The idea of a blog is for the peple who view it to make comments about the content of it. I found an article in the Jan 10th issue of the Economist about Mr. Obama's expected lack with Congress and I;ll try to paste it here. If it doesn't work pleasae go to the www.economist.com and click on Leading the Lawmakers... Good Lukc. Stell Saturday, January 17, 2009 Lexington Leading the lawmakers Jan 8th 2009 From The Economist print edition Until he becomes unpopular, Barack Obama will get most of what he wants from Congress
Illustration by KAL “CHANGE begins at home,” say the billboards in Washington, DC. They are adverts for IKEA, a discount furniture store, urging people to spruce up their apartments with new sofas. But they also describe Barack Obama’s agenda. The president-elect was chosen to stop wasting blood and treasure on foreign wars and start fixing what’s broken at home. As the flames in Gaza attest, the rest of the world is hard to ignore. Nonetheless, Mr Obama started work in the capital this week with a hugely ambitious domestic programme. He wants to rescue the economy from free fall, extend health care to nearly everyone and re-engineer the way Americans produce and consume energy. This package will be somewhat costlier and harder to assemble than an IKEA bookshelf, and he cannot hope to accomplish it alone. As Obamamania grips the planet, it is easy to forget that power in America is divided. The president cannot do much, especially at home, without a willing legislature. Before he can sign a bill, Congress must pass it. Before he can spend money, Congress must appropriate it. Before his nominees for high office can start work, the Senate must approve them. The executive and the legislature are supposed to be coequal branches of government, so the first meeting of the 111th Congress on January 6th was, in theory, just as important as Mr Obama’s impending inauguration. Few saw it that way. No cheering crowds filled the Mall, nor were lavish parties thrown to celebrate. But the success of the new presidency depends as much on the 535 unpredictable denizens of Capitol Hill as it does on Mr Obama himself. For all their power, America’s lawmakers are surprisingly little-known. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is a fascinating man. He was born in a shack in Searchlight, Nevada, where his mother took in laundry from the local brothels. He ran the Nevada gaming commission and was nearly murdered by gangsters. As the Senate’s top Democrat, he has mercilessly hounded George Bush, whom he considers possibly the worst president ever. Yet he could walk down any street in America without being recognised. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, is somewhat better-known, partly because she is the first woman to fill that post. But many Americans who know her name are hard-pressed to say what exactly she does. Indeed, during last year’s election campaign, only about half of Americans knew which party controlled the House. (It was the Democrats.) How will Congress work with Mr Obama? Some say he will charm it like a snake. His party has the same hefty majority in both chambers, with 59% of seats to the Republicans’ 41%. He has no formal power to boss Democratic lawmakers around, but he can set the agenda and promote it with his huge and expertly wielded megaphone. If his presidency is deemed a success, his party will reap the electoral benefits. Just as Mr Bush has recently dragged congressional Republicans down, a popular President Obama would help Democrats maintain their majorities in 2010. So Mr Reid and Ms Pelosi will be eager to speed his proposals—with which they mostly agree, anyway—into law. Speed will be of the essence. The economy is in dreadful shape. Wise folk concur that a swift and powerful stimulus is required. The public are receptive: nearly two-thirds say the government should spend more to revive the economy. Democrats are anxious not to let the crisis go to waste. Some see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape America. They liken the current times to the Depression of the 1930s, in part because they want to enact a new New Deal. And they figure that a big chunk of their wish-list can be whizzed through as part of a stimulus package. More money for health care means more jobs for nurses. More money for green technology means more jobs fixing solar panels on roofs. “The house is burning down, and the president of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire,” said Bertrand Snell, a Republican congressman, urging his colleagues to support Franklin Roosevelt. Seventy-five years later, plenty of Democrats hope that Mr Obama will follow FDR in uniting the country, taming capitalism and bringing back happy days. Not to be taken for granted But will Congress really be so pliant? In the Senate, Republicans have just enough votes to mount a filibuster and block bills. They are in a foul mood, not least because of a disputed vote recount in Minnesota, where Democrats claimed victory this week. And they have ideological objections to the Obama agenda. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, frets that he will hire 600,000 new civil servants while congressional Democrats waste a fortune on “things like Mob museums and waterslides”. Fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats may rebel if the stimulus grows too big. And public support may prove fragile. Though voters broadly support action to curb greenhouse gases, provide universal health care and kick-start the economy, they may change their minds if that leads to higher fuel bills or taxes. Despite all this, the chances are that Mr Obama will enjoy a lengthy honeymoon. For one thing, he shows every sign of handling Congress deftly. Both he and his vice-president are former senators, as are his proposed secretaries of health (Tom Daschle) and state (Hillary Clinton). His team is packed with people who know how Capitol Hill works. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, was the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. Philip Schiliro, his liaison to Congress, used to work for Henry Waxman, who now heads the House committee that will draft energy bills. Mr Obama is also shrewdly reaching out to Republicans, proposing that a large part of the stimulus should take the form of tax cuts. As long as he is popular, he will get most of what he wants. And he could remain popular for a while. Since the economic crisis conspicuously began under Mr Bush, Mr Obama can plausibly blame him for everything that goes wrong and then take the credit for the recovery, when it comes.
Ok, a 72 year old blogger. I love it. Let's begin the OCIC with a happy new year and a countdown to the 160 million dollar presidential inauguration. Piggyback off of your original letter- With circuit city closing it's doors (notice yesterday of 30,000 more unemployed), Honda cutting production, and google ceasing recruiting, do we really have our priorities straight; should we celebrate anything right now? Or should we finally "get to work".
“Ask not what Mr. Obama can do for you. Ask what you can do for YOURSELF!”
At the turn of the 20th century humanity once again was confronted with a similar question to that which was answered in a definite way by Sir Isaac Newton over one hundred years earlier. This time instead of asking the question that it was asked back then "Why do things fall to the ground?" (i.e., gravity) physicists now ask: "Why does energy suffer this curious one-way decay?" (i.e., entropy). Could it be possible to answer this question with the precision and elegance of Newton’s Laws?
Ludwig von Boltzmann’s (1844-1906) efforts to create a theory of atomism in the late 1800's provided a measure for this decaying process of entropy maximization and Norbert Wiener in late 1940 provided its therapy—a theory of control and communication that uses information to arrest entropy that prevents a system from performing useful work.
In a paper presented at the Imperial Academy of Sciences Boltzmann told his colleagues that Precisely those forms of energy that we wish to realize in practice are however always improbable. For example, we desire that a body move as a whole; this requires all its molecules to have the same speed and the same direction. If we view molecules as independent individuals, this is however the most improbable case conceivable. It is well known how difficult it is to bring even a moderately large number of individuals to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same manner.( Quoted in Campbell, 1982)
Boltzmann defined this improbable order as complexity and provided a set of mathematical tools to measure it. His basic idea was that the degree of complexity will somehow be related to the number of independent individuals in an entity. Unable to convince his fellow scientists of the importance and necessity to focus on the atomic level of the material world Boltzmann took his life. After considerable work and some twenty years later Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg provided the formula S = k log W Where: S is complexity k is Boltzmann’s universal constant, and W is the number of alternatives (or the number of ways in which the parts of a system can be arranged) [If you wish to read more about this subject please see: A.G. Kefalas, “Cybernetics: Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine,” Encyclopedia of Information Systems, 2001)
Of course today, at the down of the 21st century all of this is history. We know everything it needs to be known of the world of the atoms or at least we think we do! Now let’s do a little Gedankenexperiment, to use the great Einstein’s expression. Let’s substitute the words cosmos or the physical world of atoms, molecules, objects, and energy with the words society and the atoms and molecules with human individuals. Now let’s ask ourselves the question: Which models will you use to solve some of the problems facing this society? Will “the precision and elegance of Newton’s Laws” be appropriate or will you adopt “the Boltzmann’s (1844-1906) theory of atomism”? In other words, can you assume that that “a body moves as a whole; this requires all its molecules to have the same speed and the same direction” or you must accept that “If we view molecules as independent individuals, this is however the most improbable case conceivable. It is well known how difficult it is to bring even a moderately large number of individuals to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same manner.”
As we are breathlessly awaiting the new administration of the charming new president to announce “the precision and elegance of Newton’s Laws” government “stimulus packages” that will solve today’s societal problems we should stop and think a bit about how the 300 million “individuals’ that make up this “body” of the great USA will behave. Will all “have the same speed and the same direction” or will each individual or group move at 200 miles per hour going west while another will move at 30 miles per hour going east?
My answer is of course the latter. This is a country of the “individual.” There is to my knowledge no other country where the individual has so many rights. The individual is the proverbial secret cow! No politician dares telling the individual anything else other than how great he or she is. When students score low in international tests the fault lies with the teachers! When the American worker doesn’t produce as many cars per year as the Japanese is the fault of the CEO and of course as always the government that lets the others subsidize their factories. Nobody dares telling the student, look the reason you scored so low is because you have the right to “be as dumb as you wanna be.” You don’t have to take math, physics and chemistry in high school. You have the “electives” of social studies, sports, and basket weaving! So while the Indian student is struggling to figure out why is the C squared in Einstein’s formula, his American counterpart thinks that the theory of relativity has something to do with the way his relatives behave.
So yes don’t ask what the new government can do for you. Ask what you can do for yourself! And what is it that you must do? It’s actually very simple: beef up your assets. Yes enrich what’s between your ears. Acquire new knowledge. Use it to learn new skills. Use these skills to think about and build new ideas and things. Be more productive. Yes “be as mart as you wanna be.” If all of us don’t do that then there is no way under the sun that we can offer the world Mr. Obama wishes for his daughters “And I want them to get good jobs: jobs that pay well and give them benefits like health care, jobs that let them spend time with their own families and retire with dignity.” This dream world has no room for people who aspire to “be as dumb as you wanna be.” That’s a luxury we can no longer afford! Actually we shouldn’t pursue it even if we could afford it as we did thus far! The world has been very kind to us. Let’s try to return the favor. Let’s leave the world alone for a while. We’ve done enough harm the last 8 years. It’d do us some good to just find a quite corner and reflect on ourselves for a while.
Very nice. The wife
ReplyDeleteVery nice. Your wife.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a blog is for the peple who view it to make comments about the content of it. I found an article in the Jan 10th issue of the Economist about Mr. Obama's expected lack with Congress and I;ll try to paste it here. If it doesn't work pleasae go to the www.economist.com and click on Leading the Lawmakers... Good Lukc. Stell
ReplyDeleteSaturday, January 17, 2009
Lexington
Leading the lawmakers
Jan 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Until he becomes unpopular, Barack Obama will get most of what he wants from Congress
Illustration by KAL
“CHANGE begins at home,” say the billboards in Washington, DC. They are adverts for IKEA, a discount furniture store, urging people to spruce up their apartments with new sofas. But they also describe Barack Obama’s agenda. The president-elect was chosen to stop wasting blood and treasure on foreign wars and start fixing what’s broken at home. As the flames in Gaza attest, the rest of the world is hard to ignore. Nonetheless, Mr Obama started work in the capital this week with a hugely ambitious domestic programme. He wants to rescue the economy from free fall, extend health care to nearly everyone and re-engineer the way Americans produce and consume energy. This package will be somewhat costlier and harder to assemble than an IKEA bookshelf, and he cannot hope to accomplish it alone.
As Obamamania grips the planet, it is easy to forget that power in America is divided. The president cannot do much, especially at home, without a willing legislature. Before he can sign a bill, Congress must pass it. Before he can spend money, Congress must appropriate it. Before his nominees for high office can start work, the Senate must approve them. The executive and the legislature are supposed to be coequal branches of government, so the first meeting of the 111th Congress on January 6th was, in theory, just as important as Mr Obama’s impending inauguration. Few saw it that way. No cheering crowds filled the Mall, nor were lavish parties thrown to celebrate. But the success of the new presidency depends as much on the 535 unpredictable denizens of Capitol Hill as it does on Mr Obama himself.
For all their power, America’s lawmakers are surprisingly little-known. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is a fascinating man. He was born in a shack in Searchlight, Nevada, where his mother took in laundry from the local brothels. He ran the Nevada gaming commission and was nearly murdered by gangsters. As the Senate’s top Democrat, he has mercilessly hounded George Bush, whom he considers possibly the worst president ever. Yet he could walk down any street in America without being recognised. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, is somewhat better-known, partly because she is the first woman to fill that post. But many Americans who know her name are hard-pressed to say what exactly she does. Indeed, during last year’s election campaign, only about half of Americans knew which party controlled the House. (It was the Democrats.)
How will Congress work with Mr Obama? Some say he will charm it like a snake. His party has the same hefty majority in both chambers, with 59% of seats to the Republicans’ 41%. He has no formal power to boss Democratic lawmakers around, but he can set the agenda and promote it with his huge and expertly wielded megaphone. If his presidency is deemed a success, his party will reap the electoral benefits. Just as Mr Bush has recently dragged congressional Republicans down, a popular President Obama would help Democrats maintain their majorities in 2010. So Mr Reid and Ms Pelosi will be eager to speed his proposals—with which they mostly agree, anyway—into law.
Speed will be of the essence. The economy is in dreadful shape. Wise folk concur that a swift and powerful stimulus is required. The public are receptive: nearly two-thirds say the government should spend more to revive the economy. Democrats are anxious not to let the crisis go to waste. Some see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape America. They liken the current times to the Depression of the 1930s, in part because they want to enact a new New Deal. And they figure that a big chunk of their wish-list can be whizzed through as part of a stimulus package. More money for health care means more jobs for nurses. More money for green technology means more jobs fixing solar panels on roofs. “The house is burning down, and the president of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire,” said Bertrand Snell, a Republican congressman, urging his colleagues to support Franklin Roosevelt. Seventy-five years later, plenty of Democrats hope that Mr Obama will follow FDR in uniting the country, taming capitalism and bringing back happy days.
Not to be taken for granted
But will Congress really be so pliant? In the Senate, Republicans have just enough votes to mount a filibuster and block bills. They are in a foul mood, not least because of a disputed vote recount in Minnesota, where Democrats claimed victory this week. And they have ideological objections to the Obama agenda. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, frets that he will hire 600,000 new civil servants while congressional Democrats waste a fortune on “things like Mob museums and waterslides”. Fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats may rebel if the stimulus grows too big. And public support may prove fragile. Though voters broadly support action to curb greenhouse gases, provide universal health care and kick-start the economy, they may change their minds if that leads to higher fuel bills or taxes.
Despite all this, the chances are that Mr Obama will enjoy a lengthy honeymoon. For one thing, he shows every sign of handling Congress deftly. Both he and his vice-president are former senators, as are his proposed secretaries of health (Tom Daschle) and state (Hillary Clinton). His team is packed with people who know how Capitol Hill works. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, was the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. Philip Schiliro, his liaison to Congress, used to work for Henry Waxman, who now heads the House committee that will draft energy bills. Mr Obama is also shrewdly reaching out to Republicans, proposing that a large part of the stimulus should take the form of tax cuts. As long as he is popular, he will get most of what he wants. And he could remain popular for a while. Since the economic crisis conspicuously began under Mr Bush, Mr Obama can plausibly blame him for everything that goes wrong and then take the credit for the recovery, when it comes.
Ok, a 72 year old blogger. I love it. Let's begin the OCIC with a happy new year and a countdown to the 160 million dollar presidential inauguration. Piggyback off of your original letter- With circuit city closing it's doors (notice yesterday of 30,000 more unemployed), Honda cutting production, and google ceasing recruiting, do we really have our priorities straight; should we celebrate anything right now? Or should we finally "get to work".
ReplyDeleteSunday, January 18, 2009
ReplyDelete“Ask not what Mr. Obama can do for you. Ask what you can do for YOURSELF!”
At the turn of the 20th century humanity once again was confronted with a similar question to that which was answered in a definite way by Sir Isaac Newton over one hundred years earlier. This time instead of asking the question that it was asked back then "Why do things fall to the ground?" (i.e., gravity) physicists now ask: "Why does energy suffer this curious one-way decay?" (i.e., entropy). Could it be possible to answer this question with the precision and elegance of Newton’s Laws?
Ludwig von Boltzmann’s (1844-1906) efforts to create a theory of atomism in the late 1800's provided a measure for this decaying process of entropy maximization and Norbert Wiener in late 1940 provided its therapy—a theory of control and communication that uses information to arrest entropy that prevents a system from performing useful work.
In a paper presented at the Imperial Academy of Sciences Boltzmann told his colleagues that
Precisely those forms of energy that we wish to realize in practice are
however always improbable. For example, we desire that a body move
as a whole; this requires all its molecules to have the same speed and the
same direction. If we view molecules as independent individuals, this
is however the most improbable case conceivable. It is well known how
difficult it is to bring even a moderately large number of individuals to do
exactly the same thing in exactly the same manner.( Quoted in Campbell, 1982)
Boltzmann defined this improbable order as complexity and provided a set of mathematical tools to measure it. His basic idea was that the degree of complexity will somehow be related to the number of independent individuals in an entity. Unable to convince his fellow scientists of the importance and necessity to focus on the atomic level of the material world Boltzmann took his life. After considerable work and some twenty years later Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg provided the formula
S = k log W
Where: S is complexity
k is Boltzmann’s universal constant, and
W is the number of alternatives (or the number of ways in which the parts of a system can be arranged)
[If you wish to read more about this subject please see: A.G. Kefalas, “Cybernetics: Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine,” Encyclopedia of Information Systems, 2001)
Of course today, at the down of the 21st century all of this is history. We know everything it needs to be known of the world of the atoms or at least we think we do! Now let’s do a little Gedankenexperiment, to use the great Einstein’s expression. Let’s substitute the words cosmos or the physical world of atoms, molecules, objects, and energy with the words society and the atoms and molecules with human individuals. Now let’s ask ourselves the question: Which models will you use to solve some of the problems facing this society? Will “the precision and elegance of Newton’s Laws” be appropriate or will you adopt “the Boltzmann’s (1844-1906) theory of atomism”? In other words, can you assume that that “a body moves as a whole; this requires all its molecules to have the same speed and the same direction” or you must accept that “If we view molecules as independent individuals, this is however the most improbable case conceivable. It is well known how difficult it is to bring even a moderately large number of individuals to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same manner.”
As we are breathlessly awaiting the new administration of the charming new president to announce “the precision and elegance of Newton’s Laws” government “stimulus packages” that will solve today’s societal problems we should stop and think a bit about how the 300 million “individuals’ that make up this “body” of the great USA will behave. Will all “have the same speed and the same direction” or will each individual or group move at 200 miles per hour going west while another will move at 30 miles per hour going east?
My answer is of course the latter. This is a country of the “individual.” There is to my knowledge no other country where the individual has so many rights. The individual is the proverbial secret cow! No politician dares telling the individual anything else other than how great he or she is. When students score low in international tests the fault lies with the teachers! When the American worker doesn’t produce as many cars per year as the Japanese is the fault of the CEO and of course as always the government that lets the others subsidize their factories. Nobody dares telling the student, look the reason you scored so low is because you have the right to “be as dumb as you wanna be.” You don’t have to take math, physics and chemistry in high school. You have the “electives” of social studies, sports, and basket weaving! So while the Indian student is struggling to figure out why is the C squared in Einstein’s formula, his American counterpart thinks that the theory of relativity has something to do with the way his relatives behave.
So yes don’t ask what the new government can do for you. Ask what you can do for yourself! And what is it that you must do? It’s actually very simple: beef up your assets. Yes enrich what’s between your ears. Acquire new knowledge. Use it to learn new skills. Use these skills to think about and build new ideas and things. Be more productive. Yes “be as mart as you wanna be.” If all of us don’t do that then there is no way under the sun that we can offer the world Mr. Obama wishes for his daughters “And I want them to get good jobs: jobs that pay well and give them benefits like health care, jobs that let them spend time with their own families and retire with dignity.” This dream world has no room for people who aspire to “be as dumb as you wanna be.” That’s a luxury we can no longer afford! Actually we shouldn’t pursue it even if we could afford it as we did thus far! The world has been very kind to us. Let’s try to return the favor. Let’s leave the world alone for a while. We’ve done enough harm the last 8 years. It’d do us some good to just find a quite corner and reflect on ourselves for a while.