individual Liberty versus Nanny Statism that "protects" people from themselves.
• Minimal governmental interference versus Total government control.
• Personal responsibility versus Universal guilt.
• Minimal taxation versus Income redistribution.

The items on the right are the fundamental tenets of the leaders of today's Democratic Party. That is about as far from Liberalism as you can get. Politically, it is Fascism. Economically, it is Communism.

I have done more ranting than reviewing here. I'm not ashamed of that. The current state of affairs is worth a good rant. This book just gave me the tools to rant more accurately.

Politics in a nutshell

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, textbooks

As the 2020 general election approached, I found myself reading about political science, and getting confused. As one proverb has it, the two major American political parties "switched sides" a half-century ago. I found this isn't strictly true. I knew already that the Republican Party was originally liberal, with "liberal" referring to personal liberty for individuals, and that from that stance, slaves were individuals who deserved liberty. The Democratic Party of the time was considered conservative, focusing on "conserve" what is and don't change it.

Then I learned that classical liberals stood for several critical matters, principally:

• Individual Liberty
• Personal Responsibility
• Small Government
• Low Taxes

Furthermore, classical liberalism was most prevalent in England in the 1600's, and came to America where it became American conservatism over the next century or so. The four matters listed above are considered "conservative" by modern commentators.

So did the R's and the D's really switch sides? No, in the post-WW2 period, when the civil rights movement began to prevail, leading Democrats were against integration of society and defended the Jim Crow legislation that subjugated the Blacks. But after about 1970, the D's changed. The earlier tension during anti-war (anti-Vietnam war) demonstrations, between "America, love it or leave it!" and "America, change it or lose it!", led to the "change it" folks going to law school and running for office. These neoliberals—they avoid the term "radicals"—have since taken over the Democratic Party and embraced the label "liberal", seeing that the Republican Party had settled into being called "conservatives". Classically, the R's have actually remained liberal, as the term is properly defined, while the D's jumped two spaces to the left to become radicals. As I write this we are awaiting the outcome of the election, with little clear direction as to what will emerge.

To help myself think through these things I got a couple of books about politics and political science. The first is The Politics Book, published by DK, a Random House imprint, with a host of contributors and editors. As with other The X Book volumes by DK, the subtitle is "Big ideas simply explained."

I included the book cover, something I seldom do, to show the style of the illustrations within. I call this "brutal chic", and it reminds me of Soviet poster art of the 1950's. Inside, each major era is prefaced by a two-page spread of gigantic black text on stunning red. I wonder if the editors know that a red/black banner symbolizes Anarcho-Syndicalism?

According to the book's glossary, Syndicalism is a relatively new ideology, less than 100 years, described thus:

"An early 20th-century ideology that emerged as an alternative to capitalism and socialism. …it advocated the seizure of a nation's means of production—and the overthrow of its government—in a general strike by workers' unions, and the organization of production through federation of local syndicates."

Based on that description, the more recent prefix "Anarcho-" is redundant. The ideology is popular in Europe. May it stay there!

The book has articles between one and six pages in length based on the writings and ideas of 102 major political figures and philosophers, from Confucius to Robert Pape, plus short items (~100 words) on another 37 persons.

Based just on the quantity of coverage, the compilers are most sympathetic to liberal and neoliberal and socialist ideologies. I was hoping for better explanation of conservatism, but the handful of items are sloppy and uninformative. Of course, I understand that the English conservatism of the 1600's and 1700's didn't migrate to America, or rather, Toryism died away after 1776. But the shift from classical liberalism to American conservatism is unmentioned in this book.

I read the book carefully, realizing its bias, as an exercise in "know your enemy." I retain my orientation to classical liberalism, while adding that I strongly support conservative foreign policy and a strong defense. Both R's and D's have allowed the Federal government to get too big and too intrusive. I call it creeping totalitarianism. If it can be rolled back without bloodshed, that's good. I fear it cannot.

Peashooter versus straw man

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, governance, polemics

A relative who dearly wishes to turn me against President Trump sent me a book. He included a note that he hoped I would not find it "fake news." I promised to read it, and over a couple of weeks, alongside reading other books that are easier to stomach, I did read it, all of it. Luckily it is rather short.

Afterwards I recalled something I heard once, "The elephant labored and brought forth a mouse." I've used that line to describe the Mueller Report on the supposed collusion with Russia by Candidate Trump. Let's see if it applies to this book: The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.

The book has two prevailing themes. Firstly, it presents a dark picture of the "transition" from the Obama administration to the Trump administration in 2017. Secondly, it outlines as praiseworthy the lives of several people in various departments of the Federal bureaucracy. Before long I put this analogy to the pattern: art analysis. Perhaps you had a class in Art Appreciation in high school or junior college. It used to be a common "easy A" class for college freshmen who needed to keep their GPA above 2.0.

There are two ways to analyze a work of art, whether a painting by Renoir, a sculpture by Rodin, or a Shakespeare play or sonnet. One is to examine every bit in great detail, to understand the artist's technique, and the other is to look more broadly at the themes, to discern the artist's aim or goal. Taking the first method to an extreme, one might literally disassemble the work at a nearly atomic level. With this in mind, I liken The Fifth Risk to the result of looking at parts of a line drawing, a caricature, and picking off all the bits of black ink and gathering them into a little bowl; followed by snipping out some of the bits of white paper, untouched by the ink, and gathering them into another bowl. With the two bowls in front of him, the author then described them in "See how black these are!" and "See how white those are!" terms. The original drawing itself has been left a sliced-up mess in which no discernible pattern or image remains.

One reason the book took me extra time to read is that I checked into many of the claims the author makes. The first, that there wasn't much of a transition, and that its leader, Chris Christie of New Jersey, was fired along with several of his team, can be largely substantiated by public statements former Governor Christie made during interviews in 2017 and 2018. However, he clearly missed the point behind the firing. Candidate Trump had promised to "drain the swamp." The initial team was moving towards perpetuating it. President-Elect Trump had no intention to replace outgoing swamp creatures with more swamp creatures, so he left many of the bureaus to run themselves until he could get other matters out of the way. He has a long history of letting people who are doing a job "well enough to avoid jail" continue while he puts out fires elsewhere.

This is an important concept. He seems to agree with a statement attributed to General Norman Schwarzkopf: "People don't go to work every day intending to do a bad job." Let's put that together with one of my proverbs: "Does the Devil know he is evil?" Contrary to the public caricature of Donald Trump, he has great street smarts. He knows that most people do a good job regardless of the administration under which they work, but some people think they are doing a good job, even that they are doing God's will, when they do the Devil's work. James Comey and Robert Mueller are two such.

Let's look a little further. I checked into other claims the author makes. I'll just touch on one to show a principle. Pages 69-77 are devoted to discussing the Hanford nuclear site, where a lot of plutonium was made, and the cleanup that has been carried on for many years since the site was shut down. The author claims that President Trump has proposed cutting the budget for cleaning up the Hanford site. It didn't take me long to find an article at energy.gov by Dan Brouillette (look under Hanford Cleanup Process). Briefly, the Plutonium Finishing Plant building was demolished and a large amount of contaminated soil was moved away from the Columbia River to a safer location. These reduced ongoing costs. Budget cuts the President introduced were based on the projected reductions.

This is a typical case. For all the cases I could check the reason a decision was made was not mentioned by the book's author, or the item was based on hearsay and truly is Fake News. This is not collecting black ink from a line drawing. This is adding black ink where there was none. In the end, I find that most of the black chips in the bowl of black ink are similarly false.

Do I think that Donald Trump is some kind of saint? No, not at all. I was not a fan of his in 2016, but I voted for him because a shuddered at the horrendous thought of a Hilary Clinton presidency. It didn't take long for him to win my approval. The reasons are listed (sadly, with numerous typos) in the web site Promises Made, Promises Kept. A few months ago I downloaded the list and dropped it into a Word document (default settings: 11 pt Calibri). It fills most of seven pages.

The "portrait" with which Michael Lewis began was a caricature, and a poor one at that. How does he do describing the people he admires, the ones who did keep things running in spite of the President's "benign neglect" (my term; I am sure author Lewis would object)? Cutting through the tendency to hagiography, I find a pattern. They are all dedicated, all found themselves practically backing into a job in government service, all doing a good job with little direction, either before or after the "transition".

Let me ask this: Why do they all still have their jobs (those who have stayed)? If they are part of the swamp, why haven't they been targeted and in some way forced out. I think most of us know that you can't fire someone from a Civil Service job unless they commit a felony and are convicted. But it is quite possible to exile someone to a useless position and let boredom have its way with them. To answer: the majority of the Swamp Creatures are the uppermost management … the scum rises to the top.

And while I think of it, was there really some kind of purge of "climate change believers"? It seems there was indeed a list-making exercise, not of all who "believe" in climate change, but of those who cry "Wolf!" about it, when that's outside their bailiwick. I note that there are plenty of folks in place who still do so, and the President hasn't "purged" them.

Here are a few things that would have happened already if President Donald J. Trump were the kind of anti-science tyrant that his enemies claim:

• James Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan and Andrew McCabe would have been not only fired, but taken out and shot, all during the first few weeks after Trump took office.
• Robert Mueller would have been fired within the first month of his "investigation". Anybody objecting would have been jailed.
• Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler would have been jailed or shot, a year or two later.
• Barack Obama, both Clintons and Joseph Biden would be in prison as we speak, charged with treason.
• The Department of Energy (and a few others) would have been summarily disbanded.
• Thermonuclear bombs would have been used against Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.

The fact that none of these things has happened should give Trump haters pause.

I looked into the bio of Michael Lewis and found that his prior books, including a best-seller or two, were about sports. "Cobbler, stick to thy Last." The Fifth Risk is barely 200 pages in length. It has a prologue and three chapters, but no index. As noted above, the research is thorough in a specialized way, but the result is sloppy and grossly misleading. Somehow, author Lewis thinks it hilarious to take a cheap shot at Brian Klippenstein, about his liking for sheep farming; the ugliest cheap shot I've ever seen in print. One would think his mother trained him better. He may be an expert in sports, but in politics and governance he is a dilettante. He isn't an elephant who brought forth a mouse, he is a weasel.

If you hate President Trump you will hate this book

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, polemics, treason, presidents

My father had a good friend, a doctor, a few years older, named Henry. He and his wife were cheerful and usually optimistic. Being Austrian, one might think he'd be conservative; he remembered the Nazis, after all. But his politics were left-wing. When George W. Bush was elected, Henry freaked out. He hated President Bush. Soon he was sleeping poorly, staying up late at night, pacing in his living room, thinking hateful thoughts about the President. He would even groan and gnash his teeth. My father said to him, "Henry, nothing you can think or do will cause George Bush to lose a single night's sleep. Your anger is killing you, but you can't hurt him." It did no good. Henry's last years were bitter and cramped by hatred.

Today we have a President who has a devoted following of two kinds. Firstly, those who voted for him remain devoted to him and his policies and the promises he made, a great many (most?) of which he has been able to keep. Secondly, we have those who hate him and fear him in equal measure, some of whom actually can do him some harm because they have political power, and by their misuse of that power have thwarted his ability to keep some of the promises he made.

Today we have a party with the name Democratic, and millions of voters who identify as Democrats, but the party has a leadership who are fanatically devoted to utterly anti-democratic policies and measures. Although the Democratic party originally favored a combination of liberal (pro-agrarian and labor) and conservative (small government and anti-elitist) policies, the party had become staunchly conservative (in a negative way) and pro-slavery within a generation, and it came to dominate the slave-dependent South. Only under the influence of William Jennings Bryan in the 1890's did leading Democrats pivot to embrace and appropriate the liberalism and progressivism of the young Republican Party (Republican Theodore Roosevelt was the first influential progressive). Even then, this took time.

Compared to today, the Democratic Party of the mid-1900's was conservative, in spite of the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. President John Kennedy was conservative; he initiated the largest tax cut in history, up to his time, and he faced down Russia and Cuba at a critical time. Lyndon Johnson moved the party to the left, and soon many radicals of "the sixties" became Democrats. It is these who have largely taken over the Democrat party of the early 21^st Century. Riding the coattails of Kennedy's popularity, but being utterly opposed to his policies, these neo-Democrats charmed most media outlets, which were already left-leaning.

Fast-forward two generations. The media of today, both TV, radio, print, and podcast, are mostly beyond liberal; they are leftists. The stories and reports they disseminate about Democrat party leaders are 90-95% fawningly positive; the stories and reports they disseminate about Republicans and about conservatives in general are 90-95% negative, and typically contain more innuendo than fact. These media have become the propaganda wing of the Democrat party.

The Democrat party is led by former leftist activists of "the sixties" who seek to break down everything that is unique and good about the United States of America. They are the kind of people who tried to kill me and conservative friends of mine when we heckled them as they harangued students on college campuses during "the sixties" (I survived two potentially lethal attacks).

Today many registered Democrats, particularly younger ones, self-identify as Liberals. On another occasion I'll write at more length about this: Listen, Young Democrats, none of the visible leaders of the Democrat party are liberals. Liberals favor people being liberated (like freeing the slaves and giving the vote to blacks and women); Leftists are all about controlling people, aiming to enslave the entire US population. Liberals believe in people being free to make their own choices; Leftist want to make every choice for you. The Bill or Rights is a Liberal document, designed to counterbalance excessive Federalism; Leftists hate the Bill of Rights.

Leftists were well on their way towards taking over America, probably with near-permanence, when they chose Hilary Clinton as their Presidential candidate in 2015. Her job was going to be to nail down the "leftist lid" on American conservatism, to push through legislatively the measures enacted by more than 250 executive orders issued by President Obama. She was such a poor campaigner, she lost to someone who is called "the orange clown". President Trump ran a well-crafted campaign, based on a better understanding of the Electoral system, and it is most accurate to say, not that he won, but that she lost. The Left will never forgive Trump for beating their anointed champion.

The Left began a campaign to destroy Donald J. Trump the day he announced his candidacy. Amazingly, CNN was once guardedly favorable to Mr. Trump. When CNN was founded in 1980, Donald Trump was already a celebrity. He was already well known for his hype; he loved superlative adjectives like "lovely", "wonderful", "the best". He was also well known for keeping promises, and for adhering to the letter of the law (something he is blamed for by the Left!). He had this in common with wealthy people of any political persuasion: he donated to prominent Democrats and Republicans both. He was a friend of the Clintons, being seen in public with them from time to time. During the past forty years, he has been registered as a Republican, a Democrat, "none", and a Republican again. After his latest party switch, CNN led the leftist media in lampooning him every time they could. After his candidacy announcement, CNN led the leftist media to become part of "the Resistance".

It is these leftist media that President Trump calls "fake news." One of their own published an article in the Washington Post last year that purported to show that Trump had told 10,000 lies in three years in office. A closer look by both left-ish and right-ish fact checkers showed that 75%-90% of the "lies" were actually true, just using "hyped" adjectives at worst. The rest were mostly made up out of whole cloth by the "journalist", who is seen to be a bigger liar than the President. And in fact, counting TV, Radio, podcasts and print media, more than 10,000 lies against candidate Trump and President Trump have been told every day since mid-2016 (and perhaps earlier).

The focused media and political hatred of candidate, then President Trump is outlined in some detail in a new book by David Horiwitz, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win. Do take note that the subtitle doesn't begin with "How" or "Why". The author is too canny to fall into that trap. Why write a manual for your opponents to use against you? Author Horowitz has considerable credibility as a convert to conservatism, having been a strong proponent of the New Left prior to 1975.

The author details the numerous avenues by which the Left has tried to derail the Trump presidency and cripple his work. Quite frankly, nearly all the leading members of the Democrat party, and of the "never-Trump" Republicans, and of the entrenched bureaucracy, are guilty of treason. 

I could go into detail about the content of the 14 chapters, or some of them at least. I'd rather you read the book, at least if you aren't a Trump-hater. To the Trump-haters out there: I could exhort you to read it, but I wish to spare you further heartburn. You are probably going to suffer Henry's fate anyway, but why make it worse? I would only wish for those people to read it who are moderately anti-Trump; it may convert some.

The only chapter I'll discuss is 13, "What Trump Did". The Leftist media would have you believe he is a failure. So what has he done? More to the point, of the things he promised, what has he accomplished?

• He promised to "drain the swamp". This is the hardest, and he has only begun. All but a handful of the elected Senators and Representatives are corrupt to the core. Removing them requires exposing their corruption to the voters in their states. The entrenched bureaucracy includes tens of thousands who cannot be fired, who don't care who the President is, only how to retain their power and control over as many people as possible. But the "fireable" ones are being fired, starting with James Comey, John Brennan and Andrew McCabe. Their replacements may not be able to fire the swamp creatures that work for them, but they can curtail their evil.
• Prior Presidents of both parties, and the Congress with them, have engaged in a series of very unfavorable trade treaties and other unfavorable relationships. Candidate Trump promised to do away with the treaties. President Trump did so. In no special order, President Trump:
• terminated TPP
• initiated tariffs against China for intellectual piracy
• removed the US from the Paris Agreement (which favored China and India and punished the US)
• exited the Iran deal
• withdrew from UNESCO (Obama had already cancelled US funding for it)
• terminated NAFTA, which had sucked numerous industries offshore
• pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, which is blatantly anti-human-rights and particularly anti-semitic
• stopped supporting UNRWA, which "aids" Palestinians, thus enabling more anti-Israel terror
• President Obama halfway defunded the US military. President Trump restored that support, and more. In fact, President Trump has shown more overt support for the military than the four prior Presidents combined. How many know that when military casualties are brought to Dover Air Force Base, he is nearly always there to pay homage? To give credit where it is due, most prior Presidents have gone to Dover for this purpose, at least at times, as did President Obama, just once.
• President Trump persuaded 26 of 27 NATO countries to increase their financial support of NATO, closer (but not all the way) to their agreed-upon obligation.
• He enforced the "Obama red line" against Syria's use of chemical weapons, which Obama had not enforced, by bombing a Syrian air field. A year later, when Syria used chemical weapons (against Syrian citizens) again, Trump ordered another missile strike, in conjunction with France and England. This time Syrian chemical weapons production was crippled.
• He signed a measure that directed relief efforts in Iraq and Syria to specifically help Christian and other religious minorities.
• He hasn't winced from using the terms "jihad" or Islamic terrorism" or "war on terror", which were eschewed by President Obama.
• He placed sanctions on Hezbollah.
• When Pakistan became openly non-cooperative with anti-terrorism efforts, President Trump withheld nearly $1.5 billion in promised aid.
• Obama created ISIS. Trump destroyed it.
• The book describes several measures intended to give heartburn to Russia and V. Putin. My own research has uncovered more than 50 such measures. A quarter of these are economic sanctions of various kinds. He also withdrew from the IRNF nuclear treaty.
• The Trump administration approved the export of lethal arms to Ukraine (more heartburn for Putin…and the Left claims Trump is working for Putin!).

Let's see. I am halfway through the chapter. He has used his "signing pen" a great deal! Is that enough to set aside the notion of a "do nothing" President? This thought sits side-by-side with a view of him as "doing tons of dangerous things". Both can't be true. In fact, neither is true.

To see more, check out 

https://www.promiseskept.com/, where hundreds of actions are gathered under 14 headings.

I wonder: What might have been accomplished had there not been such determined opposition and insurrection against the Trump administration? He seems to have what I call Glacial Inertia. It may not seem like he is moving very fast, but on a broad front, he cannot be stopped, and a lot gets done.

A great value of the book is showing the treasonous behavior of the Left that falsely calls itself a Democratic Party. What might ensue in the next few months (just four, as I write)? Look how quickly the coronavirus scare transformed the country in the past four months. Consider the effects of the rioting that consumed much of June, 2020—though I think it will be seen as a flash-in-the-pan within another month or so.

Will Donald Trump truly smash the Left in the coming election? I sincerely hope so.

Political Math - Not so Clear-Cut

kw: politics, crime, population, economy, trends, charts

I have heard it claimed for years, by various "conservative" commentators, that the most crime-ridden American cities are led by Democratic administrations. I finally decided to gather some data and find out for myself.

The four pairs of charts presented below summarize data gathered from sources as reliable as I could manage to find. All were online. The basis was a table of crime statistics for 80 cities with population greater than 250,000. Based on data compiled by the FBI, it is found at this Wikipedia page. The population estimates are for 2009, and the crime statistics are mostly from 2014 (a few from 2013). Not perfect, but a usable start. U.S. population rose 4% from 2009 to 2014. Thus the numbers used are likely in error by no more then a few percent.

I also gathered the basic economic factor, GDP per capita, from the OpenData Network, where you can ask a question like "What is the GDP per capita for New York metro area?". The result is a map showing US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) with the area highlighted that you asked for. But then you can move the map around and click on each area of interest to see a summary for it. These data are also for 2014 (mostly). The highest GDP/person is for Oakland, California, just over $100,000/yr.

I used information found in Wikipedia and various city and county web sites to determine the political environment for each of the 80 cities. This was the most time consuming. On occasion, it is pretty easy to get the party affiliation for the Mayor and the City Council, or its equivalent, but usually only the Mayor's affiliation can easily be found. So I relied instead on the voting records that are conveniently compiled in the Wikipedia page for every county, to determine the county's political leaning, and the combination of the Governor, Lt. Governor (if there is one), and the congressional delegations, to determine the state's political leaning. I used 0, ½, or 1 for Republican, Moderate/Independent/Mixed, or Democratic, for each case. Then I combined these numbers into a single factor in which the Mayor had the most weight and the county had a little more weight than the state. I bucketed these into these categories that are shown in each chart's legend:

• Strong R (Red) – City, state, and county are represented by all or nearly all Republicans
• Mod. R (Magenta) – Significantly more R than D, but R not totally dominant
• Mixed (Purple) – Somewhere between 60/40 and 40/60
• Mod. D (Light Blue) – Significantly more D than R, but D not totally dominant
• Strong D (Dark Blue) – All three represented by all or nearly all Democrats

Now to the charts. First, Violent Crime in aggregate, normalized at incidents per 100,000 persons for the whole year:

You can click on this image to see it at full size (1672x519). Right away this seems to confirm the claims of the commentators I had heard. There is hardly anything but blue to be found above 1,000 violent crimes per 100,000 persons. However, the situation with the "Mixed" group is interesting. Crime is not in the lowest range, but the average range for these is the lowest of the five groups. And the situation for Democratically-controlled and -influenced cities is more nuanced. Many of the cities with the lowest crime also lean Democratic. For this category of crime, the safest city is Virginia Beach (Strong R), with 146, and the most dangerous is Detroit (Strong D), with 1,989.

The style of the Democratic politics clearly varies a lot, and this is worth looking into. Not that I am likely to do so any time soon. One thing I do happen to know: Two cities in Minnesota are right in the middle, Minneapolis with 1,012 and St. Paul with 663. A number of Strong R and Mod. R cities are also in this range. Democrats in Minnesota belong to a party called "Democrat-Farm-Labor", jokingly called "Democrat For Life". They are more conservative than "RINO" Republicans and even most of the so-called "Republican Establishment", while Minnesota Republicans are typically staunch conservatives, well to the right of the GOP Establishment.

I had thought that crime statistics might show some trend with city size, or with economy, but I see no clear trend here. Nonetheless, both parameters serve as a way of spreading out the data so that's how they'll be shown here and below.

Such nuances demand a deeper look than just one crime statistic. Knowing that homicide trends with violent crime in general, and is the crime that gets the most news play, I charted homicides:

Other than Chandler, Arizona (0.4 homicides per 100,000), the Strong R and Mod. R points all plot in the lower 2/3 of a bubble outlines by the other three categories, particularly Strong D. The upper part of the chart is dominated by blue markers. The "killingest" city in 2014 was Saint Louis (50 per 100K), not Chicago. I don't have current statistics to determine if this was still so in 2016, the year everyone is talking about. Thus, although details vary, this chart tells the same story as the prior one, that the Reds are a bit safer than the Blues, but the Purples are, by a small margin, the safest overall.

Let's look at crimes that are less violent. First, burglaries:

This is very interesting. Here, nobody "wins", at least no political party "wins". A handful of cities come off as very safe, led by, of all places, New York City, with 186 burglaries per 100,000. The place in which your home is most likely to be burgled is, by a small margin, Cleveland, with 1,788 burglaries per 100,000. But Toledo and Cincinnati are right up there with it (maybe there is something about Ohio…), and also Memphis. If there is any trend at all, it is that the Mixed category is still the safest in general, but only slightly.

Finally, let's look at auto theft. This is usually nonviolent, but I suspect carjacking was included in the statistic:

This resembles the first two charts a little bit more, in that Strong R and Mod. R cluster below Strong D and Mod. D. But, again, Mixed clusters below the average of all the others, though two such places crept above 500 thefts per 100,000: Bakersfield (621) and Dallas (524). The safest place to park your car is Virginia Beach (80) and the least safe is Oakland (1590).

These charts broadly support the contention that the most crime-ridden cities do tend to be led by Democrats, and in the few cases I looked into, the Democratic party has been entrenched there for decades. However, clearly not all Democrats are created equal! Several of the cities with overwhelming Democratic environments are among the safest cities in America.

I just had to devise one more chart. I normalized and combined the four statistics used above into one number. A dangerous generalization, to be sure, but here it is:

I know, I ought to have swapped the horizontal axis to put the R's on the right, but perhaps it is healthier for our mind to reverse such a convention once in a while. First, the five cities with the lowest Index scores:

• Virginia Beach, Virginia (0.331): P.E. = 0.25, Mod. R
• Plano, Texas (0.343): P.E. = 0.5, Mixed
• Chandler, Arizona (0.369): P.E. = 0, Strong R
• El Paso, Texas (0.465): P.E. = 0.55, Mixed
• Chula Vista, California (0.503): P.E. = 1, Strong D

And the five cities that "top the chart" with the highest Index scores:

• Detroit, Michigan (3.55): P.E. = 0.8, Strong D
• St. Louis, Missouri (3.22): P.E. = 0.8, Strong D
• Oakland, California (2.78): P.E. = 1, Strong D
• Cleveland, Ohio (2.62): P.E. = 0.8, Strong D
• Memphis, Tennessee (2.57): P.E. = 0.65, Mod. D

Is there any point in drawing further conclusions?

Three for a reason

kw: omnibus review, book reviews, nonfiction, science fiction, space fiction, naturalists, apes, politics, polemics

Even reviewing three books I'll have to keep it short. The injury in my fingertip is slow to fully recover. In order to type I put a pressure bandage over it; that reduces edema.

These are three quite disparate books! First, interstellar fiction at its best:

A lovely bit of space opera: Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. Niven has made his name with epic stories of immense space mysteries, in settings where starships are a bit like clipper ships: costly but in frequent use; and alien constructions of incredible size are discovered and explored.

Several years ago in Bowl of Heaven these authors introduced something even more huge than the Ringworld of Niven's "Known Space" books. The Bowl is somewhat wider than Earth's orbit, and its technology uses a captive K-class star for illumination and propulsion. Having a surface area a few million times that of a typical planet, all in perpetual daylight, such a world can support trillions or quadrillions of beings.

The story is a drama of interactions between the humans who have arrived at the Bowl and the various species they encounter there, particularly the elephantine, birdlike "Astronomers" who are nominally in charge. As the story reached its climax I remembered a 1967 episode of Star Trek, "The Squire of Gothos", in which an all-powerful being turns out to be a misbehaving child once his parents intervene at the end. As always in work by both Niven and Benford (and collaborations), we find a bracing panoply of alien minds and cultures.

The Bowl itself is of more interest to me. Several times the characters discuss its dynamic equilibrium. Rather tricky that, holding a star with the Bowl's gravity while inducing it to form a jet—similar in principle to the nucleus of an active galaxy, just star-sized—to propel both Bowl and star across the galaxy. The jet's forces counteract the gravity that would draw star and Bowl together. What I didn't see discussed is how they make it turn around to slow down. The stability of the system turns out to depend on plasma-beings called the Diaphanous. One one hand, I first thought this a copout, but it also emphasizes Niven's determination to imagine some kind of intelligent life for every possible environment. The centers of stars and the surfaces of neutron stars await…but not the interiors of black holes; that's been done.

Second, encounters of a quite different sort underlie Kindred Beings: What Seventy-Three Chimpanzees Taught Me About Life, Love, and Connection by Sheri Speede. This remarkable woman first became a veterinarian, but yearned for something more worthwhile than spaying pets and treating heartworm. An opportunity to visit Cameroon opened up a new world to her, and at the age of forty, she jumped in with both feet.

There are several threads in the book, including lots of autobiography. I'll leave it to her to describe the twists and turns of her own life. She had been blessed with an upbringing and early experiences that helped her cope with the very difficult lifestyle in rural Cameroon. Her passion has been to set up and maintain a sanctuary for orphaned and rescued chimps. Now you can learn of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center here.

The book opens with, and later develops the background story leading to, the death of Dorothy, among the first of the rescued apes. Dorothy became a kind of tribal matriarch to the sanctuary chimpanzees. When she died, Dr. Speede had to perform an autopsy, but afterward, wheeled her covered body by the compound for the other apes to view her. The clear grief on their faces was captured in a photograph that has done more to crack open the anthropological community, and the world at large, to the understanding that chimpanzees have emotions very much like ours. No longer can anyone get away with claiming that "they don't feel in ways we can relate to" or "they don't really feel pain" and so forth.

Creating and running a nonprofit of any kind, particularly an ape rescue enterprise in Africa, takes an incredible amount of fundraising and much time-consuming political effort. The author was favored with a network of support that built up quickly, and the time was ripe for a logging company and numerous regional and tribal chiefs to encourage and support the work. Still, there was a level of effort and commitment that would have deterred her had she had any idea what she was getting into. Those who do great things are often blessed by this kind of holy ignorance. They do the impossible simply because they don't yet know it is impossible.

I wept often while reading, sometimes in joy, sometimes in pain. I suspect, so will you.  I would hope better of my fellow humans, some of whom are degraded to the extent we see in rampant animal cruelty. I am also encouraged by those who express the best of humanity by, in any way, helping what they can help. I recall telling someone of a similar, small effort, and he responded, "That is just a drop in the bucket." I replied, "Yes, so where is your drop?"

Third, something to rile the blood, whether your political slant is left or right or neither: a set of Lou Dobbs chalk talks in book form, Upheaval. Lou Dobbs is unabashedly conservative. We need more like him. These days, the public face of conservatism is, at best, shamefaced. Conservative "leaders" are embarrassed to be conservative, except for a few who claim they are conservative but are actually somewhat left-leaning moderates…they are conservative only by comparison to the rampant collectivists who run this administration and the Senate.

Lou Dobbs wants to do something about that. His weapon is facts, well-researched and well-presented facts. In that, he is more effective than Ross Perot was around 20 years ago, with his flip chart campaign ads. The trouble is, most Americans either don't care enough to realize that the scandal of the month really will affect them, or they are all, "Don't confuse me with facts. My mind is made up." American politics is "American Idol" set on a larger stage. The one who can sing best and get the audience whooping gets the most votes. Nobody even listens to the words of the song.

For me, an unabashed science nerd, I find the following a most telling symptom of our malaise (my bullet points, not his):

• American astronauts have to rely on getting a ride with Russian cosmonauts to get to and from the International Space Station. I'll bet that ends if we do more than weakly, squeakily protest the current Russian "adventure" in Ukraine.
• The next visit to the Moon will be by the Chinese. They have said so. They began orbital flights in April of 1970 and intend to send Chinese astronauts to the Moon by about 2020. The next six years ought to be interesting. I wonder if they will bring back the American flag from Tranquility Basin as a souvenir.
• The latest three countries to launch orbital rockets were Iran, North Korea and South Korea, all since 2009.

Hell, if North Korea, "the dark spot on the map of the Earth at night" can afford a space program, anybody can! We spend more on dog food than on NASA.

Quite frankly, the most fundamental of fundamental problems in this country is risk aversion. America was not started by the risk averse, but now it has been taken over by them.

Do you know why I do not get more politically involved? Too imaginative, too emotional, and I don't want to die of apoplexy. I had to read the book in spurts and starts. A steady diet of polemic, even polemic I agree with and as well presented as this, makes me too upset to sleep well. Lou Dobbs is right much more than he's wrong. I hope someone is listening.

Economics that is beyond me

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, politics, polemics

Tranche: Transaction documentation usually defines tranches as different "classes" of notes, each identified by letter (e.g. Class A, Class B, Class C securities) with different bond credit ratings. The equity ("first-loss") tranche absorbs initial losses, followed by the mezzanine tranches which absorb some additional losses, again followed by more senior tranches. Equity is riskier than mezzanine, and so forth.

A simple statement like that above (cribbed from a Wikipedia article), early in the book, would have saved me a lot of puzzlement when I was reading Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy is Wrong by Edward Conard. A glossary would have been even better, because those few terms bolded above are just the tip of the iceberg of specialized jargon Conard uses. It is really too bad. The back cover has six blurbs of high praise; all are from economists, who of course would understand the book without further education. For the rest of us, the book is quite inaccessible.

Of course, I have spent two weeks with this book, gradually unscrambling the inscrutable, so I can evaluate it better. In the main, I like the author's analysis, which was a relief to me: he is a former partner in Bain Capital and colleague of Mitt Romney, and I am also a financial and political conservative. Here is a synopsis of what I did understand. Bottom Line: The cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis was a classic bubble, in real estate rather than in banking as the media have stated (repeatedly!). The collapse of the bubble led to the collapse of major banks, and we'll get into that.

In the first of three sections, "What Went Right", he outlines the parts played in a national economy—on a global stage—by Investment, the Trade Deficit, and Incentives.

• Investment: There are three things you can do with money that comes your way, consumption, savings, or investment. Here, "consumption" includes charity and any other use of money besides saving and investing, and "saving" means putting money into a bank account, money market account or CD. "Investment" means different things depending on your rôle. For most of us, it is trying to beat the bank rates by putting some money into mutual funds or stocks or bonds. It can also mean investing in more education. For a business owner, it means money spent towards innovation, to increase the competitiveness of the business, or even better to create new and lucrative products.
• The Trade Deficit is seen as a positive, a way to export labor costs. This both drives consumption and reduces its costs. It's a nice idea to "Buy American", but it doesn't make economic sense for a poor or lower-middle-class family to purchase only products manufactured by workers who earn an average $17/hr, when available products of equivalent utility were manufactured for 75¢/hr: that's a labor cost of just 4.4%, effectively zero, so you can afford a lot of transportation cost and still pay much less. This is a major reason most American jobs are in the service sector. You can't export plumbing or auto repair to China. (By the way, make sure your college student also learns a trade; more likely to pay off.)
• Incentives have two sides. A businessperson who invests is likely to compete better, and may get lucky with a blockbuster product. This will bring a great increase in income, and increased status. A businessperson who does not invest, or does so meagerly, will not do as well, and will also suffer a loss of status for failing to grow the business.

These three factors were working together and had led to the superior American economy leading up to 2007. European and Japanese firms invested less, some were protectionist, and they taxed successful businesses more heavily, so while America produced AOL, Google, FaceBook, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple, the rest of the West produced nothing of that scale.

Incentives in particular are misunderstood by most Americans, especially in the face of a steady drumbeat of Liberal propaganda that "the rich" are "oppressing" the poor and "taking advantage of the 99%". Let's be frank. Suppose the combined governments in the U.S. were to have a super-flat tax, meaning you can earn up to, say, $30,000 per year tax-free, and then the tax rate is 100% for every dollar above that point (divided somehow among Federal, state and local governments). Do you think Andy Grove or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet would have built their businesses, or even remained in the country? At a much, much lower level, I observed this: When one of my co-workers had been at a particular salary grade a few years, he or she would begin taking on more and harder projects, hoping to impress management and receive a promotion (with its extra 5-10% pay boost). If a promotion was not forthcoming within a year or two, the same person would get discouraged and begin slacking off, and perhaps even drop in productivity to a level lower than a few years before. It is a well known business proverb: you get what you incentivize.

Now, I get pretty bothered when a company executive attains a salary that works out to a few thousand dollars per hour. I don't think anybody is worth that kind of salary. However, when a business owner takes financial risks to grow the company, and happens to hit it big (like Bill Gates, everybody's first example), it may rankle folks that he becomes "worth" millions or billions of dollars, but he hasn't attained that by putting an inflated salary into the bank. What he is "worth" is the market value of that portion of the business that he owns.

I can use a friend of mine as an example. His family-owned business was worth a few million dollars when he took over its management in his 30s. He built the business, investing deeply but wisely, so that it grew a thousandfold. A few years ago he was said to be "worth" about $20 billion. The Financial Crisis has been worldwide. Although most of his company's assets are overseas, they were affected by the recession, and his current "worth" is about $2 billion. In all this time, though, he has been paid the same executive salary of a few hundred thousand, in terms of $US. And let's consider what would happen if Bill Gates or my friend were to attempt to cash out his holdings. There is hardly anybody who can afford to buy all of Bill Gates's stock in Microsoft, and probably no institution that is willing to do so. He'd have to sell the stock over time, and it would depress the market for that stock and possibly bankrupt the company, because the precipitous drop in its value would make capital purchases more difficult or impossible.

So as much as we may envy the rich, for the most part they are enjoying the rewards of their risk-taking luck. Incentives are a necessary part of a robust economy.

There was, of course, a fly in the ointment, long before 2007. As outlined in the second part, "What Went Wrong", regulators loosened regulations on the way banks write home mortgages, administration officials and lawmakers began to put pressure on banks to make mortgages more affordable to lower-income people, the credit rating agencies rated "tranches" of bundled mortgages (as defined above) more liberally than they should have, and banks and short-term investors soon got caught up in the speculative frenzy, driving up home prices.

Continually falling interest rates, led by the Federal Reserve, played a big rôle. If the homes in Suburb A all sell for $100,000, and mortgage interest drops from 8% to 4%, you can get a loan for just over half the payment. But the price won't stay put. Someone paying $587 monthly on a $80,000 mortgage finds he can get almost twice the money for the same payment. He figures, so can someone else with a cheaper house who wants to upgrade, so he puts his home on the market for $125,000, amplifying his $20,000 of equity into nearly $38,000 after paying his realtor. Now, since he can borrow more than $120,000, he buys a house for $160,000 (ignoring the fact that it was valued at $125,000 a few years earlier). Prices spiral upward.

There is a second effect. Banks got more confident in making "subprime" loans, which are loans with smaller or zero down payment, made to buyers who are near the bottom of the "qualified" credit-score window. In a price spiral, they knew that a $100,000 home, financed at full price, would gain in price (not necessarily value!), and be "worth" $150,000 in a few years. Once the homeowner has equity in the home (the $50,000 rise in price), the bank judges he is not likely to default, making the loan no longer subprime. But something happens the bank didn't expect. The homeowner got an equity loan for $50,000 and bought a boat, took a vacation, and paid some college tuition. Now the combined loans are subprime, equity is near zero, and the smallest dip in the market (they happen every few years), makes the homeowner "under water", owing more than the house is worth. This is a fragile situation. Anything even a little unfortunate—a medical bill, a falling tree that damages the roof—puts the homeowner in the position of skipping a mortgage payment so he can buy food or gas for the car. Skip a few payments and the bank forecloses. They don't really want to, because they are going to lose money auctioning off the home, but it is better than waiting to see if this particular homeowner gets back in the black. So they foreclose, the homeowner has to move, and if house prices are still down, is able to rent a home similar to the one he just left for less than he was paying earlier.

The housing market got overheated, and then cooled off, as they always do. Too many subprime loans collided with too many underwater loans, and foreclosures climbed. Some of the loans had balloon payments, leading to more foreclosures. On average, the housing market dropped 30% in value. Even a bank with a conservative loan portfolio (there were very few), meaning there was a 20% buffer of equity, found their entire portfolio at least 10% underwater, as evaluated by the short-term lenders they'd been relying on for capital. That includes people with their money in savings accounts. The short-term lenders bailed. There was a run on the banks. Banks became insolvent, and some went under.

Here is where it gets hard to follow. When I was watching this happen in 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced that we had to bail out the biggest banks to the tune of some $700 billion, because they were "too big to fail". The bailout couldn't save them all, and a few went under. The next year, with companies laying off workers due to a lack of capital—they couldn't borrow money enough to run at full capacity and cover cash flow variations—, a new administration proposed spending more than $800 billion on "shovel-ready" jobs in infrastructure repair, to stimulate the economy. They did it so badly the economy simply got worse, and it turned out nothing was shovel-ready anyway. But now such "stimulus" funds are a permanent part of federal expenditures (and just try to find out where the money is going!), making up more than half the Federal deficit every year since. It is a big reason the national debt went up by $6 trillion since 2008.

In the third section of the book, "What Comes Next", Conard outlines a great number of suggestions for improving the economy. This was hardest to follow, but the general tenor is, he is trying to get lawmakers to take a long-term view, something that is flatly impossible to do. Every one of his suggestions goes against human nature, particularly for a politician who must get elected. Now that roughly half the country's citizens obtain significant Federal support, there is a built-in majority who will never vote for a candidate who promises to make even the smallest dent in their own paycheck!

As much as I hate to say it, here is what we really need (and this is me talking, not the author): We need a Presidential Candidate who lies persistently, baldly, and totally, about "taking care" of "the people". One with sufficient charisma and inspirational power to bring a large number of lawmakers along on his coat-tails into office. He, or perhaps she, will have exactly one term, and perhaps only two years, to enact a flurry of actually intelligent legislation. The bills could be quite simple, of the order of

HB1234 and SB321, also known as The Stupid Ugly Fleece-the-Public Act, is revoked in its entirety. All expenditures authorized under the Act are to end immediately.

The trouble is, I suspect it would require jailing the entire cadre of lobbyists for lawmakers to do so. And here is another problem. Last year's $3.6 trillion federal payout supported about 15 million people plus 2 million military personnel. To cut it back to $2.2 trillion, and thus eliminate the deficit, would put about 6.6 million federal workers (probably including some military folk) out of work. So perhaps Conard's way will work better. He suggests returning to the laws and regulations of the late 1990s, in effect, with more conservative bank loan standards. He suggests limiting the "soak the rich" tenor of the country so business owners will find it worth taking investment risks to foster innovation.

This chart came late in the book, but could have done good service in Part 2. It shows that as median earnings increase, so do those of the poorest 20%. I dug into this chart. The trend line has an exponential slope of about 1.2, which is good news for the poor in a growing economy. It means that if median income goes up by factor X, the income of the poorest goes up by X^1.2. For example, if median income doubles, (X=2), the income of the poorest 20% increases by a factor of 2.3; if X=10, the factor for the poorest is nearly 16! (P.S. I'd like to find out what country is represented by that dot above and to the right of the U.S.!)

Ronald Reagan was not the first to say, "A rising tide lifts all boats". This diagram illustrates that the smallest boats rise most, contrary to what you hear in the media. So to simplify Conard's point even more: The country that innovates the most will have the strongest economy. Investing for innovation is the best use of our money, even if it risks the occasional bubble.