Republicans are Anarchists

Whatever happened to the party of "Law and Order"?

Growing up during the Vietnam War, the Left was considered anti-government and the Right was pro-government. How times have changed.

Democrats are accused of becoming socialist because they support government rules to manage an orderly process in the governance of the country. At the same time, Republicans have become the party of removing government rules that manage orderly regulatory laws. They seem to prefer a lawless, "wild-west" approach to medical and financial approaches to the US economy.

So in the grand scheme of things, if Democrats are portrayed as the party of Socialism, then Republicans should be portrayed as Anarchists.

Anarchists support an anti-government society. That to me is certainly the mindset of the Republican party. Why have laws?

This push for an anti-government philosophy seems to have been pushed by right-wing extremists. It seems, looking at developments over the past several months, that Republicans accepted an opportunity to join groups opposed to Barack Obama. Whether the opposition is beneficial for the country seems secondary, the focus seems to be to oppose Obama at any cost.

Thus as an alliance of convenience in opposition to Obama, Republicans connected with these right-wings extremists. Is this the best for the country or just people with a grudge seems unclear. Similarly what is the connection with respect to the Republican party with the "Tea Party" movement and the rise of "militias".

So looking into the future, will Republicans become ever more polarized by continuing to promulgate an anti-government philosophy? Or will they distance themselves from the fringe splinter groups such as the "Tea Party".

Taking back government? Less taxes? What does this mean other than empty slogans. Perhaps someone can explain what taking back government means. Less taxes? Under Eisenhower and Kennedy the upper end of the tax rate was 92%, it is now somewhere around 35%. I do believe the US was not socialist under Eisenhower.

"Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy.[1][2] It seeks to diminish or even abolish authority in the conduct of human relations." [from Wikipedia]

A Polish Tragedy

Here is a photo list of the most prominent Poles who lost their lives at Smolensk Airport. The list is from a Polish web site so the language is Polish but it does give a prespective of the lives lost in this tragedy.

http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/150325,21,0,0,1,pokaz.html

ACM Competition -- MIT, a loser!

US Universities Can't Compute

A lot of literature has been dedicated to education in the US. Much of the discussion centers around K-12. But maybe we should be looking beyond K-12 and what is happening at our colleges, especially considering the results of the ACM competition. This is in light of the fact that there is a battle going on in the Internet. Cyber-attacks are pervasive. Many of them originating in China allegedly (more on that later).

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is a professional organization dedicated to all things related to computers and computing. Once a year, it hosts a competition among colleges and universities world-wide. The competition deals with solving computer-related problems.

MIT is a loser! Rather a bold statement, but when MIT finishes in the "peloton" of a competition related to computers, maybe it is not so outrageous. In fact MIT finished behind Stanford, Cornell and CMU as far as American entries were concerned. Which themselves finished 14th, 15th, and 17th respectively, although they all are listed as 14th.

So who were the winners? Of the top ten, 4 were from China and 4 were from Russia; the remaining two, one was from Ukraine (#4) and the other was from Poland (#8).

While winning competitions is not a predictor of the ability of a nation to deal with the issues of Internet security, it does point out the strength of students and potentially the future workforce for all things Internet. This includes cyber-attacks and cyber-protection.

The Competition

From the news release:
"The contest took place in Harbin, China with 103 teams competing in the final round. Earlier rounds of the competition included 22,000 contestants representing 1,931 universities from 82 countries. The top four teams won Gold medals as well as employment or internship offers from IBM." [http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2010/icpc-2010]

The Results

http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/Wiki.jsp;jsessionid=DDAD0FF7938BF90C73C0D917AF29F681?page=Results%20World%20Finals%202010

The Problems

The problems are listed under the first column in pdf (finals problems). [http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc]

iPAD Setup

Just a quick link to what I find is a nice description of dealing with your new iPAD. I continue to believe that the iPAD may change the way we interact with the Internet.


http://gizmodo.com/5508769/how-to-set-up-your-ipad?skyline=true&s=i

Pension Debt

It is amazing that whereever you turn in the US, there are huge amounts of debt. Besides the federal and state spending, consider pension funds in the various states. Furthermore, these pension finds are guaranteed by state constitutions, which means they MUST payout before payroll and other state obligations.

One of the most debt-ridden entities in the US seem to be pension funds. As we have mentioned in the past states like New Jersey have an acculmated pension deficit of $46B and the city of Chicago alone has a pension deficit of $18.5B. While Illinois itself has a pension deficit of $35B. Other states and municipalities are not necessarily in better shape.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-03-07/news/ct-met-public-pensions-cost-0308-20100307_1_pension-funds-public-pension-funding-deficit

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=8191

And yet the pension funds continue to play Russian roulette with their funds expecting Vegas-like returns. Consider the following item reported in the NY Times. The pension funds "gave" private equity firms $17B just so that they can have illiquid assets.

"The nation’s 10 largest public pension funds have paid private equity firms more than $17 billion in fees since 2000, according to a new analysis conducted for The New York Times, as the funds flocked to these so-called alternative investments in hopes of reaping market-beating returns. [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03equity.html]

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

The end of the week seemed to be a public relations coup for the Obama administration. They exalted in the employment figures which indicated that payrolls rose by 162,000 workers. And all the paundits were saying how the employment numbers grew by the most in 3 years. All this seems to indicate that the recession is over and happy days are here again.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=aDCWdea8_JO0

But in my view there is no silver lining, the US continues to live off printing money. This is indicated by the trade deficit numbers. Consider the deficit numbers in January. There was a deficit of $37.3B. As we have preached in the past, the US must become more self sufficient in manufactured goods. While the US struggles to blame China for currency manipulation, there is no effort to try to deal with increasing manufacturing in the US itself. This is akin to blaming the drug supplier for the demand of the drug user. Irrespective of whatever monetary policies the Chinese chose to follow, the US should encourage in every way possible the return of manufacturing items back to the US. The US must relearn to make shoes, shirts, hats,etc.

And while it is necessary not to begrudge anyone getting a job, it is also important to understand that the more money the government throws into the system, the more likely it is that some if not most of that money will leave the US. Thus incentives like federal-back infrastructure jobs (not to mention the current increase of census workers) hire people (a good thing), pay them so that they can spend money on imported necessities. So the government creates more money only to see that money (or a good portion of it) leave its shores. Again this is not sustainable.

So the bottm line, solving the recession or making the US a strong economic (viable) country is NOT about more jobs, it is about creating an environment so that manufacturing companies are more likely to build in the US. Once that is done, the jobs will come!

"The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Departmentof Commerce, announced today that total January exports of $142.7 billion and imports of$180.0 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $37.3 billion, down from $39.9billion in December, revised. January exports were $0.5 billion less than December exportsof $143.2 billion. January imports were $3.1 billion less than December imports of $183.1billion."

http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/tradnewsrelease.htm