Secrecy Corruption Partisanship

I was listening to Dan Carlin's July 19th Common Sense podcast when he said something I've often thought about. The podcast was entitled The Inflexible Mind, and he talked about how some people are incapable of changing what they believe in. These are people that will not concede any points to someone that does not already agree with them. New facts or contradictory information is not even allowed into their minds. They have staked out an ideology and cannot be budged from it in the face of a reality that changes. I have often thought that this mental rigidity is similar to football fan mentality. Often when people watch their favorite team, every call by the referee is an affront to their team. When their own team members commit some blatant personal foul, they are silent, and seemed to not even notice.

The problem we have now in our political leadership is an insidious form of corruption that stems from the influence inherent in campaign contribution money in politics. Politicians care only about how to win the next election and will do anything to help their corporate interests that contribute to their campaigns. These same corporate interests are usually interested only in the next quarter's profits and are unable to look at their company should be run in the long term. Often, decisions are made that make this quarter or this year look good so corporate executives can get their bonus, but the decisions prove to be limiting or harmful to the company's long term interests. The question is how to get politicians and the people that elect them to look at what is best for the long term.

Often, we in the public that are electing these government officials are not even aware of everything that they are doing. It's easier to govern if you're not being second guessed by the public, and since you can decide what's public and what's classified, you can just classify anything that is potentially embarrassing or controversial. Secrecy is often used as cover for bad decisions. We are just now unclassifying some of the hidden events that got us into the Viet Nam War. The secrets coming out now are instructive, but they are too late to do us any good. We could have avoided the war in the first place, or gotten out of it sooner if we had only know the truth about what was going on. How can we, the voting public, make decisions on who to elect and what to do about our elected officials' actions unless we know what is really happening?

Unfortunately, it's not always as simple as that. In the run up to the Iraq War in 2003 there were clear indications that the war was not necessary, yet a large portion of the public was all for it, nonetheless. We knew there were no weapons in the country since the weapons inspectors had been all over the country for almost 10years. People that supported George W. Bush could not believe anything that contradicted their original premise that this was a good man that they had to support and that anyone that did not support the President hated the country. This colored everything the saw and knew from that point on. I remember going to a customer's office and hearing from him that he heard on Fox News that we had found an entire city full of weapons of mass destruction. I thought at the time, "that can't be right" and by the time I got home to look at the news myself, realized that it wasn't even being reported anymore, much less refuted.

How do you bring self-deluded people back to reality? The sad fact is that you can't change a person's minds when they are firmly entrenched in their beliefs. They are inflexible. That would be fine, I would be willing to leave it be and forget about it if it was some crazy person in the corner mumbling to themselves, but these deluded masses are not inert and non-influential isolated incidences. These masses of willfully ignorant people vote. They vote in political elections and they vote with their pocketbooks and they frequent the institutions that perpetuate their ignorance. It's become a symbiotic relationship. "Delude us!" they almost shout to their favorite media outlets, "confirm what we already think and tell us how good and patriotic we are for believing!" Fox News could not exist if the people that watch it did not demand that it behave exactly as it has.

I listened to another demoralizing podcast featuring a climatologist describing how they go about doing climate studies today. They now have to spend time studying sociology and psychology to understand why people deny the truth about what's going on and what can be done to get through to them. The scientist was demoralized because they were finding that people with extreme beliefs are incapable of changing or learning or understanding. Once an idea is rooted in a person's mind, it is almost impossible to dislodge it with facts.

And yet, it the case of Obama approval ratings within his own base, you do have a group of people who changed their minds and were disillusioned. This might have something to do with campaign promises raising expectations and the difference between campaigning Obama versus ruling Obama. I think the question many who voted for him are asking is why is he not changing things once he got into office? He was supposed to stop the wars, shut down Guantanamo, stop illegal wiretapping and roll back the loss of civil liberties, reverse don't ask don't tell, and make government more transparent. An ardent Obama supporter once pointed out to me that once you got into office, you would have access to more secret and classified information and you would be forced to decide to do many of the things the same way your predecessor had. My response to that is to ask what chance is there for us to ever elect new people and actually get change? If anyone we elect will disappear behind a veil of secrecy and make the same harmful short-termed and wrongful decisions that the last person made, then this is not a democracy and we do not have control of our country.

I believe we should strip the barriers of secrecy away from our government and our corporations and see and understand exactly how things actually work. At least then we would learn to deal with truth and facts and be able to actually think about how to fix the problems we are dealing with and learn to chart a course for the long term. It's our only hope, because the way we are doing it now is not working.

Foreclosure Crisis

One of the common phrases of the day is "the housing bubble". Perhaps if this is read in just a few years, some of this will have faded from the common memory, so for our future readers, here is a short summary.

A bubble is, obviously, anything that increases in value at an unsustainable rate, and then experiences a reduction in value, which feels like a collapse. The image of the bubble could be considered somewhat of a bad metaphor, because when a bubble collapses, it ceases to exist. During many collapses like this, the values eventually recover, but it tends to financially destroy some people in the process.

We had the so-called "dot com bubble" in the late 90s when several people were making new internet based businesses whose value was wildly overestimated and eventually collapsed. In that case, these new entities, internet based businesses were in some cases never worth anything. They were not what they now call fully monetizable. Sure, there were some great ideas and many of them were fun to use, but they were free to the users and didn't generate any revenue, while the cost of staffing them and having servers to support them could quickly outstrip their operating revenues. The search engine Google is a prime example of a company that dodged this dot com collapse and learned to become a huge money-maker.

The real estate market became a refuge for money when the stock market had a severe reversal. You had to have somewhere to put your money that was safe, and the conventional wisdom was that Real Estate Values Will Never Go Down. That prompted the financial markets geniuses to migrate over to the real estate domain and turn it into a crappy thing. Revisionist history is now reworking the story, saying that big bad government was forcing these traditional, conservative, careful banks and mortgage companies to loan money to risky, often minority people that normally would not qualify for these loans. I have yet to find any reasonable proof that this was the case. What I have heard about that makes sense to me was that the financial geniuses came up with risky investment portfolios called mortgage backed derivatives. Investors were hungry for these and the pressure to come up with them was enormous. Loan companies like Countrywide and Wells Fargo were busy looking for any warm body to sign mortgages which they could then bundle and sell off to investors. Regulatory agencies were asleep at the wheel, and no one was questioning why shortcuts in approving loans were so widespread, and certainly no one was telling any mortgage company that they could not make these risky loans (in my version of recent history, no one had to tell them or force them to make the loans, they had plenty of profit incentive to keep doing this, as well as no one stopping them). Finally, the market started waking up to the fact that there was a much higher than normal default rate on the loans, and there were less and less buyers standing in line willing to pay whatever crazy "market rate" (meaning huge increase in home value from just a couple of years before - vastly outpacing the rate of inflation) was asked for.

Oops. We had stopped treating homes as investments that you primarily bought to live in, and started treating them as vehicles for fast profits. These investments only paid off when they changed hands, so you had to buy and sell constantly. If (when) the market hit a point of overvaluation where no one wanted to pay the ridiculous price you were asking, suddenly your sure thing investment is a loss.

You could have seen it coming and many people did. I remember watching the house next door turn into a house flipper's plaything. It went from $250,000 in the mid 90's to $500,000 and hard to sell in 2003, to $1.2 million and impossible to sell in 2008. Not only did this house next door lose value because of the market reversal, it lost money because no one was living in it and taking care of it. The basement flooded twice, and flippers infatuated with shows like This Old House and other home makeover themes kept tearing it apart and rebuilding it according to their latest fad or dream. This diluted the turnover profit in any case, but really went haywire when they sunk a lot of money into the house and then it dropped in value.

Meanwhile, some people were buying and reselling homes to themselves fraudulently. These people have not been caught or prosecuted in very large numbers yet, but he scheme was to resell the house to themselves at successively larger numbers, pocketing the profit each time, and eventually defaulting on the loan, sticking the bank with the house, which was not worth anything near the value of the loan out on the house. This is a complex web of deception, but simple at its root. It relied on people willing to dummy up home value assessments and mortgage companies willing to sell to anybody and everybody. It was like the accelerator was stuck on the market and the driver, rather than being horrified at the prospect of being flung off the road, was sticking his head out the window and screaming in delight.

Now we have reached a phase, after a sufficient pause where there was not much new loan activity where banks started rushing to foreclose on homes. In many cases, the houses were purchased at inflated prices and the owners were walking away from the investments, but there were also many people that were recently unemployed homeowners that simply could not make the payments.

When the houses were being flipped and people were walking away with profits from the inflated sales, you could be sympathetic to the banks, as they would be the ones stuck with the overvalued houses. You realized that these homes would have to be sold at a greatly reduced price and the banks would have to take a loss on the house. If only someone would agree to live in the house and make payments, it wouldn't be so bad on the banks. Now they have those people already in place and they want to kick them out. It seems like the banks should be able to allow an unemployed person to continue to live in the house, and work the mortgage like a reverse mortgage for a few years. I'm not suggesting that the bank pay the people to live in the house, but they could charge them interest and maybe some slight penalties for skipping payments, and when they got their jobs back and resume payments, they owe a little bit more on the house. The bank, rather than losing the difference in what is owed on the house, gets to resume a healthy loan. However, the best home to repossess is one that was purchased back before the market raced upward. In other words, a house that is actually worth more than what is left on the loan. This is sort of like recouping losses on their crazy loans with the exact kind of people you want buying homes, namely people that will stay in the house, take care of it, and make their payments over the long haul. It is also possible that the banks have finally determined that the market has bottomed out and it has nowhere to go but up from here. That was the assumption that got us into this mess in the first place, wasn't it?

In an unrelated story, there was a serviceman in Iraq who had his home sold out from under him on the courthouse steps because his wife, depressed at her husband's long absence, was failing to pay the bills. The home was already paid for, and the bill that was overdue was the homeowner's association fees. Texas has some laws that were written favorably for Homeowner's Associations. This gives them the ability to foreclosure for overdue fees. The homeowner has to pay the lawyer's fees in this case, so it doesn't even cost homeowner's associations anything to go after the homes. Groups of lawyers figured out that this was a ripe opportunity to make some serious money. Not just the fees that they were charging to foreclose, but also in arranging buyers to snag the houses for a fraction of their true value, resell them quickly, and make some serious money off of them. The serviceman's house was returned to him when national attention was brought to bear on the case, but who knows how many other people have lost their homes in this legally sanctioned scam. Just another reason to avoid Texas. I've always felt that the deck is stacked in favor of the wealthy and powerful in that state.

The theme is the same here. Rich, intelligent people with no moral or ethics are looking at life as a game of winners and losers and trying to game the system for their own benefit. They do not care who gets hurt or whether it is fair, and in some cases, they don't care if it's legal. Anyone suggesting that the rules be strengthened or the enforcement be (applied!) increased is labelled as someone in love with big government and an enemy of the free market.

Democracy and capitalism in action? More like a system out of control and ready to run over anyone that gets in its way. Do I admire the people at the top of the heap that make more and more money? Not if it comes from the misery of the people at the bottom. We need to find a way to put the heart back in capitalism, or it will not survive.

College Degree Snobbery

I was driving in western Kansas recently and saw a Ft. Hays State University front vanity license plate. Hays is about 5 hours west of us, so you don't see that often around the Kansas City area. I realized that my initial reaction was to wonder why anyone would display and brag about this, as I didn't know much or think much of the university. Of course, I was in their back yard, so of course they were proud of their university. My reaction was snobbish, I was surprised to find. I should be happy that this person wanted to go to a university and learn something and better themselves. Why the automatic dismissal because I went to a bigger university?

As an aside, I did some quick research just now and discovered that Ft. Hays State's enrollment is 11,200 - if you count the 6,000 online students from China. Really? That's amazing. How did so many Chinese find out about this relatively obscure
American University? Are there a lot of Chinese Professors at Ft. Hays State? What a strange fact to uncover. This leaves 5,200 graduate and undergraduate students at Ft. Hays State, so the online students outnumber the warm bodies in seats.

However, my university isn't really that much more prestigious in the great scheme of things, in the bigger national pecking order. It does have about 23,000 enrollment (I think that's bodies in seats, but it doesn't say). So it's bigger than Ft. Hays State. I'm not sure it's known as an engineering or technical giant, though. I know if you want to really impress people with your engineering degree, it should be from Berkley or MIT (graduateshot.com puts Stanford over Berkley and my alma mater is not ranked in the top 55). So just as you would not move to some big city and put a Ft. Hays State bumper sticker on your car, you would probably not put a Kansas State logo on your car, either.

The Ivy League and most big east coast schools' alumni display some well deserved superiority complexes. There is much evidence to back up their pride. The Ivy League produces many Presidents all of the current Supreme Court Justices and a great deal of the leaders in business and medicine. MIT is unequalled in engineering. There is little subjective evidence that these schools are not the best (except in sports - which proves my point, I think).

Do these universities admit only the best students, or do only the only the best strive to attend such good universities? I think it's a combination of both. Only an intense desire would drive you to attend such a place. If someone is the type to to aim for an Ivy League education, then to prepare for years, and then to go through the grueling application process, they start out already on a course to higher purpose and stronger ambition. The perception of a higher quality of degree from some schools is self fulfilling.

This is not to say that this kind of education is the only way to get to the top. There are countless examples of self made millionaires that don't even go to college. Sometimes success comes from hard work or common sense, not from what is learned at college. However, within the system, whether it be corporate or political, the source of the college degree is the key that opens doors and showers opportunities on people.

My college days were nothing special, I know now, with experience and the perspective of time. I partied, chased women, and did enough to get by many semesters. I did not understand what I was studying in the broader context, and frankly, I did not live up to my potential. I recently had a dream with an old house in it. The house was dilapidated and falling apart. This was a little like my fraternity experience at college. It was not squalid, but not luxurious either. My brother did live in a house that was literally falling apart when he was in college. I would have to say that sometimes having nothing can make you hungry for more. It can force you to try harder. Other times it just drives you down. I know I thought college was great at the time when I went, but looking back now, it just seems average now. Certainly nothing to look down my nose at a smaller university over.

Pleasure Effect

A long time ago, I read a novel called Ringworld by Larry Niven. In it, I vaguely remember that there was this two headed creature that looked a lot like an ostrich. I don’t remember exactly who did what to whom, but there was a scene in the book where there was an attempt to influence the creature by beaming pleasure at it. Every time it looked at this person, they had the mental ability to induce pleasure directly into the creature’s brain, and the person turned this up whenever the creature did something associated with the person. Very quickly, the person had complete control of the creature because they controlled its pleasure center.

I remember at the time thinking, how is this different than an addictive drug? It sure seems like a perfect description of addiction. When it gets down to it, turning pleasure on or off in a person would be the ultimate control. Besides taking drugs, or the other less chemically induced ways we produce pleasure, we already do this in a huge variety of ways. What I’m describing is no different than the effect a pretty woman sometimes has on the men around her. She throws some positive attention around and men on the receiving end will stumble all over themselves in order to experience some of it. I used to fantasize about having this kind of power when I was young. I had heard about the concept of a love potion or a spell, and thought that would be great to have that kind of power.

Wouldn't this also be an excellent way to retrain a person, or help them learn. The obvious use of the power would be to simply seduce someone, but think about what else could be done with such a power over other people. Of course, this kind of thing is used in less direct and more subtle ways all the time. People are always seeking to persuade people or sway the crowd.

I flipped the concept on its head and was thinking, which is better? to use this power on someone or have it used on you? If someone cast a spell on you to make you happy or in love - why would this necessarily be bad? It's looked upon as scary because you lose control, but if you're truly happy, what does it matter what the source is? If you can overlook the subversion of your free will, the result is pretty good. You may or may not have reached the state of loving or craving the other person without the spell, but my point is, maybe you would have eventually reached that state anyway. I suppose the true limit you would put on this fictional power is something akin to what I had heard about hypnosis. I heard that you could not be made to do something under hypnosis that you would not have done anyway. The hypnosis just lowers your inhibitions and removes your embarrassment so that you will do the things that you were already capable of in front of a crowd without embarrassment. I suppose it is similar when it comes to succumbing to your desires.

The obvious place people usually take the fantasy of complete control is to see someone enslaved by this pleasure control. Such a strange concept. On one hand, you are enslaved, with all the negative connotations of that word. You are not in control of yourself, you do not call the shots, you have to do what someone else tells you to do. On the other hand, you’re happy, so what difference does it make?

In normal circumstances, the pleasure is dampened and self-limited if the negative consequences to succumbing to the lure are larger than the pleasure you get from it. Of course, this is the downside of drug abuse and the nearly impossible condition to protect people from. The DARE program, which is designed to keep young people away from drugs, along with all the other anti-drug programs (as well as abstinence programs, for that matter) always seemed so fake to me. They fail to tell you the truth about sex and drugs or alcohol. The truth is that if you try this, you might love it so much that it will soon be the only thing you want to do. You can lose control of your own free will through your love or irresistible appeal of your addiction. No doubt most people reading this are thinking about the possibly fictional story about the lab rats that were given a bar they could depress in their cage that would deliver cocaine to them. The story goes that the rats would sit there and press the bar continuously until they died. They would not eat or sleep or groom themselves, they just took cocaine until it killed them.

We as a species, in fact, all life probably to some degree, are prone to this. Knowing this, it is probably best to avoid the things in life that you know you will not be able to resist unless they help you. If you could find a way to become addicted to exercise or eating right or reading and learning, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? I suppose it wouldn’t be too much to ask to open yourself to enjoy the pleasures of experiencing and getting to know someone. To have the attitude that each person is there to be appreciated so they can enrich your life would be an accomplishment that would surely lead straight to a mostly happy life.

I’ve often thought it would be great to be the person standing up in front of a classroom making the young minds in your charge feel pleasure in and find an addiction to learning things.

We’re subject to this pleasure effect, we might as well be aware of it and filter the effect to let in the positive addictions and resist the negative ones.

Negativity Cascade

I had a complete idea, a full blown concept that came to me one night in that strange state between dreaming and waking. The seed of the thought was that a slight change sometimes makes a major effect. This is not always a domino effect, where a small initial change trips a continuous line of events, cumulating in a long series of results, although that is one example. I’m talking about how a small impetus results in an out of proportion effect.

I had recently had a few examples of cascades described to me. The first were studies that revealed historical major shifts in climate. Sometimes these shift would be towards an ice age, other times toward a warming trend. Scientists often could not tell which direction a massive shift would go toward due to a particular stimulus. For years, scientists tried to create climate models that simulated the temperature trends. Small assumptions or tiny changes would cause wildly fluctuating results. At first, they assumed these models were not correct. When the models got much better, they realized that climate changes can sometimes happen catastrophically. This was unexpected, as climatologists and early theorists had always assumed that the climate was mostly stable. They believed that when there were climate changes, they were like lumbering giants that took a long time to turn around or change direction.

There is a similar small impetus/large effect seen in the expression of genes. Sometimes a master gene can be switched on, and a whole series of processes are turned on at once. In genetics, this is often referred to as a cascade effect and is brought on by the action of some master gene. For example, there have been many reports recently about a gene called FOXP2 that is said to be a language master gene, able to start several other genetic processes when it is switched on.

This cause and effect phenomenon could also be visualized as being like an avalanche. While an avalanche is a catastrophic effect, it is a perfect example of a small originating event with a large result. Obviously, if the small action is intended and the big result is the goal, then the phenomenon is not catastrophic. The situation is not necessarily detrimental, unless deliberately unleashed on someone with that intent. Examples of this would be winning a sporting event by throwing your opponent off their game, or winning a battle by getting momentum over your opponent and overrunning them. Nathan Bedford Forrest called this “getting the skeer (scare) up” when used in battle, and he was a master of orchestrating devastating defeats over foes that outmanned and outgunned him. With equal measures of deception, bravado, and quick and decisive blows that were landed and continued while an opponent was off-balance, he was usually able to cause his enemies to collapse or flee a battle.

These examples are about a single cause and effect, or a concerted effort and the results. The cascade concept also applies to the balance of a system and what it produces. When a system tries to operate in a slight imbalance, it can deliver consistent poor results or quickly spiral out of control. When a system, process, or organization is tilted in one direction, it is very difficult to make it run in the other direction, or even straight. If you’ve ever had a car with the steering out of alignment, or driven on a freeway in a strong cross wind, you know what I’m talking about. You have to continually correct the steering in order to just go straight.

Originally, I was thinking about the imbalance being in a individual’s personal attitude. There are people out there that are negative, but only because of a slight tilt, a slight skew or leaning toward the darker side of things. Saturday Night Live makes fun of this type of person by creating an extreme version of it in the character of Debbie Downer. This character is the type of person that can suck the joy out of any and every situation. There are many average people that tilt this way slightly. I was recently scanning an article in a self-improvement magazine that was one of those advice pieces about how you should get all the negative people out of your life so they don’t drag you down. At the time, I thought about how heartless this is, as many people will go through occasional hard times, and when they do, the worst thing that can happen to them is that their shallow friends bail out on them during their time of need. I think a reasonable person that read the article would not start sorting their friends by this criteria, and weeding them out if they weren’t always perky all the time. A reasonable person would interpret it as saying that when you choose someone as a friend, do not pick those that are always down all the time. I’m sure other people's negative or positive tilt can impact your attitude, but I was thinking it is much better to be aware of these leanings and seek to be the kind of person that can re-adjust those around you to a more positive tilt. Whether raising people’s moods with humor or just listening to a friend when they are depressed, the goal should be to help your friends feel better without letting them bum you out, too. I wonder if this is naïve. Does it work to just listen to someone, and thus improve their mental balance?

I remember a very depressing time in my life when I was young and married, overseas in the Army. My (then) wife seemed determined to be in a foul mood all the time. One day, I realized what was going on and told myself that I was not going to let her drag me down into her depression. I went home determined not to react as I normally did, not to let her depression infect me. I had to do this by attempting to mostly ignore her. She noticed that something was different and that I was not reacting normally, matching her gloomy mood. By the end of the evening, this cumulated in her shaking me and screaming in my face, "I'm miserable and I'm taking you with me!" That may be one extreme of the situation, but the question is how to teach people to notice that no one wants to be around you, and realized it's because you bum them out.

I was listening to a podcast about an early psychologist that had a bad upbringing and a family history of what would probably be diagnosed as psychiatric problems. This person studied the human condition and came up with the idea that you can self-correct any mental defect by force of will and habit. It seems to me that he might be right. My wife said it was the definition of cognitive therapy. I was thinking efforts to balance yourself and become more positive would also come from practicing meditation. I’ve often wondered if meditation can really help you (in a provable and repeatable way – something that could be studied and measured scientifically). In one respect, achieving balance through meditation would be nothing more than leveling out one’s mental field, correcting an imbalance, and staving off any future cascade.

What about permanently gloomy people? Do they exist? People that would be called incurables? What about permanently happy people? I remembered the Friends episode where a dull party was going on and they called in someone they knew, but didn’t hang out with. He was called Happy Sam or something like that. The point of this story was that they were calling on this guy to tilt the perspective of the entire group, and he just happened to be really depressed, so it was the worst thing to add to the mix.

There is a saying, attributed to Louis Pasteur who made some of the most important breakthroughs on germ theory. He is credited with the quote, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” In other words, luck comes to those who are looking for it, recognize it when they see it, and seize the opportunity to exploit or benefit from it. This is why I was thinking about the cascade effect or the slight imbalance effect. It seems to me to be one of those things that awareness of can allow you to capitalize on.

Wall Street Crybabies

I didn’t need to hear the This American Life story to get steamed about the subject of the bailout, but it did add fuel to the fire. This American Life is a public radio program out of Chicago Public Radio that does stories on a huge variety of subjects. My wife has pointed out that most of them are either dark or depressing, which is a concept I resisted for a while. Now, while I can’t really argue with her, I have concluded that my tolerance for dark subjects is much stronger than hers.

This particular episode that I listened to recently was about crybabies, people that whine about their lot in life, often without justification. It had a section on these Wall Street types that just got bailed out and had their jobs and industry saved, yet are vocally bitching about government interference. The reporter went to several bars near Wall Street and tried to find someone from an industry that got bailed out and was thankful. Far from being thankful for having their jobs and livelihoods protected and preserved, they were scornful of the government and convinced that it was interfering with their industry and actively harming them. These workers that had been saved by the bailout kept saying that government didn't help them, they kept their jobs through their own value and intelligence. They kept professing how the people on Wall Street were the most intelligent people in the country. I kept thinking, when I heard this, that the only form of intelligence they displayed was the ability to outsmart people by deceiving them It shows that, for the most part, the Wall Street bailout has benefited people that don't appreciate or acknowledge it. Financial firms have record profits this year, exorbitant bonuses, and a healthy financial environment (for a financial investment firm – not for the rest of the country) yet they can't do anything but bitch about government interference.

I had earlier heard about a scheme by a major firm (I believe it was Citibank) where they are now being investigated for fraud. In this scheme, they put together an investment package that was designed to fail. They deliberately selected things that they were sure were bad bets, investments that were certain to lose value. They put these investments into packages and pushed them on anyone that they could sucker into buying them. At the same time, they put down a huge investment on shorting these packages. That means they placed a bet that the investment would fail. They knew this bet would win, because they designed the investment specifically to fail. Somehow, they found individuals with either no morals or no intelligence to go out and push these faulty investments, and they sat back to make a fortune off the manufactured misfortune of their customers.

I got into an interesting conversation with a retired stockbroker about this situation. This is an individual that I had a great deal of respect for, that I trusted, who I thought was above reproach. His response to my query of what his opinion was about the story was that stocks have always been a buyer beware vehicle for your money. He had no sympathy about the people that bought the toxic assets, he felt they should have read the prospectus. He said that every investment has a description in the prospectus that is supposed to clearly state what the investment’s risks are. I found this to be an incredulous statement. I asked him if he believed that the prospectus had a line in it that said, “this is designed to fail”.

He equated these bad investments with an auto company that produces a car with brake problems, I countered that those companies did not deliberately make a car with a defect, and that they immediately had fixed the problem. I told him that engineered products had to work or the company that sells them could go out of business, but that these protections did not seem to apply to the financial district. He claimed that the people on Wall Street are the smartest people in the USA. My reaction is that they aren't smart, they are crafty. They certainly are trying to outsmart people rather than earn money for their stockholders.

The truth about earning money and multiplying it by investing it is that people generate money by transferring wealth. The best way to guarantee that the society as a whole is wealthy is that the money is being spent and invested in vehicles that actually make something or do something like provide some service. We have for a long time expected that simply by amassing a large amount of money that you will generate a healthy interest income. The question I have is why should income be guaranteed by wealth if the only thing you do with it is by stocks that you don’t demand be accountable.

Climate Controlled Environment

Will humankind be controlled by the climate or will we control the climate?

Science Fiction aficionados have probably contemplated this question before. I noticed an old Star Trek episode that directly referenced a world with a planetary climate control, and I remember other episodes that showed the characters trying to correct various climatological and even geological problems of planets in peril. I've always wondered if this capability was far off for man. I remember a science magazine article that turned my perceptions of climate around when it discussed what it would take to transform Mars into a world where people could survive comfortably. They estimated that it would take 250 years of serious effort. That has always impressed me as a striking contrast to the time it takes planets to change their climate naturally, hundreds of millions of years, usually.

I just finished the book The Discovery of Global by Spencer Weart. In this work, Spencer Weart reviews the history of the scientists and their work for the last 150 years creating the science of Climatology and unravelling the mystery of what our Earth has in store for it.

I have never had much problem comprehending this subject before I read the book, I may not have had an in-depth knowledge of the background of the research, but the science behind what is happening and the conclusions that were drawn were never in any doubt in my mind. What I have trouble comprehending is how so many people, some intelligent and well-educated, can even begin to doubt that humans are impacting our environment. I grew up in the era of awareness and awakening to man-made pollution. I got to see a full cycle of some of the problems being identified and successfully coped with through laws and social awareness. People not much younger than me can probably not remember a time when garbage was piled up alongside most roads and highways. I do. I remember polluted streams and acid rain, and the discovery of the holes in the ozone layer. I remember when gasoline had lead in it and you saw lingering clouds of exhaust coming out of every car driving down the road. I also remember all the work that was done to correct these problems, from catalytic converters to the clean water and clean air act. I remember the bans of CFCs in aerosol cans, and the changeout of the old refrigerants to more environmentally friendly ones.

I also remember ice skating on ponds here in Kansas City when I was younger. I remember how each winter would freeze the ponds, lakes, and streams hard enough to walk on. I remember how that happened some time in December or January and lasted into March. I remember months with snow covering the ground, rather than occasional snow storms that usually melt before the next storm comes around. I don't remember ever seeing a 60 degree day in January when I was little, but I notice that most Januaries have a few of those days in the last few years.

I remember enough that Global Warming seems real and is believable on a simple, non-scientific basis. I realize that the world has had ice ages in the past, but I would not expect to notice a shift in my lifetime of a natural cycle. I understood that the ice ages lasted for tens of thousands of years at a time, and never expected that these events switched on and off quickly.

When scientists started pondering these issues, it was not necessarily with a question of how quick they changed, if they were currently changing, or if man was having an impact. Many of the early studies were simply trying to chronicle the past ages and understand what causes the shifts between temperate and icy world climates. It was thought for many years that the transition into or out of an ice age would be a matter of thousands of years. Some scientist proposed that this could change quickly and they were soundly criticized by the rest of the scientific community. Then more scientists began to see that rapid change was possible. The other debate that moved back and forth was whether we were headed into a cooling or warming trend. This debate had two sides, the naturally occurring cycles, and what the human changes were pushing the planet to. Up to the 1970s, you still had reputable scientists that believed that global cooling was in effect as a result of human pollution. I say reputable scientists because these people were not under the pay of big oil or any other polluting or energy producing company, but I suppose some of their colleagues would not call them reputable, when you look at the shellacking they took from the rest of the scientific community. The peer review process is only rarely contentious for long. Most issues resolve into a clear consensus within a very few years, and the announcement that man was causing global cooling was quickly dismissed. What was agreed was that the balance of whether there would be a shift in climate was more precarious and could change more rapidly than the scientists had believed for years. New information made them realize that things could change very quickly.

In the 50s we started understanding that man could effect weather. The nuclear tests were the first concrete example that man could have a large impact on nature, and it got people thinking. Then someone noticed that airplane contrails actually resolved into cloud systems. While some scientists were studying urban pollutants and trying to figure out what their effect was, other scientists were deliberately trying to have an effect on the weather by testing the theory of cloud seeding. Cloud seeding never proved to be a reliable way to produce rain, but it did teach the scientists that there would be legal and regulatory consequences to man made climate changes. There were lawsuits against people seeding clouds when the people downwind claimed that they were stealing rain that would have fallen on them. Those suits were not widespread. I imagine it was difficult to prove that it would have rained if there had not been cloud seeding. Meanwhile, the aerosol people were looking at the effect that pollution was having on climate. Some started with the idea that particulates in the air would block the sun from coming through and have a net cooling effect. Others argued that it would trap heat in and cause a warming effect. Studies were coming in that gave different answers for different gasses and aerosols. As you can imagine, this was very difficult to measure, and even more difficult to isolate the effect of a single component in an atmospheric stew of chemicals and particles.

People became concerned about the more visible forms of pollution and started working to reduce man made atmospheric contaminant. These efforts were largely successful, but targeted mostly the visible or more readily apparent problems. Methane and Carbon Dioxide remained invisible and unregulated. As a result, what the scientists were studying was changing. They eventually saw the carbon dioxide, and to a lesser extent, the methane as the two emissions having the biggest impact, and that impact was to make the climate warmer as they worked as greenhouse gasses and trapped the sun's energy in the atmosphere. This really only started becoming abundantly apparent in the 80s and 90s. This is why many people today still throw up objections to global warming by saying that a short time ago, scientists thought there was global cooling. It would be more fair to say that a short time ago, scientists did not have a good handle on the extent and speed of global warming.

Many suggestions to fixing the mess we are in have been proposed. On the extreme ends of the argument, some are saying we need to drill for more oil and that the Earth cannot be harmed while others are saying we need to abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible. The rational science based response is that we need to shift our energy consumption away from fossil fuels and into renewable fuels. The energy companies make huge profits from delivering fossil fuel based energy and use a portion of these profits to buy "scientists" to put out reports supporting their position that we should do nothing because there is no harm being done (does that not sound exactly like big tobacco?) and funding politicians that will try to block any move away from fossil fuels and any effort to regulate fossil fuel emissions. They have also found friends in the media and talk radio, raising fears that the only answer people concerned about the environment have is to destroy our economy and way of life. In reality, the decision is being made for us, we will quickly reach a time when we have no choice. When you consider the security that will come from producing our own energy, it is amazing to me that the conservatives and denialists are getting anywhere with their obstructionism. When you see the number of companies out there sinking money into research and development of alternative energy, not to mention the fact that retooling our power infrastructure for homegrown energy will put a lot of people to work and reap huge profits for the companies with foresight to get their solutions online and up and running first, it is amazing to me that anyone is fighting alternate energy or supporting the enormous power industries that aren't even trying to be part of the solution. It seems to me that the big energy companies are in the best position to benefit from the movement to local and sustainable homegrown renewable energy. They have the infrastructure and the financing to make these things happen, they clearly love controlling the energy markets and reaping huge profits from it. Why on earth are they not the first ones out the door to rush to jump into new energy production?

Getting back to climate changes, I have been daydreaming for years about humans taking control of the environment and making it do what they want it to do. One of my fondest dreams is to transform the Sahara into a lush landscape. Obviously, this would entail changing the way the weather generates and deposits rain in this region of the world, a project beyond the scope of people at this time. However, if this could be accomplished, it would be fantastic. This region of Africa was a lush forest not that long ago, and could be again. That much more green space on the planet would serve not only as a carbon sink and a generator of oxygen, but it would undoubtedly have a cooling effect on the globe. Not to mention that a growing population will need more space to live in and more arable land. This huge chunk of real estate is being wasted in the form it is in now. Yet, for every great idea, there is always a scary host of catastrophic unintended effects. Who knows what problems would crop us elsewhere if the Sahara Dessert were changed into the Sahara Rain Forest. Would the effect be self sustaining at some point? Anyone who has read Dune by Frank Herbert, which involved the dream of transforming a desert planet into a lush water Eden, has surely thought of this idea at some time.

One idea that came to my mind when I read the book was that perhaps we could change the way aerosols and particulates effect the sun by changing molecular alignment of molecules in air. Like sunscreen, which works by having tiny particles that act as sunshades or perhaps more like the way a venetian blind blocks the sun, we might be able to make Carbon Dioxide more transparent to sun trying to escape back into space or more opaque to the sun energy as it enters the atmosphere. Assuming that you could ionize, polarize, or maybe magnetize gasses in the atmosphere to align in such a way that they no longer perform randomly to pass or block heat, but act as we choose, this could be an important tool for man to actually control the climate. Need Cooling? you align gasses in the atmosphere to block and reflect heat and solar radiation. Need Heating? Align the gasses to allow heat through or to traps heat in and blanket the atmosphere. We would need a field mechanism on a large scale, a way to induce molecular alignment with remote fields. I'm envisioning some kind of spaced based emitters that would train on portions of the atmosphere and change the way they treat heat energy. Of course this is future technology, not even really conceived of at this time, but I tend to believe that with enough time and effort, man can achieve anything. I just want it to be something that helps us that we intended to do, not something that destroys it that we did not intend to do.

Bristlecone Crisis

Some of the oldest living things on the Earth are Bristlecone pines. Many that are alive today were alive during the time of Christ. This is hard to imagine. There are some animals that live 150 years, but that's a long time for a tree. So there must be something unique and special about these trees, but above all, they should be preserved.

I recently heard the same story described in two totally different contexts. Apparently, the oldest tree on Earth was discovered when a researcher studying Bristlecone pines was using a drill to extract a little core sample on one. The drill broke off inside the tree. The drill was valuable, so he cut the tree down to extract it. Later, when they got the tree sample back to the laboratory, they counted the rings and found it to be about 4,900 years old. It was a record by about 300 years.

Now reports are coming out that the trees are being attacked by insect, and many populations of the trees are in jeopardy. The trees exist mainly in mountainous regions, and there are populations in California and Colorado. They tend to exist in little groves in high, dry rugged areas. The ones in California live longer, and are genetically different than the ones in Colorado, but they are essentially the same kind of tree.

200 years ago, there was an beetle introduced into the eastern United States from Europe. Since that time, it has been slowly sweeping west. That, in addition to a fungus called the pine blister rust, has reached Colorado and is starting to effect Bristlecones in the state.

I listened to this report in a Science podcast. They were discussing the fact that the Bristlecones are being studied by scientists to find out why they live so long. They noted that these trees survive mainly in harsher environments. Little water, winds, high altitude which results in more sun exposure. This rougher life, this harsher existence equals a longer life. This is similar to what you hear about in humans. Recent studies have revealed that strict caloric reductions result in longer life. That which doesn't kill you makes you strong?

Our science is almost to the point where we can decode genetics and determine how the Bristlecone is able to live so long. Those genes might be useful to enhance other species to help them survive. We are also almost to the point where we could put together a defense for the Bristlecones. I suppose that's optimistic. It's one thing to be able to do something, it's another thing entirely to have the resources to make it happen.

Stem Cell Hypocrisy

I cannot be unbiased on stem cells.

I believe they hold tremendous promise to alleviate suffering, extend useful human life spans, give hope and productivity back to millions, and lower health care expenditures. The downside of stem cell technology is that I fear pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to produce a one-time cure when it is so much more profitable to develop drugs that treat the symptoms and leave the underlying chronic condition intact. My fears surround the as yet unknown horrors that people may one day develop with the technology. I believe that the thorny question of human cloning is really not much different from stem cell therapies, and holds the potential for abuse. I also believe that the potential to "upgrade" humans through stem cell technology will bring about many ethical and legal questions in the future.

For now, the days of seeing the impact of a fully matured technology, with well proven techniques lie somewhere in the future. Stem cell research has been equated with abortion, and therefore vilified and suppressed. We lost 8 years of potential progress, which would have been two or three generations of scientific development and advancement in the last 9 years.

The premise by opponents is that embryonic stem cell research kills a human being. The basis of this assertion begins with the belief that a fertilized egg is a human being. I don't happen to agree with this, as I define this as a potential human being. It cannot survive outside of a human host - its mother or surrogate mother. If you looked at embryonic stem cells under a microscope, at this stage, it would not even resemble a human. Countless millions of fertilized eggs occur naturally each month that never implant on a uterine wall. Nature, for whatever reason, just doesn't catch them and turn them into life. They are flushed away, often unknown to the women that would have been their mothers if fate had not worked out as it did. In nature, these occurances are not seen as abhorrent, they are a regular occurance. Who knows how common this is, but you don't see anyone forming action groups around preventing it. These "spontaneous abortions" are not a conscious decision, so the situation is not entirely equal, and not a serious comparison.

An excess of fertilized embryos occurs because when couples use in-vitro fertilization techniques when trying to conceive. Several fertilized eggs are made, some are used to attempt implantation, and the rest are frozen in case the first attempts fail. After a successful implantation is taken to term and produces a baby, the other embryos are not needed. These embryos are not destroyed immediately, but often kept frozen indefinitely. I'm not sure how many are kept in storage like this, but certainly, many of the excess embryos are eventually destroyed. I believe this is the main source of embryonic stem cells, although I had also heard that umbilical cord blood was rich in these stem cells. I assume this is not an often used source, as there would be no controversy to harvest them, but perhaps I am wrong and this source is being denied, too, in a misunderstanding of the situation.

In light of the recently awarded Nobel Prize for the development of the in-vitro fertilization technique, I find myself questioning the entire practice of assisted procreation. There are too many people in the world already, I cannot see why it is necessary to develop techniques to help us make more. Planetary overpopulation threatens people more than any other problem, as it is the root cause to so many other problems. We have no natural check on our population, and if we were a game species, there would be a movement to have a hunting season for us humans with the justification that something has to be done to "thin the herd". Yet instead, we develop an expensive and complicated procedure to produce children that is artificially and unnatural. Nature had created this infertility, perhaps there is a reason for that. Perhaps this is nature's way of "thinning the herd". Even if it is not, these people are genetically incapable of having children. What makes people that use in-vitro fertilation techniques think that their grandchildren will be conceived naturally? Does anyone think of that in their single-minded quest to procreate?

Where is the outrage over assisted procreation? This process creates the excess embryos which will not be brought to term. The irony of the procedure is that the parents are desperately seeking to create life, and in doing so, require that some of the life they create will be destroyed. In light of that fact, fertility treatments should be an outrage to anti-abortion people. If they are going to oppose stem cell research because it kills humans (which will be killed anyway - with no benefit to society), where is their outrage over the excess embryos that will be killed?

What I have a hard time understanding is why greater value is not placed on those already alive. Many of the people opposed to abortion and stem cell research because they see it as abortion are conservatives. In general, conservatives are more pro-war than others in society. They see no problem with sacrificing lives of full grown soldiers in war. They often see no problem with cutting off benefits to adults that they deem as deadbeat or unproductive. They have no problem complaining that unfortunate living adults (and to be fair, children, too) should not be supported by the state with food, shelter, or medical care. They are often callous about the suffering of grown people, perceiving that the got themselves into this mess. Yet an unborn embryo requires a massive effort to preserve. I see this as inconsistent. Either life is precious, and all life is precious, or life is cheap and no life is precious. I realize that the way people think is that the embryos are defenseless and need protectors and the adults could simply straighten their lives out of their own free will and take care of themselves.

I have mixed feelings about in-vitro fertilation techniques. It is an awesome scientific achievement, a technical triumph. However, I also feel it is a misuse of science. Why do we assist people who can't have children? They might be that way because their genes governing their own reproductive viability are not functioning correctly. In nature, this is the ultimate sign that that particular animal should not be allowed to continue - they can't reproduce, so they end right there. If nature were allowed to take its course, faulty reproductive genes would not survive one generation. I tried to determine what the fertility rate of people produced by in-vitro versus the general public, expecting to see a much lower rate. I could not find any serious studies, just quackery without any scientific or statistical support.

Science should be used to solve problems, not create them, and making humans more fertile in an overpopulated world is unnecessary. I realize that the desire to procreate is an emotional subject. It is hard to hear that you cannot conceive a child for those wanting children. In vitro ferilization provides a way to cheat nature out of a verdict you cannot accept, but it also kicks the can down the road for your children to be faced with the same decision. I believe couples that want children and can't naturally conceive their own should adopt. There is no shortage of "unwanted" children needing a good home. Shifting children from the "unwanted" column to the "wanted" column by welcoming them into a new adoptive family is the best solution to the problems. We need to encourage this to make the world move closer to one where all children are wanted.

They just announced the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Robert Edwards, one of the scientists that developed in-vitro fertilization.

Scientifically, in-vitro would be a useful procedure to keep or bring back endangered or extinct species. Also, the technique could be crucial in colonizing space station colonies or moon/mars bases. It's much cheaper to ship embryos than whole animals. Spin-offs from the technology will no doubt be incorporated into Stem Cell therapies in the future. So while I applaud the scientists for developing the procedure, I believe it is being misused to promote human fertility.

Weather Control

I live in a house with lots of big old trees. There are 60 to 80 year old walnuts, oaks and elms, which tower over our house. On a hot summer day, there is plenty of shade in the yard. In fact, there is little sunlight, as there is no good place to put a garden. I've always thought that the yard feels a good 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the sunnier area outside of the shade trees.

I've often wondered if it really is cooler under the trees. I've heard many advertisements and advice pieces that say that you can lower your air conditioning bills by planting trees around your house. This begs the obvious question: Do trees cause actual cooling?

Being a Mechanical Engineer who studied Thermodynamics in college, I tried to reason this out. I remember that Skylab's failed solar panels left inadequate power to cool the space station, and the problem was solved by putting a high tech beach umbrella on the station, putting it in the shade and immediately dropping the temperature to a reasonable level. The difference between that and any situation on the surface of the planet is that we have air. There are three ways heat can move or flow 1) conduction (through a solid) 2) convection (through a fluid: air or water, for example) or 3) radiation (directly out of the body independent of what kind of surroundings the body is in). In space, it's easy. The sun hits the umbrella, and radiates back out. If you make the umbrella silvery on one side or if it has very little mass, you insure that most of the heat striking the shade does not get into the thing it is shading. On a planet, objects heat up in the sunlight (receiving the energy via radiation) then re-radiate it as well as having it leave by convection and sometimes conduction. So a leaf on a tree that is struck by the sun then re-radiates the heat into the surrounding air, as well as having some of it taken away by the breezes.

I heard about an Americorps project in the Bronx where people painted rooftops of buildings white. The theory is that a white roof will re-radiate a significant amount of heat rather than absorbing it. I heard that there was a scientist that calculated that if we painted all the roofs of all the houses in the world white, that we would re-radiate enough heat into space that it would offset what we are doing that is causing global warming.

If you imagine an invisible dome over your yard, that would be what we call a "control volume". This just means an invisible boundry that you consider when analyzing something. What we know about a control volume is that if it is in equilibrium, meaning that the temperature is not rising in the volume, that the amount of heat going in equals the amount leaving. If the temperature is changing, that means that the heat is flowing toward the rising temperature zone and away from the lowering temperature zone. So you look at the cool yard and the hot open field down the street and you observe that the same amount of heat hits both areas, but you feel hotter in the direct sunlight. Even if you have a little sunshade directly over just you, you are going to be hotter in the open field.

It's pretty clear that what is happening is that you are picking up heat that is re-radiating from the ground around you when you are out in the open. In the shaded yard, a portion of the heat that would have hit your or the ground surrounding you is being re-radiated upward into space. From a convection standpoint, the leaves are being cooled by whatever breeze is coming by, and I have to assume that there are layers of air, and the air at the ground does not mix thoroughly with the air above, so there is a blanket of hotter air above you, and the air near the ground stays cooler. In the absense of a breeze, the air makes its own currents. The heated air expands and rises, moving away from the ground.

The part of the equation we moved away from is conduction. When I was attending Heat Transfer classes at K-State, it was 1984. That is still close in time to the oil embargo and the energy crisis of the late 70's. Laws had been put in place that gave builders incentives to construct energy efficient homes. You got a tax credit for installing solar panels. Back then, they were not very often panels that generated electricity, but mostly black panels that you ran water through and got free hot water out of. We learned how to design what was called passive solar buildings. These buildings blocked the sun in the summer with wide eaves, then in the winter, when the sun was lower in the sky, the south facing side of the house was able to get direct sunlight under the eaves. The best way to take advantage of this was to put a lot of glass on that wall, and put massive objects like stone, concrete, or water tanks just inside the glass (say a hallway's width away. You make the glass well insulated from convection, air tight as possible, and at best, you put a double pane glass with an evacuated space in between to prevent heat from conducting through the air and glass to escape the house. The radiant heat from the sun goes through the glass, then strikes the massive objects, which conduct heat into their centers and store it, to later be re-radiated back into the house at night. Ideally, you would have shades that you would draw after the sun goes down, preventing radiant heat loss and further insulating your windows from convection and conduction loss.

So there's no doubt that a tree conducts some of the heat into itself, but it should re-radiate this heat, making it neutral over the course of a day.

There is one difference. The sunlight that hits the tree gets used. The tree isn't just a series of canvas umbrellas, it's a living thing with cells that are using the sunlight through photosynthesis to make hydrocarbons. Some of it is sugar, some cellulose, some proteins, but the energy from the sun gets bound up in chemical bonds in the tree.

My question is: does a tree capture and use enough energy to lower the temperature? In some quick google based research, I have not yet found the answer. I'm sure they use energy, but is it like an air conditioner where they are sucking in so much solar energy that the temperature of the air drops? It certainly goes up when you release that energy by burning the logs the tree makes.

If you were a scientist with a nice research budget, you could probably model a tree as a static series of little shades, a close copy of a real tree, except yours is not alive, and you could probably measure the temperature around the real and fake tree and compare the readings, determining if there is absorption of substantial energy by the tree.

Since the method that the tree converts sunlight into sugar or cellulose is a chemical equation, you could probably calculate energy rate theoretically. Assuming sugar production has a fixed caloric rate, that might have a thermal equivalent. I believe that the work has been done before, I just haven't found it.